Sawyer stops him. We all fall in behind him. “What?” Sawyer says. “We’re starting on the other side of the river. Their neighborhood.” He thumbs toward me and Topher. “We take the other tunnel. It goes under downtown.”
Liam sneers at us. “The mission is to look for survivors and to scope out food and supplies, not to visit their friends. The most likely places are here in the downtown core. It had the highest density. It’s the farthest from the firebombed areas. And there are a lot of places to hide. We can scope the suburbs next.”
He’s infuriatingly right. The downtown area is riddled with deep, spiraling underground parking garages and shopping malls. They’re prone to filling with water during storms but perfect places to hide during a bomb attack. As close as we had to public bomb shelters in more peaceful times. And to hide from a species that has admitted they prefer high elevations, what better place than underground? I look at my camp mates. None of them seems to be able to form an argument.
Liam looks smug. “Volunteers to scout?” he says.
My hand shoots into the air.
EIGHTH
I watched the other Eighth burn and those who shot and burned him march smartly back to the compound like nothing happened. I lay on the road behind the car, watching the flame that burned hot and blue. Eighth didn’t move. I don’t know whether the shot in the neck killed him or the fire, but I knew he wouldn’t get up. In theory our armor is fireproof, but this was something else, something more than fire. They were done with him. They weren’t going to bring him back. I wonder why he didn’t run. He must have known that they’d come for him, they’d kill him. It was almost as if . . .
I twitched then, under the car, and a sliver of light appeared in my mind, as though I glimpsed something behind a door. I carried that sliver with me along the dark road back to the city. There were humans. I saw humans. I saw something so beautiful it doesn’t have a name. But I wandered away. It’s hard to focus without the buzzing directives. My mind leaps above the sludge with insights that seem to come from nowhere. There is more than one way to be free, I think, as the image of the other Eighth burning with blue fire plays back behind my eyes. I don’t have to do this. I can walk away.
I’m free, I sign to myself. I’m defective.
Dead. Stopped.
It is quiet now. I think the mission is finished. The humans are finished. I’ve been pressed into a dark corner, between a brick wall and a large metal box for I don’t know how long. I’m too scared to move.
I put my hands over my eye mask to shut out the day and try to see the sliver of light I saw by the car. I try to peel it open and look past it, but I can’t. After a few hours it presses closed and is gone.
RAVEN
In the end five of us go. Liam feels a tight-knit team works better together. Or maybe he wants to get rid of us. Either way, myself, Topher, Xander, Sawyer, and Mandy are to scout the downtown core for forty minutes and return with our report. The rest will wait in the tunnel for our return. If we don’t return after an hour, two scouts come after us. If they don’t return, the mission is a bust, I guess.
When we leave the tunnel, cautiously emerging into the daylight, Sawyer sighs theatrically.
“Ahhhhh, feel that? Hear it?” he says. “That’s the sound of the world’s biggest plonker receding in the distance.” He leans over and speaks directly into the camera Liam reluctantly permitted Mandy to strap to her helmet. “Did you hear that, Commander?”
The five of us giggle all the way up to the surface roads. We emerge, as expected, due south of the stadium. Snowdrifts pile up against the glass doors. We move forward to investigate, snow up to our thighs. Behind the glass doors is a scene I should be used to by now. Undecayed and decayed remains dot the wide entranceways and stairs.
“They tried to hide here, I guess,” Xander says.
We continue, hugging the west side of the high stadium walls. Hundreds of cars are parked in a seemingly endless parking lot. Most of them, for a change, are empty. Sawyer opens the gas tank on a few of them and checks the contents.
“There’s a lot of fuel here,” he says. “We need to think of how we can get it back to the base. We should have come here weeks ago.”
“We were waiting to be rescued,” I say. “Shelter in place. Remember?” It almost sounds funny now.
On the other side of the parking lot, down a narrow street from the pedestrian overpass, as promised, is Shoppers, one of the ones that claims to have a large “food essentials” section. Its front windows are intact, but the door is locked, and no bodies are visible through the glass. Outside the glass are two bodies, and unbelievably, two rifles and two pistols, still loaded.
There’s something unspeakably sad, I think, about two men spending their last minutes on Earth guarding food that no one will ever eat, medicines and drugs that no one will ever use. Then I remember this store could hold the goods vital for the survival of the base and silently thank the two dead guards, while Sawyer and Xander help themselves to their guns.
“Let’s check this out and then poke around a bit farther into town,” Sawyer says. He jangles the locked door. “Stand back.”
The next second, one of the windows comes crashing down with a deafening cascade of glass. We step through.
“Right, pair up. Topher with Xander, Rave with me. Mandy, you stand watch; you’re the best shot. Scope out the entire store. Exits, entrances, hidey-holes, the back room, bathrooms, everything. If the whole crew comes back here, we will need at least an hour uninterrupted. I want to know this place inside out.”
Sawyer and I head left to the end of the store, while Topher and Xander head right. Mandy stands with two guns raised at the front of the store.
Sawyer leads us down the first aisle, casually perusing the shelves. He begins to pocket things. I look at him, eyebrows raised. “Matches,” he says.
“We should look for medications, too,” I say, thinking of the list Mandy has given us all. “Insulin, penicillin, sedatives, and, uh . . . and hearing aid batteries and—”
Sawyer raises his hand to stop me. “Right. But trust me about the matches.”
I quickly stuff as many into my thigh pockets as I can. Then we move on.
We reach the end of the store. There are two double doors to our left. I poke my head through, noting a storeroom lined with packed shelves, and a large rolling door to the back.
“Exit there, closed,” I say, letting the doors swing shut with a rusty squeak.
We turn and head down the next aisle. It seems to be picnic type food in all colors and textures and sizes of glass jars and plastic bags.
“Condiments,” Sawyer says, turning down the aisle. “God, I’ve missed Tabasco.” He slips a bottle into his pocket.
As we head down the aisle, there’s a noise behind us. I turn to look, but Sawyer doesn’t notice.
“Olives!” he says. When I turn back to him, he’s opening a jar and popping small black olives into his mouth.