Get Out of Denver (Denver Burning Book 1) by Algor X. Dennison Page A

of some larger force. We can’t really know at this point; nothing like this has ever happened before in America.”
    They walked for two hours in darkness, with little talking and no one impeding their progress. It seemed that the chaos radiating out from the city center hadn’t reached most areas yet. As they crossed from Aurora into Englewood, however, they began to see glowing lights on the horizon. Shauna thought it was the sunrise until Carrie corrected her.
    “That’s west, Shauna, toward the mountains. The sun rises in the east.”
    “Well, then what’s that glow in the sky?”
    Nobody wanted to answer, and they walked on in silence, letting the truth slowly settle on their blonde companion. Downtown Denver was burning-- all of it. Shauna started to cry quietly and Carrie put an arm around her shoulder as they walked. “Where are we going?” Shauna asked through her tears. “I don’t think I can… I just want to lie down somewhere and die.”
    “We’re going somewhere safe,” McLean answered. “But we have to keep walking until dawn.”
    They passed a couple of dead bodies near an intersection with dark pools of blood around them. McLean hurried the group past on the far side of the street so no one would see the bodies in the darkness. He could smell the blood.
    They crossed a street and walked up a road that curved along the edge of a hill to where they got a view of several neighborhoods. A house was on fire several blocks away, and they could see a crowd moving around it in the fire’s glow, fruitlessly trying to quench the flames by hand with water that the people would need for drinking in the coming days. They got a better view of the fires downtown, which lit up the face of one skyscraper like the set of a macabre play. Shadows and smoke played off of it in a terrible dance. They also passed a lot of cars sitting dead in the road, doors locked and owners long gone.
    Following the edge of Cherry Creek State Park, they used its tree cover and grass to avoid the roads for a while. Eventually they came to Highway 87, which was a prominent enough landmark and thoroughfare that even though no cars were traveling, a fair number of people were walking up and down it in both lanes, or resting in and around cars.
    McLean scoped the area out as well as he could in the dark, listening to the voices of the people wandering around the highway. Most seemed quietly despondent, but some wailed in obvious mental distress. One man was repeatedly smashing a car with some heavy object, but if he was trying to gain entry he wasn’t doing a very good job. McLean wondered if he was drunk or had just snapped.
    “Follow closely,” he told the others. “We don’t want to expose ourselves near the roadway any longer than we have to. We’ll be much better off in the quieter areas away from the road.” He led them a hundred yards away from the car-smasher, and then approached the highway at a dark spot. They quickly filed across, avoiding contact with a cluster of people picking their way between cars northward, and followed the grassy bank of a canal that flowed perpendicular to the highway. They were no more than a hundred yards distant when gunshots rang out back on the road.
    Ducking down between the canal’s bank and the fence of a backyard that abutted it, they stared back the way they had come. Someone was screaming in pain near the road, and more people were scattering away from it like panicked rabbits.
    “Who’s shooting?” David whispered hoarsely. “Why does everybody keep shooting at people?”
    “Go, go!” McLean motioned them onward, and they ran along the canal until they were out of sight of the highway. Then Shauna begged for a rest, so they stopped at a picnic bench in a small neighborhood park that was completely dark.
    “Where is all this violence coming from?” Carrie asked McLean as they sipped water. “In disasters people pull together, they don’t start shooting each other. This is