Push (Beat series Book 2)

by Jared Garrett

  “It’s not going to cut me.” I let my hand fall away. No point in taking chances, anyway.

  “The metal’s so solid, but it’s all droopy,” Melisa said. “I wonder why.”

  “Gotta be gravity,” Pol said. “Combine that with the sun and weather and anything will change its shape.”

  Why did he have to know everything? “This thing used to go over a hundred kilometers per hour,” I said. I tapped a lumpy part that might have been a wheel a century before.

  “Some went faster,” Melisa said. “Like two hundred.”

  “You’d have to be in a big hurry to go that fast,” I said.

  Lexi had shown up and was studying the heap of moldering metal. “Hey, maybe you’re going so fast because you’re hungry. There was a drought going on, after all.”

  “They raced them, too,” Pol said.

  I followed him as he wandered around to another side of the thing. I glanced around. A few more overgrown, distorted lumps dotted the place where the road had been. In another hundred years, these things would be completely covered and forgotten. They’d just be part of the land. The thought felt strangely sad.

  Pol continued. “They drove them in these big circles called tracks. Kind of a long oval.”

  Melisa laughed. “They drove them in circles? For how long?”

  “Hours,” Pol said.

  “Totally pointless,” I said.

  “Well yeah, but remember they were about the individual,” Pol said. “Like one person overcoming and becoming really rich and stuff.”

  “So they could buy more stuff,” Lexi said.

  One person overcoming sounded fine. Even good. But how would someone become rich today? “I mean, that’s kind of what we’re fighting for, right?”

  “What?” Melisa said.

  “Not to get rich or whatever, but to be able to be ourselves and live the way we want,” I said.

  “True,” Pol said.

  Melisa glanced at me, then down at the car. She looked like she might have had something to say, but she kept it to herself.

  “What’s the holdup?” Lily appeared next to me. “Did you find something?”

  “This car.” I pointed at the heap of junk.

  Lexi had stuck her head through a distorted window. “No skeleton in here or anything.” Her voice sounded metallic.

  Lily raised one eyebrow. “It’s a car. Big deal. They’re everywhere. Maybe you want to not stand out in the open for so long?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. We followed her back to the group.

  “It was so different back in those days, when they were driving those things around.” Melisa had been quiet for a while after we’d rejoined the group. We’d probably walked another kilometer before she spoke. “Totally different. Everything, I mean. Cars, food of all kinds, so many people. And these huge roads.”

  I nodded. “Seems like it.”

  “Well, maybe not everything.” She got quiet for a moment. “In New Frisko we were still going to school and working every day, like those guys did. But everything was so controlled. So…” She trailed off.

  “Fake?” Pol had sped up and was walking next to James now. Lexi had wandered off, patrolling again. I watched Melisa’s profile. Straight nose, high cheekbones.

  “Safe. Everything was so safe.” Melisa took in the wide field we were walking in. There were a few trees here and there, tall grass and bushes, low hills. She took a deep breath. “This is better.”

  I pushed through a thick tuft of grass, letting the rough stems scrub against my non-bandaged arm. “Much better.”

  We passed over a few more broken, mostly hidden roads. On one really wide road, there was a huge car. The kind they had called trucks. It had to be five meters tall at least and it had two parts. One was lumpy and the other part was a big rectangular storage box of some kind with wheels. The storage box was nearly twenty meters long. What had that thing been carrying? Food? Electronics?

  Scott’s Wanderers kept us on a winding path that hugged clusters of trees and the rolling hills. I guessed the idea was to be in a place that we could get out of sight quickly if needed, since we weren’t in the forest anymore. It was hotter, too. The sun burned down on us the entire day and before long I wished we were still in the shade. But watching the sun go down right in front of us was great. The sky grew faintly pink, then darkened to an almost flame color the lower the sun got.

  We set up camp before the light had completely faded, positioning ourselves between some cars and stretching our thermal shield cloth above us. That meant we all had to crouch as we moved around, but I was willing to pay that cost to stay out of sight. We hadn’t seen any patrols or pods the entire journey, but that could change any time.

  The next day, within a couple hours of starting out, our surroundings changed completely. We spent over an hour walking in the shadow of a huge road that was elevated at least twenty meters above the ground. It had collapsed in a lot of places, and it seemed like if there had been a strong wind, more of the ancient structure would have fallen. But it provided good cover for our journey. There were decaying homes and buildings almost everywhere now and more broken roads. Trees and bushes grew up through the old concrete, and most of the buildings had trees pushing through windows, walls, and roofs.

  I caught up to Scott. “How much farther is it?”

  He tasted his mustache and considered. “We should see the city itself in another two days, I believe.”

  “Do you know how to find that sign? The one that said Grove?”

  Scott smiled. “I don’t. And we will not be entering the city with you.”

  Chapter 15

  I stumbled over something that rolled when I kicked it. “What? Why not?”

  “We have no reason to, and it was not part of our agreement.”

  And here I’d been trusting him. “So how are we supposed to find the right place?”

  “I do not know. But as I said, I don’t know where it is, so our presence in the city wouldn’t help anyway,” Scott said.

  “You really have no idea where we should go?” I kicked at a tall tuft of grass. “How big is the city?”

  Scott led the group around a heap of rotting metal. “Quite large. Remember, more than a million people used to live in that area.”

  I still couldn’t wrap my brain around that number. “So we have to explore a huge city to try to find a sign and then a building.”

  “If you wish to find the Prime Perpetrator, I would say yes.” Scott seemed distracted.

  I gestured at the group spread out behind us. “When are you and your triune leaving us, then?”

  “As I said, I will take you to the city. We will leave at that point.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Does it matter? We are, after all, called Wanderers.”

  “You don’t know where you’re wandering to after you leave us?” The Wanderer life seemed great, but not having any kind of plan was a little weird.

  “Usually no.” Scott smoothed his beard with a hand. “But in this case, there is a gathering scheduled for this month.”

  “Really?” I remembered Gabe talking about the gatherings. “Where?”

  Scott raised an eyebrow at me. “South. Do you intend to join us?”

  “Well, no.” We walked in silence for a while. The sun was beginning to drop toward the horizon ahead, and the clumps of metal dotting the destroyed roads seemed bigger as their shadows lengthened. “What do you do at the gatherings?”

  Scott took a while to answer. “We gather. We share stories and news. We eat and drink and enjoy company, greet old friends. Remind ourselves of what humanity and community are.” He sounded like he was talking to an audience of more than just me.

  “So it’s basically a party.”

  Scott laughed. “A fair guess.”

  The sun dropped lower in the sky as we walked. Before long, we were walking on old, ruined roads and dodging fallen houses and melting cars all the time. The crumbling ho
uses gave way to stumpy, worn down buildings with jagged walls full of staring, empty windows. A few of them still had visible corners, but most of them were rounded and pulverized by a hundred years of weather and wear. Bushes, trees, and grass, along with acres of spreading, crawling plants of some kind had taken over the concrete.

  “This isn’t the city?” I pointed at the fallen buildings everywhere.

  “No.” Scott scanned the area. “That is, it’s not the city you’re looking for.”

  “How can you tell? It looks like a city to me.”

  “Number one, San Francisco is right on the ocean.” He gave a quiet laugh. “Or rather, somewhat under the ocean now.” He stepped hard on the ground. “This is dry land. Number two, San Francisco is much bigger than this. The falling buildings are taller there, too.”

  “Wait, how are we supposed to get around a city that’s under water?”

  “Walk. Or swim. Only parts of the city are badly flooded.” Scott looked around. “I know this place.”

  I couldn’t think of anything satisfying to say to his walk or swim remark, so I ignored it. “You’ve been here?”

  “More than once.” He pointed at something way ahead of us that I couldn’t see. “There’s a safe place to camp not far from here.”

  “Pod!” The shout came from someone near the back of the group. “Pod! Get out of sight!”

  Scott took off, going from lumbering to speedy in a second. How someone so tall and thick moved so fast, I didn’t know. I spun, scanned the sky, and located my companions in a split second. I didn’t see a pod anywhere, but the Wanderers had some kind of viewer that helped them see farther than eyes could see. I trusted them.

  I caught sight of Melisa, James, and Pol. They were in a tight group, running toward a building. Lexi and a group of Wanderers were running ahead, in the same direction as Scott. I ran the other way, surprised at how fast Scott had gotten out of sight. The building near me had a gaping doorway that might have been a rectangle once. Now it was a ragged hole. I dove into the dim space, dropping to all fours and scrambling across a hard floor.

  I hugged the floor and wall. Had we gotten out of sight in time? Did the Wanderers’ device save us?

  I turned just enough to see out the broken doorway. Pale light washed through it, making deep shadows in my hiding place. I didn’t see anything moving. I listened. In a few seconds, I heard the faint whine of a pod’s propulsion units. How far away had it been? Did it have heat sensors or something else that could see through walls?

  The whine grew louder. Before long, a few dead leaves blew through the door from the air displacement of the pod. It was flying really low. A shadow moved slowly across the doorway, temporarily blocking the light.

  Propulsion units roared. It was right on top of us. The sound got higher pitched. Oh no. Anyone who had seen a pod knew exactly what that noise meant. It was landing.

  I inched away from the door. Propped on an elbow, I scanned the space I was in. Big ragged doorway to the street. Thick stone wall between me and the Ranjers. The room was about five by eight meters. Near my feet was a doorway to what looked like a long hallway.

  The pod landed. I felt and heard its articulating legs settle to the overgrown street outside. They must have seen us. Or they thought they’d seen something. We had two options: stay out of sight somehow, or fight. And hope there weren’t any more nearby. We had enough people with keepers that we might even win if there was only one pod full of Ranjers.

  I checked my keeper. The readout on the back of the ammunition drum flickered with faint blue light. I had two grenades and several rounds of regular bullets. Two electrical shots left, also. Not much firepower, since the Ranjers’ armor could block everything I had but the grenades. I hoped the others had more. We should have thought to resupply the weapons.

  Keeping my movements tight, I turned and used my elbows and toes to make my way through the doorway that led deeper into the building. I strained to hear what was going on outside. Shots or shouts meant we had to fight. All I heard was the pod’s whine slowing a little as it went into standby.

  I half stood up in the dark hallway, staying low in case there were windows. There were at least two walls between me and the road. I hadn’t heard of any tech that could see through two walls. I passed two doorways that led to rooms between me and the outside. Two more doorways on my other side. What had this building been? The floor was hard underfoot, not soft like I’d seen in other buildings. I came to a tall counter space and studied the building. More hallway stretched in front of me and even deeper into the building behind me. The hallways all had doorways lining them. Office building? Apartment building? I hadn’t seen any furniture that looked like beds or anything. Here and there, the roof and ceiling had collapsed. Light poured in from those spots, which made it easier to see. The floor was mostly clear except for leaves and branches, along with some rubble.

  Shots rang out. Spam! I ran down the hallway and turned at the first room. A big window, probably big enough for the SyJet to have flown through, made the room bright. I hit the floor. More shots. Who had they seen? I scrambled to the window.

  “Broadcast.” I stole a glance outside. “Melisa, Pol. James. What’s happening?”

  The pod had landed ten meters from my building. Four Ranjers formed diamond-shaped group and jogged up the street away from me. Four more went the other direction. A group of three darted into a building across the street.

  Eleven. There had to be at least three m—

  A soft thud, like a door or wall being kicked in, came from the first room I’d jumped into. There were three more. And they were about to catch me.

  “We’re all together, except for Lexi,” Melisa said in my ear. “They must have seen us run in here. They’re following.”

  “I’m with most of the Wanderers,” Lexi said. “We ran for a building and we’re trying to keep the kids quiet.”

  “Everyone stay out of sight,” I said.

  I glanced back outside. Where had Melisa and Pol gone?

  “Too late,” Melisa said.

  The building across from me exploded.

  Okay, it didn’t completely explode, but a wall blew outward. I felt like my ears were being pushed outwards from inside my head. Chunks of building flew everywhere. I threw my back against the wall as fragments of wood and wall spiraled through the window into the room I was in. I looked outside again. A cloud of dust billowed all over the street, nearly covering the pod.

  “Melisa!”

  Lights from the Ranjers’ weapons danced on the wall right outside my room. I had to move.

  “That was us,” James said, “trying to slow them down.”

  A keeper fired, then more. The noise filled the street. The Ranjers in my room were getting closer. Me against three? Even if I surprised them, I had no chance. Their armor and training were too advanced.

  “Frag,” Lexi said, “I think they found u—”

  More explosions sounded.

  “Lexi!”

  “On the run. Gonna slow them down.” Lexi’s breathing came loudly through the EarCom.

  The cloud of dust from the other building started to come through my window. It tasted flat and old. I looked outside. More shots rang out. The dust cloud had just begun to settle, but it was still hard to see.

  Bug me. A plan formed. It was really stupid. “I’m going to take the pod.”

  “What?” Melisa shouted. “No, Nik!”

  “There are too many!” Lexi yelled.

  I thumbed my ammunition drum to grenade and aimed down the hallway. I took a breath, held it, then fired. I jumped for the window that led to the street. The grenade’s explosion pushed me out. One of my feet caught on the window and I tumbled. I landed on my side and tried to roll. It hurt, but wasn’t bad.

  Pushing to my feet, I scrambled toward the pod. I had to squint to be able to see through the dust of the pulverized old building. That grenade I’d shot needed to slow down the Ranjers behind me. And the d
ust needed to hide me from the motion sensors on the pod.

  “I’m running out,” Lexi said.

  “Hold on,” I said quietly.

  Shots exploded all around me now. A bullet zipped by me. It had come from the building I’d been in. Could someone see me? I got to the pod in a few seconds. I had to fight to keep from coughing out the dust I’d breathed in.

  “Nik! They’re—” Melisa’s voice cut off as explosions tore through the building she, James, and Pol were in. They’re what? I wanted to ask; couldn’t risk it.

  I glanced into the pod. No dust cloud in there. Nobody left. Wait, no. There was a pilot. I thumbed my ammunition drum and jumped in. I fired the moment I got close. The Ranjer must have heard me, because he was on his feet, lunging at me. My electrodes got him in the neck.

  “They’re going to find the Wanderers!” Melisa again. She must be okay. “If you’re going to do something, do it now!”

  “Need help!” Lexi shouted.

  “We’re coming,” Melisa said.

  “No, I’m in,” I said.

  The Ranjer kept coming. I felt the current vibrating from my keeper, but it didn’t stop him. I backed up, thumbing the ammunition drum. The back of my knees hit the bench on the inside of the pod. The Ranjer dove at me, the skinny wires from the electrodes snapping. I pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  I glanced at my keeper. I’d selected NET. My keeper didn’t have a net.

  The Ranjer slammed into me. I collapsed against the pod wall and fell on the bench. My keeper was pinned between us. He brought a knee up at me, but I squirmed and he hit the bench. I pushed against him as hard as I could. He didn’t budge.

  One of his forearms went right to my neck. It felt like he slammed my throat back into my neck bones. I couldn’t breathe. My vision darkened immediately. I punched and struggled. He was unbelievably strong. And why was the bench jabbing me in the back like that? I felt myself losing consciousness.

  That wasn’t the bench. I started kicking at the Ranjer. It didn’t move his weight off me, but it elevated me some. I reached for the knife Lily had given me, pulling it from the sheath in the small of my back.