Free Watching Over Us by Will McIntosh

Watching Over Us
    There had been no fence or wall to mark the perimeter of the human-controlled territory in and around Pittsburgh, only a phalanx of tanks, howitzers, and concrete bunkers filled with heavily armed soldiers who were neither children nor old. Laurel’s seventy-year-old legs struggled to keep up with her platoon as they fled through the wreckage of that breached perimeter; she saw the burned and mangled bodies of some of those soldiers.
    People were screaming down in the valley behind them, down in the city. The Luyten were tearing them apart, electrocuting them with weapons that looked like divining rods, burning them alive with mushroom-shaped heaters. The air stank of charred bodies. Fires raged in a hundred places, the smoke funneling to form one big cloud over the city.
    The few soldiers on the perimeter who’d survived had turned their heavy artillery around, were firing into Pittsburgh.
    â€œLieutenant Carter?” Laurel called to her CO. “What about the people down there?”
    Carter waved her platoon on, between two bunkers, waited for Laurel to catch up. “They have to get out best they can. We can’t worry about them.”
    The only civilians left were either very old or very young—people who weren’t capable of fleeing. The thought of them huddled down there made Laurel want to die.
    Carter lifted her head, shouted, “Straight down to the railroad tracks. Let’s move.”
    Bad as Pittsburgh was, Laurel dreaded leaving it for the forests and fields, all of it Luyten-controlled territory. The closest safe haven, now that Pittsburgh had fallen, was Cleveland.
    â€œHow far is it to Cleveland?” she asked Lieutenant Carter, shouting over the artillery.
    Carter shook her head. “We’re not going to Cleveland. We’re being sent somewhere else. I don’t know where just yet.”
    A black dread washed over Laurel. They weren’t retreating to Cleveland? What else was out there but Luyten territory?
    Of course even their chances of making it to Cleveland were slim to none. The first time they got within eight miles of a Luyten it would sense them, and come after them.
    They reached the railroad tracks, which ran behind a tract of row houses, bending off to the right, beckoning Laurel’s platoon, promising an easy walk to their deaths.
    *  *  *
    â€œIf it’s a rumor, why are they all saying the same thing?” Sergio, who was walking just ahead of Laurel, asked. Laurel had been thinking about a trip to Scotland she’d taken years ago with her husband, Mark, and her kids, Paul and Julie, all of whom were dead now. She hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation.
    â€œBecause that’s how rumors work: One wrong idea spreads,” Todd said. “I mean, giant soldiers ? That’s the secret weapon? How would it help us to have bigger soldiers? This isn’t wrestling.”
    â€œThey kicked the Luyten’s asses down in Chile. That’s what Captain Noble said.” Sergio had a sticker of the Incredible Hulk on the back of his helmet.
    â€œHe did say that,” Jared chimed in.
    At this point Laurel didn’t know what to think, so she stayed out of it. Giant soldiers? It sounded unlikely. But the details—that they’d retaken a power plant in Chile, that they were being created at production facilities deep below Manhattan, Moscow, Shanghai, and, of all places, Easter Island, were curiously specific and consistent. Diamond had picked up a short-wave transmission reporting the same thing Sergio and Jared had heard in the barracks.
    But, giant soldiers?
    Her legs were burning. No matter how hard she willed herself, no matter what trick she tried, Laurel could not widen the length of her strides. Her old hamstrings simply did not have any additional elasticity in them. It felt as if she had too-short steel cables attached from the bottom of her ass to the back of her