“Hey, sir,” Sergeant Turner interrupted the conversation. “The natives are getting restless and the boys are getting jumpy. What’s the hold up?”
The guard hooked the baton onto his belt, then stepped forward offering his hand. “Sergeant. I’m Doug Stein. I was a cop before all of this went down. This fella wearing officer rank says you guys are from the real US Army.”
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Turner replied. “Yeah, we’re up here on a mission to save the world—if you can believe that.”
“You guys are gonna want to meet Jefferson,” the guard stated.
“Who is Jefferson?” Jake asked for what felt like the hundredth time.
“He was a scientist before all this went down,” Connie said. “Up at Columbia University, just like you wanted. Now he runs this part of the city.”
“No shit?” Turner grumbled.
“No shit,” Doug Stein agreed.
“Then he’s the guy we need to talk to,” Jake blurted out, unable to control his excitement.
“You guys have already been noticed,” the guard said with a wide grin. “Don’t worry about going to look for him. He’s already found you.”
Jake turned to see a force of ten or twelve big men enter the market. They wore variations of riot gear and heavy winter coats to ward off the chill. Jake still didn’t see a single gun amongst them, but the long, bladed spears they carried looked like a nasty replacement for a close-in fight.
“Is this the welcoming committee?” Jake asked dryly.
“Sure is, pal,” Doug Stein replied. “Welcome to Manhattan, the last civilized place in America.”
13
NEAR LIBERAL, KANSAS
MARCH 5TH
The backpack’s straps dug into Sidney’s shoulders. It was heavier than she’d anticipated when she packed all of their explosives into it. She wasn’t even sure what to do with half of the stuff because it was labeled with Middle Eastern text. The letters and symbols meant nothing to her, but she was confident that if she put those explosives alongside the C-4 she’d gotten from the Army guys, then it would explode anyways.
She sniffed the snot that threatened to escape her nose back inside and wiped what she hadn’t gotten onto her sleeve. She tried to convince herself that it was the cold that made her eyes water and nose run. It wasn’t that she might never see her baby or her new family again. It was not because of that, she reasserted, lying to herself.
Sidney hadn’t wanted to delay her departure any longer. It was difficult enough as it stood, but listening to Vern and the girls implore her to stay one more time was more than she could bear. So, she’d slipped out of the house in the middle of the night. The only person who knew she’d gone was Carmen, and that was simply because Lincoln needed her care. If her son was ever going to grow up in this world, she had to force the Iranians to stop hunting them.
The ironic thing was that her actions, her decision to be the badass partisan fighter is why they’d been hunted relentlessly in the first place. If they’d simply melted away into the night, leaving the Iranians alone, then they’d have never known the family existed and wouldn’t have exerted their resources to find them. But she’d thought that fighting them was the best thing to do, and now she had to live with the consequences of her actions.
There was a sound behind her. Faint. It was the scrape of a shoe on the pavement she walked down, carried to her by the wind. She glanced quickly and saw him silhouetted against the road in the moonlight. He’d been with her from the start, following her from the family’s current hideout, a shadow that wasn’t very good at being a shadow.
Sidney sighed, then stopped. She knew who it was, but needed him to understand the seriousness of the game he played, so she spun, kneeling as she did so. Her rifle fit snugly into the pocket of her shoulder and she considered firing a warning shot, to scare him away. It would certainly send the message, but at what cost? At over a hundred yards away, she could easily miss and accidentally hit him.
She swept the rifle’s barrel far to the side, firing off into the fields beyond the road. Even at that distance, she knew she’d missed him by a full fifty feet, but the muffled sound of her suppressed M-4 still had the desired effect.
The figure dove to the side of the road. “Sidney!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot!”
Sidney sighed again, more loudly this time, and put her weapon on safe before using the stock to help leverage her to her feet. The pack threatened to pull her backward, but she leaned forward against the weight.
“Get over here, Mark,” she hissed, hoping the sound would carry to him so she didn’t need to shout. The infected were still a concern, regardless of how thinned their numbers were.
The boy stood and stumbled down the road toward where she waited. “Hi,” he said, waving his hand awkwardly.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You always tell me that we have to go out in pairs to cover each other. You need somebody to watch your back and keep an eye out when you’re putting down those explosives.”
Her lips thinned. He was right, it was extremely dangerous to be on your own out here. But, dammit, she didn’t want the burden of keeping him safe during this trip. She wanted to go in, blow something up that would force the Iranians to leave them alone, and go back home to her family. “Mark, you need to go home.”
His features shifted in the moonlight, a range of emotions displaying in mere seconds. Finally, he settled on a grimace. “No,”
