More thumps of men diving to the floor reached him through the ringing in his ears and there was a curious scraping sound that Vern couldn’t quite place. Was it fingernails on the floorboard? Or the scrape of a machine gun bipod as the foreigners repositioned, ready to fire at Sidney when she came through the back door?
What was happening above? He couldn’t let them lay in wait and ambush that girl. Vern grasped the rungs of the ladder and began the slow, tortuous climb up. The wooden dowels were slick with a wetness that he knew had to be blood.
When he got to the top, he used his shoulder to try to lift the trapdoor up. It was blocked by a heavy weight. He pushed with all the strength he could muster from his precarious perch on the ladder, but it was no use. The weight was too great for him in his current position.
“Here, girls,” he whispered into the darkness below. “Take this rifle. The door’s blocked.”
A hand slapped at the side of the ladder until it found his foot. He double-checked that he’d put the safety on and slid the weapon along his leg until the stock reached the grasping fingers. “Got it,” Katie said as the rifle was pulled from his grasp.
With the awkward rifle gone, he was able to hold on to the ladder with one hand and help push with the other. It still wasn’t enough, so he took another step up the ladder and was nearly bent over double. His knees screamed in protest as he crouched down and then used his legs to push his upper back into the trapdoor.
Slowly, light began to show and he saw that it was a body blocking the door. He eased the pressure and the door began to fall back into place. If he dropped the door, the dead weight would still be there and they’d be trapped again. He had to keep going, to make the body roll off the door. He took a deep breath and pushed with everything he had.
The edges of his vision went dark and pain exploded in his chest, but he continued to push, straining against the weight on the door. The pressure against his back relented suddenly as the foreigner’s body fell away and the door flung open. Vern fell out onto the floor and clutched at his chest, staring at the ceiling above. The pain was immense and he couldn’t catch his breath.
The darkness at the edges spread, covering everything. He couldn’t see and he felt like he couldn’t breathe. The pain stopped abruptly. He wasn’t scared, he just felt exhausted. Then, all at once, his body stopped responding to his commands and his labored breathing stopped.
Vern Campbell’s final act on this earth was to save his family from being trapped in the cellar of a farmhouse. He’d saved them from a slow, agonizing death of starvation. With that accomplished, he closed his eyes and went home to his God.
8
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
MARCH 4TH
“I really don’t give a shit what this guy says,” Jake Murphy said more harshly than he’d meant to. “This is still America. He doesn’t control what I can or can’t do.”
“I get it, sir. But these guys were bad news before the infected showed up. They regularly went up against the cops when there was a functioning government. Now that everything is gone…” Specialist Feliciano left the statement hanging in the air between them.
Jake looked from the small assembled group of men around him to the barricade at the end of the bridge. They’d traveled so far, just to be stopped by some local thug who thought he ruled the place. “Options?”
“There’s the Manhattan Bridge,” Feliciano stated, pointing to the east where another bridge was clearly visible. “Or the other one—I can’t remember its name—further east and a little north. It connects Brooklyn with Manhattan, but it was a pretty shitty area before all of this went down. Probably a lot worse now.”
“And that’s it?” Jake hated being dependent on one guy to tell them how to get around the city, but Feliciano was a good kid. He hadn’t failed them yet.
“No, sir. There are a few more bridges up north, going from the Bronx over to Long Island. No guarantees that any of them will be any better, though.”
“What does this cocksucker want?” Harper asked, butting into the platoon huddle. He had an annoying way of doing that.
Jake frowned and looked at the operator. “They want food and some ammo for passage off the bridge.”
“No way. We keep getting hounded for food. That shit’s like gold. We might need it to bargain with the scientists—if we can find any.”
“Don’t fucking start that shit again,” Jake grumbled. Grady Harper had become increasingly skeptical that they’d find any surviving scientists after seeing the worsening conditions in the city. “But, I agree with you. Keeping our food secure is one of our biggest priorities.”
“And we sure as fuck ain’t giving him any ammunition,” Harper stated, making it seem like he was in charge.
“Stay in your lane, Harper,” Sergeant Turner cautioned, probably sensing another argument between the lieutenant and the CIA man—or whatever the fuck agency Harper had worked for before all of this. He’d been incredibly sketchy about those details.
“Fuck this, man,” the operator laughed. “There are only, like, three of them. Why are we even entertaining their demands?”
“Because that’s what leaders do, Harper,” Jake sighed. “We don’t risk the lives of our men unnecessarily. We explore all the options to see if there’s a potential solution that
