Lee Harden Series | Book 5 | Unbowed

by Molles, D. J.

  “I’ll try to call you right before we hit,” Lee said, his voice feeling mournful in his head, as though he’d already committed Sam to dying. “But if I don’t call you for some reason, you’ll know when we hit. You’ll hear it. We’re gonna come in hot.”

  “Alright. I got it. I’ll get it done.”

  “I know you will.”

  But Lee hung up that satphone, knowing that it was a lie. He couldn’t know anything at this point. He’d spoken out of a faith he didn’t feel. He’d said it for Sam’s sake. He’d told the kid what he needed to hear.

  He looked up at Angela. “Timeline’s changed.”

  She nodded. “I heard. Should we get everybody up?”

  Lee shook his head. There was a part of him that wanted to displace some of this exhausted anxiety onto others, to get them up, to get them ready, to diffuse some of the energy. But there wasn’t any point to it. Let them sleep with the blankets and pillows that the people of La Junta had provided them. Let them get one more night of rest. Only God knew when they’d get another chance.

  “No,” Lee finally said. “Let them sleep. But I’m gonna need Abe and Brinly.”

  Angela nodded again. “I’ll get them.”

  ***

  Sam somehow managed to doze off. That was pure biological imperative. He did it by fits and starts, leaning up against one of the columns, his arms crossed, chilled by the midnight air, but brain inflamed with every permutation of the next hours of his life, and whether or not there would be more after that, or even if there would be that many, and whether or not he could somehow save his squad from that same destiny, or if their fates had been inextricably linked with him.

  Then he realized he’d fallen asleep standing up. Though his mind picked up the thread right where it had left off—or perhaps it had never stopped pondering it—he still felt the blessed heaviness of his eyelids, that dissociative apathy of the weary. And so he slid down until his butt was on the cold ground. And he fell asleep again. And he awoke again, and this time curled onto his side.

  It was in this position that he was nudged awake by Jones. His first instinct was to touch the rifle at his side, and as he did he had a strange, contradictory moment where he felt immense relief at the presence of the weapon, and a soul-deep abhorrence that he so badly needed it in the first place.

  “Evan’s back,” Jones whispered.

  Sam came upright, looking outwards into the semidarkness. Everything seemed oddly quiet, giving it that breathless, pre-dawn feel. Too early for birds. Too late for insects. Most notably: no engines roaring back and forth; no obvious signs of a search happening.

  Evan was picking his way through the office building. His movements looked tired, and yet all Sam could think, pitilessly, was Welcome to the club.

  He stopped in front of the crouched form of Jones, and the still-sitting form of Sam. Evan’s expression wasn’t clear, but it was obviously not a happy one. Numbly, Sam waited for the bad news to be leveled on him.

  “Everyone’s scared shitless,” Evan finally murmured.

  “Shocker,” Sam grunted.

  “They’re going house to house right now, looking for you, starting in your section and moving out.”

  Well, that explains the lack of engines. They’re on foot.

  Had Sam made a stupid mistake in telling Lee that he could make it twenty-four hours? Sure, it was a little less than that now. But as pissed off as Greeley seemed, Sam genuinely wondered if he’d live to see Lee’s assault.

  And in telling Lee that he could handle it, he’d doomed Jones and Marie to his same fate.

  “How close is Greeley to getting here?” Sam asked, picking crust out of his eyes, too tired for emotion.

  “I dunno. Maybe by midday?”

  “Well, that’s not going to be enough time.” Sam raised his head, frowned into the darkness. “Is Marie awake?”

  He saw movement—a waved hand. “I am now, with you assholes talking.”

  “Might want to join us.”

  Marie rose silently and walked a bit clumsily over to them, where she promptly sat herself cross legged next to Sam.

  “Evan.” Sam returned his attention to the man, who had squatted down in front of them. “You say the other squad leaders are scared shitless. Does that mean…?”

  “Um.” A cringe. “They’re not coming. They barely let me in the door to talk to them.”

  “I see. Any way to change their minds?”

  “They’re scared of Gabriella. Scared of some of the other squad leaders that say they’ve seen them talking to you guys.”

  Fucking Nolan.

  Sam had no hard evidence to prove that point. Maybe he was letting his own personal dislike of the man cloud his judgement. But who else would it be? Who else had known about Sam, but not come to the meeting in the office building?

  Fucking Nolan.

  Sam pondered all of this for a long moment of silence. He was so tired of trying to see into the future. So tired of playing this chess game, trying to guess three moves ahead of his opponents. He was tired of sneaking around.

  To die while sneaking around felt like the greatest antithesis of his life. Or perhaps the most bitter culmination of his own self-fulfilling prophecy—You can never be scared again. Everyone around him had died because of his fear, his sneaking around. When was he going to rise up and take the fight to the people trying to kill them? When was he going to stop hiding under the damn stump in the woods, clutching a weapon that was useless if it wasn’t being used to kill those trying to kill him?

  “They don’t trust me,” Sam said. Not an accusation, as he didn’t trust them either. Simply an observation. “So it seems to me that we need two things right now: We need to get Cornerstone off our back, and we need some faith.”

  “Faith in what?” Marie asked.

  “Faith that they’re not gonna be hung out to dry. Faith that their best chance of survival is to fight, and not to hide.” He looked at each of his companions. “We only need to give them enough faith to make it to tomorrow night.”

  “And if we can’t convince them?” Jones put in.

  “Then we make them terrified to betray us.” Sam let that statement hang for a moment, then hauled himself to his feet. “What time is it, Evan?”

  “It’s around three in the morning.”

  Sam nodded, hating to be standing. Wishing he could lie back down and go to sleep and wake up in some easier day, where he was relatively safe, out from under the constant threat that loomed while you operated behind enemy lines. To him, in that moment, Lee’s assault was home. He needed to get there, to have those lines of friendly troops sweep over him, so that he could be home again. So that he could close his eyes and sleep without a background of terror gripping his mind the whole time.

  But not yet.

  He looked around him at the defunct office building. Surely it would contain what he needed. “I need markers. Pens. Paint. Anything that we can use to write with.”

  The others just sat there, bewildered by the off-the-cuff statement.

  Sam started working his way towards the closed in office that had suffered the least fire damage. There had to be something in there.

  “What do we need those for?” Jones said, rising to his feet.

  “So we can send a message,” Sam replied. “To help those squad leaders have a little faith.” He stopped and looked over his shoulder at them. “But we’re gonna have to kill some people too.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  ─▬▬▬─

  PIECES

  Everything might have turned out differently if Lee hadn’t waited to get his ragtag army on the move.

  It might have been different if he’d seen the little sedan barreling towards La Junta, and maybe had a chance to intercept it.

  Things might have been different if Lee had been able to get to the occupant of that sedan before the news started slamming through their camp like a shockwave from a bomb blast.

  Lee had all of tho
se thoughts in the moments immediately after it was too late to do anything about it. But things weren’t different. Things were the way they were.

  Even as Lee exited the weary tension of his meeting with Abe and Brinly and Angela, it was happening. Stepping out into the cool, dry morning, the stars already disappeared and the sky turned cobalt in the east, all of this seen through his single eye that ached deep in the back of its cavity, it was all hurtling towards him, unstoppable.

  Even as Brinly and Abe dispatched their second-in-commands to begin the process of disseminating the orders—Get up, get your shit, be ready to roll in one hour, it’s going down—the first sliver of sunlight caught on a distant dust cloud.

  As the hush of the encampment turned gradually to the rumble of so many hundreds of people murmuring to each other, stretching legs, wincing at aching backs, taking a morning piss, asking what was happening, is it really going down, are we really doing this, why so sudden?—that little dust cloud culminated in the shimmer of dawn light across the roof of a sedan, hauling towards La Junta, and spotted by a perimeter guard.

  As the three miles that separated the sedan and La Junta dwindled, Lee stood over a low, smoky, fire, a soldier in mismatched fatigues breathing life into last night’s embers.

  As the guard on the perimeter shouted to his buddy down the way, and his buddy used his crappy little two-way radio to call their shift leader, Lee and Abe looked down into the first little tongues of flame, smelling the familiar wood smoke, deliberately ignoring each other’s gaze as they spoke in muted tones of the only things they had any control over:

  “What’s the ammo count for your people?”

  “Everyone’s fixed with two spare mags, one in the gun.”

  “I want every man in your outfit to have at least six mags total. I don’t care who you have to take ‘em from, just get them.”

  “Alright.”

  “Sidearms?”

  “Couple of Breck’s guys. But mostly no.”

  “Track down some ordnance. I want Breck and Menendez’s guys to be rolling fat and heavy.”

  “What kind of ordnance you thinking?”

  “Get ‘em ready for house-to-house. All the frags they can carry and still run.”

  “Sure hope all these civilians can handle it.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Well. What we lack in training, we make up for in numbers. Hopefully that counts for something.”

  “Hopefully.”

  As the perimeter guard got backup—three fellow guards—and rushed to the main road on which the sedan was approaching, taking cover behind a Jersey barrier that jutted into the road, Brinly joined Abe and Lee around the fire as it began to burn the rest of the half-charred log left from last night.

  “The boys are fueled and ready.”

  A distant whoop, that could have only been a Marine getting excited to break things.

  Lee smiled. “Sounds like it.”

  “Buncha blue-balled motherfuckers,” Brinly admitted. “They’re hungry.”

  “Well. They’re in for the fight of their lives.”

  As this muted conversation was taking place, one of the perimeter guards had his finger on the trigger, and was getting ready to send an entire mag through the windshield at the quickly-approaching sedan. But then a hand emerged from the window, waving manically, and one of the other guards, who was respected as a leader of sorts, yelled for them to hold their fire.

  The guard took his finger off the trigger, and watched the sedan come skidding to a halt. The perimeter guards all pounced at once. They had minimal training, and with it, minimal self-control. When one of them started shouting, they all started shouting. Some of their commands were contradictory: “Hands up!” “Get out of the car!” “Get on the ground!” “Don’t fucking move!”

  Lee heard the shouts, but didn’t listen to them. They were muted by distance, and mixed with the sounds of talking and hollering, his army awake enough now that the nervous energy was taking ahold of them. The nearer shouts of one nervous person to another could not be distinguished from the far-away shouts of the perimeter guards.

  The man in the sedan tried to comply with the commands as best as he understood them, but he had his own mission in mind. No one recognized him when he jumped out of the car with his hands over his head, but if Lee had been there, he would have remembered him from Vici: the salty individual named Dave.

  Not so salty now. Gone was the sarcastic confidence and biting dark humor. It had been replaced with a sort of panicked energy. And if he had been a little more controlled himself, perhaps asked specifically to speak to Lee, then maybe none of what was about to happen would have happened.

  As it was, Dave went down to his knees, with his hands clasped on top of his head—by now the perimeter guards seemed to be shouting in agreement on that—and then he began yelling over them.

  “There’s an army coming! Greeley’s army just wiped out Vici!”

  And from there, the words had been said, and could not be undone.

  At the northern end of Lee’s encampment, a handful of squads were close enough to that point in the perimeter to watch what was going down, and to hear the words that came out of Dave’s mouth.

  Most of the people in those squads were Lee’s people from Butler. But he’d embedded men and women from Vici in those squads. They stared with dawning horror, and recognized their friend Dave, and heard what he said.

  Most of the squads gave no response. But those individuals from Vici looked around and found the faces of their fellows, the other volunteers from Vici.

  Their home had just been hit by an army from Greeley.

  Then it began to spread through the encampment. Those few individuals embedded with those squads took off at a run, bouncing off of each other like pinballs in a machine, ricocheting around the encampment, finding the other volunteers from Vici, and telling them what they’d heard.

  Somewhere in the center of the encampment, Cass heard the news and went white in the face. She had stuck close to Lee and Brinly and Abe and Angela, but knowing that the army was about to start moving on Greeley, she’d gone out to offer encouragement to the people of her hometown.

  To her credit, she didn’t start spreading the word. She turned and began running, her eyes scanning through the crowded people and their vehicles, looking for Lee Harden.

  At the campfire, Lee knelt stiffly, holding his hands over the rising warmth. It wasn’t particularly chilly this morning, but his injured left hand was more sensitive to the cold these days. He kneaded at the aching tendons and bound-up muscles.

  It was Abe, standing to Lee’s right, that first noticed something was off.

  He frowned out into the encampment, sensing the change in energy, the movement of people, the sound of their voices turning from nervous excitement to worry and fear.

  “Hey Lee,” he said, nodding towards the center of the encampment. “Something’s going on.”

  Lee stood up, his left knee popping, his hip jangling treacherously as though it might give out and pitch him into the fire. His eyes came up, and immediately spotted Cass, running full-bore for him.

  “What the fuck now?” were the last words he said before everything went to shit.

  ***

  Tinnitus is a funny thing.

  Lee knew that his ears had suffered a constant barrage of gunshots and explosions. All of which had perforated his eardrums on a regular basis, leaving behind a multitude of tiny scars. It was a physiological thing, he knew, and yet there was a pattern that he’d noticed.

  Tension, fear, trauma, stress. All these things regularly sparked his tinnitus. Oh, sometimes it would come and go on its own, not related to anything psychological that was happening. But when it was related to something psychological, he’d taken note that it was far worse.

  He stood in the teacher’s lounge of the school, the maps still scattered about the table, Deuce making uncomfortable, manic rounds, sniffing every corner of the room, and i
nspecting the multitude of occupants with a worried glance.

  Lee watched the dog moving, and couldn’t hear shit that was being said. The high-frequency hum had turned into a pulsing blast of imaginary noise, like uncontrolled feedback from a speaker too close to a microphone. He clenched his jaw, squinting against the squeal of noise and trying to will it to go away.

  Deuce completed a full circuit of the room and came back to his side, pressing himself against Lee’s injured leg. He could see the way the dog was stress-panting, but couldn’t hear the sound of it. He reached down and touched the fur of the dog’s head, hoping that it would help to center him, help to relieve the noise in his ears. But it didn’t.

  He looked up.

  Mouths were moving, words unheard. Faces were contorted with a mix of panic and anger. Hands and arms were moving in wild gesticulations. He could see what was happening, even though he couldn’t hear it.

  Cass and Dave, and two others from Vici, huddled on one side of the table.

  Paul and Stephen, from Lakin, Kansas.

  Jonathan and Tammy, from La Junta.

  Brinly and Abe and Angela.

  The volunteers from the towns were beside themselves. And the leaders of Lee’s army weren’t much better. The volunteers were shouting in fear, pointing out in random directions, as though pointing to their homes, like they could see them burning in their minds’ eyes. And Brinly and Abe were shouting back in anger, making a common motion: Fingers pointing down at the floor.

  Lee couldn’t hear the words, but he knew what was happening.

  The volunteers all wanted to leave. Brinly and Abe were trying to get them to stay.

  Stuck in a cloud of vicious sound, Lee looked at Angela and found her staring back at him, concern scribbled all over her features. He saw her mouth move—it was his name. She was calling his name. None of the others seemed to notice.

  Lee reached up and rammed a finger into his right ear, wiggling it about. Sometimes that helped. He tried to pop his ears like you would after an altitude change. Sometimes that helped too. But none of it worked.