She turned. Ruhi hadn’t made it.
Oh, God.
But then she spotted him pulling himself up onto the roof on the other side of the chasm. He’d managed to grab the edge. He stood, shouting, “Come on.”
“Catch,” she called softly, throwing him the gun. He’d need it — if she didn’t make it across.
But as soon as she tossed the Browning, she needed it.
A clamor arose in the shed. She looked back and saw a mujahideen stumble over his comrade’s body.
She climbed onto the top of the short wall from which Ruhi had launched himself seconds ago. Riddled with adrenaline, she crouched to leap as a bullet buzzed the very spot where her head had been an instant before. She jumped.
A second shot followed, missed, but she knew it wouldn’t make any difference: She wasn’t going to clear the gap. Felt it as soon as her feet left terra firma — or what passed for it up on the roof.
She pumped her legs, as if they might prolong her flight and defy death, reaching for Ruhi’s outstretched hand.
He seized her wrist as she fell, her weight almost pulling him down, too.
He dug his knees into the wall, dropped the gun by his side, and gripped her with his other hand. In a mighty move, he dragged her up, eyes widening as he glanced across the narrow divide.
Lana picked up the Browning, turned, and aimed, keeping her profile low. The dim outlines of three men were racing toward the edge of the other roof.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
She hit one of them.
“Get down!”
Using the roof wall for cover, they crawled toward the street side of the building, hoping none of the mujahideen would risk the leap. Shouts rose from across the divide. Then nothing.
“See that?” Ruhi said, pointing to what appeared to be another shed roof about forty feet away.
She nodded. “Let’s try it.”
What other chance did they have? A whole series of buildings lined the street. How many more jumps could they possibly survive? The distances might be even greater.
But a sprint to the shed door would leave them in the open.
“You first,” she said. “I’ll give you cover. Then I’ll go. Dodge and dart.”
She pushed him — she hadn’t pushed anyone since childhood.
Almost immediately, two gunshots rang out. They missed Ruhi. She rose from behind the short wall and fired, missing her targets. But she forced the gunmen to duck.
Ruhi threw his shoulder into the door. It didn’t open. He worked the handle frantically, an easy target. She opened fire again, emptying her weapon, but the bullets kept the shooter down. Then Ruhi kicked it in a fury and disappeared into the darkness.
“Go, go, go!” Lana told herself, the only push she would get from anyone. One last look behind, and she was off. She saw the turban, spotted the other man raising a rifle, and dived through the doorway bruised but otherwise unharmed.
“You’re good,” Ruhi said.
“I’m trained, but I’m also out of ammo.”
They found themselves inside a flimsy shed that she doubted could stop a .22. She saw the top of a wooden ladder poking up from a dark opening in the floor and started down without a word. Ruhi followed.
They lowered themselves into an attic. Spiderwebs wrapped around her face as she stumbled over old wooden boxes. She spied light streaming through a crack in a door and made her way forward, Ruhi only steps behind.
Her nerves felt like they were frying. The pair burst out of the attic onto the top floor of an apartment building, spotted the stairwell, and started down, clearing three, four steps at a time.
They encountered no one, only the odor of piss and sickness. Moments later, they burst out of the stairwell onto the ground floor — and were taken down by at least four men.
Bones in her gun hand felt snapped by a vicious blow. The Browning skittered across the floor. She heard its clatter stop abruptly, and then they were bagged in the most literal sense: dark burlap sacks dragged down over their heads, jammed into the back of a windowless van, hands and feet Flex-Cuffed with frightening efficiency.
“Let me see his face,” she heard a man say. Then: “Cousin, it is good to see you again.”
“I will kill you, Ahmed, I swear,” she heard Ruhi reply from the darkness that still surrounded her.
“It is not I who should fear the reaper,” Ahmed said in a soothing — tormenting — voice.
Holmes didn’t know how bad it had gotten in Yemen. He knew only how grim conditions had become in the States. Pure misery.
In the jury-rigged manner that was the only means available, he sat in his office reading bulletins typed out on old Royals, using the last of their ribbons. They detailed what might be the final hours of the failing republic.
Phoenix, with a runaway reactor core, had descended into bedlam, in the original meaning of that word. The Valley of the Sun more closely approximated an eighteenth-century insane asylum than a series of contemporary communities linked by highways, freeways, cloverleafs, and surface streets, all of which were littered with evidence of panic: dead bodies, smashed cars, weeping survivors, and the invisible death rays of radiation that were seeping into every corner of the city.
Radiation plumes were ravaging much of the Pacific Northwest as well, rising from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation about a hundred miles east of Portland, Oregon. Driven by winds, the invisible poison, like the invisible enemy, was sweeping over the land.
Chicago had not been annihilated by Veepox yet, but the chimera virus was arguably crueler than a melting reactor core. Even the uninfected inhabitants were behaving like the countless extras in Night of the Living Dead. The military still had the city, suburbs, and lakefront surrounded, but soldiers and National Guard troops were frequently forced to fire on throngs of citizens too desperate to care about death. Or perhaps they preferred mass execution by machine-gun fire to the microbes that would make slow madness of their lives.
Swift death was also coming to those caught in raging wildfires set off by pipeline explosions in the first cyberattack. Those fires now scorched millions of acres, turning the West into a Hades of previously unknown proportions.
And the South, still reeling from the collapsing TVA dams, faced a Category 5 hurricane as the tropical storm season moved into overdrive. Hurricane Becca, extending more than six hundred miles, was expected to pile into the east coast of Florida in the next twelve hours, and then churn northward — with no way to warn tens of millions of residents in the direct path of the storm. Holmes knew of the danger only because of emergency ham radio communications.
Was Becca a coincidence? Holmes’s rational side said yes, of course, but he could not help but wonder if the invisible enemy had cooked up the Category 5 somehow. Who would have imagined, for instance, the devastating extent of a cyberattack? Well, Holmes reminded himself, he had, in fact, conjured up just such a grim scenario, along with colleagues in government and the administration. But they were called prophets of doom and roundly ignored.
His own people at NSA, who had been laboring so hard to try to make cyberdefense a priority, were now tasked with trying to retake control of the country’s own nuclear arsenal. The only good news on that front was that three of the Navy’s nuclear-armed submarines had been able to reprogram software to regain control of their nuclear firing mechanisms. Unfortunately, the advance had no direct application to the land-based missiles aimed at American cities, though the Navy’s success did mean that revenge would be in the offing — if the enemy could ever be identified.