“Hey. Over here.”
Across the table from her sat a man with no hair on his head with the exception of his eyebrows and beard. His face was scarred as if his flesh had been burned, but beneath the damage Leona thought she saw the vestiges of what had perhaps been a handsome man. He had a neatly trimmed if patchy beard, though the hair was white where it was intercepted by scraggly scars. She noticed he had some bulk to him, real muscle and some fat, not all sinew and gristle like the majority of the men and women in Sherwood. This man and those near him ate well. But he seemed old, perhaps older than his years. He wore a multicam uniform like Leona’s, only there was no name tape. His eyes were a deep brown. He smiled at her, and seemed to have most of his teeth.
“Attagirl,” he said.
“Who are you?” Leona asked.
“Who am I? Why, I’m the warrior of the wasteland, the ayatollah ...” He let his voice trail off for a moment before arriving at a bombastic finish. “... of rock and rolla!”
“Yes sir, you are that,” said the man standing nearby. He leaned against the kitchenette’s serving station.
Leona took a moment to swallow some blood. “What?”
The man made a dismissive gesture. “Okay, guess that reference is lost on you. A fitting reference, but lost nevertheless.”
“I don’t understand,” Leona said.
“Yeah, yeah. I get that.” The man reached into one of the cargo pockets on his uniform. He pulled out two chains. One was her identification tag, informally referred to as dog tags. The other was the eagle medallion Mulligan had presented her with over a year ago. The man put them both on the dining table before them.
“So listen, I was given these. Leona R. Eklund. Serial number blah-blah-blah, A positive blood type, Methodist as a religious denomination. No branch of service indicated, but since only the US Army deleted that from ID tags, I’ll presume you’re a grunt. Right?”
Leona said nothing.
The man was not deterred. “Harmony Base mean anything to you?” he asked. When she still didn’t answer, he continued. “The reason I ask is because I’m amazed that place actually made it. I mean, really, we all thought it was a fun exercise and all—not to mention a fantastic waste of taxpayer money—but was it actually going to work? No one believed in it. From the President of the United States on down. The only hucksters who sexed it up were the representatives of Kansas and a lot of contractor lobbyists and their money. Really, it was a stellar example of pork barrel legislation if ever there was one.”
Leona slowly looked around the compartment. “Seems you know something about it.”
The man pursed his lips and inclined his head. “A bit. Enough to know where the replacement rolling stock was stored. Of course, everything that was to the east was out of reach and I had to wait a freaking lifetime to get to the western site, but hey. Patience is a virtue, right?”
“Who are you?” Leona asked instead.
“Thought I’d already told you.”
“Warrior of the wasteland, ayatollah of rock and rolla. Yeah, I remember.” Leona squirmed a bit on the seat as a bolt of pain shot through her.
The man sitting across from her held up a hand and wagged a finger. “Hey, now. No bleeding on the fine luxury appointments. I’m very particular about this rig, I intend to keep it clean as a whistle. You were only raped, not impaled.”
Leona glared at him with her one good eye. That amused the bald man, and he ran a hand over his bare head. “I like it when people stare hate at me. Makes me feel like I’ve done a man’s work.”
“Raping an unconscious woman is a man’s work?” Leona asked. She couldn’t move her lips during speech as much as she had before. The jagged edges of her teeth cut into them, and the cool air inside the SCEV assaulted the exposed nerves with lances of pain.
The man feigned deep indignation. “Hey, I never touched you, girl. That happened out there, and without my permission. Now had you been brought to me in your previous pristine configuration, well then. Maybe I would have. Might’ve kept you as my personal love slave. But now, you’re all fucked up. Literally as well as figuratively. Trust me, you ain’t beautiful any longer. A shame, but that’s how it is. Had your teeth knocked out, probably going to lose one eye, and you’ve had diseased dicks inside of you. Bet you didn’t think about that, huh? Guess what proliferates at the end of the world? Gonorrhea. Syphilis. Chlamydia. Herpes. That old champion, HIV. Despite starvation, war, and general pestilence, people are out there still getting their freak on. And without proper sanitation and preventive care, all the old poxes have returned. There’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ve been infected already. You’re a walking Petri dish, Lieutenant, so you’ll receive none of my lovin’. Sorry, I realize you probably had high hopes of being inseminated by post-apocalyptic royalty, but some things are just not meant to be.”
Leona ignored all of this, even though it threatened to batter her psyche into submission. Which was probably what the bald man wanted. “Who are you?” she asked again.
“I’m the hombre who knows all about Harmony and its mission, and who was able to procure a vehicle from the western replenishment site. That should be enough to establish my bona fides, right?” The man looked down at the table and picked up the eagle medallion. “Pretty. Damned patriotic, actually. Where’d you get this?”
“It was made out of a coin,” Leona said. “Does it look familiar to you?”
The man dropped it back to the table. He smiled again, and the skin around his eyes crinkled. “Lieutenant, do I look like a man who’s going to answer your questions? In this rig, I ask, you tell. That’s the extent of our relationship.”
“What if I don’t tell you anything?” Leona asked.
The man sighed and leaned forward, cupping his chin in his hand. “Well, let me walk through the list here. You’re well fed. You’re in excellent physical condition. You’ve got some scars on what was otherwise a remarkably banging tight body, before my people in the field decided to rearrange some things. So! You’ve apparently seen some shit, probably something nice and savage. Maybe the kind that survivors of the war would administer, right? But you don’t smell, you’re clean, and you speak perfect English. So I’m thinking you’re from Harmony. And if you’re from Harmony, that means you rolled up here in a rig like this one. I’d like to know how many personnel are with you, and how many rigs are in the area. And I’d really like to know what the hell you were doing up here with indigs. That’s got me majorly curious.”
“Maybe that’s going to be how it is,” Leona said. “Curiosity, cat, that stuff.”
“Oh, Lieutenant Eklund. Really?” The man shook his head. “Listen, we can do this one of two ways. You and I have an intelligent conversation here and now, or we have one later on where you spend a lot of time screaming. It’s your choice.”
“What, are you going to waterboard me?” Leona asked.
The man chuckled. “Waterboard you? No. Water’s a sacred resource, I wouldn’t bother wasting it on you. But I would use this.” He reached down to his belt and pulled out a small knife and laid it on the table. The blade was perhaps two inches long. Not at all impressive. Leona regarded it for a moment with her one good eye.
“Doesn’t look like much, I know,” the man continued. “But really, it’s big enough to do the job. I can use it like a scalpel, or I can use it like a broadsword. I can remove an arm with that. Or, more effectively, I can open up specific nervous pathways that would result in massive agony but not a lot of bleeding. That’s the key, you know. Controlling the bleeding. Small blades are best for that kind of stuff. Trust me, I’m an expert at this.”
“Not really intimidated,” Leona said.
“Not trying to intimidate you, Lieutenant. Just laying out your two possible futures here.”
Leona swallowed more blood. She looked down at the tabletop and saw droplets of crimson had landed on its surface. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Who do you think I am?” The man
leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. When he did that, Leona suddenly noticed the Special Forces patch on his shoulder. She tried to contain her reaction, but she must have emitted a tell. The man looked down at the patch, then fingered it. “Familiar to you?” he asked.
“Which legion?”
The man leaned back in the settee and looked at her with his head cocked at an inquisitive angle. “Which legion? Seriously, you know the slang? You must’ve been a kid when the bombs fell. Who told you about group slang?”
“Which legion?” Leona asked again.
The man hesitated for a long moment. “Fifth. Out of Campbell.”
“Heard they were pussies,” Leona said. “Real he-shes, out on the make all the time.”
The man threw back his head and laughed uproariously. He slapped the table with one hand. “Girl, you and I are going to have some fun times.”
Leona indicated the knife with her chin. “One of us will.”
The man looked down at the implement and fingered it like a man might caress a lover. “True. One of us will.” He looked up at her. “You can avoid this, you know.”
“Harmony’s still active,” Leona said. “You might win this battle, but in the end, you’ll be rubbed out. Big time.”
“I know. How many of you are here, how many vehicles, and how do you know Special Forces slang?”
“A lot, seven, and I only sleep with Green Berets I like,” Leona said. “And I don’t like you.”
He smiled again. “And you never will. Trust me.” He picked up the knife and held it up so she could see it clearly. “You will never like me, Lieutenant.” He held the pose for a moment, then slipped the knife back into its sheath. He swept up the dog tags and the necklace Mulligan had given her and handed them to the man leaning against the food prep area a few feet away.
“Hold on to these for me. Don’t lose them. They’re going to be valuable.”
Leona asked, “How would some of my personal effects be valuable to you?”
The man seated across from her smiled softly. “Because there are people out there that care for you,” he said. “And I think they might do just about anything to get you back ... like flip for us.”
“Flip for you?”
The man nodded slowly. “They won’t like it, but if they have to? Hell, yes. They’ll turn over Sherwood to us from the inside.”
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“Don’t I?” The man considered that for a moment. “Well, we’ll see. Time to get to work.” He looked at the man and the woman in the compartment nearby and pointed at Leona. “Okay, time to get to work. Get her out of here, I’m not going to mess this place up.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“It’s been a long while,” Andrews said to Griffith.
“Can’t trust them,” Griffith said. “Can’t hold them to their word. Listen to me on this, Captain. I’ve been everywhere from Iraq to Libya to Taiwan. You can’t trust an enemy who thinks he has a knife at your throat. They’ll talk pretty, but they’ll always lie. Always.”
The two men sat in the town hall, dressed similarly, in flannel and denim and sturdy government-issue boots. Only Griffith’s were a lot more beaten up that Andrews’s, despite all the walking he’d done recently.
A couple of weeks of walking around are nothing compared to what this old goat’s gone through ... and with a pair of bad hips, at that.
“They said they’d come back in forty-eight hours,” Andrews said.
Griffith looked at him through slitted eyes, his hands clasped across the head of his cane. “Like I just said ... don’t trust ’em. They’ll lie. It’s what they do, it’s one of their weapons. You told that to Stan yourself.”
“Yeah, I did. But now? It doesn’t make sense to me, Master Guns.”
It had been well over two and a half days since the gang of marauders had made their threats outside the wall of wire. Andrews figured they’d be back on time—after all, they’d launched their little demonstration and wiped out two children and critically injured their mother. The woman was on borrowed time, and even though Sherwood had some excellent medical professionals, the woman’s injuries were just too grievous. Aside from substantial internal organ damage, the woman had likely been rendered deaf and blind in the attack, and all the signs of traumatic brain injury were there—tremors alongside outright seizures. Andrews thought that she might expire even if she were in Harmony’s medical section. Her injuries were just too severe.
Griffith looked at Andrews for a long moment. The two of them sat on battered wooden chairs around an old Formica-topped table. There were people about as always, including the everlastingly sullen Trumbull who helped himself to one of the bottles behind the bar and poured himself a three-finger shot of what looked to be whiskey. He sipped it instead of gulping it back in a single gulp, and that struck Andrews as something funny. Despite his gruff demeanor, he pretty much figured Trumbull had been a pussy when the world was fully functional. So much so that he wasn’t even able to take his whiskey all at once like a man.
Not that you’ve ever had any, he told himself. Speaking of pussies ...
“Captain ... these people aren’t playing us straight,” Griffith said. “Maybe they can destroy us outright. Maybe they can’t. Either way, they’re going to string us out for as long as they can. They know the waiting, the wondering, is going to start eating us up. Every day they keep us on ice, we get a bit looser, a bit less on the ball. All that gives them is a little advantage, really. Nothing major. But in our minds, it becomes something gigantic. Something greater than what it really is. This is all PSYOPS bullshit. Them getting under our skin and having us doubt ourselves.”
Andrews considered that. “Master Guns, they killed a couple of kids.”
“So what? I’ve killed about forty in my lifetime,” Griffith said. “I sleep just fine.”
“What?”
Griffith looked at him with eyes that were hard and flinty. “What? You didn’t think your countrymen would be able to hit low and hard? Andrews, when it comes down to breaking an enemy, you have to do to them what they’ll do to you. In my day, I’ve absolutely called artillery and naval weapons onto targets where I knew full well little kids were running around. You know why I would do such a thing?”
“I’m trying to guess, but I’m coming up with a blank,” Andrews said.
“My men, fellow Marines, fellow Americans, were in dire jeopardy. I’m not going to let a man fall in combat when I have the power to save him, no matter what the upfront cost is. I want that man or woman to go back to his or her family. If the enemy doesn’t care about what happens to their kids, I don’t care either. Nor should I. My job was to take care of the Marines under my command, and I hold on to that here as well. I’ll never forget that, even if the men and women around me are survivors of the war and not Marines.” The old man stirred a bit, and half turned toward Trumbull. “Hey. Give me a dose.”
“You sure?” Trumbull asked.
“Give the captain one, too.”
Trumbull sighed. “For fuck’s sakes, Eldon. Really? I mean, he’s not even one of us!”
“He ain’t?” Griffith’s voice changed then, from erudite tactician to something Andrews thought approximated a street hood. It was pitched low and promised nothing but trouble. The pitch and timber was enough to make Trumbull take pause. He found two more tumblers behind the bar, and he wiped one down while making direct eye contact with Andrews. The other, he left alone. Favoring Andrews with an award-winning stink eye, he poured out two generous shots from the bottle, then motioned to one of the others to serve the men. A kid with an undercut fade haircut and lip gloss picked up the glasses and carried them over, swaying slightly, his eyes locked on Andrews. He wore tight, ripped jeans that hung low on his hips, and the straps of what was probably a thong curved around his thin, prominent hip bones. He smiled as he put the glasses down on the table, and Andrews caught a whiff of something like perfume. The y
oung man barely had even a trace of whiskers on his chin, and his tattooed arms were thin and smooth. He looked down at Andrews with come-hither eyes.
“Bottoms up,” he said, and his voice was high pitched and girlish. There was something innately seductive about it, and Trumbull snorted loudly from his position behind the bar.
Andrews smiled back dimly. Am I being hit on by a twink? he wondered.
“Thank you, Mitchie,” Griffith said, “but I understand Captain Andrews is married and probably isn’t interested in what you might have to offer.” The old black man looked at Andrews and favored him with a wry smile. “Do let me know if I’m speaking out of turn here.”
Andrews felt his face flush with embarrassment. “Uh, ah, no. No, you’re right. I’m definitely married—”
The effeminate boy put his hands on the table and leaned forward, smiling while simultaneously poking his ass out a bit. “But are you interested?” he asked. “It’s all cool here if you are ...”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not,” Andrews said, leaning back in his chair a little bit as the subtle scent of sandalwood caressed his nostrils. “No offense, but I don’t swing that way.”
Mitchie grunted and slowly stood up. He was maybe five foot five, and Andrews would be surprised if he weighed a buck twenty. “Well, any time you want to try your luck with an apocatrap, you let me know, sir.”
Apocatrap? Andrews asked himself. What the fuck is that?
“Yeah, thanks,” Andrews said, looking at Griffith.
“Mitchie, go on now,” Griffith said.
Mitchie made a small harrumph and walked away, narrow hips swaying back and forth to return to his position beside the bar. Andrews noticed Trumbull kept his eyes on the effeminate man. They held a cast of jealousy. Apparently, young Mitchie had a fan.
Griffith swapped glasses quickly, pulling the dirty one toward him. Andrews sat up straight in his chair.
“Hey, Master Guns ... that glass isn’t—”
“It ain’t what?” Griffith said, continuing to channel the heart of the ghetto with his voice. “It ain’t good enough for a black man to drink? You think a little grime is gonna be bad for a Marine’s health, you prissy little grunt? Your pet Green Beret would down it and eat the glass.”
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 38
