Eden Rising by Brett Battles

victory.
    “Someone needs to stay here and keep an eye on what is going on,” she said. “ You are familiar with both the buildings and the people—”
    “Not all the people,” he interjected.
    “Many of them. You will stay. I will go.”
    He was beginning to see the pitfalls of falling in love with a woman who was smarter and potentially more competent than he was. “If you take too long, I will come look for you,” he said.
    “You will not,” she said. “If I do not return by sundown, you will go to the camp, but you will not come looking for me. Do you understand?”
    “Sundown? Impossible. I cannot wait that long.”
    “Sanjay,” she said, her voice mellowing in the way it did when she tried to point out the obvious. “There are many people counting on us now. If something happens to both of us, they will have no chance.”
    “I will not let anything happen to you.”
    “I know. And I love you for that. But do not come looking for me.”
    What else could he do but agree? Of course, that didn’t mean he had to stick by the bargain. He looked down the alley again. Nothing.
    Dammit. Where are they?
    Kusum had gone to the furniture factory to fetch the three others who had come with her and Sanjay into the city. Given the situation at the Pishon Chem compound, it seemed a good idea because their help might be needed.
    Patience , the voice of Kusum said in his head.
    He moved across the room to the window on the other side. His hideout was an apartment in a building two blocks from the compound. Though the Pishon Chem facility was visible from the window where Sanjay was perched, he could see only the very tops of the Pishon Chem buildings and a small portion of the fence that surrounded the property.
    He was supposed to be closer, had been closer, in fact, until just an hour ago when he’d returned to this meeting point, expecting to find Kusum and the others waiting for him. Seeing they weren’t there, he didn’t even consider going back to his former position.
    On the roof of one of the compound buildings, he spotted one man in a UN uniform patrolling the top. It was disturbing to him how hard they were trying to sell the United Nations angle. Most survivors would arrive at the facility in a state of shock. If the soldiers were wearing jeans and T-shirts, and only had the letters UN hand painted on the sides of their helmets, people would believe them.
    The sound of something scraping the ground floated through the window on the other side of the room. Sanjay quietly ran over and looked outside. The alleyway was no longer devoid of movement. At the far end was a man approaching along one of the walls, his movement odd, off-balanced.
    It was another few seconds before he moved into a shaft of light.
    Not just any man. It was Prabal, one of the people Kusum had gone to fetch.
    He was limping, his right leg swinging carefully forward with each step. And running down the side of his face, a wash of blood.
    __________
    W HILE IT HAD beendisturbing enough moving through the seemingly empty city with Sanjay, Kusum found it downright terrifying doing so on her own as she made her way back to the camp.
    The quiet was the worst part. Here she was in Mumbai, one of the largest and busiest cities in the world, yet there wasn’t the sound of a motor, the cry of a child, the laugh of an adult. There was no music, either, something that been such an integrated part of the background noise that she noticed the lack of it now more than she’d ever noticed its presence.
    Sticking to smaller streets and pathways, she was easily able to avoid the soldiers, seeing only a single group of three near the site of an old market. She hoped the same would be true when she and the others headed back to Sanjay.
    The camp was set up in the courtyard of a small factory that had made and repaired furniture. Semi-organized piles of chair legs and tabletops and bed frames took up much of the courtyard space, but there was still plenty