What? No. I’m fine. Who are you? her mind responded before she realized she wasn’t voicing her words aloud. She took a deep breath, exhaled, and replied, “No. I’m fine. But before I tell you anything else, who the hell are you and why are you here? I need to know if you’re a friend or foe.” And she raised the Glock directly at the figure’s chest. This was no time to lower her guard. People seemed to be dying all around her tonight, and she didn’t want to be one of them. “Talk,” she commanded in a voice she hoped sounded confident, not terrified, the way she felt.

“I’m pretty certain I’m a friend. My name is Nicholas Chambers, but my friends—and people I save, I might add—call me Nick. My brother lives in Hidden Refuge, which appears to be under the control of people pretending to be the police. It’s impressive you made it out,” he added almost absentmindedly.

“It wasn’t easy. Trust me,” she said, an image of the dead man slumped on her carpeted steps flashed behind her eyes.

“I bet. You have that look that someone your age shouldn’t have, but life isn’t always fair,” he said somberly. “Anyhow, I received a text from my brother, and then we lost communications. Thought maybe it was just his cell, but when all communications went dead, including his voice-over-IP line and satellite phone, I decided to show up early, only to find his neighborhood on some kind of lockdown. There was a convoy of cars led by a police vehicle that I passed earlier, and when I did, my cell phone stopped working. I tried to enter, but a cop—or at least someone who claimed he was a cop—stopped me halfway down Hidden Refuge Drive, told me the neighborhood was being evacuated, and asked that I meet them at the elementary school, where the convoy of residents was heading. Something about him set off alarms. So I lied and told him I was lost, and before he could do anything, I rolled up the window, slammed the car into gear, and did a U-turn right there in the middle of the road.”

“Wait a minute. He didn’t try to stop you?” Sam asked, somewhat incredulously.

“Negative. I didn’t think he would. He was probably too concerned with what was going on inside. Also, if he tried to shoot me and missed, he’d have to assume I was going to go get real law enforcement. Better to play it safe. It was the right call for him.”

He had a point. Why risk further complications? Sam was pretty certain that the bad guys had already started taking losses by then. No need to make a bad situation worse.