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“Place your hands on top of your heads, fingers laced. Good, now turn around slowly. Fuck with me and I will kill you.”
They did exactly as told and though Dez couldn’t see their faces behind the masks they wore, each of them stiffened in surprise. Dez smiled as she stepped away from the wall. Behind her, Uriah Piper and eight other men—each of them experienced deep-woods hunters—knelt in the rain in a shooting line with rifles snugged against their shoulders. A sound made the soldiers look up to see eight more gun barrels—small arms and long guns—pointing at them from half-opened windows.
“Yeah,” said Dez to the soldiers, “you’re that fucked.”
For a long moment there was no sound except the dull impact of raindrops on brick and pavement and clothing and skin. Dez lowered her shotgun and walked over to the soldiers.
“Jenny?” she called, and Jenny DeGroot trotted out of the building holding a plastic trash can. Then Dez began stripping weapons and equipment from the soldiers. Grenades, walkie-talkies, knives, IFAK first-aid kits, ammunition, canteens, equipment-belt suspenders, gun belts, and the rest until each soldier wore only their hazmat suit and their battle dress uniform beneath it. All of it went into the plastic trash can until Jenny staggered under the weight.
“Take it inside. Uriah, get their rifles.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing, Officer Fox?” asked the female soldier.
Dez wasn’t surprised to hear her name. She was the only police officer left alive in Stebbins, and her presence in the school was certainly known to the military. Even so, she didn’t like hearing this woman say it. She produced two sets of plastic flex-cuffs, handed her shotgun to Piper, spun the female soldier roughly around, yanked her arms down behind her and quickly fitted the cuffs around the wrists. She repeated this with the man, who had so far kept silent.
“This isn’t how you want to play this,” warned the woman.
Dez tore off the woman’s goggles and yanked down the cowl of her hazmat suit. The woman had olive skin, short black hair, and dark eyes. She did not look even remotely afraid of Dez or the guns pointed at her, which was very strange. The woman was also older than Dez expected, maybe thirty-three, with crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and laugh lines etched around her mouth.
“Listen, sister,” said Dez. “You think I’m making a mistake here? Are you really that stupid?”
“You’re only making more trouble for yourself. What do you hope to accomplish?”
Dez wiped rainwater from her eyes. “What do I hope to accomplish,” she echoed, “Sure, fair question. I’ll tell you and maybe it’ll even sink in.” She pointed to the school. “There are eight hundred people in there. Most of them are scared little kids. None of them are infected.”
The woman nodded. “And?”
Dez almost smiled at how cool this woman was. Cuffed and captured, she was keeping everything in neutral. Dez wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or nervous.
“The other reason is that we need some insurance that General Zetter won’t bomb this place. He might be willing to kill civilians, but I don’t think he’ll pull the trigger on his own people.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“No,” admitted Dez, “but fuck it. You play the cards you’re dealt.”
The woman studied her, then nodded. “Fair enough. However, I don’t work for General Zetter. He doesn’t know my name, or my partner’s name, and he has no idea that you and I are having this conversation.”
“Bul
lshit. If you’re not with Zetter, what are you? Regular army? Who are you working for?”
“His name is Captain Sam Imura,” said the woman. “Hurt either of us and he will blow your head off.”
“That’s mighty tough fucking talk but I don’t—”
“Dez…,” said Trout suddenly. “Oh God … Dez.”
She looked at him and then down at her chest. There, between her breasts, right over her heart, was a tiny red dot. It quivered ever so slightly.
A laser sight.
She stood facing the soldier, which meant that someone out there in the storm was aiming a rifle at her. Someone hidden by rain and the humped shapes of buses and cars.
Dez shifted her shotgun so the barrel pointed at the woman’s face. She took a breath and yelled loud enough to be heard above the rain. “Take your shot, motherfucker. I’ll blow this slut’s shit all over the wall before I go down.”
“Officer Fox,” said the woman calmly. “This isn’t about you.”
Suddenly two more laser dots appeared. One was on Uriah Piper’s chest. The other moved in a slow line up Billy Trout’s body, over his chest, across his face, and stopped exactly between his eyebrows. This dot did not quiver at all.
