Southlands

by D. J. Molles

  By the time he’d shuffled downstairs and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and peered out the kitchen window, nothing was happening.

  The streets were empty.

  But still.

  There was something wrong with this place.

  Sam pushed himself away from the sink and the window and stood in the middle of the kitchen, considering himself. He was dressed in his underwear and the tan t-shirt he wore under his uniform. He’d been too tired to shower and change last night.

  After they’d returned from the mall, they’d been sequestered into the roll call room at The Barn. First Sergeant Hamrick came to retrieve them one at a time, with an incredulous scowl on his face. In private, he’d made each of them recount what had happened, then told them not to talk about it until he said it was okay.

  They weren’t supposed to talk about it back in the roll call room either, but they did.

  Mostly, they theorized.

  But they also questioned Allen-The-Wildlife-Guy on what he thought.

  Allen tried to suppress these questions—he was afraid of reprisals from Hamrick—but after he’d been badgered for perhaps the tenth time, he got mad and let it out.

  “I don’t know, alright?” he’d whispered at them. His eyes scanned the room, flashing with defensive anger. “I’m not a goddamned scientist, or—or—or an expert or anything.”

  He seemed about to leave it at that, but everyone was now staring at him, knowing that he’d broken silence, knowing that if they just provided the verbal vacuum, perhaps Allen would feel compelled to fill it.

  Allen looked at the floor, thinking. “You know how you know if you got a rat problem?” he mumbled, almost to himself.

  No one answered. They waited. Watched.

  “You start finding a lot of snakes,” Allen said. He looked up, and for some reason, his eyes landed on Sam’s and held there. “That’s just how nature works. If a certain animal has a natural predator, then when a lot of those animals gather together, there will be a lot of the predators in the same place. The predators have to eat. They know they have to go where the biggest food supply is.” He looked away from Sam. Back to the floor. “When you see predators, you know that the prey is nearby. And vice-a-versa: If you see a lot of prey, you can bet there are a lot of predators.”

  Sam remained mute to this. But beside him, Jones fidgeted and leaned forward in his seat.

  “So…” Jones squinted at Allen. “We’re the fucking prey, right? Is that what you’re saying? You’re saying that them fuckers is all gathered out there because we’re gathered in here. Is that right?”

  Allen shrugged, unsure of himself again. “I guess. I dunno. I’m not an expert. It’s just…that’s what makes sense to me.”

  Jones leaned back, looking disturbed. “Well. Shit.”

  Sam and the rest of the soldiers that had made the run into Fayetteville weren’t released until six o’clock in the morning. Sam had trundled himself home on foot, used his key to open the front door, snuck upstairs, and fallen into bed the second he got his outer uniform off.

  “You alright there?” a voice shot into his thoughts.

  Sam jerked, like a static shock, and looked around.

  Marie stood in the kitchen with her eyebrows up, looking concerned with Sam. He hadn’t even heard her walk in. She’d be here to watch Abby.

  “Yeah,” Sam said, though he still felt the overwhelming offness of the world around him. “Hey, did you hear someone on a loudspeaker?”

  Marie hesitated for a moment, then seemed to decide that she didn’t need to be secretive with Sam—he worked for the UES, after all. “Yes. I’m not quite sure what’s going down, but I’ve seen some troops rolling around, going to some houses.”

  “All the houses?”

  “No, just a few of them. Not sure what the loudspeaker was about. That came from down the street.” Marie leaned to peer out the kitchen window. “I think they’re gone now.”

  For the first time, Sam seemed to come to the realization that he was in his underwear in front of Marie. His first instinct was to try to hide himself, which was quickly covered by a more adult thought that figured he should just play it cool.

  He started making for the upstairs. “I’m gonna head in,” he said. “In case they need me.”

  “Did you get enough sleep?” Marie called after him.

  Sam grunted something in the ballpark of an affirmative and escaped upstairs.

  Five minutes later he was in uniform again, walking down the sidewalk.

  Even with relatively few people about—most everyone would still be at their work places—it only took a moment for Sam’s eyes to fall on a familiar face.

  Charlie stalked toward him on the opposite side of the street, and the second his eyes found her, she raised a hand in greeting.

  “Sam!” She quickened her pace and hustled across the street.

  There was something in the way she’d been walking when he’d first seen her.

  It felt almost like she’d come out of nowhere.

  Almost like she’d been waiting for him around the corner of one of these houses.

  “Hey Charlie,” Sam said, as she trotted up.

  He kept his greeting subdued, but Charlie seemed to be happy to see him.

  A few days ago, Sam would have taken the excitement in her eyes at face value. Now he wondered. Was this the genuine article, or was this another show? Was this just how she got him to open up to her?

  Was she pumping him for information?

  At first, when he’d come to these realizations, it had seemed more like she might just be a bit of a gossip hound. After seeing her meet up with Claire, though, things had taken on a more conniving caste.

  Charlie walked along beside him in silence for a moment, all the while Sam’s eyes going here and there, but never locking into Charlie’s like they usually did.

  “Is everything okay?” Charlie asked.

  “Yeah,” Sam grunted. “Why?”

  “You seem a little…off lately.”

  “Off?”

  “Yeah, you know.” She smiled. He caught the flash of her teeth out of the corner of his eye, and—damn himself—he looked. Felt a weak little part of him stir. “Like you’re not all that happy to see me.”

  Sam forced a smile. Somehow, through some feminine sorcery, she’d managed to now make him feel guilty. Maybe it had all really been in his head. Was he pushing her away? Was he being an idiot? Was he going to regret this?

  “I’ve just been tired lately,” he said, figuring that covered a gamut of bad behaviors.

  They walked in silence for a moment.

  Charlie seemed to be mulling things over.

  Or…strategizing?

  Somewhere in the distance, the sound of another voice on loudspeaker reached them. They both looked in the direction that the sound had appeared to come from, but they could see nothing except the houses and the occasional stand of stubborn pine trees.

  “What’s going on around here?” Charlie asked. “Have you heard anything?”

  And that’s all it took to rankle him. He stopped dead in his tracks and turned on Charlie, his dark face made darker by the furrow of his brows and the firm set of his mouth.

  “What is this?” he said, his voice low, but his words sharp. “What’re you doing?”

  Charlie looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

  Anger flashed through his clouded features. “I mean, do you actually like me, Charlie? ‘Cause from where I’m standing, it doesn’t really seem like it. Seems like you show up when you wanna pump me for information. Doesn’t seem like you’re all that into having an actual relationship.”

  Sam watched her face like trying to read an opponent at a high-stakes poker match.

  And what he saw was very odd.

  Things blipped across Charlie’s face, like she was a shape-shifter trying on every face she knew how to make. First shocked, then sad, then angry, then indignant. They cycled across her face, like t
hey were all pegs on a spinning wheel, and then suddenly they stopped.

  Her face bore the expression of someone who had many regrets.

  She felt bad.

  She had made a mistake.

  That’s what the face said.

  She reached forward and she put her hand around the back of his neck and she pulled herself up, and she pulled him down, and her mouth met his and her lips were open and he felt and tasted her slick warm tongue press into his mouth. She moved her body against him like she’d never moved it before.

  When she pulled away from him, her eyes were warm and smoky.

  “Let me show you how much you mean to me.”

  ***

  It didn’t take him long.

  Charlie knew that it wouldn’t.

  When they were finished, there was a small portion of her that felt dirty, but she also felt an electric thrill. Because she’d done what needed to be done. She’d done it for the cause, and she’d gotten what she’d wanted.

  Sam had talked to her.

  Pillow talk, one might say, though there weren’t any pillows—they’d hidden away in a nearby stand of pines. She couldn’t have taken him back to a house, so she made do with what she had available, and Sam wasn’t complaining.

  If Claire could see me now, Charlie thought as she hustled along.

  She felt…victorious.

  Nearly bursting, because she had something.

  She wasn’t sure if it was going to be useful to the Lincolnists, but it was something. And Elsie would know—and Claire too, for that matter—that Charlie wasn’t a child. She could hold her own. And she was serious. They would have to admit that now.

  She crossed one of the main streets that ran through Fort Bragg, and went into the cluster of houses on the other side. She didn’t know a lot, but she knew that she was looking for house number 506.

  She kept up a good clip along the sidewalk. She had to restrain herself from running. She didn’t want to draw attention.

  She passed six houses, and on the seventh, found the number she was looking for.

  So. This was her captain’s house.

  She gave the neighborhood a quick glance to make sure she wasn’t being watched, and then dipped in between the houses, and went to the back of 506. The shades were drawn in the windows. She thought she heard the mumble of conversation and movement through the door.

  She knocked on the door—three, slow raps. The faint noise from inside went silent.

  She stood out on the back stoop, hoping this wasn’t drawing even more attention—all this coming and going from the back door.

  “Who is it?” a voice said.

  “Cherokee.” Charlie used the password and prayed it was still correct.

  There was a long pause that gave Charlie time to wonder what would happen if she’d given the wrong password.

  The door swung open, and Charlie slipped in.

  She knew her captain only in passing. They didn’t make a habit of being together much, but everyone had an assigned captain—a person to meet up with when things went down. Peter Kerns was hers. She looked around and found many faces in that house, and she recognized some of them, but none of them were Peter Kerns.

  The person who had answered the door was a squat man with a suspicious face that peered at her like he still wasn’t quite sure she should be inside, despite having the password.

  “Where’s Peter?” Charlie demanded.

  The man squinted at her, like he was trying to gauge her trustworthiness.

  “It’s Charlie, right?” a man’s voice said, from behind her.

  Charlie spun and found Peter Kerns standing in the doorway to the kitchen where everyone was gathered. She couldn’t wait anymore. The second she locked onto his face, she spilled it out.

  “We need to get word to Elsie,” Charlie sputtered out. “There’s a massive colony of primals, right over in Fayetteville. Fort Bragg command knows about it and is keeping it quiet. We can use this against them.”

  TWENTY

  ─▬▬▬─

  RECON

  Its name was Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant.

  And, like every other nuclear power plant, it was built to be a fortress.

  Three-quarters of a mile north of the power plant, across the greenish waters of Squaw Creek Reservoir—the lake that the power plant used to cool its reactors—a peninsula jutted out from the shore.

  On this peninsula, there was a bushy crop of trees, and then a short, steep, sandy beach. Small waves stirred by the wind slopped along the shoreline. A piece of driftwood bobbed in the shallows, as though to a rhythm no one else could hear.

  In the copse of trees, Lee Harden lay on his belly, his rifle tucked up tight to him. The leaves and pine needles of the forest floor were bunched up around him and over him, and his head and shoulders and most of his rifle was covered by a mesh-like shroud, in which Lee had stuck various twigs and leaves that he’d found near his hide.

  The “sniper shroud” belonged to Tex, who lay beside Lee, similarly camouflaged.

  The two of them looked south, across the flat, open water, to the power plant on the other side.

  Lee let out a long, soft grumble of misgivings. “I don’t like this.”

  Beside him, Tex squinted through a spotting scope, which had better magnification than the scope on Lee’s rifle, but the single glaring fault that it couldn’t kill things.

  “Yeah,” Tex mumbled. “They’re in there.”

  “I’ve got enough visual to see people, but not specifics,” Lee noted. “What kind of details are you picking up? Are these Nuevas Fronteras?”

  “Yeah, most of them are wearing their cartel flag on their shoulder.”

  Lee glanced sideways and saw that Tex was smirking. “Alright, smartass. You know what I meant.”

  “Well.” Tex seemed to consider it. “I’m not seeing any military. But I am seeing a lot of guns. If I could be so racist as to identify them by apparent ethnicity, I would, but it seems to be a pretty even mix of whites, blacks, and Hispanics.”

  “They conscript from the local populations,” Lee pointed out.

  “Yeah. I’m aware. So, I can’t tell you that they’re definitely Nuevas Fronteras. But given the intel we received, and what we’re seeing, I’d say it’s pretty consistent.”

  “Consistent is good enough for me.”

  “So you wanna hit it?”

  “Now, I didn’t say that,” Lee mumbled, pulling himself away from his scope to give his eyes a rest. “It’s still a pretty massive cluster. They’ve got walls. Electric fences. Guard towers. They’re on a peninsula with almost no way to get at them. And they probably outnumber us.” Lee glanced at Tex. “Do they outnumber us?”

  Tex rested his chin on his fist and squinted across the water with his naked eye. “Don’t really have a hard count. It seemed like seven or eight guys. From this angle. I think we can safely assume that they’ve got about triple that number, stationed around the power plant. We’ll say thirty to be safe.”

  “So the numbers are pretty close.” Lee’s face screwed up like he was tasting something that had spoiled. “I dunno, man. What do you think?”

  Tex lifted his eyebrows. “I think we have something they don’t have.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A tank.”

  Lee nodded to admit the point.

  Tex rolled to face Lee. “There’s nothing they got over there that’s going to stop an Abrams. We send that fucker right up the gut, we open up their defenses.”

  “Yeah. They’ll just need to be cautious about what they’re shooting if you guys want a working reactor after we’re done.”

  “Restraint is not typically a tanker’s strong suit, but I think I can convince them.”

  Lee’s earpiece crackled to life and a familiar voice came over the line. “Abe to Lee.”

  Lee and Tex exchanged a quick glance. Tex listened in on his own earpiece.

  “Go ahead, Abe,” Lee prompted. />
  Abe spoke quietly, as they all were. It was unlikely that sound was going to carry that far. But then again, open water could be tricky, and it never hurt to be cautious. “Me and Menendez are at the boathouse. Looks clear. I’ve got my eye on eight canoes that look to be in pretty good condition. Also, several other boats around the docks that look promising.”

  “Roger that,” Lee said over the line. Then, just to Tex, he shook his head. “Fucking canoes.”

  Tex smiled and winked. “Imagine how legendary that will be.”

  The comms opened again. “Tex, this is Bigfoot Actual,” Menendez transmitted. “Just letting you know, I got word from the bunker: Our boys from O-K just arrived.”

  Tex looked thoughtful. “I copy. Any word on numbers?”

  “Yeah. Thirty.”

  Tex shot a pleased look at Lee. “Looks like the numbers are swinging our way.”

  Lee nodded, and tried to look confident, despite the fact that he didn’t feel it. Perhaps it was just the fact that Deuce was MIA that was making Lee feel “off.”

  Whenever this came to him, he told himself that the stupid dog had run off because he was a skittish little bitch, and there wasn’t a damn thing that Lee could have done about that.

  Getting angry about it felt better than letting it touch him.

  Dumb fucking mutt should’ve stayed when I told him to stay.

  Emotions properly stunted, Lee decided he couldn’t let a missing dog turn him off from a viable plan. You had to bet big to win big, right? And this was big. This was game-changing.

  No risk, no reward.

  If they did this right, they might have the groundwork laid for a strong alliance between the UES and Texas. Which meant that Lee and Julia and Abe could call it “mission accomplished.”

  “Alright,” Lee grunted, squirming out of his sniper hide. “Let’s go stare at some maps.”

  ***

  By the time they got back to the bunker, the sun had crested, and began its descent. The shadows got longer, and to the south, a broad bank of threatening clouds glowed yellow, their underbellies a dark charcoal.

  “Looks like rain,” Tex observed, as they entered the bunker and descended.

  The bunker was twice as crowded as before, but half as chaotic.