“What happened?” Misha asked, sitting against the privacy fence, exhausted.
“Someone crashed into that man. They drove right into him.”
“Your friends?” the Russian asked.
She knew the truck, and assumed it was Calvin inside, but she wasn’t ready to say for certain. How would he have found them? The Crow tribe members were supposed to be well ahead of the train. Misha had wanted it that way, he said, so they could deal with Nerio his way.
Misha gave up his guns to her and Asher. She wrapped his bloody arm as best she could, tearing part of Misha’s shirt into a dozen bandages. While Asher watched the smoke clear and stayed alert for more tossed grenades, she wiped blood from the right side of Misha’s injured neck and torso. She judged the man was suffering from shock. He sat next to the fence with a blank stare.
Tires screeched, signaling a vehicle leaving.
Misha snapped awake. “That’s Nerio. She’s abandoning her position.” He struggled to stand, then made his way to the broken fence.
“Are you sure?” she asked, not willing to expose herself to possible gunshots.
“Trust me,” he said, limping across the back yard, heading for the crash scene.
She and Asher followed, noticing the group of kids still inside the house. They were getting the show of their lives, for sure. She waved to them, which elicited immediate and excited replies.
“Are you cops?” one of them asked through the window she’d broken out with her rock toss.
“No. We’re park rangers.”
“Wow!” a few of them replied.
The smallest girl, perhaps six or seven, came right up to the windowsill. “I want to be a park ranger when I grow up. You’re awesome!”
An older redheaded girl added, “I want to be the lady with the black outfit and pretty red hair. She was cool!”
Grace didn’t want to explain the difference in motives to the children. All they knew was that guns were employed by both sides. Who was in the right wasn’t their concern. However, she didn’t want them to see the injured man on the other side of the yard, so she stopped. “Are your parents home?”
The kids shook their heads no.
“Can any of you call 9-1-1? We need an ambulance.” She was thinking of Misha, but Alejandro would also need help, as would the driver of the truck, more likely than not.
The kids retreated deeper into the house, laughing and yelling excitedly at the game they were playing with Grace.
She walked the rest of the way to the tree. Alejandro was in worse shape than she could have imagined. The front of the truck had caught him square against the side of the tree. Everything below his belt was smashed.
“She took your stupid boy. I don’t think she’s going to be too kind to him,” the injured Hispanic man spoke in accented English.
“Boy? Who are you talking about?” After she’d said it, she knew. It was Calvin’s truck, but the older man probably wasn’t the one behind the wheel.
Alejandro had no more to add. He passed out after laughing at her obvious disappointment.
“Logan,” she said with dismay.
Kansas City, KS
Ezra walked alone down the last few hundred yards of the highway before the roadblock. There were three of the TKM-blue SUVs parked end to end, blocking all three lanes of the highway heading into the city. He had to cross from the outbound lanes over to the side with the barricade. When the men noticed him, he raised his hands as high as possible, but didn’t stop walking.
“I’m unarmed!” he shouted.
“Where are you going?” a man asked from behind his truck.
“Denver,” he lied. It wasn’t his destination, but it was somewhere the men would recognize as being behind them, assuming they knew some basic geography. Given his low expectations of the type of people hired by TKM, he figured he ought to add some details. “It’s eight hundred miles in that direction.”
“How did you get through the city?” the leader asked.
Ezra scanned the roadblock to see how many men were there. He figured at least three, if each of them drove their own vehicle, though there could be a lot more if each SUV had been filled to capacity. If that was the case, his walk might have been for nothing.
“If you mean how I got past the giant explosion set off by TKM, then the answer is easy. I was one of the lucky ones who survived.”
He was about twenty yards from the trucks. Close enough to see the young guard holding a small carbine rifle on the hood of his ride. A second man appeared behind the truck on the left. Were there only two?
The man craned his neck, as if looking beyond him. “Not sure what you’re talking about. We’re here to keep people out of the city. It’s for your own protection.”
“So you’re letting me come out?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t have orders for what happens when someone comes the other way. You’re literally the first one I’ve seen today.”
He shrugged. “Surely I can’t be the first one. What about your friends? What’s the protocol for when an inconvenient person comes out of the no-no zone?” His intention was to engage the other men at the roadblock, and he wasn’t disappointed. Man number three came out from the truck on the right.
“We’ve had a few over the past week. None of them looked like you, however. They was wrecked. Beat up. Injured. You look like you’ve been up to no good in there. Mind if we check you for contraband? Weapons?”
It’s what he’d been expecting. “Be my guest. I do need to be very clear,
