Blackout

by Edward W. Robertson

  "I heard that. You're sure you're making the right decision?"

  "Yeah. I never really felt like I belonged here. Besides, after all we've been through, I think if I stayed here, it would only make me sad."

  "I think you're right."

  He could feel it building in him like an orgasm. He blurted, "You should come with me."

  Her mouth twitched. "I've wanted you to ask me that so badly. But I wish you hadn't."

  "I don't understand. Do you want to go or not?"

  "I do. More than anything. But I can't."

  Ness' heart clenched. "Why not?"

  "I wouldn't be any good for you. Or for the Dovon. The war, I'm…not the same person I was."

  "None of us are."

  She shook her head, blinking. "I became what I had to. A soldier. Capable of anything. But I'm so angry, Ness. If I went with you, I'd only turn that anger on you."

  "You changed to deal with the plague," he said. "You can change again."

  "I hope that's true."

  "Then come find out with me."

  Tristan's eyes welled with tears. "It's not that simple. I became a warrior because I had to. Sometimes, I don't even recognize who I am. Even if I can put the war behind me and find my way back to something else, it'll take years. And whatever's between us is too fragile to survive that."

  Ness took a step toward her. "It was the end of the world, Tristan. We all went a little crazy. But we can help each other come back."

  "No," she said. "We can't."

  A cold wind blew in from the ocean. His voice felt as small as a beetle. "So what are you going to do?"

  "I was going to go see Alden. Not to stay. I wouldn't be any better for him than I would be for you. But to let him know what's happened, that I'm alive, and that we're finally safe."

  "What do you mean, you were going to see him?"

  She laughed froggily, palming a tear from her eye. "When Sprite heard, he volunteered to take Alden a letter. He'll use the yacht we've got down in San Diego. He's already talked Walt and Carrie into crewing with him."

  Somehow, Ness found himself laughing, too. "Sprite, man. I wish we could all shrug it off like he does. Just dust ourselves off and head off into the next adventure."

  "That's exactly what you're doing, Ness. And that's why I can't go. I'd ruin it for you."

  He closed his eyes, inhaling shakily. She wrapped her arms around him. He hugged her back, pressing his face against her neck. When he was ready, he opened his eyes and stepped away.

  "So what will you do?"

  Tristan tried to smile, but it didn't last. "I can't stay here, either. I need to be alone. I might try the mountains."

  He searched for the words that would set everything right. That would fix whatever was broken in her. Her mask had finally slipped, though, allowing him to see how deep the hole behind it went. And he knew there were no words that could fix it.

  "I'm so sorry," she whispered. "I wish I was strong enough for this. And for you."

  He laughed, dislodging a pair of tears. "You're crazy, Tristan. You're the strongest person I've ever known."

  He stood across from her, willing things to change. For a moment, a light brightened in her eyes, but it was gone as soon as he'd seen it.

  "All right," Ness said. "Time to hit the stars. If you see one moving, give it a wave."

  Her jaw quivered. He smiled. He meant it. He turned and walked back to Sebastian, who was watching him with somber eyes. Ness shook his head. Sebastian set a tentacle on his shoulder.

  They joined the other Dovon and walked through the streets to where they'd left the ship. As Ness made to climb aboard, Sebastian stopped him. "I AM SORRY"

  "Don't be," Ness signed. "I have no regrets. That's the only thing I've ever wanted."

  He buckled in. The engines hummed to life. The ground fell away beneath them. Ness knew his feet would never touch it again.

  The thought made him happier than he'd ever felt in his life.

  * * *

  That night, they stayed on the beach. The warriors sang and danced and told stories, passing around bottles of moonshine. Raina didn't know when they had made it, let alone out of what, but she had some anyway.

  After making the rounds, Mauser returned to her side, gazing up at the black disk of the ship hanging against the stars. "Still paranoid that this is a trick?"

  "It's not paranoid," she said.

  He hoisted a bottle and swirled it. "Well, if this is to end in disaster, we'll be happier if we're drunk."

  She accepted the offer. As she tipped back the bottle, she locked eyes with her mother.

  The older woman walked up to them, ignoring Mauser's cheery greeting. She held out her hand. With a pang of childlike embarrassment, Raina gave her the bottle.

  Her mother twisted it to the moonlight, then raised an eyebrow at her. "Any good?"

  "It burns," Raina said.

  Her mom laughed, took a long pull, then gave her back the bottle, blinking back tears. "Sure does. Then again, some things are made to burn."

  She smiled at Mauser and walked back to the party. As Raina circulated among the troops, she tried to keep one eye on the ship, but as one hour became two, and two became three—each hour fortified with further sips from the bottle—she found herself more and more distracted by those around her. In time, she sat in the sand, laughing at every joke and war story.

  "Look!" Bryson shot to his feet, staggering drunkenly down the sand, finger lifted toward the ship. "It's moving!"

  Raina popped to her feet, reeling; she was drunker than she thought. Even so, there was no mistaking the sight of the blackness creeping over the stars.

  Red light glowed from the left edge of the ship. Raina's heart erupted. The line flowed to the right, lengthening, as bright as the sun itself. Were they missiles? A giant laser ready to burn the city to its last ashes?

  "Uh," Bryson said. "Are we all about to die?"

  Mauser laughed. "Not unless you're intending to flap your arms and take a closer look. Those aren't weapons. They're engines."

  The warriors breathed out audibly. So did Raina. Once the ship had rotated its engines toward the city, it began to edge upward. It was a full minute before she was certain it had shrunk in size. She kept watching. Even when the tears began to blind her.

  The red block of the engines contracted to a line. Another minute, and they were no more than a point, a single red star moving among thousands of others.

  And then, at last, it was gone.

  * * *

  The axe bit deep into the trunk, blond chips flying from the strike. Tristan drew back, gathered her weight, and hit the pine again. For the first day or so, the axe had felt clumsy and unwieldy, as likely to hack through one of her limbs as her target.

  After that, though, she'd found her rhythm. Now, as the axe hit home time after time, she thought it was one of the best tools there was.

  The trunk groaned. She jogged back. Wood cracked and popped. Needles whisked against each other. The pine gave way, toppling with a chorus of creaking wood, and slammed into the slope.

  The air smelled like dust and resin. Tristan gave herself a moment to catch her breath, then strolled down to the felled tree and started trimming the branches off at the trunk. This was by far the most tedious part of the process. It could take most of a day to remove everything. As she cleaned away branch after branch, she dragged them to a large, loose pile. Later, she'd cut them up for kindling.

  She rested as needed, keeping a close eye on the state of her hands. Her hands were callused and tough, capable of taking a lot of punishment, but they could still blister. If she let that happen, she'd lose days.

  She had the trunk cleaned by early afternoon. She stopped for a long drink of water, then measured the trunk, marking lengths with the axe. She'd get three good logs out of it. She chopped it into sections, then drove a hefty steel pin into the downhill end of the one with the widest circumference. She laid a number of small, straight branche
s perpendicular beside it, then used a stout limb as a lever, rolling it onto the smaller branches. She knotted a rope through the eye of the pin and dragged the massive log downhill, the branches beneath it acting as rollers.

  Within an hour, she had it down to the site. She paused, smiling at the foundation she'd built. She'd only been at it a week, but the log cabin was already thigh-high. It would get tougher the higher it got—she'd have to erect a scaffold of some kind, build ramps and levers on each side to haul the logs up into position—but it was only a matter of time.

  She measured the ends, then used a hatchet to cut deep grooves so it would sit firm on the logs beneath it. By mid-afternoon, she was ready to roll it into place. As she did so, sweating and grunting, she was keenly aware that if the log slipped down her levers, it could break her legs or kill her. Maybe it would have made more sense to set up in one of the old ski cabins. She was deep in the Rockies, but there were plenty around.

  But the point wasn't shelter. The point was to build that shelter on her own. Day by day. To prove to herself that she could. If she wasn't finished by fall, she'd winter in one of the pre-plague vacation houses. Then she'd come back and finish her work.

  Log by log, she'd make it whole.

  By the time the log clunked into place atop the others, she was starving and exhausted. She stoked a fire and roasted a cut of venison and a few carrots. With the sweat drying and the adrenaline long gone, the anger crept back in. Hard work was the only way to ward it off. She tried to distract herself by thinking of a better way to chink the walls than using mud, but it wasn't enough. The pain beat inside her like a trapped tide. She thought it was better than when she'd left Los Angeles months ago—she hoped it was—but she had so far to go.

  Even so. Log by log. Day by day.

  After dinner, she went to poke around her garden of potatoes, carrots, onions, broccoli, and herbs. She hated gardening more than anything. The weeds never quit coming and the growth was so slow. Tristan was surprised, then, to find that she'd been working at it so long that the stars had come out.

  She stood back, leaning on her hoe, gazing up at the silver dots shining between the pine needles. For most people, they held hope. Potential. Dreams that could never be taken away. For her, though, it was a different story. Sorrow. Regret. Pain.

  She made herself look anyway. And saw that one of the stars was moving, threading through the branches, a pale blue speck surrounded by so much darkness.

  Her heart leaped. She lifted her hand and waved.

  * * *

  For the first day or two, Walt regretted his hasty commitment to sailing out to pass a message to Tristan's little brother. For one thing, it was a bit strange that she wasn't with them. Then again, during their discussion, he could tell she wasn't in any shape to spend weeks trapped on a ship with three other people, two of them near-strangers.

  That was the other thing. The trip was going to take forever. Drunk on the beach, that had sounded like a grand idea. After all they'd been through, it would be a tropical vacation—and very well earned. But as they labored to prepare the yacht, he could see what a giant pain in the ass it was going to be.

  But life at sea was even better than he'd ever imagined.

  Steady wind. The spray of the waves. All the sun you could ask for, along with the occasional squall to mix things up. After his month-long convalescence in the Dovon ship, Walt couldn't get enough of the outdoors.

  With all the sailing-related details Sprite had to teach him, there was no risk of getting bored, either. Knots, rigging, winds, currents, how to navigate using a sextant and compass and hourglass like a god damn pirate—it was all such a kick that he was almost sad when land materialized on the horizon.

  Due to the imprecision of their instruments, they'd aimed for the middle of the island chain, trying to hit Maui or Molokai, but they'd missed the mark by a hundred miles to the north, arriving at Kauai instead. This meant they had to heave about and spend the better part of a day backtracking to the Big Island. Tristan's map of landmarks proved worthy, though. They found the valley with almost no trouble at all.

  It was comically pretty: a stretch of flat land between jungly heights sporting a sandy beach, a winding stream, and swampy fields of vegetation that looked too orderly to be wild. There was a hut at the valley's far end. No smoke or people or other signs of current inhabitation, but it was enough for Walt to tell Sprite to drop anchor.

  They launched the yacht's small rowboat. Carrie climbed in first, then Walt handed her two rifles and go-bags. They weren't expecting trouble, but you just didn't leave home without them.

  On the way in, the waves were a bit rough, but they made a smooth landing on the gray sand. Walt dragged the boat up while Carrie watched through her binoculars. The direct sunlight was brutally hot, but once they got into the shade of a tree, the constant wind left the air tropically perfect.

  "We're sure this is the spot?" Carrie lowered her binoculars. "There are a hundred valleys just like this."

  "No, this one's got the stream here. And those two shacks. Those are on Tristan's map." Walt cupped his hands to his mouth. "Alden! Yo, Alden!"

  His voice bounced back from the steep slopes. A hundred yards away, a figure popped up from the breeze-tossed grass. A rifle slanted from the crook of his arm.

  "Who are you?" he called.

  "We're friends of your sister," Walt said. "We've got a letter from her."

  The man lurched forward, jogging through the waist-high grass. "Is she okay?"

  "She's fine."

  "Then where is she?"

  Walt and Carrie exchanged a look. As the man reached them, Walt held out the letter. "This will explain better than I can."

  Alden's eyes tracked over the handwritten lines. He flipped the page, then glanced east across the ocean. He held up the letter, pages flapping. "Is this a joke?"

  "It's as real as you or I am," Walt said. "There was a second invasion. Your sister helped defeat it. Saved a lot of lives in the process, too."

  "And then she just…walked away?"

  "The war changed her into something she didn't want to be anymore. She had to get away from everything. But from what I saw of her, I think she'll find what she needs."

  Carrie gestured out at the yacht. "Sprite's here, if you want to talk to him. They spent the last two years working together. Do you know him?"

  "Yeah." Alden blinked. "Yeah. He's a good friend of Tristan's. I'd like to talk to him."

  They went back in the rowboat for Sprite, then followed Alden to his house at the back of the valley, where his wife Robi and their young son were working in the garden.

  Alden asked Sprite a bevy of questions, then sat back. "It makes sense. The Panhandler changed her. When our parents died, she became what she had to. To protect me."

  Walt rubbed his jaw. "It changed all of us. You don't even want to know what I used to be like."

  Robi tapped the table with her finger. "She looked well, though?"

  "She looked tired," Sprite said. "But resolved, too. I think you'll see her again some day."

  They spent the night on the lanai. Walt woke three different times, but he was happy to. Because it was one of the most beautiful nights he'd ever seen.

  He woke to the smell of frying bananas. The morning was humid but almost cool. Walt went for a walk. When he got back, breakfast was ready.

  "So," Alden said. "You brought the letter. What next?"

  Walt spooned up some poi. It was on the bland side, but it tasted much more nutritious than most mush did. "I don't think we've thought that far ahead."

  "You're welcome to stay here as long as you like."

  Robi gestured to the right. "The next valley over is empty. It's peaceful here. It could be home, if you want it."

  Walt took in the jungle swaying in the winds. He glanced at Carrie, then Sprite. "What do you guys say?"

  "Twist my arm," Carrie said.

  "This is one of the prettiest places I've ever been," S
prite said. "Besides, I've always wanted to see lava."

  They stayed at Alden and Robi's another day, then hiked into the next valley. It wasn't quite as nice, but taro grew in the watery flats and it had a small stream and a beach. The three of them spent the next two weeks cutting bamboo, hauling supplies from the little town a few miles to the east, and erecting two shacks at the mouth of the valley: one for Sprite, and one for Walt and Carrie. Alden pitched in. Robi, as it turned out, was pregnant again, but she was still able to prepare food and boil water while she looked out for their rambunctious toddler.

  The month after that was spent sprucing up the shacks, clearing the ground around them, and getting some gardens going. As it turned out, organized agriculture was almost unnecessary. Bananas, avocados, pineapples, taro, and citrus grew everywhere. Chickens roamed free like they'd been waiting for the aliens to tear down their coops. Thirty minutes fishing produced more than the three of them could eat. Once they had the basics in place, there was usually no more than an hour's work to be done each day.

  They spent the rest of their time hiking. Exploring. Swimming and snorkeling and surfing. Once they had a good cache of supplies, they moved the yacht to the dock in town, found some bicycles and a tire pump, and toured the island, stopping at streams and pools, investigating the ruins of Hilo, and checking out the lava fields to the south, which continued to bubble toward the sea, creating new land that would someday be filled by grass and trees and birds and people. Sometimes Sprite left on his own, venturing into the mountains and along the coast for days at a time before returning to the valley.

  Walt grew nearly as tan as Robi and Sprite. He began to wonder why anyone had ever lived anywhere but the tropics. The land seemed to want to feed you, care for you, keep you warm. He saw the odd hammerhead in the rich blue sea, and there were spiders wherever there was growth, but mostly, it was sun, fish, fruit, sex, and beaches.

  Weeks turned to months. Now and then they took a trip to a new beach, but if you'd taken a dip in one cove, you'd taken a dip in them all. Carrie was getting to be an expert surfer, but to him, a wave was a wave. On excursions, they sometimes ran into other survivors, but when Walt revealed who he was, they either didn't believe him, or started talking up their own war stories, which were mostly about the time they'd had to fire a warning shot at the jerk who lived up the hill. He soon stopped talking about himself at all.