* * *
Two weeks later, Walt sighed down at the lake. Flattened patches of canvas flapped by its shores. Outhouses stood at two corners of the camp, doors hanging open. Though Walt could see wheel ruts all the way from their place on the ridge, there were only three cars, two of them burned.
Raymond eased himself from his bike trailer and leaned against its side. "Think the aliens got them?"
"Don't see any bodies."
Mia tipped her head. "Maybe they took them. Like the prisoners you found in the desert."
"Don't see any signs of explosions, either. Aliens roll in, I don't think these guys would just throw up their hands and say 'Well, you got me.'"
Raymond poked his makeshift crutch at the dirt. "So what do we do now?"
It had been hard for Walt not to get his hopes up the last couple weeks. There sure wasn't much else to do. He'd taken point on their bike-mounted march across the suburbs of Long Beach and Anaheim, but didn't encounter anything more frightening than a starving black labrador. Raymond slept a lot. Mia asked him a lot of questions about his trip and the aliens, which he'd mostly answered except when he didn't feel like it. When Raymond was awake, he readily accepted Walt's orders and asked a lot of questions about Walt's trip, too, though he had the impression it was more about hearing about rescues and escapes than Mia's specific inquiries about where he'd first seen the aliens and what the government had been trying to do in New York before he escaped. He liked them, in a vague way—they clearly loved each other—and hated them for the same reason.
Smoke rose from Los Angeles County. They crossed the mountains to the east. Walt's impatience rose with the smoke. Its particles contained timbers and curtains, roof-tar and bedsheets, but also, no doubt, the aerosolized remains of human beings. Every day it took the three of them to reach the rebels was one more day they wouldn't be helping to kill the beings doing that burning. The ones who'd seen Earth, decided they wanted it, and kicked over the anthills of humanity. The ones whose plague had taken her away.
Up on the ridge above the lake, he couldn't help wondering that if he'd biked by himself, freed of Raymond's trailer and regular need to nap, whether he could have caught the resistance before they slipped away.
"Just one thing we can do," he said. "Get down there and find out where they went."
A short ways up the hill, a dirt road branched off the cracked highway. Walt drew his laser and walked his bike down the switchbacking dirt, Mia and Raymond behind him. Besides the lake, there wasn't much to see: collapsed tents, a firepit, outhouses that still stunk vaguely of shit, a pile of fish bones by the shore, a long stretch of picnic tables. A simple wooden shack roughly near the center of the abandoned camp. Shaky, prophetic, all-caps graffiti blazed from its side, bright red words about angels and end times. Suspecting the shack had been the command post, Walt creaked open the door. The front room had a lightweight desk with empty drawers. The back room held a cot and a bucket. The cot was empty; the bucket wasn't. Walt scowled and went outside. He and the couple wandered the grounds, poking around under the tents, occasionally calling each other for leads that wound up false—a paperclipped set of marching orders that turned out to be from April, before the aliens had arrived, and a string of penciled numbers that turned out to be the scores from the last ten Super Bowls (Raymond, a fantasy football player, had cracked that one). If there was any sign of where the rebels had gone, Walt couldn't see it.
The sun hovered above the peaks a couple miles away. Once it disappeared, the night would come fast. Back beside the wooden shack, Walt knelt to inspect a scrap of paper. One side was blank. The other showed a stick figure of a man with enormous balls.
"If our time weren't worthless, I'd say we were wasting it." Walt crumpled the paper. "We don't even know if they left us a sign."
"Well, they wouldn't leave anything the aliens could figure out," Raymond said. "What kind of sign could only a human understand?"
Walt sat back on his heels. "Culture."
"Culture?"
"Simpsons quotes. Star Wars references. Cave paintings of a guy with a mustache bellowing about soup. Anything we'd get that they wouldn't." He cocked his head, reached for the crumpled sketch, and smoothed it over his thigh. "Is this a Jackie Treehorn reference? Where did Jackie Treehorn live?"
"Who's Jackie Treehorn?"
"The Big Lebowski. Come on, he's a known pornographer."
"That guy. Um." Raymond pressed his fist to his forehead. "Malibu."
"Where's Malibu?"
"Just north of LA."
"Could the rebels be there?"
Raymond squinted one eye until it was nearly closed. "If they like getting incinerated by raging fires. It's like right there."
Walt turned the sketch one way and the other, looking for letters hidden in the lines of the sketch, for numbers or coordinates embedded in the curly hairs on the figure's testicles.
"What are you doing?" Raymond said.
"Malibu, then. It's the only lead we've got."
"You guys seen this graffiti?" Mia called from outside. "This is some prophetic shit."
Walt met the other man's eyes. Together, they rushed from the shack. Walt circled the building, reading out loud the messy red paint sprawled around three of its walls: "IN THE REALM BETWEEN ANGELS AND GIANTS / SAINT STREISAND AWAITS THE COMING / OF A RED DAWN ON THE WRONG HORIZON."
"Obviously," Walt said.
"Giants and Angels," Raymond said. "Between San Francisco and Anaheim."
"Well that fucking narrows it down."
"Saint Streisand?" Mia laughed. "Who's the superfan?"
"Saint Barbra Streisand?" Walt glanced at Raymond. "That mean anything to you?"
Raymond tipped back his head, lips parted. "Santa Barbara. It's a city up the coast a ways."
"So what the fuck does—"
"Red Dawn." Mia's eyes flared with comprehension. "The Patrick Swayze movie where the locals fight off the Soviet invasion."
They stared at each other in the fading sunlight. Walt dropped the sketch in the dirt. "Well, that was easy."