“How could it find you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s been following us.”
Topher takes off his knitted hat and scratches his head under his tiny ponytail, tucking the hat into his weapon belt. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that what you think happened is true,” he says.
“Okay.”
“It can only be bad. If this Nahx developed some kind of interest in you for whatever reason, its motives can only be hostile.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a Nahx,” Topher says, exasperated. “What kind of creature would try to annihilate an entire species, destroy a civilization, then take benevolent interest in one ordinary girl?”
Rather than protest that he called me “ordinary,” I let it hang there between us for a moment.
“I should take you back to the barn, or back to the base,” Topher says.
“What? What for?”
He steps closer to me and leans over to speak in my ear. “If there is a Nahx following you, even if it means you no harm, what do you imagine its plan is for the rest of us?” This gives me pause. I hadn’t thought of this. “I think we should talk to Liam about it,” Topher says.
“Liam? Are you joking? He’s a half-wit.”
“He’s still our commander on this mission.”
“Ugh, Toph. We’re not the army. He’s not really a commander. It’s all just cosplay.”
“With live ammo and a real alien enemy. There has to be some kind of order, don’t you think?”
He has a point. But Liam knowing about the Nahx can only be bad. He will send me back, or accuse me of colluding, or worse. Either way, he’s not likely to let me continue on the mission. And I’m not going to leave Topher.
“Look, forget it,” I say.
“Raven . . .”
“No, I mean it. Forget it. There’s no way I’m going back to the base. We have a plan. Look for survivors. Look for supplies. That is the only thing keeping me from completely cracking up.” I glance over and see Topher frowning at me. “Don’t tell Liam, please?”
“Fine, but stay close to me.”
I give him a friendly shove. “Why? You scared?”
It sounds like a joke, but I know it’s true. We’re both scared. I steel myself for what we will find today. And Topher doesn’t reply to my joke as we walk on in a silence so persistent it starts to feel brooding.
“Tucker would want me to protect you,” he finally says.
God. That doesn’t really help.
The first thing we see is the sign welcoming us to Calgary. POPULATION 1.1 MILLION AND GROWING! it proudly proclaims.
Liam poses in front of the sign, a stupid grin on his face. Several of the other soldiers laugh as they record it with Liam’s camera. I don’t find it very funny, especially as we pick through the rubble of bombed houses and streets.
Leaving the surface streets, we march down onto a wide freeway, which cuts into the city like a canyon. High stone walls rise on either side of us, giving us a small amount of cover, but I still feel horribly exposed. The sky is bright and blue, and though there is no wind, it is bitterly cold. The quick march is all that keeps me from freezing where I stand. After a few minutes we come upon some cars strewn untidily over the road, like children’s toys.
There are remains in each car, each precisely punctuated with a dart to the forehead, each perfectly preserved. Liam pops open the hatchback of one of the cars. It is piled with boxes of food, bottles of water, clothes, and blankets—provisions for an escape that was never made. “Jason!” he says to one of his recruits. “When we’re done, come back this way and clean this all out into the car with the most fuel. Then . . . borrow it.”
“Check,” says Jason without adding what I’m sure we’re all thinking: If we get out of this alive.
We reach a wide tunnel, where the highway travels under the city streets, and march into it, clicking on flashlights. The tunnel is dark and cold, unlike our underground home, but it is flat, and surprisingly empty. We plod along in the dark, silent but for the sloshing of our boots.
“Anyone remember where this goes?” Liam says. “I don’t think this was built last time I was here.”
Mandy answers. “It comes up near the Stampede grounds, I think.”
“What else is around there? Is there a mall?”
“No,” she says. “But Shoppers is there.” She closes her eyes and points around in the lost world she is imagining. “To the west of the grounds, down from the overpass.”
After a few minutes the light changes, and soon we reach a curve that leads to the tunnel exit. Another tunnel snakes off in one direction, and a ramp climbs up to the ground level. Liam turns and walks backward.
“We need to check out the store,” he says, pointing up the ramp.
Sawyer stops him. We all fall in behind him. “What?” Sawyer says. “We’re starting on the other side of the river. Their neighborhood.” He thumbs toward me and Topher. “We take the other tunnel. It goes under downtown.”
Liam sneers at us. “The mission is to look for survivors and to scope out food and supplies, not to visit their friends. The most likely places are here in the downtown core. It had the highest density. It’s the farthest from the firebombed areas. And there are a lot of places to hide. We can scope the suburbs next.”
He’s infuriatingly right. The downtown area is riddled with deep, spiraling underground parking garages and shopping malls. They’re prone to filling with water during storms but perfect places to hide during a bomb attack. As close as we had to public bomb shelters in more peaceful times. And to hide from a species that has admitted they prefer high elevations, what better place than underground? I look at my camp mates. None of them seems to be able to form an argument.
Liam looks smug. “Volunteers to scout?” he says.
My hand shoots into the air.
EIGHTH
I watched the other Eighth burn and those who shot and burned him march smartly back to the compound like nothing happened. I lay on the road behind the car, watching the flame that burned hot and blue. Eighth didn’t move. I don’t know whether the shot in the neck killed him or the fire, but I knew he wouldn’t get up. In theory our armor is fireproof, but this was something else, something more than fire. They were done with him. They weren’t going to bring him back. I wonder why he didn’t run. He must have known that they’d come for him, they’d kill him. It was almost as if . . .
I twitched then, under the car, and a sliver of light appeared in my mind, as though I glimpsed something behind a door. I carried that sliver with me along the dark road back to the city. There were humans. I saw humans. I saw something so beautiful it doesn’t have a name. But I wandered away. It’s hard to focus without the buzzing directives. My mind leaps above the sludge with insights that seem to come from nowhere. There is more than one way to be free, I think, as the image of the other Eighth burning with blue fire plays back behind my eyes. I don’t have to do this. I can walk away.
I’m free, I sign to myself. I’m defective.
Dead. Stopped.
It is quiet now. I think the mission is finished. The humans are finished. I’ve been pressed into a dark corner, between a brick wall and a large metal box for I don’t know how long. I’m too scared to move.
I put my hands over my eye mask to shut out the day and try to see the sliver of light I saw by the car. I try to peel it open and look past it, but I can’t. After a few hours it presses closed and is gone.
RAVEN
In the end five of us go. Liam feels a tight-knit team works better together. Or maybe he wants to get rid of us. Either way, myself, Topher, Xander, Sawyer, and Mandy are to scout the downtown core for forty minutes and return with our report. The rest will wait in the tunnel for our return. If we don’t return after an hour, two scouts come after us. If they don’t return, the mission is a bust, I guess.
When we leave the tunnel, cautiously emerging into the daylight, Sawyer sigh
s theatrically.
“Ahhhhh, feel that? Hear it?” he says. “That’s the sound of the world’s biggest plonker receding in the distance.” He leans over and speaks directly into the camera Liam reluctantly permitted Mandy to strap to her helmet. “Did you hear that, Commander?”
The five of us giggle all the way up to the surface roads. We emerge, as expected, due south of the stadium. Snowdrifts pile up against the glass doors. We move forward to investigate, snow up to our thighs. Behind the glass doors is a scene I should be used to by now. Undecayed and decayed remains dot the wide entranceways and stairs.
“They tried to hide here, I guess,” Xander says.
We continue, hugging the west side of the high stadium walls. Hundreds of cars are parked in a seemingly endless parking lot. Most of them, for a change, are empty. Sawyer opens the gas tank on a few of them and checks the contents.
“There’s a lot of fuel here,” he says. “We need to think of how we can get it back to the base. We should have come here weeks ago.”
“We were waiting to be rescued,” I say. “Shelter in place. Remember?” It almost sounds funny now.
On the other side of the parking lot, down a narrow street from the pedestrian overpass, as promised, is Shoppers, one of the ones that claims to have a large “food essentials” section. Its front windows are intact, but the door is locked, and no bodies are visible through the glass. Outside the glass are two bodies, and unbelievably, two rifles and two pistols, still loaded.
There’s something unspeakably sad, I think, about two men spending their last minutes on Earth guarding food that no one will ever eat, medicines and drugs that no one will ever use. Then I remember this store could hold the goods vital for the survival of the base and silently thank the two dead guards, while Sawyer and Xander help themselves to their guns.
“Let’s check this out and then poke around a bit farther into town,” Sawyer says. He jangles the locked door. “Stand back.”
The next second, one of the windows comes crashing down with a deafening cascade of glass. We step through.
“Right, pair up. Topher with Xander, Rave with me. Mandy, you stand watch; you’re the best shot. Scope out the entire store. Exits, entrances, hidey-holes, the back room, bathrooms, everything. If the whole crew comes back here, we will need at least an hour uninterrupted. I want to know this place inside out.”
Sawyer and I head left to the end of the store, while Topher and Xander head right. Mandy stands with two guns raised at the front of the store.
Sawyer leads us down the first aisle, casually perusing the shelves. He begins to pocket things. I look at him, eyebrows raised. “Matches,” he says.
“We should look for medications, too,” I say, thinking of the list Mandy has given us all. “Insulin, penicillin, sedatives, and, uh . . . and hearing aid batteries and—”
Sawyer raises his hand to stop me. “Right. But trust me about the matches.”
I quickly stuff as many into my thigh pockets as I can. Then we move on.
We reach the end of the store. There are two double doors to our left. I poke my head through, noting a storeroom lined with packed shelves, and a large rolling door to the back.
“Exit there, closed,” I say, letting the doors swing shut with a rusty squeak.
We turn and head down the next aisle. It seems to be picnic type food in all colors and textures and sizes of glass jars and plastic bags.
“Condiments,” Sawyer says, turning down the aisle. “God, I’ve missed Tabasco.” He slips a bottle into his pocket.
As we head down the aisle, there’s a noise behind us. I turn to look, but Sawyer doesn’t notice.
“Olives!” he says. When I turn back to him, he’s opening a jar and popping small black olives into his mouth.
I hear the noise again. This time I recognize it as the rusty creak of the swinging doors.
“Wait here,” I whisper, and tiptoe back to the end of the aisle. Poking my head around, I see the swinging door. Still. Nothing there.
I turn back to Sawyer. He’s grinning and shoveling olives into his mouth as I jog back to him.
“Anything?” he says with his mouth full.
“When we come back, we’ll need to post guards on that door.”
We reach the end of the aisle and are back in the front of the store. I look over to where we left Mandy. She’s not there.
My throat gets tight, and I grab Sawyer by the wrist and pull him back into the aisle.
“Where’s Mandy?” I whisper.
Sawyer puts the half-eaten jar of olives back on the shelf among some jars of baby food. He draws both his guns, and quietly, muffling the sound inside his jacket, clicks the safeties off.
I draw my own pistol and do the same.
“Under the chin,” I whisper, through teeth clenched with the effort of not chattering. Sawyer pokes his head around the end of the aisle and takes a look. He curses under his breath as he ducks back. We stand there, straining to hear. I hear footsteps crunching through the broken glass.
“Did we see any hidey-holes?” Sawyer whispers with a wry look. I shake my head.
“Can we get into the back room?”
Just then we hear heavy footsteps in the aisle next to us. I desperately want to call out Topher’s name, but I know better. Sawyer puts a finger to his lip and points down to the bottom of the shelves. I carefully slip down to the floor and turn to look under the small gap between the shelf and the floor.
There are four sets of Nahx boots there. I turn up to Sawyer, and the look he gives back to me is more apologetic than anything else. He points to me, then to the back of the store where the storeroom is. I shake my head, NO. He points to his shoulder angrily. He’s not properly uniformed, but if he were, that is where his lieutenant’s insignia would be. He points at me again, forcefully, then to the back of the store. I look at him and I suppose my eyes must show some acquiescence. Good-bye, he mouths. He holds up four fingers, three fingers, two, one.
I leap up and run in one direction while he runs in the other, yelling profanities at the top of his lungs. I slam through the swinging doors as I hear four gunshots and then the whine and thunk of three dart guns.
Then silence. Sawyer is dead, I think. I squeeze my eyes shut. Tears will blur my vision. I need my vision.
I press my back against the dirty wall. Looking to my left I see a small open door, behind which is a toilet. I’m not hiding in the toilet again. An exit is what I need. I poke my head around a tall shelf to the rolling door at the back.
It is now open, and a Nahx transport is parked in the loading bay.
My heart is pounding. How did they know we’re here? How did we not hear them? I don’t want to consider that it was the Nahx from the trailer. Maybe he has been following us all this time, leading us into a trap. I can’t think that.
I crawl back over to the swinging door and poke my head up to look through the grimy glass windows. There are no Nahx in my field of vision. None of my friends, either. Where are Topher and Xander? Did they find a hidey-hole on the other side of the store? Or another exit?
Run, I think. This is not the time to hide. I need to run back to the others. Find Topher first and get the hell out of there. This mission is a bust. Sawyer is almost certainly dead and so is Mandy, if she didn’t give the signal. The Nahx must have seen us coming. They must have been watching all this time.
Silently, I slip through the swinging doors, easing them closed so that they don’t squeak. Now I’m back in the main store. I poke my head into the aisle where I left Sawyer. It’s empty. I stand still, straining to hear anything. Down the end of the aisle I can see two more transports silently hovering outside the broken glass door. How can they be silent? I’ve heard their engines wailing before. This must be some kind of muffler or noise-canceling thing.
My eyes sting. Now I know I’m dead too; we all are. I edge my way along the back of the store until I can poke my head down the next aisle.
Sawyer�
�s body lies there, down the end, two darts in his chest and a pile of tumbled, broken jars around him. The smell of vinegar makes me nauseous.
At least he got to eat a few olives before he died is the stupid thing that pops into my head. The next thing I think of is Topher, and how losing him will feel. He’s not perfect, but he doesn’t deserve this. He should be searching for his parents, or back at the base shagging some willing girl. Or on his vengeance quest, at least, in Tucker’s name.
I tiptoe down the aisle to Sawyer’s body. He lies on his back, eyes open, staring at nothing, a pistol still clutched in one hand. My mind fills with dead friends: Felix, and Tucker, and Lochie, and Mandy. I’m never going to see any of them again. I’m probably never going to see anyone again. I pull one of the darts out of Sawyer’s chest, break the sharp tip off, and pocket it. This seems to make sense. I ease the safety back on his pistol and tuck it into my jacket.
Edging back, out of sight of the transports in the front windows, I walk the length of the aisle. It takes forever, since I have to move like a ghost to prevent the matches from rattling in my pockets. Every muscle is clenched with the effort of remaining silent. When I reach the top of the aisle, I hear the heavy footfalls of at least three Nahx. They are feet away from seeing me. Quickly, I lie down on the floor, facedown. At the last minute I pull the dart out of my pocket and wedge it under my neck. I close my eyes and hold my breath. Hopefully, there is more than one team in here. Hopefully, they don’t have some way to communicate who they have and haven’t killed. Hopefully, they won’t shoot me again for good measure, the way they did with Felix.
Now I know the meaning of hope. It’s what tethers you to the land of the living. Lose that and you die.
The heavy footsteps turn down the aisle. They approach slowly and stop above me. One of them nudges my thigh. I tense my neck muscles to keep the dart wedged. Everything inside me is screaming, praying they won’t notice that there are no black veins on my neck. I count to myself to keep from exploding. It feels like I’ve been holding my breath forever. Finally, the footsteps move away. I follow the sound of them to the far end of the aisle and exhale gently when they disappear. I lie there for a long time. It feels like an hour. Finally, I dare to open my eyes and move. I crawl down the aisle again, past Sawyer’s body, and peek out to the front window.
Zero Repeat Forever Page 14
