His heart rate started to increase, followed by heavier breathing. None of this made sense. Either the government had purposely ignored incoming reports, or they hadn’t received them. Either scenario carried chilling implications. Staring at the starry sky through the moonlit branches, Charlie couldn’t shake the image of a sky blanketed with Chinese paratroopers. It beat the other image; a convoy of heavily armored DHS vehicles rolling into town.
Chapter 5
EVENT +47:45
Brookline, Massachusetts
Alex low-crawled along the hedge, fixated on reaching the corner of the narrow yard. Traversing over one hundred fifty feet of dew-covered grass along the apartment building’s frontage had left him soaked. He arrived at the corner and lowered his head into the wet grass, thankful that the low hedge still held enough leaves to provide adequate concealment from the intersection. The cool, damp clothing felt refreshing against his skin. He’d spend a few minutes lying prone and taking in the ambient sounds at the intersection before poking his head over the bushes to confirm the road was clear.
The GPS receiver told him Stedman Road emptied into Harvard Road, but it couldn’t know that the intersection rated a stoplight. He’d taken pains to detect and avoid traffic signals, having spotted militia patrols hidden at two major intersections in the past mile and a half. He’d started crawling toward the intersection of Stedman and Harvard long before detecting the stoplight. In all truth, he’d slipped up. He could have used his NVGs to scan from a distance, but he’d started to conserve the unit’s batteries and had forgotten.
By the time he stopped to check, he’d already traversed half the distance and couldn’t raise his head fully to scan the intersection. He decided to press onward and gamble that it was clear. If it were guarded, he’d have to crawl back. Not a big deal, but with morning twilight approaching in forty minutes, he wanted to put as much distance between himself and Warren Towers as possible.
Militia activity had been steady but not overwhelming in the areas south of the Massachusetts Turnpike, confined to obvious intersection outposts or easily detectable vehicle patrols. With little background noise beyond distant, sporadic gunfire, the sound of an approaching vehicle was impossible to miss. He’d effortlessly avoided several vehicle patrols within the first mile of his journey, decreasing markedly after Pleasant Street. With 1.4 miles left to reach 42 Orkney Road, he anticipated smooth sailing, as long as he didn’t get sloppy.
He heard the repeated click of a disposable lighter and froze. A fit of hacking followed, drawing Alex’s attention to the park across the road to his left. A small orange glow appeared through the hedge’s foliage, quickly fading.
How did I miss that?
He couldn’t determine the precise location, but based on the position of the glowing cigarette, someone had decided to sit his or her ass in the small park bordering the intersection. He’d caught a serious break.
Now what?
Crawling the same one hundred fifty feet didn’t seem like a good idea anymore. The militia team had an unobstructed view of the hedge along most of its length. Rationally, he knew the result would be the same, but his mind had already closed off that route to further discussion. It didn’t leave him with a ton of options.
The hedge turned at the corner and ran about fifteen feet along the sidewalk on Harvard Street, ending at the apartment building. If he could quietly squeeze through the bushes and crawl past the corner, he’d be out of their line of sight. Alex crawled the length of the bushes, reaching the building’s rough sandstone foundation. The entire hedgerow appeared thick and well maintained. There was no way he could push his way through that without waking up the entire neighborhood. This left him with one guaranteed option. Eliminate the sentries.
While definitely the “tried and true” solution, killing militia this far from Warren Towers carried risks he’d prefer to avoid. Warren Towers to the corner of Harvard and Stedman in thirty minutes? A simple game of connect the dots on a city map would give militia leadership a fairly accurate prediction of Alex’s intended travel route. Worse yet, a straight line drawn between the two locations terminated less than a quarter of a mile from Chloe’s apartment at the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. They had no way to determine how far he travelled, but they could focus their search along this projected path, effectively trapping him in Chloe’s apartment until nightfall. Based on Ed’s report of the attack in Harvard Square, they couldn’t afford to wait until sunset to cross the Charles River. Boston sat on the verge of a complete civil breakdown.
He pointed his body at the sentries and lowered the NVGs, peering through the bushes. Leaves broke the image, but he managed to form an actionable assessment. Two armed men sat on top of a picnic table, facing the intersection. The smoker was partially obscured by a tree stump, his head and legs visible beyond the lead edge of the table. He stared down the length of the hedge, wondering if he shouldn’t try to crawl back. If they spotted movement and decided to investigate, he could take them down with little effort. If they skipped the investigation part, he’d be in trouble. The bushes would do little to protect him from a concentrated barrage of projectiles travelling at 3,200 feet per second.
He didn’t have the time to dick around with crawling back and approaching another intersection, and the sun had no intention of waiting for him to figure this out. Alex crawled along the hedge and stopped, reevaluating his line of fire to the targets. Both men sat in full view.
Let’s get this over with.
He started to rise, but stopped to reflect on his surprising indifference toward the prospect of preemptively killing them.
The sentries had been reduced to objects. Dehumanized for his emotional convenience. They fell into several convenient categories: Enemies. Targets. Obstacles. All true, but oversimplified—the way it had been done for millennia. Warfare relied on dehumanizing the enemy, no matter how “justified” the conflict. Raw human nature didn’t embrace wholesale slaughter. It had to be manipulated, which wasn’t an overly difficult task.
Alex had already convinced himself it was necessary and justified. He didn’t stop to consider why these men sat here watching the intersection. Were they doing their part to protect family and friends? Did they believe they were connected to something bigger and more important? Defending their city from the government? Alex didn’t care about the answers to any of these questions, because he was sure of one thing. If he stood up and tried to identify himself, his journey to reach Ryan and Chloe would come to an abrupt end—and that was the only piece of information that mattered.
With that in mind, he kneeled, keeping his profile below the top of the hedge. Rising slowly, he canted the rifle and braced it snugly into his shoulder. The IR laser broke the plane of the hedge and reached the man enjoying a cigarette. Alex moved the beam to the center of his head and slowed his breathing. One of the sentries’ radios broke the silence, emitting a garbled transmission, causing him to delay the shot. The second man slapped the smoker on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go,” prompting them to jump down from the table and run across Harvard Street. They hopped into a two-door sedan parked on the street and drove urgently toward Beacon Street. Alex waited for the taillights lights to disappear behind the buildings before running in a low crouch to the hedge along Harvard Street. The red lights continued to recede into the distance, vanishing from sight. A quick scan in the opposite direction convinced Alex that he could cross the street unobserved.