It had been a while since the last mortar had landed on the complex, and the small-arms fire still sounded distant. This seemed as good a time to make a break for it as they were likely to get. So they ran until they hit the nearest exit doors, shoved them open, and staggered outside into the balmy Texan night.

The asphalt parking lot outside was filled with newly minted refugees, perhaps two hundred of them. Most carried at least a go-bag. A few had managed to drag out more. They were ringed by a widening cordon of armed men and women, fifty at the most. The militia clutched antique weapons, mostly small arms, and stuck like glue to the Hesco barriers that ringed the old parking lot. Here and there Manny caught sight of a man with an RPG, or a light machine gun. It was a force meant for scaring off bandits. The rockets still thudding in the distance told Manny these men and women faced considerably more than their match.

A green blink of light caught his attention. Reggie had engaged his lapel camera. The Brit fixed him with a look that said, “Dude, what did you expect me to do?”

Most of the survivors were probably recording to their decks too. But Reggie’s little camera could do considerably more: it scanned the world around him in a 360-degree arc. It also recorded the journalist’s own physical data: his heart rate, his respiration, his adrenaline levels. Everything he saw and felt was being recorded for later consumption. The Brit was carving out a little slice of the war for safer parts of the world to binge watch.

Vehicles started to arrive. The Project’s motor pool included three tracks built to carry large groups of people in semi-armored semi-safety. The commune’s rapid reaction force set to work, loading children and wounded up first. There was no panic, no hysteria, just an exhausted efficiency that spoke of long practice. Manny saw glassy eyes and clenched jaws, but very little open rage. They’re so very used to it, he realized. Scattered throughout the crowd, Manny saw people whose bodies rattled with the sort of palsied shock that artillery leaves in its wake.

Reggie just stared out at them, mouth slack. His left knee twitched, the foot below it pumped against the ground. Manny guessed he was caught between the urge to step out and talk to some of them and the voice of sanity in the back of his head that knew how tone deaf that would be. Manny put a hand on the journalist’s shoulder.