by J. Thorn
"What if they don't go?" Mia traced a smiley face in the thin condensation on her glass; he'd moved the whiskey and soda to the deck, where it had cooled compared to the warm indoors. "What if they keep searching?"
"Then we'll leave."
"Not by car. They're attracted to them or something."
"So we escape on bikes. Or via rowboat. Or use these big fleshy things dangling from our hips."
She took a drink, swished it around her mouth. "There's a bike store down on the PCH. Near the Thai place."
"I know. You've wanted one of those bikes ever since we moved here."
She grinned, swatting at him drunkenly. "A purple one."
"I want red." He tapped his teeth. "Now there's just the small matter of getting to them without being zapped into a small pile of ash."
Alien ships patrolled the skies from then on out, their low rumbles and high shrieks bursting the clear air by day and slicing through the hillside fog by night. He doubted they'd be able to pick out two people slipping through the night on foot to the bike shop—the things hadn't noticed the two of them hiding out on the roof, after all—but the possibility was paralyzing. As was holing up in their house all day, sneaking out under cover of dark to water the wilted bell peppers or pick a little cilantro to add flavor to food they could no longer cook over an open fire.
Drop ships came and went, ferrying soldiers to cities up and down the bay. Even after the carrier departed, the smaller craft remained, buzzing in and out of LAX, cleansing neighborhoods Raymond had never visited. Staying had been a mistake. The house, the yard, the garden, the ocean view, that wasn't what made their home a home. It was the freedom they'd had. The simple, unobstructed life they'd built for themselves. Cooped up and scared, they didn't have a home. They had a cage.
Like that, the bubble burst free. He was ready to leave.
A mountain in Colorado. They'd steal a couple bikes, rig them up with baskets loaded with as much food, water, and medical supplies as they could carry, and pedal out of the city under cover of darkness. Beyond the aliens' sight, they'd find a car and forage for supplies along the way. Grab a house in a town in the foothills of the Rockies, somewhere out of the way, of little interest to genocidists, and wait out the winter there, building up supplies, scouting the mountainsides for cabins, ideally near a stream or a lake where they could irrigate a garden and maybe even do a little fishing. Depending on the violence of the snows, they might be able to put in a bit of work on the cabin in the meantime. In the spring, they would move in and get to work chopping wood, planting seeds, digging a hole to store food and keep it cool. They weren't likely to be entirely self-sufficient by the winter after that, but they could augment what they grew and caught with preserved food rustled up from the town below.
That was the plan. It was a good plan. It was practical in a way that appealed to Raymond's sense of order, based on few assumptions (that the aliens wouldn't notice two people on bikes; that they'd be able to find regular supplies of gasoline along the way; that they'd be able to traverse a snowy mountain well enough to find a cabin before spring). It was elegant and flexible. Disasters could happen, of course, alien attacks or car crashes or blizzards, but these things weren't worth worrying about. They were too large, too total. Besides, they just weren't all that likely. Things normally went to plan, and when they didn't, they had a way of working themselves out regardless.
The one problem with the plan was he didn't know the way to Colorado. They had no maps besides one of the LA freeway system tucked into the Charger's glove box. The internet was long gone. He didn't even know, strictly speaking, where Colorado was—he knew it was one of those square states, but was it above Nevada? Under Wyoming? Somewhere to the north and east, that much he knew. And he supposed that was all he needed to know. Once they got out of the city, they'd head northeasterly, pick up maps at a rest stop or tourist center or glove box somewhere along the way. Things would work out. It made Raymond feel bad to think about, but there was simply too much stuff abandoned by the dead for him and Mia to starve along the way, no matter how many times they had to backtrack on their way to Colorado.
That left just one other hole: getting the bikes. Prior to being eradicated by disease, the citizens of the beach cities had been health nuts, cycling along the strand that bordered the beach, walking dogs on the esplanade sidewalks, sometimes combining the two, terriers and poodles trotting on leashes alongside muscly-legged men ensconced in their bikes. With near certainty, they'd be able to find a couple bikes in a garage somewhere down the street. But Mia didn't like the idea of breaking into random houses. It'd be noisy, attention-grabbing. Who knew how long it would take? Raymond nodded, citing the possibility the aliens had left monitoring devices behind, or traps, or other incidental viruses. They knew precisely where the bike shop was. It was no more than two and a half miles away. Walking the back streets, they could be there within 45 minutes, then bike back. The whole thing would be quick and simple and clean. Much more so than breaking into one garage after another.
They left for the shop that night, dressed in black, pistols in hand, a hammer and a pry bar dangling from Raymond's hips. A pair of binoculars swung from Mia's neck. They walked down the hill at a swift pace, swishing through the grass under the palms in the green strip that lined the road. Something rattled a can down the street, startling them. Raymond crouched beside a palm's rough, pinecone-like bark. Mia held her pistol to her chest. In the moonlight, a skunk hopped into the gutter, waddling, its brushy tail held high.
"I should shoot it on principle," Mia whispered.
"No way. They may be our last line of defense against the aliens. Bet you they've never even heard of tomato juice."
His heart rate calmed by the time the steep hillside street fed into the esplanade. Waves struck the beach in great and sudden bursts. Raymond frowned; out to sea, a single white light rose and fell on the dark water.
"Come on," Mia said.
Yellow two-story apartments fronted the road toward PCH. The lightest of breezes sifted the palms. Ahead, a row of silent people stood along the median. Raymond jolted, blood cold. The illusion quickly resolved into parking meters. A few cars remained untouched in their parking spots. How long it would take them to rust away in the steady daytime ocean winds? He stumbled on something light and clattering. Bones gleamed whitely from stiff clothes, connected by dry strings of flesh, the rest rotted away or eaten. It had no smell. He swallowed down his dinner of cold canned ravioli.
Six months ago, these few square blocks had been one of the most pleasant spaces in a city that was almost nothing but pleasant, a pedestrian-friendly collection of sidewalk cafes, shoe and dress shops, and quiet, tasteful bars. Walking down the sidewalk, Raymond had smelled pepper-roasted lamb, buttery calamari, the hot metal of the heating lamps the restaurants turned on to combat the evening breezes.
Friday afternoons, rain or shine, a farmer's market had opened on a side street, selling boxes of strawberries, lemons and limes and oranges, rich green spinach and bunches of dewy cilantro. One van sold potted avocado trees and fat-leafed dragonfruit plants. Mia worked part-time doing reception for a dentist down the block, and when Raymond drove over to pick her up in the late afternoons, sunlight pouring through his windshield so hard he could barely see the road, he'd park, feed the meter, and dawdle down to the market while he waited for work to let her go.
It amazed him they could sell heads of spinach for a dollar apiece, a bin of strawberries for two—less than half what he'd pay at the Ralph's or the Albertsons. As their money bled away, he paced their off-red deck with the half-rotted planks at the far end and willed the patch of yellow grass along the fence to morph into a deep brown field with tidy rows of leafy green. Meanwhile, the weedy stretch of dirt beside the driveway could be the perfect herb garden. It seemed possible, even easy, to grow their own tomatoes, basil, lettuce, and bell peppers, to halve their grocery budget to butter, eggs, and packs of chicken thighs. All for the cost of
a few seeds and daily water.
Between the job hunt, fooling around with Photoshop on spec projects, and watching Star Trek streamed over Netflix, he'd never found the time. Instead, most Fridays he bought a twist of spinach for garlic mashed potatoes or a flat of strawberries for crepes, consoling himself with the thought that even two dollars saved per week would add up to a hundred by year's end. Every little difference mattered.
The market was gone now, a dark side street fronted by black-windowed apartments. Dry leaves and garbage littered the sidewalks of the cafes and salons. Metal tables and chairs sat in the open, dotted with heavy layers of rain-spotted dust.
They slunk along the road parallel to Pacific Coast Highway, meeting up with the main street the block before the bike shop. A tattered tarp fluttered over the lot. Dozens of bicycles rested in rows in front of the store, left out during the pandemic, dirt clinging to their stylish, colorful frames. They weren't even chained. Gaps in the rows indicated a few had been stolen, but most of the survivors, like them, must have been concentrating on food and cars and guns and medicine.
Mia wiped a clean line through the dirt coating a basketed bike, revealing a light purple paint job. She smiled and stage-whispered, "Regulators, mount up!"
Raymond found himself a red one, holstering his pistol. He hadn't ridden a bike since he'd gotten his driver's license over a decade ago, and he was afraid he'd spill into the street in a disaster of skinned elbows and torn jeans, but Mia pedaled off without hesitation. After an initial wobble, he rode smoothly.
Cool air whisked past his face, countered by the heat of his muscles. Mia leaned forward and turned off the PCH toward the empty cafes. The low slurp of rubber tires on asphalt was obliterated by the banging roar of sustained automatic fire.
Mia swerved in among the parking meters. "That's coming from the—"
Blue bolts flashed from the beach. A spray of tracers lashed the darkness. More gunfire kicked up, crashing over the surf, ricochets whining. Shouts and screams drifted on the wet air. Fifty yards from Raymond, a silhouette popped up from the stairs leading to the beach. Before the woman took two steps, a lance of blue light knocked her to the ground.
"We've got to get out of here," Mia said. "Like ten minutes ago."
The wounded woman's groan was riddled with pain. She rose to her hands and knees, a black lump, then collapsed back to the pavement.
Raymond gestured. "She's hurt."
"By the same laser that will hurt us if we stay!"
"We can't just leave her," he said. "Not when we can help."
He pushed off the curb and pedaled with all he had. Dead ahead, blue beams cleaved the night.
18
He flung the pad and the cards and the metal balls into the weeds. Above, the whining vessel banked, bleeding altitude. Walt stood in an open slope of gray dirt, yellow grass sprigs, and short green bushes. A series of bluffs staggered the flatlands a half mile away. The road lay a couple hundred yards in the opposite direction. No help there, either; more scrubby high desert bordered by dry mountains. No plants rose higher than mid-thigh. No buildings at all. Nowhere to hide.
The small black ship made a wide semicircle above the highway. Searching for their lost friend? Seeking vengeance on the one who'd killed it? Whatever the question, Walt's death was the answer. He ran for the tree-speckled bluffs, bogged down by the heavy bags bouncing on his back. Over his shoulder, the ship floated less than a mile above the road. Walt swore, skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust. He ducked the bags off his back, slung them behind a clump of bushes, and sprinted for the bluffs.
Stupid move, hanging on to the dead alien's stuff. He'd kept it partly as a trophy, partly with the hope that, with time and the right equipment, he could learn from it, spy on their communications network or track their movements or download some freaky alien porn to shame them out of the Solar System. Really, his thinking hadn't been practical at all, drawing from the primal instinct to take the possessions of those you killed. Possessions that had clearly included a tracking device of some kind. Assuming the aliens were capable of any emotion at all, Walt guessed their reaction to finding their friend's gear in a human's hands would involve powerful ray guns and attack-tripods.
After two thousand miles of walking, he was in willow-trim shape. He loped through the dust, breathing easily. Still, the bluffs stood impossibly far. The whining engines fell silent. The ship touched down on the road on insectlike legs. A portal rolled open. Walt stumbled, arms flailing, and put his eyes forward. If they caught him before he reached the low trees in the folds of the bluffs, there wasn't much he could do. He had a pistol belted to his hip and a jackknife in his pocket. That was it. That's what he'd have to defend himself against their guns or lasers or rockets or hypernuclear black-hole bombs. But it didn't matter: he would shoot at them until his clip ran out, and then, if he could get close enough, he would stab them, and if they took his knife he would punch and claw and bite their tough smooth skin.
Not so long ago, the understanding he would die would have caused him to question whether there was any worth to resisting a foregone conclusion. If his death were assured, better to subvert fate by taking control of the method, by letting the aliens shoot him, or better yet, by shooting himself, pulling the trigger with his middle finger.
Fuck that. If they were going to kill him, they'd have to root him out of the trees. Blow up the whole hill. Until the onset of the blackness, he would be shooting. Stabbing. Punching.
He charged across the desert field. At the road, four aliens milled around their ship, twiddling things too small to see. As if his looking at them had caused them to look back, one of the aliens stiffened in a universal posture of wary surprise and assessment. Walt spurred himself harder. He'd be at the scrabbly trees in less than a minute. By the time he glanced back, the aliens had left the road behind, running after him on smooth, many-legged strides.
Walt clattered into the loose rocks that blanketed the slope. It was steep going, and not far to his left the bluff simply rose in a sheer cliff, but here it was runnable, scablike swathes of broken rock between brambly green bushes and crumbly dirt. He leaned forward, balancing with his hand. The ground leveled into yellowing grass and pokey trees with pale green leaves. Another couple hundred yards on, the ground fell away at an unseen angle. Probably empty desert beneath. Walt pulled in behind a tree, gun in hand, and shrank against its thorny trunk.
Below, the aliens glided across the plain. They stopped at the spot where he'd tossed away the dead one's gear, then halted a second time when they came to his bags. While one stared motionless in his general direction, the other three spread out, poking among the dirt and the weeds. Walt panted, shirt sweat-stuck to his back. The nights had been cold lately—the signs for the previous towns boasted higher elevations than populations—but the days were still hot, borderline scorching. His mouth felt as dry as the bark scraping the side of his face. Far across the field, one of the aliens lowered itself and scuttled in the dust. A few yards away, a second reached down with a thick tentacle and hefted Walt's duffel onto its flat back. A third dangled his backpack from a sticklike arm. The group reconvened, waving their arms at each other in quick, flicking patterns as graceful as a swimming fish or a martial artist practicing his forms. With some consensus reached, they started back toward the road. A moment later, the one who'd been watching the bluff turned its back and followed.
Walt simmered as they hauled his things back to the ship. Had they taken his gear out of base cruelty, expecting him to now die in this dry place? Out of clinical curiosity, hoping to study his equipment and extrapolate the fundamentals of human survival? Out of a shrimplike fastidiousness that didn't allow artificial objects to lie in a natural setting? The fact he could only speculate, and therefore didn't know just how much to hate them, somehow made it all the more frustrating.
They took their sweet alien time getting back to their ship and even longer taking off. By the time the black vessel lifted into the
sky, the sun was nearly touching the western mountains. Walt waited to move until he could no longer see the ship's dark oval or hear its high engines.
Not a single one of his things had been dropped or discarded. The only thing left behind was a bunch of shallow round holes where they'd tromped around. Yellow grass wavered in the waxing breeze and waning light. Already, the wind raised the hairs on his bare arms. He had no idea how far he was from the next town. They'd been few and far between lately, sun-withered things full of trailers and weedy lots. He passed just two or three a day, and they'd been thinning. Walt had the impression he was about to head into a true American wilderness where you might go dozens of miles without encountering a single home or gas station. He'd passed a small town earlier that day; if he backtracked along the road, he might be able to make it in five or six hours.
It would lose him a day of travel. Not that he had some neurosurgery appointment awaiting him in Los Angeles. Getting there in January would be no different from getting there in December. Did he have to keep going at all? Like pausing on a magazine ad before flipping to the next story, he entertained the thought of stopping, of finding a house back in the suburbs of Albuquerque and just...staying. But he knew he would hate it, rooting through the houses of the dead for boxes of Rice Krispies and rolls of toilet paper, returning home to watch from the window while the shadows stretched across the street. He had a goal in LA. He had a goal, and however arbitrary it might be, he was enjoying its pursuit.
He headed for the rising western road. He pushed harder than his standard pace, meaning to make the most of these last minutes of light; without the heavy bags, it felt easy, oddly fun, like leaving work early when no one will notice. He'd left his coat in the bag and the night was cool and getting cooler. The sun slotted into a notch in the mountains and sunk into another part of the world. He felt like a lone hunter, keenly aware that his survival was now on the line. He hadn't had such a strong sense of purpose in ages. Possibly, he never had—he needed to find food, water, and shelter, and the only way to do it was to walk on. Meaning through purpose: that was the lesson of the end of the world.
