Burnout

1

"They think Boston's gone dark, don't they?"

The words barely carried over the steady patter of chilly October rain on the pavement. Startled, Lydia St. John glanced over at her best friend. Ava Velasquez wasn't looking at her, instead staring out over the street and gnawing on her lower lip. Lydia didn't have to be able to see her face to know that her forehead was pinched, her black eyes bleak. "Worried" was pretty much everyone's default these days.

"Yeah," Lydia said after a long moment. "Yeah, I heard Grandpa talking to Mr. Perry after you went to bed last night. No one's heard a word out of Boston for almost three days...no comms, no runners, nothing."

She slouched further into her seat, staring out into the street again. The girls were perched on top of an old Dodge van (a rusted out relic of the eighties that still ran on gas and didn't even have a GPS, let alone a hook-in to the national highway guidance system), sitting in a pair of cheap lawn chairs that had been welded to the roof. The van was parked across the entrance to the court Lydia lived on, forming a barricade with two other, smaller cars on either side of it. Someone had dragged a huge, rainbow-paneled golf umbrella out and secured it over the lawn chairs with what looked like at least two rolls of duct tape.

Not that the umbrella was doing a very good job, Lydia reflected sourly. A steady stream of icy rainwater had been leaking beneath the collar of her jacket for the last twenty minutes, and she kept having to shove wet clumps of her dark brown hair out of her eyes. She never thought she would miss something as simple as truly waterproof clothes as intensely as she did. She'd kill for her old rainjacket. The one with the stupid purple and pink flowers all over it and glittering threads running through it that reacted with any hint of moisture in the air to form a neat little ionic barrier between her and the rain.

She balanced her grandfather's hunting rifle across her knees. It was modeled after old guns, pre-Invasion, with no scope or laser mods—still used plain bullets, in fact. Lydia's grandfather was ex-military and one of their neighbors had been in the National Guard like Lydia's mom, so they had a few energy weapons, but blaster cartridges were starting to run lower than Grandpa was comfortable with. The old-tech models worked well enough and Lydia was an excellent shot with the rifle.

"Geez," Ava sighed. "That's almost the whole eastern seaboard, isn't it?" She rolled the neck of Lydia's old softball bat back and forth in her hands, picking at a piece of gripping tape that was coming loose.

Lydia shrugged one shoulder, not bothering to answer. They both knew exactly how many cities had gone dark—dropped out of contact or just been flat-out declared No-Man's-Lands by survivors—since July. Everyone knew. It was a list that was burned into everyone's minds; name after name after name. Cities that had stopped transmitting emergency broadcasts. Military pockets that had stopped calling themselves green zones. Places that no one had heard from in too long. The list got longer every week.

Every night, their entire group (nine people, including Lydia, Ava, and Lydia's grandfather) huddled around an old CB radio that someone had unearthed in their basement. The comm network hadn't completely collapsed, yet, not like the power grids and water services, but it was still a crapshoot as to where comm channels would work. In most cases, it was the old tech that was the most reliable now. Things that hadn't seen wide use since Grandpa was a boy were suddenly more valuable than gold.

Every night they turned to the channel most often used by what was left of emergency services and listened to the same bits of news: what places had dropped out of contact, what roads and highways were mostly clear, where the nearest military green zone was now. They always ended with tired warnings to remain calm and wait for the help that was always on the way. The faceless voices on the radio broadcasts had been promising help and rescue since July.