He placed a soot-smeared hand on her shoulder. “Hanson. We’re still here to protect and serve.” He looked at Mike. “You got any ideas of how to find the people still themselves?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Gill looked down at Mrs. Fiona Gregg, her husband strewn next to her on the bed. Mike stood next to him in the couple’s bedroom, and Dawn hovered over the sleepers. With her rubber gloved hands she touched the neck of the middle-aged woman, then the man.

  “They’re definitely alive… we could try and wake them, bring them out of whatever this is, but without knowing how the AI is using their brains it would be highly risky.”

  Gill ran his hand over the stubble on his chin, his face now cleaner, with a small bandage across his cheek. “So we just leave them?”

  “We can’t pick up and physically move tens of thousands of people, and we can’t wake them,” said Mike. “The AI knew that, which is why it did this. As usual it did the most logical thing it could, to beat us…” His last few words were tinged with frustration. He sighed. “We save those who are still conscious.”

  Gill nodded. He hated the idea of leaving everyone else behind, but couldn’t see any other choice.

  They made their way outside, then quickly checked the remaining nearby properties, each one a similar story. The chief had ditched his police car for something larger and heavier, a fully specked out black truck, which he filled the bed of with supplies and covered it with a dark green tarpaulin. He stood next to it looking at his home.

  “We better get going,” said Mike. “If we want to find anyone awake in the center of the city, and transport and leave before sundown.”

  Gill nodded, and Mike went to turn around when the chief started to talk. “Over two decades, actually closer to three, we’ve lived in this house.” He briefly smiled. “I had just had a pay raise and we bought it as a new build. Just what Mary always wanted.” He nodded to himself, then looked back to Mike. “I’ll lead you out,” and got into his truck.

  Mike continued to the RV and got in.

  “We’ll be lucky to find anyone to take with us,” said Brad now in the driver’s seat.

  “The chief’s right. We have to try.”

  “The sooner we get out of this city, the happier I’ll be,” said Becky in the back.

  Mike, in the passenger’s seat looked over his shoulder at her. “We’ll look for a few hours, take what vehicles we need then head east.”

  “Good. This whole city gives me the willies, I sure don’t want to be in here when it gets dark.”

  Alexis smiled. “Willies?”

  Becky smiled as well. “Something my grandma used to say.”

  “What if it rains again?” said Dawn.

  Mike had been keeping watch on the heavens all day. It was still a uniform gray, but thankfully with no darker clumps. “Hopefully that won’t be a problem.”

  They sped along the road, watching other houses and farms flow past and wondering if any of them had people inside praying for rescue. But they couldn’t stop, they had to go to where most people resided, the core of the city, with the condos and neatly arranged suburbs.

  It wasn’t long before stores were at the side of the road and Gill’s truck stopped at a junction. He wound down his window and pointed to the right, then steered into that road. The RV and Elias’s truck followed. The vehicles moved slowly, those inside scanning the lots for any sign of movement, but there wasn’t any. A community center passed by, with graffiti splayed across the side showing smiling faces.

  “There’s no one,” said Brad.

  They arrived at another junction, but this time there were no signals of direction from the driver in front. Then Mike spotted it. A church about half a block down. “Over there, try the church.” Brad drove around Gill’s truck and kept going, the chief and Elias following. Memories returned to Mike from his dream weeks earlier. “Stop here, I want to look inside.”

  The RV stopped in front of the allocated parking zones and they all looked at the church entrance. This building was not the old traditional wooden construction from Mike’s dream, but brick built and modern.

  “What’s different about this place?” said Dawn.

  Mike pushed open the door and stepped down to the concrete. “Wait here.”

  Alexis stood and did the same with the side door. “I’ll go with you.” She noticed Elias getting out of his truck, Brillo already on a leash and walked to them. “Maybe we should go first.”

  “If there’s people in there, my dog will know.”

  Gill pulled up alongside. “Stay in this area. I’m going to check out some other places. If we lose each other, just be back outside at the Roswell Museum in an hour.” They nodded and he drove off.

  Mike walked quickly with the others following, to the glass front doors and tried to see inside, but the foyer was draped in shadow.

  “I’m guessing you have a reason why we’re looking in this place?” said Alexis to him.

  “Call it a hunch.” He pushed open the door and felt the difference in the air instantly. It was a degree or two warmer. He glanced at Alexis and she could feel it too. Warmth meant people. He went to step inside when a door at the back of the small room burst open and two men appeared with shotguns.

  “Get away!” shouted the smaller of the two. Brillo started to bark, the sound from the small animal feeling much louder than it should due to the silence in the street.

  All three held their hands aloft. “We’re federal agents. We’re here to help!” said Mike.

  “Yeah, that’s what the army said, and now they’re gone and most people are asleep or something!” said the other man.

  “How you going to help anyway?” said the first man, younger than the other, with a strong southern accent. A baby screamed somewhere behind him.

  “Look. We’re not with the army,” said Alexis. “But we are trying to find people who can leave the city with us. Do you want to leave? Or stay here?”

  The two men looked at each other, when the door opened again and a forty something woman, with graying blonde tied back hair, appeared between them. “I need to see some ID,” she said.

  Alexis pulled her badge and held it up.

  The woman nodded towards Mike. “And you?”

  He frowned. “I lost mine.”

  “Well ain’t that inconvenient.” She looked at the two younger man. “Lower your guns,” then looked back to the three near the entrance. “You best come with me.”

  They followed her into the main hall, which was half full of people, around eighty or so, of all ages, including several children. “Some of these are god fearing individuals, the others had nowhere else to go to, and we don’t turn anyone away.”

  A young man, seated next to a similar aged woman with a young boy on her knee, got to his feet. “You here to save us?”

  Mike looked at the expectant faces around him, and nodded. “Yeah.”

  *****

  A modern navy blue coupe slammed into a wall, adding to the destruction of its front end. A small bobble-head dog on the dashboard nodded and swayed as the gears ground and placed the vehicle into reverse, and with a spurt the car flew backward until it hit a post, where it repeated the cycle. Three rows over, two school buses sat innocently.

  Mike, Brad, the woman who he learned was named Joan McCluskey, and one of the men from the church crouched behind a small wall to the parking lot of a school.

  “And you’re sure that thing is not aware of us?” she said.

  “Doesn’t look like they are,” said Mike. “We came across other machines that had been taken control of. The AI can’t control them completely. Those school buses are the largest and oldest vehicles we’ve seen so far. No computer aided anything. We should be okay with them.” Joan didn’t look convinced. He looked at Brad. “You think you can get them started?”

  “Maybe, would help if I had some tools and some fuel so we can take off when we have them loaded with people.”

  “We can find the fuel and tools,” said Joan. She nodded to the man next to her, who stood and ran back in the direction of the Church a block over.

  “You okay staying with Brad?” Mike said. She nodded. “I need to head back to Main Street and the museum. The police chief—”

  “Gill Sawyer?”

  He nodded. “He’s out looking for others.”

  The eyes of the woman, who was dressed in a denim jacket looked distant. “Gill’s a good man. My husband, the priest of the church you saw, knew him better than I.”

  Mike had picked up over the years when people were talking about the dead, and instead of asking about her husband, he nodded and got to his feet glancing back at the car that then drove headfirst again into the side of the school. “Watch for any of these other vehicles suddenly moving… or any machinery doing something it shouldn’t.” She nodded, and he jogged back to the road, then the sidewalk when he heard the sound of an engine echoing around the street. Gill’s black truck appeared. The chief had picked up a passenger although Mike couldn’t see who it was until the vehicle slowed then stopped. A chill ran through him on seeing the shaving commercial grin of the man he had first seen on the way into the city two days before.

  Gill slid his window down. “Alexis told me you were over here. I found about another fifty people, they should be making their way to the church. I told them to stay away from their own vehicles if they were modern and electronics in general.” He could see Mike’s eyes kept flitting to his passenger.

  “Hello there!” said the man.

  “Yeah, this is Ed,” said Gill. “Picked him up back wandering the street. Says he ran into you on your way into the city a few days ago?”

  “Yes.” Mike briefly smiled. “Good to see you made it.”

  “Oh, ain’t nothing. Real strange how all the people are gone.” He looked at the chief. “I still can’t believe they’re all in a coma? That’s some real strange nuclear fallout.”

  “Anyway,” said Gill looking at Mike. “You’re going to use the school buses to get people out?” He briefly looked over to the parking lot, Joan visible standing at the back of one of the buses.

  “That’s a good plan,” said Ed his eyes not leaving Mike.

  “Where you want me?” said Gill.

  “Brad’s going to need tools and fuel for the buses. Joan sent someone back to get that. Let’s head back to the church and we get that to them quicker.” Mike pulled open the rear door and got in. He looked at the man in the passenger’s seat as Gill drove off. He had questioned hundreds of suspects in his time in the Bureau, and there was one thing that all the guilty had in common. They talked too much. You would think the guilty would remain silent, like they do in the movies or TV shows, but he found the exact opposite to be true. For some reason they felt that an innocent person wouldn’t be quiet, so the words flowed. That was the vibe that Ed gave him. The man was guilty of something, but he had no idea what.

  They pulled into the churches road and a small breath came from Mike’s mouth at the few hundred people milling around the front of the building, and almost the same amount in the parking lot at the side. “I thought you said about fifty?”

  Gill stopped the truck out front. “I… it was no more than seventy people. They must have known others…”

  “I guess two buses won’t be enough…” said the man in the passenger’s seat.

  Ignoring the comment, Gill and Mike got out, while Alexis appeared from the entrance and made her way through the crowd.

  “They just keep coming,” she said to them. “Did you find the school buses?”

  Mike nodded. “Yup, but it’s not going to be… enough.” In his mind he scoured the streets around trying to remember seeing any vehicles that would be of use.

  “Listen up people!” shouted Alexis, who had moved a few yards away standing on a small wall near the entrance. Some of the crowd paid attention while others kept on discussing their own problems.

  “Hey!” shouted Gill, now standing near her.

  The cacophony of noise from the few hundred people quietened to a din, and most looked towards him and the FBI agent behind. Her looked up at her, as she mouthed a ‘thank you’ down to him.

  “Hello. I’m special agent Alexis Adam’s of the—”

  “You’ll gonna leave us like the army did!” said a voice in the crowd.

  “No, no. I’m… we’re not. We are here to help. But right now we need your help. We have two school buses but obviously that’s not going to be enough to get everyone out of the city. So does anyone here know of other large and old transportation that we can use and isn’t too far from here?”

  Murmurs rippled around the onlookers until a skinny man in glasses raised his hand. “There are some tour buses at the museum’s parking lot. I’m… a tour guide there. I can get the keys from the museum.”

  “Yes! That’s perfect! What’s your name?”

  “Rowland Chan.” He walked forward to her, as did Mike.

  Daryl and Dawn appeared from the entrance, and she gestured to Mike to move back inside the church. He looked at Alexis. “Wait, I’ll go with you to the museum.” She nodded in reply as he and Dawn moved into the relative silence of the church’s entrance hall.

  Dawn leaned closer to him. “I looked, but I couldn’t see any sign of people being infected, not that I know what that actually would look like. But no obvious signs.”

  “Could the nanites be active inside a person without any obvious external sign of them being there?”

  She shook her head. “I… I guess. Usually though when they are infected the person becomes… for the lack of a better term—”

  “A zombie?”

  “Yeah. It’s like with the vehicles. There’s not enough AI in the person’s brain for it to take over. Just basic motor functions.” Mike looked at the people outside. “I know why you asked me to check. You don’t want to carry the AI any further east. But Mike, it’s probably already out there heading that way. All we can do is save these people.”

  He sighed then nodded. “Yup. Okay, stay here—” he looked at his watch. It was 1 p.m. A few more hours of fall daylight left. “— I want to be leaving the city within the hour. If Brad turns up with the buses get as many on as you can. Oldest, youngest, sickest first.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I know evacuation procedure, Mike.”

  He smiled and put his hand briefly on her shoulder, then went to push the door open, but stopped. “There’s a new guy, Gill found him. Name’s Ed. Keep an eye on him.”

  “Okay.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “See,” said Rowland. He, Mike and Alexis stood on the sidewalk just outside a parking lot, with a large gray block-like building beyond. “Five tour mini-buses. Not as big as the school ones, but we usually got about twenty people in each, and they will all be fueled. The keys are in the director’s room at the back of the museum.”

  Mike scanned the street which was lined with shops to the right, some of which had their fronts smashed and green and purples rubber masks lay scattered across the sidewalk.

  “When people started to believe aliens really had arrived and were… well trying to kill everyone,” said Rowland. “Some folks went a little crazy at those who made money selling… alien stuff…”

  Mike turned his attention to the back of the double story museum, and a staircase which ran up from the ground floor. “Can we get in there?”

  “Yeah, that’s where I was going to go.” Rowland held up a small set of keys. “I can get us in.”

  They all jogged across the lot to the side of the large building, pushing a small gate open and walked quickly up the steps which took them to the height of the second floor. At the top was a white-painted door, with ‘staff only’ printed on. Rowland slid his small key into the lock, turned it and pushed the door open.

  Mike looked at the sky which was starting to darken, then turned and followed Rowland and Alexis inside. He could hardly see the two others in the narrow hallway ahead of him.

  “Electricity’s been off in the museum for over a week, so just follow my voice,” said the tour guide.

  Mike pulled his pocket flashlight from his jacket and switched it on, but no light came from it. He shook it, then gave up and returned it to his pocket. A door opened some yards ahead and he just made out Alexis and Rowland moving through it. He caught up. They were now in a large hallway, with a series of what he guessed were doors.

  “Over here,” said Rowland to his left already opening one of them.

  The door swung open and the shadowy figures moved inside. Mike went to move off when something clanged in the distance. He stopped and listened waiting for the sound to repeat but it didn’t, so he followed the others.

  A small flashlight was on a desk, its beam the only illumination in the small office.

  Rowland opened a draw at the back of it and immediately held up a lockbox. “The keys are in here! Mr. Weeks gave me the responsibility to—” Another metallic clash reverberated around the darkness outside the office, which this time they all heard.

  Mike unholstered his gun and walked back to the open doorway. “Do you know if anyone is in the museum?”

  Rowland shook his head, his fear self-evident. “Shouldn’t be anyone inside. We had a few looters, but they all left. You can’t eat old photos and plastic models.”

  Mike strained his eyes into the almost complete black, searching for any movement. “You got the keys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’re—” A spurt of white noise came from the back of his belt. Making them all jump. His radio was there, and he had completely forgotten about it. The sounds of groans and anguished cries were gone, now replaced by Gill’s voice. Mike pulled the radio out and held it so they could all hear.

  “Mike! you there? Over.”

  “I’m here. What’s going on? Over.”

  A door in the hallway outside the office creaked open.

  “There are people! Emerging from the buildings! They’re—” More static came from the radio, while outside, in the hallway something moved. “Mike? Over.”