by Hunt, James
Unable to bake with worry any longer on top of the roof, Luis retreated to the warehouse, going out the same way he had come in.
Back at the warehouse, Luis found the radio that James had left him. “James? Do you copy? James!” Only static blared back, and Luis tossed the radio back in the Humvee out of frustration.
After everything Luis had just heard, he knew that he had a choice to make. If he decided to go after James at the entry point north of the city, then he could risk being blown off the face of the earth like the rest of the military.
Luis glanced at the Humvee, remembering how adamant James had been about staying put. But the Humvee wouldn’t do James and the others any good if they died in a hail of gunfire when they walked into an ambush.
13
James struggled to keep a pace that was acceptable for the number of people and the condition of his group.
But they didn’t stop. They couldn’t stop.
The few hours that had passed since their departure from the burning building had been without any excitement.
Farther west, the streets became more desolate, and the gunshots and explosions became less frequent. The eerie silence was a stark contrast to the roars of fear and confusion that had plagued James’s journey since his departure from the ranch, but they couldn’t escape the long reach of death.
Hundreds of bodies lined the streets. They looked like dummies made out of clay or straw instead of the flesh and blood that had begun to rot under the hot summer sun.
Buzzards and flies were already calling, swooping down to collect their pound of rotten flesh. They circled the sky above the city streets, more and more of them collecting by the hour. And the longer they circled overhead, the more he wished for the return of gunfire. Because there was something ominous about those birds flying overhead. It was like they were waiting for James and his group to join the dead that they avoided. But he wasn’t going to become a meal today, and neither was his family.
When James caught sight of a few people along the roads, they were no longer running like the frenzied hordes that James had escaped from in the city’s epicenter.
Most folks were traveling in small groups like theirs, but the rare moments where they found themselves in close contact with others, both parties approached hesitantly. No questions were asked, but each of their eyes studied one another with the piercing gaze of a frightened animal.
Both were waiting for the others to make a move, keeping an eye on one another until both parties had put a considerably safe distance between themselves, and then moved forward like nothing had happened.
The longer that James moved west, the more he noticed a disturbing trend. More and more people of larger groups were heading in the opposite direction. It was like they were being turned back, but James didn’t understand how that was possible until he was forced to return to the main city roads to finish his route out of the city and found the exit blocked.
“Holy hell,” Stevie said, walking up next to James, who had stopped, the others lining up next to him.
To call it a roadblock was an understatement. An entire building had collapsed, and tar had been dumped over the mounds and set afire, letting it burn slowly and preventing anyone from trying to cross over.
“How are we supposed to climb over that thing?” Zi asked, still gripping the pistol with both hands, being mindful of their surroundings. She had grown comfortable in her position as watchdog, and James was glad to see that she’d kept her guard up even when they stopped. It made him feel better about choosing her to watch their backs.
“We don’t,” James answered, and he turned north, hoping that they could find another crossroads somewhere up ahead.
But every street was exactly the same, blocked by an impassible structure. And the farther James traveled north, the more he realized why he had seen so many people turn around.
All of those explosions, all of the crowds running in circles, people desperate to escape the city, but they couldn’t. The terrorists had collapsed the city into itself.
Wanting to avoid pushing his people to the point of collapse, James found a nearby alleyway and let them rest while he tried to come up with a way out of this mess.
The number of people attached to James’s group forced him to change his approach on exactly how he was going to navigate through the city. Moving by himself and moving with a group was completely different. It wouldn’t take much to cause them harm, which meant that James was forced to stick to the tried-and-true method of evasion.
Avoiding gunfire, crowds, and staying off the beaten path would force James to take routes that he would have normally skipped because it was slower. But slower was better than dead.
Conversation was minimal, everyone sipping from the canteen as they passed it around. A quick check on Mary’s fading vitals made James more nervous than he’d hoped. Her breathing was sporadic, and raspy, and her abdomen had swollen. She was barely holding on, and as James took her hand, he whispered his encouragement.
“You’re strong, Mary,” James said, keeping a firm grip on her hand. “You’ve always been a fighter. I just need you to keep fighting for a little while longer. I know you can do it. I love you.”
James kissed her forehead, the skin salty with sweat, and Mary stirred at his touch. He paused, hoping that she might wake up, but she remained asleep, fighting for her life.
“How much farther do we have to go?” Stevie stepped from around James’s back and then glanced back down the road they’d just traveled. “I mean we’ve gone what? Ten miles or something?”
James remained in his kneeling position on the ground and glanced up at Stevie, whose shirt had soaked with sweat, clinging to his very lean frame. “Did you get any water?”
Stevie nodded. “Yeah, I got some from your pack.” He stepped closer, undeterred by James’s efforts to try and avoid his question. “So how much farther do we have to go?”
James knew that the truth might crush the man’s spirits, and while he had no taste for lying, he decided to take use a particular well-worn tactic of diversion. “We’ve made good progress. We just need to keep up the pace.”
James paused, studying the man, searching for any signs that he might quit on them during the rest of the trip.
But Stevie stood his ground, refusing to relinquish an inch. “Let’s not kid ourselves about who’s helping who here. We both have something to gain and something to lose. I’ll get your wife to the vehicle, so long as there is still a spot for me and my wife inside.”
Stevie returned to his wife, the pair whispering to one another, and Jake walked to his father.
“How’s Mom?” Jake asked.
“She’s hanging in there,” James answered. “Did you get some water?”
Jake nodded, and then twisted his hands together the way he did whenever he was nervous.
“What’s wrong?” James asked.
Jake shrugged and then crossed his arms, keeping his head bowed. “I ran.”
James frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“After Mom was shot,” Jake answered. “She told me to run and I did.”
James glanced back to his wife, and then to his son, making the connection. “Jake, look at me.” He touched his son’s shoulder. “Look at me, son.”
Jake lifted his head, his eyes watering.
“You did exactly what your mother asked you to do,” James said. “It’s okay that you were scared. Everyone gets scared. It’s what you do after you’re scared that matters. And you came back, right?”
Jake nodded.
“That’s right,” James said. “And because you came back with those people, you were able to carry your mother to safety. You don’t have anything to be ashamed about, okay?”
Tears rolled from Jake’s eyes, and he nodded, then hugged his father as he sobbed into James’s shoulder.
“It’s all right,” James said. “Everything is going—”
It was the rumble that pulled James’
s attention to the end of the alley. He let go of his son and picked up his rifle, aiming it at the road. When he neared the alley’s entrance, James slowly craned his head around the corner to the south, his jaw dropping with surprise.
“Oh my god,” James said.
A tsunami of bodies sprinted down the streets, propelled by a momentum that rolled them over cars and crashed into the side of buildings.
James spun around, running toward the others. “Get up, everyone, now.”
Eyes turned to James in alarm, all of them rising to attention as James glanced back down to the end of the alley, expecting the bodies to roll past them at any moment. When James turned back around and found Stevie and Maya just standing there, he pointed to his wife on the stretcher.
“Pick her up, let’s go!” The booming urgency of James’s tone caught both of them off guard, and they quickly, and nervously, picked Mary off the concrete and followed James deeper into the alleyway. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to fight against the crowds heading their way.
James managed to get all of them around the back corner of the building just as the flood of bodies passed the front of the alleyway. But just as a liquid fills whatever portions of its container it can fit, people broke away from the main pack, running into the alleyway and filling it up faster than James expected.
Unsure of where the alley ended, James followed it to a side street that ran north along the street parallel to the stampede. And as they passed intersections, James watched as more and more people spilled over to their side of the road, making it harder for him to keep his people together.
“Dad! Dad!” Jake screamed.
James pushed back against the crowd, most of them parting for him because of the rifle in his hands. “Jake!” He grabbed hold of his son’s hand just as another wave of bodies rushed toward them, whisking them away in the crowd like a strong current.
Knowing that Jake could be easily trampled from the frantic pace, James flung the shoulder strap of the rifle over his shoulder and then scooped his boy in his arms, keeping his elbows out and moved with the crowd, searching for the rest of his group, including his unconscious wife.
“Stevie! Maya! Zi!” James shouted, but the moment the words left his lips, they were drowned out by the heavy pulse of the crowd.
James kept his head above water, searching for the rest of his party, trying to make sense of the mad dash and why people were running. Was it from the gunfire? He couldn’t hear anything behind him.
But the frightened herd only followed the person directly in front of them, and everyone was heading north, blocked in by the makeshift wall that ran along the west side of the city. And the longer that James ran along with the crowd, holding Jake in his arms, still unable to locate his wife and the others from the sea of bodies rolling down the street, the more he realized what was happening.
The people weren’t running, they were being herded. They were in a cattle shoot.
And when James saw the open patch ahead of them, looking as though they were going to escape into the promise land, to freedom beyond the imploding city, he saw the bodies already on the ground, people tripping over them without even looking at them.
James pushed his way to the side of the street, forcing the others out of his way and seeking the safety of the group’s edge. Then he watched in horror as the bullets rained down over the crowd.
14
Gunfire silenced the screams as James ducked into a nearby building, Jake clinging tightly to him as he pushed deeper into the building. A few others followed, but were gunned down before they made it through the door.
Jake whimpered into James’s shoulder, and James ducked into the first room he could find. He set his son down and then slammed the door shut, the gunfire shaking the entire building.
The noise was impossibly loud. It was like being stuck under a tin roof in the middle of a hailstorm.
James turned back toward the door, rifle at the ready, prepared to make his last stand against whatever evil pushed their way through. But as the gunfire petered out, no one came to finish the job.
James lowered the rifle. He leaned his ear against the door but he heard nothing. He placed one hand on the door knob and looked back to Jake on the floor, holding up one finger to his lips, miming for him to be quiet, and he nodded in response.
The door offered no whine when James cracked it open, and light spilled through the building’s front windows, illuminating the stack of bodies of those that had tried to follow James inside, but were a step too late.
James remained in the room, keeping the door cracked open and waited for any sign of movement among the dead in the streets. After a few minutes of nothing but still quiet, James stepped from the room, again gesturing for Jake to remain quiet and stay put.
Every step toward the front of the building was filled with hesitation. He had no idea where Stevie and Maya had disappeared to, but he hoped that if they did make it out, they had the decency to take his wife with them. Because God help them if they didn’t and he saw them alive again before he left the city.
A few feet from the front windows which had been blown out, James raised the rifle’s scope to his eye.
He moved the crosshairs slowly and swiftly over the bodies of the dead, everybody that he saw covered in the same blue clothing that Mary had worn, causing his stomach to flip inside out, only to have the moment pass when he realized it wasn’t her.
After scanning the bodies and, thankfully, finding no signs of either his wife, Stevie, or Maya, James focused his attention to the buildings across the street. It was possible that they sought cover during the chaos just as he did, and he remembered seeing them being sucked in the opposite direction before he lost them in the crowd.
James scanned the storefronts slowly, making sure to take his time. “C’mon.” He had gone so far, come so close, he couldn’t lose his family so near the end. They were almost out. They were almost—
James froze, shifting the scope of his rifle back over a section of window where he saw a person’s head sticking over the top of the window’s edge. It was Stevie.
James lowered the scope and then moved closer to the window, picking up a piece of broken glass in the process as he sidled up next to the wall. He stuck the piece of glass out the window, keeping himself hidden, trying to catch Stevie’s attention, who James could tell still had his head poking up through the window even without the use of the scope.
After a few tries, Stevie finally raised his hand, an acknowledgement of seeing James from his position. The pair were too far away to mouth anything and read lips, and James didn’t want to risk shouting and pulling attention to either of them, so instead he retreated back into the building to find Jake.
“I’m going to get your mom,” James said, and then removed a knife from his side and placed it in Jake’s hand. “If anyone comes in this room besides me, then I want you to stick them with this, and then run as fast as you can. Get to the warehouse. Luis will be there waiting.”
“Dad, I—”
“No,” James said, shaking his head and not allowing his son to show any weakness. “This is what needs to happen, Jake. Understand?”
Jake’s mouth quivered, and it took a few moments before he finally nodded and wiped the tears from his eyes.
“Good boy,” James said. “I’ll be back.”
James closed the door behind him and then approached the front of the building, raising his scope to get a better look across the street, this time finding Maya and Zi with Stevie. He held up his hands to make sure that they knew to stay put.
He then checked the surrounding buildings to see if he could locate the gunmen that had opened fire on the crowd. He was betting that the enemy had some kind of heavy-caliber weapon or machine gun nests positioned on the roof. It would provide the most casualty without the need for good aim.
From James’s current position, it was a thirty-yard dash over the field of corpses to his wife across the street. It was a l
ong way to run out in the open.
James adjusted his grip on the rifle as he approached the building’s exit, the door propped open by the dead woman who had tried to follow James inside. He paused, drawing a few deep breaths and mapping out the most efficient path between this building and the one across the street. He shut his eyes, whispered one final prayer, and then opened his eyes and broke from the cover of the building.
Three steps into the street and James was chased down with gunfire, forcing him to hunch forward and use the vehicles as cover. Bullets ricocheted off the cars, shattered what glass remained in the windows, and added more lead to the corpses that lined the streets.
The bodies that lined the pavement made it difficult to run, James constantly having to leap over arms and legs, the asphalt slick with blood that collected and congealed in large patches over the blacktop.
With the gunfire becoming thicker the farther James ran, he leapt the last few feet, crashing through the building’s open door, rolling a few rotations before slamming into a cluster of chairs.
Even after James was under the cover of the building, the gunfire continued for a few more seconds, but when it finally ended, he stood and glanced around the inside of the building, finding that it was the remains of a coffee shop.
A hand clamped down on James’s shoulder, and he jerked around to find Zi staring down at him, sweat beading on her face, her eyes wide, and her pupils small and narrowed in the center of her eyes, making the white of her eyeball more prominent.
“She’s back here,” Zi said.
Maya and Stevie had set Mary down on a large steel table. Everyone looked unharmed, but James did a thorough check of his wife to make sure that no stray bullets had caught her unconscious body.
