What am I doing?
He lowered the rifle a few inches and squeezed his eyes shut in frustration.
Protecting family.
If she reached the underpass, they faced the possibility of a coordinated, concerted militia effort to kill them at the bridge. He hadn’t asked for any of this shit. He should have been able to drive his car to pick up the kids without anyone stopping him or trying to kill him, but that hadn’t been the case, and that wasn’t his problem. Why should he be the one to pay the price for something that had nothing to do with him? They thought he was with the marines and decided to gun him down? Fuck them. The Liberty Boys decided to shake down the citizens and turn them into informants.
Not my problem.
He reacquired the target and started to squeeze the trigger.
“Damn it!” he screamed, unable to shoot.
The woman jumped out of the street, continuing her run on the sidewalk, mostly obscured from sight. Alex turned to find Ryan and Chloe standing in the middle of the street, staring blankly at the fleeing woman.
“Dump the backpacks! We go straight for the bridge!”
Chapter 18
EVENT +57:55
Westbound Lanes, Massachusetts Turnpike
Boston, Massachusetts
The first Liberty Boys appeared exactly where he predicted. A raised concrete section interrupted the turnpike’s featureless metal guardrail, marking the underpass. At an approximate distance of three hundred feet, he’d barely spotted the break using his 4X ACOG sight. The men materialized at the eastern edge of the anomalous concrete segment. He hoped the men that spilled onto the rain-swept highway carried the same type of unmagnified EOTech or Aimpoint sights he’d seen fitted on the militia ARs at Warren Towers.
“Run side by side and don’t stop. Find a place to hide. Looks like plenty of concealment. Go!” said Alex, slapping Ryan on the back.
He sighted in on the group, trying to settle on the target with the best chance of detecting the kids. The strategy was pointless, since they all faced his direction, apparently aware that Alex’s group planned to cross further down the turnpike. He could have delayed this if he had shot the woman. At that range, he could have put a bullet through one of her lower legs.
I will never hesitate again, he thought as he scanned for any signs that the Liberty Boys had seen them.
The kids crossed unnoticed, but by the time they traversed the highway, the militia group had covered enough ground that Alex could see their outlines without magnified optics. He should have followed his own orders and continued without stopping, but the figures appeared in his ACOG just as they reached the turnpike divider. He panicked and ordered the kids to take cover along the concrete barrier, overestimating the militia group’s detection range. He knew he’d screwed up as soon as they stopped. Now he faced a higher probability of discovery. It was time to switch from passive to active avoidance measures.
He braced the rifle’s vertical fore grip against the top of the cement barrier and centered the red arrow on the furthest target. The suppressed rifle kicked, dropping the figure to both knees as Alex snapped two hasty shots at the next man in line. While the men scrambled for the safety of the guardrail embankment, Alex hopped the divider and sprinted across the slick pavement. He reached the guardrail as his first target face-planted into the pavement.
Gunfire erupted to his left, but he didn’t hear the telltale snap and hiss of incoming bullets. A discordant volley of gunshots immediately responded from the other side of the turnpike, followed by an intense, unremitting fusillade of semiautomatic and automatic gunfire. He expected the foliage and tree trunks around him to explode with deadly projectiles, but the wall of steel never materialized.
They’re shooting each other! he realized.
Alex spotted the kids crouched behind a thick stand of trees at the edge of a chain-link fence. Ryan had his pistol drawn, peering around the trees at the dense brush to the east. A one-story red brick building peeked through the healthy shrubs along the fence. He slid down the ridge, scraping his backside on rocks or glass. Like his shoulder, he didn’t care to check. They didn’t have time for first aid. If it didn’t involve running or shooting, it could wait until they were on the other side of the Charles River. A pungent, brackish stench hit his nose, reminding him of the muck ahead.
“What happened up there, Dad?”
“They’re shooting at each other, but we need to keep moving. Must have been a shitload of them hiding out in the underpass. Follow the fence line right. Call out any targets. I’ll cover the rear until we break out of this,” huffed Alex.
He knew going right would bring them closer to the bridge, but it also put them on the wrong side of this building when the Liberty Boys figured out they had already crossed the turnpike. The volume of gunfire coming from each side suggested a squad-on-squad level engagement. They needed to avoid direct contact with elements of either group for as long as possible.
The shooting stopped by the time they reached the corner of the fence, which meant they were running out of time. He had to reach the bridge before the militia. Once on the bridge, the marines could provide heavy suppressive fire, enabling them to cross. The trick was getting his crew to the foot of the bridge. He’d estimated the distances using maps and GPS. They had to cover two to three hundred feet of open ground, slogging through thick mud, with a rifle and a pistol for defense. The only thing they had going for them at this point was the rain.
“Keep moving! When we get past the building, you make a straight line for the bridge. I’ll peel left and give you a buffer,” said Alex.
He took the lead and broke out of the tree line, running along the fence toward the parking lot next to the building. His boots sank well above the ankle, but emerged without the telltale sucking sounds that signaled painfully slow progress ahead. The rain hadn’t penetrated far enough to make this a complete disaster. A quick look inside the fence told him that it had once been a municipal pool. Mangled lawn chairs and plastic tables lay in a heap along the far fence. The pool must have been covered with a tarp, because he couldn’t tell where the pool started or stopped under the blanket of dark brown silt.
A red brick outbuilding stood between the embankment and parking lot, shielding them from view as they approached the street. Beyond the empty parking lot, Alex saw the outline of a wide traffic island containing several denuded, blackened trees. He led them through a gate into the parking lot and hugged the side of the building, approaching the street quickly but cautiously. There was no point making a run for the bridge if the Liberty Boys had set up a firing squad for them. He risked a peek around the corner and caught a glimpse of the street signals flanking the mouth of the bridge. A concrete Jersey barrier blocked the inbound bridge lane, but the barrier on the outbound lane was not in sight. He wondered if militia units had pushed the outbound barriers out of the way on all of the bridges last night. Something big was going down.
Tearing his eyes off their escape route, Alex scanned west along North Beacon Street for any signs of immediate trouble. He didn’t see any vehicles, which made sense given the potential difficulty of the mud. The militia’s quick reaction force for the North Beacon Street Bridge had most likely been positioned inside the underpass. He noted a concrete handicap ramp extending from the front of the municipal pool building to the sidewalk. A small staircase with thick metal railings sat in front of the ramp. The brick structure directly faced the bridge, making it a logical place for one of the militia observation posts. He’d have to deal with that first.