Pod (29 page)

The Gift

Yelling, from
outside
.

We’re in the cave. Aunt Janet is sleeping. I was asleep, but I’m not anymore. I’m wide awake and wondering what the heck is going on. I poke my head out of the hatch and listen. It’s definitely coming from
outside
the parking garage.

Somebody yells, as clear as a bell, “They’re gone! They’re gone! We kicked their alien asses! The sons-abitches are gone!”

There’s only one thing he could be talking about, but I have to see for myself. I jump out of the smashed Suburban, run to the side of the garage. My eyeballs almost pop out of my head. People are coming
out
of the buildings. Some are running, some are staggering like zombies. They’re falling to their knees and kissing the ground.
They’re dancing with each other in the street. They’re looking up at the sky and shaking their fists and shouting words I can’t repeat. And the best part of all—the only round object in the sky is a big, warm, yellow sun. And the only thing floating in that sea of blue is clouds. Huge, white, puffy clouds. Not a single mother ship, or floater, anywhere.

Part of me thinks it could be a trick. Maybe the aliens have some kind of invisibility shield. Or maybe they landed somewhere and the real invasion is happening
right now
, just when we think it’s safe to go outside. They softened us up by destroying our military and starving us half to death. Now it’s just a matter of time before their bug-eyed armies march down the street firing their death rays. I blink that thought away. It definitely
feels
like they left. I have to wake up Aunt Janet. This is the best news ever.

Then I hear another sound.

Breaking glass. Lots of it. A man and a woman walk out of a building across the street. The man is carrying a chair. He throws the chair through the front window of the coffee shop next door. He climbs in through the shattered hole. Seconds later he’s opening the door from the inside. The woman disappears into the shop with him. They come out a minute later holding paper sacks full of something. I don’t know what for sure, but I’m guessing it’s food. The woman hurries inside for more. The man reaches into his sack and pulls out a bottle of water. Other people see this and run over. Soon there’s a crowd of people pushing and shoving to get inside.

I run back to the cave and shake Aunt Janet’s leg. “Wake up, wake up!”

She groans something about letting her sleep.

I shake her leg harder. “The aliens are gone! People are outside. You have to come look!”

Her head pops up in the dark. “What did you say?”

“Can’t you hear the shouting? People are breaking
into
buildings.”

She looks at me like I’m speaking Martian. It shouldn’t be this hard to make someone understand that the monsters have left the building. I tell her what’s really on my mind.

“We have to get out there
now
before all the food is gone. If you don’t want to come,” I say, backing out of the cave, “then you can wait here and I’ll bring you a doughnut—if there are any left.”

“A doughnut?”

“With chocolate frosting and sprinkles.”

“This better not be some trick to get me up,” she says. She crawls out of the cave and follows me to the spot where I watched the man break the window. By this time the group has moved on. All that’s left is some guy eating coffee beans out of a bag. There are a few more people up and down the street. Some carry paper sacks, some push grocery carts full of bags and boxes. They seem to be mostly headed in one direction.

“My God,” Aunt Janet says. “It’s true. They’re gone!” She hugs me. Tears are rimming her eyes. “We did it. We survived.”

We run down to Level 1 and stop on the sidewalk. We’re standing on almost the exact spot where Richie disappeared yesterday in a swarm of floaters. Now I’m outside, with nothing over my head except blue sky. I keep expecting to see people disappear in flashes of light. I take a deep breath. The air is clear and cool and tastes of salt—and something else. Whatever that something is, I can’t get enough of it.

Someone with a grocery cart full of stuffed plastic bags and a television yells, “Get the hell out of the way!”

The freckle-faced kid from the hotel is standing with his mom and two sisters in the middle of the street. The mother is cradling one of the sisters in her arms, trying to hold the limp body up but struggling under the weight. “Do you have some food? Some water?” she says to the few people that come near them. Her voice is all screechy and starting to break.

A teenage girl is walking beside an older man with a bad limp. They both have pillowcases bulging at the seams. He’s carrying a baseball bat. They stop next to the woman. The man puts down his case, opens it, pulls out a bottle of water, hands it to the woman. The girl watches, shaking her head. The man says to the woman, “Do what you have to do. Don’t worry about breaking the law, ’cause there ain’t none.” He shoulders his load and says, “An’ don’t take your eyes off your kids. Not for an instant.” They melt into the flow.

I look where they’re headed. A green-and-white street sign says
Santa Monica
. It’s the same street I saw from Mary’s window. It ended in that strange boiling cloud. But the cloud is different. Now it’s light gray, like a thick wall of harmless fog that probably will burn off in the morning sun.

Aunt Janet grabs my arm. “It’s
him
!” she says, pointing.

I follow her hand. My skin gets that creeping-spider feeling. Mr. Hendricks is standing in front of the hotel watching the scene from behind dark sunglasses. He’s a vision of health compared to the stream of sagging bodies—well-fed, face shaved, hair trimmed and slicked back. Black Beard walks out of the hotel and stands next to him. Vladi is right behind him, the gun handle showing above his belt. He steps into the street and starts running like he needs to get somewhere fast. There’s no sign of Hacker. Mr. Hendricks and Black Beard watch together as their prison empties.

Aunt Janet says to me, “Have you seen Mary?”

“No. I mean, not yet.”

The sound of shuffling feet and breaking glass is all around us.

I say, “Shouldn’t we find some food?”

Eyes on Mr. Hendricks, she says, “In a minute.”

She’s a missile locked on target. I’m two steps behind her. Black Beard sees us coming, points and whispers to Mr. Hendricks. Mr. Hendricks turns toward us and smiles,
showing those big white teeth. I wonder if Aunt Janet left the gun in the SUV. We stop in front of him.

“Well, hello, aspirin thief. I see you survived to witness this historic day. And you brought the parking-garage pirate with you! This is a truly a special occasion.”

Aunt Janet says, “Where is she?”

“Don’t I get a ‘Good morning’ first?”

Aunt Janet’s face is hard as a gravestone.

Still with that smile, he says, “To which of my sixty-three surviving guests are you referring?”

“You know.”

“The woman with the sick infant?”

“Her name is Mary.”

“Ah, yes. Your little drug dealer,” he says, nodding to me, “gave Mary a half kilo of weed, which she traded to one of my guards for a bottle of water. He coughed himself to death last night in a blissful haze of marijuana smoke.”

Aunt Janet blinks, then says, “What did you do to her?”

“What happened to your friend is nothing compared to what the two of you did to Mr. Smith.” Mr. Hendricks aims those sunglasses at me. His smile shifts into something small and tight, like he’s considering an interesting problem for the first time. “See, my associate here, Señor Manny, witnessed the whole thing. You pushed that poor soul into the street to be shredded by those awful floating basketballs.” He stays on me for a second, then returns to
Aunt Janet. The smile is gone. “But lady, you shot him first, and that is a very big problem for me.”

“He had a knife to her throat.”

“So I’m told. Sounds like a matter of perspective to me.”

“Where is Mary?”

“My, aren’t you the persistent one! She was among the first guests to leave … excuse me,
check out
… this morning. And without paying her bill, I might add.”

Something catches my eye down the street. People are pointing, stopping to stare. The fog is beginning to thin. A long, shadowy shape is inside. I look at Black Beard. He sees it, too.

Mr. Hendricks says, “See, in the good old days I would arrest both of you for murder, then trust a judge and jury to decide your fate. But this is a brave new world. Disorder and chaos are the rule—”

There’s a sharp popping sound, like a firecracker, only I know it’s not. It’s followed by three more fast popping sounds, one after the other. Someone yells. It’s close. Maybe a couple of blocks away.

Mr. Hendricks says, “That should be Vladimir securing the pawn shop on Wilshire. The last thing we need is a bunch of crazy civilians running around with guns. Which brings me back to our situation.” He leans in close to Aunt Janet and says, “I’ll forget you killed my employee, on one condition: you give me the gun.”

Aunt Janet waits a moment and says, “What gun?”

The big man steps back and smiles.

Mr. Hendricks says, “Then we will see each other again. Under less … celebratory circumstances, I’m afraid.”

Aunt Janet turns to Black Beard and says, “Did you see which way she went?”

Black Beard looks at Mr. Hendricks. He nods. Black Beard raises a heavy arm and points down Pico Boulevard. “She wanted to head for the city. I told her the coast would be safer. I said to break into the restaurants on the pier.”

The black shape is almost entirely visible. It’s huge. I’m not sure “safer” is a word I would use.

Mr. Hendricks says, “See, there’s your answer! She went to the beach.” He shrugs. “Where else would one go in LA on a beautiful day like this?”

I dig my toes into the warm sand. Aunt Janet cradles baby Lewis in her lap and coos while he makes tiny fists with little pink fingers. Mary grinds up one of the azith pills, mixes it with water in a plastic bottle with a rubber nipple, and gives it to the baby. While he latches on and goes to town, I think about how lucky we are.

We found them under the pier sixty-seven minutes ago. Mary was hiding behind a rock, wet and shivering, with baby Lewis wrapped in a towel on her lap. She cried hard when we found her. She thought Richie had killed Aunt Janet for sure. When we told her what really happened, how Aunt Janet shot him in the shoulder and I pushed him
into the street full of floaters, she laughed. Then we helped her walk to this sheltered place on the beach, gave her some dry clothes, and set up camp.

My backpack is full of canned fruits and bottled water. Aunt Janet and I scavenged them from an empty apartment above a surf shop two blocks from the beach. Mary is sitting next to a small garbage bag stuffed with instant coffee, tea, and two blankets Black Beard gave us from the hotel. We decided to stay away from the restaurants, which were crazy with starving people fighting over boxes of cereal and Hostess Ho Hos. We saw one grocery store set on fire. There’s smoke from other fires rising on the horizon. I’m not sure where we’ll find food when we run out of what we’ve got.

A pile of driftwood is at my feet, enough to last the night. We’ll sleep in shifts. Aunt Janet has the gun. She says there are fourteen rounds left. I believe her—this time.

The sun is sinking low on the horizon. The sky is an amazing smear of orange, blue, and eggplant purple. Aunt Janet and Mary are talking about how clean everything is—the beach, the water, the air, even the streets, once you get past all the broken glass and the fires. All I know is, I swam in the ocean for the first time and it was clear and salty and cold as ice.

And Mom wasn’t there to see me.

We left another note on the car, this one telling her to meet us at the beach at the bottom of Santa Monica. Aunt Janet and Mary agreed to stay for three days to see if she shows up. We’re hoping the cell phones are working soon,
but the odds aren’t good. We spoke to a guy who said nothing works, not a damn thing, not even his watch. He told us to get out of the city. He said that what’s going on now is nothing compared to what will happen when the shock wears off. “Once folks believe the aliens are really gone,” he said, “it’s going to get ugly, and fast.”

Aunt Janet thinks the man is right. But her mind is on other things. She’s anxious to hear from her family. She has a husband and fifteen-year-old son in Washington State. Her plan is to head north along the coast, maybe on a bicycle if she hasn’t found a car that starts by then. She said she’d like me to come with her. I said I’ll think about it, but I already know what I’ll say. Aunt Janet needs someone to watch her back.

The sun is nearly set. Aunt Janet uses my lighter to start the fire. Mary puts a pot of water on to boil. People are doing the same all up and down the beach. Small dots of yellow flicker against the dark shimmering skin of the ocean. This seems to be the gathering place, and I know why.

The aliens left something behind.

It’s a giant tower, smooth and black like the floaters. No windows, cracks, or seams that we can see. It rises out of the ocean a half mile away and brushes the clouds. Aunt Janet calls it The Monolith. Mary thinks it may be the tallest thing on the planet. Whatever it is, Aunt Janet said that the minute she saw it, the pain in her stomach went away. The closer we got, the better she felt. Her headaches and nausea were totally gone by the afternoon. And baby Lewis is getting better by the minute.