Burnout (The Invasion Chronicles Book 1) (5 page)

Lydia woke up the next morning to garish, floral wallpaper instead of the lavender walls of her bedroom.  She was also clinging to about six inches of a double bed while Ava starfished out over the rest, snoring loudly.  She remembered why she wasn’t in her own bed at the same moment Ava shifted in her sleep, drove her knees into the middle of Lydia's back, and sent her tumbling off the bed.  She hit the plush cream carpet of the Royce's guest bedroom with a muffled thump, narrowly avoiding the leg of a bedside table.

"Hmm?  Wha'zzat?"  Ava’s face appeared over the edge of the bed, red creases from the pillowcase standing out on her cheek and drool clinging to the corner of her mouth.

Lydia flipped her off.

"Rude," Ava mumbled, vanishing again.  The bed frame creaked as she burrowed back into the pillows.  The house was quiet, except for someone humming down the hall towards the kitchen and a quick peek at the window showed the sun was just rising.  At least there were no rainclouds.

"C'mon, get up," Lydia said.  She rolled to her knees and poked any part of Ava she could reach.  Viciously. 

"Five more minutes." Ava buried her head under the pillow, and kicked Lydia when she tried to poke her again.   No one was calling for them yet, so Lydia didn't put up an argument. 

She rubbed the grit from her eyes and scooped her jeans off of floor, making a mental note to do laundry today.  Or at least, get as close to doing laundry as she could.  She missed automatic laundry machines almost as much as she missed coffee.  Dressed in yesterday’s clothes, she stepped out into the hallway, shoving her messy hair back up into a ponytail as she went.  Hushed voices came from the kitchen—Andrew and Grandpa by the sound of it.  Iris, Jill, and Emily were probably still upstairs, unless Jim and Eric had given the all-clear signal during the night.  She started to head that way, but paused as she passed the arch that opened into the living room. 

No one had wanted to let the boys out of the sight of whoever was keeping watch, even after it became evident that they weren’t going to Burn.  Jill Royce had been in the process of making up the couch for the Reeds when Grandpa shooed her and Ava off to bed.  Caleb and Zack weren’t in the living room, though their duffle bag was sitting on the end of the couch with the blankets folded neatly on top of it.  She was about to continue on into the kitchen when her grandfather entered. 

"Morning," he said, running an affectionate hand over her hair. 

"Hey," she replied. "Everything okay?" 

"For the moment...Jim and Eric said a pretty big group of Burnouts showed up just after we cleared the street.  Some of 'em moved on during the night, but there's still about a dozen up near the Garrison house." 

"What are we gonna do?" 

"For now, sit tight,” Grandpa said, frowning.  “Everyone stays inside unless it's an emergency; you and Ava decide if you want to stay here, or go on back to the house.  I'm going to head over to Eric's place and help them keep an eye on things.  Hopefully, they'll leave on their own.  If not..."  He trailed off, shaking his head. 

Lydia glanced towards the kitchen and lowered her voice.  "I could do something.  Maybe?" 

Grandpa went still, his frown deepening as he ran a hand through his iron gray hair. He, too, shot a narrow look at the kitchen, tilting his head to listen for any voices.  "Lydia.” He rested one hand on her shoulder.  "Not unless there's no other choice, you understand me?" 

"But Grandpa, I can help.”  She wasn’t sure she could get a group as big as the one Grandpa described moving away from the barricade, but she was willing to try.  “I could try to get one of the cars out in the street moving, maybe slam some doors.”   

"It's too dangerous,” Grandpa insisted, his eyes pained.

Lydia bit her lip, looking down at her shoes for a moment.  “Do you really think they wouldn’t understand?” she asked in a small voice.  “They’re our friends!  It’s not like being a Psio is illegal.  I’ve never heard any of them say anything bad about us!  You really think any of them bought into those people saying people like me caused this?” 

“Lyddie!” Grandpa said, “Lyddie, sweetheart, no.  No, I don’t think that.  I just—” He laid his hands on her shoulders, gripping them tightly.  “I don’t
know
, all right?  I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t know how they’d react.  Especially with strangers in the mix.  We have to be careful.” 

Up until Invasion, Psios were something that belonged in science fiction stories.  There were many things that existed only in the imagination before Invasion, but Psios were certainly the strangest of them.  It wasn’t a common thing—most scientific studies estimated that somewhere between three and five percent of the global population displayed measureable psionic abilities.  It wasn’t a statistically insignificant number, but it wasn’t as though people bumped into Psios everywhere they went. 

Still…up until Invasion there hadn’t been any at all.  Well, not any that science could confirm.  No one was still quite sure how Psios had come about; if it was some talent humanity always had that had somehow been brought out, or if it was a product of the Invaders.  There were a ton of theories, of course: chemical weapon detonated in the atmosphere, exposure to Invasion tech.  The real crackpots (the ones that liked to blame Psios for everything from hang nails to hurricanes) theorized that it had to be secret experiments performed on unsuspecting humans by the Invaders themselves. 

Whatever the reason, Psios started appearing in the population a year or two after Invasion.  A Psio’s ability varied from person to person, with little to no rhyme or reason that anyone could find. Some people could sense emotions, some could pick up stray thoughts or project their own to people close by.  Some could move small objects by looking at them, or light matches with a thought.  In some of the more famous and sensational cases, people had been able to make plants bloom, or predict what a person in another room was going to do. 

But the thing about Psios—the thing that had probably kept them safe, and kept people from panic-fueled witch hunts—their abilities were small.  Limited.  There was a noticeable increase in the strength of abilities if they got handed down through generations, but nothing truly Earth-shattering.  Psios, for all that some people hated them, feared them, were still basically just parlor tricks.  There were only a few records of people developing a psionic ability to the point it could be dangerous, and even those instances hadn’t been recorded in decades.

It was supposed to be as close to impossible as you could get in world where Invasion had happened. 

Lydia
was supposed to be impossible.  Her
family
was supposed to be impossible. 

Psios weren’t supposed to be able to hold a full conversation from any room in the house, all without ever speaking a word, the way Grandma had been able to.  Psios weren’t supposed to be able to touch an object and instantly know its entire history, no matter how far back that history stretched, the way Mom had been able to.  Psios certainly weren’t supposed to be able to do what Lydia could.

Lydia hadn’t actually encountered a limit to what she could lift and move with her abilities, and she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been able to use them.  According to family tradition, Jennifer St. John found out her daughter was also a Psio when she came upstairs to wake a two-year-old Lydia from a nap and found her entertaining herself by levitating her toddler bed a few inches off the floor and zooming it from one side of the room to the other with her still sitting on it.  Lydia didn’t even need to have eye contact with whatever she was using her powers on, like most telekinetic Psios she’d seen records for.  Psios at Lydia’s level, at her family’s level, weren’t unheard of…but they were the next best thing.  That was the reason they went to so much trouble to hide what they could do.  How strong they were.  That was the reason Grandpa was still reluctant to tell the others about Lydia’s abilities. 

It was easy to dismiss a Psio as a quirk of human genetics when the best they could do was roll a pencil across a desk after staring at it for five minutes.  When that Psio could probably pick up a car and throw it up the street, it got a lot harder not to be afraid.  Still…

“We’re going to have to tell them someday,” she said, and couldn’t quite keep a shade of rebelliousness out of her tone.  “Sooner or later, something’s going to happen and I won’t have a choice.  I’m not going to let you or Ava or
anyone
get…I’m not going to let anything happen if I can help it.” 

Grandpa’s forbidding expression gentled.  “I know,” he admitted quietly.  “And maybe you’re right, but now’s not the right time.  Just trust me, okay?  We’ll talk about this after things have settled down some.”

Lydia huffed, but subsided.  This was a fight she’d had many times with her family—ever since Ava had accidentally found out she was a Psio—and she’d never won it.   

"Now," Grandpa continued, "one thing you
can
do is help Andrew keep an eye on those boys."

"Caleb and Zack?" 

Grandpa nodded.  "Talk to ‘em; see what you can find out from them." 

Lydia smirked, raising one eyebrow.  After a moment, he seemed to realize what that sounded like.  His eyes widened. 

"Not like
that
," he hissed.  "Jesus.  Give an old man a heart attack, why don't you?"  He tweaked her nose. 

"I know what you meant, Grandpa...but why?  Did they say something last night?"  Her heart sped up at the thought that she and Ava might have put them all at risk, after all, that Caleb and Zack could turn out to be people like those in some of the horror stories they had heard on the broadcasts.  Grandpa seemed to read the panic in her expression. 

"I want to know a little more about them before we drop our guard completely, but they seem like good kids.  Don't—Christ, kiddo, I'm not going to get
angry
at you for helping people."

"So you don't think they're like those people we keep hearing about?"

"I doubt it.  They didn't have much ammo on them, and they handed their weapons over right away.  Besides...if they were up to something, letting themselves get chased by a pack of Burnouts is about the stupidest way to go about it. Especially with the kid.  How they've managed out there when one of them can't
see
."  He shook his head with a look of slight admiration.  "Anyway, they aren't going to be going for their truck anytime soon, obviously, so we might be stuck with them for a while.  There's oatmeal in the kitchen.  Andrew dumped about half a jar of cinnamon in it, so it's almost good." 

"Long as it's not vegetable medley," she replied with a half-hearted smile

Grandpa smirked at her, before turning for the front door.  Lydia watched him a moment before taking a deep breath. 

"Are we really almost out of food?" she asked.  For the second time in as many minutes, her grandfather froze.  Then his shoulders slumped.

"You heard that."   

"I'm sorry.  Ava and I heard you arguing with Jim." 

"No, no, you need to know."  Grandpa’s voice turned weary.  "Our supplies are getting pretty thin.  None of us thought we'd have to last this long.  But we’ll figure something out.  We're going to be okay.  I promise."

Lydia gave a hesitant nod.  She knew that no one could promise
that
anymore.  Still, if there was anyone who could figure out a way to keep everyone safe, it was Grandpa.  She shoved her hands into her pockets and watched her grandfather continued down the short hallway and out the front door.  Going back to their house didn’t hold much appeal—there was nothing waiting for her there but chores.  At least here, she had people to talk to. 

And speaking of talking to people...

She found Andrew in the kitchen, standing at the counter with mug of steaming oatmeal.  He was staring out the window over the sink, but Lydia could tell most of his attention was behind him.  Caleb and Zack Reed were seated at the small table in the breakfast nook, heads bent together as they talked. 

They had taken advantage of the limited (
very
limited.  As in buckets-and-ditches-dug-out-in-backyards limited) bathroom facilities.  They’d both shaved, and a little bit of water still beaded on the twists of Zack’s hair around his ears.  They'd apparently had some spare clothes in the duffle bag, as they were both much less dirt-and-gore encrusted than they had been last night.  A half-eaten bowl of oatmeal with two spoons sat between them, and a dark gray towel was spread out on the table in front of Zack.  Caleb’s gun lay in pieces on the towel, along with a bristle brush, a pile of cotton swabs, and a small bottle of cleaner.  The blaster’s charge cartridge had already been disassembled, thoroughly scrubbed free of any dirt or particles that could interfere with the complicated reactions that formed the bolts the blaster fired.  Surprisingly,
Zack
was the one cleaning it. 

"Morning," Lydia said, sliding past Andrew to grab another mug from the stack by the sink. 

The clean-burn camp stove that they cooked most of their food on had been set up over the real stovetop.  A lone pot sat on it, the warm scent of cinnamon wafting from it.  Andrew grunted an acknowledgement, saluting her with his mug.