Defenders (46 page)

The sound of bomber engines grew louder, punctuated by bombs hitting their targets. It sounded like they were leveling the whole area.

The explosions were deafening; they sounded as if they were right behind her.

The wall of a nearby building exploded, spitting bricks and glass. The world flipped upside down, then righted itself, then flipped again. They were hurtling end over end; heat scorched Lila’s face, flames, rooftops, screams closing in from all sides.

She hit the ground with a tooth-rattling jolt, and she and the Luyten lay still.

Lila tried to lift her head, but it dropped back to the pavement. Huge feet rushed by—a defender.

“Come on,” she called to the Luyten. She was confused about what had happened, where they were. She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them again. The world came into better focus.

Two of the Luyten’s appendages were gone. Its dark blood was pinwheeled across the pavement and up the side of a half-standing storefront. Puffs of hot air pushed past Lila as the Luyten’s center rose and fell, rose and fell.

That way. Under.
There was a sewer grate in the street ahead, swung open.

She scrabbled at the pavement, trying to pull free. One of the Luyten’s remaining limbs was on top of her. She came out a few inches, then slid back. She pulled harder, groaning with effort, and felt the Luyten’s muscles bunch as it struggled to raise the limb. She spilled onto the pavement.

“Thank you,” she said. The Luyten was still, its center no longer puffing.

A woman lay close by, dead, her face caved in, her legs smoking.

There was no way for Lila to make sense of what she was feeling, so she didn’t try. She wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, roughly, as if they had no business being there.

Kai let the mountain bike coast as close to the pile of debris as possible, then swung his good leg over and jumped off. Pain shot up his hip. Ignoring it, he lifted the bike over his shoulder and carried it through the piles of concrete blocking his path. As soon as he was clear he set the bike back on the street and took off, pedaling as hard as he could. He checked the crossing street; he was on Taylor Street. The train depot was less than a dozen blocks away. It looked like he might make it out.

What worried him wasn’t so much
his
status; it was Lila and his dad’s. His Luyten guardian angel had been silent since warning him about the impending firebombing and telling him to head for the King Street Station in Alexandria.

“How about it?” Kai said, huffing. “Are they okay?”

Lila is safe.
It was a different Luyten.

“What about my father?”

I’m sorry. Your father is gone.

Front tire wobbling, Kai skidded to a stop. He buried his eyes in the crook of his elbow as a terrible, howling grief filled him. He was falling, with no one to catch him. “What happened?”

The defenders bombed his house. A precision strike. We think they traced Forrest’s laptop when he linked into their channel.

The loss was hitting Kai so much harder than he ever would have guessed. He felt frozen; he wanted to go somewhere and cry under a blanket.

We’ve all suffered terrible losses; we can’t let it keep us from carrying on. Not now.

Kai forced himself onto the bike. He pedaled. Maybe he could funnel his grief into rage. As he picked up speed, he became increasingly confident that he could.

The train car was so tightly packed, and moving so fast, there were moments when Kai was lifted off his feet by the bodies pressing on all sides. It was a mercifully short ride, but as soon as Kai stepped out, part of him wished he could climb right back in. There was no fighting in the area around the train station, but by the sounds—tank engines, mortar fire, gunshots—there was an awful battle raging nearby.

Luyten were handing out weapons from open cars on a freight train, but selectively. Kai guessed they were digging into people’s minds, giving them only to war veterans who knew how to use them well.

Follow the others into the woods across the highway
, a Luyten instructed. Kai trotted toward the highway, limping heavily on his bad side.
The defenders are trying to withdraw their forces into Fort Meade. Most of them have yet to arrive, because we’ve been harassing them, slowing their retreat.
We’re placing you between them and Fort Meade. Your job is to hold them back until enough of them have arrived. Then we’ll send our reinforcements in behind them.

A pincer movement. The defenders used the same technique to devastating effect against the Luyten. “Won’t they be expecting that?” Kai asked, as he climbed the rise beyond the highway and pushed into the underbrush, trying hard not to think of his father. He could do that later; right now he needed to stay focused.

They don’t know these reinforcements exist.

“They’re Luyten?”

Well armed. Just keep as many defenders as possible from reaching their heavy weapons.

Kai pushed on, his leg and hip burning fiercely. Others passed him, many looking downright eager to fight. He passed rows of dead bodies, lined up shoulder to shoulder, and grim-faced people dragging more toward the rows.

There was a break in the forest ahead. He reached a big winding road fringed with blood-soaked grass. People, along with a few Luyten, were crouched behind trees on either side. A dozen or so dead defenders were piled in the road, creating a makeshift roadblock.

This is the primary route into and out of the base. Cross it and keep going, but hurry—another convoy of defenders is about to make a push to break through. I’m going to station you toward the back of the base, away from roads, and put you in charge of a platoon.

“I don’t want to be in charge of a platoon,” Kai protested.

I don’t want to be in charge of ten thousand humans. We do what we have to, Boy Who Betrayed the World.

Kai would have laughed at that, if he hadn’t lost his stepfather an hour earlier. What a strange, strange world he lived in, that he would be having this conversation.

He passed a bright orange sign, warning that he was trespassing near a defender military installation and would be shot on sight. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he muttered, nodding to two women who were hurriedly setting up a machine gun beside the bough of a big ironwood tree.

The air was saturated with the sound of gunfire. The woods thinned out and gave way to scorched open fields. Thousands of people dotted the landscape, some of them crouching or lying on their stomachs, pointing rifles. Others stood clutching bladed weapons. Many others were already dead—bloodied or blackened, dismembered and disemboweled. Kai counted five Luyten as well, two dead. Power lines supported on big steel towers hung overhead.

A dozen or so people, and one Luyten, were running toward Kai.
Your platoon. There’s a lull right now, but the bombers the defenders have managed to get in the air are battering our positions, and in ten minutes a dozen defenders will attack.

“Wonderful,” Kai said.

I positioned you where resistance was lightest, because of Five.

If this was light, he couldn’t imagine what the people defending the roads were facing. “How is Five doing?”

Five is alive. He’s fighting. He says he hopes to break bread with you when this is over.

“Tell him I’d like that.”

He also sends his condolences. Despite their past, he had deep respect for your father.

Kai blinked back tears. “Thanks. We’ve all lost a lot.”

Yes, we have.

Kai turned to greet his platoon. “How many of you have guns? Hold them up.” Three people raised weapons: two pathetic 1911A-1 pistols—standard twentieth-century US Army sidearms—and one M-4 carbine.

The growl of an enormous engine cut through the other battle sounds.

Bomber
, a new Luyten voice warned. It took Kai a moment to realize the Luyten speaking to him now was the one who was part of his platoon.

There were no ditches, and the tree line was too far away, so their only defense was to lie flat on their stomachs.

The first bomb landed on the opposite end of the long, rectangular field. Each subsequent explosion shook the ground a little harder until one landed close enough that Kai felt a blast of scorching air on his left side. He clung to the ground, his face pressed into the dry wild grass.

The bomber roared out of sight over the trees. Kai jumped up, scanned the tree line where the defender infantrymen would appear soon. Kai waved his rifle in the air to get his platoon’s attention. “As you can see, I have an awesome weapon. We’re going to fuck up some defenders with it.”

A tank is coming. It will try to provide cover for the infantry trying to break through. They’re desperate to get troops inside. They’ve got parking lots full of idle weapons.

The crack of falling trees preceded the enormous tank, which broke into the field and immediately started firing, its turret swiveling left and right, its report deafening.

Kai led his platoon left, trying to get out of its range.

A dozen defender infantrymen broke from the trees close by. Kai dropped to the ground, bracing his rifle against the edge of a bomb crater. He chose a defender, pointed him out. “That one’s ours. Harass him. Draw him this way. As close to me as you can.”

Easy
, his Luyten platoon mate said.
They’re engineered to hate me; I’m like a red cape to a bull.
The Luyten headed toward the defender.

The faces kept changing, but Kai always had twenty, as new troops poured into the battle faster than the defenders could kill the old ones. There had to be forty or fifty defenders firing from the trees. A dozen charged onto the field, trying to make it to the base.

Kai closed one eye, squeezed off a few rounds. He was almost out of ammunition, then he’d be nothing but a guy with a gimpy leg swinging a shovel or a butcher knife, whatever he could pry out of a corpse’s hand. The people who had to get that close to a defender to hurt it died quickly.

There were bodies everywhere, just everywhere. So many wounded, dragging themselves through the dirt, or just lying there screaming. Kai could no longer hear them; his ears had stopped ringing an hour earlier. The explosions and gunfire now registered as nothing but thumps in his chest and gut; otherwise, the battlefield was blessedly silent. His foot throbbed; the toe of his boot was gone, and, Kai assumed from the pain, some of his toes with it. There was a bloody shrapnel wound in his good side; Kai had no idea how bad it was.

He was glad he hadn’t promised Lila he wouldn’t let himself get killed. Surely some of them would survive this, but not many.

More defenders broke from the trees, rifles blazing. An explosion threw Kai forward; razors of agony tore through his back. He struggled to his hands and knees, wiped dirt out of his mouth. It felt like there was something stuck in his back, near his left shoulder blade.

“Jesus, this is a slaughter!” Kai shouted into the air. “Where’s the help you bastards promised?”

Soon. Hold on. Hold them back.

Kai wasn’t sure he could stand. He found his rifle, dragged it toward him, wedged the butt into a long scar in the ground, thought of Oliver, and looked for a target.

The defender closest to him was cutting people to pieces with his assault rifle, turning and spinning to keep people from coming up behind him. But people just kept coming, even the ones who had nothing but knives.

Look in the woods.

Kai lifted his head, strained to see. Bright colors were moving around in there, and the wall of defenders that had been pummeling them from the edge was now facing the other way, some of them backing into the open field.

A Luyten in full battle gear burst from the trees. Kai let out a full-throated scream of joy. Two more appeared, then a third, swooping down from above the trees in a flight sleeve. It sped right at the defender Kai had been watching, leveled a heater at it. The defender’s head and shoulders blackened; it collapsed to the ground, smoking.

Struggling to his feet, Kai limp-trotted toward the tree line, wanting to help. He made it halfway before he stumbled and fell hard, felt searing pain in his shoulder blade. He pressed the ground, got back on his feet. Thousands of people were storming the tree line, burying the defenders under a crush, hacking them with knives, machetes, axes. Kai desperately wanted to join them, but he fell again.

He stayed on the ground this time, content to watch the others cut every last defender down.

Lila dropped the shovel on top of the pathetic pile of dirt she’d managed to accumulate. She looked at her palms. There were blisters on the pads below each finger, plus the jagged cut in her left palm she’d gotten trying to move debris to get to Oliver. Surveying the eight-inch-deep rectangle she’d managed to carve out, Lila sighed, gave the handle of the shovel a kick. How could anyone dig a hole six feet deep?

Tongue jutting from the side of his mouth, Errol retrieved the shovel and gamely tried to pick up where Lila had left off. The shovel looked enormous in his little hands. Lila knew she should take Errol inside where they were relatively safe, but Erik was still in there.

Squatting on her haunches, she watched Errol. He was an even worse digger than she, but far more enthusiastic. He was oblivious to the rubber stink in the air, the rumble of faraway jets, the pop of distant bombs. At least the fighting had moved off to somewhere else.

Lila pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped Errol’s runny nose, then went to the fence. She swung the gate open and surveyed the street. Surely Kai knew to come here, when he found Oliver’s house was gone. Surely Five would tell him where Lila was, even if he wasn’t speaking to her.

If Five was still alive. If Kai was still alive.

She had no idea what she would do if Kai died. She’d have no one but Errol. She’d never been adept at making friends; most of their friends were Kai’s poker friends. Most of his friends would be dead when this was over, in any case.