Human Element

by AJ Powers

  CRASH!

  The handle blasted into several pieces as the door shot open, revealing a giant that took up most of the entry. He was unarmed—a Webber—but still a threat. As if they were as equally in sync as the Webbers, Aaran and Hadas opened fire at the same time, giving the man no chance to react.

  The Webber flinched and stumbled backwards as his muscular physique absorbed blow after blow of copper-jacketed bullets. The glass windows at the front of the store shattered as Hadas’s fifty-five-grain FMJs bored straight through the man’s body and kept going. His olive-drab jumpsuit quickly saturated with blood as his body succumbed to the devastating injuries.

  Aaran was disturbed again by the lack of emotion in the man’s face when he took his last breath and crumpled to the ground. They kept their muzzles trained on the door as they both recovered from the concussive effects of Hadas’s 5.56-millimeter shots bouncing around the concrete room. The room had filled with the bitter smell of burnt gunpowder, and a heavy haze hung in the air from the smoke.

  Seconds passed, and no one else barreled through the door. Aaran looked over at Hadas. “We need to get out of here, now!”

  After a quick magazine change, Aaran walked toward the front. “Watch out!” Hadas shrieked just as he reached the door.

  A woman wearing the same style of jumpsuit spun around the corner, her hand clutching a box cutter. Aaran blocked her initial swing with his carbine and then stumbled back into the stockroom as she took another swipe. Using the momentum from her swing, Aaran grabbed her wrists and fell backwards, pulling her with him. As Aaran landed awkwardly on his backpack, he yanked on the woman’s arms and pulled his knees up to his chest. Just as the woman’s body fell onto his, Aaran kicked his legs up and launched her over his head.

  The Neurowebbing in the woman’s head was helpless to replace the oxygen that had just been forced out of her lungs from the sickening impact. Her body’s natural instincts temporarily usurped the electronic impulses issued by the Nebula, and she wheezed for air.

  Aaran scrambled to his feet and reached for his carbine, but before he could take aim, a deafening report from Hadas’s Jericho had put the woman down.

  Hadas was mesmerized by the dancing smoke pouring out of the end of the barrel. Despite talking a big game, the two dead bodies in the store were her first kills. She felt a flurry of emotions stirring inside, but instinct trumped them all. She looked over at Aaran. “You okay?” she asked, pointing to the gash on his arm.

  He glanced at it, then over at the woman. “Doing better than her,” he said before looking back up at Hadas, fear in his eyes. “Okay, now we really need to go.”

  This time, Aaran let his suppressed Scorpion lead the way into the retail portion of the store while Hadas kept close behind him. A gust of icy air rushed in through the shattered windows as they cautiously approached their only exit.

  “Hold up!” Hadas said before they’d reached the front of the store.

  Aaran looked over his shoulder. “What is it?”

  “I need my shoes,” she said as she pointed to her feet and then to the sea of sparkling glass on the ground all around the exit.

  “Go!” Aaran said with urgency as he heard another truck approaching. He stepped outside and took cover behind the box truck that the cadavers inside had been driving. The engine was getting louder. “Hurry it up, Hadas!” he shouted over his shoulder.

  “Coming!” she said as she ran across the store, her laces undone. She ran outside, heading straight for the cab of the truck. She jumped onto the step and looked in through the window. “The keys are inside!”

  “You’re joking, right?” Aaran couldn’t believe what she was insinuating.

  Hadas shook her head.

  “No. Hell, no!” he replied. “That is absolu—” Screeching tires interrupted him as the incoming truck took a sharp turn through the intersection off to their side. Aaran looked over just as it came into view. “Shoot!” he said raising his gun and pulling the trigger.

  Hadas hopped off the truck and put her Tavor to work again. Sparks flew off the cab of the truck and puffs of powdered glass erupted from the windshield, but the truck kept driving. Aaran dropped his sights down and aimed at the tires. A loud blast filled the air and an explosion of chewed-up rubber spit out from beneath the vehicle. The truck swerved for a few seconds in an effort to regain control but was unable to before it collided with a stalled-out firetruck on the side of the road.

  Before Aaran had finished processing everything that had just happened, Hadas jumped into the cab and fired up the engine. With the door still open, she leaned out and looked back at Aaran. “You coming with me or what?”

  Aaran let out a frustrated sigh. This is a terrible idea, he thought while he jogged over to the cab. “Move over!” he barked.

  He shot her a glare as he climbed into the cab and shut the door. “Buckle up,” he said as he followed his own advice and reached for the seatbelt with his right hand, keeping his left on the steering wheel. He put the truck into drive and stepped on the gas. The truck jerked forward and Aaran immediately aimed for the exit. The parking lot was filled with swimming-pool-sized potholes and enormous cracks that delivered brutal impacts to the truck and the passengers inside, impacts that became more devastating when Aaran pressed down harder on the gas pedal.

  “Easy there, Andretti,” Hadas said as she grabbed onto the handle above the door. “This thing isn’t going to do us a whole lot of good with a broken axle.”

  “It’s not going to do us much good for very long anyhow,” Aaran retorted. “You know as well as I do that this thing is lo-jacked six ways from Sunday. They know right where we are, and I imagine a whole freakin’ battalion of Sentinels are already heading our way!”

  Hadas didn’t respond.

  Aaran turned onto the road and punched the gas, hoping to at least get a few miles out of the truck before bailing out on foot. The tires slipped on the accumulating snow, causing the truck to veer out of control. He let off the gas and steered into the skid, wrangling the truck back in. After he regained control, Aaran gradually built up speed, and within a few seconds, they were storming down Main Street.

  “That was too close back there,” Hadas said.

  Aaran, intensely focused on spotting any trucks, helicopters, or tanks that would inevitably be coming their way, didn’t respond at first. “We need to be more careful,” he finally said. “Our luck is going to run out eventually.”

  “Yeah…I know.”

  Aaran’s foot stayed heavy on the gas pedal as they barreled up a hill that took them out of Hamilton. Having checked the odometer when they had pulled away from the shoe store, Aaran waited until they’d gotten to three miles before saying, “Speaking of running out of luck, I think it’s time we ditch this thing.”

  Hadas nodded.

  Suddenly, the truck lurched as it quickly accelerated. Hadas looked over at the dashboard and watched the needle creep toward seventy. “Uhm, I’m not planning on jumping out of this thing. Maybe you should slow down.” Aaran’s petrified expression tied her stomach in knots. The needle was climbing higher. “Aaran!” she raised her voice. “Slow down!”

  “I can’t, Hadas.”

  Aaran’s words spooked Hadas. She glanced in the mirror hanging from her door expecting to see a convoy of trucks in hot pursuit, but she only saw snow swirling around the asphalt in their wake. She looked back at Aaran. “You can’t? Why not?”

  Aaran let go of the wheel and emphatically stomped on the brake pedal to no effect. “I can’t stop because I am not driving the damn thing anymore!”

  Chapter 22

  “What do we do?” Hadas asked, a look of distress on her face.

  Aaran’s mind went blank. “I don’t know.”

  With the speedometer bouncing around eighty-five, jumping from the speeding truck was off the table. The odds of walking away in one piece were astronomical, but even if they managed to survive the impact, their battered bodies wouldn’t make it
half a mile before they became target practice for the Sentinels.

  Aaran grunted when he tried to take control of the steering wheel again, but the tires maintained their course. He then grabbed the shifter and put the truck into neutral, but the move had no impact on the transmission. In a last-ditch effort, Aaran reached for the key and gave it a powerful twist, snapping it off in the ignition. “Damn it!” Aaran screamed before slamming his closed fist into the dash. He ignored the throbbing pain in his hand as his eyes fixated on the crack in the plexiglass sitting between him and the gauges and dials on the board. It gave him an idea.

  He looked over at Hadas and awkwardly lifted the Scorpion up, placing the end of the suppressor up against the plexiglass. “Try not to hit me,” he said before pulling the trigger.

  The first bullet killed the lights on the dashboard, and the subsequent rounds caused a ticking sound to come from the engine compartment. Aaran’s carbine spit shells around the cab while he furiously mashed down on the trigger over and over again. He had just run dry when Hadas joined in.

  Aaran’s muffled shots had sounded like a kitten’s purr compared to her unsuppressed 5.56. His ears rang and his teeth rattled from the blast, but her rifle bullets chewed through the dashboard with much greater ease than Aaran’s nine-millimeter rounds.

  Not even ten rounds into the magazine, Hadas stopped firing when they felt the truck shudder violently. It kicked and bucked and cried for a moment and then…Nothing. The engine seized up, but they continued rolling down the road at a high rate of speed. The windshield quickly became obscured with a swirling mixture of white and black smoke pouring out from beneath the hood. The acrid smells of oil, gasoline, and burning rubber filled the cabin.

  Aaran coughed and wheezed when the fumes began suffocating him. It felt like he had just jammed a branding iron directly onto his lungs. His eyes filled with water, only adding to the chaos of his sight. He tried to roll down the windows, but they were electric and unresponsive. The world started spinning as nausea set in. With his carbine empty and lacking the mental clarity to change out the magazines, Aaran reached for his USP and shot three times at the driver door’s window.

  The smoke in the cabin was sucked out through the broken window, bringing some much-needed, albeit little relief. The smoke pouring out of the broken window was quickly replaced by more funneling in through the vents and bullet holes on the dash. Aaran jumped when he heard Hadas blast a few rounds into her window with the Tavor. They both stuck their heads out of their windows, puffing for fresh air like fish out of water.

  Aaran squeezed his eyes shut to get a reprieve from the harsh, chemical-filled smoke assaulting his vision. He wiped at them with his wrist, but it had little impact on the burn. He opened them again when he felt the truck start to bounce from the passenger’s side. The double yellow line out his window was getting further away. “Hadas! We’re going off the road!” Aaran yelled. He looked over and saw that her body had gone limp, her head and right arm still hanging out the window. She was unconscious.

  The cab shook as the right wheels slipped down the slope of the drainage ditch just off the side of the road. Aaran experienced a moment of weightlessness when the truck began to tip. The world slowed down as he looked over at Hadas, her body slipping further out the window. “Hadas!” he shouted, reaching over and grabbing her left arm. With every muscle in his body constricting to the point of pain, Aaran pulled her back into the cab just as snowy grass came into view.

  The impact was fierce and seemed to take decades to finish, but Aaran blacked out before they’d come to a stop. The ticking sound of exhaust in the frosty November air drew him back to consciousness. He hadn’t been out all that long.

  He was confused by the warm, sticky blood that was defying gravity as it flowed over his cheek to his ear, but when he opened his eyes, he was reminded that the truck was on its side. As best as he could tell, they were in a field just northwest of town. When his memory caught up with his consciousness, he remembered that he and Hadas had been kidnapped by a speeding truck.

  Hadas! Terrified, he turned his head toward her, wincing in pain with the movement. He called to her, his voice hoarse from noxious smoke.

  She didn’t move.

  “Damn it, Hadas, wake up! We need to go. Wake up!”

  A few seconds passed before she finally stirred. Her eyes fluttered open before she squeezed them shut again. She mumbled something unintelligible before she kicked her feet out and her whole body went rigid like she had just stuck her finger into an outlet. “Aaran?!” she screamed, pain and agony constricting her voice. “What happened? Where are we?” she asked frantically, her wide eyes taking in the confusing scene.

  “You’ll figure it out soon enough. Can you move?” he asked as he wiped away the blood from his face with his sleeve.

  Hadas’s shriek bounced around the cabin of the truck and she grasped at her left shoulder. Her four-letter words emphasized the pain while she attempted to use her left arm to unbuckle herself. “What the hell happened to my shoulder?” she screamed, tears running down her face.

  “It’s better than being dead.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Aaran said, careful not to fall on top of her when he unbuckled himself. He helped her out of her seatbelt before shimmying his way out the window and up on top of the driver’s door. He swung his Scorpion over his back and knelt down, reaching his hand through the window. With her left shoulder completely useless, Hadas was all but stranded without Aaran’s help. But through a series of grunts and groans, Aaran managed to pull Hadas up far enough that she could make it the rest of the way on her own.

  They stood in silence and listened for certain death approaching in the distance, but they only heard the increasing wind from the cold front blowing through. Whether the Nebula believed them dead from the crash, or maybe they lacked the men in the area, no one was following Aaran and Hadas. It was an unexpected reality since Aaran was certain that they would have already been trying to outrun a helicopter or two by now. He was uneasy about the silence surrounding them and suspected that it wouldn’t last for much longer. They had to flee the scene immediately.

  Aaran tossed his and Hadas’s backpacks to the ground before jumping down from the truck. His knees immediately buckled from the impact, and he fell to the ground—he was weaker than he realized. He quickly got back to his feet and helped Hadas down.

  “All right, let’s go,” Aaran said as he slung his backpack over his shoulders, picked up Hadas’s pack, and grabbed his USP.

  “Where?” Hadas asked as she looked around, empty cornfields on either side of the road.

  “I haven’t been out this way for a while, but I’m pretty sure if we head that way, we’ll run into Four Mile Creek before long,” he said, pointing to their right. “The creek is going to be the only way for us to cover our tracks.”

  “Okay,” Hadas said, eager to leave. “Let’s do it.”

  Both felt unnervingly vulnerable as they walked through the large field just off the side of the road. The biting cold was already getting the best of Aaran, and his fingers were starting to tingle. Off to his left was a beautiful farm house that looked like it had been built around the time of the Civil War, but had been updated with modern amenities. Aaran wanted nothing more than to run straight over to the house, toss a handful of ibuprofen down his throat, and bury himself beneath a stack of blankets. But even if there hadn’t been any snow on the ground to highlight their path to the porch, the houses in the immediate area would be the first places the Sentinels would search for them. They had to get as far away from the crash site as they could.

  Aaran’s incessant need to look over his shoulder while they crossed the field was only exacerbating the soreness he felt from the crash. With each turn of his head, he expected to see the enemy hot on their trail, their guns cocked, locked, and ready to rock. But all he saw was the smoking wreckage of the box truck sitting in the drainage ditch.


  After a twenty-minute hike that seemed to stretch for hours, they reached the creek. Though they would still be somewhat exposed from the air, they were concealed from the road. Their timing couldn’t have been any better. No sooner than they had descended into the valley did they hear the cavalry arrive.

  Astonishingly, there was a distinct absence of helicopter blades churning through the air. There were quite a few truck engines, but nothing like what he had seen back in Loveland. It was yet another odd response from the Nebula, making it impossible for Aaran to figure them out.

  They walked in total silence for over an hour before Aaran finally spoke. “How’s your shoulder?”

  Hadas was favoring the shoulder a lot. The constant, dull pain was manageable, but if she tried to move it, a searing, hot shockwave rippled throughout her entire body. “Hurts like hell whenever I move it. And walking on slick rocks sure doesn’t help matters.”

  “Hold up a second,” Aaran said as he came to a stop and took his pack off, setting it down on a large rock. He unzipped it and grabbed a sweatshirt. Positioning the shirt around Hadas’s injury, he adjusted it to cradle her arm when secured. Carefully working the sweatshirt around her body, he prepared to knot it behind her neck. Unable to tie the sleeves together without jostling her shoulder, Aaran asked, “You ready?”

  Hadas begrudgingly nodded.

  She grunted, growled, and whimpered, doing whatever necessary to suppress the shriek of agony that her body so desperately wanted to release. She panted heavily when Aaran let go of her arm and it came to a rest in the makeshift sling.

  “How’s that?”

  After a few heavy breaths, Hadas said, “Yeah, that feels okay.”

  “All right, let’s go,” he said before he retrieved both packs from the ground.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon in silence while they traveled down the winding path of Four Mile Creek. They both were busy processing everything that had happened. The Nebula’s underwhelming response was unexpected. Aaran was perplexed by the AI he thought he had understood. But as he trudged through the creek, he realized he’d never truly understood them at all.