Burnout (The Invasion Chronicles Book 1) (3 page)

 "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.

They couldn't let themselves wonder, or hope, or grieve.  There was no time for it.  The only way to stay alive right now was to stay sharp, and stay alert.  Sometimes, Lydia wasn't sure which of them had it worse.  They knew what had happened to Ava's mom and dad.  Lydia would never know what happened to her mother after that final text.

Ava sighed, the noise coming out watery and choked, and laid her head on Lydia's shoulder.  They sat in silence, just listening to the rain on the rooftop.    

By dinnertime, everyone knew that Burnouts had been spotted by the barricade.  It was quieter than usual as most of their group filed into the Royces’ spacious dining room.  Lydia moved through the line behind Ava and Grandpa, listlessly spooning canned chicken, peaches, and mixed vegetables onto a glass plate.  She couldn't stop thinking about what she'd overheard in her grandfather's kitchen.  Were they really running out of food? 

She knew their supplies weren’t exactly plentiful.  Most everyone had a foodsynth these days, and the fully-stocked pantries and cellars Lydia saw in books and old movies hadn’t been commonplace in a decade or two.  Why would you need to keep cans of vegetables and boxes of pasta on hand if you could just synth whatever meal or ingredients you wanted?  Grandpa and the Royces had been smart enough to start synthing as many nonperishables as possible once services started failing, but they’d only had a few days before safety measures in the energy plants started kicking in and the power grid went down.  Backup power in house batteries had only lasted about a week after that.  Another neighbor, Eric Grant, had a portable generator that he had managed to rig to a few car batteries, but they wouldn’t use that to run the foodsynths unless it was the only thing keeping them from starving. 

Mr. Grant’s generator had a much more important purpose.

How had she not noticed how short supplies were getting?  She grabbed a glass of water, and moved into the living room, which was the only room on the first floor that still had seating in it, and plopped cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch.  Ava dropped down beside her a moment later, and began stirring the mushy pile of peas, corn, and carrots on her plate. 

"What is this even supposed to be?  It tastes like metal," she said, curling her lip.  

"I thought everything was supposed to taste like chicken," Lydia replied, stirring her own pile of mixed vegetables with a similar expression.  

"The
chicken
doesn't taste like chicken."

"It can’t be that bad."  Lydia poked at the rubbery, white and pink lumps of meat on her plate.  Synthesized food was supposed to be indistinguishable from non-synthesized food; it was all made of the same proteins and fats…but the quality did suffer the longer you ran a foodsynth without having the filters changed. 

"You think chili powder is spicy, I’m not trusting your opinion on this.”

“I was nine, and Grandma’s family was from Germany, let it go!” 

“You
still
think chili powder is too spicy,” Ava said with a disdainful sniff.  Lydia rolled her eyes, but couldn’t actually offer a counterargument.  “I'll give you half my peaches if you eat this, too," Ava muttered after a moment, lifting a spoonful of the vegetable medley only to let it slide back onto her plate. 

"Eat your vegetables," Grandpa interrupted dryly, nudging Ava's leg with the toe of his shoe.  Lydia bit back a snort of laughter at Ava's disgusted look.  Ava wrinkled her nose, but immediately began shoveling the stuff into her mouth, obviously deciding that if she couldn't foist it off on her friend, she may as well get it over with as soon as possible.

And also obviously trying to chew without actually tasting anything.   

Lydia shook her head and bent back over her own plate. She wasn’t a picky eater, but her stomach was knotting unpleasantly.  She had never heard Grandpa sound like that, not in the entire time since the Burnouts had appeared.  If he was that worried, their situation had to be even grimmer than she thought.  What would they do if—when—they ran out of supplies?

Grandpa and Mr. Perry had argued long and hard about sending a few people into town to try and scavenge what they could find before deciding to make do with what they already had.  Going to the surrounding houses would be a risky endeavor, too.  No one was exactly sure how many Burnouts roamed the neighborhood, and, well...

She and Ava
were
the only ones on Meadowbrook under the age of forty. 

Mike Carter was tough as nails, and he was the best shot out of their entire group.  His knees gave him trouble now, though, and while he once might have been able to outrun the both of them (even Ava, who had been on the track team every year since seventh grade), that was no longer the case. Jim Perry was a pretty good shot, as was Jill Royce.  Andrew was fine as long as he had time to aim. 

There was no one else who would be able to deal with moving targets, though—
especially
if they had to be on the move themselves.  And while Jim and Jill were good, Jim just wasn't all that fast on his feet, and Jill Royce was pushing seventy.  Lydia knew how to handle every weapon they had (and Ava was learning), but there was no way Grandpa would allow them outside Meadowbrook to go hunting for supplies by themselves.

So what were they going to do?

She was jolted out of her thoughts when someone laid a hand on her shoulder.  She looked up to find Emily DeSantos—the Royce’s next door neighbor—standing in front of her and Ava with a couple of packets of drink mix, in pink lemonade flavor. 

Emily was in her late forties; a quiet, pretty woman with pale blonde hair going white at the roots and gentle, gray eyes.  She was a divorced mother of twin boys, freshmen at Ohio State.  The last Emily had heard from them, they were throwing a couple of suitcases in their car and heading for her house with some of their friends.  They had never arrived. 

"Oh, awesome!  Thank you, Emily," Ava said, grinning up at the woman. 

              "Yeah, thanks," Lydia added, taking the drink packets.  Emily nodded to her, and smiled at Grandpa before moving off to get her own dinner.  Lydia passed one of the drink packets over to Ava, then ripped hers open and dumped it into her water.  Amazing, that something as mundane as a packet of lemonade mix was cause for excitement now.  

Lydia ate quickly, head bent over her plate as she let the hushed conversation in the room wash over her.  Unsurprisingly, almost everyone was talking about the Burnouts she and Ava had seen—wondering how close the things might come to the barricades, if they should put more people out on patrol around the barriers between the houses in addition to the two that were always on shift on top of the van. 

She listened with half an ear to the debate as she ate.  Grandpa was oddly silent, and she and Ava were watching him with concern.  He barely appeared to be paying attention to the others.  He hunched over the plate in his lap, one foot tapping the floor by Lydia's hip in a fast, jagged rhythm.  Despite herself, Lydia felt another wave of apprehension. 

"
I don’t know
," her grandfather had said...and if Mike Carter didn't know what to do, when he had been the one directing them, leading them, holding them together since this had started, what were they going to do? 

No answers had appeared by the time she made herself eat the last of the tasteless chicken.  Ava finished quickly, as well, and the two sat trying to enjoy their warm lemonade.  The conversation around them moved into how they would schedule extra patrols. The knot in Lydia's stomach refused to unwind, and after another ten minutes of listening to the adults in the room arguing, she stood up. 

"Want me and Av to go take over for Mr. Perry and Mr. Grant so you guys can work this out with everyone?" she asked the room at large, though the question was mostly directed at her grandfather. Ava frowned at her before jumping to her feet. 

"Oh, hon, would you?" Jim’s wife, Iris—a round faced woman with close-cropped, graying hair and laugh lines around her eyes and mouth—asked from her seat in the dining room.    "That okay with you, Mike?" 

Grandpa nodded reluctantly.  "Someone'll be out before sundown...you see anything else, I want one of you to come get us, all right?  Double-time."  He leveled a hard gaze at her, then sighed and heaved himself up out of the chair.  "You girls be careful," he said seriously.  He bent down and kissed the crown of Lydia’s head, then pulled both her and Ava into a tight hug. 

Lydia closed her eyes for a moment.  Even with her nose smashed uncomfortably against one of the buttons on his shirt, she never felt safer than she did in the middle of one of her grandfather's rib-cracking hugs.  Grandpa smiled at them, and tucked a lock of hair that had come loose from Ava's braid behind her ear.  The girls waved to Emily and Jill Royce, before heading to the front hall. 

Ava swung her jacket over her shoulders.  "Oh good," she deadpanned. "It would be a real shame if these had time to dry off before we went back out there."  She gave Lydia a sarcastic thumbs-up.

Lydia winced.  "Sorry," she offered sheepishly, shoving her arms into the still-damp sleeves of her mother's jacket.  She opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.  The rain had let up, lightening into a soft drizzle that was more mist than anything else.  "I wanted to get out of there."  

"And we couldn't
get out of there
and do something besides go sit on the van for another hour?" 

Lydia shrugged, unable to explain the itching, nervous energy twisting her insides.  She needed to be
doing
something.  "You didn't have to come with me," she said as they hurried across the court to the barricade.  Ava shot her a look.  And kept right on walking with her. 

Jim Perry and Eric Grant gave up their places on top of the van without argument, climbing down quickly.  Eric, a thin, nervous-looking man with bulging green eyes and reddish orange hair, had retired from an engineering job a couple of years ago.  He was the one who had directed most of the construction of the barricades, and kept their few machines running as best he could with patchwork wiring and jerry-rigged power supplies.  It was amazing what he’d been able to do with car batteries and some tin foil.

She and Ava crawled back up on top of the van, and took their places on the lawn chairs, Lydia once again balancing the rifle across her knees.  It still wasn't getting dark until fairly late in the evening, but Lydia didn’t think Grandpa would wait very long before sending someone out.  Ava shifted in her seat, stretching her legs out and crossing her ankles.

"Do you think we'll have to leave?" she murmured.  She started picking at a loosened thread in the outer seam of her jeans. 

"If we're running that low on food, we might not have a choice," Lydia replied.  

The thought was terrifying.  Meadowbrook Court was small.  And cramped.  And makeshift.  It lacked even the most basic necessities she had grown up with, and most days she felt like she was trapped in some holofilm based on pre-Invasion days.  She was afraid that she was going to wake up one morning and find that Burnouts had broken through their barricades.  She was afraid of what was waiting for them out in the remains of the neighborhood she had known for as long as she could remember.  Still...at least she knew what to expect here. 

The thought of heading out of the relative safety of the cul-de-sac?  Braving the roads and highways that broadcast after broadcast on ancient radios warned people to stay away from?  Heading out into what was left of her home city with nothing but a car window between them and the Burnouts? 

Even with her…talents…the thought was terrifying. 

They might not have a choice, though.  Whatever the radio broadcasts said, help was
not
on the way.  That much was becoming clearer and clearer each day.  If they truly only had a couple of weeks' worth of food left, their best hope for survival was making for the green zones in Cleveland or Indianapolis.  Lydia very carefully did not let herself think about the possibility that the green zones were as much of a myth as the help on the way. 

"Grandpa will figure something out," she said.  She
did
believe that.  No matter what, her grandfather would find a way to keep them safe.  Ava nodded hesitantly, staring off into the direction that the Burnouts from earlier had come from.  Quiet fell over them again, the air tense and uncomfortable.

Lydia couldn’t stay still, her mind turning useless circles as she drummed her fingers against the rifle, keeping an odd counterpoint with the patter of the rain still falling.  From time to time, one of her hands found its way to her mouth, and she chewed on her thumb nail until she realized what she was doing.  The rainy, gray gloom that had enveloped the street was just starting to darken, when a loud noise split the air. 

It came from farther up the street, where the road curved into a sharp bend that led out into other parts of the development—a clattering, metallic crash that carried over the rain.  In the graveyard-like quiet of the neighborhood, the sound echoed.  Ava sat bolt upright in the chair, shrieking before she caught herself.  Lydia jerked to her feet. 

"What was that?" Ava whispered.  Lydia shook her head, clutching the rifle until the stock creaked. 

"Sounded like a trash can or something got knocked over?" she replied, squinting against the gathering darkness.  They still heard the occasional car alarm go off somewhere in the subdivision, or animals rooting through garbage and debris that littered the streets.   Ava stood up as well.  The falling rain was the only sound for several seconds.  Just as Lydia was about to shrug it off and sit back down, the quiet was broken by another crash and a shout. A distinctly human shout.

Ava’s hand came down on Lydia’s shoulder, her nails digging into the muscle.  “Was that,” she began, but Lydia hushed her.