Falling Stars Page 2

  Amelia flinched as someone kneed her in the ribs. Hands scrabbled over her, scratching at her arms. Someone else seized her SmartFlex and tried to rip it off her wrist.

  “Let go!” She jerked free and kept moving, stumbling toward the back of the truck. The rest of the attackers ignored her. They were focused on the boxes of medical supplies.

  The sound of a gunshot ricocheted inside the truck. Dr. Martinez moaned.

  Amelia twisted in her mother’s grasp, trying to see what happened. But the icy dread in her gut told her she already knew. The woman with the ponytail had shot the doctor for no reason.

  They ran for the wide-open doors.

  2

  Micah

  The second the door flew open, angry hands grabbed Micah Ramos Rivera and jerked him from the transport truck. He fell, his spine and the back of his head cracking hard against the pavement, skewing his glasses and knocking the breath from his lungs.

  For an agonizing moment, he tried unsuccessfully to suck in air as he stared helplessly up at a tangle of lunging, shoving bodies. Someone stomped on his hand. A sharp kick to his ribs sent pain exploding through his side.

  He rolled to the right until he slid beneath the truck. He gasped for air, half-expecting someone to grab him, drag him out, and do whatever damage they intended. But as soon as he hid out of sight, the attackers forgot him. They scrambled into the truck, shouting and screaming.

  His brain screamed for oxygen. His heart thundered in his chest. He craned his neck, scanning for Silas. He couldn’t see him, only an army of legs, the attackers dirty and ragged, the soldiers’ uniforms crisply creased. Screams and gunshots filled the air. Several bodies were on the ground, some unmoving, a few groaning as they tried to drag themselves to their feet.

  He sucked in his first ragged breath, but there was no time to recover. He could wait here in relative safety for the military to regain control and fend off the attackers. Unless the attackers were stronger. They had their own guns. Maybe they would win—and then what? Would they kill everyone in the transports, just for spite? It was possible. Anything was possible.

  He didn’t know the state of the new world, since they’d been locked up in quarantine for weeks, but he knew the old one. The old world was plenty bad enough. There were gangs of killers who would as soon slit your throat as smile at you. If these attackers were desperate enough to attack an armed transport, they were desperate enough to do just about anything.

  He couldn’t stay here. Amelia and Willow were still in the truck. His brother Gabriel was trapped in the other transport, along with Nadira and Celeste and the others. He had to help them. He was no fighter, but he’d do whatever he could.

  Micah rolled onto his stomach with a gasp. Pain lanced his side. He felt his ribs gingerly, but he couldn’t tell if anything was cracked. Nadira might know, but there wasn’t time for that now. He scanned either side, searching for an opening in the raging battle. There didn’t seem to be anyone at the front of the truck.

  He adjusted his glasses, took a breath, then crawled on his belly, ducking his head and using his arms to propel him forward, the bare skin of his elbows scraping against the pavement. He inched behind the right wheel and looked out.

  A thick copse of trees lined the shoulder of the highway. Ahead and to his left, an SUV had flipped on its side, its windows shattered, a bullet hole puncturing the bumper through a faded sticker that read “Home Sweet Home” below a photo of palm trees and sand.

  Further along the shoulder, dozens—no hundreds—of vehicles were pushed into the middle of the road in a haphazard jumble, some tipped, others turned sideways, still others with their doors hanging open.

  All of them empty. Micah shivered. They reminded him of dead animal carcasses.

  A dozen yards away, a soldier shot an attacker point blank with a pulse gun. The man shuddered, his eyes rolling wildly in his head, before crumpling to the ground.

  A drone sailed over a group of six people prying open the doors of the second transport with crowbars, shooting rapid-fire into them. Three fell, dropping their guns as red bloomed across their backs. Two more attackers ran at the drone from behind, threw an electric net over it, and brought it down.

  The second transport door burst open. The attackers yelled and hurled themselves inside, leaving their fallen comrades. One of the rifles lay only a few yards in front of Micah. So tantalizingly close.

  He pulled himself out from beneath the truck and blinked against the harsh sunlight. The air smelled burnt, singed with bullets and seared flesh from pulse guns.

  He winced against the pain as he crawled across the hot pavement and grabbed the gun. His hand ached in protest as he wrapped his fingers around the rifle’s stock and jumped to his feet.

  A gunshot blasted far too close. He whipped around, raising the barrel, his blood roaring inside his own head.

  Three dozen people were pushing the soldiers back, covering the rest of their group as they unloaded boxes of supplies. There were so many of them, over a hundred compared to the dozen soldiers. They were men and women, young and old. They all had weapons.

  Several of his own people sprinted for the woods. He recognized Horne and Senator López, Amelia and her mother, Elise. Willow dragged her brother by his arm. Silas ran after them. He grabbed a rifle of his own and covered them as they fled.

  They were safe. At least, they were safer than he was at present. Micah turned his attention to the second transport. His heart constricted in his chest. His brother was a traitor and a terrorist, but he was still his brother.

  Just us. Always. The phrase they always used with each other echoed painfully through his mind. Micah both loved and hated him. Sometimes he thought his own emotions would tear him into pieces. But however conflicted he felt, he couldn’t stand by and let him die.

  He spotted Jericho inside the transport, struggling to reach the doors from within as attackers poured inside. In front of him, a man dressed in black aimed a rifle at a soldier trying to protect the transport. Micah raced forward and slammed the stock of his gun against the man’s head from behind. He dropped to his knees. Micah struck him again to make sure he was out of play, then leapt over his body and dashed toward the transport.

  Another soldier wrestled with an attacker a few feet from the door. Both their guns were on the ground, but the soldier pressed a knife to the throat of the attacker, a skinny man with matted gray hair and a respirator mask slung over his face.

  A box of medical supplies labeled ‘antibiotics’ toppled on its side at his feet. Before the soldier slit the man’s throat, a second attacker darted in from behind and stabbed the soldier in the back.

  “No!” A flashback of the Grand Voyager roared through his brain—dead bodies everywhere, shattered glass glinting in the blood pooling across the shiny marble floors, the terrorists mowing down innocent people, the rat-a-tat of gunfire exploding in his ears.

  The gray-haired man stumbled back. The soldier fell face-first onto the pavement and didn’t move. Micah swung his rifle up and pointed it at the second attacker. These people were murderers. They were terrorists. They were—

  A kid stared back at him. Thin and gangly, he couldn’t have been older than thirteen. His green eyes glimmered with terror above the mask covering his mouth and nose.

  The gray-haired man didn’t run. He stepped in front of the kid. “Please.” His voice came out muffled behind his respirator.

  The gun shook in Micah’s hands. Why was a kid attacking an armed convoy? But he knew. He recognized the desperation in the kid’s eyes, the same reckless hunger reflected in the old man’s. He’d seen that look a hundred times in his old neighborhood, a slum crumbling into crime, drug addiction, and chaos. They were hungry enough, angry enough, needy enough.

  They weren’t terrorists. They were desperate people willing to do desperate things.

  He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t shoot an old man and a kid. He lowered the muzzle. “Go.”

  The man gra
bbed the medical box and ran, the kid on his heels.

  Micah stared after them for a moment, the sounds of gunfire fading around him. How bad was it out there, to attack an armed convoy for a box of antibiotics?

  A bullet whizzed past him. No time to think about that now. No time to think about anything but saving his people in the second transport. Saving Gabriel, who out of everyone didn’t deserve to be saved. But Micah couldn’t help himself.

  He ran for the transport.

  3

  Gabriel

  Gabriel Ramos Rivera wished for death every single hour of every single day. He deserved death for the sins he’d committed. Death was coming for him. Death in the form of a firing squad; Jericho promised him that.

  He survived the last eighteen days as a captive in quarantine in a stupor. The interrogations were brutal. The deprivation, waterboarding, the chemical-assisted questions repeated over and over, hour after hour. His captors always dressed in contamination suits. In their masks, they appeared like faceless monsters.

  He couldn’t blame them. As a rebel, he’d known the risks if he were caught. He went in with eyes wide open. Anything was worth bringing the corrupt elite to their knees. Any risk, any sacrifice. But he’d been wrong.

  He hardly noticed when the transport lurched to a stop. Even the first pops of gunfire seemed like a distant dream, just another part of the waking nightmare trapped inside his own tortured mind, where he replayed the horrors of the Grand Voyager again and again.

  When the transport walls began to shake with pounding fists and the first screams filtered through, he came to his senses with a jolt. The convoy was under attack.

  The two soldiers guarding Gabriel leapt to their feet. Jericho joined them. Within a few moments, the attackers jammed the doors open, and the soldiers shot into a crowd of two dozen people.

  Three bullets punched through the transport in rapid succession. One of the Grand Voyager survivors fell with a grunt. The rest of the survivors screamed, spilling from their seats and dropping to the floor.

  Gabriel stared up at the twin beams of sunlight pouring through the bullet holes. Was this finally it? Would a stray bullet find him and end his misery?

  Jericho stalked back to Gabriel, his face hard as obsidian. Broad-shouldered and muscular, he exuded confident strength. He rubbed his square, stubbled jaw, his brown skin filmed with a sheen of sweat. “Let’s go. We need to get off this damn truck.”

  He yanked on his handcuffs. “I’m a prisoner, remember? The guards will shoot me if I try to escape.”

  Jericho’s lip curled. “They’re too busy shooting everybody else. We’re not staying in this metal death-box a second longer.”

  “Leave me, then,” he growled. “Let me die.”

  “You’ll die soon enough.” Jericho grunted as he jerked Gabriel to his feet. “But not like this.”

  Jericho shoved Gabriel in front of him. He stumbled over the crouched bodies of the others. Someone grabbed his pantleg. He recognized Celeste Kingsley-Yates, the tall, spoiled black girl with the mass of springy, cranberry-red coils. She was pretty as a model, but now her face was ashen, her lips pulled back in a grimace of terror. “Don’t leave me!”

  “Follow us,” Jericho said. “Your best chance is to get to the woods and wait out the gunfight.”

  Celeste nodded and crouched behind him. Another woman, Meredith Jackson-Cooper, cowered behind her. Once upon a time, she’d been a corrupt CEO of a big pharma company, with a helmet of poofy yellow hair and a smile stretched taut as a rubber band. Now she was just a shaking, terrified woman.

  He suppressed the urge to spit on her. His remorse for his crimes had done nothing to nullify his towering hatred of the corrupt, greedy elite.

  Jericho exchanged a few words with the soldier guarding the front doors. His pulse gun pushed back the crowd of attackers momentarily. “I’ll cover you!” the soldier said.

  Jericho gestured with one hand. With his other hand, he shoved Gabriel out of the transport. He stumbled, falling to his knees. Pain sliced through his knee caps. A moment later, Jericho dropped to the ground and hauled Gabriel to his feet. “Go!” he yelled.

  Micah rushed to Jericho’s side. He felt his brother’s presence like a buzzing pain beneath the surface of his skin. Micah didn’t even look at him.

  “I’m with you!” he called to Jericho.

  Bullets whizzed over his head. Everyone shouted and screamed in the chaos. Soldiers and attackers battled around the transports. One of the transports ahead of them managed to barrel through the car blockade and took off, a dozen men chasing it.

  For half a second, he thought the attackers might be another New Patriots chapter—they would rescue him, everything would change—but no, they were just a ragtag mass of angry civilians with weapons.

  Several bodies sprawled on the ground. Blood streaked the grass. He nearly slipped as Jericho pushed him.

  Two attackers ran straight at them, shouting and pointing assault rifles. Without hesitation, Jericho spun toward the attackers. He reached them before they could react and alter their target. Jericho slammed his fist into the nose of the first one, hurled himself at the second and wrestled his gun away from him as they both went tumbling.

  Gabriel watched numbly, his yearning for death and an instinctive desire for self-preservation warring within him. Before he could decide either way, Jericho popped up with an assault rifle in his hands. Both attackers were slumped on the ground, unconscious.

  Jericho gestured with the muzzle of the rifle, his black eyes flashing. “Look alive!”

  Celeste and Meredith dashed past him. Micah stayed by his side, his gun swinging wildly. Gabriel followed, his arms uncomfortably bound in front of him with the handcuffs. He tensed for another attack, maybe a bullet to the brain.

  Both the attackers and the soldiers were otherwise occupied. No bullets or pulse lasers whizzed past them. He and Micah ran into the woods with the others.

  Jericho stopped them fifty yards into the tree line. They paused in the center of a small clearing surrounded by towering pine and oak trees. Dead leaves and pine needles littered the ground. The scent of sap filled his nostrils.

  Celeste leaned against a tree trunk, gasping for breath, tears streaking her sculpted cheeks. Meredith stood beside her, her arms wrapped around herself, her face a mask of horror. The Middle-Eastern girl, Nadira, and the arrogant bastard Tyler Horne trailed behind them.

  Gabriel didn’t see Amelia. She was trapped in the first transport. As long as she and Micah were safe, he didn’t care about anyone else.

  “Are you sure fleeing into the woods is the wisest choice?” Horne held his side. A bit of blood smeared his temple. “We’re moving away from the soldiers who’re supposed to protect us.”

  “I’m going back for the others.” Jericho ignored him and turned to Micah. “Move in deeper. I’ll find you.”

  “Shouldn’t I go with you?” Micah asked.

  The sound of Micah’s voice sent a spear of pain through Gabriel. He’d gone eighteen days without seeing or hearing his brother. Micah was the same as he remembered, maybe a bit taller, his face still boyish, tousled black hair falling into his eyes.

  His brother hated him now, loathed him. And for good reason. He glanced at the leaf-strewn ground, unable to meet Micah’s reproachful gaze.

  “I need you to lead them.” Jericho’s tone sharpened. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Micah answered. “No, sir.”

  Jericho took off while Micah led them deeper into the forest. Gabriel didn’t refuse or even speak. He walked obediently behind his brother. A few moments later, several people crashed through the forest. Elise Black, the senator Enrique López, a huge black kid he didn’t recognize, and Willow and her brother broke through the trees.

  “Amelia,” Gabriel croaked before he could stop himself.

  “Don’t you dare say her name,” Micah spat, so much anger in his voice that Gabriel flinched.
Where was the kind-hearted boy who’d been utterly loyal? He was gone, along with everything else.

  “She’s coming.” Elise Black breathed hard, her hands on her stomach. “Silas is with her.”

  The sound of gunshots faded. For a long moment, the group stared at each other, straining their ears for any sound. There were only the insects trilling in the underbrush, a few birds chirping high in the trees.

  “Is it over?” Micah asked.

  “They overwhelmed the convoy,” Willow said. “There were too damn many of them.”

  Jericho returned, winding through the trees, leading Amelia, Silas, and several others. He cradled two assault rifles and four handguns in his arms—all stolen from the fallen attackers. He hadn’t managed to snag any of the military-grade pulse guns that were illegal for citizens. “Who here can handle a gun?”

  He handed a rifle to Silas and a handgun to Micah. “I’ll take one,” Willow piped up. Holding her hands out imploringly, she looked like a little kid.

  “I don’t think so.” Jericho handed one to Amelia’s mother instead. “You know what to do.”

  Horne gestured for one. “I’ll take one of those off your hands.”

  Jericho hesitated. “You know how to shoot?”

  “Of course!” Horne grabbed a pistol before Jericho could protest further and tucked it into his belt. He’d probably never shot anything more dangerous than a pheasant. Gabriel clenched his jaw and turned away in disgust.

  His gaze landed on Amelia. Her face was as beautiful as he remembered, with her finely carved cheekbones, delicate features, and skin as pale as ivory. Her long white-blond hair hung to her waist in a practical braid, stray tendrils sticking to her damp forehead.