“I guess so,” Jake replied to the warlord’s question. “I’m Lieutenant Jake Murphy, United States Army.” He stepped forward with his hand outstretched, but two men moved to intercept him, faltering his progress.
“Stop it, you two,” Jefferson admonished. “They have guns. If they wanted to kill me, they’d just shoot me.” He stood and closed the distance. “Idiots.”
Jefferson shook his hand and then Sergeant Turner’s when the man introduced himself as well. “And you are?”
“Grady Harper,” he replied. “I worked for a different branch of the government.”
“Oooh, secretive.” Jefferson pointed a finger at him. “I like it. We only get a couple of hours of electricity a day around here from the solar panels we rigged up, so we can’t waste it on watching TV, but I used to love a good spy movie. Please, just tell me that we didn’t do this to ourselves. That the CIA or the Army didn’t accidently release the virus that we were planning to use on somebody else. Can you at least tell me that?”
Grady’s eyes narrowed as he assessed the man farther. There were literally hundreds of different government agencies, how’d he settled on the CIA was either incredibly astute, or he was just bored out of his mind and looking for anything exciting.
“We didn’t do this,” Grady replied. “It was the Iranians, in concert with the North Koreans.”
Jefferson slapped his palms together and pointed toward the back of the apartment. “I knew it. I knew it wasn’t us.” Louder he yelled, “You owe me now, Beth. I was right. It wasn’t us!”
He turned back to the small group. “I bet you have some fun stories about secret missions.” Jefferson’s long fingers wrapped around the back of Grady’s hand, easily half again longer than his own, as they shook hands. There were no calluses, no rough patches, it was as if the guy had been an office worker before all of this instead of the cop or gangbanger that Grady had thought upon initial inspection.
“So,” Jefferson said, “allow me to introduce myself. I’m Jackson Jefferson. Somehow, the residents have elected me to help guide them through these trying times. Is there a government response to help us out? I mean, we can still see those things across the bay, so I don’t think we’ve beaten them yet.”
“We’re actually trying to get to the labs at Columbia University,” Jake declared. “We thought—”
“Don’t bother,” Jefferson said. “They can’t help you.”
“Why’s that?” Grady asked.
“Most of the scientists are dead. One of their researchers went a little crazy and killed all of the crusty old bastards who refused to listen to any new ideas after a few weeks of trying to discover the truth about the virus. Real messy scene too. Dead people all over the lab and nobody bothered to clean them up.”
“So, there aren’t any scientists left?” Lieutenant Murphy asked.
“Eh, there may be a couple that I missed. Not a hundred percent sure.”
Alarm bells began to sound in Grady’s head. “That you missed?” Jake asked.
“Yeah. I killed those stupid old fuckers,” Jefferson chuckled. “We had the body of one of the whackjobs that the NYPD killed at LaGuardia. It was a few weeks old, so the cells we were working with were not the best samples. I wanted to get a live subject from New Jersey because I thought I was onto a potential discovery, but because it didn’t follow ‘established medical protocols’,” he said as he made exaggerated air quotations with his fingers, “they said that it was dangerous and incredibly shortsighted. One of them even went on to say that I was trying to kill everyone in New York City. Can you believe that? The final straw was when that same dick suggested they should infect me—me!—with the crazy juice to make a live test subject. Obviously, I couldn’t let that happen.”
Grady shifted his weight to his back leg, glancing around the room. There were at least two guards in there with them, but no way of telling how many more were in the other rooms. Jefferson had called out to a female, so there was at least one noncombatant out of sight as well, maybe more.
“You do realize that if you try anything, you won’t make it out of this building alive, don’t you?” Jefferson asked, pointing at Grady. “I grew up on the streets of New York. I see you choreographing an attack there, Mr. Spy Man.”
“Grady, don’t do anything stupid,” Jake hissed.
Grady gritted his teeth. “You’re admitting to murdering scientists?” he asked. “The very same scientists who could have helped put a stop to this?”
Jefferson shrugged. “A lot has happened around here that you guys don’t know anything about.” He crossed one leg dramatically over the other. “That reminds me, you were just about to tell me where you came from and what you’re doing in my city.”
The lieutenant shook his head slightly at Grady, meaning for him to leave it alone. “We traveled here from El Paso, Texas,” Jake said, telling a white lie since the two of them had come from Kansas, while the rest of the platoon had come from Texas, but this guy didn’t need to know that part. “Our research
