Raymond's ears rang. His head thumped. His skin stung. His nerves were a burning web of numb fire. Smoke hazed the street. Bits of falling rock clinked on pavements and parked cars. Someone was screaming. He couldn't feel his feet. A round, smoldering crater bridged the street ahead. The car was gone. So was Mia.
Someone grabbed his arm. Walt. "Come on!"
"Where's Mia?"
"It's making another pass. We have to go."
Raymond staggered forward, but Walt's arm clung to him like a wet rope. "Okay. I'll just get Mia."
That rope-like force tugged him back from the crater. Mouth gaping, David spilled from the office doors into a scree of shattered glass. Anna goggled at the sky. Otto gave them a blank look and sprinted down the cross street. Walt pulled Raymond after the old man.
Otto swerved alongside the shelter of the buildings. Raymond's leg ached. He still couldn't see Mia. Puddles splashed around his shoes. A jet hummed way up in the sky. A human jet? Why would a human jet have bombed them? Were they killing everything that moved? His left cheek was warm and tingling. He tasted briny metal.
His existence seemed to blink off for a few minutes. Then he was down in the dark, candles flickering over the grimy tiles of the subway, seated on the platform. He stood, leg twingeing. Otto muttered with Walt across the way. Raymond limped toward him. The skinny stick of shit barely had time to flinch before Raymond punched him in the eye. Walt's head snapped back. Without a word, he bounced to his feet, jabbed Raymond in the nose, and doubled him over with another strike to the stomach. Wheezing, Raymond plowed his shoulder into Walt's midsection. The thin man jolted into the concrete.
"You dumb shits!" Otto's heavy hands pawed them apart. Walt wriggled against the old man's granite grasp, eyes fiery windows in the blank wall of his face.
"You killed her!" Raymond bucked his shoulders. "You put her in that car!"
"I sure did."
He blinked. "Then you killed her!"
"Aliens killed her."
"On your orders."
Walt just nodded, eyes dimming. Water trickled down the tunnel. Raymond tensed.
"She saved us," Otto said in his ear. "Do you understand that?"
"What are you talking about?"
"The car was the target. She hadn't hauled ass away from us, we'd all be belly-up."
"I watched from the roof." David's eyes were sunken, dark. "I didn't think any of you had survived."
Otto's hand was hot on his shoulder. He would have killed Walt if that grip weren't there, leeching away his rage, a meaty, dangling lamprey. Raymond's knees went out. He sat down hard, a tangle of legs. His howls echoed down the empty tunnel. Anna's eyes bulged. Otto shuffled. Then Raymond was crying too hard to scream, his ribs bouncing against the cool stone, tears and snot slicking his tipped face; soon, he was too tired to do anything but lie still and breathe and breathe and breathe.
By the time he finished they were gone. Raymond relit a candle and rose, shaky and strangely relaxed. His feet moved on their own. Otto and Walt murmured to each other down the platform; further below, he heard snoring. He watched himself walk up the dust-colored steps past posters of dead rappers promoting vodka and of movies that had never made it to public screens. The air was thick like a bathroom after the hot showers he no longer had. He smelled mold and washed-out urine.
The mouth of the exit was as gray as the walls. He snuffed his candle and swayed up steps still moist from the rain. A weak breeze touched his face. The street was silent, the rain finished. Broken windows gaped blackly from offices and banks and ground-floor restaurants. The city was nothing more row after row of useless, walled-in spaces. A sodden bee's nest lost under a board in a vacant field.
He wandered in a way he hadn't wandered since he was a kid. Black hills bracketed the city to the north. Soaked paper stuffed the gutters. Crashed cars rusted in intersections, the desiccated bodies of their drivers as broken as the windshields and hoods. In an alley between a tattoo parlor and a waffle house, a child's body lay under the tires of a smashed van, its leathered skin rain-soaked, its long black hair a snarled lump. When they'd moved into the house in Redondo, the basement had been filled with two generations of belongings. Box after box of his grandma's clothing scraps, patterns, zippers, and lace fringe, all yellowed and crusty. A wheeled chair, its vinyl seat hard and brittle. Tubes of paint with age-spotted labels, paint caked inside. A box of broken desk lamps with two-pronged cloth cords. Mason jars of loose screws and bolts and washers. Envelopes of undeveloped film with expiration dates in 1935, the blank photo paper separated by black tissue that shredded to the touch. All of it—every magazine, plastic bag, and screwdriver—coated in a tactile layer of dust and grime, yellow and gray and greasy. Things no amount of cleaning could make proper. Nothing could be sold or salvaged. The only thing to do was pile it up and set it on the curb.
In Los Angeles, yellow buildings rested in gray streets. It didn't matter what happened to it now. There was nothing left worth saving.
Raymond wandered until his feet blistered and his leg throbbed. When he returned to the tunnels, even Otto was asleep. In the morning, they gazed dumbly into their cans of cold beef stew.
David cleared his throat. "I think it's time we talk about where we go from here."
"Talk away," Walt said.
"I've been thinking about the structure of LAX. Specifically the sewers. If we can find a map, or devote the time to mapping them ourselves, I don't see why it would be impossible to gain entry to their local base of operations and...well, explode it."
"Start planning."
"I'm quite serious."
"Then start planning. In the meantime, we'll keep looking for chances to pick them off."
"We're not going to kill an alien invasion two and three at a time." Anna's voice was low and hard as the platform. "We'll be dead before spring. And they'll still be squirming in their towers, spawning, squirting their sperm over the Earth."
"At this point we're cavemen," Walt said. "What more can we do?"
"We can nuke them," Raymond said. They all turned his way. He hated the pity and patrimony in their eyes. "The big ship is back. It just takes one big missile."
"Boom," Anna said.
David blew into his knobby hand. "At this point, it does make for an attractive possibility."
"To prompt those things to blow up the city," Walt said. "Along with us and everyone else who's hiding in it."
Raymond rolled on his back and smiled at the black ceiling. "Where are the nukes, Otto?"
"Don't tell him."
"Otto. Where are they?"
"It won't help. It'll just get people killed."
"We're all going to die, Walt. Bombed in the street. Shot on the beach. Burned in our homes. We'll starve and we'll freeze. We'll nod out behind the wheels of cars and beside the road when we just can't go on. We'll die alone, or we'll die telling someone we love them. What does it matter? We're all dead. You can die here, setting traps for the things who killed our whole species before they set one tentacle on the dirt. Or you can die trying to kill them all. To make sure no other human feels what we've felt."
Droplets tickled down the tunnels. Otto's mustache twitched. "Vandenberg. Right north of Lompoc. Not far out of Santa Barbara."
Raymond wanted to rise that moment and walk out of this hell. Leave Walt to the creatures. But some dull, pedantic quarter of his mind informed him he didn't have the time or the energy. He wanted to run. He wanted to scream. He wanted to sleep until everything on the surface wilted to dust.
"God damn it." Walt's lighter splashed his face with quick orange light. Tobacco mingled with the mildew of the subway. "If you want to go, then go. Disappear. Don't put the rest of us at risk."
"Fuck you, Walt," Raymond smiled. "Who's coming to Vandenberg?"
Anna tipped back her chin, mouth pursed. "Staying here is stupid. I'm not getting bombed. That's for Arabians."
Raymond laughed at the roof. All this and still the old big
otry. "David?"
"She was your wife, wasn't she?" David said.
"She was."
"Sasha was mine. I'll go."
Raymond chuckled again. Walt was about to be as alone as he felt. "Otto? You want to show us the way?"
The old man hunched his heavy shoulders. "No, I don't think so. Don't think I will."
"What?"
"I get why seeing what you seen gets you ready to take out the knives. I don't blame you. She was about my daughters' age, you know." Otto smoothed his gray mustache with downward strokes. "No matter how big a boom those missiles make, I don't think it's gonna wake any of them back up."
"Fine." But it soured him, reduced his victory over Walt to a trivial, meaningless moment. Raymond was sick of his emotions pinging around like a ball-bearing on a concrete floor. "I'm going to sleep. We'll leave tomorrow night."
He half expected Walt or Otto or both to try to talk him down, to physically stop him. Walt just watched him rise to gather his gear. Otto looked at his own hands, turning them over each other, rough skin rasping. Raymond brought his things to the lower platform and clicked off his flashlight. On the cold stone, he shivered.