“Avian, what if the sweep that I saw wasn’t the only one?” I said in a shallow breath. “What’s to say that the first gens everywhere aren’t starting sweeps? Why would it ever be limited to that one?”
Avian swore again. He crossed to the tent and tossed the flap aside. “West! Time to get up. We’ve got to go.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked from within, his voice groggy.
“Our time may have just run out,” Avian said, already disassembling the girl’s tent as Karmen stepped out of it.
With the world finally dry, Dr. Evans stepped out from his glass prison box. Susan and Karmen started, stepping back several steps. He just held his hands up and took a step away from them.
“Judging from you two, something is wrong,” he said, placing his hands where his hips should have been. He was much more shapeless without any skin or fat to fill him out. Just bones and mechanical organs.
“I made a huge mistake in assuming there would only ever be one Bane sweep,” I said, helping Avian pack up the tent. By this point, West had rolled out of his tent and Bill returned to help him pack it up. “Why aren’t there any Bane coming after us, Dr. Evans?”
He, like Avian and I had done, turned to the city. “If it is a sweep, this is different. The city still looks like it’s standing.”
“I don’t know,” I said as I shoved the tent into the back of the solar tank. “But something isn’t right.”
“Karmen, Susan,” Avian said as we flew around packing and getting ready to go. “You two need to get moving. The road was clear our whole way here. Be careful, but move fast. We have no way of knowing if it will stay that way.”
“Find Royce when you get there,” I said, checking that my magazine was fully loaded. “Tell him to have the scientists work as fast as they can. Tell him we don’t have nearly as much time as we thought.”
“Royce,” Susan said, nodding her head as she pulled her pack on. Karmen did the same. “He’s the leader in New Eden?”
I nodded. “By now he’ll have found out something we did without his knowledge and he’s going to be angry about it, but tell him we will be back as soon as we possibly can.”
“Okay,” she nodded as Bill slammed the back doors to the solar tank closed. “Thank you for taking care of us last night.”
Bill and West climbed back in the van while Avian and I held back a moment.
“We were more than happy to,” Avian said with a nod. “Those of us left need to help each other.”
“I hope we see you both again soon,” Susan said.
“Hasta luego,” Karmen said. “Ser seguro.”
And while I didn’t know exactly what her words meant, I understood their sincerity.
Avian and I climbed into the van and waved goodbye. Karmen and Susan started down the road we had come.
“You want me to start through the city?” Bill asked as he started the tank. I breathed a sigh of relief when it fired right up. The sun had risen and charged the solar panels.
“I don’t think we have any choice,” I said as I looked around to my companions. Adrenaline was burning through the blood of everyone around me. “We have to see what is going on. If the Bane really are starting more sweeps…”
“Got it,” Bill said, nodding when I didn’t continue.
We rolled forward toward the city. Within minutes we were passing gas stations and long abandoned roadside stands.
I stood when we started creeping into the city outskirts, and unlatched the hatch. A gust of cold air blasted into the tank as I pushed it open. I pulled myself up and over the lip. I straddled the hole with my legs, my butt sitting on the very edge of the lip, my legs spreading across the hole and bracing the other side with my boots. I reached across and placed my hands on the handles of the firing turret.
“You want any back up, up there?” West called from below.
“I’ll let you know,” I said distractedly as I scanned the roads around us.
Soon, the scattered buildings grew more compacted and the shops grew bigger. But so far everything looked intact.
“You see any of them?” West called up. I looked down to see him peering out his window, his rifle propped up in it.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Not a single one.”
Windows revealed abandoned buildings. There were no inactive watchers from within. Not even one lone Sleeper. No Hunters crashed out of buildings to rush us.
So far, the city was abandoned.
We drove with baited breath for another twenty minutes that felt like days. We waited for movement, for a helicopter to swoop down on us from the sky, for the Evolved world to be recognizable.
As the city grew taller and more glamorous, the buildings showed their destruction.
So may had collapsed, had caved in on themselves and were nothing more than piles of rubble. Others showed scorch marks. Trees were smoldering stumps and the road was blackened in long stretches.
The air tasted very faintly of smoke and ash.
“How long ago do you think this happened?” I asked, surveying the destruction.
“A few weeks,” Avian said, though he didn’t sound too sure.
“Considering there are no more flames burning and how the air seems to be mostly cleared,” Dr. Evans said. “I would estimate the blaze started over a month ago. The city would have burned for weeks. I would even guess that the rain we saw last night put out the last of the flames.”
By this point, Bill had pulled off of the main freeway and taken to a main road that led us right into the heart of the city. We approached the highest buildings.
The buildings on both our left and right had once been beautiful. I saw a row of white columns with beautiful detail carved into them. Scorched trees and bushes hinted at what must have once been fantastic landscaping. But now they were burned to the ground and crumbled.
We broke between the two half crumbled buildings and stopped in our tracks.
Everything on the east side of the road was a crumbled, destroyed mess.
“Ground zero,” Bill said.
My eyes scanned the rubble, but there was nothing to see. The sweep had moved on.
I heard Bill click the tank into park and everyone stepped outside.
The road that had once separated the east from the west side was filled with debris. Chunks of concrete were stacked fifty feet high, but there wasn’t the shape of even a single solid wall. Steel beams rose out of the ground in abstract shapes, curving, some frayed and splintered.
The Bane had leveled this side of the city.
“You think their destruction caused the fire that burned the west side?” West asked. He shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand as he took in the damage.
Dr. Evans shook his head. “Impossible to say. Could have been. But it very likely could have been natural from lightning. Everything is dry as a bone out here. It wouldn’t take much of a spark to set everything afire.”
“Maybe that’s what started the sweep,” Avian said, his assault rifle sweeping the scene before us. “Maybe lightning caused the fire on the west side of the city. That could have woken up the Bane. Driven them east, starting the sweep.”
I nodded. It seemed possible. But impossible to ever know for sure. “Whatever way it happened, there’s no denying there are more sweeps happening,” I said, relaxing my grip on the turret. There would be no Bane to shoot. “We have no way of knowing how many have started.”
“The Bane,” Dr. Evans said with a sigh. “Their brains all work the same. Same generation of TorBane, same impulses, same way of thinking, if you can call what they do thinking. I would say worldwide sweeps will start within the next two months. It only took four months for TorBane to wipe out the world. That first sweep you saw was about a month ago, Eve. It’s probably safe to say the one you witnessed wasn’t the first one.”