The Surface Breach
1023 Words
Marcus pressed flat against a parked car, Priya crouched beside him. Twenty feet away, floodlights lit up a checkpoint made of concrete barriers and razor wire. A family knelt in the road…a man, a woman, two kids…hands raised, while three soldiers stood over them with rifles up.
"Please," the man said. "We're not sick. Check us. Check us right now, we'll show you."
One soldier kept his rifle steady. Young guy, maybe twenty-five, name tape read REYES. His hands weren't steady, though. Marcus could see the barrel shaking, just slightly.
"Sir, I need you to stay on your knees," Reyes said. His voice cracked on the word "please."
Another soldier, older, stepped up beside him. "Sergeant Reyes. Command already flagged this group as exposure risk. Kids were at the platform when it went down. You know the order."
"They're not showing symptoms," Reyes said.
"Symptoms don't matter anymore. Exposure's enough. You know that."
Marcus felt Priya's hand grip his arm. "They're going to shoot a family for standing near an infected person," she whispered. "That's not containment. That's a massacre."
"Quiet," Marcus said. "We can't help them from here."
"Marcus…"
"I know."
Reyes lowered his rifle an inch. Just an inch, but enough that the older soldier noticed.
"Reyes. Weapon up."
"They're kids, Staff Sergeant."
"That's not your call to make."
The little girl in the family started crying, the kind of crying that doesn't stop for anybody's argument. Her mother pulled her close and put a hand over her ear, like that would help.
Reyes looked at the family. Looked at his commanding officer. Looked back at the family.
"I'm not doing it," Reyes said. He set his rifle down on the hood of a nearby vehicle. "I'm not shooting people who aren't turned."
The staff sergeant's face went through about four different colors before settling on furious. "You're relieved. Get back to base, you're done…"
A scream cut him off. Not from the family. From the street behind the checkpoint, where the barricade hadn't fully sealed.
Marcus turned and saw them coming…six, seven, maybe ten shapes moving fast down the middle of the road, the same wrong-jointed run he'd seen in the tunnel. The staff sergeant spun, rifle up, and started firing before he even finished turning around.
"Contact! Contact, we've got a swarm coming from the west perimeter!"
Everything after that happened too fast for anyone to control. The family scattered instead of running toward the soldiers, which was the wrong choice and the only choice their instincts gave them. Two more soldiers opened fire. Reyes grabbed his rifle back off the hood and swung it toward the incoming horde instead of the family.
"Go, go, get behind the barrier!" Reyes shouted at the family.
Marcus grabbed Priya's sleeve. "This is our window. Move."
"Toward the gunfire?"
"Away from the tunnel thing that ran off ten seconds before this happened. You said following, not chasing. It ran off because it knew this was coming."
Priya didn't argue with the logic. They stayed low and moved along the line of parked cars, putting distance between themselves and the checkpoint chaos. Behind them, gunfire kept cracking, and the staff sergeant's voice kept screaming orders that nobody had time to follow.
They reached the end of the block and ducked behind a delivery truck. Marcus looked back once. Reyes was still standing his ground, firing controlled bursts, but the horde had reached the barricade and soldiers were falling back or falling down, and the family was gone…scattered into a side street or worse, Marcus couldn't tell.
"We can't help him," Priya said, reading Marcus's face.
"I know."
"You want to anyway."
"I said I know."
They kept moving, cutting through an alley that ran parallel to the main road. The gunfire behind them thinned out, replaced by the low chorus of sirens further off, and screaming that came from too many directions to trace back to one source.
"Marcus." Priya's voice had changed, gone quiet and careful. "Where's your daughter's school? How far from here?"
"Not school. Sitter's house. Mrs. Hart, two streets past the old textile building." Marcus checked a street sign, orienting himself. "We're maybe twenty minutes out on foot, if the streets stay clear."
"They won't stay clear."
"I know that too."
They rounded a corner and nearly ran straight into someone moving fast the other direction…Reyes, rifle slung, blood on his sleeve that wasn't his own, breathing hard like he'd sprinted the last two blocks.
"You're the two from the tunnel exit," Reyes said, stopping short. "I saw you duck out before the swarm hit."
"You're the guy who wouldn't shoot a kid," Marcus said.
"Yeah, well, that's why I'm not walking back to base right now." Reyes glanced behind himself, then back at Marcus and Priya.
"Command's going to mark me as a deserter in about ten minutes, so I'd appreciate it if you two didn't announce my location to anybody in a uniform."
"Wasn't planning to," Marcus said. "Where's the family?"
Reyes's jaw tightened. "Two of them made it past the barricade. Don't know about the other two." He didn't say which two, and Marcus didn't ask.
"We're heading to pick up my daughter," Marcus said. "You know these streets better than us. You know where the safe routes are?"
Reyes let out a short, humorless laugh. "Safe routes. Right now, buddy, there's no such thing." He looked at Priya, then back at Marcus, weighing something.
"But I know which checkpoints are already overrun and which ones haven't fallen yet. That's worth something."
"Then come with us," Priya said. "Three's better than two, especially with a working weapon."
Reyes hesitated exactly one second before nodding. "Fine. But we move fast, and we don't stop for anybody we can't verify."
They started down the alley together, the sirens behind them growing fainter, replaced by something worse …a low, distant sound that Marcus couldn't place at first, until he realized it was a crowd.
Not screaming. Not running. Just a low, steady moan, coming from somewhere close, and getting closer with every step they took toward Mrs. Hart's house.
- Writer
