Cut Off (3 page)

Dead quiet. Quiet like, well, the end of the world. Funny thing: he used to dream of silence like this. Back in Idaho, he'd taken walks at night to pretend the stillness of the hour was a permanent thing. That the whole world was and always would be as empty as four AM on a Sunday morning. He'd always imagined that's when he would finally be happy, when there was no one left to bother him, and it was just himself and the wind. No worries besides a place to sleep and a meal to eat.

Yet as he watched Macau and saw no movement besides the flap of the palms outside the apartments and hotels, he still wasn't used to how damn quiet it was.

He passed a grid of tennis courts. Starlight gleamed on the glass face of a hyper-modern hotel whose churned-up grounds suggested it hadn't been completed before the Panhandler put the project on hold for good. To his left, the road curved between dense growths of trees, gnarly banyans whose trunks looked like a hundred ropes bundled together.

"Looks like something from
your
planet," he signed.

Sebastian made a twitch of amusement. What Ness interpreted as amusement, anyway. Language was tough enough, particularly when you were working with a highly dumbed-down and human-adapted version of the alien sign language, meaning neither of them were native speakers.

But interpreting emotions that you weren't certain the other species had to begin with? Ness had gotten pretty good at reading Sebastian, but at times, he was reminded how completely different the two of them were. And Sebastian was far and away the most "human" of the bunch. The dudes back in the sub? Forget it.

The road meandered on. Ness kept his eyes sharp for signs of farming, but the trees were so thick he figured he'd miss it unless he stumbled on a hoe or a bucket. He looked for signs of aliens, too: their ghoulishly organic structures of blue and orange, their silvery gadgets, their vehicles. The farmer on the mainland had claimed she'd heard the unmistakable whine of an alien jets, seen the lights tracking out toward the islands. Pretty flimsy, but whatever. Sebastian had a map taken from the early days of the invasion which claimed there was an airport on the east side of the island, about two miles from their current position. Ness wasn't sure the jet (if it even existed) would be there, however. Those things didn't need runways. You could probably land one safely in the middle of a swamp.

They emerged from the park into upscale highrise residences. In the courtyard between three identical twenty-story towers, a fountain sat idle, a three-tiered system of bowls that looked like it had been teleported in from an Italian piazza. Beside it, three orange plastic buckets sat upside down. A framed screen leaned against them. He gazed up at the surrounding buildings. Halfway up one of the towers, a curtain dropped across the window, swinging side to side.

"See that?" he gestured. He backed up to get the alien in his field of vision, wishing, not for the first time, he had a built-in motion detector like Sebastian's sense-pods.

"I see," Sebastian said.

"You see the face that went with it? That settles it, doesn't it? My people don't make a habit of living places swarming with
your
people. It's one or the other."

Sebastian faced him straight on, tentacles bent obstinately. "We have only arrived."

"And there's a hundred other islands out here. Hell, for all we know the jet was headed to..." He had intended to say Shreveport, but its very obscurity was the reason they had no sign for it. "Seattle," he gestured instead.

"Airport."

In the apartment window, the curtain shifted again. "We've been spotted. Let's get out of here and argue somewhere else."

"You are impatient like the opposite of rock. The only way to endure is to persist."

Ness grinned and moved from the fountain. "Fine, wise master. Airport first."

They got back on the road and continued east, sticking tight to the shadows of the buildings. It was hot and humid and Ness' shirt stuck to his back, an ongoing irritation and distraction. When it was just him and the crabs, he had gotten used to wearing the bare minimum to carry his weapons and gear, like that internet picture of Sean Connery in the red bikini.

The road swung through a roundabout and shot through more pastel apartments and condos. The median was hopelessly overgrown with grass, ferns, bamboo, and other jungly crap. So far, Macau resembled one of his games of
SimCity
: elegant, expensive highrises, lots of parks to absorb pollution, and no obvious industry. Its grid left something to be desired, however, angling this way and that. Without Sebastian's map, he would have been hopelessly lost.

They entered more parkland and hooked left down a boulevard fronted by trees on one side and low, stately buildings on the other. Ness had grown up in a college town and knew a university when he saw one. Ahead, he spotted a parking garage next to an expansive building with a weird, arched roof that resembled white bubble wrap.

"Airport," he gestured.

"It resembles the eggs of the —," Sebastian replied, concluding with a sign Ness had never seen before.

"People always made airports look like sculptures. Don't ask me why. The whole point of an airport was to get away from it as fast as possible."

Although there were no obvious signs of danger, or life at all, for that matter, Ness drew his laser, a pistol with a heavy handle and a fat, blunt barrel. Low marine clouds began to push in from the sea. Once he was reasonably sure it was deserted, he followed a narrow street to the tarmac sprawling along the shore. A half mile of calm water stood between it and an artificial strip of land running alongside the island that had once served as the runway.

Trucks and containers scattered the tarmac. So did the wreckage of two jets, crumpled together at an angle, wings busted, fuselages scorched by fire. Ness could see it in his mind: mid-Panhandler, a pilot is ordered back to the terminal. He panics. Veers toward the causeway to the runway, pulling away from the little truck meant to guide the planes around. Slams right into the side of a second jet. Boom, both go up in flames.

Or it had gone down nothing like that. He didn't particularly care how each piece had crumbled. No need to tend to a man's hangnail when his head's vaporized across the wall.

They came around the corner of the parking garage, scanned for movement, then wandered out to see if there were any signs of recent use. Planes rested at the terminals, their cargo holds disemboweled, suitcases and clothing scattered across the pavement. All of it was soiled by years of rain. Ness stopped beneath the wing of a jet and turned in a circle.

A gunshot cracked through the night, neither near nor far. Ness flinched, teeth bared. Sebastian, unable to hear it, reacted to his reaction, shrinking his profile, fitting a lens to one eye with a mini-claw, producing a laser with one of his finer tentacles.

"Gunshot," Ness gestured.

"Where?"

"Hard to say." He gestured to the tarmac. "There's nothing here. Except hostile humans. Time to get off the streets and back in the sub."

"Agree. We move on."

They hustled across the tarmac back to the street, Ness' ears anticipating another shot. He glanced at Sebastian. How the hell had his people survived their gunpowder era when they couldn't hear when they were being shot at? He had half a mind to ask, but talking history with Sebastian was virtually impossible. Too many names, places, events, and concepts with no clear translation. Anyway, now wasn't the time. He had to keep his eye on the streets and the buildings, not his friend's agile limbs.

They padded into an intersection. To the southwest, pillars of blue light shot into the sky.

Sebastian was the first to speak. "We must go see."

"
Do
we?" Ness signaled back. "They got some lights. Impressive to see someone has pulled themselves out of the Stone Age, but not exactly within the scope of our interests."

"Ness. We go to see the lights. That is why we are here and this is what we must do."

Ness squeezed his eyes shut. The lights were less than a mile away and Sebastian was in one of his excited moods. He knew from experience how far arguing would get him. "One look. If there's no sign of your people, we're on our way. For real this time."

"Yes," Sebastian gestured. "We look."

They took the boulevard to a gigantic roundabout and hung west toward the blue spotlights aimed straight at the clouds. A quarter mile away, the source revealed itself: the curtain wall of a white hotel with golden trim and bell-shaped peaks, like a Disney castle or an Indian palace. Ahead, a man's laughter rolled across the night. Ness beckoned Sebastian into the trees fringing the road.

"End of the road for you, buddy," Ness signed. "We got humans ahead."

"Ones who
want
to be seen. We must see why."

"Well, we're not going to be stupid about it. You're going to park yourself in that garage and cover me while I go in for a closer look. Agreed? Or do I have to remind you that you look like something barfed up by Moby-Dick?"

"Though you insult me, we do as you say. We keep you safe."

"Glad we're on the same page," Ness muttered out loud.

Keeping to the unkempt trees, they threaded to the garage and made their way up a dank stairwell that smelled like condensation on concrete. Puddles and rusting cars fought for control of the parking spaces. They got up to the sixth floor and Sebastian installed himself at an opening in the wall with a view of the hotel, whose two wings opened toward them like the wide end of a V. Pools and shops and fountains filled the grounds between its two arms.

Humans, too.

Not by the hundreds, as they must have in the days before the plague. But from his perch in the garage, Ness watched multiple people strolling toward the center of the complex, drawn, bug-like, to the lights. He'd no sooner had this thought than the blue pillars snapped off. People cheered. A handful of small white lights remained scattered in the windows.

"I'll be back," Ness signaled, but without any way to impose an Austrian accent on his hand gestures, nor an audience capable of getting the reference, the whole thing felt hollow.

He jogged down the stairs and toward the hotel. Voices hung in the dense, warm air. The lingering vowels of Chinese were completely foreign to him, yet the very sound of spoken language made him nostalgic.

Torches flapped from walkways. Cages made of wire and bamboo hung from trees and poles, songbirds tweeting away from inside. Beneath a branch laden with ten cages, a smiling old man stood in bright green traditional robes, chattering away in words Ness couldn't understand. The courtyards were a maze of bushes, dark restaurants, and quiet pools, but the lights and noise made it easy to know the way forward.

The smells of tobacco and floral perfume wafted through the leaves. Ahead, two men walked past a collapsed pagoda and turned the corner. Ness followed and came face to face with the central building, another palace-shaped edifice (though significantly shorter than the two wings). Atop its facade, ten-foot letters flickered irregularly, declaring it the "GALAXY."

The scene out front made Ness snort. A crowd of a dozen waited outside the front doors, blocked by a red velvet rope and a man with the head of a bullet and the body of a cannonball. He opened the rope for a sleek young couple dressed in black. As the door opened, a wave of what sounded like live hip-hop pealed outside. The door closed, taking the music with it.

The bouncer turned two scruffy-looking men away. They stared at him, as if to argue, then turned, hunching their shoulders and muttering to each other as they walked away. The bouncer moved forward to speak to two more men. He looked skeptical until one of the men lifted a slim briefcase, with great effort, and clicked it open. Hundreds of copper-capped AA batteries gleamed within. The bouncer raised his eyebrows and opened the velvet rope.

Once those two were inside, the bouncer made his way through the line, checking to ensure those waiting had brought enough specie to be worth his time. He progressed methodically, checking in with a superior via walkie talkie. The line grew behind Ness. Just as he began to wonder what he was doing there, and whether Sebastian was able to see him at that distance, let alone cover him, he found himself face to face with the bouncer. The round man barked something and gestured toward Ness' hands.

"Inside?" Ness said, motioning toward the doors.

The man repeated himself and halved the distance between them. Ness was already sweating, but a sudden flush took him. The man pantomimed turning out his pockets and indicated Ness should do the same. Not an ideal situation, given some of the hardware he had on him.

"You know what, forget it." He smiled at the man and began to turn away.

The man grabbed his lapel, continuing to gesticulate. Ness knew he should apologize and disengage, but the feeling of a hand on him was like a burning brand. He grabbed the man's wrist. This was useless: said wrist was built like the steel cables of a suspension bridge. With a fluid circular motion, the man detached Ness' grip and clenched Ness' wrist. With his other hand, the bouncer drew a collapsible black baton and whipped it open with a hard crack.

Ness went for his laser. An arm flung itself around his shoulders. A face pressed near his, grinning. This new man, who looked kind of but not entirely Chinese, said something to the bouncer, who arrested his baton's descent and glared from beneath his heavy brows. The two men exchanged sentences. The bouncer turned to Ness and voiced another incomprehensible question.

"Smile and nod," the stranger said into his ear. His English was very good, with a faint accent Ness couldn't place. Ness obeyed. The bouncer glowered at him some more, then parted the red velvet rope. Before Ness had another chance to try to get himself killed, the stranger ushered him forward, chattering at the bouncer the whole way.

They entered a room of marble floors, pillars, and a silent fountain. Spotty electric lights shined from the ceiling, casting the room in a demonic red pall. Drums and bass thudded faintly, accompanied by someone rapping in Chinese.