"Not the one you keep beside your bed, I hope." She grinned. "Well. Want to take that stuff down to the river with me again?"
He glanced at her. Was it that easy? Should he tell her he was too busy? It would be so much simpler. Get lost in the work. Forget it all. He felt stuck, trapped inside the same old block of ice. Kristin smiled, eyes tick-tocking between his, asking for a decision. But he was capable of movement, wasn't he? It was the ice that was stuck. He just had to will his limbs to move.
"I'll be there," he said.
He spent the night with her and returned to the harvest at dawn. Day by day, they cleared the fields, hacking down swaths of green and baling them into wagons to be dried. He saw Kristin every second or third day. At night, the desert air grew so cold he thought the dew would crust into frost, but the weather held through Halloween. One day, he realized he hadn't seen Shawn in weeks. He wasn't sure if he missed him.
At the plant, the lights stayed on late. Sometimes, when he wasn't too exhausted, Ness took his binoculars to the river's edge and watched men with guns patrolling the grounds. Rains came and went. At sunset, dust set the horizon aflame with orange and pink and red.
Larsen's heavy hand stirred him from the middle of the night. Ness startled, scrabbling to the edge of his mattress, back pressed against the cold wooden wall.
"Get up," Larsen said.
"Where are we going? Do I need my shoes?"
"Only if you like your feet."
Ness dressed and got his shoes. Larsen strode through the cornfields, crunching through dried stems and broad, striated leaves, cutting to the banks of the river where the water would smother his words.
Larsen stared at the silvery ripples for so long Ness began to shiver. The tall man planted his foot on a rock and heeled it into the river. "There are no bombs."
Ness hunched his shoulders tight against the wind. "Is that a Zen thing?"
"Daniel doesn't think they'll work."
"He doesn't think high doses of radiation will kill things made out of flesh and blood?"
"Do we know they have blood?"
"Okay then, flesh and goo."
Larsen gazed across the river. "Daniel thinks two things. First, that the fact they were able to survive a trip of unknown light-years proves they're radiation-resistant. Second, that we shouldn't fight."
Ness breathed into his hands. "Sooner or later, they'll come for us."
"Unless they don't."
"Yeah, they're probably perfectly cool with us running a nuclear reactor. Just so long as we keep our yard trimmed and don't let any missiles pee on their rose bushes."
"Again, he sees two things. Someone else drives them off. And we're fine. Or the resistance fails, and we're dead no matter what we do."
"What if we could have made a difference?" Ness said.
Larsen swiveled his flat-cheeked face toward Ness. "He thinks the chances of that are so low that it's not worth antagonizing the invaders."
"I don't get why you're telling me this."
"To do with it what you wish." Larsen sniffed and turned from the river. Ness followed him for three steps, then fell back. The conversation was over.
He returned to the river and sat down. He watched the ripples until his mind was ready to move. Larsen wouldn't have come to him to prompt him into speaking to Daniel. Ness had no special evidence. No proof of concept in the bombs. If Larsen couldn't talk the old man into action, Ness wouldn't have a prayer.
The tall man could be coming to him to vent. Ness had the impression few people liked Larsen. Maybe he didn't have any friends. Or maybe he'd come to Ness because he knew Ness had no power nor the will to grab it, and that he could spill whatever he pleased without fear that Ness would use it against him, to discredit or betray him to Daniel.
No, he didn't think so. Larsen wasn't so different from the farmers and locals back in Moscow. If he had a problem, he'd do something about it—or keep it to himself.
He had given Ness this information so Ness would put it to use. So Ness would go on strike? Stop producing ethanol until Daniel started producing bombs? Daniel would just get Brandon to do it. Or bribe Nick.
Ness went still. He knelt and tapped a wave-lapped rock, reassuring himself with its solidity. Daniel could replace one person. He couldn't replace a hundred.
Ness went home. He woke so nervous he couldn't eat breakfast. He spent hours rehearsing what he would say, discarding one phrase after another, searching for the perfect line of logic. He still wasn't sure he'd found it when the workers came home from the fields for dinner.
He waited until most had finished but few had left the tables. Then, heart beating so hard he thought his heart would squirt from his ribs, he climbed on top of his picnic table and cleared his throat.
"My name's Ness. I'm the guy who was so lazy he had to be literally whipped." A few people chuckled uneasily. His entire body itched. "Since then, I've tried to get my head on straight. Because I thought we were working toward something important. I thought we were working to kill the aliens who took our families away. Who are still fighting to wipe us out. But I don't think we are fighting back. I think we're working toward something else instead. Something the people running this place don't want you to know about."
Nick looked up at him like Ness' teeth had fallen out one by one while he was speaking. "What are you talking about?"
He almost lost his nerve. "We're not working for our safety or our future. We're working so the people in the plant can take what we make and sell it for themselves." He described the arms deal, the meat they ate, the radios they had access to, the computers and the trucks and the hired soldiers. "That plant isn't just across a river, it's in a different world. One where everything we create gets sent to them and we're left with the scraps.
"Daniel tells us all this hardship is about fighting the aliens. But someone in his camp just told me he doesn't plan to fight back at all. Therefore, I can only conclude that we are being used—and will go on being used until we do something to stop it."
He broke off; he'd had more, but he forgot it abruptly. He stood on the picnic table, biting the skin around his thumbnail, their sunbeaten faces watching him from under the shadows of the tarps.
"Is that true?" Erasmo said to the old man who woke them every morning, who still hadn't moved. "They get to just drive into town?"
The old man shrugged. "How should I know? Don't tell me shit."
"This whole time they said they were building bombs," said Ellen, a hefty woman who swore every time she rose from tending the rows of crops. "If they're not looking to give the squid a taste of what we did to Nagasaki, just what the hell are they doing over there?"
Ness shrugged. "Selling our stuff for other stuff we'll never see."
"So what do you want to do about it?" Nick said.
Ness could have hugged him. "Nothing. I want to do nothing. Quit working. Go on strike."
Ness hadn't known what he expected. Cheers? Applause? Boos and a hail of tomatoes? Instead, they met his proposal with blank silence, looking away when he climbed down from his perch. He walked to the river and wandered the banks until long past dark. He thought about going to Kristin, but it wouldn't do any good. He'd failed.
In the morning, the workers rose, ate breakfast, and stayed at the picnic tables, watching each other, as if waiting for someone to break rank and Ness' spell with it. The old man stood with his arms folded, toothpick wiggling from his teeth. He caught Ness staring and nodded.
A half hour after they were scheduled to start the day's harvest, the people dispersed. Some went back to their bunks. Some went to the river to wash their clothes. Others walked south, packs on their backs, to spend the day foraging in town. None went back to the fields.
At the tables, Nick sipped his water and laughed. "It's like we're all skipping school. Know what happens next?"
Ness shook his head. "I never skipped school."
"They send security to get you."
Ness laughed t
hrough his nose. His humor was as short-lived as his rebellion. The next morning, while the workers were still waiting on their oatmeal, trucks rolled onto the bridge. They crossed the wide gray waters, wheels spitting dust, and came to a stop at the end of the road to the farm. Men with rifles leaped from the backs and advanced on the workers. Ness stood and prepared to run.
22
Teeth swam above her head. Two white rows of teeth. Teeth divided by narrow gray seams. They sank toward her neck, a pink tongue-tip protruding from the incisors. Tristan tried to scream.
Water touched her lips. She swallowed. She had done this before. She choked and sat up, water dribbling down her shirt.
"It's alive!" said the woman who owned the teeth. "Glad to see we're not just wasting the stuff. Starting to feel like I was pouring it down a pretty little drain."
Tristan sat up, taking in the plain white sheets, the bare and water-spotted walls. "Where am I?"
"Williams," the woman said. "Williams, Arizona. Former United States of Earth."
"So you know about them."
"We're not living in a basement just to keep cool."
Tristan reached for the water glass, finishing it. The water was room temperature and tasted like dirt. "They're trying to wipe us out. I didn't know anyone was left."
"Oh, was there a plague or something?" the woman said. "That would explain why all my friends dropped dead."
"They're working on a second plague. A final strike."
The woman pressed her lips together. "Doubt there's enough of us left to kill."
Her name was Jen and she was gently plump. His name was Mikel and his brown eyes were as bright as his smile. They were married, both in their late thirties. They lived in the basement of a former Grand Canyon gift shop and diner beside a large blue lake. Mikel had found Tristan on the road while scavenging their designated sector of the town—even before the Panhandler hit, Williams had just three thousand people, most of whom knew each other by face if not name. After the Panhandler hit, it was reduced to 22. One Sunday after the dust had settled, a former volunteer firefighter went door to door to invite the survivors to the Lutheran church to learn who'd lived and hash out what to do next.
After the meeting, six survivors left town to seek different fates. The sixteen who remained in Williams split scavenging rights between themselves as equally as possible—although it had taken more than a few arguments to settle who got what share of the propane shop on the north end of town—including shared and unrestricted passage to the two lakes and two reservoirs. There hadn't been a single significant squabble since.
Jen told her all this over a breakfast of potatoes, eggs, and homemade bread. Tristan held the velvety yolks in her mouth before swallowing. "So you just split up the whole town? Is there anything left?"
Mikel poured her more water. "Food, guns, gas, and Coke? That's all been hauled back to our lairs, which ought to tell you a thing or five about a people's values. Nonessentials haven't been picked quite so bare."
"Where'd you come from?" Jen said. "You looked like a scarecrow come to life."
Tristan dug into her potatoes. "West. I ran out of food. I meant to restock along the road. Turned out the road was out of water, too."
After another day of rest, Tristan felt well enough to get up and do some wandering. Like Mikel said, the town had been picked free of food. She found a duffel bag upstairs in the gift shop and walked to the sporting goods store on the east end of town, which still carried a few things deemed too common or useless to be worth hoarding: a canteen, a compass, two silvery emergency blankets, two Swiss army knives, a radio, a collapsible fishing rod, artificial bait. All the guns were gone. The biggest knives, too. Tristan shouldered her bag, climbed onto a bike, and rode back to the house, dropping the bike off the bushes down the street and stashing the bag in the passenger side of a dust-caked Cadillac.
She volunteered to help clean their home. Jen grinned and showed her to the broom, dustpan, mop, and bucket. Tristan took care of the basement, spending extra time in the couple's bedroom, then moved upstairs to the gift shop, careful to sweep all the closets and storerooms as well.
Along the way, Tristan discovered Mikel kept three guns in his bedroom and another nine wrapped in coats in a box in the attic. He'd hidden spare ammo in a chest, the small boxes buried beneath shot glasses printed with tiny pictures of the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff. Tristan waited for the couple to fall asleep, then crept to the attic, where she took a scoped rifle and an automatic pistol. Using a pen light taken from the kitchen, she compared the ammo in the guns' magazines to what was in the green cardboard boxes—she hadn't had time to do so earlier, too afraid of being caught—and returned downstairs.
A man waited in the darkness, gun pointed at her head.
"What you got there?" Mikel said.
"Two of your guns," Tristan said.
"What are you thinking?"
"That the rest of the world isn't likely to be as nice as Williams."
"Man, we don't need all these weapons. You could have just asked."
Tristan shrugged. "People say yes more when a gun does the asking."
Mikel sighed. "You got food? Water?"
"I've got water from the lake. I was going to go to the reservoir and catch a few fish before dawn."
"You can't drink straight out the lake, you'll shit your brains out. Go wait outside while I kit you out right. And for God's sake, be quiet. Jen hears you robbing us, you'll break her heart."
Tristan went out to the car and got her bag. Mikel crept outside and handed her a pillowcase heavy with small boxes and bottles.
"You know there's an alien camp down the highway?" she pointed.
"I've heard the jets."
"You heard about any others like it?"
The light of the quarter moon glinted in his eyes. "Who you lose?"
"My brother." She slung the bags over her shoulders. "I'm sorry. Tell Jen whatever you want."
She walked to the end of the street and got the bike from under the bushes. Its basket was big enough to hold both her bags, so long as she bungeed them down, but she had to carry the rifle slung on her shoulder. She'd taken a map from the gift shop. It was cartoonish and poorly-scaled, but all she had to do to find Flagstaff was follow the highway.
She biked east into the lukewarm night. She could spend an eternity combing the country and still never find Alden. She needed news. That meant she needed people. People carried news like STDs.
She was still weakened from her bout of exhaustion. It took her two days to bike the 35 miles to Flagstaff. In between, she holed up in a rest stop. From the east, a line of mountains oversaw the city. Flagstaff was smaller than she expected. Smaller than Redding. Snows held to the heights of the two pyramidal peaks beyond the town. She climbed a hill a mile outside the city. The grass had died during the summer, but the outskirts were dotted with gnarly pines that smelled of needles and bad syrup. She scanned the streets through the scope of the rifle, keeping her finger outside the trigger guard.
Extrapolating from Williams' numbers, Flagstaff could have as many as five hundred survivors. If so, they were doing a damn good job of hiding from each other. Anything green and orderly stood out from the desert like a malleted thumb, but she saw a bare handful of gardens scattered around the town.
It had been one thing to deal with a gaggle of naked, traumatized prisoners and a too-kindly couple. It was another thing entirely to stroll into a strange town demanding answers from total strangers who'd been through unknown trials of their own. Could she connive her way into another household? Someone nice. Popular. A former reverend or elementary school teacher. Sponge them and their connections for knowledge.
But it would take too long to set up, be too risky. Anyway, she wasn't sure she had the stomach for some elaborate con. It hadn't been that long ago she was campaigning the streets of Berkeley for gay marriage rights. Some part of her—the same part of her that believe Alden was still alive—continued to bel
ieved others deserved respect, honesty, fair treatment.
She channeled her inner Clint Eastwood and walked her bike down the middle of town. When that drew no notice, she picked out a two-story house, checked it for people living and dead, tore a square of cardboard from a box in the garage, and wrote a message in block Sharpie. After thinking for some time on the apocalypse's equivalent of the saloon, she biked around until she found the Walmart and duct taped her sign to the front doors:
"NEED INFO ON ALIENS, ESP. PRISON CAMPS. WILLING TO BARTER. LEAVE TERMS HERE."
She returned to her home, which had enough canned fruit and soup to last her a week or better, and killed the rest of the day raiding the neighbors. When she returned to her sign the following afternoon, she found it had been defaced with two names, a drawing of a penis, and a request to meet at 5 PM, no date given.
She turned in a circle, eyeing the parking lot. Several RVs rested at the far end. She cleared them one by one and settled inside the second-largest, prying open the windows to convince a breeze to flush out the sweltering air. She found an unopened bottle of grapefruit juice in the pantry. It was blood-warm but smelled fine. She drank it as she watched the lot.
The sun was still well above the horizon when the man walked to the door and stopped to gaze across the baking asphalt. He lit a cigarette and stepped into the shade of the entry. Tristan examined him through the scope. He wore baggy sports shorts, but despite the heat, a light jacket covered his torso. Probably had a pistol on his hip. She made sure she could draw hers, then popped the door and dropped down the steps.
His eyes locked on her. As she crossed the baking lot, she kept her attention on his right hand, which he used to hold his cigarette. Dry, bitter smoke dispersed across the cars.
She stopped out of arm's reach. His gaze skipped from her chest to her rifle to her hips. "What's your name?"
"What's it matter?"
"All relationships are based on trust. How can you trust when you don't know who to hold accountable?"
"Tristan."
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 55
