by Kyle Noe
Glancing outside, Samantha didn’t see anything at first.
She waited several more seconds, but nothing stirred.
Then, she stepped back down the ramp and waited some more.
A stiff breeze nipped at the back of her neck.
The sound echoed again. Just out of sight.
Her hand with the pistol came up, and Samantha advanced, following the noise.
She’d gone fifty paces when she found it.
A tiny drone, gray in color, no bigger than a house cat, lying on its side. The machine had obviously been jettisoned during the crash. It was shaped like an octopus. It sputtered and hissed, yellow liquid leaking from a gash on its underside.
Samantha reached a finger down, and the drone shocked her with a low, electrical current.
“You little punk,” she said.
She paused and then brought her foot down, dashing the drone to pieces.
“Serves you right,” she said, kicking at the pieces.
She pivoted and heard it again.
The clicking sound.
Turning around once more, she was surprised to see two more of the drones.
Bigger this time.
Undamaged.
Looking as new and as shiny as the day they’d rolled off the Syndicate assembly line.
And aside these drones were two more machines.
There was a rawness to these two additional drones. They were unfinished. Samantha watched as tiny, flesh-colored pieces of conduit shot out like silk from a spider from the pieces of the original drone to these new creations. She couldn’t believe it. The first drone that she smashed was birthing newer, larger drones.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
She bulled forward and stomped these new drones to pieces only to see lengths of whiplike conduit spawn newer, ever larger constructs.
In moments, the ground was littered with a dozen drones the size of pigs and these drones were, in turn, splitting apart to create larger machines.
One of the things seemed to turn its head toward Samantha who realized she was in exceedingly deeper shit.
“This is so not cool.”
She considered trying to destroy these new drones, but realized this might make the situation even worse. She turned and ran, and the drones followed after her.
By the time she’d reached the ramp, the reverberations coming from behind her were no longer the sounds made by a small device. They were the rumble of a much larger entity, something the size of a bear or perhaps an elephant.
She tripped and rolled over and peered back and what she saw almost made her lose her breakfast.
The drones had combined to form an exceedingly large machine that rose up to its full and terrible height, twenty feet in all. The newly formed machine staggered for a moment, its hulking frame trembling and twitching. It was a like a baby horse fighting to rise to its feet for the very first time.
Circular cutting instruments emerged from compartments on its side and the barrel of what looked like a gun protruding from a hole in the center of what appeared to be its head.
Samantha’s mind told her to run, but her feet betrayed her.
The thing reached for Samantha and—
BAM!
A shot ricocheted, splitting the air over the crash site.
Samantha heard an impact and saw a few friction sparks skid across the drone’s carapace.
Something or someone had fired a gun at the machine, and the effect was like a pebble being tossed against the back of a tank.
Pistons hummed to life, and the thing heaved its incredible bulk around as a figure spilled into sight.
It was Eli, and he was standing in the middle of the crash site.
Standing very much alone.
Holding his smoking revolver.
Eli’s gaze hopped from the machine to Samantha.
He fired the revolver until there were no more bullets left. The bullets bounced off the drone, causing it no damage. Each shot seemed to piss the drone off more and more.
“Okay, that’s cool!” Eli shouted. “I apologize! I give up!”
He dropped the revolver and threw up his hands in a gesture of goodwill, and the drone unleashed a misshapen cry and moved menacingly toward Eli.
“RUN!” Samantha screamed, rising to her feet.
Eli did, or at least tried to. The footing was poor because of the crash, so he’d only managed a handful of blundering steps before he pitched sideways into the gash in the ground left by the crashed alien glider.
Samantha ran to his defense, watching the drone rear back as if ready to strike Eli down.
“COVER YOUR EYES!” she shouted, not really knowing why she’d said this.
Eli did, and the drone looked back at her, the thing’s cutting instruments spinning to life.
“Never bring a saw to a gun fight,” Samantha said to herself.
Without thinking, she lifted her hand and willed a shot from her pistol. There was no trigger on the pistol, of course, but that didn’t matter. Samantha focused everything she had on the singular thought of taking down the drone and somehow, those thoughts, that concentrated energy, caused the pistol to fire.
The pulse of light that emanated from the tiny barrel shone as brightly as the center of the sun. The recoil stood Samantha’s hair on end, and she blinked. When she looked back, the drone vanished. It didn’t blow apart or erupt in a pillar of fire, it simply, fucking ceased to be.
Where it had once stood was now a smear of gray ash and nothing more aside from a few banners of white smoke.
“Holy shit,” Samantha said.
“Hey,” a voice said.
Samantha watched Eli emerge from his hiding spot, covered in gray dust.
“Watch your language,” he said, wagging a finger.
He walked forward and picked up his revolver. Then he turned and peered down at the smear of ash.
“Okay, so that just happened,” Samantha said.
“This is freaky to the power of ten, girl,” said Eli. “How’d you do it?”
Samantha held up the shiny, pistol-like alien weapon. Eli whistled and
Samantha pointed to the revolver that Eli was still holding.
“You’re nuts by the way,” she said.
“Says the twelve-year-old girl who just vaporized a robot monster with what—what is that thing anyway?” he asked, pointing to Samantha’s alien pistol.
“It’s alien,” she said, releasing her hand, shocked to see the pistol drop from it to the ground. “It’s an alien weapon.”
“How’d you know how to use it?”
She shrugged. “It’s like I keep telling people, I’ve got skills.”
He walked toward her.
“You okay?”
She nodded, retrieving the pistol, pocketing it.
He pointed to the glider. “Anything else inside worth scavenging?”
“Maybe, but we might not have too long to look,” she replied, with a nod.
The two spent the next fifteen minutes hurriedly carrying as much Syndicate weaponry as they could out of the fallen glider and into the woods where they concealed it with brush and stripped tree limbs. They marked the spot with a red ribbon tied at the base of a sapling.
Their work over, the two trekked into the woods and sat in the shade of a massive oak tree. Eli pulled out two sodas from a backpack and handed one to Samantha. She downed it in a few seconds and pulled out a battered cellphone. She brought up a folder of photos and swiped through them. Some were of her with family members, pets, dressed up in crazy outfits with friends. And the last ones were of her and Quinn, smiling, arm-in-arm, in better times. She stared at the photos and then looked away, sliding the phone into a pocket.
“What made you come back?” she asked.
Eli thought about this for a moment. “You know how they say with age comes wisdom?’
She nodded.
“I have not experienced that,” Eli continued with a toothy grin. “I’ve fo
und the older I get, the dumber I am. That’s why I came back. Because I’m a fool.”
“I’m glad you came back,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I also figured you might need a chaperone,” Eli replied.
“I can handle myself.”
“I can see that now,” Eli said, looking out over the crash site.
Eli finished his soda and crushed it against his forehead.
“So, where will you go?” he asked.
“I heard the resistance has an outpost in Omaha.”
Eli whistled.
“That’s a long, treacherous walk, young lady.”
“Especially when you go it alone.”
He glanced over. “Care for a little company?”
“Why would you want to come?”
“Because I get bored easily, Samantha. And I ain’t never seen nobody take down those alien suckers like you did.”
She grabbed her gear and smiled at Eli and start walking across the field as he hurried after her.
THEY MADE their way through thick strands of brush and then across a flat field before heading up into a bunching of ancient, old-growth forest. They slipped through the hardwood, as silent as thieves, keeping their eyes and ears focused on the heavens and the terrain that lay before them. Every so often, they’d hear a metallic shriek and would then take cover in the trees, but never did they actually see the enemy.
They crossed a blacktop road and moved laterally through a marsh and then into a pocket of raised ground that lay above a broad floodplain.
The two made camp at dusk, Eli starting a small fire where he cooked a stew made from canned vegetables and the remains of a squirrel he killed and roasted in the coals.
Fearful of being spotted, they covered the coals in dirt and sat in implacable silence, listening to the calls of the creatures that only come out at night. Samantha was still on edge. She was grateful for Eli coming back, but she didn’t know the man, and her mother had always told her to be wary of strangers, particularly strange, older men. Plus, the fact that he’d just upped and left the industrial yard, a relatively secure location, to follow her, a twelve-year-old girl, might strike some as peculiar.
“I never did catch where you came from, Samantha,” Eli whispered.
“That’s because I didn’t throw it.”
Eli’s teeth flashed white in the murk.
“Ohio,” Samantha finally replied. “Cleveland.”
“Mistake by the lake,” Eli said, in reply. “My home town’s Baltimore.”
“My dad used to dig the Orioles,” Samantha said.
“Them and blue crabs are about all we’re known for,” he said, with a smile.
“You’re a long way from home, Eli.”
“I was working when the black hats invaded.”
“Around here?”
Eli nodded.
“I hauled for a long-distance truck towing business. ‘Invite us to your next blowout,’ was our motto.”
“I like that,” she replied, with a grin.
“You got a ride you need towed or transported, that was us. From Boston down to Miami and to all points out west. I was towing an armored truck, a bank car, in Lexington when the world turned over.”
She registered this. “I was in Ohio with my uncles and aunts.”
“You in the city?”
“Out in the country,” she replied. “We barely made it out of a town near Lima when the bombs started falling. My family had a dugout coop, and that’s where we went.”
“And your mother?”
“She’d been called up.”
“Active duty type stuff?” Eli asked.
Samantha nodded. “My granddaddy said she was on the front lines.”
“Why’d you leave the coop?”
“I wanted to find my mom.”
“That’s a little… what’s the word?”
“Insane?”
“Yep,” Eli replied, snapping his fingers. “That’s the one.”
“I hitched a ride with some resistance fighters and made it all the way out to Vegas.”
“You are a few bubbles off plumb, girl.”
Samantha took this in. “The aliens attacked us in Vegas, and after, we tried to run. I left with thirty-eight people.”
“And?”
“And I’m the only one left.”
Eli was readying to respond when a humming sound filled the air. The noise was like a dozen muted cellphones buzzing all at once. The two looked around, and Samantha realized it was coming from her pocket.
She slid a hand down into the pocket and pulled out the alien pistol. The weapon was humming and pulsing with a white light.
“What’s happening?” Eli asked.
Samantha stood, and a new reverberation danced across the tops of the trees. A change in the air that Samantha knew was brought about when a large machine or machines sliced through it. She glanced at the gun and realized she’d probably made a huge mistake. It was highly likely that the aliens implanted a tracker in every piece of equipment. A beacon that the aliens used to pinpoint lost or stolen weaponry.
“Run,” she said, to Eli.
“What? Why?”
“THEY’RE COMING! RUN!”
Panic gripped Samantha who spun and bolted through the trees as the air began howling. Soon, it was as if she and Eli were standing in the midst of a whirlwind. Dust and debris were kicked up, and then Samantha saw the dark form through a gap in the canopy.
It was a long, sleek-looking alien craft of some kind. There wasn’t a single light visible on the exterior of the craft. The bastards, she thought, they are flying in stealth mode!
She waved her hand, and Eli followed after her. They combat-ran between the trees, the metallic shriek echoing from behind them.
Samantha looked back to see the underbelly of the alien glider open, objects emerging, dropping through the air, crashing through the tops of the trees.
Her hand came up, and Eli saw forms toiling in the murk, drones that resembled oversized spiders. Periscope-like devices shout out from the front of the drones. Red lights flashed, and Samantha was certain they’d been spotted. Metallic tentacles quickly jutted out of the sides of the drones, wrapping around the trunks of trees, propelling the machines forward.
“They saw us!” she shouted.
Whirling around, she led Eli on a frantic dash up and over a switchback in the woods. Branches and foliage slapped at their faces as they blitzed blindly through the woods. There were bursts of light from behind, balls of plasma that shot past their heads. Non-lethal munitions, Samantha thought. She’d seen the aliens bring the noise back in Vegas, and she knew they were capable of torching the entire area if they wanted to. The attackers must’ve wanted her alive, she thought. But why?
The ground dropped in front of them as they plunged into the blackness, the sound of the drones growing louder behind them when—
WONK!
A metallic netting of some kind was fired into the trees above them.
Samantha jolted and Eli grabbed and pulled her back as the netting fell to the ground, tethered to conduits that were then snatched back by the drones. In so doing, he had just saved her from being captured.
She was about to thank him when the sky filled with greenish light and several drones smashed through the trees and went airborne directly above them.
Samantha raised her pistol and fired.
A bonfire-bright pulse of light atomized the drones, setting the crowns of the trees on fire.
More drones emerged, disoriented by the fire and smoke.
Eli clutched Samantha’s wrist, and they threaded down over the trunk of a massive, fallen tree. They jumped and found the slope carpeted with leaves, the two sliding down over an embankment.
“There’re too many!” Eli said.
Samantha wasn’t worried about the drones anymore.
Her eyes were fixed on the massive glider that was streaking through the sky up ahead of them, the vast expanse of the machi
ne sheering off the tops of the trees.
Samantha’s eyes narrowed to slits.
She raised the pistol and took aim at the nose of the glider.
The sounds of the drones from behind melded with the roar of the approaching glider. Samantha measured her breath and felt the trigger when—
CRACKBOOM!
The advancing glider was hit, dead-center, by a rocket fired from the ground.
The rocket tore the glider in half like a movie ticket.
Eli and Samantha watched, dumbstruck, as the aft of the vessel plummeted to the ground.
The front of the glider continued for several thousand feet, trailing banners of smoke and bursts of fire that licked the night sky.
It was coming directly for them!
Samantha and Eli ducked and dove forward as the glider wreckage soared past them, close enough to singe their hair.
The crippled glider slammed into the hillside above them with great sound and fury, crashing through the forest in a fireball, destroying all of the pursuing spider drones.
There were several secondary explosions, and then the only sound was the crackle of the fire and the howling of the wind and the footsteps of the people emerging from the shadows.
Samantha looked up, and a group of heavily armed men and women appeared through the trees. One of them was holding a still-smoking Hafnium rocket launcher.
Samantha held up a hand to her eyes. One of the men, clad in a tactical vest, strode forward. He was handsome, but road weary, his face sporting a week’s worth of stubble.
“You’re lucky we were tracking you,” the man said.
“We were fine on our own,” Samantha said.
“Not from where we’re standing, Samantha,” the man said.
Samantha’s eyes widened.
“You… how do you know my name?”
“Because I know a man who used to fight with your mother.”
The man leaned a hand down.
“Name’s Hawkins, and I’ve come to bring you in.”
6
DEATH SUITS HER
Q uinn’s head throbbed from the booze and loud music as she peeled herself off the bunk and uneasily rose to her feet. Renner was still asleep, splayed on the ground, snoring, surrounded by a small mountain of beer bottles.
