It wasn’t any outpouring of human compassion that made her not like what she’d done to Sam. It was the fact that her bosses hadn’t allowed her to pull the trigger on all of them at once.
In a purely practical sense, she understood their reservations. Much of what she’d gained on these people—the squad leaders that had come to talk to her about how much they didn’t like what was happening in Greeley—was hearsay. She lacked concrete evidence. Her bosses, fresh off of having their asses chewed soundly for not having enough guards to post on the perimeters, didn’t want to lose a dozen squads that they’d just created. They were worried about how that would make them look to Briggs.
So, rather than let her strike them all down at once, they’d told her to pick the biggest offender and test her theory. If the evidence supported her theory, then she would be allowed to start operations to take down the others.
Well, if last night’s debacle was any indication, Gabriella guessed that the evidence was pretty damn sound.
What bothered her was the fact that there were still squads out there with questionable if not downright rebellious leanings, and they all knew that shit was going down. If her bosses had allowed her to take them out all at once, then she could have mitigated the risk of them getting away. Now, they’d be on high-alert, ready to run at the drop of a hat.
Worse than that, Gabriella was not ignorant of the fact that her own life was in danger. The meeting that she’d had with those squad leaders had taken place right here, in this very house. They knew where she lived.
The danger to her life was a fact that her bosses didn’t seem to care much about. And she’d been afraid to raise the point for fear of being seen as a coward, and having her own loyalties questioned. Besides, her bosses weren’t dumb. They knew what they were doing. They’d simply decided that they’d rather her life be in danger than their jobs.
She sighed, considering the muck at the bottom of her cup. But she could see the grits in it, coating the white ceramic. She could almost feel their annoying texture on her tongue.
She reached across the table and gathered her carefully recorded documents on these people. Transcripts of their entrance interviews. Notes about what they’d said when she’d met them here. Pictures of them. Their shifts. Their assigned positions. Where they were housed.
Most of them were third shifters, which meant she could hit them right now, in broad daylight, while they were asleep. That seemed to be the best plan. If she waited much longer, they might be down at the ration lines.
No, it was time to put the rest of this into action.
She’d given her bosses a verbal report late the previous night, and, out of an abundance of interest for their own skins, they’d finally admitted that these other squads needed to be eradicated. Gabriella had been given the green light.
She had twelve squads of Cornerstone operatives at her disposal. She just needed to make sure that they all struck simultaneously. Word of Sameer Balawi’s take down would have spread to them by now. If the treasonous squad leaders caught wind of an operation against one of them, they’d all go into hiding, and then Gabriella would have to answer for it.
She piled the files on top of each other, shuffled them into a neat block of manila and paper, then tucked them under her arm.
Time to get it over with.
And who knew? At the end of this, she might be in line for yet another promotion. Not that she needed much more amenities than had already been provided for her, but being in charge of the entrance interviews for newcomers was not her idea of a career. Besides that fact, with Briggs ordering the borders closed, there wouldn’t be much work in that sector for much longer.
She needed to shine today. She needed to execute with absolute precision and confidence. It was her chance to prove herself, to make a name for herself, and to secure her bosses’ good graces, and perhaps come to the attention of Briggs himself.
As she made her way to the front door, she allowed herself a moment of fantasy: being assigned to FOB Hampton—where at least they had real coffee—perhaps with a contingent of operatives under her, or at the very least, some more important responsibility than talking to haggard refugees all day long.
She exited her house, taking a quick scan of the street beyond. It was quiet. Most everyone else in this neighborhood had their own duties to attend to, and had already gone to FOB Hampton, or to the guard outposts and armories, or wherever else they were assigned.
It wasn’t them that she was worried about. It was those squad leaders that knew where she lived.
She cinched her right elbow against her side, felt the firm reassurance of the holstered pistol there on her hip.
There was no one else about. No one waiting and watching for her. No suspicious persons lurking about.
She turned, fumbling the key from her pocket as she juggled the file folders. She locked her front door and dead-bolted it—there’d been a rash of break-ins in a nearby neighborhood. It wasn’t that she had anything terribly valuable in the house, or that she thought the dead-bolt would really stop a determined burglar. But why not be cautious?
She turned, focused on getting the key back into her pants pocket, and stepped down off the concrete stoop. Only then did her eyes come up, at which point her entire thought life, thoughts of organizing those twelve Cornerstone squads and effectively executing her plan, dissipated like smoke in the wind.
A lone figure stood, right there in the empty driveway—where the fuck had he come from?
Recognition slammed through her hard.
“Sam!” she snapped, in the same moment that the file folders dropped from her arms and she lunged for the pistol on her hip.
Sameer Balawi raised his hand, a pistol in his grip.
Gabriella cried out in panic and rage as her hand squashed down tight on the grip of the pistol and yanked it from its holster…
A single shot rocked the quiet neighborhood street.
***
Sam felt very little in that moment, but knew that it wouldn’t last.
His heart slammed in his chest, sure. All the physiological reactions to taking a life. He felt those full-on, as he stepped over to Gabriella’s twitching body and pointed the pistol at her head again. The constriction of his blood vessels. The tightness in his chest. The tunnel vision creeping up on him.
But he felt no emotion. No victory. No shame. No spite. No guilt.
Just two machines, he and her, crashed into each other. He had come out alive. She had not.
But he dimly knew that his clinical detachment was only forced on him by the mission—The mission, the mission, the mission! Got to get it done!—and that eventually he would feel something about this. Who knew what it would be? He suspected it wouldn’t be good.
True to the detached state that his mind was in, he took in her jittering body, and assessed whether he should shoot her in the head again. It didn’t feel wrong to do—dead is dead, whether you accomplish it in one shot or two: They both equate to killing—but another gunshot could hone in already pricked ears. Get him attention that he didn’t want.
Sam decided she was dead enough. The twitching was just random. The death throes of an animal that had already passed over.
He stuffed the pistol into his waistband, then jammed his hand in the pocket of his pants and drew out a folded piece of paper, which bore the message that he had written. He stuck the paper halfway into Gabriella’s belt line, so that it wouldn’t get whisked away in a breeze.
His eyes fell on the stack of folders jumbled off to the side of Gabriella’s corpse. One of them had fallen open, some of the papers sticking out of it. He saw an image, printed in low quality. It was a picture of one of the other squad leaders—one of the ones that had met with Gabriella in the very house in front of which Sam stood.
Sam quickly gathered up the folders, becoming increasingly aware that he’d already spent about twenty seconds out in the open since the gunshot. Any more time would put him at undue risk. B
ut he didn’t want to leave these folders. They had the look of something that he should take with him.
He stuffed them all under his arm and, without another glance at the woman he’d just killed, he strode through the narrow gap between her house and the neighbor’s. He emerged on the other side, onto another quiet neighborhood street on which he was the only pedestrian.
He turned himself west, towards his hideout in the abandoned office building, and walked along, just as casual as you please, while all of his problems gathered behind him like a pack of feral dogs, waiting for the right moment to tear him to pieces.
***
There was nothing out here, Lee observed.
On this lonesome stretch of highway, heading north away from La Junta and deep into the abandoned flatness of the Colorado plains, Lee sat on a jumpseat between the driver and front passenger of the MATV. He stared out the windshield, his elbows propped on his knees, his hands holding up his face, his eyepatch still on because he’d forgotten about it. His one good eye watched the endless miles pass under them.
This place was so brown and lifeless and flat, one could have believed it was the sight of a nuclear detonation that had razed the landscape, if it weren’t for the endless line of power poles that passed to their right.
His cramped position, the annoying rub of the fabric patch over his raw eye socket, the ache in his hip—none of it got through to him. Physical pain seemed a dim and easy thing to ignore in the light of the tumult of thoughts that rolled over and over in his head.
The thoughts bore no clear consensus. They clamored at each other like a meeting of divisive politicians, all yelling their own points, none of them listening, none of them truly heard.
Should he have put his foot down? Should he have fought and killed the dissenters?
And what good would that have done? The dissenters were too numerous, too scared for their families. If he had “put them in their place” he would have only hardened their already-made decision to leave. And he might have alienated his own people in the process.
But what were his people thinking now? What did they think about him now that they’d watched him merely cave to the demands of those that were supposed to help them? Did they believe he was weak? He certainly felt weak.
Did they have enough faith in him to continue on? And even if they did, was it even possible to take Greeley now? He’d run this entire course through the American central states, all the way up from the Gulf, operating on the presupposition that he needed more fighters, that he needed to create a grassroots movement, a groundswell of people willing to stand up against Greeley.
What could he say now? They’d all gone away. Fled back to where they’d come, to die at the hands of the army now chasing Lee down. Could he convince the remaining fighters—all the soldiers and Marines and guerillas from Butler—that their objective was still attainable?
Was it?
The silence in the MATV was cloying, pressing, begging for someone to fill it, but no one had the guts, not even Lee. Because what was there to say? Good try, folks. We gave it a solid effort, but sometimes shit doesn’t work out. Go back home.
Home to where? They had no home. They were nomads now. They were the barbarian hordes knocking at the gates of Rome. They were the Mongolian horsemen raging towards China. They had no place to call their own except the place they might conquer.
And all the miles between them and the place to be conquered were dwindling—Lee could feel them draining away like someone had opened a port in his veins and was taking the very life out of him.
The silence. The tinnitus whispering in it, keening, threatening to come on strong again.
Lee coughed, for no other reason than to give his ears something to hear. His heart began to pound. His palms against his face felt clammy. His stomach roiled, empty, nauseas—starving but without an appetite. His mouth watered weakly, making an idle threat—Lee knew he wouldn’t puke, and had nothing to puke up if he did.
His eyes fixed on a turn off—a single lonely cattle road that led off to the right, out into the nothingness. He needed to stop. They had to stop. They were barreling north towards an objective, and Lee was not prepared to come within sight of Greeley, and though he knew there were hours between him and that place, he could go no closer knowing that he had no clue what to do when he got there.
He thrust his hand out over the driver’s shoulder. “Pull off there.”
The driver didn’t question it. The bulky vehicle slowed, then turned off, the hum of the tires on asphalt turning to the rumble of a dirt road.
“Keep going,” Lee said. “So that everyone can get off the road. We’re calling a halt.”
“Yes, sir.” The passenger reached and took the radio handset, and transmitted the command back to the convoy.
There was something quieting, calming, about the call-and-response of military commands. It was something familiar that Lee latched onto in that moment, a tiny piece of something to keep him from hurtling out into the void.
By the time the convoy had come to a complete stop, amid the swirling dust storm they had created, nearly five full minutes had passed. And by that time, the tannish dust hanging stubbornly in the windless air, Lee was striding through the ranks of vehicles, eye forward, not looking at the faces through the windshields that watched him as he passed.
Who are you, Lee Harden?
What was this thing in the center of him that wouldn’t let him stop? Why did he keep fighting, and fighting, and fighting? From the first time he punched a kid in the mouth when he was in grade school, all the way to watching Mateo Ibarra burn alive, and all the people in between that he’d left dead and broken with his violent hands…what had been going on inside of him?
He wasn’t alone. Deuce trotted along at his heels. Brinly, Angela, and Abe followed him.
After nearly a hundred yards, they exited the pall of dust. The day was bright and cloudless. The dry land baking in the sun, the horizon roiling with mirage, as vast and flat as an ocean.
Lee had no specific distance that he wanted to walk. He just needed to be away from prying eyes and ears. Perhaps he walked a little further than was necessary, caught up in his thoughts. But eventually he stopped and turned.
The others gathered around him. Deuce appeared circumspect, and maybe a little disappointed that there was no standing objects on which to piss. The dog let out a grumbling sigh and sat down.
Abe looked back towards the convoy, his head tilted up, taking in the towering dust cloud. “Not a fan of that,” he said, nodding towards it. “Like a fucking signal.”
Lee considered that. “How close do you think that army is?”
“I have no clue,” Abe grunted. “Hopefully not close enough to see that shit. They’ve been tracking our movements, though. Probably from tire tracks—can’t hide the movement of hundreds of vehicles.”
Lee sighed, his eyes traveling to the tops of the dust cloud. Like the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites out of the desert. Hadn’t Brinly once compared him to Moses? And here he was, in the desert, with his faithless people. Except there was no mountain around on which he could ascend and hear the voice of God.
No, they were on their own.
He reached up and removed the irritating eye patch. Gently rubbed the scarred eyebrow. It relieved a tiny portion of the itch in his socket. He’d learned to mostly ignore that itch. It couldn’t be scratched.
Lee let out a slow, tense breath. “I’m at a bit of a loss right now.”
There was a moment of quiet, in which they could hear the dim rattle of people exiting their vehicles in the dust, their voices muted, disconsolate, ill-defined.
“Well,” Brinly started. “The way I see it, we have two options. We either continue on, or we cut and run.”
“Cut and run where?” Abe asked. Not a challenge. Just a question. Everything and anything was on the table at this point, and they all knew it.
Brinly waved a hand at their desolate environment.
“We can still do damage. Out here, spread out. Not in one big cluster. It’ll be harder for that army to track us down if we split up into core groups. Those core groups can harass, sabotage, steal, wreak havoc.”
“To what end?” Angela asked, earnestly.
Brinly shook his head. “To stay alive, I guess. At the very least, we won’t be trapped between Greeley and an army.”
“This army that’s chasing us?” Abe said. “The second they realize we’re not pushing on Greeley, they’ll just pass us right by and re-enter Greeley. Fortify their defenses. And then Greeley becomes untouchable.”
“Sam’s still inside Greeley,” Angela observed.
“Yeah, I know.” Lee dropped his gaze to the dust at his feet. “I know.”
“If we scatter, we’re effectively abandoning him.” Angela’s voice was toneless.
“I guess the real question,” Abe put in. “Is whether you think our army can actually get the job done.”
Lee put his hands on his hips, raised his gaze to the convoy, now a bit clearer as the dust had begun to settle. “Shit. That’s exactly what I can’t decide, Abe.”
“Are the odds too long to take the risk?” Angela said, almost as though speaking to herself. “Dammit, Lee, I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here either. Part of me just thinks, Do it. There’s still hundreds of people in that convoy that think we’re heading for Greeley right now. They’re here now. They’re ready to fight. Are they gonna keep fighting if we scatter? Go into hiding? That might kill any fight they got left in them.”
Brinly stretched his neck from side to side, his blue eyes not meeting anyone else’s. “At this stage in the game, Lee, it’s either we keep playing, or we fold. If we want to keep playing, then we go all in. It’s either risk it all, or call it a fucking day.”
“Call it a fucking day,” Lee echoed with a bitter tone in his voice.
Lee Harden Series | Book 5 | Unbowed Page 36
