Technosis: The Kensington Virus by Morgan Bell Page B

“They are federal; they are going to kill us!”
    His mother slowed, but she didn’t stop. Sam saw a blur to his right and felt himself being thrown sideways.
    ∞
    “Why aren’t they texting or complaining?” Rosen asked.
    “It’s different; something is changing it,” Jamie said, then fired into the skull of one of the KVs.
    “Think it’s time we go low tech,” Rosen said, shooting four of them.
    “Knives?” Jamie asked, shooting three more.
    “No, old school,” Rosen replied, detaching the long flat blade strapped between his shoulders.
    Jamie followed suit. The two men swung machetes through the necks of the pressing crowd, kicking falling bodies out of the way. After hacking their way through more than twenty people they managed to reach the entrance to the mall.
    “We make a run for the truck?” Rosen asked.
    “On three,” Jamie agreed, hacking down another KV who used to be an insurance salesman.
    “One,” Rosen said.
    The glass of the entrance doors exploded. Rosen and Jamie dropped to the ground. Jamie looked over his arms that covered his head and saw where the gun fire was coming from. Two soldiers were firing into the mall. They were strafing the entrance.
    ∞
    “You okay?” a voice behind Sam asked.
    “Where’s my mom?” he demanded.
    “If she is lucky, dead.”
    Sam looked up expecting to see one of the adults, instead he saw a girl, maybe fifteen years old. “Follow me.”
    Sam got up and set out in the opposite direction to the girl. He found that she had dragged him into one of the clothes stores. He stepped out and saw gunfire ripping through his mother’s creepy boyfriend.
    He looked for his mother and was getting ready to run out into the concourse when he felt something pull him back.
    ∞
    “It’s Jackson and Sanchez,” Rosen said. “What the hell are they doing?”
    “They aren’t doing anything,” Jamie said. “It’s the virus.”
    Rosen took aim with his firearm and shot Jackson and then Sanchez. The two soldiers fell, but kept firing.
    Glass continued to shatter as the fallen soldiers, heads all but obliterated, continued to send a hail of bullets into the front of the mall. Then there was a moment’s silence. Both soldiers ran out of ammunition, and their hands wandered across their bodies, probing and feeling their way until they found their ammunition clips.
    “Now!” Rosen yelled.
    ∞
    “Let go of me!” Sam yelled, as hands pulled him back.
    “And watch you die? No thanks,” the girl spat out, dragging him backwards through the store.
    Sam spun around, “Who do you think you are? I’m going to get -”
    “Killed. Killed is what you are going to get if you don’t follow me out of here,” she insisted, not slowing her retreat to the back of the store.
    She came to a doorway and cracked the door open. Peering out she saw a black federal transport van in the parking lot. “You see that over there?”
    Sam looked out through the gray and black of the Paramus, New Jersey winter night at the vehicle, and nodded his head. “Yeah, so?”
    “When they leave, we leave,” she said, and retrieved a back pack from behind a shelf in the storage room.
    “Why?”
    “Because if we try to leave before they do, we’re dead,” she told him, and slipped on the backpack.
    “And if we stay?”
    “We’re dead.”
    ∞
    Both men jumped to their feet and ran into the parking lot. The dead soldiers’ hands tried to put the clips into the guns but were struggling. Rosen kicked the weapons away and removed the hands. The bodies lay quivering.
    “I thought text messaging was bad enough,” Rosen said.
    “We better see what’s waiting for us in the truck,” Jamie replied.
    The two men moved toward the transport vehicle. There were four soldiers, dead, outside the vehicle. Rosen and Jamie examined them. They’d been shot through the head, their weapons gone.
    Rosen knocked on the back door of the transport, “What’s your status?” he yelled.
    “We have a