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“Come on,” he said. “To the roof.”

Roger’s jaw dropped. “You nuts? You want to go outside?”

“It’s not safe,” said Debbie.

“Especially up high and exposed,” Clive added.

Nate shrugged. “We need to see more,” he said. “You with me, Velma?”

“You got it, Shaggy.”

Xela straightened up, winced, and put on a brave face. “I thought I was Velma?”

“Back off, bitch,” Veek said. She managed a smile. “You’re Daphne. Deal with it.”

“Seriously?” Roger shook his head. “You’re going up?”

“Coming or staying?” asked Nate.

Roger met Xela’s eyes. “I’m in.”

They headed for the door. Tim pulled the pistol from his belt and offered it to Nate. “Just in case.”

“In case what?” Nate asked. “Is it loaded with nukes?”

“Sorry, no. Just hollowpoints.”

“Then I don’t think it’s going to do much good.”

* * *

The fire door to the roof was wedged tight. The four of them positioned themselves on the stairs and pushed. There was a lot of weight on the other side. The door moved a few inches, then a few more. They saw bricks scattered on the rooftop. Some were still cemented together in groups of three or four.

“Looks like the machine room came apart,” said Veek. “You think they hit it?”

“Wind from the big one was pretty gnarly,” said Roger. “Might’ve just been that.”

The door opened another two inches. “I think I could squeeze through,” said Xela.

“Keep pushing,” said Nate.

“Why?”

“Because if we need to get off the roof fast we don’t want to squeeze through one at a time.”

“Hey.” A voice echoed up the stairwell in a bad stage whisper. It sounded like Clive. “Are you guys making the scraping noise?”

“Yeah,” called Veek. “The door’s stuck.”

“Cool,” he said. “Just making sure.”

They all broke out in grim smiles and pushed again. The opening was two feet wide. Roger put his back against the door and braced his leg up against the frame. He grunted and heaved and the door moved another seven or eight inches. “Good enough?”

Nate nodded. “Works for me.”

He led the way out onto the barren roof. The wooden sun deck and all its furniture was gone. In places the tar paper was torn away in broad patches. One of the air vents was shredded into long strips of metal.

They turned, scanning the skies in every direction. Roger saw them first and pointed. All of them looked north.

The squid-whale pack was two miles away. They’d gained altitude and were soaring up over a set of huge hills like desert sand dunes. One of the smaller ones swept down and plucked a palm tree from the ground with its tentacles. It was hard to tell from their angle, but it looked like the beast swallowed it whole. The pack veered off to the east and coasted across a ridge that ran from the distant hills down past the building and on to the south. They swooped down and vanished from sight.

Nate’s eyes followed the ridge, waiting for them to reappear, and then he squinted. He tried to focus on a distant shape that contrasted against the endless gray of ground and sky. It was at the very top of the hill and was thinner than it was tall. “You guys see that?”

Veek peered over the top of her glasses. “I see something.”

It seemed to be glossy, but Nate wasn’t sure if it was just his eyes trying to focus on it. He tried to estimate the distance and height off a few lone palm trees and guessed the tower might be fifteen or twenty feet tall, which meant it was about ten feet wide.

Xela hobbled over. The blade of glass was still in her leg, but didn’t seem to be bleeding much. “Looks old,” she said.

“How so?” asked Nate.

She shrugged. “Just the lines of it. I might be totally wrong.”

“Doesn’t look like they’re coming back,” said Veek.

Nate glanced over his shoulder. “Assuming they’re the only ones.”

Roger leaned past the railing. “Found the sun deck,” he said. He tipped his head at the ground below.

The broken planks and beams stood out against the bleached soil. The wood spread out in a trail starting at the base of the hill and leading north. A lone deck chair stood right side up in the middle of it all.

Nate strained his eyes. “Anyone see any sign of Oskar? Anything? Any...any parts?”

“I think,” Xela said, taking her time, “if one of those things ate him, they wouldn’t need to bite.”

“Wouldn’t need to,” muttered Roger, “but they might do it for fun.”

“But if we don’t see anything it means he might be alive, too,” said Nate. “We can’t write him off yet.”

They stared at the sun deck for a moment. Veek pulled off her glasses and wiped the line of blood onto her shirt. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll bring it up. All you guys heard those things talk, too? It wasn’t just my brain crashing, right?”

“I heard it, too,” said Nate.

“Almost pissed myself,” Roger said with a nod.

“Me too,” added Xela. She didn’t smile.

“No question about how they see us,” Nate said.

“Yeah, but they’re smart,” said Veek. “They speak
English
.”

“I don’t think they were,” said Xela. “I mean, I don’t want to sound all new-age, but they were speaking right to our minds, weren’t they? Telepathically?”

Roger shrugged. “It was loud,” he said. “Really loud.”

“It could’ve been in our heads,” said Nate. “That might explain all the bleeding.”

Roger nodded. “Right. Getting stuff done to your brain makes your nose bleed. I read that in a book once.”

“You read a book?” said Veek.

“Wait for it…” said Roger. “Annnnd...fuck you.”

“What I mean is,” said Xela, slapping Roger on the shoulder, “I don’t think we were hearing English. I mean, I don’t know about you guys but I was getting a lot of ideas and images more than actual, y’know, words.”

Veek nodded. “Same here. Just lots of things like ‘food’ and ‘prey’ and—”

“Cattle,” said Nate. “It called us cattle.”

“We’re hamburger, you mean,” said Roger.

“No.” Veek shook her head. “It means we’re something they raised on a farm to turn into hamburger.”

They all looked to the northern hills for a few moments.

Veek moved toward the back of the building. Xela limped back over to the remains of the machine room and Roger went with her. Nate followed the path of the whale-beasts with his eyes. The shattered deck made a fine guide for half a mile. He scanned the horizon in every direction. He didn’t think they could sneak up on the building, but he wasn’t so sure about being able to get away from them if he did see them.

Xela tossed a half-brick through one of the holes. It clattered on some of the machinery and then the sound of it faded as it fell down the elevator shaft. She looked back at them. “D’you think all the tunnels came over, too? Do they count as part of the building?”

“No clue,” said Nate.

“Might be a good place to hide out.”

“Good place to die,” said Roger. “One of those things collapses the building or lands on it, bet you anything all those tunnels cave in.” He walked back to Nate and crooked his chin up at the sky. “Don’t think the sun’s moved since we got here,” he said.

“I think you’re right.”

Roger waved up at the distant dunes. “D’you notice the shape of the hills?”

Nate followed his gesture. “What do you mean?”

“There aren’t any of the other buildings or anything, but the land’s a lot like it is in our world. We’re still halfway up that same hill. Got little mountains up ahead of us, just like the Hollywood Hills.”

Nate studied the hills and realized Roger was right. They were scoured down to dirt and stone, but he could see the curves and dips that made up the view from his apartment. He could even see the small plateau where the Griffith Park Observatory would sit.

“
Up there to the right, that ridge? That’s where Vermont Avenue would be.” Roger waved his arm in the other direction. “That’s all Hollywood over there. Bet if we went a couple miles that way we’d find an ocean.”

“Yeah,” said Veek, from the far side of the roof, “but what’d be in it?”

“Nothing,” said Nate. “That’s the overriding factor here, isn’t it? Everything’s dead.”

“Not dead,” said Xela. “Killed. Eaten. Those squale-things have sucked the life out of this whole world.”

Veek tilted her head. “Squale?”

“Squid whales,” said Xela. “A stupid name makes them a bit more bearable.”

“Squale it is, then,” said Roger.

The door scraped and they all jumped. Clive stepped out onto the roof. “We’ve got a problem,” he said. “The machine’s off.”

Veek’s eyes went wide. “What do you mean?” asked Nate.

“I mean it’s off. The sparks, the hum, it’s all stopped. Ever since that big thing flew by.” Clive took a moment to breathe and slow himself down. “The machine’s not protecting us anymore.”

Nate wiped the blood from his face with a damp paper towel. “So, here’s where we stand,” he said. “We’ve got some bottled water, and enough in toilet tanks for anything else. We’ve still got power, which means everything in the tunnels came over to this side with us. That also means we don’t have to worry about food for a little bit. All our refrigerators are going to keep working, so we should be good for a couple of days at least.”

They were back in Clive and Debbie’s apartment. They’d straightened some of the surviving furniture so people had somewhere to sit. Mandy was curled up silently on one end of the couch with her arms wrapped around her legs. The bodies of Auntie and the two men were down in the lounge, out of sight.

“And then what?” asked Xela from the other end of the couch. She’d dropped her pants so Tim could pull the glass from her thigh. She squeezed Roger’s hand while it happened. Tim put a few drops of superglue on the gash and then wrapped her leg with some gauze pads and a long bandage from Clive’s first aid kit. It was messy, but it wasn’t getting any worse.

“By then we’re not going to be here,” said Nate. “There’s a way to reverse what they did. Oskar was sure of it, so I’m sure of it.”

“Oskar’s dead,” said Andrew. He knelt on the floor near the kitchen area. “He’s joined the Great Ones.”

“I don’t think you know as much about all this as you think you do,” Nate said to the bound man.

Andrew pasted on his smug look.

Nate looked back to his neighbors. “There’s a chance he’s out there hoping we’ll rescue him. We don’t know for a fact he’s dead.”

“We don’t know that he isn’t,” said Clive. “Hell, even if he is alive, he could be a hundred miles from here, the way those things move.”

Nate nodded. “I know, but I think we need to check. The squales flew off over a ridge out by the hills. They might have a nest or something up there.”

Roger cleaned the last of the blood out of his ears. “So what’s the plan?”

“I think some of us should go over all the pictures from Tim’s room. Maybe we can find a connection between the circuit diagrams and the actual machine and figure out how to get it running again. The rest of us will go up to that ridge and look for a sign of Oskar. If there’s nothing, we come home. If there’s something, depending on what it is, we’ll figure out what to do next.”

“How are you going to get up there?” asked Xela. “We don’t have cars and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any buses.”

“Thank God for the subway, then,” said Veek with a smirk. A few of them chuckled.

Nate smiled. “We’ve got four or five bicycles in the building, right? The ground’s sandy, but it looks solid enough to ride on. We could be at the ridge in an hour. Less time to come back because it’s all downhill.”

“We could just sit tight, too,” suggested Tim. He ran a piece of white tape across Xela’s bandage. “We’ll all get reported missing in an hour, tops. There’ll be a lot of really smart people looking for us on the other side.”

“I thought it took three or four days before somebody could be declared missing,” said Debbie.

“Most people aren’t under twenty-four hour surveillance,” said Tim. “If the guy in the green car or part of his team doesn’t lay eyes on me inside of sixty minutes there’s going to be a shitstorm. Pardon my language.”

“Ummmm...” said Roger, “Think that guy’s dead.”

Tim’s face dropped. “What?”

Roger angled his head towards the front of the building. “Saw it when I was running up here. Green Taurus with the airbag set off. Looked like blood on it.”

“Plus, remember what Oskar was saying,” said Nate. “The Kavach Building’s still in Los Angeles. It’s still in the lock. I bet nothing looks that unusual over there. It’s just wrong for us because we were in the building when it happened.”

“Were a lot of weird lights when I got home,” said Roger. “People noticed that.”