Free The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon, Book 5) by Sam Sisavath

drink cold water until I barf.”
    *
    The part of her that had been trained by Will and Danny, and that had been surviving out here by herself without them, knew that they weren’t going to reach Salvani without encountering resistance. The nineteen-year-old in her that was barely a year removed from her senior year of high school was holding out hope that it was a possibility.
    She should have known better.
    The first shot hadn’t finished its echo before the bullet punched through the front grill of the Nissan and Danny jammed on the brake. The truck swerved slightly, Danny fighting the steering wheel for control, face contorted into a tight grimace. He finally managed to stop the vehicle, freezing it in place across the two-lane highway, the nose barely a foot from ramming into the concrete divider.
    That allowed Gaby to look out her glassless window and up the road at two nondescript trucks parked about fifty yards from them. They had looked like all the other derelict vehicles they had passed since Route 13, with nothing about them standing out. Which was why Danny had almost driven right up to them when the first shot shattered the calm midday air.
    Except these cars weren’t abandoned, because there was a man peering back at her from behind a scope, the long barrel of his rifle leaning over the hood of the parked white Ford truck. The other vehicle was some kind of Chevy, and it sat along the shoulder. She thought she caught a glimpse of another figure moving around on the other side of its windows.
    A flicker of movement drew her attention, and she didn’t have to turn very far to see a third man moving on the other side of the concrete divider, jogging up the highway toward them. The man’s head was bobbing up and down as he attempted to stay as low as possible, but he was doing a very poor job of it.
    She twisted in her seat and shouted, “Get out the other side! Now now now!”
    Then she was turning back around, opening her car door, and lunging out before she even realized what she was doing.
    The other side, you idiot! Go out the other side!
    Too late. Her M4 rifle was clutched tightly in her hands, though she didn’t remember when she had picked it up from where it had fallen during Danny’s chaotic struggle to regain control of the vehicle. As soon as her foot landed on the hard highway floor, she expected to pay for her dumb decision. When she heard the crack! of the rifle, instead of feeling pain in her chest, there was a buzzing sensation right next to her right ear. The bullet sailed past her and hit the roof of the car behind her before ricocheting into the air.
    Two more shots rang out as she darted toward the back of the Nissan, the ping! ping! coming from behind her. She swore she could smell metal against metal. Maybe that was just her imagination, though she didn’t stop to ponder it. Instead, she grabbed at the top of the truck bed and used it to slingshot herself around the corner until she saw the back bumper and kept running until she was on the other side.
    She was happy to see that Danny was on the highway and pulling Milly out after him with one hand, the other holding his beat-up M4A1. Claire and Annie were already huddled against the truck, using it as a shield.
    “You okay?” Claire asked when Gaby crouched down next to her.
    Hey, that’s my job, Gaby thought, but it took her a few seconds to stop her racing heartbeat long enough to respond. “I’m good. You?”
    “I don’t think I was hit.”
    She looked past Claire at Danny, who was depositing Milly next to Annie. “Danny…”
    “I saw two,” he said.
    “I saw three.”
    “Where?”
    “On the other side of the divider—”
    “Check.”
    “—behind the white truck—”
    “Double check.”
    “And behind the red Chevy.”
    “Didn’t see that one,” Danny said. “You still running around with just the holes God gave you?”
    She managed a smile. “Yes.”
    “Good.”
    Crack! A bullet punctured the front tire