Watching Over Us

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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.

“Lieutenant Carter?” Laurel called to her CO. “What about the people down there?”

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