I remained mute, but she must have expected me to get that detail. “I know that you think I follow him like a stray dog—“ She paused there and thought better of it. “Puppy. But I do not. I am loyal to him because he saw through the bravado, the damage, the insanity, and found me worth trusting. That is why I owe him the same. I do not agree with all his choices, and I often tell him so, but out of earshot of the others. Nothing kills morale like dissent in command.” A grin appeared on her face, wry with amusement. “He has you for the public objecting. You are the voice of the group. I am the voice of his conscience. Not that either of us has much left, but I get the feeling that now you know yourself how that happens, over time.”
Silence fell, strained as it was, but I refused to say anything. What could I have said? I realized that she was honoring me with telling me what I was sure not many people alive knew, but it wasn’t the kind of story you thanked someone for sharing with you. And considering what she had been through my life still was a walk in the park—or maybe a hard obstacle course, but still on the mild side. It just sucked because it was my life, not someone else’s.
“Do not feel bad,” she offered, her voice softer than before. “I told you, I’m not here to belittle you. True, someone might say my loss was worse, because I got to hold my children, nurse them, see them laugh and play and cry. The way I see it, I was gifted years that I spent with them that you never had. You never held your child. Don’t even know if it was a boy or girl. I grieve for what I lost. You grieve for all the things that you never had. I hope that you will heal faster than I did. There is only one piece of advice I can offer you, if you want to hear it.”
It felt disingenuous to deny her offer, and after a few painful seconds of deliberation I nodded for her to go ahead.
“There is only one person on this earth who feels like you feel, and that is him,” she said. My mouth snapped open, ready to object, but she forestalled me with one of her typical glares. “I’m not finished yet. I did not say ignore what happened. Or that you should forgive him. Do whatever you need to do. Lash out, or withdraw—whatever feels right to you. But don’t forget that he is hurting, too. Not to have sympathy with him, but to have someone who sits in the same boat with you. Who understands that there will be days when it’s easier to go on, and days when it’s hard. There is no reason for you to go through this on your own.”
When she fell silent, it was obvious that now she was done. Pia waited for a moment, then turned around and left. I should have said something, to at least acknowledge the trust she had in me to share all this with me, but I simply couldn’t. It was all too much. Out there in the plains I’d thought that silence was my enemy, but I’d been wrong. Silence was comfort. Having to deal with everything else on top of what was going on inside of me, that was the problem.
Hugging myself, I glanced over to the mutilated sand sack. That was another can of worms I didn’t want to open. With the soldiers and the traders, that rage I’d felt had seemed justified. But this explosion? And I wasn’t even referring to the fact that I could suddenly mobilize strength enough to pull a stunt like that, let alone attempt it.
The door creaking open again made my thoughts grind to a halt—not per se a bad thing—but I really could have done without who entered. Nate looked appropriately apprehensive as he let the heavy door fall into the lock, then stepped just far enough into the room not to look like he was on the verge of bolting. I stared at him, feeling my stomach churn as bile made it up my esophagus. It made me feel physically sick, but rather than hunch over and give in to the impulse, I steeled my spine and straightened.
He waited for me to say something, and when I just kept it to baleful stares, he sighed and started talking first.
“I’m not here to apologize,” he clarified—and that was about as far as my restraint went.
“Of course you’re not,” I bit out. “Why would you? I’m sure that you can just reason this away like everything else. Because you are never wrong. You always do the right thing. The pertinent thing. The world would end if you’d have to say that you’re sorry.”
A muscle jumped in his cheek, but his voice remained even as he replied.
“That’s not it. I’m not going to apologize because I am well aware of the fact that you neither want to hear my apology, nor would accept it.” He paused, looking as if he were approaching a dangerous animal and didn’t want to provoke it. Well, fat chance. Consider me provoked. “I had my reasons, but I know that you don’t want to hear that, either.”
“Oh, I want to hear. How exactly do you explain why you—“ I had to cut off there, my throat closing down, but more from anger than grief.
He looked away, unable to keep holding my gaze. “I didn’t think—“
“Well, what else is new?” I snarled, interrupting him.
Normally he would have gotten angry at that, but not this time. If anything, he looked downright uncomfortable. “I did what I did because at the time it seemed like the best thing to do—“
“You fucking lied to me!” I screamed, all that pent-up anger and pain breaking loose. “How the fuck can you explain away that you lied to me?!”
Nate looked borderline flabbergasted, needing a moment to catch up with me. “You’re angry because I lied to you,” he stated, as if that fact was absolutely astonishing to him. Maybe it was. If that was it, we were in way more trouble than I’d realized.
“Yes! Why wouldn’t I be mad at you for lying to me?”
“I thought this was because of—“
I just couldn’t let him spell that out, so I shouted right over him. “Of course I’m angry because of that, too! And hurt. And confused. And a million other things I can’t make sense of right now! But I can deal with all that, even if it drives me insane. But what I can’t deal with is you betraying me like this!”
So much for trying to calm down. But if I was honest, calming down was the last thing I wanted to do right now.
Nate visibly deflated, looking lost while he was searching for what to say. When he spoke up again, his voice was pressed, a clear note of pain in it.
“I had to. Bree, I swear, I had to. You were looking so fucking devastated when I told you that you’d lost the baby, I couldn’t tell you the truth.”
“Why not? Did you think that it would get any better once I found out later? You didn’t really think you’d get away with this?”
He shook his head, then rubbed his eyes in pure frustration.
“Of course I’m not that stupid. I…“
“You what?” I asked when he didn’t go on.
He sighed. “I didn’t know what exactly to do, so I just… winged it.”
“You… winged it,” I echoed, my voice cracking. My throat closed up, but there were no tears in my eyes—a small mercy.
I could see plainly on his face that he was aware what this was all doing to me right now, and I felt a glimmer of satisfaction when I realized that it was killing him.
“You don’t understand,” he started, then shook his head, beginning from scratch. “You were dying. I was trying so hard not to give up because you were holding out a day longer than should have been possible, but there was no doubt that you wouldn’t just bounce back from this. Then you started bleeding on top of all that, and I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, how to handle this. I’ve never been this desperate and helpless in my entire life. That’s how Burns and Romanoff found me, sitting in the bathtub, rocking you in my arms, blood and… everywhere.” He paused for a moment, trying to gauge my reaction, but I knew that I wasn’t giving him anything. “Pia sent them. They expected that by then you would be dead, I would be done burying you, but not quite ready to leave yet. I think all of us would have preferred that to reality. But you weren’t quite dead yet, and I couldn’t bring myself to do the humane thing and end it for you. What I could do was get fucked-up ideas in my head that you’d want for your death not be completely meaningless. That if there was a possibility that you could contri
bute one last thing to science, you’d hate me forever if I passed up that chance. It didn’t mean anything to me right then, because all I could think about was that you were dying.”
So much for only him sharing my pain. Try as I might to close myself off, that was always a two-way street with us.
“So you did what exactly?” I asked, barely more than a harsh whisper. Now it was anguish rather than rage that made my voice unsteady.
Nate exhaled, swallowing hard before he replied. “After I cleaned you up as best I could, we packed up everything that had come in contact with your blood, and I told the guys to take it back to the Silo. Even if the heat wasn’t ideal, I figured Sunny could still do something with… that. And if not, I didn’t give a shit, either. They didn’t want to leave me there but they agreed with me that if you’d still been lucid, you would have told them to go.”
That was probably true, as I hated to admit. It was so much easier to ignore his reasoning now, but impossible to forget.
“What did you end up burning?” And burying, by extension.
He shrugged. “The sheets. Towels. Part of a mattress. I would have burned the car seats, too, but I needed at least one for later, so Andrej soaked them in bleach before they left. You can hate me for this now, but back then it felt like I’d done the right thing.”
And he probably had—I just couldn’t admit it now.
“Why the lies?” I asked, clearing my throat to get more than a croak out. “I kind of get why you told me you burned it all at first, but later?”
“I didn’t think—“ he started, looking so helpless that suddenly, my anger roared back to life.
“Damn well you didn’t!” I screamed. “You let me stand over a grave that wasn’t one!” I was surprised that it was only that which angered me now, not the fact that he’d proposed to me over it. Knowing the truth didn’t take the morbidity out of the gesture, but that didn’t matter.
I’d never seen Nate so conflicted with trying to find the right words, likely because there weren’t any. “I know I screwed up,” he admitted. “I just couldn’t. I know it was wrong, but you needed to be there. You needed to grieve. Even if I could turn back time, I would do the same again. Hate me for that if you will, but your sanity is more important to me than what you think of me.”
Now this was where it got easy again. “My sanity?” I asked, my voice going up an entire register. “You fucking betrayed me, Nate! You. Betrayed. Me. You lied to me! You deceived me! There is only one thing in the entire world I can trust, and that is that I can rely on you! Well, la-di-da, not fucking true anymore! You are such a fucking asshole!”
A hint of defiance crept onto his features, but he did his best to remain relaxed. “I did what I did because I was convinced that it was the best thing for you. That you hate it doesn’t change that. Deal with it. It happened. Even if I wanted to, I can’t change it.”
And there it was again, that condescension. That “I know better than you” attitude that, if sometimes warranted, never went down easily. Normally, I would have snapped right back at him, or screamed, flown into a rage—but not today.
I punched him, hard enough that I felt his nose break under the impact of my knuckles.
I was sure that he could have ducked, or at least blocked my swing. He must have seen it coming, but he just remained standing there, taking it. He winced at the pain and his body automatically recoiled, but he only took a step back, likely to steady himself. Discomfort flared up in my knuckles, and I was tempted to punch him again, but instead let myself deflate. There was no sense in this. It didn’t change anything, and this time, violence didn’t lessen the emotional turmoil inside of me. It just made me feel… empty.
Dead.
I stared at him from up close, watching as blood started leaking from his busted nose. No longer did he try to evade my gaze, but what I read in his eyes didn’t make a difference. He knew that he’d deserved that—that, and more—but he really wasn’t sorry. He knew that he’d done what he thought was best, and it was only circumstantial fault that things had turned out differently. I could have died. I could have died on our flight from the motel, or in the days it took us to get from there to the Silo. I could have ignored how exactly Sunny had reached his conclusions. If any of that had happened, he would never have had to ‘fess up. He had gambled, and he had lost. Too bad that I was the one suffering the consequences now.
Or maybe he’d known from the beginning that he’d fucked up and had just been biding his time, waiting for his punishment.
“Never lie to me, ever again,” I said, new heat creeping into my voice. “Not to save me, or to keep me from hurting. I can take it. You say you respect me? Then treat me with the respect I deserve.”
He didn’t protest, but also didn’t agree. That made me want to punch him all over again.
“Say it!” I shouted, putting all my anger and frustration into those words. “Promise me that you will never lie to me again!”
Nate swallowed thickly, and I could see the war going on behind his eyes. It was then that I realized one crucial thing—all the fights we’d had; all the times when he’d driven me insane by either ignoring me not to single me out, or when he’d underhandedly manipulated me into performing to the best of my abilities, he’d always done it all for a single reason: to protect me. It had never been malice, or contemptuous condescension. From the very beginning he’d always seen the very best version of me, and pushed me to become her. Because the world we were living in was harsh and unforgiving, and anything but giving a hundred and ten percent would end in death. He’d done it all for me, even if that meant that I was angry at him, or might even decide that I no longer wanted anything to do with him. As much as that realization rankled, it also hammered down why it hadn’t been a mistake to say “okay,” if not “I do.” But it was about time that he stopped being my coach and my leader, and started being my equal.
I knew that we were on the same page when finally he offered a pressed, “I promise.”
Maybe I should have acknowledged that somehow; said something to let him know that I was aware that he’d never put me down or considered me too weak to face the truth, but I just couldn’t. Maybe later, but not now.
Without another word, I went past him. I just needed to get the fuck out of here.
Chapter 13
This time I managed to keep my orientation as I stalked through the tunnels, aiming for the hangar. Most people I passed gave me a wide berth, but just before I made it to the hangar, a bunch of scavengers didn’t. I would have passed right by them if not for one of them giving the other a slight shove that bounced him right into my elbow.
“Watch where you’re going, bitch!” the guy complained.
One of the others noticed my sunglasses, still firmly crammed up the bridge of my nose. “If you need sunshine, baby, maybe we can cheer you up?”
I stopped in my tracks, halting before I turned around, giving them all the time in the world that they needed to take me in—including the three marks across the back of my neck. They already seemed less brave when I came to face them, and the one with the “suggestion” looked a little green around the nose when I took a step toward him.
“Who are you calling a bitch?” I sneered. It was easy to follow that up with a mirthless grin as they collectively shied away. A chorus of murmurs answered me, none of them meeting my eyes. Cocking my head to the side, I gave them a dismissive once-over, scoffing at what I saw. “Trust me, you wouldn’t enjoy a single second of me giving you a good time.”
No replay came, so I whipped back around and walked away, fuming inside. The hangar looked just as I remembered, only now it was full of cars. People were lying under or crouched over the vehicles, the hangar echoing with the sounds of mechanic tinkering. I craned my neck, looking for the Rover, but it didn’t seem like anyone had brought it down yet. The Jeep was also missing—the one that Pia and Andrej usually drove; there were several others present—so I decided to go look up
stairs. Late in the day as it was, there were only a few vehicles coming in, and three were lined up to leave the hangar through the ramp that led through the heavy blast doors. I ignored them as I went up the ramp, figuring that if anyone was pressed for time, they might as well honk me out of the way. Someone shouted after me, but I ignored that as well.
The sun was not yet setting but low enough in the sky that what remained of the trees around the tarmac outside shielded some of the glare from my eyes. They still watered at the brightness, but less so than before. The Rover stood where I had left it, smack in front of the decontamination shack, but it wasn’t alone. The Jeep stood next to it, and Andrej was busy patching up the rear side window of my car from what I could tell.
I slowed down, feeling the heat of the day chase away the last chills the Silo’s much cooler air had left inside of me. It wasn’t just hot out here, but also loud, with people everywhere. Stanton and her guards must have chased away a good number of the loiterers when we’d arrived, because now there were a lot more people standing and sitting around, all in full gear and armed. I stood out like a sore thumb, underdressed and with only my two guns and a knife, making me feel naked.
But that wasn’t what suddenly tightened my chest and made breathing impossible. It was the people—the noise they were making, their motions, their sheer presence—that from one moment to the next triggered my fight-or-flight response. It was as if I was back in that factory, fighting my way through waves and waves of zombies, knowing that there was no chance in hell of escaping—
Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 Page 14
