Siege by Mark Alpert Page A

unconscious bodies in our arms. I aim my cameras for a second at Brittany, who’s taking quick, shallow breaths, her blood pressure plunging. Her pale lips are twisted into a grimace, as if she somehow realizes how much danger we’re in. Behind us, the roar of destruction grows louder, chasing us down the corridor. Sigma’s giant Snake-bot is tearing the high school apart.
    Suddenly, the hallway’s linoleum rumbles under our footpads. A thick steel column shoots up from the floor in front of us, spraying dirt and tile in all directions. Another oversize Snake-bot, identical to the first, rams into the ceiling and triggers another collapse, filling the corridor with debris. Our escape route is blocked.
    â€œI got this!” Shannon yells. She switches Tim Rodriguez’s unconscious body to her right arm and uses her left to open the door to Room 107, the high school’s chemistry lab. “Come on! This way!”
    Zia and I barrel into the lab behind her, our robots smashing through the narrow doorway. Shannon dashes past the lab tables and heads for the windows on the other side of the room. Because the chemistry lab needs lots of ventilation, its windows stretch across the entire wall, with just a few slender mullions between the glass panes. Shannon points at the glass with her free hand. “Lead the way, Zia! Get us out of here!”
    Holding Jack Parker and the freshman girl close to her torso, Zia bounds toward the windows. Her massive shoulder joint crashes through the mullions and glass, and the momentum of her leap carries her outside. Shannon and I follow her, jumping through the gaping hole her War-bot made. We land on the lawn beside the high school and start running across the grass.
    Without breaking stride, I pivot my head to the left. The fuselage of the V-22 is broken into five burning pieces, and the gigantic rotors lie on the ground. I scan the wreckage for Marshall’s Super-bot and look for DeShawn’s quadcopter in the evening sky, but I don’t see either of them. I send out a radio signal, transmitted in elaborate code so that Sigma can’t decipher it: Marshall? DeShawn? Where are you guys? But no one answers.
    I can tell that Shannon is also transmitting distress signals and getting the same nonresponse. The silence is alarming. Did the Snake-bots damage Marshall and DeShawn? Or maybe capture them? The random noise of fear rises in my circuits again. I push it back down and keep running, angling toward the football field behind the high school. Although we can’t rendezvous with the other Pioneers, we can try to save the unconscious students. And the best strategy for saving them is to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and Sigma’s Snake-bots.
    On the other side of the football field is Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park, which is hilly and heavily wooded. If we can get past the field and slip into the woods, we’d have a better chance of evading Sigma’s machines. But just as we reach the football field’s end zone, a third Snake-bot bursts from the ground at the fifty-yard line. It pushes tons of dirt and turf aside as it emerges from the center of the field, where the big Yorktown Y is painted on the grass. The steel tentacle rises a hundred feet above us and coils overhead, ready to strike.
    At the same time, the other two Snake-bots stop pummeling the high school and slither toward the football field. Each is as big as a subway train, but they move in sinuous waves instead of a straight line, their motors bending and twisting their flexible armor. We’re surrounded on all sides by enormous, powerful machines. There’s nothing we can do except make a last stand.
    â€œAdam! Zia!” Shannon’s voice booms from her loudspeakers, still confident and unafraid. “Put the students on the ground and form a perimeter around them!”
    Bending my Quarter-bot’s torso, I set Brittany on the turf in the end