Page 43 of Following Their Heart

The fuck is going on? Why the hell is everything going to shit?

I sag into the first position seat, and I rack my brain, because there’s literally nothing else I can do. I tune out my frustration, pull at my hair, and I think back.

All our set-up and testing went smooth today. Scrap got a complicated radar system up and running over the past few days. Sure, he never got a chance to test it, but the function was solid, showing clear skies for several hundred miles. Yet, when the birds came, followed by the choppers, we had no warning besides the god-awful shrieking.

Brawn, Jud, and I got that second missile truck in position, and Scrap had it networked perfectly to the summit so he could launch the missiles from up there. While we couldn’t exactly waste missiles on a hot test, the aiming and firing mechanisms showed everything functioning within parameters. Yet, there’s been no sign that Scrap has fired a single SAM. He’s had to have had opportunities. We have one goddamn chopper circling camp, and up until I went blind in this useless tank, the other was making structured sweeps over the mountain, looking for Cora, no doubt. Scrap could have taken either down with those missiles. Why hadn’t he?

We had these tanks locked and loaded. The guns were one thing we were happy to test. Aiming at the berm they’re now parked on, we shot the hell out of a pair of rusted VW bugs. The 120 mm rounds made holes the size of aerosol cans on entry. The exits looked like grenades had blown the back sides of those little cars to bits. The aim, using the scope inside the tank, was spot on. Of course, it was. Scrap finetuned the sighting. Like everything he touches, it worked likebuttah.

My brain comes to a screeching halt.

Scrap.

My Scrappy boy.

Everything he got working is currently failing. That isnothow things happen for our Gifted mechanic and tech expert. Usually, everything he touches works perfectly.

That kiddo can take any hunk of parts, get in there with tools, and make it work. He can even improve the function a lot of the time. It’s a damn useful Gift, especially in a world where there aren’t always manuals laying around next to broken shit.

The radios, the tanks, the SAM trucks, even that grenade. It’s all mechanical or electrical stuff, the kind of stuff Scrap can get working in his sleep. And right now, it’s all refusing to function.

What if someone on Raptor’s team has a Gift that fucks up mechanical and electrical shit? Like some kind of EMP jammer?

That has to be what’s going on. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

We planned for every mode of attack. We armed ourselves to the teeth to defend our turf, our woman. But we never considered the enemy might have Gifts to rival our own.

This isn’t a battle of weapons. It’s a battle of the Working. All our firepower is useless unless we can figure out how to fight on a whole other level. We need the Working’s help. Or we’re going to get soundly whooped.

I try the radio again. I need to tell Scrap that his Gift might be the target of this attack. But it’s no use. The radio is dead. I can’t even get it to power on when I replace the batteries with fresh ones from the toolkit under my seat.

Damnit!

I try the latch again. If I can’t radio the others, I need to get out of this can and let them know what’s going on. Still no dice. I’m still just as stuck.

Outside the tank I hear thewhomp-whomp-whompof a chopper coming in to land. Sounds like about where Jud had been standing with that grenade launcher, but he’s smart. He’ll have taken cover when he realized his grenade malfunctioned.

Wherever he is, he’ll know as well as I do that the enemy is on our doorstep. I hope our leader’s got an ace up his sleeve, because I’m fresh out of cards.

Cora

“Is it working, yet?”I ask Grim for the hundredth time.

“Ne.” He saysnoin Ukrainian, and it sounds likeknee, hard on theN. He’s sitting at the bay of communication equipment in the bomb shelter, and I’m wearing a hole in the floor behind him with my pacing.

“What about the Walkie-Talkie?” I pick up the hand-held radio sitting near his elbow.

“Useless down here.” He’s flipping through one of the many manuals, trying to troubleshoot. “Bombs can’t get through. Signals can’t get through.”

He’s explained all this to me already—that the only way we can check in with the others from down here is by using the external equipment, accessed from this desk. But desperation makes me need to hear it again. And again. Because none of this fancy equipment is working, and I can’t wrap my head around it.

We’ve been down here all day, and up until half an hour ago, we’ve been connected to the guys up above. Thanks to the TV monitors, we watched as they tested out the tanks and parked them on that ridge by the parking lot. We watched Shep herd the cows and goats into the barn and shut them in. We watched Doc use a pulley system to raise a bunch of weapons and ammunition into the treehouse. Using the radio, we’ve been listening in to the guys as they communicated with their Walkie-Talkies. Sometimes, they checked in with us to see how we were doing. Doc, especially, kept calling down to flirt, which helped me not to stress so much about not being able to contribute.

But all of a sudden, the communication equipment failed. Now, the monitors are showing nothing but blue screens with the message, “Signal Error.” The radio is giving us nothing but static on every band of channels. Even the emergency phone connected to Jud’s office is dead.

Night has fallen, and I don’t know what’s going on up there. The last thing I heard was Scrap telling everyone to take cover because a flock of birds was coming. He said it was a huge flock, and he sounded seriously concerned, and then we got nothing but static. We tried to find the birds on the monitors, but those were dead, too.

Grim has been trying to get everything working again, but his troubleshooting skills, like mine, are limited to powering things off and on again.

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