Bound to Ashes (The Altered Sequence Book 1) (4 page)

I turn back around and my breath shakes out of me. We really did it.

Peregrine stares at the floor and says, “It won’t get easier.”

[Alessandra]

Alright, Aless, just one dart. The Pneu-Dart tranquilizer darts, top of the line, able to put down a full-grown male African lion for enough time to tag it and do a physical.

I wonder if it’s going to be enough.

“Hey, Mead,” Heydrich’s voice reaches my ears behind my black fiberglass riding helmet. It’s so hot in here. And he says my name like he’s being sarcastic.

I turn to look. He straddles his skimmer with that arrogant slouch, his thick dark eyebrows furrowed and scowling. He’s always scowling. That scowl, etched into my mind, the same scowl he wears every time he takes another one of my people. Calm down, Aless, he won’t be wearing it for long.

“You’re taking Valley Central Road. It’s a straight shot. Don’t stop until you get there. Got it?”

“Yeah. Got it.”

Heydrich sits on his skimmer like it’s a warhorse. “Let’s not fuck this up,” he says, like he expects us to. Two of them are some stupid ‘foot soldiers’ he recruited somewhere, a bald man and a guy with infected cartilage ear piercings. They’re stern and staring at Heydrich like he’s a respected wartime general, or a king about to lead them into glorious battle. A sick knot of anger balls in my stomach if I look at them too long. I caught the guy with earrings bashing a kid, like a thirteen year old kid, with the butt of a rifle once. Over a can of creamed corn or something. Why, of all the human beings on planet Earth, were they gifted with immunity to the virus? But then again, that describes just about everybody Heydrich brought into our commune a year ago, not just these particular goons. When he stormed the place and outnumbered us ten to one. Soon I won’t have to lose anymore sleep over thinking about what I could have done differently that day.

James, my only ally in this situation and the last member of the team of five, is staring at
me
, not Heydrich. He’s stiff as a board on his skimmer. His visor is up and his intense eyes are watching me. I barely nod at him and he nods back, snapping the visor down. He’ll get the job done. He’s one of probably four people in the world I can
really
count on.

Heydrich snaps his visor down, pulls his legs up, and the skimmer thrums to life, peeling out in a wide arc. He’ll be taking a left down 142nd. His two goons take off, one going down a side street across the bridge and the other disappearing down the road on his way to 144th. James hesitates, looks at me one last time, and I know he’s fighting the urge to just take the skimmer and run. As far from this wasteland as possible, far from our commune, far from all this fighting and Heydrich and his small army of trigger-happy crooks, far away to the facility in the north. Where survival might actually be an option.

But we can’t get there without
them
.

I touch the air-powered dart pistol tucked in my jacket. The big game tranquilizer rifle is safe in the storage compartment of my skimmer. If this doesn’t work, we’re all screwed.

I’m the last to leave. Heydrich, his goons, and James are all far off by now. The quiet streets are vacant of life. I pull up the screen on the display panel of the skimmer and the navigation menu flickers to life. I tinker with the settings until I can bypass the security codes via loopholes, courtesy Perergrine. I’ll have to thank her when I get back. After all, this is the only skimmer with a working network. The rest are just glorified motorcycles. Thankfully, the touch screen still works.... I get to the dropdown menu I need.

Human, Animal (10-50 lbs), Animal (60-120 lbs), Animal (>120 lbs), Vehicle (Commercial), Vehicle (Military), Vehicle (Other).

I select ‘Vehicle (Other)’ which includes all of the Northern Alliance’s tech that runs hotter than anything else on the menu. A large animal, sure, maybe their body temperature is 100.4 on average, but I need something hotter. I smile to myself, because it’s not a large animal or Northern Alliance vehicle I’m after.

The settings are in place and the sensor pings only one artifact. My heart races. Heydrich was right, they were flushed out. No other living thing or machine in operation runs at an average of 105 degrees.

“See you soon.”

[Dev]

Cain seems to know what he’s doing, and it’s easier to follow. Every once in a while he’ll stop, scan the scenery with those fierce eyes, then wave us on, all the while mentally calculating and scheming. I’ve never seen him like this. He’s usually just a cold, mechanical sniper. Now he’s burning with focus.

Ashton walks next to me, tense and flexing his hands. He glares at Cain almost the whole way.

We call it the factory district, but really, if I were to break it down it’d be half warehouses, half open fields, burnt trees, and roads. So it’s not that enclosed. I guess I always remember it being more claustrophobic than it is. Maybe it wasn’t always so close. The trees planted in rows by the road crowd each other and block most of the building faces. There’s hardly a window that isn’t busted open and all the billboards are peeling and illegible.

Eventually, Cain stops us in front of a building with huge slabs of marble and granite stacked like letter V’s in the front parking lot. Qualistone Quarry, Countertops and More. The glass doors are broken in, so we duck into the front lobby. It’s dust-colored like everything else. Cain leads us around a corner behind an intact window, striped with horizontal blinds shadows. He kicks a big metal desk out of the way and turns around to face us.

“We’re betting all of it on a hunch,” Cain says. Getting straight to the point, how like him.... He never was one to take time to do pep talks. “But it’s what we have. Jules: ground level of the restaurant supply place.”

Jules makes it known she’s already not a fan with a drawn-out groan. She’s probably thinking of the lingering stench of rotten seafood that hangs by the building.

Cain says nothing, just eyes her for a moment, then moves on. “Ashton: roof of the strip mall down the road, along the river. I’m stationed on the electronic billboard. Dev, you stay here.”

He must be enjoying bossing us around for once. Jules and Ashton are still glancing at me like they’re waiting for my approval, so I do my best to look attentive. If they doubt the plan, it has more of a chance to go wrong.

“If anything goes wrong,” Cain says, “after the humans make a move, we meet at the base of the river under the bridge. For one day and one night. If you can’t make it, you’re left behind.”

And after that, what are we going to do? Assuming we kill the humans during this attack, then what? They still have the coordinates, they can still find us. They’re not going to send
all
of them. This ambush won’t get rid of them forever. It’s still just a big game of who can outlast the other. How many humans can we stop, detour, or kill before they eventually break through and do us in? But then again, would they even pursue us that far? Who knows how persistent they’ll be.

Cain looks at me and says, “Dev, you got anything to add...?”

I must have spaced off. “No.”

“Good.”

Ashton, Cain, and Jules file out of the building and I hover behind, alone, to watch them go. Ashton pauses enough to glance at me and offer a reassuring smile. I miss him take off running, though, because I blinked.
“See you later,” Jules says as she turns around. “Probably.”

Cain and Jules head off in their own directions. I watch them disappear into mirages down the black asphalt.

The curving road is desolate again when my friends and their dust trails fade away. My chest gets tight and I grab the front of my shirt to try to stifle it.

You’ll see them again. Don’t worry. They’ll be fine. I shut my eyes and repeat it to myself a few times to force it in.

Can’t sit still. So I step all the way outside. My boots crunch the broken glass on the pavement.

Cain didn’t specify if I was supposed to be on the roof or the ground floor, but then again, I don’t think it really matters. So I find a couple slabs of leaning granite to climb on to get to the roof. I barely reach and have to pull myself up with my fingertips. The roof is black tar and metal ventilation pipes. Piles of dead leaves, pine needles, and blackened branches from a nearby snag lie swept at the base of every feature. I kick aside some sticks and sit at the base of a rusty pipe.

Down the road, I try to pick out where the others are going to be stationed. There’s the electronic billboard standing in the distance where Cain is hiding out, probably like a hawk hanging over prey. The strip mall down what looks like 144th, a teriyaki-nails-deli-salon combo, is where Ashton is ready to jump down on a human envoy. Jules is even farther down and hidden on a side street. A small shadowy trap ready to be sprung. If they’re on foot, game over. She’s quick. She told me she had to kill tons of humans with her ability once, which isn’t too hard to believe. We all had to do things like that at Caduceus. Everyone’s training was a little different, just different brands of horror. I wonder how old she was at the time.

I’ve got a good view over the road and the city in the distance. The vast and empty city. I wonder what it used to be like before it was a dusty wasteland full of disease and poison. To actually shop at one of these stores instead of sitting on top of them like a sniper perch. But to fit into this daydream, I would have to be a human myself. Not a patented, eighteen billion dollar investment for some war. I turn my hands over and try to see the biological carbon fiber reinforcement under my grey skin like a smooth mesh, but its fibers are too small to see. It’s only a faint graphite sheen. These hands are so wrinkled and callused and scarred to shreds. I can’t imagine them belonging to anyone else but me. Even a figmented, human-version of myself in my pointless daydream.

I trace the scars across my hands and wrists. When you’re force-fed words like ‘virtually invulnerable’ by the people who engineered you, your curiosity gets the better of you. I’ve found that I can repel stuff like dull blades and pretty much any high temperature, like soldering irons and campfires, but ‘invulnerable’ is a laughable exaggeration. There’s a spot on my hand where a car’s metal frame dug into it when I tore it open to get at the boxes inside. I think I can only remember the scar in the first place because that car was stuffed to the brim with nonperishables. Guess the dead human in the driver’s seat thought he could drive away from the virus and the bombing.

A grating sound in the distance. But there’s nothing on the horizon, no movement, not even wind. The rubble heaps piled against buildings remain undisturbed. A skimmer? No, too heavy-sounding. Broken buildings settle over time, it could have just been a metal support beam finally falling. Maybe if my friends were right next to me instead of who-knows-where, my heart wouldn’t have been pounding over one little noise.

“Calm down,” I sigh at myself, sitting cross-legged on the roof and raking my fingers through my short hair.

It could still be ages before the humans make a move.
If
they make a move. ...But that wouldn’t make sense. They’d
want
to strike early, utilize their new intelligence. It’s like the humans stopped everything to try to kill us ever since winter passed and the droughts replaced it. I’m amazed we’ve lasted this long, honestly. They have a wealth of military-grade technology at their disposal. We are damn lucky. The only thing that saved us was our hiding spot, the missile silo, but apparently nothing good can last.

Another sound fades in. Sort of a humming, keening sound.

Okay. Now
that
is a skimmer. One that’s getting louder.

I’m allowed to worry now.

Judging by the dust cloud they trail behind them, it’s taking the main road right this way. And it only sounds like
one
, thankfully.... It emerges from the rippling heat in the distance as a black beetle, sliding across the landscape. The first time I went toe-to-toe with a human on a skimmer nearly got me killed. I do
not
want to have to do that again.

But, considering my luck.... We’ll see.

I forgot how fast skimmers are. It’s not beetle-sized anymore now. The rider is as dark and as sleek-looking as the machine, hunched over the display panel and armored with riding gear.

I vault off the roof and hit the ground hard, rolling under one of the leaning slabs of granite. It’s shadowed pretty well under here, and I shouldn’t be visible to anything on the road....

Except, well, skimmers have a way of knowing if any living thing is in the vicinity. I swear under my breath. What good is hiding if the human knows I’m here already?

All I see is the galaxy-swirls of granite in front of me. The keening hum is loud and close. I can get the jump on them once they get off the skimmer. They’ll have to get off. The parking lot is way too full of debris. The skimmer could maneuver it, but it would be awkward and stumbling. Am I just saying that to make myself feel better...?

The hum tapers out and eventually sputters to a stop. Helmet buckles clicking, a breath of relief from the human, and footsteps on the ground. The human takes four steps to the back of the skimmer, or what I assume is the storage area on the back, and the electronic hinges open. More clicking, but this time it’s a rifle I hear. They sure are taking their time. The movements aren’t as fast or frantic as usual. It’s like the human is out for a relaxing hunting trip instead of a mission to kill supersoldiers.