Vagrants (Vagrants Series Book 1)

by Jake Lingwall

  Jeff caught his breath and searched ahead for any signs of the vagrants, but he couldn’t see far beyond the carnage immediately before him. He wrapped his cloak around his mouth with one arm to act as a filter and then ordered his hood to only show indicators for humans.

  At first, the sensors misfired, indicating humans where only parts of them remained. The leech corpses were piling high now, blocking out most of the fallen humans who had been crushed beneath the warring robots.

  As he circled around a particularly physical battle between two of the larger leeches he’d seen on the battlefield, his vision lit up with a cluster of markers not far ahead.

  Two hundred and sixty-one humans—that was far too many to be the vagrants, but they were the only breathing bodies indicated, so he altered his path to be in roughly that direction, farther away from the clash of the Apostles.

  A cloud of tiny floating cubes buzzed around him, and Jeff shrunk down tight on his bike, hoping that one of them wouldn’t decide to put a pin-size energy blast into his head. Instead, they fired at the front of his bike, disabling his weapons, before speeding on to another target.

  Jeff strained his neck quickly to see Horus fail to dodge one of the great tentacles of Petra. He let himself savor the sight of Horus losing a pair of its arms even as pieces of its wings buzzed around Petra like an angry hornets’ nest, burning it with their red lasers.

  A pair of flying leeches flew just over his head, leaving a trail of ionized air behind them as well as a putrid stench. Something dropped from one of them, and Jeff’s eyes followed the small blue orb to the ground in front of him.

  He was in trouble. Again his mind tickled. He hit the reverse thrusters to try to slow himself, but he knew it wasn’t going to be enough. He shot one glimpse at the relatively clear ground beneath him and jumped.

  An implosion happened in front of him, suddenly sucking the air toward where the orb had landed. Jeff hit the ground and rolled. His body armor absorbed most of the impact, but every part of him that wasn’t metal cried out in pain.

  An explosion rocked the ground, sending a shockwave of static energy skirting out over the plains from where the orb had been. The energy caught a leech to his right and fried it. Jeff shied away from the energy, but it washed over him anyway. His cloak diffused it from hurting him, but it knocked his hood offline, returning his vision to normal.

  He wished he knew how to press, and in theory, Carlee had already taught him. Jeff closed his eyes and desperately tried to turn a broken body of a leech into a new bike, trying his hardest to envision a reality where he had parked his bike in that location.

  The sound of a leech stomping behind him quickly ended the pursuit.

  Jeff opened his eyes and took off running toward where the humans were supposed to be, not far from him now. He weaved when he felt the instinct, and a green laser missed him by a few inches. His running was slightly lopsided because his mechanical leg provided far more power than his human one, but he leveraged the imbalance to help dodge several more attacks.

  A pile of leech bodies stacked five or six deep lay right in front of him, and Jeff searched for a way out of this mess as the leech closed in on him from behind.

  He dove forward, sliding underneath the awkwardly arranged wing of a dead leech as a laser burned the ground behind him. He didn’t slow as he picked his way through the twisted metal of the leech. He used his metal arm to break and bend debris to clear his path.

  He emerged a moment later into a clearing filled with hundreds of Petra’s humans clinging to one another, surrounded on all sides by a wall of destroyed leeches. Turrets rested all around them, discharging round after round into the air at leeches crawling over the wall of their fallen kin.

  A human encased in force-field armor was hacking a leech with an enormous force-field mace. Jeff only knew one person large enough to fill the armor. Talon leaped on top of his latest kill and stretched out a hand. A force-field disk appeared in front of it just in time to block some explosive shells from two leeches flying over the humans. The turrets caught the leeches with their tracking shells, reducing the leeches to a shower of melted metal.

  The relief Jeff felt at finding the humans didn’t last long. He couldn’t find Carlee or the other vagrants anywhere. Only Talon—who lured a leech toward him and then pressed in a giant force-field spike beneath it, skewering the catlike leech—was visible.

  An air transport big enough to carry fifty people popped into existence to his left, causing the humans to scream in panic. Jeff found Jane seated on the ground not far away. She lifted her petite hand, and the humans rushed forward to fill the vehicle.

  Jeff fought the urge to join them. There were already too many people trying to fight their way into the transport. The doors closed around them, forcing people away. Some humans clung to the edges as it lifted off the ground. Dozens of tiny flying leeches popped into existence around the carrier as it took flight.

  He cursed as he saw a leech rise over the dead bodies of its comrades and prepare to blow the transport away. Before it could fire, Talon soared through the air and landed on top of the leech. A giant gun appeared in his hands, which he immediately discharged into the electronic beast.

  The leech fell, lifeless, on top of the ever-growing pile of slaughtered machines. Talon looked invincible as he shot through the air to intercept another leech, knocking energy blasts aside with his force-field armor. Another shuttle appeared where the last had arrived. The huge transport opened its doors, and more humans flooded inside.

  It was by far the largest item he’d ever seen pressed. Carlee had been so nervous to press in even small items, and the antigravity vehicle Carlee had pressed for them in Fifth Springs wasn’t half the size of this transport. That feat had sent the vagrants fleeing, but Jane didn’t even get to her feet.

  A ball of energy ten feet wide hit Talon in the back while he was in the middle of sending a small leech flying through the air with his mace. His arms went limp as the energy diverted away from Jane. His force-field armor flickered as he tumbled out of sight.

  Jane snapped her head around to where Talon had been. The serene expression on her face changed for the first time that Jeff had ever seen. Her head drifted slowly until she met Jeff’s eyes.

  She lifted her hood and let her long blond hair flutter in the wind created by the transport lifting off the ground. The turrets downed the leech that had hit Talon, but their firing rate dipped to slow motion. Nothing seemed important but Jane. The complexity in her eyes captivated him. She had always been so distant, but now she was acutely present, and Jeff didn’t feel fit to be the object of her focus.

  “Go,” she mouthed to him as the sky turned dark above the small arena of shattered leeches. The handful of humans left around her fell to their knees as if to pray.

  “Go,” she said again, and the momentary trance that had held him was broken. One of Petra’s city-crushing tentacles floated above them. Energy pulsed through the thick cord of Apostolic metal and death at the same pace as his racing heart.

  Jane smiled at him, and Jeff turned to run, forcing his way through the dead leeches faster than before. Metal scraped against his uniform, tearing at it. He scraped his face and his hands, but he pushed through the mess of leech remains. He could hear Petra’s arm falling on them as he fought his way to the open battlefield.

  He dove out of the pile of vagrant-killed leeches just as Petra smashed it. He scrambled forward, away from the deafening noise and destruction. A wave of dust passed over him as the tentacle crushed everything beneath it. Jeff crawled forward on his hands and knees until the dust cleared and he could go no farther.

  As far as he could see, mounds of twisted metal and burning crops sprawled in front of him. The fighting was concentrated in patches now, where the survivors of the two armies were beating one another furiously to death. Exhaustion rested on his shoulders while he looked over it all. Jane had led them into the heart of this conflict, and now she was gone as
well. Petra’s tentacle lifted from the ground and whipped through the air, plowing through aerial battles before it smashed into Horus’s backside. Their fight was far away, but the Apostles towered above the rest of the destruction, locked in battle.

  More than half of Petra’s limbs were destroyed, but Horus looked to be barely holding off the inevitable. Jeff slipped a smile as Petra’s arms wrapped around Horus, encircling it in a tight grip that the Apostle that had slaughtered his family struggled to free itself from.

  Jeff ignored the leeches flying by him as he looked on, eagerly awaiting Horus’s death. It didn’t scream in pain like a human would have; instead, Horus looked all too calm for its situation.

  The sparse clouds above the Apostles parted, and a brilliantly white Apostle dropped from the sky. Its force-field wings deactivated, and it dropped like a meteor, plummeting directly toward Petra’s head. Jeff watched in disbelief as the white Apostle activated a pair of gigantic force-field swords and pointed them below its feet.

  “No!” Jeff screamed.

  The white Apostle that had been at Fifth Springs and had pursued the vagrants ever since pulled its swords free from Petra’s reeling head and gracefully swooped down and severed the arms holding Horus in place.

  “No . . .” He lost his will to scream. Horus freed its damaged body from Petra’s tentacles, and together with the white Apostle, they overwhelmed what was left of Petra.

  Instinctively, Jeff moved his metal hand and snatched one of those small floating cubes out of the air and crushed it. He turned around in time to see a wheel-shaped leech rolling toward him. He knew he couldn’t fight it with his arm, and outrunning it wasn’t likely, but he prepared himself to flee anyway.

  A blur smashed into the leech, reducing it to metal shards. A human in a set of thick metal armor landed on the ground where the wheel of death had been. Pieces of the flight suit stuck out where necessary, and a pair of guns was attached to the human’s back; otherwise, the armor obscured the rest of his savior’s identity.

  “What was your plan, there, Handsome?”

  “You’re alive!”

  “You really think I’d let an Apostle kill me?” She didn’t wait for his answer before her armored suit fired to life. She grabbed Jeff with one arm, and they shot into the air, twisting around to dodge some energy blasts.

  For miles around below them, all they saw was pure devastation. The scrunched pile of leeches where Jane had saved so many and paid for it with her life shrunk out of view as they soared into the air. Surprisingly, the extreme force of the acceleration didn’t bother him; the rest of the battlefield was too mind-boggling for him to feel sick. Thousands of leeches were still locked in combat, but the only thing Jeff could focus on was the sight of Horus standing on top of Petra’s dead body, roaring triumphantly into the sky.

  23 SIDE EFFECTS

  “IT WAS STUPID,” JEFF CONCLUDED. He broke a stick in half and tossed it into the fire that was reflecting into the stream by their camp—if it could even be called a camp. It was just the two of them, eating some supplies that Stefani had pressed in a few hours ago.

  She had refused to press him a flight suit of his own, so he had held on to her as they flew farther away from the battle that had left Petra dead and the vagrants without their leader. Jeff told her about the rendezvous points, but Stefani insisted that if Jane was dead, then their group was finished.

  “No, it was pathetic,” Stefani said. “No, it was worse than that. It was a class A attempt to remove yourself from what’s left of the gene pool. Actually, even that doesn’t seem to do it justice—”

  “I get it.”

  “I’m not sure you do. If Carlee had been foolish enough to follow after you, and you had gotten her killed, I would have put you down myself. What you did was dangerous—and not in a hot way. In a worthless way. Like handing a baby a gun or smoking in a pool of oil.”

  “I thought I could help some people. I didn’t want to be a coward . . . and Horus killed my family. It killed everything that I knew! It pretty much killed me. In the moment, I felt like if there were even a one-in-a-million chance that I could tip the scales in Petra’s favor, it would have been worth it.”

  “And?”

  “And I was wrong.”

  “And?”

  “I’m an embarrassment to my ancestors and the gene pool at large.”

  “Good. That’s the first step, acknowledgment.”

  “What’s the next step?”

  “Not doing that suicidal crap again. You can’t help people if you’re dead. And you can’t kill Apostles, especially when one that has a giant army around it.”

  “Got it.”

  A rock bounced off his metal arm with a twang, and Jeff lifted his eyes from the embers.

  “Don’t lie to me, Handsome.”

  “I wish I could kill it,” Jeff said. “I hoped I could learn to press like you guys and use it to try to avenge my brother, my sister-in-law, and their kids. But . . . I . . .”

  “But you’re starting to realize that even when you learn to press, there is nothing you can do to change the past. And that sucks.”

  “It does.”

  “And even worse than that, you’re starting to realize that even with our abilities, this world is still rotten. No matter how much we do, we can’t change things. There are so many people, so many things—all making decisions and creating new paths—that what we can control feels so . . . petty.”

  “I just wanted to do it for my brother . . .”

  “Revenge isn’t for the dead, Handsome,” Stefani said. She stretched before rolling over and lying on top of her blanket.

  “Why do you keep going? Why do you keep doing all of this, and don’t say it’s for the food. I want to know the real reason.”

  “I stay with the vagrants because of Carlee.” Stefani didn’t offer more than that, and Jeff was about to comment on how that didn’t seem much better than revenge when she continued. “And I keep getting up every morning because there’s so much in life that I haven’t done or experienced yet. Wouldn’t seem right to give up just yet.”

  “I could do with less experiences.”

  “I’ve never lost a pair of limbs, but I’ve been shot a few times, stabbed with a knife once as well. Wouldn’t trade away those memories. They’re all part of my path. Landed me here and now.”

  “Shot and stabbed? What else are you waiting for then? Burned? Poisoned?”

  “I’d like to see more of the world. Have a family. Kill a bunch of warlords. You know—I don’t want to be on my death bed thinking about the things I could have done.”

  Stefani sounded vulnerable, almost as if now that she had shared her desires with Jeff, she was exposed to getting shot. He looked over to see her staring up at the stars with her rifle nearby and a small scanner spinning around by her head. Of all the things he had expected to hear, the desire to have a family wasn’t one of them.

  “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t,” Stefani cut in. “Just . . . let it simmer.”

  He had always thought that he’d have a family eventually; everyone in the coalition was required to reproduce if possible. Human societies needed a fresh supply of bodies to replace the casualties. But none of the girls in Fifth Springs had been the type he’d want to share a house with, let alone a life. Charlotte had tried her best to find him someone, but truthfully, she was the only woman he’d ever met whom he thought he might be happy with. And she had married his brother. The only woman until now, that is.

  “So, you’re sure Carlee made it through?” Jeff asked.

  “You saw what Talon was able to do against those leeches, right?”

  “He killed hundreds of them. They were piled high until Petra smashed them and . . . Jane.”

  “Talon was a powerful vagrant. He could do things that most of us couldn’t, but he’s no Carl. Not even close.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I’m pretty good, but Carlee is one vagrant I wouldn
’t want to get into a fight with. She can press things that I can’t get my mind to wrap around. She made it through that leech army. No doubt in my mind.”

  “She was so sure that you survived the Apostle encounter as well.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you that she’s smart?”

  “Is she better than Jane was?” Jeff asked.

  “I . . . it’s hard to know. I never saw Jane press anything. I don’t think anyone did.”

  “I did. She was pressing in carriers for the naked people. They were big enough to hold fifty or sixty people at once. Talon was defending her.”

  “I see . . .” Stefani took a minute to respond. “Well, I wouldn’t put that outside of Carlee’s capabilities, at least since . . . lately. She really is something special. So was Jane but in a different way. No one could sense other paths like Jane, not even Carl, but if I needed someone to press me something important, complicated, or big, I’d take Carl every time.”

  A dozen questions raced through his mind faster than Stefani had flown them away from the wreckage of Petra’s domain. It was impossible for him to pick just one to ask.

  “So, vagrants can be good at one thing and not another? And how are people more powerful than others, and did Carlee get more powerful somehow, and why didn’t Jane press?”

  Stefani chuckled as she glanced over at him, catching him staring across the dying fire at her. He turned away.

  “I’m not your teacher. Carl does a much better job at that than I do.”

  “Come on—you have to give me something.”

  “My secret inner desires weren’t enough for you?”

  He stopped himself from saying something without thinking, which was a notable accomplishment. Knowing he could win any fight he got into had only served to loosen his undeliberate mouth over the years.