Do I know you?

  It was crazy to think that after staring into the eyes of someone who was about to die, but I swore I did. She looked so familiar. Something in that ghostly face pressed against the glass—it tugged at a memory I couldn’t quite reach.

  Before I could rack my brain, sorting through every face I’d ever walked past or spoken to, one of the Bees turned on its headlight.

  The effect was immediate. Even in the harsh afternoon light, the atmosphere had been bleached an excruciating white as the Bee began to crunch down onto the asphalt, looking for human survivors. Its motors whirred and clicked, a mechanical insect sound that made me feel like a cicada was drilling into my ear. The light swept left and right in methodical arcs. Hutch’s hand clamped around my skull and shoved me downward, pressing my face head-first into the gravel. Sharp stones bit into my cheek.

  “She’s alone, I think,” I managed to say through gritted teeth, pushing away the thoughts trying to cram themselves back in my head. The gravel scraped my jaw as I spoke. If all I could do was try to remember who she looked like, then I had no chance of concentrating on saving her. I needed to focus. “What are we going to do?”

  “We?“ Maggie asked, her dark eyes widening at me. Her fingers tightened around her own knees until her knuckles went white. “That’s a suicide mission, Jack.”

  “She’s a human, Mags.”

  “Not for long.” The words came out flat, resigned. She’d already written the woman off.

  I didn’t know why I was getting so aggravated with Maggie. What she said snapped something in my head, and I had to turn away before I went too low, before I said something that would cut too deep. Facing Hutch now, I whispered furiously, “You’ve got to side with me on this, dude. We have to help her.”

  “Why do we?” He shrugged, his broad shoulders barely moving. His face had that calculating look, one I’d gotten used to over the last few months. He was already casting our chances aside. “It’s too risky.”

  “I helped you.” The words came out harder than I meant.

  “I wasn’t surrounded by Bees.” His jaw tightened. “There’s a difference in our situations.”

  No, but he was a stranger. I’d stumbled right into him half-dead, delirious from dehydration, and I stole his pocketknife from his center console to cut him free from that overturned truck. Hutch walked like a zombie behind me, slowly recovering over two days. One of those days we’d been holed up in a house with boarded windows, and I watched over his sleeping body while Bees crawled the neighborhood outside, their searchlights cutting through the cracks in the plywood. I did that for a stranger. And I did it again, when we ran into Maggie and Eleanor hiding in that SUV, half-starved and terrified. And again, when we walked right into Eden with nothing telling us that they were good people. Humans help each other. That’s just what we did.

  I would need to help her, at whatever the cost.

  I patted myself down, my hands moving quickly over pockets and belt, thinking of anything that they could use if I died. There was a finite amount of resources now left in the world; anything that got glassed by the Bee’s laser-focused plasma guns would be an excruciating loss. Every bullet mattered. Every knife. I unstrapped my rifle and handed it over to Maggie. “Hold onto this for me.”

  She gripped it without thinking, her small hands wrapping around the stock, but then her eyes snapped up to mine. “Why? Jack, why are you—”

  “I’m going to sneak her out of there.”

  “You are not,” Hutch snapped, his hand shooting out to grab my shoulder and shove me back down onto the gravel. Admittedly, it was easy. I didn’t want to make too much noise with the Bees just below us, their sensors probably already picking up vibrations through the concrete. A wave of bleached white light scanned right over our heads, so close I could feel the static electricity making the hair on my arms stand up. I swallowed a dry lump in my throat. “We’re not risking our lives. Not like this.”

  “I’m risking mine,” I said, meeting his eyes. “You two stay here. Stay safe.”

  “You’re an idiot.” Hutch shook his head slowly, and I could see something like pain flash across his face. “You think that I want to see you die right now? You think I want to watch that happen? Stay here and we form a plan, together. Like we always do.”

  I shoved his hand off of me, harder than necessary. “You were willing to let her die,” I snapped at him. “Just write her off like she’s already gone?”

  “I’m willing to get you and Maggie out of here, so we can live.” His voice dropped lower, more intense. “I told us to go looking for the Bees, and we found them. So now we have to go back to safety and form a plan. That’s all I’m willing to do.”

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  In normal circumstances, I would have probably looked at him like he’d grown three heads. It was strange to be so attached to others so quickly—we’d known each other for less than two months total—but the Fall had a way of speeding everything up. Every human became much more fragile in the face of imminent death. The ones you know might as well be the last ones you’ll ever see again. Hutch’s need to get us out of here safely wasn’t completely altruistic, and I understood that. The other option was that he walked out of here completely alone, and I could see in his eyes that terrified him more than the Bees did.

  And I think that all of us didn’t mind being alone before the Fall. But things changed, and they changed very quickly.

  I gave him a look, trying my best to appear unwavering. “You guys get home safe. I’ll follow up with her when we can make it out.”

  “How are you going to make it in?” Maggie asked sharply.

  “I’ll find a way.”

  “That’s a helluva plan.”

  I wanted to snap at her again, but Hutch had sensed it before any of us: the air superheating, static filling our ears like a swarm of angry wasps. He grabbed the back of our necks and threw us forward, throwing himself over Maggie’s tinier body. Moments later, a blast of plasma took out the chunk of the roof we were crouched behind, completely decimating it. The gravel turned into hot bullets smacking across my arms and legs, and the Bee below stomped twice—heavy, deliberate thuds that shook the concrete—to readjust its aim.

  “Time to go!” Hutch shouted in my face, and then he was picking Maggie up off the ground and running for their lives.

  I peeled myself up off the gravel and began running after them, watching another bolt of plasma splatter across the gravel to the right of us, sending chunks of cement and tiny pebbles our way. I covered my head just as I slid into the stairwell, nearly tripping down the first five steps after Maggie and Hutch.

  We all ran back into the manager’s office, but the door remained open.

  We might need the second exit at any moment. I briefly contemplated the jump off the roof. We could survive that twenty feet, no problem. But running on broken legs…

  Hutch was breathing hard, clenching his hair in his hands as he glared out of the windows into the warehouse floor below.

  I knew why he was angry. He was an ex-SEAL—actually, he was still one, if the military kept existing. This was not a position he wanted to find himself in.

  Sagging down next to the desk, I tilted my head against Maggie’s knee and gasped for air. She was equally as worn out, having been jostled and thrown around by Hutch. Her brown hair was flying out of its braid like wisps. Hutch glanced at us, and I could tell what was going on in his eyes: he was not fucking happy with either of us right now. He tilted his rifle against the office wall and sank down, stretching his legs out with a grunt.

  “So,” he said, “we’re going to die.”

  “We’re not dying.” Maggie yawned. It was just a reflex from her hard gasping, a leftover symptom of her asthma. We lucked out that she didn’t need her inhaler, or we would have had to watch her die a few times over by now. “I think that we need a plan now, but we’re not dying.”

  “Hold up here until they reboot?” Hutch said.

  That made a bit of sense, if it didn’t still involve us constantly under threat of the Bees. They typically lasted a few hours on high-alert before their systems told them to go back to their crawling mode, where they instead patrolled sections of human streets that the Mastodons determined were useful. There was no rhyme or reason we could figure out yet to those patrols: I assumed that we would find more out in the coming weeks, as the invasion continued.

  All of us ended up deciding that might as well be the only choice we had. I laid down on the blue carpet and stared at the water-stained ceiling tiles while Hutch glowered out of the window. Maggie found a crossword puzzlebook and began working on it slowly, swiveling back and forth in the manager’s chair with a faint squeak. We’d intended to stay like this for another few hours until another blast outside shook the entire building, and several chunks of brick seemed to swell with heat on the wall to our west. Hutch let out a timely fuck and we all got down to the ground instinctively.

  Hiding behind things was a good way to avoid getting glassed, but if they shot randomly, then we were doomed.

  Maggie flinched as another blast exploded the wall into pieces, brick dust billowing into the office. Hutch peeked over the lip of the windowsill to look below. He ducked back down quickly and raised his fingers at us: two.

  Well, that made it easy. I nearly sighed in relief that we didn’t see more.

  Bees were deadly, but they were also quite chunky. It took them a bit to get at us, even if they ran fast.

  We all held our breath as we listened to their heavy footsteps crunch down on the polished cement floors below. The sound was rhythmic, methodical—crunch, crunch, pause, crunch. I imagined this place not as empty fifty years ago: a press, maybe. Every one of those machines could have blocked a shot of plasma from us if they had still been here. But we’re the ones who pushed for paper recycling, and reducing the amount of books and paper needed for offices, and holiday and birthday cards. There was no need for places like this town to exist with the new age, and so they removed all of our best defenses, all of the best things we could have hid behind.

  Another crunch made the ceiling shake, and dust fell down from the tiles above our heads in a fine gray rain.

  “They’re getting closer,” Maggie breathed.

  I nodded. There was nothing else I could do in the moment but nod, really. We had no way out except the roof, which would be about a twenty foot drop. Maybe more. We would break our legs if not worse, and then somehow hobble to safety. That would also mean leaving all of our gear behind. Jumping with backpacks and rifles didn’t seem doable in the moment.

  I grit my teeth as a Bee blasted another hole in the wall, wondering what they were possibly doing down there.

  We could have sat there and stayed clear of the bots, maybe even survived if we were quiet enough upstairs. Bees responded to movement and loud noises, but one could sneak around them if they tried. It was that tracking light that ultimately got you in the end.

  We could have, but then the voice came.

  Behind me, crackling like wrinkled static, a woman’s voice asked, “Can you hear me?”

  Maggie and Hutch looked at each other, and then they looked at me. All three of us frozen, barely breathing.

  We had no time to say anything. All Hell broke loose.