Pulling the clutch level while kicking the shifter into first gear, Zeke hesitantly rolled the bike towards the wall. It took another urgent squeeze from Noah to force him to pull on the throttle.
And then they were off.
Noah must have requested the gate to open ahead of time, because the black metal exit was steadily rising in front of them. Just in time, he noticed that there was a holding space within the body of the wall, and slammed on the brakes, sending them skidding.
As soon as they were inside, the interior gate slid back down, locking them in. Absolute darkness enveloped them. He fumbled around to find the bike’s lights, but a few seconds later, the gate in front of them rose rapidly upwards, revealing the outside world.
The outside world. He hadn’t set foot in it for a decade.
“Go, Zeke!” Noah urged, squeezing him once again with his left hand while pointing forwards with the barrel of his machine gun.
Ready or not, here I come.
Zeke kicked the bike back into life, speeding onto the wide-open carriageway, jaw clenched, eyes set straight ahead. Noah remotely controlled his helmet for him—a map overlay appeared, red arrows pointing out a suggested route.
“Are the types going to be on us straight away?”
“Let me worry about them. You just need to follow the road and ignore everything else.”
“But what if—”
“Zeke,” Noah said. “Take a breath.” Noah’s thighs clamped even harder against his, then he withdrew his arm from around Zeke’s waist to rub his back in small, slow circles. If Noah was trying to eradicate the types from Zeke’s mind, it was working.
They drove straight ahead for a while, Zeke’s speed increasing with his confidence. His heart sank, however, when his interface requested they turn off at a junction.
“It’s going to get a lot more rough from here on out. I wouldn’t try to go much above thirty. Remember what Vitt was talking about the other day—don’t blindly follow the AR arrows, trust what your eyes can see.”
“How long until we get there?”
“Only about ten minutes. We’re almost there,” Noah said, even though Zeke knew the difficult part of the journey was yet to begin.
Zeke turned off by taking a sharp left, sending dust flying up beside them. It was instantly clear what Noah meant by ‘rough’. Although the road leading up to the wall entry point was well-maintained—it needed to be, with how much it was used—the infrastructure budget only stretched so far. Large portions of tarmac were missing, requiring him to either weave his way around them or risk throwing them off the bike.
The further they travelled, the worse the conditions got. Thick overgrown patches of hedges forced him to swerve several times. Above, trees leered ominously towards them, branches outstretched, ready to snag them.
Finally, they reached the crest of a hill. The remnants of human civilization came into view. Zeke slowed to a halt.
This area hadn’t gotten off lightly in the initial round of carpet bombing, a decade ago now. In front of him was a sea of ravaged buildings. Many angrily jutted up towards the slate-grey sky, their edges jagged like half-rotten teeth. Some were reduced to their metal skeletal frames, some ashes and rubble. Looking at it now, he could almost see the smoke, almost hear the reporters narrating over the footage as drone cameras captured it for the first time. He remembered him and Zaya, silently sitting side by side, staring at screens for hours while around them their parents cried, panicked, and screamed at each other.
“It’s… quite a sight, isn’t it?” Noah said.
“Sorry.” Zeke rolled the bike forward, navigating the rough terrain of the downwards slope carefully.
“It’s a cloudy day, so expect a fair bit of activity on route from now.”
It was at the very base of the hill that he saw the first one. A dark blur of movement to his right, in a side alley.
“Noah…” Zeke croaked out.
“I’ve got you. Don’t even look at them.” Noah’s reassuring voice trickled into his ear as he squeezed Zeke tightly before letting go, turning his body away from him. Rapid vibrations from Noah’s shots buzzed through Zeke, almost throwing him off-balance. The faint echoes of inhuman cries tormented his mind as he sped on, as fast as he dared. The road was now treacherous. Debris seemed to jump out at him from the shadows, threatening to upend them at any moment. A right-turn arrow appeared on his visor. Zeke flicked the indicator.
“Who are you signalling to?” Noah said, laughing. Zeke couldn’t fathom how he could be so calm when they were mere inches away from death. “Maybe try indicating left, they might fall for it.”
After what was possibly the most terrifying ten minutes of Zeke’s life, the distance-to-goal alert ticked down to a hundred metres. They were now on a wide-open road—a dual-carriageway in its previous life. Squad E waited in a small circle ahead, their backs to each other, weapons in position. They’d parked three more motorbikes nearby, as well as a quad bike. Curiously, it was towing a trailer, with what he was fairly sure was a cement mixer in it. Zeke gritted his teeth. He was still clueless as to what a code seven-seven was.
“Alright, listen up. It’s about five hundred metres to the drain. Habib and Vitt will pour the cement.”
“We’re doing what now?” said Zeke, hoping his tone conveyed his annoyance at the lack of information.
