Harden

by D. J. Molles

  She looked out the window of the room. Lee thought it was good that it didn’t overlook the school. He watched Angela’s mouth tighten down. Her eyes…they didn’t narrow or squint, but there was something about them that hardened, like watching a scrim of ice rapidly form on the surface of water.

  “Well,” she said, quietly. “Fuck him.”

  “Yeah. My thoughts exactly.”

  She turned back to him. “Lee, we’ve got a problem.”

  We’ve got a million fucking problems.

  He struggled not to take a big breath to steady himself against the sudden drop that he felt in his gut.

  “I spoke to Jeff Teague today.” Her hands found each other. Fingers knit together. “You remember him?”

  “The agriculture guy.”

  “Yes.” Her mouth opened. Closed. She appeared to consider her words carefully. “Even if we’d been able to plant in Field Twenty-Nine, we wouldn’t have had the fuel necessary to harvest what we planted.”

  Lee frowned. “I thought we worked the numbers out. I thought we had enough in the tanks to last us through the harvest.”

  “Yeah, we did. But the fencing operations.” She shook her head, grimaced. “It used more than we thought.”

  “We accounted for a fifteen percent overage.”

  “It used more than that.” She looked away from him. Out the window again. “Some of the ground was harder than was expected. Harder for the augers to get through. It burned through a lot more fuel than we expected and we didn’t catch it until it was too late.”

  “Jeff didn’t catch it until it was too late.”

  “You can’t blame him for this.”

  “I am blaming him for this. It was his fucking responsibility.”

  “Lee, you know as well as I do that sometimes the numbers just don’t work out.”

  Lee bared his teeth briefly and decided to look at the blank, textured hospital wall instead of Angela. Because she was right. Sometimes this shit happened. But it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

  “So, what does Jeff project now?” Lee asked.

  “We got enough to finish the thirty fields,” Angela replied, slowly. “And we can run the planters. But then the tanks are gonna be at the dregs. Any cultivating will use the little we have left. And we won’t have a goddamn drop for harvesting operations.”

  “What about harvesting by hand?” Lee said.

  Angela nodded. “We’re going to have to. But Jeff says that it won’t be enough.”

  “What do you mean it won’t be enough?” Lee found his hand rubbing at his head, his fingertips touching the scar that ran across his scalp. “You saying we got too many people to feed, but not enough to harvest?”

  Angela shook her head. “No. That was my initial thought too. But the problem is the security. Transporting enough people into the fields, along with their protective details? We don’t have enough for that either.”

  Angela looked bitter, and for a moment Lee felt his own stomach sinking because he heard the hopelessness in her voice, and he counted on her to have hope. He could make it through the slog of every day misery, but not if those around him didn’t have hope.

  “Jeff says that we’d only be able to harvest a small percentage of it before the rest rotted in the fields.” Angela shifted her position in the bed, wincing in pain. “He says it’d probably get us to the end of the year. But no further. And that’s maintaining reduced rations as they are now.”

  They were silent for a moment, lost in considerations. That endless, web-like series of analysis where every choice leads to a consequence, and all the choices sucked and all the consequences were bad.

  Well, as long as we’re on the topic of shitty news…

  “I think we have a problem with the primals.”

  Angela looked at him again. “When do we not?”

  Lee thought about whether he should even tell Angela at this point. But she deserved to know what might be coming down the pipeline at them. “We recovered one of them today, at Field Twenty-Nine. One of the primals. It was still alive when we got there. We put it down.”

  Angela waited, sensing there was more.

  “It was small. Looked young. I think it might prove Jacob’s concept.”

  “The breeding concept?” Angela frowned. “I thought we’d already proven that.”

  “No, we know they’re breeding but…this is more to do with how quickly they’re breeding. I think what we recovered today was one of the juveniles that we’ve reported seeing.”

  Angela lowered her eyes. “Oh.”

  “Doctor Trent is taking a look at it. Trying to determine the age of it. He doesn’t agree with my theory. He says that he objects to it in—” Lee put up air quotes “—the strongest terms possible.”

  “Okay,” Angela said. “What is it that you think?”

  Lee sighed. “I don’t know what to think. I hope Doc Trent is right. I hope it’s just a small primal. Maybe it’s the opposite of bad news. Maybe it’s a good sign. Maybe the small primals are a sign of…I dunno…malnutrition or something.”

  “That’s what killed off the regular infected.”

  Lee gave her a fractional nod. “That. And the last two winters. And the primals hunting them. Now the primals don’t have them as a food source, and they’re turning to the next easiest prey. Which is us.”

  “This thing you recovered…you think it was born in the last couple of years?”

  Lee shrugged. He had no other answers for her.

  Angela had grown very still. Over the last three years of hell on earth, she’d become accustomed to the rising tides of fear that would come upon them. And she had learned how to press it all down. How to calm the seas within herself. How to compartmentalize.

  That was good, Lee thought, as he watched her grow steady again. A valuable trait in a leader. It had its own consequences: eventually you didn’t feel much at all—even the stuff you wanted to feel. But that was a butcher’s bill that had to be paid later.

  Much of what they did was on credit, building up debts against themselves that they hoped they would eventually pay off in some far-flung future when things were going to be “normal” again.

  A future that Lee often thought was more fantasy than anything else.

  Angela smoothed the wrinkles out of her blanket. “We need fuel. That is priority number one. Without the fuel to harvest the crops, we starve. If we starve, then the primals are a moot point. As of right now, we have the power back on, and that is keeping the currents running on the fences, and that is keeping the primals out.”

  “For now,” Lee said. “They’ve been testing those boundaries, though.”

  “Yes, they have.”

  Eventually they were going to figure out how to get past the electric fences. Just as they’d figured out how to defeat previous fortifications. It was only a matter of time.

  Angela was right. They needed fuel.

  Fuel to not only keep the populace from starving, but fuel to reinstate the hunt and destroy missions, which they’d put on hold because of their diminishing fuel reserves. In retrospect, perhaps they should have continued to seek out the dens where the primals gathered.

  If they could’ve impacted the population of primals, maybe they wouldn’t have had to waste so much fuel building the damn fences to keep them out.

  “Fuel,” Lee said, refocusing himself.

  Angela nodded in agreement. “We have to turn the pumps back on.”

  “The Gulf, then.”

  “That is where the pipeline leads, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  They’d gone over all this before. The mission was half-planned already, because they knew that this was going to happen. They just didn’t think it was going to happen so soon.

  They knew virtually nothing outside of the four members of the United Eastern States: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. They would need to cross a lot of unknown territory to turn the pipelines back on. They had no idea
what was around the pipelines, if anyone was currently in control of those pipelines, and if the pumps and refineries were even still operable.

  They would need more than a dozen people to get the oil flowing again. But they would need an advance team to figure out what was going on. To take the temperature of the locals. To make alliances. To build connections and allies.

  “Well.” Lee nodded, feeling a sinking feeling in his gut that he couldn’t quite explain in that moment. “I’ll tell the team.”

  EIGHT

  ─▬▬▬─

  CO-ORDIN-ATIN’

  Elsie Foster was a stone cold bitch.

  That’s what Mitch was thinking as he watched her.

  They were in Carl’s office on the bottom floor of the Support Center. They’d scrubbed the room of anything relating to their ongoing investigation of the Lincolnists.

  Mitch had suggested they leave it up, including the cork board with pictures and notes attached to it, linking certain dubious individuals to Ms. Foster. Mitch thought it might rattle her.

  But Carl liked to keep his cards close to his chest. And it was his office. And ultimately, his investigation.

  Carl was seated at his desk. Elsie was directly across from him. Mitch was cattycorner, sitting on the side of the desk.

  “So,” Carl said, in his flat, calm voice. “You had no direct dealings with John Burke.”

  “That’s not what I said,” Elsie corrected, mirroring his level tones.

  She was a middle-aged woman with mouse-brown hair that she kept in a tight braid and was beginning to show streaks of gray. She had a kind face, on the surface. A nice, polite smile. But her eyes were like little nuggets of dirt, and they gave nothing away.

  Elsie knew better than to volunteer information. She let Carl probe, and answered only what she had to answer.

  Carl rested his elbows on the table and sighed. “Okay. What was it that you said?”

  “I’m sure you recall, Mr. Gilliard. I said it less than a minute ago.”

  Carl watched her in silence. A classic interrogator’s move. Give the suspect silence, and sometimes they feel compelled to fill it.

  Elsie was not that type of person. She simply sat there, smiling back at Carl, like this was all just a civil discussion taking place at some social gathering. She was waiting it out. Completely comfortable with the silence.

  What Elsie had said, was that she’d met John Burke a handful of times, during meetings where the Lincolnists discussed peaceful solutions to their issues with the UES. The way she told it, John Burke had seemed edgy, and had a lot of disagreements with the rest of the peace-loving Lincolnists, and that they all got a bad vibe from him, but he’d never explicitly told them he was going to do anything violent.

  It was a load of shit, and everyone at that table knew it. Carl and Mitch knew it was shit. And Elsie knew that they knew. She just didn’t care. Because she also knew that their hands were tied by none other than Angela herself. Angela wanted proof, and until she got it, she wasn’t going to authorize any sort of action towards the Lincolnists. It was their right to peaceably assemble, after all. It was their right to discuss things, as long as those discussions didn’t turn into a safety hazard. And so far, not a single Lincolnist interviewed had said anything other than what Elsie was saying now.

  They all claimed they wanted a peaceful solution. Without bloodshed.

  Carl could rattle the sabers, so to speak. Make threats. But Mitch knew he wasn’t going to do that. Carl never made threats that he couldn’t back up. And even if he could back up those threats, why give forewarning?

  And so, Elsie Foster’s bullshit statement, and her current silence, brought their efforts to a stalemate.

  Elsie blinked a few times. “Mr. Gilliard,” she said, still with that simpering smile. “As much as I enjoy staring into your handsome visage, I have things that I need to do today. So are we done?”

  Carl shrugged. “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?”

  “No. Are there any other questions that I can answer for you? That is, questions that I haven’t already answered?”

  “Did you arrange to have Angela assassinated?”

  Elsie didn’t even blink. “Of course not. What a ridiculous accusation. We want a peaceful solution.”

  Carl gave her a smile as stale as a three-week old saltine. “That’s very reassuring to hear.” He raised his hand from his desk and gave a small shoo gesture, as though Elsie Foster were a gnat on his desk. “You may go now.”

  Her eyes flashed, but that was it.

  But any reaction was a victory.

  Elsie rose from her chair and departed without another word. She knew better than to fire back at them. She knew better than to do any of the stupid shit they hoped that she would do.

  Mitch had to give her credit. She knew exactly how to play this game.

  When she had left, Mitch rose, went to the door, and closed it. He turned on Carl and crossed his arms over his chest. “Fuck it. I say we put her and her Lincolnists on work detail in one of the new fields, then cut the power to the fences. Let this problem work itself out.”

  Carl leaned back in his chair. “Mitch, if there was a way to bury these people and not raise suspicions, they’d already be dead.” He put a finger to his lips, thoughtfully. “We need to get someone inside. Gain their trust. Get them to talk about the shit we know they’re talking about.”

  Mitch nodded in agreement. “You got anybody in mind?”

  “No, not yet,” Carl admitted. “I guess I’m still holding out hope that Angela is pissed enough after getting shot that she just authorizes us to take them out.”

  “If I had to take a bet,” Mitch said. “I’d say you might want to start looking for that undercover.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  Carl glanced at Mitch, then nodded at the door.

  Mitch opened it.

  Tomlin leaned in. “What’s up, Mitch?” he said, then looked at Carl. “Team meeting in The Cave. Lee’s got something for us.”

  ***

  The Cave was a windowless room on the second floor of the Support Center.

  Only six people were allowed entry to this place, and that was Lee and his team. It was their briefing room, their armory, and often their hangout.

  The lack of natural light didn’t mean that The Cave was dark. It was well-lit by a collection of several gaudy lamps that they had acquired over the course of their two years doing missions together.

  The lamp-thing had started with the finding of a tacky, stained-glass table lamp, which featured, of all things, dolphins. Tomlin had unearthed it in the manager’s office of a tire shop that they’d raided to outfit their pickup trucks. Tomlin, who was often the instigator of shenanigans, had insisted that it go on Lee’s desk in The Cave.

  Since then, the lamp collection had grown.

  A crystal lamp.

  A lamp with a pink, fuzzy shade.

  A lamp with a giraffe as its base, and a cheetah-print shade.

  The gaudier the better.

  The lamps provided plenty of light, because the room was fairly small. Maybe twenty-by-thirty, with a single door on the narrow side. It was just big enough for all six team members to claim a space, which then turned the room into—as Abe had once observed—an Epcot Center of personalities.

  Lee’s desk—the only desk, in fact—stood in the far left corner. He actually shared that space with Carl. The two of them generally kept the desk orderly, Carl’s side moreso than Lee’s, partly because Carl was more orderly, and partly because he had his own office. If you were facing the desk, Lee’s locker and gear box were on the left, and Carl’s were on the right.

  Clockwise from the desk, the next corner belonged to Abe. His area was neat, and mostly free of mischief, although he was the owner of the Africa-motif lamp. Other than that, just a folding chair and a dartboard on the wall. Disputes were known to be settled by a game of cricket.

  Julia’s station was up aga
inst the flat of the right wall. She had an additional locker, which held all her medical supplies. Charts of human anatomy and books about battlefield trauma marked her area. She had been studious in her role as team medic. Almost obsessive.

  The next corner was Nate’s area. Being the only one of the team besides Julia that had no prior military experience, his area was festooned with things that the others had brought him to “help” him.

  A diagram of the nomenclature for an M4 rifle had been erected on the wall because Nate had once failed to identify the gas key. Except that all the names for the rifle’s parts had been crossed out and replaced with “NATEnclature”: The muzzle was labeled, “BOOMY END”; the magazine was labeled, “INFINITY BOOLITS”; the buttstock was labeled, “SHOULDER KICKY THINGY”; etc., etc.

  On the wall over Nate’s gear trunk was tacked a plastic baggie filled with little paper squares that Tomlin and Abe had lovingly cut out. It was labeled, “grid squares.” He had fallen for the old “Get the keys to the Humvee” trick, but had realized he was being fucked with when they’d asked for him to find them some chemlight batteries.

  Nate took it in stride, with a laugh and a roll of his eyes. Despite all the picking on him, he’d become a good operator. The rest of the team liked and trusted him. His operational experience in the world after the collapse of society was all the resumé that he needed.

  Tomlin’s place was directly across from Nate’s, and was by far the messiest area of the room. Tomlin insisted that it was “organized chaos,” and that he knew where everything was.

  Lee had put a perimeter of duct tape on the floor around Tomlin’s section to mark his “boundaries,” and if ever an item attempted to cross Lee’s perimeter, he gave it a swift kick back across the border. It didn’t help that Abe, Nate, and Julia routinely tossed random items into Tomlin’s area—a street sign, an old baby doll, bits of trash, and, most famously, a large, purple, two-sided dildo.

  The dildo now sat in a biohazard bag atop Tomlin’s locker, a permanent part of the décor.

  The wall adjacent to Tomlin’s gear locker held a large paper sign, on which was inscribed in bold block letters, one of Lee’s favorite exclamations upon walking into The Cave and seeing Tomlin’s area: JESUS CHRIST, BRIAN! POLICE YOUR SHIT! Abe and Nate had erected the sign so that, if Lee was ever not present, Tomlin would still be reminded to police his shit.