Sidney knew she was going to die. Either from the fall, the infected, or the Iranian motherfucker shooting at her. She’d never see Lincoln again. It was over.
Hands gripped her wrists like iron. “I’ve got you!” Mark grunted.
She sobbed, thanking the Lord that Mark was there for her. He pulled her and she tilted her pelvis to get her legs up over the edge.
“Stop moving!” he said through gritted teeth. “You think you’re helping, but you’re not.” He pulled and her thighs came back up over the edge.
Another burst of machine gun fire chewed at the roof around them. Mark heaved one final time and they both fell through the window into the house.
17
BIGGS ARMY AIRFIELD, FORT BLISS, EL PASO, TEXAS
MARCH 7TH
Hannah looked at herself in the mirror. She felt like an idiot. She was all kitted up like a soldier once more. The last time she’d done this, her entire team died and she ended up wandering South and Central America hoping to find safety from the crazies back home. That safety didn’t exist. They were everywhere. Worldwide.
She sat down heavily on the cot the supply sergeant had given her to sleep on. It wasn’t much, but she’d gotten better rest in the past couple of days than she had in over a year on her own. Not that it helped tonight. It was one in the morning and they were planning on leaving in an hour so they’d arrive at the facility around noon, in the heat of the day when the crazies were known to be less active.
What if this operation went the same way as the last one? Could she handle seeing more good soldiers die uselessly? Worse, could her mind cope with the devastation if she somehow ended up alone again all the way back down where she started? Her hand unconsciously fell to the M-4 rifle they’d given her. She’d suck start the goddamned thing before she let that happen again.
“How are you doing, Hannah?”
She looked up to see Colonel King. She wore the Army physical fitness uniform. The woman was a lifelong military helicopter pilot. Her slim body looked like she could run a marathon without any training. Hannah’s hips and boobs had always been too big to make her good at the Army’s style of fitness, which consisted of running and pushups, followed by more running.
“I’m doing okay, ma’am,” she replied. “Nervous, but I mean…”
Colonel King smiled, with only the barest hint of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes. The only giveaway to the older woman’s age were the streaks of gray shot through her short, brown hair. “You’ll do fine. We’re sending you with the very best soldiers in the division.”
Hannah nodded. “I know, ma’am.” She sighed. “It’s just I’ve been through so much this past year. I kept myself together up here,” she pointed at her temple, “by telling myself that once I made it back to the States that everything would be okay. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew that it was an impossible dream that the border wall had stopped the spread, but I still forced myself to believe it, y’know?”
The colonel nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s a rough spot the general and I are putting you in. It isn’t fair. Believe me, I understand that it isn’t.” She stepped fully into the room and leaned against the wall, allowing her body to slide down until she was sitting. “I’m not going to bullshit you, Hannah. We are asking a lot from you. You spent all that time just trying to make it back home and now that you’ve made it, we’re sending you right back out into the wild. I could try to give you some false motivational, hoorah kind of message about your patriotic duty and all that, but I’m not going to do that. The fact of the matter is, you’ve done your part, and more. Thanks to you, we have a very good idea of where this facility is. But, very good idea doesn’t mean we actually know where it is. That’s why we’re asking you to go along. We need your familiarization with the area to tell us where the facility is.”
“Familiarization? Ma’am, I was there over a year ago. And, we didn’t exactly go sightseeing. My team leader felt like we were pressed for time, so we went directly there, through the jungle.”
“But you’ve seen the building?” the colonel pressed.
“Yeah, but I mean—”
“Then you’ve got a better sense of the place than anyone else does. Hannah, please. If there’s any chance that there’s a way to reverse this or give the US Government a leg up on research, then we’ve got to take it.”
It’s Groundhog Day, Hanna thought. They wanted to go back to that damned facility to get samples and find evidence in order to stop the virus. Going back scared the shit out of her. Back to where Grady lost his life. Back to where Baz, Chris, Rob, and Alex Knasovich had all sacrificed their lives for the same damn mission.
But she had to. She knew that the best shot at a vaccine would come from the facility. If there was ever a shot at some semblance of normalcy, then this was the first step to getting there. The first step of, like, six hundred and forty-three steps, but they had to start somewhere.
“Fine,” Hannah relented. “I don’t want to go, but I will.”
“That’s all we can ask of you,” Colonel King replied. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah. Let’s get this over with.”
The colonel uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, allowing the momentum to lift her
