Captives (23 page)

Two hours into the walk, Walt blurted, "Why the disguise? Was someone looking for
you
?"

"Not that I know of."

"Then why bother? Isn't it a lot of effort to look like the opposite sex?"

She had a good laugh. "Totally. Much harder to cut my hair short and throw on a pair of jeans than to comb, brush, pluck, shave, and primp."

"Come on. You're actively making yourself look male. I've seen your makeup. That chest thing you wear."

"At first it was an accident. The bomb, it left me…" She swallowed against a catch in her throat. "The man who found me thought I was a he. As soon as he found out otherwise, he quit treating me like a wounded stray and started treating me like something he owned. Like something he never wanted to leave his pocket."

"Let me guess," Walt said. "Bald, gangly, big creepy eyes. Penchant for eating live fish."

"Normal. To look at, anyway. You'd never know anything was wrong. Once I got away, I got some men's shirts. Boots. Baggy jeans. Chopped off my hair and started painting my jaw. The injuries helped, too."

"You look pretty good now."

She rolled her eyes. "You think that's what's important to me?"

"Just saying."

"Walk into a strange place wearing a dick, and as soon as you convince them you mean no harm, most men are happy to pass along the gossip and send you on your way."

"But if you're wearing a set of boobs, it's another story."

"You're skeptical?" Mia smiled, beyond amused. "It isn't all of you. Most men don't get too weird. If only because their wife's watching from behind the curtains. But some of them look at you like you're a shelf in a grocery store."

"Know what, I believe it," he said. "Think we're built that way? Or are we a product of all that violent, machismo bullshit pounded into our heads from the moment we're born?"

"I don't give a shit. All I know is it's a thousand times easier to get where I want in jeans instead of a dress."

Walt nodded to himself. "That blows. Ever think we'd have been better off evolving from worms?"

Ahead, the highway was blockaded with burnt-out cars and haphazard piles of barb wire fence. She detoured around it and the one-horse town it sheltered. If it was still being guarded, its people made no show of themselves. She still hadn't seen any pursuit from Abyss, no buzz of engines or wail of dogs. In her experience, trips of this nature tended to fall into one of two categories. Boring, uneventful ones that seemed to take forever at the time, but in hindsight, existed as no more than a blink. And then there were the adventuresome and dangerous ones that snapped past in the moment, but spanned the memory like bay bridges: miles long and built to last.

For the most part, their journey was the former. The mountains were the hardest part. There was nothing in them, no houses with bathrooms to cuff Walt inside. She had to press on until they found a rest station on the other side where she locked him to a toilet paper dispenser. He had some choice words about that which she promptly forgot.

The foothills grew green again. They descended to Pismo on the coast, then hooked inland. After one more day, by the light of the late morning sun, she was there.

From afar, it looked like a LEGO set. The white building at its center, square and trim, a giant American flag branded on its side. The platforms and the bony scaffolds wrapped around the sleek missiles. Warehouses and auxiliary launching pads in gray and white and a bright, toy-like red. A ball-shaped structure propped up by steel stilts.

A figure emerged from the gigantic square tunnel beneath one of the launch pads.

Her heart jammed itself inside her throat. She knew that it couldn't possibly be him, not after all this time, yet a part of her insisted it had to be, or that at the very least it would be a friend who'd know where to find him. She got out her binoculars and set them to her eyes, sweeping them toward the figure as it moved from shadows to sunlight.

She choked. Far below her, the alien drew to a stop, legs and tentacles held close, and gazed up at the sky.

15

He reached for his laser. Halfway to his pocket, he remembered it wasn't there, yet his hand kept moving forward anyway, as if the weapon was a dog that had wandered into the neighboring field but would return with a whistle. He touched empty cloth.

"Do you see that?" Mia whispered.

He didn't have binoculars, but he'd recognized it as soon as it had stepped into the light. "Hard to miss."

"What's it doing here?"

"Want me to go ask?" He motioned to the launching pads. "If I had to guess, it's got something to do with those missiles. Maybe it's building itself a ride home."

"Do you know as much about them as they say?"

"That depends on what they say."

"That you understand them. That you
get
them." She rolled her free hand in a circle, using the other to keep the binoculars tight to her eyes. "That's how you destroyed them, isn't it?"

"I got lucky." His eyes moved to the pistol on her hip. "All I know is they can't hear, they can sense movement, and they're just as stupid as we are."

"I seem to recall they die if you shoot them in the right place."

"Unless you're fighting rocks, most things do."

Mia lowered the binoculars a few inches. "Let's do that, then."

"What, kill them?"

"I suppose we could talk to them. Maybe they don't know they're trespassing on government land."

The alien was moving, climbing the ramp to ground level. "You can't be serious. If I know one thing about them, it's that aliens and us don't coexist. Raymond can't be here."

"This is the closest I've gotten to him since L.A. Maybe he left a message behind like the Bear Republic Rebels did for us."

"A message to who? His dead wife? Or me, the guy he blamed for it?"

"We can't know what's here until we look." She got out the gun, holding it atop her thigh. "You have two choices. You can help me clear this out. Or we go back to the last town and I handcuff you to a bike rack until I'm done here."

"That's a pretty staggering lack of imagination," he said. "As a third idea, you could let me go. And if those things are here?" He gestured toward the alien as it swung around the ramp and scuttled across the launch pad toward one of the gray outbuildings. "Then maybe it's time to let
this
go."

"Choose. If they can't hear, that means they won't notice when I shoot you."

Employing that same principle, he swore freely. "When does this end, Mia?"

"When I find him."

"Not your search. You and me. I got you here. If the answers aren't here, I can't give you anything more."

She eyed him levelly. "Then it sounds like it would be time to throw you away."

Way downhill, the alien extended a tentacle to the gray building's door, then disappeared inside. "If I help you kill them, it's the last thing I do for you. After that, you let me go."

He could see all kinds of emotions doing battle for her eyes, but she kept her face a perfect mask.

"Why would you trust me to keep my word?" she said.

"Because the last time we met, you were pretty cool." He showed his teeth. "And if you don't, I'll try to kill you. Win or lose, at least I'll be free."

"Deal."

"Sweet. Then get me a gun and let's get down there."

She gave him a look like he'd suggested bobbing for severed feet. "I'm not rushing in there when we're this close. We wait and we watch."

He sighed. An hour later, having seen no movement anywhere besides that of the sun cranking through fifteen degrees of sky, he began to understand how serious she was about that plan. As he gazed down on the green, tree-spotted fields, and the glaring blue ocean beyond, he had plenty of time to second guess his decision to go to the base with her. He didn't doubt she would have honored her threat to lock him up, but he was skeptical that it would be to the heavy, steel, radiator-style bike rack he'd had in his head. More likely, it would have been to some more plumbing. The kind of thing he could bend or break if he had a few hours to himself and no worries about being heard.

Too late to change his mind, though. She'd be suspicious. Cuff his wrists to his ankles and toss him in the trunk of a car. And if she died down there, he'd have several days of sheer misery to regret his decisions and/or existence.

Nope. He had two routes out: help eradicate the aliens, or murder her. Both good choices. He'd take whichever presented itself first.

The alien stepped out from the gray building and flowed down the ramp on its bevy of tentacles and claws, disappearing into the garages beneath the facility. Two minutes later, it reappeared and returned to the gray building, then cycled through this process a third time.

Mia inhaled sharply, shifting forward onto her knees. "That's our first target. The one that keeps carrying things out of that building."

"What if it's not the only one here?"

"Then we're down one enemy."

Before he could argue, she was snaking down the steep hillside, sticking behind the plentiful bushes and shrubs. After the long walk through the dry valley and enclosing mountains, the coastal humidity was as rich as the scent of the chlorophyll. As they neared the base of the hill, the alien came outside and Mia stopped and got down. As soon as it was back in the tunnels, she moved on.

At ground level, she circled wide, coming around the back side of the gray building. Keeping her head cocked for any rasp of tentacles or churning gravel, she tried the door. It opened. The interior smelled like a halved, raw mussel. Sunlight seeped through the tinted windows into a small foyer. Mia walked forward with her pistol kept high, her eyes roving side to side. Walt was acutely aware of his empty hands. He cast about for something to fill them with—should have grabbed rocks while he was outside—but Mia was already advancing down the hallway, shoes silent on the dusty linoleum.

Doors hung open to either side, the rooms beyond housing a mishmash of computers. Some looked so old they were probably run by a tiny dinosaur with a wry outlook on his profession. Others looked so new they might not have been invented yet. Adding to the disarray, many were in a state of disassembly. Green motherboards rested on desks, surrounded by tiny pill-shaped circuitry (diodes?) and the little rectangular things with the silver pins that always reminded him of robot roly-polies. Stripped wires lay tangled like golden spaghetti. A faint metallic smell hung in the air.

Mia pivoted inside each room, sweeping her pistol from corner to corner. Walt kept watch on the hall, ready to launch himself through a doorway at the first sign of trouble.

Somewhere ahead, a metal door slammed shut.

Mia popped sideways from an office, gun held forward. She trotted down the hall. Walt followed in her wake. It was the most distracted she'd been since busting him out of the prison at the reservoir. He stared at the middle of her back, imagining what might happen if he were to jump on it. She would fight like a demon, though, and if he didn't get her gun away in the first move, they'd wind up in a nasty grapple. Tough work, beating someone down with your bare hands when they were on top of you tooth and nail. If the alien happened upon them during the struggle, they'd both be toast. Even if he disarmed her, she'd come after him. Make him shoot her. Dealing with maniacs wasn't any fun. Insanity was like a superpower. To fight someone who possessed it, you had to tap into some mania of your own.

Ahead, the hallway grew lighter. Mia made an abrupt right into an open lobby, its high windows spilling California sunshine over the bare floor. Halfway across it, an alien looked up from a tarp covered in computer guts. Its bulbous eyes focused on Mia, shifted to him, then jerked back to her; its two thick sensory tentacles shot up, tips expanding like little radar dishes. It fumbled for the blunt pistol dangling from its purple bandolier, the only clothing adorning its long body.

Mia's gun roared. Across the room, a hole appeared in the window, the reinforced glass going foggy with tiny cracks. The gun went off again. The alien's body twitched back, but it stayed in place, held steady by the dozen legs and tentacles connecting it to the ground. Its thin, prehensile tentacle curled around the butt of its laser. A third shot jolted it again. The fourth knocked its baseball-sized eye inside its skull.

Slow as a deep breath, the alien tipped back its head, as if it were a gentleman boxer reassessing an underestimated opponent. It leaned to the side, limbs angling as its body stayed upright, then collapsed in a loose heap.

Gloppy yellow blood oozed to the floor. Mia strode forward, stepping over its limbs, and shot it in the head a second time. Besides the jerk of the bullet's impact, it remained still.

"One down," she said.

"And who knows how many to go." Walt moved toward it, stomach twisting at the familiar smell of its froggy innards, and crouched down, reaching for its bandolier.

Mia shifted her gun on her knee, almost but not quite pointing it at him. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Doubling our firepower?"

She took the laser and pocketed it. "We have to move fast. Before its friends realize it's missing."

With the laser out of play, he stood and backed away from the body. "Or wait here and ambush them one by one."

"No good."

"Really? It sounds a hell of a lot better than strolling into whatever's going on in the tunnels."

She ejected her magazine, replaced it with a spare, and began thumbing fresh rounds into the one she'd removed. "We won't get more than one that way. After the second squid goes missing, the others will wise up. They'll come for us. I don't like the idea of fighting an unknown number of the enemy on ground they know and we don't."

He crinkled his forehead. "What's the alternative? Charge in blindly? I'm going to need much better drugs than adrenaline to get me to do that."

"We don't have to charge." She gazed at the alien, corners of her mouth turned down in disgust, then stood, knees popping. "But we do need to clear the tunnels."