The ache in his leg fueled his march toward the hills. The mist returned, fogging the windshields of the silent cars, sliming him with clammy dew. Their feet scuffed the dark sidewalks. Raymond had two moods now. Despair came with no warning, rogue waves of helplessness that sucked him out on a rippling tide. When it receded, he was left with a dry and pulsing rage. That fueled him, too. He carried one of the laser pistols in hand. He hoped he'd finally get to use it. Aliens. Looters. It didn't matter. Just one thing prevented him from making some extra noise and light right there in the street and killing whatever crawled out to investigate: getting to Vandenberg, and smashing that mothership out of the sky.
Like the night before, Walt hadn't offered any serious resistance. Just talked some bullshit about how they'd need keys and codes and electricity and the whole thing would be a stupid waste. Raymond figured those bunkers were built to last a long time. Their own generators. There would be overrides, backdoors into the system. For all Walt knew there was a big red button Raymond could mash down with his fist. If it really needed some special key or code, a general, colonel, or buck private would have stayed there till the bitter end, bleeding out every orifice, but still waiting for the president's command to rain down hell on whichever country had unleashed the virus that had killed America dead.
Walt had laughed at that ("Nobody's going to iron their uniform and run up the flag while their wives and mothers are coughing blood"), but Walt thought everyone else was just as amoral as he was. There were those who remained devoted to their duty no matter how dim the candle got. If just one soldier had stayed true to his responsibility while the rest of the world scattered and died, Raymond would free the Earth from the monsters who'd wrecked it.
As they headed west, art deco highrises shrunk to apartment blocks and the shells of sushi-fushion joints. Surf rumbled ahead, hollow and rhythmic. Beyond the sand of Santa Monica, waves foamed in the clouded moonlight. The lights of the ship hovered in foreign constellations. At the first sight of color to the east, Raymond pulled them off the PCH down a curling, palm-lined street, where they holed up in a clay-tiled hacienda the size of a high school gym. Out back, the pool was half full of green sludge. He slept in a dusty canopy bed and was awakened twice by the rumble of engines from the highway.
David and Anna heard them, too, and readily agreed to stay put until nightfall. Raymond watched the street through the curtains while they discussed trajectories and targeting. The sill was cold against his elbows. He remembered holding Mia.
They returned to the road with the return of the night. The upscale density of Santa Monica transitioned to stark houses on dead lawns. A short hill rose just past the highway. On the other side of the road, cream-colored manors on stilts crowded the black sea.
Ahead, chaotic thrashing broke the metronymic wash of the waves. White spray drifted on the buffeting sea wind. Raymond hunkered down beside a damp white wall and peered down an alley between two houses. Past the sand, dark shapes fought against the breakers, leaping and plunging, jerky yet graceful—and all wrong.
He got out his binoculars and leaned into the night. Three of the creatures stood on the beach, silent and still. Past them, dozens of others tumbled and tussled and grappled. At times, they fell without being touched. One lashed the water with its tentacles, splashing everyone near it.
One of the three on the beach waded into the water. By the time it reached the pack of swimmers, their heads bobbing and disappearing in the swells, the sea reached only to its swollen carapace.
Raymond lowered his binoculars. "They're children."