by Alex Barnett
"That's crazy!" Ava protested, but there was no conviction in her voice. She and Lydia had spent many evenings speculating that things were worse than they had been led to believe, but they hadn’t thought it was that bad.
"Last I checked, we’re in the middle of a goddamn robo-zombie apocalypse," Zack said. "Crazy’s all we got.”
Lydia slumped back in her chair, a chill sweeping through her. She let her spoon drop back into the oatmeal with a wet plop, her appetite suddenly gone. "Are…is anyone any closer to figuring out how this happened?” she asked, afraid of the answer. Caleb shot her a look, and she immediately shook her head. “I mean, yeah, we know it was an Invasion leftover—but has anyone figured out where ground zero was? Or how we missed something that could do…could do this for almost seventy years?”
“Haven’t heard anything since August. There was a rumor that some Army pocket was tracking the source,” Caleb answered with a dark look. “Folks were still pretty sure it started somewhere in the US. New York, maybe, or Chicago. Hell, there’s Invasion wreckage washin’ up every year on the beaches up north. Remember a few years ago when they found a pulse cannon core on the Jersey Shore?”
Lydia looked down at the scarred wooden tabletop, itself a pre-Invasion relic that had belonged to Jill Royce’s parents, and balled up her fists.
Invasion.
Even sixty-seven years later, there was no one on Earth who hadn’t been affected by Invasion, wasn’t still being affected by Invasion. Lydia had seen pictures from the time period: grainy black and white or sepia toned photos that bore an eerie resemblance to the view she looked out on every day. Destruction. Chaos. Terrified people. All that was missing were huge, black ships hanging in the sky.
Invasion was when Earth learned for sure that humans weren’t alone in the universe, and it might have been the moment when they were snuffed out entirely.
May 30th 1949, a year before Grandpa was born. Sometimes, Lydia wondered what it must have been like for her great-grandparents too look up into the sky and see dark, oval vessels the size of football fields descending through the clouds. They must have thought the world was ending.
Even today, debate still raged over the Invaders’ motives, but there was no mistaking them for benign. Most academics accepted that if Invasion had happened even five or ten years later, if the machines and production lines of World War II had had just a little more time to cool off, if people had had just a few more years to get complacent in peace again, the outcome might have been very different. As it was, the Invaders probably hadn’t expected much of a fight and had been caught off guard by how quickly humanity responded to the threat. The few industrialized nations that weren’t still crippled by the effects of World War II had scored crucial early victories, proving that even though the technology was something never before seen—it wasn’t invincible.
It hadn’t been that easy, though.
The ships sent out swarms of fighter vessels and overland attack vehicles. The skies once again became hostile in large parts of the world, and people learned to listen again with fearful hearts for bomb sirens.
The Invaders themselves were as much of a mystery as their motivations for attacking Earth—with every ship brought down, the military failed to find even a hint of the beings controlling them. Slowly, the realization sank in that they wouldn’t, that either the world was dealing with something on a completely different scale from any human understanding of life…
Or the world was facing a fully automated fleet.
The Invasion raged for almost a year, claiming casualties in every nation on Earth…but eventually the tide had turned. New alliances formed during the war were put to the test, governments and nations that had stayed out of the conflict—or even fought on the wrong side of it—reached out, wishing to join forces in the face of complete extinction. The tide had turned. Victories became more decisive; the skies were slowly reclaimed. A month before Lydia’s great-grandmother gave birth to Grandpa in a military hospital down in Florida, the last invading ships were finally brought down.
And the whole world changed forever.
The Invasion fleet had been huge, big enough for multiple ships over every continent in the world, and that wasn’t even counting the smaller attack vessels. The amount of wreckage had been enormous. Most of it had been cleared away in the first decade after victory was declared, nation after nation snatching up as much of it as they could to study the technology. The leaps made in science and engineering in the years following Invasion had been incredible, unprecedented in human history.
Almost overnight, great leaps were made in transport, in energy, in communications, in military infrastructure and weapons, in architecture. Post-Invasion tech seeped into every aspect of life. Even fields that hadn’t been jumpstarted by the study of Invasion technology had benefitted. There were whole academic circles devoted to theories of what medicine, psychology, art, and history might have been like had humanity not advanced so quickly in other areas, freeing up time and funding to pursue those fields. There was no one on Earth who had not had their lives irrevocably altered by Invasion.
Then there were the “leftovers.”
Even decades of scavenging tech from the Invasion fleet hadn’t been able to clean up all of it. At least a few times a year, something broke on the news about some new Invasion-era relic being discovered. People all over the world stumbled upon remnants of the fleet that washed up on beaches, or turned them up in fields during planting season or construction. When Lydia was seven, one of her classmates brought a defunct onboard computer from a real Invasion fighter vessel—apparently something his dog had dug up in their back yard.
Most often, the leftovers were harmless. Half-destroyed and missing parts, with power sources that had died years ago. Some…were not. It didn’t happen often, but occasionally someone found a relic that was still active. Weapons, ballistics, explosives. A fully-functional attack drone discovered by a Filipino fishing crew nearly touched off an international incident when no less than five nations tried to claim it for salvage. Such finds were rare, though, and had been for many years.
Until the Burnouts appeared, that is. No one doubted the Burnouts were the result of an Invasion relic. That question was settled. Unfortunately, that was the only question that had been settled before the Burnouts basically collapsed society in every nation on Earth. No one knew what kind of weapon or artifact had been activated—if it was a weapon, or the Burnouts were just some side effect of a previously unknown aspect of Invasion technology. No one had been able to figure out where the first Burnouts had come from, nor how they spread so quickly.
Grandpa had tried to hide it from them, but Lydia and Ava knew there was more than one military institution operating under the theory that this was some final stage of the Invasion that had somehow been prevented all those decades ago. Or that the Burnouts signaled the return of whatever alien race had sent the first ships…that the Invaders had returned with technology that had had just as much time to advance as Earth technology. Truthfully, Lydia didn’t know which thought was worse.
Lydia shook her head, as if she could physically dislodge the dark thoughts. “Did, did you guys tell my grandpa or anyone about what you’ve seen out there? It’s been months since we had any contact with anyone outside the barricade."
Zack nodded. "Caleb was up talking to your grandfather most of the night."
Lydia took a deep breath. Grandpa would figure out what to do, she told herself. They had been safe for this long; they could hold out. Zack tilted his head towards her.
"Sorry," he said.
Caleb laughed, low and without much humor. "Too bad no one actually had an apocalypse plan, huh?"
"Excuse you?" Zack sputtered. "I had an excellent apocalypse plan. I mean, I was thinking zombies, not weird cyborg attack…things…but I had an apocalypse plan.”
"Man, locking yourself in the nearest Wal-Mart isn’t an apocalypse plan." Caleb rolled his eyes. "That's just Ho
llywood."
"Says the dude who wanted to grab a crossbow in that sport shop last month."
"Wh—hey, those things don’t make any noise! It was a good idea!"
"Only if you know how to shoot it," Zack countered. He finished with the gun barrel and held it up for inspection. Caleb tilted it to one side, holding it up to the light streaming in from the windows.
"Good to go," he said. Zack set the barrel down on the towel again, and capped the bottle of cleaner. Caleb gathered up the brushes and swabs, wiping the brush down on one corner of the towel as Zack picked up the pieces, reassembling the weapon with a speed that had both Lydia and Ava staring. He was almost as quick at it as Grandpa. Caleb grinned at their shock, open and easy.
"Yeah, there's a reason he does all the maintenance."
Ava let out a low, impressed whistle. Lydia bit her lip, curiosity welling up inside her. "Can I ask you something...I mean, do you mind?" she asked.
"Ask away," Zack said, tilting his head downward so that his glasses slipped down his nose. "I'm not shy." He winked, and shoved the glasses back up. Lydia let out a soft huff of laughter.
"Can you see anything?" she asked.
Zack gnawed on the inside of his cheek. "Mmm, light and shadow, mostly," he replied. "I mean, like, I can tell there's a window behind you two...things like that. It's hard to describe."
“What, I mean if you don’t mind me asking, what happened?” Ava added.
Disabilities like Zack’s weren’t unheard of, but they were unusual these days. The biomedical fields were finally catching up with the technological fields, and Lydia knew there were at least three cybernetic implants on market that could restore almost a full field of vision in blind patients.
“Don’t mind,” Zack assured her friend, leaning back in his seat. “I was born like this…came way too early and this,” he gestured towards his glasses, “was a side effect that stuck around. My eyes are too messed up for implants to work, and they’re not messed up enough for our insurance to cover a transplant. I’m too well-adjusted,” he said with a laugh, and shrugged philosophically. “Ain’t like that’s an issue now, anyway. I get by.” His expression turned playful, and he waggled his dark eyebrows. Lydia found herself answering his crooked grin almost involuntarily. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
Zack pulled an exaggeratedly serious face. "Did you two have an apocalypse plan?"
Caleb heaved the long-suffering sigh of a lifetime of such exchanges, and Zack socked him on the shoulder. “Shut up, it’s a valid question. I don’t trust people who didn’t have an apocalypse plan.”
“Malik had an apocalypse plan,” Caleb muttered with a sly grin. Zack immediately grimaced.
“Doesn’t count, he thought New Kirk was better than Original Series Kirk, how good could his plans’ve been? Also, I thought we agreed you weren’t going to mention Malik anymore?”
Caleb smirked and winked across the table at Lydia and Ava. “Ex-boyfriend,” he stage-whispered.
“Very ex-boyfriend,” Zack said, a sour expression twisting his face. Lydia blinked in surprise. Oh…well okay, then.
The conversation moved into more typical territory. They were deep into a discussion of the last movie they’d seen (Ava and Zack were heartbroken that the new Black Widow sequel would never get to theaters), when they were interrupted by the sound of footsteps hurrying down the stairs. All four of them tensed, falling silent as Emily appeared in the doorway.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said tersely.
5
Lydia raced up the stairs, Ava close behind. Caleb and Zack followed, Zack's fingers hooked into his brother's belt loops. The stairs let out onto a small landing and a short hallway leading to the two upstairs bedrooms. At the end of the hall was a large, plate-glass window with a dark bed sheet tacked over it to block any light or movement at night. Jill and Andrew were on either side of the window, peeking out around the edges of the sheet, while Iris Perry hovered in the doorway to one of the spare bedrooms.
"What's going on?" Lydia asked. "Did something happen over at Mr. Grant's?"
"Come here," Andrew replied. Lydia glanced at Ava, and the two scurried closer. Zack and Caleb hung back, slouching against the wall by the Royce's bedroom door.
Lydia edged around Andrew, taking his place by the window and peeling back the sheet. Ava crowded in close beside her as Lydia looked first across the court to Eric Grant's house. It was the same model as the Royce's, with a large window in more or less the same place. She held her breath as she looked for any hint of movement in the window. There was nothing.
But when she looked into the street, she didn't need an explanation.
"Oh, hell," she breathed.
The street outside was full of Burnouts. Full. Grandpa said there were about a dozen Burnouts wandering around several houses up from them, but Lydia's eyes skipped around, counting thirty, forty, nearly fifty of the things.
They weren't—they weren’t doing anything. Just standing in the street at odd intervals, like actors waiting for someone to yell “action!” Some pressed up against the barricade, or faced the houses, but many stood with their backs turned toward Meadowbrook, as if they’d just frozen in the act of walking down the street. Lydia’s heart leapt into her throat as she tore her eyes from the street and looked back towards Eric's house. She didn't want to keep staring at the gruesome figures, too afraid that she might start recognizing bodies and faces.
She had never seen so many Burnouts in the same place. Even in the worst days of the summer, when they had been constructing the barricades and the noise had been unavoidable, the most they had ever had to deal with was seven or eight.
"What should we do?" Ava whispered, stepping back from the window. Behind them, Caleb leaned over and whispered something to Zack, before striding forward to look for himself. His expression tightened at the sight in the street, confusion flashing across his face.
"I don't know," Andrew said. Lydia had never heard him sound so nervous. "Mike went over to Eric's, but he hasn't signaled anything. They...this doesn't make sense! They were leaving this morning!"
Lydia crossed her arms. "I'm going over to Eric's," she announced.
Andrew narrowed his eyes, glancing over at his wife before nodding slowly. He heaved a tired sigh. "Swing around through the back yards," he said. “And for God’s sake, be careful.”
“They shouldn’t be able to see me from the street,” she replied. "Av, you coming?”
“You know it,” Ava said immediately. Behind them, Caleb stepped away from the window.
“Mind if I tag along?” he asked.
“I guess so,” Lydia answered after a moment of surprise, seeing no reason to protest. They trooped back down to the first floor, the Reeds trailing behind them. Zack didn’t bother holding onto Caleb’s belt this time, but Lydia heard him counting the stairs under his breath as he went.
"Want your cane?" Caleb queried. Lydia glanced over her shoulder to see Zack giving a tired nod.
"Might as well...looks like we're gonna be here a while. God, I miss Bella," he said in a subdued, tired voice.
Caleb’s face softened. “I know man, I’m sorry.” Zack hooked a hand onto Caleb's elbow, and the two broke off for the living room.
Ava paused in the hallway that led back to the guest room, one hand twisting and untwisting the length of her black hair into a coil. Sweat sheened on her forehead, and her dark eyes were wide enough for Lydia to see the whites all around. "You think it's going to be all right?" she asked.
Lydia blew out a breath. "Let’s see what Grandpa and Jim say," she said, shaking her head. "I don't know, Av. There's so many."
She forced herself to keep her voice steady, to not show any hint of the pinpricks of icy fear that felt like they were crawling up her spine. She wanted, oh she wanted, to believe that whatever had drawn the Burnouts would go away, and the things would follow. It was not the first time that there had been Burnouts on the street...it
was not even the first time there had been a large enough group to warrant shifting the lookout to Mr. Grant's house while the rest of them hid.
But it had never been like this. Lydia had never seen that many Burnouts near their street. And the way they were just standing there, unmoving. Like they were watching for something. Like they were waiting for something. Her heart pounded against her ribs with the force of a jackhammer and the hair on the back of her neck kept prickling, like someone was standing right behind her.
She wanted Grandpa.
Ava closed her eyes, her whole body slumping for a moment. Her friend reached under her collar and drew out the little silver cross she’d been wearing as long as Lydia had known her, murmuring to herself in Spanish. Lydia was conversant after a decade of them practically living in each other’s pockets (and could swear like a Mexican national thanks to Ava’s big brother), but she still had to take a few seconds to translate in her head. She waited silently while Ava pulled herself together, nudging her friend with her shoulder when Ava straightened again.
“Okay?” she asked. Ava exhaled shakily.
"Okay," she agreed. "Let’s head over there." Her voice did not sound as steady as her words, but Lydia didn’t call her on it. She nodded, shoving her hands into her jeans pockets.
"You know it don’t work like that!"
The words came out in a furious hiss that tried to be quiet and missing the mark. It sounded like Zack’s voice. Lydia pulled up short, nearly causing Ava to slam into her. Caleb whispered something back, too low for Lydia to make out, and then she heard Zack let out an aggrieved sigh.
"I don’t know, okay? Maybe…" He trailed off. Lydia looked over at Ava, confused. Zack sounded upset. Frustrated. Lydia tilted her head, curious, before striding into the living room.
"Everything okay?" she asked. Caleb and Zack were huddled over their duffle bag, heads bent low together. The two startled at the sound of Lydia’s voice, and Caleb took a hasty step back from his brother.
“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine,” Caleb said, running a hand through his messy hair. “We’re just trying to figure out how I’m going to go get the truck.”