“Run!” Jeff shouted. He pushed Dane forward, turning his back on the Apostle as the pieces of its wings scattered over the landscape, shooting red lines of deadly lasers toward the ground as they searched for humans. Jeff didn’t need to see them coming to know that at least one of those leeches was tracking him. They passed through the unguarded gates and ran for the center of the community.
Dane was smaller than Jeff, but he kept pace as they sprinted after Chad. The screams of people dying filled the air in all directions as the Apostle’s leeches flooded the community.
“Where are we going?” Dane shouted.
“Chad’s! We have to save the kids!”
“We’ll die!”
Jeff growled and pushed himself even harder, forcing his feet to move faster over the rubble, and sprinted past scenes of chaos. He saw Chad leap up the stairs ahead of him as they closed in on the old two-story home where Chad’s family of five lived. Chad ripped the door off the entrance and dove inside just as three of the wing shards from the Apostle slammed into the building from the side. Chad’s home exploded, spewing fire and brick in all directions. Jeff was blown backward and slammed into a wagon across the street, crushing the wooden frame beneath his body.
He tried to scream to Chad, to Charlotte, to his two nephews and his newborn niece, but nothing came out.
2 COURAGE
JEFF HAD STAGGERED TWO STEPS forward, toward his brother’s tomb, when a red laser seared a running man in half a dozen feet in front of him. He pulled back by reflex, and the rumble of the approaching giant ripped through his mind, shattering his rational thought.
He scrambled back, over to where Dane was slumped in a pile of debris, and fished his friend out of the rubble. The Apostle was getting closer, its crunching steps louder and more horrifying as they briefly obscured the screams of people being hunted by the mindless wing-piece robots under the Apostle’s control.
“Wake up, buddy. Dane! Come on!” Jeff shouted at his unconscious friend as he carried him as best as he could amid the slaughter and debris. He kept his distance from the other humans fleeing the scene so that he wouldn’t create too inviting of a target for attack, but he wasn’t moving fast enough. He risked a glance over his shoulder to survey the area where the giant feet of the Apostle had crushed Chad’s neighbor’s house.
A woman he recognized as Alex ducked out from behind the crumbling wall of a building that had been destroyed and partially rebuilt a handful of times. Her hair fluttered in the air behind her as she ran for her life, a few steps behind Jeff. She carried a small bag, likely containing all the food and water she had to her name.
She was going to die. He knew it. She needed to slide behind the rusted remains of an old sedan to her right and run north until a larger pack of humans would draw the Apostle’s attention away from her. If she did that, she’d make it. He knew it. He could see the events play out in his mind. He wanted to scream to her, to tell her what to do, but that wouldn’t save Alex.
Air materialized into energy around her arms and neck, snapping her into place. She was too close to the Apostle. They could manipulate the environment with molecular precision within short distances; it was one of the countless feats of science that were so beyond human comprehension that many worshiped the Apostles as deities and their technological weapons as divine power. It was hard to fault those who did so.
The woman shrieked in horror as the impossibly tall robot shined a light on Alex, reducing her body to dust. Jeff wanted to stop running, to turn around, to fight the Apostle that effortlessly destroyed everything he had ever known, but he couldn’t. It would mean death for his friend, a friend who had shared his vow to protect his family and each other until the end.
It seemed impossible that any mere human had ever dared to challenge these perfect creatures. Jeff had never cared for history, but that was mostly because all the old men around the fire had always told their own versions of the downfall of humankind and their tussles with the warring Apostles. Listening to people pine away about the past never made things better now.
“Jeff . . .” Dane said just as Jeff felt his friend regaining consciousness on his shoulder.
“You’re still alive. Can you run?”
“What?”
“Can you run?” Jeff shouted as he turned down a street that was already littered with bodies and flaming buildings. There weren’t many people still alive as far as Jeff could see, which meant he was likely only a few moments away from being sliced himself.
“Left! Left!” Dane shouted, and Jeff obediently cut hard to the left, dodging a laser that cut into the old pavement with a hiss. A leech shot over his head with a hum, apparently uninterested in circling around for another shot. There were certain advantages to being an insignificant species on this planet; as far as most Apostles and their leeches were concerned, humans weren’t worth the effort to kill.
“Can you run?” Jeff asked again. He couldn’t even hear himself sucking in as much air as he could as he moved Dane from his shoulder and set him down. He looked over his shoulder; behind him, he could see the legs of the robotic god crushing the largest coalition community in a hundred miles.
“Faster than you, like always,” Dane said. The words were what he would have expected to hear from Dane, but the tone wasn’t anything close to normal.
“Good—stay close. We might be able to make it out.”
“Where’s Chad?” Dane asked as he held his head.
“Just stay close.” Jeff sprinted from between the houses and into the open, heading back toward the new crater that filled the space where he had won his fight not long ago. The earth beneath him looked like a cutting board, with deep lines sliced into it, and the body of one of his neighbors usually accompanied each cut.
“Thanks for not leaving me,” Dane said between gasps. They were sprinting hard, and Jeff was already winded, so he grunted in response.
“I figured there was no point in starting to leave you behind now.”
They were fighting for their lives, and Jeff’s instincts hit him far harder than any of the shockwaves had. A leech was going to cut Dane’s head off. He knew it as clearly as he had known he was going to win his fight with Canon. The world seemed to slow as Jeff looked over to his friend and saw a leech cruising toward them. He had lost one brother today; he wasn’t going to lose another. Jeff dove at his friend, pushing him out of the way of the red laser, successfully knocking him aside and saving Dane’s life.
It wasn’t until Jeff hit the ground that he realized that the laser had missed Dane, but he hadn’t been so fortunate. He screamed in agony as his blurred vision found his left arm steaming in the middle of the street, several feet from where he lay. The leech buzzed by overhead and out of sight.
He pushed through the pain, trying to force himself up, but his legs weren’t working correctly. He managed to get some leverage with his right arm and pushed himself up to where he could see that his left leg had been cut off at the thigh. He dropped his head to the ground, unable to keep himself upright at the sight. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to pass out. But he didn’t want to die—not like this.
“Dane! Dane!” Jeff grabbed at his friend as his face appeared above him.
“Jeff . . .” Dane seemed to say, but Jeff was having a hard time hearing. He continued to try to pull at his friend as if he were the only thing that could save him from drowning in the terror of the moment.
Dane fought off Jeff’s hands and tried to calm him, but he was beyond consoling.
“We have to go! Dane! We have to go! Pick me up! We can make it! We can make it!” They could make it. The slaughter was mostly over; with his insight, he knew that Dane could carry him out of this deathtrap. But they needed to go—now.