He flung the pad and the cards and the metal balls into the weeds. Above, the whining vessel banked, bleeding altitude. Walt stood in an open slope of gray dirt, yellow grass sprigs, and short green bushes. A series of bluffs staggered the flatlands a half mile away. The road lay a couple hundred yards in the opposite direction. No help there, either; more scrubby high desert bordered by dry mountains. No plants rose higher than mid-thigh. No buildings at all. Nowhere to hide.
The small black ship made a wide semicircle above the highway. Searching for their lost friend? Seeking vengeance on the one who'd killed it? Whatever the question, Walt's death was the answer. He ran for the tree-speckled bluffs, bogged down by the heavy bags bouncing on his back. Over his shoulder, the ship floated less than a mile above the road. Walt swore, skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust. He ducked the bags off his back, slung them behind a clump of bushes, and sprinted for the bluffs.
Stupid move, hanging on to the dead alien's stuff. He'd kept it partly as a trophy, partly with the hope that, with time and the right equipment, he could learn from it, spy on their communications network or track their movements or download some freaky alien porn to shame them out of the Solar System. Really, his thinking hadn't been practical at all, drawing from the primal instinct to take the possessions of those you killed. Possessions that had clearly included a tracking device of some kind. Assuming the aliens were capable of any emotion at all, Walt guessed their reaction to finding their friend's gear in a human's hands would involve powerful ray guns and attack-tripods.
After two thousand miles of walking, he was in willow-trim shape. He loped through the dust, breathing easily. Still, the bluffs stood impossibly far. The whining engines fell silent. The ship touched down on the road on insectlike legs. A portal rolled open. Walt stumbled, arms flailing, and put his eyes forward. If they caught him before he reached the low trees in the folds of the bluffs, there wasn't much he could do. He had a pistol belted to his hip and a jackknife in his pocket. That was it. That's what he'd have to defend himself against their guns or lasers or rockets or hypernuclear black-hole bombs. But it didn't matter: he would shoot at them until his clip ran out, and then, if he could get close enough, he would stab them, and if they took his knife he would punch and claw and bite their tough smooth skin.
Not so long ago, the understanding he would die would have caused him to question whether there was any worth to resisting a foregone conclusion. If his death were assured, better to subvert fate by taking control of the method, by letting the aliens shoot him, or better yet, by shooting himself, pulling the trigger with his middle finger.
Fuck that. If they were going to kill him, they'd have to root him out of the trees. Blow up the whole hill. Until the onset of the blackness, he would be shooting. Stabbing. Punching.
He charged across the desert field. At the road, four aliens milled around their ship, twiddling things too small to see. As if his looking at them had caused them to look back, one of the aliens stiffened in a universal posture of wary surprise and assessment. Walt spurred himself harder. He'd be at the scrabbly trees in less than a minute. By the time he glanced back, the aliens had left the road behind, running after him on smooth, many-legged strides.
Walt clattered into the loose rocks that blanketed the slope. It was steep going, and not far to his left the bluff simply rose in a sheer cliff, but here it was runnable, scablike swathes of broken rock between brambly green bushes and crumbly dirt. He leaned forward, balancing with his hand. The ground leveled into yellowing grass and pokey trees with pale green leaves. Another couple hundred yards on, the ground fell away at an unseen angle. Probably empty desert beneath. Walt pulled in behind a tree, gun in hand, and shrank against its thorny trunk.
Below, the aliens glided across the plain. They stopped at the spot where he'd tossed away the dead one's gear, then halted a second time when they came to his bags. While one stared motionless in his general direction, the other three spread out, poking among the dirt and the weeds. Walt panted, shirt sweat-stuck to his back. The nights had been cold lately—the signs for the previous towns boasted higher elevations than populations—but the days were still hot, borderline scorching. His mouth felt as dry as the bark scraping the side of his face. Far across the field, one of the aliens lowered itself and scuttled in the dust. A few yards away, a second reached down with a thick tentacle and hefted Walt's duffel onto its flat back. A third dangled his backpack from a sticklike arm. The group reconvened, waving their arms at each other in quick, flicking patterns as graceful as a swimming fish or a martial artist practicing his forms. With some consensus reached, they started back toward the road. A moment later, the one who'd been watching the bluff turned its back and followed.
Walt simmered as they hauled his things back to the ship. Had they taken his gear out of base cruelty, expecting him to now die in this dry place? Out of clinical curiosity, hoping to study his equipment and extrapolate the fundamentals of human survival? Out of a shrimplike fastidiousness that didn't allow artificial objects to lie in a natural setting? The fact he could only speculate, and therefore didn't know just how much to hate them, somehow made it all the more frustrating.
They took their sweet alien time getting back to their ship and even longer taking off. By the time the black vessel lifted into the sky, the sun was nearly touching the western mountains. Walt waited to move until he could no longer see the ship's dark oval or hear its high engines.
Not a single one of his things had been dropped or discarded. The only thing left behind was a bunch of shallow round holes where they'd tromped around. Yellow grass wavered in the waxing breeze and waning light. Already, the wind raised the hairs on his bare arms. He had no idea how far he was from the next town. They'd been few and far between lately, sun-withered things full of trailers and weedy lots. He passed just two or three a day, and they'd been thinning. Walt had the impression he was about to head into a true American wilderness where you might go dozens of miles without encountering a single home or gas station. He'd passed a small town earlier that day; if he backtracked along the road, he might be able to make it in five or six hours.
It would lose him a day of travel. Not that he had some neurosurgery appointment awaiting him in Los Angeles. Getting there in January would be no different from getting there in December. Did he have to keep going at all? Like pausing on a magazine ad before flipping to the next story, he entertained the thought of stopping, of finding a house back in the suburbs of Albuquerque and just...staying. But he knew he would hate it, rooting through the houses of the dead for boxes of Rice Krispies and rolls of toilet paper, returning home to watch from the window while the shadows stretched across the street. He had a goal in LA. He had a goal, and however arbitrary it might be, he was enjoying its pursuit.
He headed for the rising western road. He pushed harder than his standard pace, meaning to make the most of these last minutes of light; without the heavy bags, it felt easy, oddly fun, like leaving work early when no one will notice. He'd left his coat in the bag and the night was cool and getting cooler. The sun slotted into a notch in the mountains and sunk into another part of the world. He felt like a lone hunter, keenly aware that his survival was now on the line. He hadn't had such a strong sense of purpose in ages. Possibly, he never had—he needed to find food, water, and shelter, and the only way to do it was to walk on. Meaning through purpose: that was the lesson of the end of the world.
This feeling lasted until the cool became the cold of the high desert. Walt was tired and thirsty. He envisioned himself lying in the dirt beside the road, weeds prickling his bare arms, woken repeatedly by his own shivers, the gusting breeze, the furtive rustles of rodents seeking seeds. With no idea whether the next town was thirty miles away or just around the next bend, he began to make deals with himself, promising to lie down and try to get some sleep in another half hour, and when that half hour turned out to be a dull stretch of empty moonlit roadside, to go for another ten minutes, and when t
hose ten minutes went by, just another five, because anyone can walk for five minutes—until finally, with an audible sigh, he dropped off the road into the dust, found a rock-free patch of dirt, and balled up, one arm pillowing his head, the other tucked inside his shirt for warmth.
His stomach gurgled. Whenever he woke, which was often, his tongue was so dry he had to wipe it around his teeth until it no longer felt like the arm of a desiccated starfish. After a little less than three hours, he was shivering too hard to go back to sleep. He got up, stretched, silently cursed out the aliens, and walked on, jogging intermittently once it grew light enough to see the road was clear. When it warmed up, he napped in the partial shade of a waist-high bush that smelled like pollen and dried-out sage.
The land rolled on, bristly yellow weeds over scabby gray dirt. Walt was already starting to think about slicing off parts of the bushes and gnawing them for moisture or trying to shoot a rabbit with his pistol and drink the blood. He should have carried three bags, not two, with the third a fanny pack or neck-pouch filled with the critical essentials: bottled water, high-energy food like fruit and nuts and dried meat, a couple of lighters and bandages, an extra box of bullets, and a thermal blanket. Enough to keep him healthy and focused for a couple days if he ever again had to ditch the rest of his gear.
Assuming he lived, he'd get right on that.
He hadn't even thought twice about drinking his own urine before he turned a bend into a spread of houses down the hill. An obvious main street, a tic-tac-toe board of side roads, a few splashes of persistent green among the shriveled yellow lawns and wind-driven dust. A place where a few hundred humans had once lived among the luxuries and conveniences of the era.
A 76 station waited at the edge of town, gas prices fixed at $3.19 for 87-grade. A dust devil twirled in from the neighboring desert, spinning itself out over the hot pavement. For a minute, Walt just waited, letting his senses sense and his instincts instinct. He crossed the lot and stepped inside.
The shelves had been emptied. Completely. The fridges, too, even of the rotting, clotted milk cartons he'd expected to find there. The trash cans offered the butt of a hot dog, now reduced to a foam of dry brown mold. The bathroom key was still under the register. Walt went inside the dark room to try the faucets just for fun. They didn't work.
A small local supermarket sat down the block, shopping carts rusting beside the cars, front windows smashed out. The front rows were just as empty as the gas station. He walked into the gloom of the back of the store, shuffling his feet, trailing one arm along the dusty shelves. Of the few objects he found—packaged rubber gloves, rawhide dog bones, boxes of toothpicks and straws—none were edible or potable. Something like frustration expanded from the center of his chest, squeezing his organs, but the emotion had a rawer, wriggling edge to it: the bone-deep animal panic that he might never taste food or water again. He found three boxes of something powdery, flour, possibly, or muffin mix, and shuffled for better light. Nope. Baking powder. Son of a bitch.
"Hold up there." A man's voice echoed among the scoured aisles. Walt dropped his boxes and went for his pistol. A hammer clicked. Through the sun-dazzle on his dark-adjusted eyes, Walt made out a man's silhouette, his arms extended, a pack clinging to his shoulders. "What do you think you're doing?"
It took two tries before Walt could speak around his dry throat. "Trying to find something to drink."
"You won't," the man said. "We took it."
"From the whole town?"
The man nodded. Walt could see a little better now, well enough to make out the man's brambly brown beard, his slight paunch, his t-shirt and cargo shorts.
"That seems excessive," Walt said.
"Not when nobody's making anything new." The man flicked his pistol. "Set down your gun and walk out the door."
Walt dropped his cocked elbows a couple inches. "I just want some water. Something to eat. Just enough to get me to the next town."
"Got anything to trade?"
He started a mental inventory of his packs before remembering he had nothing but his clothes and the contents of those clothes' pockets. The aliens had once more taken everything from him: first Vanessa, then his family and his friends, and as if that hadn't been enough, as a final measure they'd swung by in person to take away his food and his water, his sleeping bag and cookware and all the rest. He smiled. He knew he wasn't being personally persecuted, that he wasn't the human Job to their alien Jehovah, but he couldn't help feeling that way. Honestly, at some point it had crossed the line, become too much and too absurd to maintain his anger towards. He could still feel it there, deep down, but right now what he really wanted to do was laugh.
"No," he said. "Lost everything but what you see."
"Then put down your gun, walk out those doors, and get on down the road."
"How about you be a proper host and give me something to drink? That way I won't stink up your nice little town when my body collapses on Main Street."
The bearded man shook his head. "Don't make me ask a third time."
Walt squinted. The man's voice was young; eyes adjusting to the sunlight, Walt saw his face was, too. Not any older than himself. No doubt a local—no traveler would have pitched a permanent tent in this desolate place—one of at least two survivors, because he'd said "we," but no more than five, ten at the very outside, given Panhandler survival rates. Walt's gut said it was fewer. Possibly just the kid and his girlfriend. He had just enough to lose to be afraid to risk leaving this place in search of somewhere better.
A town's worth of food between two people. Laying claim to it by virtue of their ability to take it—so if they refused to share, with himself in danger of dying as a result, did that allow him to just take from them what he needed? He set this kettle of thought on the backburner—he did possess something he doubted they had, actually, way out in this nowhereland.
"I've got information."
The kid's pistol drooped fractionally. "About what?"
"The Panhandler. Where it came from."
"The Midwest, Iowa or somewhere. Some big pig farm where they grew piglets in vats."
Walt laughed. "I wish all we had to worry about were pigs. I've seen the truth, and if you want it, it'll cost you—" He did some quick mental arithmetic of what would get him through the next couple days. "To the tune of three bottles of water and four candy bars. Alternately, two cans of soup or ravioli, or one bag of potato chips. Family-size."
The kid shook his bearded face. "Two bottles of water, one Butterfinger, and one fun-sized bag of barbecue Lays."
Silly, considering the info he was about to pass on could save the kid's life, but unless Walt was about to cross into Death Valley (which he was pretty sure, but not absolutely so, was a ways into California), it should be enough to keep him going. Anyway, giving up the info wouldn't cost him anything, and he really wanted water. He stuck out his hand.
"Deal."
The kid lowered his pistol. "Was it the CDC, then? Like the smallpox got out? Or mutated Black Death from India?"
Walt couldn't help smiling. "Aliens."
"Aliens?"
"Aliens. From outer space."
The guy's beard ruffled, his brows knotting. "Come on, dude. I'm serious."
"Same here."
"Yeah." The kid waved his free hand at the sunny street past the windows. "I don't see any Martians out there."
"Well, that's because you're kind of nowhere."
"How do you know, then?"
"I've seen one. It attacked me and I killed it. They look kind of squiddy and spidery. Crabby, maybe. Definitely something with a shell and little pinchy-claws and—"
The other man shut his eyes and waved his splayed palm, as if suffering a flutter of chest pain. "Stop it. Please, just walk out of here and leave town."
"Where's my snacks?"
"Come on. You don't know anything."
Walt regarded him silently. He had no way to prove it. No pilfered laser guns or floating holo-bal
ls or stuffed severed heads. Nothing more convincing than his word. They'd had a deal and he'd told the truth. Somehow this felt more important than the fact that leaving without water could be a death sentence. They had a deal. The kid had broken their deal because why not? There was no one around to enforce it. It wasn't a covenant carved on stone tablets, the violation of which would result in a punishment of locusts and plagues. It was just a fleeting arrangement, something the kid could yank back if, in his own judgment, the rules no longer applied.
It wasn't much. The kind of snack you would pop down to the bodega for on a stoned afternoon. A few calories of matter and ounces of fluid. The kid probably had as much in his pack right now. If he and his girlfriend had really rounded up everything in town, they had enough to last for years. Likely it would go bad before they could consume it all. Yet the kid clung to it, likely from some combination of righteous principle (Walt had "lied" to him) and the baseless, instinctual terror of want that manifested itself in greed. The toddler's pout that it's mine and you can't have it. If the snacks and water in question just disappeared, the kid wouldn't miss them in the slightest. To Walt, it was the difference between reaching the next town or in collapsing in the weeds three days from now, gum-eyed, gazing at the faraway clouds.
"Give me what we agreed on," Walt said.
"If you'd done what we agreed on you'd be munching on that Butterfinger right now. Instead you try to feed me some cock-and-bull story about..." The kid mashed his lips together, fluffing his beard. "Invading ETs here for our Reese's."
"If I were a betting man, and I could trust the guy I was betting with to actually give me my stupid fucking bag of fun-size chips, I would bet they sent the disease to soften us up. You don't need to bring many tanks and shit when you can just wipe us out with galactic ebola."
"I don't want to hear any more of this stupid crap! Just get out and—"
Rage splashed Walt like a bucket of paint, shocking and vivid and total. He flicked up his pistol and fired into the right side of the kid's chest. The bang rang down the empty aisles. The kid spun, hands sprawling, gun skiddering away. He flopped on his face and gasped. As Walt walked up, he struggled to a seated position, left hand clamped to his upper chest, and kicked his heels at the floor, scooting away.
"You shot me!"
Blood pattered the white tile, coppery and hot. "And you might die. But you might not. I think that's pretty good."
"You shot me!"
Walt was almost annoyed enough to plug him again. "I heard you the first time, you god damn whiner. We're going to make a new deal right now. Is there food and water in your pack?"
The kid nodded, skin blanched beneath his beard. "The water and candy, plus some—"
"I'm going to take that and your gun. You're going to stay here and keep quiet for fifteen minutes while I leave town. Don't try to come after me. In exchange, I won't shoot you dead and go rape your girlfriend before I kill her too."
He'd been guessing about the girlfriend; the guy had something keeping him here, and Walt hadn't seen a wedding ring. Given the dread, hatred, and terror wrestling for possession of the kid's face, Walt guessed he'd guessed right.
"You leave her alone."
"I will. Now give me your pack."
The man gaped. Walt twitched the pistol. The kid winced and slipped the pack's straps from his shoulders. He held out the bag, left hand slick and red and shaking. Walt took it and backed off and crouched down to fight with the zipper. Metal-foil packaging, crinkling wrappers, ribbed clear bottles. Walt shouldered it and picked up the fallen pistol.
The kid stared at him, eyes bright with pain. "Don't you touch her."
"Don't worry," Walt said. "We have a deal."
He walked out the front door, half expecting a melodic beep from the dead sensor. Sunlight struck his skin. He jogged down the main street. He was thirsty as hell, but he didn't pause for a drink or a bite of the crispy Butterfinger until he was a half mile beyond the trailers and adobe houses shimmering in the still-hot autumn sun. He didn't see anyone on the road behind him. For a moment, he imagined going to a bar to meet the kid and his girlfriend, who would be a little chunky but pretty in an alternative way, a lopsided haircut and a nose with a strangely attractive lift to its tip, and they'd laugh over beers and argue but in a friendly way about Pynchon being over- or underrated and whether Nolan was the new Kubrick. He didn't think the kid would die of the gunshot; of infection, maybe, but not blood loss or internal damage. The pair had scoured the whole town. They'd have the antibiotics to get by.
Walt reached the next town in a little under two hours. He smiled wryly as he entered a mini-mart and loaded soups and soda and bottled water into the pack.
He broke into a silent two-story house, checked for bodies, then napped in the upstairs bedroom. At dusk, groggy, he found a backpack and filled it with a blanket, a can opener, a couple of cooking knives, a fork and a butter knife and a spoon, packets of kitchen matches illustrated with old presidents, two flannel shirts, a metal cup, some Band-Aids and Neosporin, a small and a large pair of scissors, some balled-up gold-toe socks, a couple of too-large shirts, and an unopened bottle of scotch. With the sun sinking into the mountains, he had a few slugs from a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniels, his elbows resting on the stone-capped island in the darkening kitchen. It didn't feel the way it used to. An empty habit. He left the bottle on the island.
Days came and went. He watched the skies, saw nothing but clouds. For all he knew the aliens had left. He crossed into Arizona. The days began to cool, the nights to freeze in the high hills; he slept in houses when he could find them. He saw some signs of others, smoke rising from chimneys, now and then a distant engine, but even fewer hints than before. Maybe the survivors were hiding. Maybe they'd simply run out of food.
More mountains, more desert, hours passed picking through houses, adding binoculars, a Swiss army knife, a lightweight sleeping bag, Bic lighters, gel ink pens, canned and packaged food, bits of wire and string, a replacement pair of shoes (keeping his old ones in the replacement duffel), a carton of Camels which he smoked as the mood struck him. There was an odd purpose in his exploring and gathering, a deeply-rooted need that left him serenely Zen-like. He entered houses looking for nothing in particular, picking through the dusty objects in drawers and closets, turning them over in his hands, contemplating their manifold uses, discarding the overspecialized and the no longer necessary, taking only the emergency and the everyday. Once, a rifle shot crackled over his head on his way through the middle of a town. He traveled overland until his water began to run down. He didn't resent the shot. A warning, no more. That was how you did things. Make your intentions clear, then follow through.
Somewhere in the desert, but a less-desert where green things were possible and scraggly trees grew in the folds of the hills, he stopped, stone-still, and reached for his binoculars. A mile off the highway, cone-like structures rose amidst the weeds and shrubs, steep and deep blue and thirty or forty feet tall, a few higher and thicker. Spindly-limbed things sidled among the tall cones, pausing to do things Walt was too far away to see. Hemispherical ground vehicles glided over the dirt on a blur of motion that could be treads or dozens of short legs. Perhaps a hundred or more of the cones, a couple dozen of the creatures, a handful of the cars.
It took Walt an embarrassingly long time to realize he was looking at a city.
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