“That’s a pipe dream. They’re here for a reason. I don’t know why, but there’s no way they just popped up in the middle of Kansas on accident. They aren’t going away.”
“Then maybe I can make them stop hunting us,” she retorted hotly.
“What about your baby? I can’t believe you’d want to leave him.”
“I don’t want to leave him, but what choice do I have? If I don’t do something, they’re just going to send more patrols this way and maybe we can’t stop them the next time. Maybe they come in here and kill everyone, take Katie and Sally. This is the only way I can buy time for you.”
“Hey!” Carmen said cheerily. “I see you’re awake.” She passed off Lincoln to Sidney as she walked into to room and picked up the blood pressure cuff and stethoscope from the bedside table.
Sidney hefted her son and rearranged the growing boy in her arms. He was big enough now that he could support the weight of his head for a few seconds at a time, but still too little to do much beyond soil himself and laugh. In a few months, maybe six or so, he’d be crawling and getting into everything.
If we survive that long, Sidney thought bitterly. She’d made up her mind. The only way to keep Lincoln alive was to get the Iranians off their trail. She would bring the pain to those fuckers in Liberal and make them wish they’d never come here.
11
BIGGS ARMY AIRFIELD, FORT BLISS, EL PASO, TEXAS
MARCH 5TH
“No, ma’am, I’m being serious,” Hannah said, sighing in frustration. She’d spent most of the day trying to get in to see the division intelligence officer. She’d been bounced around by the airfield medical personnel for several of those hours before being allowed to talk to a sergeant on the Aviation brigade staff. After another long discussion, he brought in the brigade’s intelligence officer, who, surprisingly, believed her story after a couple of retellings and made an appointment for her to see the commander.
“So what?” the colonel asked dryly. She’d been skeptical of Hannah’s story from the moment she walked in under guard. Apparently, the Army here had been dealing with the crazies for a long time, so the information she thought she had was of little use. “We’re spread thin here as it is, barely keeping afloat between distribution center raids and assisting the infantry when large hordes of the infected show up. What is it that you expect me to do with your information about the origination of the disease?”
“I… I don’t really know, ma’am. I’ve been on the road for so long, I just—”
“Why don’t you get some rest, dear?” Colonel King said, her tone softening and becoming almost motherly. “I’m sure you’ve been through quite a lot. That Blackhawk you flew in here with is registered to the Mexican Army. It must have been exhausting to fly that far on your own, especially with the illness inside of you taking so much of your energy.”
The illness, Hannah surmised, was from her encounter with the crazy in Central America that had bitten her hand. She’d been able to hide it from the PA’s initial examination, but had forgotten about it during her subsequent interviews. The sergeant said she was immune, but that the disease that turned normal people into stark raving murderers coursed through her veins. She was a carrier.
“I’m fine, ma’am,” Hannah replied. “I just need a good night’s sleep and a proper meal, then we can go back. The answers have to be in that lab. I just know it.”
“Ms. Dunn, even if I believed your fantastical story about you being some sort of special operator, we simply don’t have the resources to investigate some mythical lab complex where you say this thing started,” the colonel stated, her tone hardening once more.
“I never said I was SF,” Hannah corrected her. “I was the pilot for a CIA-contracted SOF team. We tried to stop it in North Korea, but they’d already closed down the facility by the time we got there, and—”
“North Korea?” Colonel King scoffed, her thin features tightening over the bones in her cheek, giving her a scarecrow-like appearance. “I thought you said it was Brazil. You can’t even keep your story straight. I don’t know if that’s from your brain being scrambled from the infection or from you being on your own out there in the wild,” she pointed a bony finger toward the wall of her office, “but I don’t appreciate you wasting my time with made up fairy tales. Guards.”
Hannah gripped the arms of the chair tightly as hard fingers dug into her upper arms, attempting to pull her from it. “Colonel King, please!” Hannah pleaded. “I’m telling the truth! We went to North Korea, but the facility was shut down and sealed. We found evidence that the operation had moved to Brazil to be closer to the United States. There were log books written in both Korean and Iranian—I mean Persian—that told of what they were doing, what their end state was. I’m telling you the truth.”
“Stop!” the colonel demanded as Hannah struggled against the men trying to remove her. “No, I mean, you guys stop,” she said, gesturing at the two guards. “Miss Dunn, what did you just say?”
The guards released her and she struggled to remember what she’d said that got the colonel excited. “Um… We found log books written in both Korean and Persian?”
“Thank you, Sergeant Grant. Go get the S-2. Tell him that I want him here now.”
“Ma’am, she’s infected…”
“She’s immune, Sergeant. I don’t have anything to fear from her.” She leaned back slightly
