“Dad! What’s going on?”
There was a rattle of keys and a door opened. “Mayor gave the order to evacuate.”
“What about Cal? You can’t just leave him here!”
“He’s a prisoner! Now come on!”
Nat’s father had them halfway to the cell block door when the biggest explosion yet sent Nat crashing into his back. They both hit the ground. Nat was up first, digging for something on her father’s belt. The next thing I knew, my cell door was being thrown open. I started to run, but Nat pushed me back. There was a clatter of steel as she fumbled with something between us. Cold metal slapped against my wrist.
“What are you doing?”
Nat’s father appeared at the cell door. “Natalie, we don’t have time for this. We have to go right—”
Nat stepped to the side and her father stared openmouthed at the handcuffs that now secured my wrist to his daughter’s. Nat tore another key off the ring she’d stolen from him and threw it down the drain of the sink behind us.
“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “Looks like it’s both of us or none.”
The three of us ran through the police station. It was packed with a torrent of officers tearing up and down the hall, and the noise from outside was nearly deafening now. Emergency sirens wailed all around us.
“Is it drones?” Nat asked.
“Not this time. Manned bombers and ground troops on the way.”
The crowd parted and the front door of the station appeared before us. I stopped dead.
“Bear,” I said. “Where is he?”
“No time!” Nat’s father said. “We have to go now. There are trucks waiting outside.”
Nat turned, darting down a hallway, dragging me with her by our cuffs. Her father yelled after us, but then he was on our heels as we ran down the cell block.
“Here!” Natalie threw herself against a door and we found ourselves in the midst of a kennel full of furiously barking dogs in cages.
“Bear!”
“At the end,” Nat’s father said. “Last row!”
Nat and I ran for it as her father started opening cages to free the other dogs. Bear was cowering at the back of his cage, too terrified to bark. I got the gate open and he jumped into my arms.
“Okay, buddy, let’s get out of here.”
I pinned Bear to my chest with my cast and we all ran back out into the station and toward the front door. Outside, vehicles were already pulling away. Another officer appeared to lead the police dogs into a van as Nat’s father led us to a parking lot where one police cruiser still remained. I barely had time to push Bear into the backseat before Nat’s father was gunning the engine and pulling out. We left the station and tore through the town of Waylon.
The Path’s bombing run seemed to have subsided, leaving a ruined town in its wake. Everywhere we looked, there were fires. The frames of houses trembled within coronas of flame, and scores of trees burned, throwing off showers of sparks in the kicked-up winds. All around us, people were fleeing however they could. Cars careened through the streets, mixing with families on foot, loaded down with their possessions. Injured and dead lay on the sidewalks, some wept over, some abandoned. Nat’s father ignored them all, weaving through the streets, trying to avoid craters that pitted the roadway.
“Where are we going?” Nat shouted, but her father ignored her. He steered us around a traffic jam, half of the car on the road, half on the shoulder. We shot across a grass divider and onto a service road, where he shut off his headlights and sirens and pushed the speedometer to seventy.
Bear trembled in my lap. A blur of trees passed outside our window and then switched to a high steel fence. I leaned forward and saw the outline of a control tower and a few small private planes and helicopters.
“Get off the road!” I shouted, grabbing at the bars between us.
“What?”
“Get off the road now!”
“Why?”
I pointed out ahead. “Because of that!”
The entrance to the airport appeared in front of us. Parked outside were three Path Humvees and ten or fifteen soldiers. Nat’s father jerked the steering wheel and the car fell off the roadway and down an embankment.
“If there’s an airport, it’s the first thing the Path seizes,” I said as we bounced over the field. “They’ll have the place surrounded in an hour.”
Nat’s father cursed, then conferred with someone on the radio. We ended up on a dirt road, eventually meeting up with a small convoy of evacuees deep in the woods and out of sight of the Path. There were police and civilian vehicles as well as a single yellow school bus. All of them were parked with their lights out just off the roadway. Nat’s dad pulled over and got out of the car, leaving us inside with the engine running.
He joined a crowd of men, including Limon and his buddy, who were gathered around an older man consulting in low tones. All of them were armed, but I didn’t see anything heavier than AR-15s and shotguns. Dozens of terrified civilians surrounded the officers. They were a mix of young and old, men, women, and children. Entire families bunched together.
“This is because of me,” Nat said, staring darkly out of the window. “This is for what happened at the checkpoint.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “They’ve hit the town before.”
“Not like this.” I started to speak again but Nat cut me off. “Tell me what happens next.”
“Once they have control of the town, they’ll gather everyone together and give them the Choice.”
“And my guess is the people who refuse to join up don’t really go to cozy little concentration camps to wait out the war.”
The windows of the yellow school bus were full of the faces of children, most of them younger than us. I thought of a little boy holding a toy out to me in the middle of the California desert, his relieved family smiling behind him.
“No,” I said. “They don’t.”
Ahead of us, the sheriff was arranging the armed men into teams, pairing them off and pointing them toward vehicles.
The door was locked and there was no catch or door handle on the inside, so I threw my shoulder against the window, making a racket until Nat’s father noticed and returned to the cruiser.
“You can’t do this,” I said as he pulled us out of the car. “All you’re going to do is get yourselves killed.”
He grabbed the cuffs attaching me and Nat and worked a key into them. “We don’t have a choice.”
“You do,” I said. “Surrender. Say you make a choice for the Path. All of you. They’ll take you, but no one has to die. It’s the only way.”
He popped the cuffs off of us and then stared down at me. “Son, these people murdered my wife and tonight they put my town to the torch, killing God knows how many people in the process. Every person here will fight them until we don’t have breath left in our bodies. Anybody who’d do different is a coward.”
He waved another cop over.
“Get them on the bus,” he said. “Now. We move out in five.”
“Dad!” Nat shouted. She tried to go after him, but the other deputy held her back and started herding us toward the bus. Bear was on him immediately, jumping up and digging his paws into the man’s leg. When the deputy turned to swat Bear away, Nat twisted out of his grip and sprinted back to her father’s cruiser. I followed, jumping into the passenger seat as she slammed the driver’s-side door shut.
“Nat, what are you—”
She threw the car into reverse and took off, barely giving me time to close my door. She sped out of the
