Southlands

by D. J. Molles

  “Jules,” Lee prompted.

  Julia jerked. Her spine went erect. Her shoulders drew back. She nodded towards the man on the ground, and she shielded herself behind a façade of hardness. “Your boy can’t keep his dick in his pants. That’s all.”

  More silence. A lot of glancing around from the men present. Julia saw the theories rolling around in their heads, she saw the disbelief, the suspicion, the falseness, the rejection, and she had to fight to keep from screaming at them.

  Tex frowned at her. He shifted his weight. “What…what are you saying?”

  Lee stirred, his face screwing up under a sudden surge of violence, and then it was calm again. “First of all,” he grated. “Jules, are you okay? Are you injured?”

  The man on the ground moaned. “I’m fucking injured! I need a fucking doctor!”

  Lee’s eyes didn’t come away from Julia’s, but he spoke to Tex. “You shut that motherfucker up, or I’ll kill him and deal with the consequences. You understand me?”

  Tex blinked, trying to compute. Flustered, he turned to the man on the ground. “Pikes, shut your fucking mouth for two goddamned seconds.” He turned back to Julia. “I need you to tell me what happened. Because it doesn’t look good.”

  “It doesn’t look good?” Julia’s eye flared wide. The muscles in her legs started jumping like her knees were going to give out on her. “It doesn’t look good? How the fuck does it look besides that he tried to rape me and got his balls crushed for it?” She took a step forward, like she might start swinging on Tex and was stopped only by Lee’s hand on her chest. Julia felt herself losing control and couldn’t bring herself back again. “What’s it look like to you? What do you think happened? You think I seduced him? You think I was out here giving him a blow job and decided to pop his nuts instead? You think this is my fault somehow?”

  Tex looked caught. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  One of the other soldiers mumbled, “This is bullshit.”

  “Julia,” Lee raised his voice. “Are you okay?”

  Julia slapped Lee’s hand away from her. “I’m fucking fine, Lee. I’m goddamned right as rain.”

  “Don’t get mad at me,” Lee snarled at her. “I’m on your side.”

  “Is this true, Lee?” Tex demanded.

  Julia’s face tingled with heat. “What’re you asking him for? You don’t believe me?”

  Tex’s lips curled up. “I don’t fucking know you.”

  Lee spun towards Tex, but another body interjected itself between them. Julia hadn’t seen Abe approach, had no idea how much he’d seen or heard, but for some unknown reason she felt a melting relief at his presence.

  He put a gentle elbow against Tex, and a hand against Lee, and spoke in a quiet, calm voice. “Alright, everyone chill out. Y’all’re out here yelling and attracting primals. Let’s move this shit show inside.” As though he was supremely confident that his words had calmed everyone, he slipped from between Lee and Tex and scooped a hand up around Julia’s shoulders and started guiding her around the others. “Come on, let’s have a look at your face.”

  Julia found herself leaning on Abe. The rest of the world melted into a confusion of whispered voices and shuffling steps, and she had to move her feet to keep up with Abe as he ushered her around everyone, keeping his body between her and them.

  He stayed with her all the way into the cabin and back up the stairs to the bedroom with the two twin mattresses, and Julia followed him numbly. It wasn’t until he had closed the bedroom door behind them and Julia sat on the edge of the bed with her arms wrapped around her, that she let any of it out.

  ***

  “Menendez,” Tex snapped as they all bustled back into the cabin. “Post extra lookouts until daylight.”

  Sergeant Menendez nodded. “Got it.”

  The other soldiers tramped inside and stood about, unsure of what to do with themselves at this juncture. Two of them hauled their injured teammate—Pikes—to a separate room. He moaned and whimpered the whole way, and Lee watched him go, thinking, I should’ve killed him. There was no reason to stop. I should’ve splattered his brains.

  “Everybody else,” Tex continued, still sounding irritated. “Stand down. Go back to sleep. Stare at the wall. I don’t care. But chill out and stay quiet.” He turned to Lee. “I need to speak to you. Privately.”

  Tex stalked off, and Lee followed.

  In the background of his anger, there was the thought that You’re trying to make an alliance with these people—don’t throw that away.

  And yet he found himself willing to do exactly that.

  For what? Not for Julia. Killing him wouldn’t do anything for her. Killing Pikes would only make Lee feel better. But it would hamstring his mission here in Texas.

  Lee gulped a big breath of air and held it. Then let it out slow.

  What’s your mission?

  Unite the UES and Texas.

  It’s difficult to see the big picture when you want to brutalize another human being. And yet Lee had lived in conflict and violence for so long that he was capable of doing just that.

  Big picture: The UES and Texas needed each other. They had too many common enemies to survive without an alliance.

  Lee didn’t want to put his relationship with Julia on a balancing scale with the survival of the United Eastern States…and yet here he was.

  Tex led him into a spacious laundry closet and swiped the sliding doors shut behind him.

  Lee was the first to speak. “What the fuck, Tex?”

  Tex’s eyes blazed, but he kept his voice low. “What the fuck me?” he jabbed a finger out behind them. “I’m not the one that brought my girlfriend into a crew of killers. What the fuck did you think was gonna happen?”

  Lee’s fingers tensed and he felt heat rising up his neck. “I didn’t see you complaining when you found out she was a medic.”

  Tex ignored the assertion. “Surely she knew this could happen?”

  Lee leaned in close. “Are you really not holding your man responsible?”

  “Yes, I’m fucking holding him responsible! He’s a fuck-ass and he always has been. And now he’s got a crushed testicle. Meanwhile your girl is perfectly fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “Did he get his dick in?”

  It was only by monumental effort that Lee didn’t smash Tex’s face in right then. Sure, Lee still wasn’t a hundred percent, and after he had his face smashed in, Tex would return the favor with interest, but for a moment Lee forgot all the ramifications of what he was trying to accomplish.

  “He tried to rape her,” Lee hissed.

  “But he didn’t, did he?”

  Lee was silent. Burning.

  Tex seemed to rally himself. He took a deep breath and let it out, and spoke in a whisper. “All I’m saying is that your girl is physically fine—minus the black eye and the busted nose—and my guy is out of commish. I call that square.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I think that’s your emotions talking.” Tex raked his fingers through his short hair. “What do you want me to do? Execute him?”

  Yes. That was exactly what Lee wanted. Better yet, he wanted Tex to let Lee execute him.

  And yet...

  For the moment, Pikes’s crew was mad that their guy had been injured. But that would cool.

  If Pikes became a martyr, their feelings towards Lee and Abe and Julia would only become more strained.

  Lee didn’t respond to Tex’s question, because he couldn’t bring himself to admit that, in a way, Tex was right. As disgusting as that made Lee feel, he wasn’t going to torpedo the whole operation against Nuevas Fronteras over this.

  The two of them sat in silence for nearly a minute, gathering themselves.

  When Tex spoke again, his tone was more level. “What happened?”

  “You should’ve let Julia talk,” Lee said. “I didn’t see how it started. Just how it ended.”

  Tex looked at the tile floor under their feet. �
�Lee, you know as well as I do that that shit wouldn’t have flown. The guys were worried about Pikes. They didn’t want to hear anything about Julia. If we started having a public hearing about this shit, it was going to go downhill quick. You know how these guys are. Pikes is an idiot—I’m not denying that—but he’s one of our brothers. All these guys are brothers. They’ve been fighting and keeping each other alive for years before your crew came along. They aren’t going to want to hear the facts of the matter. Not until they cool off. I know you thought I did the wrong thing there, and maybe I did—maybe I did wrong by Julia—but you also know I was right to get everybody separated and cooling off.”

  Lee didn’t respond to that. He didn’t want to respond. He didn’t want to feel like he’d betrayed Julia.

  “She got up to go take a piss,” Lee said, his low voice suddenly tired. “She usually has one of us watch her back. She said she’d be fine because you had sentries. She was only worried about primals—teepios. I felt weird about it, so I waited a few minutes and followed her outside. I didn’t want her to see that I followed her, because she gets mad at me if she thinks I’m handling her with kid gloves. By the time I went outside, I heard them struggling. I ran around the corner. Saw Pikes on top of her. Saw her pants were pulled down. I jumped in, pulled him off of her. Then she crushed his balls, and the rest you saw.”

  Tex looked Lee over. Processing.

  “You must’ve really wanted to kill him,” he said.

  Lee’s eyes hit Tex’s. “Still do.”

  “I guess I owe you one for not.”

  Lee’s eyes narrowed. “What am I supposed to tell Julia?”

  Tex took another deep breath and leaned back onto the old dryer. “We’re in a bit of a pickle, huh?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “You have to back up your people. And I have to back up mine.”

  “Do you want this to work?”

  Tex thought about it for a moment, and Lee wished that he’d been quicker to answer. But he did eventually nod. “Yeah, Lee. I think we need to help each other.”

  “How about your guys?”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they going to work with us now?”

  Again, Tex took longer to consider than Lee would have liked. But again, he nodded. “Yeah. I tell them what went down, I think they’ll call it a wash. They want to back up their boy, but they’re smart enough to know he made a shitty decision and got his shit crushed for it.”

  “Alright.” Lee shifted. “So what do I tell Julia?”

  Tex shook his head. “You know her better than I do, Lee. Is she going to go apeshit about this, or will she be cool?”

  Lee wanted to believe that she’d do what was necessary to keep the mission going. But this was one of those things that men only understood academically. The ugly truth was that he couldn’t really put himself in her shoes. It was a delicate and spiny issue that Lee was unprepared to tackle.

  “I don’t know,” Lee finally admitted. “But Tex…you know me. You know I don’t say stupid shit. I’m not making a threat here. I’m just telling you ahead of time: If Pikes steps on the wrong side of me or any of my team again, I’m gonna kill him.”

  That last sentence hung there for a moment.

  Tex appeared to be measuring the appropriate reaction to that. And eventually he just nodded. “Well. Thanks for letting me know, I guess.”

  A sharp knock rattled the laundry closet door.

  Lee’s heart sank, thinking that new problems had arisen.

  Tex spat a quiet curse and flung the door open. “What?”

  Sergeant Menendez stood there, and immediately Lee knew this wasn’t about Julia and Pikes. Menendez’s dark features weren’t angry and suspicious. They were alarmed.

  “Tex,” Menendez spoke rapidly, giving Lee a sidelong glance. “OP Casa’s on the line. They got hit, and they’re gettin’ their shit pushed in. They’re asking for help exfilling.”

  Tex was already moving before Menendez had stopped talking. He looked over his shoulder as he stalked out of the laundry closet. “Say whatever you need to say to her Lee. We’re gonna need a medic.”

  ***

  When Lee opened the door to the bedroom, he found Julia dressed, pulling her armor on. Abe was at his bedside, doing the same. He looked over his shoulder as Lee stopped in the door with a frown on his face.

  Abe gave him a pointed glance towards Julia.

  Julia was focused on her task, to the deliberate exclusion of Lee.

  “Julia…” Lee started, knowing he was on unsteady footing.

  She looked up at him. Her one good eye seemed flat and gray. Her swollen left eye was turning purple. The only expression on her face was the slight downturn at the corners of her mouth.

  “We heard, Lee,” she said. “I’ll be ready in less than a minute.”

  She was shut off. Closed down.

  No longer open for business.

  Lee wondered where he’d made the misstep, or if he even had, or if Julia was simply coping with it in the only way she knew how. It left a big, open hole that gaped between them, unfulfilled and unacknowledged.

  “So, you’re aware?” was all Lee could think of to say.

  She nodded as she pulled her medical pack off the floor and slung it onto her back. “I heard Menendez tell Tex there was a problem with one of their outposts. And they’re gonna need a medic.”

  Shit. What else had she heard?

  He registered suddenly that the laundry closet was below this bedroom.

  Lee took a step towards her. “Listen…”

  Her eyes flashed. “Lee, do you not think I have my priorities straight?”

  He didn’t know how to take that.

  Julia shook her head at him. “You don’t think I know that there are bigger things at stake?”

  Lee looked away. “No…I just…”

  Julia put a hand on his chest. “Lee. I’m fine. It’s not like I haven’t had a busted face before. I’m fine, and I can operate. We need to do this. For the UES.” She jerked her head over her shoulder to where Lee’s gear sat next to the bed. “And you need to get dressed.”

  FIFTEEN

  ─▬▬▬─

  CADDO

  Five minutes later, they tore through the early-morning darkness in Tex’s pickup. The clock on the dash said 4:00 a.m., and Lee thought that felt about right, judging by the tremble of fatigue and tension in his gut.

  Lee, Abe, and Julia were crammed into the back, their armor and weapons making them rub against each other in what would normally be ample passenger space. Out of necessity, Deuce was in the truck bed, looking half-worried and half-excited as he tried to brace his body against the wall of the truck bed to keep from sliding around the more aggressive curves. Thompson drove, and Tex rode shotgun with his rifle in one hand and a satphone in the other.

  They’d lost contact with their outpost shortly before hitting the road. Tex waited for them to call back with any extra details, but both he and Lee knew that wasn’t likely.

  “They have any idea who hit them?” Lee asked.

  “I’d guess Nuevas Fronteras, but they couldn’t confirm,” Tex said, turning in his seat to look into the back. The headlights of the other three vehicles trailing behind them splashed over Tex’s worried face. “Whoever it is, they hit hard about thirty minutes ago. Our boys are pulling out of OP La Casa, trying to head for one of my bunkers as a rally point. We need to cut off their pursuit—give them enough time to break contact and get to ground.”

  “How far out?” Abe asked.

  “About thirty mikes,” Tex replied.

  Julia had her medical pack between her knees and her face was all business as she went through the contents with rapid, practiced fingers, prepping what she thought she might need. “You have any details on casualties?”

  “Negative.” Tex shook his head. “I’ll try to get that if we can make contact again.”

  The tension in the air
was like a stifling blanket when you’re already hot and out of breath. And yet everyone was ignoring it.

  Lee leaned forward. “How far between OP La Casa and the bunker?”

  “Roughly five miles. Hilly terrain.”

  “Your boys on foot or do they have vehicles?”

  “They have some vehicles, but not enough. If they did what they’re supposed to do, vehicles will help stage a base of fire in the high ground and cover the retreat of the guys on foot.”

  Lee nodded along to this, forcing his tired brain to work in the mode that he needed it to. It was almost a relief, after what had happened at the cabin. Exhausted though he may be, and dire as the situation sounded, at least this was familiar footing.

  “Are we heading to that high ground?” Lee asked.

  “That’s the plan. We’ll see how it shapes out when we get there.”

  “What intel do we have on the enemy?”

  “Limited,” Tex said. “But there’s enough of a force that they pushed fifty of my troops out of their fortifications. Breckenridge is my guy on the ground and he said they hit them with some big guns—fifties, he thought. I’m assuming vehicle-mounted.”

  “Shit.” Lee frowned. “Any reason Nuevas Fronteras would be interested in your position at OP La Casa?”

  “La Casa’s our southernmost outpost. The closest thing for Nuevas Fronteras to reach out and touch. My best guess is a reprisal for hitting their convoy.”

  “Were any of the tankers stashed there?”

  “No, we have them secured farther north.”

  “You got on the line with any of your other outposts?”

  Concern creased Tex’s brow. “You think this could be a feint?”

  “It won’t hurt to check.”

  “I don’t want to tie up the line,” Tex said, waggling his satphone in the air.

  Lee dove into his pack and pulled out their own satphone, handing it over to Tex. “Use mine. Hit up your other outposts. Let them know what’s going on and get them on standby just in case.”

  For the next ten minutes of hurtling through the dark countryside, Tex called every outpost along their southern border, plus the one where they’d hidden the stolen fuel tankers. The best that Lee could decipher from hearing half the conversations, it sounded like all was quiet elsewhere.