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  Sally pushed her button and the window lowered. Marcus did the same.

  The wind whipped through the cabin, swirling, muting everything else. The air was salty, heavier than in Atlanta or in west and central Texas. It was like Louisiana, but without the odor of bayou rot.

  The second Pop Guard vehicle was closing in. It too tried to make a run along the driver’s side, but instead of pulling even, it zipped past them. Dallas got off a couple of shots, although nothing hit.

  The tinted windows of the car revealed nothing but vague shapes of the presumably armed men inside. Sally pressed the gas, accelerating to keep the car from passing them completely. But the car was too quick. It put half a car length between them and started to merge in front of them.

  “Hold on,” Sally warned.

  She slammed on the brakes, coming out of her seat to step hard on the pedal. The truck’s tires screamed against the road. Smoke curled around the truck. Everybody pitched forward. Marcus hit his shoulder on the dash. Hard. He grunted, a push of anguish from his lungs.

  Sally slipped the truck in reverse and backed up through the cloud of smoke, which filtered into the cabin. Andrea coughed. So did David.

  Sally braked again, not as hard, and spun the wheel to the left like she was playing roulette. Then she jerked the truck into drive and made a fast turn.

  “We’re heading back to the water,” she announced. “The boat has got to be there by now.”

  Another Pop Guard vehicle was ahead of them. It was coming straight for them, on their side of the road. Sally swung the wheel again and headed south. Right into the path of another Pop Guard patrol.

  Marcus leaned forward, using the large side-view mirror for balance. His right side strained, his back tightened, but he gripped his weapon with both hands and set the heels of his hands on top of the mirror’s thick molded plastic frame.

  They were closing fast. Seventy-five yards separated them.

  He tucked his head into his armpit and yelled to Sally, “Aim for it! Straight for the car!”

  Fifty yards.

  Confusion flashed on her face for an instant, although she didn’t question him. Her hands shifted on the wheel and Marcus felt the vehicle jerk beneath him. He wobbled but held his spot.

  Forty yards.

  “Hold it,” Marcus said.

  Lifting himself up, he leaned in. His finger found the trigger. He aimed, fired.

  Twin pops cracked through the windshield of the oncoming car. There were twenty yards between them.

  “Hold it!” he shouted.

  A third round spiderwebbed the glass and the car jerked to one side, then the other. Then it peeled off the narrow road and slammed into the thick trunk of a dead magnolia. An instant later they sped past the smoking heap of a car. Half a body stuck through what was left of the front passenger’s side windshield.

  Marcus’s face was windblown, eyes glossy, skin reddened. He puffed his cheeks and exhaled. “Alright,” he said. “We know they’ll keep coming.”

  Sally stayed the course. South on Franklin Street. The road curved hard to the right when they passed Broad Street. Now they were on Savage.

  “Where does this go?” asked Marcus.

  “I don’t know,” snapped Sally. “I got here the same time you did, remember?”

  Marcus checked behind him. Lou was comforting David while holding her infant. She was anxious. He could see it in her eyes. She wanted to be in the fray. Slinging knives, pulling triggers, doing bad things for a good cause.

  Andrea’s eyes were closed. She had her mouth pressed to her infant’s ear. She was soothing the child, whispering and shushing. Javier was playing with the buckle end of the seatbelt he wasn’t wearing, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around him.

  “Another one,” Dallas said.

  Savage converged with another street that ran south into a Y intersection. The Pop Guard patrol was even with them and appeared willing to sideswipe them at the mouth of the intersection.

  Sally saw this, looking through Marcus’s window. She pressed the gas and the truck surged ahead.

  Marcus leaned from the window, his elbow on the sill, and took a shot. Then another. The rear driver’s side passenger window shattered. The tinted glass peeled away and hung by threads of glass along the side of the car. It flapped and banged and revealed a man clutching the side of his throat. His wide eyes were a mixture of shock and fear.

  Beyond the dying man, in the back seat, another guard returned fire. The pops were hollow sounding, like the cap bombs Marcus used to slam at the ground as a kid. One of the rounds drilled the door next to Marcus’s head and buried itself in the headrest. Foam padding bloomed behind him and Andrea shrieked, startling her baby.

  Sally beat the car to the Y intersection and headed south on Rutledge. The car nipped the back of the truck and the rear slipped. But Sally maintained control as the truck wobbled from side to side.

  “We’re running out of road,” she said. “Left or right at the dead end? Left or right!”

  Marcus didn’t know. Either way, they’d be on the lone road that ran along the southern edge of what was essentially a flat peninsula.

  “Either,” he said. “Just make a choice.”

  Sally went left. She drove away from the Hazel Parker Playground, where they’d stationed themselves for the rendezvous with the boat, and was heading east now. The Pop Guard patrol was at their bumper. Marcus’s side-view mirror shattered. Glass sprayed into the cab and caught the side of his face.

  He grimaced and swiped at his face with a heavy hand, the grind of grain-sized fragments raking across his skin. His fingers came away streaked with red and he cursed under his breath.

  Sally was driving along Murray Boulevard, and turning left wasn’t the right way to go. It ended at an abandoned US Coast Guard Station. There was a sharp right-hand turn. It was blocked. Two Pop Guard patrols were positioned behind their vehicles like police staffing a barricade at the end of a long chase.

  Sally braked hard again. She slipped the truck into reverse and started driving backward along Murray. With the rearview mirror useless and Marcus’s side view shattered, she tried aiming the truck with the help of her side view. The truck wove backward.

  Bullets from high-powered rifles peppered the hood, clinking off the metal and fiberglass. Rounds thunked into the windshield. Marcus leaned out his window again and returned fire, more for cover than anything else.

  In the rear seat, facing the opposite direction, Dallas opened fire on a new threat. A large passenger van was barreling toward them. They were trapped. Then Sally swung the wheel wildly, and the truck, almost tipping onto its side, made a left-hand turn in reverse and headed north on Rutledge.

  The respite was short-lived. They were trapped again when the van made a right. Behind them, at the next intersection, was another blockade. They were caught. There was no avoiding it.

  Sally stopped the truck and slid it into park. She looked over at Marcus, her eyes wide. There was something in them that apologized for not finishing the job. Marcus saw the familiar haze of pain and loss in her eyes when she opened her mouth to speak.

  Then a bullet slapped into the side of her head. Her body jerked awkwardly and she slumped against the open driver’s window, the back of her head banging against the sill. The truck’s engine idled at a low purr. Sometimes people didn’t get happy endings no matter how much they deserved them.

  CHAPTER 29

  APRIL 22, 2054, 6:50 AM

  SCOURGE +21 YEARS, 7 MONTHS

  CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

  The sudden death of their conductor startled Marcus. Instinctively, without fully processing what had happened, he swept the weapon toward the spiderwebbed windshield.

  The van was stopped in front of them, its passenger-side door open. A man in a leather duster stood behind it, a rifle leveled at the truck, at Marcus.

  “Weapons out. Then everyone out,” he said. “Now.”

  “What do we do?” a
sked Dallas.

  Marcus glanced at Sally’s limp body slumped awkwardly in her seat, her mouth agape, her shirt bunched at her waist. He said a silent prayer for her. Although he hadn’t prayed in a long time, it felt right.

  “We do as the man says,” said Marcus. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  “The hell we don’t,” said Lou.

  “Lou,” Marcus said, “you have to think of your kids.”

  “I am thinking of them.”

  “Toss your weapons from the truck,” said the one in the duster. “Do it now. Then get out. I’m giving you until five. Then I’m—”

  Marcus tossed his weapon through the window. It bounced off the asphalt into the sandy dirt beside the road. Dallas did the same on the opposite side of the truck.

  The duster-wearing soldier stood up taller behind the open door. He lowered the barrel, angling it downward as if it were the lever that pushed him higher in his stance. Another man, bigger in frame and in a Pop Guard soldier’s uniform, opened the driver’s door and stepped from the van.

  “That can’t be all of ’em,” said the soldier in charge. “Two handguns? Doubt it.”

  His voice carried in the warm air. It was resonant, controlled, the voice of a man who was used to giving orders. Marcus had listened to a lot of men and women in his time who affected the same verbal posture. There was something psychological about the way they issued commands.

  “My hands are empty,” said Marcus. He raised both of them, fingers spread apart. “We’ve got more weapons. There are rifles in the bed.”

  Keeping his rifle aimed on Marcus, the soldier on the driver’s side said something to his commanding officer Marcus could hear but didn’t understand. It was spoken softly enough that it sounded like a murmur of slurred words. The commander nodded.

  “I want all of you out,” said the one in charge. “There are two men?”

  Marcus nodded. “Yes.”

  “Men first,” said the man in the duster. “Slowly, hands where I can see them. You first, then the one in the back.”

  Marcus kept one hand up and opened the door with the other. He nudged it wider with his shoulder and stepped from the truck onto the road. His hat was on the floorboard. It had fallen from the dash during their failed attempt to avoid exactly what was happening now.

  The soldier in charge tilted his head to his right, Marcus’s left. He jutted his chin in the same direction. “Step to the side,” he said, “away from the truck.”

  Marcus did as he was told. He sensed the presence of more weapons aimed at him. He glanced behind him. He was right. Two Pop Guards stood about fifty feet back. They had him in their sights.

  On the opposite side of the truck, without waiting for instructions, Dallas did the same thing. He opened the door, stepping away from the truck. Fingers spread, he held his hands high above his head.

  Marcus shrugged. “Now what?”

  The man in the duster tossed his rifle into the front of the van and slammed shut the door. The whack of metal on metal echoed.

  At his sides, his fingers flexed in and out, in and out. It injected Marcus with the same shot of adrenaline he’d absorbed in the moments before gunfights on the streets of Baird. The young gun would wiggle his fingers, flex his hands, as if he were engaged in some peacock ritual before mating.

  Marcus couldn’t help but smile at the showmanship as he strode forward. His posture was straight, shoulders back, but he walked with an unmistakable swagger. This man not only issued orders, he carried them out. He was the kind of alpha male that Marcus both appreciated and loathed. Maybe that combination of emotions was because Marcus recognized it in himself.

  The soldier stopped in the center of the road and set his booted feet shoulder width apart. He whipped back the duster, revealing a revolver at one hip. A thick leather gun belt sat cockeyed on his waist. Despite the seriousness of the dire situation facing them, Marcus couldn’t help himself.

  He snickered, immediately pressing the smile flat, and sucked in his breath. No need to poke the dragon.

  The man flexed his hands. A brow arched questioningly above one eye. “Something funny?”

  “No.”

  He pursed his lips into a pout, nodded slowly, and motioned toward the truck. “I’m Captain Greg Rickshaw. Population Guard. But I guess you knew that second part.”

  Marcus didn’t respond.

  “Followed you here from Atlanta,” he said. “You’re the ones who rushed out of Gladys’s place, right?”

  Marcus’s silence answered the question.

  “Two women?”

  Marcus nodded.

  “Leave the women out of it,” said Dallas. “Take us. Let them go.”

  “Quiet, Dallas.” Marcus looked over the top of the truck at him. “Not now.”

  Dallas frowned. He looked away from Marcus and eyed the ground.

  A smile curled on Rickshaw’s face. He shot a look at the soldier on the other side of the van. “How gallant,” he said. “Isn’t it gallant?”

  The soldier nodded, although Marcus sensed a hesitancy in the soldier, like there was something he didn’t like or didn’t trust.

  “We all know the women are why we’re here,” said Rickshaw. “More to the point, the women and their children are why we’re all here. Frankly, I could shoot you dead in the street and it wouldn’t affect anything. It wouldn’t even be a ripple in a pond, a flap of a butterfly’s wing.” His gaze shifted to Marcus. He lifted a hand and held up four fingers. “Two children and two infants?” It was more of a statement than a question.

  Marcus nodded. “Yep.”

  “I want the women out of the truck,” he said. “Again, one at a time. Hands up and such.”

  “They’re holding babies,” said Marcus.

  Rickshaw sucked in a deep breath. His nostrils pinched when he did. He nodded slowly, mulling over the next step. “That’s fine. It keeps their hands full. They can’t do much with an infant in their arms, now can they?”

  “I guess not,” said Marcus.

  Rickshaw lifted his right hand, palm up, then curled his fingers inward, motioning for the women to get out of the truck and move toward him.

  “What about the older children?” asked Marcus.

  “We’ll deal with them in a moment. This is my rodeo, cowboy, so hold your horses.”

  Clenching his jaw and resisting the urge to say or do something he’d regret, Marcus nodded. He pivoted. The heel of his boot ground against the road. Through the cracked windshield, he looked past the slumped body of their conductor and locked eyes with Lou.

  She nodded and said something to Andrea, who shook her head, her stressed features pinched with resistance. Lou remained calm, her flat expression evident through the glass.

  “They might want to hurry,” said Rickshaw. “I ain’t got all day.”

  Marcus turned away from the truck and toward Rickshaw. He flashed a smile. “If this isn’t your first rodeo, then you know it can be tough to get a bull through a gate. Give it a minute.”

  Rickshaw stiffened, flexing his hands at his sides. His fingers clenched into fists and relaxed.

  Behind Marcus, the doors creaked open. He dragged his glare away from the sadist and fixed it on his friends.

  From one side of the truck, Lou slid out and found her footing behind the rear passenger door. Andrea was a mirror image on the driver’s side.

  Behind them, the Pop Guard soldiers positioned at the blockade lifted their aim. They tracked both women independently.

  Marcus stood still. He said nothing as the women met each other at the front of the truck.

  Dallas whispered something to his wife. She offered him a weak smile but kept moving past him. Dallas looked like he wanted to run after his wife, but his better judgment held him in place and forced him not to do something stupid.

  “Bring the babies here,” said Rickshaw. “I got car seats in the back. I’m gonna need you to strap them in for me.”

  He held out his ha
nds and wiggled his fingers. It reminded Marcus of a cheerleader in the late twentieth century. Spirit fingers? Was that what they were called? He’d never been much for cheerleaders. Yeah, they were athletic, but he could never get how they could smile and drive pom-poms into the air in support of a team down twenty with less than a minute to play.

  “I’ve got a little arthritis,” said Rickshaw. “Makes it difficult for me to work the tiny buckles and straps.”

  The women exchanged looks. Andrea hesitated. Lou nodded at her and the two of them walked forward, shoulder to shoulder.

  From the truck, one or both of the boys whimpered. One of them called for his mother.

  The women marched deliberately, step by step, toward the van in front of them. As they approached Rickshaw, he held up a hand.

  “Whoa, slow your giddyup.” He shifted to look at Marcus. “Did I say it right, cowboy?”

  Marcus tightened his jaw. He balled his fists. His fingernails, which he’d meant to trim before leaving his home in Virginia, dug into the calloused flesh of his palms.

  Andrea was trembling. Even standing still, she wasn’t standing still. Marcus knew the woman was brave. She was strong. But everyone had a breaking point and Andrea was obviously nearing hers.

  “Let me see the child,” said Rickshaw. He extended his arms and stepped closer to Andrea. “I’m not gonna hurt it.”

  Andrea curled her shoulder inward, her hold on the child tightening. She shook her head.

  “I’m not asking,” said Rickshaw.

  “Take mine,” Lou said. “You can hold mine.”

  Rickshaw studied both women. He stepped to the side and faced Lou.

  “Lou,” said Dallas, “what are you doing?”

  Lou handed Rickshaw the child. “He’s a boy. He’s strong. He’ll be a good soldier someday.”

  “Perhaps,” said Rickshaw.

  He took the child with both hands. But instead of cradling him, he scooped him under his arms and held him up with his legs dangling. The wrapped fabric that swaddled the child fell away. The baby was nude. He kicked his legs and started to cry. His pink skin reddened except for the skin around Rickshaw’s fingers; it was blanched white.