Breakers

  "What makes sense?" From the deck, Raymond gestured to the huge dark wedge and its soaring strings of lights. "That thing? If I were to make a list of all the things that made sense, I would be dead before I got to the giant fucking mothership over Santa Monica Bay."

  Mia hugged her elbows to her chest. "You think it's a coincidence that thing shows up just months after the plague that wiped us all out?"

  "Maybe they're just passing through."

  "If they want an inhabited planet, why waste soldiers and resources? Why not let a little bug do the job?"

  Raymond rubbed his mouth. "If that's true, what do we do now?"

  "We've got a car."

  "The radio said it first showed up in Japan. We don't know if it'll stay. And unless Martha Stewart survived the Panhandler, I don't think we'll find a nicer home."

  "We could die here."

  "We could die anywhere. What if we go to Palm Springs and it turns out these things love high heat, golf, and pretty blue pools?"

  "So we stay put," Mia said.

  "We don't even know for certain they intended to attack us. Maybe this is a reverse War of the Worlds where they came to bring us peace and love and accidentally gave us space-AIDS instead." He gazed at the star-occluding ship rumbling toward the city. "I think we need to see what they do before we make any decisions ourselves."

  "If they hover over here with one of those blue beams of death, you're getting the world's loudest I-told-you-so."

  "Let's go inside. Put out the candles."

  They locked the door, which Raymond found both absurd and comforting. Smoke wiggled from the snuffed candles. He and Mia stood hand-in-hand by the window and watched the ship drift to a stop over the downtown some twenty miles north. Smaller lights disgorged from the belly of the carrier and cruised over the dark buildings.

  "Think one will blow up the Hollywood sign?" Mia said in something near a whisper.

  "As long as they're here, I think I'd rather be where I can see them."

  "When you put it like that, I think we should keep watch. Sleep in shifts."

  "Let me guess," he said. "I get first watch."

  "Well, it was my idea that's saving our lives here."

  Raymond sat in darkness before the bedroom window overlooking the ocean. Mia slept soundlessly behind him. The massive wedge of the ship relocated somewhere around Venice Beach, hovering hundreds of feet in the air. Small vessels came and went in ones and twos, drawing slow loops around the cities or disappearing beyond the hills that ringed the valley. No more than six or eight of the smaller ships patrolled at any one time; sometimes as few as one streaked above the black streets. They left dark contrails, rumbling lowly, banking and climbing like standard jets. If they were capable of UFO-style zigzags or sudden bursts of eyeball-shattering speed, they weren't showing off.

  "How's the Earth doing?" Mia slurred when he shook her awake five hours later. "Still existing?"

  "Just a lot of buzzing around. Whatever they're here for, it's not to entertain us."

  With Mia watching out, he fell asleep easily. A sky-shredding shriek woke him at dawn. A silvery plane streaked in over the water to the south.

  "That's one of ours," he said.

  "No shit. An F-16."

  "Does this mean we still have a military?"

  Two jet-sized triangles swung away from the giant black body of the carrier and raced forward on thin white contrails. As they closed, the alien fighters let loose a volley of compact rockets that tumbled away and then leapt forward as if stung. The F-16 pulled up hard, ejecting sun-bright flares that fell away on jagged columns of smoke. The rockets followed straight through the clouds. The jet curled off into a tightening corkscrew; as if they were tied to it on strings, the trailing rockets spun with it. Two collided in a white bloom that absorbed the missiles around it. Raymond wiped his eyes, blinking at the afterimage.

  The alien vessels dovetailed apart. The F-16 slowed and swooped in behind the one that had vectored left. Missiles lanced forward. The alien craft banked hard, then burst in a shower of hot splinters. The boom reached Raymond a few seconds later, a deep thunder in his chest.

  The surviving triangle swung in behind the F-16 as smoothly as if they'd choreographed it.

  "They set him up," Mia said. "They were willing to lose one to take him down."

  Electric blue light pulsed between the fighters. The F-16 crumbled. Flaming metal tumbled into the Pacific. Raymond didn't see a parachute. "Is that it?"

  "Why send in a single plane? Feeling out their capabilities? Or did we just watch Maverick get blown up?"

  "Identifying F-16s, talking tactics—what are you, Sun Tzu?"

  "I used to paint miniatures when I was a kid. My uncle liked wargames."

  "Weird." The motionless carrier threw its shadow over the beaches. Another blue triangle left a port on the carrier's smooth side and paired up with the inbound survivor. They curved over the bay, then turned south, shooting over the house in a window-rattling pass.

  "So they're hostile," she said.

  "Or defending themselves."

  "They fired first. They killed us with a plague and then showed up with a battle fleet. You want to wait until they kick in the front door with their tentacles before you admit they're not here to make friends?"

  He rubbed his stubble. "Yeah. All right. It doesn't look good."

  The lines melted from her forehead. "So what do we do?"

  "If we're going to leave, we need to be ready. That means putting together food. Water. Maybe some gas. And finding out about the highways. I don't want to peel out of here just to run into a permanent traffic jam on the 405."

  "You really should have been an accountant."

  "What kind of a thing is that to say to the man you love?"

  "I'm just saying you're logistically-minded." She smiled and leaned in to kiss him. "Where should we start, General?"

  The two fighters swooped in from the south and beelined for the carrier, startling him. "I don't really feel like driving around in broad daylight. Not when they've got a Death Star parked over Santa Monica."

  "What, you don't think a car can outrun an alien jet fighter?" Mia flicked her thumbnail against her teeth. "So what if we forage the neighborhood on foot? We've got a lot of walking-distance homes we haven't been to yet. Then to check the highways..."

  "What?"

  "Just considering whether it's completely insane to grab a couple bicycles and check out the roads via velocipede."

  He laughed huskily. "You're seriously proposing we run a bicycle ninja mission down the LA freeways while the Alpha Centauri Air Force buzzes the skies."

  She lifted her palms up, then slapped her hips. "Don't think that I don't think this is incredibly, incredibly weird. It's just a whole lot less weird than it would have been six months ago."

  He couldn't argue with that. Aside from a fat-bellied squarish vessel that disappeared into the rises of Beverly Hills that afternoon, the alien ship didn't do much more besides hang there exactly the way a brick wouldn't. That night, he and Mia dressed in black and jogged from the house carrying the revolver, a crow bar, a duffel bag, a siphon, and three red plastic gas jugs. Mia smashed passenger windows, popped gas caps. Raymond sucked gas into the jugs, wiping his tongue on his sleeve.

  "We should have brought some god damn Scope," he whispered, tongue stinging.

  "Keep sucking."

  Dizzy, he sat on the curb while the gas drizzled into the jug. A point of light tracked across the misty skies. It had been a strange run: the dwindling money that had threatened to ruin their life together; the plague that had threatened to end their lives together; the gardening and foraging that had brought them closer than ever in this new silent world; now an alien invasion that threatened to—? That, he couldn't say. Maybe they were here to finish their eradication of humanity and he and Mia would die together in a flash of heat and light. Maybe they would round the survivors up and restrict them to subsistence on reservations. Or may
be, so long as the survivors left Earth's new arrivals alone, humans would be able to run free in the jungles, the mountains, the icecaps, whatever scraps of land the aliens didn't want.

  Maybe it was just the gasoline talking, but Raymond was amazed by the idea that, barring complete eradication, people somewhere would adapt and survive. Despite the horror of the past and the chaos of the present, life went on. Cosmically, life in some form would always exist—if there were two sapient species, there were likely to be hundreds, possibly millions, condensing from primal sludge on far-flung worlds into beings capable of crossing the lightyears of vacuum that separated them from the others. Even if he was soon to be vaporized by one of these neighbors, he found it strangely comforting to know that uncounted species would continue to exist all across the universe until the day the last star burned down to a cold cinder.

  He filled both jugs from a single Ford Excursion. At last there was some use for the things.

  He waddled down the street after Mia, gas sloshing. In a white-trimmed Cape Cod manor, they found a basement pantry filled with cases of Sprite, bottled water, and modular transparent drawers of Wheat Thins, Ritz, orange peanut butter crackers, fruit snacks, granola bars, trail mix, dried fruit, snack-size Snickers, and bags of pretzels and Ruffles and Sun Chips and beef jerky.

  "Mormons," Raymond said.

  "What? How can you tell?"

  "They're supposed to keep a year's worth of food in the house to help wait out disasters. Guess there wasn't much Jesus could do about an alien virus."

  Mia tucked a black strand behind her ear. "Well, they can rest happy knowing they're still providing Christian charity. Start grabbing."

  He managed to wedge a plastic drawer under each jug-laden arm and headed for home, sweating through the humid, neutral night. There, they stashed the goods in their garaged car and stood panting in the candlelit gloom.

  "This'll take all night," she said. "We should just take the car over and load it up."

  Raymond rolled his lips together. "I don't know."

  "Because it'll waste gas? It's three blocks from here. We'll be fine."

  "Not if an alien fighter jet decides we're stealing the food they rightfully earned via plague."

  "You're no fun," she smiled.

  "We'll compromise. I think there's a wheelbarrow in the shed."

  The tire sagged, but the thing rolled. They bumped it up the steps to the foyer of the Cape Cod mansion and piled it high with drawers of food and cases of water. As they started down the sidewalk, a rising car engine blatted from around the bend.

  "Get off the road," Raymond said.

  "We already are."

  "Leave the food." He grabbed her hand, rushed through the open iron gate of a white three-story Tuscan, and knelt behind a square stone pillar, dew soaking the knees of his jeans. A hollow keen skirled beneath the roar of the engine. Headlights bloomed in the fog up the street. A black Porsche swerved around the bend, slick with mist, and tore past their hiding spot, tail lights waggling as it skidded on the shoulder. Its engine faded.

  "Yeesh," Mia murmured. "If you're going to drive drunk, you should do it in something less awesome than a Porsche."

  She began to rise. Raymond grabbed her belt and forced her back down. "Normally when somebody's fleeing, it's from something."

  The second half of his sentence was overwhelmed by a rising keen from up the street. A pale blue light burst through the fog some twenty feet above the ground. Raymond squinted in the glare. A truck-sized black oblong cut through the air, its edges ridged like a scallop. It hurtled past on a blast of wind and disappeared around the bend toward their house.

  "Holy shit," Mia breathed.

  "Let's wait a minute. It might not be the only one."

  "Did that thing spook somebody into jumping into their car and taking off? Or did it see the car moving and fly in to run it down?"

  Far down the hill, the night rang with the bang of high-velocity metal instantly becoming no-velocity metal. Screams filtered through the fog.

  Raymond waited through a minute of silence, then rolled the wheelbarrow down to the house and pulled the garage door shut behind them. They lit a single candle apiece that night, whispering to each other in the shadows. The ship hung over the bay.

  When they woke, it was gone.

  They watched the skies from the window, then ventured onto the deck. With no sign of the carrier, its fighters, or the scout that had run down the driver of the Porsche, Mia watered the garden and fed the chickens while Raymond went inside for the radio and left it on the deck tuned to Josh Jones' station. It fuzzed and hissed. Raymond picked spinach and rinsed it in a bucket under the deck. He mixed pepper, vinegar, and crushed almonds and brought Mia a salad they ate in the sun.

  "Maybe they don't like 72-degree days," she said.

  "Or hovering-mothership ocean views."

  "Where does that put us now?"

  Raymond could only shake his head. His hands were sun-browned, rough-palmed. "They're crazy aliens. If we try to figure out what they're up to, we're just guessing, aren't we? For all we know, they didn't leave, they just flew a few miles up to drop a really big rock on us. The only thing we can do here is plan for the worst."

  "That they'll come back, disintegrate me, amputate your limbs, and let their alien women repeatedly have their way with you."

  "When does it start getting bad?"

  She spritzed him with her spray bottle. "So we check the highways. See if they're traversable. Otherwise, business as usual."

  "We'll check tomorrow night. Make sure they're really gone first."

  Rather than surfing or going for a walk, he watched the ocean from their back yard, aware that if they had to drive away or the aliens came back with alien-nukes, he might never see it again. White foam lined the shore. Breakers rose and slapped the sand. Pelicans and gulls rode the winds and bobbed along the surface. The sea was both larger and smaller than his mental image of "the sea," with finite edges at Malibu on the north, the rocks beneath their house on the south, and the sudden straight-line terminus on the western horizon, which looked no further away than the green shores of Malibu. Yet he knew it stretched on and on and on, thousands of miles of unseen water, speckled here and there by islands you'd miss if you didn't already know they were there, so huge he could only see a bay-sized fraction of it at a time, and only then its wind-chopped surface. How long would he have to stare at the bay before he saw every drop of water circling through the Pacific?

  "Well, hi out there, fellow incredulates," Josh began at 9 PM on the nose. "So the big news, in case you just awoke from a hospital coma, is an alien fleet rolled in, shot a few people, snatched a few others, and then left for more probeable pastures. Sources say they lit out for Las Vegas, but as we haven't heard from them in hours, I offer this as nothing more than rumor. Go nuts.

  "Down to brass tacks and hard facts. If the military's out there preparing its inspiring resistance, all we've seen was a single F-16, possibly piloted by a madman, who managed to blow up one enemy fighter before being swallowed by the mighty Pacific. The good news: the bad guys don't have force fields or invincible polycarbon armor. They can be destroyed. Hypothetically, we can fight back.

  "The bad news: they do have lasers. Or zappy light-things that resemble what we think of as lasers. They've got a big ship, too. A really, really, inconceivably huge ship. The silver lining is that as far as we know, there's just the one of these Imperial Star Destroyers. Which may be why it had to stroll off to Las Vegas itself to see what there was to see.

  "Oh, right, and the other bad news: they're probably here to kick our ass. Hope some of you boys with crop dusters in the barns also have a few missiles stashed away in your grain silos."

  Mia stood. "Let's go."

  "What?"

  "Josh said the ship's in Las Vegas. That means we can check out the freeways."

  "Why can't that man just give us a damn traffic report?"

  They drove down the hill in
the black late-model Charger they'd stolen from one of the lots down in Torrance after deciding the increased fuel economy of a Civic hybrid wouldn't be worth the possible risk of not being able to outrun Mad Max-style attackers. Mia rolled down the window and leaned out her head to scan the skies. On the PCH, two men scattered in the headlights, bags bouncing heavily from their shoulders. After a few miles, the sprawling lanes of the 110 snarled with abandoned cars; at the edges of the Charger's headlights, a burnt-out trailer stretched across the road, packed in by the charred shells of sedans and SUVs. Raymond rolled to a stop, engine idling.

  "That doesn't bode well for the I-5."

  Mia nodded, frowning. "I don't suppose you ever took a whole lot of flying lessons you never told me about."

  He threw it in reverse, did a head check, laughed to himself, then flipped around and, with a strange little thrill, drove the wrong way back to the onramp. Cool sea air flowed through Mia's window. The 405 stayed drivable all the way to Santa Monica, where one of its banking turns became tangled with shorn metal and fire-bubbled paint. Raymond clucked his tongue and got out on foot. His flashlight swept over bones and sun-tautened skin. The pileup was only a couple cars deep, but beyond, stalled and silent cars clogged the road like shiny boulders.

  "Seen enough?" he said.

  "The PCH runs north for hundreds of miles."

  "You want to check every one of them?"

  "Just the ones that lead out of here. If they're serious about wiping us out, the city will be the worst place we could be."

  He backtracked down the highway and swung into Santa Monica, which he knew about as well as Bangkok. Figuring the streets he'd heard about before he moved to the area must go somewhere, he drove in widening circles until he intercepted Wilshire, then cut west among sand-colored apartment complexes, pink storefronts, and palm-lined sidewalks. A white sheet painted "HELP" flapped from the roof of a department store. He jagged the car around a wreck, glass crunching under the tires. On the corner, a man in a fur coat stared them down, ambling to the middle of the street as they drove past.

  Wilshire flowed into the PCH. Dark cars angled the shoulder, but the road stayed navigable as the city sprawl cleared out into a solid row of beachside houses to one side and yellow hills to the other. He drove for three miles, headlights splashing the pavement, engine whirring through the emptiness.

  "Pull over," Mia said.

  He slowed, guided the car into the crunching gravel. "What do you think?"

  "We could go right now. Just keep driving."

  "Where would we go?"

  "Somewhere with a stream. Or a lake. These days every house in the world is a mountain cabin without the mountain. Why not find a real one?"

  He bit the skin inside his lower lip. "We'd lose the garden."

  "Damn! If only plants could grow."

  "Maybe all the sun and sea breezes have wiped your mind, but it's September. In places like mountains, that means it's fall. And you know what comes after fall?"

  "Bourbon and eggnog?"

  "Where are we going to find that? Or anything else we need?"

  She cocked her head. "With all that food we found, I don't think we'll have a problem making it through a couple seasons."

  "What about winter coats? Snow gloves? Axes or hunting rifles or great big piles of wood to burn when it gets cold?"

  "So we'll stop by the first sporting goods store we see. We put our house together in like four months. Do you really think it would be that hard?"

  He stared at the blank dashboard. "I like it here. I don't want to leave."

  "Even if that means getting vaporized by aliens?"

  "What happens when they come to the mountains? Do we go to the desert? The South Pole? The moon?" He ran his hands through his hair, clasping them behind his head. "How long do we run? Are we happy? If we're not, how do we find a place where we will be? I think if you find a place where you're happy, then you have to take risks to preserve it. Staying in the city's a risk. But so is lighting out for the mountains in the middle of the night when we don't know what we'll find there any more than we know what the invaders are going to do from here."

  A slow smile lit her brown eyes. "I didn't know you felt that strongly."

  "Do you really want to go?"

  "I think we'd be safer. But I don't think we'd be happier."

  He started the Charger back up and nosed his way across the median to the opposite lanes. Wet, cool air swirled through the windows. He would have missed that moist-salt smell, would wake every morning to the confused sense that something had been lost.

  "Stop the car?"

  He braced himself for another change of mind. Instead, she asked him to get out, then took him by the hand and led him to the moonlight-lined beach, where she laid their clothes on the sand as a blanket, then unzipped his pants and straddled him. On the way home, he drove shirtless and shoeless.

  "Apparently sin truly is reserved for humanity," Josh Jones reported a few days later, "because the aliens buzzed out of Vegas in just two days. Grapevine hears tell of men on the ground. Alien men, that is, or possibly women, or men-women, or cloaca-sporting lobster-monsters who find our human penises and vaginas so sickening they crossed the inky void just to stamp us out. In any event, these things are said to have lots of spindly arms and legs, with skin as hard and crusty as old sourdough. Supposedly they spent a lot of time going into hotels and coming out with corpses. Not mummy-bones, either—big wet fresh ones. Like going down to the farmer's market, you know, except instead of coming home with ripe red tomatoes, it's dead bodies. These ground troops have been seen in Vegas after the ship set sail.

  "And speaking of sourdough, the mother ship was last reported lumbering west for San Francisco. Stay safe, friends."

  Raymond and Mia resumed gardening and water-gathering and foraging. In concession, he took a trip to the REI, where they went in with flashlights and loaded up the car with parkas, sleeping bags, axes of various sizes, lanterns and replacement lights, freshwater fishing tackle with its bright pink PowerBait, jack knives and hunting knives and scaling knives. Every single rifle was gone. Brass littered the floor, spinning away over the hard white tile and brown stains of dried blood.

  Josh's reports grew sparse. More house-to-house alien raids in San Francisco, then up to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, where fleeing motorists were destroyed by scalloped black fighters with platoons of alien infantry remaining behind to scour the cities. For several days, Josh had no news of the aliens at all: the carrier had disappeared somewhere over Canada.

  Raymond woke two weeks after the carrier's departure to see it hovering above the bay. Lumbering, beetle-like vessels disappeared into the city while the wedge-shaped blue fighters circled overhead. After striking out at two more sports stores, Mia had ventured back to the former house of the Mormons. She'd come back with a pair of scoped rifles, a .45 and a 9mm pistol, and green cardboard ammo boxes that felt far too heavy for their size. The morning of the aliens' return, she stuck the .45 in her belt and handed him the 9mm.

  "Don't leave home without it."

  That night gunfire crackled from the beach cities below them. Unseen ships keened below the cliffs. Fire blossomed a short ways inland, thick gray smoke angling into the sky. It burnt out by morning.

  There wasn't much to do but watch from the windows. They held hands in silence. With warm afternoon sunlight banking off the waves, one of the heavy ships detached from the carrier and, flanked by two fighters, flew straight for the hills.

  Mia pulled him away from the window into the lushly carpeted hallway, where they flattened their backs against the hall. The bass oscillation of an engine approached, climaxed, began to fade, then abruptly ceased.

  "What's the plan?" Raymond said.

  "Nothing to do but sit tight, is there? Unless you'd rather get blown up in the car."

  "No. We can't afford the insurance bump."

  He locked the door and drew the curtains. Hours passed with little
more than the deep warble of the heavy vessel and the high whines of the fighters. Once, they heard the dry pop of pistols. With the sun hanging just above the horizon, an engine growled nearby. The staccato clatter of steps struck the asphalt.

  Raymond parted the curtains. Up the street, alien foot troops fanned out from a boxy covered vehicle. Metal glinted in clawed limbs. While three took up position behind it, one of the beings strode to the picture window of the house two doors down and bashed the butt of a long rifle through the glass. Another team of four broke toward the neighboring house; behind them, four more trampled the overgrown flowers of the front yard on the way to their gates.

  "Oh Jesus," Mia said.

  Raymond's head buzzed numbly. "The panic room. Now."

  He ran to the back bedroom and the painted steel door set into its wall. The handle wouldn't budge. From outside, metal groaned and clanged against the pavement.

  "It's stuck," he said.

  "Let me try." Mia bumped him out of the way and pulled with all her strength. With a frustrated shriek, she leaned on the brushed steel handle and rammed her shoulder into the door. "Did you lock this?"

  "How would I lock it from the outside?"

  "How should I know? I grew up in a trailer, not this ritzy mansion bullshit—" Downstairs, glass cascaded across the stone floors. A Y-shaped vein pulsed on Mia's forehead. She grabbed his hand. "Come on."

  She raced for the back deck, closing the door behind them. A soft breeze countered the sunlight washing Raymond's skin. Below the deck, the yard terminated in a waist-high stone fence, cliffs and sea below. He bared his teeth. Even if they could leap clear of the rocks, the water would be no more than a few feet deep.

  "Boost me up," Mia whispered. He goggled at her; she slapped him and cradled her hands in example. "Snap out of it and give me a boost!"

  He laced his fingers together. She stepped in, steadying herself against the wall as he lifted her, forearms straining, her bare foot secure in his hands. She grabbed the lip of the roof and wriggled her chest and hips up over the edge as he pushed her feet up from below. She turned around and dangled her arm down.

  Raymond crouched and jumped. Stucco scraped his fingers. His knuckles strained, supporting his weight as he kicked his legs against the wall. Mia clamped his forearms and heaved. The roof's edge sheared skin from his chest. He got a knee up and rolled on his back, panting. Mia pressed her body to the shallow pitch and army-crawled away from the edge. Muffled footsteps filtered from below.

  16