Seneca Rebel (The Seneca Society Book 1) (23 page)

At a classic, "you pump, you pay," gas station Dom and I agreed to take turns waiting at the car to keep a lookout, just in case. Dom awkwardly danced his way inside, trying to withstand the pressure of a near-bursting bladder.

He came back, relieved. My turn. I thought nobody was in the gas station except the cashier but then I saw some old lady in the aisle reading the label on a pack of vita-melts. Ancient country music was playing. Patsy Cline. A muted monitor with the news was on behind the FlexPay hub. Local weather report– 30 degrees.

I hit the bathroom. As I headed back out, I looked straight at the cashier. There was just something about him. The guy was about fifty years old with thick gray hair, weathered reddish-brown skin, shielded by a layer of red-gray stubble. A toothpick dangled from his mouth. A dark blue and white striped button-up, sleeves rolled above his leathery elbows, this was a man who had clearly worked his whole life to provide for someone, somewhere, who loved him, like I loved my dad. There was a sparkle in his eye as he smiled and nodded at me. I grinned back.
 

Then, behind him on a screen, something snagged my attention. Side-by-side pictures of Dom and me, captioned with, "Runaway teenagers in extreme danger. Please report to authorities." I froze, tried to keep from choking and jetted out to the car, not giving a second glance at the cashier I left in my dust.

44

"G
UN
IT
!" I was panting, but he was right there with me and didn’t ask a thing until we’d peeled out of the station.
 

"What is it?!"

The Prius took off up the circular highway entrance ramp.

"The search– it's gone full force."

"How?"

Before I had the chance to answer, an ominous buzz rained down on us. Through the rear windshield we saw a swarm of twelve football-size helicopter drones headed straight for us. We hit the friction of the shoulder.

Dom whipped his head back around, gripped the wheel and swerved off the shoulder back onto black, nearly nailing a freight truck as we merged onto the highway. My head spun between hanging on as we wove in and out of traffic and tracking the swarm of drones that was closing in behind us.

Panic alarms were going off in my head, but at the same time I focused on my conscious agenda. I could run codes to change any quantum computing system in the world, and this was the time I needed to make it happen.

Game time.

"Gun it! I'll get us connected to these suckers."

"Doro–"

"Just drive, Dom, I got this!"

And he did, as I huddled over my flexer and locked into the zone. I smashed through screen after screen, feverishly drilling code into the communication-crowded airwaves, determined to access the network those drones were on. They had multi-layered shields on them, but I just kept pounding, trying every access code I could. Pain radiated up my forearm. I shook my right hand to ward off the burning onset of Carpal Tunnel.

Dom careened through cars and trucks doing about fifty now with the drones right behind us. Dizziness set in as my eyes went from the road to my flexer.

"Ughh." I squeezed the bridge of my nose.
 

"What, what?!"

"I'm just a little car sick."

Dom gave me a look that might have been comical if the whole situation hadn’t been so crazy. He yanked the wheel to squeeze between two cars to the clear lane on the far right.

Pop! "Ahhh!" Dom shouted as one of our rear tires was shot out and we skidded back across two lanes. A horn blared as the truck it was attached to swerved to miss us. Dom tugged at the wheel as he gunned it. Sixty miles per hour and climbing, the awol tire's metal rim grinding into the asphalt.

The drones flew out in front of us. A red beam shot down on each of our faces. Dom tried to swerve out of the beam, but it was locked on us. I didn't take focus off my flexer, "Just a few more–"

"We don't have a few more!" Dom yelled.

Sparks spewed up from the tire rim.

Boom! I was in the drone network. "Got it!" I’d cracked their code, and reprogrammed them to take command from my flexer.

Pop! Another tire blew– the front left. The car screeched back across the highway and rammed the rail on the inner shoulder. Dom yanked the steering wheel the other way and the car fishtailed, flipped up onto its driver's side, slid about ten yards, then slammed down, landing on its roof and skidding about thirty yards more before coming to a stop, upside down in a ditch.

My hair swept the car’s ceiling as I twisted my head to get my bearings. I peered in Dom's direction. He’d been super jostled by the impact, and had been knocked out but was coming to. "Dom! Dom, come on, we gotta get out of here!"

I scanned for an exit plan. The roof was flattened halfway, the windows all smashed. Dom's side was covered in blood, his head severely gashed by broken glass. Two cars of concerned witnesses pulled over to the shoulder and stopped above the concrete ditch we were in. I held my flexer to my mouth. "Activate sunglass flexer mode." My flexer blinked three times and morphed into black shades, I put them on, undid my seatbelt and tumbled out with a thud. It knocked the wind out of me, but I powered through it. Gasping for breath, I got up on my knees and picked broken glass out of my bloody palms.

"They got us, Doro. They got us!"

"No way!" I reached for his seatbelt. "Ready?" He painfully nodded.

Click. He dropped like a sack of potatoes.

I pushed at his shoulder. "Out the window!"

He groaned in pain and pulled himself through the crunched glass. I trailed after him. He collapsed onto the debris-caked cement. It stuck to his blood and sweat-drenched forehead.

"Y'all okay down there?!" A man called from just up the hill. He kept glancing from us to the drones above us.
 

"You shouldn't stay here," I yelled back, knowing that just being near us could put an innocent bystander in danger.

"We've flexed for help! They're on the way."

This poor nice guy. He didn't know there was no such thing as help right now, but he was definitely freaked out by the hovering drones.

Dom's eyes squeezed tightly closed, and he winced from the pain, using shallow breaths to control it. I wiped the blood from his face with the sleeve of my newly acquired sweater.

It was only seconds before the rumble of more airborne predators infiltrated our sound-space. Dom and I looked at each other. In that moment, without uttering a sound, we both knew this would either be our end, or a new beginning. Dom hedged his bets. "Doro, please, I need you to look out for my family, get them to Seneca..." He forced himself to his feet.

"Dom, what are you doing?"

He didn't reply, but for a guy who’d just had the daylights knocked out him, he gave off a powerful vibe. He turned and focused on the hard line that separated the road from its neighboring forest of half-naked November trees that ran parallel to the ditch as far as the eye could see. He pointed into the woods, "Go that way, and don't look back."

"Dom, don't you do anything–"

"You got this, Doro!" And with that, he bolted up the hill from the ditch and ran full speed, down the outside shoulder.

"Dom!"

He couldn't hear me as he ran straight into the oncoming enemy cyclone. This guy had a thing about putting his own life in harm's way to protect mine.

During my second week at Seneca I had practiced force field science in the defense-tech lab in mathematics applications session. I knew if I could transfer the energy from Dom's flexer with mine as the control center, I could utilize the drone network to form a shield over us. It was a long shot and time was running out. I ran up the hill and looked down into the oncoming traffic, in the direction of the drone fleet. "Activate virtual keypad," I commanded my flexer. Three, two, one, bam, the iridescent orange keys appeared and floated in the mist-thick, brisk air, two feet in front of my chest. I didn't miss a beat. Punching commands at the speed of light, I was rocking my coding maneuvers inside the drone network faster and harder than I even knew I could.

The deathly rumble closed in, rattling me from my toes to the tip of my head as cars whizzed by on the highway. It became a deep, wicked roar.

Dom must have tapped into some reserve adrenaline supply, because I could see that he made it far, fast. He looked back over his shoulder to me as he ran, and frantically threw his arms out to signal me to go into the woods, but I wasn't bailing on him. No freaking way.

I pumped the air buttons in one seriously hardcore last-ditch effort, commanding the creation of a shield formation over my positional coordinates, and covering one hundred yards to my north, which was how far away Dom was by then.

The vibrations from the imposing threat felt like an earthquake. Pieces of glass popped off the cement like Mexican jumping beans. The Ghost Barrel rotorcraft fleet were in view now, dwarfing the oncoming traffic to toy car status. Six Ghost Barrels– silver and black robot driven vessels with ten-foot wingspans capped in spherical propulsion fans, flew straight towards us from the direction we had just come. The big dogs had been called in. And my coding was coming up short. The drones weren’t responding to my commands.

Dom abruptly stopped in his tracks on the road’s shoulder. He threw his hands over his ears, as his clothing rippled from the sickeningly powerful mechanized winds. Something invisible slammed him to his stomach pinning him to the ground. One Ghost Barrel stayed on him, holding him pinned against the pavement, the rest kept on moving toward me.

Ghost Barrel fleets were known for taking out entire villages in an instant. They were built from weather and crash-proof superalloy materials, armed with the most extreme assault weaponry. They would incinerate us, destine us to air pollution duty, using our remains to quicken the demise of our dear Planet Earth. It could happen to Dom and myself in less than ten seconds. I dropped to my knees. Bowed my head in defeat, knowing I'd done all I could.

Suddenly the swarm of drones spread out into a dome correlation along the shoulder of the highway that extended from over my head to Dom's limp body. It created a whirlpool-like pull on us and all the debris nearby. Their bending light, sound and energy deflected all outside signals and materials. Through the blur of it all, I could see the Ghost Barrel fleet do a 180 in perfect formation, and fly back in the opposite direction. The shield I had created with the drones kept the Ghosts from being able to trace us. Their menacing purr made the hair on my neck stand up, sending shivers through my shoulders. And off they flew, hopefully right back to where they came from, with the message that we meant business, too. Was I excited? Sure. But I knew better than to celebrate prematurely. First things first. I had to get up from my knees and on to my feet. And then figure out what our next move would be.

45

T
HE
G
HOST
B
ARRELS
' grim aftermath filled my head with sludge– fumes that stank like burnt egg and gas, dirt and debris that were caked in my nostrils and my snarled hair. I realized that I was too exhausted to stand so I lowered myself to a rigid roadside seat. Hugging my arms around my shins I dropped my head to knees. Soon, the sound of my own breath overtook the distant pounding of the Ghost Barrel fleet. I rested my cheek against my thigh, and looked over in Dom's direction. He was still laid out flat, his chest rising and falling like a pneumatic drill. He finally pushed his body up to sit, looked back at me and softly shook his head in disbelief. It was a miracle we’d made it, but it wasn't over yet.

We were beaten up, but not broken down. His intense eyes found their way to mine and held on unwaveringly, re-igniting the conviction we felt and the stamina each of us needed to keep on.

He made his way over to me. "You're bleeding pretty bad," I told him.

Dom wiped his fingers across his temple and looked at his hand, unfazed by the blood. He took off the t-shirt he had on underneath his hoodie, ripped it into a rag, and wrapped it around his head like a warrior.

My flexer was still in sunglass mode, wrapped around my eyes with coordinates pulled up for Claytor Lake in the upper right corner of the black lens. It was the only Seneca entrance point for which I had location data. This would be our one shot. My air keyboard still floated there in front of me. I stared it down, knowing exactly what I needed to do. "I'm locking our position to the drones, and we're outta here." Dom nodded, and let me do my thing without uttering a word.

I concentrated on getting the coordinates right. Within seconds, the hovering drones amped up, and buzzed back in the direction they’d come from. Just like that, nemesis was repurposed into ally. Whoever said mine were idle hands could kiss my butt. My shoulders loosened up. I cracked my neck. My tech work here was done... for now.

"Let's go." Dom nodded toward the southwest. I didn't question him. It was his turn to fuel this unpredictable ride. He started into the woods and I was right there, in mutual stride.

As we trekked along, the only sounds we heard were the crackle of twigs and rocks under our feet, and the faint howl of winter winds blowing in. We came to a stream, maybe four feet across, caked over in a thin layer of misty ice. Dom brightened up when he spotted it, and stomped a hole in the ice with his heel. "Ladies first." And they said chivalry died long ago.

I knelt down palming the cool, clay-colored earth, and lowered my face to the dark blue, rippled reflection in the freezing water. I could see the pain in the mirror image that stared back at me. I smashed into it with my fists, cupping the water back up to my mouth. I gulped and gulped with my eyes closed. I ran my hand along the ice and then over my face to wipe away some residual grit. Invigorated, I turned back to Dom. He was transfixed, watching me with those tiger-eyes of his. "Sorry, I'm hogging all the water."

"Girl, you can have all the water that you want."

Dom had my back, and I was certain that, by now, he knew I had his. "I'm parched like crazy. You must be, too."