Mutated - 04 by Joe McKinney

were using rubber donut rounds, the kind of nonlethal ammunition riot police had used on crowds before the outbreak. They were taking her alive. But why?
    The black shirts swarmed over her then and handcuffed her hands behind her back. Two of the soldiers scooped her up off the ground and carried her between them to the waiting truck, while the remaining two turned back to the south and looked around for Sylvia Carnes and the other woman.
    They weren’t there, Richardson realized.
    Quietly, he stepped back from the window and crossed to the opposite side of the room. There he stepped out of the back window and hugged the wall of the building, moving south.
    When he got to the corner he stopped and looked around. More windowless red brick apartment buildings. More brown, vacant lots. Gray paved streets with scraggly weeds coming up through the cracks. Sylvia Carnes and the other woman were there, standing out in the open, just waiting to be captured. Or worse.
    Roving camera, he thought. You’re safe here. You can just watch. Record. You can keep yourself safe, detached, uninvolved.
    “Move,” Richardson said aloud. “Come on, Sylvia. Move.”
    He heard the truck start up at the far side of the building. He heard the black shirts yelling, one of them directing the others to the south. They’d be on Sylvia Carnes and the other woman in less than a minute.
    Decision time, he told himself. You can walk away. You don’t need to be a part of this.
    Richardson leaned forward and cursed himself. He was mad at his own stupidity. And at Sylvia. Why couldn’t he ever take the easy option? Why couldn’t he just turn his back and walk away?
    He ran for them.
    They were watching the lots to the north—still hoping against hope, he knew, that Niki Booth would come running around the corner—and they didn’t even realize he was there until he grabbed them both by the arm.
    Both women looked like they were going to scream. The younger one actually tried, but the sound caught in her throat and all she could manage was a weak, choking gasp. She sucked in a breath and he knew she was going to try again.
    “Don’t make a sound,” he said. His voice was barely more than a whisper. “If they hear you you’re dead.”
    We’re all dead, he thought.
    He pulled them back toward the building where he had been hiding.
    “Come with me,” he said. “There isn’t much time.”

C HAPTER 4
    When Niki Booth awoke, she was on her stomach in the bed of the truck, a tan-colored boot right in front of her face. Her hands were cuffed behind her back. The truck bounced on the bad roads, telegraphing every bump through its worn springs to her aching ribs. Every breath was an effort. Every bump brought tears to her eyes.
    “She’s awake,” one of the black shirts said from above her.
    She turned her head to the side and looked up at the man. He was a lot older than she, forty maybe. He had a long, stringy red beard and freckles on his neck and face, and a tattoo of a raven on the inside of his left wrist.
    She tried to roll over, but the pain in her side made her wince and then she started coughing up blood. Big phlegmy wads of it darkened the dirty bed of the truck. She groaned.
    And then she caught herself. These bastards weren’t going to see her hurt. She steeled herself against the pain and looked up at her captors, scanning their faces, their clothes, the way they handled their weapons.
    The black shirt with the raven tattoo followed her gaze to his hand and adjusted his grip on the shotgun, perhaps thinking that she was debating her chances of getting the weapon from him.
    “It’d be a mistake,” he said, and the faintest hint of a smile touched his mouth. It suggested that he wouldn’t mind if she tried, though.
    Another bump in the road caused her to roll to her left, and when she did she got a view of the second guard. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette and looking across the deserted city. The shotgun