by J. Thorn
They had their choice of tents, but Raymond had to sit and rest his leg before he'd finished hammering the second stake. He watched with jagged annoyance while Walt took over—it seemed like he'd never have another moment alone with Mia again; he estimated he'd last another two or three nights before he'd have his first wet dream in years—but as soon as the tent was up, complete with its moist-tent smell, Walt set off to find another for himself. Raymond crawled through the flap and struggled off his shoes. He was suddenly exhausted, unable to stand, barely capable of nodding when Mia asked if he was tired. She began to unroll their blankets, but he couldn't bring himself to help.
David boiled coffee in the morning while Otto patrolled the fringes and Anna tried to coax a squirrel from a tree with a handful of peanuts. The other two were still in their tents. Raymond and Mia had quit building fires at the house once the aliens got too serious and the coffee was the first he'd tasted in weeks. He lifted his mug, a dirty white thing printed with music notes and a smutty one-liner about piano teachers, then sipped.
"I think those things flew all this way for dark roast."
"I had to crush the beans with a hammer." David nodded at the sock he'd used for a filter. "Don't worry, it was clean. In a relative way."
"Who ever thought brewing coffee could be such work?"
"It's remarkable how fast it all went away. How long would it take you to learn how to build a car? I can conceive of living in a cave rather than attempting to set a foundation. A cave!" David laughed, wryness shot through with wonder. "If we didn't have those damned crabs kicking over our sand castles, I think it could be honest fun to try to piece it back together."
Raymond rolled coffee over his tongue. "Think we could do it?"
"Sure. We can still read, can't we? If our visitors up and left this afternoon, I can envision running water within a year."
"I'd kill for that."
David leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Don't try to fight some silly war. You have a beautiful young woman. Find someplace to be with her where nothing will interfere."
He nodded but said nothing. Part of him wanted to do just that. If Colorado was a dream, it was one that could be willed into reality. If the aliens were having that much trouble quashing the cities, how long would it take them to win over the wilderness? Did he owe it to his species to help fight? How did you measure that responsibility against the responsibility to keep those you love happy and safe? He suspected this wasn't a question for the head. Instead, it was for the heart, the guts, any of the squishy things below the brain.
The coffee was cold when Mia woke, but he poked up the fire. Her eyelids fluttered at the roast potatoes and rosemary.
"Let's go for a walk," she said once she finished eating.
"My leg hurts."
"Exactly. We'll stop when it gets to the bad kind of pain."
He found a long, sturdy, and reasonably straight stick. The woods smelled like pine needles and a coldness that might never come. Mia matched his erosion-slow pace. Birds cheeped from the branches. After a few hundred yards, he was hot enough to ditch his flannel. After a half mile of knotty woods and open grass, the pain forced him to sit in the sun on a broad, flat boulder, where he knuckled the muscles around his throbbing wound.
"What do you think we should do next?" he said.
She grinned. "You ever done it in the woods?"
When they finished—he'd stayed on his back, which felt like it had a couple new scrapes, not that he'd noticed while he was cupping her breasts and she was grinding him into his discarded clothes—he thought until he remembered his question. "About the Bear Republic Rebels. Now what?"
Her chest rose and fell under his flannel. "I don't see any rebels to do anything about."
"They could have relocated. Gone out on a mission."
"And they could all be feeding alien larvae."
"I'd like to stay," he said. "Just for a while. If they haven't come back in two weeks, we'll decide from there."
"Okay." Her voice was dreamy. He let his eyes rest along with his leg. He never slept so well again.
Otto rarely offered more than a handful of words, but made no further demands for them to move on, either. Walt passed the time lugging in water from a stream beyond the hill, gathering edibles with Anna, who was some kind of botanist, and keeping watch over the trailhead to camp. David brewed his coffee and combed his radio dial for anything besides static. After Raymond's fourth afternoon of limping through the woods with Mia, he returned to find Otto sitting in front of their tent, a cigar squiggling smoke from his lips.
"You're working hard. That's good. But you're going to get hurt. That's not so good."
He swept his forearm across the sweat on his hairline. "We'll be okay. Mia's keeping her eyes open."
"You need to find a woman who can build a set of crutches." Otto nodded at a pair he'd leaned against the tent, stripped blond pine branches knotted together with fibrous white twine. "See if those don't help the leg."
Raymond sat down to inspect them. The wood was smooth, the bonds tight. "Thank you."
"If you're gonna be here, you need to be healthy. You hunt?"
"When I was a kid."
"Well, start reminiscing. The winter won't kill us, but three straight months of baked beans sure might."
Otto shoved off, knees and knuckles popping, and shuffled in the direction of the trailhead. Raymond watched until he disappeared around the bend.
That night, they all ate together for the first time, gathered around the fire as it roasted potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and red bell peppers from an overgrown garden a couple miles up the road. David cooked them on a fine mesh screen, fastidiously speckling them with pepper and flaky rose sea salt, then forked the slices out on paper plates and topped them with a chutney mashed from garden mint, cilantro, and chilies. Raymond dug in while it was hot enough to burn the roof of his mouth, leaving small strips of skin he wiggled free with his tongue.
"I've been thinking about this for a long time now," Walt said when they'd been reduced to licking tomato juice and salt from their fingers, "and what I can't figure out is how the three of you came to form this little A-Team."
Anna straightened her dark ponytail. "What d'you mean?"
"Daffy scientist, dapper, epicurean survivalist, and grizzled old gun-lover. It's like you met on a reality show."
"You think I'm daffy?"
"Don't be offended by a snap judgment. It's true of anyone who cares about squirrels."
"My story's same as yours." Otto's plate was crumpled on his belly. "Met these two here trying to find the army. They broke down up north. Couple of geniuses who'd never seen a fan belt before."
David folded his paper plate in half three times, then dropped it into the fire. He used a rag to wipe down his knife and fork. "I was a history professor at Pomona with a mildly successful blog about pre-modern technology and solutions to problems we no longer have. It was a curiosity, then, or a hobby for green advocates who'd rather spend their money on iron cookware and goose farms for fletching than they would on alternative energy, but now the wind farms are powering nothing and I know how to boil leather, so there's that.
"My Sasha and I both proved immune to the Panhandler. We had a cabin in the mountains where we lived while the violence boiled off into steam and the stovetop patina of the dead. We spent some time discussing the ideal place to relocate—right where we were, where we had the advantage of familiarity? Canada, for the isolation? Central America, to avoid winters and achieve a yearlong harvest? An island in the Gulf seemed attractive, too, but neither of us knew much about nautical matters.
"Ultimately, we decided to travel to Eastern Washington. It's relatively isolated, it's a desert clime with mild winters, and despite the summer heat, which frankly sounds barbaric, you can make good work farming due to volcanic soil and the Columbia River, which, we predicted, would also once more become a potent source of salmon. So. The truck was loaded. Routes were mapped. Food c
anned and tubbed. Gas siphoned.
"I-5 is an interesting route, if you've never taken it. The interior of northern California is positively Mediterranean, if lacking a gorgeous blue sea or the centuries of cultural tradition. But the olives are just as green.
"We were attacked outside Redding. Mountain town, very pretty. Sasha died on the highway. We were holding hands and she fell into the weeds. The shot entered the back of her head and one look at the remainder told me enough. I ran into the woods. I lived there like a native until it got too cold. I supposed I'd come south for the weather, but really I was hoping to run into my attackers. Motorcycle people. They wore orange. I saw no sign of them. I detoured to Monterey to see whether the aquarium still had any minders—she'd been a marine biologist, Sasha, relished our trips there. She loved to roll her eyes at the guides."
In the silence, a log crackled, startling Raymond. David stared at his hands. Anna gave him a gentle smile.
"I was working for a Monsanto team up north," she said. "Altering seeds. It was reeling, dizzy stuff. We made DNA sing and dance and sprout horns. If I still had that team, these aliens would be toast. Chomped up by fifty-foot carnivorous corn cobs. I'm not kidding. Well, kind of. I wasn't surprised by the virus or the invasion. I think I'd been assuming the agricultural conglomerates would take care of the apocalypse within the next decade themselves.
"I don't know why I headed south? Mexico, I think. Oaxaca. Pictures of the cliffs. And then Chichen Itza. I thought if I saw those ruins I could understand our own. I took Highway 1 because what's the hurry? The ocean's nice." She nudged David's hunched shoulder. "I bumped into this guy staring at a bunch of dead fish."
Mia dug a seed from her teeth. "What about you, Otto?"
"Already told it."
"Come on, there's no TV out here. I'm dying."
"Kids didn't take to the sickness," he said simply. "Figured I'd go to Alaska. Always wanted to live there before I had my girls. But when I found these two outside Monterey without a rifle, sidearm, or spitball gun between them, well, it seemed like murder to leave."
Raymond couldn't tell if there was an edge of annoyance to David's smile. Anna's seemed wholly pleased. "So you three?" she said. "Let's don't stop story hour here."
"Well, we inherited a house in Redondo Beach," Mia said.
"And were about to lose it," Raymond smiled. "Or be forced to move out of, anyway."
"Then, you know, the world ended."
"And after our house burned down, we realized all those much nicer houses on the hill didn't have owners anymore. So we moved into one. We had a garden, a system for water. It was really nice."
"Then we looked outside and there was a mothership hovering over the bay." Mia laughed, sobering up as she checked off the alien sweeps and their measures to clear out the city, the botched raid by the Bear Republic Rebels, how they'd taken Sarah into the house. "She shot Raymond as we were trying to flee. We bumped into Walt in the street on our way out of town. That was just, what, two weeks ago?"
The faces around the fire turned toward Walt. "I walked there from New York." He tossed his paper plate into the flames. "It took a while."
"You walked?" Otto said. "From New York City? Has the East Coast not heard about cars?"
"It made sense at the time."
The fire coughed sparks. At the time, Raymond thought, it always makes sense. Even here and now, camped out with strangers waiting for an army that might not exist, forced into the wilderness by aliens and plague, it made sense, in its own particular way; he knew the chain of events that had brought him here, could see the shape of several routes from here. But should they have moved into the house on the hill? Should they have gone to Alaska? Mexico? Eastern Washington?—well, no, he'd driven through the place enough to know that. But the point stood. It would be cliched to think that, no matter how narrow the rapids ahead looked, he had a million options at any point in time, but the truth was he did have a million options. Some better than others, no doubt, but he couldn't know which for sure until he gave them a shot, and if he found himself in the midst of a bad current, he could switch course at any time. A million boats could clog any river. All he had to do was jump to a different deck.
In a literal sense, though, he had a bullet-shaped hole through his leg that was still on the mend. So he hobbled through the woods on his crutches, Mia handing him bottled water when they stopped. Walt, ever restless, announced he was heading back south for a few days to seek out sign of the BRR. The others lodged no complaint.
Even as Raymond was living those days—smelling the pines, feeling the grit of the trail under his feet, the sharp yet sweet pain in his thigh when his weight landed too strongly—he knew they'd be ones he looked back on with no second guesses about what other boats he could have taken instead. They were simple and clear and good. They reminded him of the first days Mia had moved in with him in Seattle to his dingy apartment shared with two male friends and a small German Shepherd, none of whom ever raised a finger to clean. It was dirty and they had no AC in the summer and Raymond supplemented his job cataloguing books at a bookstore with food stamps, but his friends were right there and Mia liked them and he knew the neighborhood. The two of them had to stretch $180 to cover a month's groceries, and he knew if they were still living that way in their 30s, something would have gone terribly, dreadfully wrong, but at the time, it was a perfect balance of work, sleep, sex, vodka, video games, art, weed, sobriety, and movies, with just enough nights out at the bars, restaurants, and parks to keep from getting cabin fever.
The culmination of this period, which had lasted two years until he and Mia moved into their own apartment minus roommates and dogs of any kind, had come on a Fourth of July weekend when his roommate Matt talked them into driving to the lake and barbecuing in the heat beside the dazzling cool water, where they ate beer-marinated bratwurst and passed around fifths of Dr. McGillicuddy's Fireball Whiskey while playing a strange game involving golf ball bolas and PVC pipe wickets. In the morning he and Mia had dismissed their hangovers with a puff of smoke (but not too much to drive) and he'd taken her down to a motel on the Oregon Coast, which she'd somehow never seen, and it was rainy and windy and cold, but they poked at sand dollars and crabs on the shore and ate seafood caught that day and then went back to the seaside motel where they'd screwed so hard he was surprised the headboard hadn't pounded down the walls and bucked them right into the neighbor's room.
That was it, one weekend, a stereotypical summer holiday with his friends and one more day spent on vacation proper, but the memory was so clear to him he could have narrated every detail on command—how the sun had disappeared in mist as they crested a ridge past Portland; the scallops at dinner at a restaurant where the carpet was so worn it was shiny; the dirty word they'd found carved into a colossal and wave-worn trunk washed up on the sand; the color of the mugs—white outside, teal inside—at the coastal-hipster coffee-and-sandwich place they'd walked to before driving back north. Two days that felt endless because each moment was so rich it could have fed a full day of its own. He and Mia had had that time together in the house on the hill before the aliens arrived, and now, walking and screwing and chatting in the quiet, cool woods outside Santa Barbara, they'd found it again. That was what life was about. Building times so good they felt like forever.
A week later, Walt came back from LA with two more alien lasers, a pack full of bows and arrows, and an idea. He plunked down by the fire. Otto, upset that Walt hadn't properly identified himself before he drew down on him at the trailhead, was mollified when Walt handed him one of the short-barreled foreign pistols for examination.
"Don't suppose you found this piece in a Hollywood pawn shop."
Walt shook his head. "I lifted it from its former owner, who made no objections to me taking it after being very thoroughly shot."
"Just how thorough?"
"Skull like a bowl of gazpacho."
"I take it that's a soup."
"You take right." He
leaned in toward the heat, face yellowed by the firelight. "I found a way to fight back."
Otto nodded, the stubble on his neck rolling. "Nuke 'em. I know where three silos are in-state."
"We can't nuke them," Mia said.
"Says who? Now's not the time to be worrying about a few flipper-babies."
Raymond frowned. "They've tried. We heard about it on the radio. Everywhere they've launched a nuke, the aliens knocked it down and leveled the place."
"Did Americans try?"
"Not that I know."
"There's your problem."
"It's not nukes," Walt said. "It's the opposite. I don't know how many of those things there are—five thousand, ten—but I know how many there aren't."
David ran a thumb along the wrinkles below his jaw. "Guerrilla warfare. The tactic of occupied lands throughout history."
"They can't fly in reinforcements overnight. If we can kill them one by one, until they don't have the men to crew their ships, we can beat them."
"This plan," Anna said, "sounds like it could be rephrased as 'choke their rivers with our dead.'"
Walt laughed. "I'm not asking anyone to come with me. You don't have to decide right now. What I'm telling you is I'm going to go back to Los Angeles to kill as many of those genociders as sneakily and evilly as I can."
Otto stood, as if ready to ride off on a stallion then and there. "They killed my daughters. I been waiting for some army, but if I haven't seen it now, I doubt I ever will."
Raymond glanced at Mia, who was already searching for his eyes. "I don't know about us. We'd need to talk."
"I'll go," David said. "All the knowledge in the world is no use if you're disintegrated before you can teach it to the children."
"Um," Anna said.
Walt hugged his knees to his chest, his face still and distant as the full moon. "Take your time. I'd like to radio around. Spread the idea. See whether anyone else is already trying it and what they've found out. Should take me a couple weeks before I'm ready. Do whatever you think's right."
Raymond shifted, thigh jangling with a sudden shot of pain. A new boat floated down that river.
