Chapter 94
As she stood there, the sound sharpened into the unmistakable roar of engines, more than one, moving low enough that the vibrations reached her through the barn roof before the noise fully registered.
Military. The strained pitch of the turbines indicated that whatever was overhead wasn’t just passing through.
Charlotte pulled the hazmat suit over her shoulders and sealed the chest clasps, her hands moving quickly from practice.
She fixed the faceplate in place just as the first explosion struck.
The eastern tree line flared. It wasn’t a bomb but something smaller and more precise.
A type of munition designed to cripple rather than destroy.
The flash burned bright, and in that harsh light, Charlotte saw figures running along the perimeter where the watchers had stood just minutes earlier.
Some were already down, while others raced toward the house with the urgency of those who knew that seconds now mattered more than anything else.
A second explosion hit even closer. The toolshed behind the barn took a direct hit, and the corrugated metal roof lifted in flames before collapsing inward.
The machine inside it fell silent, producing a sound like a large animal crashing to the ground.
Near darkness followed. The barn’s lanterns still burned, but beyond the doors, the farm was consumed in darkness, with only the fires spreading from the explosions lighting the scene.
Charlotte ran. The hazmat suit restricted her, but the restriction was better than exposure, and the attack outside had a signature she knew.
She shoved open the barn doors and ran into chaos.
People were pouring out of the house, the cabins, and the garden plots, where some had been sleeping in tents.
A woman carried a child. A man with a rifle moved toward the eastern fence where the first blast had hit. There was no clear direction, only the raw scramble of people who had been safe minutes earlier and now understood that safety was gone.
“Mason,” Charlotte shouted.
The name came out muffled through the faceplate.
She turned toward the porch where he had been sleeping on the swing, but it was empty.
The blanket lay crumpled on the boards, and the swing moved gently in the night air as if someone had just left it.
Charlotte ran across the yard. A third explosion struck the northern pasture, and the cattle bolted for the tree line in a blind rush.
Fire from the toolshed had spread to the woodpile, and the orange light turned the running figures in the yard into shadows that leaped and disappeared.
“Mason.”
There was no answer. The dog was gone, too. The blanket still held the impression of a small body, and when Charlotte’s gloved hand touched it, she found it warm. A voice rang out from the house.
Claudia was shouting orders with the hard authority of someone who had shifted from host to commander in the space of a heartbeat. “Everyone to the root cellar. Move now.”
People streamed toward the cellar entrance beside the kitchen, children first, then adults carrying whatever they could grab.
Charlotte didn’t join them. Mason wasn’t in that stream.
She checked every face as they passed, and his wasn’t there.
She ran toward the cabins. The eastern fence was fully involved, the woven wire burning where the first blast had landed, and the firelight threw long shadows across the open ground between the house and the tree line.
A figure appeared from the direction of the creek, small and running, with something dark at his side.
Mason. The dog kept pace at his heels, both of them moving with the focused determination of creatures that knew running was the only choice left.
Charlotte reached him as the fourth explosion hit.
It landed in the garden plots behind the house, and the force knocked her to her knees.
Mason slammed into her chest hard enough to drive the air from her lungs behind the faceplate.
She pulled him against her. His face was bare. There was no mask. His eyes were wide with a fear that had gone past crying into the stillness of a child who had already spent everything on terror.
“Where’s your mask?” Charlotte shouted.
He only shook his head. Either he didn’t know, or he couldn’t make the words come.
The dog pressed against them, ears fixed on the eastern sky where the engine noise wasn’t fading but multiplying.
Another explosion struck closer. The main house took a hit on its western corner, and the porch where Mason had been sleeping collapsed in splintered wood and flame.
The roof held, but the house had been badly compromised, and from inside came the sound of someone screaming.
Charlotte rose with Mason in her arms. He was light, too light, the weight of a child who had been underfed for weeks before reaching the farm, and she carried him toward the barn where the spare mask waited in her saddlebag.
They had crossed only half the distance when the coughing began.
It came from the livestock pens. One of the barn crew was on his knees in the dirt with both hands clamped to his throat, his body convulsing with a cough.
The gas. It had the same signature as the one Charlotte had seen at the community center, at the shoreline, and in the contaminated zone east of the river.
The last explosion still rolled through Charlotte’s bones when the alarm sounded from the eastern watch post. Three short blasts from the air horn on the barn roof. Yellow gas. Eastern approach. Moving fast.
Mason was already under her arm when the warning cut across the farm. “What is it?” he asked.
Charlotte didn’t answer right away. She had seen that color before, and the memory hit hard enough to make her stomach turn.
The eastern valley had started to change.
A thick yellow haze rolled down the ridge road in a low sheet, dull and mustard-colored, turning the morning light sick as it spilled through the lower trees.
Charlotte grabbed Mason by both shoulders and turned him toward her.