by J. Thorn
"How's it look?" Walt said.
Raymond made a face. "Shot."
"Guns will do that." He grabbed a pillow from the other couch and dropped it to the floor with a dusty plop. The blankets from the bike-trailer had the same smell as the couples' house. Wordlessly, Mia spread a blanket on the other couch and sat down to shuck off her shoes.
Raymond watched him make his bed. "You said you're from New York?"
"Yeah."
"How'd you get here?"
Walt pointed to his feet. "Those guys."
Mia narrowed her eyes. "You walked. For thousands of miles."
"If you only do one thing all day long, you can get a surprising amount of that thing done."
She smoothed hair away from her forehead. "Why?"
"Because there is a lot of time in a day."
"Why'd you walk from New York to LA?"
"Oh. To kill myself."
She laughed through her nose. "You didn't do too hot."
"My life has not been an unqualified success."
Her smile melted, replaced by something he couldn't read. Raymond clicked off his flashlight, ruffling into his blankets. Walt was suddenly conscious of the man's breathing, of Mia's, of every shift among their bedding, however minor. He raked up his blankets.
"I'm going to find a couch somewhere."
Mia shifted on her bedding. "I was going to suggest the same thing."
Walt squinted, found the flashlight, and wandered down the hall, boards squeaking under the thin carpet. In another office, he locked the door and curled underneath a desk. He fell asleep before he'd decided where to go next.
In the morning, he climbed the steeple and surveyed the hills with his binoculars. Smoke rose inland. Black specks keened from the north. He climbed down to poke around the church, but found nothing more interesting than a couple of basement vending machines which he broke open for a breakfast of peanut M&Ms and Coke. He'd never really liked Coke. After months without anything like it, it tasted ambrosial.
Footsteps creaked overhead. He found Mia right before the front door.
"Some scout ships out there," he said. "Don't go far."
"I don't need to run a marathon to take a piss."
He handed her a can of Coke when she got back. "You should tow Raymond in that bike trailer. He keeps bouncing his balls around like a bunny with a stroke, your kids will be senile before they're born."
"We're not having kids."
"They can't hear, either," he went on. "The squid-crabs, I mean. The scrabs. No, that's terrible." He licked his thumb, wiped Coke from his lip. "But they can sense motion. So if you're stuck in an elevator with one, fart all you want, just don't try to exit before them."
"They can't smell, either?"
"No, the sound. Possibly they can't smell, but a lot of ocean creatures seem to do nothing but smell other things. I expect their sense of smell is at least adequate."
She gave him a look like he'd asserted he could speak to housecats. "Are you being serious?"
"I've killed a few of them," he said, swinging back to things that might be relevant.
"How?"
"Stabbed two through the eyes. They have brains and they don't like being stabbed in them any more than we do. Lasered a third. They have distributed organs or something like it, though. I get the impression it would take a lot of bodily damage to take them down; explosives would work, shotguns probably, too. Swords. I expect swords would be great. I had a sword for a while, but I had to leave it behind when they hunted me down after I killed the first one."
"You know a lot about them." Mia popped her Coke with a pleasant hiss. "Where are you going now?"
"I had been thinking south. I think there are interesting things in the south." He shrugged. "Do you know where the rebels are? The ones the woman who shot your husband was rolling with?"
"She said they lived at a lake outside LA. The only place I know like that is on I-5 on the other side of the mountains."
"There, then."
"You want to fight back."
He shook his head. "I have to."
Mia nodded slowly. "Before last night, we wanted to go there, too. Maybe we could go together. It'd be safer."
"You mean than for you to try to make it with a husband with a hole through his leg."
"And for you to actually find the place instead of winding up in a Mexican whorehouse."
"That doesn't sound so bad."
"These whores have been dead for eight months. After bleeding out of every orifice."
"All right." Walt crumpled his empty soda can and chucked it to the floor. "We're all going to die, you know."
* * *
Two weeks later, Walt sighed down at the lake. Flattened patches of canvas flapped by its shores. Outhouses stood at two corners of the camp, doors hanging open. Though Walt could see wheel ruts all the way from their place on the ridge, there were only three cars, two of them burned.
Raymond eased himself from his bike trailer and leaned against its side. "Think the aliens got them?"
"Don't see any bodies."
Mia tipped her head. "Maybe they took them. Like the prisoners you found in the desert."
"Don't see any signs of explosions, either. Aliens roll in, I don't think these guys would just throw up their hands and say 'Well, you got me.'"
Raymond poked his makeshift crutch at the dirt. "So what do we do now?"
It had been hard for Walt not to get his hopes up the last couple weeks. There sure wasn't much else to do. He'd taken point on their bike-mounted march across the suburbs of Long Beach and Anaheim, but didn't encounter anything more frightening than a starving black labrador. Raymond slept a lot. Mia asked him a lot of questions about his trip and the aliens, which he'd mostly answered except when he didn't feel like it. When Raymond was awake, he readily accepted Walt's orders and asked a lot of questions about Walt's trip, too, though he had the impression it was more about hearing about rescues and escapes than Mia's specific inquiries about where he'd first seen the aliens and what the government had been trying to do in New York before he escaped. He liked them, in a vague way—they clearly loved each other—and hated them for the same reason.
Smoke rose from Los Angeles County. They crossed the mountains to the east. Walt's impatience rose with the smoke. Its particles contained timbers and curtains, roof-tar and bedsheets, but also, no doubt, the aerosolized remains of human beings. Every day it took the three of them to reach the rebels was one more day they wouldn't be helping to kill the beings doing that burning. The ones who'd seen Earth, decided they wanted it, and kicked over the anthills of humanity. The ones whose plague had taken her away.
Up on the ridge above the lake, he couldn't help wondering that if he'd biked by himself, freed of Raymond's trailer and regular need to nap, whether he could have caught the resistance before they slipped away.
"Just one thing we can do," he said. "Get down there and find out where they went."
A short ways up the hill, a dirt road branched off the cracked highway. Walt drew his laser and walked his bike down the switchbacking dirt, Mia and Raymond behind him. Besides the lake, there wasn't much to see: collapsed tents, a firepit, outhouses that still stunk vaguely of shit, a pile of fish bones by the shore, a long stretch of picnic tables. A simple wooden shack roughly near the center of the abandoned camp. Shaky, prophetic, all-caps graffiti blazed from its side, bright red words about angels and end times. Suspecting the shack had been the command post, Walt creaked open the door. The front room had a lightweight desk with empty drawers. The back room held a cot and a bucket. The cot was empty; the bucket wasn't. Walt scowled and went outside. He and the couple wandered the grounds, poking around under the tents, occasionally calling each other for leads that wound up false—a paperclipped set of marching orders that turned out to be from April, before the aliens had arrived, and a string of penciled numbers that turned out to be the scores from the last ten Super Bowls (Raymond, a fantasy football player, h
ad cracked that one). If there was any sign of where the rebels had gone, Walt couldn't see it.
The sun hovered above the peaks a couple miles away. Once it disappeared, the night would come fast. Back beside the wooden shack, Walt knelt to inspect a scrap of paper. One side was blank. The other showed a stick figure of a man with enormous balls.
"If our time weren't worthless, I'd say we were wasting it." Walt crumpled the paper. "We don't even know if they left us a sign."
"Well, they wouldn't leave anything the aliens could figure out," Raymond said. "What kind of sign could only a human understand?"
Walt sat back on his heels. "Culture."
"Culture?"
"Simpsons quotes. Star Wars references. Cave paintings of a guy with a mustache bellowing about soup. Anything we'd get that they wouldn't." He cocked his head, reached for the crumpled sketch, and smoothed it over his thigh. "Is this a Jackie Treehorn reference? Where did Jackie Treehorn live?"
"Who's Jackie Treehorn?"
"The Big Lebowski. Come on, he's a known pornographer."
"That guy. Um." Raymond pressed his fist to his forehead. "Malibu."
"Where's Malibu?"
"Just north of LA."
"Could the rebels be there?"
Raymond squinted one eye until it was nearly closed. "If they like getting incinerated by raging fires. It's like right there."
Walt turned the sketch one way and the other, looking for letters hidden in the lines of the sketch, for numbers or coordinates embedded in the curly hairs on the figure's testicles.
"What are you doing?" Raymond said.
"Malibu, then. It's the only lead we've got."
"You guys seen this graffiti?" Mia called from outside. "This is some prophetic shit."
Walt met the other man's eyes. Together, they rushed from the shack. Walt circled the building, reading out loud the messy red paint sprawled around three of its walls: "IN THE REALM BETWEEN ANGELS AND GIANTS / SAINT STREISAND AWAITS THE COMING / OF A RED DAWN ON THE WRONG HORIZON."
"Obviously," Walt said.
"Giants and Angels," Raymond said. "Between San Francisco and Anaheim."
"Well that fucking narrows it down."
"Saint Streisand?" Mia laughed. "Who's the superfan?"
"Saint Barbra Streisand?" Walt glanced at Raymond. "That mean anything to you?"
Raymond tipped back his head, lips parted. "Santa Barbara. It's a city up the coast a ways."
"So what the fuck does—"
"Red Dawn." Mia's eyes flared with comprehension. "The Patrick Swayze movie where the locals fight off the Soviet invasion."
They stared at each other in the fading sunlight. Walt dropped the sketch in the dirt. "Well, that was easy."
* * *
"Why did they fly out here at all?" Mia said. "It's so much effort."
Raymond peeked under the bandage on his leg and frowned. "Could be for water. Look at them. They crawled out of an ocean or a river somewhere."
"But water's everywhere. There's water on the moon."
"Not the kind you can swim around in."
"If they can fly all the way here, I think they can melt a few blocks of ice."
Walt tapped out a cigarette, flicked his lighter. The cherry glowed orange in the darkness of the park. The smoke chased the scent of trees and weeds. They'd been on the road three days and he expected they'd reach Santa Barbara sometime the next day. For better or worse. For all they knew the rebels had moved on again, or been wiped out, or the graffiti on the shack had been nonsense, some war-crazed trauma victim's idea of a joke. Walt inhaled, smiling. He supposed that would be funny: scrawl some gibberish on a wall, let travelers try to make sense when there was no sense to make. Watch from the hills while they rolled out on a wild goose chase. If their search for the BRR didn't pan out, maybe he'd give that a try himself.
Mia gave him a look. "I still can't get over that.
"Over what?"
"You survive the Panhandler, and what do you do? Start smoking."
"I already smoked."
"You'll regret not quitting next time you have to outrun a bear."
He let smoke trickle out his nostrils. "Bears have to eat, too."
"They don't have to eat you."
Raymond popped a big blue antibiotic. "Not so long as you can outrun me."
Walt flicked ash. "It doesn't matter. The aliens will get me sooner or later."
"You don't know that," she said. "There aren't enough of them to police the whole planet. You could hide in the mountains. That's what we're doing if we can't find the resistance."
"The thing is I'm not going to leave them alone."
Mia considered him across the moon-bleached blackness. "Why do you think they did it?"
"Water," Raymond said.
Walt glanced into the patchy black woods beside the clearing. "Why do you think?"
"Just to kill us off." She leaned forward, conspiratorial. "They wanted to take us out before we could become a threat. There's no other reason to come all this way when other resources must have been so much closer. Is there?"
"There are a million possible reasons. I doubt they'll ever bother to explain."
"Don't you want to know?"
He stubbed out his cigarette. Tiny orange embers blinked away. "What would it change?"
"Don't you sound tough."
"Well?"
Mia sat back, staring into the space between them where they would have lit a fire if Walt hadn't ruled it out. "It would make sense. The plague. The invasion. The extermination. It would all make sense."
"How the hell can the end of the world—"
Behind him, a man cleared his throat. Walt spun, the cool smoothness of the alien pistol appearing in his hand. Three silhouettes stood twenty feet away, assault rifles glinting in the thin silver moonlight.
Walt rolled his eyes. "Haven't we all seen enough guns already?"
III:
LIFTOFF
25
"Are you the resistance?" Raymond said.
"Get on your knees!" A bear-shouldered man rumbled forward, gun out, barely a toy in his swollen arms. A thick gray mustache carpeted his snarling lip. "I said get down!"
Raymond lowered himself to the damp grass, bracing his knee. Mia reached for his hand. Walt stayed on his feet.
"We look like aliens to you?"
The hulking old man raised his elbows as if to jam the barrel of his rifle into Walt's face. "I'll have all the time in the world to read your guts you don't kneel down right now."
A tall, thin man stepped next to the first, glasses winking over his cadaverous cheeks. "Otto, you really think they'd play dress-up just to fool you?"
"They must first know us before they can destroy us."
"They have bombs for that."
The grass soaked Raymond's knees. His leg throbbed. "We're looking for the Bear Republic Rebels."
The third figure edged forward, nearly as thin as the tall Asian man, a bony, bright-eyed woman in her mid-30s. Her dark hair was bound behind her head. "Are you soldiers?"
"Who isn't?" Walt said.
Mia lowered her hands fractionally. "We found the sign. It said the resistance was here."
"What sign?" Otto said. "Did they send you here?"
"I can barely walk." Raymond undid the lace keeping his slit pant leg together, exposing the blood-spotted bandage. "I don't think 'they' would send a crippled guy to take you down."
Walt shrugged. "Unless that's a cunning ploy to lower their guard."
The tall man rolled his eyes. "Don't encourage him."
Otto snapped away his gun. "You'd be better off if you were on their side. You won't find nothing here."
Raymond rose, teeth gritted. The tall, gaunt man was David, the woman Anna. They led the newcomers down a path through the woods. A mile from the road, collapsed tents lay beneath the leafless branches. Cold ashes waited in the dark. Dew gleamed from a flipped Jeep. Under the scent of moisture on fallen leaves, a faint wh
iff of feces clung to the night.
Walt laughed. Raymond eased himself to the ground. "What happened?"
Anna's eyes, so wide she constantly looked like she was preparing to sit down to her first meal of the day, went rounder yet. "Well, they disappeared!"
"We think they left," David said. "I don't see any bodies, for one."
"Because the squids took 'em." Otto wiped his glasses on his shirt and gazed into the black woods as intently as if they'd caught fire. "They're here for meat. Our meat."
Mia crinkled her brow. "That's a long way to go for sausage."
Walt gazed at Raymond. "Remember that next time you're thinking of taking a solo trip to Alpha Centauri."
"Hilarious," Mia said.
"Shit, he could be right, though. I busted out a bunch of people they had penned up like pigs."
Otto snorted. "A little elf like you led an alien jailbreak?"
Raymond expected him to come back with withering bluster, but Walt just stood there. Raymond rubbed his leg. It hurt in that dull but insistent way that was somehow more aggravating for the knowledge it wouldn't fade soon.
"Have you been here long?" he said. "Is it safe?"
"Nowhere ever has been," Anna said.
"A few days." David caught Otto's eyes. "What do you say? Mind if they split the camp with us?"
Otto laughed, a phlegmy chuckle of Marlboros and old wars, and swung his chunky hand at the field of musty tents and dented, empty cans. "You sure we got space?" His gaze honed in on Walt. "No. You want to sleep, find some place that isn't next to me."
"We're not going to hurt anybody," Mia said, puzzled.
"At least not from this planet," Raymond said.
Otto lifted half his mustache. "Look, you came out here to go stomping around with the rebels. You see any rebels here? Any flags? Jets? Choppers? Tomahawks? You got nothing for you to stay here."
Raymond stood, leg shivering. "You're here."
The old man snorted again, then shook his head. "It's a free country. But you so much as look my way while you think I'm counting sheep, I'll put one between your baby blues."
"I'm glad we could be reasonable."
