Free Crashed by Robin Wasserman

here!" Riley's voice in my ear. Riley's shirt absurdly pulled over his face as if he had anything to fear from the poisoned air. Riley's hands on my shoulders. Riley, there, but seeming very far away. Riley alive and in motion, seeming wrong in the still, empty room. Empty until you looked down.
    "Lia!" Riley grabbing me. Dragging me out of the plaza.
    Running, stumbling over something lumpy and large that didn't make a sound as our feet sank into its chest.
    Running without looking down, just step over them like stones, just go, Riley said, don't stop don't look just go.
    Running and standing still, leaving a piece of myself in the empty atrium, still watching the red light pool in the whites of their eyes.
    Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

TOGETHER ALONE
    "We're all better off now."
    The red light turned to tears, trickled down pale, still faces. Their eyes were bleeding.
    Alert! Biohazard! Alert! screamed the vidscreens, although there was no one left to warn.
    "Get it together!" Riley's hands were rough on my arm and back, pushing me forward. "We have to get out ."
    What's the hurry? I thought, a mad giggle rising in me. No bio equals no hazard. Safe and sound.
    But I shook him off and I ran with him, down the dead, empty hall, the corp-town in lockdown, its residents hiding or evacuated. Or neither. Steel shutters had dropped to shield the glass walls, trapping us inside, in the dark. The biohazard protocol had locked even the glowing emergency exits, sealing the corp-town tight--no nasty microorganisms would escape to the outside world. And no mechs.
    Riley went straight for the control panel to the right of the nearest exit and ripped off the cover. He began messing with the wires, stripping two of them with his teeth and winding them together, then touching them to a third, and before I could ask what the hell he was doing, the steel slid up toward the ceiling, and he pushed through the door. His hand gripped mine, tugged hard, and I followed.
    We cut across the matted astroturf surrounding the residential cubes, ignoring the solar-powered cart that had carried us here--even if it wasn't on lockdown with the rest of the compound, it was too slow and too easily tracked by the secops. Alarms were blaring across the campus, and steel shutters had dropped across all the residence cubes, turning them into bunkers, a fitting accessory to the corp-cum-war zone. The air split with distant sirens. Thunder shook the sky. Except it wasn't thunder; it was a squadron of helicopters dropping toward the glass cube as the emergency vehicles, the fire trucks and ambulances, appeared on the horizon. Next would come the secops looking for someone to blame. I suspected we'd do.
    "We didn't have to run," I said, my brain finally starting to work again, though I was still running, because he seemed so sure and I was so not. We passed the wastewater ponds and trampled through deserted soy fields. The workers had presumably all been hustled away to the underground safe houses dotting the perimeter, and only the reaping and spraying machines remained to witness us tearing through the knee-high fronds of sallow green. "We could have stayed--maybe we could have helped."
    Riley sped up. "We're helping ourselves."
    * * *
    We ran for miles, quickly crossing the boundaries of the corp-town into open country. Security at the borders was light--in most spots nonexistent--and it would probably take at least an hour before the secops had a chance to cover the grounds. In the meantime, the more distance we could put between us and them, the better. Mech bodies didn't tire, so we just kept going. Through industrial wastelands and past smokestacks puffing purified clouds into foggy sky, beyond the boundaries of the corp-town, away from the sirens, through flat fields and more fields, staying off the road, feet tramping through the high grass, another mile and another stretching between us and the corp-town. I'd been a runner, before, and I knew my stride.