Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

“Danny.” Wes grabbed his arm. “Are you sure about this?”

“No.” Danny admitted.

Wes looked at him, then at Blake and Nathan. Had any of them objected Danny would have listened, but no one did. “Okay.” Wes patted Danny on the arm again. “Let’s do it then.”

Danny indicated to Wes he was going upstairs, but that the three of them should stay where they were. Wes flashed a quick thumbs-up, and Danny headed up the stairs. Entering a large empty room, Danny noticed two snipers in the windows. One was focused on the building across the way, the other locked on Eddie’s brother.

“One…” the megaphone man yelled. Danny left the doorway, took several quick soft steps to the first sniper and slit his throat.

“Two…” the voice boomed as the second sniper caught a peripheral glimpse of Danny and turned towards him in time to welcome a bullet to his forehead.

“Okay!” Eddie yelled. “I’m here!” He stepped into the doorway as Danny shot the man with the megaphone and the three men with guns to Lazzo’s head went down. Danny quickly took out two more men hiding behind the railcars as Eddie’s brother scrambled for cover. Wes took out another one from below before Danny came running down the stairs.

“Let’s go, guys,” Danny yelled to the other three. They ran out the door into the parking lot and directly into a barrage of gunfire. Nathan took several shots to the chest and head and went down in a matter of seconds. Danny grabbed Wes and pulled him back inside the building. Blake initially had been determined to reach Nathan, but realized he was too far out in the lot. Now Blake was trapped behind a pole and drawing heavy fire, with no way to safely retreat. As the troops circled, Blake looked frantically for a way out. Danny and Wes gave it to him with two quick shots each. Danny ended it with a grenade lobbed perfectly under the soldiers’ jeep. Headlights were turning into the lot at the other end of the depot, closing in on their location. Blake scrambled for Nathan, but again the quest to reach his friend was interrupted by gunfire. Bullets sprayed the ground around him and Blake knew he wouldn’t make it. They didn’t have a second to lose. They had to leave Nathan behind.

Danny, Wes, and Blake raced to their truck, and within minutes they had cut through the back streets and were on their way out of town. For some reason the other vehicles didn’t pursue them. Either that, or they got lost.

No one said a word until Cheyenne was a speck in their rearview mirror, and then Wes asked Danny, “Still feel right to you?” Blake pounded the seat in frustration, tears stinging his eyes. He couldn’t believe Nathan had gone down like that—couldn’t believe they’d had to leave him there.

Danny was just as angry. He knew his decision had cost Nathan his life, so no, it didn’t feel like the right move to him. And he felt even worse about leaving Nathan behind, but he gritted his teeth and remained silent. Nothing he could say would make any of them feel better now.

Eddie stepped into the doorway ready to accept his fate. Normally, with his back to the wall he’d have ended his own life. But he couldn’t watch his brother die right in front of him, even if he was certain they were going to kill both of them anyway. So he gave in. Arms up, head held high, ready for the kill shot that never came.

Instead he watched, stunned, as someone opened fire across the train yard, surgically taking out at least seven men in mere seconds. As his brother scrambled for safety and his few remaining men covered for him, Eddie ran down the stairs to meet him. Lazzo ran into his arms. “You safe little brother. You safe man.” He heard a voice yell across the courtyard in clear English, “Let’s go, guys!” in the ensuing moments of silence. Then they heard the gunfire begin again across the way.

As curious as Eddie was as to who had intervened on their behalf, he had lost too many men to stay any longer. Let them fight it out. He needed to get his men to safety. When they had retreated into the building, twenty-two men against a hundred soldiers (and two helicopters), he figured that was the end. “Lazzo, Omar, Cabo, get the rest. Let’s go,” he said, and he and his men began their run to the jeeps. They pulled out and turned onto Highway 85 south, beginning the drive towards Loveland. It was 2 a.m. His Americans were no doubt long gone by now, but he knew where they were going, and he knew there was no way they could make it through Denver. The Qi Jia army held Denver as one of their five national strongholds, and it dually served as the new command center of the entire country. There were more than a hundred thousand men there, and it was a fortress. No way in. No way out. Not alive anyway.

No, the Americans were either heading west through Wyoming, or they were heading south and then west on one of the only other available routes: Highway 14 through Roosevelt National Forest, or Highway 34 through Estes Park. The Wyoming route would be too far out of their way and way too wide open. There had been no indication on any of the maps that was a route they would even consider. He had a feeling they were going one of the two more remote ways through Colorado. He intended to park halfway between their two options and, assuming they hadn’t already passed through, follow them whichever way they went. He and his men were headed for a body of water halfway between highways 14 and 34, called Horsetooth Reservoir.

As we entered Colorado, we couldn’t help but notice the massive wall under construction. It was almost twenty feet thick and only about five feet tall, but there were tower sections built every few hundred yards that were easily twenty feet tall. It appeared as if the enemy was intending to build a wall along the northern state line of Colorado. Could they be doing that around the other sides too? If so, would the southern wall be completed by the time we got there? This wall was a whole new problem we had never imagined. What was going on in this place?

Cameron explained how the giant wall made sense to him. “Colorado would be the logical headquarters for this army, right in the middle of the country. Plus, the North American Aerospace Defense Command Center (NORAD) is in Colorado Springs. Our three primary defense centers are…or were…in DC, here and Hawaii. NORAD has a bunker here people can live in for years. That would have been where they were probably trying to move the president or vice president when this whole thing went down. Supposedly it’s impenetrable. If the enemy has control of it, we’re all screwed. They could wipe out whatever they want with nukes from the command center in there. I’d think getting into CM would have been priority #1 for anyone who knows our defense system. Fortunately, Colorado Springs is south of Denver. That place is probably crawling with enemy troops, whether or not they’ve taken over NORAD. That could be why there’s almost no one up here.”

I took in everything he was saying and started to think about the President. He probably was dead, wasn’t he? Did we have any government officials left? Cameron was also right about another thing—there didn’t seem to be any troop presence up here at all.

Cameron had no trouble finding the mine on an overgrown road behind the reservoir. Fortunately it was empty and provided sufficient cover from the rain—shelter from both storms. Danny had the truck with the radar, so we had taken no chances driving to the lake. Since crossing into Colorado, we had painstakingly traveled dirt roads and avoided all contact, as directed. We saw a few lights on in some farmhouses, presumably lanterns, but knew we couldn’t trust them to be friendly. Every town we’d seen around here, small or big, had already been burnt to the ground.