The Breakers Series: Books 1-3

by Edward W. Robertson

He reached out to grab her hand, stopping halfway. "But not by yourself. Your parents were part of a rebellion, weren't they? If we can find who they were working with, we can help strike back. Wipe out the whole island. Be free again."

  Her head thrummed. As real as a memory, she could smell the smoke of their homes as she burnt them to the ground, feel the heat of the islanders' blood as she cut them to the bone. She shook her head, dislodging the vision.

  "I can't. I don't know who they were meeting with."

  "Oh, well. That's too bad." Martin smiled the way he smiled when he was about to show her a new gizmo he'd dug out of the ruins. "But I do. Want to go talk to them?"

  8

  They walked east along the road away from the beach until it forked north, and then they walked north instead. Walt wasn't positive it was the right way—his only map of the region was a broad-level thing you might find at a diner, far too crude to show the two-lane road spooling from the jungle—and when he asked Lorna if she knew any better, she murmured something he couldn't make out and kept on walking.

  Neither their course nor her silence was a big deal. If the road dead-ended, or turned the wrong way, they'd get back on track eventually. As for Lorna, he didn't much feel like talking, either. Not that anything had gone wrong the night before. She'd more or less attacked him, riding him angrily, refusing to make eye contact. She'd even come. Yet he couldn't shake the feeling the circumstances of their liaison—woman lost in the jungle two thousand miles from home, reliant on a near-stranger to get her back in one piece—were the sort that would once have landed him on a campus list somewhere. Or a Penthouse Forum, which might be even more disgraceful.

  He gave her a furtive look. She walked untiringly, face blank, hair a bit greasy, but the line of her clenched jaw and the sharky draw to her eyes made her look even prettier. She hadn't been snappy or insulting to him, just distant; if she were angry, it wasn't with him. He did mean to help her. Pretty generous, he thought, considering it meant putting his own well-being on the line. And if he was the type of person who wouldn't agree to such a thing until she'd fucked him, well, he'd long since made his peace with himself.

  Aside from those concerns, he felt relaxed, but otherwise little different from how he'd felt the day before, when his Ripken-like dry streak was still going strong. Sex was a lot like air or water, he figured. You only get worked up about it when you find yourself without it.

  So they walked north for days, slowed by his ankle until it healed up, sticking to the road except once when Walt thought he heard the keen of an alien ship and twice when they saw smoke curling from homes along the way. Then they returned to the world of leaves and muggy air and whining bugs. Two days into their revised travel plans, the jungle opened on a small town. Walt knelt and watched through his binoculars. Pigeons fluttered around in the cobbled square, but he saw no humans.

  Lorna had lost her bag back when she'd followed him away from the beach. Walt looted a nice map from the glove box of a Volvo, then explored the pastel yellow and off-red houses for several hours, helping Lorna pick out clothes and hiking shoes and her own binoculars and machete and drinking jugs.

  Inside a sprawling stucco villa, Walt tossed a pan down on the patterned rug. The piece was durable iron and reasonably small, but he already had a good one—a little too small, maybe, but at least he knew how it cooked, and it had high enough rims that it could double as a bowl.

  "You know, we'd save ourselves a lot of trouble if we just stripped down to knives and strings of varying thickness." He leaned against the plaster wall. "That's all you need to get by, isn't it? Stuff to cut things, and other stuff to tie it back together."

  Lorna picked up the pan and added it to her pack. Wordless, she entered the shadows of the hallway and lost herself in the bedrooms, footfalls echoing on the stone floors.

  They found some canned goods, which Walt didn't entirely trust, and a half-full swimming pool, which convinced him to camp at that house for the night, strain the pool water through a fine-woven sheet—the water was unchlorinated, old rainwater—then boil it over the fireplace, where Walt cooked corn and tomatoes and peppers from a neighbor's garden gone to seed. He let the tomatoes char on one side and didn't toss in the peppers until the last couple minutes. He thought it was pretty good, but waited the whole dinner without a compliment.

  "We could probably find some bicycles," he said. "The only problem is trying to balance with five gallons of water and full packs. Maybe we can find bike trailers."

  "So we can throw them away next time we have to cut through the jungle?" Lorna said.

  "What we really need are sled dogs. And a couple thousand miles of snow. Or we could just put little wheels on the sled and have a dog-drawn carriage." He spooned corn from his all-purpose metal bowl/cup. "Then again, feeding the dogs would be problematic. Unless we also rigged up a few teams of sled chickens. In fact, forget the dogs. With chickens, we could make the food carry itself."

  She set her metal thermos on the red tile so carefully it didn't make a click. "What are you talking about?"

  "Forget it."

  In the morning, he tried to start a few cars, just for fun, but none even attempted to turn over. One had grass growing from the dirt that had blown into the seams of the hood. He didn't bother trying to rig up something involving bikes. He didn't have a good solution for that yet. They were carrying too much weight. There was no way around it. The less food and water they carried, the more they would have to forage. The more they foraged, the less time they'd have for travel. On an unfamiliar road, it was best to grab up all the goods in front of you than to rely on more to materialize further down the path. They could get around this if they could find some good bike trailers, but like Lorna said, they'd have to abandon them the second they went off-road. The jungle was far too thick.

  So they walked on. Lorna cut a quick pace down the blacktop, one that left her sweating freely and ready to collapse into sleep each night. He thought she was punishing herself. Survivor's guilt. He'd probably had some of that himself after the plague. Two days out from the village where they'd restocked, they heard a car grumbling down the road and ran into the bushes to watch, but its engine faded the other way.

  Along the road, they made good time. Their feet and legs had been hardened by the passage through the jungle and they sometimes managed forty miles per day. With no major delays, they might make L.A. in two months. Walt had the impression the timing wasn't completely critical. Even crazy alien hive-babies needed some time to grow up. As long as they finished the trip in less than, say, five or ten years, he imagined they'd arrive with plenty of time to make a difference.

  The jungle was regularly interrupted by wide patches of tall grass and short trees, the corpses of former farms being devoured by the forest. Lorna wasn't proving much of a travel companion. It wasn't that she was unwilling to help. She pitched in on all the essentials: scouting towns, kindling fires, traipsing around for water, setting snares in the jungle at night and checking them at dawn. With her around—more specifically, the second pair of eyes and extra set of shoulders she provided—he bet they were covering more ground than if he were alone.

  He was lucky if he could get her to say more than four sentences a day. That had its upside, of course. It meant she never complained, and that he didn't have to worry about her yakking on and exposing them to anyone who might be lurking behind the tree line or the doors of old homes.

  But the flipside to that coin was she never admitted when she needed to rest. For all he knew her toes might have fallen off inside her tennis shoes. If she wound up with an infection, a broken bone, or even a bad case of blisters, they might be stopped for weeks on end.

  For that matter, there was just something vexing about running around with somebody who wouldn't speak to you. It ran contrary to the idea they were in this together. It meant he had to make all the decisions for himself. Not a huge deal, considering the bulk of their decisions boiled down to "Should we keep going?
Y/N?" But even so. Annoying.

  Nine days into their trip, they camped out in the ruins of a foundation a few hundred yards into the jungle. Walt put together a fire while Lorna added water to the cornmeal she'd been grinding up from old kernels over the last couple days. After a dinner of fried bananas and somewhat undercooked cornbread, he hung up his socks to dry. Leaves rustled in the darkness. Walt whirled. Two round yellow eyes stared from the shadows.

  "That is totally a jaguar," he said.

  "Good for it," Lorna said.

  Walt backed up and got his .45 from his bedding, keeping his eyes on the disembodied pair all the while.

  "That's crazy. That thing's like right there." He waved his arms. "Hey, cat! Go be-feline someone else!" The eyes blinked slowly and disappeared. Somehow, that made it worse. Walt stood and turned in a slow circle. "Holy shit!"

  Lorna had stayed seated all the while. "All you've been through and you're afraid of a cat?"

  "Well, I was crazy back then. It helped."

  "You went crazy? Why?"

  "Oh, the usual." He seated himself, staring into the black trees. "Girlfriend cheated on me, then everyone in the world coughed up their lungs and died."

  "Including her?"

  He set down his gun. "Yeah."

  "How'd you take it?"

  "I told you. Went crazy. Genuinely sick. I hated her, so I was happy she'd died—I found her in our bed; this was in the early days, before we knew what was happening—but I loved her, and that made me want to die too. Killed a lot of people instead."

  He stopped to think for a moment, then laughed and shook his head. "It was surreal. My world ended right along with this one. Sometimes I thought the two were linked. That Vanessa dying had caused the plague. That I was walking across my own brain, and there was nothing outside it, and when I reached California, instead of reaching the Pacific, I would find myself in front of a smooth bone wall curving from the sea to the sky."

  The fire popped. He took a sharp breath of woodsmoke, then smiled at Lorna. "But I got better."

  "I can tell," she said. "Squatting on ruins. Running back to war the first chance you get."

  "I said better, not well." He'd kept his crutch/cane around as a walking stick/bludgeon. He poked its scarred foot at the fire. "What about you?"

  "What about me?"

  "Who'd you lose?"

  The light undulated over the hard planes of her cheeks. "Husband."

  "What did you do?"

  She stared into the fire for a long time. "Went on."

  He woke several times in the night to screeches that were far too close, but there wasn't much he could do about them. After a while, the creature quieted down, but started shrieking again at dawn. Unusual. Walt swore, rinsed out his mouth, shook out his boots, then went to check it out. One of their snares had caught a small brown monkey with limbs as long and spindly as pipe cleaners. The snare noosed around its neck and right arm flapped weakly against the dead leaves. Walt rubbed his mouth and got up to go.

  "What are you doing?" Lorna said behind him.

  He jumped. "Checking the other snares."

  She hoisted a lolling rat. "Already got it. Why don't you take care of that one?"

  "It's a monkey."

  "So? You've killed humans before, haven't you?"

  "Well, for one thing, they tried to kill me first," he said. "For another thing, it's a monkey."

  She cocked her club, arched her back, and whacked the monkey's skull. The beast howled, voice penetrating the canopy. She struck it again and it went silent. She hit it a third time, mashing the side of its head.

  "Doesn't look like a monkey to me." She hunkered down and slipped it from the tangle of thin rope. "Looks like meat."

  "There's something wrong with you."

  "Why are you coming to Los Angeles?"

  "I'm generally opposed to the hostile takeover of Earth by outside forces."

  "Are you in love with me?"

  "We've only known each other a few weeks. If I fell in love with every woman I just met, we'd be having this conversation in southern Utah, not southern Mexico."

  She smiled a hard smile. "Answer the question."

  "I'm going because I gave my word!" He stepped up to her, then considered the treetops instead. "Wait, that's not right. I don't care about my word."

  "Then why, Walt?"

  "Because I'm still mad."

  She smiled broadly, slung the monkey over her shoulder, and walked away. They ate it for dinner that night. It was on the greasy side, but it was meat.

  He feared what her increasingly bizarre behavior foretold for the rest of the trip, but after the bludgeoning of the monkey, Lorna seemed to normalize, as if she'd at last plucked out whatever pieces of shrapnel had been worming their way into her guts. She replied to his questions. Made suggestions. Two days later, while he was cleaning up the camp, she returned from up the road to let him know there was a town ahead.

  "Good," he said. "I'm down to my last good pair of socks."

  She shook her head. "Chimneys are smoking."

  "Oh. Back to the jungle with us, then."

  "I found a trail through the woods. Looks like it circles around town."

  "Nice work." He zipped up his pack and beckoned forward. "Lead on."

  She walked for a quarter mile, sticking to the shoulder of the road so she could jump into the brush at a moment's notice, then swerved onto a muddy little path weaving through the undergrowth. It was too short for humans—an animal trail, wild pigs or something—forcing them to duck and dodge and slash with their machetes. Slow going and too loud. Between hacks of his blade, Walt froze and put a hand on Lorna's arm, stilling her. He cocked his head.

  "That is a guitar," he whispered.

  Notes trickled through the leaves, acoustic and melodic. It had been months since Walt had heard music. Maybe a year. Not since the Maya had invited him to one of their harvest festivals. To Walt's ears, the song sounded very Mexican in style, but the feelings expressed through it were universal: a bittersweet yet gentle regret, the sort of song you'd play six months after your lover has left you, when it's been long enough for the ache to soothe, but still recent enough to sting.

  In the middle of the jungle in the middle of a broken world, the music was like magic, a slice of order coaxed out of the chaos. A portal to another place. One where you had the luxury of spending thoughts and calories on love instead of finding the next meal or staying out of the jaguar's claws.

  "Let's sheathe the machetes for a minute," Walt murmured.

  "Don't want to interrupt?"

  "Did you just make a joke?" he said. "I'm more concerned about being noticed and killed."

  He put on his leather gloves to push aside the branches and thorns by hand. The going got even slower. Half the trail was cleared by the passage of animals, but over the last few days the jungle had clearly gotten younger, trees bursting out of reclaimed farmland, and with a less-developed canopy blocking out the sun, the undergrowth sprouted all the more fiercely. After three miles and two hours negotiating the trail, they cut brush back toward the road and walked on.

  They spent another night camped off the road in the young jungle. No fire this time. They still had the other night's monkey meat, along with flat slabs of cornbread just beginning to go stale.

  "What were you doing out here, anyway?" Lorna said as dinner wound down. "All you've done for the planet and you wind up sitting on a crumbling pyramid like a forgotten king."

  "So?"

  "So there's much more work to be done."

  "For who?" Walt said. "I'm not part of society. I'm just an animal. Eat, shit, sleep. I don't see lobsters and armadillos building houses and getting the power lines hooked up again. They seem pretty happy anyway."

  "You don't have to do things for others. You could do them for yourself. But you came to rest like a fallen fruit."

  "Like I'd be the first to lead a meaningless life."

  She gave him a flinty stare. "That's
what you expect from yourself?"

  "Come on." He washed out the taste of monkey with a swig of water. At least the monkey was something new. He was getting so tired of water. Jugs were almost empty, too. Would have to find more tomorrow. "I would say I've already accomplished more in my life than some civilizations. What should I do for an encore, enslave the sun? Invent a time machine that runs on grass clippings?"

  Lorna shrugged and smiled, mocking, but with the first warmth he'd seen out of her since the night after the beach. "You peaked young. You don't always have to top yourself, Walt. Sitting out on your own life is the best way to make sure the rest of it's disappointing."

  "But it might be a very long disappointment," he said. "I think I could live with that."

  "How long had it been since you'd been with a woman?"

  "A while. Several whiles."

  "You're right. It's quite a life you had going."

  "There's more to life than that, you know. Sex and romance was just a cynical invention of the greeting card-industrial complex."

  She laughed. "You don't believe any of this. You're here with me. You're on your way to L.A. You can't wait to kill them again."

  "Here's what happened: I got someplace comfortable, and I let myself stay there." He knew better than to reach out to her. "Isn't that what we're all trying to do?"

  He got up with the daylight to wander around and try to scare up some water. His empty bucket banged against his back, rope coiled around his shoulders. Birds whooped. Like always, it was hot, but maybe a little less hot than the heat he'd grown used to in the Yucatan.

  Within a few hundred yards of the camp, he spotted a gap in the trees. It might have been a house, or your everyday, run-of-the-mill clearing, but he could smell the fresh water, and he wasn't surprised to find a cenote sunk into the forest, easily a hundred yards wide and god knew how deep. The water forty feet below the rocky rim was a bright, frosty blue, opaque with minerals. It looked like the sort of thing that would get an elf drunk.

  He nudged a hefty rock with his foot, sat down on it, braced his soles, and lowered the bucket hand over hand. It donked against the limestone facing, spinning awkwardly. Back at the cenote at Chichen Itza, he'd rigged up a whole pulley system—one of the many projects he'd spent a few days cooking up, although in this case, it had been one of the rare bits of labor that had saved him more time and energy than it cost—and ever since traipsing off with Hannigan and Co., reverting to hauling in a bucket with his own two hands felt like an incredible pain. From this high up, most of it would slosh out anyway. What he ought to do was try to dip just the lip of the bucket into the stagnant rainwater, get himself a good gallon or so, bring that back to the camp, then come back here with Lorna to—