Burnout (The Invasion Chronicles Book 1) (12 page)

Immediately, Zack perked up.  “Chocolate?  Hell yeah, I’m there.”  Caleb rolled his eyes at the swift mood change, while Lydia reached over and smacked her friend on the arm.

“Don’t give away all our candy,” she mock-growled.  Ava winked at her. 

“Relax, he’s not touching the Reese’s.” 

Caleb laughed, shaking his head, but turned serious again.  He reached up and laid one hand on his brother’s neck, pulling the younger boy close in a not-quite embrace.  “Rule thirteen, okay Z?” he said in a grave tone.  Zack grabbed Caleb’s wrist, squeezing once as he nodded. 

“Rule thirteen,” he agreed. 

Caleb drew back and rubbed a hand over the stubble that was starting to shadow his jawline.  “All right, you ready?” he asked, looking over at Lydia. 

She really, really was not.  But she glanced over at Ava and then nodded as firmly as she could.  “Let’s get moving,” she said. 

She followed Caleb out the back door into the yard, pausing for a moment on the paving stones that made up a little patio.  She took a deep breath of the cooling air, glancing around at the lengthening shadows and the last scraps of orange sunlight clinging to the Western edge of the sky.  She forced herself to follow Caleb towards the fence without looking back at where Ava and Zack were standing in the doorway.

“Hey Caleb?” she asked.

“Hmm?”

“What’s rule thirty-five?”  She couldn’t quite decide if the exchanges she kept hearing were a joke, or an actual creed that the brothers were living by.  Caleb ducked his head, laughing a little. 

“Rule thirty-five is just for Zack…no one ever knows as much as you
think
they know.  He gets carried away sometimes, forgets the difference between what’s happened and what
might
happen.”

“Ah.”  They followed the fence to the very back of the yard, near Grandma’s lilac bushes and the beds of flowers that had been dead or dying long before the world had ended.  None of them quite had Grandma’s gift for gardening, but Mom and Grandpa refused to take the flowerbeds out.  She hesitated at the makeshift door that would let them into Jim and Iris’s yard.  “What’s rule thirteen then?”

Caleb froze in the action of boosting himself over the fence, one foot dangling near her head.  When he looked down at her, he seemed to have aged ten years, shadows in his eyes that Lydia didn’t want to know the reasons for.  Again, she wondered what Zack knew about their family, their friends; if he’d been able to tell Caleb what had happened to any of them. 

“Rule thirteen…no dying unless it’s together.” 

They ran through Eric Grant’s backyard silently, crouching like spies in some old movie.  As they reached the other side of the yard, Caleb pulled up short and turned to face her again, pulling a set of keys out of his jeans pocket.  One was an old-fashioned metal-toothed key, the kind that some fuse vehicles still used to start the combustion engine.  Two others were the thin strip of iridescent silver that Lydia was more familiar with—ID flats that were coded to a person’s DNA and wouldn’t let anyone but an immediate family member access a car or house.  Ridiculously, a large, neon-pink rabbit’s foot keychain dangled from the set.   

As he started to pass the keys over to her, something caught in the faux fur of the rabbit’s foot caught her attention—a flash of something metallic.  A small metal disc, about the size of a quarter, was caught in the fluff.  As Caleb jostled the keys, the disc shook loose and fell to the ground.  Lydia heard a soft
beep
as the object hit the grass. A moment later a wavering, blue-tinted holo image shimmered into existence a few inches above the disc, right at their feet.  Caleb sucked in a breath with a small, wounded noise. 

The disc was a cheap holo—the kind you could buy by the dozen at malls and amusement parks.  The image was low-resolution, only a few seconds long, and it glitched every time it looped back to the beginning.  The image disc probably didn’t even have an adapter to plug into a picture frame.  Even so, it was immediately evident why Caleb was carrying such a thing on his person. 

The image was of him and a girl about his own age, obviously taken sometime within the last couple years.  Caleb’s hair was longer, worn in fluffy coils rather than his current utilitarian buzz cut.  He was smiling, a wide, toothy smile that lit his whole face up.  Happiness practically beamed out of him—all of it directed at the girl. 

Even in the grainy, cheap image, the girl was the kind of beautiful that belonged in magazines and movies, with smooth, regal features and a generous mouth.  Her hair stood out around her face in an ink-black cloud of spiraling, natural curls and there was laughter and light in her eyes.  By the angle of the photo, she was sitting in Caleb’s lap and their heads were bent close together, Caleb’s chin hooked over her shoulder.  

Caleb was stock-still, not even breathing.  For an instant, a stricken look flashed across his face—sadness and loss and pain all rolled up into one.  Lydia’s eyes dipped to the bracelet stretched tight around Caleb’s wrist, delicate and feminine.  If she could see their hands in the image, she had no doubt that that bracelet would be dangling from the girl’s wrist, a thin sparkle of silver against her ebony skin.  Without a word, she bent down and scooped the disc up, tapping the switch in the center to shut off the image. 

Caleb took it from her and tucked it back into his pocket with careful, reverent hands.  He pressed his lips together, shaking his head a little.  “My girlfriend,” he said in explanation.  “Jaslyn.” 

“I’m sorry,” Lydia said, wincing at how lame it sounded. 

“You get used to it,” Caleb replied, more to himself than her, before straightening and visibly forcing the thoughts of his girlfriend away.  “All right, when we get out there, you gotta move 
fast
, you understand?  Don’t hesitate.  We make some noise, get their attention, and then we 
run
.  Don’t stop, don’t look back, don’t worry about me.  
Keep
.  
Moving
.”   They scuttled across the Perry’s yard.  “Don’t shoot unless you gotta.  Just how strong are you?  Will you be able to keep them off of us?”  He tapped the side of his head with two fingers for emphasis.   

“Strong enough,” Lydia answered grimly.  “And yeah, I’ll keep any Burnouts away from us.  How far out is your truck?  Like, did you see any street signs?”  

“Straight up the street, and like two streets over.  I think Mountain Brook? Something like that?   We’re gonna have to crisscross around the neighborhood a few times to get ‘em off our tails once we lead them away.  You up for that?”    

Lydia nodded tersely.  That wasn’t so bad, she told herself.  It was less than five minutes away from Meadowbrook.  They could make it.  They could.  And she knew the streets and roads of the subdivision better than some of the people who had been living here for twenty years.  She would be able to wind them around any obstacles or large groups of Burnouts and get them back to the barricade safely.  This was going to work. 

It had to. 

They paused at the fence that separated Mr. Perry’s yard from Eric’s.  Caleb laid a hand on her shoulder, turning her to face him.  His eyes were grim, the lines of his mouth hardening. “Last chance,” he said. 

Lydia met his eyes with a steady calm she tried very hard to convince herself was real.  “Let’s get moving, before Grandpa sees us.”   

Caleb squeezed her shoulder briefly, before holding the keys up again.  He gave the rabbit’s foot a quick kiss.  “Luck ain’t failed us yet.  Can’t hurt, right?”  He started to pass the keys over, but hesitated, his eyes suddenly going wide.  “Crap…you do know how to drive, right?  Like manually?”

“You’re asking
now
?  Oh my God, of course I know how to drive!”

“Sorry, sorry!  Some schools don’t teach you how to drive a fuse anymore.  And you never said how old you are!” he grumbled. 

“Well don’t worry.  I’m sixteen.” 

And teaching manual driving (as opposed to just basic safety and emergency measures with more standard electronically guided vehicles) had been approved by school board vote two years ago.  Some of the larger cities like New York and Los Angeles had switched entirely to guidance system-driven cars within city limits, but it was not unusual in Columbus to see fuse vehicles that combined clean burn and combustion technologies.  There was even a fairly large market for classic cars that had been built before Invasion technology was adapted to the auto industry in the late sixties and early seventies.    

“Well okay, then,” he said with forced brightness.  “Great.”  He flexed his fingers as he stared at the top of the fence.  “Okay, just…just be careful with the ignition.  Sometimes you gotta jiggle it a little.” 

“Right, okay.  Anything else?” 

“The brakes can be a little sticky…don’t, like, stomp on them.”

“Okay.”

“And the steering wheel’s got some play in it—”

“Holy crap, how old is this truck?!”

Caleb looked offended.  “Not like I’ve been able to run her into Triple A!  Depending on how close the Burnouts get, I might have to just jump in the bed.  There’s a camper top over it, so just
go
if I tell you to.  Nothing’s gonna get to me.”

He bent down, cupping his hands for her step into for a boost up.  She accepted this time, balancing herself carefully with one hand on his shoulder.  He lifted her with surprising ease, holding steady while she swung a leg over the fence top and dropped down into Mr. Grant’s yard as quietly as she could.  He followed a moment later, landing beside her with a grunt.  They stuck to the shadows, creeping along the perimeter of Mr. Grant’s yard while Lydia kept one wary eye on the house, expecting Grandpa to come storming out at any moment.  There was no movement from the back door or the windows, though.   

Eric Grant’s home was on the very edge of the semi-circle of houses that formed Meadowbrook Court, the court itself sticking out at the end of the street like a spur.  A grassy expanse about thirty feet across separated his backyard fence from the next-closest neighbor’s.  Once they went over Mr. Grant’s fence there would be nothing between them and the Burnouts. 

They’d be sitting ducks.  Worse, even.  They stopped again at the fence on the far side of Eric’s yard.  

As soon as they did, Lydia realized their risky plan had just gotten 
infinitely
 riskier. 

Caleb halted, one hand snapping out to grab her wrist, though she had already stopped as well.  Eric’s privacy fence was as tall and solid as all the others on Meadowbrook Court, but it was topped with a decorative element of thin strips of wood woven in a lattice pattern.  Though the resulting gaps in the top of the fence weren’t large enough to cause much of a security risk, they were large enough to be seen through.  And on the other side, Lydia could see the shadowed outlines of multiple heads.  The Burnouts had wandered into the side lot between houses.   

They still weren’t moving, standing still as statues the way they’d been doing all day.  Nonsensically, Lydia wondered if she would be able to hear them breathing if she got close enough to the fence.  Oh God, she was going to have to get closer to the fence…

“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” Caleb hissed.  He raked one hand back over his head, glaring at the dark-stained wood of the fence.  “Okay, we gotta…we just...”  He stopped, looking a little sick as he came to the same conclusion Lydia was reaching. 

“You’re absolutely sure we can’t wait?” she asked, her stomach tightening as she listened to the dry rustle of grass in the breeze.  The Burnouts weren’t even shifting their weight from foot to foot.   

Caleb’s jaw clenched, and she shook his head in a short, sharp motion.  “This is our only chance,” he said, a thread of steel in the words.   

Lydia swallowed, the dry click of her throat loud in her ears.  “We’ve got to go through them, then.  We’re going to have to come out right by the barricade.”  She was irrationally proud of how steady her voice was.  Lydia didn’t give herself time to think twice, or consider what she was really suggesting.  The sense of urgency that had driven her to agree to go with Caleb in the first place was pounding like a drumbeat in her head.   

They had intended to go through a few neighbors’ yards and then come out about halfway up the street to give themselves some distance from the worst of the throng…but that was out, now, too.  They couldn’t risk causing a lot of noise that would start drawing more of the Burnouts into the space between Mr. Grant’s house and the next.  They needed to get the things chasing them 
away
 from Meadowbrook.  There was only one choice.   

“Yeah,” Caleb muttered, his shoulders slumping in defeat, “yeah, we do.”     

Lydia took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders up.  “All right, boost me up and I’ll…I’ll clear us a path,” she said determinedly.   

Burnouts.  They were just Burnouts, now.  Not human, not people, not neighbors and acquaintances and friends.  There was nothing she could do for any of them now, and everyone she had left to love was in danger.   

“It’ll be fine.  We got this.”  Caleb smiled at her encouragingly.  She just hoped his confidence wasn’t as faked as hers was.  Once again, he bent down and cupped his hands to give her a leg up.  Lydia breathed again, pulled the blaster out of the holster and stepped into them.   

Though first, she took the keychain out of her pocket and pressed her own quick kiss to the brightly painted rabbit’s foot.   

Couldn’t hurt, right?   

# 

She hesitated.   

For a single, solitary instant, she hesitated.   

There were only four Burnouts in the grassy space just outside Mr. Grant’s fence—the grass grown knee-high and weed-choked over the summer—standing at odd intervals along the fence with their heads bowed.  A woman in a torn and tattered bathrobe, and three men in jeans and t-shirts advertising a weekend baseball league that met in the park near the subdivision.  They weren’t moving, weren’t even twitching…and then they were. 

As soon as she cleared the top of the fence, the things jerked in eerie unison, their gazes all snapping to her in the same instant.  In the deepening twilight, the featureless, white eyes seemed to glow brighter than usual.  The thick veins of silver trailed over every inch of exposed skin and this close there was a metallic sheen to them, a pattern that looked almost geometric, and for a moment, Lydia  

Could.   

Not.   

Move.   

She forced herself, though.  Forced herself to look at the things and see only large targets.  She forced her eyes to skip over them, and raised one hand.   

She called up her power, the heat of it racing through her chest.  Adrenaline spiking in her veins, she reached out and
pushed
, flinging her free hand outward in a gesture meant to help her focus the energy.  It hit the Burnouts like a wave, slamming into them before they could do more than raise their hands towards her.  She flung them up and away from her, tossing them to the ground like broken toys.    

One.   

Two. 

Three. 

Four. 

They lay sprawled on the ground, and Lydia couldn’t let herself look at that, either.  She lunged forward to brace her hands on the top of the fence and leap over.  She dropped onto the grass, stumbling and almost stepping on one of the things.  Suddenly everything was 
real
.  She gasped out loud, her hand tightening on the blaster.  She was outside the barricades that had kept her safe for three months…outside without Grandpa, without Ava.  Outside with the Burnouts.  Her blood rushed in her ears and her heart hammered against her ribs like a frightened bird.  Dimly, she heard a soft grunt as Caleb pulled himself over the fence and dropped down beside her.