March Home

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Jo pressed send on her cracked tablet. When her tap didn't register, she tried again, providing more warmth and pressure.

At that, the pending wheel began to turn. It was a promising development but no guarantee for success. Sector-1's network wasn't known for its reliability. Half the time, they were lucky to have electricity. Without the generators roaring around the clock, it would be a dead zone in more ways than one.

"Hurry up," said the gang-kid in line behind her.

When Jo didn't acknowledge him, he shoved her from the one working public outlet within a mile radius. The handful of others were reserved for the Medical Ward and the Coalition.

The charger was ripped from the plug. "Hey!" The wall broke her fall and she ricocheted back to upright with only a scraped elbow. It was a wound she was willing to inflict to keep the tablet safe. If she wasn't vigilantly careful, it might go dark for good. "I wasn't done!" She covered the outlet with her hand before the boy beat her to it. "This is important! It affects us all."

"You're done when I say you're done!" He nudged her out of the way and went on to complete whatever was more pressing to him than the survival of the human race.

With an explosive sigh, she placed the tablet in her knapsack and left before his "friends" arrived.

Although Jo didn't often shy away from a fight, this time she had to. She didn't want to meet the renowned Dr. Bhaer looking like a street ruffian, and believed she had the signal strength and battery power to push the message through.

The wind was frigid, and her time was valuable, so she dipped below ground. The abandoned subway tunnels were a hotspot for crime, infection, and any number of other ways to die, but she had her sabre, moved with a rat's speed, stealth, and agility, and wouldn't be in there for long. Her destination was only one "stop" away.

Jo knew at least twenty different routes to the Medical Ward, and if she mixed and matched, she was never in the same place at the same time. As an added safety measure, she kept her hair army-short. If she was spotted from the corner of anyone's eye, she looked like a boy.

This didn't help Marmee sleep at night, but few things did. Her husband's unit was missing, Meg was pregnant, Amy was studying horticulture with the Tau-Cetians, and Beth was infected with HSV-11. And it looked like the worse-case scenario.

Only half of those infected with HSV-11 survived and recovered, typically those in the sixteen to forty range. Most others died within forty-eight hours. The remaining ten percent slipped into a coma. With the treatment they had available, they could only delay the inevitable. There was only one known way to "rise" from this state.

The way things were progressing, the doctors would have to strap Beth down, flailing and foaming at the mouth, and expose her brain to toxic levels of gamma radiation. This would be the "humane" way to end her life.

So, in other words, Jo was the least of Marmee's problems. Fortunately, Amy was in a sterile environment, and Jo and Meg had beat the odds and now had full immunity. It gave Jo some scrap of freedom, what little could be achieved with the Tau-Cetian space station looming overhead.

Jo vaulted over a turnstile, severing a zombie head from its body with her sabre while doing so, and sprinted up the dead escalator. After slipping through the shards of glass of the broken door, she stepped into the open space and relative light of a courtyard. She no longer expected to feel the warmth of any sun at this early hour. She was surrounded by crumbling skyscrapers and the space station was like a cloud of doom.

It was hard to believe the Tau-Cetians were the lesser of three evils. In the armistice of 3y.270d, the Coalition agreed to fulfill their quotas for food, fuel, and raw materials, and in exchange, the Tau-Cetians would vacate the Earth's atmosphere in ten years' time.

The deal was preferrable to extinction, and reasonable after three years of war, but the land was scorched, and the industrial infrastructure was in shambles. The humans could barely feed themselves. If they couldn't begin there, how could they meet the rest of the Tau-Cetians' demands? They had 209 days to figure that out or come to terms with the consequences of their failure.

Jo was halfway across the courtyard when the sirens went off. She was supposed to take cover immediately, but she was so close to her home away from home, and kept running.

What was she running from? The third and most pervasive evil—Warlords. They'd never bow down to an alien race, and intended to die fighting, killing or enslaving anyone who disagreed. They'd gained control of Sector-2 and 3—most of the water and farmland—and they were now infiltrating Sector-1, the capital and industrial center, and Sector-4, the science and technology hub.

Before Jo reached the shelter of two buildings, gunfire erupted. It rained down on her, stippling the cobblestone at her feet.

A grenade hit the building in front of her. She was blasted back. Someone caught her in the air beneath her arms.

A fat bearded man turned her around by the cuff of her knapsack and lifted her to eye level. "You are no boy," he sneered while she dangled there, helpless. "The eyes never lie."