Pulse

Faith.”
    Dylan’s blood turned to ice. If Clara knew, Faith didn’t have a chance.
    “Where is she?”
    “Old Park Hill, at least that’s what the message said.”
    Dylan was moving fast, but even at his fastest, it would take a few minutes to reach the school. “Don’t go anywhere; hold on.”
    Dylan switched frequencies to Clooger. “Old Park Hill, bring everyone.”
    Clooger didn’t hesitate, not even for a second. “I’ll gather the crew. We’ll get there as fast as we can.”
    “Hawk,” Dylan yelled, switching frequencies again. “What’s the inventory?”
    All the Drifters who’d been packing to leave were suddenly moving for the door, which left Hawk sitting all alone in a corner. He messaged Meredith in the basement, telling her to stay as still as a statue, and began reeling off worthwhile items near Old Park Hill.
    “Lots of desks and chairs. You can use those to distract her, but they won’t do much damage.”
    “What do we have that’s got some weight?” Dylan asked. He was watching the ground as he flew, searching for heavy objects he could bring with him. There was a limit to what he could carry while he was using so much of his mental energy to fly and talk to Hawk, but he thought he could grab at least one thing.
    “Four large trees, but it’ll take some work to uproot them,” Hawk said. “Wait . . .” He paused, not sure he should mention an idea he had.
    “Hawk, if there’s something we can use, spill it,” Dylan said. “This is no time to play it safe.”
    Hawk received an incoming message from Meredith as he continued scanning the area around the school for items that could be used as weapons:
Protect her at all cost.
    That was all Hawk needed to hear.
    “I’ve located six State vans, all within three miles of the school. Four are idle for the night; the other two are on autopilot.”
    Dylan was getting close, maybe thirty seconds from Old Park Hill, and Hawk’s idea sounded promising but risky.
    “All hell is going to break loose if the States find out,” Dylan said. They would discover the truth about first and second pulses soon enough, but the longer that could be put off the better.
    “I bet I can disable the connection,” said Hawk. “They’ll look like software rogues that crashed out. It’ll raise some eyebrows, but I’m not seeing anything else as good as these vans. They’re the perfect weight and size. You can really throw those mothers.”
    Dylan made up his mind as he landed among the trees at the edge of Old Park Hill. “Tell Clooger to carry them over on his way in. Have him leave them on the football field. One on the fifty-yard line, space the rest ten yards apart, right down the middle of the field. Got it?”
    “Yeah, I got it.”
    Hawk didn’t bother to message Clooger about the State vans. If he could disable their monitoring, he’d be able to control them from his Tablet. He could drive them onto the football field with less risk than Clooger and his gang of Drifters could carry them.
    As Dylan approached the front doors of Old Park Hill, there was a surprising silence in the air. The whole world had gone quiet. And then, like the crack of a starting gun in the race of his life, he heard the sound of a tree falling.
     
    At least Faith pulled the first punch, as it were. She had leaped to the roof of the school, which was long and flat, walking with purpose and rage. When she reached the edge of the open courtyard, she’d looked down and seen Clara Quinn sitting on a bench, facing the other way as if she didn’t have a care in the world. There were three large trees in the courtyard, their canopies higher than the roof, along with some scattered benches and concrete pathways running like an X through the space. The walls of the school rose up around the courtyard, and Faith thought it created the appearance of a giant boxing ring.
    Faith knew this would be her only chance to inflict some early damage and hopefully even the odds. She had an idea of how to accomplish this when she took a good look at the largest tree. Its base was four feet wide, plenty of weight to hold down a teenage girl long enough to scream in her face.
    Faith thought about the tree and all the unseen roots beneath the ground. She put every ounce of her being into that tree, told it to move much faster than it would if it were simply falling. It would need to move faster than Clara could react to it. There was something like the trigger of a gun in