The extent of their injuries meant their “run” was more like a hobble. Reggie had dislocated his unshrapneled arm. Manny had fucked his knee up in the fall and done something awful to his ribs. The two stumble-staggered as fast as they could manage, toward an abandoned gas station by the side of the old highway. They reached their temporary salvation and took cover inside the dusty, cobwebbed building.

“Cuntcuntcuntcuntcunt!” Reggie screamed as he slumped down against the wall. It took Manny a second to process the fact that he could hear again.

“You’re alright!” he shouted. “You’re fine. We’re going to be OK.” Manny had no idea if that was true, but he knew managing fear would be critical to their survival.

The gas station had been abandoned for a decade or more. Most of the glass was gone but the basic structure of the inside counter was still intact. He and Reggie took cover behind it, careful to avoid the piles of shattered glass and shrapnel. There were old bullet holes in the wall all around them. At one time there’d been a plexiglass window on the inside wall behind the counter, with a little bucket in it so the cashier could do business at night without letting customers inside.

Most of the plexiglass had been removed, leaving a gaping wound in the building’s concrete hide. Manny stuck his head out of the hole and looked out at the site of the massacre. Both transports had been hit. Much of the field was aflame. The sick-sweet smell of burning human flesh wafted over them like a dense fog. Manny saw two of the escort trucks still firing into the sky. There was another flash above as one of them hit a drone. It corkscrewed out of the air, burst on the ground, and ignited the dry grass.

“What the fuck do we do?” Reggie shout-asked. There was panic in his voice, and quite a lot of pain, but the journalist didn’t seem to have lost his wits.

“We need to get out of here,” Manny said, “while those drones are still occupied.”

The highway was a couple hundred feet away. The civilian vehicles following them had scattered when the attack began. Some of them had clearly been hit by machine gun fire from one of the drones. Others had crashed, rolled into ditches, and been abandoned by their occupants. Manny spotted one, an ancient white jeep, that looked like it had taken a round through the window. He could see blood inside the vehicle, but the engine and wheels seemed intact. The treeline of a sparse forest was just on the other side of the highway, a half-mile away. If they could reach it.