Breakers

  Glass smashed inside the house. Raymond pressed his back to the roof, digging in his bare heels and pushing himself up from the ledge. Mia grabbed his wrist. A scout ship whined from up the hill. Beneath them, hard feet thunked stone and hardwood. Dishes shattered across the floor. The search moved with methodical swiftness, footsteps and the clatter of dropped objects moving from one room to the next. If the aliens spoke, Raymond couldn't hear them. Sweat slicked his palms and waistband, pooling in the small of his back. Aliens tromped up the steps, muffled by carpet, fanning into the bedroom directly beneath them. The soldiers paused.

  With a soft rumble, the door to the deck slid open.

  An alien clicked onto the wooden planks. It strode to the railing, scanning the silent yard with its oversized eyes, two thin limbs waving over its head. Raymond's foot slipped, scuffing over the rough roof. Mia's fingers clamped his wrist. The alien didn't budge. It raised a smooth, curved object like a buttonless remote to its head, one tentacle twitching near its waist, and eyed the rich brown dirt of the tilled and weeded garden. It put the remote away and walked inside the house.

  The creatures thumped around for a while longer, opening doors and knocking things onto the carpet, then clacked down the front steps into the driveway. Mia scooted to the edge, legs dangling, flipped around so her stomach faced the roof, and dropped to the deck with a light thump. Raymond followed her down. She crept to the landing above the stairs. The front door hung open. Chairs had been overturned, closets opened, coats and shoes slung over the carpet. They retreated to the bedroom and hunkered below the windows beside the bed. Scouts whined across the skies. Troops clumped down the street. Once, gunfire crackled downhill, followed by a single sustained scream.

  The sun sunk below the waves. The dome of its light retreated with it, shrinking into the blue, a wall of navy darkness advancing on its heels. At nightfall, Mia rose, knees popping.

  "I need a drink."

  "I might need two," he said. She bolted the front door while he mixed warm Jim Beam with warm ginger ale. He passed her a glass and sipped his, vaguely troubled. There were no ice cubes clinking around inside his glass. He still hadn't gotten used to that. They put the scattered coats and shoes away, cleaned up the stuffing ripped from the couch in one of the living rooms. The house carried an odd, tidal pool smell, like drying kelp and withered mussels. Mia spritzed lavender air freshener while he opened windows.

  "Well?" she said as they sat in bed, curtains drawn. A single candle flickered near the door.

  "Well what?"

  "They just went house to house. You still want to stay?"

  "Maybe they'll consider the neighborhood all clear."

  "And maybe this was just a preliminary sweep and next time they'll come back with alien Rhoombas made to vacuum up blood."

  Raymond didn't know what to say. If the aliens stayed, they'd be fools to stay themselves. Those things could come back any minute. Start dropping bombs. Chemicals. Leaving carried dangers of its own, but if they could get a toehold somewhere remote, a cabin in the Rockies, say, they'd probably be able to live for years without being discovered by the aliens. Possibly their entire lifetimes. The creatures hadn't brought a planet-wrecking fleet; he hadn't seen any superweapons; it even seemed plausible the combined military of Earth could have driven them back, if only every nation in the world hadn't been wiped out by the Panhandler. The aliens simply wouldn't have the resources to scour every last human from the planet. Not in this generation. So long as the survivors clung to their nooks and crannies, insect-like, and didn't try to bite or sting the new dog on the block, it seemed plausible they'd simply be left alone.

  Deep down inside, he'd already made the decision to leave, but something was holding it back, like his intentions were a bubble trapped under tar. Inevitably, it would rise to the surface, but it was still working its way through the layers of his brain. He couldn't say when it would burst free.

  Leaving meant giving up everything they'd worked for. Handing over the few scraps of green they'd collected from the soil, the few jugs of blue water they'd gathered from the sky and sea. Leaving would mean leaving their home, their last real link to the old world, to their old lives, a world capable of creating iPods and Charleston Chews and new episodes of Lost. Driving off into the wild yonder would mean accepting, finally, that it was all over. Whatever the future held, it would be nothing like the one he'd expected to live into old age with.

  Dumb as it was, then, to want to stay in a place where alien beings were actively seeking to unroot the human remainders, he couldn't help it. He wasn't ready. His brain was still clearing the path for his emotions to follow.

  "We'll stay prepared," he said. "If they leave again, we'll drive off. We'll head for the Rockies."

  He meant it as a stall. As the virus had proved, everything could change in the span of days. The American army could arrive in force and blast the aliens into thundering rubble. The creatures could take a look around, consider humanity sufficiently ruined, and blast off to destroy another civilization in star systems unknown. Or announce the whole thing had been one big misunderstanding—who knew. Nobody, that's who, and that was the point. Whatever they believed today could be turned on its head tomorrow.

  "What if they don't go?" Mia traced a smiley face in the thin condensation on her glass; he'd moved the whiskey and soda to the deck, where it had cooled compared to the warm indoors. "What if they keep searching?"

  "Then we'll leave."

  "Not by car. They're attracted to them or something."

  "So we escape on bikes. Or via rowboat. Or use these big fleshy things dangling from our hips."

  She took a drink, swished it around her mouth. "There's a bike store down on the PCH. Near the Thai place."

  "I know. You've wanted one of those bikes ever since we moved here."

  She grinned, swatting at him drunkenly. "A purple one."

  "I want red." He tapped his teeth. "Now there's just the small matter of getting to them without being zapped into a small pile of ash."

  Alien ships patrolled the skies from then on out, their low rumbles and high shrieks bursting the clear air by day and slicing through the hillside fog by night. He doubted they'd be able to pick out two people slipping through the night on foot to the bike shop—the things hadn't noticed the two of them hiding out on the roof, after all—but the possibility was paralyzing. As was holing up in their house all day, sneaking out under cover of dark to water the wilted bell peppers or pick a little cilantro to add flavor to food they could no longer cook over an open fire.

  Drop ships came and went, ferrying soldiers to cities up and down the bay. Even after the carrier departed, the smaller craft remained, buzzing in and out of LAX, cleansing neighborhoods Raymond had never visited. Staying had been a mistake. The house, the yard, the garden, the ocean view, that wasn't what made their home a home. It was the freedom they'd had. The simple, unobstructed life they'd built for themselves. Cooped up and scared, they didn't have a home. They had a cage.

  Like that, the bubble burst free. He was ready to leave.

  A mountain in Colorado. They'd steal a couple bikes, rig them up with baskets loaded with as much food, water, and medical supplies as they could carry, and pedal out of the city under cover of darkness. Beyond the aliens' sight, they'd find a car and forage for supplies along the way. Grab a house in a town in the foothills of the Rockies, somewhere out of the way, of little interest to genocidists, and wait out the winter there, building up supplies, scouting the mountainsides for cabins, ideally near a stream or a lake where they could irrigate a garden and maybe even do a little fishing. Depending on the violence of the snows, they might be able to put in a bit of work on the cabin in the meantime. In the spring, they would move in and get to work chopping wood, planting seeds, digging a hole to store food and keep it cool. They weren't likely to be entirely self-sufficient by the winter after that, but they could augment what they grew and caught with preserved food rustled up from th
e town below.

  That was the plan. It was a good plan. It was practical in a way that appealed to Raymond's sense of order, based on few assumptions (that the aliens wouldn't notice two people on bikes; that they'd be able to find regular supplies of gasoline along the way; that they'd be able to traverse a snowy mountain well enough to find a cabin before spring). It was elegant and flexible. Disasters could happen, of course, alien attacks or car crashes or blizzards, but these things weren't worth worrying about. They were too large, too total. Besides, they just weren't all that likely. Things normally went to plan, and when they didn't, they had a way of working themselves out regardless.

  The one problem with the plan was he didn't know the way to Colorado. They had no maps besides one of the LA freeway system tucked into the Charger's glove box. The internet was long gone. He didn't even know, strictly speaking, where Colorado was—he knew it was one of those square states, but was it above Nevada? Under Wyoming? Somewhere to the north and east, that much he knew. And he supposed that was all he needed to know. Once they got out of the city, they'd head northeasterly, pick up maps at a rest stop or tourist center or glove box somewhere along the way. Things would work out. It made Raymond feel bad to think about, but there was simply too much stuff abandoned by the dead for him and Mia to starve along the way, no matter how many times they had to backtrack on their way to Colorado.

  That left just one other hole: getting the bikes. Prior to being eradicated by disease, the citizens of the beach cities had been health nuts, cycling along the strand that bordered the beach, walking dogs on the esplanade sidewalks, sometimes combining the two, terriers and poodles trotting on leashes alongside muscly-legged men ensconced in their bikes. With near certainty, they'd be able to find a couple bikes in a garage somewhere down the street. But Mia didn't like the idea of breaking into random houses. It'd be noisy, attention-grabbing. Who knew how long it would take? Raymond nodded, citing the possibility the aliens had left monitoring devices behind, or traps, or other incidental viruses. They knew precisely where the bike shop was. It was no more than two and a half miles away. Walking the back streets, they could be there within 45 minutes, then bike back. The whole thing would be quick and simple and clean. Much more so than breaking into one garage after another.

  They left for the shop that night, dressed in black, pistols in hand, a hammer and a pry bar dangling from Raymond's hips. A pair of binoculars swung from Mia's neck. They walked down the hill at a swift pace, swishing through the grass under the palms in the green strip that lined the road. Something rattled a can down the street, startling them. Raymond crouched beside a palm's rough, pinecone-like bark. Mia held her pistol to her chest. In the moonlight, a skunk hopped into the gutter, waddling, its brushy tail held high.

  "I should shoot it on principle," Mia whispered.

  "No way. They may be our last line of defense against the aliens. Bet you they've never even heard of tomato juice."

  His heart rate calmed by the time the steep hillside street fed into the esplanade. Waves struck the beach in great and sudden bursts. Raymond frowned; out to sea, a single white light rose and fell on the dark water.

  "Come on," Mia said.

  Yellow two-story apartments fronted the road toward PCH. The lightest of breezes sifted the palms. Ahead, a row of silent people stood along the median. Raymond jolted, blood cold. The illusion quickly resolved into parking meters. A few cars remained untouched in their parking spots. How long it would take them to rust away in the steady daytime ocean winds? He stumbled on something light and clattering. Bones gleamed whitely from stiff clothes, connected by dry strings of flesh, the rest rotted away or eaten. It had no smell. He swallowed down his dinner of cold canned ravioli.

  Six months ago, these few square blocks had been one of the most pleasant spaces in a city that was almost nothing but pleasant, a pedestrian-friendly collection of sidewalk cafes, shoe and dress shops, and quiet, tasteful bars. Walking down the sidewalk, Raymond had smelled pepper-roasted lamb, buttery calamari, the hot metal of the heating lamps the restaurants turned on to combat the evening breezes.

  Friday afternoons, rain or shine, a farmer's market had opened on a side street, selling boxes of strawberries, lemons and limes and oranges, rich green spinach and bunches of dewy cilantro. One van sold potted avocado trees and fat-leafed dragonfruit plants. Mia worked part-time doing reception for a dentist down the block, and when Raymond drove over to pick her up in the late afternoons, sunlight pouring through his windshield so hard he could barely see the road, he'd park, feed the meter, and dawdle down to the market while he waited for work to let her go.

  It amazed him they could sell heads of spinach for a dollar apiece, a bin of strawberries for two—less than half what he'd pay at the Ralph's or the Albertsons. As their money bled away, he paced their off-red deck with the half-rotted planks at the far end and willed the patch of yellow grass along the fence to morph into a deep brown field with tidy rows of leafy green. Meanwhile, the weedy stretch of dirt beside the driveway could be the perfect herb garden. It seemed possible, even easy, to grow their own tomatoes, basil, lettuce, and bell peppers, to halve their grocery budget to butter, eggs, and packs of chicken thighs. All for the cost of a few seeds and daily water.

  Between the job hunt, fooling around with Photoshop on spec projects, and watching Star Trek streamed over Netflix, he'd never found the time. Instead, most Fridays he bought a twist of spinach for garlic mashed potatoes or a flat of strawberries for crepes, consoling himself with the thought that even two dollars saved per week would add up to a hundred by year's end. Every little difference mattered.

  The market was gone now, a dark side street fronted by black-windowed apartments. Dry leaves and garbage littered the sidewalks of the cafes and salons. Metal tables and chairs sat in the open, dotted with heavy layers of rain-spotted dust.

  They slunk along the road parallel to Pacific Coast Highway, meeting up with the main street the block before the bike shop. A tattered tarp fluttered over the lot. Dozens of bicycles rested in rows in front of the store, left out during the pandemic, dirt clinging to their stylish, colorful frames. They weren't even chained. Gaps in the rows indicated a few had been stolen, but most of the survivors, like them, must have been concentrating on food and cars and guns and medicine.

  Mia wiped a clean line through the dirt coating a basketed bike, revealing a light purple paint job. She smiled and stage-whispered, "Regulators, mount up!"

  Raymond found himself a red one, holstering his pistol. He hadn't ridden a bike since he'd gotten his driver's license over a decade ago, and he was afraid he'd spill into the street in a disaster of skinned elbows and torn jeans, but Mia pedaled off without hesitation. After an initial wobble, he rode smoothly.

  Cool air whisked past his face, countered by the heat of his muscles. Mia leaned forward and turned off the PCH toward the empty cafes. The low slurp of rubber tires on asphalt was obliterated by the banging roar of sustained automatic fire.

  Mia swerved in among the parking meters. "That's coming from the—"

  Blue bolts flashed from the beach. A spray of tracers lashed the darkness. More gunfire kicked up, crashing over the surf, ricochets whining. Shouts and screams drifted on the wet air. Fifty yards from Raymond, a silhouette popped up from the stairs leading to the beach. Before the woman took two steps, a lance of blue light knocked her to the ground.

  "We've got to get out of here," Mia said. "Like ten minutes ago."

  The wounded woman's groan was riddled with pain. She rose to her hands and knees, a black lump, then collapsed back to the pavement.

  Raymond gestured. "She's hurt."

  "By the same laser that will hurt us if we stay!"

  "We can't just leave her," he said. "Not when we can help."

  He pushed off the curb and pedaled with all he had. Dead ahead, blue beams cleaved the night.

  18