Breakers (27 page)

"I'm kidding. My name's Walt. I'm—"

"What are you doing out there?"

"No time for questions. This fence—"

"I asked first. What are you doing here?"

"Getting
you
out of
there
." He pointed at the wires enclosing the grounds. "Is that electric? How does it work?"

"How should I know? For all I know it's sorcery."

Again Walt smiled. "How many of them are in the tower?"

Her shoulders rose to meet the edge of her dark hair. "Three? Nine million? I haven't been making them sign in and out."

That jibed with what he'd seen, though who knows what they'd been up to while he'd slept. "Listen. I'm an idiot, so I'm going to go inside that building and try to disable the fence. I need you to wake up the others and tell them to get ready to move. If any of them makes a peep, I'm running away without looking back."

She squinted at him, leaning closer to the wires, long legs silhouetted. With some will, he stopped himself from glancing at her crotch.

"Who are you?"

He put a finger to his lips. "Take care of business. I'll take care of mine."

She watched him turn away. By the time he crawled to the deep blue face of the tower, he heard her whispering to the others, shushing their confusion. He drew his longest knife, a Vietnam-era-type combat knife with a seven-inch blade and a broken compass in its pommel. The door was just a little too wide and a little too tall and sported a T-shaped handle on its right-hand side. Purely mechanical. It opened without trouble; either their door technology wasn't up to par with their interstellar travel, or they were way out in their version of the boonies. Walt supposed that sort of limitation explained why they'd only managed to kill 99% of humanity so far instead of the whole damn thing.

The door opened to a tight, spartan entryway with a bulky, fridge-shaped object to his right and a spiral staircase to his left. He paused, listening. An electric hum just soft enough to drive you crazy. Elsewhere, further up or possibly outside, the shuffle of a large creature's weight. Oddly gloomy, like the twilight of a theater before they turned the lights down all the way (an experience, some distant part of him registered, that he'd never have again). He stepped onto the stairs.

His foot missed. He fell forward, knee banging into the surface. He gripped his knife and froze. By the time he'd convinced himself nothing was on its way to investigate, he'd seen the stairs weren't stairs at all—just a long, smooth, inclined ribbon of some rubbery, sandpapery material that these things apparently oozed right up.

Between strings of mental swearing, he gave long thought to backing out the door and running west as fast as he could. He couldn't, of course. Someone in the pen would shout out at him, calling down the aliens. He should have thought of that beforehand. Everyone was in this for their own survival. Those human cattle in the enclosure out there, they wouldn't give a shit if he died running away. All they'd care was some coward hadn't died trying to save their own pointless lives.

He smiled, angry. This was why you never try to help.

There wasn't even a handrail. He planted one foot on the ramp, preparing to crawl, but found the hard, rubbery surface gripped his shoe as firmly as a handshake. He leaned up another step, then straightened until he was nearly upright. A strange vertigo hit him—his feet felt sturdy as roots, but his upper body felt dangerously unbalanced, as if he might topple over if he blinked in the wrong direction—and he lowered himself to a crouch. Above, the ramp spiraled along the wall all the way to a dim hole in the ceiling and an unseen room beyond. The center of the tower was empty, just disturbing, dizzying empty space.

He crawled up on an improvised combo of hands, knees, elbows, and feet, proceeding with the speed of a hungover turtle. Some fifteen feet up, the ramp flattened out, giving way to a short landing and an oval alcove set into the wall. A single glance at the recess told him all he needed: empty space, just large enough for one of the many-legged creatures to insert itself within, and two narrow windows facing black mountains and pinpricks of stars. And, a couple feet to the left of the windows, a rack of what were recognizably guns.

He picked one up. Pistol-like, with a short, fat barrel and a grip like the handle of a sword, a slightly flared cylinder with a round knob at the end. One button on either side of the barrel. Holding the grip, he could just reach the buttons with his thumb and forefinger. It was surprisingly heavy and he saw no obvious sign of a clip. He carried it in his left hand, knife in the right, and continued up.

More landings. More alcoves. He paused often but heard nothing beyond the background hum. He was more than halfway up the ramp and was certain he'd be incapable of safely moving up or down any faster than a literal crawl. If one of those things came in from down below or up top, he'd be a squatting duck.

His luck, if you could call it that—he didn't think any such term applied when you'd deliberately chosen to clamber around an alien guard tower manned by hostile monsters—held to the top. The ramp rose to a wide, round hole. Above, the same dim lighting showed little besides a wide window and a curved ceiling another fifteen feet up. No visible aliens. Walt straightened, inch by inch, until his eyes cleared the ledge.

The hole opened into the corner of a room as barren as the rest of the tower. Windows paneled a circular space some thirty feet across. One of the creatures was inserted into an alcove, its back to him, curled up more tightly than he could have imagined. Another stood twenty feet from the first in front of something that looked like a computer designed for slobbery dogs: its graphics were Atari ST-simple, and they changed little despite the at-times frantic typing, twisting, sweeping, and signing-like gestures of the limbs waving and poking at a combination of keys, trackballs, and empty spaces above gleaming black pads.

Neither turned his way. Guided by a growing hunch, he crept towards the one at the computer even more slowly than his scuttle up the ramp. The alien tapped and jabbed at its terminal. He drew up behind the alien, smelling its odor of fish oil and drying kelp. Its claws and tentacles twitched above the motion-pads, poked keys, massaged knobs. For a minute, Walt just watched its motions; he had every doubt he'd be able to replicate them and navigate the system, but who knew. Besides, there was something very sweet about this moment, of knowing the alien's fate while it remained clueless. He wondered if one of them had felt the same way when they'd unleashed the virus on Earth.

Fast as a viper, he raised his knife. The alien stuck up its two antennae-like limbs, swiveled its head, and fixed him with giant squid-eyes that looked like the perfect image of cartoon surprise. Walt barked out a laugh and slammed the blade down into its right eye. The knife plunged easily, sending a spray of clear, watery liquid followed by thick inky goop. The alien hissed and jerked away, limbs spasming, clubbing Walt's face. The knife slipped from his grasp, embedded in the creature's brain. It fell, tentacles slapping the rubbery floor, one bony leg sweeping Walt's feet from under him.

Feet thumped behind him. He reached for the knife waggling in the dying alien's eye but was driven back by a wall of writhing limbs. The alien from the alcove bore down on him, its eyes as widely, comically angry as the other's had been surprised. Walt leveled the alien pistol and jammed down the buttons, bracing himself for the bang and the kick. A beam of electric blue light appeared between himself and the alien. Skin crackled, sending fat sizzling into the air with the smell of fresh battered cod. The alien didn't make a noise as Walt waved the beam back and forth, severing limbs, slashing black gouges across its body and the pink, strappy thing it wore around its middle. It collapsed in an avalanche of charred parts that slammed into Walt and drove him back into the still-twitching body of the first.

Because there didn't seem to be anything else to do, he swore.

He arose from a mess of singed limbs and briny goo. The first alien hadn't sensed him until he'd jerked up the knife. The one by the stream hadn't noticed him until he'd moved, either. So they could sense bodily motion, but imperfectly. He remembered reading that sharks and some other species could sense the electrical charges of contracting muscles or something like that, but all the animals that could do that lived in water, which Walt was pretty sure could carry a charge much better than air. On the other end of things, he wasn't certain the aliens could hear at all. They seemed to communicate through motion, too, and they sure as hell didn't do any shouting or screaming when they died.

Walt shoved bits of dead alien away with his feet and turned to the computer. The screen meant nothing to him, abstract rods and squares and zigzag lines with no clear icons, pointers, or even text. Within seconds of fiddling with the controls, he was ready to walk outside and simply laser through the wires around the pen.

A pen that was rectangular. Just like the leftmost object on the screen. And the rods were the towers and the zigzags the mountains—could it be that easy? Experimentally, he moved his hand over one of the motion-pads, hoping to conjure up a pointer he could drag to the pen. Instead, the screen switched to a wall of glyphs which he couldn't turn back no matter how he waved his hands. After a minute of conducting an orchestra that wasn't there, he went to the hole, lowered himself onto the ramp, and scooted down to the ground floor.

He could hear the gasps from the pen as he walked outside, hunched his back to shield the light as best he could, and simply lasered through the lower wires.

"You were in there a long time," the young woman whispered.

"Did you miss me?"

"Who would miss a failure?"

"Get the others over here," he smiled. She went and whispered to the crowd of two dozen, who ducked under the clipped, still-smoking wires and stood shivering in the night air.

"Now get down and crawl until we're outside the light," Walt whispered to the group.

"We're naked," hissed a stocky man with a hairy stomach.

"Would you rather get a thorn in your balls or a laser in your back?"

"Can't you steal a car?"

Walt raised the laser. "
Crawl
."

They did. Through weeds and rocks and dust, through whimpers and soft yelps, pale asses bobbing in the moonlight. After a hundred yards, Walt stopped them and pulled out his binoculars. The camp was as still as it had been before he'd approached the pen. He rose to a stoop and gestured the prisoners on. Men and women rose and followed, knees and elbows rubbed raw and pasted with dirt. They ducked along with their hands splayed over their breasts and genitals, hissing through clenched teeth when their feet struck a stone; once, a young man fell and had to be helped along on the shoulders of two others. They reached the highway with no sign of alarm from the colony. On the blacktop, Walt dug out four bottles of water and handed them to the young woman and three others, watching with mild interest as each escapee glugged down as much as they thought they could get away with before passing it on.

"Well," he said, "good luck."

"Good luck?" the stocky man said. "With what?"

"I'm not your shepherd. Besides lying down in a big human bull's-eye, traveling in a group is the stupidest thing we could do. They'd find us in an instant." Walt waved at the dark hills. "I'm leaving. On my own. If you like living, you should do the same."

"That is insane." The young woman splayed her hands at the crowd, disregarding her nudity. "We're hungry. We're tired. We don't even have any goddamn clothes. They shipped us in here from San Francisco and I don't even know where
here
is. People are going to die. You can't just walk away."

"I got you out. You can figure out what to do next."

He turned away. When they followed, he jogged off the road into the cheat grass and brambles; their crunching bare-footed steps diminished. When he glanced back a couple minutes later, they were still standing there, silhouettes as straight and still as human cacti.

* * *

After that, he stayed well off the road, risking contact only to meet the demands of water and food. The land descended, mountains rolling down to hills, but stayed desert the whole way, mile after mile of yellow grass, spiky green-brown shrubs, and gray dust. According to the highway markers, he was nearly forty miles into the state before he realized he'd crossed into California. Other than a two-day stretch so hot he slept out the second afternoon in an empty rambler with all the doors open, the weather ranged from slightly warm in the day to slightly cool at night. It felt exactly as he'd always imagined California would feel.

He saw an alien jet once, streaking over the southern sky. He crouched among the weeds until the drone died away. Sometimes, he imagined at least a few of the prisoners had made it out. The girl, maybe—she'd been young, strong. Who knew.

Another set of hills rose to the west. By nightfall, he climbed up the highway, a patchy set of lanes unfurling along the sides of crumbling hills. Peaks swelled beside him, massive and silent in the darkness. Green weeds appeared in tufts beside the shoulder, then leafy plants, trees in the crags and scree. Dawn broke behind him and he moved through the brush, smelling the dew on the grass and the sweet-choking scent of flowering weeds.

After panting his way up an innocuous crest, he stopped cold. In the thin daylight, one vast cityscape carpeted the valley, too long and boundless to see its ends.

21

Down the hill, a crew of aliens fanned across the roads, metal glinting from their claws. Dome-like armored vehicles ranged ahead, squirting flame into houses and condos. Thick white smoke bellowed into the skies and was blown inland in streamers by the steady offshore breeze.

Raymond's voice was soft as church. "What the hell are they doing?"

Sarah turned from the window, giving him a steady eye. "Burning out the vermin."

"That's it," Mia said. "Time to go."