CHAPTER 66: THE KILL ROAD [1]

Tick... tick...

Time moved.

The tension was palpable, sweat dripping down foreheads, and then...

The horn wailed, and the wall exhaled fire.

"Move!" Ethan said, and they were up and running, boots hammering the cracked asphalt as the Kill Road unfurled before them like a scar.

The run began; the 20 minute countdown started.

The first fifty meters were the kind of sprint that felt like falling. Floodlights carved white corridors through the smoke, while turrets drummed a brutal rhythm that rattled teeth and turned the air to grit.

The wall had scythed the front ranks moments earlier, cutting through razorbacks and splitting them open like crushed tin, ash-crows sizzling on hot pavement, but the Kill Road never stayed clean.

It crawled with what slipped the net, twitching things with too many joints, slick bodies like spilled oil, and beaks that clicked like metronomes set too fast.

Reid ran point with Kara a step off his shoulder. They led the group forward, both at alert and ready to face the first threat that would approach.

Ethan hovered between front and back, eyes flicking to count...

Holt moved low and long, Jonas already breathing like a furnace, while Travis was tight on his flank with a hand ready to blaze. Mira floated more than running with wind in her hair, steps sure where the ground wanted to roll an ankle.

"Left!" Holt suddenly snapped, and the whole cohort swerved around a tangle of wrecked barricades where something in the early weeks had died on wheels.

The asphalt there squirmed as a carrion crawler unfolded from a crack like a gray, wet ribbon and snapped at ankles.

Jonas reacted immediately as without breaking stride, his heel came down and made the thing flat. Two more writhed free, but Kara’s spear flicked twice in rapid succession and those went still too.

The turrets shifted pitch.

It was still the early hours of the morning, and visibility was low.

Floodlights skimmed the road and locked to the far lanes. Ethan tasted metal as he saw the light draw arcs like stretched wires, illuminating their path.

"Seventeen minutes!" Reid called back without looking. His voice carried like a tight rope. "We have to move faster, keep the lane!" He roared.

They kept it.

But then, a shadow fluttered as the sky peeled into ash-crows, black paper monsters with ember eyes. They dove as a curtain at the group.

Mira lifted one hand without breaking pace and drew a slicing gust sideways.

BAM!

The flock broke, half blown wide, and half shoved into the next lane where a turret stitched them into dust.

Tututututu...!

The sound of the turrets’ roar cut through the morning as feathers, if that’s what you could call them, went up like flash paper.

Blood sprayed like a fountain.

"Fifteen!" Holt roared. "Let’s stay on the clock, mind your right!"

Ethan’s eyes pulled to the right lane, where the floodlights didn’t fully reach.

And there, he saw shapes that matched their pace in the periphery.

At first, he thought they were beasts, but they were too upright and too disciplined to be beasts. Just a flicker, and he saw them for what they were... a line of bodies moving under glow-sheened shields.

Other Awakened.

"We’re not alone," Holt said, and this time he didn’t sound surprised.

Kara stole a glance. "They waited for a window," she said. "Same as us."

They crested a ripple in the road and saw them fully; six survivors running parallel, tight as a fist.

Just like they expected, they were not the only survivors. These guys seemed to have waited for the first group bold enough to take the window and once they saw them take it and did not die immediately, they followed.

Of the 6 survivors, the foremost bore a shield that wasn’t metal, an ovoid pane of condensed shimmer extending from his forearm.

He leaned into it when a stray round sparked close, the pane flexing like thick glass and throwing the heat wide.

To his left, a stocky woman’s boots cracked the asphalt with each step, [Earth Reinforcement], her ability echoing in every stride.

Another trailed a thin Rift energy veil that made bullets lose their nerve. The rest ran tucked, protecting two limping figures at their center.

Reid measured them with one look, then returned to his lane. "Shieldbearers," he said, voice neutral. "They’re just like us, disciplined. Let’s keep our line."

Travis huffed between footfalls. "Do we... do we say hi or... exchange casserole recipes or...?"

"Run!" Jonas barked. "That’s the recipe!"

They ran.

The Kill Road narrowed where wrecks had fused into lumps and the wall’s suppression arcs bent around a ruin. Ethan raised his hand and pointed at a new line. "Take the seam, three meters left!"

Holt veered first, finding a path through two burned-out sedans whose frames had slumped and stuck like lovers who’d died in each other’s arms.

Jonas shouldered a fender aside and made the gap wider, and Kara slid through like water. In the process of sliding through, Travis banged his shin and swore, but he kept moving.

A pack of Clip Hounds jittered across the seam, their paws a clatter of nail on iron. One lunged at Ethan’s thigh, and he responded as the Exo-Spike Gauntlet flashed into being with a thought and met it under the jaw.

BAM!

Bone crumped in one devastating blow.

Another leaped for Travis. The medic flinched and braced, then got spared the bite when Mira’s wind made empty air where teeth expected a throat.

"Thirteen!" Reid barked, the urgency raw in his voice.

The Shieldbearers matched their pace two lanes over.

Their manifest shield soaked a spray of shrapnel; the bearer grunted and held. But then, behind them, farther out near the dark edge of the floodlights, a new group appeared, skating the lane like skittish fish.

This group was clearly even bolder, they waited until the window was just 13 minutes before making their appearance.

They flowed where gaps opened, and held back when gunfire knotted.

They were nine of them, lean and ragged, faces gaunt with hunger and old fear. One vaulted the hood of a dead truck with insulting grace, another threw something that spat blue sparks and made a creeping maw convulse.

"Scavengers," Holt said, recognizing them for what they were immediately. "They’re not friends."