“Nice mirror!” a voice shouted. It was male, deep, and it sounded familiar. “Where’d you get that? Archers? Nice place to shop. We were gonna hit it later ourselves, stock up and whatnot.”
Will didn’t answer. Instead, he listened to the man’s booming voice rattle down the length of the highway, before it eventually died in the breeze.
“He sends his regards!” the man shouted. “Your old buddy! Josh!”
Josh?
“He wanted to be here himself,” the man continued, “but he had other business. He told me you’d be coming back in this direction sooner or later. Of course, we thought you’d be coming by car, not bicycles. That really threw us for a loop, let me tell you!”
He had heard that voice before, over the radio.
“Kellerson?” Will shouted.
“Bingo!” the man shouted back.
Sonofabitch.
He looked back at Zoe. Her face was pale, but she wasn’t trembling nearly quite as much as before. She stared back at him with sunken eyes and seemed to be breathing fine, though that might have just been a combination of adrenaline and pills.
“We’ll be fine,” Will said. “Trust me, okay?”
“Okay,” she nodded back.
He couldn’t tell if she actually believed the lie or if she was humoring him. It was impossible to read anything in her face at the moment. He wondered if he had looked that spaced out after getting shot a few days ago.
“Hey, you still alive back there?” Kellerson shouted. “It goes without saying, we can do this all day. Got supplies and more ammo than we know what to do with them. And night ain’t your friend, but then you probably already know that, don’t you?”
Will scooted back toward Zoe and felt her pulse. Weak, but it was still there.
“You’re doing good,” he smiled at her. “I’ll be back, okay?”
She didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure if she couldn’t, or if she didn’t want to. He could almost feel her drifting away, leaving her body.
“Hey, Will!” Kellerson shouted. “Josh told us you were a badass ex-Army Ranger. I gotta say, I’m unimpressed, man!”
Even before Kellerson finished the word “man,” Will was darting across the highway. There were only two meters between the Bronco and a large Suburban minivan in the next lane. It was a quick dash, with only the two mountain bikes in his way. Will had to leap over them, raising his profile higher than he wanted.
He heard a gunshot and a bullet zipped past his head, almost taking his ear off.
And he saw something else in the half-second he was in the air — a man in a hazmat suit on the other side of the concrete barrier that separated the south and northbound lanes. The man had apparently been making his trek down the highway for a while and was only ten meters from Will’s position when Will spotted him.
The man froze, looking like a kid caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. Will landed behind the minivan and snapped off a quick shot in the man’s direction. He managed to hit the man in the right shoulder and watched him spin and drop, disappearing behind the concrete barrier.
Will ducked his head just as the minivan’s windshields exploded, and glass poured down on top of and around him. Bullets that didn’t pelt the Suburban’s sides — the ping ping ping! going into metal like chimes — dug lengthy grooves across the highway floor.
He leaned out from behind the Suburban and glanced at where he had last seen the man in the northbound lane. He saw a thick head of blond hair bobbing along the barrier, fleeing back up the highway. Will considered taking a shot to finish the man off, but that would have involved leaning almost completely out from behind the minivan, and he had a feeling the guy with the hunting rifle was waiting patiently back there at the station wagon for a shot. Throughout the torrent of gunfire, Will had heard the familiar rattles of M4 carbines, but not a single shot from a bolt-action rifle. The man was just waiting for him to make a mistake.
Then the gunfire stopped, and there was just the heavy silence of a dead city again.
That, too, didn’t last.
“Hey, Will!” Kellerson shouted. “You still alive back there?”
Will didn’t answer.
“Come on!” Kellerson continued. “Cat got your tongue? You know you’re not going anywhere. This is it, buddy! This is the end of the line! Make it easier on yourself and the blonde! Throw out your weapons and I’ll end it quick. Scout’s honor!”
Will glanced toward the highway barrier again, expecting another figure to rush up alongside it, having used Kellerson’s taunting as cover. The man was talking so much Will thought it had to be a trick, some kind of clever diversion.
But no, there was no one on the other side this time.
He’s just a loudmouth, after all.
“Will?” Kellerson shouted. “This is getting boring, man. I’m giving you till the count of five, then we’re coming. I got no time for this Alamo bullshit! You ready, buddy? Five!”
Will looked back across the lane at Zoe. Her eyes were closed, and she looked on the verge of sliding off the Bronco’s back bumper at any second. After three solid seconds of staring, he couldn’t tell if she was still breathing.
He thought about how she had come back to rescue him when she didn’t have to…
“Four!”
He flicked the fire selector on the M4A1 to full-auto. If they tried to bull rush him, he could probably take three, maybe four if he was really lucky.
Captain fucking Optimism.
Not that he had much of a choice. He and Zoe were dead if he stayed still.
“Three!”
They had stopped firing, and he guessed they were getting ready to do exactly what Kellerson had promised — move on him. Of course, they weren’t going to make it easy to pick them off. They would probably do it slowly, moving between vehicles, keeping behind cover the entire time. Eventually, they would reach him. That was the problem.
Eventually they would be right on top of him.
“Two!”
Will was going to stand up, take the fight to them, when he heard a series of gunshots — and this time the bullets weren’t coming at him or hitting the Suburban or scalping the highway around his vicinity. Instead, the gunfire sounded like they were coming from a handgun — a Glock — and they were hitting cars up the highway—behind the ambushers.
The hell—?
Will stood up behind the Suburban and peeked through the broken windows. The hazmat suits were returning fire on someone else further up the highway. The figure was wearing black and had ducked behind the highway barrier on the northbound lane after drawing their attention, and bullets were chopping into the thick concrete block in front of him, spraying the air with a fine white powder.
For a moment, he thought it was the blond who had tried to flank him earlier, but no, it couldn’t have been the same person. That guy was wearing a hazmat suit, while this one was dressed all in black. It looked like some kind of assault vest, too.
Then there was a single, very deliberate shot, and Will saw the man with the hunting rifle flinching as something hit him in the chest. He collapsed to the highway, disappearing behind the ’80s station wagon he had been using as cover.
A second player.