Free The Resisters by Eric Nylund Page B

too late. The cracked window held.
    His eyelids drooped … and closed.
    Ethan jerked upright. No! He couldn’t fall asleep!
    He raised a trembling hand but felt his strength draining away.
    He hit the glass.
    Every window on his side of the bus shattered. Glass pebbles showered over Ethan. The bus shuddered and skidded to the side of the road. Hot wind, dust, and smoke blasted inside.
    The chemical smell was gone, though.
    Just in time. His head cleared.
    Ethan stared at his hand … and then at the massive damage done to the bus.
    There was no way
he
could’ve done this, was there?
    A second impact sent the bus tumbling sideways.
    It flipped—the other windows crumbled—metal wrenched and sparked.
    Ethan, strapped upside down and helpless in his seat, tasted blood.

 
    BLOOD RAN OUT OF ETHAN’S NOSE AND dripped to the floor—or rather the ceiling that was now where the floor should be in the overturned bus.
    He coughed. The smoke got thicker.
    What had just happened? Nothing made sense.
    Maybe it was because he was hanging upside down, semidrugged and shaken.
    From the back of the bus there was a sputtering and a sudden strong acrid odor. The battery packs were back there. From his chemistry class Ethan knew that if they cracked, they could leak an explosive gas.
    He’d figure out what had happened to the bus later. He had to get out first!
    The harness that had saved him from serious injury when the bus flipped was snug … and still locked.
    He’d have to cut himself out. With what? The shattered glass was the “safe” kind, plastic-coated, that made tiny pebbles when it broke. He couldn’t use it.
    Under the seat ahead, though, a metal brace had twisted free and dangled there.
    Ethan stretched—barely touched it with his fingertips, pulled it closer, grasped it, and pulled it free!
    The end of the brace had a wicked, razor-sharp edge. Ethan sawed through the straps of his harness—and dropped headfirst onto the ceiling of the bus.
    He scrambled out of a broken window and staggered from the bus.
    The back of the bus had been crumpled like an empty aluminum can. Jets of gas spewed out.
    Ethan ran up a nearby hill, climbing to the paved road the bus had been on.
    The bus exploded! A wave of force and heat knocked him over. Flames shot through the passenger section and lifted the bus into the air—then it landed with a terrific crash.
    A few seconds slower and Ethan would’ve been roasted alive.
    He trembled but forced himself to stop, got to his feet, and got his bearings.
    He was outside in the real world. It looked like a cross between the Sahara Desert and the cratered surface of the moon. There was no vegetation. The ground was a series ofstrip mines and toxic waste channels. The air was choked with dust … and drones.
    A dozen of the same part-insect, part-rocket things that had attacked him yesterday circled the blackened, smoking remains of the school bus.
    Three drones peeled off and landed, surrounding Ethan.
    They were bigger than he remembered. Their slim torpedo bodies were about his size. Their wings were super-thin translucent silver metal. Each had a single eye, a segmented bulb in which Ethan saw hundreds of hexagonal reflections of himself.
    Their stingers pointed at him. They retracted with a click, like they were about to shoot.
    The skin at the base of Ethan’s spine crawled.
    He tensed, trying to figure out how to dodge
three
of those darts at once.
    A shadow streaked overhead—there was a hypersonic buzz—three red lights strobed so bright, they left Ethan blinking—and there were three flashes of heat that instantly sunburned his right arm.
    The three drones around him sizzled, and lines of molten metal scarred their lengths. Their tiny insect legs gave out, and they dropped to the ground, inert.
    Ethan’s vision cleared and he saw a giant dragonfly zip between the drones over the bus, shooting them with lasers and ripping the closest to shrapnel with its front