Cut Off (14 page)

Ness pulled himself from the water and drew his pistol. They crept up the dock, then ran across the open sand into the trees. These proved to be a thin line bordering an outpost or nature station of some kind. Chinese-language signs were posted around the plain, blocky buildings.

"There," Sebastian gestured.

He pointed a tentacle at a wisp of smoke in the field to their left. Hedges surrounded the rectangular patch of grass. Ness picked his way through the thorny branches, stopping as soon as he spied the dim, bulky shapes resting in the middle of the field. Wooden crates. Ness drew nearer and circled them, ensuring no one was hiding behind them. Twenty feet away, the wisp of smoke had ceased, but the ground was blackened and hot. Two parallel impressions in the dirt marked where the vehicle had landed.

Ness walked up to the waist-high crates. They were unmarked, unremarkable. He bent near and sniffed but could only smell the saltwater in his clothes and the grass beneath his feet.

"What do you say, man?" he signed to Sebastian. "Think we ought to bust one open?"

Beside him, Sebastian went still, then began to gesture. "There is a new signal. A boat—and it is headed this way."

9

"Get your things." Tristan folded the note into her pocket. "We have to go back to the shack."

"What does that note say?"

"We're not safe here. Grab anything you can't do without. You've got two minutes."

Alden spread his hands. "Tristan, what's going on?"

"That's the problem," she said. "I don't know."

He ran into the house. Tristan got behind a shrub to watch the path to the road. Birds chirped from the trees. After a few moments, she got out her pistol, stood, and jogged down to the road, angling for a view of the downslope. Much of it was hidden behind trees, but what she could see was clear, as was the highway out of town.

The front door banged open. Alden walked outside with a small bag over his shoulder and a look of frustration on his face. Tristan took a last look at the road. Together, they cut into the woods, headed across and up the mountain.

"We'll go to the shack and pick up a few things," she said.

"Tristan! I'm tired of running after you like one of Helen's dogs!"

"Here." She handed over the note.

He read it and looked up, swatting at a spindly branch that he was about to bumble into. "What does that mean? What do they know?"

"About the aliens? What I did to Lewis? That popcorn butter isn't really butter? I have no idea."

"What if they just want to talk?"

"Then they can leave a message. And if they're
not
here to talk, what then?"

"We run them off," he said. "Otherwise, they'll come back for us again, won't they?"

"Lewis was the hothead. Without him, they may cool off."

The new shack was just as they'd left it. She opened the door and grabbed their pre-packed bags and two rifles in soft cases. "We shouldn't stay here. Lewis must have told Fiona about it. They were working together."

"We have the foresight to build a bunker for a situation like this, and now we can't use it? That blows."

She wiped her sweaty forehead on her shoulder and gazed up at the trees. "How sheltered is your crow's nest? Can you be seen from the ground?"

Alden rubbed the back of his neck. "I tried to hide it in the canopy. Wouldn't be much good otherwise."

She didn't like the idea of putting themselves in position to be treed, but they were going to need somewhere with a view. "Lead the way."

He took her a short ways uphill to the base of a tall tree with a canted trunk and a wide sprawl of leaves. Its base was angled enough to climb above eye level. Afterward, Alden had augmented the climb with cutoff boards and a rope laid on top of the trunk. She might not have noticed if he hadn't pointed it out. She was encumbered by a backpack and rifle, but the makeshift ladder allowed her to ascend without difficulty.

"Platform's over there," Alden pointed.

Tristan had been looking up all the while and she suddenly found herself clinging to the trunk forty feet above the ground. She seemed to lurch; she dug her fingernails into the plank and concentrated on her breathing. The vertigo quickly passed. Alden hung his stuff on a branch, scrambled up to the platform, retrieved his gear, then took hers. She climbed up behind him.

The platform was comprised of two 2x4s covered with plywood. There were no railings, and it took her a moment to maneuver herself to a comfortable sitting position. Settled, she found herself an expansive view of the hillside, the open slopes at the base of the mountain and the highway at its bottom. She dug her binoculars from the bag and followed the course of the road toward town. She'd barely gotten past the hotel when she spotted movement.

Ten-odd men and women were marching north along the road. It was too far away for her to see if they were armed, but the display of force was strong proof they were carrying guns, too.

"It's a posse," she said.

"A posse? Let me see those." He reached toward her. She passed him the binoculars. He focused on the road, went motionless, then lowered the binoculars from his eyes. "So that's what a posse looks like. This is about Lewis, right? How would they know?"

"Fiona might have connected his disappearance to my visit to his house. She could have been watching me when I returned there after Haleakala, too."

She watched the group turn off the highway and climb the side road into the mountains. As they crossed the meadow leading to the forested heights, leaving two of their members behind in the grass for cover, Tristan scooted across the platform to the trunk.

"Stay here," she said. "I'm going to keep an eye on the shack. Be ready to run."

He nodded. "Be careful."

She descended and stalked downhill to where she had a view of the Fallback Shack and its approach. She hunched behind a fern, unshouldered her rifle, and put her eye near the scope, keeping her finger away from the trigger guard. She watched, sighting in on every rustle of leaves. Long minutes went by. Downhill, someone hollered "Hello?", the word stretched mockingly.

They called some more, voices tumbling from the side of the mountain. It got quiet for a while. Through the trees, Alden whistled. She jolted, looked for movement, then retreated to his tree.

"Get up here!" he hissed from above.

"What do you see?"

"Smoke."

Her scalp tingled. She slung her rifle over her back and climbed up the trunk. At the platform, he pointed straight toward their house. It was a mile away and hidden by the treetops, but the pillar of white smoke rising from its location could not be missed. The wind carried the faint whiff of varnish.

"That's it, then," she said quietly. "That's war."

"You're not thinking of fighting them."

In point of fact, she was. About rushing down there and nailing them from the woods before they knew what was happening. Or, more wisely, moving to the heights directly above town to conduct a guerrilla war, picking them off one by one until Lahaina was vacant, and she and Alden had the town and its surroundings all to themselves.

But that was more fantasy than cohesive thinking. Given how quick they'd been to torch the house, the posse could only be here about Lewis. He couldn't have made it out of the crater alive—the alien had come out for a look around, implying it had disposed of him and was ensuring there were no other humans to be dealt with—but Fiona had pieced things together. Or not. Maybe Fiona knew nothing, but had seized the opportunity to cement the Guardians' control of the town, get the people used to doing violence, and take down an outsider, all in one fell swoop.

When Tristan looked at it abstractly, she admired the canniness of the move. In practice, however, it meant Alden was hiding in a tree and would probably be shot on sight.

Tristan would be back. Months down the line, when they had grown complacent, forgetful. She could return, watch them, mark down where each of them lived, and wipe them out in a single breathless night.

"You can't," Alden said, as if reading her thoughts. "They've got an
army
."

"Nine people. Two more watching the meadows." She ran her hand through her hair, resetting her train of thought. "We'll wait until nightfall, then sneak down to the hotel. Stay there tonight. At first light, we'll launch the canoe."

"Where to?"

"Molokai. It's close and it's green. That means easy food and lots of places to hide."

They lapsed into silence. The column of smoke climbed on and on, blowing into the side of the mountain. Leaves stirred below them. Footsteps. Slowly, Tristan extended her head past the platform, searching for a glimpse of whoever was beneath them. The steps neared. Breathing through her mouth, she laid her rifle across her knee. After a moment, the steps picked up, wandering away from the tree.

After a while, her bladder began to fill. She hadn't anticipated that. The leaves were keeping the sun off, at least. She shifted position and got a bag of macadamia nuts and dried mango from her backpack, careful not to crinkle the plastic.

As she was putting the bag away and licking the stickiness from her fingers, a whining note drifted across the air. At first she thought it was her own ears, the product of too much silence, but the note produced by a ringing ear was steady and even. The whine was pitching up, getting louder. Uneasily, she gazed across what she could see of the sky.

And there it was, dark and V-shaped, much closer than the keen of its engine would imply. A moment later, she realized why: it was headed straight toward them, the sound lagging behind.

"Oh fuck."

Alden's head swung up. His eyes went wide. The jet neared the column of smoke. Something dropped from its belly, pulsing with light. The missile arced straight toward the smoke and impacted in a silvery flash. A pillar of fire swept upward, red and churning; debris spumed into the air, tumbling madly. A bone-vibrating boom cracked across the mountain.

The jet swept past and banked, bleeding speed. The pillar faded from red to black, continuing to climb into the sky. The rustle and clatter of the falling debris washed over them. A rifle banged downhill. At first, Tristan thought someone must have survived the explosion, but the jet veered for the open grass of the foothills. She brought up her binoculars. A muzzle flashed. She sighted in on the shooter, who was aiming up at the jet, firing steadily. His partner knelt to do the same. The jet slowed until it appeared to be drifting. The second man got up and ran downhill. A blue beam appeared from the ship. It scorched the grass, flicked off, and reappeared, strobing toward the fleeing figure. It struck him and the body spun in half.

Far too late, the first rifleman stood. A single bolt knocked him back down. Besides the warble of the jet, the mountain was quiet again.

"Should we run?" Alden whispered.

"Where?" Tristan said. "The house is gone."

"The canoe."

"Not until that jet's out of here. Besides, some of the townies must have survived the bombing. They weren't all at the house."

"Do you really think they'll be out for us after
that
?"

"They should be," she said. "I'm the one who brought the squids out here."

"Because of Lewis?" Alden rubbed his palms down his face. "I thought they took care of him."

"They've been here for at least a few years. Secret. Hidden. What if when we went up there, the aliens saw us? Then, a few weeks later, Lewis shows up, too?"

"They think their cover's blown. So they come blow us up instead. Why today?"

"Should I check their calendar? Maybe the smoke caught their attention."

Alden looked at her sharply. "What if they've been watching us? Saw that the townies were on the march?"

"And concluded we humans were about to launch an attack on them?" Her skin prickled. "Then they won't leave until they've wiped us out."

The whine of the jet faded. The thunder of another explosion roared from the south, more distant than the strike on the house. A low hum emerged beside the racket of the jet. Along the beach, a second vessel popped from behind a string of resorts. Fatter and slower than the jet, it skimmed the water, vectored toward shore, and came to rest on the open grass beside one of the hotels. Figures emerged. With the help of her binoculars, Tristan could see their shape and movements weren't human. A squad entered the buildings while the rest stood watch on the shore.

For a while, the jet's engines faded. Alden pointed out to sea. The black triangle swept out from land, soaring a half mile over the waters. A mile from the coast, an explosion geysered from the waves. The report reached them seconds later.

"They just took out a boat," Tristan said. "They're exterminating us. Not a good time to be running around."

"So what do we do? The Fallback Shack?"

"That's what we built it for, right? We'll wait until it's dark, then make our move."

As the hours dragged on and the sun grew closer to the west, she kept hoping the aliens would drop the rest of their bombs, turn around, and return to the caldera. But the force on the beach was going from hotel to hotel, methodical, and every time the jet's whine disappeared, it resumed minutes later, making another sweep over Lahaina, the shores, the resorts. Twice, it winged over the mountain and they ducked their heads to hide their faces.

By nightfall, with no sign that the occupation would be ending soon, Tristan climbed down from the platform for a better view of the forest floor. It was draped in shadows, but over the course of five minutes, she saw nor heard any movement more substantial than the birds settling into sleep and the stir of the leaves in the offshore wind. She finished her descent, then beckoned Alden down too.

"Slow and quiet," she murmured. "We don't know what's out there."

She drew her pistol. He started to do the same, then unslung his rifle instead. Tristan started through the woods, pausing at every sign of motion. She could still hear the jet somewhere to the south, continuing to circle, hunting for signs of life.