by J. Thorn
His foot turned on a slimy stone, spilling him into a damp and stinking mat of kelp. Thick black flies clouded his face. He struggled up, knees soaked, palms stinging. In the dimming light, he could see nothing but rocky shore and rising cliffs.
Ahead, the cliff jagged inward, slumping from a sheer incline to one that was merely stupidly dangerous. Fallen rocks piled around its base. Grasses, shrubs, and small trees poked from its pitched face.
The last of the daylight was slipping away. He could wait out the night down here, risking the tides and whatever the aliens were up to. Road-honed instinct told him it was something big. There might not be any city left come morning, and tucked away as he might be below the cliffs, if it spilled out to him, he'd have nowhere to run.
He started up the scree, planting a hand for balance. Smoke touched his nose. A third of the way up the climb, the rubble stopped, replaced by a fast rise staggered with flatter stretches. Walt leaned into the rock, planting each step, grabbing for the stumps of brush and trailing branches. Halfway up, he stopped on the flat top of a boulder to catch his breath. Waves rolled beneath him, dark and indistinct. He was already having a hard time seeing his handholds. Within minutes, he'd be groping along under the confusion of full night.
Foot by foot, he carried upward, fingertips bleeding, shoulders and biceps burning. Just below the top, the slope transitioned to a sheer cliff. Walt hung there a moment, squinting to left and right for an alternate route, but the nooks of the rock wall were blurred by darkness. He reached up and scrabbled for a hold. He raised his knee, planted his foot. The rock beneath him shifted and tumbled away, racketing down the stone rise. Walt's legs swung into empty space.
He gasped, sweat slicking the rock beneath his clenching palms. Above, a muffled gunshot clumped across the early night.
23
Sarah shifted her grip on the gun, teeth bared. Raymond's head buzzed so hard he thought he'd fall over. He blinked repeatedly, as if that would wash the nightmare away.
"Put down the gun," he said.
"So you can ride into a massacre?" Sarah smiled. "I shoot her now, at least just one of you buys the farm."
"And then you and I live here in bliss."
"That's right."
His face felt numb. "There is a problem with that plan."
Sarah squeezed the crook of her elbow tighter to Mia's throat. "What's that?"
"The part where you shoot my wife."
"Everyone loses people. You get used to it."
"Yeah, you seem to have come out with flying colors," Mia said.
Sarah ground the barrel of the pistol into Mia's hair. "Shut your fucking face. You're a dead person. Dead people don't get to speak."
"How do you think you'll get him to stay when that happens? Chain him to a bed and break his legs?"
"Shut up!"
"Maybe you just make great iced tea. And know how to make ice in a place where it never freezes."
The blood fled from Sarah's mashed-together lips. She stood across the garage just in front of the door, too far to charge. The other guns were with their packs near the middle of the room; much closer, but Sarah's index finger only had to travel a fraction of an inch. Raymond edged forward.
"You stop right there." Sarah pointed the gun at him, then quickly returned it to a spot above Mia's right ear. "You don't move. You move, and I stucco the wall with her brains."
He held up his hands. "Don't shoot. I'm frozen."
It was true. What was the logic? Did she truly believe she could kill Mia and then convince him to live with her in loving harmony until the aliens burnt the whole hill to the ground? The only thing that made sense was that Sarah had gone moon-barkingly, chair-eatingly crazy, that the months of watching everyone around her die, first to the plague and then to aliens, had broken her mind completely, reducing it to a howling, mad wreck. How could he try to reason with that? How could you talk an insane person into doing something sane?
"Maybe we don't have to leave," he said. "Maybe we can all stay right here."
"So you can tie me up in my sleep? Knife me?"
"Nobody's going to knife you."
Sarah jerked her chin at Mia. "She'll talk you into it. Then you'll make your little excuses, and be sad for a while, but you'll ride away and you'll forget me."
"Jesus," Mia said. "How about we take your picture and promise to pray to it every night?"
"Enough!"
"I saved your life." Raymond was on the verge of tears. He didn't understand how that could mean so little to her, how she could justify taking whatever she wanted without the barest shred of gratitude. "Doesn't that mean anything?"
"And now I'm gonna save yours."
She sneered at Mia, fingers shifting on the grip of the pistol. Raymond's heart disintegrated, floating away like cold mist. It hit him in a hot rush, questions and conclusions he'd only be able to sort out after the fact. His wife was about to be shot by a crazy person and he was utterly helpless to stop it. Not only that, but it was his fault—he'd saved Sarah, he'd brought her back here, helped restore her health, allowed her to stay although she was a stranger with no claim whatsoever to the life between himself and Mia. It hadn't occurred to him that the mysterious relapse of Sarah's fever had been nothing but a ploy to get them to stay at the house with her, to stave off discussions of sending her off on her own. Mia'd had some suspicions, vague as they were, but he hadn't even begun to question the unknown woman in their home. He couldn't or wouldn't see the bad in a person, and now Mia would die.
Yet he couldn't have just left Sarah on the sidewalk above the beach to bleed to death, either. What should he have done? Made her leave as soon as she was able to walk? Snuck out with Mia in the middle of the night? How would he know to do these things without the foreknowledge of what was happening right now? Maybe any notion of power or control was just a laughable illusion—21st century humanity had been wiped out by a plague it could never have suspected. He and Mia had weathered that, had built themselves a new life amidst the wreckage, but now that was going to be blown away, too. It had all been a sad delusion.
Sarah pointed the gun at his legs, frowned, and pulled the trigger.
The bang was impossibly loud, tearing through the garage with a force as terrible as the bullet plowing through his left thigh. The impact staggered him. He banged into a toolbox and fell hard on the concrete floor. The pain hadn't yet hit. Instead, its threat waited in his nerves like the afterimage of lightning in the seconds before the thunder strikes.
"Not going anywhere now, are you?" Sarah said. She swung the gun back Mia's way. "Not once there's nothing to leave for—"
Mia darted forward, grabbing Sarah's wrist and jabbing her stiff fingers at Sarah's eyes. Sarah shouted and cringed back, hand to her eyes. Mia hammered her wrist into Sarah's forearm. The gun jarred loose. Mia punched her in the nose; Sarah yelped, stumbling back into the bikes. She tumbled down in a crash of metal.
Mia picked up the gun and pointed it at Sarah's teary face. "I don't know who the fuck you are. I'm not sorry I won't find out."
"Don't shoot!" Sarah thrust up her hands. "I'll go. I'll leave right now. I'll—"
Mia pulled the trigger. Sarah's body flew back into the toppled bike. Her arms flopped limply, elbows bent like a butchered chicken. Mia righted her aim and fired three more times, hands bucking.
"Are you okay?" Mia leapt over the boxes of food and jugs of water, kneeling beside Raymond and his blood-soaked thigh. "Don't move. I'm going to find one of those blood-tying things."
"Tourniquet."
"Don't move."
She rushed into the house. Raymond clamped his palms to the wound and tried not to faint. It hurt now, a knifing burn; the bullet had passed clean through his muscle, and blood dribbled from both holes. Mia returned with a handful of rags, a fifth of Grey Goose, and an abbreviated extension cord, stray wires poking from the end where she'd chopped it short.
"You cut that up?" Raymond said. "What if we need to plu
g something in out back?"
"Take off your pants."
He unbuckled and unzipped, breath hissing into his lungs as he peeled his jeans away from his leg. "You killed her."
"I fucking did."
"I mean, you killed her."
She splashed vodka over the bullet holes. He arched his back in pain as she swabbed blood. "Honey, she shot you. She was about to kill me."
"I know." He did know. He did know that. Something was wrong. Besides the hole in his leg. And the corpse sprawled over the bike. Those were obviously wrong. This wrong was a different wrong, like remembering a memory but maybe that was just something you dreamed or got told. He frowned. Mia taped the rags around his leg and he screamed. She knotted the cord around the top of his leg. The pain brought him around. "How are we going to leave?"
Mia tucked a sweaty strand behind her ear. "The alien army down there will be a strong incentive to figure that out. Drink this."
He swallowed from the bottle of water. Room temperature, but it tasted amazing; he drank half the bottle in one long chug. "I'm sorry. I should have known."
"Rest here. I'm going to check the window. Maybe we can wait another day."
She left him with his pain. He sat up, panting. He willed himself to stand. He owed it to Mia. If he couldn't move, she'd have to go without him. He grabbed hold of a shelf of oil cans and pesticides. It was his fault. If he was able to weather the fire, they could arrange a place to meet—Angels Stadium, any landmark south of LA. Leaning into the shelf, he pulled himself to his right foot, sweat popping along his hairline, pain throbbing through his thigh. They could do it. She could take a gun and he could hide in the yard and follow her after the flames were gone. From there, take a car to Arizona or New Mexico, just the two of them, and wait out the winter. Just the two of them. He stood, quivering.
Mia popped through the door. "We need to leave. We can walk the bikes if we have to. We just have to outpace the fire."
Raymond grabbed a five iron from a dusty bag of clubs and caned his way to Sarah's body. He knelt, grimacing, and rolled her body off the bike. She was warm and yielding. Hot blood soaked his palms. Mia crouched in front of the garage door, grabbed the handle, and rolled it up with a hollow rumble.
On the other side, a man stood in the night, short and lean and blank-faced behind his patchy beard. He raised a strange pistol to Mia's face.
24
Walt scrabbled his toes against the cliff face. Beyond its edge, another burst of gunshots clapped its approval. Walt's biceps shook, his fingers stiffened. The pack pulled on his back like something alive. He lamented never lifting weights.
He wouldn't let go. He wouldn't fall. Arms jittering and burning, he hauled himself straight up, feet groping. A rock loosed, kicked down the cliff. Dangling from his taut right arm, he reached with his left and dragged himself another foot up the stone. His toes found a ledge. He rested there for some time, waiting for the burn to seep from his arms. When he resumed, the climb was surprisingly easy, the cliff yielding hand- and toeholds so readily it was like it wanted him off just as much as he did. The slope leveled out. He crawled the last few feet on his belly, rolling into the overgrown, dried-out grass of a dead person's back yard.
Gunshots. Possibly gun shots fired at a god damn alien. He could smell the smoke with every breath. Orange fires lined the dark neighborhoods a few hundred yards downhill. Spotlights blazed on windows and doorways. Gouts of flame spurted from hemispherical tanks.
The shots had come some way to his right, further out along the curve of the point. Walt jogged out to the sidewalk, passing an Italian-style home with vacant, broken windows and a wide-open front door. The neighboring joints looked worse, if anything; weedy, yellow yards, shattered windows, broken-down fences, loose papers flapping in shrubs and iron grilles. Southern California looked like shit.
Ahead, a dusty car sat in the driveway of another monstrous home ripped from a Tuscan fairy tale. Green things grew in the side yard, sprouting from rich brown soil in neat leafy rows. Curtains shaded intact windows. Hard to tell in the darkness, but those windows didn't look too dusty.
He opened the iron gate and crept into the driveway, laser pistol in hand. Voices from the garage—a woman and a man. No sign of aliens. Walt turned for the street. The garage door cranked up. He whirled, sighting his pistol at a thin, pretty young woman whose olive hands were painted with drying blood.
He glanced at the youngish blond guy with a bloody bandage around his leg, then back to the woman. "Did you shoot him?"
"No!"
Walt flicked his gun at the stretched-out blonde woman with the holes in her face and chest. "Did you shoot her?"
"Of course I did." She glanced at the corpse and snorted. "My husband rescued her from an alien attack on the beach. She was part of a resistance movement. The rest of her platoon got killed on some mission. Maybe that drove her crazy. Maybe she was crazy before. Either way, things got all Single White Female in here. After she shot my husband, I shot her." She cocked her head. "Who the fuck are you to care, anyway?"
Walt met eyes with Raymond, who was pale with shock or bloodloss or both. "That what happened?"
"She wanted to kill my wife and stay here with me. She was nuts."
Walt considered the bloody mess that had once been a fit young woman. She was now quite dead. Of course, if everyone who'd killed another person deserved execution, Walt himself would need to be hanged, electrocuted, gassed, and guillotined. There was the matter of whether they were lying about the particulars of the woman's death, but he didn't think so. The man had been undeniably shot. The dark-haired woman had a righteousness to her. A clarity, too. Anyway, who gave a damn?
He lowered his gun. "Okay. Let's load up the car."
"Can't," the woman said. "They can sense cars. We're leaving on bikes."
"Bikes," he smiled. "Why didn't I think of that."
The man, Raymond, glanced to his wife. "I don't know."
"Me neither." She turned to Walt, fixing him with a crossbow stare. "Who are you?"
"My name's Walt. I'm from New York. We have to go."
"So take one of the bikes. We've got a spare."
He waved the pistol. "This thing shoots lasers out of it. That makes me like God from the Third Testament where all He does is kill aliens. Only this God doesn't know Beverly Hills from Bakersfield."
Raymond's mouth parted. "What?"
"You can come with us tonight," the woman said. "Once we're out of here, so are you."
"Agreed." The couple had pretty much everything ready: the bikes, packs of gear, a sort of trailer, hitched behind a purple bike, loaded with water and blankets and more backpacks. The woman belted on a pistol. Walt threw his leg over the bike with the trailer.
She stared him down. "That one's mine."
"Just trying to help."
"Help different."
She kept one eye on him as she gently helped Raymond lift his wounded leg over his bike. The man shut his eyes, breathing hard. Mia smoothed sweat from his brow. Walt smothered his frown. She'd stay with her husband, he saw, even if it meant stopping altogether, dying in the same blast from an offworld weapon.
"Where are we going?" he said.
The woman's attention stayed on Raymond's wavering effort to keep himself balanced. "South."
"Where south?"
"Not-here south."
Raymond hopped from the garage on his good leg, bike wobbling beneath him. "We should have stolen a tricycle."
The woman smiled and walked her bike beside him. Walt trailed, gun in hand. As they crossed the driveway to the street, Raymond glanced back at the house with wistful near-regret. A look like leaving for college for the first time. Like wandering through your back yard and discovering the grave of your first dog.
An explosion kicked up downhill, fierce and close enough for the shock to strike Walt's skin. Raymond inched uphill, one hop at a time. Walt moved beside him and supported his handlebars.
Even
so, Raymond had to rest less than half an hour later, dropping off the road into the scrubby grass that fringed the cliffs. Mia gave him water, some crackers. Walt watched the silent road, ready to race off if more than a scout appeared. If worse came to worst, he'd leap off the cliff and see what happened.
The aliens stayed downhill, torching the million-dollar homes with all the patience of incoming tenants who plan to stay for the next ten or twenty million years. Raymond declared himself rested a few minutes later. They made good time then, aided by the road, which first flattened out and then ran downhill. The road angled into a sharp point; at sea's edge, a dark tower rose into the night. A light flickered through a window at its peak, disappearing a second after Walt saw it.
He reached for his weapon. "We could rest here."
"I don't think so," Mia said. "It's a dump."
"And I hear it's haunted," Raymond laughed.
Walt rolled his eyes. Couples. Like their histories were so much more special just because they'd had someone to share them with. They moved on, stopping a quarter mile or so down the road at a railed overlook. Walt could no longer smell smoke, just the salty sea, the sweat griming his clothes, the sweet-sick scent of weeds blooming across forgotten yards. For a while after that, there were no houses at all, just empty slopes and the rolling road. Besides the beach, it was the first open and undeveloped land Walt had seen in days.
Raymond stopped in front of a steepled church, leaning over his handlebars. "I think that's all I've got."
"It's okay," Mia said. "We're far enough for now."
The church's front doors were locked. Walt walked to the neighboring field, picked up a rock, and threw it through the door's window. He swept broken glass with his foot while Mia helped Raymond inside. She returned to help him wheel in the bikes, storing them in a kitchen at the back of the church, then hauled the packs to an upstairs office with a couple of couches. Raymond lay on one, shoes off, scanning his leg with the help of a flashlight.
