Penny began to shake and cry. “It’s all burning,” she said. Her father hugged her.
“Cass,” Farryn said, “we need to go.”
Cass stepped into the room. “If you want to stay alive, we need to go now,” she said firmly. Her father looked at her, a blank, lost expression on his face, and then he slowly nodded.
CHAPTER 24
THE PETEY STAGGERED BACKWARD INTO A DOORWAY WHEN NICK’S BLAST hit it in the chest. The door crumpled inward, shattered by the immense weight of the bot. It took the Petey a few moments to clear itself of the rubble, firing its lase arms wildly in an effort to protect itself. Another rifle blast hit it, from the fighter to Nick’s left, and another, and then a third, this one from Lexi. The Petey’s armor cracked, exposing a tangle of wiring, and it ground to a halt, its arms suddenly hanging limp.
“Nick, clean it up,” said Ro. Nick thumbed his rifle to low burst—no need to drain the battery with anything larger when the armor was cracked—and squeezed off the shot. The burst hit the crippled Petey right in the large gap on its chest, and the bot shattered. Neo-plas and metal alloy flew thirty feet in every direction, and the rebels ducked for cover. Ro laughed and clapped Nick on the back.
There was a flash of light and the sidewalk at their feet exploded, sending up a shower of concrete and dirt and knocking Ro and Nick to the ground.
“Petey, ten o’clock!” a nearby fighter shouted, releasing a burst from his rifle. Nick, dazed, staggered to his feet. Lexi grabbed his forearm to steady him. Damn it, he thought. Where did that Petey come from? Another blast from the bot crackled past his left shoulder, and the man next to him screamed and went down. Three bursts from the rebels hit the bot, and it fell backward. Lexi’s hand dug painfully into Nick’s arm. She pulled him to cover, but through the smoke of the explosion, Nick saw that Ro was down.
“Go!” he yelled at Lexi. With a look that said she wasn’t going anywhere, she began climbing over rubble and helped Nick heave Ro to his feet. Ro had blood on his forehead, and his eyes were glassy and dazed. Nick hooked one of Ro’s arms over his shoulder, Lexi the other, and together they dragged Ro toward cover. They managed a crouching, staggering run toward the corner of a building. After a few seconds Ro began to revive, and by the time they neared the wall, where the rest of the group had already hidden, Ro was bearing his own weight.
“I’m fine,” he said, leaning against the wall, wiping the blood away from his eye. He nodded at Nick and Lexi. “Thank you,” he said.
“I didn’t see that one,” said Nick. “Wasn’t paying attention—” His bot eye caught a flicker of movement up and to the right, and he wheeled, sighted the sphere bot, and aimed. But before he could squeeze off a shot another burst hit it, sending the bot to the ground.
The burst had come from the other side of the street—which was empty. What the hell? Nick thought.
He heard footsteps running on the street, approaching, and his bot eye scanned frantically. Nothing. But he could hear footsteps, and then he heard a quiet, low laugh. Suddenly a man appeared from nowhere.
Nick let out a strangled yell, then realized he recognized the figure. It was Parson, one of Clay’s rebels, wearing one of Kevin’s camouflage suits. He took his hand off the control knob on his vest, and nodded at Nick, grinning. “Didn’t mean to scare ya,” he said.
“Didn’t,” Nick said.
Parson turned to Ro. “Scout bots still giving away your positions?” he said.
Ro nodded.
“We’re still working on getting all the General’s comm targets. Just be careful, and keep an eye out for the spheres.”
“Just get the damned comm targets down,” said Ro. He tore a strip of cloth off the bottom of his shirt, and tied it around his forehead to cover the gash that was still oozing blood into his eyes.
Parson twisted the controls on his vest, and disappeared. Nick could hear him jogging away. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
Ro’s team slowly worked their way farther into the City, where they were to rendezvous in Hightown with the other teams pushing in from the perimeter. Fighting inward from all directions, by the time the rebels reached Hightown, the City would be under their control.
They took down four more Peteys and five spheres, and lost one more rebel, a woman who had her neck broken by a falling chunk of wall. Ro took her rifle, closed her eyes with his fingertips, then grimly moved on, leaving her under the rubble.
As they approached Hightown, the bot engagements became less frequent—maybe the camouflaged fighters were thinning them out, Nick guessed—but they came across more and more City residents out on the streets.
Their homes had been destroyed, and they had nowhere to go. Some huddled amid the rubble, weeping, trying desperately to find cover. Others were too dazed and shocked to function—Nick passed by men and women who were just sitting on the street corners, their faces blank, their clothes torn and bloody. Most didn’t even look up as Nick passed them. One man shuffled past, moaning, his feet bare and bloody, his face scorched red and blistered. Others lay dead on the street, crushed by the collapsed buildings, burned by the explosions, lased by crossfire.
Nick held down the nausea and horror that threatened to overcome him as he searched the faces for anyone he might recognize—his parents, most of all, but also Kevin and Cass and Farryn, as well as Doc, and Lexi’s parents. Nobody, alive or dead, looked familiar.
Ro called out to the survivors as they passed. “Come with us! We’re here to free you from the bots! Come with us and fight!” A very few joined them—four men and two women. Ro quietly signaled for two of the rebels to loop back to the rear, to keep the survivors under watch.
Most of the people on the streets ignored Ro, or went scrambling for cover when they saw the rebels approaching and refused to come out. “Idiots,” he muttered quietly to himself, but loud enough for Nick, standing next to him, to hear. “We’re offering them freedom.”
Nick stepped around the body of a man lying on the street corner, arms bent at unnatural angles under his torso. He forced himself to study the face—no, nobody he knew—and then he looked away, fighting back the urge to throw up. Yeah, he thought bitterly. Freedom.
And then he looked back at the body, suddenly realizing—yes, the man was wearing a tan jumpsuit. He looked around the street. Of course. He had been so preoccupied with the hunt for bots, with the pitiful survivors, the dead, that he hadn’t even realized that he was a half block from the re-education center.
There it was, on the left. It was on fire, flames licking out the shattered windows. The roof of the building had collapsed, pancaking the floor below it, and the rest of the structure was threatening to collapse as well.
Nick froze in his tracks, staring, remembering. He hoped every last one of the rusted Lecturer bots was in there, destroyed. But how many people were inside? How many men and women and kids in jumpsuits lay on the white tiles, overcome by smoke, crushed by the collapsed building, burned? He wanted to rush into the building and look for survivors, but he forced himself to turn away. There was no time. And all he’d manage to do would be to get himself killed.
If he was near the re-education center, he knew, then that meant he was only a few blocks away from his parents’ apartment. He looked off to the west, where flames and smoke rose up into the sky. No . . . He felt a dizzy rush of panic. They have to be okay. . . .
“Lexi, I’ll be back,” he said.
“Where are you going?” Lexi said.
“Gotta check out my parents’ neighborhood. We’re close.”
“I’ll go with you,” Lexi said.
“No!” he said harshly, and then, more softly, “Please. Stay with the team. It’s safer.”
“No deal,” said Lexi. “I’m going with you.”
Nick hesitated, then realized there was no way Lexi was going to back down, so he just nodded.
“Ro,” Nick said, fighting to keep his voice calm. “Lexi and I need to go check something ou
t. We’ll find you at the rendezvous.”
Ro shook his head. “No. We stick together.”
Nick gritted his teeth, rushed through the options. He had to go, there was no question of that. . . . Should he just take off running? Ro wouldn’t shoot him in the back, would he? Or he could come up with some sort of plausible lie . . . or . . . “My parents,” Nick said, desperate enough to just try the truth. “We’re near where they must be. There’s fire . . . I need to get them out.”
Ro stared at Nick. Nick gripped his gun tightly, waiting, forcing himself to wait, to not just say to hell with Ro and take off.
Ro nodded. “Be quick,” he said. “Don’t waste any time.”
Nick felt like he had been released out of a starting gate. He nodded at Lexi and took off running, west, along a side street. Lexi followed close behind. He kept an eye out for bots, his hand near the trigger of his rifle—he wouldn’t be much help to his parents if he got himself killed. And he couldn’t let Lexi get hurt. He darted past abandoned scoots and around bombed-out rubble, giving a wide berth to a storefront that was on fire, the flames flaring out the broken window.
He ran four blocks west, one block north, his heart in his throat. He could hear the crackling roar of the fire ahead. The air was smoky and he could feel the rising heat on his cheeks. His parents were so close . . . they had to be okay . . . he’d find them . . . they’d be so relieved . . . he’d bring them to the rendezvous and then out of the City and the medic would remove his mother’s chip and then they’d finally, finally be a family again. . . .
Nick turned the corner and stumbled to a halt. His parents’ entire block was aflame, fire raging through the rubble. Not one building had been left standing. The first thing his scrambled brain recognized was the heat, the intense heat on his face.
“Which one is it?” said Lexi.
Nick didn’t answer. He didn’t even know which building was his parents’. It didn’t matter—nobody could be alive in any of the buildings. He took a stumbling step forward, into the street lined on both sides by collapsed, burning devastation.
“Mom!” he yelled. “Dad!” He walked down the middle of the street. He was crying, but the heat evaporated the tears on his face.
“Mom!”
Nothing moved except for the fire. There was no sound except for the roar of the flickering flames. He sat down in the middle of the street, rifle across his legs. He stopped crying; now he just felt numb. His parents, if they were in their home, were dead. All he could do was hope they had gotten out, that they were alive somewhere in the City. But no, they were probably dead, their bodies just feet away. Crushed. Burned.
A whir of motion in the air to his left caught Nick’s attention, and his bot eye zoomed and targeted, and before he could even think, he was on his feet, releasing a blast at the sphere bot that had appeared over the wreckage forty feet away. His blast hit the bot squarely, and it burst open with a loud pop and a flare of green-tinged flames, and crashed to the ground.
“Goddamned rusted bots!” he yelled. He shot another burst into the broken husk of the sphere, sending the bot flying up and backward. He watched it roll to a stop, separating into two pieces like a cracked egg.
“Nick!” said Lexi. “Let’s move! They’re not here. They must have evacuated.”
“Damned bots,” he said again, quietly. “And damned Clay.”
“Come on,” Lexi said. “They’re not here! I need to see about my parents, too.”
Nick looked up at her, feeling a rush of shame. Of course . . . Lexi’s parents . . . Hopefully one good thing could come out of this rusted mission.
They found two scoots, but Lexi had him climb on the back of hers. “I remember how you drive,” she said. Nick didn’t argue; she was right. It would be ridiculous, after all he’d been through, to get himself killed by falling off a scoot.
They rode as quickly as possible, picking through the obstacles—the overturned scoots, the broken, smoking shells of bots, the collapsed buildings, the dead bodies. Nick forced himself to check every one. He recognized none of them. Two were so badly burned that he couldn’t make out their features, but they were both very tall, much taller than his parents, or Cass, or Kevin. The streets, as they drove away from Hightown, were empty of people—living people, at least—but Nick could see the occasional face in a dimly lit window, peering out at them as they rode past. How long were they going to hide in their homes, in the sacked City, waiting for their lives to return to normal? Would they ever come out?
Nick felt Lexi’s body tense as they approached her block, then relax when they turned onto her street and saw that her neighborhood was untouched. He couldn’t believe, despite everything, that he could be distracted by the way her back felt, leaning against his chest, and her waist in his hands, but he was.
The front door to Lexi’s house was wide open. Lexi jumped off her scoot and rushed inside, leaving Nick to figure out how to park the scoot. He quickly gave up, let the scoot topple onto its side, and hurried after her.
They searched every room, Lexi calling out for her parents, but the house was empty. Lexi stood in the living room, her hands on her hips, saying nothing and staring at the entrance to the kitchen.
“We need to go, Lexi,” Nick said. “They must be okay. You saw how they had gone through their clothes, and the kitchen cabinets are open. . . . It looks like they packed up and got out of here in a hurry.”
Lexi’s shoulders began to gently shake, and she lowered her head to her chest and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. It took a moment for Nick to realize that she was crying. He was stunned—Lexi was too tough, too strong to cry—but then he pulled her into a big hug. She resisted, then turned and put her face in his chest and began sobbing.
He held her tight, not knowing what to say, or what else to do. He felt useless. Soon Lexi calmed down, and pushed him away, stepping back. She wiped the tears off her face with the back of her hand.
“I miss them, Nick,” she said. “I left them and they don’t even know if I’m alive and I feel horrible.” She looked like she was going to start crying again, and Nick stepped toward her, but she held her hands up, clenched her jaw, and with a visible effort of will, kept control. “Rust!” she said. “Enough of this stupid weeping. Come on. We need to get back to Ro.”
She pushed past Nick and out the door. Nick watched her walk away, still feeling as if he should have said something, or done something, more.
They ditched the scoot near the center of Hightown. Two rebels stood on the street corner, their backs to the center of town, guns at the ready. Nick was careful to make his and Lexi’s presence known right away with a whistle. The guards swung their guns toward him. “We’re with Clay!” he called out. “Ro’s team.”
The guards nodded, and waved him past with the muzzles of their guns, then returned to their scan of the street. Security perimeter, Nick realized, looking down a street to his left, seeing another pair of rebel guards at the far intersection.
In the center of Hightown, Nick found that a hundred rebels had gathered, along with an equal number of survivors. The City survivors looked haggard and nervous. Most were empty-handed, but some carried a few random supplies—packages of dehydrated food, extra clothes. One woman, her face pale, her eyes wide and unblinking, held a shivering black poodle.
Nick pushed through the crowd, looking for his parents, and Lexi’s parents, and Kevin, and Cass, and Farryn. He recognized nobody. He kept shoving through the people, standing on tiptoes, trying to cover the entire crowd. Nick grew more desperate as he worked his way through the group, and his eyes began to sting, threatening tears again, but he held back the panic and the tears. He was not going to be weak in front of all these people.
He circled through the entire crowd, searching, and came back to his starting point. Nobody he knew. Should he go back out into the City to search? Where would he even begin? He didn’t know what to do.
He began to edge to the perimeter of the cro
wd—maybe he’d just pick a direction, and start looking—and then he saw Clay enter from a side street and climb onto a pile of rubble. She raised her arms, and the crowd, with prompting from the rebels, quieted. General Clay raised her long arms above her head and gave a victory yell.
“This has been a glorious first strike,” she shouted out to the crowd, “but it is only the beginning. For those of you who have elected to join us, I applaud you for taking back your humanity.” Clay paused, looking left and right, surveying the crowd. “We will be back, to gather more supplies. But for now, we need to return to the forest.”
Nick thought she was done, but then she added, “And for those True Believers who refuse to accept their freedom, their humanity, who refuse to fight with us . . . they’ll rust in hell along with the damned bots.”
CHAPTER 25
WHEN FARRYN AND CASS AND HER FAMILY MADE IT OUT ONTO THE street, City 73 was strangely quiet. The fires still burned, but there was no lase fire, no explosions. Her parents and Penny just stood there, shrinking against the doorway, staring in stunned disbelief at the ruins of Hightown.
“It’s going to be okay,” said Cass’s mother, pulling Penny close to her. “The robots will fix everything.”
And that’s when Cass realized she couldn’t bring her family to Clay’s camp. They were True Believers to the core. Her parents were thoroughly brainwashed, and her sister had never known anything other than the City. Clay would . . . Cass hesitated, hating to even think it, but she knew it was true. . . . Clay would have them killed.
So what to do? Where to take them? Rust, she thought, I didn’t plan this out very well. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of the City.” I’ll find a Freepost, she decided. Get them settled and safe.
She realized this meant abandoning her brothers, but she had no choice. Her birth family wouldn’t survive in the woods without her. She’d get back to her brothers when she could.
City 1 Page 11