Carrion (The Bren Watts Diaries #1)

Chapter 12

"I'm coming with you," he said.

I wanted to protest, but I was so tired that I didn't. I nodded, and Luke hopped out of the vehicle.

We approached the nearest person we could talk to ahead of us. He was a man close to his late forties wearing a New York Giants cap and a red and forest green plaid shirt, leaning against his Ford pick-up truck. He chatted with another driver, a short and bearded man who looked like in his early thirties and wearing a gray jacket.

"Evening, officer," The man with the gray jacket said.

I looked down at my clothes. The navy blue jacket I wore had the insignia badge and patch of the NYPD plastered at the front and back in bold white letters.

I gulped. "Uh—Right. Evening."

The man on the NY Giants hat narrowed his eyes at me.

"Do you guys know what's going on ahead by the ramps?" I asked.

The gray jacket man scoffed. "I've been here for an hour. They keep telling us to stay indoors, but I live in Union City across the river! How am supposed to go home when I'm stuck here?"

"I live in Hanover, too. My wife is probably waiting for me, and I've been stuck here for hours, and then that plane blew up," said the man with the hat. "I couldn't get past the riots, so I was forced to take this tunnel. I reckon you might know what's going on."

Oh. Right. I frowned, but I tried to hold my gaze impassively, looking away to my side. Luke didn't say a word.

"The riot's growing," I said.

"Growing? Like it went bad?"

"Not bad. It's worse than that. Multiple people dead, possibly hundreds."

"What do you mean hundreds of people are dead? Is it terrorist-related? Like the plane?"

"I don't know. My friends and I are trying to get out of the city to avoid it."

The man with the hat looked behind me. "You are young to be a cop," the man with the hat said.

I sighed. "It's because I'm not."

The gray jacket man backed away from me instinctively. He looked at the squad car. "You stole that?"

"The cop who owned it died. We borrowed it to escape the Upper West Side." It was Luke who spoke. "The rioters killed him."

It was that time I unzipped my jacket and showed them my bloodied white shirt. The gray jacket man gasped. "Is that—?"

"Yeah. Blood."

"Oh my god. I don't believe this!" The gray jacket man groaned, stepping back toward his vehicle.

However, the man with the hat studied me. "That your blood?" He asked.

No way of going around it now. "Other people. Crazy Ones. I think they contracted something. I don't think it's a normal riot, and I believe the government is trying to suppress the information. We barely could get anything out of the radio."

The man with the hat didn't say a thing but nodded. That was when I noticed it. Peeking between the buildings, I could see the ramps leading out of the tunnel. No cars came out from the Union City end of the tunnel. My tail and gut tingled and roiled, respectively.

Unbeknownst to me, The US government had already called in the National Guard from Newark and Jersey City, barricading the Union City end of the tunnel. Beyond that, the National Guard did the same by blocking off the bridges and any other ways into Manhattan.