Captives (25 page)

He feared he'd lose the trail there, but it continued off the concrete onto a dirt path worn into the dirt, freckled with deep, round prints where spike-tipped alien feet had penetrated the soil. The wind died down. He smelled the particular rot of human bodies.

The pit was covered in sheets of plywood. He drew these aside, exposing the body. It was dark with bloat. At first, his eyes couldn't make sense of what it was resting on. As sudden as a snapshot, the image clarified: yellow bones, brittle clothing, bundles of hair kept together by withered scalps.

He stumbled back from the mass grave, breathing through his mouth. Once he'd collected himself, he hooked the knob-end of a rib bone into the body's belt loop and dragged it aside, bones clattering under its ripe weight.

Many of the skeletons were loosely bound by the clothing they'd died in. He checked their pockets, turning up scraps of paper, jackknives, packets of pills, bits of twine, a flask. Liquid swished inside it. He unscrewed the cap and was disappointed to find it full of water.

Near the bottom of the shallow pile, he began to find wallets in the pockets of their jeans. These held notes, directions, more pills, condoms, thick wads of looted cash. Pictures, too. One was a selfie of a couple, the man's arm visible at the edge of the frame. Behind them on the pier, the ocean stretched to the horizon. They'd had to press their faces close to fit inside the narrow field of view, but they would have done so even if it had been a panoramic shot. The love in Raymond's eyes was as clear as the sunny Los Angeles skies of that day—one of hundreds—when they'd been together, and imagined they always would be.

16

He found her going through the trash cans on the upper floor of the cube. The look on his face wasn't sympathetic, but there was a discontented sadness in it that she understood at a glance. Everything froze. She found herself on her feet, numbly following him down the stairs and across the sun-warmed tarmac. They passed the curved roofs of the identical military sheds and reached the pit in the grass.

He was handing her something. A picture. It fluttered in her hand. She frowned, uncomprehending. "Where did you get this?"

He squinted, gestured to the pit. "I went through their pockets. Found it in one of the wallets."

"How did it get
here
?" She knew this was a stupid question, but couldn't quite place why.

"Because this is… it. The last place he came to."

"He was probably robbed. Or he lost it and someone picked it up and carried it here."

Walt's jaw tensed. He motioned her around the side of the pit. A partial skeleton lay beside it, held together by stiff, dusty jeans and a black hoodie sporting the words "REDONDO BEACH." Mia bent toward the remains, halting halfway. That had been their hometown, but their house had been burnt down; how could this object of clothing have survived?

And then the answers stood before her, as unexpected yet inarguable as turning a bend in a mountain stream and coming face to face with a black bear.

"Bones," she said, as if that were the answer to a question she'd been trying to remember all morning. A spike went through her, but she didn't feel the pain, just the hollowness of its passage. Everything was white. She lifted her hand but she couldn't see it.

She found herself on the ground. One hand on it, palm in the sandy soil, a black beetle trundling toward her fingers as if they had a date. Wind. Sun. A man standing over her. She shook her head, not in denial or rejection, but in the core-deep disappointment of the parent of an addicted child.

This moment of clarity withdrew like the tide before a tsunami. Then she was crying, choking, her chest heaving so hard it felt like it was trying to turn inside out, to eject the Raymond she'd been carrying inside all these years. Just when she thought her throat would close and her eyes would pop, the wave of grief ebbed, draining to hiccups and sniffs.

A hand held out a rag. It wasn't clean, but neither was she. She rubbed her eyes and blew her nose until she could breathe again. She tried to pass him back the square of cloth.

"You go ahead and keep that," Walt said, not without irony, but with a gentleness, too.

"I'm so stupid." She dropped the rag and scooped up a handful of sand and gravel, just to have something to hold, grinding the fragments in her palm. "So fucking stupid."

"How's that? For not psychically knowing what happened?"

"I looked everywhere. Of course he was here."

"Of course," Walt said.

"Not
here
," she said, gesturing toward the towering scaffolds, the rockets they wrapped, the white cube, the sun on the tarmacs. "Here." She gestured to the pit. "Gone."

"There was no way to know that until you found him. Until you searched. What was the alternative, say, 'Well, my husband isn't here, so he's probably dead. Guess I ought to move on and find some
other
love of my life'? That sounds like it would totally satisfy the human need for answers."

"I could have at least prepared."

He bit his lip, sobering. "It never occurred to you?"

"It occurred. I didn't dwell."

"Probably for the best. That's what survivors do."

"Do you know where she is?"

"Who? Carrie?" He folded his arms, shoulders bunching. "Sort of. Maybe."

"Do you know if she's alive?"

"No."

Mia laughed. It wasn't a good sound. "Then how can you be so calm?"

"Who says I'm calm?" He laughed too, but it sounded like an emotion expressed ten years after the fact. "As soon as you decide whether to kill me, I'll be running for her like my ass is on fire."

She drew her pistol and set it beside her. It was black plastic of some kind, yet it felt as heavy as a meteor. "I'm not going to kill you."

"Thank god. I was afraid you were going to think I knew where he was buried because I put him here."

She shook her head. "Even if you had, what would it matter?"

"Well, you could have some revenge."

"What would that change?"

"Your feelings," he said. "Like everyone says, revenge won't bring them back. But it still feels damn good."

"Doesn't matter." She touched the hatched grip of the gun. "I'll never know who did it."

Walt gazed at the pit. "The aliens were probably here guarding the nukes when he and the others showed up. Could be we had our revenge yesterday."

"Could be."

He was quiet for a time, then sighed and knelt in the grass a few feet from her. "There's no lesson here," he said softly. "Things happen. Once they're done, that's it."

"How Zen."

"Buddha had it right. Attachment is suffering. All that shit. He had it figured out two thousand years ago and we still won't listen."

"We're captives," she said. "Prisoners of our own hearts."

He plucked blades of grass and let the wind take them from his palm. "But it's worth it, isn't it?"

She was about to respond, but was silenced by the memory of their first night in L.A. The drive from Seattle had taken two days. Near sundown, on their way into the Valley, with the city in sight from the heights of the hills, they'd been blessed with their first traffic jam. Four lanes bumper to bumper. It had taken them forty minutes to creep two miles forward. All of a sudden, for no clear reason, the cars unbunched; within a minute, they were traveling seventy miles an hour again. Negotiating the highways from there to Redondo had taken another hour. By the time they pulled into the drive, it had been dark.

Raymond had shut off the van and the absence of its engine felt wrong until she opened the door and heard the shuffle of the palm fronds in the night. They unlocked the front door, inhaling the smells of a home that wasn't yet theirs, then propped it open while they lugged in their things. Just the essentials: they were too exhausted to do more. She could barely bring herself to strip the sheets from the bed and get fresh ones from the closet.

He had fallen asleep quickly, as he always did, his arm curled beneath her, vaguely uncomfortable, but also reassuring, physical proof that she was where she wanted to be with who she wanted to be with. The traffic beyond the windows sounded like the surf. The house had been closed up for weeks. It was too warm and she wanted to get up and walk in the cool of the night, but she was tired, and she knew there would be other nights, thousands of them, nights when she
hadn't
driven through six hundred miles of farms and deserts and mountains. Anyway, it felt good to be next to him while he slept, resting in the brief division between the end of one journey and the beginning of another.

Slumped in the grass beside the Air Force base, Mia took a long, shuddering breath, running her hand through her short-clipped hair. That memory alone had been enough to justify the last six years of searching. Worth what she was feeling now. Worth everything she would endure from the present moment to the day she died.

A part of her had been anticipating this, hadn't it? The grief was bearable because it had been there all along. Her companion as she'd traveled across the big empty country. Yet she'd kept herself hidden from it, too, under the guise of Thom, the carefree wanderer who wanted nothing more than to pass along news and tales, and to let others know that whatever they were going through, they weren't going through it alone.

Neat trick, that. Maybe she wasn't done with him after all.

"Maybe I'll take another walk across the country," she said.

"You did that too, huh?" He plucked more grass. "When you were searching for him?"

She nodded. "It changes you. All that emptiness. You're a piece of dust. If you vanished, no one would ever know."

"Cheery. I think they put that in their tourism brochures."

"But that means you
can
vanish. Walk into the next town as whoever you want."

He laughed. "I'm not sure that's entirely good. I did some pretty fucked-up shit along the way."

"Like?"

Walt shook his head. "Doesn't matter now."

"How did you forgive yourself?"

"Who says I did?"

"If you felt
that
guilty, you would have shot yourself."

"You're forgetting that there are two forces more powerful than guilt: the survival instinct, and self-deception. Often, the two go hand in hand."

"The brain is the best liar." She didn't know if the words were hers or Thom's or something that had been exposed when they'd pulled the plywood from the pit. "It
wants
to absolve you. To wash your hands of what you've done. That's the secret, isn't it? We're all sociopaths. The only way we can stand ourselves is if our brain is constantly wiping the slate."

"Probably." He stood, hands in pockets. "Then again, that's what makes us so good at surviving, isn't it?"

She could see his impatience in his posture. She felt the sudden urge to shoot him for no other reason than that he was there. "Do you know how I found you?"

He shrugged. "A good old fashioned dose of obsession?"

"Someone in L.A. told me they had your wife. He's dead now, but from what I gather, his friends are somewhere in the north part of the city."

Walt gazed south, his line of sight blocked by green hills. "Are you headed back there?"

"I'm not sure. Probably."

"We could go together, if you want. Then we can use the carpool lane."

"No," she said. "Right now, I need to be alone."

He smiled. At first she thought it was because his offer wasn't genuine, that he was happy to be on his own, but that wasn't it at all. He was happy for her.

She was getting low on supplies, but she split up what she had and offered him half. He accepted without pretending that he couldn't possibly impose, which she appreciated, then went underground to try to find himself a laser. As soon as he disappeared into the darkness of the garages, she got up and left.

Two miles and three hills later, she stopped in the middle of the road. Compelled, she got the picture from her pocket. The one he'd taken at the pier. She'd always thought it made her left eye look skewed, but to her, the pretty young woman in the photo no longer resembled her at all. The man matched her memory, but he should: it had been taken less than a year before the final time she'd seen him.

The barrel of the pistol tasted like steel and grease. She didn't know when she'd put it in her mouth or how long she'd been standing there. For a moment, she was certain she'd pull the trigger. Then the urge left as fast as it had come on, swept away as briskly as a coastal storm. She walked on.

She diverted from the road to hike across the grassy hills, heading vaguely southeast. A river wound through a small valley hosting old farms and an empty town and she stopped to replenish her water and to spear-fish using a branch she carved into a point. It wasn't easy, but there were lots of trout and she wasn't in a hurry. With primal satisfaction, she ate them uncooked.

She didn't have much camping gear, let alone a tent, and the night was rough enough that she had to get up before the sun and walk around to warm herself. Once the sun rose, she resumed her overland hike to the east.

Her emotions continued to flare and wane, vacillating between pulsing anger and ringing desolation. Over the next few days, the desolation came less and less often, mostly in that stretch of afternoon when she'd already been walking for hours but had hours more before she could sleep. In time, she discovered the anger was as much for herself as for what had happened. The lie had comforted her for six years, but now those years had been rendered as hollow as a shell in the tide. That was
her
fault. The one link in the chain of events that she had real control over. She had chosen easy comfort over the emptiness of truth and it had cost her a tenth of her life.

Without meaning to, she found herself overlooking I-5 as it chugged up the brown mountains enclosing the city. She knew where it would take her and that it wasn't her home. That her only real friend there had been murdered.

But that just made the decision easier.

The mountains peaked. A few miles later, the highway was joined on both sides by the gas stations and apartments of a town. Cars clogged the road—she supposed their owners had died as they'd lived—and she stopped to climb into the bed of a pickup truck and onto the warm metal of its roof.