Seed by Rob Ziegler Read Free Book Online Page B

pressed the fire button and hurled the grenade in a high arc. Pulled Tsol behind the Lobo, pushed him down, bent herself over the top of him. Emerson joined them an instant later.
    Metal fragments came first as the grenade’s electromagnet switched on, propelling its steel casing away in a perfect sphere of hypersonic razors. They cracked against the Lobo and arched overhead, evidenced by a thousand molten friction contrails and the firecracker peppering of tiny sonic booms. Next came the sound, a frozen bell shattered under a hammer.
    Then came the screams.
    Doss peered around the Lobo. The migrants had momentarily halted their charge. Those not shredded staggered in confusion. She looked east towards New D.C. The zeppelins hung impossibly far away.
    “Can’t stay here,” she told Emerson.
    “There.” He pointed at a mostly intact strip mall a hundred meters beyond the concrete barrier. They would have to cross a hideously exposed stretch of broken parking lot, but it was their only choice.
    “You take him, I’ll cover.”
    Emerson nodded, grabbed the assignment by the forearm and rose. Doss pulled her Ingram from its sling, slapped his back with the flat of her palm.
    “Now.”
    Emerson and Tsol began to sprint. Doss stepped out from behind the Lobo. A few of the migrants had noticed the agent as he darted across the freeway, assignment in tow. They raised their rifles. Doss leveled her Ingram and began firing short bursts. Two migrants flew apart, ceramic bullets exploding inside them. The others ducked and covered. Doss fired a final burst and ran after her cohorts. Over the barrier, down the median, onto the parking lot. She heard the far-off throb of chopper blades—the cavalry.
    She hadn’t gone fifteen paces across the lot when bullets began to smack into the asphalt at her feet. Ahead of her, Emerson staggered and grunted as bullets struck his broad back. He pushed the assignment forward, regained his footing and kept running. Doss stopped, turned, fired a long burst at the migrants lined up now along the barrier. A bullet smacked into her Kevlar blazer as she tried to reload. Pain lanced through her side and her legs buckled, dropping her to her knees. An RPG sailed past her head. It exploded somewhere behind her. The concussion steamrolled her.
    She stared at the cracked pavement in front of her face. She had skinned herself on a hundred empty lots like this, playing with her sister outside tent cities from Chicago to Atlanta. She knew that if she cried, Olivia would laugh. Sienna Doss resolved not to cry. She stood.
    A bullet hit her shoulder and she staggered. Gunfire roared from the freeway. Several refugees made their way down the median, firing as they came. Doss turned and saw Emerson and Tsol both down, side by side, thrown by the RPG. They struggled to rise. Blood exploded from Emerson’s leg. Doss heard him scream.
    “Neal!” She stumbled towards him. The assignment gained his knees and sat there dazed, shaking his head. Emerson writhed. The chopper’s thud drew closer. Doss looked from Emerson to Tsol and back again. “Fuck.” She staggered to Tsol, pushed him flat and lay herself over him. He pressed his lips against her cheek.
    “I am fated,” he whispered.
    “You’re shit.”
    Bullets rained down.

CHAPTER 4
    ondo’s wagon—the wooden flatbed of a twen-cen cargo truck chopped free from its cab and driven by a series of electric motors geared to the back wheels by three heavy drive chains—jounced and rattled as they rolled west out of Amarillo along the broken track of the old interstate. Hondo sat at the front, calling directions to Brood, who heaved at the tiller welded to the rear differential, steering them around the worst of the freeway’s craters. They made perhaps five miles per.
    Brood shivered under his zarape in the morning chill. Flexed his bruised ribs beneath where the AK bullets had buried themselves in his flak jacket. Every few minutes he glanced behind them.