Lee Harden Series | Book 5 | Unbowed

by Molles, D. J.

  The man balked, but Lee held up a hand before he could protest. “Yes, that’s a threat. But it’s conditional: If you don’t do anything stupid, then there won’t be any more bloodshed. I just want you to understand the situation. I won’t be taking any orders from you, or anyone else in Vici. Right now, Vici needs to explain itself. So do whatever you need to do to get Cass out here, and we’ll figure out how we’re going to proceed. Got it?”

  Less than ten minutes later, a pair of headlights bloomed in the squat cluster of buildings that was Vici, and came roaring down the road towards them.

  Lee keyed his comms. “Brinly, give me a sitrep on Vici. What’re you seeing?”

  Brinly’s response came quick: “Just the one vehicle coming out. My spotters have eyes on a few armed civilians gathering near the front of the main street, but that’s it. No overt aggression at this time.”

  “Roger that. Thank you.”

  The incoming vehicle skidded to a stop about twenty yards from Lee. He squinted against the wash of dust and the blazing headlights. Doors slammed. Silhouettes appeared, hurrying forward. One that he recognized as Cass. Followed by three others, and the three sentries.

  Cass’s features coalesced in the glow of the competing headlights. She looked tired, stricken, scared, furious. Lee simply watched, not feeling a damn thing.

  “What is this?” she nearly shouted. “I thought I had until dawn. And my guy says you killed some people?”

  Lee nodded. “We did. But they were trying to kill us. Or, more likely, me.”

  He reached into his cargo pocket, drew out the ruined satphone, and handed it to Cass as she came near enough to him. She snatched it from him after a brief hesitation, and Lee watched her carefully. No semblance of recognition.

  “The fuck’s this?” she turned it over in her hand. “I mean, obviously some sort of phone. Why are you giving me this? Is that blood on it?” She looked briefly horrified.

  “That was on your man’s body,” Lee stated. “It’s a satphone. Same model that’s used extensively by my people, and Greeley. They’re from the Project Hometown bunkers. They just…” A humorless grin slashed his face. “Keep turning up.”

  Cass did some mental computations. She held his gaze the whole time. “Are you accusing me of being in league with Greeley?”

  Lee shrugged. “Are you?”

  Cass spat off to the side. “Fuck that. And fuck you for asking.”

  “Well.” Lee took a breath. “Come with me, then.”

  Cass didn’t move. “I’m starting not to trust you.”

  “Good. That means you have a brain. You shouldn’t trust anyone. But if I wanted you dead, I’d give a signal and have my people mow you down right here and now. And then we go into your town and…well, you get the picture. Right now we’re just talking.”

  “Fine. Then let’s talk.”

  “You don’t want to see the bodies?”

  “Who are they?”

  “Beats me. I recognized a couple from the meeting earlier. I don’t know their names.”

  “You fucking callous asshole.”

  Lee pointed a finger at her. “And you’re either plain-old-ignorant, or you knew these people were going to try something, just like I did. So which one is it, Cass? You fucking got your head in the clouds or did you know and not do anything about it?”

  It was a cruel question to which there was no good answer. Lee knew it, and so did Cass. Rather than respond, she nodded towards the bodies that were now heaped on the shoulder of the road. “Show me the bodies.”

  Lee turned to escort her. Her sentries made to follow, and Lee halted. A brief and silent interchange occurred: Lee shook his head at the sentries, causing them to stop; Cass turned and looked at them; they looked worriedly at their leader; she waved them off.

  Lee and Cass walked back along the roadway, neither saying anything.

  In the steeply angled glare of headlights, in the warm thrum of the engines, and the speckles of dust that floated through the air, Cass stood there with her hands on her hips and stared down at the bodies.

  “Sonofabitch,” she murmured.

  Lee stood next to her. It was odd, he thought. Standing so close to someone whose people you just killed, and who you’ve just threatened to wipe off the map if they looked at you wrong. To stand there, almost shoulder to shoulder and look down at the crumpled human forms with their slack mouths and dead eyes, as though it was all nothing more than the aftermath of an unfortunate accident.

  Like a shelving unit that’s collapsed, or a vehicle that’s blown a tire.

  Lee waited for Cass to say something.

  She eventually straightened, and gestured to one of the bodies in the middle. “Fucking Denny. I should’ve…” She looked away. “I should’ve known.”

  Lee thought, Yeah, you should have, but hadn’t he made that same mistake?

  He chose to stick to more practical matters. “Who was he talking to on that satphone, Cass?”

  Cass whirled, glaring. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  Lee gauged her face, her reaction. It’s earnestness. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. People liked to think of themselves as good at reading other people. But what Lee had come to realize was that it didn’t matter if you were good at reading people. Because other people were just as good at lying. Humanity lived in a constant arm’s race of deception.

  “Have you had any contact with anyone from Greeley?” Lee asked.

  Cass hesitated, and Lee knew the truth, even before she nodded. “Some of Briggs’s goons—the guys with the red triangle—”

  “Cornerstone.”

  “Right. They came through. But that was a long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Months.” She considered. “It was cold. It had to’ve been January or February.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They wanted to set up an outpost. We told them no.”

  “You got lucky. That must’ve been before Briggs started to let them off the leash.”

  “Yeah, well.” Cass rubbed her forehead. “Obviously Denny had a private meeting with them. That’s the only time I can think of that he would’ve come into contact with anyone from Greeley.”

  “Did he ever speak out in favor of Greeley?”

  More hesitation. Cass seemed to know where Lee was going with this.

  He pressed. “If there are more people in your community that might dime us out, I need to know about it.”

  Cass straightened. Crossed her arms over her chest. “If you think I’m going to let you come into my town and…do whatever it is you think you’re going to do…you’re mistaken.”

  Lee sighed, hooking his hands together on the butt of his slung rifle. He looked off into the east, where the first light of dawn was turning the horizon gray. What a shitty crossroads to find himself at. But he had known it was eventually going to happen.

  Still, standing in that moment, facing that choice, he realized he’d never quite made up his mind about what he was going to do.

  Cold practicality said that Vici could not be trusted. And if they could not be trusted, Lee could neither let them join him, nor could he leave them behind. So…cold practicality said that the only real solution was to wipe them out.

  The people in his convoy, loyal or not, would not do that. If Vici had turned into a threat, Lee knew that his people would engage and win. But that was hot-blooded. Easy to rationalize. That was combat.

  This would be murder.

  Lee couldn’t let them go, and he couldn’t take them with him.

  But he had to do one of those two things.

  “You’re not making this easy on me,” Lee grunted.

  “You think this is easy for me?” Cass snapped back. “You have no idea the clusterfuck you’ve put me into.”

  “Oh, I know. We’re actually both in a similar dilemma, Cass. I can’t trust your people. And yet I can’t remove them as a potential threat. I’m a lot of things, and
maybe I am a callous asshole, but I’m not a mass murderer. Yet.”

  “That’s hardly comforting.”

  “It wasn’t trying to comfort you.” He took another deep breath and faced her. “We’re at an impasse, you and me. So maybe it’s time we sat down and figured out how to extricate ourselves from this shitty position.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  ─▬▬▬─

  HOSTAGES

  The last twelve hours had passed in a haze.

  Sam still doubted his senses as he swung out of the flatbed truck that was making the dawn rounds, dropping off the overnight guard shift that were packed into the back like migrant laborers.

  He still doubted that this was real. There were moments when he would settle into this new and strange version of things, and for a few brief seconds of respite, he would relax. But then he would remember shooting Frenchie, and having to threaten to kill Johnson to keep him in line, and how he had spent the entire night making the rounds in an unfamiliar section of perimeter in the middle of enemy territory.

  Then everything would swirl and he would become certain again that this was a nightmare from which he fervently looked forward to the sensation of relief he would experience when he awoke and realized that none of the past twelve hours had actually happened.

  He stopped on the sidewalk as the flatbed trundled away, carrying two other teams of guards with sleepy, drawn faces.

  Head count, Sam told himself. Make sure you got everyone.

  Was that really necessary if this was a dream?

  He decided to do it anyways.

  He turned in a bleary circle. One, two, three, four…five?

  Oh, yeah. Frenchie was dead.

  Only four now, not counting himself.

  No one spoke. Not even Jones. The scuffle in the flat, only minutes before they’d had to go to their “orientation” where they received their shitty overnight guard duty assignments, had created a wall between everyone. A strange, invisible, and yet sound-proof barrier.

  They trudged up the stairs to their flat. The thud of their feet on the treads bore a sloppy, exhausted rhythm. The heavy footfalls of people ready to crash.

  They had only the blankets they’d brought with them, no bed rolls, and no beds provided. And yet, Sam thought about pulling that blanket around him and snugging himself into a corner of the room with his back against the wall, and he thought that he would never sleep so comfortably.

  Unless you keep thinking.

  Ah, but wasn’t that always the problem. The body wanted sleep, but the mind was high-strung. Unable to release its fearful death grip on reality.

  Was it strange that he pictured Johnson standing over him while he slept, putting a knife to his temple and slamming it through?

  If you’d have asked Sam a single day ago, that would have seemed like a macabre fantasy. Now it seemed like a real possibility.

  This is why Lee doesn’t trust anyone.

  They entered their flat, Sam coming in last and closing the door behind them.

  His eyes went to his pack, to the corner of the room that he’d staked out to be his bed. But he shook his head and forced his heavy eyes wide.

  “We can sleep in a few,” Sam said, his voice ragged with grogginess. “Right now, we need to debrief and call in a report.”

  His team of four gathered at the kitchen counter, leaning slackly on it, like their legs might melt away at any moment.

  “Come on, guys,” Jones grunted. “Not like we haven’t done an overnight shift before.”

  It was true. But this overnight shift had come on the tails of several less-than-restful nights, and a day full of mental trauma. Everyone was on their last dregs of can-do.

  Sam forced himself to remain upright at the counter, though all he wanted to do was ooze down onto it. “Alright. Debrief. What did you see?”

  “Buildings,” Jones yawned. “The same fucking fifteen buildings, over and over again. That’s what I saw.”

  “Very helpful, Jones,” Sam sighed. “Be serious. I don’t have the energy for jokes.”

  “I wasn’t joking.”

  “Roughly a quarter-mile stretch,” Marie said. “That’s what I paced off. One squad, roving, over a quarter-mile stretch. And those squads are untrained. Watching their weapons familiarity when they passed out the rifles?” Marie shook her head. “They’re newbies. If they have any experience with fighting, it’s whatever they gathered while surviving the last five years.”

  Pickell nodded, rubbing his face vigorously. “Realistically, the makes Greeley’s perimeter weak as shit. Five inexperienced fighters per quarter mile of perimeter. And there’s probably some gaps.”

  Sam frowned, tried to do the math, tried to figure how many people he’d seen loaded onto buses, and how that might factor out along Greeley’s entire perimeter. “That’s just guesswork, though,” he concluded. “We’re making assumptions. There’s no telling if other sections of the perimeter are stronger, and there’s no telling how many civilians from Greeley have also been pressed into service.”

  Pickell shrugged. “Does it even matter? We know that our section is weak. And our section is run by us. Should…” Pickell lowered his voice. “…Should Lee make an incursion, it’d be best if he came in on our perimeter so we could just turn it over to him.”

  “That’s true,” Sam admitted. “Except we were posted on the southwestern perimeter. That’s the opposite end of where Lee wants to enter.”

  Johnson shifted and spoke for the first time since Sam had a knife to his throat. “We also don’t know if we’ll be assigned the same section of perimeter every night. They might rotate the squads around.”

  Jones propped his face up on his hand, mushing his features. “Lee wants to hit close to the airfield, right?”

  “Ideally,” Sam nodded.

  “Did anyone notice if any of the other untrained squads were assigned to a section near the airfield?”

  No one answered.

  “My assumption would be no,” Sam said. “Greeley’s got to know that’s prime real estate. I don’t think they’d assign untrained squads to that area. They’d want it covered by Cornerstone. Better trained, and better equipped.”

  “That’s a reasonable assumption,” Marie agreed. “But still just an assumption. And you know what they say about assuming.”

  “Right.”

  Pickell crossed his arms. “Any reason why Lee can’t hit two places at once? That’s a classic feint move. He could run an assault on our section, draw Cornerstone into the fight, then hit the perimeter near the airfield with a secondary attack.”

  Sam shook his head. “You’re right, but I’m not going to develop strategies for Lee. He’ll do what he sees best. Our job is just to report.”

  “And to see if we can turn some people to our side,” Marie noted.

  Sam grimaced. “That’s seeming less and less likely. They have the new squads on a fucking stranglehold. We’re not even allowed in certain areas of Greeley. They don’t trust us, and my sense is that they’re going to keep watching all of us very closely.”

  Marie gestured to the drawer where they’d hidden the satphone earlier. “No point in speculating. Report the situation and let Lee do with the information as he sees fit.”

  Sam sighed. “Not much to report. Anyone else see anything that could be useful?”

  “Yeah,” Jones said with a frown. “They gave us two mags. One for the rifle, one for a spare. As far as I could see, that’s what they gave everyone. That’s not much. An untrained rifleman is gonna burn through that within one minute of being attacked.”

  Sam considered this. “Question is, did they only give us two mags because they don’t trust us? Or because that’s all they have to give?”

  “It’d be awesome if that’s all they have to give,” Jones replied. “But we can’t operate on that without knowing it. At this point, all we can say is that big sections of unimportant perimeter are being guarded by untrained and under-equipped riflemen. Th
ey’ll fold fast if they get hit with even moderate pressure. Sixty seconds, they burn through their ammo? They’re not true believers. They’re not going to keep fighting. They’ll turn and run or straight up surrender.”

  “It seems too easy,” Pickell observed.

  “Well, it’s not,” Jones replied. “Lee busts through on one of these shitty perimeters, that means he’s got miles of urban fighting to get through before he reaches anything important. Which is probably why he wants to hit closer to the airfield. The weak perimeter might be more trouble than it’s worth as an entry point.”

  Sam opened the drawer, finagled the satphone out. “Marie’s right. No point in trying to plan the strategy for him.” He drew out the satphone. “Jones, Pickell, gimme some eyes on the outside and at the door. Gimme ten minutes and then we’ll catch some sleep.”

  ***

  Dawn broke over a long, straight section of road directly to the south of Vici, Oklahoma.

  Sprawling across this road, a belt of vehicles and people—mostly vehicles on the south side, and mostly people on the Vici side.

  Directly in the center of this ring of intense scrutiny, like two prize fighters in a cage-less match, stood Lee and Cass.

  Brinly and Angela stood close behind Lee, and the same gaggle of strangers from yesterday backed up Cass.

  Cass was currently in furious discussion with what Lee assumed were her advisors. Perhaps co-leaders. He didn’t really know how they’d worked it all out, only that Cass seemed to have the ultimate say-so.

  Lee waited patiently, his armor and rifle doffed, for the time being. Even without the extra weight, he was tired of standing. Everything ached, and a night without sleep had left him impatient.

  A gentle touch at his elbow.

  Lee turned and looked at Angela, who looked just as wrung out as he was.