Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3] Read online

  RECIPROCITY

  Sidney’s Way volume 3

  a Five Roads to Texas novel

  Written by

  BRIAN PARKER

  Illustrated by

  AJ POWERS

  Edited by

  AURORA DEWATER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Notice: The views expressed herein are NOT endorsed by the United States Government, Department of Defense or Department of the Army.

  RECIPROCITY

  Copyright © 2021 by Brian Parker

  All rights reserved. Published by Phalanx Press.

  www.PhalanxPress.com

  Edited by Aurora Dewater

  Cover art designed by AJ Powers

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  Five Roads to Texas: a Phalanx Press Collaboration

  The Five Roads to Texas world is ever expanding. Look for more adventures from the minds of other Phalanx Press authors on the Five Roads’ Amazon page HERE.

  Works available by Brian Parker

  Amazon Link for Brian’s works:

  http://hyperurl.co/49bffn

  American Dreams series

  The Decline | The Ascent | End Game

  Five Roads to Texas series

  Five Roads to Texas | After the Roads | The Road to Hell

  The Days Before (a prequel) | Reciprocity

  Easytown Novels

  The Immorality Clause | Tears of a Clone

  West End Droids & East End Dames | House of the Rising Gun (coming soon!)

  High Tech/Low Life: An Easytown Anthology

  The Path of Ashes series

  A Path of Ashes | Fireside | Dark Embers

  Washington, Dead City series

  GNASH | REND | SEVER

  Stand Alone Works

  Grudge

  Enduring Armageddon

  Origins of the Outbreak

  The Collective Protocol

  Battle Damage Assessment

  Zombie in the Basement

  Self-Publishing the Hard Way

  Plus, many more anthology contributions and short stories.

  Do not be overcome by Evil, but overcome evil with Good.

  ~ Romans 12:21, The Bible, New International Version

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

  MARCH 26TH, DAY 1

  Sirens echoed loudly down the street. The artificial canyons created by the city’s massive skyscrapers intensified the sounds of panic causing a nearly overwhelming cacophony of sounds. New Yorkers in suits fought with tourists in flip-flops for taxis. Men punched women who stepped in their way. Police officers fled toward their own homes, abandoning their duties in their haste to escape Manhattan.

  Jackson Jefferson watched in horror from the windows of a souvenir shop he’d taken refuge in against the pandemonium. The young scientist had been on his way to work when everything went to shit. Of course the world would fall apart this week, he thought bitterly. He’d moved into an apartment in Midtown with his girlfriend, and another researcher at the hospital, just this past Saturday. He was finally within biking distance to work instead of riding the subway…and now this happened.

  “What’s going on out there you think?” a guy asked from behind him.

  He turned to see the twenty-something Middle Eastern employee standing in the center of the store with a broom. “I don’t know, man. I was riding my bike to work when everyone started going crazy. The alarms started going off and then an emergency text message popped up on my phone.”

  The employee held up his phone, still staring out the window without looking at Jackson. “I got it too.”

  “I think everyone did. There was like, a twenty-second delay while everyone read the message and then panic set in. I guess they’re all trying to get home before they get trapped.”

  Jackson lifted his phone from where it had rested in his hand beside his leg while he watched the chaos outside. He pressed the wake button and slid his thumb along the number diagram, keying in his PIN to unlock it.

  There it was. The mayor’s emergency message was still displayed on the screen. He hadn’t even had time to navigate away from it before people began fighting for a way out.

  “I’m lucky then,” the employee said. “I just live upstairs.”

  “Hey, ah…” Jackson read the man’s nametag. “Amir? You should probably lock up for the day.”

  “My father would kill me.”

  The young researcher pointed at the pandemonium in the streets. “He may get mad, but some of these people may actually kill you. I mean, did you see the part in the emergency message where it said people are killing each other?”

  Jackson reread the message on his phone.

  “This is an Emergency Alert from Mayor Romano. All bridges and tunnels from/to NYC will be closed in one hour. Anyone left in the city after that time will not be able to leave. No exceptions. There has been an outbreak of unknown origins across the United States. Millions of people affected. Victims become agitated and murder anyone near them. This is not a hoax. All NYPD officers are ordered to report to your precinct headquarters. Citizens are urged to remain calm.”

  “Remain calm, my ass,” Jackson grunted. “Oh shit! Beth!”

  He’d been so engrossed in watching the disaster unfolding before him that he hadn’t called his girlfriend. He tried to dial her number, but it wouldn’t go through. The phone kept saying that all circuits were busy.

  Jackson didn’t know what was going on, but he was sure it was a hoax. Why else would they say that it wasn’t, in the message? Asshole hackers were always doing stuff like that for their social media channels. They’d record peoples’ reactions and upload the videos. This was just another hoax. He looked up from his phone as someone slammed into the shop’s large window. Only this time, whoever set off this hoax was going to get somebody killed.

  He texted Beth, hoping the simple digital message would be able to squeak through the overcrowded cellular network. There was no luck. It wouldn’t go through either. This was shaping up to be a world-class disaster.

  “Yeah…” Amir said, his eyes never leaving the scene out on the streets. “Maybe I should lock up the shop.”

  “Good idea,” Jackson agreed.

  Finally, Amir looked away from the window to Jackson and said, “So…”

  “Oh. I didn’t mean kick me out, man,” the scientist protested. “I meant to just lock up and keep the crazies out.”

  Amir crossed his arms over his chest. “How do I know you’re not one of them? Maybe you want me to lock myself in here with you so you can rob me.”

  The sound of screeching tires and then the telltale loud bang of a crashing car made Jackson’s head whip around toward the street. A large SUV with a ridesharing company’s sticker in the window had crashed into a light pole right outside. Its hood was crumpled and smoke oozed around the edges adding to the eerie scene in the street.

  The passenger opened the back door and ran from the car, screaming. Jackson could see the driver, still trapped in his seatbelt. He thrashed uncontrollably, apparently unable to get out. “Oh God,” the young researcher muttered.

  Flames erupted from the engine compartment.

  That was all
the motivation Jackson needed. He’d been raised to always help those in need and the driver was definitely in need. He ran outside. His sense of self-preservation from just a few moments ago was gone. He had to help that person. He wasn’t a paramedic or a firefighter. The only thing he would be able to do was unbuckle the driver’s seatbelt. It had to be enough though. Someone else would help him once the driver was out of the car.

  Traffic had slowed as drivers gawked at the flaming wreckage, making it an easy run across the six lanes of traffic. He reached the driver’s door in seconds, but four-foot tall flames were already licking the air around the edges of the hood.

  Jackson wasn’t prepared for the intense heat of the fire. The vehicle fire seemed much hotter than the normal flames from the gas burner in his old apartment. The intense, skin-boiling heat threatened to overwhelm him, even from several feet away. He couldn’t imagine what the driver was experiencing inside the SUV.

  The driver continued to flail his arms wildly in an attempt to free himself. Why doesn’t he just reach down and unbuckle his seatbelt instead of freaking out? Jackson wondered. It was weird, but then again, he’d never been in a car accident before, so he had no clue what was normal and what wasn’t.

  He reached out and grabbed the door handle. It singed his skin and he cried out, snatching his hand back quickly. The man noticed him and screamed for help. He slammed his head into the window several times, leaving a mess of bloody smears across the glass. He must have hit his head when the car crashed into the pole.

  Jackson pulled the sleeve of his heavy flannel shirt down over his palm and tried again, this time successfully opening the door. The man’s screams intensified. They were incoherent screams of pain and agony. The seatbelt restrained the man as he reached out for help. His fingers clutched at Jackson’s shirt, pulling him into the car.

  “Hey!” Jackson shouted. “Hey, stop!”

  He pulled one arm free of the sleeve and pirouetted, sliding his other arm free, and stepped back from the car. The driver screamed, dropping Jackson’s shirt and reaching for him again.

  “What the hell, man? Calm down. I’m trying to help.”

  The flames had grown higher and thick, black smoke billowed into the SUV from under the dashboard. It was all Jackson could do to avoid inhaling the smoke as he stepped closer to try to unbuckle the seatbelt once again.

  The driver’s teeth gnashed, slamming together, barely missing Jackson’s shoulder. He jumped back away from the lunatic. “What are you doing, man? You just tried to bite me!”

  A gurgling sound emitted from the man as the unpleasantly sweet smell of cooking meat began to mingle with the acrid smoke. Jackson looked up in time to see the driver retch and he sidestepped as a mass of pink, frothy, blood-filled liquid landed several feet beyond where he’d been standing. If he hadn’t moved, it would have hit him in the face.

  The driver’s screeching resumed and he beat in frustration at the steering wheel. Jackson stepped over once again, and was rewarded with a vicious scratch across his forearm as the man’s fingernails dug into his exposed skin.

  “Aiee!” Jackson wailed, jerking his arm backward.

  Blue and orange flames burst from the passenger side dashboard. The heat and smoke drove him back. He stumbled, hitting his hip on a trash can before falling to the sidewalk. Pain exploded in his right elbow as it slammed into the concrete. He rolled onto his side, cradling his arm.

  The driver’s screams abruptly stopped, causing Jackson to temporarily forget his pain. He looked up. The entire inside of the SUV was a roiling mass of flame. The man’s skin was charred black, cracking and peeling away to reveal the pink meat underneath. His lips were pulled back, the snarl of pain frozen on them forever, revealing white teeth.

  Jackson threw up on the sidewalk. He was close enough to the ground that some of it splashed back up onto his chin.

  He pushed himself sideways away from the puddle of partially-digested egg and cheese sandwich. He looked around for anyone to help, but nobody paid him or the poor man in the SUV any attention. They were alone in a crowd of people, rushing to get back to their homes.

  Jackson tried to dial 9-1-1. The same prerecorded message about all circuits being busy blared from the cell phone’s small speaker. He pushed himself to his feet. Even from here, at least fifteen feet away from the burning vehicle, the heat was intense. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice told him to run before the SUV exploded. That’s what always happened in the movies. The clock began ticking and he staggered away from the scene.

  There was nothing he could do anyways. He was a molecular biology doctoral candidate, not a firefighter. What was he supposed to do?

  By the time he reached the small souvenir shop across the street, Amir had heeded his advice and locked up the store. Heavy duty roll-down security shutters covered the windows and bars protected the door.

  “Shit!” Jackson exclaimed. His damn bicycle was inside the store. He slammed his palm against the shutters, causing them to rattle loudly.

  He beat on them for a solid five minutes, but Amir never returned. Jackson grunted in defeat and decided that he was much closer to work than to home. Maybe somebody was still at the lab. He’d go there to try to find a ride home.

  As he trudged up the street, toward Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center where he worked, his mind filed away the fact that the SUV hadn’t exploded. Instead, it had simply burned itself out once all the flammable material was used up. If that wasn’t right, what else had Hollywood gotten wrong about that sort of stuff?

  RECIPROCITY

  1

  * * *

  NEAR LIBERAL, KANSAS

  MARCH 2ND, DAY 341

  The wind howled across the plains, stirring the hunter’s hair. She was covered head-to-toe in a mottled woodland camouflage pattern that her group had looted from the sporting goods section of the Walmart on the far side of town. The snow still lay thick around her, but there was enough of the long prairie grasses and abandoned corn stalks dotting the landscape that her camouflage blended in from a distance.

  Sidney Bannister rotated the switch on her suppressed M-4 from safe to semiautomatic with her thumb and sighted in on her quarry’s head. She squeezed the trigger gently, easing the firing pin back until she reached the point where the weapon discharged, surprising her slightly. The gun coughed and a muffled report echoed across the open fields. Every time she paid any attention to the sound she was annoyed at the way all of those movies she’d watched before the outbreak had misled her. Sure, her rifle was much quieter than an unsuppressed weapon, but it sure as hell wasn’t the James Bond kind of silent she’d expected.

  Her shooting skills had progressed by leaps and bounds since Jake first taught her how to shoot all those months ago, but three hundred feet—about the distance to the outfield fence on a baseball field—was as far as she was confident about hitting her target.

  “You get it?” Mark, the newest addition to their little group, asked. Jake had found him in a grocery store—was it only last month?

  So much about what they thought they knew about their new world had changed in such a short amount of time. Jake, whom she thought she had a future with, had gone off on some ridiculous mission to Washington, DC with that Grady Harper nutjob. Harper was a cowboy who thought the infected were scared of him or something. The only thing he was good for would be getting everyone in Jake’s little Army group killed.

  After the airstrike at the Campbell farm, they knew it was only a matter of time until the Iranians came looking for them, so they’d abandoned the farm, going farther off the main routes. Sidney had gone on the offensive with the help of Vern Campbell and his granddaughters. Just yesterday, they’d ambushed a small patrol and killed four of the Iranian bastards. It was exhilarating to finally be doing some good.

  “Yeah, I got it,” Sidney replied, motioning toward the deer she’d taken. She lifted the small field binoculars to her eyes and examined the kill. She’d hit it just be
hind the eye. A tiny hole opened into a large wound on the opposite side of the creature’s head. Movement at the edge of the cornfield caught her eye. “Ahh, dammit.”

  “Infected?”

  She dropped binoculars into the snow and brought the rifle back to her shoulder. “Yeah. They’re going after our kill.” She felt him shifting beside her and she pulled her cheek from the rifle stock. “No. You’re not getting in on this. I need you watching my back.”

  The boy grumbled, but stayed facing the opposite direction with his own weapon—a large-caliber machine gun that they’d taken from some dead Iranians a few days ago. He was her rear security, a tactic that Vern had insisted upon for two-man hunting teams. If they didn’t maintain a 360-degree security, the infected, or worse, the Iranians, could attack them. The machine gun gave them added firepower in case they couldn’t simply melt away into the fields surrounding them.

  “How many of them?” Mark asked.

  She squeezed the trigger, aiming for center mass on the malnourished infected that was running toward fresh meat instead of attempting a headshot. It stumbled and went down. She kept the scope’s red dot hovering just above it so she could fire once more if it got up.

  It didn’t.

  “Just the one right now,” she whispered. “We’ll give it a few min—ah, damn.”

  “What?”

  “They got it. Too many of them out here.”

  She lowered the rifle and grabbed the binoculars. There must have been at least ten or fifteen of the beasts emerge from the corn, enticed by the scent of fresh blood. She’d taken the shot when the deer was only a few feet from the edge of the corn, so there wasn’t a lot of time to react to the advancing group. They would get the meat and Sidney’s group wouldn’t.