Wide, terrified eyes looked back at him, bone-white in the glow of his weaponlight.
Doubts. Recrimination. Rage. Fear.
Lee put a single round between those eyes.
“What the fuck!” the woman shouted.
The sound of it was like claws on a chalkboard. It shivered through some primordial substance in Lee’s spine, causing his entire body to tense up.
“Enemy combatant,” was all Lee said.
He wanted to kick the body over onto its back, but he could neither kick with his bum leg, nor could he balance on it to kick with the other. Instead, he bent down—painfully—and shoved the man’s shoulder hard enough to get the body to roll.
It was limp now. The limbs melted, fell to the side.
A satphone clattered to the dust.
“Goddammit,” Lee growled.
In the distance another burst of automatic gunfire.
Lee had no comms—the only radio was back in the Humvee. He didn’t know what was going on in Triprock and suddenly felt miles away. Removed. Like he was on the dark side of the moon.
He snatched up the satphone. The casing of it was coated in dust. “Search the body,” Lee commanded, taking a step back while the two soldiers swept in, one posting over the body as though it might suddenly come alive again, while the other began rummaging through pockets and gear.
“Why’d you kill him?” the woman’s voice scraped at Lee again.
The satphone trembled in his hands. He tried to activate it, but his thumb kept missing the button.
“Did he have a weapon?” she was right at Lee’s shoulder.
Lee spun on her, the words rising to his mouth: Shut the fuck up! He managed to bite down on them before they left his lips. His eye hit the woman’s, and everything that he didn’t say in that moment came through in his gaze like a transmission burst.
She took a step back from him, the indignation in her face giving way to the fear that someone feels when a mean dog with no leash bares its teeth.
Lee tried to swallow, but his tongue was desert-dry. “Enemy combatant,” Lee husked.
She is not your enemy. She is one of your people.
The fear in her eyes added a note of shame to the toxic mix boiling up in Lee’s brain.
Lee held up the satphone. “It turned out to be a satphone. Could have been a gun, or a grenade.” Breathe in. Breathe out. “I would kill a hundred of him before I let one of you get taken out. This is war. This is what it looks like.”
The woman’s lips trembled. She knew it was true. But truth, and what we wish was the truth, often collide and leave a mess of gore in their wake.
The woman managed a nod.
Lee wanted to ask her name. Wanted to shift down, take himself out of the red, appeal to her reason, connect with her somehow. But there wasn’t time for that.
His hands had stilled enough. He thumbed the satphone on. Looked at the call log.
The last phone call was made approximately two minutes prior.
TEN
─▬▬▬─
GRASSROOTS
They took no prisoners.
The assault on Triprock lasted nine minutes, from start to finish. The majority of the Cornerstone operatives still in residence were holed up in the main ranch house. Abe left them where they lay. There was no point in cleaning anything up.
Structure-to-structure, the three fire teams cleared the entire settlement, pulling the civilians out that had taken cover during the brief and violent raid. They amassed the civilians in the center of Triprock, telling them only one thing: “We’re friendly. We’re here with Abe Darabie and Lee Harden.”
Abe stepped out of the last cleared structure, one of the bunkhouses that had harbored mostly civilians, and one man that the civilians had identified as Cornerstone, despite the fact that he was not in uniform. Abe waited until the civilians had left before putting the man down.
He didn’t beg for mercy. He seemed resigned to his fate.
Abe touched off his comms, spinning in a slow circle, his eyes finally shooting out to the surrounding overwatch positions. “Abe to all elements, Triprock is secured. Positions One, Two, and Three, check in.”
Position One checked in, and told Abe they were moving into Triprock.
Then Position Three checked in.
Abe turned and looked towards the distant copse of trees that stood out black against the navy sky. “Position Two, you copy me? Abe to Nugs or Scots, or anyone from the Highlanders.”
The line remained empty. Dead.
A crackle.
Abe’s sinking heart gave one last hopeful twitch.
It didn’t last long.
“This is Corporal Turner to Major Darabie.” The young man’s voice was haunted. Strained. “We lost Scots and Nugs. The…the primals got them.”
Abe clenched his teeth, air hissing through them. “I copy, corporal. Did you take those fuckers out?”
“Affirmative. We got them…we got them when they were trying to haul the bodies away.”
Shit.
“Abe copies,” he transmitted, his chest feeling hollow. “Meet up with us down here.”
***
His adrenaline subsiding, Lee’s aches nagged at him for attention. But he had work to do.
He drove the Humvee into the front gates of Triprock, his lips tight and turned down at the corners.
He should be glad. The mission was a success. At least partially. Triprock had been liberated. They’d only lost two soldiers. He should be counting his blessings. But the reality of that one man that had escaped and made a phone call was like a meat hook that caught his guts and dragged them down low.
There were no lights on in Triprock, save for the weaponlights of the fire teams, scouring through the darkness, illuminating in bare flashes the gathering of civilians in the center of the ranch.
How many were there now? A hundred? Maybe less? Had anyone died in the crossfire? Had anyone that he’d known in Triprock been killed by Cornerstone in the intervening months since he…
Abandoned them?
He pulled the Humvee straight up to the crowd, the headlights illuminating faces—some of them familiar to Lee, others not. He searched the crowd for the Robledos, and Sally Sigman. He put the Humvee in neutral, activated the emergency brake, and cut the engine.
He tried his best to not look too lame as he struggled his way out of the vehicle. As his feet hit the dusty ground, he remembered his eye, and the patch in his pocket. He let his rifle hang, and stood behind the door of the Humvee, almost furtively, while he dove into his pocket and strapped the eyepatch over his head.
There. At least he didn’t look like a monster now.
The two soldiers and one civilian woman emerged from the Humvee. Lee closed his own door and looked back. The woman had sat directly behind Lee, and was on his side of the vehicle, now facing him. Her eyes glanced off of his, avoiding contact.
“What’s your name?” Lee asked, trying to sound human.
She hesitated. Swallowed. “Darcy.”
Lee dipped his head. “Hey. You did good, Darcy.”
Darcy finally met his eyes, her own narrowed. “I didn’t do anything.”
Lee managed a smile. “But you didn’t do anything wrong, either.”
Her shoulders straightened a bit at that. “I’m sorry about earlier. I didn’t…”
Lee waved it off. “Nothing to apologize for. These things are hard on everyone.”
Darcy nodded. “You were right to shoot him.”
Lee’s smile left his face like a bit of tumbleweed caught in the wind. He turned away from her without answering. Yes. He was right. The man he killed wouldn’t haunt his dreams. Already, Lee had forgotten what his face looked like. Just another enemy combatant.
But he wouldn’t forget the sound of Darcy’s voice. That would stick with him. A little clarion call of humanity from some long lost part of him. A reminder that his brutality was a means to an end, and not the real him.
> It wasn’t the real him.
He did what he did so that one day, he wouldn’t have to anymore.
Was that logic flawed?
“Lee.”
He turned and found Abe standing before him, his NODs pushed up from his eyes.
Abe jerked a thumb back. “Settlement’s clear. No more Cornerstone. These are all the civilians. I got eighty-four by my last count.”
Lee nodded and moved away from the Humvee, towards the crowd of onlooking civilians. Abe fell into step with him. “Angela and Brinly are ten minutes out with the rest of us. Have you made contact with the Robledos?”
Abe shook his head. “Haven’t seen them.”
Lee stopped before he reached the edges of the crowd and lowered his voice. “The runner got a call out on a satphone.”
“Goddammit.”
“Nothing to be done for it.” Lee turned back to the crowd. Raised his voice. “Eric or Catalina Robledo?”
The crowd shifted. Uncomfortable. Eyes glanced around—not looking for the Robledos, but instead avoiding a nasty truth.
Lee knew the truth just from looking at them.
A slim, dark-haired young woman pushed her way to the front of the crowd. “They were killed.”
Lee had the urge to smile at the sight of Sally, but her words prevented that. Her eyes connected to Lee’s, and he saw in them—or imagined that he did—a note of accusation. He opened himself up to it, knowing what was coming. “When?”
Sally’s hands clenched and unclenched. “Last month. After…”
After I abandoned them.
Lee nodded in understanding, and Sally let him off the hook. Thank God.
“But you’re here now,” Sally declared. She turned to the others that surrounded her. “He came back.”
A murmur of assent went through those gathered. It was mild. Shock at the sudden changing of their fortunes, and probably a good bit of confusion. They’d all been ripped from their beds by the sound of gunfire. They were still piecing together what the hell had happened, and how their entire reality had been overturned. But at least they weren’t hostile.
Sometimes that was the best you could hope for.
Lee had learned one valuable lesson with people: You couldn’t trust them, but you sure as shit could rely on them to act like people. And people were selfish, panicky, and generally stupid. It was a breath of fresh air that Lee didn’t find himself suddenly put on the defensive with a bunch of accusations about how none of this would have happened if he hadn’t abandoned them in the first place.
Lee took a deep breath. “Alright, everybody listen up. I’m gonna keep this short and to-the-point. The last time me and Abe were here, we took out the cartel that was holding you down. And before we left, we advised you all to leave.”
Another murmur. This one less friendly. A little more defensive.
Lee held up a hand. “We’re here again, and this time you don’t have an option. One of the Cornerstone operatives got a call out before we were able to stop him. I don’t know who he called, but we should assume that someone in the Cornerstone command structure now knows that Triprock is not theirs anymore.”
Sally took another step forward. “We’re in the same damn situation as last time, Lee. Where the hell do you want us to go?”
Lee met her eyes. “I want you to come with me. All of you. We’re not staying here. Me and my people are on the move. And we’re heading for a fight.”
A man that Lee didn’t know stepped forward. “All due respect, sir. But there’s only, like, what? Twenty of you? Who exactly are you talking about fighting?”
Lee shook his head. “There’s more than twenty of us. President Angela Houston and Major Brinly of the Marine Corps will be here momentarily with nearly five hundred others. And, as for who we’re fighting? We’re fighting the people that did this to you.”
“Cornerstone?” the man asked.
“Greeley.”
No one spoke for a moment. Not even a whisper. Everyone chewed on it in the silence of their shocked and sleep-fogged minds.
“There’s a war going on,” Lee said, scanning the crowd, looking for those eyes that would shine back at him and show him a person that believed, a person who was willing to fight to the death for that belief. “We’re beyond just trying to make do and outlive the plague. We’re past that. This is a war for our home, for our country, against people hell-bent on subjugating you at your most vulnerable. But you’re not as vulnerable as they think you are. You’ve got teeth. You can bite back.”
Sally spoke up again. Practical as ever. “They took all our weapons.”
Lee nodded. “Don’t worry about the weapons. We can provide you with weapons. All you need to do is pick them up and be willing to use them.”
A third person stepped forward, an older man. “And what if we don’t?” he asked, his voice weary. “What if we just want to be left alone?”
Lee made eye contact with the man. His weathered face. The age in his eyes, far greater than what was obvious from his body. He might be in his fifties. But his eyes looked ancient. Lee understood that exhaustion. He lived it, every day.
The problem was, Lee couldn’t trust them. If he let any of the people in Triprock simply wander out on their own, then it would only be a matter of time before they talked, spread the word, outed Lee, and crippled the mission.
The truth was cold and bitter: Lee couldn’t let any of them walk away from him. But that was not a truth he was willing to reveal at this point. It would do more harm than good.
“Being left alone isn’t an option anymore,” Lee answered, evenly. “The truth is…” How to put this? “…If you want to live, then your only option is to join us.”
***
Brinly had unplugged his earpiece from his radio, allowing Angela to listen to the traffic as they approached Triprock. Her heart had downshifted out of its palpitations that had taken her straight from the moment of waking to the moment she heard Abe transmit the “all clear.”
And only two dead.
She hated herself for that. For the fact that only losing Scots and Nug felt like a victory. But compared to what her imagination had conjured when the operation had been forced, it was a victory. She’d imagined a lot more of her people dead.
Abe. Menendez. Breckenridge.
Lee.
Goddamn him for running out there like that.
She swore, one of these days she was going to chain him to a seat in the command MATV.
Close beside her, taking it all in with a complete lack of emotion—or at least emotion that could be seen—sat Abby. As they pulled into the gates of Triprock, followed by a long line of vehicles crammed with their rag-tag army, Angela stole a few glances at her daughter, trying to suss out what was going on behind those eyes that looked so much like her own.
Abby had grown up. Sure, she’d gotten longer and leaner and didn’t look so much like a kid anymore as she approached her tweens. But the real changes were happening on the inside. And Angela wasn’t sure she liked what she was seeing.
Abby used to have a deliberate policy of mental avoidance, acting like everything was fine, finding other kids to play with, complaining about the lean meals they ate, and otherwise being a shining example of a person unwilling to admit the gory changes in the world that was falling apart around them.
Now she’d become a sponge. Taking it all in. Like she was opening her eyes to the reality of their world for the first time. And rather than recoil in horror, she seemed to find it fascinating. Like a logic problem that needed to be solved.
She both envied her daughter, and yearned to see her be more…
Emotional?
Wasn’t it a good thing that she was like this? Wasn’t this a better way to live? Did she really want her daughter to spend the rest of her life with a knot in her gut? Wasn’t it better that she adapt to these challenges?
Abby was, in truth, a tiny microcosm of what was happening to all of the people that had evacuated
from Butler. They had left their pretensions of stability, and thrown themselves wholesale into something completely alien. They’d thrown themselves into Lee’s world. A world where the right to be alive was guaranteed only by the muzzle of the gun in your hand, how many rounds you had left, and how willing you were to put down anybody that threatened it.
As Angela and Abby exited the back of the MATV, she found herself looking for a place to deposit Abby, to get her out of the way of the adult conversations about to take place. But there was no place to put a child in Triprock. There were only bullet-chewed buildings, and the dark, slumped figures of bodies on the ground.
So Abby stayed with her. As had become the norm.
Angela rounded the back end of the MATV with Brinly, and spotted Lee, doing his best to walk without showing his limp.
Angela’s mind filled with discordant thoughts, but Abby apparently had no such problem. She stepped out in front of her mother, showing that strange development that still surprised both Angela and Lee: She didn’t shrink away from Lee like she used to.
“Did you get them all?” Abby asked, as though asking if all the garbage had been bagged up.
Lee’s one eye flitted down to Abby. A frown dipped his brow for a fleeting second. A consideration of what to say. And then a decision. “Yes. We got them all.” He returned his eye to Angela. “One of them made it out. We stopped him but he had a satphone, and he did manage to make a call out.”
Angela looked over Lee’s shoulder to the center of Triprock, where the survivors of this little settlement were moving about. Some of them going to the places where they lived, others carrying their minimal belongings out, and still others standing with those belongings, as though waiting for a train to whisk them away.
“Is Triprock on board?” Angela asked.
Lee nodded. “Didn’t take much convincing. After last time, I guess they can see the writing on the wall.”
“No dissenters?”
“Not really. Nobody with any real convictions.”
“What’s the temperature like?”
Lee Harden Series | Book 5 | Unbowed Page 10
