Janson had once been friends with dozens of men and women in Hillcrest, and the thought of them facing off with an angry mob of terrorists sent a chill down her spine. But what could she do? Even with all of her strength, she was only one woman. She wouldn’t stand a chance against the thousands of terrorists lining the streets of Baltimore.
As the anchorman began to criticize the president for letting an American city fall into such chaos, Janson’s thoughts turned inward. An inner voice accused her of lying to herself. And it was right. In truth, it wasn’t the angry mob that was keeping her away from Hillcrest; it was her own shame.
When Jarrod Hawkins had killed the one man she truly loved, she had allowed herself to be consumed by rage. And in her quest for revenge, she had accidentally shot and killed a dear friend. Eli Graham.
Eli’s ghost still haunted her every day. She hated closing her eyes for fear of seeing his lifeless face. She hated silence, knowing the quiet would bring Eli’s last words to her ear You aren’t…you. But you can be…again. I pray to God…you will be again.
She couldn’t face her old friends. Not anymore. To see Eugene, San, Kacen, Nicole, Yuri, and the others would be to subject herself to constant flashbacks of what she had done. Even if they could find it in their hearts to forgive her, she could never forgive herself. For these reasons and a thousand more, she was better off on her own. She—
A sudden silence pulled her from her reverie. She tilted her head to listen and could hear the hearts of everyone around her beating faster than they had moments before. And the voice of the anchorman was gone.
Janson pushed away from her table and wandered toward the center of the restaurant where the television was mounted to the wall. She stood among a dozen other patrons who were staring at the flickering screen.
An icy blade pierced her ribcage and froze her heart when the flickering stopped and a face appeared. The silence in the restaurant deepened until it felt as if she was standing on the surface of the moon. Then the face on the television began to speak.
“People of the world, hear me, for I am your only hope.”
Janson’s mind raced as she tried to figure out how Katharos could have hacked into the live broadcast of a cable news network. Then the face’s next words nearly dragged her into unconsciousness.
“My name is Borya Tabanov…”
Her knees buckled, and she steadied herself by gripping the edge of a table. It was impossible—she had seen Borya’s underground fortress disintegrate into a cloud of ash. With him inside. This had to be a trick. But the fact that Katharos still had the capability to hijack a news feed made her skin crawl.
She forced her focus back to the present and listened to the disembodied head. Most of the speech sounded like environmental doomsday predictions that she had heard on the news for years, but then the face started talking about weapons of mass destruction and a fusion bomb that was destined for a city in Middle America.
And just like that, the face was gone.
“I knew it,” a man at the bar said. “It’s the friggin apocalypse. The end times, man.”
His partner shook his head. “It’s just the terrorists trying to scare us.”
“Yeah? And what’s the point of that?”
“To damage the economy. If everybody is scared to go outside, then nobody is buying anything.”
“You’re full of crap,” the first man said. “Don’t you see what’s happening? The whole world is falling apart.”
Soon, the restaurant was as loud as a football stadium with patrons voicing their opinions about the speech that the face had delivered.
Janson calmly strode over to the buffet, loaded two more plates with food, and returned to her table. There was no point in joining the hysteria. It surprised her that Katharos still had the capability to hack into a nationally televised feed, but she knew everything in the speech was a bluff. The only fusion bombs in existence were under the strictest security imaginable, and there was no way that the remnants of Katharos could get their hands on one.
She plunged her fork into a pile of scrambled eggs and lifted it toward her mouth. But before she could take a bite, the entire restaurant was filled with blinding light. Pain stabbed into her retinas, and screams echoed through the building.
Janson blinked twice, adjusting her synthetic eyes to view the world in the infrared spectrum.
The restaurant had erupted into chaos. People were running for the door, clamping their palms over their eyes, or pointing at something in the distance. Janson shoved her way to the nearest window and looked outside.
Her stomach twisted, and she had to swallow vomit that pooled in the back of her throat.
In the distance, miles and miles to the southwest, a column of smoke was climbing into the stratosphere.
They had done it. Katharos had detonated a thermonuclear weapon in the heart of Chicago. Which meant millions of people had been vaporized in an instant. Men, women, children…the elderly and the young. Good people and evil people alike had been sentenced to death. And millions more would die in the coming days, weeks, and years due to radiation exposure.
The throng took on a mind of its own as customers made a mad rush for the door. Janson watched the unfurling cloud for several more seconds, buffeted by the people around her but remaining on her feet. Then a toddler’s cry brought her back to reality.
Eighty-nine people were all trying to fit through the same pair of doors at the same time. When the people in front realized this was impossible, they began to elbow and shove each other. A woman landed on her back, starting a fight between two men. And in their midst, a child was about to be trampled.
“Enough!” Janson shouted, loud enough to be heard over the swelling chaos.
The sudden shout gave less than a second of pause to the panic-stricken crowd, and they began to fight once more.
The crying child—a little girl with her hair pinned into twin buns—sat on the floor and cried for her mother. A man, pushed by someone behind him, stumbled and stepped on the toddler’s hand.
The child screamed, but her cries were drowned out by the noise.
Then a middle-aged man, whose only crime was that he stood in Janson’s way, was flying across the room. She shouldered her way to the little girl, lifted her up, and held her close to her chest. With her free hand, she shoved the largest, angriest man within reach, knocking him flat on his back. Then she drew one of her pistols and aimed it at everyone around her.
The effect was instantaneous. The sight of a woman holding a child with one hand and a gun with the other was like a powerful sedative; people stopped fighting and fell silent, watching Janson with their hands outstretched as if to fend off the potential spray of bullets.
But Janson didn’t pull the trigger. Glaring at the people encircling her, she said, “Whose child is this?”
A woman stepped forward, thanked Janson, and took the crying child away. When the woman had been absorbed back into the crowd, Janson drew her other pistol and leveled it. “Now. We are going to calmly exit the building. Women and children first. If anyone, and I mean anyone tries to start another fight…” She moved closer to a man who was bleeding from his nose and pressed the barrel of her pistol against his forehead. “I will put a bullet in your brain. Got that?”
The man at the other end of her pistol swallowed and gave her a shaky nod.