Breakers (29 page)

An explosion roared over the condos and the yellow grass.

He rose to a crouch, spell broken. Bits of debris and trailing smoke ribboned the air to the north. Screams and automatic weapons drowned out the waves. Another explosion ripped through an apartment building overlooking the beach, sending its face sloughing down the slope in a clattering thunder of stone, wood, and glass.

Walt zipped up his pack and ran for the bike path lining the bottom of the harsh hills, laceless shoes flapping on his feet. On the pavement, he stuffed his shoes into his pack and turned south for the tall green cliffs. Staircases and ramps punctuated the slope every couple hundred yards. No good; he couldn't be sure what was happening up in the streets. The smoke he'd seen while cutting across town roiled a handful of blocks inland from where the shore curved along the rising hills. He'd follow that curve, by night if he had to, until it took him to a place that wasn't on fire.

Engines thrummed above. The sun was minutes set by the time Walt reached the curve in the beach. The cliffs soared a hundred feet vertical, mounted near the top by spacious decks with long, red-timbered legs. The sand gave out to a rubbly carpet of sharded rock and browning kelp. Surf welled between the stones. In the sea's quiet moments, a sound like angry static drifted from the heights. He knelt to thread new laces into his shoes and started along the rocks, splitting his attention between his footing and for any possible passage up the sheer walls.

His foot turned on a slimy stone, spilling him into a damp and stinking mat of kelp. Thick black flies clouded his face. He struggled up, knees soaked, palms stinging. In the dimming light, he could see nothing but rocky shore and rising cliffs.

Ahead, the cliff jagged inward, slumping from a sheer incline to one that was merely stupidly dangerous. Fallen rocks piled around its base. Grasses, shrubs, and small trees poked from its pitched face.

The last of the daylight was slipping away. He could wait out the night down here, risking the tides and whatever the aliens were up to. Road-honed instinct told him it was something big. There might not be any city left come morning, and tucked away as he might be below the cliffs, if it spilled out to him, he'd have nowhere to run.

He started up the scree, planting a hand for balance. Smoke touched his nose. A third of the way up the climb, the rubble stopped, replaced by a fast rise staggered with flatter stretches. Walt leaned into the rock, planting each step, grabbing for the stumps of brush and trailing branches. Halfway up, he stopped on the flat top of a boulder to catch his breath. Waves rolled beneath him, dark and indistinct. He was already having a hard time seeing his handholds. Within minutes, he'd be groping along under the confusion of full night.

Foot by foot, he carried upward, fingertips bleeding, shoulders and biceps burning. Just below the top, the slope transitioned to a sheer cliff. Walt hung there a moment, squinting to left and right for an alternate route, but the nooks of the rock wall were blurred by darkness. He reached up and scrabbled for a hold. He raised his knee, planted his foot. The rock beneath him shifted and tumbled away, racketing down the stone rise. Walt's legs swung into empty space.

He gasped, sweat slicking the rock beneath his clenching palms. Above, a muffled gunshot clumped across the early night.

23

Sarah shifted her grip on the gun, teeth bared. Raymond's head buzzed so hard he thought he'd fall over. He blinked repeatedly, as if that would wash the nightmare away.

"Put down the gun," he said.

"So you can ride into a massacre?" Sarah smiled. "I shoot her now, at least just one of you buys the farm."

"And then you and I live here in bliss."

"That's right."

His face felt numb. "There is a problem with that plan."

Sarah squeezed the crook of her elbow tighter to Mia's throat. "What's that?"

"The part where you shoot my wife."

"Everyone loses people. You get used to it."

"Yeah, you seem to have come out with flying colors," Mia said.

Sarah ground the barrel of the pistol into Mia's hair. "Shut your fucking face. You're a dead person. Dead people don't get to speak."

"How do you think you'll get him to stay when
that
happens? Chain him to a bed and break his legs?"

"Shut up!"

"Maybe you just make great iced tea. And know how to make ice in a place where it never freezes."

The blood fled from Sarah's mashed-together lips. She stood across the garage just in front of the door, too far to charge. The other guns were with their packs near the middle of the room; much closer, but Sarah's index finger only had to travel a fraction of an inch. Raymond edged forward.

"You stop right there." Sarah pointed the gun at him, then quickly returned it to a spot above Mia's right ear. "You don't move. You move, and I stucco the wall with her brains."

He held up his hands. "Don't shoot. I'm frozen."

It was true. What was the logic? Did she truly believe she could kill Mia and then convince him to live with her in loving harmony until the aliens burnt the whole hill to the ground? The only thing that made sense was that Sarah had gone moon-barkingly, chair-eatingly crazy, that the months of watching everyone around her die, first to the plague and then to aliens, had broken her mind completely, reducing it to a howling, mad wreck. How could he try to reason with that? How could you talk an insane person into doing something sane?

"Maybe we don't have to leave," he said. "Maybe we can all stay right here."

"So you can tie me up in my sleep? Knife me?"

"Nobody's going to knife you."

Sarah jerked her chin at Mia. "She'll talk you into it. Then you'll make your little excuses, and be sad for a while, but you'll ride away and you'll forget me."

"Jesus," Mia said. "How about we take your picture and promise to pray to it every night?"

"Enough!"

"I saved your life." Raymond was on the verge of tears. He didn't understand how that could mean so little to her, how she could justify taking whatever she wanted without the barest shred of gratitude. "Doesn't that mean anything?"

"And now I'm gonna save yours."

She sneered at Mia, fingers shifting on the grip of the pistol. Raymond's heart disintegrated, floating away like cold mist. It hit him in a hot rush, questions and conclusions he'd only be able to sort out after the fact. His wife was about to be shot by a crazy person and he was utterly helpless to stop it. Not only that, but it was his fault—he'd saved Sarah, he'd brought her back here, helped restore her health, allowed her to stay although she was a stranger with no claim whatsoever to the life between himself and Mia. It hadn't occurred to him that the mysterious relapse of Sarah's fever had been nothing but a ploy to get them to stay at the house with her, to stave off discussions of sending her off on her own. Mia'd had some suspicions, vague as they were, but he hadn't even begun to question the unknown woman in their home. He couldn't or wouldn't see the bad in a person, and now Mia would die.

Yet he couldn't have just left Sarah on the sidewalk above the beach to bleed to death, either. What
should
he have done? Made her leave as soon as she was able to walk? Snuck out with Mia in the middle of the night? How would he know to do these things without the foreknowledge of what was happening right now? Maybe any notion of power or control was just a laughable illusion—21st century humanity had been wiped out by a plague it could never have suspected. He and Mia had weathered that, had built themselves a new life amidst the wreckage, but now that was going to be blown away, too. It had all been a sad delusion.

Sarah pointed the gun at his legs, frowned, and pulled the trigger.

The bang was impossibly loud, tearing through the garage with a force as terrible as the bullet plowing through his left thigh. The impact staggered him. He banged into a toolbox and fell hard on the concrete floor. The pain hadn't yet hit. Instead, its threat waited in his nerves like the afterimage of lightning in the seconds before the thunder strikes.

"Not going anywhere now, are you?" Sarah said. She swung the gun back Mia's way. "Not once there's nothing to leave for—"

Mia darted forward, grabbing Sarah's wrist and jabbing her stiff fingers at Sarah's eyes. Sarah shouted and cringed back, hand to her eyes. Mia hammered her wrist into Sarah's forearm. The gun jarred loose. Mia punched her in the nose; Sarah yelped, stumbling back into the bikes. She tumbled down in a crash of metal.

Mia picked up the gun and pointed it at Sarah's teary face. "I don't know who the fuck you are. I'm not sorry I won't find out."

"Don't shoot!" Sarah thrust up her hands. "I'll go. I'll leave right now. I'll—"

Mia pulled the trigger. Sarah's body flew back into the toppled bike. Her arms flopped limply, elbows bent like a butchered chicken. Mia righted her aim and fired three more times, hands bucking.

"Are you okay?" Mia leapt over the boxes of food and jugs of water, kneeling beside Raymond and his blood-soaked thigh. "Don't move. I'm going to find one of those blood-tying things."

"Tourniquet."

"Don't move."

She rushed into the house. Raymond clamped his palms to the wound and tried not to faint. It hurt now, a knifing burn; the bullet had passed clean through his muscle, and blood dribbled from both holes. Mia returned with a handful of rags, a fifth of Grey Goose, and an abbreviated extension cord, stray wires poking from the end where she'd chopped it short.

"You cut that up?" Raymond said. "What if we need to plug something in out back?"

"Take off your pants."

He unbuckled and unzipped, breath hissing into his lungs as he peeled his jeans away from his leg. "You killed her."

"I fucking did."

"I mean, you
killed
her."

She splashed vodka over the bullet holes. He arched his back in pain as she swabbed blood. "Honey, she shot you. She was about to kill me."

"I know." He
did
know. He did know that. Something was wrong. Besides the hole in his leg. And the corpse sprawled over the bike. Those were obviously wrong. This wrong was a different wrong, like remembering a memory but maybe that was just something you dreamed or got told. He frowned. Mia taped the rags around his leg and he screamed. She knotted the cord around the top of his leg. The pain brought him around. "How are we going to leave?"

Mia tucked a sweaty strand behind her ear. "The alien army down there will be a strong incentive to figure that out. Drink this."

He swallowed from the bottle of water. Room temperature, but it tasted amazing; he drank half the bottle in one long chug. "I'm sorry. I should have known."

"Rest here. I'm going to check the window. Maybe we can wait another day."

She left him with his pain. He sat up, panting. He willed himself to stand. He owed it to Mia. If he couldn't move, she'd have to go without him. He grabbed hold of a shelf of oil cans and pesticides. It was his fault. If he was able to weather the fire, they could arrange a place to meet—Angels Stadium, any landmark south of LA. Leaning into the shelf, he pulled himself to his right foot, sweat popping along his hairline, pain throbbing through his thigh. They could do it. She could take a gun and he could hide in the yard and follow her after the flames were gone. From there, take a car to Arizona or New Mexico, just the two of them, and wait out the winter. Just the two of them. He stood, quivering.

Mia popped through the door. "We need to leave. We can walk the bikes if we have to. We just have to outpace the fire."

Raymond grabbed a five iron from a dusty bag of clubs and caned his way to Sarah's body. He knelt, grimacing, and rolled her body off the bike. She was warm and yielding. Hot blood soaked his palms. Mia crouched in front of the garage door, grabbed the handle, and rolled it up with a hollow rumble.

On the other side, a man stood in the night, short and lean and blank-faced behind his patchy beard. He raised a strange pistol to Mia's face.

24

Walt scrabbled his toes against the cliff face. Beyond its edge, another burst of gunshots clapped its approval. Walt's biceps shook, his fingers stiffened. The pack pulled on his back like something alive. He lamented never lifting weights.

He wouldn't let go. He wouldn't fall. Arms jittering and burning, he hauled himself straight up, feet groping. A rock loosed, kicked down the cliff. Dangling from his taut right arm, he reached with his left and dragged himself another foot up the stone. His toes found a ledge. He rested there for some time, waiting for the burn to seep from his arms. When he resumed, the climb was surprisingly easy, the cliff yielding hand- and toeholds so readily it was like it wanted him off just as much as he did. The slope leveled out. He crawled the last few feet on his belly, rolling into the overgrown, dried-out grass of a dead person's back yard.

Gunshots. Possibly gun shots fired at a god damn alien. He could smell the smoke with every breath. Orange fires lined the dark neighborhoods a few hundred yards downhill. Spotlights blazed on windows and doorways. Gouts of flame spurted from hemispherical tanks.

The shots had come some way to his right, further out along the curve of the point. Walt jogged out to the sidewalk, passing an Italian-style home with vacant, broken windows and a wide-open front door. The neighboring joints looked worse, if anything; weedy, yellow yards, shattered windows, broken-down fences, loose papers flapping in shrubs and iron grilles. Southern California looked like shit.

Ahead, a dusty car sat in the driveway of another monstrous home ripped from a Tuscan fairy tale. Green things grew in the side yard, sprouting from rich brown soil in neat leafy rows. Curtains shaded intact windows. Hard to tell in the darkness, but those windows didn't look too dusty.

He opened the iron gate and crept into the driveway, laser pistol in hand. Voices from the garage—a woman and a man. No sign of aliens. Walt turned for the street. The garage door cranked up. He whirled, sighting his pistol at a thin, pretty young woman whose olive hands were painted with drying blood.