What’s your response going to be if they disobey your command?”

The grizzled career cop gave her the kind of look inspired by an encounter with the criminally insane. “This isn’t a University sit-in. Disorderly mob activity is a threat to public safety.”

“Answer the question, Captain. What will be your response if these protesters fail to disperse?”

The captain gave her a steely-eyed glare. His eyes flicked to the camera in his face. 

“We have the situation under control.”


#


Wendell half-ran, half crawled the last hundred yards of alley between him and the clean, well-fed young people. He knew somewhere in his gut that if it took more than 50 more steps, he wasn’t going to make it. He would collapse, and never get back up. 

Not alive, anyway.

The first person he saw stood out like a beacon in the crowd. The young girl was angelic — a slender blonde with a sweet, infinitely gentle face…. 


#


Amy turned her head and he was just there. An emaciated figure, skeletal really, with big glassy eyes and a filthy hand that reached unsteadily for her. He must have tottered from the alley because suddenly here he was, mouth working like a gasping fish. 

She screamed, because this apparition was about to grab her arm. Shea whirled, saw the man, and pulled a small silver .38 revolver from his coat.

In the next split-second Amy recognized that the man faltered, a uniquely human reaction to a firearm pointed at him. He was alive. She started to open her mouth, though she had no idea exactly how she would articulate what she needed to...

There wasn’t enough time. Shea pulled the trigger. The man dropped, a black hole fissuring blood from his temple. Dead. For good, at least.

Amy stepped forward, words starting to form on her lips. A second bark of gunfire, more distant, and Shea himself was sliding along a toppled wall with a stricken expression. 

Mercifully, Amy never registered that the top of Shea’s head had been roughly sheared off by police bullets. Less than a second later, her own brain was quieted forever by a bullet’s deadly passage.


#


Jerome sensed the white girl’s shooting more than witnessed it — he was tracking the gunfire’s sudden reports while hustling over treacherous terrain that demanded his attention — but he caught her crumpling to the ground and quickly put two and two together. The police had opened fire on the crowd, and that meant they would keep shooting until there were no potential threats left. Jerome knew as well as the most hardened v-cop that anyone without a bullet-perforated brain was a potential threat.

Jerome ran headlong through the panicked crowd, everyone stumbling over rubble in their haste. All around him ankles turned, knees buckled, bodies crashed heavily to the unforgiving ground. Signs and placards were trampled underfoot.

Their bold words forgotten in the roar of discharged rounds, Andre and Jimmy darted fleetly onward without a glance back at Jerome. His step was more unsure and he fell behind. Their backs vanished behind a swirl of fleeing bodies and when the way cleared again, Jerome had lost track of them.

This was unsettling enough but things got worse when he ran right into a v-cop in black body-armor — they rebounded off each other like billiards balls. This cop’s helmet screen was transparent and Jerome got a glimpse of a man’s youthful Asian features and startled eyes.

There was a second cop beside him — a lithe female — who reflexively lifted her submachine gun to waist level.

Jerome veered right, zigzagging blindly to put the cops behind him. He plunged through the doorless threshold of a derelict building and took refuge in its shadows.

Breathing hard, Jerome picked his way through the gloom of a long-closed bank lobby. An asteroid belt of dust drifted in the rays of light filtering through breaks in the walls. 

Running across the dark room, he sought another way out. There. A broken window beckoned from the other side of the building.

Jerome ran heedlessly through the debris in semi-darkness. He shot a glance over his shoulder to check for pursuers.