Burnout (The Invasion Chronicles Book 1) (6 page)

Ava finally appeared as Lydia was scooping out a ladle of the pasty stuff, still looking mostly asleep.  Flecks of toothpaste gathered at the corner of her mouth, and she was braiding her dark hair on autopilot.  Lydia hid a smile.  Not even the end of the world could turn Ava into a morning person.  She grabbed two spoons from the pile by the sink, raising them and the mug so Ava could see.  Ava nodded, stifling a yawn behind one hand. 

Lydia decided she missed bagels, too.  Coffee, washing machines, and bagels.  Those were what she considered civilization. 

Well okay…toilet paper was nice, as well.

"That all you're going to eat?" Andrew asked, his bushy eyebrows knitting together in concern.  He glanced over at Caleb and Zack.  "We're tightening some belts around here, but for God's sake, you can each have your
own
."

               Lydia laughed as Caleb jerked his attention away from his conversation with his brother.  "Huh?  Oh.  Oh, no, we're good.  Thanks, though."

"It's fine, Andrew," Lydia added.  Andrew nodded doubtfully. 

"If you say so," he muttered.  "Listen, I’m gonna head upstairs and try to clean up a little bit."  He rubbed at the whiskers on his chin.  “Come and get us if you need anything.”  He shot a look at Caleb and Zack, but he didn’t seem overly concerned about leaving her and Ava alone with them.  He bustled out of the kitchen, and she and Ava dropped down into the seats across from the boys without being asked. 

"Hey," Caleb said cautiously. 

"Morning," Ava yawned, a small frown creasing her forehead as she realized what Zack was doing. 

He was about halfway through cleaning their gun, everything laid out precisely in front of him.  He flitted from part to part with barely a hint of hesitation, his movements quick and sure.                  "Wow...isn't that hard?" Ava said, sounding impressed.  Immediately, she cringed.  "Crap, I'm sorry—I just meant--"

Zack just chuckled.  "Not as long as I know where everything is," he responded.  "Gives me somethin’ to do."  His smile turned mischievous.  "Besides, if I let Caleb do it, the firing pin gets all gunked up and he tries to put the barrel on backwards."  

"That was one time!" Caleb protested, punching his brother's shoulder.  "And we were in a
little
bit of a hurry."

"Excuses, excuses," Zack sighed.  He set the brush aside and held the part up towards Caleb.  "Good?"  Caleb inspected the piece, nodding.  

"Looks fine to me."  

Zack grinned and adjusted his sunglasses before tapping his fingers along the towel until they connected with the gun's barrel.  "So, Lydia and Ava, right? Which one is which?"  

It took Lydia a second to realize what Zack was asking.  "Uh, I'm Lydia...Ava's sitting across from you." 

Zack tapped two fingers against his forehead in a salute.  "Caleb says you got a really smart setup.  I mean, I assumed it was good since none of us, you know,
died
last night.  Sounds like you're walled off pretty good.  How long’ve you guys been holed up here?"  

"Zack," Caleb warned, his body jerking.  Lydia would bet money he'd just kicked his brother under the table.   

"We've been here the whole time," Ava offered.

"Since
June
?" Caleb said incredulously, his disapproval vanishing.  Lydia drummed her fingers on the tabletop as Ava nodded and took a large bite of the oatmeal.

"Evacuations got a little wild in Columbus—there were all these news reports about people getting into wrecks, stranded on the roads, that kind of thing.  Things weren't too crazy here, so Grandpa decided to wait it out.  One of the neighbors left, but everyone else stayed, too," Lydia said.  "When they started talking about what the Burnouts really were...everyone decided it would be safer to just barricade ourselves in until the military got the city back under control." 

For the first time, Zack's fingers faltered in their movements, and he nearly dropped the barrel.  At the same time, Caleb pulled a strange face.  The expression vanished almost as soon as it appeared, though.

"Yeah,
that
worked out real well for everyone," he said.  The words carried a bitter edge, sharp and biting in a way Lydia wasn’t quite sure he meant for them to hear.

"How bad is it out there?" Ava asked.  "I mean, we've heard a lot on the broadcasts…but it's mostly just naming off places that've gone dark and telling people to stay off the roads." 

Caleb and Zack snorted at exactly the same time.  "You been listening to the
official channels
," Caleb said, his fingers twitching like he was about to make air quotes. 

"What's that mean?" Lydia demanded.   

"You know,” Caleb said, quirking an eyebrow.  “Stay in your homes, avoid large metro areas, remain calm, help is on the way!”  He let out a disgusted huff.  “All they want’s to head off another panic.  Whatever military’s left is losing ground fast.  Far as we can tell, only about half of the 'green zones' actually still exist.  When was the last time you actually heard an official talk, and not just someone telling us what officials are saying?  And what officials?  The President hasn’t made a live statement in going on a month, now."

Lydia’s eyes got wider as Caleb spoke, and Ava went still and silent.  They’d noticed.  Of
course
they had noticed.  Everyone knew that there weren't nearly as many emergency broadcasts as there had been when the Burnouts first appeared.  She’d heard some of the adults talking about it in whispers. Heard Grandpa and Jim discussing whether things were getting better or worse when she was supposed to be asleep. 
She’d
been thinking about it just yesterday.  She'd hoped, though.  They all hoped they were wrong.  Zack nodded as Caleb talked, his face pinched. 

"How...how do you know the green zones are disappearing?" Ava asked in a quavering voice.  "Why would they tell people to try and get to them if they aren't
there
anymore?"

"Crowd control," Zack said cynically.  "We were in Charleston when everything started going crazy. Been on the road since June.  We've seen it.”  His smile turned wry.  "Well...Caleb's seen it.  I hear it, mostly.  But there’s herds of Burnouts on the roads, just wandering around all the dead cars.  Cities are no-man's-land; I don't care how many people are still broadcasting from ‘em."

"We passed six green zones before we got to Columbus...four of ‘em were overrun and the others were turning people away at gunpoint," Caleb added.  "People are already turning on each other for supplies...how much worse you think it'll get if word gets out that the Burnouts are winning
?
"  

"There's other channels broadcasting from places weren't hit as hard; a couple out of Canada have good info.  You have to hunt for ‘em, but it's better than what they're feeding you on the official network."  Zack waved a dismissive hand.

"That's crazy!" Ava protested, but there was no conviction in her voice.  She and Lydia had spent many evenings speculating that things were worse than they had been led to believe, but they hadn’t thought it was
that
bad.

"Last I checked, we’re in the middle of a goddamn robo-zombie apocalypse," Zack said.  "Crazy’s all we got.”

Lydia slumped back in her chair, a chill sweeping through her.    She let her spoon drop back into the oatmeal with a wet plop, her appetite suddenly gone.  "Are…is anyone any closer to figuring out how this
happened
?” she asked, afraid of the answer.  Caleb shot her a look, and she immediately shook her head.  “I mean, yeah, we know it was an Invasion leftover—but has anyone figured out where ground zero was?  Or how we missed something that could do…could do
this
for almost seventy years?” 

“Haven’t heard anything since August.  There was a rumor that some Army pocket was tracking the source,” Caleb answered with a dark look.  “Folks were still pretty sure it started somewhere in the US.  New York, maybe, or Chicago.  Hell, there’s Invasion wreckage washin’ up every year on the beaches up north.  Remember a few years ago when they found a pulse cannon core on the Jersey Shore?”

Lydia looked down at the scarred wooden tabletop, itself a pre-Invasion relic that had belonged to Jill Royce’s parents, and balled up her fists. 

Invasion.

Even sixty-seven years later, there was no one on Earth who hadn’t been affected by Invasion, wasn’t
still
being affected by Invasion.  Lydia had seen pictures from the time period: grainy black and white or sepia toned photos that bore an eerie resemblance to the view she looked out on every day.  Destruction.  Chaos.  Terrified people.  All that was missing were huge, black ships hanging in the sky. 

Invasion was when Earth learned for sure that humans weren’t alone in the universe, and it might have been the moment when they were snuffed out entirely. 

May 30th 1949, a year before Grandpa was born.  Sometimes, Lydia wondered what it must have been like for her great-grandparents too look up into the sky and see dark, oval vessels the size of football fields descending through the clouds.  They must have thought the world was ending. 

Even today, debate still raged over the Invaders’ motives, but there was no mistaking them for benign.  Most academics accepted that if Invasion had happened even five or ten years later, if the machines and production lines of World War II had had just a little more time to cool off, if people had had just a few more years to get complacent in peace again, the outcome might have been very different.  As it was, the Invaders probably hadn’t expected much of a fight and had been caught off guard by how quickly humanity responded to the threat.  The few industrialized nations that weren’t still crippled by the effects of World War II had scored crucial early victories, proving that even though the technology was something never before seen—it wasn’t invincible. 

It hadn’t been that easy, though. 

The ships sent out swarms of fighter vessels and overland attack vehicles.  The skies once again became hostile in large parts of the world, and people learned to listen again with fearful hearts for bomb sirens.   

The Invaders themselves were as much of a mystery as their motivations for attacking Earth—with every ship brought down, the military failed to find even a hint of the beings controlling them.  Slowly, the realization sank in that they
wouldn’t,
that either the world was dealing with something on a completely different scale from any human understanding of life…

Or the world was facing a fully automated fleet. 

The Invasion raged for almost a year, claiming casualties in every nation on Earth…but eventually the tide had turned.  New alliances formed during the war were put to the test, governments and nations that had stayed out of the conflict—or even fought on the wrong side of it—reached out, wishing to join forces in the face of complete extinction.  The tide had turned.  Victories became more decisive; the skies were slowly reclaimed.  A month before Lydia’s great-grandmother gave birth to Grandpa in a military hospital down in Florida, the last invading ships were finally brought down. 

And the whole world changed forever. 

The Invasion fleet had been huge, big enough for multiple ships over every continent in the world, and that wasn’t even counting the smaller attack vessels.  The amount of wreckage had been enormous.  Most of it had been cleared away in the first decade after victory was declared, nation after nation snatching up as much of it as they could to study the technology.  The leaps made in science and engineering in the years following Invasion had been incredible, unprecedented in human history.  

Almost overnight, great leaps were made in transport, in energy, in communications, in military infrastructure and weapons, in architecture.  Post-Invasion tech seeped into every aspect of life.  Even fields that hadn’t been jumpstarted by the study of Invasion technology had benefitted.  There were whole academic circles devoted to theories of what medicine, psychology, art, and history might have been like had humanity not advanced so quickly in other areas, freeing up time and funding to pursue those fields.  There was no one on Earth who had not had their lives irrevocably altered by Invasion. 

Then there were the “leftovers.”

Even decades of scavenging tech from the Invasion fleet hadn’t been able to clean up all of it.  At least a few times a year, something broke on the news about some new Invasion-era relic being discovered.  People all over the world stumbled upon remnants of the fleet that washed up on beaches, or turned them up in fields during planting season or construction.  When Lydia was seven, one of her classmates brought a defunct onboard computer from a real Invasion fighter vessel—apparently something his dog had dug up in their back yard. 

Most often, the leftovers were harmless.  Half-destroyed and missing parts, with power sources that had died years ago.  Some…were not.  It didn’t happen often, but occasionally someone found a relic that was still active.  Weapons, ballistics, explosives.  A fully-functional attack drone discovered by a Filipino fishing crew nearly touched off an international incident when no less than five nations tried to claim it for salvage.  Such finds were rare, though, and had been for many years.