by J. Thorn
He hadn't thought much in the hours since he'd been awake and moving. There'd been too much to see. Exploring the lake had reminded him of a real-life version of The Legend of Zelda, the last of which he'd played a couple years ago. It wasn't exactly the same, of course. The Zelda dungeons had a designed, logical procession to them. You went into one room to drain the water to reach the lower levels of the next room where you found the small key to unlock the door to the next room where you climbed across the vines on the walls to reach the grappling hook you needed to cross the chasm to reach the big key to open the door to the boss you defeated in order to increase your life meter and make you that much tougher for the next dungeon and the boss at its end.
He didn't know what the real-life equivalent of that would be. Something like searching the grounds of a nearby house to find the key to get into the garage to find the scrap wood he needed to build a raft to float to the island in the lake where he'd find the Coke can he needed to trick the baby rattlesnake at the foot of a tree to slither inside so he could climb up to the one branch suitable to make the fishing pole he'd use to catch the trout that would nourish him through the next leg of his walk. Faced with that, you'd just go smash in the window of a Big 5 instead.
But the feel of the worlds was the same. Walt was alone in the woods to explore lost lakes simply to see what was there and what he could do with it. A mundane find like snagging a trout or stumbling into a strawberry patch felt like a blessing. The discovery of a bottle of Ibuprofen or Jim Beam was an outright miracle. Even when there was nothing special to find, when the fish wouldn't bite or Busch Stadium was nothing but an empty crater of grimy seats and patchy grass, the finding of these places, the witnessing of their existence, was holy, in its way. Perhaps when he made it to LA he'd travel America's backroads, mapping lakes and rivers and woods for their own sake. He could go far south, too. Witness the old places, the temples and ruins and ziggurats enfolded in the jungles of the Yucatan.
Walt returned to the highway. He headed west. Some ways past Amarillo, tilted monuments jutted from the plain. He stepped into the wind-swept grass. Amid the dust and sunlight, cars rose from the soil at uniform angles. Each was wrapped in a skin of graffiti. Wind whisked through fenders and side mirrors. There was no sign of smoke or tilled fields in sight. Walt walked down each row of painted cars before doubling back to the highway.
He'd done a fair amount of exploring as a kid. A few blocks from his back yard, the fenced properties disappeared, replaced by forests on uneven hills and dark canyons laced with weedy trails. Squirrels barked from the boughs. Rabbits burst from the brush, kickstarting his heart. No doubt the land was owned by someone, but there were no fences. No signs. No shacks or roads or parking lots or barns. Walt didn't even know how far these backyard wilds stretched—he'd once followed the trails all the way to a two-lane highway, a walk that lasted until the sunlight gave no warmth and he worried his mom would be home from work before he returned. The sun set minutes before he slipped in the back door.
Another time, he cut west from the trails, hoping to reach an empty stretch of beach. A couple miles into his walk, he descended a slope into a shaded stand of trees. Water rested in the muddy footprints across the path. Overhead, a treehouse spread across the branches of the oak.
Walt stepped off the path. Horizontal boards were nailed across the trunk in an easy ladder. "JV + KM" had been carved inside a heart scratched into the bark. Above it was a word Walt had heard on the playground but didn't understand. Crumpled beer cans rested in the weeds.
Cold stole over Walt's stomach. This was a place where the older kids came. He knew they carried knives and drank beer. He didn't know what they'd do if they found him in the treehouse he desperately wanted to climb to. He'd be hurt and miles from home. He saw his bleeding face pushed into the mud and the treehouse took on a sudden weight of shadows and mystery, a violent unknown where strangers did bad things far from sight of their parents and police. Walt turned in a circle. The sunlight couldn't fight past the leaves. He turned and ran for home.
The Stonehenge of cars brought back whiffs of that same feeling. They had clearly been planted and painted as a whimsical gesture, as strange, stark art in the middle of an equally stark prairie. But whoever'd put them here was dead. They were now symbols whose meaning was lost, steel gravestones to an unknown intelligence.
A bend in the road eclipsed the upright cars. Days began and ended. Sometimes he didn't think of Vanessa for hours at a time.
Except when he ran low on supplies, he approached most cities by night; not all the bodies in the street were long dead. He liked the night better anyway. Late morning was the worst of all: though the heat was less than what would later cook the prairie, the heat of pre-noon was an itchy kind, a stifling closeness that woke you, dehydrated and cramped, through the walls of a tent that smelled like hot, musty plastic. It was a time for death and regret. Early afternoons were far better. He never felt bad for sleeping through their dozy warmth, and if the morning had been chilly, as they'd been back East, the sun's high strength was welcome. Late afternoon to dusk was a busy time, a time for assembling kindling, mending clothes, catching fish, and studying maps. It was productive and confident.
Sunset he didn't much care for, except after storms when the skies looked sharp and bright as shattered glass. Otherwise, they were too portentous, a bad, gusty border-time when it was too dark to work but too light to walk without fear of being spotted on open ground. Early night rarely saw harsh cold. It had an electricity to it, a charge that spurred animals and self to lean forward and cover ground. There was a foreboding to late night, when a weary brain saw looming strangers in place of mailboxes and heard lurking leopards in every shuffle of the wind, but the time made him feel like night's agent, too. Something to be feared.
But he liked the minutes before sunrise best of all. The sun wasn't yet visible, but its foremost rays were strong enough to clarify the shadows into grayscale reality. It was a vanishing time, just long enough to put away your knife and pretend you've been good all along. It was in the predawn that he most fully felt his survivordom. He felt more alone then than at 3 AM, but pleasantly so, the last witness of darkness and the first to touch the new day's dew. The time and the feeling it produced burnt off so quickly. Within minutes, the sun was up and you could forget at once there had ever been a buffer between night and day.
The miles rolled on and on, forgotten lands and leftover homes. Walt started smoking again. It passed the time. He spent entire weeks traversing the hard beauty of the grasslands, scrublands, and deserts of Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. By that point, according to his maps, his trip was more than two-thirds complete. He didn't consider delaying. Instead, he perspired his way through a range of dry, yellow mountains, pausing to towel his sweat from within the shade of rest stops and under the sickly-sweet smell of pollen-swollen trees. On the far side of the pass, pines and green meadows carpeted the old stones. He knelt in the grass around a soggy-banked stream and stripped naked. Rather than the punishing, can-feel-the-UVs-cancering-my-skin burn of his trip through the desert, the day's sun felt simple and soft on his shoulders and face.
He soaped himself up, rinsed off, and sat naked on a rock to hack at his beard and hair with scissors, navigating through touch and his blurry reflection in the blade of a knife. Reasonably manicured, he lit a cigarette and sat back on the rock to dry himself in the sun.
Rocks clattered among the trees where he'd left his bags. He squinted through the sunlight. Smoke trickled from his nostrils, dry and sweet. The stream jangled among the smooth pebbles. Back near the trees, the rocks clicked again. Walt had left the guns with his bags. Stupid. Weak. He hadn't expected anyone else to be out in these wilds. Now he would pay for it. He reached for his knife.
The pines' lower branches waggled. Walt was struck with vertigo as the nearest tree appeared to lean forward. Brown-gray rods emerged above the waist-high wall of grass. Walt breathed out, smiling. Could he ta
ke down a buck with just a knife? His bare feet wouldn't be a problem. His soles were as thick as gardening gloves.
The antlers glided forward. Beneath them, what should have been a lean tan deer resolved into an angular, ridged mess of beaks, multi-jointed limbs, and hard skin the bright gray of wind-churned waves. Round, irisless eyes goggled from an oversize bulb of a head. The creature slid away from the trees on somewhere between four and eight legs—some also lifted from the ground to waver like antennae or a questing hand. It looked part crab, part squid, part dinosaur, part nothing. It paused, limbs lifted to the air, as if testing the wind.
15
"What makes sense?" From the deck, Raymond gestured to the huge dark wedge and its soaring strings of lights. "That thing? If I were to make a list of all the things that made sense, I would be dead before I got to the giant fucking mothership over Santa Monica Bay."
Mia hugged her elbows to her chest. "You think it's a coincidence that thing shows up just months after the plague that wiped us all out?"
"Maybe they're just passing through."
"If they want an inhabited planet, why waste soldiers and resources? Why not let a little bug do the job?"
Raymond rubbed his mouth. "If that's true, what do we do now?"
"We've got a car."
"The radio said it first showed up in Japan. We don't know if it'll stay. And unless Martha Stewart survived the Panhandler, I don't think we'll find a nicer home."
"We could die here."
"We could die anywhere. What if we go to Palm Springs and it turns out these things love high heat, golf, and pretty blue pools?"
"So we stay put," Mia said.
"We don't even know for certain they intended to attack us. Maybe this is a reverse War of the Worlds where they came to bring us peace and love and accidentally gave us space-AIDS instead." He gazed at the star-occluding ship rumbling toward the city. "I think we need to see what they do before we make any decisions ourselves."
"If they hover over here with one of those blue beams of death, you're getting the world's loudest I-told-you-so."
"Let's go inside. Put out the candles."
They locked the door, which Raymond found both absurd and comforting. Smoke wiggled from the snuffed candles. He and Mia stood hand-in-hand by the window and watched the ship drift to a stop over the downtown some twenty miles north. Smaller lights disgorged from the belly of the carrier and cruised over the dark buildings.
"Think one will blow up the Hollywood sign?" Mia said in something near a whisper.
"As long as they're here, I think I'd rather be where I can see them."
"When you put it like that, I think we should keep watch. Sleep in shifts."
"Let me guess," he said. "I get first watch."
"Well, it was my idea that's saving our lives here."
Raymond sat in darkness before the bedroom window overlooking the ocean. Mia slept soundlessly behind him. The massive wedge of the ship relocated somewhere around Venice Beach, hovering hundreds of feet in the air. Small vessels came and went in ones and twos, drawing slow loops around the cities or disappearing beyond the hills that ringed the valley. No more than six or eight of the smaller ships patrolled at any one time; sometimes as few as one streaked above the black streets. They left dark contrails, rumbling lowly, banking and climbing like standard jets. If they were capable of UFO-style zigzags or sudden bursts of eyeball-shattering speed, they weren't showing off.
"How's the Earth doing?" Mia slurred when he shook her awake five hours later. "Still existing?"
"Just a lot of buzzing around. Whatever they're here for, it's not to entertain us."
With Mia watching out, he fell asleep easily. A sky-shredding shriek woke him at dawn. A silvery plane streaked in over the water to the south.
"That's one of ours," he said.
"No shit. An F-16."
"Does this mean we still have a military?"
Two jet-sized triangles swung away from the giant black body of the carrier and raced forward on thin white contrails. As they closed, the alien fighters let loose a volley of compact rockets that tumbled away and then leapt forward as if stung. The F-16 pulled up hard, ejecting sun-bright flares that fell away on jagged columns of smoke. The rockets followed straight through the clouds. The jet curled off into a tightening corkscrew; as if they were tied to it on strings, the trailing rockets spun with it. Two collided in a white bloom that absorbed the missiles around it. Raymond wiped his eyes, blinking at the afterimage.
The alien vessels dovetailed apart. The F-16 slowed and swooped in behind the one that had vectored left. Missiles lanced forward. The alien craft banked hard, then burst in a shower of hot splinters. The boom reached Raymond a few seconds later, a deep thunder in his chest.
The surviving triangle swung in behind the F-16 as smoothly as if they'd choreographed it.
"They set him up," Mia said. "They were willing to lose one to take him down."
Electric blue light pulsed between the fighters. The F-16 crumbled. Flaming metal tumbled into the Pacific. Raymond didn't see a parachute. "Is that it?"
"Why send in a single plane? Feeling out their capabilities? Or did we just watch Maverick get blown up?"
"Identifying F-16s, talking tactics—what are you, Sun Tzu?"
"I used to paint miniatures when I was a kid. My uncle liked wargames."
"Weird." The motionless carrier threw its shadow over the beaches. Another blue triangle left a port on the carrier's smooth side and paired up with the inbound survivor. They curved over the bay, then turned south, shooting over the house in a window-rattling pass.
"So they're hostile," she said.
"Or defending themselves."
"They fired first. They killed us with a plague and then showed up with a battle fleet. You want to wait until they kick in the front door with their tentacles before you admit they're not here to make friends?"
He rubbed his stubble. "Yeah. All right. It doesn't look good."
The lines melted from her forehead. "So what do we do?"
"If we're going to leave, we need to be ready. That means putting together food. Water. Maybe some gas. And finding out about the highways. I don't want to peel out of here just to run into a permanent traffic jam on the 405."
"You really should have been an accountant."
"What kind of a thing is that to say to the man you love?"
"I'm just saying you're logistically-minded." She smiled and leaned in to kiss him. "Where should we start, General?"
The two fighters swooped in from the south and beelined for the carrier, startling him. "I don't really feel like driving around in broad daylight. Not when they've got a Death Star parked over Santa Monica."
"What, you don't think a car can outrun an alien jet fighter?" Mia flicked her thumbnail against her teeth. "So what if we forage the neighborhood on foot? We've got a lot of walking-distance homes we haven't been to yet. Then to check the highways..."
"What?"
"Just considering whether it's completely insane to grab a couple bicycles and check out the roads via velocipede."
He laughed huskily. "You're seriously proposing we run a bicycle ninja mission down the LA freeways while the Alpha Centauri Air Force buzzes the skies."
She lifted her palms up, then slapped her hips. "Don't think that I don't think this is incredibly, incredibly weird. It's just a whole lot less weird than it would have been six months ago."
He couldn't argue with that. Aside from a fat-bellied squarish vessel that disappeared into the rises of Beverly Hills that afternoon, the alien ship didn't do much more besides hang there exactly the way a brick wouldn't. That night, he and Mia dressed in black and jogged from the house carrying the revolver, a crow bar, a duffel bag, a siphon, and three red plastic gas jugs. Mia smashed passenger windows, popped gas caps. Raymond sucked gas into the jugs, wiping his tongue on his sleeve.
"We should have brought some god damn Scope," he whispered, tongue stinging.
>
"Keep sucking."
Dizzy, he sat on the curb while the gas drizzled into the jug. A point of light tracked across the misty skies. It had been a strange run: the dwindling money that had threatened to ruin their life together; the plague that had threatened to end their lives together; the gardening and foraging that had brought them closer than ever in this new silent world; now an alien invasion that threatened to—? That, he couldn't say. Maybe they were here to finish their eradication of humanity and he and Mia would die together in a flash of heat and light. Maybe they would round the survivors up and restrict them to subsistence on reservations. Or maybe, so long as the survivors left Earth's new arrivals alone, humans would be able to run free in the jungles, the mountains, the icecaps, whatever scraps of land the aliens didn't want.
Maybe it was just the gasoline talking, but Raymond was amazed by the idea that, barring complete eradication, people somewhere would adapt and survive. Despite the horror of the past and the chaos of the present, life went on. Cosmically, life in some form would always exist—if there were two sapient species, there were likely to be hundreds, possibly millions, condensing from primal sludge on far-flung worlds into beings capable of crossing the lightyears of vacuum that separated them from the others. Even if he was soon to be vaporized by one of these neighbors, he found it strangely comforting to know that uncounted species would continue to exist all across the universe until the day the last star burned down to a cold cinder.
He filled both jugs from a single Ford Excursion. At last there was some use for the things.
He waddled down the street after Mia, gas sloshing. In a white-trimmed Cape Cod manor, they found a basement pantry filled with cases of Sprite, bottled water, and modular transparent drawers of Wheat Thins, Ritz, orange peanut butter crackers, fruit snacks, granola bars, trail mix, dried fruit, snack-size Snickers, and bags of pretzels and Ruffles and Sun Chips and beef jerky.
