Burnout

3

"Let me see your hands, right now," said Grandpa, stone cold and glowering. "Who are you?"

The strangers were younger than Lydia thought—the taller one was maybe nineteen or twenty, and his brother couldn't be more than a year or two older than her and Ava. The older one was good looking in a square jawed All-American kind of way, tall and leanly muscular, with buzzed black hair and smooth, copper-brown skin.

"My name's Caleb," he said calmly. His words had the odd, sing-song accent of the southern areas of the tri-state—something that wasn't quite a Kentucky drawl, or a West Virginia twang. With the accent, and the Buckeyes logo splashed across the stained front of his gray sweatshirt, he had to be an Ohio native. "Caleb Reed. This is my brother, Zack. Look, sir, we don't want any trouble."

Zack Reed was about the same age as Lydia and Ava. He was several inches shorter than his brother—maybe an inch or two taller than Lydia's own 5'6"—and not as broad shouldered. His features were sharper than Caleb's, with a crooked mouth and a tilt to his eyebrows that gave him an inquisitive expression, but there was no mistaking the two were related. He wore a Captain America hoodie that was a couple sizes too large for him, also dirt-and-blood spattered. His hair was a riot of short, tight black twists and weirdly, he was wearing a pair of decent-quality sunglasses.

"Where the hell'd you come from?" Grandpa demanded. Emily and Iris tried to draw the girls away from the confrontation, but Lydia refused to go, fastening her gaze on Grandpa.

"Okay, we were just...man, can we please put the guns away? We were just looking for a place to hole up for the night, okay? Our car's running low on charge and we stopped a couple blocks over...I was trying to pop a battery off of one of the cars in the street. I made too much noise, or somethin', and before we knew it, there were Burnouts everywhere!" Caleb's eyes never left the barrel of Grandpa's weapon. He shifted to one side as he talked, trying to shield his brother with his own body. "I swear we don't want any trouble. We probably would've died if that girl hadn't yelled—I was gonna run right past your place."

Grandpa's gaze flicked to Lydia and Ava at that, and they shrank against each other. Lydia shrugged one shoulder, wincing when she saw the muscle in her grandfather's jaw twitch. There were rules. Things they were supposed to do if they ever saw other survivors, plans brought about by too many reports of looters. Survivors who had gone almost feral. Who would steal from camps of people and leave them with nothing. There were reports of people who had been killed for their food and water.

"They were gonna get run down," Ava said bravely. "I couldn't...Mike, I couldn't just let it happen."

"We're talking about this later," Grandpa warned, before looking back at the boys. "Either of you been exposed?"

Lydia held her breath. No one had been able to find out much about how the Burnouts became what they were before the things had managed to overrun anyone who was trying. There was a technological component to it—that much was obvious from the physical changes. Some kind of nanotechnology, some undiscovered leftover from the Invasion era...at least Lydia hoped so. She didn't like to think about the possibility that someone could have known about tech that could create a Burnout and not destroyed it. One of the things military scientists had been able to learn was that it took some degree of exposure to a Burnout's blood to become a Burnout yourself.

Someone who had been attacked by a Burnout...who had been touched by an open wound, or clawed...there was a good chance they were just a ticking time bomb. No one was sure how much exposure was necessary to make someone a Burnout, but no one could afford to take chances anymore. An hour or less, the emergency broadcasts claimed. An hour for someone who had been exposed to start slurring their words, start losing control of their voluntary muscle groups. An hour for a spider's web of thick, silvery veins to spread across the skin. An hour for a person to cease to be. "Exposed" was just another word for "dead" now.