Walt could hear it now, a steady sough that sounded so much like the wash of traffic he had almost convinced himself the next crest would reveal a coastal California that had never fallen to plague and invasion. Cars jamming along sunny streets. Taut-legged women in jogging shorts leading muscly, well-groomed pit bulls down the sidewalks. Men in sunglasses arguing breezily into their cell phones from behind the wheels of their red convertibles. After 3000 miles of walking, he'd find the one place in America that was still America.
But despite the cloudless skies, that false sound of traffic was punctuated irregularly by a heavy, crackling thunder. And the walls of nearby houses were scorched black or flattened in an ugly rubble of charcoal, jutting timbers, and gray, yellow, and black debris, things that had once been shoes and dishes and CDs and books and figurines, now nothing but torched, rained-out garbage. In his two-and-a-half-day march from the hills, he'd been shot at once, seen a handful of faces whipping drapes closed or ducking into doorways, heard the buzz and the whine of strange ships hurtling across the sky. This place was dead, too. A graveyard waiting for the last of its walking dead to wise up and bury themselves.
He wondered what Vanessa would think. It was exactly like and exactly unlike he'd imagined. The hills ringing the valley had held old ramblers and the 1960s' vision of the future. Descending brought him through miles of dirty streets and dirtier tenements, cars and buses damming whole blocks. At a glance, LA's middle had shown nothing but bilingual strip malls, grassless soccer fields, Spanish signs, and boarded-up taco shops, but there had been surprises, too: dirt lots packed with forty-foot stacks of pallets; iron grilles on the ground-floor windows of every home; bulk fabric outlets; three-story paintings of Jesus' face on the sides of warehouse walls.
And the highways—the fucking highways. Great gray ribbons of concrete soaring like bizarro Roman aqueducts. At one point, the highways were stacked four deep, one sunk into the ground, the other three crossing one on top of another until the last stood a hundred feet above the ground. Dogs gnawed bodies in the weeds. Stretches of the lanes were as blank as the desert roads; others sat clogged with vans and trucks and SUVs and sports cars, some torched black, leathery-skinned corpses sprawled on hoods and slumped behind wheels. Back in the cities, entire blocks resembled the burnt-out husks of a long-ago war, stray papers flapping in the breeze, glass glittering from porches and sidewalks. Other neighborhoods looked like model homes that had never seen a tenant.
After months of overland travel through woods, deserts, plains, and small towns, it felt nearly as alien as the field of blue cones where he'd freed two dozen people from the wired-up pen.
He knew Vanessa would have loved the weather, if nothing else. He hadn't been keeping strict track, but it was late October or early November and any kind of sustained walking left him dewed with sweat, morning or night. The skies were warm and blue. A bit chilly at night, but a light jacket was all he needed.
Two and a half days later, he could hear the wash and crash of surf.
Lines of tall palms fluttered in the constant breeze. Dead ahead, the sun gleamed hard and yellow, less than an hour from the horizon. He crested the hill. Half a mile away, a gap of silvery-blue sea glimmered between the beachside condos. Hacienda-style mansions squatted on the meandering residential roads to his right, a twin set of smokestacks rising some ways further. A couple miles to his left, a big hill or a small mountain rose in a round green lump, wreathed in sea-blown mist and the smoke boiling up from its base.
Something bad was happening over there. Logically speaking, he should have hidden for another hour until he could move with the relative safety of darkness. But the ocean was right there. He could hardly stop himself from sprinting, his pack thudding into his lower back, the sunshine soaking his skin but offset by that steady bay wind, a journey of three thousand miles reduced to a thousand final steps. He loped down the sidewalk, crouching down at intersections to watch for movement. Machines groaned a mile to his left. A single scream hung in the humid air, stopping as abruptly as an answering machine clicking off.
The strip of sea grew closer. Gulls screeched. Birds with wingspans as wide as his arms soared in twos and fours. Surf rustled and thundered. He could smell the sea more strongly than his own sweat now, a different scent from the beaches of Coney Island or Long Island—tangier, kelpier. He crossed another intersection, hand shielding his eyes from the onpouring sun, and reached the edge of what was once American civilization. A set of stairs led down to the sandy beach, flanked on one side by a blue Cape Cod-style home and on the other by a weathered apartment block with a rusty satellite dish sticking from its side. He jogged down the steps, stopping at the landing halfway down. The beach was cratered and scorched but clear of aliens or people. A rock jetty protruded a short ways to his right; further on, a wooden pier extended into the waves. South showed nothing but lifeguard stands and bathrooms on the way to a rocky beach set beneath sheer cliffs, all half-obscured by a light screen of smoke.
He headed straight across a bike path at the bottom of the steps. His shoes sunk into the sand. A tingling numbness swept over him. Ragged volleyball nets flapped in the wind. Spray speckled his face. Just before water's edge, he crossed a line of bulbous brown kelp, small white shells, and coin-sized lumps of what looked like tar. A fringe of gulls waddled away, murmuring squawks of complaint.
Walt stopped a couple feet below the tideline. Foam curled up the beach, bubbling away into the wet sand. At once he collapsed. For her, of course, Vanessa, the woman he would never see again, her megawatt grins and airy charm. But also for the knowledge—as sudden as his drop to his knees, as deep as the waters on the blue horizon—that whatever they'd had together had been gone long before the plague arrived. He cried for the complete and stupid loss of everyone and everything, of thousands of years of culture and growth swept away in the span of days. And lastly, for himself—not in self-pity, for he no longer felt any of that, but for his journey here, the sheer endurance and will of it, for the idiocy and impossibility of his nearly arbitrary quest. He'd fucking done it. He was here. He was alive.
He should have brought something of hers to give to the ocean. A picture, a necklace, a pair of her damn panties. She'd wanted to live here. Some part of her could have, and if he'd been a little wiser, he could have done more for her in death than he'd probably ever done for her in life. He sat back in the sand, disappointed in himself for the first time in a long time.
The sun hung over the horizon, round and red. It was suddenly cold. His shoelaces were bright blue.
Because they were Vanessa's. One of the pairs he'd brought to replace his on the road, which he'd done a couple weeks before losing his bags to the aliens. Hurriedly, he stripped off his shoes, tugged out the laces, stood, and splashed into the shockingly cold water until it swirled around his thighs. He balled up the laces and flung them as far as he could.
Back on the beach, he toweled off with a stiff blanket. He felt placidly empty. He thought about what he should do now. Automatically, he considered suicide. That had been the goal, anyway, to die somewhere along the reach of those endless highways. But the desire was no longer there. It had been burnt out somewhere along the way, as bygone and lost as the civilization of iPhones and stretch SUVs and high fructose corn syrup.
He supposed he should survive, then. Go see what there was to see.
He decided to watch the sun go down. It was his first glimpse of the Pacific, after all, and the ritual would put a hard cap on the trip he'd just completed. The sun sat a few degrees above the horizon, a red bloom amid the salty haze on the straight blue line of the sea. He sipped bottled water. The sand was still warm under him; the air was just now cool. Walt felt timeless, an anonymous, ephemeral witness to a process that had played out daily for billions of years, a cycle whose significance was clear even when its mechanics were misunderstood. (And if humanity survived now, isolated pockets in the unwanted jungles, deserts, and icy wastes, how long before they once mo
re forgot the Earth revolved around this setting sun?) He could sit there forever, observing and confirming the process of tide and moon and bird and sun and dolphin, somehow becoming the world, as far removed from mortal fears and neuroses as the breakers rolling endlessly and unstoppably to the shore. The sun sunk halfway below the waves; was he far enough south to see the green flash of its final moment?
An explosion roared over the condos and the yellow grass.
He rose to a crouch, spell broken. Bits of debris and trailing smoke ribboned the air to the north. Screams and automatic weapons drowned out the waves. Another explosion ripped through an apartment building overlooking the beach, sending its face sloughing down the slope in a clattering thunder of stone, wood, and glass.
Walt zipped up his pack and ran for the bike path lining the bottom of the harsh hills, laceless shoes flapping on his feet. On the pavement, he stuffed his shoes into his pack and turned south for the tall green cliffs. Staircases and ramps punctuated the slope every couple hundred yards. No good; he couldn't be sure what was happening up in the streets. The smoke he'd seen while cutting across town roiled a handful of blocks inland from where the shore curved along the rising hills. He'd follow that curve, by night if he had to, until it took him to a place that wasn't on fire.
Engines thrummed above. The sun was minutes set by the time Walt reached the curve in the beach. The cliffs soared a hundred feet vertical, mounted near the top by spacious decks with long, red-timbered legs. The sand gave out to a rubbly carpet of sharded rock and browning kelp. Surf welled between the stones. In the sea's quiet moments, a sound like angry static drifted from the heights. He knelt to thread new laces into his shoes and started along the rocks, splitting his attention between his footing and for any possible passage up the sheer walls.
His foot turned on a slimy stone, spilling him into a damp and stinking mat of kelp. Thick black flies clouded his face. He struggled up, knees soaked, palms stinging. In the dimming light, he could see nothing but rocky shore and rising cliffs.
Ahead, the cliff jagged inward, slumping from a sheer incline to one that was merely stupidly dangerous. Fallen rocks piled around its base. Grasses, shrubs, and small trees poked from its pitched face.
The last of the daylight was slipping away. He could wait out the night down here, risking the tides and whatever the aliens were up to. Road-honed instinct told him it was something big. There might not be any city left come morning, and tucked away as he might be below the cliffs, if it spilled out to him, he'd have nowhere to run.
He started up the scree, planting a hand for balance. Smoke touched his nose. A third of the way up the climb, the rubble stopped, replaced by a fast rise staggered with flatter stretches. Walt leaned into the rock, planting each step, grabbing for the stumps of brush and trailing branches. Halfway up, he stopped on the flat top of a boulder to catch his breath. Waves rolled beneath him, dark and indistinct. He was already having a hard time seeing his handholds. Within minutes, he'd be groping along under the confusion of full night.
Foot by foot, he carried upward, fingertips bleeding, shoulders and biceps burning. Just below the top, the slope transitioned to a sheer cliff. Walt hung there a moment, squinting to left and right for an alternate route, but the nooks of the rock wall were blurred by darkness. He reached up and scrabbled for a hold. He raised his knee, planted his foot. The rock beneath him shifted and tumbled away, racketing down the stone rise. Walt's legs swung into empty space.
He gasped, sweat slicking the rock beneath his clenching palms. Above, a muffled gunshot clumped across the early night.
23