The Escape Page 9

  Home. Safety. As if Grand Central could be anyone’s home, or safe at all. When Annie first came to the camp, she wanted to believe everything Colonel Lanche said. Wanted to believe that he had the citizens’ best interests at heart—the citizens he was responsible for.

  For a long time, she believed what she was told. Didn’t question anything.

  Didn’t question when the rations got smaller, when the people became weaker. Too weak to fight anyone or anything.

  And then Emily escaped, and then Taryn was executed. After that, she couldn’t help but to question everything . . . at least in her mind. Not out loud, not yet.

  Too dangerous.

  “Tell me everything you know about Clarissa, and about Barker,” Lanche said softly, “and I will bring your friend back. We need your help, Annie.”

  “Okay,” she said, her voice shaking. She wanted to appear cooperative. “Clarissa is kind of tall, taller than me by several inches at least. Um, she has red hair, long red hair, but I think you know that already. She was my roommate on the Tracks.”

  Lanche sighed. “Good, thank you for all of that, but we need more. Where were you last night?”

  “In my subway car, with my leg elevated, because it’s still healing.”

  “Have you ever met Barker?”

  Should she lie? Tell the truth?

  Telling the truth as much as possible would probably be the best bet. She just couldn’t tell them that Barker told them Jenna was alive, or that he’d taken Clarissa willingly.

  Did they know that she’d gone of her own free will, or did they really think she’d been kidnapped?

  What if . . . What if something happened, and she really had been kidnapped?

  “Simple question,” Lanche said sternly. “Yes or no. Did you ever meet Private Barker?”

  “Sorry, sir, I was trying to recall. Yes, I’ve met him, but only once. He visited Clarissa on the Tracks.”

  “When?”

  “The other night.”

  “Really?” Lanche frowned. “It was just the other night, yet it took you so long to recall when it was?”

  “I haven’t been off the Tracks since I came back from the infirmary, sir. It’s hard to tell the days apart, that’s all.”

  “Tell me exactly what Barker said to you when you met him.”

  “He said, um . . . he said, ‘My name’s Private Barker. You must be Clarissa.’ And then Clarissa said she was, and he asked her to go for a walk. Then I fell asleep. That’s all I remember.”

  “Did you see him last night?”

  “Um, yes, he came by and took Clarissa for a walk, and I fell asleep.”

  The soldier looked at Lanche, above her head. “Sir, she told us that Clarissa was with her in the car when she fell asleep last night.”

  Fuck. Fucking hell.

  “I was mistaken. Now that Colonel Lanche asked me to tell him exactly what happened, I remember. Barker took Clarissa on a walk.”

  “Did she go with him of her own free will?”

  “She didn’t look happy, but she went, sir.”

  “Did she say what happened the first time Barker took her for a walk?”

  “No, sir, she’s not the type to tell me anything like that. Or anything at all, really. So I don’t know . . . anything.”

  Lanche frowned at her. “Did Barker have a gun with him?”

  “I don’t recall, sir. The soldiers always have their guns with them, right? But I can’t remember one way or the other.”

  Damn it. Maybe she should have said he didn’t have the gun, so they wouldn’t go after them trying to get the gun back.

  “Actually now that I think about it, no, he didn’t have a gun.”

  “That’s not what the guard said, the one who saw him leaving with the girl,” Lanche replied. “He said he had a gun and a pack.”

  “I don’t know anything about it, sir. I’m sorry, I wish I could help.”

  “Where would Barker take her?” Lanche asked. “Where did he take her the first time?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I assumed they had stayed inside the terminal since she didn’t say otherwise.”

  “I thought she didn’t tell you anything.”

  He was trying to trip her up. Fuck.

  “No sir, she didn’t tell me anything. Nothing at all.”

  “What’s wrong? Why are you sweating?” he asked. “Am I making you nervous?”

  Yes.

  “It’s just my leg, sir. It really hurts from being carried up here.”

  “Here,” he said, and she watched with cautious interest as he reached into a drawer, a locked drawer, and took out a bottle of something very dark and thick-looking.

  Lanche took a glass, an actual glass—something she wasn’t used to, since they all drank from metal cups—and poured what looked like four shots of the stuff into it.

  “Drink this. It’ll make all your pain go away.”

  It was a trick, she knew it was a trick. They were plying her with the alcohol, trying to loosen her tongue. But her leg was on fire, and she knew the drink would quench it.

  She took a sip. It burned her throat on the way down, but holy hell it was so good. She gulped the entire glass, already feeling woozy before she was even done drinking. The stuff worked quickly.

  “Why don’t you rest for a moment,” the Colonel said. He placed another chair in front of her. “You can put your leg up on this.”

  Why was he being so nice to her? He could be very nice when he wanted to be, the Colonel. Maybe he really did want to help . . .

  Don’t be fooled. Don’t be a sucker.

  With a groan, she put her leg up on the chair, grateful that the throbbing slowed. The room was wobbly around the edges, blurred. She blinked.

  “I may have . . . drank too much,” she laughed softly.

  “You rest. I have to see to something, and I’ll be back. We don’t want you to be in any pain, now do we?” Lanche smiled kindly

  (or maybe it wasn’t so kind)

  and left, leaving the soldiers standing watch over her.

  Maybe it was the drink, but she wasn’t afraid of them. And they didn’t try to touch her, or say anything. They just stood there. Not like she’d try to escape, not with her leg all messed up.

  Not while she was drunk off her ass.

  One of the soldiers was even kind of cute. The one who’d carried her.

  She woke up later, on the Tracks, still tipsy, with a piece of ration bread near her hand.

  Oh God.

  The Colonel had come back to talk to her, and she had been so intoxicated she couldn’t remember what she’d told him. She’d blacked out. Everything past the first few moments after taking the drink was fuzzy.

  Clarissa, wherever you are . . . I hope you’re far away.

  The Cross Bronx Expressway, Bronx, NY

  Barker was tired, but they kept walking. Only the image of his father’s boat kept him moving. His legs felt like jelly. In fact, he could barely feel them at all.

  They kept to the main roadways, mainly because they didn’t have a map to figure out a more direct route to the marina. It was frustrating having to walk north only to find the road curving south, but he didn’t want to lose his way.

  Of course, by being out in the open, on the major roads, it would also be easier for the Colonel to find them.

  They heard the rumble of a truck engine long before they saw it.

  “Hide,” he said quietly.

  Jenna grabbed Clarissa’s arm and pulled her down next to her, crouched behind a car. Only Jenna of the two of them had a gun.

  Barker slipped behind another car, to the right, and peered down the road, waiting to see the vehicle.

  If there was a car running, it could only mean one thing: the soldiers from the camp. They were the
only ones who had working vehicles.

  “Don’t shoot until you can see them clearly,” he said to Jenna, who nodded without looking at him. Her eyes, too, were fixated on the old pickup truck heading toward them, weaving in and around the stalled vehicles, driving on the shoulder, and sometimes even crossing all the way to the other shoulder to get through.

  The cars were, for the most part, in pretty normal linear order, although many had rolled or crashed when the power went out. So some cars were turned, partially blocking the road.

  That was good for Barker and the women, but not for the army guys. It slowed them down. But not enough for Barker to outrun a vehicle going easily forty miles per hour.

  “We’ll have to go on the offense,” Barker said. “I’ll shoot the driver first. Jenna, you shoot the guy in front.”

  “What if there are more? I think there are more,” Clarissa said, the fear evident in her voice.

  “I will fucking kill them all if I have to,” Barker said. His pulse pounded, adrenaline rushing through his blood like a drug.

  He focused his sight on the driver, who was moving the truck at a pretty steady pace, heading right toward them.

  “What if they don’t mean to kill us?” Clarissa asked.

  “They didn’t come looking for us just to say hi,” Jenna said, and raised her rifle. “And I will kill to protect us. I will.”

  Barker exhaled the way the Colonel had taught him to do, right before he pulled the trigger. The noise was deafening. And he’d missed.

  “Fucking hell. Fuck fuck fuck,” he said as two men from the back of the truck sprayed gunfire their way.

  But they couldn’t see him the way he could see them, and the car between them offered protection. Barker fired again, and this time, he hit the driver. The truck swerved madly as the man slumped forward in the driver’s seat, and the front passenger grabbed the wheel.

  A bullet whizzed by his head, so close he could feel the air pressure around his head change as it went by.

  Barker took aim, but it was harder this time, with the truck swerving. He shot and missed.

  Then a blast came from Jenna’s rifle, and the second soldier was down.

  “Got one,” she gasped.

  The truck hit a stalled car and two other soldiers jumped out of the vehicle, not bothering to even put it in park, and ran toward them.

  Barker switched the tab on his rifle from semi to full auto, even though he knew it would waste bullets. He pulled the trigger and held it, a spray of noise and bullets flying from the gun toward the men, but as far as he could tell, neither were hit.

  Fuck. He wasn’t used to shooting on full auto. The recoil was a bitch and he had no control. He switched it back to semi, took aim, and brought another soldier down. It was a chest shot, though, and he wasn’t sure if the guy was dead or just wounded.

  Barker looked over at Jenna, but she wasn’t there. She’d left her position when he was busy firing. Where the hell was she?

  A burst of rapid gunfire came from behind another car. Now he didn’t dare fire back, in case it was Jenna and not the enemy.

  “Die, motherfucker!” she screamed, and there was silence.

  No more gunshots sounded on the deserted road.

  “Jenna, are you hit?” he yelled.

  Please, God, let her be okay.

  He ran forward, hoping it wasn’t a trap, hoping he wasn’t running right into a soldier’s gun.

  But no. The soldiers, four of them, were dead. Two in the truck, two bodies on the road.

  “Jenna?”

  She looked up at him, rising from behind her hiding spot against a car tire. “I’m okay. You?”

  “I’m okay.” He ran his hands through his hair and his fingers came back bloody. “What the fuck?”

  “Oh my God.” Jenna ran toward him and touched his head. “You were shot in the head!”

  “No, I’m fine,” he said, but his scalp was bleeding. “Get Clarissa, make sure she’s okay.”

  “I’m fine,” Clarissa called, and she ran toward them. “I really need my own gun, okay? I need a gun. I’ll never point it at you, Barker, okay?”

  Barker tried to nod but he was feeling dizzy.

  “Shit, Barker, are you hit?”

  “Just a scratch. I must have hit my head.”

  Jenna looked at his wound carefully. “I’m not a doctor, but I think that the bullet grazed you. You’re missing some skin but . . .” She winced as she probed his wound, and he stifled a groan. “But it’s not deep.” she said.

  “I didn’t even feel it,” Barker said. “I mean, I thought that bullet missed me completely.”

  “A couple of centimeters’ difference and you’d be dead.” Jenna wiped her bloody hands on her pants. “Do you have a first aid kit in your pack?”

  “Check their truck,” he said, sitting on the pavement, leaning against a tire. “Take everything. The guns, the ammo, the packs. We need it all.”

  Jenna and Clarissa went to the truck, and Barker watched as Clarissa gingerly picked up one of the dead soldier’s guns and strapped it across her chest.

  “How did we just kill four trained soldiers?” Jenna asked in amazement.

  “We had the element of surprise. We saw them first, we were hidden, and we made the first strike,” Barker said. “That’s how.”

  Clarissa grabbed a roll of gauze out of one of the supply packs. “There’s nothing to clean the wound with,” she said. “Just water.”

  “Go for it,” he said, and laid back, his cheek resting against the pavement.

  The water burned worse than the initial shot did, as she poured it over his head, letting the blood sluice out onto the street. She stuck a bunch of gauze squares against it and wrapped his head with the roll.

  “How do you know how to do this?” he asked.

  “I learned it on television,” Clarissa laughed. “Before the Pulse. Everyone on TV needs someone to put pressure on a wound at some point, right?”

  He laughed, which hurt his head, so he stopped. “Thanks.”

  “We can take their truck,” Jenna said.

  Barker sat up slowly. “If we take the truck, what will we do when we get to the marina? Leave it there? What if they find it? They’ll know where we are.”

  “We should hide it,” Clarissa said. “Put the bodies in the truck and drive it off the road somewhere, so if they find it, it will throw them off our trail.”

  Jenna nodded. “Barker, you lie there and rest.” She handed him a canteen of water. “Hydrate.”

  Then, she leaned down and kissed his lips. “You scared the fuck out of me.”

  He smiled.

  He may have just had to kill men for the first time in his life. He may have been wounded by a bullet meant for his skull, but Jenna had kissed him, and somehow the day didn’t seem so terrible after all.

  * * *

  “Grab its legs,” Jenna told Clarissa. She’d rather refer to the man she’d just killed as “it,” not a person. Not his legs. It was just a body.

  They would have killed us. Why send out four men otherwise? To take care of them once and for all. Colonel Lanche didn’t care about questioning her. And as soon as Barker stole another gun and more supplies and escaped, Lanche had to know that Jenna was actually still alive.

  Working together, they put the two dead men

  (bodies. Just bodies.)

  in the back of the pickup truck, and moved the driver and the body in the front seat into the back too.

  “I can drive the truck by myself, and walk back, if you want. You can stay with Barker,” Jenna offered. But the thought of being in that truck, piled high with bodies, gave her the heebie-jeebies.

  “Unless you think he needs me to stay, I’ll come with you. So you have someone to walk back with.” Clarissa gave her a quick, strong hug. “Yo
u did really awesome back there. I don’t know if I would have had it in me.”

  “If you had a gun, you would have done it. When someone’s shooting at you, instinct kinda takes over, you know?” She gestured at the dead man’s gun strapped to Clarissa’s chest. “And now you have one. Just keep your finger off the trigger and the switch on Safe until you need it, okay?”

  “Got it.” Clarissa flipped the little lever from Semi to Safe and grinned. “Yikes.”

  The seats were covered in blood—the scent of copper and death filled the truck.

  “I don’t want to get in,” Jenna whispered.

  “So forget it, let’s just leave it. Let’s just go. They won’t go searching for the men for at least another day, and we’ll be on Barker’s boat by then.”

  Jenna shook her head. “We have to at least face it in a different direction, or hide it a bit.” She pointed to the cemetery off the side of the expressway. “Wait here. I’m going to drive it off the road into the cemetery.”

  Clarissa stepped back and Jenna got into the truck. She hadn’t driven in years. Even before the Pulse, she didn’t have a car. Didn’t need one in Manhattan. Last time she’d driven was in a rental car when she’d gone to her friend’s wedding in Atlanta.

  Her friend in Atlanta, and her husband . . . were they dead too?

  The car was still running. She had no idea how to work a stick shift, but she turned the wheel and pressed the gas, and the truck rolled off the side of the road, bumping hard as she ran over something. Fuck.

  She kept it moving, trying to turn the wheel as much as possible, to make the truck look like they were heading in the other direction. But the gravestones got in the way, so she stopped.

  She turned the key in the ignition and shut the truck off, and put it in park, trying not to touch the blood that seemed to cover almost every surface of the interior. Impossible.

  I need a bath. Fresh clothes. How can I keep walking when I’m covered in blood?

  Killing those men—what if, after everything she’d done, this was the thing that sent her to hell when she died?

  Please God, please know I had to do it.