Relapse (Breakers Book 7)

  Edward W. Robertson

  © 2014

  THE BREAKERS SERIES

  Breakers (Book 1)

  Melt Down (Book 2)

  Knifepoint (Book 3)

  Outcome (Novella)

  Reapers (Book 4)

  Cut Off (Book 5)

  Captives (Book 6)

  Relapse (Book 7)

  To hear when the final book is out, please sign up for my mailing list.

  I:

  DAYS OF GOLD

  1

  The woman was asleep in the chair, but a sap to the back of the skull would do that to you. Lowell crouched on the rocky ledge, resting his elbows on his knees, and observed the steady rise and fall of her chest. He inhaled the misty sea air lofted by the waves bashing the cliffs a hundred feet below. It felt nice. Nicer than the Heart, to be honest. Especially with the breeze. Once things settled down, he'd have to suggest he operate out of the coast on a regular basis.

  But things weren't about to settle down until he took care of their little Catalina problem. He glanced away from the seated woman and toward the island. A blue lump in the haze of the horizon. He grimaced.

  The cliff, the chair, the woman tied to it—it was all pretty roundabout. One good MOAB would take care of the rebels. He'd tried to convince Anson to assemble one and dedicate one of his little communities to refurbishing a functional bomber, but Anson had nixed the idea on the grounds that they lacked the expertise and needed to resolve the situation faster than it would take to acquire.

  He could believe it. Even so, Lowell thought there was another explanation: Anson didn't like the idea of conjuring up something that could wipe him out in one fell swoop, either.

  Smart. Self-serving, though. Both traits followed Anson in most everything he did. Lowell didn't much care for the man's attitude, but the aggravating thing was he was certain that's why Anson would win.

  While Lowell waited for the woman to regain consciousness, he spat out his gum and shook out a fresh stick. Not that there was anything fresh about it: it was brittle and dry, and after the initial rush of sugar, the flavor quit in thirty seconds. It was the small pleasures, though.

  The woman gasped. He stood, facing her. Tied to the chair, she groaned unsoberly, lolled her chin, and went slack again. Blood gleamed from her hair, but it had already begun to scab.

  Lowell sighed and sat on the warm rock. He liked to let people come to in their own time, but much longer, and he might have to give her a splash.

  He gazed down at the sea. It was fall and the dark gray fins of dolphins broke the calm waters just past the breakers, swimming parallel to the twenty-mile strip of sand that began below him and ran to Malibu. In time, he got out another stick of gum. Inside the wrapper, the gum was broken into tiny triangles.

  For a second, his mind was knocked back in time. It was like the baseball cards he'd bought as a kid. Topps? Had that been it? Each pack with an ancient, flour-dusted strip of shattered pink gum, the splinters so sharp you could cut your mouth if you weren't careful. He used to wonder how old that gum was, imagining the Topps factory cranking out ten million pink sticks in 1953 and stuffing that initial run into new packs ever since.

  He'd bought new cards for two, three years. Filled three broad boxes designed to hold hundreds of baseball cards apiece. Eventually, he got tired of the hobby and set them aside. When they moved a few years later, his mom told him to get rid of them and he sold most of his collection back to a card shop for a fraction what he'd paid. Entranced by the prices of old cards in the Beckett guides, however, he'd culled a few dozen, rookies and such, and stored them in flimsy plastic sleeves, preserving the rarest in rigid, clamshell-style cases. These cards had gone in a shoe box.

  Somehow, the shoe box—his retirement fund, he'd joked to himself—had followed him across five states and two marriages. He'd parked it in the basement with all the other possessions he'd never use but couldn't bother to toss out. Forgot about it until the day Garrett lugged it upstairs.

  The boy was about to turn seven. Perfect age for boys of the right attitude to become entranced by sports heroes and the abundance of statistics they produced across seasons and careers: batting average, RBIs, homers, stolen bases, laid out in neat columns across the back of the card in type so small you'd have to have a six-year-old's eyes in order to read them.

  When Garrett opened the box, Lowell looked down on the old cards with a nostalgia he rarely allowed himself. Aware, at last, that they were never going to pay the rent, but that they had value as entertainment for his son, Lowell had extracted them from their cases for closer inspection. Garrett read their names out loud, mispronouncing half of them, poring over the years listed on the back, which to him must have sounded like ancient history. Lowell supposed they were.

  Noticing a greasy rectangle on the back of a Rickey Henderson, Garrett brought it closer to his face, scraping the mark with his nail. "What's that?"

  "Gum stain."

  Garrett swiveled his tan face to stare up at him. "Gun stain?"

  "Gum. These cards, they used to come with a stick of gum next to them. That stuff was older than I am, but it was the best thing I ever tasted."

  "Can I have some?"

  "I don't know," Lowell said. "I doubt they still put gum in them. These days, kids would bitch about it ruining the value of their cards."

  "Oh." Garrett looked back to the Henderson card. Arguably one of the ten best to ever play the game, but according to the card, his career had hardly begun. "Well, what did it taste like?"

  "Like… summer."

  Garrett played with the cards for another few hours. Meanwhile, Lowell logged onto eBay. It took a week for the auction to conclude, ten days after that for the package to arrive, and three days after that for Lowell to get Garrett for the weekend. By then, the kid had forgotten all about it.

  Garrett tore open the tape, revealing six sealed packages of Topps. He thumbed open a wrapper, revealing pristine cards and the sharp pink shards of a floured stick of gum.

  He looked up, goggling. "You found it!"

  "Wasn't easy," Lowell said. "Had to send myself back in time. It took me a whole week to build the machine. The first time I went back, I nearly got eaten by a T. rex. Had to jam a stick in its mouth."

  "You're weird," Garrett laughed.

  "Well? Try it out."

  Carefully, the boy picked the shards from the pack, put them in his mouth, and chewed. He blinked. "This is the best!"

  "Told you."

  "Is this all there is?"

  "Could be. They don't make it like that anymore."

  Garrett gathered up the five other packs and held them in his hands. "Then I'll save them. As long as I can."

  "Good boy."

  When had that been? The eBayed Topps had shown up, what was it, March? Had to be, because Lowell had still been working on the Keppler case.

  His last case before the Panhandler virus debuted in April.

  Much, much later, when Lowell returned to the city and went back to the house, in the nightstand beside Garrett's bed, he'd found three packs of unopened Topps.

  Up on the cliff, Lowell blinked, crumpled the gum wrapper, and flicked it into the wind. He thought about following it down, but there were no real legs to the impulse. Given the state of things, he didn't trust anyone who didn't give regular consideration to falling off a precipice with their eyes closed.

  The woman coughed, jolting against the pencil-thin cords securing her to the chair. Lowell leaned forward to ensure she wasn't choking. She blinked, eyes watering, coughing up the spit she'd inhaled.

  "Need water?" he said.

  "Please," she gasped.

  He got out his canteen, poured a drop in hi
s palm to ensure it hadn't become too hot from sunshine, then held it to her lips. She drank, then spit, then drank some more. Done, she drew back her head and stared at him, eyes hooded.

  He scratched his upper lip with his thumbnail. "What's your name, honey?"

  "Definitely not 'honey.'"

  "Bad guess. Well?"

  She bunched up her face. "Sissy."

  "Sissy." He smiled. "I didn't know they made Sissys anymore. My name's Lowell."

  "I know who you are."

  "Good. That will make this a lot easier."

  "Are you going to hurt me?"

  "I'm going to ask you some questions," he said. "I expect to get answers."

  "Why are you doing this?"

  "You were on Catalina for the last several weeks. I'd like to know what you saw there."

  "A herd of bison," she said. "It was real pretty."

  "How many people? How many boats? How many guns? You don't have to be precise. General estimates will do."

  "You want to invade them again, don't you?" The woman turned her head, watching him askance, as if she couldn't stand to look at him straight on. "Only this time, they won't have anywhere else to go."

  He pursed his mouth and glanced to sea. "If you don't think they're planning for the same war, you're deluding yourself."

  "Oh, you mean a war to retake the home you stole from them?"

  He smiled, hiding it quickly. "Here's the facts, Sissy. You're here. I need answers. I'd like to get them from you, because that will save me a lot of trouble. But if you're bent on causing me trouble, I'll get those answers somewhere else."

  She laughed with naked scorn. "If I won't talk, then what? You're going to shove me off this cliff? What kind of monster are you?"

  Lowell rubbed his mouth, other hand on his hip. "When the aliens came, they took away a lot more than our government, our two hundred TV channels, and our internet full of cats. Mostly, what they took is our option to be good people. When everything fell apart—when the virus stole our parents and our children—the only thing left was survival. The law of the jungle. Which, as it turns out, means no law at all."

  "Do you always talk this much?"

  "Only when I think it will do any good." He chuckled. "So no. Normally, I don't talk much."

  He moved behind her chair, gravel crunching beneath his heavy-soled shoes.

  She tried to twist against her ropes. "What are you doing?"

  "Saving us both a lot of time." He grabbed the back of the chair, tipped her back, and dragged her a foot closer to the cliff. "What's on Catalina, Sissy?"

  When the chair's legs were back on the ground, she wriggled hard, the cords sawing into her upper arms. "Let me go!"

  Lowell moved around to face her, waiting her out while she thrashed and bucked. This took a minute. She slumped back, sweating, strands of hair scraggled across her forehead like cracks on the ceiling of an old house. She dropped her chin to her chest and panted.

  "Do you understand yet?" he said.

  "Understand what? That you're a psycho?"

  "That chair's not going anywhere. Those ropes, they aren't moving either. That means you aren't moving."

  "Then I guess you aren't, either."

  Lowell sighed. He got out his canteen and unscrewed the lid with a metal rasp. "How many people presently live on the island of Catalina? Best guess."

  With all that thrashing, she'd worked up a sweat. A bead slipped into her eyes and she blinked against the salt. Lowell got out a hanky and moved to dab her eyes.

  She snapped at his hand. He whipped it back and her teeth clacked down on empty air.

  He pocketed the hanky. "Final warning. You answer my questions. Or you die. How many people are on Catalina?"

  "About five million. So if you want to see the bison before they eat them all, you better hurry."

  "What kind of preparations have they made? How do they keep watch on the ocean?"

  Sissy strained again, skin going pale beneath the bonds. She gritted her teeth and yelled wordlessly, then slumped again. "Why won't you let me go?"

  He got a pair of leather gloves from his back pocket and put them on. "Once you start letting people go, that's a habit you can't come back from."

  Her eyes locked on his gloved hands. "What are you doing?"

  He moved behind the chair. She rocked against it, chair legs tocking against the stony shelf. He grabbed its back slats, dragged it to the cliff's edge, and arranged her to face the waves battering the black rocks at the bottom.

  "Stop it!" she yelled into the wind. "I haven't hurt anyone!"

  "If you've made it this far? I doubt it."

  He swayed back, then drove a straight kick high into the back of the chair. It scraped forward and tipped. For a moment, it hung there, as if gravity no longer had to play by the old rules, either.

  The chair levered forward. Sissy went with it. She screamed, because that's what people did. As usual, it didn't do anything but annoy the other people in the vicinity, which consisted of only him.

  He waited for the thump before moving to the edge. On the apron of rock fronting the cliffs, Sissy had finally been released from her cords.

  Lowell took off the gloves. He scowled at the blue smudge of the island. Who would have thought it would be so much trouble to kill one teenage girl?

  * * *

  His orders were to head back to the Heart. But even on horseback, it was a long trip to the hills north of L.A. Besides, his head wasn't in the right place. He rode instead through the trails across the forested hills of Palos Verdes. Early in the afternoon, he emerged on the other side and beheld the vista of San Pedro. A bunch of everyday houses and strip malls leading down to the docks.

  From on high, he couldn't see why it was worth squabbling over.

  He led his horse down the draw to the streets, clopping toward the Dunemarket. Technically, since conquering it, Anson hadn't authorized it to reopen. Then again, technically, what remained of the market had shifted to the west, into the parking lot of a shopping center that hadn't served as a battlefield. So you could say with an honest heart that it wasn't the Dunemarket at all.

  The blacktop held a few dozen rusting cars, a score of merchants with their stalls and blankets, and a trickle of people browsing the offerings: lighters, salted fish, ammunition, camping gear, solar panels, and so on. Lowell tied his horse at the shaded entrance to the Ralph's and headed toward Wendy's stall.

  She was middle-aged and heavily tanned—Central American, he thought, although those identities were starting to fade—with black, bunned hair and potent arms. As he approached, she was thick in it with a young man Lowell knew by face but not by name, gesturing broadly as she informed him precisely how he was undervaluing the jar of peanut brittle he desired.

  Lowell waited his turn. The young man left, peanut brittle in hand. Wendy turned and smiled at Lowell, but she'd recognized him beforehand. Though she hid it well, he could see more in her expression.

  "Got anything for me?" he said.

  "It's your lucky day." She bent beneath the cashier's table, withdrew a plastic tub, and set it on the table with a rattle. She extracted a faded yellow rectangle emblazoned with blue letters. "Juicy Fruit. King size. Fifteen sticks."

  He smiled and nudged his hat an inch higher on his brow. "How much?"

  "For you?" She glanced down. "No charge."

  "Come on. I know times are tough. Besides, I got to keep the price high or else everyone else will buy it out from under me."

  "Well," she said.

  "Hang on." He reached into the pocket of his jacket, found his way past the coins Anson was trying to introduce but which no one liked, and got out a pocket watch. He flipped it open to let her see the motion of the hands. "You like these, don't you?"

  Wendy eyed him. "That's way too much."

  "Not to me."

  He set the watch on the table. He walked off and pulled the red strip sealing the package. The stick he withdrew was stiff, but he was used to t
hat.

  "What's that?"

  Across him on the dusty, sunny parking lot, a little girl gazed up at him, head cocked like a dog that's heard a sound you can't.

  "What do you mean, what's that?" he said. "It's gum, girl."

  "What's gum?"

  "It's good." He held it out to her. "It's chewy. It'll keep you out of trouble."

  "I don't like trouble." Her hand dangled from her wrist, dog-like again, then she took the stick and popped it in her mouth, chewing broadly. Her eyes widened. "It's sweet!"

  "A few things still are, aren't they?"

  He winked at her and walked off. He mounted up and headed north across the quiet desolation of Los Angeles. If he'd felt like pressing, he might have made it to the Heart that night, but he didn't. He camped in an apartment with a good view of the long downward slope of La Cienega and the brown weeds to either side. In the morning, he resumed, crossing the battered splendor of the modern white hotels and apartment towers of Beverly Hills, following the road through the secluded houses and up to the wooden palisade bulwarking the Heart.

  He was allowed inside without challenge from the sentries. At Anson's house, he waited in the foyer until the man emerged from a meeting. Anson was a big, blond brick of muscle, and if Lowell ever got into a fight with him, he would not allow himself to be brought to grappling range.

  The other man shook his hand and grinned like always. "Great to see you, man. Well? What kind of news have you brought?"

  "I had one good lead." Lowell followed Anson upstairs to his quarters, a sprawling room that led to a deck with a view of the reservoir. "Woman named Sissy. She'd been on Catalina since the exodus. Came back for Grandma's recipe box, got caught up with some old friends and stayed long enough for our moles to catch wind." He folded his arms. "She knew what we wanted to hear."

  Anson opened the door to the deck. "And?"

  Lowell sat under the umbrella and took off his hat. "And nothing."

  The blond man's grin fell. "Did you put the screws to her?"

  "The screws? You mean did I torture her?"