Lee Harden Series | Book 5 | Unbowed

by Molles, D. J.

  “You think you love it. But all it does is propagate itself. That’s the whole fucking problem. That’s why we always fuck it up.”

  Marie began to quietly shush him, as though his words were too unsettling to listen to.

  “Oh, God,” Pickell whispered again. “Damn. Wish I’da known.”

  “Shh. Shh. Easy now.”

  “Well…That’s really kinda funny.”

  “Incoming.”

  Sam jolted at the single word from behind him—Jones’s urgent hiss. The world swirled in Sam’s vision as he turned to where he knew Jones was stationed in the darkness. Small details whirled and melted. Tears in his eyes.

  He shot to his feet, raising his stolen rifle. He could just make out Jones’s form, slightly backlit by the ambient glow of starlight outside. And further beyond, in the street, a single figure, hustling toward them in a stooped scuttle.

  The second that figure breached the interior of the building, Jones hurled himself from the shadows, grabbing the newcomer by the back of the neck and throwing them to the ground, the muzzle of his own rifle jutting into their face.

  “Easy!” came the single-syllable yelp. Hands upraised.

  Sam had already crossed the distance—hadn’t even been aware he was moving until he stood over top of Jones and the person on the ground. He didn’t dare flick his weaponlight on—any illumination in this open area could give them away.

  “Name, motherfucker!” Jones seethed, all the ire in his voice straining against the low volume he kept.

  “It’s me!” A man’s voice. “It’s Evan!”

  Evan.

  Sam’s mind circled the name like a wolf might circle a scared rabbit. Only after a few moments of silence did he lower his rifle from pointing between the two dark pools of the man’s eyes.

  Right. Evan. One of the squad leaders. One of the rebels.

  “The fuck are you doing here?” Jones demanded.

  “I…I thought you might be here.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, asshat! Who sent you?”

  “No one sent me!” The man’s voice was raising. “I came alone!”

  Sam shook himself out of his stupor and nudged Jones with his knee—calling him off from further aggression. “Evan, keep your voice down.”

  “Sorry,” came the whisper.

  “How’d you know we were here?”

  “I didn’t. I just guessed. I heard what had happened—shit! Everyone’s heard! Y’all kicked the fucking hornet’s nest! They’re out to get you guys! They pulled the big red handle, man! What the hell were you thinking? Is it happening? Is Lee coming?”

  Sam frowned in a sudden welling of suspicion, though he kept his eyes wide to soak in the minimal light. “Who sent you here?”

  “Christ! No one sent me! I heard what had happened and thought maybe you guys were doing…the thing. You know? I thought maybe you’d started and…and didn’t tell us?”

  Jones looked up at Sam. He couldn’t read Jones’s expression, but he gave a shake of his head, and that seemed enough for Jones. He retracted his rifle from Evan’s face, then seized the man’s arm and hauled him up to his feet.

  “You said you came alone?” Sam pressed, his eyes shooting out to the street beyond, looking for any other tell-tale movement. Perhaps Cornerstone troops circling, closing in on them. But all was dark and quiet. Quiet, that is, save for the distant sounds of the buzzing hornets’ nest they’d kicked.

  “I swear,” Evan pleaded. “I’m alone.”

  “Why aren’t you on shift?”

  “I don’t have shift tonight!” Evan’s voice was defensive. “I’m off!”

  “Where are the others?”

  “I don’t know. On shift, maybe? What happened?”

  Sam leaned close—close enough to smell the man’s cool sweat. A strange, foreign musk. “Someone talked.”

  Evan stared for a long moment. Then his head turned back and forth between Sam and Jones. “Wait. I didn’t say shit. Are you accusing me?”

  “Should I be?” Sam snapped back.

  “Fuck no! I didn’t say shit to nobody!”

  Nonsensically, Sam thought, double negative—so you DID talk! As though they were children on a playground, playing with pedantic turns of phrase. He shook his head as though the thoughts were cobwebs he needed to free himself of.

  “Alright, chill out,” Sam husked. “Shit’s just out of control. We don’t know who to trust right now.”

  “You can trust me.”

  Like hell I can, Sam thought, but kept it to himself. “Someone talked, Evan. I need to know who.”

  “Well, I don’t know!” Exasperation. “It could’ve been anybody! But…it wasn’t me. I swear.”

  Jones made an ugly grunting noise. “Yeah, you keep swearing.”

  “Look.” Evan seemed desperate. “I know y’all are on edge. I’m just trying to make y’all understand it wasn’t me. I’m with you guys. I’m here.”

  “Alright, let it go,” Sam growled. “If we thought it was you we’d’ve already killed you. So relax. We still need to know who talked. Do you have any idea who it was? Anybody say some weird shit after we met? Did anybody even act weird?”

  As much as Sam could see in the darkness, Evan seemed flummoxed. “Hell, man, everybody acted weird after that meeting. How could we not act weird? Everyone was fucking keyed up out of their minds. This is big shit.”

  “But did anyone seem suspicious?”

  A long pause.

  “Not any of us,” Evan said, quieter now. “But…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s heard from Gabriella.”

  There it was again. That ugly, most likely possibility, rearing its head. Why did Sam keep pushing it under like he was trying to drown it?

  Because you trusted someone. You trusted Gabriella. And you don’t want to admit that it was a giant fucking mistake.

  Lee had told him not to trust anybody. Sam had seen it as a necessary risk. But hindsight is always 20/20. Necessary risks became tragic mistakes at the whim of the wind. Gotta risk big to win big, except for when the big risk results in a big loss.

  “What are we gonna do?” Evan whispered.

  Rather than answer, Sam turned away from him. Found his eyes tracking through the darkness to where Marie huddled over Pickell. Their forms were still. Quiet.

  “I need to make contact,” Sam said, moving now towards Marie. “I need the satphone.”

  He stopped, just over top of Marie and Pickell. She seemed not to have heard him.

  “Marie,” Sam repeated. “I need the satphone.”

  A soggy sniff. The barest hint of motion. Her hand, moving to her side. Then extending, the satphone in it, offering it up to Sam. The starlight from outside caught on her face in silvery streaks.

  He didn’t reach to take the satphone. His hands felt numb. His whole body felt like it was collapsing in on itself. A physiological reaction, before his brain even came to terms with what his subconscious already knew.

  Marie drove it home to him in two breathless words: “He’s dead.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  ─▬▬▬─

  FAITH

  The people of La Junta had been more than generous. Despite Lee’s admonition to Jonathan Reeves not to wipe out their food stores on feeding Lee’s cobbled-together army, many of the residents of La Junta had come of their own accord.

  People offered up what they could afford to, as a sign of welcome. Not just food, but many people gave blankets, cots, pillows, hammocks, and even a few small mattresses, as it was obvious that Lee’s army slept in their vehicles. They’d grown accustomed to the discomfort of this, but the gesture was appreciated.

  There was a strange atmosphere in the place. Festive wasn’t quite the right word. There was too much anger in it. Too much hunger for vengeance. But there was a hope to it. That was what Lee’s army had brought with them. That’s what they’d given the people of La Junta.

  A
sudden light at the end of a dark tunnel that everyone thought they would be wandering in for the rest of their miserable lives. Lee had brought them the possibility of something better.

  And that troubled him.

  He lay awake in the room that had once been the teacher’s lounge of the school they were housed in, reclined in an office chair, with his feet propped up on a large circular table covered with a haphazard collection of maps. Some of them were ripped from atlases. Others were even hand-drawn. They all centered around Colorado, and Greeley specifically—particularly the hand-drawn ones, as they hadn’t found a real map of the city that had any detail to it.

  On the largest of these hand-drawn maps, rendered partly from Abe’s memories of Greeley, and partly from Sam’s intelligence reports, a scattering of chess pieces stood—black for Greeley troops, white for Lee’s army.

  It was these Lee found himself staring at as the hours stretched towards midnight.

  That same, quiet, irrefutable fear working its way through his mind, the very same fear he’d had when he was trying to save Butler from its inevitable fall: It’s not enough.

  The people of La Junta, and before them, the people of Lakin, and Cass’s people from Vici, were operating on the hope of this promise that Lee had given them, though he’d never really promised them anything. They believed in it nonetheless—that he would win. That he would take down Greeley. That he would end the adulteration of their country, and bring it back to what they remembered from better times, before the world had gone to shit.

  He’d only ever promised them a fight. And a fight they would have. But they, perhaps reasonably, believed that Lee would not have undertaken this effort unless he was relatively confident in the chance of victory.

  And that’s where they were wrong.

  Lee was doing this because there simply wasn’t another way. But he knew, quietly, secretly, never-to-be-breathed-aloud, that their chances of victory were slim.

  Abe knew this secret. And it was likely that Brinly did as well. To an extent, he felt that Angela knew it too. But to breathe it, to give it life by articulating it, was somehow verboten. It seemed that they’d all silently agreed to that.

  A quiet snuffle of breath drew his attention away from the chess pieces.

  Across the room, a pile of figures lay on a series of less-than-comfortable-looking couches.

  Deuce shifted around in his sleep, as dogs are prone to do, huffing loudly as he situated himself against Abby. Deuce had made friends with her, as soon as he had discovered Abby could be coerced into giving him bits of food. Abby was only too happy to do it in order to secure her own needs, which was a warm, soft body to cling to in her sleep. A symbiotic relationship, newly born.

  Deuce, pressed against Abby, who held him with one arm, still asleep despite the dog’s repositioning. And Abby, curled up against the back of the couch, her head on her mother’s lap.

  Abby had learned to sleep through anything. Kids already had an uncanny ability to do that, but Abby had adapted to all kinds of terrible things. Uncomfortable sleeping arrangements and constant danger were just a few of the things that didn’t seem to keep her awake.

  Angela, though, slept on a hair trigger, and had come awake with Deuce’s stirring. She blinked heavy eyelids, looking down at Abby and Deuce. Her hand on her daughter’s shoulder, just like Abby’s hand was on Deuce’s flank. Her fingers moved, stroking Abby’s blonde tangles a few times.

  Lee watched her closely as her eyes began to drift off again.

  She must have felt him watching her. She glanced up, eyes coming partially awake again, and connected with Lee from across the room. Neither of them shied away from the eye contact. They held it, a whole history passing between them in that protracted moment. A strange intimacy that had grown from shared pain, shared triumph. Experiences carved into their bones.

  The moment was shattered by the sharp chime of the satphone.

  Lee’s core tightened, sending a tremor through the table where his legs were propped. A few chess pieces toppled over.

  It had to be Sam. But it was midnight. The timing was all wrong. He should be on his guard shift.

  Lee jerked forward from his reclined position. Boots hit the floor. He snatched up the satphone, thumbing it on and pressing it to his ear. He didn’t say anything, fearing in that moment that the satphone had been discovered by Greeley, and if he said his name, it would doom Sam to a firing squad…

  “Lee?” It was Sam’s voice. Quiet. Strangled. Madness lurking underneath that single syllable.

  “Sam. What’s wrong?”

  Angela came upright in the couch. Abby moaned softly and stayed asleep, but Deuce perked up, watching the two wakeful humans carefully. Angela’s expression was one of waiting for an explosion to go off.

  A shush of breath in the microphone. It shuddered. Trembled. “I fucked up.”

  Lee’s mouth went dry. His face felt cold. All the blood rushing out of his extremities and gathering in his hammering heart. “Alright. Just tell me what happened.”

  “I had to, Lee. I didn’t have a choice. If I hadn’t trusted somebody, we wouldn’t have been able to get people to rebel. But it…fuck me, it backfired.”

  Lee’s jaw clenched. Oh, dammit, Sam! I told you not to trust anyone!

  “We got outted. They came for us. Johnson and Pickell are dead. It’s just me and Jones and Marie. We’re hiding out, but I don’t know how much longer we have. They’re looking for us right now. We…we killed some of their people to get away, and now they’re tearing the fucking city apart looking for us.”

  “Alright, alright. Take a breath, Sam. We’ll figure this out.”

  Angela rose up from the couch, padded closer, all the tense muscles in her face giving her a haggard appearance, as though she’d aged twenty years in ten seconds.

  “How long do you think you can hold out?” Lee asked.

  Hesitation. “I don’t know. We have a decent hiding place. The people looking for us, they haven’t gotten close yet. But I think they will. We, uh…we have weapons. And there’s at least one other squad leader that knows we’re here. He’s with us now.”

  “Do you trust him?” Lee said, unable to keep the bite out of his voice, and hating the accusation that it leveled on Sam.

  Silence for a long protracted moment. “I don’t trust anybody right now.”

  Lee closed his eyes. “Do you think you can hold out until tomorrow night?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. Yes, we can hold out. I have no fucking clue when they’re going to find us, but we can lay low.”

  “This guy that’s with you, the other squad leader…I know you don’t want to trust him, and I’m not saying you should, but can he help at all? Is there a way to use him without putting yourself in too much danger?”

  “He already knows where we’re hiding. If he decides to screw us over? Well. Then we’re screwed. So I don’t know how to answer that question, Lee. Am I supposed to trust him? Just…Just tell me what to do here. I need you to tell me what to do.”

  “Alright. Gimme a second…”

  Lee smashed his hand over his mouth. His palm was clammy. He stared at the maps, at the chess pieces—not enough—and tried to conjure some way out.

  Lemons out of lemonade. That was Lee’s only option. At this moment, according to Sam’s report, Greeley was ass-over-heels, trying to find a group of rebels in their midst. Yes, Sam’s life was on the line. But so was everyone’s. The fact remained: Greeley was as distracted as they would ever be. While they were hunting for Sam, their attention was turned inward.

  Lee had already planned to mobilize on Greeley within two days. What did it matter if he had to move that up a single day? It would take advantage of Greeley’s momentary distraction, and if they hit hard enough and fast enough, they could take the heat off of Sam at just the right moment, allowing Sam to do his work from inside.

  “Okay, listen,” Lee said. “We’re mobilizing at first light. We’re coming. We’r
e gonna be there by nightfall tomorrow. Less than twenty four hours—” Oh God, are we really doing this? “—you can make it that long. Do not tell this other squad leader when we’re going to be there. But tell him to get whoever he can that’s willing to stand up and fight with you. Your hiding place—how many people can you jam in there?”

  “As many people as we can get. It’s big enough.”

  “Good. See if you can’t assemble a strike team there. Be ready by nightfall tomorrow. You’ll know when we hit. Do you have a target?”

  “Yes. An armory. I think we can take it…if I get enough squads to help. But Lee, what if someone fucks us over again?”

  What if, what if, what if.

  “Be ready for it, then. Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. The only other option is that you kill this motherfucker that’s in your hide with you and lay low.” Lee frowned deeply. “You’re the man on the ground, Sam. You tell me: Is that what you need to do?”

  There was a long moment where all Lee could hear was Sam’s steady breathing.

  “No,” Sam finally said. “No, we came here with a mission, and I’m gonna fucking get it done.”

  “Don’t go all heroic on me. Use your head, not your heart. Don’t tell me you can get it done if you can’t.”

  “I can get it done.”

  “Alright, then those are your orders, Sam. Gather who you can. Set your sights on that target. If anyone even looks like they’re getting cold feet, you take them out. You understand me? No moral wrestling. We’re beyond that. There’s too much at stake.”

  “I understand.”

  “Then you know what you need to do.” Lee felt his stomach squirm around inside of him like all his guts had turned to live snakes. Was he feeding Sam to the wolves? Should he backtrack and tell Sam to just lay low?

  It’s not enough.

  Lee was already against the clock, with less resources than he wanted to have, about to take on a mission that only had a distant glimmer of a chance at success—that ugly truth that none of them could voice. He needed every edge he could get. And Sam was an edge.