Medora Wars Read Free Page B

fountain that was adjacent to the back of the stage, trapping everyone who had hid there, with no place to escape.
    Sheffield remained quiet, thinking and waiting, unwilling to make a hasty move. He tried counting the gunmen, and thought it was somewhere around fifteen, but wasn’t sure if he could see all of them around the large crowd that had formed.
    Elise turned on her back and looked up at Sheffield. “What do you think they want?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Do you see Secretary Gamez?”
    “No.” He kept his focus on the vans. He wanted to say what he really thought was going on, but he was afraid that using the word ‘bomb’ would immediately incite panic. “Miss Whitten, I want you to be ready to run exactly when I tell you to. Be ready to get up fast, make sure to take off your high heels.”
    “Okay,” she whispered, slipping her shoes off, and rising so that she was crouched beneath the stage on her hands and knees.
    “Tranquilo, tranquilo. Nadie va a morir.” One of the four gunmen behind a van calmed the crowd by assuring them that no one was going to die. The other three behind the vans burst into movement and backed away from the back doors of the vans, trying to create space to open them. Once they had moved the crowd away, the gunmen opened the back doors of both vans at the same time, and then backed away with their rifles drawn.
    “They opened the back doors of the vans,” Sheffield whispered down to Elise.
    “Why? Are they taking something out?”
    “No, they just opened them and moved away.”
    The entire crowd around the vans silenced, attempting to understand what was happening as the gunmen had distanced themselves from the vans, but maintained hostile stances with their rifles aimed toward the people.
    Slowly, but steadily, armed men exited the vans. Because the back of the vans were faced the opposite way, Sheffield couldn’t tell who they were, but he did see numerous men in helmets falling out and into the crowd of people. It looked as if each van carried about five armed men who had filed out.
    “Okay, it looks like we have even more armed men, about ten more from the vans,” Sheffield said.
    Several screams erupted in the crowd followed by spots of quick movements. The crowd then panicked again with shouting and people trying to climb over one another to get away. As some people broke free of the crowd, they were immediately shot down by the men that had lined up around the outside, discouraging others from trying the same.
    “What the hell is going on?” Elise impatiently scooted out from underneath the stage and knelt so that just her eyes could see out over the crowd.
    “Stay down! They just shot someone,” Sheffield said, berating her.
    Ignoring Sheffield, Elise looked out and saw a man in a helmet as he brought down both his arms clumsily on top of a woman’s head and collapsed into her, bringing her down into the mass of people. The woman let out a long cry into the air, “Me muerde, me muerde!”
    “Oh no,” Elise said, standing to her feet. “They’re biting people!”

Chapter Two: Jersey City
     
    “…And we know what we have lived for and what we will always live for. As citizens of this great nation, we have the tenacity and heart to know that we can be reborn of our hardships, and restored to our great American heritage. We are the patient hearts of mothers who lost their children. We are the emboldened courage of the countless fathers who died never knowing if their families would ever be safe. We are the innumerable heroes who together saved millions of lives from the greatest calamity that has ever struck this nation. We survived the greatest battle that has ever been fought before and by an enemy that had never been known. Yet to this day, we all continue to feel the absence of every single one of our six million brothers and sisters that we lost during that brief two-day battle. We know them, we love them, and we will forever miss them.
    “It is