Riding with Dex was a punishment in of itself, but I was trying to remain as hopeful as possible while we cruised back into town.

  We were lucky to even have been given the chance to double-back. This could have happened in a couple weeks when we were sent out again.

  Timing mattered.

  Dex decided to lay down in the back halfway through the drive, forcing us to pull over and switch his and Hutch’s place. No one complained about this, because it meant we didn’t have to be subjected to his constant whistling—that grating, tuneless sound that had worn on my nerves every time he started up again. As I pulled back off the highway, close to town, I watched in the rear view as Dex stood up and decided to piss right off the back of the truck onto the cracked asphalt below.

  “Brake check him,” Hutch said to me, his jaw tightening.

  “If only it was that easy,” I sighed. Doing anything to injure him intentionally would mar our chances at getting him to witness what’s happening. They know about the Bees, but he needed to feel the heat of that plasma if he was going to be able to convince his father to do anything about protecting Eden.

  Thankfully, the road had been mostly cleared. Some abandoned cars were still parked along or in the middle of the highway—doors hanging open like broken jaws, ogling at their occupants deserting them—but we haven’t seen a human since we got to Eden. I didn’t have to worry about deer flying through the road either: neither side of this stretch of land had any trees, therefore nowhere for them to hide. I could pay less attention to oncoming traffic, and so I decided to roll down the window and hang my arm outside, tapping idly against the truck’s weathered door. The wind, cool and humid, felt good on my neck and cheek after yesterday’s sunburn—a relief against skin that still felt raw and tight.

  Hutch pulled out a piece of contraband jerky from his pocket and began to chew it slowly, meaning to savor the taste of it. “You remember how you saved my life?” He asked, his voice quieter than usual.

  “It wasn’t like it was a lifetime ago.”

  He snorted, a sharp exhale through his nose. “You know what I fucking mean, Jack.”

  I did. He was trying to talk about it.

  I just didn’t think there was anything we should have to talk about. It wasn’t something that I brought up, and it wasn’t something Hutch was proud of. Anybody would be embarrassed to have missed the bulk of the apocalypse because their seatbelt was choking them. He was almost to Dallas before a semi got distracted by the first ships booming into our atmosphere, swerving right into Hutch’s lane and crunching his truck into pulp. He’d only gained consciousness when I found him hours later.

  By then, I thought he was dead. It was near-impossible to be unconscious for more than a few minutes, deprived of oxygen, without having some sort of brain damage. But when I cut him loose from his seat belt, Hutch just opened his eyes and stared at me. He wheezed through his crushed throat, the sound wet and labored, but his first words confused the hell out of both of us: “You found me?”

  “Who are you?” I asked him back, snapping a bit too aggressively. To be fair, I was under an immense load of stress at the moment. I was at a bar downtown that’d gotten glassed, and barely made it out alive. Chunks of concrete fell from the heavens and sliced my back shoulder—I could still feel the phantom sting of it. People were dying in the streets, being shot with burning-hot plasma that left the air smelling of charred flesh and ozone. There was now barely any humans around, and I was alone.

  Hutch blinked slowly, and squinted at me, his eyes struggling to focus.

  “You don’t know me?” He asked, confusion etched across his bruised face.

  We chalked it up to delirium from his obvious lack of oxygen, but for a wild moment, Hutch thought I’d been next to him during the invasion. He told me later that he remembered looking to his right and I was there, although he couldn’t remember what we were discussing. Hutch couldn’t even tell me if this was his truck or not; for the first few days he had no idea where he was, or what he did for work. His driver’s license came from Maine and his name was Douglas Hutchinson, but when I called him Douglas, he glared at me with surprising intensity and just said, “Hutch.”

  But this was all minutiae in the grander scheme of things. We had bigger things to worry about, like survival.

  Inside the truck, I looked at him sideways, keeping one hand on the wheel. “I told you already, we’re even.”

  “That’s not what I was trying to say, you dick.” His fingers drummed against his thigh—a nervous habit I’d noticed before.

  “Then what?” I shrugged awkwardly, unsure where this was heading.

  Hutch leaned back in his seat and sniffed, his gaze distant. He was mulling something over, but he was historically a man of few words. It would be a pain for him to let any escape preemptively.

  “A while after, you told me that you had a gut instinct to turn onto the on-ramp you found me on, right?”

  I nodded, remembering that moment with strange clarity. “Left or right were my options.”

  “But you picked right.” Hutch gave me a look so heavy that I had to focus on the road, my hands tightening on the steering wheel. He was trying to tell me something, and I had no idea what to say. “I think it’s the same for this time around. You’re acting like you have to go help her. I thought you’d jump out of the truck on the way back to Eden when we left.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “She’s a person, too.”

  “But you had that feeling.” He shoved my arm, not hard, but with purpose. “You were going to pick right, not left.”

  I stayed silent for a while, thinking about what he said, the hum of the engine filling the space between us.

  Yes, even I admitted I ran on hunches. They were just…irresistible in a way. They’d led me to different paths my entire life, always subverting expectations. After high school, I was supposed to go to the University of Texas for political science. But I went to the police academy instead, despite never quite feeling like I wanted to be a cop, or I belonged to the force. I’d worked while I took night classes and became a detective, and I only did so because it was something I felt like I needed to do. No one asked me to do it, but I did anyway.

  The day before the invasion, I had decided to use my PTO to go up to Dallas to watch the World Series. The Texas Rangers had been doing great this year, and every bar in the city was flagged with their banners and posters. I didn’t even remember how I chose the bar I pulled up to. I just did.

  Everything in my life was based on a well-timed hunch.

  So, yes—when I met Hutch, it was a pure accident. The same reasoning led me to Maggie and Eleanor, and now I wouldn’t trade either of them for the world. They were the family I never quite had, and the people I never thought I’d meet. I was a loner before this. I barely talked to my foster parents. I was just…I was here, and I was making the best of it.

  I nodded eventually, realizing I let myself go too silent for too long.

  “It’s a hunch,” I told him, my voice steady. “I just…Hutch, I thought I knew her. She looked so familiar to me.”

  “You said the same thing about Maggie, remember?”

  Yes, but Maggie looked like any other freshly post-grad Texan woman. I would have ran into her on Sixth street at any time of the last five years, and likely remembered her. It was hard not to think that way—Maggie was drop-dead beautiful, even when she was covered in a thick layer of grime and sweat. There was a chance I even just thought I saw her on a magazine cover while waiting in a check-out line.

  When I asked her if we knew each other, Maggie skirted the question. She also thought I was hitting on her, so that was likely why. We never brought it up again.

  “I think that something weird addled our brains,” I finally told Hutch uncertainly.

  He looked at me, then turned his gaze out of the window.

  I didn’t want to admit he was right, because that would be quite the gambit. But I knew what he meant, and I agreed with him: something odd was happening, and it felt like it had to do with me.

  ***

  We entered the warehouse district well before the morning sun could.

  The truck was precious, and loud, so we decided to stow it away just in the outskirts. Bees moved fast, but we could potentially outrun one long enough to get back here. I pulled out a map from Dex’s backpack - Eric, that asshole, only gave us one—and marked the cross streets before shoving it into Dex’s chest. He grimaced at me as I designated him the Navigator.

  “The warehouse we found earlier was around the corner from here, just a ways.” I gestured in the general direction. “It’ll have a sunflower field in an alley next to it. Dex, do you have your rifle ready?”

  Dex patted down his pants like he put it in his pocket before he remembered it was in the back of the truck. Hutch and I both stared at each other as Dex fetched it, making sure it was loaded and ready.

  We were going to die with this guy around. I couldn’t really choose an alternative, though. Dex was Marshall’s own eyewitness testimony.

  “I say we scout the rooftops to make sure we don’t run into any surprises,” Hutch said.

  Dex clutched his rifle to his chest. “I thought you said you know where they were.”

  “I did. They’re in the same place you saw them. But I don’t know if there will be more of them this time,” Hutch explained shortly. “We got away from them by the skin of our necks. They might have called more reinforcements from the Mastodons.”

  “Why would they be here?” Dex blinked at us. “We’re nowhere near a city.”

  Even I wished to know the answer to that. Why were they here?

  It bugged me that it wasn’t as easy as guessing human patterns. Humans were predictable. We were a herd species, and many of us traveled in packs. It was one of the main reasons cities were so popular—it felt like there was less danger the more people were around. With the rise of technology, we began getting more and more isolated from one another, and those communities began to close themselves off. There was more than one call I had answered while on-shift of someone screaming in terror, only for the neighbors to close their ears to it.

  But we were still predictable. Humans had a limited range of decisions to make in any given situation, and someone in the billions of people on Earth had made that choice before. It wasn’t like we reinvented the wheel daily.

  It was different with the Mastodons.

  We had nothing to go off of. They just appeared, they took out our strongest links, and now the rest of us scrambled around like cockroaches at their feet.

  “We can scope them out for a bit to figure out if we’re missing something,” I finally said, realizing I owed them my own opinion. Dex raised his eyebrows at me but just shrugged, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “We should gather intel if we could.”

  “Intel,” Dex muttered, shaking his head with a bitter laugh. He climbed onto the sidewalk and began to walk, albeit in the wrong direction, his footsteps echoing off the empty storefronts. “He thinks we can get intel. What are you going to do, punch the thing to death?”

  Hutch clasped my shoulder and squeezed, his grip firm and grounding. “Say the word, and I’ll shove him off a building.”

  “There’s not much we can do,” I said with a tired sigh, feeling the weight of it settle into my bones. “Marshall won’t believe us, but he might believe his own son.”

  “You’re right about the intel. I just don’t think we’ll find anything.” Hutch’s voice carried a note of resignation.

  I gave him an imploring look, meeting his eyes. “If we don’t begin gathering intelligence on the enemy now, then what are we doing besides making their job easy for them?”

  “It’s a bit harder considering they are alien invaders with advanced technology.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face.

  I clapped his back and started to walk after Dex, my boots crunching on debris scattered across the pavement. Someone had to wrangle him from his own fate. I was worried if he went too far, a Bee would find him and just stomp him into pulp. Not even an alien would waste their precious plasma on an idiot like him.

  “Well,” I called behind me with a grin, my voice carrying through the dead streets, “they might have tech on their side, but we’ve got something more valuable.”

  Hutch began walking behind me, his dark hair falling into his eyes, his expression skeptical. “What’s that?”

  “Your positive attitude.”

  “Fuck you, Jack.”

  I chuckled, shaking my head as I turned back around to go yank Dex around before he got himself killed.