Southlands

by D. J. Molles

  It couldn’t have been more than two feet tall if it had stood up. But it was crouched down, and backed up into a corner created by the hollow of a rock and a trunk of mesquite. Where pudgy, toddler’s fingers should have been, the fingers were elongated, and clutched reflexively in the moldering leaves and dirt. Where baby fat should have been, there was only skin stretched taut across abnormally developed cords of muscle. Where a child’s face might have existed in another world, a gaping mouth slavered and spat and snapped at the air. Wild eyes, with not a drop of humanity in them.

  Within ten yards, you had to account for sight over bore, which was about two inches. So Lee put the dot on the top of the juvenile’s head, right where a dim hairline was sprouting, and fired one round through its brain.

  The thing slumped in place. One hand made a last scratch at the dirt. But that was it.

  The other three padded up quickly behind him to see what he’d fired at.

  “Damn,” Tex breathed, after a moment. “Lookit that.”

  “You ever dealt with juveniles before?” Lee asked him.

  “Yeah. But I never seen one that young.”

  “Couple weeks ago we bagged a juvenile,” Lee said. “Brought it back to our doctor in Bragg for an autopsy.” Lee recalled the information he’d received from his last satphone contact with Fort Bragg. “It was female. Bit bigger than this one. Doc said she was menstruating already.” Lee gestured at the small, deceased form. “Another year, this one would be hunting. And mating.”

  “That fast, huh?”

  Lee nodded. “We don’t know for sure, but we’re guessing that at two years they’re dangerous. And procreating. Maybe full grown by three years.”

  Thompson made an unhappy noise. “That’s not encouraging.”

  “All the more reason to hunt them out,” Tex said. “Come on. We’re expected in OP Elbert.”

  FIVE

  ─▬▬▬─

  PEER PRESSURE

  Sam Ryder was not an idiot.

  Before the end of the world, he’d been a smart kid. His father had hammered him on math and science, believing—no, insisting—that Sam was going to be a doctor one day. Only straight A’s for the kid that had once been known as Sameer Balawi.

  Through the end of the world, Sam had become more than book smart. He’d become savvy.

  Smart and savvy.

  Not an idiot at all.

  But if there was one thing that could lay utter waste to any young man’s smarts and savvy, it was sex—or at least the never-ending, never-reached promise of it. The female form like a curl of smoke in the back of your mind, befuddling your thoughts, always so close, and yet far away.

  Like a Will-o’-the-Wisp, leading you deeper and deeper into the bog of your own stupidity.

  Not being an idiot by nature, Sam had discovered that he wasn’t looking at his relationship with Charlie very objectively. Objectivity usually didn’t occur until an hour or so after their meetings, at which point he would frown and consider everything that happened in the stark, cold light of not being horny.

  There was a common thread to their meetings, Sam had discovered, though it hurt his young man’s ego to admit it—because every young man wants to believe that the girl he loves is just as eager to jump his bones as he is hers.

  The common thread was this: Charlie had a lot of questions, and not a lot of lovin’.

  When she mined his head for gossip, her eyes shone bright and focused.

  When they necked afterward, she became limp and disinterested, but she let Sam do his thing, until of course he tried to reach into her pants, at which point she said she didn’t want to go that far, and, almost with relief, used that as an excuse to terminate their time together.

  At first, Sam told himself he was just being a little bitch about it, because he wasn’t getting what he wanted. He was manufacturing some big conflict, when in fact it was just that Charlie had the decency to put a stop to him when he wasn’t controlling himself.

  Gradually, over several nights of pensive guard shifts spent stalking the high voltage fences around Fort Bragg, Sam had realized there could be only one real explanation for Charlie’s behavior.

  She was more interested in asking him questions than getting physical.

  So, this time around, he played the game her way.

  This all made him feel like an insecure and manipulative boyfriend trope, but then he couldn’t quite get rid of the warning bells in his head that had been chiming—very quietly—ever since he’d come to this realization.

  They met by the Community Center, which was normal. Then they walked along paths, while they talked. Or, more correctly: she asked him questions and he answered them.

  It was interesting. In the light of his new understanding, she didn’t seem to want to be there with him at all. It became obvious to him that her smiles never reached her eyes, and her saccharine words weren’t sincere. These observations hit him like body blows from a heavyweight boxer.

  He’d kind of been hoping he was the insecure boyfriend, and that it was all in his head.

  With a little more clarity, he also noted that she asked a lot of questions about Lee.

  What was Lee doing?

  Who was Lee with?

  Where was Lee right at that moment?

  “Why’re you so concerned with Lee?” Sam couldn’t help asking.

  Charlie looked briefly surprised. But then she smiled at him and said, “You know how it is, Sam. He’s the hero around here. Everyone wants to know what he’s doing.”

  Sam held eye contact with her longer than was necessary, and he knew that her smile was fake. Time and time again she’d dazzled him with that smile and he’d been fooled by it. But now it was like that optical illusion where the drawing is both a beautiful young woman, and a haggard old lady—once you’ve seen the trick, it can’t be unseen.

  They made some perfunctory small talk.

  They stopped in a quiet section of woods where they traditionally did some of their making out. Charlie seemed to be steeling herself. This didn’t escape Sam—once again, he couldn’t unsee it. And, frankly, it hurt.

  “Well,” he said, looking away from her. “I better head on.”

  She looked surprised again. And…relieved.

  “Oh?” she asked, which was a safe way to answer. Neither encouraging him to stay, nor pushing him away.

  “Yeah,” he mumbled, feeling his heart sink. “I got guard duty tonight. Need to get some sleep. Been running a little ragged.”

  Charlie nodded. “Okay then. Don’t let me stop you. You need your sleep.”

  He nodded back. Forced a smile.

  She gave him a little goodbye wave, and then started off through the woods.

  Sam turned and headed back the way he’d come.

  About twenty yards down the path, he ducked behind a thick pine and he waited for a moment. Until the sound of her footsteps could barely be heard. Then he peeked out from behind the tree, and barely caught the flash of the tan overalls she wore for work, disappearing into the trees.

  He stepped out and quietly followed.

  ***

  Charlie went through the woods in the usual direction until she could no longer hear Sam’s footsteps, and then she cut through the woods towards the customary meeting spot.

  These woods had a lot of customary spots. Charlie thought of them as checkpoints. Checkpoint One was meeting Sam at the Community Center. Checkpoint Two was the spot that she usually let him clumsily make out with her until she finally put a stop to it. Then he went his way, and she went hers, and the last stop she would make would be Checkpoint Three, here in the middle of the woods, off the path, where Claire Staley would be waiting for her.

  Claire wore her usual work attire. She was Angela’s secretary, so it was generally something in the realm of business casual. Angela liked to wear jeans to work, so Claire had figured it was okay for her to do the same, though she would don a gray women’s blazer to make her look more professi
onal. And it covered the .38 snub nose she kept tucked in her waistband.

  Charlie also wore work attire, but since she worked with farm animals, it was always the same pair of tan Carhartts.

  Claire had her hands in her jacket pockets. Her intense green eyes marked Charlie’s face with interest. “What? No making out this time?”

  Charlie frowned. “How…?”

  “Usually your lips are all flushed and plump.” Claire smirked. “Made a clean getaway this time?”

  Charlie touched her lips absently. “Yeah. He said he needed to get some sleep.”

  Claire seemed to consider this seriously. “You think he’s losing interest in you?”

  Charlie fidgeted. She didn’t want Sam, but somehow the prospect of him not wanting her was irritating. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Well.” Claire considered the trees around them. “Perhaps it’s time to seal the deal.”

  “What?” Charlie gaped. “You mean have sex with him?”

  Claire shrugged one, noncommittal shoulder. “Men are easy marks, Charlie. It might behoove you to get a little more serious about what you’re doing here.”

  “I thought you said I didn’t need to do that.”

  “That was then. This is now.” Claire sighed. “It’s just business, Charlie. Don’t get all wound up. Think of it like a well: You have to keep the pump primed. Sometimes that just takes a little more effort.”

  “I’m not having sex with him.”

  “Then maybe your usefulness has run its course.”

  Charlie was wholly offended. “Hey! I’ve done good work!”

  “You have. I’m not saying you haven’t.” Claire’s eyebrows cinched down. “But if you let Sam lose interest in you, then we lose a very valuable potential asset. And then what do I have for you to do? Not a whole lot, Charlie. Sam is your job right now. It’s your job to keep the information flowing.”

  Charlie pouted. Crossed her arms.

  Claire rolled her eyes and seemed to let it go. “What did he have for you today?”

  “Not much,” Charlie admitted.

  “Does he know where Lee is?”

  “No.”

  “Does he know what Lee’s doing?”

  “I don’t think he knows shit.”

  “Does he not know, or is he no longer willing to tell you?”

  Charlie glared.

  Claire grew stern. “It’s a serious question, Charlie. Remember what I told you?”

  “That I need to grow up?” Charlie snapped.

  “Yeah,” Claire nodded. “This isn’t about your girlish pride or the sanctity of your pussy.” Claire jabbed a finger in the air. “This is about information. This is about war. And I’m not going to lose an edge—I’m not going to lose an insider in Angela’s house—because you’re too damn high and mighty to put out.”

  “Why don’t you fuck him then?”

  Claire seemed to genuinely consider it. She put her hands back in her pockets. Looked away into the woods again. “I’ve done plenty to get what I need. I’d do that too, if it was necessary. Do you want to continue to be useful to the cause, Charlie?”

  “Yes,” Charlie answered, without hesitation.

  Claire smiled, and it seemed genuine. “I believe you. And maybe you’re right. Maybe he was just tired today. Maybe you just keep doing what you’re doing and see what happens. But I need to know that you’ll do whatever you need to do to keep the information flowing.”

  “Fine,” Charlie said, sullenly. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Claire reached out and touched Charlie on the shoulder. “History is going to remember what we did, Charlie. They’re going to remember what we sacrificed to make this country whole again.”

  ***

  Sam watched from fifty yards away, crouched low at the base of a tree.

  A line of ants marched through the flaky chunks of pine bark, but Sam didn’t see them.

  All he saw was Charlie and Claire.

  He couldn’t hear what they said. Only the murmur of their voices, and a few odd words here and there. Charlie seemed pissed. Claire kept looking around, as though she didn’t want anyone to know that she and Charlie were meeting.

  After a brief but heated exchange, the two young women parted ways, and then it was just Sam in those woods, and he sat there on his knees for a while, thinking.

  Charlie and Claire.

  Claire and Charlie.

  Charlie, asking so many questions.

  Then meeting with Claire.

  Claire, at the house out beyond the wire with a bunch of drunk teenagers.

  Claire, showing up in Angela’s office while there were primals loose in Fort Bragg. She showed up to help, but what had she done? She’d hovered near to Marie while Marie had a quiet conversation with Lee on the satphone. She’d taken the satphone back down to the Watch Commander afterwards.

  He remembered all of this, but it still felt disjointed in his mind. The connection between all of these memories wasn’t there.

  Or maybe he just didn’t want to admit to himself what was really going on.

  After about ten minutes, he rose up from his position, and left the woods, telling himself, They’re just friends. Charlie and Claire. Girlfriends. Swapping gossip.

  Except they hadn’t looked very friendly to him.

  And whatever they were swapping looked much more serious than gossip.

  ***

  Sam swung by The Barn because there wasn’t anywhere else to go, and he didn’t feel like sleeping just yet.

  The Barn was a big building they used as a home base for all the active troops in Bragg, including the guards, of which Sam was one. This was where his roll call was. This was where they housed the vehicles, and handed out the weapons from the armory, and generally kept all their day-to-day military admin stuff for keeping the Fort Bragg Safe Zone relatively safe.

  There was a stir over by the First Sergeant’s office. He wasn’t in, but there was a cluster of young soldiers outside of his door, looking at something on the corkboard like high school students checking their posted test scores.

  A lot of the “soldiers” weren’t original US military. They ranged in age from fifteen to twenty, and a lot of them had signed up after the Fort Bragg Safe Zone had been established, just like Sam had. There was always a need for young men to do stupid, dangerous shit because young men don’t believe they can die.

  Sam was well aware of his mortality. But he’d signed up like everyone else because…that was the thing to do.

  Peer pressure and all that.

  They’d all received an abbreviated form of Basic Training, and an even more abbreviated form of Infantry AIT. The Old Heads (the ones that were actual soldiers before the world went to shit) scoffed and turned up their noses at all these young “half-boots,” but Sam had still thought the training was pretty hard.

  In reality, although abbreviated, the training had been harsher than was typical back in the day. None of the Old Heads would admit this, but the drill instructors that had run the thing—and still did augmentative classes every so often—disliked the half-boots, and made sure to take it out on them in training. And there was much less overview than there used to be, and almost zero backlash if some young half-boot got rolled down a flight of stairs in his footlocker for being a fat, lazy shit that couldn’t make the run time.

  The civilian populace didn’t waste energy getting up in arms about it like they used to when getting up in arms about things was the national pastime. Nowadays they all figured the world was harsher than it had been, so it only stood to reason that the military training should be harsher too.

  Sam had never received the footlocker treatment—he was good at PT, and he followed orders and mostly kept his mouth shut—but he remembered a few guys that had. They’d gone silently to the medical center to have their broken arms casted, and then they recycled through to the next class. Now they laughed about the time they took a trip downstairs in the “thinking box.”
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  Sam nudged his way into the scrum of young men, some in ACUs, some in MultiCam. He found a familiar face and parked himself there.

  “What’s this?” Sam asked.

  Private Gomez nodded towards the corkboard, where Sam now saw a clipboard had been placed, and the half-boots (and a few Old Heads) were taking turns going up to it and scribbling something on it with the pen that hung from the clipboard on a piece of string.

  “Sign-up sheet,” Gomez said.

  “For what?”

  “For huntin’ primals, bro.” Gomez smiled. “Since we got fuel now, they’re reinstating the hunt-and-kill ops. Apparently they’ve been out tagging these motherfuckers with a tracker or something. Gonna track ‘em down and snuff ‘em out.”

  “Oh.”

  They shuffled forward a few paces, the crowd forming itself into something of a line.

  “Are you signing up?” Sam asked.

  “Fuck yeah, I’m signing up,” Gomez said.

  “You know any details about it?”

  “Yeah.” Gomez shot Sam an insolent look. “Gonna kill primals. What else you need to know about it?”

  Sam shrugged.

  The line continued to move forward.

  Sam guessed he was in line now.

  If the sign-up sheet had come out two weeks ago, before Sam had started to think that maybe his relationship with Charlie was more one-sided than she let on, he probably would have taken a pass.

  But now he felt like he needed to do something dangerous. Very suddenly, the idea of not seeing Charlie again seemed more like a relief than anything else. And going off to do something life-threatening felt like it had an added element of “screw you” to it, that, in that particular moment, felt right to him.

  Like he might prove something.

  And then he thought of Abby, sitting in a hospital room, still waiting to see if the white blood cells in her body were going to start raging, still waiting to see if that bite from the primal was going to infect her. And he thought of Sergeant Hauer, being dragged underneath a car, screaming as he was eaten alive…