Captives (24 page)

She went to the front doors and watched the grounds beyond. He joined her. Bare pavement and silence. She moved outside, holding the door for him. He nodded an amused thanks. After a long look at the giant white cube overlooking the tarmacs, lots, and outbuildings, they crossed the pavement and entered the wide ramp leading down into whatever lay beneath the launch pads, sticking tight to the concrete wall. This angled in gently, funneling them toward the vast entrance. As they neared, it exhaled the dank smell of a parking garage, along with the organic, coastal smell of something that's rested in the sun too long but hasn't yet begun to rot in earnest.

Mercifully, the smell grew no stronger as they neared the entrance. Walt moved to the side of the gap and peeked inside. The space beyond was cavernous, dimly lit by the sunshine and weak artificial lights. Vehicles and machinery were strewn around the interior. The floor was matted with a flat orange substance that brought back nothing but bad memories. The side walls sported numerous doors and sub-chambers. The machines would offer some cover, but too often, they would be exposed to all sides.

"No." He withdrew around the corner, pressing his back to the wall. "This is crazy. There could be hundreds of them in there."

"Or zero," Mia said. "So far, we've only seen one. If there's a colony in there, it's a sleepy one."

"All it takes is one. Look at this place. Go on, I'll wait."

She brushed past him, smelling like old sweat and burnt powder. He scowled at himself. Was it mental cheating if you didn't mean to think about it? The genitals were traitors to the nobler intentions of the brain. Or maybe the brain was a traitor to the simple commands of the genitals. Either way, it was no wonder they were at constant war.

Mia took a long look and withdrew. "You're right. It looks bad. So what?"

"So there has to be a smarter way than trying to tiptoe in to a place it would take twenty men to cover."

"We can't wait them out. The only question is whether you're coming with me or getting cuffed to a pipe."

He mashed his lips together. "We go in together. But that doesn't mean we have to be idiots about it." He glanced back toward the building where they'd left the alien's body. "You ever see that
Far Side
cartoon where the guy with the giant ass is complaining about always having to be the rear end of the two-man horse costume?"

She turned and gave him the funniest look he'd seen since they'd joined forces.

* * *

An hour later, they returned to the ramp down to the giant garage. Walt led, Mia following right behind him. She still wasn't letting him carry a gun, but at that moment, walking unarmed into an alien lair was only the second-most stupid thing he was doing.

Even after he'd gutted it and scooped it out, and with its mass distributed across two people, the alien's body weighed a shitload. The tentacles hung from them like clown-balloons full of cucumbers. The head pressed on Walt's like the world's dumbest motorcycle helmet. Careful not to disturb its balance, he glanced back. Mia was hunched beneath the alien's tapered, flattish body, hidden behind a limp screen of tentacles and legs.

He quashed the sudden urge to giggle. "You ready?"

"The sooner we get going, the sooner I can wash off the smell."

"Go." He shuffled forward and she followed suit.

He passed into the shade of the artificial cavern. The orange mat squished underfoot. The smell of greased metal joined the briny undertones of the alien habitation. Half of the vans, carts, and forklifts had their hoods popped, the engines in various states of deconstruction. Parts shined in the sparse light. So did oil slicks. The work on the vehicles wasn't pre-plague. It was current.

He pulled his eyes from the machinery and resumed looking around for the beings responsible for dismantling it. He detoured around the bright puddle of fluorescent light spilling from a buzzing tube in the ceiling. As he neared the wall, he stopped and cocked his head. A faint, metallic click repeated from ahead.

"Do you hear that?" he said.

"Sounds like our mechanic."

The body was starting to slip from his. He slung one of its swaying tentacles around his neck like a scarf and moved forward. The clicking and scraping grew louder. He came to an open doorway. A look inside showed flat tables, machine parts, decent light. He still couldn't see the source of the noise. He whispered the command to move and walked inside.

To his right, an alien hunched over a table, its back three-quarters turned as it manipulated what appeared to be a white toy space shuttle. One of its thick tentacles raised and turned toward the incoming motion. The tentacle paused mid-flex. The alien glanced toward them, returned to its work, then swung back around in a tremendous double-take.

"Shoot it!" Walt waggled a tentacle, spinning its tip like a lasso. "
Mia!
"

The alien surged to its many feet. The skinned corpse shifted on Walt's head and back; Mia shoved past him, the gun bucking in her hand. Walt clamped his palms to his ears. The gun flashed six times. The alien juddered back, collapsing in stages. It held tight to the toy shuttle even after it stopped moving.

Walt grabbed a pipe wrench from the table, raised it back, and gave the thing's head a satisfyingly crunchy whack. He turned to goggle at Mia. "What the fuck were you waiting for?"

She gestured at the toy. "What was it
doing
?"

"Getting ready to pull me apart like string cheese! Who cares what it was doing? What does that have to do with why we're here?"

"Maybe you were right," she said. "Maybe they are trying to blast off. To get away from here. The rockets on those pads look like they could reach space."

"Probably because they're ICBMs." Walt glanced at the ceiling, as if he'd be able to see through it to the towering missiles still waiting for someone to push the button. "Better get dressed. The party's not over yet."

He knelt and heaved the body back over his shoulders and head; it had slipped loose while he was administering the coup de pipe wrench. Mia helped settle it over his shoulders, tucking a tentacle into his belt and knotting it. As he adjusted the thick, leathery pelt, his shirt rode up and the cool tentacle brushed his skin, sticking like damp rubber.

A long, gray head poked into the doorway. Its owner stared at them, uncomprehending. Mia put a round into its eye. Walt shuffled up to it and repeated the business with the pipe wrench. Together beneath their disguise, they moved back into the main garage/hangar, confirmed there were no other aliens dashing toward them, then dragged the body of the second inside the workshop with the first.

The garage was silent. They moved along its outer wall, bumbling through each doorway they came to. They found plenty of computer parts, engines, and welding projects, but no aliens.

Not until they found the hive room.

This had once been storage of some kind. Across the back wall, the shelves had been pulled out, leaving seven large cubbies lined with orange matter. Three of the cubbies had occupants. As Mia fired on them, two of them didn't so much as wake up. The third popped up its head and froze in bafflement at the sight of the pistol-wielding "alien," providing a perfect target for Mia's final rounds.

She swapped out her empty magazine and nodded at the cubbies. "Suppose that means we've got one left?"

"Either that or they keep have a spare room for in-laws."

They continued room to room, soon becoming so proficient in walking together beneath the weight of the alien suit that they hardly required any verbal coordination at all. There were no other aliens in the underdark, nor in their rapid search of the ground-level outbuildings, which showed no additional instances of the orange flooring that seemed to appear wherever the aliens took up long-term residency. The same was true of the high white cube. By the time they finished their hasty once-over, the sun was minutes from hitting the sea, pink and orange across the scudding clouds.

"Well," Walt said.

Mia shook her head. "Don't."

"Don't suggest we find a place to sleep before it's too dark to see? The only part of this place with lights is the basement. I'd rather spend the night chained to the tailpipe of a moving car."

"Needs to be secure. Could be one of them out there yet."

Metal squealed behind her. She whirled, going for her gun; the door of a storage hut swung open. She approached and checked it, but it was nothing more than the forceful evening wind.

They installed themselves in a corner office of the big white cube. The room had no windows exposed to the interior of the building and its door was blank metal. She set the handcuffs on a table and he picked them up and chained himself to a heavy wooden desk at the far end of the room. It was the last time he intended to do so.

"Anything I should keep my eye out for?" he said.

"Anything." She moved to the window, starlight touching her face. "Anything at all."

"He left L.A. with the others. The Asian dude and the crazy lady. At this point, I don't even remember their names."

"I don't expect that anyone does."

He tried, but it was hopeless. One of those things his brain would spit out on its own time. "Try Alaska. If we don't find anything here, I mean."

Mia glanced his way. "Did he say something about it?"

"No," Walt said. "But that's where men go when there's nothing left for them here. It's like the Heartbroken Dudes' National Preserve." He slid out a drawer to serve as a rest for his cuffed elbow. "Anyway, I get the idea the crabs prefer warm weather."

"My parents took me there once when I was young. Alaska, I mean. It's as beautiful as they made it look in the movies."

He wanted to reassure her, to tell her that even if they didn't find anything here, that if she kept searching and never gave up, she'd find him some day. But it didn't feel natural, this urge. It felt like something that had been implanted in him during the old days. The soft days when water and light appeared at the flick of a knob or a switch. When food had been so plentiful that its producers had to machine-sculpt it, inject it with dyes, and box it in disposable works of art just to convince you to buy
this
brand of nourishment instead of
that
one.

Back then, however discouraged and down in the dumps someone might be, chances were mighty good that they wouldn't starve to death, die of an infection caused by cutting themselves while fleeing through the woods, or be shot down and robbed by feral gangsters. Their lives looked more like this: they would shut down the Facebook that allowed them to chat in real time with friends who lived so far away the sun rose three hours earlier, then go eat ice cream from an appliance that could keep food frozen for years, and finally, go to bed in machine-laundered sheets spun halfway across the world—sheets that weren't even strictly necessary, since their bedroom was heated or conditioned to be the optimal temperature for human habitation.

In a world like that, when you told someone "Everything will be all right," odds were that you were telling the truth. There in Vandenberg, though? If he told Mia that he thought they'd find evidence of Raymond here, a note or a single fiber of that one shirt he always wore, he wouldn't be lying through his teeth. He'd be lying through his
teeth's
teeth.

He folded himself beneath the desk and slept, startling awake at every creak of the building or hoot of the owl keeping watch on the base through the night. As it began to grow light, Mia got up and dropped the key in his lap and they went outside to pee in the cold shadows of the morning.

They made a circuit of the perimeter, then returned to the chambers beneath the launch pads to ensure the aliens were still dead and none of their friends had shown up to avenge them. That accomplished, he and Mia returned above ground for a more deliberate and subtle search of the area.

This involved thumbing through papers for handwritten notes. Checking every wall inside and out for graffiti. Walking to the titanic missiles that had drawn Raymond and the others here in the first place and then climbing the scaffolding surrounding the forgotten weapons. At the top, Walt edged across a catwalk strung past the missile's tip, but this showed him nothing besides the self-evident fact that hundred-foot-high catwalks were scary as hell.

Mia stood at the top for a long time, looking at the clouds and the ocean and the buildings as if words would appear there if only she wanted to see them badly enough. At last, she climbed down. Walt followed. On the ground, he cleared his throat and shook his head. She didn't acknowledge him. Instead, she wandered across the pad in the general direction of the central cube. Halfway to it, Walt stopped to examine a small scorch mark that looked like it could have been recent. When he stood, Mia was at the cube, already disappearing inside.

Something stopped him from running off. It wasn't fear of being caught; the area was surrounded by hills and patchy forests. With a few minutes' head start, she'd never find him.

What stopped him was the mystery. The insidious feeling that Raymond
had
been here, and if they opened the right drawer or entered the right room, the answer would be revealed—along with the proof that there was some order and meaning to things after all. That it was more than a woman wandering among the ruins of nuclear weapons in search of a husband who'd left her for dead long ago and then vanished like a morning mist.

He scraped off this thought like the bullshit it was. A trio of Quonset huts sat across the cement. He walked to them as if he intended to double-check them, resisting the urge to glance over his shoulder at the dazzling white cube to see if Mia was watching from the windows. He walked between two of the huts. Another fifty yards beyond them, the cement quit. That was all that separated him from the high grass beyond. From escape.

From Carrie.

He passed the huts and risked a look back. The buildings were short, but blocked line of sight between himself and all but the uppermost floors of the cube. Heart picking up speed, he entered the open lot leading to the grass. The gray pavement bore dark, irregular stains. He crouched. The blood was dry, but it was there, undisturbed by rain. It wasn't even completely brown yet. Ahead, droplets and smears led toward the grass.