by Alex Barnett
“You gonna be okay?” Lydia asked, shaking away the dark thoughts. She rubbed at her temple until the warning twinge of a tension headache faded away. It was always harder, somehow, to use her abilities on something she couldn’t actually see.
“No,” Ava said bluntly, “but I’ll survive.”
Lydia looked out over the deserted street that used to be her home, her eyes roaming over the abandoned vehicles, the trash and debris that was strewn everywhere. The vehicles she and Ava were sitting on were only part of a barricade that ringed the entire court, a Frankenstein’s monster of a blockade made of everything in the houses that hadn’t been nailed down.
Her grandfather’s neighborhood had been a quiet subdivision, all manicured lawns and neutral paint. The kind of place that had high PTA meeting attendance and bred armies of mild-mannered CPA’s named John. It was a war zone now. The street was clogged with dead cars, and bits of trash and debris drifted freely in the wind. Here and there, toys and clothes littered the asphalt, bits and pieces of lives just left outside to rot.
Two houses at the end of the block had caught fire at the end of the summer, older “heritage” homes that hadn’t been treated for fire resistance. With the power grid gone, the standard fire suppression systems hadn’t activated. The houses burned nearly to the ground before a lucky August downpour put out the blaze. They were just twisted, blackened hulks now; broken piles of roof beams and metal support studs reaching up to the sky like bones poking out of a disturbed grave.
Every night, the voices on the emergency broadcasts urged people to just hold on a little longer. They promised that help was on the way. That the threat of the Burnouts would soon be contained.
Lydia knew she was not the only one who had realized those voices were lying.
#
The Royces arrived right on time, jogging across the court from their house with their jackets held over their heads. Lydia passed the rifle down to Andrew Royce as Ava scrambled off the van, and then followed her friend. She stumbled as she jumped onto the ground, nearly tripping forward. Jill steadied her with one bony hand on her shoulder, and she shot the old woman a grateful smile.
"Any trouble?" Andrew asked. He pursed his lips at their wet and bedraggled appearance, sighing as he tossed a glare up towards the umbrella. Jill climbed up onto the van with a speed and agility that belied her wrinkled face and short bob of gray hair. Andrew waited until his wife was steady before passing the rifle up.
"We saw some Burnouts," Lydia reported. "Three of them."
"They were heading back towards Brookhaven Street," Ava added, "up by those houses that burned down? But they might come back. One of them...one of them was Jenny Morrison." Ava's voice dropped low on the last sentence, her jaw going tight as she stared at the ground. Andrew's face softened, and he closed his eyes.
"Ah, kid. I'm sorry," he said as he gave Ava’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. "I know her and your family were close." He sighed again and scratched one hand through the thick, white whiskers on his chin.
Lydia and Ava were the youngest people on Meadowbrook—most of the houses were owned by retirees and middle-aged couples whose children were out on their own. Apart from one other family with young children, Lydia was usually the only person on Meadowbrook under the age of forty. She knew if Mr. Royce got the chance, he would put the Burnout that used to be her friend's favorite teacher out of its misery rather than leave them to do it.
"You two need to tell Mike." Andrew jerked his chin towards Lydia’s house. Lydia exchanged a wary glance with Ava before nodding. Her grandfather would understand why Lydia hadn’t shot the Burnout, but he would still be furious with them both for risking it.
"We will," Ava promised. “Right now."
"Good. And get dried off, too!" Andrew turned around and began his own climb up to the top of the van (much more slowly than his wife had managed). "Last thing we need is anyone gettin' sick around here," he muttered as he heaved himself up.
They took off running across the court, splashing through puddles on the asphalt. The rain was coming down even harder than before, and the drains had started to back up. She and Ava would probably be recruited to go around to the drains in front of each of the houses and make sure they were cleared of debris before the afternoon was over. They darted up the steps of her grandfather's house, pausing to strip off their dripping jackets and kick off their mud-spattered sneakers.
Grandpa’s house wasn’t the largest on the court, but Lydia thought it was the prettiest. It was a simple two-story with a wraparound porch and a large port window on the east-facing wall. It had pale green siding with bright white trim and old-fashioned shutters, and her grandmother had put large flowerbeds under each window the year after she and Grandpa moved in. Lydia had spent many hours with her grandmother, tending the flowerbeds and the large garden out back.
Like most houses in their neighborhood, it was heritage-style and had been built with mostly pre-Invasion designs and materials. They had most of the bells and whistles of modern technology, of course—fire suppression, network-connected comm screens in all the rooms, automatic appliances—but Lydia’s grandparents had never cared for the aesthetic of post-Invasion tech. Their house had none of the graceful lines, shining surfaces, and automated everything that Ava’s did. The inside of her best friend’s home resembled something out of an old pre-Invasion science fiction story.
Lydia carefully draped her jacket over the back of the wooden porch swing, running her hand over the soaked sleeve for a moment. It was one of her mother’s, a sturdy military-issue leftover from her mom’s days as an Army nurse (unfortunately before ionic weatherproofing had been refined enough to mass produce).
They slipped into the house quietly. Grandma had always hated the sound of slamming doors, and even eight years after her death, even with what might very well be the end of the world going on, no one in the house ever forgot that rule. Lydia felt some of the sick, hyper-vigilant tension that they all carried all the time now dissipate as soon as they closed the door. Logically, Lydia knew they were only a little safer in the house than they were outside. However, it was hard not to feel protected while surrounded by the familiar walls. This house had been home for almost as long as Lydia could remember.
The windows had all been thrown open despite the rain, and the cool air swirling through the house was a welcome change after the hot, stifling August. The electricity was one of the first things to fail, and Lydia had never realized just how uncomfortable the house could get without environmental regulators. Even something as basic as air conditioning was missed. Several of the other houses on Meadowbrook didn’t even have windows that opened, relying completely on the central air system. There had been a lot of people sleeping on the floor in Grandpa’s living room during the hottest summer months.
She reveled in the breeze the swept aside the stale odors of sweat and smoke. If she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could almost smell the lemon furniture polish and fresh coffee that she'd always associated with the house. God, she missed coffee. Some days she thought she would sell her soul to be able to synthesize a fresh cup of coffee. The kitchen was the one area of the house where her grandparents had unabashedly relished advances made since Invasion, and the foodsynth was always the latest model.
They were about to dash upstairs for dry clothes when they heard raised voices in the kitchen. As one, they paused in the front hall and exchanged startled looks. Grandpa didn't sound angry, exactly, but he was arguing with someone. Without thinking about it, Lydia pressed a finger to her lips, jerking her chin toward the kitchen. Ava nodded, and the two slipped down the short, narrow hall. They paused by the entryway, flattened against the wall and tucked just out of sight of the long breakfast bar that dominated the space.
Mike Carter paced back and forth in front of the sink, muttering a string of profanity to himself. Well, mostly to himself. He was in his mid-sixties, a retired Marine with scarred, gnarled hands and sharp, hawk-like features and piercing eyes
that were the same whiskey-brown shade his daughter and granddaughter shared. His shoulders had started to stoop with age, and his middle had gone a little soft in the past few years, but he’d always seemed a near invincible figure to Lydia. In the three months since the Burnouts had appeared, he'd become the de facto leader of their group.
Jim Perry, a heavyset black man with a shining bald head who had been Grandpa’s next-door-neighbor for seven years, was seated at the breakfast bar. Spread out across the gray crystal countertop was a pile of old road maps that appeared to have been drawn on with red and green marker. The red marks heavily outnumbered the green. Ava elbowed Lydia's side, raising a questioning eyebrow. Lydia just shrugged.
"It's too risky," Grandpa said, halting his pacing and turning to face his friend. "We're safer here." He leaned forward, bracing his hands against the counter across from Jim.
"I get what you're saying, but how long you really think couches and chicken wire will keep those things out? This was supposed to be temporary. Two weeks, three weeks tops, before the National Guard or someone got everything back under control," Jim answered with a sharp look. "That's what we planned for. You said yourself we wouldn't be able to hold out like this permanently."
"I know that!" Mike Carter hung his head, wisps of iron-gray hair falling over his forehead. "I know what I said," he continued, his voice softening. "But that was before…all of this. Boston's gone dark. Atlanta went last week. Philadelphia hasn't made a peep since early yesterday morning." His whole body deflated, the wrinkles deepening on his already craggy face.
"Mike, we can't stay here," Jim said, scrubbing a hand over his face. "We're running low on food; the only meds we have are what was in the bathrooms. We're down to throwing trashcans out every time it rains to collect water. Seriously...how long can we last?"
Lydia turned wide eyes on her friend. They had known about the water, of course—hard to miss that situation when they had been the ones scrubbing out every available container and lining them up on the sidewalks—but they had no idea that food was getting to be a problem.
"It's not an emergency, yet," Grandpa said, crossing his arms over his chest and jutting his chin out.
"Which is why we should leave now! Before it gets to be an emergency. While we still have supplies. We’ve got two cars still run on gas and Eric thinks he can get the van running again. There’s supposed to be a green zone up near Cleveland…"
"And a hundred and fifty miles of highways that’re good as parking lots between there and here. Crawling with Burnouts, besides," Mike said bitterly.
Jim sighed heavily, swiping at his round, jowl-heavy face with his sleeve. Even in the dead of winter, he always seemed to be sweaty. The brutal summer without environmentals had been torture. Silence stretched between the two men, tense and so thick that Lydia could hardly breathe. Ava slouched back against the wall, staring at the ceiling.
"What else can we do?" Jim asked finally. "We've got another two weeks before the food gives out. Three if we’re careful."
Lydia's eyes shot to her grandfather, watching the way his lips thinned into a grim, colorless line. His rough hands tightened on the edges of the breakfast bar until his knuckles went stark white.
"I don't know," he admitted after a few heartbeats, and Lydia had never heard him sound so defeated. Mr. Perry nodded with a tired shrug, leaning forward to prop his elbows up on the counter. Neither man seemed inclined to continue the argument.
Ava waited a beat, and then grabbed Lydia's wrist. She gave it a light tug and the girls darted back silently before Lydia raised her voice.
"Grandpa, we're back!"
"Everything okay?" Grandpa called. A moment later, both her grandfather and Jim appeared.
Lydia slanted a look over to Ava, and she bit her lip. "Not really. We saw three Burnouts...closer than they've been in a while. One of them was almost halfway to the van before it turned back. There were a couple of others wandering around up by Mrs. Fielding’s place."
"Great," Jim muttered, passing one hand over his face and fixing Grandpa with a dark glare.
"We'll talk later," Grandpa said with a warning look. "Are you two all right?"
Lydia knew what he was really asking. She shrugged. "One of them was Mrs. Morrison," she said. "I was going to take her—it out, but it turned back before it got too close. I didn't think it was worth the noise."
"No, no, no. That was the right call," Grandpa agreed. "Ava, honey..." He trailed off, at a loss for words. Ava just shook her head sadly.
"I'm gonna go get changed," she said. "Lyds, you coming?" Without waiting for an answer, she turned and hurried up the stairs, her footsteps echoing in the sudden silence of the front hall.
Lydia glanced at her grandfather. "You need me for anything?" Grandpa shook his head, his eyes on Ava's retreating back. He laid a hand on Lydia's shoulder and gave her a gentle push towards the stairs, urging her to follow.
Lydia’s room was a good size, and Ava a frequent enough guest that Lydia’s mom had just bought another twin bed years ago. Lydia used it as a couch when Ava wasn’t visiting. Ava had already swapped shirts and was pulling a fresh pair of jeans on as Lydia entered. Then she flopped down onto her bed, immediately rolling over onto her stomach and reaching down onto the floor.
After a moment’s fumbling, she pulled a plain white sketch pad and a box of colored pencils out from under the bed. She flipped to a random page in the book, pulled out a black pencil that had been sharpened down to almost nothing, and began scratching out seemingly random lines. Lydia didn’t have to ask what the picture would be—she could already see the rough outline of a woman’s face taking shape on the page. Over the next few hours, maybe a couple days, a beautifully rendered sketch of Mrs. Morrison would appear on the paper, in detail so fine it would look more like a photograph than a drawing.
Ava’s favorite teacher would be smiling, maybe playing piano…some real or imagined memory where she was safe and happy, and not the monstrous thing she had been turned into. Ava had a portrait for everyone she had known and loved that they could confirm de—that they knew had Burned.
There was a picture of one of Ava’s teammates on the track team, a girl named Zoe who had lived a few streets over from Meadowbrook. They had seen her wandering near the corner of Brookhaven early in the summer, her eyes a solid white.
There was a picture of Father Jacob, the priest at the church Ava’s family had attended since she was two years old. He had been doing rounds at one of the local hospitals when it was quarantined and declared a total loss two days later.
There were pictures of Ava’s parents.
They took up more than half the sketchpad, picture after picture of Ava’s mother, Rachel, and her father, Luis. Drawings of them with Ava in all stages of life, of them with her brother and sister. Family portraits, vacation pictures that Lydia knew had hung on the walls of Ava’s house, her parents’ wedding portrait. Each drawn in loving, meticulous detail, so that Rachel Velasquez’s dark hair seemed to shine on the page, so that Luis Velasquez seemed to be about to take a breath and laugh. Picture after picture after picture, as though Ava was trying to commit every memory she had of them to the paper. So many nights, Lydia had woken up to find her best friend sitting up in bed, sketching feverishly, tears in her eyes as she tried to produce as many portraits to hold onto as she could.
Grandpa had tried to go get Rachel and Luis the first night people had started realizing that the Burnouts were not going to be contained. Lydia and Ava had sat at home, frantically trying to reach other members of their family, though all the comm channels were jammed with thousands, perhaps millions, of people trying to do the same. The whole time, trying not to notice how long it was taking Grandpa to get back. Trying to ignore the local reports of whole neighborhoods being blocked off by police and National Guard soldiers.
Lydia had gotten one message from her mother that night, the last word she had ever received. Ava hadn’t been able to contact her siblings.
Her parents had never made it to Meadowbrook. Grandpa returned hours after he left, stumbling out of his vehicle with a shell-shocked expression. Lydia was already reaching for her friend before her grandfather even said a word. They hadn’t needed him to say anything. The empty car was answer enough. As long as she lived, Lydia would never forget the sound of the broken scream that tore out of Ava.
It was jarring to think about the way things had been before, to look around her bedroom now—with the bright lavender walls covered in band posters and art prints; the useless computer deck on her desk. Most of her bookshelf was taken up with memorabilia from the sci-fi and fantasy books and shows she’d devoured from a young age. Action figures, snow globes, glass and resin figurines, even a few holographic sculptures that still had battery life and hadn’t been cannibalized for something else.
It all seemed so trivial, now; ghosts from a world that didn’t exist anymore, and might never exist again. This must have been what it was like during Invasion.
"I'm sorry about Mrs. Morrison," she said, pulling her sweatshirt over her head and dropping it on top of Ava's wet things. She went to her dresser and started pawing through her clothes, eventually selecting one of last year’s softball tees. It was worn threadbare in places, but at least it was soft and still fit.
The steady scratch scratch of pencil on paper slowed, and Ava sighed.
"It's stupid, I know," Ava said. She focused on the sketch pad in her lap, her eyes glassy and wet. "There's...we can't assume anyone’s left, I know that. I just hoped—" She cut off and slammed the sketchpad shut with a rough cry of frustration. The nubbin of a pencil went flying across the room.
Lydia sank down onto the mattress next to her. "I know," she said, wrapping her friend in a one-armed hug. And she did.
They couldn't let themselves think about what might have happened to friends and neighbors, their classmates and the people on their sports teams. They couldn’t wonder if anyone they had known and cared about was still alive. They couldn't let themselves think about family—grandparents, or aunts and uncles, cousins. Ava’s older brother and sister.