Free Society: After It Happened Book 3 by Devon C Ford Page B

poured out of him, now she took a breath to speak.
    He held up a hand and shushed her.  She fought down her angry indignation and supressed the urge to cuff him around the head.  He leapt to his feet and threw away the cigarette, calling Ash back to heel as he swung the carbine back to his front and raised it in one smooth action.  He squinted through the optic pointed down the empty and overgrown motorway.
    “What is it?” she asked, a hint of fear making her voice slightly higher than normal.
    “Movement” he said gruffly “Vehicle, almost a mile away” 

HARD CHOICES
     
    Emma nursed the uncomfortable car northwards on a motorway littered with cars and green plants overgrowing the hard shoulder and central reservation.  She was sure last week that she was going to die.  She had started to cough, and had felt drained very quickly.  She recorded her notes throughout, dictating what she felt to be her own death so that someone might find her research and the data she carried and one day understand what it was that happened to them all.
    For three days she coughed and shivered, drinking all the water she carried and being too weak to find more.  She was confused, fevered.  She couldn’t understand how she had gone past the forty-eight-hour mark.  Had she?  Was she not reading her watch correctly?
    She was even more confused when she woke up on the fourth day, feeling better.  She had coughed so hard that her throat was sore and had bled from the minute rips caused by the violent coughing.  Her abdomen hurt, and looking under her top she saw her stomach muscles more pronounced than ever; she found herself looking at a six pack and wondering who it could belong to as it couldn’t be hers.  She had coughed herself to death, and this was some form of afterlife.  That was it.
    Only it wasn’t.  As her mind cleared from the fever she had suffered, she realised that she had been ill but had not died.  She suffered exactly the same symptoms, so she thought, but the virus had not killed her.  She saw her digital voice recorder abandoned on the floor next to where she lay sweating and shivering.  She had left it on and flattened the battery.  Hopefully she could charge it in the car when she got moving again, but first she needed water. 
    She needed water, food and clean clothes.  She had to admit, she stank.
    She gathered what she needed, taking aspirin to try and numb the pain in her head and body.  She found clothes to wear in an abandoned shop after climbing in through the window.  She washed with cold water, helped herself to deodorant and fresh clothes before leaving through a fire escape.  She paused at the sign which told her that the door was alarmed, and pushed the bar anyway.  She doubted there was anyone alive close enough to hear it.  She started her car, and continued north.
    Completely unaware that she was being watched.
    The two men in the car followed her.  They kept back in the distance, keeping her car over a mile away when the geography allowed and waiting for the right time.
     
    Dan whistled Ash and told him “IN”.  The dog launched himself through the open window of the Discovery.  He started to walk sideways, keeping the car in his scope as he moved towards the driver’s side.
    “Get in, Marie” he said calmly.
    “We’re not going after them are we?” she asked “I don’t, I think, let’s call up the others” she reached for the CB.
    “No time” he said, and started the big three litre as she watched the car approach without the need for the optic.
    “Female. Alone” he said as he reversed and went to drive down the exit slip to get behind the car.  Benefits of no traffic, he thought.  He stopped, turning the nose of the car to the left and moving to lean out of the window and raise the gun again.
    “What is it?” asked Marie, flustered and more than a little annoyed at him.
    He didn’t answer, just reached for the CB.
    “It’s Dan, anyone there?” he