Chapter 2
Hannah Maven
“What is our distance?” I said looking over at Scott.
“We are fifty miles to the east,” he said looking at his gadget.
“This is farther than we have ever gone. I think we should dock soon,” I said.
“There are some houses on the shore,” Jared said pointing to the shore. We were all in a boat; there were eight of us going on a supply mission. This was how we kept our colony going. Most houses in the area were abandoned and were abandoned with haste. So food and resources were left in the homes. We raided these abandoned homes and took what supplies we could find, like canned food and bottled water. We did these supply runs about once a month, but we had never gone this far before. But it was necessary because we had hit all the houses near the human colony that we lived at.
“Looks good to me; let's start paddling toward the shore,” Scott said.
I looked at the shore looking for any sign of activity. By activity, I meant the Clenok cyborgs. They had taken over the Earth in a quick sweep. None of us were expecting it. My sister Helen and I were twin sisters. We were vacationing on Long Island in a cute little bed and breakfast at the very tip of the island when the first wave of attacks happened. The cyborgs had amassed armies without us even realizing it. The first city they hit was our home city of Atlanta Georgia. Because of this, we knew that we couldn't go home, so we stayed on Long Island as we mourned the loss of our family and our home in Georgia. The city had been shut down while the Earth armies tried to fight the cyborgs. So we decided to just stay where we were at the bed and breakfast. During that time, we thought that the cyborg army would fall, and everything would go back to normal. But it never happened. We were all wrong, and I underestimated The Clenok cyborgs. The battles went on forever and spread from Georgia. The machines were hitting every major city, and people were in a panic. Society as we knew it had collapsed. Before we knew it, we had been staying on Long Island for several weeks, and eventually, it turned into years. The bed-and-breakfast owners had abandoned the place, and soon we were on our own. That was when we set out to find better shelter, and fast, because we knew the machines were coming our way.
We stumbled across a human gathering at an old nineteen-twenties Art Deco estate called Willow Springs. They were setting up a fence and some protection. They were setting up resources like a garden and gathering water and food from other houses to keep it going. For my sister and I, it was better than being out on our own, so we joined the Willow Springs gathering of humans.
But before we knew it, a couple of years had passed, and we were still living in Willow Springs, and we were still fighting the cyborgs. But most of the human armies had been decimated. As far as we knew, there were only human colonies like us spread out in what used to be known as the United States. We were all on our own, trying to survive.
Now, I was on one of those supply missions to bring supplies back to the people of Willow Springs, including my twin sister, whom I had talked into staying at the estate while I went out on a run.
“We are approaching,” Jared said.
“Everyone be on guard,” I said. Finally, the boat reached a pier. We tied up the boat and walked down the pier on to the lawn of the first house that we saw. It was the only one on the shore. The rest of them were set back in the trees a little, and I could only see two.
“Let's check this house out, and if it's empty, we got to keep going into those trees,” Scott said.
We spent some time looking through the house. The refrigerator was empty. There was nothing to be found. So we went through the trees to the other two houses set back far from the shore. Those two houses also did not have anything.
“We are not having any luck here. We got to keep going,” Jared said.
“We are heading toward a main road. If we keep going through the forest, there should be a main road with more houses,” I said pointing to the trees.
“All right, let's do it,” Scott said.
We hiked into the wooded area for about fifteen minutes. The forest was getting dense. I was starting to get nervous. I pulled the handgun that I kept in a holster around my thigh and cocked it.
“What is it?” Scott whispered to me.
“Nothing. I just have a bad feeling,” I said.
“You and your sister with those feelings. Just because you are twins does not mean you have some sort of superpower,” he said rolling his eyes and then continuing to walk ahead of me.
But five minutes later, I was proven right.
“There! There!” we heard someone shout from a far distance. It wasn't any of our people. We stopped and looked at each other. Suddenly we heard the sounds of blaster guns; they weren't human guns. They were cyborgs.
“Clenok! Get back to the boat!” I shouted. But all of a sudden, we found ourselves in a battle. On one side there were Clenok coming through the brush. On the other side, we could hear humans. I felt a blast from a gun go by me, and I dove to the ground. I looked up to see cyborgs coming through the trees. I couldn't believe it. We were suddenly being assaulted by the things we feared the most.
"Clenok! Grenades!” I heard a man shout. I turned to the other direction to see a group of people I had never seen before. They were dressed like they had been in the army. Then I saw what they were doing. The man pulled the pin from a grenade and was about to chuck it in my direction. I quickly got to my feet and ran. Everyone was running in all different directions, and I couldn't see anyone that was with me on the supply run.
Boom! The grenade went off. I caught the tail end of it as it launched me into the air. I fell to the ground. I blacked out. I thought that maybe I had died.
But when I woke up, I wished that that were true because I had suddenly found myself in a fate worse than death. I opened my eyes. I could see the leaves of tall trees over me. They were passing over me as though I was on a boat floating down the river. But then I felt the searing pain around my ankles. It took me a while to shake off the sleep.
I looked toward my feet and began to panic. But I didn't dare scream. My ankles were bound together by a rope being pulled on by a cyborg. I looked around me, and I was surrounded by them. They were marching forward together in unison. My heart was racing. What the hell has happened? Why are they taking me? Where are they taking me? I cannot believe this was happening. Fuck.
I looked over to my right. That was when I noticed a woman being jerked forward. She was walking. Her wrists were tied together and a cyborg was in front of her pulling her along. She looked at me with wide eyes filled with fright. I had never seen her before. She was not from the Willow Springs colony. I wondered if she were part of the human group I saw in the woods. But she gave me a look as though she was happy that I was awake, and not dead. She looked relieved to not be alone with the cyborgs. I found no relief in it.
I looked at the cyborg in front of me. They were terrifying. They had the same shape as a human, if a human was a weredragon. They were a shiny silver color. They were machines. The legs were long metal poles that looked like human bones, like human legs without the skin and muscle. It had been revealed a long ago that the machines copied the human form. They walked just like us. Even the head looked like a human skull, but with glowing eyes and no emotion. They continued to drag me across the forest floor, and I felt the sting of the brush on my back.