Breakers (25 page)

Somewhere in the desert, but a less-desert where green things were possible and scraggly trees grew in the folds of the hills, he stopped, stone-still, and reached for his binoculars. A mile off the highway, cone-like structures rose amidst the weeds and shrubs, steep and deep blue and thirty or forty feet tall, a few higher and thicker. Spindly-limbed things sidled among the tall cones, pausing to do things Walt was too far away to see. Hemispherical ground vehicles glided over the dirt on a blur of motion that could be treads or dozens of short legs. Perhaps a hundred or more of the cones, a couple dozen of the creatures, a handful of the cars.

It took Walt an embarrassingly long time to realize he was looking at a city.

19

Blue bolts licked the darkness, touching the clouds and disappearing as if they'd never been there at all. The shot woman lay facedown in the street, shins propped on the sidewalk. Raymond braked, the rubber of his tires grabbing hard at the pavement, and dropped to his feet. The air smelled like burnt hot dogs. The woman's eyes were shut. Her ribs swelled within her camouflage shirt. On her left lower back, a scorched hole exuded a wisp of smoke. The wound was dime-shaped and puzzlingly devoid of blood. On the beach eighty feet below and a couple hundred yards away, dark figures shouted and ran, lit by sporadic bursts of rattling gunfire and electric blue lasers. Armored aliens splashed along the tideline.

"Are you awake?" Raymond said over the hollers and bangs. "Can you move?"

She stirred, groping at the asphalt, lifting her short-haired head to blink at him. "Help me."

He'd let his bike drop to the ground. Mia sat on hers a few yards away, staring unreadably. He propped up his bike and gestured hard. Mia pedaled forward and pulled to a stop.

"Raymond. Aliens with lasers. We have to go."

"Help me get her up!"

She opened her mouth to say more, then gave one abrupt shake of her head and knelt beside the struggling woman. They hooked their hands under her armpits, guiding her to her feet. Raymond shouldered her weight. She groaned, face pinched.

"What now?" Mia said. "Think you can cram her into your basket?"

"Get on the seat," Raymond said to the woman clinging to his shoulders. She licked her lips and reached out with one hand, leaning clumsily for the seat. He helped her lift her leg over the bar, then, with Mia supporting the bike, knocked out its kickstand and jumped on. The woman wrapped her arms around his middle. A searing white blast rocked the beach below, followed by a huge, gut-thumping crump. As Raymond pushed off, wobbling, falling sand tickled his face and hissed on the sidewalk.

He biked for the hill, Mia just ahead of him. It was hard work, a strain on his thighs and his balance; if he hadn't spent the last several months gardening, surfing, hiking around, and hauling wood and water from place to place, he might not have made it. A man screamed from the beach, a long wail that penetrated the staccato thunder of gunfire. A blue line flashed over their heads. Raymond didn't risk looking back. A widely-spaced row of mansions appeared along the rising cliff, buffering them from the battle on the beach. Mia kept glancing back at him, face tight. A light fog enshrouded them. The sounds of battle became hollow, spectral, echoing in the cliffs, fighting with the thump of the surf. A deep buzz mounted to a crushing bass, then dopplered away. Seconds later, a string of explosions formed a constellation across the beach. The injured woman grunted. Raymond opened his mouth to ask if she was okay, but was silenced by a rolling wave of tremendous booms.

Things got a lot quieter after that. A few bursts of gunfire, a couple of shouts. Mostly nothing but the slow rhythm of the breakers folding over the shore. The silence was more frightening than the clamor and ruckus of the battle.

Mia unlocked the chained gates. Raymond stopped in the driveway. The woman was awake enough to dismount, eyelids fluttering in pain.

"Get inside," Mia whispered. "Get inside, get inside, get inside."

"We're getting," Raymond said. He helped the woman up the steps, then reached down for one of the flashlights they kept inside beside the door. With the light on, he froze, his mind clicking in dry little circles. He had no idea what to do, where to start.

"We should get her upstairs," Mia said, as if sensing his paralysis. "One of the spare rooms."

"Yeah." He pulled his head back to face the woman. "Think you can climb some stairs?"

"This is a nice house," she said in a dried-out voice.

"That's why we stole it."

Flashlight in his free hand, hugging her ribs with his other arm, he led her step by step to the second floor. Below, Mia rattled around in the closet where they kept their medicine. Raymond stumbled the woman into the room next to theirs and maneuvered her beside the bed. She went unconscious the moment she left his shoulder, thumping leadenly into the comforter, legs dangling off the bed's edge. Gingerly, he swung her feet up and rolled her on her back, then, after checking the curtains were drawn, went to their bedroom for candles.

Mia popped into the room with bottles and bandages just as he finished unbuttoning the woman's camo jacket. "What are you doing?"

Raymond gave her a look. "Not that. Give me a hand here."

The woman's smooth belly was unmarred. They stripped off the jacket, flinging it to the side of the room, and rolled her on her stomach. The wound penetrated some two or three inches into her back, black-fringed, just wide enough that Raymond could have stuck his little finger inside, a bizarre, sudden desire he quashed as quickly as he'd had it. There was almost no blood. Just erratic drops that slid through the invisibly fine hairs on her back.

Raymond sat back on the bed. "So, what? We just sort of clean her up?"

Mia pursed her lips and gave a little shrug. "Then slap a bandage on her. I don't really think it will matter."

He glugged rubbing alcohol on a fistful of cotton, breathing through his mouth to avoid its sharp smothering scent. "But she's hardly bleeding."

"What, you've never watched a medical drama? Shock? Infection?"

"We've got some antibiotics." He swabbed the edges of the wound, the hot red circle surrounding it. The task was both disgusting and automatic, the kind of thing that would make him shudder with revulsion if he gave it a moment's thought. Would they have been better off leaving her for a medic on the beach? Then again, everyone there had been blown up or driven off.

"Will they be the right kind for whatever infects her?" Mia patted a wad of cloth over the woman's back and, with Raymond holding her up by her shoulders, began winding a long tan bandage around her middle. "I just don't think people with big dirty holes gouged through them have very high survival rates."

He supposed she was right. If so, he thought the woman's death would be a failure, a nullification of whatever he'd achieved in getting her out of the combat zone. But trying to do what's right in the moment it's happening—isn't that all you can do? Mia clipped the bandage in place. He blew out the candles and went out to bring the bikes inside. Later, in bed together, the door open in case the woman called out, Mia touched his shoulder.

"That was a crazy thing to do, do you realize that?"

"She'd just been shot."

"I'm not saying it was the
wrong
thing to do."

"Oh."

"But if something had happened to you—what would I have done?"

"Grabbed a baseball bat and raced down to the beach to hit some alien-head dingers, I bet." He smiled over a small pang of annoyance. Nothing bad had actually happened. Instead, they might have saved someone's life. Now more than ever—cliched as he knew it was—that was one of the most important things in the world. Too much longer like this, and there might not be any of them left at all.

* * *

Her name was Sarah Campbell. She woke two days later, calling for water, sweating through her tank top. After they'd explained what happened and where she was, she told them about the attack on the beach by the Bear Republic Rebels, a resistance movement of soldiers and civilians based somewhere in the northern mountains. They'd come to Redondo to—well, she couldn't say; to find something, or to find something out, Raymond gleaned that much, but Sarah grew elusive whenever she began to approach anything like a fact about the mission. She was somewhat less vague about the BRR: a few hundred members and growing, some access to weapons and vehicles, in sporadic contact with several other cells around the world. All working towards the same rather obvious goal. So far, they hadn't had much luck.

"They've just got the one big ship." Mia gazed down at Sarah's pale, dirt-streaked face, her close blonde hair. "Why doesn't someone just nuke them?"

"They tried. Russia. The ship shot down the missile, then carpet-bombed St. Petersburg. Same deal in India. Not just incendiaries. Some chemical thing that poisons whatever's left of the rubble."

"But only after we strike first?"

"Seems so."

Mia frowned. "So we've got the choice of sitting on our thumbs and getting wiped out day by day and month by month, or taking a swing and getting annihilated all at once."

Sarah nodded, wincing. "Aliens seem content to kill us at their leisure so long as we don't try anything stupid. We need to start thinking sneaky instead of flashy."

"Are the Bear Republic Rebels accepting recruits?" Raymond said.

"Always."

He glanced at Mia. "What do you think?"

Sarah struggled upright. A waft of pus and burnt meat rose with her. "You don't want any part of that."

"Those things have been going door to door," Mia said. "The only way we stay here long-term is in a mass grave."

"Like it's any different if you try to fight back? Did you see what happened on the beach? The fucking hole in my back?"

"If you'd seen what's been going on
here
—"

"Look, it doesn't matter, okay? They blew up most of the airfields from orbit. Even the ones they missed, you think our pilots had a miracle cure? They're just as dead as the generals and the Marines and the guys who drove the tanks. Word is the enemy is setting up manufacturing plants. They'll wear us down until we're spraying AKs at their fighters like the god damn Taliban. Better to run off to the woods and live out our lives than get massacred like we did down on the beach." Sarah wilted back among the sheets, suddenly pale, sweat glistening on her brow and on her chest above her tank top. "You guys have each other, all right? You need to hang onto that."

"Speaking of which," Raymond said a moment later, "we've got some work to do. Just holler if you need anything."

"Thank you," she said softly. "And thanks. For picking me up."

"Didn't seem to me like I had a choice."

They didn't really have much to do—clean up the bikes, maybe, but it was still too light out to risk feeding the chickens or tending the garden—but Raymond knew when a person needed some time to themselves. In the garage, he and Mia oiled the bikes amidst the soupy, clinging, asphalty fumes. Yellowish fluid grimed his fingernails. Mechanics had always made intuitive sense to Raymond, fitting as neatly to his stolid, careful mind as the bike's chains fitted to their gears. He wished he'd pursued such things years ago, learning to maintain cars and work simple machines, unknowingly preparing for this blown-out present. Could have earned them a good living in the meantime, too. If he'd had a few more years, maybe he could have made it as an artist and graphic designer, but there'd been no guarantees; given everything that had happened over the last eight-odd months, he felt regretful he hadn't been more practical, resentful that he'd chased his dream at the expense of their future.

Mia wiped oil from her fingers with an old shirt. "What do you think?"

"I think if these bikes get any greasier we can fry them for dinner."

"About the resistance. The BRR."

He sat back, sweating lightly. "You want to go?"

"It makes sense, doesn't it? If we're going to fight back, we have to do it now. Before they're settled in. While there's still enough of us to matter."

"Yep."

"Wait, you agree?"

"It's one thing to run off to the mountains when it sounds like everybody else has thrown up their hands and walked off. But if we ran and hid now—" He set down a wrench with a small metal click. "What if we wound up with a kid some day? Knowing it was just a matter of time before some alien ship spotted the smoke from our chimney?"

"You're cute when you're trying to predict the future." Her grin faded, gradual as a sunset. "Then there's Sarah."

"She can come with if she wants. If not, I don't see why we can't leave her the house."

"She'll need recovery time."

"You normally do when you're shot in the back."

"If we have to go before she's better, can you leave her behind?"

He cocked his head. "Let's do whatever we can to prevent ourselves from having to answer that. Like getting another bike."

Mia nodded with a drawn-in little smile that told him she'd already decided for herself. Patrols buzzed the skies the next few days, pinning them inside until the middle of the night. Then they went to the yard to gather eggs and lettuce and slosh around water and dry corn. Sarah slept a lot. Raymond spent some time thinking about how to get the BRR's exact location out of her despite her being dead set against ever seeing them again. The rains came back, dampening the October days, shrouding them in cloud and mist. Sarah began to walk by herself, to empty her own bucket by day and plod to the latrine in the corner of the yard by night. She showed no signs of infection. Once she was able to walk easy, and with the patrols diminished to a scattering of lone ships around the city proper, Raymond took Sarah out for a tour of the grounds.

She watched the chickens peck at the fog-dewed grass. "Where'd you find those guys?"

He gestured into the hills. "Up there somewhere."

"Suppose there must be plenty of loot out there if you look hard enough." She stretched. She'd taken a bath earlier, her first proper one since arriving. Her short blonde hair had feathered out a bit, buffeted by the unsteady sea breeze. Moonlight caught the freckles on her bare, toned shoulders. "And a garden, too. You two self-sufficient?"