They were being reassigned to protection duty in New York. Their new mission was to keep the men and women of the city safe. He didn’t really have the authority to do that, but if the Army wanted to make an issue about it in a few years when it’d unfucked itself, then the men’s defense would be that they followed the final, lawful orders of Lieutenant Jake Murphy.
For him, he was done. Once they got back to Vern’s farm in Kansas, he would help Sidney and the old man as best he could. And Carmen. Shit. He’d forgotten about Carmen. He did not envy a reunion with the fiery Puerto Rican. Their parting had been terrible. She’d called him a pendejo and threw him out of her room when she found out that he was leaving to go to DC—they hadn’t even known about New York at that point. Carmen was a force to be reckoned with, that was for sure.
He pushed his way into the apartment. Maybe he should go to Bliss with Sergeant Turner he mused.
35
LIBERAL, KANSAS
MARCH 23RD
Sidney looked around the farm. It hadn’t suffered that much in the month that they’d been absent. The front door had been kicked in, but the Iranians hadn’t burned down the house or the barn, which was her main fear when she told Vern that she was going to go check it out.
They’d left the cattle in the pasture, but from what she could tell, they were gone. The Iranians must have taken them for their use. Bastards. There seemed to be enough chickens left just hanging around the area, though. If they could recapture them and put them into the barn, then they’d be okay.
“What about the solar and the well?” Mark asked, handing her the binoculars.
“We’ll have to go in and see.”
She and Mark had grown close during their mission to destroy the Iranian base at the airport. Hours upon hours spent in close proximity to one another when the infected answered their calls to attack meant a lot of time to learn about one another. He was a good kid. If she’d been a little less responsible when she was a teenager, he was the right age to have been her son. As it was, she’d begun to think of him like that, as crazy as it sounded to her.
“Hopefully, those bastards didn’t booby trap the place.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “I’m thinking they might have done something, so we need to be very careful, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“What is it?” Sidney could sense there was more that he wanted to say.
“It’s just…” He sighed in frustration. “Is this smart? They know where we are if we come back here. Isn’t this just risking a new set of assholes coming to attack?”
“I think we accomplished our mission. There wasn’t a single Iranian left alive at the airport and they killed a shit ton of infected during the attack. You saw it, thousands of the damn things. The bodies were stacked three or four high. They did us a huge favor.”
They’d sat nestled deep inside that stand of spruce trees, afraid to move beyond the cover they provided, for four days. The Iranians put up one hell of a fight, but in the end, the sheer number of infected had overwhelmed them. No reinforcements had arrived in an attempt to save the day like they’d done at the outpost. No one escaped the airport to go beg for help from another base somewhere else. They’d been completely alone, and that is what gave Sidney hope that the Iranians wouldn’t return.
“Yeah, but won’t more of them just come back?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. They suffered way too much loss over the last few months. We were hitting them, killing every one of them we saw—”
“The Redskins, right?” Mark said, laughing.
“Yeah, the Redskins. We hurt them bad even before the stuff we did last week. Wreckage from that big plane is blocking the runway, so they can’t land troops at the airport—which was how they were able to get here in the first place. That fighter jet they had on the far side of the cargo plane looked like it was pretty messed up too. I didn’t put any explosives on it, but that big mother burned hot.”
She let the binoculars hang low as she stared blankly down the road in the direction of town. “After being here for a while, they should know that there’s nothing really of value out here. I don’t know why they’d bother to come back—especially since they can’t land here now. Going overland is a fool’s errand—”
Her voice caught in her throat. “Jake?” Mark asked.
“Yeah. Those idiots aren’t ever coming back. Even with those big Army trucks, they never would have made it. A mob of infected would stop them dead in their tracks.”
She pushed the binoculars forcefully into the outside pocket of her backpack and zipped it closed. “Anyways, that doesn’t matter. They’re long gone, just like the Iranian assholes. We’re alone out here, except for the infected. Vern had a very good setup here at the homestead, and we left with only the stuff we could carry on our backs, so this place is our best chance at long-term survival.”
“Alright. Um… You ready to go check it out, then?”
“Yeah. Like I said, we take it slow, okay?”
He nodded solemnly as they stood from their place of cover behind the burned out remains of Vern’s old truck. It had been shoved to the
