Chapter Text
Friday, July 16, 1999, 10:00 PM
Sam may as well have been in Hell.
Good thing he was used to it.
July in Mecca, California ran an average high of 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and it didn't want to cool off that night. Working in a small pizzeria with flaring ovens put the ambient temperature at 10 degrees higher than that. And the particular day made Sam's face burn. Everything put together made sweat run in rivulets down his reddened body. Only the air conditioning blasting at full intensity made the interior of Mama Aquarone's Pizza survivable. This was what he lived with all his life. Though uncomfortable, he didn't know any other way.
His eyes were drawn toward the upper corner across from where he swept the floor. Normally, the TV showed sports reruns instead of the news - nobody wanted to hear all the depressing things going on in the world - but on that day, just about every major channel showed some variation of the same thing, as they had since that morning and probably would until midnight. Not just in California or the United States, but the entire world.
The entire human world, he amended. Most of Earth's land was no longer governed with human interests in mind. Therefore, he listened to the soft voice of the local KESQ anchorwoman, Karen Devine.
"Ten years ago exactly, the world changed forever," she began. Either this was the hundredth time she'd done this, or, more likely, it was repeated from earlier in the day. The screen changed to shaky footage of dogfights between fighter jets and small spacecraft. Then a ground war fought in Africa, he believed, then satellites falling to Earth, then distant nuclear explosions in major world capitals. It was objectively horrifying, but he'd seen this footage so many times that he'd become completely desensitized. Washington, D.C., Moscow, and Beijing had all been wiped off the map within an hour - it was a minor miracle those were the only places to be nuked, though some warheads were detonated high over major industrial areas for the EMPs, as well as to be massive shows of force. If they nuked India, Pakistan, or the rest of China, billions would have died.
"Thankfully," the lizards wanted most of Earth intact, especially those places. They liked it hot. But not nuclear hot. His damp hands tightened on the broom's handle as he aggressively swept any hint of impurity across the checkered black and white floor and into the corner. There were no customers inside to interrupt. His only company were the two people in the back of the restaurant and occasional headlights of cars driving past.
"During his annual address of the situation, President Perot had this to say about the anniversary," Karen continued, though Sam was pretty sure he'd missed something in the haze. He turned to the TV to see this.
It cut to a clip of the President speaking from Detroit, D.C.
"I will say what I have said from the beginning of this administration: Earth is the rightful property of human beings, and it always will be," Perot began in his Texan drawl. Sam had been hearing it for the last seven years, yet he still found it a little silly. "While the kith may be here to stay, you can rest assured that our treaties with other human nations stand strong - and the United States Armed Forces is prepared to back them up. The kith will not take one more square foot of land from the Soviet Union, Europe, Manchuria, Patagonia, and they certainly will not take it from the United States."
Is that little left? Sam didn't need to ask the question. A cold shiver rolled down his back despite him cooking alive. Aside from the places named (some of which, like the US, had chunks taken out of them), along with Canada, Greenland, Mongolia, and some island and mountain nations, Earth was now controlled by lizards.
"I still have family down there, you know." Sam turned to find Marisol leaning over the counter, almost as sweaty as him. She worked in the kitchen. He did janitorial work and delivered the food. They were a perfect duo.
The woman worked the same hours he did, which meant they'd gotten to know each other intimately over the last few years. Sam once tried to get even more intimate, only for her to confess that she played for the other team. He had no problem with that. Honestly, she might have been his only friend. Not many other 25-year-olds stuck around in a town with no future unless they had no choice. Well, Marisol technically lived on the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation, not Mecca, but that was five minutes away and had the same population problem. She and Sam were just stubborn.
"You've mentioned. I'm sorry," Sam replied as more stock footage waltzed across the screen.
"They're all right," she replied with a shrug. "All right enough, anyway. People are still able to call and use the Internet. They've almost gotten used to it." Yeah. The kith didn't have Holocaust-esque death camps for humans, at least. Countries which swore allegiance to the lizards' overarching government, allowed lizard settlement, granted the lizards access to the best land, etc., were allowed to operate normally. Ones that did not quickly found themselves with new human leadership more sympathetic to the reptiles. It was bad, but he acknowledged it could have been a Hell of a lot worse.
"Sam, there's an order," another woman huffed from behind Marisol. His employer was somehow completely dry as she walked into view. Never understood how Miss Aquarone shrugged the heat off, especially given her age and... substantial size. Regardless, he got to do what he was hired to instead of being extra help. A date with the open road was the only kind of date he could get, but he enjoyed driving. Who could it have been? Mr. Davis? Mrs. Brown? Those were a couple of his regulars who were hungry for some pie under a dark sky. "New address down in Bombay Beach."
He turned to her, feeling an eyebrow raise and the corners of his mouth lower. First, Bombay Beach was right at the edge of their 30-minute driving radius, so he hoped against hope that the customer tipped well. Second, the town sat directly in the middle of the neutral zone: the two-mile buffer running across North America in a straight line which nobody owned. Not a place he wanted to go, even if it wasn't technically reptile territory.
Then Miss Aquarone turned to Marisol, adding, "The order is an extra-large thin crust. Light on the cheese, heavy on the meat. And the customer wants every kind of meat: sausage, pepperoni, chicken, anchovies, the works." Upon hearing that, Sam went from suspicious to downright scared.
"I don't want to deliver to a lizard," he muttered. Any confidence he may have wanted his voice to carry simply failed to materialize. Miss Aquarone looked sympathetic, especially given the day, yet she held firm.
"I didn't ask over the phone whether they were or not." Sam understood. If the caller was human, they'd never buy from her restaurant again. "Look, deliver this once, and if they're a kith, we can blacklist the address." Fair enough.
He cleaned for another 15 minutes. The TV had been turned off, allowing him to focus on his frigid fear in the scorching heat. He would be in and out, he told himself. He wasn't going to be kidnapped, tortured, and eaten as dessert. He'd just gotten the place spotless when Marisol shouted at him that the pizza had been boxed and slipped into the delivery bag.
"I'll finish up and head out soon. Sam, you don't need to come back tonight," his boss said from behind Marisol, who handed him the food. Marisol's expression was both amused and a little grim, and she gave him a nod as if telling him to be careful.
"I'll see you guys tomorrow, then," he said as he walked out the rear door of Mama Aquarone's, which shut behind him. While it was at least 80 degrees in the dead of night, it felt like a pleasantly cool mist washed over him compared to the inside heat. He'd soon get used to it and feel hot again. The light-up car topper was still on the roof of his blue Ford, so he flipped that on and climbed in.
He dropped the pizza into the passenger seat, and the smell of sizzling meat drowned out any other scent in the ensconced space. It normally would have appetized him, but the suspicious context made him squirm.
Kith were obligate carnivores. Neither plant life nor mammals evolved on their native planet. They had some limited ability to digest grain and dairy, but 90 percent of their diet needed to be flesh. No wonder there are so many rumors they eat humans, he thought. His hand tried the ignition while his eyes landed on the pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview. While he'd gotten them to spice up his decrepit ride, they often made him think about how he gambled with his life when he went out. Pizza delivery was one of the riskiest professions in the country; more of them were killed on the job per year than police officers or firefighters.
The key failed to start the engine for a little longer than Sam cared for, yet the Taurus roared to life after a few good twists. Such was the power of American engineering. He shook his head. Not too long ago, Americans were worried about jobs being exported to Mexico or Japan. The wish to keep such jobs in the country had been granted in the worst way possible. While the lizards allowed manufacturers in countries they controlled to export to ones they did not, few companies were willing to carry such products, and even fewer humans bought them. The movement to sever the economy from over half the world had been catastrophic.
Out in the wastes, though, things were nearly as bad as they could get. Sam pulled onto the deserted road and turned on the radio as he found himself on State Route 111 before the end of the minute. He sank into the seat.
"We're back from commercials. Once again, I'm Art Bell, coming to you live from the high desert and great American Southwest on Coast to Coast AM." It sounded like the voice spoke directly to him as Sam accelerated down the road, which only had one lane going each way. "Our last caller had a truly fascinating experience where a spirit guide revealed to her that the kith actually come from another dimension instead of another planet. If anyone has their own experiences to share about that, or something else entirely, the lines are open."
Sam didn't believe a lot of stuff which people called into Art about (and, to his credit, Art didn't seem to believe everything, either). Even in a world where aliens turned out to be real, some topics, like the bottomless pit in a guy's back yard or vaccines being used for mind control, were dumb. But other things, like ghosts, psychics, and cryptids? Why couldn't those be real in this crazy universe? Even if they weren't, he found the program more entertaining than anything else on at that time of night. Sam let it wash over him as he quickly got out of town and took in the lay of the land.
The highway was pretty much dead despite being the only land route to kith territory in the region. Sure, it was the middle of the night, but this was one of maybe three or four border crossings in the state, with the others lined by roadblocks, cordoned off by fences and walls, or blown into craters. The next closest was probably Interstate 15, which must have been 100 miles west. As for the surroundings, it was what he'd lived with all his life: a massive flat, dusty landscape marked with scrub and occasional palm trees. The Salton Sink may have been terrestrial, but it made him think of Mars sometimes. At least the local body of water, even if rancid, was enough to support some plant life. Otherwise, it was bone dry. The town he lived in was called "Mecca" because it looked like Arabia. A holy city, though, this Mecca was not.
The road turned south, making him think about how the land changed the closer to the equator one got. Not just into other natural environments, but unnatural ones. A decade of kith terraforming had done bizarre things to the Earth. In the background, Art and a caller went on at length about how the government knew the kith were coming since the 70s and didn't do anything about it.
Sam barely needed to focus on anything other than the road and not nodding off. Despite having never driven this far (at least not in the 10 years), he didn't need directions. State Route 111 ran right through Mecca, and from there, it was a straight shot to his destination. Still, if he needed them, he'd consult the bundle of maps in the glove compartment. He shook his head slightly. In the 80s, when Sam was still in school, he remembered people talking about a plan to put satellites in orbit that would give cars immediate information about where they were and digital maps about where to go next. Kessler syndrome put an end to those dreams.
Dreams. Those were what almost came to him as he drove. Rarely went out that late, and he began to zone out. The cold air current and gentle radio noise combined to make him far sleepier than he should have been. Sam barely snapped awake in time when he saw the chain link border gate racing toward him. Rather, he barreled toward it at lethal speeds! His foot slammed onto the brake, and he skidded to a halt with the hood inches away from impact. His poor car thudded its rear onto the ground. Sam's heart thudded in his chest. The lucky dice jangled in the rearview. Once again, his gambling paid off.
Sam looked to his left, where a small, plain booth held a single occupant. An older man, perhaps 60, looked at him calmly from the interior, unperturbed by what he'd just witnessed. Or maybe he was just as tired. The droning vibrations of the air conditioning put Sam to sleep in his house (and car), and it'd be just as easy in one of the few shelters in the wastes. He turned off Coast to Coast AM and reluctantly cranked down the window a crack. Hot, sticky air tainted with the faint smell of sulfur invaded the cabin.
"Hello, sir," Sam spoke loudly so he could be heard over the blasting AC in both their cubicles.
"Hello," the border guard replied not quite loudly enough for Sam to be exactly certain he actually said that. To his surprise, the gate rumbled open before he did anything.
"Do I need to show my ID to get through?" he asked, already reaching for his wallet. "I've - I've never been to the neutral zone before."
"I don't need to see anything to let you in, but I will need to ask some questions before you get back out." A wave of panic swept over Sam about needing to file tax forms or whatever, but the man just laughed. "Don't look so scared. As long as you're an American citizen - or, frankly, a human - and aren't smuggling a lizard in the trunk, you'll be just fine." The man pointed south and spoke with some contempt, "Obviously, my cold-blooded counterpart at the Familial Hegemony border two miles down the road will turn you away if you try to go through - but why would you?"
If he expected an answer to the pointless hypothetical, he was out of luck. Sam had no plans to stick around.
"Enjoy the slice of paradise!" the guard sarcastically shouted as Sam put the vehicle in drive and continued south. Looking left and right, he saw that the chain fence, topped with barbed wire, went as far east as he could see. To the west, it couldn't have continued far before ending at the water. No idea how the salt lake was patrolled, if it was at all. The window went back up, and he kept traveling. Didn't have to go far. About a mile down the road, he saw a cluster of lights a short distance to his right. He slowed as he tried to find a street, and he eventually got to a dirt one.
Damn it. The clunker got him through a lot, but he always worried it was one bump or rattle away from giving out like an old person's heart after one pickleball match too many. He turned onto the dirt path, which remained surprisingly smooth under the tires. Still remained cautious. The few lights brightened as he rolled in.
His headlights caught a sign hammered into the ground next to the unpaved pass. It was one where different letters could be added or removed, like at a gas station. All of them in this example remained intact, though the board was caked in dust. He slowed to read it.
BOMBAY BEACH
233 FEET BELOW SEA LEVEL
LOWEST TOWN IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
POPULATION: 18 HUMAN, 33 KITH
It was a ghost town. To be fair, it had been since before the kith came. The Salton Sea wasn't the tourist destination it had been in the 50s. The salt lake had been created by a canal accident in 1905, and without much inflow, it slowly got smaller, smellier, and more saline. Sam's nose crinkled. While he couldn't smell it from most of Mecca, the stench of rotting eggs here overpowered that of fresh pizza. He didn't know how humans could stand it. Even 18 seemed like too many for a place like this.
They probably can't afford to leave, he thought as he passed the first of the houses, which were arranged in a grid pattern. Or maybe they don't want to. Sam could relate. He didn't join his family in the relative safety of San Francisco. He'd lived in Mecca since he was a baby, and he didn't want to abandon it. Not yet. In this case, though, it seemed more like the human stragglers were of the aging hippy variety who didn't care to live among society. That guess was based on the rotting art he saw in several yards as he rolled through. There was a circle of spikes, a gigantic metal banana, and a sculpture which combined a biplane with a skeletal flying fish. Not the kind of thing most HOAs would allow.
"2176 Fifth Street," he muttered as he drove closer to the Salton Sea. Even with the windows closed tight, he was still compelled to breathe through his mouth. After a minute more probing, during which he saw nobody on the street, he found his mark at the southwest side of the outpost. It was a white one-and-a-half-story bungalow, which seemed unusually tall for Bombay Beach. He hadn't seen a single building more than two stories in the entire village. The house was decrepit but not totally collapsing - paint peeled off, and the rickety television antenna swayed in the breeze. It sat across the dusty avenue from a sandy berm almost as tall as the house. Clumps of desert grass grew in the earthen embankment, which existed to protect the town from the Salton Sea on the other side in the improbable event that it flooded.
He pulled to the edge of the street, took a deep breath, grabbed the warm pie, and popped the door open. The good news was that things already smelled so bad that they couldn't get any worse. The heat, though, was oppressive. This close to the water, it was damper than the dry heat of even a few miles from the Salton Sea. He marched to the door. As he did, he noticed the silhouette of a tree behind the house. A tree made of meat. He had never seen one before and hoped to never see one again. It all but confirmed what he believed.
Sam rapped firmly on the door, which could have been destroyed with a single good kick. He moved his head closer, hearing someone shuffle. He stepped back, stood straighter, and braced himself for the overwhelming likelihood that he was about to speak to an alien for the first time in his life. The door swung open, allowing him to see the occupant. Much as he tried to keep his cool in the heat, Sam still felt his stomach drop.
It was a lizard.
Sam tried not to stare. That was rude. Scary as the kith were to humans, that was more because of the collective trauma they inflicted. Individually, they weren't that intimidating. Sure, they had sharp claws. Yeah, they had sharper teeth. But they were also pretty small. This one came up to his chest. That made it five feet tall at most. Probably closer to four and a half. Of course, he spoke as an able-bodied adult man in his prime. To older people, kids, people with physical disabilities, and many (though certainly not all) women, fighting one in close quarters would have been a nightmare. It'd be like wrestling a small crocodile where every move it made could sever an artery.
Based on the dull blue scales, he believed this one to be female, though he couldn't tell for certain. Kith didn't have secondary sexual characteristics the way humans did, aside from females having wider hips. He couldn't be certain about that part because she, thankfully, wore clothes. That was a human custom they'd adopted. Not that he complained, but it was surreal to see one wearing sweatpants and an NSYNC t-shirt, though some small holes had been poked in the rear by the row of small spines running down its back.
"You, um, ordered a pizza?" he said slowly, trying to make sure she comprehended. It was probably unneeded. She understood what he said if she spoke good enough English to order.
"I did. Thank you," she rasped. The voice sounded female, even as it also sounded like a snake. Speaking of which, her forked tongue shot out of its reptilian snout to probe the air. Presumably, it was used to the terrible stench and only detected the delicious meaty odor. He slid the pizza out of the lined case, and the kith snapped her jaws together slightly. Maybe that was their version of excitement or a watering mouth. Her two large, dark eyes fixed on the food, which he quickly handed over. She took it with one hand, and it looked almost comically large compared to her frame. With the other, she removed a premeasured amount of money and reached out.
Sam didn't want to touch her hand, but he wasn't cold enough to tell her to set it down. He hesitated for longer than he should have, so she lowered her head. Didn't know what the gesture meant - he wasn't versed in their body language, despite his guesses. He made contact with her scales for the briefest of moments. With that, the transaction was concluded. Nothing left to do but leave.
He leafed through the money while walking, just to confirm she paid correctly. He'd heard kith right over the border often traded with American dollars or Mexican pesos instead of... whatever currency they were supposed to use. The "dakna," he believed it was called. Her having American tender made enough sense. While weathered, Washington, Lincoln, and Hamilton all looked legit. He'd give her the benefit of the doubt that it was real and not counterfeit. If it was good enough to fool him, it'd pass muster anywhere he spent it. He pocketed it, though everything except the tip would be delivered to Miss Aquarone the next day.
He slid into his car, still cooler than the outside because of lingering cold air, and turned the key. A weight lifted from his shoulders. I can go home.
Nothing happened.
He wrenched it a few more times to no effect. Sam's stomach fell as a horrible realization dawned on him. The battery finally died. He was stuck.
His body shook. He'd need to buy a new battery. That wasn't cheap, but he had enough money to cover the repairs. Far more dire were when and where he found himself stranded. Alone at night in an alien land. He felt like a soldier trapped behind enemy lines. He stepped out of the vehicle once again and paced circles around it. He didn't own a cell phone, and even if he did, there was no way one could have gotten a signal from the lowest, most podunk town in the hemisphere! The closest phone was one he didn't want to use, yet he saw no other option.
He trudged toward the house before he changed his mind and knocked on the door again. Sam fidgeted. A rustling came from within as the lizard answered the door again. She tried to block the view, but he caught a glimpse of the opened pizza box on a small table.
"Did I not pay enough?" she asked, sounding concerned.
"It's not that," he assured her. He waved at his Taurus. "My car is broken. Would... would it be all right if I used your phone? I need to call someone."
She looked behind her, as if worried about what he would find inside. Maybe there was a dead body. Too late to back out now, though. He'd rather take his chances with her than wander around asking strangers or trying to walk a mile back to that border patrol guy.
"Yes, come in." She opened the door wide enough for Sam to get in, though no wider. "I am sorry about your car..." She turned, allowing him to see her tail move out of the way for him.
"It happens," he muttered as he entered her home. "Thank you," he added. He didn't want to sound ungrateful, yet he would rather have been anywhere else. The night couldn't be over quickly enough.