Cut Off (2 page)

He rolled his eyes and dug his floss from his pack. At least he had the real stuff. To conserve supplies, she'd taken to picking her teeth with fish bones and carved twigs. She didn't enjoy acting like his mother on this matter—in fact, it was one of the least pleasant treats the apocalypse had to offer—but she figured they had another thirty to fifty years of natural life ahead of them. Even with good care, most of their teeth weren't likely to be with them to the end.

That was the major difference between then and now. Before, if your tooth hurt, you went to a dentist. Your car broke down, you called a tow truck to take it to the mechanic. Now? You survived on your own. You had to learn to do things that seemed beyond you—or you went without. You had to prepare to make things last. And you had to plan what you'd do if all those preparations broke down.

That was what the backup shelter was all about. That night, she went to sleep thinking how they'd build it. If she had dreams, she didn't remember them.

They got up early and continued along the road through empty towns, shielded from the sun by overhanging trees. The road curled up the coast and cut through Lahaina, a modest town that had once served as the tourist hub of this lobe of the island. A handful of survivors made their homes there, presumably to take advantage of the plentiful resources in its former restaurants, bars, and shops, but Tristan knew only one of them by name, an older woman named Helen who had dedicated her post-Panhandler life to caring for all the dogs that had been left unattended by the collapse, and who sometimes visited them on their mountainside home to ask if they'd seen any strays.

The town ended and they walked on, bordered on both sides by the remains of a golf course, now sandy and pimpled by gopher holes and bird nests. Someone had converted several of the holes into wobbly rows of grain. Tristan peeled off the highway to hike through a silent subdivision to the crummy road up into the mountains.

Below, hotels encrusted the shore, grimy windows attempting to gleam in the bright noonday sun. They had been nice enough. Full of all kinds of useful goods. Then a man had come pulling a red wagon, seeking those same goods, and Tristan had surprised him and he'd opened fire. She took him down and they buried him in the sandy lawn of the steakhouse up the beach. Alden wanted to take his things, but Tristan, needing to draw the line somewhere, had restricted their looting to the most useful objects—his pistol, lighters, and antibiotics.

The plunder of the hotels was what had brought them there, and for that same reason, they'd had to leave it. Even in the midst of their move, she hadn't minded much. The stored food at the resorts wouldn't have lasted them more than another year. And besides being removed from the beach, their new home was much better. Starting with the fact it
was
a home and not a tower of identical hotel rooms whose doors closed much too loudly.

They returned to it that afternoon, a simple place with a blue roof and wide lanais to take advantage of the breezes. As soon as they set down their packs in the garage, Alden went around back to wash up using the rain water they collected with tarps and barrels. She put away the gear, then cleaned herself up and sat at the table with a view of the ocean.

Conceptually, the idea was simple. Find a spot deep enough in the woods to feel safe, then put up a shelter and some storage. Wouldn't have to be perfect. Didn't need to last a hundred years. The whole point of the Fallback Shack, as she'd begun to think of it, was that it was a temporary structure. In case of emergency, all it would need to do was keep the rain off their heads and the bugs out of their food for long enough for them to find a boat, rig it up, and sail to one of the other islands that sat within sight of Maui.

Logistically, however, that meant finding the right spot. Designing a structure. Going into town for supplies and lugging them all the way up here. It wouldn't be a picnic.

The obvious solution was to find a pre-existing structure and repurpose it. Offhand, she didn't know of one that was appropriately hidden—the whole point was to be away from any roads, clearings, and signs of civilization—but they were going to have to scout around either way. She started as soon as she'd cleaned up, traipsing uphill into the trees and brush. The slopes were steep, clogged with red-brown clay that stuck to her shoes. She found a perfect location later that day, a bowl-shaped depression shielded on one side by a shoulder of rock and hemmed in by dense trees with long, narrow leaves. There was even a creek winding down the shallow canyon a hundred yards further north. The spot was close enough to the house to reach in short notice, but not so near that anyone approaching their home would stumble on it by accident.

That left the small matter of erecting the thing. The way she saw it, the compound would consist of three phases. The main structure, a simple wooden frame enclosed with plywood or any other lightweight material that wouldn't conduct sunlight well. This would be surrounded with chain link fencing; they could weave hala leaves into the chain to conceal the structure, with the fenced, outdoor area acting as a lanai.

The third and last piece of the equation would be storage. She thought they ought to be able to get away with digging a hole, filling it with coolers or plastic bins, padlocking those, then covering them up, possibly with more chain link. It wasn't like they had bears or wolves to worry about. The tubs would keep out the bugs, and the chain would keep out anything big enough to mess with the tubs.

She wasn't sure if Lahaina would have everything they needed, but once they got home, she sat down at the kitchen table to draw up a list of supplies. It grew rapidly.

"Do you really think we can do this?" Alden laughed once she'd filled her second page.

She shrugged. "Sure. All we have to do is get the Sugar Cane Train up and running. Haul it all in one trip."

"We could find a new boat instead. Load it with supplies and run to it at the first sign of trouble."

"We could. And it might get stolen, just like the last one. Or damaged by a storm. Besides, if something comes along that's bad enough to make us leave, we may not be able to move around in the open until things settle down."

He tipped his head to the side. "Guess we don't have anything better to do."

"That's the spirit."

The day was done, but in the interests of getting an early start, she put together what they'd need for the morning trip. Enough food and water for a day. Probably more, given how hard they'd be working. A pistol each—Alden had finally gotten over his post-Hanford thing against guns—and she'd take a rifle, too. They hadn't run into trouble since the man at the hotel, but that could have something to do with the fact they always left the house armed.

In the morning, they took the road into town, carrying nothing but their packs and guns; they'd find a cart at the store. It was a quiet walk. Outside the Ace, she lit a lantern and walked inside the dark building. It smelled musty, with a faint tang of grease. The store had been looted repeatedly, and much of its stock had been knocked to the floor in useless piles, but there was still plenty to be salvaged. There were so many empty homes it was typically easier to move into a new one than to undertake significant repairs on your current one.

Anyway, there were so few people left to take anything.

She could never decide if trips like this were fun or eerie. Both, she supposed. There was something primally satisfying about strolling around a place taking whatever you liked. But it kind of felt like grave robbing, too; she always felt an unidentifiable tension in the air. If she were superstitious, she'd have ascribed it to the ghosts of those who'd been outlasted by their inert creations.

Tristan moved quickly, loading boards and rolls of chain link onto the flatbed cart Alden had brought in from the parking lot. The cart was so rusty and dirty the wheels didn't want to turn. While she found hand saws, construction-grade hammers, and boxes of nails, Alden chipped at the obstructing corrosion with a flathead screwdriver.

All the padlocks were gone, and there were no bins of the type she was looking for, but otherwise, the store had everything they needed. The cart grew heavy. Would take both their strength to push it up the mountain road. They would have to make a second trip, and possibly a third, for additional chain link and sheets of wood for the walls. She'd worry about that once they had the frame in place and a better idea how much more materials they'd need.

Alden frowned at the cart, which smelled like the lubricant he'd found and sprayed on the wheels. "This is going to suck, isn't it?"

Like everything that hadn't been touched since the plague, the lumber and tools had become coated with a greasy patina of filth. Tristan tugged off her gloves and tossed them aside. "Why do you think I wanted us to get up so early?"

"Because you're a tyrant?"

She smiled and got behind the cart. "Help me push, slave."

They rolled it toward the doors, the overloaded bed rumbling so loud they had to shout to hear each other. As they neared the front, Tristan snapped off the lantern and held the door open. Alden muscled the cart outside.

In the dazzling midday sun, a man stood in the parking lot, dressed in ragged jeans and a windbreaker. "What have you got there?"

Slowly, Tristan moved in front of Alden, keeping both eyes on the man's hands. "A lot of none of your business."

"You sure about that?" He watched her back, right hand hanging beside the pistol on his hip. "That looks like city property. And I can't let you take it."

2

He leaned into the oars, fighting the chop, a speck of aluminum on the plain of the sea. Dark outlines of islands rose to all sides. He glanced over his shoulder at the jumble of bridges, dead buildings, and parkland. Kept expecting to see lights—rumor had sure made it sound like Macau had rediscovered honest-to-God civilization: law, electricity, the works—but the only lights were the stars, and even they were having a tough time shining through the soupy humidity.

Two hundred yards from the towers sprouting from the shore, a cross-current tugged the rowboat parallel to the island. Ness sighed and quickened his pace. Could have taken a bridge, but you never knew with those. People liked to guard them, set traps. Like the time in Okinawa. Bridge itself couldn't have been more than a quarter mile, a plain road strung between two arms of sand. Looked as empty as everything else. Yet halfway across, he'd felt the tug of a wire on his foot, and then heard something clicking, and before he knew it he was flinging himself over the railing while fire and shrapnel bloomed overhead like something out of a Vin Diesel movie. As the ocean had risen to meet him, and he considered the best way to land in it without being busted to pieces, he wistfully thought about how much he missed those damn movies.

After that, he'd ruled out bridges on general principle. Thus rowboats and detours and other such nonsense. He paddled against the current, but it was pulling him to the side faster than he could maintain course. He supposed it didn't matter exactly where he landed. He gave up fighting it and focused on moving forward.

Beside him, a gray rope lifted from the water. The tentacle swayed back and forth, then slid over the rowboat's gunwale with a slick rasp. A second tentacle followed, thicker, flared at its end. The first one waved to catch his attention. Ness removed a hand from the oar and gestured back.

"Do you see?" Sebastian signed.

"Nothing," Ness signed back. "So far."

"Be the hero."

Ness chuckled. Without his other limbs and pincers to add nuance to his signs, Sebastian's "speech" got all messed up. There were times Ness could hardly understand him. Course, sometimes it was worse when Sebastian had all his limbs in play. Tentacles snapping this way and that, claws twirling like Cthulhu's halftime show; Ness didn't stand a chance of interpreting it all. Nothing to do but go stark still until Sebastian calmed down enough for Ness to follow again.

"You got it, boss," he replied. The tentacles slipped back below the water.

At last, the current quit shoving him down the shore. He steered away from a line of rocks and toward the soft silt that had piled against the side of a nearby bridge. The boat scraped the dirt and jarred to a stop. Ness hopped out, crouched behind a rock, and scanned the roads and parks with the night vision binoculars that never left his neck. Seeing nothing, he returned to the waterline, plunged his hand into the warm water, and shook it back and forth.

Sebastian emerged in that eerie way of his, at first a few spikes and curled limbs that might conceivably be a ball of kelp or some freaky turtle, then manifesting into a seven-foot alien with an oversized head and a horizontal torso held aloft by a whole mess of legs. He was keeping most of his tentacles and manipulators close to his body to minimize his profile, but that was a bit silly. If a human rounded the corner and bumped into him, there would be no passing him off as anything but what he was. It would be all
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, except in reverse, with the humans pointing and screaming while Ness and Sebastian tried in vain to hide.

"Sure this is the right idea?" Ness signed.

Sebastian twitched three tentacles. "Why are we here? This."

"Yeah, but I have the advantage of not looking like a space monster. You could wait at the sub."

The creature's limbs whipped and spun so fast Ness could hardly follow. "Wrong. A gutbrother does not send his gutbrother into the unknown while he hides in the shell."

There was no arguing with a person who said things like that. "Just be careful, okay?"

He moved in a low crouch up the embankment toward the towers fronting the shore. Beneath the coating of dirt, the buildings were pastels, with bizarre, winged balconies. Ness was no expert on China, let alone its architecture, but the churches looked Spanish or some damn thing, triangular faces flanked by squared wings and encrusted with baroque nonsense, the steeples capped with crosses. He led the way, Sebastian clinging tight to the sides of the buildings. As they neared a street, Ness stopped for another look around.