Southlands

by D. J. Molles

  The neighbor had spilled the beans in a state of overexcitement, and then stood there, like an emotional vulture, waiting to see Derrick’s reaction to the news.

  Derrick’s reaction had been disbelief.

  He said, “Thanks for telling me,” and closed the door on his neighbor’s expectant face.

  He’d gotten dressed in his ACUs, moving slow, in a state of shock.

  Suicide?

  That didn’t sound like Colonel Staley at all. But people said you could never really tell when someone had reached the end of their rope.

  And that got Derrick thinking about what had caused Staley to get to that point.

  And that got Derrick thinking about the satphone.

  Someone had used that satphone to call an unknown number, right smack dab in the middle of everyone trying to figure out who the hell was leaking information to Greeley, Colorado. And the last person to have that satphone had been Staley’s daughter, Claire.

  Claire. Who worked for President Houston.

  Derrick was still frowning as he looked himself over in the mirror and made sure his uniform was up to snuff.

  Derrick was a man who took pride in the confidence of his superior officers. He’d gone to Colonel Staley directly with what he’d found, not wanting to go behind the man’s back and betray him.

  Staley had told him that he would handle it, and not to speak to anyone else about it.

  So Derrick hadn’t.

  The picture of discretion, he’d deliberately forgotten about it.

  Until now.

  Now, his mind was rife with misgivings. Had he done the right thing by keeping silent about it? Of course he had. His superior officer had asked him for silence.

  But was he really thinking what he was thinking?

  Claire…

  Derrick didn’t want to be a panic hound or a rumor monger. But on the other side of that, this was about a potentially huge leak in Fort Bragg. And no one knew about the satphone except Colonel Staley and him.

  And now Colonel Staley was dead.

  Looking at himself in the mirror, Derrick came to the only conclusion that he supposed a good soldier should come to. He’d sworn to be quiet to protect Colonel Staley. Now the man was dead, which meant that silence needed to be broken.

  He simply couldn’t sit on it anymore.

  He had thirty minutes before he needed to report to the watch commander’s post. He had time to go by Carl Gilliard’s office and tell him what he knew about the satphone. Because someone needed to know. And at that point, Derrick would have done his due diligence, and it would be someone else’s problem.

  Resolute, he walked to the front of his residence, and was nearly to the door when someone knocked on it from the other side.

  Derrick felt a flood of irritation.

  Another neighbor, come to blab about the bad news and see if Derrick got emotional.

  He swung the door open, frowning.

  A man in a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over his head levelled a shotgun at his chest. There was a single, bright bloom of fire from the muzzle, and Derrick felt a massive lead fist punch him in the chest, lifting him briefly off his feet, and then slamming him onto the floor on his back.

  His heart was pulverized instantly.

  His last fading thought as he stared at the ceiling of his house was that it was strange that he hadn’t even heard the shotgun blast, but how he heard the very clear sound of the man’s footsteps running away…

  TWELVE

  ─▬▬▬─

  INTERROGATIONS

  Carl stepped out of his office in The Compound, leaving Taylor Sullivan alone to wring her hands.

  He closed the door behind him, and looked bleakly at the legal pad in his hand. His notes were sparse, because the information was sparse.

  Giving Sullivan her due, they had Elsie Foster dead to rights. She’d coerced Sullivan into trying to infect Abby with tissue taken from the primal that Doc Trent had autopsied. To nurse Sullivan’s credit, she hadn’t even got to the point where she’d harvested the tissue from the primal to do the job.

  But Carl didn’t want to move on Elsie out of a knee-jerk reaction. If he locked her up, all her little compatriots were going to go to ground. And Carl wanted to wipe them out in one fell swoop.

  Problem was, Sullivan had no clue who Elsie’s associates were. Carl had grilled her for an hour, going over the same damn shit, and ultimately gotten the same answers: Elsie had always met with Sullivan alone. There was no third party. No one else around when they met.

  The one potential thread he had to pursue here was in reference to her son.

  Her rapist son.

  Ben Sullivan had been caught at a party date raping some girl, using drugs that he’d stolen from his mother’s nursing kit. The pure negligence of Sullivan leaving those things accessible rankled Carl, but he could no more punish her for that than he could punish Ben for being a rapist.

  Angela and Carl had guaranteed complete immunity to them in exchange for Elsie.

  So as much as Carl wanted to beat the hell out of the kid, he wasn’t going to do it. But he was going to ask him a few pertinent questions that might reveal more of Elsie’s crew. After all, someone had been at the party to take compromising pictures of Ben.

  Carl went two doors down, to another office that was no longer used, accept to now contain Ben Sullivan. They weren’t purpose-built for interrogation rooms, but they would have to suffice. The Compound was the safest place for them right now.

  Carl opened the office door and slid in, giving the young man inside a long, cold look.

  Ben Sullivan jerked when Carl opened the door, like he’d been caught doing something wrong. Guilty conscience, Carl supposed. The office was mostly empty. Ben was standing over by a bookshelf that contained a few three-ring binders that belonged to its previous occupant.

  Ben was a tall, good-looking kid. Carl wondered why he found the need to date rape girls. Maybe he liked the sense of power and control.

  Carl closed the office door and pointed to a chair on the visitor’s side of the empty metal desk that stood in the room. “Ben. Have a seat.”

  “Where’s my mom? Is she alright?”

  Carl tucked the legal pad under his arm and stepped further into the office. He grabbed the chair he’d motioned to and jerked it out so that the seat of it was facing Ben. “Sit,” he commanded.

  Ben looked like he might start making a deal out of it, but then withered under Carl’s icy gaze, and took the seat.

  Carl stepped to the desk and sat on the edge of it so that he loomed over the kid. He scanned his legal pad as he spoke. “She’s fine. She’s a few doors down. She’s worried about you. But both of you are safe here. Per the deal that she struck with President Houston and I.”

  Ben gave a nervous nod. He had the basics down—Mitch had given him the general overview when he’d transported him to this location. A form of “witness protection,” one might say.

  “I’m Master Sergeant Carl Gilliard. I’d like to talk to you about a few things.” Carl let his eyes sneak up and bore into the young man sitting across from him. “And let me remind you that your complete and total cooperation is a prerequisite to you and your mother’s continued safety here.”

  Ben looked worried. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that the only reason I have to protect a rapist is because you have information that I want.”

  Ben’s face paled, and then flushed at the cheeks. His mouth started to work up a denial.

  Carl held up a hand to stop him. “Ben, don’t start this off on the wrong foot. Remember: Complete and total cooperation. That means honesty. As long as you’re honest with me, the slate’s wiped clean. You’ll never be punished for what happened.”

  Ben appeared to be going through some mental gymnastics, trying to deal with this.

  Carl let him squirm for a moment before continuing. “Somehow, Elsie Foster, the leader of the Lincolnists,
came into possession of some photographs that showed you…doing things you shouldn’t have been doing. Elsie used those photographs to try to coerce your mother into killing someone. Your mother came clean to us about this, in exchange for our promise of protection over you and her.”

  “What were the photographs?” Ben demanded. “I want to see them.”

  “We don’t have them.”

  Ben looked triumphant. “Then how do you know they’re even real?”

  “Your mother saw them. She knows it was you. A mother recognizes her son.”

  Ben shrunk into his chair. His face flushed.

  “I’m not interested in the photographs, or what you were doing in them,” Carl went on. “What I am interested in is who took the photographs. Because whoever took the photographs is likely tied to Elsie Foster.”

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Alright.” Carl shrugged. “Let’s start with the party then. Whose house was it at?”

  “It wasn’t at anybody’s house.”

  “Was it one of the unoccupied houses in the Safe Zone?”

  Ben avoided eye contact. “It wasn’t in the Safe Zone.”

  Carl frowned. “You guys went outside the Safe Zone? To have a party?”

  Ben considered the ramifications of admitting to this, but then seemed to recall Carl’s warning for complete cooperation. “Look. It wasn’t my idea, okay? I thought it was stupid to go outside the wire. But…but that’s what we did.”

  “How’d you get outside the Safe Zone?”

  “The culvert,” Ben mumbled. “The one where the primals got through.”

  Carl stared at the young man, making a few unpleasant connections in his head. “Christ. So that was how they got in. You guys left the goddamned door open for them.”

  “No! We didn’t leave it open! I swear. It was closed and locked last time I saw it.”

  “Locked with what? They found a padlock down there, but it was old.”

  Ben looked sheepish. “A…uh…carabiner.”

  “It was locked with a carabiner?”

  Ben nodded.

  Carl rubbed his face. So…that answered the mystery of how the primals had gotten inside the wire, and who had unlocked the drain gate in the first place. And wasn’t it just goddamned typical that it would be teenagers, off to do stupid teenager shit without a care in the world for the consequences.

  “Alright,” Carl rallied himself. “That’s getting off topic. So there was a party. Who was at this party?”

  “A lot of people.”

  “Any adults?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Not really? What’s that mean?”

  Ben huffed. “Well, like, I’m an adult, right? I mean, I know I’m only seventeen, but I’m old enough to join y’all’s army. So, like, I’m an adult.”

  God help me. “Okay. Anyone older than that? Any real adults there?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Who was there?”

  “You want me to name all of them?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  Ben fidgeted, looking flustered. “Uh…well…Charlie was there. The girl that hangs out with Sam Ryder.” Ben seemed to seize on something that he felt put him on the high ground. “Yeah, Sam was there, too. You know? Angela’s son? Adopted son, or whatever…”

  Carl’s eyes narrowed. “Sam was there?”

  Ben nodded eagerly. “Yeah. Yeah, he was there. Maybe he took the pictures.”

  Carl stared at Ben for a long moment, wondering if this was bullshit, but he didn’t think that it was. He pursued several trains of thought to a few basic conclusions, none of which were very good for Sam Ryder.

  “Okay. Who else?”

  Ben flopped around in frustration. “I don’t know, man. Just…a lot of people. I don’t even remember everyone that was there.”

  “Who put it on? There must have been someone that invited you out. Someone who appeared to be running the party, or had set it up.”

  Ben rubbed his brow and looked at the ceiling. “Well…yeah. There was the chick that…man, we were all just trying to have a good time, but she would always start talking about freedom and the old United States, and whether or not anyone at the party felt like the UES was illegitimate—a bunch of shit like that. It was annoying. No one cared. Everyone was just trying to cut loose for a little bit.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere.

  Carl tried not to appear too eager. “And who was that?”

  “Hell, I can’t even remember her name. But she’s around, you know? I think she works for President Houston. Or something. Maybe she just works at the Support Center. I dunno.” Ben seemed to alight on some nugget of recognizance. He held up a finger. “Her dad’s the general, though.”

  Carl tilted his head. “The general?”

  “Yeah. For the Marines, I guess.”

  There was no one in Fort Bragg that held the rank of general—Marine, or otherwise.

  “You mean Colonel Staley?” Carl probed, feeling his pulse quicken.

  Ben nodded. “Right. Yeah. Colonel. The guy in charge of all the Marines. That’s her father. I remember that, because I always thought it was weird that she would talk about that shit when her father’s…you know…one of you guys.”

  Carl felt a tingling in his fingers. Heat on the back of his neck. “Okay. Staley. You remember her first name?”

  He didn’t want to lead Ben into an accusation. It needed to come out of Ben’s mouth, not Carl’s.

  “Staley. Right.” Ben nodded. “Crystal Staley.”

  Carl’s mind pursued new trains of thought now, and he suddenly became acutely aware that his window of opportunity to snatch up the Lincolnists had suddenly shrunk down to nothing.

  The kid had said Crystal, which was close, and he’d also been clear that it was Colonel Staley’s daughter. Carl decided he needed to go ahead and cut a corner to fill in some blanks.

  “You mean Claire.”

  Ben had the enlightened expression of someone who has just remembered something. He snapped his fingers and pointed to Carl. “Yes. That’s it. Claire Staley.”

  Carl’s mind had already gone down this rabbit hole, but now, upon having the name confirmed, he pictured it more clearly, and it made his heart sink.

  Claire. In Angela’s office, just hours ago.

  There to report that her father had committed suicide.

  And who had Claire observed in Angela’s office?

  Taylor Sullivan.

  Everything came together suddenly in Carl’s mind.

  He rocketed off the desk and rushed to the door, barking behind him, “Don’t move from this spot.”

  ***

  As the last bit of color bled out of the sky, Claire Staley walked quickly through a strip of woods in the Fort Bragg Safe Zone.

  Things were starting to unravel. The careful tapestry that she’d woven for the last two years in this place was starting to pull apart, and she needed to stop the damage before shit got out of control.

  Urgency pulled at her feet like an aggressive dog on a leash. It was only through concerted, controlled breathing that she kept the rising panic at bay and kept her feet moving normally.

  Running would only draw attention.

  She’d been stuck with Carl Gilliard and Angela Houston, answering their questions and trying to keep her pounding pulse from being noticeable. She wept, and the tears were genuine, because she hadn’t wanted to do what she’d done. The circumstances had simply forced her hand.

  Angela was pitying.

  Carl was suspicious.

  He hid it well enough, but Claire wasn’t blind. One liar is good at spotting another.

  As she went through the story that she and Elsie had come up with, careful to answer as much truthfully as she possibly could, and leave the untruths non-specific, her mind had been locked onto a single image.

  Taylor Sullivan, standing there in Angela’s office.

  Something had happened
. Something had been said.

  Some of Carl’s men had arrived and whisked Sullivan away without a word.

  Then Carl had left to pursue some other duty, and been replaced by one of his men—Mitch—who then conferred quietly with Angela outside her office while Claire sat inside of it. All the while she was left alone she wracked her brain, trying to think how quickly she could get the hell out of there and warn Elsie.

  If Taylor had talked, then it was only a matter of time before Carl and his goons went to snatch up Elsie. And then everything that they worked for was going to be undone.

  She’d gotten free of Angela’s office only twenty minutes ago. They’d talked about where Claire was going to stay, and Angela offered to let her stay in her house, but Claire had said that she needed to walk. She needed to clear her head.

  It was the best she could come up with.

  Time was short. Risks had to be taken.

  Angela didn’t seem to think it suspicious that Claire needed to take a walk.

  Mitch didn’t seem so sure, but he was less suspicious than Carl had been.

  She’d checked her surroundings multiple times as she’d walked, and she’d done it as discreetly as possible, wanting to know if Carl’s suspicions were strong enough that he or someone else might be tailing her to see where she went.

  But she didn’t catch sight of a tail.

  She’d ducked into the woods, and was now cutting across to the back of Elsie Foster’s residence, in the northwestern corner of the Safe Zone.

  She stopped at the edge of the woods and stared at the back of all the little tract houses that used to house military families. The lights were starting to come on as the darkness spread across the sky. The light at the back door of Elsie’s house was on. Which meant the coast was clear.

  Supposedly.

  Claire had not lasted this long by being trusting.

  She took a long moment to check the other houses that bordered the street beyond, and she tried hard to get a glimpse of the street itself, to see if there was anyone out, any vehicles in the road that might indicate that Carl and his men had already been there.

  But all was still and quiet.

  Claire crossed the small backyard at a jog. She didn’t want to be out in the open longer than she needed to be, and she was aware that, if Carl had gotten the full implications from Sullivan, he might already have operatives watching the house.