by Alex Barnett
Burnout
By Alex Barnett
Dedicated to Mom (because what mom doesn’t want a story about the world ending in a robot zombie apocalypse dedicated to her?) for always being willing to tell me I’m a good writer, but also how many mistakes I made in that draft and Jon, for being my perfect writing partner.
Contents
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Epilogue
1
"They think Boston's gone dark, don't they?"
The words barely carried over the steady patter of chilly October rain on the pavement. Startled, Lydia St. John glanced over at her best friend. Ava Velasquez wasn't looking at her, instead staring out over the street and gnawing on her lower lip. Lydia didn't have to be able to see her face to know that her forehead was pinched, her black eyes bleak. “Worried” was pretty much everyone’s default these days.
"Yeah," Lydia said after a long moment. "Yeah, I heard Grandpa talking to Mr. Perry after you went to bed last night. No one's heard a word out of Boston for almost three days...no comms, no runners, nothing."
She slouched further into her seat, staring out into the street again. The girls were perched on top of an old Dodge van (a rusted out relic of the eighties that still ran on gas and didn’t even have a GPS, let alone a hook-in to the national highway guidance system), sitting in a pair of cheap lawn chairs that had been welded to the roof. The van was parked across the entrance to the court Lydia lived on, forming a barricade with two other, smaller cars on either side of it. Someone had dragged a huge, rainbow-paneled golf umbrella out and secured it over the lawn chairs with what looked like at least two rolls of duct tape.
Not that the umbrella was doing a very good job, Lydia reflected sourly. A steady stream of icy rainwater had been leaking beneath the collar of her jacket for the last twenty minutes, and she kept having to shove wet clumps of her dark brown hair out of her eyes. She never thought she would miss something as simple as truly waterproof clothes as intensely as she did. She’d kill for her old rain jacket. The one with the stupid purple and pink flowers all over it and glittering threads running through it that reacted with any hint of moisture in the air to form a neat little ionic barrier between her and the rain.
She balanced her grandfather’s hunting rifle across her knees. It was modeled after old guns, pre-Invasion, with no scope or laser mods—still used plain bullets, in fact. Lydia’s grandfather was ex-military and one of their neighbors had been in the National Guard like Lydia’s mom, so they had a few energy weapons, but blaster cartridges were starting to run lower than Grandpa was comfortable with. The old-tech models worked well enough and Lydia was an excellent shot with the rifle.
"Geez," Ava sighed. "That's almost the whole eastern seaboard, isn't it?" She rolled the neck of Lydia’s old softball bat back and forth in her hands, picking at a piece of gripping tape that was coming loose.
Lydia shrugged one shoulder, not bothering to answer. They both knew exactly how many cities had gone dark—dropped out of contact or just been flat-out declared No-Man's-Lands by survivors—since July. Everyone knew. It was a list that was burned into everyone's minds; name after name after name. Cities that had stopped transmitting emergency broadcasts. Military pockets that had stopped calling themselves green zones. Places that no one had heard from in too long. The list got longer every week.
Every night, their entire group (nine people, including Lydia, Ava, and Lydia’s grandfather) huddled around an old CB radio that someone had unearthed in their basement. The comm network hadn’t completely collapsed, yet, not like the power grids and water services, but it was still a crapshoot as to where comm channels would work. In most cases, it was the old tech that was the most reliable now. Things that hadn’t seen wide use since Grandpa was a boy were suddenly more valuable than gold.
Every night they turned to the channel most often used by what was left of emergency services and listened to the same bits of news: what places had dropped out of contact, what roads and highways were mostly clear, where the nearest military green zone was now. They always ended with tired warnings to remain calm and wait for the help that was always on the way. The faceless voices on the radio broadcasts had been promising help and rescue since July.
Ava twirled the end of her long, black braid over her fingers, squeezing water out of it. "Man. I wish I'd brought some shampoo out. If I'm gonna be wet and miserable, I might as well get a real shower out of it."
Lydia snorted, and flicked a few drops of rain from her sleeve onto Ava's face.
"Hey!" Ava protested, squeezing another stream of water from the ends of her hair and flicking it right back. Despite the situation, Lydia felt a smile tugging at her mouth as they dissolved into a miniature splash fight. However, the lighthearted moment was broken when Lydia caught a flash of movement in the corner of her eye.
She shot up in her chair, all trace of laughter vanishing. Ava froze too, her face paling as she lifted the bat. Lydia squinted, peering through the mist. Her throat tightened. There, in the very center of the street, a lone figure was slowly making its way toward the barricade. Even from a distance, Lydia could tell it wasn't a person. Not anymore.
"Crap." Ava’s shoulders slumped. "Burnout?" she asked, even though there was no way it could be anything else.
"Yeah," Lydia sighed. She stood, searching for firm footing on the rain-slick metal. "Definitely."
She braced herself, raising the rifle to her shoulder with the smooth surety that came from long familiarity. Grandpa had been taking her shooting since she was small, a hobby Lydia had always enjoyed. She'd never thought she'd be using the skill for something like this, though. She held her breath, and they watched silently, waiting to see what the figure would do.
It was a woman...or it had been. It was hard to see through the rain, but Lydia didn't need to be close to know what the thing stumbling up the street looked like. She'd seen it plenty of times (more times than she wanted to think of) in the months since everything had gone crazy.
She knew that up close the woman's skin was waxy pale. The features were caved in, the skin pulled tight against her skull. She knew the woman's lips were a dark, purplish blue and that veins stood out starkly on the neck and wrists, spreading across the pale skin in a web of silvery blue. Each movement was stiff and jerky, too fast and then too slow, as though she couldn’t quite get her muscles to work right.
The eyes were the worst, though: filmed over into a solid white. They were blank, featureless, nothing left of the pupil or iris, and they terrified Lydia more than almost anything else she had seen in the last few months. There was nothing human about those eyes. Nothing at all.
Survivors called them Burnouts—a slangy term some doctor or soldier spouted off on TV, back when there still was TV. Back when scientists and military were occasionally managing to capture one of the things and study them, back when there were still news broadcasts to talk about what they found. Burnouts were still alive…technically. Their hearts were still beating, they still breathed. They even seemed to still need rest, going dormant for periods when there was nothing around to draw their attention. As near as anyone could tell, however, a Burnout just wasn’t there anymore. No thoughts, no personality, no person. They were reduced to motor function and instinct.
Lydia sighted along the rifle's barrel, taking a deep breath as Ava rose from her seat. They watch
ed the Burnout wander back and forth across the street, hoping it would lose interest in whatever it was doing and head back deeper into the subdivision. Lydia was a good shot (and Ava was learning), but neither of them wanted to shoot the Burnouts if they could avoid it. They had a limited amount of ammunition, and there was always the risk that the noise would draw more of the things. The Burnouts had been people, once. Here, they had been people Lydia had known.
"Should I go tell your grandpa?” Ava asked. Lydia shook her head.
"There's only one," she said. They watched in tense silence, but the thing showed no signs of turning away. It continued to amble up the street towards them, its features becoming more and more distinct. "I'm gonna have to take it out.”
"Wait," Ava said, hunching forward, as though the extra inch would help her see through the rain better. "Wait, Lyds, is that..." She trailed off, squinting, then swore loudly in Spanish. Her hand shot out to Lydia's wrist, jostling the rifle barrel and bringing it down.
"Ava!" Lydia barked.
"Is that Mrs. Morrison?" Ava asked in a small voice.
Lydia froze, staring at her friend in surprise before jerking her attention back to the Burnout. It was still about sixty or seventy feet away, moving towards the sidewalk now. Lydia tilted her head, lowering the rifle. She still couldn't see the Burnout well enough to make out all the details of the thing's face...but now that Ava had said it, there was something familiar about the figure. She swallowed again, nausea swirling in her stomach.
"I-I think so," she whispered, watching the Burnout come closer and closer. Close enough to see the clothes it was wearing, and the familiar spill of long, bright red hair down its back. Only one person on the streets around Grandpa’s house had had hair like that. Lydia closed her eyes briefly. Mrs. Morrison was the music teacher at their school—was friends with Ava's mother. She gave Ava piano lessons in the summers.
"Lyds," Ava began, "we can't. I mean, you're not going to—"
"We have to," Lydia interrupted, though she made no move to raise the rifle again. "Av, we have to. It's...that's not Mrs. Morrison anymore."
The Burnout (it was a Burnout, nothing more, and certainly not the woman who had made them cookies and invited them over for lemonade; who had loved the roses in her front yard and always called Lydia “honey”) was going to notice them any moment now, and then it would rush at them.
"Can you do something?" Ava asked suddenly, desperation edging her voice. She knew—had known—Mrs. Morrison better than Lydia, had considered her a favorite teacher. If Lydia was feeling sick at the sight of the Burnout, she couldn’t imagine what her friend was feeling.
"Like what?" Lydia snapped, but even as she said it, she knew what the other girl was talking about. "Ava." She glanced around them, though there was no possible way anyone was close enough to hear them. It was a reflex. "Av, I can't. Grandpa—" She trailed off helplessly as Ava turned begging eyes on her.
"Please?" she said. "Can you at least try?"
Lydia looked back at the Burnout, chewing on the inside of her cheek. She knew she shouldn't. She knew that. It had been the one unbreakable rule she had grown up with—no one else could know what she could do. No one could know about the things her mother and grandmother could do. It was a secret that had to be kept unless there was no other possible choice.
Since the Burnouts appeared, Grandpa had made sure to remind her of those lessons again and again. He warned her, his voice deep and serious, that she could not risk drawing attention to herself and her talents right now. Ava had been the only exception ever made to that iron-clad rule, and they could not afford to make any more. There was no telling what people already terrified and on edge might do if Lydia let her secret slip.
She was already setting the rifle aside, though. They both knew she was going to do as Ava asked. She never had been any good at saying “no” to her best friend.
"I don't even know if I can do something big enough to get its attention in this weather," Lydia warned. Ava nodded her understanding, relaxing a little now that the gun had been put away. "It'll probably wander back up here later.”
This time, Ava hesitated before slowly nodding again. "I know," she said. "Lyds, I know.... I just...I don't want to watch." She ducked her head, and reached up to shove a sopping clump of her bangs out of her face. A rush of sadness bloomed in Lydia’s chest and she took her friend's hand.
"It's okay. I get it," she said, squeezing Ava's fingers reassuringly. She turned and stared out at the Burnout again. "I get it," she repeated, and took a deep breath.
She looked farther up the street. The rain was coming down too hard to see much of anything, but she knew what she needed was there. A couple hundred yards up the street was a house with a bright red storm door that had been hanging open for weeks, drifting back and forth in the breeze and slamming against its frame when a sharp wind gusted. Good enough.
Lydia tilted her head, and narrowed her eyes. She ignored Ava beside her; ignored the motion of the Burnout as it rounded an abandoned car. Her entire focus faded to the door, to the way it would be just barely moving. Then she pushed.
Warmth shot through her, as though a sudden hot wind was racing in her veins. It was a feeling she had grown up with—power rushing through everything around her; that she could touch and bend and direct. She exhaled sharply. As she breathed, the resounding crack of the door wrenching back and slamming into the side of the house echoed over the rain.
The Burnout startled, turning towards the sound. The door swung back and forth, smacking against the siding and the frame faster and faster. More than the light wind could account for. The noise carried down the street, the loud bangs drawing the Burnout's attention completely.
Lydia sighed in relief as it began stumbling back the way it had come, running with stilted, uneven strides. She closed her eyes and let the warm, rushing sensation in her chest go on for a few more seconds. The Burnouts tended to just keep going in whatever direction they were pointing in, Lydia had noticed, until they saw something else. When her eyes snapped open again the door halted, instantly falling silent.
The Burnout was still heading in the direction of the noise, and Lydia exchanged an uneasy glance with Ava when she saw a couple of other dim figures emerge from the mist-shrouded spaces in between the houses down the street. None of the things turned back towards Meadowbrook Court, however. Lydia slipped her hand out of her friend's, and picked up the rifle.
"Thanks," Ava said quietly. She sank back down onto her chair and shot Lydia a sheepish, apologetic look. There was no mistaking the gratitude in her dark eyes though. Lydia's mouth quirked up into a tired smile.
"No problem," she said.
They looked back to the street in front of them. Lydia kept her hand curled around the rifle for the next ten minutes, relaxing only when the three Burnouts seemed to lose interest in the now-silent storm door and began wandering off in the opposite direction of Meadowbrook. As the figures faded into the mist, Ava slumped down in her chair, reaching up to rub her eyes with one hand.
Lydia rolled one of her sleeves up and looked at the black plastic watch that stood out starkly against her pale white skin. It was something she would never have been caught wearing before...but it wasn't like she could pull out her phone and check the time anymore. She and Ava had another twenty minutes before Andrew and Jill Royce—an older couple who had lived across the court from her grandfather for almost ten years—were due to take their places. They would have to warn the Royces there were Burnouts in the immediate area.
Ava shivered, wrapping an old denim jacket that actually belonged to Lydia’s grandfather tighter around her thin body. Ava had been in the middle of an annual week-long stay at Lydia’s house, a tradition every summer since they had decided they were best friends in second grade, and few of the clothes she’d brought with her were suited to the cooler weather. She and Lydia could share t-shirts and pajamas, but Lydia was shorter than her by almost five inches—pants and long sle
eves ended far short of Ava’s wrists and ankles. She flashed Lydia a pale ghost of her usual bright smile.
“Who says a Psio never comes in handy, huh?”
Lydia nudged her friend’s ankle with one foot. “Hey, easy on the p-word,” she muttered. She was joking, but even so, she couldn’t help a quick glance around to make sure there was no one in hearing distance. Habit of a lifetime. Even in Ohio, it wasn’t like Psios were unheard of—Columbus was a pretty cosmopolitan city, after all, and though there were no hard numbers worldwide, most geneticists agreed that the percentage of the population with confirmed psionic abilities was rising. It was just—not particularly common, and still a little taboo. Especially families like Lydia’s, where there were multiple generations with abilities.
That probably had something to do with the direct correlation between Invasion and the spike in people born with such abilities.
The point was, Lydia’s telekinetic gift wasn’t something she had ever advertised; Ava was the only person outside of her family who knew. And while she didn’t share all of Grandpa’s fears about what could happen if she started using her powers more often, she was afraid of how the rest of their group would react. Would look at her.
There had been plenty of people blaming psios for the Burnouts, after all. Stupid conspiracy theories, the kind that had been popping up whenever there was some disaster ever since the days of Invasion. Psios had been blamed for everything from hurricanes to earthquakes to the failure of presidential candidates. This time had been different, though. The Burnouts were no natural disaster, and plenty of people had been willing to buy into any theory that might provide answers.
Grandpa tried to shield her from the worst of those news reports, the ones that showed angry mobs descending on homes and businesses of people who had been open about their psionic abilities. He’d tried, but Lydia had her own newsfeeds and media sites she could search. The pictures still gave her nightmares.