Defenders (7 page)

Kai studied it. “How does it know when someone dies?”

“It’s just an estimate, based on updates people here receive.”

Kai pressed his tongue to his upper lip, stared at the readout, mesmerized.

“Why don’t you try talking to the Luyten again?”

“He told me to call him Five.”

The idea of it having a name unsettled Oliver in a way he couldn’t articulate.

“It’s a he?” Oliver asked.

Kai shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems like a he.”

“Why Five?”

Looking sheepish, Kai shrugged yet again. “I don’t know.”

Luyten tended to congregate in groups of three, when they congregated at all, so Five probably didn’t correspond to his place in a group or family, although it might. It was a prime number, but Oliver couldn’t see how that mattered. Maybe it wasn’t his real name, only one he’d chosen for Kai to use.

“Does the number five hold any special meaning for you?” he asked Kai. “Your lucky number? Your birthday?”

Kai couldn’t take his eyes off the Luyten. “Not really.”

Oliver stared at the Luyten. Looking at it was unpleasant, not only because it was large and terrifying, but because of the wound, the ragged stump.

Oliver folded his arms across his chest, leaned closer, counted its limbs.

Five. There had been six, now there were five.

It was a tiny insight, but it provided a glimpse into how the creature thought.

“Why don’t you try talking to Five again?” he said.

“What should I say?”

“I don’t know. Anything.” Oliver waved his hands, trying to come up with something. Topics of conversation were not his strong suit. “What did you talk about before?”

Kai shrugged. “Where to find food, how scared we were.”

That wouldn’t work now. What else could you talk about with an alien? Maybe they should try to win it over, with pleasant topics. Small talk. Fall back on standard CIA interrogation procedures.

“Tell it about your hobbies.”

“My hobbies?” Kai said it as if he’d never heard the word before.

“Things you liked to do. Before, you know, you couldn’t do them anymore.”

Haltingly, Kai began to talk about a water park near his house, where you surfed up a stationary fifteen-foot wave.

The Luyten remained silent.

It had once been an indoor flea market. The battered sign by the road, hanging from a rusted pole, read
KELLER’S FLEA MARKET
. It sported an image of a cartoon flea. Now it was an enormous morgue, a body factory. Lila hated the place, dreaded going in there, but her father was too busy to bring the containers out, and there were too many for Alfe to carry on his own. Plus, Alfe didn’t look any more eager to go inside than Lila.

“You ready?” He was already holding the balled-up T-shirt close to his mouth and nose.

“Shit. I’m never ready to go in there.” She stepped out of the two-seat open buggy she’d salvaged and converted to solar.

Inside, she tried to keep her eyes on the concrete floor, three feet in front of her, but her peripheral vision picked up a bit of the horror show that was all around, and her imagination filled in the rest. The bodies were on tables, on the ground, some literally stacked in piles along the walls. Many were badly burned; most had gaping wounds. The ones who’d been killed by the Luyten’s lightning gun had the soles of their feet blown out.

Even if she were wearing blinders, the rancid stench would have made the place intolerable. Even with the T-shirt covering her mouth and nose, she held her breath as long as possible before taking a quick, gasping breath and holding it again.

Lila wondered if you ever got used to the smell and sight of bodies. Maybe she had, to a degree, only so gradually she hadn’t noticed. Wouldn’t the sight of hundreds of bodies have sent her screaming and gibbering three years ago? Probably.

She spotted her dad, wearing a transparent mask that covered his whole head. He was collecting DNA samples, moving from body to body with a handheld DNA harvester. He spotted Lila and Alfe a moment later, and pointed toward the back of the immense, low-ceilinged space. Lila waved with her free hand, hurried to the back where she found half a dozen battered, filthy red gasoline canisters.

It was difficult to carry three canisters each while keeping the T-shirts in place, but they managed. As soon as they were outside, Lila let the arm holding the T-shirt and one canister drop to her side. She exhaled heavily, trying to drain every ounce of the rotten air out of her lungs before inhaling the relatively fresh outside air.

“I don’t know how he does it,” Alfe said, breathless, hands on his knees. “It’s like being in a pit of hell.”

Lila nodded as she turned and headed for the buggy. The sooner they got downtown, the sooner this hellish errand would be finished. Discovering the taps were not working that morning had shaken Lila, for surely if there was one thing you could count on, it was water.

For Lila, downtown Savannah had always been an oasis, an ancient, beautiful city of manicured squares and elegant architecture. Today it felt like a moldy, menacing place. All around people were running, shouting. There was a heavy police presence, but the police looked as exhausted and scared as everyone else.

Lila turned right onto Bull Street, anxiety rendering her unable to glean even the slightest satisfaction from the way the buggy she’d rebuilt and retrofitted to run on solar power was performing. Ahead, Chippewa Square was all but empty; there was no water distribution going on like they’d heard on the radio.

She pulled over, looked around for some indication of what might have happened.

Someone whistled. Lila spotted an old woman sitting on a porch.

“You looking for water?” the woman called. She was wearing a pink kerchief tied under her chin, and shelling pecans by hand on a rickety card table.

“Yes!” Alfe shouted.

“They moved it to River Street.” The woman pointed east.

Waving thanks, Lila headed toward River Street, wondering why they’d changed the location at the last minute without leaving word at the original site. Things were so uncertain. In the past it was always easy to know who was in charge, where to go for what.

In the seat beside her, Alfe watched the houses roll past while he chewed on his cuticle. In two weeks he’d be sixteen, and he’d go off to fight. Lila would have envied him, would have snuck off and joined him, if going to fight wasn’t synonymous with going to die. She’d be going soon enough—ten months, assuming she was alive ten months from now.

She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and flinched, adrenaline washing through her. It was only a tour bus, likely pressed into service to transport refugees. They wouldn’t suddenly be marauding through downtown, she reminded herself. There would be warning, the emergency siren at least. Sharpshooters were stationed all around the city; high-def cameras that could focus on objects a mile away were watching in every direction. That there were more of them outside the city than usual didn’t mean they were coming.

None of that was the least bit comforting. And if they came, they would kill everyone, except maybe the children.

“You okay?” Alfe asked.

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither.” He studied his finger, chewed at his cuticle a little more before adding, “I feel like we’re all in a room, and the walls move in a little more each day.”

“I’ve never had so many nightmares. I don’t want to sleep, but being awake is just as bad.”

Pedestrian traffic was growing heavier. Many of them were pushing handcarts, or carrying pails or water skins. Ahead, the crowd was tightly packed. Lila parked on the edge of the cobbled sidewalk, and they followed the crowd down the rough cobblestone to River Street. Between the brick buildings that used to house bars and gift shops for the tourists she caught glimpses of the Savannah River, where hundreds of enormous slate-blue fins jutted from the black water—markers for the portable hydroelectric power generators that filled the river. Along with parking lots filled with solar panels and a few hastily built rooftop windmill farms, it was all that staved off total blackout conditions.

There was no line, only a throng pressing toward an elevated scaffold where half a dozen people were distributing water through spigots that resembled gas pumps. A truck carrying a filtration system was drawing the water out of the river.

There was a rumor circulating that the pumps to Savannah’s houses were working fine, but Luyten had contaminated the city’s underground water supply, so the water had been turned off. It was difficult to separate the rumors from truth.

The crowd swelled, and soon Lila and Alfe were surrounded by people. It was an unpleasant feeling; those on the outside tended to push forward, eager to get closer, as if the river might run dry before they reached the front.

“There should be police here, getting everyone into lines,” Lila said.

“I guess they’re all on the perimeter.”

The honk of a tugboat made Lila’s heart nearly burst through her chest. Several others glanced toward the boat as well, hypersensitized to anything that resembled the emergency siren.

There were shouts from the front of the crowd, jostling that rippled backward until a boot heel sunk down on Lila’s toes. Pain coursed through her foot; she was nearly knocked down as people pushed backward.

“Where? Where is it?” someone closer to the river shouted.

“They’re coming, oh God, they’re coming.”

Suddenly people were stampeding. Jostled and pummeled, Lila turned and struggled to stay on her feet. Someone had spotted Luyten. They must have come down the river, maybe underwater.

She heard Alfe calling her name, spotted him ten feet away, weaving in the tightly packed mob. He shouted something, but she couldn’t make it out.

The crowd carried her across River Street, up a steep cobbled road. When they reached Bay Street there was more space to move. Her heart racing, Lila jogged up Whitaker, watching for starfish, expecting one to appear behind her at any moment.

“Lila!”

It was Alfe, pressed against the First Citizens Bank building up ahead. Lila ran to join him.

“We have to hide,” she said.

“That won’t do any good. They’ll know right where we are.”

She grabbed Alfe’s wrist. “Remember when you saw them by that lake? They’ll know, but two people aren’t worth chasing.”

They ran into the bank. It was deserted, save for three or four employees, one of them armed, and an elderly couple. It was less a bank now, more an exchange center, where people swapped gold, gems, ammo, anything that still had value.

“They’re coming!” Alfe shouted.

“Why didn’t the siren sound?” a woman in a blue and white business tunic asked. She looked to be in charge, was beautiful in a way that made Lila think of mannequins.

“I don’t know,” Alfe said.

Outside, someone shrieked. Crowds were still running past.

Lila looked around for a place to hide. Somewhere tight, where Luyten couldn’t easily reach. An inner room, or better yet, if there were stairs leading down into a cellar … or a vault.

“Does this bank have a vault?” she asked.

“A vault?” the beautiful woman repeated.

“Come on,” Lila said. Alfe followed her behind the row of teller stations, down a wide hallway. It was an old bank—it might have one of those vaults full of safe-deposit boxes.

“There,” Alfe said. She’d been looking for a big, round opening, but it was a narrow, heavy door.

They waited by the entrance to see if the others were following. Two of the employees appeared, the old couple a dozen steps behind them. A moment later, the woman in charge followed.

“It won’t lock,” Alfe said, pointing at the edge of the heavy door, where the bolts had been soldered in place. They pulled the door closed as far as it would go. Despite lacking a lock, being in the small steel room in near darkness gave Lila a sense of safety. She and Alfe sat on the floor with their backs against the far wall. The others sat as well.

They waited, listening.

“Anya, shouldn’t we run?” the armed employee, a muscular guy in his thirties, asked the woman in charge. “We can’t hide from them.”

“They can’t hunt down every person in every building,” Lila answered. “They kill people as fast as they can, so they’ll go after crowds in the streets.” If one of the starfish did want to get to them, Lila had no doubt it could. She’d seen them squeeze through smaller spaces than the double doors of this bank.

“But if they’re here, they won’t ever leave. Once they take over the city they can take their time coming to get us.”

Lila hadn’t thought beyond the next few hours. “Once they move past us, I guess we head out of the city.”

“To where?” the old man asked, trying to control the panic in his voice.

There was a crash, out in the lobby. It sounded like a table of trade goods being upended.

“Shh,” Alfe hissed.

All of them looked toward the door. It knew where they were. In a few seconds that door would fly open, and it would kill them all. Lila pulled her legs to her chest. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Alfe’s Adam’s apple bob.

Muffled shouts erupted outside. The voices sounded surprised, alarmed, angry. Not terrified. They didn’t sound like people being killed.

“What’s going on?” Anya asked, her voice low.

“Maybe it’s more people looking to hide.” Alfe got to his feet, opened the door wider. “This way,” he called.

“Who is that?” It was a woman’s voice. Footsteps clicked down the hall. Alfe stepped back as the door swung open to reveal a small, pudgy woman in her fifties or sixties. “Anya? Carl? What are you doing in here?”

“The starfish are coming,” Anya said.

The woman in the doorway shook her head. “It was a false alarm. Evidently porpoises strayed too far up the river, and someone thought they were a starfish.”

Lila let out a burst of laughter. Porpoises? That stampede was started by some nearsighted putz who’d spotted porpoises.

“The looters were real, though. I walked right in on them—they ran off with armloads of automatic rifles.”