There was nothing he could do anyways. He was a molecular biology doctoral candidate, not a firefighter. What was he supposed to do?
By the time he reached the small souvenir shop across the street, Amir had heeded his advice and locked up the store. Heavy duty roll-down security shutters covered the windows and bars protected the door.
“Shit!” Jackson exclaimed. His damn bicycle was inside the store. He slammed his palm against the shutters, causing them to rattle loudly.
He beat on them for a solid five minutes, but Amir never returned. Jackson grunted in defeat and decided that he was much closer to work than to home. Maybe somebody was still at the lab. He’d go there to try to find a ride home.
As he trudged up the street, toward Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center where he worked, his mind filed away the fact that the SUV hadn’t exploded. Instead, it had simply burned itself out once all the flammable material was used up. If that wasn’t right, what else had Hollywood gotten wrong about that sort of stuff?
RECIPROCITY
1
NEAR LIBERAL, KANSAS
MARCH 2ND, DAY 341
The wind howled across the plains, stirring the hunter’s hair. She was covered head-to-toe in a mottled woodland camouflage pattern that her group had looted from the sporting goods section of the Walmart on the far side of town. The snow still lay thick around her, but there was enough of the long prairie grasses and abandoned corn stalks dotting the landscape that her camouflage blended in from a distance.
Sidney Bannister rotated the switch on her suppressed M-4 from safe to semiautomatic with her thumb and sighted in on her quarry’s head. She squeezed the trigger gently, easing the firing pin back until she reached the point where the weapon discharged, surprising her slightly. The gun coughed and a muffled report echoed across the open fields. Every time she paid any attention to the sound she was annoyed at the way all of those movies she’d watched before the outbreak had misled her. Sure, her rifle was much quieter than an unsuppressed weapon, but it sure as hell wasn’t the James Bond kind of silent she’d expected.
Her shooting skills had progressed by leaps and bounds since Jake first taught her how to shoot all those months ago, but three hundred feet—about the distance to the outfield fence on a baseball field—was as far as she was confident about hitting her target.
“You get it?” Mark, the newest addition to their little group, asked. Jake had found him in a grocery store—was it only last month?
So much about what they thought they knew about their new world had changed in such a short amount of time. Jake, whom she thought she had a future with, had gone off on some ridiculous mission to Washington, DC with that Grady Harper nutjob. Harper was a cowboy who thought the infected were scared of him or something. The only thing he was good for would be getting everyone in Jake’s little Army group killed.
After the airstrike at the Campbell farm, they knew it was only a matter of time until the Iranians came looking for them, so they’d abandoned the farm, going farther off the main routes. Sidney had gone on the offensive with the help of Vern Campbell and his granddaughters. Just yesterday, they’d ambushed a small patrol and killed four of the Iranian bastards. It was exhilarating to finally be doing some good.
“Yeah, I got it,” Sidney replied, motioning toward the deer she’d taken. She lifted the small field binoculars to her eyes and examined the kill. She’d hit it just behind the eye. A tiny hole opened into a large wound on the opposite side of the creature’s head. Movement at the edge of the cornfield caught her eye. “Ahh, dammit.”
“Infected?”
She dropped binoculars into the snow and brought the rifle back to her shoulder. “Yeah. They’re going after our kill.” She felt him shifting beside her and she pulled her cheek from the rifle stock. “No. You’re not getting in on this. I need you watching my back.”
The boy grumbled, but stayed facing the opposite direction with his own weapon—a large-caliber machine gun that they’d taken from some dead Iranians a few days ago. He was her rear security, a tactic that Vern had insisted upon for two-man hunting teams. If they didn’t maintain a 360-degree security, the infected, or worse, the Iranians, could attack them. The machine gun gave them added firepower in case they couldn’t simply melt away into the fields surrounding them.
“How many of them?” Mark asked.
She squeezed the trigger, aiming for center mass on the malnourished infected that was running toward fresh meat instead of attempting a headshot. It stumbled and went down. She kept the scope’s red dot hovering just above it so she could fire once more if it got up.
It didn’t.
“Just the one right now,” she whispered. “We’ll give it a few min—ah, damn.”
“What?”
“They got it. Too many of them out here.”
She lowered the rifle and grabbed the binoculars. There must have been at least ten or fifteen of the beasts emerge from the corn, enticed by the scent of fresh blood. She’d taken the shot when the deer was only a few feet from the edge of the corn, so there wasn’t a lot of time to react to the advancing group. They would get the meat and Sidney’s group wouldn’t.
She observed the infected for a moment as they fell
