It had taken half a day to get everything packed up and moved out, and the other half of the day and half that night for the successive groups from the Coast Guard site to get where they were going, some nameless place in the middle of nowhere. Dirt roads up hills and into woods, far enough north and inland that the Visitor's coastal slash-and-burn patrols wouldn't even spare a thought in their direction (not that anyone was hoping and/or praying). It was a former Outward Bound base camp that had not quite fallen to ruin, somewhere in the Los Padres National Forest, or so the maps said. Better not to have a real place-name at all, just a rough direction to follow and an anonymous place to dig in, just in case. There was a reasonable communications network of Resistance cells even further out, though it would take a few more days to rig up the generators and hook into the long-abandoned transceiver systems. Tyler had determined that there was enough here to work with, and more than enough to start out with in terms of shelter and nearby water sources. Empty fuel tanks were quickly retooled and put to use. In the next day or so there would have to be yet another recon trek for supplies, but that would have to wait for the "last wave" to arrive from the old camp.
That last wave would include Farber and Donovan and the others who were blowing the old pseudo-homestead to bits. After that… nothing but the universally hated wait-and-see. Wait to get fully supplied, and see if the Geek Squad had pushed all the right buttons. And see if they got out alive. That last thought was something Tyler shoved into one of the little cells he partitioned off in the back corner of his brain where the craving for humanity and need sat waiting for the right, rare, safe moments to venture out. For now, though, Tyler slammed the door tight and shot the bolt. He checked the action on his Glock and went to relieve Maggie on watch.
"Who the hell goes there?" Maggie dropped into a crouch, aiming her Steyr pistol in the direction of the nearby footsteps just beyond the circle of lantern light. New surroundings, new variables… it made her twice as twitchy as she usually was during her watch. Whatever made the sound froze in place. When she switched on the laser sigh the red pinpoint sat motionless at the center of… something. "I'm not gonna ask again."
"If you expect me to take another step when I'm wearing that little red dot dead-center, you're nuts."
"Oh for christsake…" Maggie rose and lowered the gun. "Tyler, you got some nerve calling me nuts, sneaking around in the dark like that."
"It's my watch, genius. Feel free to stay here all night, though." Tyler was holstering his own weapon, drawn by reflex. He stepped into the sickly light; it spread into their surroundings as if the dark was sucking it right out of the cheap camp lantern at Maggie's feet.
When he she could get a better look at him, Maggie could see his offhand shrug was more of a shudder. "Relax, Tyler, I wouldn't have killed you with the first shot." She picked the lantern up, the better to illuminate his exaggerated smirk. "You just can't handle a woman drawing on you first, can you?"
He took the lantern from her and set it down back down a little too hard. "Never happened before."
"Hah, that's not what I heard," Maggie snickered as she took the thermos of coffee Tyler held in his non-trigger hand. "Gimme."
He shook his head in mock dismay and sat down on a rock. "Damn, no secrets between you two, are there?"
"No more than you have." She sat next to him and poured the hot coffee into the cup from the thermos. After swilling it down Maggie filled it again and handed it to Tyler. "Admit it, you'll miss my sweetness and charm when this is all over."
He snorted as he swilled in turn. "Maybe," he grunted. After a minute or two of silence he muttered into the empty dark in front of him, "I'll be goddamned if I know how you do it."
"Do what?"
"She'd come back after you were out with those skank lizards, and I knew she had more shit boiling inside than I could ever put to rest in a million years. But she'd come back, and change, and try to wash that dirt off that only she could see… there wasn't fuck-all I could do to make a difference, I knew that, so I just kept in range but let her be. Then she'd take off for a while, and the two of you would do whatever you do to keep yourselves from climbing a tower and spraying the world with gunfire. And when she came back again, well I can't say it was 'all better', but… I dunno. Whatever language you two speak that keeps you sane," now he looked Maggie in the eye, all smartass gone. "I'd pay real money for lessons… for when this is all over."
Maggie reached out impulsively to lay her hand on his arm. "C'mon. You already know it. You just speak a different dialect, is all."
Tyler looked down at her hand, then up at her face. "Bullshit."
"Hey," Maggie released him and gestured with both hands, "No secrets, right? If you were so clueless don't you think I'd have heard about it by now?"
She got no reply but a grumbled "Hmph," followed by another stretch of quiet. Well not quiet, exactly… crickets and frogs and who know what else were chirping and moaning and filling the air around them with everything except spoken words.
Finally Tyler needled Maggie, "You gonna hang around all night? Scared to walk back to camp in the dark?"
"Please. I get the feeling I won't know how to be scared by anything again, once things get back to normal."
Normal. What is that, anyway?
"Normal" was like the future; nobody dared consider it in terms of anything other than the next battle, the next run for cover. That anyone still believed in "normal" was held as a closely guarded secret, a habit born of superstition and bitter experience.
Maggie had been terrified of "normal" since she'd lost Mark, the straight-as-an-arrow improbable love of her life. For the briefest time between meeting in war and realizing what they might have together, she'd craved a return to normal. But now the prospect of "normal" threatened her with a long, empty run of days with no adrenaline rush to focus her, no struggle for survival to distract her from the suspicion that she'd found and lost what she most needed before she ever had a chance to enjoy the life it – he – promised.
For Tyler, "normal" was such a long-ago concept it had become entirely foreign until very recently. Even his marriage hadn't been "normal". It had been a desperate connection born of another, entirely human, war. That and the combination of his disgust with the man he'd been and his hope that marriage to someone like May Linh could make him human. Maybe even make him into the husband that May Linh had hoped he might become, if she'd lived long enough. But normal? Nothing in his life had ever felt normal until he'd stumbled into the few hours snatched here and there with a crazy naïve (or maybe not so much) computer geek in the ragged refuge of a second-hand room furnished by a first-class scrounger. He wished he could feel guilty about that, for the sake of a family long dead, but the man he'd become was a less than perfect liar. Tyler looked sidelong at Maggie, suddenly aware of how alone she might be if and when anything got back to "normal". He knew equally well that he would not be alone (a little taken aback to realize he didn't want to be, not any more). He couldn't help wondering if Maggie might deserve that kind of life more than he did.
They knew each other just well enough to know when things were about to get a little too deep for people like them, so Maggie brought back wiseass with, "Speaking of scared… wanting 'language lessons' wouldn't mean you're scared you won't be able to keep up with Angie? Need a little help from her other partner in crime?"
"Nah. I'd just hate to break up a high quality conspiracy by taking her away from all this."
Maggie's response was no less sincere for being kept to herself. Thank you, love of my best friend's life.
If she'd had been a little less jumped up on stress and caffeine she might have broken down. As it was, she laughed out loud as she stood to leave then bent to kiss the one small spot on Tyler's head that was almost perfectly empty of hair. "Good luck with that, you bomb-throwing bastard. You're stuck with both of us."
Tyler nodded in quiet satisfaction and offered the "real" smile usually reserved for Angie.
"Works for me."
"Listen up, geeks! The bus is leaving and you're not on it. Last call for fresh air before lockdown."
Chris Farber had just piled the last case of bottled water in the corner of the bomb shelter. Willie had helped with the last few loads, having been relegated to the role of "support" for data entry purposes, which meant mostly making sure his friends didn't forget to eat and drink, and providing backup for bathroom breaks. As his familiarity with human entry unit (aka "keyboard") layout was less than perfect, New Todd and Angie were the Designated Keyboard Commandos for the task at hand. Since shortly after dawn they'd both been hammering away, each focused on a split display on the Visitor module screen propped up between them. New Todd's task was to enter the contact data for the Visitor operatives, and Angie's was to enter the "friendly human" contact data. Each of them had their own personal reasons for hyper-efficiency. If Chris couldn't relate to the connection between mind and pure machine, he could definitely relate to the obsession with victory regardless of the means. He was likewise aware of the inclination to ignore necessities such as food, drink, and air when thus obsessed.
New Todd barely grunted, "Yeah whatever."
Angie, being considerably older and less in the first flush of the true love of full-bore-last-chance data processing, glanced up from her work. "Huh?"
"C'mon, take a walk," Farber invited.
Willie was about to follow when his more recently refined sensitivity to human non verbal communication kicked in. "No franks, I am fine with this air," he volunteered, not quite "refined" enough to assume an explanation wasn't in order. "Angie, fake a break." Truer words hadn't recently been spoken. Willie knew that New Todd was a lost cause, and couldn't be distracted.
Angie smiled affectionately at Willie. Tyler's my heart, and Maggie's my soul, but you're… everything else.
"Yahz, boss," she offered with faux-servility. "Lead on, Big Bear," she told Chris as she followed him up the stairs. "Yikes!" After even a comparatively short time in the dim light of underground computer room (lit mostly by a few odd lamps and the monitors in front of her and New Todd) the overcast sun made her squint.
"C'mon, Mole Woman," Chris reached back and grabbed Angie's hand to pull her along behind him. "Tyler's right, your eyes are gonna be square and useless in natural light before too long."
"Tyler says a lot, sounds like."
"Nah, just enough."
Angie followed Chris to the open area between the lighthouse and the main compound buildings. The bomb shelter entrance was hidden in a stand of sea grass and scrubby brush nearer the edge of the bluff that led to the beach. They wound up on in the midst of the array of permanent picnic benches that had been installed ages before, when the Coast Guard used the area for training, not for war. Chris climbed up on one, facing the beach, and when Angie sat next to him she studied him for a minute, then confessed, "I feel like I should know you better than I do."
The big man smiled and nodded as if validating some inner expectation. "Not much more you need to know, you pretty much got it on the road here." Before Angie could reply he continued, "He's right, you wonder way too much about things that got settled when you weren't paying attention."
She tried to look indignant, but he was right enough so any objection would have been lame. "Call it a weakness," she suggested. "But I'm learning to recognize what's been settled, even if I can't help wondering about it sometimes."
"You're right with that." Farber still seemed focused on the waves beyond the cliff and the horizon yet further beyond them. "You both learned a lot, in case you're wondering about that too. Even though it appears pretty settled."
It didn't take a psychic or even a shrink to decode that. Angie had always had the feeling that what Tyler might have been holding himself back from wasn't what had developed between them; maybe it was his own doubts about his ability to be a lasting part of it. His willingness, his need, wasn't a question. She was dead certain he loved her and that he meant what he said when he told her he'd be there with her as long as he was breathing. What Angie wondered about was whether or not he'd decide he was up to it, given his obvious opinion of who he'd been vs. who he'd become. That, she knew, was the one thing he'd never stop wondering about.
"I wonder about less than you think," Angie advised Chris. "I see who you are, and who you are to each other. And I wonder less about coming between that than I do about how it all fits together."
"Uh-huh."
After that Farber said nothing else for so long that Angie thought maybe the conversation was over, so when he spoke again she almost jumped at the sound of his voice.
"Look, Angie, if anything it's him that's standing between you and me. Because Ham and me, we've been together for so long… there's no space for 'getting between'. Like there's no space between you and him for getting between. Maybe it's Ham with me on the one side and you on the other, all locked up with nowhere to go except all together, even if it's not all at the same time or in the same direction."
God damn, he makes more sense than Tyler and me on our best day, if we ever find one.
"So tell me," Angie inquired, knowing Farber would navigate the verbal segue without batting an eye, "How come you never call me 'Angel'."
Chris's matter-of-fact laughter rumbled out to sea. "Same reason he doesn't call me 'Big Bear'. Some names belong to whoever gave them to you, right?"
As usual, Angie bowed to unassailable logic. "Right, and right." She cast a glance behind them, where the last few vehicles were waiting. "Look…" she didn't get any farther before the Big Bear of a man wrapped an arm around her.
"Yeah, me too," he told her. "Bang them keyboards and we'll see you later. You got five minutes to lock down before we hit the button and it all goes up."
Suddenly overcome by the reality of what might (or might not) happen, Angie threw her arms around Chris Farber and planted a mighty kiss on him. "You bet your big hairy ass I'll see you on the other side… of Tyler and everything else."
Neither one looked back as they went their separate ways: Farber to join the departing caravan where the detonator waited for his mark, and Angie to descend to the dimly lit place where she and her friends would "save the world".
Or not.