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Synopsis
THE BATTLE LINES ARE DRAWN
Scientist Emma Miller was the first American infected in the Pandoravirus pandemic, which triggers violent rages and sociopathic homicide. No longer fettered by morality or emotion, she has attracted millions of followers, both infected and uninfected. But is she America’s worst nightmare—or its only hope?
Emma’s twin sister Isabel and brother Noah struggle against the threats posed by rampant infection, deadly civil unrest, and desperate government measures. Their—and humanity’s—only chance for a future may lie in an alliance with Emma and her expanding community. Will it be peace between Infecteds and Uninfecteds, or eradication of one group by the other? While cities burn and social order crumbles, one family’s fight to survive will determine the future of civilization.
Praise for Eric L. Harry and Pandora: Outbreak
“Like Crichton and H.G. Wells, Harry writes stories that entertain roundly while they explore questions of scientific and social import.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Harry’s vision of an apocalyptic plague is as chilling as it is plausible. This masterful thriller will leave you terrified, enthralled, and desperate for the next entry in the series.”
—Kira Peikoff, author of No Time to Die and Mother Knows Best
“After a devastating epidemic that changes the very nature of humans, two sisters, an epidemiologist and a neurobiologist, hold the key to humanity's survival.”
—Library Journal
Release date: January 7, 2020
Publisher: Rebel Base Books
Print pages: 325
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Pandora: Resistance
Eric L. Harry
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY
Infection Date 61, 2030 GMT (4:30 p.m. Local)
“Dad, do I shoot?” Noah’s fifteen-year-old daughter Chloe whispered from the door on the opposite side of the barn.
A thirtyish man held a revolver to the head of a taller fiftyish woman in hospital scrubs and wearing a surgical mask. Noah and Chloe were unseen and only thirty yards from where the pair stood at the fence, but that was too far for Noah to see their eyes. The supposed female hostage’s hands were bound behind her, but…something wasn’t right.
“Dad?” Chloe said quietly while squinting into her assault rifle’s scope. “I think I got the shot.” Her mouth was open and her breathing steady, like their private instructors had taught. Her blond hair, cut short for the apocalypse, was pulled back from her face in a tiny ponytail by a blue band so that it didn’t spoil her aim.
Noah looked up at the turreted tower—a last minute addition while prepping for just this sort of confrontation—atop the main house forty yards from the barn. His wife Natalie had joined their thirteen-year-old son Jacob behind their two rifles.
“Dad?” Chloe asked. “Make a freakin’ call. Should we just give ’em some food? Or do I shoot? Jake and Mom are twice as far, and Mom…Your call.” Noah’s heart was pounding. His stomach threatened to cramp. He had to force his breathing past the bands of tension strapped around his chest.
“You’re runnin’ outta time!” the man with the pistol shouted toward Jake and Natalie. It sounded scripted; unemotional. That also described the man’s calm hostage, who scanned the house and, now, the barn. “She’s gonna git shot if you don’t hand over fifty pounds of food and/or ammunition.”
There it was. The passive voice. Not, “I’ll shoot her.” He’d lost his “I.”
“I think they’re both bad,” Chloe said in a voice warped by her press on her AR-15’s stock. “Something’s not right.”
“I got the shot,” Noah said quietly, which drew his daughter away from her sight. “Get ready.” His crosshairs danced across the man’s face, straying onto the torso and head of his captive. If the bullet clipped the metal fencing that diagonally crisscrossed his round, magnified view, it could deflect into the face of the woman. Or it could miss both and, if they’re legitimate, get her shot in the head by her supposed captor. Noah’s throbbing heart kept him from filling his lungs. His right hand took its orders from his right eye. The crosshairs traversed the man’s nose repeatedly. Each time his trigger finger added a feather’s weight. Now. Now. Now—
Bam!
The infected man’s head was flung backwards and he dropped straight to the ground past lifeless knees. Crosshairs don’t lie, his instructor had said.
The female hostage swung a pistol around and fired straight at Noah.
A bullet slapped the wall above him and clattered through the barn as Noah dove onto the chickenshit covered floor.
Noah heard three shots. He crawled back into the doorway with his rifle. The woman lay draped over the man. Neither moved.
Bam! The top of the woman’s head exploded. It was Chloe. “Just making sure.”
“Clear!” came Jake’s call in a voice breaking with puberty, or anxiety, or both. “Clear!” came Natalie’s call from beside him in the tower.
“Clear!” came Chloe’s high-pitched shout.
Noah saw no movement by the gate or in the downward sloping woods beyond the fence where the two bodies lay. “Clear!” He led his daughter on a stooped run back to the front door of the main house.
Natalie came down the spiral staircase to meet them—a mid-thirties version of their teenage daughter. “I missed her with my first shot.” She sounded pissed. “Fucking animals. They would never have left us alone. And trying to trick us. Use our emotions to…to kill and….” Natalie wrapped her arms around Chloe, hugging, kissing, and stroking her head. “I’m just so glad,” kiss, “that you’re both safe.” Kiss. Tears welled in her eyes, and she sniffed. “But I hit that bitch with my second shot. Motherfuckers.”
Noah nodded toward Chloe. “Natalie,” he said as softly as he could manage.
“What?” His wife was on an emotional rampage. “It’s kill or be killed, Noah. Don’t you forget that. Don’t you go…go wobbly on us.” Two people had just tried to kill her children. She turned to Chloe, but shouted up the staircase, “Jake! Listen up! There’s us. This family. And there are targets—everyone else—who you’ve gotta be ready to kill to protect us. This family. From now, till this is all over, if it’s ever over. Keep your weapons close and yourself ready. Always figure out how you’re gonna hit every single target around you, and be ready because situations can change in a split second.” She grew angrier by the word. “And there are people like those two vermin who need to be killed. Hold your head up, and get ready. Because this family is gonna survive. We can do this.”
She took off back up the spiral staircase. “Jake! Anything moving?”
“No.”
“Then keep your head down.”
“Then how do I know if anything’s moving?”
Noah turned to Chloe, who arched her eyebrows at her mother’s comments then sank onto the arm of the sofa. “What next?” she said, shaking her head. “I thought Infecteds were supposed to be, like, brain damaged or whatever. They tried to trick us. I didn’t think they were that smart.”
“Obviously they’re not smart enough,” her mother yelled downstairs. “Noah, what tipped you off?”
He thought for a moment. “The woman wasn’t terrified.”
The window in the living room exploded into shards. Noah and Chloe dropped to the floor. Both Jake and Natalie fired several shots. “You okay down there?” Natalie asked.
“Yeah. How many?”
“Can’t tell!”
More glass shattered. Noah crawled to the open door. Natalie called out to him to be careful as bullets peppered the front of the house.
“There are a coupla people!” Jake shouted. “Behind some bushes to the right of the barn! Their cover is bad! Say the word!”
“Wait for me!” Noah rose despite the sporadic fire and dashed past a crouching Chloe for the spiral staircase. He climbed the stairs to the Tower’s opening and crawled over to Jake and Natalie.
“They’re right there.” Jake enlarged the photo he’d taken on his iPhone and pointed toward a thick clump of foliage. His finger was shaking.
“Alright. On the count of three, we all get in a slit and start firing back at those bushes.” The shots were coming their way every few seconds, but seemed random. “Don’t hold back. Even if you miss it’ll force their heads down. Let it loose. Okay?”
Jake and Natalie nodded. Noah counted down. On the beat after he said, “One,” they all rolled into firing positions and began a steady stream of shots—one per second per person—until a man in a jacket holding a rifle began hopping downhill on one leg. Jake hit him squarely in the side, and he fell into the weeds.
A bullet slapped the stone six inches from Noah’s head, sending a spray of rock chips onto his face and a fine mist of dust into his eyes.
“There are more on the right!” Jake cried out.
Before Noah could object, Jake slithered over and began firing toward the small gate leading up to the hunting cabin. Noah and Natalie joined him, ignoring the questions from his daughter below asking what was happening. When Noah slipped his rifle through another slit, he saw a man grab the small gate and immediately jerk his hand back as he fell to the ground. The electric charge in the fence had done its thing.
As the man scrambled to his feet—Bam!—Noah’s 5.56mm round struck his center mass and he never rose again. Jake was plinking away at a woman who was literally hopping and weaving her way away from the gate as if dodging his shots. She fell and curled into a writhing ball. Uninfecteds, Noah thought. She felt pain. He fired at the targets—anyone not this family, just as Natalie had instructed—no matter their Pandoravirus status.
When a woman and a boy rose to flee, both fell. The woods were still, but for their writhing and moans of pain. Noah and Jake ceased fire. Natalie fired two shots. The first at the boy, and—as Noah and Jake watched in horror—the second at the uninfected woman, his mother, who crawled back for him. “Got ’em,” was all she said. She turned to Noah. “We need to talk about this. Downstairs. Jake, keep your head down. Use your phone.”
Sitting on the stairs leading down to the basement where the kids slept, Chloe demanded and got a recount of what had just happened. Everyone was hyper and cotton mouthed. Then Natalie said, “Chloe, your father and I need to talk.”
“About what’s going on? I wanta be here for that.”
“Chloe,” Noah began to explain, “there are some things your mother and I—”
“No,” his wife interrupted. “Let her stay.” They all sat on stairs just below ground level. “Jake?” Natalie shouted, looking up in his direction. “Everything quiet?”
“All clear,” he replied. “Just me and a bunch of dead people.”
“You’re gonna have to go clean that up,” Natalie told Noah. “Before…”
“What?” Chloe asked in the silence. “Before they start to smell or something?”
“It’s not just the smell,” Noah said. “Bodies carry diseases, not just Pandoravirus.”
“But it’s dangerous to go out there,” Chloe noted correctly.
“It’s even more dangerous not to,” Noah replied. “Patrolling, remember? We can’t let them settle in just outside the fence and take shots at us when we least expect them.”
“We can’t even move around the property anymore,” Natalie said. “I can’t get to the grow labs. Chloe can’t get to the barn. We’re trapped. And they know we have stuff. Food and ammunition, that’s what those first two wanted. How long, Noah?”
He had no idea what she meant. “How long till what?”
“How long can we hold out here? How long can we stay lucky?”
“Well…you gotta consider the alternatives, which are piss poor.”
“What are they? Our options?”
Chloe’s head went back and forth between her parents like at a tennis match.
“We could stick it out here, no matter how bad it gets. Or we could try to make ourselves useful to Emma’s new community and hope to avoid her deciding to eradicate all Uninfecteds. Or we can make a run for it.”
“Make a run for it?” Chloe asked. “Where?” But before anyone could answer, she said, “I’m down for that. Getting the hell outta here.”
Natalie and Noah were clearly undecided. And unlike their kids, they were exhausted from the responsibility. At least Noah was.
“It’s gonna be dark soon,” Natalie said. “Better clean up those bodies. Be careful.”
Chloe chortled. “Be careful. Just go outside the fence, bury a bunch of Pandoravirus-infected bodies, and fight off any attacks. But be careful.”
“You’re coming with me. Your mother and Jake will cover us.”
There were so many bodies that Noah had to use the little Bobcat to dig a trench. When the hole was getting deep enough, more shots rang out, but it was over almost as soon as he’d found good cover. “Two more!” Natalie called out from the Tower. Noah turned off the electric fence and had Chloe take cover beside the handle in the barn so that she could reelectrify it quickly. He then donned gloves and a mask and began dragging bodies through the gate to the mass grave. He tried not to look at them. But when he used the Bobcat to dump the first load of dirt into the trench, he saw—staring back up at him—the lifeless eyes of a woman wearing makeup and earrings. He quickly dug another trench to be filled with people to be killed later.
Chloe electrified the fence, trotted back across the yard to the main house, and joined Noah and Natalie on the floor in the foyer beneath the level of the windows. Broken glass covered the sofa and chairs.
“I vote we make a run for it,” Chloe repeated. “They’re gonna keep coming.”
“But out there,” her mother replied, “it’s just us versus them. No walls, no towers, no fence.”
“Chloe,” Noah said. “Why don’t you head downstairs and take a break?” He expected an argument. Instead, their teenage daughter crawled along the antique runner to the top of the basement stairs.
In the silence following, Noah said, “In answer to your question…no. I don’t think this is gonna work.” He shrugged. The sound of buzzing outside from the drone’s little electric motor confirmed that Jake was keeping an eye on things. “All this…” Noah said, feeling utterly defeated. “I don’t know what I was thinking. How I thought this might work.”
“Don’t you dare!” Noah looked at his wife with a start. “You don’t have the right to give up.” She was angry…with him. “You don’t get to quit. You have to fight…for us!”
As if on cue, Jake shouted down from the tower. “More on the way! I count four!”
From the basement, Chloe cried, “Ahhhh!” The footfalls of her boots were heavy on the wooden treads until she got down on all fours, struggling to keep her rifle slung over her shoulder.
Natalie was first off the floor with her rifle. She glared once more at Noah before he followed and both ascended the spiral staircase to join Jake in the tower.
* * * *
Things grew worse as the evening wore on. The number of near misses mounted. Sometimes, the smack of a bullet a foot away was noted by a “Jeez!” or a “Shit!”; other times, they were too busy returning fire. But each close brush with death left its mark on its would-be victim, and doubly on their parents. After darkness fell, the cumulative toll of the fear, adrenaline, and stress was written on all four faces of the Miller family.
In between assaults, Noah began to prepare. Down in the basement, he distributed among the four huge backpacks of all the food, water, ammunition, and camping and survival supplies that would fit. Several times, he completed the process only to find that the packs were far too heavy. Out came water and some food. In went ammunition. The net savings in weight, therefore, was modest. He tucked a few small bars of gold into his pack, but left in the safe $9 million worth at the last quote he’d heard before the exchanges closed.
Another attack began with several shots fired by Jake from the tower. Noah grabbed his rifle and, on the spur of the moment, a nylon sack filled with hand grenades, courtesy of his sister Isabel’s Marine boyfriend. He hit the stairs just as all hell broke loose. “Noah! Noah!” Natalie was shouting from the tower. “There are a lot of them!”
He had left Chloe crouching beside the open front door peering into the darkness.
“Lock that door and keep low!” Noah shouted, panting as much from the anxiety as from exertion as he climbed the spiral staircase. In the tower, he found Natalie and Jacob blazing away, and ducked as grit from the stone wall above their heads rained down with each shot fired in return.
“They made it to the fence behind the barn!” Jake took the time away from his rifle to shout. “They’ve got big bolt cutters. We don’t have a shot from up here!”
Natalie never stopped firing. She barely winced as her face lit with each blast from her AR-15. If only she were a good shot.
Noah knelt above his prone wife and took aim. The security lamps in the trees around the property began to explode and fall dark as the attackers shot them out but revealed their positions with muzzle flashes.
“Noah!” Natalie took the time to say while inserting a new magazine into her rifle with quivering hands. “They’re coming inside! There are too many of them!”
There was motion inside the barn. The second time Noah saw it, he squeezed off a round. The barn flickered with a half dozen shots that forced him down behind the crenelated tower wall. Stones behind them spat debris from new pockmarks.
“Chloe!” Noah called down the stairs. “Get away from the front wall! They’re inside the fence! If you see movement, shoot through the door or windows!”
“Okay!”
Too many rounds hit the tower to raise a head to return fire. Natalie, Jake, and Noah all lay flat under a rain of fragments shot loose from the walls and roof above them. Noah dragged the nylon sack over and extracted a smooth, round grenade. Jake and Natalie stared back at him in amazement. Natalie nodded her encouragement. He grabbed the first grenade and its handle—its spoon—firmly in his right hand, and had to pull with effort the metal pin, bent ninety degrees, out through its hole. The unrelenting fire his way made exposing himself even for a quick throw dangerous, but the barn was a long way away.
Noah readied himself. “Chloe, get down!” he called out. In what he perceived was a slight lull, he rose to one knee and put everything he had into a throw, grunting as he flung the grenade as far as he could toward the barn. He dropped back to his belly and reached for another grenade.
The brief but shocking blast was of a higher order of magnitude than the firearms, even the shotguns, and it must’ve been triply stunning to the people in the barn, whom it silenced for a moment.
Noah threw another. From his high vantage, he saw it bounce once and skitter into the dark structure, which exploded in light and flame and boiled with smoke. Noah even heard a distinct scream. He grabbed another and, with less fear of being shot, hurled a third grenade, which again bounced inside. It burst with a chest thumping thud, and the barn became consumed in fire. “They’re running!” Jake said.
Natalie, Jake, and then Noah resumed firing. But they weren’t all running away. A few crossed from the barn toward the house. Most didn’t make it. One or two did. “They’re downstairs!” Natalie said, terrified, as the guns all fell silent. “Be careful.” Noah nodded and crawled toward the spiral staircase.
At the bottom, in the darkness, Noah got a wave from Chloe, who had taken cover behind a plush armchair in the living room opposite the double storm shutter clad windows. The twin sheets of metal were filled with holes, and bright light from the remaining security illumination and the fire in the barn shone through them like flickering stars. Noah heard Natalie ask Jake in a whisper if he saw anything, and Jake’s reply of, “Nuh-uh.”
Noah aimed his rifle at the front door. Propped up beside it, however, was the shotgun and, in a crouch, he went to get it.
“Dad. Dad!” came Chloe’s breathless whisper.
He returned to the living room in a crawl and she pointed at the windows. The light from holes was extinguished one by one as a human form pressed against the shutters and tried to peer into the room.
Quickly, before the form could disappear, Noah raised the shotgun, flicked the safety off, took aim at the target’s chest, and pulled the stiff trigger.
The roar and brilliant flash of the gun overwhelmed his senses to such an extent that he missed the recoil and only felt the pain in his shoulder when he coughed from the smoke. A tightly packed pattern of holes admitted even more light through the shutters where the attacker’s chest had been.
There was another, single shot from the tower. “Got him!” Natalie called out, presumably felling the last of the fleeing attackers. The blaze from the flaming barn danced across the living room walls. The apocalyptic light show in their darkened refuge’s living room made it official. Time to go, Noah now knew for sure.
Chapter 2
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY
Infection Date 63, 2145 GMT (5:45 p.m. Local)
Emma Miller approached the ranch style home warily. At her side was Fred Walcott, the cowboy hat wearing local sheriff. Hiding in the thick woods were Emma’s former roommates at the NIH hospital in Bethesda—Dwayne Bullock, a Marine Lance Corporal and former Beijing embassy guard, and Samantha Brown, the slender twelve-year-old with every strand of her long blond hair in place. Her father had been the U.S. ambassador to China when she and then Dwayne had caught SED—Severe Encephalopathic Disease—from infection by Pandoravirus horribilis. Emma made sure Sam was behind cover. She was too high functioning an aide to lose. Not so Dwayne’s small militia of ragtag Infecteds—dullards all—who awaited orders to attack.
“That’s far enough!” shouted the potbellied man in the front doorway maybe twenty yards away. He was obscured by the screen door and framed in the darkness of the home behind him, but it was clear that he held a long gun.
Walcott obviously knew the man. “Randy, we’re goin’ around, spreadin’ the word that there have been some changes in town.”
“What kinda changes, Sheriff?” There was a smaller figure beside him—Randy’s wife, Emma surmised.
“Well, the virus came through,” Walcott replied. “There was some trouble, but it’s mostly passed. This young woman here, Dr. Emma Miller, is in charge now.”
There was a brief, whispered exchange behind the screen door. “Who put her in charge?”
“I have a proposal to make,” Emma called out. “If you agree to abide by the Rules, we can all work together and survive.”
“Who’s we?” Randy asked, now pressing against the screen.
“The survivors,” Emma answered. “In this area.”
There was more whispering. “Are you infected?” came their next question. Emma caught Walcott’s questioning glance before she simply nodded. Randy stepped back into the shadows. The only thing they could see clearly now was the muzzle of his weapon. “Git the hell off my prop’ty, Walcott! What the hell do you think yer doin’ here?”
Walcott shrugged, and turned to leave until Emma said, “This is your last chance!”
They waited on more debate in low but urgent tones. Finally, Randy said, “What does that mean?”
“If you don’t join us, you’ll run out of food and supplies and try to come and take them. We can’t wait for that to happen. You’ll be a danger to the community. So, we’ll have to kill you all,” she said simply and honestly. They might as well have all the relevant information before they made their decision.
There were full-on arguments now from inside the house. “There’s a bunch of ’em in there,” Walcott said softly. He was fidgeting and growing increasingly anxious.
“Breath in through the nose, and out through the mouth,” Emma advised.
The door opened. Walcott flinched. Emma caught his hand before he drew his pistol. With parting arguments cast over their shoulders, four people emerged—a couple and a young boy and girl—and rapidly approached the infected emissaries, but not too closely. “We’ll join up,” the woman said.
“You’ll agree to abide by the Rules?” Emma asked.
The woman’s husband began to whisper something, but the woman gathered her two children into her arms and said, to Emma and Walcott, “You’ll treat us fair, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Emma said. “The Rules will be clear. If you follow them, there will be no punishment and your needs will be taken care of to the maximum extent possible. If you break the Rules, however, the punishment could include death.”
The woman’s husband shot her a look. But his wife hugged her son and daughter to her as if they were human shields. “We agree.”
Walcott directed them off toward the flatbed of a pickup truck, politely keeping his distance and leaving them in the open air with the two other Uninfecteds who’d agreed so far. They exchanged nods of greeting but said nothing and stared at their feet.
Emma and Walcott met Dwayne by the highway. “I can’t tell how many are in there,” Emma said.
“Should I ask those people who just left?” Dwayne replied.
“No. Let’s not put their loyalty under too much stress yet. As a matter of fact,” Emma said, turning to Walcott, “have your deputy drive them into town before we kill everyone in that house.”
Walcott gave the orders. The pickup departed with its wide-eyed Uninfecteds. “It still makes sense,” Walcott said, “to just infect ’em all. I don’t trust ’em otherwise.”
“And you trust Infecteds?” Dwayne asked.
“Infecteds will kill ya at the drop of a hat,” the sheriff replied, “but they’re not as devious. I never know what Uninfecteds are thinkin’. Plannin’. Infecteds are simple. They ain’t plannin’ nothin’.”
Emma was ready with what was becoming her stock reply to the suggestion that Uninfecteds all be forcibly infected. “Half would die, and we’re already short of manpower and skills. Plus, you’ll be surprised at how useful the Uninfecteds will be. They’re industrious and innovative.”
“And devious,” Walcott repeated.
“So don’t trust them. But also don’t trust Infecteds. Follow the Rules and be fair about them, and we’ll end up with the right population after a while. Now, kill them all.”
Dwayne organized the attack. Four men crept toward the house holding Molotov cocktails. Three lit rags protruding from beer bottles and hurled them onto the roof of the one story house. The fourth man had trouble with his lighter. By the time he rose from behind a wood pile to throw his bottle, he was shot from a window.
Randy sat in the gasoline flames spreading from the bottle he’d dropped. He emitted no shouts of pain. He didn’t flail his arms and legs in panic. His clothes and skin quickly blackened and drooped from his seated frame before he toppled over dead.
The roof was ablaze. Smoke poured like an upside down waterfall out the upper few inches of the front doorway, and began escaping open windows all around. Emma checked her watch. They should be able to get to a couple more houses before dark.
The screen door burst open as the coughing man from before rushed out. He swiveled his shotgun left and right, but he was squinting through watery eyes and couldn’t find a target. A rapid succession of single shots riddled him as his gun boomed and a tree branch dropped to the ground next to his body. A woman appeared, hands raised in surrender, with a young child clinging to her legs. They were easy shots. There was more shooting from the rear of the house as its other occupants fled straight into Dwayne’s people. It was over in minutes.
When Dwayne approached Emma, she said, “Maybe we shouldn’t do it this way. Burning down a perfectly good building, probably filled with supplies, just to get at the people inside seems wasteful. See if you can figure out another way to flush them out.”
Dwayne asked Walcott how much tear gas he had during their walk to the trucks for the short trip up the highway to the next house. Samantha had marked it on her map with a big capital “I” for Infecteds.
Chapter 3
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY
Infection Date 64, 2215 GMT (6:15 p.m. Local)
Isabel Miller was totally exhausted; a fact she denied with an increasingly fake smile every time Rick Townsend asked if she needed a break. She wasn’t one of Captain Rick’s Marines, so he had no idea what her limits were. Nor did she, but Isabel understood that the harder they pushed themselves, the sooner they’d catch up with her brother Noah and his family, who had fled their compound just before Isabel and Rick arrived.
The tree-lined highway along which they trudged shrank over the hours from a ribbon of asphalt many miles long, to a stretch of pavement no further than the crest of the hill ahead. Beyond that, she could see neither the road nor the dangers that awaited them.
Her long brown hair was matted by sweat and slowly coming loose from its tight bun just beneath her Kevlar helmet. Her spine felt like shattered glass from the heavy pack she carried but seemed ominously to be falling numb. Her feet, knees, and shoulders ached, and her thighs burned. Her hands flirted every so often with a quiver. The evening air was growing chilly, but in body armor and boots she produced heat that even damp camouflage clothing couldn’t shed. Sweat poured down her face, her ribcage, and in the little valley in the small of her back. Still more worrisome, despite the sweat she felt the onset of chills like the first warning of a fever but more likely the first symptom of physical collapse. She had to will herself to take each step like in the unnatural gravity of some supermassive planet.
All conversation had finally halted. Gone were the little personal trivia games of earlier in the day. “Okay, here’s something you don’t know about me,” she had said cheerfully. “I always sneeze twice. Not once. Not three times. Twice.” Now, Isabel set her sights in silence on objects ahead. A bare white trunk of a rotten tree. A yellow road sign warning drivers of a junction. An abandoned, rusting junker in the roadside ditch. She plodded along until reaching those bite-sized milestones, then found another.
When Rick stopped, dropped his pack beside the road, and knelt amid some litter, Isabel grew annoyed. She had told him she didn’t need a break. He was manufacturing one nonetheless. If Isabel took her pack off and sat, she knew she wouldn’t rise again.
“Come on!” she snapped. Rick raised the trash and sniffed. Isabel rolled her eyes. “Seriously? Are you from some lost tribe of green-eyed Wisconsin dairy farmers?”
“These are MREs. Five of ’em. Still fresh.”
“You think it’s theirs?”
“No soldier worth his salt would’ve eaten a meal right on the side of a highway.”
“They’re tired.” Isabel set her sights on the toppled tra
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