He didn’t know what would happen after he retrieved the vaporizer. She hadn’t said she’d stay with him. But the fact she’d fixed him up with a bike and mentioned they should find a store to get food for Kevin andthemseemed promising.
They left the quad for a wider thoroughfare. Within a minute, he spotted a sprawling building set among tall grasses. She braked by a tall cylinder and pointed to the building across the street. “This is the school.”
Rok nearly fell off the bike at the sight of the school sign. He leaped off, letting the bike topple, and sprinted across the road.
“The vaporizer is in here,” Chloe was saying as she dug through the trash. “Found it! Rok? Rok? What are you doing?”
Heart pounding, he stared at the sign.
Chloe and Kevin came up beside him. “What are you looking at?”
“My brother’s alive!” He pointed to the writing scrawled over the marquee. “Grav wrote that.”
Chapter Fourteen
No wonder she hadn’t been able to read the graffiti—it had been written in an alien language. “What does it say?” she asked.
“It’s over,” he said.
“Over? What to do you mean?”
“The Earth campaign is over. Progg-Res has conceded defeat. The command ship returned home.”
“The Progg are gone?” she asked incredulously, her heart thudding. “Gone for good?”
He nodded.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because Grav says so. As an aide to the Earth campaign commander, he’s in a position to know.”
“Butyou’rehere. And I nearly got killed by a Progg in St. Louis.”
“We were…left behind. With communications down, many are probably unaware the General Ministry called off the campaign.” His expression turned grim. “This explains why we lost contact with other units. If we can’t ping a signal off the command ship, we can’t communicate.”
“Then, how would your brother know?”
“They would have notified him the ship was leaving.”
Earth communications were down, too, thanks to the Progg, so there was no way to get a big-picture view of the situation. But she’d walked and ridden hundreds of miles, a thousand miles, passing through once-vibrant cities turned into ghost towns. In the early days of the invasion while there’d still been internet and TV, she’d seen entire city populations vanish in the blink of an eye. New York City. Los Angeles. Washington, D.C. Houston. Tokyo. Auckland. London. Moscow. Beijing.
And now there was no electricity. No planes flew overhead. Very few survivors. The trio had been the first people she’d encountered in months.
“Why retreat? You won.” She gestured at the deserted street, dented cars scattered helter-skelter, the overgrown landscaping, weeds popping up through sidewalk cracks. “Do you see any people here other than me?”
“Do you see any other Progg?” he replied in a quiet voice.
“I encountered one a few days ago in St. Louis. I assumed the regiments moved on to vanquish another area.”
Slowly, he shook his head. “They died.”
Dead? The invaders were dead? Her jaw dropped. “What?”
“Before communications shut down, we’d heard from other units, men were getting sick and dying. Then the men in my unit fell ill and died. I’m the only one left alive.”
“That’s when you decided to look for your brother.” She’d thought it was odd he’d just walked away from his unit.
“Yes.”
