As The World Burns Read Free

shouted, trying to be heard over all the noise.
    "I don't know the exact location. Hopefully as far away from the East Coast as you can get. You'll be okay," he said.
    "How do you know?" Sacha asked.
    "Listen," Lieutenant Harris shouted as he approached. "We're a country at war now. All bets are off."
    With that said, the detectives handed Sacha their cards and soon disappeared among the crowd flowing back into the police station. Sacha looked up to the clipboard officer standing in front of him.
    "Mr. Kaminski, have a seat," he said. Sacha did as he was told and climbed the steps up into the bus. Inside, the bus was crowded. He wasn't keen on moving too far towards the back, due to some of the unsavory faces watching him.
    Sacha took the third seat to his right, and found himself next to a large and quiet bearded man. He wasn't Polish, which Sacha knew. He almost looked Romanian, but Sacha couldn't tell for sure. The bus was oddly and tensely quiet. After the last prisoner entered and sat, the clipboard officer shut and locked the gate that separated the prisoners from him and the driver.
    The clipboard officer, Sergeant Davis, was a clean-shaven young man who had an air of politeness to him. He was also heavily armed. In addition to the shotgun slung around his shoulder, his pistol belt was equipped with a Taser, a 9mm Beretta, and several cans of pepper spray. The civilian driver, a stocky man with a recently trimmed crew-cut, climbed into the bus and took a seat. His name was Mel. He wore a T-shirt that read: Mel's Dinner, either in jest or seriousness.
    "You know where we're going right?" Sergeant Davis asked.
    Mel nodded. The bus roared to life as the prisoners stared out their windows trying to make sense of what was going on.
    "Doesn't look like we'll be going anywhere for a while though," Mel said to Sergeant Davis.
    "Just do what you have to do to push us through," Davis replied.
    Mel laughed.
    "Okay. We'll see."
    The bus moved forward a couple of feet--then stopped. A line of traffic blocked its movement in all directions. A large cloud of exhaust filled the air for miles ahead. "This is going to be interesting," Mel added with another chuckle.
     

 
    Chapter Two
     

Colorado at Last
     
    The Chevy Malibu's engine hummed as Paul attempted to keep his eyes open and on the road. Julie slept soundly in the passenger seat. The car was nearly nine years old with over 150,000 miles on it. It wasn’t bad for a car of its age. There had been no major problems with it and it ran pretty well on gas. The lack of fuel was literally grinding the country to a halt, though Paul didn't know what was going on beyond his immediate surroundings. He knew that if they had just enough gas to get to Denver, then he would be happy. If he could just make it within the city he would find Samantha on foot if he had to.
    It was night and they had left a rural town outside of Kansas City, Missouri, only six hours prior. They took Interstate 70 through Kansas and met little resistance. For the most part, things looked ordinary, though most shops and gas stations were closed. Military and police vehicles often passed them by without care or notice, clearly more focused on other pressing matters at hand.
    Paul didn't want to stop, he had waited long enough. In all his certainty he had yet to verify if his wife, Samantha, was still alive. He hadn't heard from her in the weeks following the nuclear attack that struck key areas of Pennsylvania, wiping out the population and sending survivors scrambling. The attacks were later coined as the start of “Day One.”
     
    Day One began with a single act of terrorism against the New York Stock Exchange. Now it was Day Nineteen, nearly Day Twenty, and Paul was no closer to finding the truth about anything than when he and Julie first fled their hometown in a mad dash west. He knew that Samantha had been attending an expo-conference at the Denver Convention Center on Day One. He had received an