Dog Blood

importantly, going out into the open and watching those evil bastards being hunted down and executed was as close to revenge as he was ever going to get. And Christ, he needed some kind of revenge or retribution. Through no fault of his own his life had been turned upside down and torn apart. Like just about everyone else, he’d lost almost everything and he wanted someone to pay for it.
    The truck lurched forward, stopping just inches short of the back of the vehicle in front, then lurched forward again as the convoy began to move. Mark glanced back across the park as a helicopter gunship took off from its soccer-field landing pad before taking up position overhead, their escort and their eyes while they were outside the city.
    A single strip of gray pavement weaved through the park from a central point, running through a large, rectangular parking lot (now filled with military vehicles), then continuing on as a half-mile-long access road with copses of trees on either side. As the track curved around, Mark shielded his eyes from the relentless afternoon sun and looked out across this bizarre militarized zone. How could it have come to this? He’d played here during school vacations as a kid; now look at it. The village of tents and trailers made it look more like a third-world slum than anything else. Or perhaps a badly organized humanitarian response to some devastating natural disaster-the aftermath of a hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, or drought?-although nothing like that ever happened here. He forced himself to look up from the never-ending crowd of refugees that seemed to cover every visible square yard of land, forced himself to shut out their constant cries and moans that were audible even over the rumble of the truck, and forced himself to ignore the foul, rancid smell that filled the air. He concentrated instead on the tops of the trees that swayed lightly in the lilting early summer breeze. That was the only part of the world that looked like it used to in the days before the Hate.
    It was a relief when they reached the access road and Marshall followed the other vehicles around to the right. Even here, though, there were people everywhere, crowded in and around the trees, desperate to find shelter and shade. There were more of them here than when he’d last been out with Marshall. He focused on one particular woman who sat cross-legged on the grass, desperately trying to hold on to a hysterical, squirming, screaming child. Surrounded by her few remaining possessions gathered up in plastic bags, she gently rocked her terrified, inconsolable little girl. He found himself wondering what had happened to this woman to bring her here. Had she had a partner? Had they turned against her? Had there been more kids? She looked up and caught his eye, and he quickly looked away. He forgot her almost immediately, suddenly preoccupied with his own insurmountable problems instead. Mark’s girlfriend, Kate, was pregnant. Much as he tried to deny it, he wished she weren’t.
    The convoy moved away from the densely occupied heart of the city and out through the exclusion zone. This was a bizarre and unsettling place. In the wake of the panic and terror caused by the onset of the Hate, under military orders the authorities in cities like this had pulled the remaining population inward, housing them temporarily in stores, office buildings, high-rises, and anywhere else that space could be found. The exclusion zone (which was generally between half a mile and two miles wide) was an area of dead space, a desolate strip of no-man’s-land wedged between the hordes of overcrowded refugees and the city border, which was patrolled from the sky. It was a place that had been abandoned rather than destroyed and that now stood like a vast and dilapidated museum exhibit. They drove past the front of a modern-looking school, its buildings empty when they should have been filled with students, the knee-high grass making its athletics track look more like a field of crops overdue for harvest. At the front of the convoy a military vehicle that had been fitted with a makeshift snowplow-like attachment cleared the road of a number of abandoned cars that had been stuck in a frozen, unmoving traffic jam for weeks.
    The closer they got to the border, the worse Mark began to feel. Desperate not to let his anxiety show (for fear of Marshall misreading his reaction), he leaned against the window and forced himself to breathe in deeply,