Page 69 of Seer Prophet

Did I Miss Something?

They made it to the Chinook in just under two hours.

They stood outside to regroup before take-off, gazing around the empty, cracked asphalt of what had been a school playground.

The human woman even seemed to recognize it, Loki thought.

He watched her look around, a faint sadness in her dark eyes. He wondered if she’d gone to school here, if she had memories specific to this place, ones that were personal. The question pulled at him. He had to fight to keep his light off hers to find out.

He wanted to comfort her, in any case.

He could see the shock wearing off her slowly, not just of her rescue, but maybe of the shift in her reality, from slavery and certain death to something a lot less certain and still only barely tinged with hope.

To Loki himself, the place looked desolate. It reminded him of war-torn areas of his youth, places razed by human bombs, broken and devoid of life, littered with dead animals and people.

It also looked abandoned.

The field’s grasses had turned to a near-swamp in the months after the containment fields failed, high and green in places, brown and smelling of mulch and mold in others, especially near the chained link fence that separated the field from the road. To his left, in the distance, he saw a brown brick building, windowless, that stretched the length of yet another street.

From the woman’s fleeting memories, he guessed the brownstone building had been the school, and the large cement building next to it, the gymnasium.

Directly in front of him, a sad-looking remnant of school pride stood in the form of rusted metal bleachers. Empty now, the bleachers overlooked the waving grasses of the field, limp in the slanting, sideways rain of yet another tropical storm.

At least one dead body lived under those bleachers.

Loki could smell it, even from where they stood.

He glanced at the woman, and saw her shove small, white-looking hands in the front pockets of her black jeans. She wore four rings, he noted?silver, chunky things that felt less like they had emotional meaning than that she liked to wear them for other reasons. He wondered if they served as weapons, especially in that horrible place where they found her.

She caught him staring, and he averted his gaze. He fought not to react to the way her light clung to his, seemingly looking for reassurance.

More images flickered through her mind, memories of this place.

Loki felt her grief. He noted her shock worsening, this time from being underground for so long. Shock of memory, the realization that her world had crumbled even further while she’d been locked away.

Fear of the unknown. Worry for her daughter.

Grief for lost friends.

Grief for a whole way of life, gone forever.

Tearing his light from hers, from her memories, he fought to refocus on his task.

Blinking into the rain, he faced his small team, and the Chinook parked just behind them.

According to their pilot, Preela, and Rex, the muscular seer Loki left with Preela to help her guard the Chinook, the two of them spent most of the last seven hours on the roofs of nearby buildings, dodging militia groups and armed human gangs. They spent a lot of that time on the same brick school that stood behind them, although apparently at least one human gang lived inside those windowless walls.

Rex spent most of his time in the Barrier, looking for possible threats while Preela piloted. Rex also got tasked with persuading better-armed humans not to aim missile launchers and other anti-aircraft devices at them while they were in the air.

They even managed to get the Chinook refueled at the half-submerged JFK airport.

That feat alone impressed Loki, as well as others on the team.

Given the value of the fuel tanks there, and the dangers from rising waters, they must have been resourceful, indeed.

Preela reported, and the far less-talkative Rex confirmed, they’d had to fight their way through one of the local militias to gain access to the tanks. That same human militia determined some means of diluting the higher-octane plane fuel to a version they could stretch out for use in ground vehicles. That told Loki they must have at least one person of decent intelligence with them, despite how animalistic Loki observed most of the humans behaving here.

He found himself thankful, again, they would be leaving soon.

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