“Oh, whatever,” I said, still feeling a little dizzy. “It’s not like you haven’t gone through half my closet for your weird sex clients.”
“My clients are not weird, Ollie. They’re lonely, which is what I’m going to be after I murder you for stealing my shit.”
“They gotta be a little weird to be paying for cowgirl porn,” Sam muttered.
“Do you want me to beat you to death with my helmet? I’ll beat you to death with it,” Lulu said, still clutching the large helmet in her hands.
Sam grinned. “Well, it would be Oliver’s helmet now, wouldn’t it?”
“Where’s Miguel Mustache?” Rosita asked as she and Ariceli walked up.
That stopped our bickering. Sam quickly recounted what’d happened as we walked back to the farm.
As he recounted what had happened, we received word that Miguel Mustache was already in the medical unit and that he’d be okay as long as we kept any infections at bay. But he would need at least a month to recover.
None of us said out loud what we were all thinking. What would happen if the farm was overrun? How would he be able to run if he was passed out?
And that thought extended to not just Miguel, but to all of the older farmers. They wouldn’t be able to run. There was nowhere to go. It was an uncomfortable thought.
The scooters Rosita and Ariceli had been riding stood on their own and trailed alongside us, humming with power and pulling the trailers as Cindy the pig grunted and the chickens clucked. Despite our victory, we remained mostly silent, morose.
Plus, that one streamer…the Julie Experience. She had seen us before she’d been destroyed. They’d all seen the honeybees. They would be back looking for us. If one looked at the map, our location was impossible to miss. The next attack would be at home.
Soon thereafter, the Moderator buzzed overhead. The Gonzales farm went up in a massive explosion. A minute afterward, another set of distant pops suggested what was left of the Yanez farm had also gone up.
Even if we did survive this, what then? They were destroying everything. What would happen if we actually won? What would we do? Everything was gone.
“What’s that?” Sam suddenly asked, pointing up in the air. An intermittent light appeared in the night. It moved lazily, drifting downward. It was something big with blinking green and yellow lights on each corner.
Something was falling from the sky. It was going to land on the road right in front of us.
My heart stuttered.No. Not now. It’s too soon.
But a moment later, Roger chimed in.
“Odd. It is a supply crate from Apex. Do not approach it.”
The crate was descending with a pair of parachutes. We all stopped dead on the road to watch it. Multiple drones suddenly appeared, coming from behind us and from the direction of the farm and forming a circle around where the large crate would land.
“Guns ready,” I said upon seeing how large the giant box was. The damn thing was big enough to house two Attenuators. Or a dozen RMI soldiers. Or it could just be a massive bomb. If it was, we were much too close.
I moved off the side of the road. To my right, the newly erected outer fence of our own property stood, and there was a small drainage ditch between the fence and the road. We all dove in. Rosita crouched down next to me. Her face was covered with dirt.
“Maybe we should run,” she said.
I shook my head. “No time.”
She leaned into me to brace herself. “We left Cindy out there.”
Sure enough, the scooter dragging the cart with Cindy the pig had stopped in the middle of the road along with the other scooters.Cindy stood within the confines of the cart, grunting indignantly because she and the chickens were suddenly alone on the road.
“If it is a bomb and we survive, at least we’ll be eating good tonight,” Sam muttered from my left. “We should have at least grabbed a few chickens to save.”
“If that whole crate is a bomb, it’s not going to matter where the chickens are,” Lulu said.
I took a quick glance over my shoulder, second-guessing my decision not to just haul ass out of here. Beyond the fence stood my ruined grain fields filled with land mines. There was supposedly a path through them marked with yellow rocks, though I couldn’t be sure we’d see the path in the dark. The EMP mines wouldn’t explode in the traditional manner, but if one of us accidentally stepped on one, we’d get the shock of a lifetime. And the other side of the road was just acres and acres of an untended apple orchard that was overrun with weeds and plica bushes.
“Heads down!” I called.
