The Escape (5 page)

She whirled around, visualizing Barker, his handsome face, his tall, gorgeous body—

No! Focus on the uniform, not on . . . him.

Okay. She imagined the uniform. The camo. That ugly soldier’s shirt that she saw every night above her as she lay on that dirty old mattress, getting fucked for food.

And . . . she would shoot that uniform. Right over the pocket that covered the heart.

Forget the heart. Just shoot the pocket. It’s just . . . a pocket.
On a godforsaken uniform.

There could be no man behind that uniform, no heart. Because if she thought about what was under that uniform—the flesh of the man she’d just spent an amazing night with—she’d never be able to go through with it.

There wasn’t enough ammo around for her to take a practice shot. And she couldn’t risk having the gunshot give away her location until he was actually there, behind her.

Until she was ready to kill Private Barker.

Keep running, Jenna.

Emily and Mason’s cabin, upstate New York

Mason wished he
had a bow and arrow. His ammo supply was getting lower all the time, and he couldn’t afford to waste bullets unless he had a clear shot.

But damn it, that deer was close. He’d been hiding in his perch in the tree for over three hours, waiting. Emily didn’t want to use up their minimal salt reserves to make a salt lick, to entice the deer, which was understandable. Still, all that meat! If he could get it.

The deer didn’t notice him, or smell him. He’d covered himself in mud, which had the dual effect of protecting him from mosquitoes and camouflaging his human scent.

The deer were almost all hunted out ever since the Pulse. But this one was big, really big. If he could get it, they could have enough meat to eat for a year, plus the hide to use as a blanket, something Emily had been wanting for a while.

Breathe. You can do it.

Mason waited for the deer to still, and took aim at its head, between the eyes.

Slowly. Pull the trigger.

The sound was deafening. Birds he hadn’t even noticed before flew out of their branches in a flutter, escaping the noise.

And the deer fell.

“Whooo!” Mason screamed, and climbed down the tree as fast as his cramped legs would take him.

A clean kill. The animal was dead, its lifeless eyes staring at nothingness.

Thank you God for this animal
. It was a quick prayer, but sincere.

Emily would be so excited—he couldn’t wait to see her face when he came home, dragging their salvation.

Tonight, they would feast. And they’d live another day.

New York City

Barker wasn’t sure
which way Jenna would be headed, other than away from Grand Central. That was a definite.

Without his pack, he was faster than he had been before. If she was wearing the bag herself, then she’d be even slower.

Good.

The Colonel had been right. She was a dangerous woman. And if she was that intent on not going back to the camp for questioning, then she was most likely not as innocent in Private Andrews’s murder as she made herself out to be.

No wonder she was running. Well, justice would be served. He’d get her, he’d get his gun back, and he’d take her back to Grand Central where she belonged. Fuck her and her manipulative ways.

He’d have been better off if he’d kept his cock in his pants and focused on the mission. Stupid, stupid. He should have known better.

Well, I know better now.

Jenna was likely right-handed, so Barker turned right. Hopefully she wouldn’t recall what he’d said about how most people turn right when they don’t know which way to go, which was why they’d turned left when choosing a room in the building.

No, she’d be panicked. Fleeing for her life. She’d just run.

With the city as silent as it was, if he could just get close enough, he’d hear her. Hear her feet on the pavement, hear her cursing to herself.

He listened, but there was nothing.

Where was she?

I’m coming for you, Jenna.

Jenna couldn’t go
any farther. Her lack of exercise in the past year had taken its toll, and she was weak. Out of breath. Even walking hurt.

It was probably suicide . . . but she had to rest. Hide, and rest. Just until she got her second wind.

A stalled children’s school bus looked like a good place to hide. She’d be able to keep an eye out on the road through the window, and she’d have two points of exit if she had to get out in a hurry.

Jenna stepped up on the stairs into the bus, scanning quickly for bodies. Nothing, thank God. Hopefully the schoolchildren had found their parents. Would they have? In the chaos, after the Pulse?

Don’t dwell.
Words of wisdom from Private Barker.

The bus had been picked clean. No backpacks, no food, nothing. But the seats looked comfortable enough.

Jenna wished she could curl up on one of those seats, but it would be too easy for Barker to look in the windows and see her. No, the dirty bus floor was her only option.

She took the heavy backpack off, sighing with relief, and crawled under a seat until she was hidden from view.

Water.
Surely there’d be a canteen in there.

The zippers stuck, but she managed to open the pack and rifle through the contents. More rations. And water, several canteens full. No wonder it was so heavy.

Jenna drank deeply, the precious fluid dripping down her chin in her haste. She took a bite of the sawdust bread to help fill her stomach, and then set it all back into the pack.

The hard bus floor suddenly seemed inviting, and she stretched her body, relaxing all of her overworked muscles, letting the stress sink out of her and into the bus floor. This would do just fine, at least for now. At some point she’d have to get up and keep going.

All she wanted was to find a safe place, a place where she didn’t have to run anymore. A place with food and shelter and warmth.

Did that even exist anymore, outside of the FEMA camps?

Yes. The radio said so, at least according to what Emily told Mason. She didn’t know Mason well enough to trust him, but if Emily said she heard it with her own ears, then . . . yes, America was rebuilding. And fucking hell, if it was rebuilding, then she was going to find out where and how and join that fight.

Please, Barker, just pass me by. Don’t make me shoot you.

Barker was screwed.
Totally fucking screwed. He’d lost Jenna, lost his gun, lost his supplies, and now he was out on the city streets with only two options: keep searching for Jenna—and probably die trying—or go back to the camp without her. And without his gun.

He’d be the laughingstock of the camp, but that’s not what bothered him. By letting his gun get into the hands of what the Colonel would undoubtedly refer to as a “domestic terrorist,” there was a very good possibility that he’d be tried for treason.

His lawyer skills were useless under martial law. There were no trials, no juries, no judges. Just orders and commands and brainwashed soldiers who followed those commands.

He’d be executed.

No way.

But . . . yes, he would be. He could see that now. So maybe Jenna was onto something when she’d insisted that she’d be killed if he brought her back. The more he thought about it, the more she seemed less crazy-paranoid, and more . . . right?

Oh God, now I’m going crazy too.

But it was a crazy world now. Crazy shit happened. He’d seen citizens gunned down. Looters shot on sight, including mothers who were holding their babies, trying to get the last can of formula off of the shelf.

It was a sick fucking world.

But if he dwelled on it, if he thought about it too much, then he’d never be able to go back to Grand Central and see things the same way ever again.

Fucking hell. He felt like he was in that old movie
The Matrix
, when Keanu Reeves had a choice to take the red pill, and see what was truly going on, or take the blue pill and live in blissful ignorance.

I think Jenna forced me to take the red pill, whether she knows it or not
.

He stopped running.

There was no way he could go back, not without his gun. But he couldn’t bring Jenna back there either, not if she really would be executed. Of course Lanche had told him it was just for questioning—he must have seen in Barker’s eyes that he never would have brought her in to be killed. No way.

Maybe Lanche knew that Barker wasn’t as brainwashed as the others. That his analytical thinking had him questioning things, even if he didn’t voice them.

Why hadn’t he voiced his concerns? Dangerous men had risen to power so fast since the moment the Pulse happened. Corruption abounded when the lights went out. And yet he’d put on his uniform and taken his gun and got in line to follow orders. Where was his red pill then, huh? Fucking hell.

He’d been played from the start.

A yellow school bus caught his eye, up ahead. He could only imagine what had happened on the day of the Pulse. All those little kids, on their way home from school. They’d have been laughing, playing, ignoring the bus driver when she told them to sit and keep the noise down.

He imagined the students dancing in the back seats to their iPods, maybe sharing the earbuds with a friend.

And then the music would have stopped, suddenly. The bus would have stalled, right there where it stood now, a year later, with vines growing onto it through cracks in the pavement.

All the commuters on the streets would have opened their car doors and looked around in confusion. What happened?

The fucking Pulse happened, my friends.
They couldn’t have known that then, though. It took a while for people to realize the full extent of what seemed like a very strange power outage at the time.

But maybe the driver wasn’t a she, maybe it was a he. Maybe he was older, and had lived during the Cuban missile crisis. Maybe he was a war vet, even.

Get under the seats!
he would have yelled. Because an EMP always hits minutes before the nukes. Maybe the kids listened, maybe they didn’t.

But the nuclear strike never came.

The kids’ cell phones wouldn’t work. No way to call Mom at work and tell her they didn’t have a ride home. At what point did the driver tell those kids to just get off the bus and start walking?

How far, how many blocks, how many bridges would those kids have to cross to get home? Would they have been mugged for their backpacks, for their bottles of water? Maybe not at first. But by dark, yeah.

Did they make it home? Or were those families separated forever?

Don’t dwell, Barker.
Don’t think about it. It’s over. It already happened, no sense in feeling the sickness all over again, as if it was happening right then in front of him.

He started to walk toward the bus, his gaze riveted on the sickening, choking vines that crept up the sides, proof that even in a city made of cement and steel, nature would find a way.

Something caught his foot, and he stumbled. Fell.

He screamed when the ground dropped out from under him, darkness encased him, and still he fell farther.

When he landed at the bottom of the open sewer, he was drenched, alone, and bruised.

Fuck me, I’m a dead man.

Jenna heard an
angry yell, somewhere outside the bus.

Shit.

She lay still, not moving, barely breathing. Maybe it was the “criminal elements” Barker had spoken about, those men who still scavenged through the city instead of living at the camp. Or maybe it was . . . Barker.

His voice sounded distant, but she could hear him. Cursing loudly. Yelling. It was Barker all right.

Where was he? Why wasn’t the sound moving closer?

Why wasn’t the sound traveling . . . at all?

Jenna sat up and grabbed the rifle. She peered out of the back window of the bus, but Barker was nowhere to be seen.

And yet, she could still hear him.

Then silence.

What the hell was going on?

Then a yell again, a sound like a trapped lion. Angry. Maybe . . . scared?

Just hide, he’ll pass by.

She ducked down again, but over the next half an hour, she kept hearing the same thing. Silence, then yelling. Sometimes it was just “Fuuuuuck! Fuck.”

Sometimes it was grunting, like he was doing something strenuous, and not succeeding.

And the sound never moved, never got closer. Something was wrong.

Really wrong.

Well, I won’t get any rest knowing he’s nearby.

She had to investigate. And if she saw him . . . she’d shoot him.

But could she actually do that?

She looked at the rifle on the strap across her chest. It had a little switch on the left side, one that was pointing toward the word “safe.” Above that was the word “semi” and to the right, what looked like a spray of bullets.

It was a military-issue gun. An M16, she thought she remembered the soldiers saying. What was semi? What would the bullet spray switch do?

I really don’t want to find out.

But she got up, put on the heavy bag, and exited the bus.

She held the rifle up to her face, pointing the muzzle out, and scanned the area. Nothing.

But Barker was there, somewhere. Screaming in fury.

“Um . . . hello?” she called.

“Jenna!” she heard him yell. “Thank you Jesus! Help me, please.”

What the fuck?

“Where are you, Barker?”

He started laughing. Could he see her?

“I’m in the sewer. Don’t fall in yourself. I can’t climb out.”

Jenna looked for an open manhole, and found it. Nothing was in its path to keep people from falling in. If she had come from the opposite direction, she might have fallen in it as well.

“Please, Jenna, help me.”

Jenna walked slowly over to the edge of the manhole and peered in. The hole was deep, about three feet over his six-foot frame.