Read Zombies vs Polar Bears: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 5 for Free Online Page B

tell her
where they'd gone? She couldn't guess.
    “I told the colonel the kids left Cairo.”
    She appeared to wince at the news.
    “Why in the hell would they leave this place?” She
appeared exasperated, sounding a lot like the colonel, but calmed in
moments. “Would you mind telling me how they escaped?”
    “Escaped? No, they just left.”
    Were they prisoners. Be careful Marty.
    She tried to reassure herself, but deception didn't come naturally
to her.
    “Of course. And how did they leave , if I may ask?”
    There was no lie that made sense. No one could walk out the front
because it was a huge floodwall door that only opened for the
military. The bridges were also guarded. The only way out was the
water. She would never believe he swam, would she?
    “Ma'am? This is very important.”
    “Is Liam in trouble?”
    “Trouble?” She smiled, but it was humorless. “No,
of course not. We have a list of guests that we have to balance with
all the refugees in our town. If people don't check in, we have no
idea how much food we need, or if there are infected among us. My job
is to organize the survivors according to their abilities. Having a
strong young man, or young woman, would be very valuable to the
people manning the ditch.” She pointed toward the north.
    “So, let me ask you again. How did they leave?”
    Marty's glib response surprised both of them.
    “They swam!”
    “Swam? Are you sure?”
    “They said there were so many barges they could almost walk
across to Kentucky. But that they had to swim a little ways, too.”
    She commended herself for putting them in the wrong state.
    Elsa stared at her for many seconds. Like the colonel, she bore
into her eyes, but she was able to resist the woman a little better
than the angry man. The colonel showed pain and sadness, but also
determination. In the woman she only saw hatred. It's what made it so
easy to read her.
    “Swimming, huh?” She thumbed her phone again. Marty
absently wondered if the young woman's generation would survive
without technology, because that's where they were heading. Except
for this little enclave of Cairo, the whole world was probably going
dark.
    Elsa held up an image on her phone; Marty knew she was caught.
    The one time I try my hand at lying…
    It was a grainy photo of her in a hospital bed with Liam,
Victoria, Hayes, and Duchesne standing around her.
    “This photo was taken from a low-level surveillance drone
over St. Louis five days ago. Here you can clearly see you. We've
identified Liam and Ms. Hennessey, and of course we already know Mr.
Hayes and Mr. Duchesne. The bodyguard and Mrs. Hayes are unimportant
to this little sit-down. What's relevant is that I need you to think
hard about what you tell me. I didn't bring you here to sit in this
cool air without a reason.”
    “No, I didn't think you looked like a kind woman.”
    “Kind woman? Really? Kind?” She stood up and tossed
her phone on the bed, but grabbed it quickly and wiped it on her
pants with a huff.
    “This town is disgusting, you know that?” She didn't
wait for Marty's response. “I have a whole state to run. This
town is under siege. The sick are getting sicker. And you think I
care about being kind to a couple of runaway kids. Kids, who I might
add, somehow escaped from these men?” She pointed to Hayes and
Duchesne on her phone, though Marty knew who she meant. She wondered
if the drone was able to record sound through the windows as that
would probably be of interest to her. Hayes and Duchesne didn't
exactly see eye to eye.
    “No, I'm going to ask you again and you're going to tell me
what this is all about. Why are you on a government watch list and
why are these two kids running around the tri-state area showing up
on drone footage and security checkpoints?” She slid her screen
and showed Marty another pair of photos—shots of Liam and
Victoria's torsos on a highway bridge from the earliest days. She
recognized his shirt. And Victoria wore a