I crashed forward, losing my balance for an instant, and then I was down in the dirt and lost and Hina’s hand was gone.
I spun around and saw her.
One last time.
She’d stopped running. She was just stood there, staring at me, and I watched as that frothy cloud descended upon her, buzzing and biting and coming down slow. Consuming her. Her head, her beautiful head. The swarm seemed to suck her inside it. It went down past her neck and over her shoulders, spun down her arms and low down her chest, pulling her in like a twister on the plains.
Her beautiful belly. That soft brown skin. The tree. All of it. Gone. Ravaged. Every root and branch and leaf. Every secret inside that now would stay hidden.
And I howled at that swarm and the crops and the sky, and the stars should have quit because there weren’t no reason to be shining.
The locusts were at her hips now, clawing their way lower. And I could have touched them if I’d just reached out my hand. But finally I felt my legs moving, pushing me backward. I was on all fours. And then I was running.
At the wagon every door was closed. I punched at the windows, smashed at the roof. And I felt the locusts buzz closer, tearing through the air toward me.
Alpha threw open the door as I felt the sharp mouths sink into my skin. I fell inside, pulled the door shut. But the locusts were still on me, gnawing my neck and the back of my skull.
Crow pushed me to the floor and leaned over me, swiping at the locusts, crushing them with his fist. They bit at him, and he lashed and cried till the last one was dead. And then he just crouched above me, his fists all bleeding and raw and the windows black with that swarm pressing in at us.
Then, finally, as the noise let up and the swarm drifted higher, I could hear the sound of Sal weeping. And Alpha’s voice, quiet and muffled.
“What were you doing?” she kept saying. “What have you done?”
I stared at her as the moonlight spilled in. Her face was slick with tears and her hands were clasped at her stomach, pressing at the bullet wound like she might squeeze the blood back inside her.
Alpha gazed at me through a face full of pain. She was quivering with it. But her eyes were still sharp. Focused. The veins on her neck twitched and her breath came short and shallow.
“Banyan,” Crow said, but the word seemed to float past me. “Banyan.”
He’d slid behind the steering wheel with his hands all mashed and bleeding. I stared at him, wondering what could possibly matter now.
Then I sensed the night shift color again. Brighten. But not on its own accord. I stared through the windshield and saw three pods in the distance. Bearing down the road toward us, burning us up with their purple glare.
Crow cranked on the engine and spun the wagon back around.
“You’re gonna need to hold them off,” he said, and for the first time, everything about Crow seemed out in the open. And he was scared shitless. Just like me.
I hauled Alpha into the back as Crow slid the wagon through a turn and began speeding back down the service roads. Undoing all the distance we’d covered. Losing ground all over again.
I got Alpha set so she’d not be shaking around too much, and she was staying silent now, but her eyes told me all I needed to know. Her hands were slick with her own blood, and I tried shoving my hands against her wound but the blood kept coming and the blood would not stop.
“Sal,” I screamed, and I could hear Crow shouting at me. “Sal.” I grabbed the kid by his neck. “Quit sniveling, you little shit. You gotta help.”
I pulled off my shirt and had Sal shove it deep in Alpha’s stomach, stemming the wound that kept gaping and frothing like some sort of mouth. Then I yanked the piece of bark off my torso and placed it over the shirt, strapping it in place so tight I was scared it might stop her from breathing.
Sal fingered at the bark.
“Leave it alone,” I told him. “Take one of these.”
I handed him one of the pistols I’d snagged from the pod.
“Come on,” Crow bellowed, and I yanked up the rear hatch with Alpha behind me, and Sal at my elbow, ready to shoot.
“Fire,” I yelled, and we let it rip. Just squeezing the triggers, letting off a round of those fancy bullets, a round that seemed like it might never end.
The GenTech pods didn’t fire back at us. They just kept on coming, our bullets puncturing the purple steel but not slowing them down a damn bit.
“The glass,” Crow called. “Aim for the glass.”
I tried. Kept trying. But it was too hard to point straight, what with the wagon swerving every which way as we bounced through the sand.
Finally, I cracked one of the windshields and sent that pod reeling into the crops. The others opened fire now, keeping their bullets low, aiming for our tires.
“Keep shooting,” I said to Sal, but he held his gun up. Empty. I handed him what was left of mine and reached for Alpha’s rifle in the front of the wagon, stretching my arm out across her crumpled body, groping through the dark.
But my hand never found the rifle.
The duster appeared out of the crops in front of us like a wall of steel teeth. Crow seized up the brakes but we hit. We hit hard. The wagon never stood a chance. Those duster blades ripped right through the engine and gobbled it in pieces, clamping down every inch and dragging it inside the belly of that giant metal beast.
The blades chopped through the steering wheel, and Crow’s thighs exploded as the metal ripped them apart. I grabbed his arms and yanked what was left of him into the rear of the wagon.
But the duster kept coming.
Sal was gone, I remember. Like maybe he’d been hurled out the back on impact. Or maybe he’d scampered free. And Alpha was out cold. I dragged her on top of me with one hand and clawed toward the open hatch with the other. The sound of the duster was something beyond noise. So loud it seemed silent. Or perhaps I’d already gone numb.
Crow pulled his bleeding stump along with his fingernails. The three of us moving too slow. But then we reached the hatch. Pushed through.
My wagon thrashed and spun into tiny chunks behind us and I remember gazing back down the throat of the duster, watching my old life being digested and sorted into scraps. And the duster seemed to keep eating my wagon, long after everything had stopped moving, even after the blades had stopped spinning, after every engine shut off.
And in the same way, I don’t think there was a time I stopped screaming. Crow all bloody and twitching, and Alpha all gone beside me.
I wailed and hollered and I wished I was dead.
Then the duster fired up a torch beam and brought that light down upon us. The color of a bruised purple sun. And the headlights of the pods all fused together, making things as bright as they were bad.
I heard footsteps. Doors opening and closing. I heard voices. Then they were taking Alpha from me. They had blood on their suits. Purple and red. And I couldn’t stop them from taking her because they were taking me too. Needles jabbing at me, breaking my skin.
“Hold still,” someone yelled. As if I was moving. Then I could hear Crow screaming and it was exactly what the Darkness must have sounded like. The twenty years of night.
“Not again,” Crow roared, till his voice split in two. “Not again.”