The Eve (The Eden Trilogy) (12 page)

Avian swore under his breath, looking toward the sun where it rose in the east.  “We should probably get moving.”

“Yeah,” I said.  The flap to the girl’s tent was pushed open and Susan stepped out.  “Hey,” I said, turning toward her.  “Did you come through the city before you got to us, or did you skirt around it?”

“We hung to the edges of the city,” she said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.  “We needed food so we didn’t dare completely miss it.  I knew it would be one of the last ones before we got to your people.”

“And were there any Bane?” I asked.  My eyes jumped to the sky when a flock of birds suddenly started and flew over our heads.

“We were trying to avoid them, obviously,” Susan said, looking at me like I was stupid.  “And there was the fire.”

“But did you see any?  Were they inactive in any of the buildings?  Did you see any of them scouting?” I asked impatiently.

Susan was quiet for a second, her gaze dropping to the ground as she reviewed their journey.  “No,” she said, her brow furrowing.  “Actually, we didn’t.  There were tons of them north.  We had to make a huge effort to avoid them.  But none of the cities we have passed through yet have been as big as Vegas.”

“Something’s wrong,” Avian said as I looked at him.

“Avian, what if the sweep that I saw wasn’t the only one?” I said in a shallow breath.  “What’s to say that the first gens everywhere aren’t starting sweeps?  Why would it ever be limited to that one?”

Avian swore again.  He crossed to the tent and tossed the flap aside.  “West!  Time to get up.  We’ve got to go.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked from within, his voice groggy. 

“Our time may have just run out,” Avian said, already disassembling the girl’s tent as Karmen stepped out of it.

With the world finally dry, Dr. Evans stepped out from his glass prison box.  Susan and Karmen started, stepping back several steps.  He just held his hands up and took a step away from them.

“Judging from you two, something is wrong,” he said, placing his hands where his hips should have been.  He was much more shapeless without any skin or fat to fill him out.  Just bones and mechanical organs.

“I made a huge mistake in assuming there would only ever be one Bane sweep,” I said, helping Avian pack up the tent.  By this point, West had rolled out of his tent and Bill returned to help him pack it up.  “Why aren’t there any Bane coming after us, Dr. Evans?”

He, like Avian and I had done, turned to the city.  “If it is a sweep, this is different.  The city still looks like it’s standing.”

“I don’t know,” I said as I shoved the tent into the back of the solar tank.  “But something isn’t right.”

“Karmen, Susan,” Avian said as we flew around packing and getting ready to go.  “You two need to get moving.  The road was clear our whole way here.  Be careful, but move fast.  We have no way of knowing if it will stay that way.”

“Find Royce when you get there,” I said, checking that my magazine was fully loaded.  “Tell him to have the scientists work as fast as they can.  Tell him we don’t have nearly as much time as we thought.”

“Royce,” Susan said, nodding her head as she pulled her pack on.  Karmen did the same.  “He’s the leader in New Eden?”

I nodded.  “By now he’ll have found out something we did without his knowledge and he’s going to be angry about it, but tell him we will be back as soon as we possibly can.”

“Okay,” she nodded as Bill slammed the back doors to the solar tank closed.  “Thank you for taking care of us last night.”

Bill and West climbed back in the van while Avian and I held back a moment.

“We were more than happy to,” Avian said with a nod.  “Those of us left need to help each other.”

“I hope we see you both again soon,” Susan said.

“Hasta luego,” Karmen said.  “Ser seguro.”

And while I didn’t know exactly what her words meant, I understood their sincerity.

Avian and I climbed into the van and waved goodbye.  Karmen and Susan started down the road we had come.

“You want me to start through the city?” Bill asked as he started the tank.  I breathed a sigh of relief when it fired right up.  The sun had risen and charged the solar panels.

“I don’t think we have any choice,” I said as I looked around to my companions.  Adrenaline was burning through the blood of everyone around me.  “We have to see what is going on.  If the Bane really are starting more sweeps…”

“Got it,” Bill said, nodding when I didn’t continue.

We rolled forward toward the city.  Within minutes we were passing gas stations and long abandoned roadside stands.

I stood when we started creeping into the city outskirts, and unlatched the hatch.  A gust of cold air blasted into the tank as I pushed it open.  I pulled myself up and over the lip.  I straddled the hole with my legs, my butt sitting on the very edge of the lip, my legs spreading across the hole and bracing the other side with my boots.  I reached across and placed my hands on the handles of the firing turret.

“You want any back up, up there?” West called from below.

“I’ll let you know,” I said distractedly as I scanned the roads around us.

Soon, the scattered buildings grew more compacted and the shops grew bigger.  But so far everything looked intact.

“You see any of them?” West called up.  I looked down to see him peering out his window, his rifle propped up in it.

“No,” I said, shaking my head.  “Not a single one.”

Windows revealed abandoned buildings.  There were no inactive watchers from within.  Not even one lone Sleeper.  No Hunters crashed out of buildings to rush us.

So far, the city was abandoned.

We drove with baited breath for another twenty minutes that felt like days.  We waited for movement, for a helicopter to swoop down on us from the sky, for the Evolved world to be recognizable. 

As the city grew taller and more glamorous, the buildings showed their destruction.

So may had collapsed, had caved in on themselves and were nothing more than piles of rubble.  Others showed scorch marks.  Trees were smoldering stumps and the road was blackened in long stretches.

The air tasted very faintly of smoke and ash.

“How long ago do you think this happened?” I asked, surveying the destruction.

“A few weeks,” Avian said, though he didn’t sound too sure.

“Considering there are no more flames burning and how the air seems to be mostly cleared,” Dr. Evans said.  “I would estimate the blaze started over a month ago.  The city would have burned for weeks.  I would even guess that the rain we saw last night put out the last of the flames.”

By this point, Bill had pulled off of the main freeway and taken to a main road that led us right into the heart of the city.  We approached the highest buildings.

The buildings on both our left and right had once been beautiful.  I saw a row of white columns with beautiful detail carved into them.  Scorched trees and bushes hinted at what must have once been fantastic landscaping.  But now they were burned to the ground and crumbled.

We broke between the two half crumbled buildings and stopped in our tracks.

Everything on the east side of the road was a crumbled, destroyed mess.

“Ground zero,” Bill said.

My eyes scanned the rubble, but there was nothing to see.  The sweep had moved on.

I heard Bill click the tank into park and everyone stepped outside.

The road that had once separated the east from the west side was filled with debris.  Chunks of concrete were stacked fifty feet high, but there wasn’t the shape of even a single solid wall.  Steel beams rose out of the ground in abstract shapes, curving, some frayed and splintered.

The Bane had leveled this side of the city.

“You think their destruction caused the fire that burned the west side?” West asked.  He shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand as he took in the damage.

Dr. Evans shook his head.  “Impossible to say.  Could have been.  But it very likely could have been natural from lightning.  Everything is dry as a bone out here.  It wouldn’t take much of a spark to set everything afire.”

“Maybe that’s what started the sweep,” Avian said, his assault rifle sweeping the scene before us.  “Maybe lightning caused the fire on the west side of the city.  That could have woken up the Bane.  Driven them east, starting the sweep.”

I nodded.  It seemed possible.  But impossible to ever know for sure.  “Whatever way it happened, there’s no denying there are more sweeps happening,” I said, relaxing my grip on the turret.  There would be no Bane to shoot.  “We have no way of knowing how many have started.”

“The Bane,” Dr. Evans said with a sigh.  “Their brains all work the same.  Same generation of TorBane, same impulses, same way of thinking, if you can call what they do thinking.  I would say worldwide sweeps will start within the next two months.  It only took four months for TorBane to wipe out the world.  That first sweep you saw was about a month ago, Eve.  It’s probably safe to say the one you witnessed wasn’t the first one.”

“Worldwide,” West said in a disbelieving breath.  He swore.  “So you’re saying we’ve got about eight weeks to get this transmitter built, or we’re
all
dead.  That’s it for the human race?”

“Or less,” Dr. Evans said.  The pain and regret in his voice ripped through my own heart.

“Let’s get moving then,” I said, dropping down through the hatch so I was standing on my seat, my upper half still out through the hole.  “We don’t have any time to waste.”

THIRTEEN

The solar tank could not move fast enough, but at least the sun made it reliable.

We got back on the freeway, and we drove.  We did not stop, even when the Bane started showing up in small towns.  

There were many destroyed bodies lying in the streets, piles of parts and gleaming metal.  My army had been here at some point.  Those that were left we either blasted away with the turret, or I turned them on each other. 

From what we saw in Vegas and in our travels northeast, we could all guess that the Bane sweep had moved east.  According to Bill’s maps, there weren’t any big towns for them to hit for over a thousand miles.  If we could move fast enough, maybe we could save some lives.

We were lucky that we had found sanctuary where we did and even luckier that NovaTor was located where it was.  If both had been located on the east coast somewhere, we would never have made it out alive.  But we were fortunate.  There were only small towns, besides Vegas, between New Eden and the location of NovaTor.

Avian passed around the packed last-forever food when the sun reached its highest point in the sky.  Soon after that, we pulled off the main freeway and onto a highway.  The road was badly cracked and potholes forced us to slow.  We could drive no faster than thirty miles per hour.

So we were only forty miles from NovaTor when darkness enveloped us and the solar tank rolled to a stop.

Right as the first flakes of snow started to fall.

I set up our tent as Avian made sure Morgan was set for the night.  West had offered to keep watch over her and would get Avian the moment it looked like she needed him.  I appreciated this small gesture toward normalizing the relationship between the three of us.

I sat in the entry of the tent, my booted feet on the dirt, my rear end on the tarp floor of the tent.  The cold breeze pushed my hair off my face.  The air felt fresher out here, crisp and free.  Not like in the city.

A few snowflakes clung to Avian’s head and shoulders as he walked up to the tent.  He sat next to me, tucking his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them.

“Is it weird that I both do and don’t miss the snow?” Avian said. 

I smiled.  “I know what you mean.  It reminds me of home, of Eden.  But I do not miss winters.”

“Do you remember two years ago, how much snow we had?” he reminisced.

I nodded.  “I think there was snow on the ground for ten weeks straight.  I don’t miss sharing a tent with fifteen other people.”

It had been a hard winter.  In an attempt to stay warm at night, we had packed as many people into one tent as possible, hoping body heat would be enough to keep everyone from freezing.

Avian chuckled.  “Tye hated that.  Did you know he slept up in the watchtower every night during that time?  By himself?”

“I didn’t,” I said, shaking my head.  “But it doesn’t surprise me.”

“I thought for sure I would find him frozen to death every morning when I went to check on him.  He was always so stubborn,” Avian said.  He leaned toward me, bumping my shoulder with his.  “I guess that’s where you learned it from.”

I met his eyes and smiled.  There were days when I missed Tye so much.  I couldn’t imagine how bad it must be for Avian.  Tye was his cousin and best friend, after all.  I wouldn’t be half the soldier I was if it hadn’t been for Tye’s instruction.

Avian wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me into his side.

“I miss them,” I said.  I knew Avian would know who I was including in “them.”  I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else.  Saying it to anyone other than him would have made me feel weak, too human.  But this was Avian.  It was different.

“Me too,” he said.

The snow continued to fall, soft and light.  The night grew darker.

Reaching for the lantern he’d set at his feet, Avian slipped his hand into mine.  We stepped inside the tent and I zipped the flap closed behind us.

Avian had set the lamp on the floor.  He sat on the sleeping bag and slipped his boots off.

As I looked down at him, I marveled at how I could have ever doubted I had loved Avian.  As I recalled the last year, it should have seemed so obvious.  The way no one had ever been able to understand me like he did.  The way no one could comfort me the way he could.  The way I could never stay angry with him, no matter what he had done.

I didn’t believe in soul mates, but I did believe in the better half of two wholes.

Avian was mine.

“Tell me what it would have been like,” I said as I knelt and straddled his lap.  I brought my hands to either side of his face, letting my fingertips barely brush his cheeks.  At that moment, I was drowning in his beauty.  “If the world hadn’t ended and you and I had fallen in love.”