***

The smoke from the fires at the refinery had yet to slow its enthusiastic rise into the atmosphere, giving its very best to try to block out the sunlight above them. Nelson had estimated that nearly seventeen thousand barrels of oil would burn, raining a black ash over the surrounding area.

Alex stepped around the makeshift medical tents, attending to the wounded, and looked down at his arm, where the flakes of black had gathered. He smeared his fingers across the greasy specks, and they smudged into fat streaks against his skin. Alex grew more and more fixated on the streaks until he tripped over something that broke his concentration. When he looked down, he saw an exposed boot sticking out from under a tarp.

The ground that surrounded him was covered with at least twenty tarps of soldiers who had been killed and pulled from the wreckage of the refinery. Underneath each tarp was the face of a man who’d given his life for the cause of bringing the end of suffering to others. That was the underlying goal of the entire operation against the Coalition. The black ash covered the tarps in a speckled darkness, giving their forgone bodies the same level of bleakness as their eternal rest.

This is what Gordon wanted. There couldn’t have been any other reason for it but that. Whatever dark, twisted disease had consumed him wanted to spread, and the pandemic had begun.

“You’re making this harder on me.”

Alex turned to see Luis with his shirt off and a patch over his shoulder. As Alex took in the size of Luis, he was thankful the beating didn’t continue when they first met. What Luis lacked in height, he made up for in width.

“How’s the shoulder?” Alex asked.

“I’ll live. You helped save over thirty men today.”

“It should have been more.” Alex looked back down at the number of tarps over the bodies.

“I did that to them,” Luis said, lost in a trance, staring down at his fallen comrades. “I led, and they followed.”

“You did what you had to,” Alex replied.

“No. I rushed it.”

“They were going to blow that refinery no matter how many soldiers showed up, and no matter how long they held it. It was always going to come down.” Alex walked over and placed his hand on Luis’s good shoulder. His fingers slipped from the slick oil specks that rained over them.

It was appropriate, the shadowy haze they were all being blanketed with. It was a slow process, letting the darkness take you. It was barely noticeable it at first, just a few flecks here and there. It’s a light drizzle that you don’t think will amount to much, but after a while, it grows.

That’s what Gordon had done to the country. It had been nothing but a light drizzle of deceit for the past three years, but in that time, the face of the nation had changed. Piling up, day after day, week after week, month after month, was the steady rise of filth that came in the form of the communities where citizens were forced to labor at the cost of their freedom. It sprouted in farm camps where those who were deemed troublesome or guilty were sentenced to work off their indiscretions in the harshest conditions at the cost of their dignity. And it had caused more bodies to be buried and burned than lives it saved.

“I’m going to kill him,” Alex said, looking down at the thickening blackness on the tarps below them. Before Luis could say anything, Nelson came running up to the two of them, attempting to balance the laptop in one hand and smearing the black muck collecting on his glasses.

“Guys, I think I found them.”

Luis immediately snapped out of his stupor and snatched the laptop out of Nelson’s hands. “Where is she?”

Nelson tugged at the laptop and pried it from Luis’s grip. “They didn’t register them under any names, but I managed to trace two deliveries to farm camps in Topeka.”

“Are you sure it’s them?” Luis asked.

“I can’t be one hundred percent, but the timestamps are around the same times Emma and Todd would have arrived. And seeing that these two were the only pieces of data entered that didn’t have a name associated for that date, I’d say it’s safe to say it’s them.”

“How close are they to the capital?” Alex asked.

“Well, that’s where it gets tricky. They’re not in the same farm camp.”

“What?” Luis asked.

“Emma is stationed on the outskirts of the city, but Todd is stationed almost directly in the downtown district.”

Luis immediately left and headed for one of the trucks. Alex chased after him, but when he placed his hand on Luis’s shoulder, he jerked it away. “Luis, wait.” Alex jumped in front of him and forced him to a stop. “Listen. You’ve just been shot, and we’re in Texas.”

“Then I better leave now.” Luis smacked his non-wounded shoulder into Alex, knocking him out of the way, and when Alex grabbed Luis’s shoulder again, he twisted Alex’s hand off, almost breaking his arm in the process. “I have to get her back!”

“And how do you expect to do that? By yourself?” Alex asked, rubbing his hand, which felt like it had been broken in half. “There’s a reason the military saved Topeka for last. It’s a fortress.” Alex watched the realization wash over Luis as the sprinkle of black ash continued to cover them in a fine layer of charcoal. “Todd and Emma are there because of me. We’ll get them out together.”