This is the End 2: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (9 Book Collection)

by J. Thorn

  He biked for the hill, Mia just ahead of him. It was hard work, a strain on his thighs and his balance; if he hadn't spent the last several months gardening, surfing, hiking around, and hauling wood and water from place to place, he might not have made it. A man screamed from the beach, a long wail that penetrated the staccato thunder of gunfire. A blue line flashed over their heads. Raymond didn't risk looking back. A widely-spaced row of mansions appeared along the rising cliff, buffering them from the battle on the beach. Mia kept glancing back at him, face tight. A light fog enshrouded them. The sounds of battle became hollow, spectral, echoing in the cliffs, fighting with the thump of the surf. A deep buzz mounted to a crushing bass, then dopplered away. Seconds later, a string of explosions formed a constellation across the beach. The injured woman grunted. Raymond opened his mouth to ask if she was okay, but was silenced by a rolling wave of tremendous booms.

  Things got a lot quieter after that. A few bursts of gunfire, a couple of shouts. Mostly nothing but the slow rhythm of the breakers folding over the shore. The silence was more frightening than the clamor and ruckus of the battle.

  Mia unlocked the chained gates. Raymond stopped in the driveway. The woman was awake enough to dismount, eyelids fluttering in pain.

  "Get inside," Mia whispered. "Get inside, get inside, get inside."

  "We're getting," Raymond said. He helped the woman up the steps, then reached down for one of the flashlights they kept inside beside the door. With the light on, he froze, his mind clicking in dry little circles. He had no idea what to do, where to start.

  "We should get her upstairs," Mia said, as if sensing his paralysis. "One of the spare rooms."

  "Yeah." He pulled his head back to face the woman. "Think you can climb some stairs?"

  "This is a nice house," she said in a dried-out voice.

  "That's why we stole it."

  Flashlight in his free hand, hugging her ribs with his other arm, he led her step by step to the second floor. Below, Mia rattled around in the closet where they kept their medicine. Raymond stumbled the woman into the room next to theirs and maneuvered her beside the bed. She went unconscious the moment she left his shoulder, thumping leadenly into the comforter, legs dangling off the bed's edge. Gingerly, he swung her feet up and rolled her on her back, then, after checking the curtains were drawn, went to their bedroom for candles.

  Mia popped into the room with bottles and bandages just as he finished unbuttoning the woman's camo jacket. "What are you doing?"

  Raymond gave her a look. "Not that. Give me a hand here."

  The woman's smooth belly was unmarred. They stripped off the jacket, flinging it to the side of the room, and rolled her on her stomach. The wound penetrated some two or three inches into her back, black-fringed, just wide enough that Raymond could have stuck his little finger inside, a bizarre, sudden desire he quashed as quickly as he'd had it. There was almost no blood. Just erratic drops that slid through the invisibly fine hairs on her back.

  Raymond sat back on the bed. "So, what? We just sort of clean her up?"

  Mia pursed her lips and gave a little shrug. "Then slap a bandage on her. I don't really think it will matter."

  He glugged rubbing alcohol on a fistful of cotton, breathing through his mouth to avoid its sharp smothering scent. "But she's hardly bleeding."

  "What, you've never watched a medical drama? Shock? Infection?"

  "We've got some antibiotics." He swabbed the edges of the wound, the hot red circle surrounding it. The task was both disgusting and automatic, the kind of thing that would make him shudder with revulsion if he gave it a moment's thought. Would they have been better off leaving her for a medic on the beach? Then again, everyone there had been blown up or driven off.

  "Will they be the right kind for whatever infects her?" Mia patted a wad of cloth over the woman's back and, with Raymond holding her up by her shoulders, began winding a long tan bandage around her middle. "I just don't think people with big dirty holes gouged through them have very high survival rates."

  He supposed she was right. If so, he thought the woman's death would be a failure, a nullification of whatever he'd achieved in getting her out of the combat zone. But trying to do what's right in the moment it's happening—isn't that all you can do? Mia clipped the bandage in place. He blew out the candles and went out to bring the bikes inside. Later, in bed together, the door open in case the woman called out, Mia touched his shoulder.

  "That was a crazy thing to do, do you realize that?"

  "She'd just been shot."

  "I'm not saying it was the wrong thing to do."

  "Oh."

  "But if something had happened to you—what would I have done?"

  "Grabbed a baseball bat and raced down to the beach to hit some alien-head dingers, I bet." He smiled over a small pang of annoyance. Nothing bad had actually happened. Instead, they might have saved someone's life. Now more than ever—cliched as he knew it was—that was one of the most important things in the world. Too much longer like this, and there might not be any of them left at all.

  * * *

  Her name was Sarah Campbell. She woke two days later, calling for water, sweating through her tank top. After they'd explained what happened and where she was, she told them about the attack on the beach by the Bear Republic Rebels, a resistance movement of soldiers and civilians based somewhere in the northern mountains. They'd come to Redondo to—well, she couldn't say; to find something, or to find something out, Raymond gleaned that much, but Sarah grew elusive whenever she began to approach anything like a fact about the mission. She was somewhat less vague about the BRR: a few hundred members and growing, some access to weapons and vehicles, in sporadic contact with several other cells around the world. All working towards the same rather obvious goal. So far, they hadn't had much luck.

  "They've just got the one big ship." Mia gazed down at Sarah's pale, dirt-streaked face, her close blonde hair. "Why doesn't someone just nuke them?"

  "They tried. Russia. The ship shot down the missile, then carpet-bombed St. Petersburg. Same deal in India. Not just incendiaries. Some chemical thing that poisons whatever's left of the rubble."

  "But only after we strike first?"

  "Seems so."

  Mia frowned. "So we've got the choice of sitting on our thumbs and getting wiped out day by day and month by month, or taking a swing and getting annihilated all at once."

  Sarah nodded, wincing. "Aliens seem content to kill us at their leisure so long as we don't try anything stupid. We need to start thinking sneaky instead of flashy."

  "Are the Bear Republic Rebels accepting recruits?" Raymond said.

  "Always."

  He glanced at Mia. "What do you think?"

  Sarah struggled upright. A waft of pus and burnt meat rose with her. "You don't want any part of that."

  "Those things have been going door to door," Mia said. "The only way we stay here long-term is in a mass grave."

  "Like it's any different if you try to fight back? Did you see what happened on the beach? The fucking hole in my back?"

  "If you'd seen what's been going on here—"

  "Look, it doesn't matter, okay? They blew up most of the airfields from orbit. Even the ones they missed, you think our pilots had a miracle cure? They're just as dead as the generals and the Marines and the guys who drove the tanks. Word is the enemy is setting up manufacturing plants. They'll wear us down until we're spraying AKs at their fighters like the god damn Taliban. Better to run off to the woods and live out our lives than get massacred like we did down on the beach." Sarah wilted back among the sheets, suddenly pale, sweat glistening on her brow and on her chest above her tank top. "You guys have each other, all right? You need to hang onto that."

  "Speaking of which," Raymond said a moment later, "we've got some work to do. Just holler if you need anything."

  "Thank you," she said softly. "And thanks. For picking me up."

  "Didn't seem to me like I had a choice."


  They didn't really have much to do—clean up the bikes, maybe, but it was still too light out to risk feeding the chickens or tending the garden—but Raymond knew when a person needed some time to themselves. In the garage, he and Mia oiled the bikes amidst the soupy, clinging, asphalty fumes. Yellowish fluid grimed his fingernails. Mechanics had always made intuitive sense to Raymond, fitting as neatly to his stolid, careful mind as the bike's chains fitted to their gears. He wished he'd pursued such things years ago, learning to maintain cars and work simple machines, unknowingly preparing for this blown-out present. Could have earned them a good living in the meantime, too. If he'd had a few more years, maybe he could have made it as an artist and graphic designer, but there'd been no guarantees; given everything that had happened over the last eight-odd months, he felt regretful he hadn't been more practical, resentful that he'd chased his dream at the expense of their future.

  Mia wiped oil from her fingers with an old shirt. "What do you think?"

  "I think if these bikes get any greasier we can fry them for dinner."

  "About the resistance. The BRR."

  He sat back, sweating lightly. "You want to go?"

  "It makes sense, doesn't it? If we're going to fight back, we have to do it now. Before they're settled in. While there's still enough of us to matter."

  "Yep."

  "Wait, you agree?"

  "It's one thing to run off to the mountains when it sounds like everybody else has thrown up their hands and walked off. But if we ran and hid now—" He set down a wrench with a small metal click. "What if we wound up with a kid some day? Knowing it was just a matter of time before some alien ship spotted the smoke from our chimney?"

  "You're cute when you're trying to predict the future." Her grin faded, gradual as a sunset. "Then there's Sarah."

  "She can come with if she wants. If not, I don't see why we can't leave her the house."

  "She'll need recovery time."

  "You normally do when you're shot in the back."

  "If we have to go before she's better, can you leave her behind?"

  He cocked his head. "Let's do whatever we can to prevent ourselves from having to answer that. Like getting another bike."

  Mia nodded with a drawn-in little smile that told him she'd already decided for herself. Patrols buzzed the skies the next few days, pinning them inside until the middle of the night. Then they went to the yard to gather eggs and lettuce and slosh around water for the plants and dry corn for the chickens. Sarah slept a lot. Raymond spent some time thinking about how to get the BRR's exact location out of her despite her being dead set against ever seeing them again. The rains came back, dampening the October days, shrouding them in cloud and mist. Sarah began to walk by herself, to empty her own bucket by day and plod to the latrine in the corner of the yard by night. She showed no signs of infection. Once she was able to walk easy, and with the patrols diminished to a scattering of lone ships around the city proper, Raymond took Sarah out for a tour of the grounds.

  She watched the chickens peck at the fog-dewed grass. "Where'd you find those guys?"

  He gestured into the hills. "Up there somewhere."

  "Suppose there must be plenty of loot out there if you look hard enough." She stretched. She'd taken a bath earlier, her first proper one since arriving. Her short blonde hair had feathered out a bit, buffeted by the unsteady sea breeze. Moonlight caught the freckles on her bare, toned shoulders. "And a garden, too. You two self-sufficient?"

  "Some of the plants are still coming in," he said. "I think we would have been by next spring, summer. There'd be more than enough preserves to see us through then."

  "Why in hell would you want to run off and join the army when you got a house and a garden above the sea?"

  "Why are you so quick to run off after one setback?"

  She gave him a hard-eyed gaze that looked for a second like it would lead to punching. That look burned off, replaced by a flicker of humorless laughter. "It wasn't the first." Her tone was worn-out, resigned. "You think anyone got off that beach? Besides me?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know."

  "Anyone who ran got hunted down. They always are. Only thing for us to do is melt into the wilderness and hope they'll let us live in peace."

  "Well, no matter what Axl Rose says, this isn't exactly the wilderness. We have to go."

  Absently, Sarah stroked her upper arms. "That's too bad. You built something special here."

  "It only took a few months of work. We can do the same somewhere else."

  She gave him a long look, heavy with an emotional calculus he couldn't integrate. "You could, couldn't you."

  While Sarah slept that night, Raymond combed the neighborhood until he found a third bicycle. He didn't see any sign of people or aliens during the hour he was out. On the way back, he heard the whine of a jet engine, but it was far off, obscured by the dark and the mist.

  He woke to the sound of screaming. Sarah lay in bed, pale and sweating, the muscles of her arms and legs as tight as piano strings. He checked her wound. It had scabbed about an inch below her surrounding skin, but it looked no worse from when he'd helped change her bandage a few days earlier. Raymond gestured Mia out of the room.

  "I think she's infected."

  "Her skin doesn't look red."

  "It could be something internal. Or in her bones. I don't know, I'm not a doctor-man."

  Mia swept stringy hair from her face. She'd kept up combing it, but they'd had to ration their water more strictly since Sarah's arrival, and she hadn't bathed in days. "We've only got so much medicine."

  "We've got boxes of it."

  "Enough to last another forty years?"

  He set his mouth. "If we don't give her anything and she dies, you get to haul her corpse out of here by yourself."

  "Jesus." Mia laughed, startling him, "Did you ever think we'd be having a discussion like this? Threatening each other with dead bodies? What happened?"

  "I don't know." He laughed with her in a way that felt very strange. They gave Sarah an antibiotic twice a day, parceled out painkillers. At night she staggered to the latrine and Raymond helped her back to bed. Mia set up three packs with food, water, meds, lighters, knives, extra socks and shoes, a knife and fork and spoon, lightweight blankets. She packed the pockets of three coats with extra gear—needles and thread, boxes of ammo, a small wrench set and spare nuts and bolts for the bikes, some string and wire and flashlights and matches.

  Not that Sarah was in any shape to ride if something happened. Without speaking, he and Mia had agreed on that much. They hadn't again broached what they'd do if they had to leave and she couldn't. No use risking a fight over something that might never happen.

  He began to hope that decision would stay hypothetical as Sarah's health picked back up. Over the next couple weeks, she was walking on her own, if weakly, and coming out to sit beneath the deck to watch them work the yard or to smile down on the dark waves. He asked her about the BRR on a few occasions, including where exactly they were located, but she brushed him off each time.

  "I think you're nice people," she said over the ruffle of surf. "Fact, I know you are. Most people would have left me by that beach to learn who's better at scooping up dead meat: outer-space aliens or California sea gulls. You wouldn't give the BRR up to the invaders. Not like most."

  Raymond sipped his water. "Then what's the problem?"

  "You're good people. I can't help good people sign up to get slaughtered."

  "Don't you think that should be our decision?"

  She gave him another one of her long gazes, full lips parted, eyes flickering with a strange mercy quickly quashed. "Me and my boyfriend went into the movement together. Adam. Looked a little like you but more muscle. He'd been in the army—Iraq. 18 months. We lived in Bakersfield, which fell apart as fast as anywhere else. Didn't matter with Adam. He got us out before the worst hit and found us a farm by the hills. It's pretty dry there. I didn't see how we'd last any longer t
han it took the apples to rot off the trees.

  "I think he could have done it. He'd done some stuff in Iraq, which is hardly any wetter—digging wells, outhouses, all the things you have to do to make living in a shithole a little less shitty. Anyway, it was just the two of us. You don't need a ton of good land to feed two people.

  "We saw the ships a few months later. Don't know what they were doing way out in BFE. Checking out the old oil fields, maybe. They sure spent a lot of time poking around the derricks. Their mistake. Third time they came by the same field, Adam was waiting for them. Mowed them all down with an M-16, then dynamited their ship. When another one flew in to see what had got the first, he and his buddy Chris took them out, too.

  "Long story short, he talks me into joining this resistance group he's heard about on his ham, and the two of us and Chris drive off to this lake outside LA to find this group of ex-Marines and Navy and so forth. At first it's mostly scouting the aliens out, intel, and we can't believe the things we're seeing—groups of people rounded up and executed in the streets, others hauled off in these makeshift handcuffs for God knows what. Once we get a read on their movements, we start hitting 'em. Taking down their scouts. Adam booby-trapped their patrol routes with IEDs. Took out more than a few. Learned a few things, too. They look an awful lot alike, you know. Not just because they're fucked-up aliens. Their height, their features, their claws—hardly any difference from one to the other. Like they're clones, or hive-born.

  "Then they started to crack down. Kicked our asses whenever we tried to penetrate the city. Somebody in charge gets a brilliant idea for an amphibious smash-and-grab down in Redondo. Me and Adam were on the same boat along with the rest of our platoon. Had an engine, but we paddled in to come in under the radar, so to speak. We got the salt-spray coming in with every splash and the waves weren't big but you feel every inch in your stomach. Whole place is dark. The breakers start to push us in hard and the next thing you know we're grinding sand. We jump out into the surf and rush up to the rally point at a lifeguard station.

  "Only Adam doesn't make it. This blue bolt just cuts him down right above the tideline. His head, it makes this popping noise, and my face is stinging and hot and I'm standing there wearing his brains, his skull. I'm screaming. Everything's going to shit—lasers, bullets, shouting, aliens up on the ridge just wasting everybody. I don't even remember what's next. I'm running up the ramp, I'm up on the sidewalk, and one of those blue flashes lights me up, too."