Captives (38 page)

He thought it was something beyond that, though. With the world in the state it had been reduced to, there were a jillion places to hide away from the few remaining human eyes. There must be a reason they'd come back to this specific spot.

Whatever it was, he wasn't going to be the one to figure it out. Not just then, anyway. Since getting taken to the ship, he had been feeling pretty good about himself. He'd maneuvered his way here and, so far, had managed to convince the aliens not to execute him. Probably, he was closer to Carrie than he'd been since the Abyss had recaptured her at the farmhouse off I-5.

Despite all that, after an hour alone in his tube, he began to feel much less impressed with his accomplishments. The truth of the matter was that he was probably going to be executed. Carrie would never know he'd been here. She, in turn, would be worked until she grew too old or frail, and then she too would be killed. Flushed from the derelict ship into the Pacific, to be taken wherever the ocean's great tides dictated. Meat for the fish. He'd once seen a true crime TV show about a couple that had been tied to an anchor and dumped—alive—into Santa Monica Bay. He'd always wondered how long it had taken them to die. Whether they'd drowned more or less instantly, or if they'd stayed conscious as they were pulled down into the darkness, and learned exactly how it felt when all hope was removed.

He thought he was nearing that place himself. Depending on how convincing he'd been to the alien, he might already have passed the threshold between where your actions mattered and where you were merely playing out the string. If not, he was close. Close enough that continuing to pursue it might be nothing more than suicide.

He had already made quite the effort, hadn't he? If there were some impartial, all-seeing judge out there observing Walt's motives and moves, surely they couldn't blame him if he decided to walk away. In his opinion, he had gone above and beyond the call of duty. This wasn't his wife of fifty years here. It was someone he had been with for what, a year and a half. Goldfish lived longer than that. Frankly, he was young enough that if he did walk away, it was probable that he'd find someone else, maybe wind up with a few kids. To throw himself away on a fruitless effort to untie Carrie from the anchor? Why? What would that serve? His own sense of duty? Wouldn't it be far braver to have the guts to walk away?

He closed his eyes. Lights swam on his retinas. When he opened his eyes, he remained sealed in the moist darkness. The alien scent felt overwhelming. Suddenly, he thought he might barf, and then the thought of being trapped in there with his barf made him actually retch; with a mouthful of bile, he teetered on the brink, brain urging his throat to swallow while his stomach urged it to open wide and fire all torpedoes.

For a long moment, the outcome was unclear. But one thing was crystal: he did not want to be trapped in a rubbery horizontal closet with his own vomit for company. He swallowed. Breathed deep. And got better.

The judgment of the community, or some imaginary impartial arbiter—they didn't matter. Neither, ultimately, did his survival. That is to say, of
course
it did, but allowing himself to be led around by that mindless part of his mind that did nothing but rationalize its self-preservation: that wasn't making a decision. That was ceding control to biology.

Not necessarily a bad move. Biology was fucking badass. It had gotten very, very good at living to see another day. Thing was, that didn't mean its motives had anything in common with what he—Walt, the part of him that was more than mobile meat—wanted.

He'd find her, then. And he'd tear this ship apart if that's what it took. Because
fuck
them. If they wanted to pull him out of retirement a second time, he'd show them just how stupid their decision had been.

This resolved, he went to sleep. He woke a couple times before the door unsealed. As light spilled into the space, Walt sat up, smacking his head against the moist, yielding ceiling. He scooted out and dropped to the floor.

"About the facilities," he said. "Should I just go in the corner, or—?"

She cut him off with a wave of her hand, leading him to a door at the other side of the entry chamber. This opened to a small, hemispherical room. It was unlit and she left the door halfway open to illuminate a fixture resembling a miniature volcano, complete with caldera. In case its function wasn't completely obvious, the smell emanating from the hole at its center removed all doubt.

A bank of knobs and tubes projected from one wall, some metal, some rubbery. Having no idea whether these still worked, let alone how to make use of them without mangling himself, he didn't even try.

When he exited the bathroom, the woman was gone. An alien moved forth from the wall and he flinched hard, then regained his footing. It was dim, but even under floodlights, Walt wouldn't have been able to tell whether it was the one he'd "spoken" to before. Then it passed him a pad and held another up to his face, the white letters glowing from the black background:

"MAYBE IT IS NOT YOU"

"Glad you've seen reason," Walt wrote back.

"BUT IT COULD BE IT IS YOU"

"I told you, how could I have—"

It cut him off mid-sentence, tentacles waving over his pad. It wrote, "MUCH HAPPENS THAT CAN NOT HAPPEN, THIS IS THE WAY, STARS FORM AND NOT-LIFE BECOMES LIFE"

"Hang on," Walt muttered out loud, "let me write this down."

"IF A DIRT CAN BECOME AN US, MAYBE YOU ARE WALT LAWSON WHO SURVIVES THE CRASH. IF SO, IF THERE IS CHANCE, THEN REASON SAYS: KILL YOU"

"I see. You guys are real moral leaders, you know that? First you try to exterminate us, then you decide to execute me on the miraculous chance I'm your war criminal—a guy who, by the way, was just fighting back against what
you
started."

It took a moment to read this. When it finished, it glared at him, tentacle tip dancing over the pad. "YOU THINK THERE IS LAW"

"After what you did here? Not really."

"THEN I KILL YOU BECAUSE THERE IS CHANCE OF WALT"

"Again, brilliant reasoning. If this is how the universe works, go ahead and shoot me now. You'll be doing me a favor."

"HOW SHOULD WORK"

"There's nothing
to
work! Don't you get it? Walt died in the crash along with your friends. He's already gone. You're angry for your loss and you want to punish someone. Doesn't matter who. Just so long as you can tell yourself you got him. You got that son of a bitch! Wow, your dead friends would be so proud of you!"

It leaned forward. "DO NOT TALK OF HEARTFRIENDS WHEN YOU DO NOT KNOW HEARTFRIENDS"

Walt sighed, clamping his fingers to his temples. He returned to the pad. "That's off point. The point is, everyone got their revenge a long time ago."

"AND BUT THERE IS CHANCE"

Walt met the thing's steady stare. Was it looking for an out? A reason
not
to kill him? Or was it going through the motions to minimize its guilt, aware that he probably wasn't Walt, that this entire thing was nothing but vanity, the opportunity for it to tell itself that it had vanquished its species' worst enemy? They were social creatures; they must have some form of guilt, something resembling a conscience. He knew they had a sense of loyalty, and probably of honor. He'd seen that much in the first days of the invasion, when they had come back for their friend in that desert field, and finding it dead, had tried to kill its killer.

Yet he didn't think reason was going to save the day here. There were too many barriers of biology, culture, and language. He was going to have to pull it back to basics. Go primitive. Something all animals understood.

"Fight me," he wrote. "Single combat. No weapons."

"FIGHT FOR WHAT"

"I can't prove I'm not Walt. You can't prove I
am
. You want to feel right about this? Give me the chance to defend myself. And if you win, you'll have the satisfaction of pulling me apart with your bare claws."

It stared at him, a thin, translucent membrane flicking across its round eyes, its marble-sized pupils expanding and contracting as if they were breathing. "THESE ARE BUT LIES"

"Then shoot me!"

"TO FIGHT, THIS MEANS? I HAVE STRENGTH OR YOU HAVE LUCK. WHAT IS THIS OF JUSTICE"

"At least it's a standard. Makes more sense than executing me on the off chance I'm some guy you have no right to hate in the first place."

The alien swayed back from him, lowering its pad, eyes rolling toward the dark ceiling. Their faces were as expressionless and rubbery as a Godzilla suit and this one was no exception, yet as it looked up for guidance that wasn't there, Walt could feel its weariness, the exhaustion of consciousness, of fighting to make sense of an existence born from chaos. He didn't think his read of it was entirely projection. There was a reason it was talking with him in the first place. A lot of them—hell, a lot of
people
—would have shot him with a smile.

"COME," it wrote.

"Where to?" he wrote back.

It didn't bother to look at his pad, merely swept him along in an insistent wall of tentacles. Together, they exited the sleeping chamber and hooked down a dark hallway. A dim, rhythmic noise drifted on the thick marine air, but Walt couldn't tell if it was machinery or manual labor. Whatever it was, it intensified. Ahead, a middle-aged man dressed in gray rags saw the alien and moved to the side of the tunnel, averting his eyes. They turned again, passing an open door where people stood over a table sorting limp, green-brown sheets of matter that might have been anything from clothing to food. As they went by, one of the people looked up. She was haggard and pale, but a bedrock resolve showed in her movements, the set of her jaw.

"Carrie?" Walt said.

Recognition bloomed in her eyes, but he was already being dragged past, hauled into the unknown guts of the ship.

24

"The aliens mean to kill the people of San Pedro?" Mia said. "Why do they care?"

Across the table, Dreggers lifted his brandy to his lips and had a long sip. His eyes were glassy, out of it by half a mile. "Do you think they tell me these things? Do you think they invite me up to their library, clip me a cigar with one of their little claws, light it with one of those bright blue bastard guns, and say, 'Gil, it's time we leveled with you'?" He laughed bitterly. "I'm nothing but a tool myself. A knife to be kept sheathed until it's time to draw blood."

"But you know Anson. Why would he partner with them?"

"To take control of the entire basin. To make it his from Malibu to Orange County."

"He can't do that on his own?"

"That's not the question." The old man jabbed at the air. "
Can
he? Sure, anything's possible. Unless he turns down their offer and they go partner up with the savages instead. Then
he's
the one looking down the barrel of a laser. Even if the bugs couldn't convince anyone to shack up with them, and fled for less ethical pastures, there's no guarantee his forces are a match for the girl's. We've got more people, but to my eye, they've got more
soldiers
. They fought the Catalinans, after all. Hit them on their home turf. Pit a pirate like Karslaw against a little girl and I know where my money's going—but it wasn't the pirate who walked away from that one."

Mia simply nodded, not wishing to interrupt his stream of words, which he seemed to have been dwelling on for some time. After he'd spent several seconds staring into his glass, she said, "You're saying that, to get his hands on one city, he's willing to betray his entire species."

"You're still missing the scope of the thing. Who says he intends to honor his end of the deal? Once he's got their toys, and a kingdom all his own, how content do you think he'll be to have them sitting on his doorstep? They can't be
that
tough, can they? Or else why would they need his help quieting down the city? Anson looks like a boy scout, a man who never intended to climb as high as he has. As humble as his dick is long.

"But when that man looks out at the world, what he sees is a mirror. He wants it to reflect him whichever way he turns. He's not about to let a bug-eyed freak get between him and his view of himself."

"But he's got to deal with the southerners first. When?"

The old man gestured with his glass, sloshing what little was left in it. "Summer's coming. Always the season for war. Figured we'd have a little fun with their water, soften them up, but had to move to plan B. Good thing he keeps me around, isn't it?"

He chuckled, set his drink in his lap, cradling it in both hands, and lowered his head. Mia thought he was thinking, but he began to snore. She stood, muscles stiff, and made her way to the front room.

"Leaving so soon?" his wife said from the darkness.

Mia whirled, heart racing. "I wasn't enthralled by his proposition. Or his ability to hold his liquor."

The old woman laughed with careless schadenfreude. "Good night."

Mia all but ran home. In the morning, though she hadn't slept well, she forced herself to get up at first light, and was at the gates within twenty minutes. She had two gigs down in the zones that day. The first wasn't until lunch, but she told the man at the gate she needed extra time to prepare.

Once she was past the orange grove and on the road descending from the Heart, she began to run.

She couldn't stay. Dreggers had gotten too drunk, said too much. Even if he couldn't remember the specifics of what he'd revealed, he might come after her for no better reason than that she'd rejected him. It would have been nice to try to collect more specific details from Anson, but she knew two things: he was gunning for the Place. And he was deadly serious.

For the first few miles, she kept watch to all sides, noting alleys and doorways she could dart inside at the sound of hoofbeats or shouts. Then she found a bike and concentrated on nothing but the path ahead.

As she neared home territory, she stopped to adjust her appearance. At her shack in the Seat, she refined it until the face in the mirror was Thom's. Only then did she call on Mauser. He wasn't in, but she found him at the fountain.