by Sam Sisavath
The man standing out of the hole in the Humvee’s roof was taking aim at the running figure when Gaby fired down at him. Her first shot missed, hitting the desert camo rooftop instead, but it startled the man enough that he abandoned his target and looked up at her. Her second shot hit him just above the right eye, and his lifeless body slipped back through the hole.
The two men running behind the Humvee opened up on her. Gaby dived backward, falling to the gravel floor as bullets tore at the rooftop edge, sprinkling her with chunks of loosed brick. She didn’t know how long the gunfire went; it might have just been a few seconds. Her heart was pounding in her chest, making telling time difficult.
Then the shooting stopped, and she heard what sounded like a car crash in the distance.
She pulled herself back up and moved slowly back toward the edge. It was so suddenly quiet that she couldn’t help but feel as if she was being lured into the open. She cautiously peered down one more time and saw the man she had saved, looking back up at her.
Will.
She waved down at him, and he waved back.
Gaby backtracked and hurried over to another section of the rooftop. She glimpsed the two men in hazmat suits fleeing back toward the front driveway. She lifted her rifle, but they were moving too fast and she was at the wrong angle. She heard a gunshot and one of the men stumbled and fell, but the second one managed to slip behind a support column and take cover.
A moment later, two of the Humvees roared to life and took off. She watched them go, winding around the driveway, picking up speed as they drove through the parking lot. She was glad to see them retreating, glad it was over, until she saw the small faces pressed up against the back windshields.
No. No…
Then they turned into the street and was gone, the loud sounds of their heavy engines fading up the road. She didn’t know how long she stood there and listened, but it seemed like hours. Or maybe that was just her mind reliving the sight of the small faces in the back of the Humvees.
The children. Where are they taking the children?
*
IT TOOK JEN a while to find a safe place to land the helicopter. She hovered over the parking lot, then tried the side streets, but there were always too many cables, cars, or trees in the way. Finally, she found a mostly empty parking lot in a strip mall half a block away and touched down.
Will was moving under them the entire time. Gaby, sitting in the cockpit’s passenger seat, spotted him climbing up, then down, a billboard between where they eventually landed and the hospital parking lot.
Gaby hopped out of the helicopter before the rotors stopped spinning and jogged over to meet Will halfway. He had a black military-type backpack slung over his back.
“Where’s Mike?” she asked.
Will shook his head.
Gaby looked back at Jen, Benny, and Amy as they climbed down the helicopter. The kid stayed behind, looking out the back window, button nose pressed against the glass.
“Where’s Mike?” Jen asked as soon as she reached them.
Will pointed back at the billboard he had climbed earlier. “He was covering me from there. One of them must have gotten in a lucky shot.”
“Are you sure?” Amy asked.
“He’s still up there.”
The three of them hurried past him and toward the billboard.
Gaby stayed where she was. “The other two guys?”
“Snipers on the roof took them out when we were coming back,” Will said. “What about everyone inside?”
She shook her head. “There’s no one left. They killed everyone.”
“Not everyone. They took the children.”
“I saw them in the Humvees. Why did they take the children, Will? For the ghouls?”
“Mike and I captured one of the collaborators. He told us the ghouls had some kind of plan for them. Their orders were to kill the adults and anyone who fought back.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Don’t they need every ounce of blood they can get? There’s not exactly a lot of us still running around.”
“Apparently not anymore.”
He looked back at the billboard, at Jen and Amy as they climbed up to the scaffolding while Benny waited at the bottom.
“Your arm,” she said, noticing the bloody handkerchief around his left arm.
“It’s fine. Just a scratch.”
“I grabbed the medical supplies Amy put together for us. They’re in the helicopter.”
“Good. At least we won’t be going back empty-handed.”
“Are we going back to the island?”
“I don’t know yet.” Will looked down at his watch. “Those Humvees…”
“Tell me we’re going after them,” she said, surprised by the conviction in her voice. “We can’t just let them take the kids, Will.”
“It’s not entirely up to us.”
Jen, Amy, and Benny were already walking back toward them. Amy had an M4 rifle slung over her shoulder, and Benny was carrying a pack similar to Will’s. They look sullen, like relatives at a funeral. Which, she guessed, wasn’t too far from the truth.
“Should we bury him?” Jen asked, when she finally reached them.
“We can,” Will said. “Or we can go after the Humvees. They left with the kids inside, and they have a thirty-minute head start on us.”
“What are we going to do?” Benny asked.
“It’s your call,” Will said. “The three of you. It’s your friends up there in the hospital. If you want to chase them and get the kids back, Gaby and I will come with you. Or you can cut your losses and come back to the island with us.”
The three of them exchanged a look, and Gaby was happy to see the strong resolve in Amy’s and Jen’s faces, though Benny didn’t look completely sold on the idea. He looked even younger than his eighteen years at that moment, bad facial hair and all.
“We can’t just let them get away with it,” Jen said.
“Those were our friends,” Amy said. “Those kids…we knew their parents. They’re our families, too.”
“What about you?” Will asked Benny.
“How would we even find them?” Benny said.
“Look around you,” Jen said. There was a look of determination on her face, maybe even anger. “This city’s dead. If they’re on the road, we’ll find them, because they’ll be the only things moving for miles.”
*
“COMM’S DOWN,” JEN said when she saw Will putting on his headset.
“What happened?” Will asked.
“See for yourself.”
She had discovered it back on the rooftop—someone had put a bullet through the box that controlled the helicopter’s communications system. The damage had been limited, and according to Jen, everything she needed to fly was still intact.
Will put down the headset and glanced back at her. “You didn’t grab the ham radio too, did you?”
“It didn’t occur to me, sorry,” Gaby said. “Should we go back for it?”
“No, it’ll take too much time, and the attackers already have too big a lead on us. We can always come back for it later.”
Gaby nodded, even though the idea of returning to Mercy Hospital made her squeamish. After the gunfight on the rooftop, she had raced back downstairs for her pack, in her room, which thankfully the collaborators hadn’t bothered to raid. That had meant running through the bloodied hallways, and she didn’t feel like doing it all over again.
“Let’s go, Jen,” Will said. “We’re burning daylight.”
Jen lifted them back into the air and angled the helicopter north. Benny, sitting next to Gaby, was staring out the window, looking back at the hospital. She could only imagine all the emotions going through him at the moment. Tom was back there, along with all of his other friends. Dead now, all of them.
Nothing lasts forever out here. I learned that with Matt and Josh.
“Will, your arm,” Amy said, leaning forward in her seat, her movements constrained by the
kid in her lap. “Let me look at it.”
“It’s fine, just a scratch,” Will said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Will picked up his pack from the floor and put it on his lap, then took out a bottle of water. He unwound the bloodied handkerchief from around his arm and poured water over the wound, then wiped it down with a new, clean handkerchief.
Gaby leaned forward. “Will, I have the medical supplies back here.”
“We might need them later.”
He disinfected the wound, then wrapped gauze tape tightly around it, before shoving everything back into the pack. It didn’t look like much of a dressing at all, but Will didn’t seem bothered by its lack of aesthetics.
They didn’t know where the Humvees were going, but using their last known direction, Jen guessed they were heading toward Interstate 10 about two miles north. The highway was still the fastest route in and out of the city, but the Humvees weren’t exactly made to travel in heavy, unmoving traffic. Gaby wondered how they expected to maneuver through the car-strewn roads.
They found out when they saw cars along the thicker parts of the highway stacked up along the sides, where they had been pushed to clear a path for a Humvee-sized vehicle to move through freely. The attackers were heading east on I-10.
“Humvees can do that?” Gaby asked.
“No, but the ones I saw had thick sheets of metal soldered onto the front grills,” Will said, “like you’d see on snow plows. It looked like they’ve been using that method for a while.”
“So they’re literally just pushing cars out of their path.”
“Looks like it.”
“Makes it easy to track them,” Jen said.
“In the city, yes,” Will said, “but once they reach the countryside, they wouldn’t need to push cars around anymore.”
“I guess we better catch them before then.”
Gaby sat in the back with Amy, Benny, and the button-nose kid. The Bell 407 helicopter was designed for two in the cockpit and three in the back. The two gym bags filled with medical supplies, along with her backpack, were on the floor around their feet, further limiting their ability to move around. Benny was in the middle between her and Amy, his rifle between his legs.
She leaned against her window to get a better look at the highway stretched out below them, straining to see what lay ahead. The wall of vehicles pushed to the sides went on endlessly, and she wondered how far they could have gotten in the forty-minute head start they had on the helicopter.
“Any ideas where they might have gone?” Will was asking Jen.
“I-10 joins up with I-49 in about a mile,” Jen said. “If they keep straight after that, it’s sixty miles to Baton Rouge, the closest big city.”
“What if they turn off I-49?”
“Alexandria is the first big city, about ninety miles up the Interstate, and lots of smaller cities in between. There’s also Sandwhite Wildlife State Park.”
“What’s there?”
“About 15,000 acres of state-run woods, give or take.”
“So they’re probably not going there.”
“Who the hell knows. I didn’t even know these people existed until two days ago.”
Gaby looked over at Benny. He was staring straight ahead, trying to concentrate on something outside the cockpit window. Maybe the bugs hitting the glass. He looked so young and unprepared for all of this, but she had to remind herself that he had saved her life on the rooftop.
He’s full of surprises.
She put her hand over his. He flinched at the surprise contact, then softened when she gave him her most comforting smile. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. When she pulled back, he was blushing.
“You’ll love the island,” she said.
“Does this mean you’re taking me there?” he asked, grinning awkwardly back at her.
“One hundred percent.” Gaby looked across Benny at Amy. “Does he have a name?” she asked, nodding at the boy.
“Freddie,” Amy said.
“Hey, Freddie,” Gaby said to the boy.
He looked over at her for a moment, seemed to think about responding, but decided against it and looked back out the window instead.
“I’ve tried all day,” Amy said. “Nothing.”
“What about his parents?”
Amy shook her head. She didn’t have to elaborate, because they both knew what that meant.
“The loop’s up ahead,” Jen announced.
They were coming up to the intersection of I-10 and I-49, which, according to a big sign, met at a large loop called the Marabond Throughway. They saw right away that the trail of vehicles pushed to the sides didn’t continue along I-10, but instead moved toward the curving ramp that joined up with I-49. Because the off-ramp was a tight squeeze, some of the cars had been pushed off the highway completely and were now scattered along the ground below.
“I-49,” Will said. “They’re heading north.”
“Looks like it,” Jen nodded.
“The closest big city is Alexandria?”
“Yeah.”
“How many people?”
“Two hundred thousand, give or take.”
“A lot of people means a lot of ghouls,” Will said. Then, “How are you for fuel?”
Jen checked her gauges. “If we catch them before Alexandria, I should be fine.” Then Jen saw something else outside the cockpit window: “Do you see that? Is that one of the Humvees we’ve been chasing?”
Will leaned forward to get a better view.
“How many did you see take off?” Jen asked.
“Two.”
“Could that be one of them?”
“It’s possible.”
Gaby leaned against her window, trying to spot the Humvee among the cars. Instead, she caught a glint of something metallic—and a man leaning out the open side hatch of a parked van on the highway below them. He was wearing some kind of camouflage uniform and had something that looked like a long, green tube resting on his right shoulder. He was pointing it up at the sky—right at them.
“Will!” Gaby shouted. “Down there!”
Will glanced back at her, saw where she was pointing, and looked down and immediately saw the man. “Rocket launcher!” he shouted. “Jen, evasive maneuvers!”
Jen jerked reflexively on the control stick and the helicopter banked left just as Gaby saw a rocket slash across the sky, trailing white smoke behind it. She looked over and saw Benny staring back at her, eyes wide with terror. On the other side of Benny, Amy was clutching the boy.
The helicopter kept turning, and though Gaby had no idea what a helicopter could and couldn’t do, she had a feeling this wasn’t something it was supposed to do.
“Hold on!” Will shouted from the cockpit. “Everyone hold on to something!”
Gaby grabbed Benny and he reciprocated, clutching on to her so tightly she almost couldn’t breathe. Then her world shook as something violently slammed into the helicopter and there was a loud, strange scream—not human, but more like metal cutting metal.
In the part of her mind where logical thought was still possible, she guessed that the rocket hadn’t landed a direct hit, because she was still alive and not incinerated. But it was close enough that the helicopter was spinning out of control and was clearly falling out of the sky. She had the strangest feeling of being weightless.
The helicopter was now emitting a loud, screeching noise around her. Or maybe that was Amy screaming. Benny’s grip on her was so tight, almost cutting off her oxygen, that she wasn’t entirely certain if everything she was hearing was coming from outside or inside her head.
She looked over her shoulder and back at the window just in time to see the rotor blades—still spinning at impossible speeds—plummeting out of the sky alongside them. It had come completely detached from the helicopter and was engulfed in flames…
Book Two
‡
GIMME SHELTER
CHAPT
ER 15
LARA
SHE SPENT MOST of the afternoon trying to ignore the fact that she couldn’t reach Will at Mercy Hospital. Or reach anyone there at all. The only time she made contact was through Jen’s helicopter, but the man with the deep voice who answered hadn’t picked up the second time.
Her last contact with Mercy Hospital had been two hours ago.
Lara paced the Tower’s third floor, looking at the ham radio every few minutes. She willed it to squawk, for Will’s voice to come through. If not Will’s, then Gaby’s or Jen’s. She would have settled for just about anyone at the moment.
But there was nothing.
What the hell is going on over there?
Either they had turned off their radios, or they were purposefully ignoring her call. Neither answer made any sense. Had she allowed Will to walk into an ambush? Will was certain Jen could be trusted, and Lara had learned to trust his instincts. There was nothing “squirrelly” about Jen. Will would have noticed, just as Danny noticed it from West and Brody in the first few seconds after meeting them. The two of them just knew when something wasn’t right.
There had to be another explanation.
What the hell is going on over there?
“Still nothing from Mercy Hospital?” Danny asked, coming through the door behind her.
She shook her head and continued pacing.
“Nothing,” Maddie, standing at the window, said.
“What about our designated emergency frequency?” Danny asked. “If Mercy Hospital’s MIA, Will or Gaby would be using it to try to contact us.”
“I tried that, too,” Lara said, grinding her teeth. “Nothing.”
Maddie and Danny exchanged a brief look that they were probably hoping she didn’t catch.
“What’s going on?” she asked Danny.
“You’ve been up here for two hours,” he said. “Go back to the hotel. Go eat something.”
“Soon.”
“When?”
“Soon, Danny.”