Lee Harden Series | Book 5 | Unbowed

by Molles, D. J.

  Big Fuck clenched his jaw and glared. “You think I’ve never met someone like you?”

  “I think you’ve never met me.”

  Big Fuck didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He just stared. And all across his meaty face, there was hesitation. And every man that stood with him saw it, sensed it, and drew back.

  Sam straightened. Sneered. “If you were gonna jump, you’da already done it.” He sheathed his knife and turned away from the man, his whole body crackling like an electrical fire. He didn’t meet the gaze of any of his teammates—didn’t dare let them bring his mind back to reality in that moment. He saw them out of the corner of his eyes, though, still with their knives out, standing over their packs.

  Sam stooped and snatched up his pack. Threw it over his shoulders. Turned back forward.

  He was almost surprised that the man was still standing there. Still vapor-locked with indecision.

  Sam’s throat was dry and hoarse. His heart and lungs felt like he’d just sprinted a mile. He felt a little sick, but bore down on the center of himself, pulling up every ounce of hatred and anger and insanity—all the things that curdled down in the low parts of everyone that had been through what he’d been through. Most of the time you never let it see the light of day. But this time he had.

  “Come on,” Sam growled over his shoulder. “We need to find a place to shack up.”

  Sam started walking forward.

  The man with the Bowie knife took one stutter-step backwards, and then remembered himself and planted his feet. He tried that same smile again, but it had lost its wolfishness.

  Every dog thinks they’re a wolf until they meet something that kills for its survival.

  “You ain’t gonna have your friends around you all the time,” the man said as Sam drew abreast of him. “Watch yourself, wetback.”

  Sam stopped, his shoulder just out of arm’s reach of the man’s knife. He stared him straight in the face, and he spoke from a place that he found was utterly and completely honest. “If you every try to jump me, it’ll be the greatest goddamned day in my life.”

  Then Sam and his crew walked on, and the man and his crew stood back and watched them go.

  They stayed on that main drag through the center of The Tank, all the while Sam feeling the eyes of the man burning into his back. The fear was a dim thing now, but his body had still geared up for a fight, and that blast of adrenaline had no outlet but to tremble through his knees as he walked, and course through his hands that he kept tight on the straps of the pack he’d been willing to kill and die for.

  He would’ve fought for the pack. It contained the thing that he needed in order to accomplish his mission. Without the contents of his pack, the mission was dead.

  After a walking in a haze of silence, straight down the road—Sam didn’t want to take a turn too soon and look like they were trying to get away—he guided his crew to the left and down one of the side streets, aiming for the northwestern corner of The Tank.

  A hand on his shoulder made him jerk.

  He looked to his right and found Marie’s sharp gaze fixed on him. “You alright?”

  He smiled. “Oh, yes. I’m fine.”

  “Jesus, man,” Jones uttered, now that they were clearly out of earshot. “Where’d all that shit come from, you crazy bastard?”

  Sam shook his head and looked at Jones, trying his best to appear normal again. “Just running off at the mouth, Jones. I learned it from you.”

  But was that really true?

  Jones gave him a weirdly perceptive gaze, like just for a flash, he could see inside of Sam. But he covered it up with a smile of his own. “I dunno if you learned that from me.”

  Off of the main drag, it became apparent that The Tank was not as crammed full of humanity as Sam had originally thought. The scores of disconsolate people thinned, and then disappeared. The structures around them stood in relatively good shape, compared to a lot of towns Sam had been in out east. Windows were still intact. Doors had been kicked in, probably during clearing operations some time back, but other than that most everything looked eerily “normal.”

  And by “normal,” Sam supposed it was completely abnormal. Destruction and decay was the usual now. This was like some preserved diorama of a past society.

  Sam guessed that any one of the buildings surrounding them now was empty, but he continued heading west and north, zig-zagging up the grid of streets. If he couldn’t be right there on the main drag, he’d at least be able to see Greeley. So when they reached the edges of the town called La Salle, Sam chose a building that seemed to provide a good view straight across to the southern edge of Greeley.

  A small sign on the front of the building declared it to be “Valley Packing and Catering.” It had a fence around the outside of it, though the gate hung open. It struck him as a decent place to set up camp.

  Looking out towards Greeley, he could see squat guard towers. They were all repurposed deer stands, he noted. The kind that stood about twenty feet off the ground, with a black polymer box seated on top, and windows all around.

  The closest one to him was about three hundred yards out, sitting in the middle of another road. He could just make out the shadowy shapes of heads through the windows. Machine gun nests, ready to take out any poor bastards that might try to sneak their way into Greeley.

  About a hundred yards from Sam, he could see old road constructions signs that had been painted over so that they no longer said things like ROAD WORK AHEAD or MEN WORKING. They were spaced at even intervals, and they all said, DANGER: DO NOT PASS THIS POINT.

  Sam returned his attention to Valley Packing and Catering. “Seems as good a place as any, yeah?”

  A resounding silence from his crew showed him a lack of objection, so they took to the structure, unsheathing their knives, and clearing it room by room, just to make sure that no one else had made their home here.

  It was empty. Large. Most of the main structure was open, stainless steel tables and meat hooks and drains in the floor for processing meat and cleaning the blood off the floors. An image flashed through Sam’s head of the man with the Bowie knife, hanging from one of those meat hooks, skinned and quartered…

  In the northwestern corner of the building, they found a large office with a window that faced Greeley. The view barely cleared the fence that surrounded the meat processing plant, but Sam could at least finally put his eyes on the place that had, in his mind, become a mythical goal.

  Greeley. Home of President Briggs. The place that had spat out Cornerstone operatives and erstwhile soldiers, and sent them after the United Eastern States to destroy everything that meant anything to Sam.

  He stood at the window, his hands on the sill, staring at it with a sense of deep and abiding hatred that had soured in his guts since his bloodied and battered squad had high-tailed it out of Butler.

  I’m going to burn their fucking house down.

  Sam breathed heavily of that feeling, tasting it, keeping it, harboring it. He would do whatever it took to make that happen. Nothing was beyond him at this point. No task too big. Or too gristly.

  He turned away from the window and looked at his team. “Well, we made it past the first hurdle, I guess. We’re here. And we haven’t been caught. I’ll take that as a victory.” He shucked his pack off and nodded to Frenchie and Johnson. “You two, get on watch. This place is ours now. No one gets close without me knowing about it.”

  Frenchie and Johnson nodded, then dropped their packs and headed out of the office.

  Sam hefted his pack onto the cheap, Formica-topped desk that dominated the center of the office. As he unzipped the main compartment, he eyed Pickell.

  “How you feeling, Kosher Dill?”

  Pickell chose a rolling office chair to collapse into, setting his own pack between his feet. “If I’m being honest, Sarge…I feel a little pukey.”

  “I know we’ve got some privacy, but get out of the habit of calling me ‘Sarge.’”

  “Right.”
Pickell nodded. “Sam.”

  “You take your antibiotics?”

  “I’ll take ‘em now.”

  “Stay on that shit. Still gotta clean your system out. Make sure you’re eating and drinking.” Sam stopped with his hands in his pack and regarded Pickell with a sudden welling of appreciation. “Can’t believe you came with us, man.”

  Pickell pulled a half-empty liter of water from his pack and uncapped it with a lopsided grin. “Little thing like a gutshot can’t stop me. Not gonna let you guys have all the fun.” He took a sip of water and then grew serious. “Gotta do this. For Billings and Chris.”

  Sam nodded, feeling a familiar twist inside of him. Then he refocused himself on the pack and drew out the jumble of electronics that was tangled inside. Most of it was bullshit. Wires and random parts. Camouflage.

  He separated out the useless components from the items that he actually needed. He’d done his best to dismantle the satphone to the point that it was unrecognizable. He arranged the parts on the desk—the body, the disconnected antenna, the sensitive silicon board and wires, the keypad, the battery.

  “Alright,” Sam breathed, staring at it all. “Now we just gotta hope that I can put this shit back together again.”

  FIVE

  ─▬▬▬─

  GEORGIA

  It seemed to Captain Perry Griffin that Mr. Smith had come down with something.

  The virus was failure, and it had led to Mr. Smith obsessing over the lines of dead bodies, sometimes inspecting a tall man’s corpse for lengthy periods, as though if he wanted it bad enough, it might suddenly morph into Lee Harden.

  The sickness had incubated in Mr. Smith over the course of the last week and a half as they’d finished their cleanup of Butler, and now he was downright green with it. There were no more bodies to obsess over and stare into their fly-ridden eyes. They’d all been hauled out and dumped about five miles south of Butler.

  And now it was official: Mr. Smith hadn’t managed to kill Lee Harden.

  Interestingly enough, Griffin found himself positively sunny whenever he encountered Mr. Smith’s downtrodden demeanor. A good portion of that was just that he didn’t like Mr. Smith. Okay, that wasn’t quite true—he fucking hated that bastard, and he sometimes wondered if he’d take the time to waste a tourniquet if he found the man bleeding out. Which is something he imagined, probably more than was healthy.

  He might. Out of a sense of duty. Carry on with the mission, and all that. But he wouldn’t like it.

  But there was another part to Griffin’s enjoyment of Mr. Smith’s failure. And every time it occurred to him, he shoved it away. Wouldn’t give it the time of day. Refused to admit that it was an actual thought that had come from his own brain.

  Are you glad that Lee survived?

  Standing in the gymnasium of the local high school, watching Mr. Smith out of the corner of his eye, Griffin again pushed the thought away. It was more complicated than that. It had to be. Because Griffin knew that if it came down to it, and Lee Harden was standing in front of him right then, he’d punch a hole right through the bridge of Lee’s nose and be done with it.

  He didn’t view it as his job, or his calling, to kill Lee. His purpose was broader than that. It was to dismantle a machine that threatened to destroy his country. Lee was not that machine, but he was a part of it, and so Griffin would have no qualms in taking him out if the opportunity presented itself.

  For Mr. Smith, it was a very different story. And President Briggs was currently making that very obvious to him. Griffin didn’t know what was said over that satphone, but Mr. Smith’s face went from green to white, so he could imagine.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Mr. Smith said, with a deadness in his tone like the soul had been choked out of him. “We have everything in place. We’ll be ready to continue our pursuit…Yes, sir. I understand, sir.” Then Mr. Smith blinked, glanced sideways at the phone against his ear, and then took it away. President Briggs must have hung up on him.

  Mr. Smith folded the antenna back against the phone. Straightened. Managed to summon some hardness back into his face. He placed the satphone on the bullet-chewed table that now held all of their command and control technology. He seemed to avoid Griffin’s gaze, instead looking at Colonel Freeman, who stood with his arms crossed a few paces away.

  “I take it the president isn’t overly pleased that you didn’t bag Harden,” Freeman noted.

  Mr. Smith’s eyes narrowed. “We didn’t bag Harden.”

  Freeman smiled without humor. “Sure.”

  “The president is putting control of the entire southeast under your command, Colonel Freeman,” Mr. Smith relayed, his voice simmering with a whole soup of negative emotions. Mostly, though, it seemed like he was trying to reestablish control.

  “I’m honored that he would think of me,” Freeman said. “Should I continue to go through you, Mr. Smith? Or would he prefer if I contacted Greeley directly?”

  A little venom rose to Mr. Smith’s eyes. “I think he’d prefer that you just do your fucking job and not make a nuisance of yourself.”

  Freeman was unperturbed. He seemed, over the course of the last ten days, to have grown accustomed to Mr. Smith’s mood swings, and had recognized what Griffin already knew: Mr. Smith was on the outs with Briggs, and really didn’t have any power over them, despite what he’d like them to believe.

  Mr. Smith finally steeled himself and turned his gaze to Griffin. “Captain, you’re going to ready your troops for departure. We leave today.”

  “We aren’t leaving a garrison behind?” Griffin asked, more out of professional diligence.

  “We’re leaving Colonel Freeman and his troops. That’ll be enough.”

  “Roger that. Do we have a destination or are we just taking in the good ol’ U-S-of-A?”

  “Our orders are to push into Texas and reclaim the refinery there at all costs.”

  “At all costs,” Griffin echoed. He hated stupid, nebulous terms like that.

  Mr. Smith tilted his head. “Those were the president’s words.”

  Griffin sighed. “And they may have been. But he didn’t mean them. The troops we have with us are basically the only offensive force that Greeley has left. So, no, I don’t give a fuck what the president said, we’re not assaulting anything at all costs.”

  Mr. Smith pointed to the satphone. “Would you like to call him?”

  “No, I’d like to use my common sense. Someone around here has to.”

  Mr. Smith squared himself to Griffin, his jaw muscles bunching.

  Griffin just raised an eyebrow. “And what about you, Mr. Smith? What’s the president want you to do?”

  Mr. Smith gave a snide smile. “Find and kill your friend.”

  Griffin checked his expression into neutrality. “Feels like you’re implying something there.”

  “Don’t be coy, captain,” Mr. Smith growled and turned away. “You’re obviously not disappointed that we didn’t get Lee Harden. It makes me question your loyalties.”

  Griffin laughed at him. “Okay, then. Question away. I know where my loyalties lie. You want to get your panties all twisted up because I’m not sharing in your abject failure, go right ahead. I took down the United Eastern States. Now I’m going to head west and I’m going to route out the remnants. That’s my job, and I’ll do it well, just like I did this job well.”

  “Gentlemen,” Colonel Freeman harrumphed. “That’s probably enough of that. If you’re going to mount an offensive together, you may want to bury whatever hatchets need to be buried.”

  Griffin held up his hands and took a step back. “No hatchets here, colonel.” He gave Mr. Smith a nod, though the man was still not looking at him. “I’ll ready the troops for departure.”

  ***

  Rogers had died in the night.

  He’d fought like hell to stay alive, and Marlin and Wibberley had done everything they could for him, but it wasn’t enough. Sepsis had taken him, making his last day on this ea
rth a hell of fever and hallucinations and vomiting up the small amounts of water he was able to choke down.

  He’d been the last surviving member of their two squads. Now it was just Marlin and Wibberley. They’d stuck with their man for ten days, huddled in an abandoned house a few miles outside of Butler, going out only at night, and only to get water from the poncho liner they’d left under the house’s rain gutters.

  They were both dehydrated. What little rain they’d been able to gather had mostly been given to Rogers. They kept just enough for themselves to stave off the worst effects. They hadn’t eaten in a week. The emergency rations in their packs hadn’t lasted long.

  Marlin wasn’t sweating, despite the heat of the day. Hunger came in waves, but most of the time, he didn’t feel it. They were passed that point now. His stomach had given up crying out for food, and now the lack of calories had reduced itself to a sort of insane biological imperative, rather than an actual physical sensation.

  He lay in the brush beside Wibberley, the two of them peering through a thicket of green leaves, to the gray pickup and the two Cornerstone operatives that stood outside of it, their quiet conversation drifting through the woods.

  How far were they from Butler now? They couldn’t have been too far. This was one of the outpost sentries that the Greeley invasion force had posted on the routes into Butler. Maybe a mile or two out from the town itself.

  Marlin blinked away a wave of faintness that presented as a prickle of heat across his scalp, and a fluctuation in his vision—one moment, everything would get dark, and then the next it would be stark and over-bright. His heart hadn’t stopped pounding all morning. His blood felt like used motor oil in his veins.

  He clutched his rifle and slowly turned his head to the left, where Wibberley lay. They made eye contact with each other, but didn’t speak. The time for talking was done. There was nothing more to say. Only action.