Blue bolts licked the darkness, touching the clouds and disappearing as if they'd never been there at all. The shot woman lay facedown in the street, shins propped on the sidewalk. Raymond braked, the rubber of his tires grabbing hard at the pavement, and dropped to his feet. The air smelled like burnt hot dogs. The woman's eyes were shut. Her ribs swelled within her camouflage shirt. On her left lower back, a scorched hole exuded a wisp of smoke. The wound was dime-shaped and puzzlingly devoid of blood. On the beach eighty feet below and a couple hundred yards away, dark figures shouted and ran, lit by sporadic bursts of rattling gunfire and electric blue lasers. Armored aliens splashed along the tideline.
"Are you awake?" Raymond said over the hollers and bangs. "Can you move?"
She stirred, groping at the asphalt, lifting her short-haired head to blink at him. "Help me."
He'd let his bike drop to the ground. Mia sat on hers a few yards away, staring unreadably. He propped up his bike and gestured hard. Mia pedaled forward and pulled to a stop.
"Raymond. Aliens with lasers. We have to go."
"Help me get her up!"
She opened her mouth to say more, then gave one abrupt shake of her head and knelt beside the struggling woman. They hooked their hands under her armpits, guiding her to her feet. Raymond shouldered her weight. She groaned, face pinched.
"What now?" Mia said. "Think you can cram her into your basket?"
"Get on the seat," Raymond said to the woman clinging to his shoulders. She licked her lips and reached out with one hand, leaning clumsily for the seat. He helped her lift her leg over the bar, then, with Mia supporting the bike, knocked out its kickstand and jumped on. The woman wrapped her arms around his middle. A searing white blast rocked the beach below, followed by a huge, gut-thumping crump. As Raymond pushed off, wobbling, falling sand tickled his face and hissed on the sidewalk.
He biked for the hill, Mia just ahead of him. It was hard work, a strain on his thighs and his balance; if he hadn't spent the last several months gardening, surfing, hiking around, and hauling wood and water from place to place, he might not have made it. A man screamed from the beach, a long wail that penetrated the staccato thunder of gunfire. A blue line flashed over their heads. Raymond didn't risk looking back. A widely-spaced row of mansions appeared along the rising cliff, buffering them from the battle on the beach. Mia kept glancing back at him, face tight. A light fog enshrouded them. The sounds of battle became hollow, spectral, echoing in the cliffs, fighting with the thump of the surf. A deep buzz mounted to a crushing bass, then dopplered away. Seconds later, a string of explosions formed a constellation across the beach. The injured woman grunted. Raymond opened his mouth to ask if she was okay, but was silenced by a rolling wave of tremendous booms.
Things got a lot quieter after that. A few bursts of gunfire, a couple of shouts. Mostly nothing but the slow rhythm of the breakers folding over the shore. The silence was more frightening than the clamor and ruckus of the battle.
Mia unlocked the chained gates. Raymond stopped in the driveway. The woman was awake enough to dismount, eyelids fluttering in pain.
"Get inside," Mia whispered. "Get inside, get inside, get inside."
"We're getting," Raymond said. He helped the woman up the steps, then reached down for one of the flashlights they kept inside beside the door. With the light on, he froze, his mind clicking in dry little circles. He had no idea what to do, where to start.
"We should get her upstairs," Mia said, as if sensing his paralysis. "One of the spare rooms."
"Yeah." He pulled his head back to face the woman. "Think you can climb some stairs?"
"This is a nice house," she said in a dried-out voice.
"That's why we stole it."
Flashlight in his free hand, hugging her ribs with his other arm, he led her step by step to the second floor. Below, Mia rattled around in the closet where they kept their medicine. Raymond stumbled the woman into the room next to theirs and maneuvered her beside the bed. She went unconscious the moment she left his shoulder, thumping leadenly into the comforter, legs dangling off the bed's edge. Gingerly, he swung her feet up and rolled her on her back, then, after checking the curtains were drawn, went to their bedroom for candles.
Mia popped into the room with bottles and bandages just as he finished unbuttoning the woman's camo jacket. "What are you doing?"
Raymond gave her a look. "Not that. Give me a hand here."
The woman's smooth belly was unmarred. They stripped off the jacket, flinging it to the side of the room, and rolled her on her stomach. The wound penetrated some two or three inches into her back, black-fringed, just wide enough that Raymond could have stuck his little finger inside, a bizarre, sudden desire he quashed as quickly as he'd had it. There was almost no blood. Just erratic drops that slid through the invisibly fine hairs on her back.
Raymond sat back on the bed. "So, what? We just sort of clean her up?"
Mia pursed her lips and gave a little shrug. "Then slap a bandage on her. I don't really think it will matter."
He glugged rubbing alcohol on a fistful of cotton, breathing through his mouth to avoid its sharp smothering scent. "But she's hardly bleeding."
"What, you've never watched a medical drama? Shock? Infection?"
"We've got some antibiotics." He swabbed the edges of the wound, the hot red circle surrounding it. The task was both disgusting and automatic, the kind of thing that would make him shudder with revulsion if he gave it a moment's thought. Would they have been better off leaving her for a medic on the beach? Then again, everyone there had been blown up or driven off.
"Will they be the right kind for whatever infects her?" Mia patted a wad of cloth over the woman's back and, with Raymond holding her up by her shoulders, began winding a long tan bandage around her middle. "I just don't think people with big dirty holes gouged through them have very high survival rates."
He supposed she was right. If so, he thought the woman's death would be a failure, a nullification of whatever he'd achieved in getting her out of the combat zone. But trying to do what's right in the moment it's happening—isn't that all you can do? Mia clipped the bandage in place. He blew out the candles and went out to bring the bikes inside. Later, in bed together, the door open in case the woman called out, Mia touched his shoulder.
"That was a crazy thing to do, do you realize that?"
"She'd just been shot."
"I'm not saying it was the wrong thing to do."
"Oh."
"But if something had happened to you—what would I have done?"
"Grabbed a baseball bat and raced down to the beach to hit some alien-head dingers, I bet." He smiled over a small pang of annoyance. Nothing bad had actually happened. Instead, they might have saved someone's life. Now more than ever—cliched as he knew it was—that was one of the most important things in the world. Too much longer like this, and there might not be any of them left at all.