"Get us in there," Allen whispered to the woman.
She pulled a chain from around her neck and placed a key in the lock to the front door. Allen put a hand or her hand before she turned the knob. "Are there any surprises in there for us?" he asked.
"It depends… on what you mean… by surprises," the woman said between air-sucking gasps.
She turned the knob and stepped inside.
Allen let Brown and Epps go in first. He scanned the street one last time with the NOD. There. He saw one. He put it down quickly, regretting the loss of another round of ammo. But he wasn't taking any chances. That was an order from Tejada himself. With the street empty of Annies, he backed into the townhome and closed the door.
Chapter 12: Keep Your Brains Off the Photos
She couldn't believe it was ending. It was over—her life. How long did she have left?
Mercy led the soldiers down into the basement, struggling to find the lantern in the darkness. She felt one of the soldiers squeeze by her, as if he could see, and then the lantern flared to life. She squinted at its brightness, wondering if it were somehow brighter than usual. She held her hand up to the light and looked at the source of her despair, a circular impression in the webbing between her thumb and index finger. Neat rectangular wounds dripped small amounts of blood. But, as she had come to learn, it wasn't the size of the wound that mattered. It didn't matter if the dead took a chunk out of your arm or merely scratched it; the end result was always the same.
The soldiers looked at where she was looking, at her hand, and she saw their faces drop. She smiled at them. They had tried so hard to save her, but she knew her time was up.
She reflected on the long road that had brought her here, the losses she'd suffered, her husband, her parents, a dozen other people she had thought to be safe with. She thought of how far she had come, learning to survive, learning to scavenge for food, for weapons.
Mercy had been a nothing, a nobody, just a waitress at the P.F. Chang's down the road, working for tips and washing her hair three times in a row on the weekends just to get the smell of Chinese food out of her long, black hair.
When the trouble came, she had been reporting to work, oblivious of the signs around her. Her townhome, her castle, her stronghold, had been nestled between two other townhomes. Her neighbors were seldom seen nerd-types with dark skin. She had the distinct impression they were Intel employees, foreigners brought overseas for their ability to code. She had served the type plenty of times at P.F. Chang's.
She had been oblivious to the signs of trouble, the ambulance and police sirens that had been sounding all damn morning. She even cruised past a car wreck in the middle of the road, using the shoulder to get to work. She didn't look at the carnage. She had made that mistake once. It was one of the few times in her life that she had ever seen a dead body. It had been twisted and mangled, the edges of the wounds looking like raw hamburger meat soaked in blood. So now she knew better.
Mercy didn't listen to the news or the radio. She didn't listen to anything. The antenna in her car had broken off in the carwash, and she always hated how negative the news was. Her husband was always asleep as she left for work. His job at the water treatment plant gave him some odd hours, but they made it work. At least they had weekends off together. Still, it always seemed like one of them was going while the other one was coming during the week.
At the P.F. Chang's, she didn't notice the lack of parked cars. The restaurant was located in a fairly busy shopping area known as the Streets of Tanasbourne, a new-school shopping center designed as a response to the death of the shopping mall. The shopping center was filled with high-priced boutiques that attracted a high-end clientele. It was filled with shit that people didn't need, clothing that you couldn't wear to a barbecue, jewelry that would get you robbed in her neighborhood, perfumes that cost more than she earned in a week. The funny thing about the shopping center was that none of the people that worked there could afford to shop at the damn place. All of her customers came in three varieties, pinched-face bitches with their noses in the airs, spoiled-rotten teenagers wielding their parents' credit cards, and self-important men with wandering eyes and thirsty leers. She hated the men the worst.
On the day that everything had changed, Mercy had strolled into the backdoor of P.F. Chang's with nary a thought in her head for the apocalypse. She was thinking about whether or not she should take her smoke break before she even went inside, before there were customers, before all the suit-wearing perverts with fat faces and wedding bands on their fingers tried to flirt their way into her pants.
She decided to save it for later. She wasn't a big smoker. She had always been gifted with the ability to quit whenever she wanted to, but she never fully wanted to quit, so she allowed herself one a day, and somehow, she kept to it. Inside the restaurant, a few things caught her attention. One, it was oddly quiet. There was always some sort of chatter going on between the dishwashers and the chefs. But the only person she saw was Marco, throwing vegetables into an industrial slicer and dumping the remains into plastic bins.
"Hola, Mercy,"
