They were running.
Oliver couldn’t remember ever being all that athletic in general, or a good runner in particular, but he wasn’t having any trouble keeping up, which either meant that he was better than he thought he was, or that Minerva was equally unathletic.
She was the only person he could measure his progress against, since from the moment he exited the ambulance to the several minutes that had since elapsed, they encountered no other people. On the one hand, this was the expected end-state when everyone on the street elects to evacuate, but on the other hand there was a huge difference between all the drivers fleeing on foot and no other living soul anywhere. Even with the best civic evacuation plan imaginable, there was bound to be a straggler or two, and yet they’d not seen one. Also, nobody was inside any of the stores they ran past, or at the windows of the office buildings, or the residences.
They weren’t all hiding, he decided. And they hadn’t all fled. They were missing.
This was just one absurd detail in a series. The rain was, indeed, faintly vinegary. It made Oliver both question his sanity and crave cabbage. Rain such as this had never—to his knowledge—existed in the real world. Its only appearance was in an unfinished story he wrote. Likewise, the impossible weapon on his back and the impossible tech built into his impossible helmet only existed in that story.
If he were dreaming, fine, great, he could live with that. But this wasn’t a dream.
“Hold on,” Minerva said. It was effectively an order, so he took it that way and slowed to a stop.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, although there was so, so much wrong.
She turned around slowly, scanning the road behind them. The ambulance was still in sight, as they had run straight down the middle of Dot Ave., between the cars. Oliver didn’t care where they were running, and Minnie perhaps didn’t know. It was all absurd anyway.
“Something’s coming. Get down.”
She ducked down and put her hand on the butt of her cannon. He was wearing his, but at this moment, preparing to actually use it was a step too far. Oliver could tolerate the emptying of the streets and the impossible rain, but the minute the pulse cannon on his back turned out to be a real weapon was going to be a point of no return.
Unless the aliens turned out to be that point.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know, just get down. Something.”
Whatever instinct she was relying on worked pretty well, as something was indeed coming. A yellow light reflected off the glass facades of the buildings at the corner of Dot and Common, an indication that a vehicle of some sort was making its way down Common. The problem was that the traffic on the street was so utterly gridlocked, it was simply not possible for anything to be moving rapidly in that direction. Unless, of course, that thing was flying through the air.
“This is a prank, isn’t it?” Oliver said, his voice almost at a whisper. The first time he tried speaking to her through the comms when they were outside, he shouted, which she did not at all appreciate.
“What? Is what a prank?”
“I don’t know what else this could be. All I do know is this can’t really be happening.”
“Well Oliver, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe one of the aliens can explain it. Soon as we see one, we’ll ask. Now shut up.”
The source of illumination was a ball of light, or what was presumed to be a ball at the core. It was too bright to look at directly, so it could have been a square or a triangle in there. Even the visor with the special filter didn’t help.
The technology on display was clearly advanced. As he watched, the light came to a standstill several feet above the intersection, froze there for several seconds, and then headed down Dot.
Oliver held his breath and froze, as the object passed a few yards from their position and down the street, where it disappeared around the bend in the road.
“Did it see us?” he asked.
“No idea. Not sticking around to find out. Let’s go.”
“Where?”
She looked down at the inside of her wrist. There was apparently some kind of portable computer on a wristband, although from his perspective it just looked like clear black plastic. She pushed a spot on the band, then sort of stared into the middle distance for a second or two.
“Rendezvous point,” she said, pointing. “Two klicks that way.”
“Who are we even meeting? I thought we were looking for Ben’s treasure.”
“I don’t know who we’re meeting; we’ll find out when we get there. Can you run or do I have to carry you?”
“I can run.”
They ran. He had many, many questions, but it was becoming obvious that Minerva either didn’t know or wasn’t willing to provide any answers. And once he accustomed himself to the idea that as much as none of this could possibly be happening, it was, he started to see the things the way she did.
For one thing, the little ball of light—a probe, clearly—was silent. It wasn’t what had been making the metallic grinding noise earlier, and it wasn’t what everyone had been running from. They had not yet encountered the thing responsible for the noise, but the longer they stayed near the intersection of Dot and Common, the more likely it was they would. And it didn’t sound at all like something they wanted to meet.
Running, then, made a lot of sense.
“The military copter,” he said, after they’d gotten a few blocks.
“What?”
“It’s what I… it’s what was in the story. They took out the aerial defenses first. This is what you meant, that nothing in the sky was a bad sign.”
“You’re catching up.”
“And you knew it was going to rain.”
She stopped.
“Get your head in this,” she said. “We’re losing the sun, switch to night vision and pop your headlight.”
“What?”
She hit a button on the side of her helmet, and turned on the light attached to the front of her armor. He mirrored her actions, and discovered that for some reason it all felt familiar, like he knew which buttons to hit and switches to throw.
Oliver looked at the panel on his own wristband. The plain black plastic didn’t look like plain black plastic through his visor; it looked like a keypad and a series of command buttons. Without thinking, he started punching buttons, and a second later a 3-D map of the city was overlaid atop the actual city as he saw it through the visor. There was a flashing beacon some distance away, with the path leading to it traced out in red. It was the rendezvous point.
I don’t know how I did that, he thought.
“We good?” Minerva asked.
“We’re good, let’s move.”
After hitting the same intersection the probe had disappeared around, they cut left and into the neighborhoods again. This time, Ollie felt none of the confusion he experienced when piloting the ambulance down the same streets, because he had a map in front of him and because it felt like he had a much clearer grasp of the city layout now. He was pretty sure he knew where they were going, and what the beacon represented. He still didn’t know who they were going to find when they got there, but as Minnie said, that was something they could worry about once they’d arrived.
The neighborhoods were jammed with row houses behind chain-link fences. Nobody was on the streets, and if the people were inside—it really felt like there wasn’t—it was behind drawn shades. They encountered more cars, abandoned in the middle of the road only without congestion. That was curious. He could understand if someone got out of a car and ran if there was no place to drive and there was something they needed to escape on its way. This was different. It was like everyone in town had engine trouble at the same time.
“Where are all the people?” he asked.
“Gone.”
“Yeah, I see that. The city’s abandoned, where did they go? Were they taken? Is this an abduction scenario?”
“You tell me.”
“No, I really don’t know. They’re not hiding.”
“I don’t think they are, no,” she said. “I have a theory, but you won’t like it.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“I think… hang on.”
Minvera stopped. They’d been running for about fifteen minutes, which was longer than Oliver could remember ever running at one time in his entire life. He didn’t feel winded. It was surreal.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Heard something.”
They were standing in the center of the street in the middle of a block of low-rent housing in a neighborhood that sat halfway between Dot Ave. and Newton Street. He was pretty sure the beacon was on Newton.
It was a terrible place to stop. The roofs on both sides were flat and the buildings were forty feet tall, and they had no cover aside from a couple of parked cars. This was an ambush point. The only reason stopping there made some measure of sense was that it hardly mattered where one stopped; the whole place was one big ambush waiting to happen. City planners, he reflected, rarely concerned themselves with the potential for snipers.
“This is a bad place to hear something,” he said. “We should keep moving.”
Then came an ear-splitting screech. It was something out of the same library of sounds as the earlier roar—a metal-to-metal grinding quality—but more urgent, and much closer.
“Where is it?” he asked. His cannon was already out, an action performed automatically. It gave a little whine as it armed.
Minnie was also armed, and spinning slowly.
“Not sure,” she said.
The thing—it was an alien, most assuredly, but Oliver wasn’t going to be calling it that until he saw it—let out another cry. It came from behind him, and above the ground.
“It’s on the rooftops,” he said.
“Yeah, I think you’re right. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They broke into a sprint down the middle of the street, far more concerned about what was chasing them than with the possibility that a car driven by a human might show up ahead.
The thing on the roof followed. He heard it running.
I count six legs, he thought.
The rooftops weren’t contiguous, so there were periodic gaps in the footfalls as it jumped—and perhaps flew—between them. There was something like flapping going on back there.
“It has wings,” Minnie said.
“I hear it.”
They were about to negotiate the turn at the end of the road. Once around the corner they’d be on a street with fewer buildings and fewer roofs, so there was a sense that if they reached the crossroad, they’d be okay.
The creature on the roof must have agreed, because just a few steps away from that turn, there was a rush of air and rainwater and an audible whoosh as something large and capable of flight passed directly over their heads.
Once past, it flew straight up to a height of about twenty feet, and then allowed gravity to take it to the ground directly in front of them.
It was… a giant bug. There was no other way to describe it. It had six legs, bulbous eyes, a mouth with four pincers and something that looked like it could be a beak, almost. It had four wings on its back, segmented somewhat like those on a butterfly.
It stood on four of its legs, while the other two were raised like weapons, with sharp talons.
It shrieked at them. When it did so, its mouth seemed to double in size.
Minerva fired her pulse cannon while the bug was mid-shriek and jumped behind a parked car in anticipation of a return volley. The blast struck the alien in the thorax and knocked it several feet backward.
Ollie was about to fire as well, except that he still thought this was a stupid attack, and this bothered him. The alien could have landed on them instead of flying past and presenting itself as a stationary target. They were missing something.
“Shoot!” Minnie shouted, while upping the energy level on her cannon. The alien took a blast that would have killed a human and was still standing; more force was needed.
Ollie could have maybe finished it off with a second shot. Instead, he turned, and checked the sky. Two more aliens were inbound.
“Check your blinds!” he shouted, firing his cannon at the nearest airborne alien.
He’d only touched an ion pulse cannon for the first time in his entire life about a half an hour earlier, but when he took the shot it felt like something he’d done a thousand times before. The recoil—far more gentle than with projectile weaponry—was exactly what he expected, and his aim was true.
The blaster setting wasn’t high enough to be lethal, but it didn’t have to be; he just needed to stun the thing and knock it off course. The shot caught the side of its face and carried into the wings. It plummeted to the ground ten paces away.
Oliver didn’t have time to make sure it would stay down, because the other one was still inbound. It had its legs—with the sharp hooks on the end—spread open in an attack formation coming right down on him. With practiced skill that he never practiced, Oliver cranked up the power level on the cannon and fired right between the legs at the naked underbelly. It was covered in a carapace, but the pulse blast was energetic enough for that not to make a difference, especially since he got off the shot when the thing was barely fifteen feet above.
He dove to the side at the last second, as the creature crashed to the ground right where he’d been standing, and shattered like a piñata, if the piñata was a giant cockroach.
“Good news, they can be killed,” he said.
“Yeah, thanks,” Minerva said. She was checking other parts of the sky. “We gotta get out of here.”
The one in the middle of the intersection had shaken off the initial blast, but was still presenting as a nice easy target, so Minnie shot at him again. This time the force was adequate, because the alien’s head exploded.
“There’s our opening,” she said.
They got moving. The third alien—the one clipped by Oliver’s first pulse blast—screeched, but didn’t give chase. Ollie thought maybe he’d damaged the wing. He had a bad feeling about that screech, though.
“I think that sound is a request for reinforcements,” he said.
“I think you’re right. Set perimeter.”
He thumbed open the option on the wrist console. The visor display added a grid in the top left corner. It was a quadrant grid, nine squares in which he was always the center square.
“Set altitude to thirty feet,” he said, not to Minerva but to the computer embedded in his helmet. A blue light flashed a silent confirmation of the order. He now had eyes in the back of his head, and those eyes would be looking for aerial attacks.
“Done.”
“Good, set the cannon to seven and aim for their mouth; that seems to do the trick.”
“Already on seven.”
“Show-off. Let’s move.”
She found another gear, and then they were sprinting down the road.
The beacon was only a half-klick away, but to get to it they’d have to negotiate a couple of narrow side streets.
“We need cover,” Oliver said.
“I know. An armored helo or two would be great about now. Too bad they shot them all out of the sky.”
“I’d settle for a bunch of trees.”
“Trees? I can get you trees. Follow me.”
When they got to their left turn, Minerva continued straight, which caused the map on his visor to have a tiny seizure for a few seconds, until it rewrote the red line he was supposed to be following. Then they ran past the next street, and the next, and he was expecting the computer to start swearing at him. Instead, the bottom left square of the perimeter grid lit up.
“Seven o’clock,” he said. “Twenty-five feet.”
“I see it,” Minnie said. She stopped in her tracks, turned around, took a knee, and fired once. Oliver ran past her without checking to see if the shot hit its target.
She started running again immediately, and now he was on point, which was fine except he didn’t know where they were going.
“Console wants me to take a left here,” he said.
“Don’t. Three more blocks.”
They made it two before his grid lit up again.
“Four o’clock, coming in low,” Minerva said.
“I see it.”
Oliver planted his feet and spun around. The pavement was smooth, and slick from the rain, so he allowed his momentum to carry him into a skid while he oriented himself toward the alien. It was on a flat trajectory a few feet off the ground, and coming right at him, which made for a pretty easy shot. He took it, as Minerva passed and retook the lead. He watched long enough to see the head burst, then got moving.
The street where they finally turned left—to the immense relief of Oliver’s in-helmet computer—was wider than the others, with a thin strip of grass down the middle and trees lining both sides. He followed Minnie past the grass strip to the far sidewalk.
“Better?” she asked.
“Better, but now we’re pretty far off the mark.”
“Picky.”
The treetops played a little havoc with the perimeter alarm in his helmet, but it unquestionably made things worse for the aliens who showed a preference for attacks from above. Twice, they heard a tree behind them suffer from an impact, followed by a tremendous flapping noise as the aliens fell back. They were probing the foliage for weaknesses, which was fine with Oliver. The trees might have had a few complaints about it though.
Their way was clear all the way to the corner, where another left turn would be needed. The rendezvous point was only another couple of blocks from there, but without any more cover.
Minnie came to a stop at the trunk of the last useful tree.
“What do you think?” she asked. They could both hear the consternation from above. Ollie’s perimeter grid was busily losing its mind because at least four aliens were in the air overhead, and he imagined hers was doing the same. As soon as they broke in the open they were going to have to be faster than an alien in flight. That was a big ask.
The beacon on his visor map was bouncing up and down over the now-visible rendezvous point: the Candle Square subway terminal, which was a collection of polished steel and glass that stood on an island just before the convergence of three main roads. It was one of those places that looked like an architect’s name should be attached to it somewhere. It always made Ollie a little uncomfortable. Some days it looked like a larger building had collapsed into a large hole. Other days he thought of something erupting from deep in the Earth.
“Do you think we’re the only ones to make it this far?” he asked.
Minerva looked surprised.
“You mean, other soldiers, running around town?”
“It’s a rendezvous point. The clear implication is that we’re meeting up with someone there. You’re the one who’s been calling it that, I’m just taking it to the logical conclusion. So do you think there are others?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“And if it’s a base, it could be manned. And armed.”
The station looked like an asymmetrical pyramid, or one that used to be symmetrical before something tragic happened with the foundation. A series of horizontal gashes scored the top third of the triangle. These were vents for the underground air recycling system, but they could also be gun perches.
“You’re thinking we might have cover,” she said.
“That’s what I’m thinking, yeah.”
“Seems risky.”
“We can’t stay here all day. If we fall, we may as well fall forward.”
“Never backward,” she said. It was a rallying cry they learned during the training they never had: Always forward, never backward. Oliver thought it was a good lesson to ingrain in a foot soldier you were training to run toward danger, although maybe not the best advice to someone who hoped to survive a battle. Cannon fodder needed that kind of motivation.
“All right,” Minnie said, “we do this in steps. Hit the tree at the corner, then across to the store with the awning, the pickup truck, and then straight for the mouth of the station.”
“Roger.”
They bumped fists, then forearms, then slapped each other on the shoulders, a complex gesture of affection honed by years of training and working together, none of which actually happened. It was their secret handshake.
“On three,” she said.
It was a slow three-count, because she was actually waiting until one of the aliens above became engaged in the tree, on the assumption that this would mean there was one-less attacker to worry about for at least one part of this suicide sprint.
When it happened, they went. She took the lead, both because she was faster and because she was still, technically, his commanding officer, if they cared about those things.
They didn’t make it all the way to the tree across the street before being noticed. One of the flyers spotted them, and swung in low and fast from the left, parallel with the street they were crossing. Minnie slowed down and gave herself up as bait because Oliver had the better shot. He took it, with a dialed-back pulse blast that shredded the alien’s wings. It skidded across the street between them. He jumped over the stunned bug’s twitching body and kept rolling.
At the new tree, Oliver took a quick look over his shoulder. Three bugs in the air, two landing, all looking back at him.
We’re not going to make it, he thought.
From the tree to the awning wasn’t so bad, but another quick glance made it clear the aliens were working on a plan of their own.
“What do they even want?” he asked.
“Right now they want to keep us from getting to the rendezvous point, and that’s all we need to know.”
They made for the pickup truck at the same time one of the aliens dove through the awning, which wasn’t nearly as effective at preventing an attack as the trees had been. It ended up tangled in the canvas, though, which was good. But the bugs near the trees were making their play now, and it was a good one. Three new attackers landed in the street in front of the station, called in from wherever these things originated. Five behind, three in front, and nothing above their heads.
“This would be a great time for someone in the station to provide us with some of that cover you were hoping for, wouldn’t you say?” Minerva said.
“Sure would.”
Just then, a ninth bug dropped in from the sky, right onto the roof of a truck. It came down so fast the perimeter detectors didn’t see it until it was landing. They both fell back, Minnie firing before she even hit the pavement. Her aim was a little off; the cannon shot glanced off the bug’s face. It shrieked, and jumped directly overhead.
Ollie blew him apart with a blaster setting at nine, showering both of them in bug guts.
“Yuck,” she said, getting to her feet. “Move, Ollie.”
The bugs were trying a pincer assault, pinning them between two forces, having learned, perhaps, that they could only fire the blasters so often and at so many targets.
Minnie went with a direct charge at the three between her and the rendezvous point. It was a smart call, if only because the next overhead assault would have more trouble with a rapidly moving target. It closed the gap between her and the bugs awfully fast, though. She needed three or four seconds between cannon shots at that energy level. Even assuming she hit her target the first two times, it would be hand-to-hand before the blaster was ready for a third shot. These things didn’t look like pushovers in close combat.
Ollie’s helmet had gone wonky, meanwhile. He could see out of the visor pretty well despite the bug gunk all over it, but the computer wasn’t dealing well with the stuff. It was flashing and firing off all sorts of invalid alarms and notices, and he was having a lot of trouble figuring out what was a real notification and what was a malfunction.
He flung the helmet off. He lost comms, but they were close enough to shout at each other. Rain soaked his face and clouded his vision, but he didn’t mind. Through the helmet, it all felt a little less real. This was immersive.
The five bugs at the end of the street had become ten, and they were charging. All the three in front of the station had to do was hold the line until the main assault arrived, and so far nobody was firing a big gun from inside the station. Maybe they were alone.
“We might as well be,” he said, to himself.
He spun the dial on the blaster to full. Warning lights flashed all over the place as the pack on his back began to vibrate and the barrel heated up.
“Oliver!” Minnie shouted. “Put your damn helmet back on and get up here!”
She fired a kill shot at one bug, but a second was charging her to close the gap. She needed Ollie beside her to take the second shot and he wasn’t there.
“Hold the position,” he said. Then he took aim, and fired.
No matter how big a blast shot he took, as long as there were ten targets it wasn’t going to do much good. Oliver wasn’t aiming at any of the bugs, though; he was aiming at the building twenty feet in front of the bugs.
The kickback from the shot was like nothing he’d experienced before: it knocked him backwards about five feet.
That was probably why the cannon wasn’t supposed to get dialed that high.
The pulse lit up the whole intersection as it arced into the glass-and-stone façade of the ground floor bagel shop Oliver sincerely hoped was as unoccupied as it appeared. The aliens up the street hesitated, having not taken into consideration the possibility that the humans had this kind of firepower at their disposal. But when the shot landed and did nothing more than completely destroy the shop, they continued forward.
Then the whole building started coming down. Two support walls had been atomized at the base, which turned the entire five-story structure into a hail of brick and granite and chunks of cement, which fell into the street between Oliver and the oncoming horde.
Minnie still needed his help, though, and now his cannon was useless. He turned to see her firing a second shot at the charging alien—and missing. It anticipated, and maneuvered at the last second. She jumped aside as it crashed into the pavement she’d been occupying.
The battery pack on Oliver’s back was still vibrating, which was a bad sign. If he was wearing his helmet he’d probably be getting all kinds of warning feedback, but he knew what was happening all the same. You never dial a cannon to full.
He sprinted right at the alien that was about to engage Minnie. She was in the middle of the street, on her back, waiting for the blaster to re-arm, and basically out of time to do anything else but hope that would be happening shortly. The bug had no such timeline to concern itself with, and was up on its hind legs, about to come down on her with two talons.
“Hey, ugly!” Oliver shouted. He aimed the barrel of the cannon at the alien’s head. It was useless, but the bug didn’t know that. It reoriented on him, and charged.
By now, he was familiar with the mode of attack. The aliens charged, then roared, then closed in for the kill with either those huge pincers or the talons on the ends of their feet. If he had a functioning blaster, he’d take the shot during the creature’s roar. The blaster had fired its last shot, but it wasn’t done being useful.
When the bug stopped and opened its mouth, Oliver threw the entire weapon, pack and all, into its maw.
The thing made a quizzical gulping sound and halted its attack for long enough to allow Ollie to get on the other side of it.
“Time to run,” he said to Minnie, jerking her to her feet.
“What did you do?”
He threw her over his shoulder—he’d be getting hell for this later if they survived—and sprinted for the nearest piece of cover: a parked sedan.
They nearly made it when the pulse cannon that was caught somewhere in the gullet of an alien erupted.
This had a rather final effect on the bug who swallowed it, as well as to the entire side of the street it was occupying. The explosion manifested as a blinding white light that sucked up all the sound, before releasing it and a tremendous amount of force in all directions. Oliver and Minnie had just negotiated the corner of the sedan when the shock wave carried them both back and through the window of a burrito place.
Ollie didn’t have his helmet on any more, and this was a really bad time to not have his helmet, but he survived. It may have helped that he had Minnie and her armored torso in between him and the blast when it happened. Or it could have been that he was just really lucky at a good time to be lucky.
“You all right?” she asked.
Oliver’s ears had gotten rung pretty good, so she had to get right up into his face to ask the question. He nodded and pointed to the station: they had to go before the aliens recovered.
He tried standing, but that wasn’t so easy. She had to help him up, and then help him to walk.
“I’m really dizzy,” he said.
“Your body knows what to do, just keep walking.”
They got out of the burrito store to the sidewalk, and headed down the street, with him leaning on her way more than he should have been, but the bugs were gone so it was okay.
Except for the one still between them and the rendezvous point. The explosion didn’t kill it, any more than it killed Minnie and Oliver, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to end up still facing him. It was a surprise anyway.
Minnie threw Oliver to the ground and drew her weapon, but this wasn’t quite fast enough. She was still raising the barrel, and was a half-second away from having her head removed, when a pulse blast from another angle completely destroyed it.
The shot came from the top of the glass wall of the subway station. A remote-operated cannon barrel extended out of one of the vents.
“Didn’t I tell you they were gonna end up being bugs?” someone said over a loudspeaker.
“Wilson?” Minerva said. “You’re a little late, we could have used that gun five minutes ago.”
“I’m early,” he said. “You guys are the ones who are late. Now are you going to get in here, or do you want to blow up more of the city first?”