The jeep bounced and swayed over the lumpy grassland terrain. Reggie puked out the window. Manny felt nauseous too. He honestly wasn’t sure if it was more from the pieces of people scattered inside the vehicle or sheer motion sickness. Fifteen seconds went by. Thirty. A minute. Manny allowed himself to think they might make it out of this alive.

And then he heard the buzz. That sickening, familiar machine hum that every warzone kid knew as well as the sound of their own mother’s voice. A drone. Closing in.

Manny jerked his head out the window and scanned the sky. The jeep hit a pothole and his head slammed up into the top of the window frame. He saw stars and almost lost control of the vehicle entirely. It veered to the right and lifted up onto only two wheels. He righted the jeep, spun it back to the left and gunned it again as he turned the other way. He stuck his head out again and scanned behind them.

There it was. The black beetley fucker, buzzing toward them. It was close enough that he could see the glint of its camera optics and the barrel of the heavy machine-gun slung underneath it. Manny knew it was picking up speed to compensate for the recoil of its weapon. It would be low on ammunition now. It’d probably wait to fire until it was too close to miss.

The treeline was so near he could almost grab it. Another fifteen seconds and they’d be there. But the drone was close. They didn’t have that long.

He looked over to the journalist.

“Get ready to bail.”

“Get ready to wh–?”

Manny saw the muzzle flash, and in the same instant he spun the wheel hard to the right. The drone’s first round chunked through the back of the jeep, cracked the axle and blew apart the left tire. But the jeep was in the air an instant later. It flipped over like a drunken dolphin and the rest of the drone’s shots blasted chunks out of the ground where the jeep would have been. By the end of the burst, the recoil had robbed the drone of its momentum and brought it to a spinning halt in the sky.

The jeep rolled twice and bounced Manny and Reggie around like rocks in a tumbler. It hurt. It hurt shitloads. But Manny was high enough on adrenaline and fear that he could almost ignore the pain. Blood streamed from his forehead. Something ached terribly in between his shoulders. When the jeep came to a stop he was deeply surprised to be alive.