“Interesting. Anything else?” Dex asked, finding that he did want to know. Not so he could share it with the Overseers; more out of curiosity. A dormant section of his brain wanted to see the aliens receive retaliation. He always did his part in tiny ways. Taking an extra day to answer their requests, doubling rations when he shouldn’t, just to test them. So far, no one seemed to care, and that was when he realized no one did. They were there for more than human interaction, but until this moment, Dex hadn’t thought about what that might be.
They’d been there for twenty-five years, and nothing had really changed since the first few years. Dex knew of twenty-seven manufacturing facilities in the United States alone and imagined there would be hundreds around the world. What were they doing in China, where the infrastructure would be massive? James hadn’t answered him. “Anything else?” Dex pushed.
“I caused problems they will be dealing with for months, let’s put it that way,” James said with what sounded like a smirk of satisfaction in his voice.
“Will they make you fix it?” Dex asked. This guy might be one of the few the Overseers wanted caught so they could keep him working. He was sure the rest of the Roamers he brought in were killed, and not pleasantly. They usually killed the returning Roamers in front of other workers to make a point. Dex had witnessed it a few times with rogue Hunters. He could still see Daphne’s weather-worn face as her throat was cut outside the Columbus facility. The five Hunters stationed there had to dig the grave and clean the stains when it was done.
“I suspect they will,” James said.
Dex wasn’t so sure. There had to be others in the aliens’ network that would understand the system Trent James had built.
The whining of a Seeker drone startled him. He was a hunter of Roamers, and that was what he did to survive. Nothing else mattered.
His gun was up, and he scanned the treetops, but in the darkness, he couldn’t find the source of the noise. Then he heard it.
Mechanical legs were pounding the forest floor, twigs snapping wildly. “Run!” Dex shouted, pushing James forward. The road was only a hundred yards away, and Dex fumbled for his keys as they ran. He had them in his left hand when James stumbled and fell hard, skidding to a stop at the base of a pine tree.
Dex grabbed at the man, but he was groaning, injured. It had taken all his energy to make the miles-long hike back to the car, and the Roamer was at his end.
“Shit!” Dex shouted, kicking the ground. He considered running for his car and getting out of there without James. He could let the Tracker notify the powers that be about his whereabouts.
“Help me,” Trent James whispered, and Dex saw his eyes blink open. They were wide, staring at something behind Dex.
He pulled the man up, and saw his car between the trees a short distance away. They could make it.
A bullet blasted into the tree beside Dex, and his heart leapt into his throat. The Tracker had found them.
“This is my target! I’m Dexter Lambert.” He said his full name, hating the Tracker for making him recall his parents’ surname at that moment. He wanted to make it pay. “This is Trent James, and he’s in my custody!” He was yelling, unable to lower his worked-up voice. Dex shouted his ID badge number out, for the Seeker and Tracker to hear, even though he knew they could scan him. “Your masters want this man alive. It’s in his file.”
The sound of the Seeker grew louder as it lowered from above the tree canopy. It hung in the air twenty feet up, directly between the Tracker and Dex. The Tracker watched him with glowing red eyes, its head tilting in animal mimicry. He wondered if they were always programmed like that or if it was something the aliens changed to make the robots feel more familiar to humans.
He wished the Trackers would speak to him. He knew they were intelligent, almost as if they were organic creatures. They learned and adapted, and it made them formidable foes. It was why Dex was glad they were on the same side. Right now, he wasn’t so sure they were.
It walked closer, moving on all fours. One of its guns had protruded from its back, and Dex was sweating as the muzzle of the high-powered weapon pointed toward him and James behind him. “I thought they wanted you alive,” Dex muttered through closed teeth.
“So did I,” James grunted. He was bleeding from the lip and the cloth over his stump had turned red again, dripping slowly on a pile of dead leaves by his feet. “If I don’t make it, you have to do something. I can see you want to make a difference. There are others.”
Dex’s blood went cold. Why was this man telling him this? He worked for the Overseers. He was only there to look out for himself, and he’d continue to do that. “Don’t bother,” Dex warned him, but it was too late.
“Omaha. University of Nebraska. Science Hall. Locker Three One Alpha. 01-09-27 combination. Got it?” the man’s voice was hardly audible. “Locker 31A. 01-09-27. You’ll find all you need there.”
“Shut up,” Dex said. “Just shut up.”
The Tracker was coming closer, slow, tentative steps.
“This man is under my custody. Stop where you are and let me detain the target and take him to my car.” Behind him, James was still whispering the locker number and combination. The Tracker was close, barely ten yards away. It looked larger than before, and Dex had rarely seen them from this angle. They usually remained in the distance, watching.
“University of Nebraska.” The words were so quiet, a gasp of a man knowing he’s on his way out. Dex glanced down and saw blood pooling beside James’s leg. His stump had clearly opened up, and if he didn’t receive help right away, he was going to die.
“I need to get you some help,” Dex said, stepping to the side.
The blast was instantaneous. James’ head exploded, and pieces of the man splattered across Dex’s jacket and face. He wanted to scream but couldn’t find the air.
James was dead, and the proof was covering Dex. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his leather jacket and glanced at the corpse beside him. His ears rang from the loud shot, and he looked to see the Tracker was already gone. With a quick scan in the air, Dex saw the Seeker drone had departed as well.
His back pressed against the large tree trunk. He had some seriously inside information now, something that might help fight the aliens and drones. In his startled state, he didn’t know what to do with the dead man’s last words.
Chapter 9
Cole
Cole walked through the abandoned rooms, seeing dust-covered glass cases showing what the place looked like long ago. He read the small plaques of a time estimated to be more than two hundred years before his shelter was a reinforced position in a war between America and Mexico.
He couldn’t understand why humans would fight against each other. The concept of killing another person over land or resources wasn’t completely removed from his reality, as he’d suffered confrontations with other groups more than a few times in his life, but he found the idea of actually being at war with his own kind bizarre.
He guessed they didn’t have the aliens or human collaborators to contend with. If they had, he was sure they’d see eye to eye and turn their old guns on the shiny drones and hovercraft.
Turning his mind to more immediate issues, he set to work digging loose the heavy glass covering the water well preserved as a museum piece. Cole had been taught about museums but hadn’t been inside one before. Preserving the past seemed pointless, however, seeing as humans were unable to preserve their present. Cole didn’t imagine they had much of a future either.
Everything he knew of the history of his people was that they were either too busy destroying the planet or each other to pay much attention to what was going on around them. He guessed that was probably why the world was the way it was by the time he was born.
He used the small crowbar from his pack, breaking away the crumbled mortar from the edges of the glass cover before forcing the edge of the tool underneath it and standing on it to use all of his weight on the lever. It took him a while
, most of the morning, and eventually he’d shifted it enough to create a gap large enough to stick his arms into.
Cole sat back, breathing hard after the exertion as he tossed a fist-sized stone into the dark hole. It took a couple of seconds to reach the water, making him take an involuntary shuffle away from the edge.
He pulled the bundles of twine from his pack, carefully connecting each end to the next piece with secure knots before going off in search of something to gather the precious fluid.
Another room yielded large plastic bottles, which he tediously adapted to work as pails. Ultimately lowering his creation into the dark abyss, he felt the weight of it fall away when it hit the surface of the water. He left it there for a while until the distant hint of bubbles faded to nothing, pulling gently on the cord to return it to the surface.
He lifted it up and over, cautious not to catch it on the stone lip, and made a celebratory noise as he saw two bottles containing clear liquid. He dipped his finger in one, licking the water and finding it crisp and cool with no trace of salt or chemicals. He filled all of his containers, bringing up another yield to drink until he couldn’t drink any more.
He went outside, assessing the low walls and seeing the obvious animal tracks of the small creatures that called this place part of their home. He went to the biggest, where the deeper impressions indicated a four-legged animal of a good size, and rigged a pair of wire snares into the gap in the wall where the animal entered to follow whatever patrol routine it lived by. The snares were looped above a high metal frame nearby, twice the height of a man, so that anything activating the traps would drop into the lower ground inside the wall and hopefully suspend itself.
He felt no sadness in taking the life of the abundant animals in the world he lived in, but he took no pleasure in killing anything except drones, which came as naturally as breathing.
After making a fire in a corner of one room, he stretched out on what had once been a comfortable couch, then closed his eyes and slept.
A sharp twang and a hiss of fast-moving wire woke him. His eyes went instantly wide, even as his body hadn’t moved a millimeter, but he quickly scrabbled to his feet. He ran for the sprung trap the second he realized that whatever had triggered it wasn’t dead or dying.
The whining, snarling sound was mixture of desperation and fear and the promise of violent retribution. He had to stop it from making such a racket, and quickly. Sound carried at night even more than in the daytime; something about the stillness of the air and the lack of ambient noise caused by the various wildlife being tucked up somewhere safe.
Sleeping with his boots on had been the habit of a lifetime for exactly this kind of scenario. He snatched up the shotgun, even though he had no intention of using it, transferring the gun to his left hand as he ran towards the source of the noise and silently slid the long blade from the leather sheath on his belt.
In the last dying light of the long day, he saw what had triggered his snares and was hit by a number of emotions all at once. The shaggy-coated coyote was caught by one back leg and instead of the other snare tightening around the animal’s throat, it had caught it by the upper jaw. The pained predator thrashed and whined in anguish.
He wasted no time. He stepped as close as he could safely and held the blade ready to slide it to the hilt in between the coyote’s ribs, only he stopped before he could bring himself to make the thrust.
The animal ceased fighting, instead lying still and whimpering as it stared at him with one wide eye. Cole felt a connection to the animal then; not a sense of them being on the same side by any stretch of the imagination, more that they were both just trying to survive in the same screwed-up world. Neither of them had asked for this, but both were forced to rely on their own cunning or they would simply die.
Cole shook himself out of the locked gaze and quickly pulled down the snares to let the coyote rest on the earth. He circled it carefully, not entirely sure what he was doing, and clutched the knife in his hand in case it didn’t want to let him help. Knowing he might end up bitten, and that an infected bite could mean his death, he reached tentatively towards the snare wrapped tightly on the animal’s rear leg, fully prepared to use the knife if his life was in danger but wanting to try and save the animal if he could.
A low growl came as his fingers brushed the thick coat and the animal jolted from his touch like it was electric, but it didn’t move as he deftly removed the wire loop. Blood showed through its coat, making him worry that the leg had broken and his attempts to save it were doomed. The trap wrapped around the thing’s top jaw, curling the lip up to show sharp teeth and underline the fear coming off it in waves, was much harder to remove safely.
Cole started from the other end, trying to take the pressure out of it by manipulating the wire without effect until it suddenly came loose and the coyote thrashed and used its front paws to drag the wire from its mouth. It lay there panting, watching him, with blood dripping from its tongue and he suddenly felt ashamed of himself.
He’d set the trap for the Trackers, which he hoped wouldn’t be coming, but also in the hopes that he could snare something he could eat. Finding himself looking at enough meat to sustain him for a few weeks, he felt no desire to hurt the animal any more than he already had and realized that he had to atone for what he’d already done somehow.
Reaching into his pocket for a scrap of his dried meat, Cole leaned closer to offer it towards the wounded animal and froze when it issued a rumbling growl from deep in its throat. The snarl stopped and its nose twitched at the scent of food. The confusion lasted for a second more before the growl returned and he tossed the scrap of tough meat towards the animal for it to sniff and cautiously pick up with a long, bloody tongue.
He left a trail of jerky towards an empty storeroom, where he poured fresh well water into a dish and went to reset the snares with loops too small to repeat the mistake before returning to sleep behind a firmly closed door.
Chapter 10
Alec
Alec was sweating profusely; the summer had finally hit the region with a vengeance. Why today? Why couldn’t the heat have waited until whatever was going to happen was over? He worked tirelessly on the welding job, holding sheets of metal, riveting corners and edges, while someone else came to weld seams together in a never-ending process.
The shift had started almost four hours ago, and it had to be close to eleven. Noon would mark a fifteen-minute break, and Alec hoped he’d be able to hide the hand-off. Crash and Jackfish were working on the other side of the facility’s open room, where their section of the curtained structure lay.
Alec watched from the corner of his eye as human guards entered the room, motioning the workers to the side as they fully covered the metal-walled contraption. Alec had absolutely no idea what lay behind the curtains and doubted he ever would. If he made it through today alive, he would be running away that night. He’d find a way to sneak Beth out too. Sure, they’d be on the lam for a while, but there were ways to get an ID tracker out.
He glanced to his own wrist, rotating his hand while he contemplated cutting the ID tag out of his own arm and giving Beth the bracelet that muted the signal.
Beth was on the far edge of the manufacturing floor, a tablet in her hand as she strolled down the line, checking to make sure everyone had enough supplies for the afternoon’s tasks. She never met the gazes of the workers as she tapped in any requests for rivets, solder, or gas canisters. Today appeared to be no exception.
It happened so fast, Alec didn’t know how to react. Jackfish punched one of the human guards in the face, and Alec let go of the metal sheet he was holding up, letting it clang to the floor.
“What are you doing?” the welder asked him abruptly, until he lifted his mask and saw the budding altercation.
Beth was walking toward the guards, her head low and tablet in her grip, and Alec’s stomach dropped.
Everything slowed as he looked around for Simon, and out of instinct, yelled, “Beth! S
tay back!” The words flew from his mouth before he could think twice, and her eyes lifted to meet his from a hundred yards away as the gun went off. Bang. Bang.
The first bullet hit Jackfish in the head, dropping him to the ground, and the second appeared to just miss the target as it strayed, striking Beth in the chest from fifty yards away.
Alec was screaming now, but Darnel held him back. “You don’t want to be messed up in that. The guards’ll kill you,” he whispered in Alec’s ear, but he hardly heard the warning. His ears were buzzing, a white light threatening to envelope his vision.
Blood pooled around Beth as guards surrounded her.
A hand flew around Alec’s mouth as he was about to scream her name.
“Don’t move.” The woman’s voice was quiet but authoritative. “Do not let them have this. Leave tonight. We’ll meet you on Ridge and Cherry. When the moon’s at its peak.”
The hand left his face, and he glanced to see Monet saunter away.
Darnel was only within a few feet, but he was distracted. He didn’t appear to have noticed the conversation. Alec patted his rear pocket and felt a small foreign object inside. The drop had been made.
All of this, Beth getting killed had been for whatever was in his pocket now. Tears formed as he realized his only friend in the world was lying dead and he couldn’t go to her.
Screw it. They couldn’t stop him from seeing her one last time. Alec motioned to step forward on weak knees. The entire working population was standing in a line, arms in the air, and the human guards were aiming guns at them, moving through the line, shouting for everyone to remain calm. It was all background noise to Alec as he walked, each footstep feeling abnormal.
The guards stood at attention, lowering their weapons, and the rational part of Alec wondered what had them so stiff. The rest of his mind could only think about getting to Beth’s side.
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