Read Here We Stand (Book 2): Divided (Surviving The Evacuation) for Free Online Page A

eyelids fluttered. He couldn’t be more than fourteen. Tom wanted to help. He wanted to do something, but there was nothing anyone could do. On the boy’s leg was a bloody bandage, another on his hand.
    “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and walked on. There really was nothing he could do for the boy, the old man, or any of these refugees.
    “Nothing,” he said aloud. Guilt stung as sharp as the truth in that simple realization. In front, there were hundreds of people drifting toward the town. Behind them were even more. This had been the event he’d wanted to avoid when leaving Manhattan. They were on foot, seventy miles from an uncertain salvation, surrounded by thousands of refugees, and an uncounted number of the dying infected. Soon the sound of slamming car doors would be joined by that of undead fists beating against the thin glass of their temporary tombs.
    “We need to get off the road,” he said, jumping up onto the roof of the nearest car. The driver slammed a fist against the windshield. Tom unslung the rifle, pointing it at the driver, but the woman was still alive. She cowered back in her seat, hands raised in front of her face. He ignored her and scanned the woods.
    “There’s a track,” he said, jumping back down.
    Helena turned to the woman in the car. “You need to get out,” she yelled. “Get out, get moving. Don’t stay here.” The terrified driver just shook her head.
    Tom turned away. “What was it that woman with the RV said? We have to help everyone we can, but we can’t help everyone.”
    They headed away from the road. There were refugees on the track. Too many, he decided, and cut a route away from the churned-mud path.
    Regularly spaced pine trees had deposited a thick carpet of needles on a forest floor made uneven by up-jutting roots. He tripped twice before he found his footing, but felt easier as the sound of the slowly fleeing refugees receded. The noise from the road was barely diminished.
    The ground began to rise, and he found himself walking up a steep incline. At the top, a tree had fallen, knocking into the nearest, ripping it out of the loamy soil. From the height of the splintered stump he saw the town, and the barricade on the road leading into it.
    Two yellow school buses had been parked across the road. Their windshields touched. Their rear tires were sunk into the muddy ground. Razor wire glistened in front and around the vehicles, and over corrugated metal embedded in the field on either side. On top of the school buses were eight figures. They were too far away to identify any more than the long gun each carried. In front of the barricade, filling both lanes of the road, were cars and trucks of every size and make. In and around them was a swarm of people.
    “Why did they come here?” Helena asked.
    “I don’t think they did,” Tom said. “Not intentionally. Someone stopped, asking to be let in. Someone coming from the other direction did the same. When the third stopped, it blocked the road. This is the result.”
    There was a stretch of empty ground, about twenty feet deep, between the buses and the refugees. It wouldn’t remain empty for long.
    “I make it close to four hundred people within a hundred yards of the barricade,” Helena said. “And only eight people to stop them. They won’t let them in, will they?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Do you remember the compact that drove off the road a couple of miles back? That track must lead to the far side of town. They’ve already been overrun, they just don’t know it yet.”
    “Overrun? You talk as if it was an invasion.”
    “The effect will be the same,” Tom said.
    “No. It doesn’t have to be. They’d argue that they can’t save everyone, that they can keep the people in the town longer if there are fewer people with whom the supplies have to be shared. That’s not the right way to think. They can keep all these people alive today, and tomorrow that help will be repaid when