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The boy ran, his breath heavy, the cool night wind blowing chilling his skin. He looked behind him, nothing. He slowed, breathing in and out, lungs burning. Then he heard crashing behind him, and he picked up his pace again. They were getting closer, and closer...
Five hours earlier...
The air whipped about him as his bike bounced over the dirt road, throwing up dirt. The moonlight softly illuminated his path as well as the fields around him, empty expanses of grass, the lonely dirt road winding through them. Every here and there would be vestiges of humanity, an old fencepost there, a crumbling stack of rocks that may have been a shed there. He knew these landmarks by heart - he had traversed this path many times, ever since his mother had let him make the journey from the village to the town. He felt like a man doing the five-mile trek, starting in the late-afternoon after helping Mr. Alberstead with his farming, and always coming home late at night, around 9 or 10. Recently, his mother had even considered letting him go with the scavengers, the men and women from the village who went to the wreckage to take parts back and sell them. The wreckage. The older kids played there often. It was the crashed husk of a great warship. His mother had told them that it was Oscdean, and that it was still dangerous. It had come down during the battle that lit up the night sky just a few miles away from the village, just one of many of the Great War that seemed to be tearing apart everything around the village but never actually touched the boring little collection of buildings. He hadn't even been able to watch the battle - he had been out, pedaling in the opposite direction to the town on his regular evening trip. He had missed it, and now he was missing the wreckage of that ship.
But he couldn't stay unhappy for long, not with the wind whipping past him. The bike ride always cheered him up, always made him happy - to be free of the village, to see a little of the outside world. The town always interested him, the hustle and bustle of life within Torby. The stadium there was the biggest building he had ever seen, but he knew from the pictures in the papers hung on windowframes next to the C.E. recruitment posters in the shops that farther into the Doggerlands that there was more - massive cities filled with skyscrapers. Their names came naturally to him - Oscdea, Almere, Novenae, Lorikeet. How he wished to see them, if only for a moment.
Suddenly, his imagination was torn away from him when his bike hit a jut in the road. He hadn't been paying attention, he flipped over, and his last thought as he went careening to the ground head-first was that his mother was right.
He tasted dirt. He opened his eyes groggily, only a little bit. He saw nothing but darkness, and heard a strange buzzing noise, a sort of deep roar. His head was face-first in the dirt, and he lifted it, staring right at the slight imprint in the ground. He was cold. Moving his arm to try to pick himself up, he shouted in pain, whimpering. His aching muscles protesting, he moved himself to a sitting position, first seeing his twisted bike ahead of him. It was still night, thank God. All thoughts of his mother not letting him go out again left him as he looked up.
It was there, before him, lights glimmering softly, thousands of him. A gigantic shape in the air, like some prehistoric leviathan. He rubbed his eyes. It was still there. It must have been a mirage, a delusion. Flame roared from three gigantic engines each the size of a building. They lifted some kind of craft, a massive beast, the size of a city, which directly faced him. He felt like David, like an ant, like something amazingly small. It was moving closer, slowly. The biggest thing he had ever seen. He felt himself shaking as the roar became louder, the roar of the engines. The ground vibrated as it passed overhead. Even from here he could feel a slight warmth from the engines. The underside could be seen now, and he noted detachedly again that it almost looked like some massive creature of the water, the sharklike body directly above him. He saw that the underside was dotted with gun turrets and bomb bays. It continued, the sight and noise putting him in such awe that he didn't even notice the helicopter, didn't hear it land just a couple hundred yards away from him. But he hear the rustle of feet, and looking behind him, seeing the shapes of soldiers, their gun barrels glinting in the light from the giant craft still roaring above, he was snapped from the trance. He heard a shout as he ran, disappearing into the brush.
The boy ran, his breath heavy, the cool night wind blowing chilling his skin. He looked behind him, nothing. He slowed, breathing in and out, lungs burning. Then he heard crashing behind him, and he picked up his pace again. They were getting closer, and closer.