Burnout (The Invasion Chronicles Book 1) (23 page)

“I—Mom, I’m scared.”  She whispered the words into the stillness of the room, biting her lip hard enough to hurt.  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”  The pain of Mom’s absence never left her, but it was so much sharper here, surrounded by the scraps of her mother’s life.  So much clearer.  It stabbed through her, threatening a new wave of tears.  “I know you’re…I
miss
you,” she choked.  “I miss you so much and I’m so scared, Mama.”

How long she sat there, she wasn’t sure.  Eventually, though, she became aware of someone standing in the doorway and hastily scrubbed at her eyes.  When she peeked out of the closet, Grandpa was there.  He just stared around Mom’s room, his eyes lingering on the same books and knickknacks that Lydia’s had. 

He didn’t say anything about her red eyes or flushed cheeks, just lifted his arm when she came to him and wrapped it around her shoulders.   

“I miss her too,” he whispered raggedly.  “God, every day.” 

Lydia buried her face against her grandfather’s chest, willing the hot tears not to come.  If she started crying again, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop. 

“She’d want us to do this,” Grandpa continued.  “I wasn’t sure about throwing in with those boys at first, but your mom and your grandma both…they’d want us to do whatever it took to stay alive.  And, I’m glad the kid’s like you; I’m glad you have someone to talk to.”  Lydia leaned back, looking up at Grandpa quietly.  He gently brushed a few stray tears away with one calloused thumb.  

Lydia took a deep breath, reluctantly stepping out of her grandfather’s hug.  She flexed her hands for a moment, feeling the spark of her power deep in her chest.  There was something she had to say.  Something that had been brewing since the moment she and Caleb arrived back at Meadowbrook to find it overrun.  Something that had crystallized when she realized that Ava’s desperate plan was the only way any of them were getting out of Meadowbrook alive.

“I’m not hiding it anymore.”  The words were soft.  Quiet.  But hard as steel.  She looked up at Grandpa, setting her jaw.  “I’ll be careful.  I won’t hurt myself, if I can help it.  But I’m never hiding it again.  I can protect people; I can protect
you
.  And if I can, I’m going to.” 

She met her grandfather’s eyes squarely, almost daring him to contradict her, to insist that it was still too risky to use her abilities openly.  But how many people might have survived if she’d been honest from the start? 

She wasn’t going to lose anyone else.  Not Grandpa, not Ava.  Not Caleb or Zack.  No one.

Grandpa looked away for a moment, then let out a rueful chuckle.

“Just like your grandmother,” he sighed.  He laid a hand on her shoulder.  “You’re not a little girl anymore,” he admitted, “and we’re all going to have to do whatever it takes to stay alive.  I can’t tell you not to use the best weapon we have.  But sweetheart, please remember this: 
we can’t lose you either
.  Me and Ava, we couldn’t take it.” 

“He’s right,” Ava interrupted softly from the doorway.  Her friend crossed the room in three short strides and hugged her tightly. 

Grandpa left them alone, moving back out into the hallway and scooping up the pillowcase Ava had stuffed full of things from the bathroom.  Lydia heard him heading down the stairs as she and Ava stood in the quiet of her mother’s bedroom.  After a moment, Ava released her, stepping back.

“We’re never coming back here, are we?”  Ava sounded as lost as Lydia felt.

“
Don’t talk like that
,” Lydia wanted to say.  “
Of course we’ll be back,”
she wanted to say. 

“I don’t know,” she said. 

She took one last, despairing look around her mother’s room, swallowing against the lump in her throat.  “C’mon,” she said at last, steeling herself, “let’s get these loaded up.” 

The downstairs linen closet took only a few seconds—spare sheets and towels, and whatever blankets were sitting on the top shelves.  Lydia wanted to take more; wanted to grab more pictures off the walls, the figurines from her room, the chess set that had belonged to Grandma’s parents from the closet under the stairs.  They were out of room, though.  Out of room and out of time. 

Grandpa was just coming back through the front door, leaving it standing open. Lydia could see the Jeep idling in the driveway.  A few bundles bulged underneath a magnetized cover on the luggage rack and the trunk space was piled high with supplies.  Despite the cool wind, sweat stood out on Grandpa’s brow. 

Across the court, Lydia could see Caleb had pulled the truck through the barricade and backed it as close to one of the ruined windows on Jill and Andrew’s house as he could.  He was lifting cardboard boxes packed with whatever food and water supplies were left out onto the lawn.  After he had about four boxes lined up, he hopped through the window himself, and loaded them up into the truck bed.

She tried to focus on him, ignoring the devastation that encompassed the court.  Most especially ignoring the pile—
pile
—of Burnouts that had been swept against the barricade like garbage swept by an ocean wave.  She didn’t want to look at broken bodies and twisted limbs.  She could separate herself from the reality of what the Burnouts were when they were trying to kill her.  In death, though, they were people again.  People she might have seen in the street when she and Ava went running.  People she might have known. 

“Everything ready?” Grandpa asked, taking one of the bags from Ava.  Lydia rolled her bedspread into a more compact ball and nodded. 

“We grabbed as much as we could,” she said. 

“Good…that’s, that’s good.”  Grandpa sighed.  He hoisted the duffle bag onto his shoulder and glanced around the front hall again, and clenching his jaw. “God, never thought I’d be leaving like
this
,” he muttered.  Ava let out a ragged, watery chuckle. 

“You mean you never planned for a robot zombie apocalypse?” she asked, going for lighthearted and missing the mark by about a mile. 

Grandpa smiled at her anyway.  “No, I can honestly say that I never planned for a robot zombie apocalypse.” 

Caleb finished with whatever he was loading up.  He darted back into the house, but came out only a few moments later, shaking his head.  The lump in Lydia’s throat grew larger, squeezing the breath from her lungs.  This was it.  There was no turning back, now. 

“Come on now…square up,” Grandpa said softly.  So softly, in fact, that Lydia wasn’t certain he was talking to the two of them at all.  “Go ahead and get in the car, girls.  Reed and I—we’re gonna see what we can do for Andrew and Emily.” 

Lydia knew she should offer to go help.  They wouldn’t be able to dig a grave in the time they had left—not in the rocky soil and clay that made up the ground around here—but she could at least help them move the bodies up to one of the bedrooms.  Give them some dignity.  The words stuck in her throat.  She wasn’t sure she’d be able to handle seeing what Andrew had done rather than be Burned.  Seeing Emily’s kind eyes blank and solid white.  Her stomach churned, but she couldn’t make herself follow her grandfather across the court.  

“You gonna be okay?” Ava asked as he made his way towards Caleb, side-stepping thick streaks and puddles that were turning a rusty brown under the early morning sun.  Lydia closed her eyes against the sight and tried to take shallow breaths.  There was a crispness in the air that promised a cool day, but a smell that felt like it coated her nose and mouth lingered over the court.  Meadowbrook reeked of
death
. 

“Are you?” Lydia countered.  She leaned against her friend for a moment, staring out at the place that had been her home, and would never be again.  Even if the Army rolled through the town tomorrow and got everything back to normal, Lydia didn’t think she would ever be able to feel safe here again. 

“Better go get Zack; I think he was in the kitchen.  I’ll go put the stuff in the Jeep,” Ava said, holding out her hand for Lydia’s bag.

Lydia nodded and passed it off to her, watching as Ava dragged the two duffle bags down the driveway and began searching for a place to stuff them in the cargo space.  She laid her bedspread over the porch swing and headed back into the house, calling for Zack as she entered the front hall. 

“Back here!”

She followed the sound of his voice back to the kitchen again, finding him sitting cross-legged up on the island.  His cane had been folded in on its handle, and he spun it in idle circles on the countertop. 

“You ready?” she asked.  “Everything’s almost packed up.  Grandpa and Caleb are…they’re over at Jill and Andrew’s house.” 

Zack nodded to himself, shifting so that his legs hung down the side of the island, his heel making soft, hollow
thunks
as he kicked it gently.  He made no move to jump down, instead tilting his head.  “Where’s Ava?”

“Putting stuff in the car, why?”

In answer, Zack pressed his lips together, shifting back and forth with an expression of deep discomfort.  “Cause I want to talk to you about something.  Alone.” 

Lydia raised an eyebrow, though he couldn’t see it, a whisper of unease stealing through her.  “About what?” 

“This, mostly.”  He made a vague gesture between the two of them.  “Us.  Why me and Caleb had to find you.” 

“You said you had a vision that we could protect each other.”  The unease flared into suspicion, a kernel of wariness forming hot and hard in the pit of her stomach.  He must have heard it in her voice, for he started shaking his head back and forth.

“I did!  I do, no, I’m being straight with you about that.  Believe me, a
huge
chunk of why we’ve been circling around Columbus for the last couple weeks is because I know my brother lives longer when you’re watching his back.  Me too, for that matter.”  He offered a tentative smile.  “So does your grandpa, and Ava.  We help each other, Lydia.  We really do.” 

“I’m sensing a
but
here somewhere,” she said, and couldn’t quite quash a note of fatalism.  Of course there was a catch—there had to be. 

To her surprise, Zack curled in on himself, his face twisting into a mask of weary, bitter grief.  He tugged at a twist of hair hanging in his face, and when he spoke again, he sounded far away.  Lost, somehow. 

“No one’s going to figure out the Burnouts,” he said softly.  “The cavalry’s not coming, no matter what any damn broadcast tells you.  It’s Invasion.  Not just Invasion-era, but
Invasion.
  Whether the Burnouts came from some asshole tripping over an antique weapon, or it just took the Invaders seventy years to get to their end game, I dunno.”  Lydia’s breath stuttered to a halt, his words seeming to hang in the air between them.  She didn’t want to hear them, didn’t want to process them, didn’t want to believe them.  Not because she thought Zack wasn’t being truthful.

Because she’d never heard anyone willing to say it out loud. 

Of course that was the only explanation that made sense.  She’d known it the moment she had seen the first news reports about the Burnouts.  So had every other person on the planet.  She’d seen it in the eyes of every news anchor reporting on the crisis, heard it in the voice of every “expert” they called in to talk about the Burnouts.  It lurked just under every nameless, faceless warning to remain calm and wait for help.  Everyone knew—but if they talked about it, if they let it out in the open, then they would have to face what that meant: that Invasion was no longer a closed chapter in their history books.  

That maybe it never had been. 

Lydia clenched her fists, biting down on the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted blood.  “What does that have to do with why you came looking for us?” she asked, and was proud of how steady her voice was. 

“I’ve been having visions since I was three,” Zack said.  “Sometimes I think I’m the luckiest person in the world, ‘cause I was born blind and they let me
see
.  I know what colors look like, what sunshine and the sky looks like.  I know what my
family
looks like.  And sometimes I think I’d give anything to be able to turn them off—because I also know exactly how many ways a situation can go straight to hell.  I know how scared my mom was when she got t-boned in an intersection.  I know exactly where my dad Burned, and how much he hurt and how hard he fought to stay alive for me and Caleb.  I know what my brother looks like covered in blood, screaming.  And the worst part, the
worst
part, is sometimes I know how to change things.  I know what we have to do, which street we have to turn down, how long we have to wait.  But a lot of the time I don’t.  I don’t know what helps and what makes things worse—I don’t know there’s a
goddamn horde of Burnouts waiting to take the place of the one you just led off.
”

He stopped, breathing hard, and Lydia could only stare in stunned silence.  He dashed a hand across his eyes, hissing through his teeth as he tried to pretend he wasn’t on the edge of tears. 

“There’s things, there’s things that’re gonna happen if you stick with us, Lyds.  Horrible things.  And I can’t—I can’t tell you all of them, ‘cause I don’t know if telling you changes something.  If you’ll hesitate or not hesitate, and something that
should
happen doesn’t.  But I need you to understand why we came here, you more than anyone.  I’m not going to lie to you.  I won’t…I swear I won’t ever lie to you.”