by D. J. Molles
Pretty soon they’d be re-using the previous day’s grounds, or adding burnt bread crumbs.
Bellamy grumbled another curse and turned around, intending to return his well-used coffee cup to his office.
Griffin exited his office. He closed the door behind him, much as Bellamy had done, and began marching across the conference room with purpose in his steps.
He didn’t look around. Didn’t see Bellamy watching him.
He let Griffin get most of the way across the conference room before he started to follow him.
This conference room was connected to the adjacent one by a single door on the far side. The next conference room over was the one where Lineberger had his office, and Bellamy felt confident that was where Griffin was heading.
Bellamy let Griffin get to the door between the two conference rooms before he pushed himself off of the table that held the coffee maker, and followed after him.
Griffin remained fixated on his task—he kept his eyes forward, and kept up a brisk pace.
Whatever had just happened, whoever it had been on the satphone with Griffin, it looked like it was urgent.
As Bellamy followed, half his mind was trying to puzzle out what had happened, while the other half was screaming at him that he might give himself away by showing this much interest…
But he kept following. Whatever news it was, Bellamy needed to figure it out—it could be important to Tex—and that was Bellamy’s job right now. Besides, he also reported on a regular basis to Lineberger, so it wasn’t going to seem amiss for him to appear outside of the colonel’s office.
By the time he made it to Lineberger’s office, the door was closed, and he could hear quiet conversation beyond the plywood walls. Griffin and Lineberger were both speaking quickly, but keeping their voices down.
Bellamy glanced around him, but no one else seemed to be paying much attention to the fact that he stood there. He chose a spot nearby that didn’t look like he was hovering so close to the door as to be eavesdropping—just waiting for the colonel to be available so Bellamy could make his report.
Shit. What was Bellamy going to say?
What was his reason for being outside the colonel’s door?
He started to rack his brains for a reasonable answer, but before he could settle on one, the conversation inside the office came to an abrupt halt, and a second later, the door opened up.
Griffin emerged, looking as focused as he had when he’d been on the satphone. He caught sight of Bellamy standing off to the side, and he stiffened.
“John,” Griffin said, his eyes narrowing.
“Perry,” Bellamy returned, trying on an ill-fitted smile. “You look particularly tense today. Everything alright?”
Griffin mirrored the smile, and it was just as awkward on his mouth as it was on Bellamy’s. “Just busy. Lot of pans in the fire. You know how it is.”
“You know it,” Bellamy chuckled, and then, in a sudden flash of inspiration, went with, “Hey, if you get a little time off, I still got a few cans of Coors Original in my room. Bet it’s been a long time since you had a legit beer. You should come by. Tie one off.”
Griffin nodded. “Yeah. That sounds great.”
They split apart.
Neither one convinced of the other.
“Major,” Colonel Lineberger growled from inside the office. “Did you need something?”
Bellamy swung himself into the open doorway, still trying to appear casual. “Yes, sir. Was just planning on making contact with our allies down south this afternoon and confirm the re-shipment of fuel.” His excuse came to his tongue almost without forethought. “I was curious if we had any intel on the routes into Colorado. You know—which ones would be safer for the convoy at this point. Try to avoid any more drama.”
Lineberger listened to this with an enigmatic expression on his face. Bellamy couldn’t tell whether the excuse had flown or crashed. So he stood there, still trying to smile and look casual.
Perhaps ill-conceived, or perhaps an inspired gamble, Bellamy jacked a thumb behind him. “Perry seems edgy today. Everything okay? Anything I should know about?”
Colonel Lineberger then surprised Bellamy by cracking a smile. “Well, you know Perry. He’s a little tense as it is. But yes, there’s some stuff going down.” Lineberger gestured to the open door. “Close the door. I’ll bring you into the loop.”
***
Elsie Foster disconnected the satphone, and for a moment, her gaze lingered on the blind-drawn windows.
Claire watched her, trying to discern the gist of the message that they’d just received from their contact in Greeley. As Claire watched, Elsie’s lips tensed, and her face hardened into the expression of determination for which she was known. As though just like that all the uncertainty had been banished and she was now, once again, completely sure of herself.
“They say they want some proof of our capabilities. We need to determine a target,” Elsie said. “Somewhere inside the Safe Zone. Something that will do damage to Angela. Something that will make it easy for them to come in and help us take over.”
Claire bit her lip. “Shit. Elsie. That sounds like they’re using us.”
Elsie nodded. “They are using us. And you shouldn’t be surprised. We’re the ones that need help. But they have a team they’re ready to deploy close by to us. Within striking range of Fort Bragg. But they’re not going to hit until we cripple the defenses.”
Claire covered her mouth and nose with both hands and took a deep breath. Her hands smelled musty. After a moment’s thought, she pulled them away from her face. “I’ve got an idea, but we’ll need to coordinate with the captains.”
***
“House-to-house,” Carl stated. “That’s the only way.”
It was only him and Angela, standing in her office, the desk separating them.
Carl hunched over the desk, his fists propping him up. Angela stood back, her arms crossed over her shoulder. She stared at the master sergeant across from her, at the bitter lines of his face. A thin vein had started to show under his right eye.
“You mean start kicking in doors?” Angela said, and found her voice devoid of emotion. She felt that she was stewing in a mental fallout zone. Everything was too big for her. And in her failure to grasp its enormity, she found herself detached and calm.
Was this how real leaders made their hard decisions?
Was it just a matter of dissociation?
She wouldn’t know.
She was a fraud.
Regardless of her lack of tone, Carl seemed to sense push-back, and he wasn’t wrong—indiscriminate house-to-house raids went counter to everything Angela wanted to believe about their burgeoning society.
“Angela, this is what has to be done. The Lincolnists are mobilizing.” He started to slap a hand down into his open palm to punctuate each point as he made it. “If they’re mobilizing, that means they want to fight us. We can’t wait for them to choose the place and time of the fight. We have to cripple them as soon as possible. But that requires that we know where they are. And there is no way to route them out in a timely manner without going house-to-house through Fort Bragg, and flushing them out.”
“You can’t just go through Fort Bragg, kicking in everyone’s doors.”
“We don’t have to kick in everyone’s doors. Just the people that won’t let us in.”
“Carl, this is not a dictatorship! You are not the gestapo!” Angela raised her hands up and clutched the air in front of her face, trying to claw adequate words into existence. “We’re…we’re civilized!”
“You get too civilized and you get overrun by barbarians,” Carl growled. “Ask any number of other civilized people. You want to survive and preserve your ideals? Well, then you have to get rough sometimes. You have to do dirty shit. That’s the way it is, Angela.”
Angela never presumed to be an amazing leader. But she also didn’t like being talked down to. Her eyebrows cinched into a glare at Carl. “How much of this is because i
t’s the right thing to do? And how much of it is because you just want to kill them all for betraying you and Tomlin?”
Carl’s bottom lip pulled back in an almost spasmodic move, exposing his lower teeth for a flash. A wince. The prodding of an unhealed wound. “It doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong, Angela. It’s the only thing to do.”
Angela shook her head fiercely. “I don’t believe that.”
“Then enlighten me as to our other options.”
“You have your men go in an orderly fashion to the houses of the people that didn’t show up to work today. You knock on doors. You ask questions. Civilly.”
“You’re treating a matter of warfare like a police action,” Carl snapped.
“That’s because it’s not war!” Angela took a moment to breathe and reign herself in. “These people are our neighbors. And there hasn’t been any overtly violent act. Yet.”
Carl looked shocked at this assertion. “No overtly…?” He leaned in. “What about the fucker that tried to kill you, Angela? What about Lieutenant Derrick, dead on his goddamn doorstep? Holy shit. What about Elsie Foster trying to get Sullivan to infect your daughter? Those feel awfully overt to me!”
Angela felt like she was suddenly split right down the middle.
The feeling that she’d had as she held onto Abby, thinking of what Elsie Foster had been willing to do just to get at Angela, and how Angela wouldn’t feel anything but good about beating that woman to death with her own hands…
And then the feeling, like she’d helped create this tottering house of cards. And that house of cards was the UES, and in it was sheltered the belief that they were good again, they were beyond the dirty, pathetic, scrabbling in the dirt and blood and savagery of the years that followed the collapse of the world’s societies.
She didn’t want that house of cards to fall, but it was so fragile.
Those two sides of her, warring.
The savage, and the civilized.
Angela took a shaky breath and rolled her shoulders back so she felt erect and in control. She looked Carl in the eye. “No house-to-house raids. It’s an option, Carl. And I respect your professional opinion. But we’re going to hold onto the hope for a peaceful option as long as we can. If it becomes obvious that there won’t be a peaceful option, then we will do it your way.”
Carl, feeling something in the air change between them, drew back from the desk, and it didn’t escape Angela that his nose curled for a moment, like he found her distasteful.
Angela had never felt so alone in her life.
She wished that Lee were in the room at that moment, even though she thought that he would probably agree with Carl. It didn’t matter. Right now it was just Angela, one tiny island, and not a friendly face in sight, and she felt lost.
She was just acting like she had her shit together.
Like she was the president of this place.
Like she was firm in her resolutions.
But she was perched on a razor’s edge. Barely hanging on.
With some apparent effort, Carl smoothed the sneer from his face, and gave Angela a nod. “We will continue to make contact with the houses that did not report for their work details and hopefully we will come up with something that we can use.” He looked like he was about to say something else, but then decided not to.
It didn’t matter.
Angela was able to read it in his eyes.
Hopefully it won’t be too little, too late.
EIGHTEEN
─▬▬▬─
TRIAGE
Tex’s bunker, north of the town of Caddo, was a madhouse.
Lee had stood topside amid the camouflage of a small radio tower used to disguise the entrance to the bunker, while the wounded and the soldiers carrying them hit the lift and were taken underground, and the sun came up over the tree-lined hills.
His face began to ache from the bits of copper bullet jacketing that had peppered it earlier, but he knew that was only cosmetic damage, and others had serious wounds.
No primal bites, though.
The only two primals that had attacked up the hill had been the two that Lee and Abe had put down.
It was only once they’d reached the bunker that Lee realized Deuce had not been in the truck bed with him when they’d escaped the hilltop. His stomach dropped, and he began coursing through the flashes of memory, trying to remember if he’d seen the dog during the firefight.
Had he run off when he’d scented the primals on the hilltop?
Had he been shot?
His brain went through all of this several times before he registered that he hadn’t seen Julia either. With every pickup truck full of escaping and wounded soldiers, his hopes rose and then fell. No sign of Julia.
She’d been on the hill when Tex had told everyone to hightail it.
She would have arrived first.
She would be underground, tending to the wounded.
Perhaps Deuce would be with her.
That’s what he told himself, and every time he did, it quelled the nausea gripping his stomach for a handful of seconds, but then it would come back.
Finally, they were down to stragglers, and Lee found an open spot to park himself in the lift, and took it.
In the cold confines of the steel freight elevator, there were two soldiers with minor wounds who handled their situations with a grim sense of humor, asking if this meant they got extra rations. Their buddies supporting them laughed dutifully and kept things light.
When Lee made it to the inside of the bunker, twenty minutes after arriving topside, the doors opened and a tsunami of noise rushed at him.
The jokes of the soldiers in the lift were drowned out by someone screaming, and at least three other soldiers shouting things back and forth to each other, trying to be heard over everyone else that was trying to be heard.
The soldiers in the lift with him edged forward, and Lee let them shoulder him out of the way. One wounded soldier limped along, supported by his buddy, a hole in the top of his boot, and dark red staining the tan leather. The other soldier clutched his arm to his chest and exited.
Lee slipped through the doors, trying to catch sight of either Abe or Julia, or even Tex, but the main level of the bunker was a mish-mash of bustling bodies. Lee had never been in an Emergency Room after a major disaster, but he imagined this is what it looked like.
The lift opened on a long hall, off of which were several doors. Lee was familiar with the layout of the bunker, because it was a template from which every Project Hometown bunker was created.
On the edges of the hall, the less-wounded stood or sat against the walls. Others that were worse off were being carted by comrades, by hand or in makeshift litters, and they were being stopped and inspected by a cluster of what looked like three other soldiers that were either combat medics or, perhaps, just Combat Life Saver-certified.
The soldiers pleaded their cases, and the interim medics triaged them, everyone speaking very loudly.
But no sign of Julia or Abe.
As though materialized out of thin air, Lee became aware of a face in front of him. It wasn’t until Lee looked down and saw the lips moving that he realized his ears were still ringing, and he wasn’t catching much of what was being said.
He blinked a few times to refocus. “What?”
The soldier in front of him—a man with a two-day growth of beard and a streak of blood across his brow like war paint—looked exasperated. “I said, is there anyone else topside? Tex wants to activate the security.”
Lee frowned, abruptly irritated. “I don’t fucking know. Tell him to check the fucking cameras.” Lee shouldered past the man, and into the bustle of the hallway.
The doors to either side of the hallway hung open. The rooms were filled with supplies, but in the center of them, wherever space could be had, there was a wounded person being cared for.
In the armory room, a soldier lay on a stack of ammunition boxes in place of a gurney. He was consciou
s, leaning up, and staring back at Lee. The pants on his left thigh had been cut away all the way to his groin, and a tourniquet was cinched tight into his flesh, just above a bundle of bloody bandages at mid-thigh.
“Hey man,” the soldier said, his eyes worried. “You gonna help me?”
Lee passed on. There wasn’t much he could do for the man, and he had neither the time nor the energy to express useless condolences. He needed to put his eyes on his people. He needed to make sure that Julia and Abe had arrived back in one piece.
At the very end of the hall, he looked in on the room where foodstuffs were stored, and found Julia hunched over the abdomen of a body, her hands gloved, and wrist-deep in the man’s gut.
Lee felt the tension in his body release. His knees gave a twitch like they might go out.
The swelling around her eye had gone down some, and she must have seen him out of her periphery, because her head snapped up, stray strands of hair across her face. “Hey!” she snapped. “Lee! Get in here!”
Lee stepped into the room, letting out a pent-up breath. “You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. Drop the rifle and armor. Gimme a hand.”
Lee unslung his rifle and propped it up in the corner of the room, then shucked his sweaty armor off and tumbled it next to his rifle. His chest felt better for having been relieved of the constant pressure.
As he approached the body of the man, laying on a stainless steel table, his eyes went first to Julia’s hands, which were inserted into what looked like an incision that she’d made. She pressed them into the man’s guts, deep enough that Lee thought her fingers were touching the back wall of the abdominal cavity.
Then Lee’s eyes went up to the man’s face, registered the pale, waxy skin, and the fact that the man was unconscious—either by shock, or by anesthetic, Lee didn’t know—and only then did Lee realize that it was Pikes.
The man that had tried to rape Julia, only hours before.
“Motherfucker…” Lee gaped.
“We got a problem,” Julia husked.
“No shit.”
Julia looked at him. “I got my finger on the bleeding. I need you to grab that hemostat. There. The one on his chest. I don’t wanna move or I’m gonna lose it.”
