The Hunted Read Free Page B

And thin. His voice raspy.
    Shy looked to Shoeshine, but he was already turning around and walking the other way.
    Carmen and Marcus were as wide-eyed as Shy.
    “Go on now,” the bald man said, motioning them forward with his rifle. “Walk.”
    Before Shy even understood what was happening, the four of them were retracing their footsteps, past the battered fish restaurant and all the other damaged buildings. He kept his eyes partially on the asphalt in front of him, stepping around sharp objects with his bare feet and trying to think. Who were these people? And why did they have rifles?
    As soon as they were back on the sand-covered boardwalk, the bald man called for them to stop.
    Marcus nudged Shy as the four of them turned around. “Shit, I woulda lost it if they tried to get me back on that boat.”
    “Still might,” Shy said, watching two of the masked men pointing out toward the sea.
    The bald man spoke again: “Who are you? And where’d you come from?”
    A guy dressed in overalls and a straw hat lowered his mask, too. “Everyone knows you’re supposed to stay put,” he said. “You’re lucky it was us who caught you and not the Suzuki Gang.”
    “Our cruise ship wrecked,” Carmen blurted out. “We’re the only ones who made it back.”
    The men looked at each other, their masks making it impossible to read their reactions. One of the kids on bikes was staring directly at Shy. He wore a filthy-looking gray sweatshirt. Hood up. Baggy jeans tucked into combat boots. He held a large white jug by its handle.
    Shy was first to look away.
    “What’s happening here?” Marcus asked. “Is everyone really dying from that disease?”
    The leader ignored Marcus and pointed out toward the water instead. “Who owns that boat?”
    “
We
do,” Shy said. “We got it off an island way out there.”
    “What island?” someone asked. “Catalina?”
    “Jones Island,” Shy corrected him.
    Another man lowered his mask and said to the leader: “It doesn’t add up, Drew. They just told us they were on a cruise.”
    “They look sick,” one of the kids said. “They probably got kicked out of somewhere else before it spread.”
    “Make ’em go back where they came from,” another kid said.
    “No, we gotta shoot ’em,” the first kid said.
    Shy stared at the pack of kids in shock.
    A guy in a Dodgers cap cocked his rifle suddenly and raised it.
    “Yo, man!” Marcus called out, shielding his face with his hand. “Slow down! Damn!”
    Shy cowered along with Carmen and Marcus, spooked, but Shoeshine just stood there, unfazed.
    The guy in overalls dropped his bike, walked over to the man in the Dodgers cap and lowered the barrel of the rifle. “That’s not who you are, Tom.”
    “They can’t even answer a simple question!” the man shouted.
    “Who cares what they say,” someone else blurted out. “Leave the gun alone, Mason. You know what we have to do.”
    Shy’s heart pounded. These people were actually arguing about whether or not to
shoot
them.
    The guy named Mason made sure the barrel stayed aimed at the ground. “Explain how you got here,” he said. “We don’t allow outsiders to wander into our zone.”
    “What ‘zone’?” Carmen said. “We don’t even know what that means.”
    “We claimed this entire stretch of beach weeks ago.”
    “It’s marked on all the signposts,” someone else said. “There’s no way you could’ve missed it.”
    Shy remembered the fluorescent-green spray paint he’d seen on many of the street signs. Had the entire state been marked off into zones? Had his neighborhood in Otay Mesa?
    Carmen was first to step up again. She told the masked group how the four of them had been working on a luxury cruise ship bound for Hawaii. How the earthquakes had created a massive tsunami that wrecked their ship. How they had to bail into a dark, stormy ocean on lifeboats and life rafts with no sense of where they were or what they were supposed to do.
    Shy listened to