Chapter 5 ~ Devos
The vehicle slowed and then stopped. They were nowhere near their destination. Anna picked up a strong emotion of fear from the driver. She leaned out into the aisle to see him talking on an emergency radio, but couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“Something’s happening,” she said, uncurling her fingers from Beth’s tight grasp.
The skimmer began to rock from side to side. There was complete silence inside as the passengers tried to process what was going on. As the rocking became more serious, screams broke out.
The driver’s voice came through speakers in the ceiling. “Everybody stay calm. Stay in your seats—”
Windows began breaking, sending glass shards flying inward. The rocking intensified, and suddenly the boarding door burst open and two figures dressed in black entered. Anna assumed they were men, but there was something off about the way they moved, almost as if they had too many joints, and their heads sprouted directly from their shoulders.
The skimmer’s red emergency lights began flashing, giving Anna a pulsing view of the interior.
“Devos!” screamed someone in the skimmer.
The Devos attacked the driver. There was a brief scuffle, and then Anna saw a dark splash on the front glass of the skimmer. She was willing to bet it wasn’t Devo blood. Anna pushed Beth down between the seats.
“Hold on!”
The skimmer tipped on its side and Anna tumbled across the aisle along with most of the Chosen, ending up pressed against windows that now were flat against the ground. Behind her she heard girls trying to get into the fresher to reach the rear exit, but the door wouldn’t open.
A terrible scream reached Anna’s ears. A Devo had picked up one of the Chosen, and the other one had stabbed the young girl through with a metal pipe torn from the seating supports. So strong was Anna’s uncontrolled empathy with the fatally wounded girl that her hands flew to her chest as though the pipe had pierced her. In the intermittent, nightmarish view, Anna fixated first on the blood pouring out through the pipe and then on the girl’s face, locked in a grimace of pain and astonishment. She jerked a few times, then her chin sank to her chest. To Anna’s horror, another pipe, and another, plunged through the girl’s mercifully dead body.
Kammy! They killed Kammy!
Anna froze. Her heart strained against her rib cage, its beat besting the rhythmic flashing of the emergency light. Seeing her friend like that scared her more than anything in her life had done. Then one thought pierced her haze of fear and moved her to action.
We’re next.
She looked up at Beth, who was still braced with her arms and legs wound around the seat supports, hanging like a spider from the ceiling. As long as she kept her mouth closed, Beth would escape immediate attention.
The one bag Anna was allowed to bring with her wasn’t within her reach. Her woomera and several darts were in it. She didn’t expect to hunt anything in the Dome, but it was a powerful memento of her life in Nampa. Her bag was stuffed in an overhead compartment above the seat she’d been in. Anna would have to untangle herself from the thrashing bodies of the frightened Chosen, stand up, open a luggage compartment, have bags fall out on her head, and locate her own, all while the Devos were busy at the front end of the skimmer.
Without calling attention to myself, or I’ll end up like Kammy.
Anna took a few deep breaths. There was no telling whether outside help was coming or if so, when it would arrive.
Go, Brave Warrior.
She wormed free of the other girls and stood up. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the two Devos grab the arms of another girl, Orra, and pull in opposite directions. Anna turned away just before the girl’s piercing scream and wave of pain reached her.
Breathe. Close it out.
She had to shut down or lessen the intense emotions that were bombarding her from all sides, or it was going to be a very short, unsatisfactory rescue. Her mother, who had mild empathic skills, had given her a couple of basic lessons in setting up a shield, but they required quiet and meditation. And truthfully, Anna hadn’t practiced very much. She didn’t have the ability, as professional empaths did, to snap a shield in place instantly and keep it there for a long time.
The carnage and the emotional assault paralyzed her.
Maybe a quick try.
With mayhem around her, Anna focused on her meditation image, the infinity symbol.
“Anna, you sporn, get down!” Beth’s shout came at her. Anna ducked down as a ragged, whirling pipe spun over her head. “What the forn are you doing?”
Making a stupid, stupid mistake.
Anna stopped trying for any sort of empathy shield. She lunged for the luggage compartment lid, opened it, and tugged the bags out. They were all the same design, but hers had a three-foot-long wooden piece shoved into the side of it, easy to feel. She caught her bag on the way down, zipped it open, and seated a dart in the notched end of her woomera.
“Everybody get down!” she yelled.
Swinging overhand with all her might, she twisted her wrist and pulled her thumb and forefinger apart at the right moment to release the dart. It sprang away in the darkness, caught once in flight by the emergency light, appearing to stand still. The next flash of the light showed the dart buried in the forehead of one of the Devos. His enraged partner reacted and started toward her. Her head nearly bursting with the emotional energy contained inside, her fingers shaking, Anna seated and launched another dart.
The second Devo was down.
Girls started climbing toward the broken windows in panic, to escape the bloody scene.
“Stop! Don’t go outside. There could be an army of Devos out there,” Anna said. She had to repeat herself a few times to be heard by everyone, but the rush to get out faded.
“Stay in here. It’s safer. I’ll kill anything that tries to get in.” Anna’s voice was shaky, but convincing enough. The remaining Chosen settled down, some crying, some consoling each other.
Things were chaotic outside. The noise of flyers overhead, their blades whirling, was followed by rapid gunfire and unfamiliar, guttural screaming—more Devos dying, Anna assumed.
She didn’t know much about Devos, the strange mutants that ranged the Wasteland, except that their ancestors had been as human as hers had before the wandering planet nicknamed Doom had ping-ponged its way through the colony’s solar system. Silva was forced into a hotter orbit, closer to the sun. That was the end of paradise on Silva, and the beginning of the Aftermath. Ultraviolet radiation caused mutations that sent humanity’s evolution accelerating down divergent paths. Those who fared the worst ended up as feared Devos, who didn’t have a stable society. They survived by raiding. Still, she’d never heard they were as brutal as the ones who attacked the vans. Their method should have been stealth attacks on isolated travelers.
Should have.
There were indistinct voices outside, and the skimmer rocked feebly a couple of times. Then there were footsteps on the upended side of the vehicle and window glass showered in on the dead driver at the front. Anna seated a dart and moved toward the center of the skimmer. It looked like she was going to have to make good on her promise to kill anything that entered.
Light poured through the broken window. A voice followed. “Any survivors in here?”
Do Devos talk like the rest of us? The two who were in here only grunted.
“Show yourself,” Anna said.
“Hold on,” was the reply. More glass fell down as the arrival cleared the edges of the window to make entry safe.
Anna tensed, ready to launch her dart, as two dusty boots appeared in the light from the broken window, followed by a pair of legs, then a chest with some blood on the shoulder of a uniform—a Defender. Last to pop through was a young male face with an amazing grin.
“You’re the first survivors we’ve found,” he said, pleased at the discovery of living Chosen. “Uh, don’t shoot me.”
&nbs
p; Anna lowered her woomera to her side.
“Lieutenant, live ones here!” he yelled out of the window. The flashlight was handed down to him. He reached across the driver’s body toward some switches on the dashboard. The emergency light stopped flashing, replaced by four steady but dim white lights. He studied the interior of the skimmer. The grin left his face as he saw the bodies of the two girls. He made sure the Devos were dead and removed weapons from their belts.
Those look like ripple guns. They could have killed us all in a few minutes but chose to do it one-by-one. To savor it, I guess.
It wasn’t likely that the Devos had the ability to build ripple guns, weapons that set up destructive sonic wave patterns inside flesh, breaking down tissue and melting a person from within. Ripple guns did their job fast, or so Anna had heard. Death happened as soon as a crucial organ was hit, like the brain or heart, and the rest of the melting took place when the victim couldn’t feel it anymore.
The guns were Dome tech, meaning they’d been obtained by killing Domers. Devos didn’t barter.
The sight of the bloody pipes protruding from Kammy’s body flashed through Anna’s head. She shivered.
They only kept the guns as backups. Too humane for the Devos.
“Anyone else hurt back there?” the man asked.
Anna shook her head. “Bumps and scrapes. Nothing serious, if you don’t count the two dead girls up front and the driver. What took you guys so long?”
She got a better look at him as he walked toward her. He had brown hair and skin paler than anyone she knew, skin that rarely felt the power of the sun. He was younger than she’d first thought, not much older than she was. His eyes looked gray, but they could be any color, washed out by the strong light of the flashlight he carried. His face fell a bit when he registered the dig about taking so long.
“We didn’t get word right away,” he said. “The Devos knocked out the Defender guards who were with the skimmers. I’m sorry about your friends. You did a great job protecting the rest of the people in here. That was you, right?”
“Yes. What about the other transports? How many Chosen—”
“They’re all dead. Your skimmer is the only one that had any survivors. It looks like the others ran out in a panic, and Devos were waiting for them.”
Anna’s spirits sank. She’d been hoping there were few casualties. There were moans from the other girls, some of whom had friends in the other skimmers. She checked them off mentally, the friends she’d never see again, including Mona and Swirth, who’d been at Anna’s birthday party. Life was hard in the Burbs and it wasn’t unheard of to lose a friend to a hunting or farming accident. Grief threatened to settle its dark wings over her, but she pushed it aside for a quieter time. There was too much to deal with now.
If Logan had passed the test, he’d be dead now.
“Listen, I’m really sorry about everything that’s happened. My name is Noah Parson. I’ll help you, all of you, get to the Dome where you’ll be safe.”
In a short while, a new skimmer arrived to continue the interrupted trip to the Dome. Most of the girls closed their eyes and hurried by the dead bodies on their way out, but Anna stopped at each girl. Closing their eyelids with her fingers, she placed her hand on each forehead.
Be at peace, sister. May the Spirit within you be released to join a new body.
The Burbans believed that all life was connected, all made of the same material spread throughout the universe, and that all human and feeling animals were inhabited by a spark of the Universal Spirit. When a person or animal died, the fragment of spirit was released to rejoin the Universal Spirit, and then the body broke down and returned its components to the Universal Body, the matter from which everything was formed.
Although she didn’t know what the Domers believed, she gave the same farewell wish to the skimmer driver. She paused near the Devos, uncertain. Anna couldn’t imagine herself wishing the brutal spirits of the Devos a new life.
Their own will have to take care of that, according to their beliefs, if they have any.
She touched each Devo corpse and whispered, “Be at peace, brother.”
When girls finally reached the Dome, they were some bureaucratic things to take care of that they’d been warned about by Noah. He was at their side the whole time, as promised.
Seen clearly in the Dome lighting, his eyes were pale gray, almost to the point of being colorless. Anna guessed his age at eighteen. The tight cut of his Defender uniform revealed a fit body, with a slim waist and a broad chest that conveyed strength. He carried himself with confidence and the bearing of someone accustomed to respect, even at his age and lowly military rank.
It was the middle of the night before Anna and Beth were escorted to their shared quarters. Wearing the light nightgown she found set out on her bed, and in spite of what she anticipated, Anna slept a sound and dreamless sleep.
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