Captives (26 page)

The entire city lay before her, a wasteland of concrete and asphalt. Entire blocks had burnt to the ground, the black wounds only partially reclaimed by grass and wildflowers. Beyond everything, the Pacific waited. The air was hazy, but she thought she could make out the bulge of the ship shining from the water.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember it as she'd first seen it after the thousand-mile drive from up north.

She got out the photo from the pier and flicked her lighter to its corner. Once the flame wicked up the glossy picture, curling it, she set it on the truck's roof in front of her folded legs and watched it burn down to brittle ash. She didn't look away until the wind had dragged the remnants off to join the dust.

Before she lost the light, she got out her mirror and kit and added the shades and lining that changed her face to Thom's. The differences were subtle, but that was all people needed to allow their brains to trick them into seeing a male face to match her hair, hat, clothes, and manner.

Maybe they would execute her as a deserter. Maybe her bones would join the great heap that offered the girl-queen her counsel. If so, a part of her would welcome it. If not? Then she had business with the thugs who'd killed Kolton.

She hopped down from the truck and followed the highway into the city that had once been her home.

17

By the time he came back from the garages with a new laser and what he was pretty sure was a three-pack of alien batteries for it, she was nowhere to be seen. He didn't bother to shout or wander around looking for her. He could feel it as simply as the wind on his skin: she was gone.

About god damn time.

She'd left him with the map. He spent a good long while consulting this, absentmindedly twirling the laser until he accidentally gripped both buttons at once and a blue beam scorched the cement black. Then he got up and backtracked to the town they'd come in through. The bike he'd seen on the way in was still there. Rustier than he'd expected, but it held together for the first day. Two more, and he'd be in L.A.

He spent the night in a church overlooking the ocean several miles west of Santa Barbara. Now that he was away from her, the last week felt surreal. Nightmarish. He'd lost a lot of time. Probably ought to have found a way to attack Mia or sneak away. He'd pretty much quit trying after she'd caught him with that stupid glass on the doorknob trick. He'd had opportunities. If one of them had panned out, he could have been in Los Angeles days ago.

Then again, he was here to second-guess himself, wasn't he? Hard to argue with not being dead.

He slept, then spent the first hour of the morning poking around for supplies. Nothing too heavy. It was late spring in Southern California; he could get away with a long-sleeved shirt so long as he was willing to travel by night to keep his blood flowing. As he swept the church, he lucked out: in a locked room in the basement, he found the remnants of a canned food drive. Which meant all the shit no one from the good old days had wanted to eat—cream of mushroom, vegetable broth, canned green beans—but it looked pretty good to him. He set aside the distended cans and winnowed the rest to the heartiest selections, figuring he shouldn't try to carry more than twenty. Annoyingly, there was no can opener, but he'd found knives. Not that he needed them. Shortly after meeting Carrie, she'd shown him how to open cans by vigorously rubbing the top against a piece of concrete and then squeezing the sides to pop the lid. That was probably the moment he'd fallen in love.

On the spot, he ate a can of ravioli, contemplated a cream of chicken, then decided that even if it wasn't bulging with botulism, seven-year-old chicken was about five years past his trust boundary. He selected the cream of potato instead.

To get inside, he'd destroyed the knob and couldn't close the door, so he left it hanging open. Upstairs, it occurred to him it might be valuable to have a known source of food for their trip home. Especially if, as seemed likely, they had to flee L.A. without slowing for goodies. He'd seen a screwdriver in a downstairs tool closet. He unscrewed the remains of the knob and replaced it with the one from the closet. Ten minutes later, he was out the door and on the road.

Santa Barbara materialized ahead. Much of California stood out to him as what he thought of as Generic America, e.g. strip malls, McMansions, and chain stores, the personality-free result of towns that hadn't gotten their start until a century or two after the stuff he'd grown up with on the East Coast. But parts of it were much older, predating English-speaking America. Santa Barbara looked like one of those: red clay roofs, arched windows, Spanish churches. It kind of sucked that it would all be in ruins within another few decades.

A voice stopped him mid-stride. Not just a voice: a voice being used to sing. And that was joined, a few lines later, by the warm notes of an acoustic guitar. His instincts directed him to detour, but for once, other people might prove more useful than annoying and/or dangerous. Besides, after his partnership with Dim, public displays of guitars had taken on a new meaning.

He followed the noise to a cafe. It smelled like frying eggs and herbal tea. Out front, three people eyed him, making note of his pack. He was an obvious stranger, but they didn't challenge him as he thumped across the wooden porch and into the dining area.

A dozen people were seated around the interior, enjoying breakfast and the steady light gushing through the eastern windows. An old man sat near the back of the room, hunched over a guitar, surrounded by open space. He had a deep, clear voice with a slight twang. Walt had an instant and uncanny sense of recognition, then remembered Johnny Cash had died years before the plague.

He seated himself away from the others, swinging his pack beneath the scuffed wooden table. The old man with the guitar finished one song, took a drink from a glass of something amber and foamy, then started up a new piece. Boots tocked toward Walt. He glanced back and met eyes with a lanky middle-aged man with a faded sleeve of tattoos around his left arm.

"Pay to stay," the man said. "Get you something?"

"Got a drink menu?"

The man didn't budge. "Tea, beer, gin, Tang."

Walt laughed. "Should I be more impressed by the gin? Or the Tang?"

"Gin's homemade. Tang isn't."

"And how is the gin?"

He shrugged. "Nobody's gone blind yet."

"It's way too early," Walt said. "But I can't not have homemade gin."

"Cash or trade?"

"Better make it trade." He bent under the table, fished around his bag, and withdrew a can of tomato soup. He clapped it on the table. "Doesn't get more classic than that."

The man sniffed. "I got plenty of food."

"Yeah, but how much of it can you carry around in the bottom of a backpack for twenty years without worrying it'll go bad?"

"Not as much." The man slid the can from the table with a metal scrape. "One gin."

"Three." Walt pointed to the old man with the guitar. "I'm buying him one once he's done."

The man brought the can to his ear and shook it. He made a quick calculation, then nodded and walked off. He returned with a jelly jar half full of a semi-opaque liquid speckled with bits of pulp. Walt had a swallow. Lime juice, the citric acid doing its best to combat the potent juniper of the gin. Alcohol caught in the back of his throat and he swallowed involuntarily, eyes stinging. The bartender snorted and moved off.

Walt keenly lamented the loss of ice in drinks, but it had been a long time since he'd paid for one prepared by someone else. Or since he'd sat around a room full of strangers without mentally listing what order he'd shoot them in if he said something that pissed them off. He sipped steadily and even managed to relax a bit. Sitting and drinking in the company of others while someone played songs felt like such a fundamental human experience that its recent absence in his life now struck him as freakish.

Things were going to come back, weren't they? Not to normal. Not the
old
normal, anyway. But normal-ish, if in a bizarre, postmodernly medieval way. One where ex-software engineers drank home-brewed mead around tables manufactured in the now-defunct nation of Pakistan and argued the best ways to resurrect the grid, yet who sat up straighter whenever a wolf howled from the night.

The future belonged to the wolves, though. This cafe, this flashback to Before, it was a blip. Soon enough, he and everyone who'd lived in the ruins before they were ruined would be dead. Their offspring would grow up knowing nothing but this. That's when things would
really
get freaky.

He found himself terribly disappointed that he'd miss it.

The old man wrapped up a song and croaked something about a break. The audience applauded politely. The man stood, back stooped like a fishing pole with a big one on the line, and shuffled to the bar. Walt grabbed his pack and moved to intercept him.

"Great set," he said, not yet seating himself. "You a gin man?"

The old man regarded him. He had pale blue eyes and a fixed expression of not giving a shit. "What do you want?"

"To talk. I get five minutes and you get a drink. Interested?"

"Isn't it a little early for gin?"

"I'd say it's one alien invasion too late to give a damn."

The old man stared, then twitched his mouth in what would have been a smile for a man of less petrified facial muscles. "Gin it is."

Walt took the stool beside him and waved the gangly bartender over for a round. He said nothing while he waited for the drinks to arrive and neither did the old man. The bartender clinked down two jelly glasses. The old man sipped, expression as flat as ever.

"That puts you on the clock," Walt said. "Are you a tom?"

"If that's what they call it."

"If you're the traveling kind, I'll call you my hero. Been to L.A. recently?"

"Enough."

"How was it?"

The man rolled his glass between his fingers. "Won't be back."

"Why's that?"

"It's no good."

Walt pressed his lips together. "You know, for a man who makes his living with his voice, you're not much of a talker."

The man took a drink and rolled it around his mouth. "Southland, it's not so bad. They're free folks. Ship's run tight enough they don't mind if you drop by and make some swaps. Just don't get into it with them about religion."

"Yeah? Which one do they follow?"

The old man regarded him with one pale blue eye. "Fish heads."

"Fish..?" Walt decided to skip this. "Is that where the Dead Stars are?"

"That would be to the north," the tom said. "And the reason I'm not going back."

"Hostile to strangers?"

"Oh, they'll let you inside readily enough. But once you're in, that's where you stay."

"As slaves."

The old man swirled his glass. "Not that I saw. Mostly, it was the oath. And the desire to take it." He paused. Walt waited for him to continue of his own accord. "Big on loyalty, those ones. Seem to think it comes from stating as much. They'll strap you to a partner, too. Someone who'll show you the ropes with a grin—and keep an eye on you all the while."

"That's it?" Walt said. "An oath and a snitch and everyone goes all Stepford Wives?"

"'Course not. What they do is inculcate a sense of com
mun
ity. Ain't no better way to make a man turn the knife on his wants than to make him think the community will look down on him like a dog."

"Still seems kinda thin."

The man shrugged. "If you don't do as they like, they got nothin' against killing you, either."

"But you were there. And got out fine."

"First off, I was sponsored. Second, soon as they learned I wasn't fixing to stay, they expedited my departure. With a quickness."

"Sounds like a twelve-car pileup of assholes," Walt said. "Why would you go there in the first place?"

The old tom took a long drink. "To see if there was a tale worth the telling."

Once the man finished his drink and half of a second, it took significantly less effort to cajole the words out of him. Not that there was much more to learn. He didn't know anything about who was in charge, any slaves the group might be holding, or what their unknown leader might value about those hypothetical captives. Walt thanked him and got on his way.

He followed the coastal road on his bike, a little wobbly from the gin. The days were growing long and by nightfall he was passing through the hills of Malibu. He might have made it to the city then, but something told him he'd be better off waiting until morning.

Dawn came early. He made a trip to a creek to refill his water, ate a can of beef stew, and rode on. He didn't have much of a plan. That could come later, after he was inside. From what the old man had said, that much would be easy.

The road threaded between the hills and the shore. Ahead, a broad, white barricade spanned the lanes. Walt coasted, then braked. Tall red letters were painted across the blockade. "VISITORS TURN BACK," it said. "TO SPEAK, FIRE TWO SHOTS INTO THE AIR."

Reasonable enough, except for the fact he didn't have an Earth-standard firearm. It was a more cunning system than the hand-painted letters implied. By making strangers announce themselves, the Stars didn't have to keep someone on the road at all times—either that, or they
did
patrol it, but got to pretend like it was unobserved ground. On top of that, they could learn immediately if intruders were armed.

So what did they do with visitors who weren't carrying guns?

He got off his bike and turned in a circle, taking in the hills, the homes on the bluff, the apartments rising from the entrance to the city proper. Well, if somebody was watching from up there, they had him already.

He cupped his hands to his mouth. "Bang! Bang!"

His voice echoed through the emptiness. He waited. Crickets chirped from the weeds. He called out a second time. When no answer came, he hiked up his pack and walked past the wooden barrier. Ahead, something red flashed from the roof of the apartments. It flicked back and forth, a flag or a scrap of cloth.