The convoy slowed. My bracelet crackled.
“Trixie 2 is approaching. She will enter the first truck,” came Roger’s voice.
“I’ve never fired a gun before,” Sam said a minute later after we had started to pick up speed.
He was nervous, just saying what was on his mind. It was a dumb thing to say, yet I’d been thinking the same thing.
“None of us have,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “I guess not.”
Roger told us there would be rifles in the civil defense bunker. Ancient pulse rifles. It was unclear if they’d be strong enough to pierce the printed armor of the mechs or if they even worked at all. Probably not. Nobody had guns except the sheriff and his deputies, and they used old-fashioned gunpowder-style weapons.
We all had plenty of experience with video games, and we were pretending like that would be enough.
They’re going door-to-door,Roger had said.
The more we drove, the more scared I became.
I thought of the small town of Burnt Ends, of the shops. Of the diner built inside the shell of an ancient scorched landing vessel fromHibiscowith the red-and-white-checkered tables and the Earth jukebox. Of Lucinda, the nice waitress who always gave me a slice of apple pie.Farmers are the backbone of the whole planet,she’d say.You need toeat.She’d put her hand on my shoulder and give it a little squeeze, remarking about how big I was getting.
Was she okay? What about everyone else?
I thought of the sheriff. Paunchy old Sheriff Jake, who always won the annual chili cook-off with his Supernova Extreme Barn Burner. Where was he? I could just picture him stepping out onto the street to face a group of giant war machines with nothing but his chemical pistol. How could that have ended in anything but tragedy?
The trucks slowed.
“We are approaching town,” Roger said, voice crackling over my bracelet. “Two kilometers to our target. Trixie 2 will perform another reconnaissance before we proceed. Everyone put your earpieces in. Maintain radio silence unless absolutely necessary. I do not know the capabilities of the hostiles, but we should assume they can detect the location of outgoing signals and possibly shut them down.”
I pulled an earpiece off the bracelet and stuck it into my ear.
“It’s too bad we don’t have the Earth systems,” Sam muttered as he struggled with his earpiece. “Full text. Translation. You can just think it, and it appears on an HUD screen.”
“These aren’t meant for this sort of thing,” I said, rearranging the earpiece. “They had military-grade ones even before, but I doubt they have anything like that in the defense bunker. No, just do one ear, remember? He said we only do one ear.”
“Oh, yeah,” Sam said, sticking the second back into the bracelet.
I rolled down the window as we waited. I couldn’t see anything but the back of the transport in front of us. That and empty, flat fields to my left and right filled with knee-high weeds waving back and forth in the wind.
I had a quick memory of jogging through this same field once years ago. Sam and I, both about ten or eleven years old. We’d been running, chasing after a loose goat that we thought we’d spied through the glass of our transport. We’d both hopped out into the mud, running and screaming and laughing as we rushed through theweeds. Mr.Locke had lost all his goats a few days earlier after one of them had toppled the fence, and he was offering a bag of pears to anyone who found one. We’d run and run with my grandfather hollering at us from the road to come back. We’d never found the goat.
I took a deep breath through the open window. I could sense it. The wrongness in the air. The stench of something burning. I swallowed. The air was normally sweet, mixed in with the scent of rain and the distant, barely noticeable odor of farm animals from the Tibbit ranch and all the others on the other side of the river.
But now the sense of danger was palpable.
Ahead, the sound of something mechanical suddenly whirred. Next to me, Sam stiffened.
This wasn’t a mech, but the familiar sound of a heavy-duty off-road hauler moving at full speed. At the same moment, the hopper bed behind me clanked as the drones within started to move.
Before I could question it, Roger crackled in my ear. “Exit the vehicle immediately and run west. You have an incoming hostile on the ground, ETA forty-five seconds.”
Chapter 9
Sam and I just looked at each other for a half second before we both scrambled out of the truck. Lulu was already outside, cigarette dangling from her mouth, and she was helping Rosita out as the Serrano brothers both jumped out behind us.
“This way!” Lulu called, running. We all jumped from the raised roadway and splotched on the field. Lulu, the shortest of us by far, practically disappeared in the weeds. We ran toward a distant line of trees. Just beyond that was the bank of the Pantano River. If whatever the hostile was followed us to the river, we’d get trapped. We’d have to jump in.
I glanced north toward Burnt Ends, and all I could see was the tops of the radio towers and several plumes of smoke. There was something wrong with the town’s skyline, but I couldn’t immediately place what it was. Behind us, multiple honeybees were all clambering out of the hoppers, getting themselves clear of the trucks and scattering in all directions. The lead hopper, now empty of all its honeybees, started pulling forward down the road on its own, leaving the others idling.
