The soldier nodded and jogged down the stairwell, passing the message down the line.
Napp turned and strode past the bony Warden, moving toward the exit. His mind conjured visceral images of the battle ahead, and he licked his lips. A fight with the infamous Agent Janson, he thought. This will truly be a sight to behold.
It wasn’t possible—and yet, there they were, two blocks away from Hillcrest. Thousands upon thousands of Wardens.
Janson backed away from the edge of the six-story parking garage and slumped against a rusty sedan. A chill crept down her spine and she wrapped her arms around her torso. They were Wardens, she was sure of it. The way they stood there, facing Hillcrest, not talking, not shifting on their feet, not scratching an itch. They just…stood there. But how could there be so many of them? And what chance did she have against a force that size?
She closed her eyes and let her head thump against the sedan’s side panel. It was hopeless, plain and simple. There was no way she could take on that many Wardens, regardless of how well armed they were. If they fought her with sticks and stones—or even with their bare hands—she would succumb to exhaustion before she could kill them all. Hillcrest, and everyone inside, was doomed.
Her synthetic eyes focused in and out, settling on a minivan at the opposite end of the fifth floor. She imagined a mother and father visiting downtown Baltimore before the apocalypse, loading their children into booster seats and passing out boxes of fruit juice. The world, though diseased in its dark corners, had been beautiful and innocent compared to her new reality. Compared to this.
Sighing, she pushed away from the car and rose to a crouch. She stayed low, moving toward the center of the garage where she could scrounge for food in the abandoned vehicles before making her retreat. There was nothing she could do for Eugene, Kacen, Yuri, Nicole, San, and everyone else in Hillcrest. She was a lone warrior without a country, a flag, an army, or even a wingman. But she could survive; every breath she took for the rest of her life would be an act of defiance against Borya and his empire of mind-slaves.
The third vehicle she checked had a bag of chips on the passenger seat and a half-empty bottle of soda in the cupholder. Swinging her left elbow, she cracked the side window and reached inside.
The chips were stale and the drink had gone flat, but she needed the sugar to fuel her escape. Once she had put some distance between her and the army of Wardens, she could search for something more satisfying.
A memory of Eugene teasing her for eating two heaping plates of food flashed before her eyes. She smiled as Eugene begged her not to eat him when she had finished her food. But the smile waned as her mind drifted to darker places. The last time she had seen Eugene, he had been condemning her for what she had done on the rooftop of Hillcrest, when she had tried to kill Jarrod in a misguided quest for vengeance. When she had accidentally shot and killed Eli, her closest friend.
She turned toward the street where the Wardens had gathered, ready to pour into Hillcrest. If Eli had still been alive, would she still decide to flee? Could she abandon him to death for the sake of her own safety?
Her shoulders sagged under the weight of shame. Not long ago, she would have gladly sacrificed herself for her friends. It was contemptible to even consider giving up on them now.
She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and returned to the edge of the parking garage. The Wardens still stood in neat columns, but they had turned to face a lone man who was standing on the wreckage of a burnt SUV. He shouted loud enough for her to hear the venom in his voice. Then he pointed toward the parking garage, directly at Janson. And ten thousand Wardens glanced over their shoulders to look at her.
Gasping, she ducked out of sight. Her heart pounded against her ribs, and she searched the garage for ways to fight back. Her rifle only had six rounds of ammunition left and would do nothing to slow them down. Against a force that size, even a two-ton bomb wouldn’t be enough.
Her eyes narrowed, and she reached out and touched the rusty sedan. Then, rising to her feet, she ran to a utility truck that was sagging on two flat tires. She tore the lock away from the truck’s silver toolbox and peered inside. Without hesitating, she snatched up a crowbar, a screwdriver, and a propane blowtorch.
She cast a glance toward the street; the Warden’s weren’t moving—yet. There was still time. She sprinted up the ramp to the top level and placed the blowtorch at the far end of the parking garage. Then, lowering her head, she dashed back inside and skidded to a stop beside the utility truck. Dropping to the ground, she shimmied under the truck and pierced the fuel tank with the screwdriver. Neon-green diesel fuel began trickling out, splashing against the concrete.
Janson ran out and repeated the process with fifteen more vehicles of different shapes and sizes, and soon the fumes were burning her lungs.
Coughing and covering her mouth, she leapt from the third floor onto the adjacent rooftop of an office building.
The Wardens were amassing into distinct groups—forming battle units. Janson ran onward and jumped to the next rooftop, clenching the crowbar in her hand.
Draw them away, she told herself. Get as many of them away from Hillcrest as you can.
She reached a building overlooking a large crowd of Wardens, then she took a deep breath and dropped to the ground. They raised their weapons—shards of glass, broken boards, kitchen knives, and pistols—and moved in to surround her.
Janson raised the crowbar above her right shoulder. She would not win this fight, and she knew it. But she would die surrounded by their miserable corpses.
22
Fairview Beach, Virginia
The Potomac River stretched out in front of Jarrod like a vast moat. Clouds of steam rose from his shoulders as he knelt by the shoreline, dipped his mouth into the brackish water, and drank.
The journey through the Carolinas and across Virginia had taken far too long. But every aircraft on the planet had been grounded by the high-energy particles raining down from the glowing sky, and most would never fly again. Jarrod had been forced to travel in a sturdy but outdated truck, pushing it to its limits. It broke down twenty miles past Richmond, and he’d been forced to run the rest of the way to the last great obstacle in his path: the bloated Potomac River.
Jarrod’s core temperature finally began to cool as his stomach filled with the ice-cold water. He wiped his mouth and sat back on his haunches, gazing into the distance and weighing his options. The bridges had all been taken over by Borya’s soldiers—men armed with weapons confiscated from a nearby naval base. It would be easy enough to fight his way through, but he couldn’t risk revealing his whereabouts to Borya’s puppets, who would immediately warn the standing army in Baltimore. Surprise was his best advantage, and he would not part with it lightly.
He dipped a foot into the water and frowned as it sank into a thick layer of mud. The genetic and chemical alterations that he’d endured in the depths of Hillcrest had given him many spectacular abilities, but a prowess for swimming was not among them. And, as he had grown bigger and stronger since the transformation, his buoyancy dwindled further. At best, it would take him an hour to swim across the river. At worst, he would sink to the bottom, suffocate, and remain there until the fish consumed his corpse.
Jarrod’s armored shoulders gleamed in the light of the pearlescent sky as he tilted his head to the sound of distant voices. Moving away from the riverbank, he crept toward the sound and rotated the light-refracting orbs in his armor to render himself invisible. The scrubby lowland vegetation gave way to an unkempt lawn around a pair of apartment buildings overlooking a sandy beach. At the far end of the beach, a rowboat tottered halfway in the water as a tan, athletic man pulled the bow onto the shore. A man with a stained t-shirt and bad teeth sat in the stern of the vessel, stowing the oars.