“I thought we were coming back here to talk,” Caleb said from the backseat as he pulled his seat belt tighter.

“We can talk and ride at the same time.”

“I don’t understand,” Luke said. “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re going there, anyway?”

Victoria explained, “Honey, it doesn’t feel safe to be here. People are really scared, and scared people can do very dangerous things.”

Copley pulled the transmission into gear and eased back onto the narrow road. The nose of their vehicle had just begun to cross from grass back to pavement when the SUV on their left moved to close the gap.

McCrea leaned forward in this seat and pointed through the windshield. “Keep going,” he said. “Your mission is to get us back onto a main road, it is not to be polite.”

The first sergeant smiled. “Copy that.” He stepped more heavily on the accelerator and lurched out in front of the offending truck. The driver leaned on his horn. Copley flipped him off.

“Keep the digital communication to a minimum, First Sergeant,” McCrea said.

Victoria cringed at the sound of scraping metal as the other vehicle refused to back off.

“Hey!” Caleb yelled.

“Take it easy, Mr. Copley,” Victoria said.

McCrea turned in his seat to look at her. “This is my vehicle, ma’am. Let us do our jobs.”

As they pulled past the other SUV and onto the sweeping lawn of the Hilltop Manor, the Suburban bounced and rolled precipitously, knocking its occupants around the interior.

“We need to stop!” Victoria commanded. “We just hit that vehicle.”

“Keep going,” McCrea ordered. “Ma’am, I predict that a lot of things are about to change. Hit-and-run laws will have less clout than they used to.” He chuckled when he spoke, and he could see that the attitude pissed her off.

She stayed silent, though.

First Sergeant Copley didn’t even try to get back onto the pavement, choosing instead to four-wheel through grass and gardens, and even a few bushes and small trees. At every new opportunity to return to a roadway, they encountered more vehicles, lined up to shed their passengers.

“So many cars!” Caleb exclaimed.

“It’ll take hours to get all those people through the screening,” McCrea said. “I expected a crowd. That’s why I was in such a hurry to get here quickly, but I never expected anything like this.”

“Do you think traffic will thin once we’re off the property?”

“We’re kind of screwed if it doesn’t,” Copley said. He whipped the wheel to the right and then to the left again to fit through a space between trees. The ear-to-ear grin spoke to how much he was enjoying this.

When they finally broke through a row of hedges, they found themselves on a paved surface with no other vehicles in sight.

“What the hell is this?” McCrea asked. “Where are we?”