“Did you say we’re out here for people today?” Mark asked, remembering their brief conversation when he first got into the truck.

“Yep.”

“Great.”

A double pisser. Excursions outside the city were always more risky and unpredictable when civilians were involved. More importantly, if they weren’t out here collecting supplies, there’d be nothing for them to take a cut from when they got back.

“Look on the bright side,” Marshall said under his breath, sharing Mark’s disappointment and almost managing to smile. “Loads more of those cunts die when the public are involved.”

He was right. As soon as the first civilians took a step out of their hiding place, hordes of Haters would inevitably descend on them from every direction. Maybe that was the plan? Easy pickings for the helicopter and the forty or so armed soldiers traveling with them in this convoy. He wondered what kind of state the survivors they rescued would be in. Would they even be worth rescuing? He couldn’t imagine how they’d managed to last for so long out here. Christ, it had been hard enough trying to survive back in the city. If these people thought their situation was going to get better after they were rescued, they were very wrong.

The road they followed used to be a busy commuter route into town, permanently packed with traffic. In today’s baking afternoon heat it was little more than a silent, rubbish-strewn scar that snaked its way between overgrown fields and run-down housing projects. Sandwiched between the first military vehicle and the squat armored troop transport bringing up the rear, the three empty, high-sided wagons clattered along, following the clear path that had been snowplowed through the chaos like the carriages of a train following an engine down the track. Still bearing the bright-colored logos and ads of the businesses that had owned them before the war, they were conspicuously obvious and exposed as they traveled through the dust-covered gray of everything else.