And they were speeding closer every hour.
Sarah toyed with her supper, teasing a few shreds of spinach from her summer shade garden from the egg and cheese filling.
Blaze chewed a heroic bite of the pastry, swallowing hard. “Look, I don’t mean to pry.”
Oh, Lord. “That sounds ominous.”
“You said you had a will after your parents died. Is it up to date?”
“Nothing’s changed.”
The thought ofher willran around her head, too.
“And just so you know, you and I will sleep in the barn with my friends. The bratva will doubtlessly hit the house first, probably a frontal assault with AK-47s.”
Shock ran through her, but Blaze didn’t seem to be perturbed. “AK-47s?”
“It’s the preferred weapon of mass murderers in the United States. If they’re professionals, they’ll set up under ghillie suits in the cornfield like I did and pick us off with sniper rifles, but I’m not optimistic about their professionalism here.”
Bullets were going to rip through her house—the house she’d grown up in, the house she’d taken ownership of when her parents passed, the floors she mopped and the shelves she dusted—and everything would beshreddedby gunfire.
Just like she and every other kid of the millennium had grown up being taught to fear every day of their lives at school.
Blockade and hide.
Run and escape, or evade if you can’t.
And if the worst happened, play dead.
Several children had survived school mass murders by pretending to be dead.
Blaze said, “You should evac Muffintop to your friend’s place. She won’t be safe here. Considering the weapons Mary Varvara Bell wanted from me, they might already have drones.”
Even the air above the ceiling beams and roof menaced them. “Okay.”
“Charlie and HowNow should be returned to the neighbors. Military-grade ammunition travels three hundred meters or more. Even if they attack the house, the bullets fly, and the animals are large targets.”
“Right.” She shouldn’t have brought them home. “It seems real now.”
He reached over and took her hand. “Yeah. Combat is scary when it gets real.”
“It felt like I was back home, on the farm that I own, onmy land,where I pay the taxes and everything ismine,but now it feels like they’re invading my country.”
Her house shrank, the walls melting inward, and the floor under the table floated and bobbed.
Blaze asked, “You okay?”
“No,”popped out of her mouth before she could stop it.
“Sarah?” he asked, standing up from his half-eaten plate and stepping toward her. “We can still leave. I’ll send the word to have everyone turn around, and I can cancel the supply orders while you drive. We can gonow.”
No. No, theycouldn’t.“The animals.”
“We can drop them off on our way out of town. You drive your pickup with them in the trailer, and I’ll follow you to Abigail’s place.”
“The corn.”
“We can take your computer with us to monitor it.”
