Key Lime Sky by Al Hess

Author:Al Hess [Hess, Al]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781915998132
Publisher: Angry Robot
Published: 2024-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

11

When we reached the rec center, the sandstorm had died out, but my protestations had not. Ezra kept putting a hand on my arm and shaking his head. If trying to reason with Molly was a waste of time, maybe my constant voice behind her head would annoy her enough to let us out of the truck.

“Even without the metal detectors, if you have goggles or welding glasses, we can–”

“Will you stop!” She threw the truck into park, yanked out the keys, and turned around. “You two aren’t going back there. Who the hell knows what will come out of those eggs–”

“All the more reason to go back now and try to find the terraforming source before they hatch.”

Her face suddenly shifted to neutral. She reached into her bag and pulled out a thick zip tie, then turned to Ezra. “Put out your hands.”

“What?” His question was almost a laugh, and that must have been the wrong move because Molly threw open the truck door and yanked me out by my hair.

I tried to pull away, but she kicked me in the back of the knee, and I lost my balance and fell. The nails in her bat scratched across the asphalt. “You hold out your hands, or I’m going to make a homerun into the side of the professor’s head.”

She wasn’t going to do it. Probably. But that uncertainty made me hold my tongue. I refrained from standing up in case she decided I was resisting. From this vantage, I couldn’t see Ezra in the truck, but a moment later his shoes scraped on sand. He stopped beside us, flanked by Molly’s brothers, wrists bound in front of him and his face the color of a cherry tomato.

“You don’t need to zip tie me,” I said. “I’ll walk in with–”

One of the brothers yanked me up and jerked my arms behind me. Hard plastic looped tight around my wrists. They pushed us toward the rec center. It was a small brick building with a false façade and a mural of questionable artistic talent painted on the side, depicting grazing pronghorns. The only thing sinister looking about it was the amount of red plants and sand that had cropped up around the front doors, but I didn’t at all like the idea of going inside.

Before I could warn them that the red plants might have eggs on them that needed to be crushed, I was hauled forward and through the doors. With arms restrained, my usual stims were impossible, and my fingers beat against my backside like caged birds.

Trying to access the internet resulted in nothing, but that didn’t stop me from refreshing my blog over and over in my vision until I ran into a chair in the lobby. I had no way of knowing if my last cached post had published during a momentary clear signal, and maybe it didn’t matter. Authorities probably didn’t know how to address what was going on in town any more than I

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