by J. Thorn
26
Smoke tumbled from the chimney of the false hacienda, rising in a pillowy white language even aliens could understand: humans live here. Down the block, Walt shied his left arm away from the thorns of the brush he was hidden beneath and listened to the keen of the coming ship. Could be in for a bombing. That would be some bad luck. Have to scrap the whole campaign, at the very least resolve for a longer slog than his most patient projection. If they couldn't count on luring the squids out to play, whittling them down could take years. Years Walt may well wouldn't see; his spot was just thirty yards from the hacienda's front door, and if the bombs came largely or sloppily enough, his last moments would consist of the transition from being Walt into becoming a foul-smelling mist of vaporized guts, carbonized bone, and superheated shit.
Well, he'd find out soon enough.
Something hefty and ceramic crashed from the second floor of the house where Walt crouched in the shrubs. He scowled. While Walt was out roving and broadcasting, Mia had trained with the others at camp, ranging from competent to natural at everything she tried, be it firing pistols or bows, building and lighting fires quickly, or hiding in just the right place to have full coverage of a park trail while remaining nearly invisible. But first time in the field and she was smashing vases like an epileptic steer. He turned over the idea of walking out on the group and continuing on his own. Then again, no need to decide while he was still waiting for the bombs.
The engine-noise swelled until it was ready to jiggle the windows from their frames and his teeth from his jaw. Through the thick screen of branches, the scalloped black oblong of a flier descended vertically, disappearing behind the clay tile rooftops a couple blocks away. Dust plumed above the houses, dispersing in the faint wind. At once, the keening snapped off, leaving Walt's ears ringing with the tiny wail of a muted TV.
Three aliens rounded the corner, carrying weapons in claws and tentacles, dressed in their perverse pink straps that reminded Walt of a pandering anime character. He had the sudden urge to laugh. Less than a year ago, he'd had to worry about taking out the trash, given himself ulcers over whether an unknown young stage actor had the kind of abs that could shatter an already-cracked relationship. Now, he was hiding in a bush with a laser pistol in one hand and a grease-blacked katana in the other while a team of human-hunting alien seamonsters slapped their way down a sunny Los Angeles suburb. Why ever plan for anything?
The three beings crossed the lawn of another Spanish-style manor three houses down, sticking near its front as they advanced towards the smoking chimney. When they reached the neighboring house, one squid posted up behind a pillar and aimed its guns up at the blank windows. The other two crossed an overgrown, yellowing side yard for the porch of the smoking house.
Up and across the street, a flock of pigeons burst from a third-story window. The aliens whirled. From the window above and behind Walt, a needle-pointed arrow slashed the air, thunking through the closest alien's skull. Yellow fluid splashed the porch. A second arrow pierced the body of the posted-up squid before it could return fire, crumpling it in a sprawl of squiggling limbs. Blue lines appeared between their claws and Mia's window. Under the brush, Walt took aim and lased through the neck of the unwounded squid. The arrow-wounded survivor rose, uttered a noise exactly like a human gasp, and turned its weapon on him.
Another arrow knocked it back down, jutting from one of its many armpits. Walt fired, singeing its face before it yanked itself away from his beam. A return shot scorched the thorny brush three inches to his right, clogging his nose with thick wet smoke. His next shot missed. An icy heat licked across his left forearm; his hand jerked reflexively, firing wild. He smelled burnt hair and sausage. The alien picked itself up, guns leveled. An arrow hissed between them, piercing its throat and pinning it to the patchy yard.
Walt rolled out from under the bushes. Laser ready, he jogged up to the pinned body. Yellowy, mucosal blood guttered from its wounds. He raised his katana and struck off its head.
Down the street, Otto kicked open a front door and sprinted around the corner where the flier had touched down. Walt severed the heads of the other two creatures and knelt for their guns, carefully tapping the pads he'd discovered that sent them into a safety-like sleep mode. Across the street, the door creaked open.
"Don't have too much fun there," Mia accused, bow slung over her shoulders.
He flicked his sword, slinging gore. "Enjoyment in one's work is one of the keys to a fulfilling—" A gut-shaking explosion downstreet made them both wince. Greasy smoke uncoiled over the rooftops. Otto's shoes smacked pavement. Walt grinned, slung the pistols into his pack, and sheathed his sword. David wanted to study the aliens' gear, so Walt knelt to gather it up, disabling the tracking devices with a sleep mode similar to that on the guns—they'd hunted him down in Arizona because he hadn't seen a simple on/off switch. "Don't even think we needed the pigeons."
She jerked her chin at his forearm. "Are you hurt?"
He glanced down at the raw spot. His skin was pinkened, an uneven line of hair obliterated or reduced to small black curls. "Like the wise man said, pain don't hurt."
"God, I miss movies." She glanced at Otto as he pulled up beside them, panting. "Did you blow the ship?"
"To seven different hells, girl."
"Bikes," Walt said. "Gloat later."
They were near the crest of the hill before they heard the far-off whine of another flier; by the time the bombs fell, crumping, as removed as the howls of a wolf, they were more than a mile away. Walt pulled off the road anyway, holing up in a shoe store in a busted-up strip mall.
"Question," Mia said in tones that would have passed in a library. "Did anyone think that would go that well?"
Otto shrugged his bearish shoulders. "We got surprise, planning, cunning, homefield advantage. Can't ask for much more." He twitched his gray mustache, considering. "Besides a column of armor and some Warthogs up high."
"That went about as well as a monster-fight can go. It was like we had the cheat code for Contra."
"Well, the next level of a video game is always harder than the last." Walt had a bad feeling as soon as he spoke the words; absurdly, he remembered playing Battletoads as a kid. Specifically, the level where his toad-warrior mounted up on a hovering scooter and he had to dodge upright obstacles that resembled giant sticks of original-flavor gum. They came one after the other, faster and faster, until his scooter was speeding so fast it inevitably resulted in his craft being smashed and his froggy body being flung to its death on the far side of the screen. By the end of the course, reflexes were simply not enough. The only way to make it out the other side was to know in advance the location of every single stick.
That was a video game. You could memorize it. It didn't adapt to you. Eventually, if you played it enough, memorizing each of its obstacles, you would beat it, no matter how many times your toad died along the way.
He glanced at Mia, the contrast between her delicate face and the taut muscles beneath her sun-browned skin, and thought, suddenly, of kidnapping her, conking her out and running away to live in an igloo to train penguins to bring them fish through the winter.
"What are you smiling about?" she said.
"Alternate realities."
This, too, was truer than the glibness that had spurred it. No matter how fast the obstacles came or how often they changed, he couldn't stop playing when the game was the only chance he had to see every last one of those things dead. As for Mia and Raymond, he was less certain. In a small, strange way, he'd been disappointed when they told him they were in with his mini-resistance. He'd wanted them to go somewhere—the Caribbean, Brazil, the outlands of Patagonia. Anywhere but LA.
Instead, Raymond said they'd given it a lot of thought, and at the end of the day, they'd decided living like there's no future would only guarantee it. Or something equally hokey and cliched, who could remember such things? He'd even tried to talk them out of it, told them they didn't owe him, humanity, or any
one else a damned thing, that when happiness slows up enough for you to catch it, you grab it with both hands and lock it in your closet. Mia had just given him this look that only a woman can give a man and told him he'd watched too much Die Hard. Well, what can you do. You can't force a person to not go ambush nightmarish killers from beyond the stars.
After the success at the house, they repeated their trap in a Beverly Hills radio station, replacing the smoking chimney with a broadcast signal and the pigeons with two goats they found cropping the grass of an elementary school. They roamed through and lived in the subway tunnels—that LA had a subway was both news and hilarious to Walt—camping in the cavernous gloom at the base of the stairs, retreating to the platforms with candles and flashlights to sleep, stirred at night by the skitter of rats and the sudden panic that they lived in a concrete cave that smelled like mold and stagnant water and that if their lights burnt out they'd have to stumble through total darkness while their hands trailed along the cold tile walls. But it was safe, inasmuch as anything was these days. Anna watched from a rooftop of an art deco apartment, binoculars clamped to her eyes, walkie-talkie in hand, while Walt led David and Mia to plant two IEDs—David and Otto had combined forces to gin these up—at the entrance to the Staples Center, where they'd seen pairs of squid visit for reasons that probably had nothing to do with basketball.
And then, like that, the missions dried up. Not for want of waiting or watching. That, aside from occasional midnight scavenger runs from the tunnels, was essentially all they did. But because the aliens disappeared. Not the ships; those still scorched the sky on a daily basis. Their base at LAX was only growing, too. Walt spent long hours watching the creatures erecting their cone-houses and milling around, but he couldn't think of a way to tackle the airport that wouldn't result in a lemming-like display of self-destruction. It was the foot patrols which had stopped. The only time when the aliens were vulnerable to six people on foot armed with hand-lasers and equally silent bows and arrows.
"They got wise," Otto said, a dim hulk on the candlelit subway platform. "They may look like dog vomit, but they ain't dumb."
Raymond paced the edges of the light. His limp was almost gone. "It was working, wasn't it? So what do we do?"
"Draw 'em out."
"How's that?" Walt forked up a cold meatball. "Parachute naked into LAX?"
"I thought you were the idea man, idea man."
"If they've wised up to us picking them off, they'll wise up to us drawing them out to pick them off."
Mia tugged her blanket around her shoulders. "Do you think we should stop?"
"I say we bomb them," Anna said. "See how they like it."
Despite the darkness, Otto squinted. "Push came to shove, I could fly us a helicopter. Doubt I'd even have to remember how to land it."
"Are those automated now?" David frowned. "I didn't think autopilots had progressed past in-flight duties and...oh. You're laughing."
"Other ideas?" Walt said.
"Sabotage?" David said. "It would require access to their ships."
Anna rubbed her nose. "Poison them. Just poison the shit out of them."
"With what?" Otto gestured to the empty rails beyond the light. "You got a spare truck of Martian Big Macs down that tunnel?"
"Did we conclude they eat people? We can find corpses, fill the corpses with poison, and leave them in the open. The rest takes care of itself."
"They're not going to eat bodies off the sidewalk!" Mia said. "Would you?"
"I prefer my meat freshly killed through humane methods. But these creatures appear crustacean in nature, from which we might conclude they are not only carrion-eaters, but—"
"We don't know they eat people," Walt said through a mouthful of marinara. "Think better than you're thinking right now."
"Why don't we keep doing what we're doing?" Raymond glanced around the candlelight. "I haven't even gotten out there yet. How do we know the patrols won't come back tomorrow?"
Otto palmed his gray stubble. "The fact you want to go to war tells me you've never been in one."
"You have?" He raised his brows at Otto's nod. "Which one?"
"Which one you think? I look young enough to have been plunking camel jockeys? I'm talking about the jungle. Churned clay. Socks that never dry out." He drew a long breath, puffing his chest. Walt should have guessed he was a Vietnam vet, and a specific kind at that: he who thinks final authority in all matters rests with those few who'd been at Khe Sanh or Hamburger Hill. "I'll tell you something," Otto went on. "One day I'm on recon with a roughneck named Samms. The sun's starting to go down, which you don't like, because it's still hot as a dog's mouth and meanwhile the night-bugs are starting to make so much noise you couldn't hear a Panzer brigade sneaking up on you. The shadows, too. Fronds that could be men or their guns. You see everything and nothing and the only reason you don't head straight back with a false all-clear is the guilt of walking the others into the unknown.
"We reach the edge of a clearing, Samms and me, and the sun comes back. It's yellow on the green grass and the brown water. Down the way, a dozen VC with AKs are yelling at unarmed civilians and kids. I don't understand a word of what the civilians are saying back but you can tell they're scared. That break in the voice means the same in any language. It's open field between us and them and Samms and me know we can't get any closer without getting plunked.
"They're arguing for a while, the soldiers and one rice-skimmer, and then one of the men with the guns gets bored and he shoots the farmer. We're far enough away it's a second between when the farmer drops into the muck and when we hear the report. The other civilians—there must be forty of them, fifty—take off across the sopping fields. Mud's splashing their knees. The soldiers just stroll after them like they just finished a nap. No hurry at all. After the civilians have made a hundred yards, we see why.
"Across the field, there's a barb wire fence. The woman and the kids are streaming into the fence and they're screaming and tearing themselves apart trying to squirm to the other side. Caught in the spikes, the soldiers walk right up to them and shoot them dead. Less than a minute after the first farmer got shot, the field is quiet and the barb wire is heavy with the bodies."
Otto leaned back from the circle of candlelight, shoulders sagging like a weary bear. "Samms and I had tried to help, we'd be two more bodies in the field. Samms knew it. I knew it. But every day since I know I should have tried. I should have given everything to stop those monsters at the wire."
Walt scowled down the gloomy tunnel. The old man was ready to die. Probably, he was just as ready to seize command if Walt decided to turn back or if the aliens persisted in staying beyond their reach. He supposed they were all doomed anyway; whether they died tomorrow or two years from now, there was no stopping the enemy. Otto was too war-sure. David, too theoretical; Anna, too scattered; Raymond and Mia, too—domestic. They'd killed a few aliens together, sure, but it was too fantastical to go on.
Something was coming. After moving in together after college, Vanessa had adopted a six-week-old chihuahua, an all-black female with floppy bat ears and round black eyes. He'd resisted the move, as much as he could—she'd brought it home without a word of warning, walking through the door with a velvety little thing that could hardly run without falling down—but had wound up serving as its primary caregiver on the long nights while she auditioned, rehearsed, then unwound in a Village bar. That meant housebreaking. He laid down newspapers, even the diaper-like puppy pads that were supposed to convince dogs to go in one spot, but on countless occasions he looked up from a Mets article on his laptop to find the little dog squatting on the middle of the carpet, urine dribbling from its hind section, its black eyes so blankly stupid he wanted to crush the thing in his hands until it stopped squealing. His anger was so thorough, so mind-erasing, he had to count out loud until it boiled away.
Here they were, six little puppies piddling across Los Angeles. The force that smashed them would be furious.
&nbs
p; * * *
It began to rain. It continued to rain. It rained until water spilled down the subway steps and sluiced onto the tracks, forcing them deeper into the tunnels. They jugged all the water they could, took impromptu showers with soap and shampoo looted from the smashed-out CVS on the corner. David constructed an elaborate filtration device from charcoal, sand, and a trash can with a drain punched through its side. Anna wandered back from a midnight run to Home Depot to seed carrots and lettuce in the sidewalk planter. Otto watched with mustached disapproval from the bottom of the steps where he spent every waking minute ensuring he'd see the aliens before they saw him.
Walt doubted the man had to worry. They hadn't seen alien foot patrols for three weeks. Even the aerial presence had lessened, as if the invaders were equally discouraged by the ceaseless rain. Walt had waited for them to relax their guard or for another strategy to emerge, but there existed a hypothetical point where waiting would backfire—when reinforcements would arrive from the stars, or the aliens began breeding, or humanity simply lost the numbers and will to fight back. He wandered the platforms, flashlight in hand, in search of ideas. Instead, he turned a corner and found Mia hastily wrapping a towel around her lithe, damp, candle-shadowed body.
Water dripped from her dark hair. "You'd think I could find some privacy in the LA subway even before everyone else died."
"Didn't know this was the ladies' room."
"Now that you do, will that make you more or less likely to come back?"
"I'd rather not start making enemies with humans, too."
"Sounds smart." She slicked back her hair, pattering water on the concrete. "What are you doing down here?"
He kept his eyes on her face. "Thinking."
"Well, sorry to interrupt you."
"Who says I stopped?"
She smiled, eyebrows puzzled. "When I start shivering in a few seconds, it's cold, not because—"
Footsteps rasped down the platform. Adrenaline jolted through Walt's solar plexus—he envisioned driving his flashlight into the alien's throat—but then a candle wobbled into view, followed by Raymond. He frowned at Mia's towel, the bucket of soap and water.
