The sniper rifle materialized in a split second. I have not used such a high-grade weapon before, so I passed it to Jaxen, whom I believed was quite experienced in using such precision weapons. He accepted the expensive gift and cocked it with steady hands, then turned to the direction the so-called mutated shambler was coming from.Unlike regular shamblers, the giant mutated shambler wasn’t exactly slow. Its size aided its movement, so even though it wasn’t trudging at us, it was covering so much distance just by shifting its massive legs.“Guess we should get Bear Cat out of the way,” Jaxen said, peering through the sniper. “That bitch-ass zombie looks like it’s coming for us right now. It looks like it’s ready to give chase.”Ignoring Jaxen’s warning, I walked over to Bear Cat just to catch a clear glimpse of the giant. The floor was already vibrating as it covered more and more distance. Then, as though it had seen me, it crouched to the floor, and like a goddamn ball, it started

No!I swear to the good Lord, I don’t want to fight goons. I didn’t ask to fight them. They attacked us first, and now, even Jaxen was ready to turn off the engine and come out with his gun.That minimart with apocalypse-grade reinforcement seemed to have something we need. It might have the fuel. And it surely has the engineer who reinforced it. Exactly what we were out for. I glanced at Jaxen’s face. He was cool. Still holding the steering wheel. But he should have moved if he swears he doesn’t want to teach those goons a lesson.“What do you think?” I asked him.“What do you want to hear?” he retorted, giving me a side-eye.The stones landed over and over again, hitting Bear Cat. Who the heck made them feel they could fight Bear Cat? What the heck gave them the guts to throw stones at us? The one with the gun aimed it at us. I waited for him to shoot. And yes. He shot. The fucker shot at Bear Cat.The hum of the vehicle now felt like it was calling us to go deal with those goons, e

After acquiring all the scrap metal and engines in Ruby’s minimart, we all boarded Bear Cat and Jaxen took off. Ruby slipped two earpieces into her ears and relaxed her head on the headrest, her oversized glasses still hanging on the bridge of her nose.Peter Pan, on the other hand, kept nursing his wound by running his middle finger around the bandage on his thigh. It irritated me, so I looked away from him and focused on the windscreen.The drive was quiet. We weren’t done scouting for supplies. We needed more. My space warehouse had initially dropped to seventy-five percent, but with the scrap metal taken from the minimart, it increased to eighty-two percent.We needed one thing we hadn’t gotten yet. Gas for Bear Cat. The gas station we picked Ruby up from was empty. No gas reserve. Also, we needed to take more people home so that work would begin as soon as possible in Hawthorne.“Is that the way to your place?” Peter asked, his voice hoarse. “Are you part of Sky’s gang?”I turned

The heat hit before the sound did.Bear Cat's back end lifted off the asphalt like something had punched it from underneath, and then the boom caught up, a wall of pressure that cracked the windshield into a spiderweb and threw Ruby's head into the seat in front of her. I grabbed the door handle just to have something to hold onto. My whole body slammed sideways into Jaxen's shoulder."Nest's popped," Jaxen said, voice flat like he was reading the weather off a clipboard. He wrestled the wheel and got us back on four wheels, tires screaming against the cracked road.[Warning][Nearby Tier 5 seeker nest ruptured][Estimated hostiles: 40+][Recommend immediate evacuation]"No shit," I muttered, watching the Scanner drop pin after pin after pin across my mental map, faster than I could actually process them. Forty of them. Maybe more, the system had stopped bothering to count individually and just started throwing up a mass instead, a red bloom spreading out from the rupture point like i

The scrape of claws on metal is a sound you don't forget once you've heard it. It's the sound of something deciding you're dinner and being right about the timeline."It's on!" Ruby shrieked, twisting in her seat to stare at the back window, where a gray shape had its claws hooked into the tailgate and was hauling itself up, jaw working, drool or ichor or whatever passed for spit in that thing stringing down in long ropes."I know," Jaxen said, and I realized he'd known before Ruby said a word. Of course he had. Hyper-Awareness didn't sleep on the job even when the rest of him wanted to.He didn't slow down. If anything he sped up, weaving Bear Cat through the wreckage littering the service road, trying to shake it loose the old-fashioned way. It didn't work. The thing had claws built for exactly this, hooked and vicious, and every jolt just seemed to make it climb faster, dragging itself along the roof now, upside down, moving like something out of a nightmare that hadn't gotten the