Walt scrabbled his toes against the cliff face. Beyond its edge, another burst of gunshots clapped its approval. Walt's biceps shook, his fingers stiffened. The pack pulled on his back like something alive. He lamented never lifting weights.
He wouldn't let go. He wouldn't fall. Arms jittering and burning, he hauled himself straight up, feet groping. A rock loosed, kicked down the cliff. Dangling from his taut right arm, he reached with his left and dragged himself another foot up the stone. His toes found a ledge. He rested there for some time, waiting for the burn to seep from his arms. When he resumed, the climb was surprisingly easy, the cliff yielding hand- and toeholds so readily it was like it wanted him off just as much as he did. The slope leveled out. He crawled the last few feet on his belly, rolling into the overgrown, dried-out grass of a dead person's back yard.
Gunshots. Possibly gun shots fired at a god damn alien. He could smell the smoke with every breath. Orange fires lined the dark neighborhoods a few hundred yards downhill. Spotlights blazed on windows and doorways. Gouts of flame spurted from hemispherical tanks.
The shots had come some way to his right, further out along the curve of the point. Walt jogged out to the sidewalk, passing an Italian-style home with vacant, broken windows and a wide-open front door. The neighboring joints looked worse, if anything; weedy, yellow yards, shattered windows, broken-down fences, loose papers flapping in shrubs and iron grilles. Southern California looked like shit.
Ahead, a dusty car sat in the driveway of another monstrous home ripped from a Tuscan fairy tale. Green things grew in the side yard, sprouting from rich brown soil in neat leafy rows. Curtains shaded intact windows. Hard to tell in the darkness, but those windows didn't look too dusty.
He opened the iron gate and crept into the driveway, laser pistol in hand. Voices from the garage—a woman and a man. No sign of aliens. Walt turned for the street. The garage door cranked up. He whirled, sighting his pistol at a thin, pretty young woman whose olive hands were painted with drying blood.
He glanced at the youngish blond guy with a bloody bandage around his leg, then back to the woman. "Did you shoot him?"
"No!"
Walt flicked his gun at the stretched-out blonde woman with the holes in her face and chest. "Did you shoot her?"
"Of course I did." She glanced at the corpse and snorted. "My husband rescued her from an alien attack on the beach. She was part of a resistance movement. The rest of her platoon got killed on some mission. Maybe that drove her crazy. Maybe she was crazy before. Either way, things got all Single White Female in here. After she shot my husband, I shot her." She cocked her head. "Who the fuck are you to care, anyway?"
Walt met eyes with Raymond, who was pale with shock or bloodloss or both. "That what happened?"
"She wanted to kill my wife and stay here with me. She was nuts."
Walt considered the bloody mess that had once been a fit young woman. She was now quite dead. Of course, if everyone who'd killed another person deserved execution, Walt himself would need to be hanged, electrocuted, gassed, and guillotined. There was the matter of whether they were lying about the particulars of the woman's death, but he didn't think so. The man had been undeniably shot. The dark-haired woman had a righteousness to her. A clarity, too. Anyway, who gave a damn?
He lowered his gun. "Okay. Let's load up the car."
"Can't," the woman said. "They can sense cars. We're leaving on bikes."
"Bikes," he smiled. "Why didn't I think of that."
The man, Raymond, glanced to his wife. "I don't know."
"Me neither." She turned to Walt, fixing him with a crossbow stare. "Who are you?"
"My name's Walt. I'm from New York. We have to go."
"So take one of the bikes. We've got a spare."
He waved the pistol. "This thing shoots lasers out of it. That makes me like God from the Third Testament where all He does is kill aliens. Only this God doesn't know Beverly Hills from Bakersfield."
Raymond's mouth parted. "What?"
"You can come with us tonight," the woman said. "Once we're out of here, so are you."
"Agreed." The couple had pretty much everything ready: the bikes, packs of gear, a sort of trailer, hitched behind a purple bike, loaded with water and blankets and more backpacks. The woman belted on a pistol. Walt threw his leg over the bike with the trailer.
She stared him down. "That one's mine."
"Just trying to help."
"Help different."
She kept one eye on him as she gently helped Raymond lift his wounded leg over his bike. The man shut his eyes, breathing hard. Mia smoothed sweat from his brow. Walt smothered his frown. She'd stay with her husband, he saw, even if it meant stopping altogether, dying in the same blast from an offworld weapon.
"Where are we going?" he said.
The woman's attention stayed on Raymond's wavering effort to keep himself balanced. "South."
"Where south?"
"Not-here south."
Raymond hopped from the garage on his good leg, bike wobbling beneath him. "We should have stolen a tricycle."
The woman smiled and walked her bike beside him. Walt trailed, gun in hand. As they crossed the driveway to the street, Raymond glanced back at the house with wistful near-regret. A look like leaving for college for the first time. Like wandering through your back yard and discovering the grave of your first dog.
An explosion kicked up downhill, fierce and close enough for the shock to strike Walt's skin. Raymond inched uphill, one hop at a time. Walt moved beside him and supported his handlebars.
Even so, Raymond had to rest less than half an hour later, dropping off the road into the scrubby grass that fringed the cliffs. Mia gave him water, some crackers. Walt watched the silent road, ready to race off if more than a scout appeared. If worse came to worst, he'd leap off the cliff and see what happened.
The aliens stayed downhill, torching the million-dollar homes with all the patience of incoming tenants who plan to stay for the next ten or twenty million years. Raymond declared himself rested a few minutes later. They made good time then, aided by the road, which first flattened out and then ran downhill. The road angled into a sharp point; at sea's edge, a dark tower rose into the night. A light flickered through a window at its peak, disappearing a second after Walt saw it.
He reached for his weapon. "We could rest here."
"I don't think so," Mia said. "It's a dump."
"And I hear it's haunted," Raymond laughed.
Walt rolled his eyes. Couples. Like their histories were so much more special just because they'd had someone to share them with. They moved on, stopping a quarter mile or so down the road at a railed overlook. Walt could no longer smell smoke, just the salty sea, the sweat griming his clothes, the sweet-sick scent of weeds blooming across forgotten yards. For a while after that, there were no houses at all, just empty slopes and the rolling road. Besides the beach, it was the first open and undeveloped land Walt had seen in days.
Raymond stopped in front of a steepled church, leaning over his handlebars. "I think that's all I've got."
"It's okay," Mia said. "We're far enough for now."
The church's front doors were locked. Walt walked to the neighboring field, picked up a rock, and threw it through the door's window. He swept broken glass with his foot while Mia helped Raymond inside. She returned to help him wheel in the bikes, storing them in a kitchen at the back of the church, then hauled the packs to an upstairs office with a couple of couches. Raymond lay on one, shoes off, scanning his leg with the help of a flashlight.
"How's it look?" Walt said.
Raymond made a face. "Shot."
"Guns will do that." He grabbed a pillow from the other couch and dropped it to the floor with a dusty plop. The blankets from the bike-trailer had the same smell as the couples' house. Wordlessly, Mia spread a blanket on the other couch and sat down to shuck off her shoes.
Raymond watched him make his bed. "You said you're from New York?"
"Yeah."
"How'd you get here?"
Walt pointed to his feet. "Those guys."
Mia narrowed her eyes. "You walked. For thousands of miles."
"If you only do one thing all day long, you can get a surprising amount of that thing done."
She smoothed hair away from her forehead. "Why?"
"Because there is a lot of time in a day."
"Why'd you walk from New York to LA?"
"Oh. To kill myself."
She laughed through her nose. "You didn't do too hot."
"My life has not been an unqualified success."
Her smile melted, replaced by something he couldn't read. Raymond clicked off his flashlight, ruffling into his blankets. Walt was suddenly conscious of the man's breathing, of Mia's, of every shift among their bedding, however minor. He raked up his blankets.
"I'm going to find a couch somewhere."
Mia shifted on her bedding. "I was going to suggest the same thing."
Walt squinted, found the flashlight, and wandered down the hall, boards squeaking under the thin carpet. In another office, he locked the door and curled underneath a desk. He fell asleep before he'd decided where to go next.
In the morning, he climbed the steeple and surveyed the hills with his binoculars. Smoke rose inland. Black specks keened from the north. He climbed down to poke around the church, but found nothing more interesting than a couple of basement vending machines which he broke open for a breakfast of peanut M&Ms and Coke. He'd never really liked Coke. After months without anything like it, it tasted ambrosial.
Footsteps creaked overhead. He found Mia right before the front door.
"Some scout ships out there," he said. "Don't go far."
"I don't need to run a marathon to take a piss."
He handed her a can of Coke when she got back. "You should tow Raymond in that bike trailer. He keeps bouncing his balls around like a bunny with a stroke, your kids will be senile before they're born."
"We're not having kids."
"They can't hear, either," he went on. "The squid-crabs, I mean. The scrabs. No, that's terrible." He licked his thumb, wiped Coke from his lip. "But they can sense motion. So if you're stuck in an elevator with one, fart all you want, just don't try to exit before them."
"They can't smell, either?"
"No, the sound. Possibly they can't smell, but a lot of ocean creatures seem to do nothing but smell other things. I expect their sense of smell is at least adequate."
She gave him a look like he'd asserted he could speak to housecats. "Are you being serious?"
"I've killed a few of them," he said, swinging back to things that might be relevant.
"How?"
"Stabbed two through the eyes. They have brains and they don't like being stabbed in them any more than we do. Lasered a third. They have distributed organs or something like it, though. I get the impression it would take a lot of bodily damage to take them down; explosives would work, shotguns probably, too. Swords. I expect swords would be great. I had a sword for a while, but I had to leave it behind when they hunted me down after I killed the first one."
"You know a lot about them." Mia popped her Coke with a pleasant hiss. "Where are you going now?"
"I had been thinking south. I think there are interesting things in the south." He shrugged. "Do you know where the rebels are? The ones the woman who shot your husband was rolling with?"
"She said they lived at a lake outside LA. The only place I know like that is on I-5 on the other side of the mountains."
"There, then."
"You want to fight back."
He shook his head. "I have to."
Mia nodded slowly. "Before last night, we wanted to go there, too. Maybe we could go together. It'd be safer."
"You mean than for you to try to make it with a husband with a hole through his leg."
"And for you to actually find the place instead of winding up in a Mexican whorehouse."
"That doesn't sound so bad."
"These whores have been dead for eight months. After bleeding out of every orifice."
"All right." Walt crumpled his empty soda can and chucked it to the floor. "We're all going to die, you know."