A Better World by Marcus Sakey Page A

vehicles and an eighteen-wheeler were parked in a cluster. He pulled up alongside and killed the engine. Turned to Amy, saw her look, and said, “I’m not going to do anything stupid. I just want to see if they’ll let us past.”
    She took a breath, held it, and let it whistle out. “Okay. Talk good.”
    He smiled, leaned over, and kissed her quickly.
    The night was colder than he’d expected, his breath turning to frost. The makeshift command center was lit by headlights and pole-mounted floods. He heard arguing and followed the sound of it to a group of people in civilian clothes, facing a soldier with ramrod posture and an implacable expression. An aide stood beside him, holding a rifle. Beyond them were more vehicles, a Humvee and a tank and, wow, a couple of helicopter gunships bristling with weaponry. Ethan joined the crowd.
    “—you don’t understand, my wife needs insulin, we used the last of it this morning, and without it, she’s going to—”
    “—packed rig due in Detroit tomorrow morning—”
    “—there’s no heat, no food, come on, show a little—”
    The soldier raised both hands in a
calm down
gesture. When everyone quieted, he said, “I understand your concerns. But my orders are explicit. No one is to pass this checkpoint. For those of you with medical emergencies, we have rudimentary capabilities here, and the hospitals in Cleveland are operational. For everyone else, all I can say is that every effort is being made to supply food and repair the power grid.”
    “Can you tell us what’s going on?” Ethan asked.
    The officer gave him a quick evaluative glance. “The DAR believes the leadership of the Children of Darwin are here. There are missions underway to capture them. Our job is to ensure that none slip past. Which I’m afraid means that no one can leave Cleveland.”
    “That’s insane,” said a goateed kid in front of Ethan. “You’re locking down the whole city to catch a couple of terrorists? That doesn’t make any sense.”
    “Listen, man.” A burly guy in a John Deere cap stepped forward. “I’m a truck driver. Bad enough people are burning us alive, but if I don’t get my load to Detroit on time, I get stuck with the whole bill. That ain’t gonna happen. So how about you let me past?”
    “No one gets past.”
    “Now you listen to me—”
    “Sir.” There was a way soldiers and cops could say “sir” and mean, “I’m inches from beating your ass,” snapping their voice like a broken cable. “Get back in your vehicle right now.”
    This is a waste of time.
Ethan was about to leave when John Deere grabbed the officer’s arm.
    Oh, don’t do that, that’s a very bad—
    The floodlights seemed to flare in the officer’s eyes. His aide stepped forward and snapped the butt of his assault rifle into the trucker’s face.
    The sound was an egg thrown against concrete. The man collapsed.
    Ethan saw motion behind the two soldiers, on the Humvee.
    The .50 caliber machine gun swiveled over to aim at them. Maybe twenty feet away, and even from this distance the barrel seemed a hole big enough to crawl into.
    Ethan stared past it, to the man pointing it. He was good-looking in that blond sort of way, cheeks ruddy beneath his helmet, gloved hands on the weapon, finger on the trigger. He looked all of nineteen years old, and scared.
    What was happening? How and when had things slipped into this strange new place? A world where the grocery store didn’t have groceries, where the power vanished, where terrorism wasn’t something happening to someone else. A world where the line between this moment and utter disaster was so slender as to be defined by the fear in the heart of a nineteen-year-old boy.
    The other civilians seemed frozen. On the ground, the trucker made a wet sound.
    Slowly, Ethan raised his hands. Keeping his eyes locked on the soldier behind the gun, he began to back away. One step, and then another, and then he was apart from the group, and then he