Harden

by D. J. Molles

  If anyone asked him how he fed Deuce, Lee planned to tell them that Deuce ate from Lee’s own rations. Which wasn’t entirely a lie. Lee also portioned off small amounts of his own rations, which he then let dry out in the sun and then stored them in a nylon bag.

  He carried this with him to feed Deuce during longer missions. It was easier than carrying around raw animal parts. Also, a less attractive scent for the primals.

  It’d been a while since they’d been on a multi-day mission, so Lee had a decent-sized bag of his home-dried, this-and-that dog food stored up.

  Which was good. Because they were going to need it.

  Lee scooped out a mound of the ground mystery meat with a cold metal spoon that stayed with the bucket in the mini-fridge. He plopped it down into Deuce’s bowl, and at the same time admonished the dog, “Sit. Wait.”

  He tapped the spoon off. Stuck it back in the bucket. Stuck the bucket back in the fridge.

  Deuce hovered over the bowl, as still as a statue.

  “Deuce,” Lee said.

  The dog’s ears twitched. But he remained transfixed with the gunk in his bowl.

  “Deuce.”

  Finally, the dog looked up at him. Held eye contact.

  That’s what Lee wanted. Deuce needed to learn to take his instructions always from Lee. The dog was continuing to learn, and Lee was continuing to teach him. But they had a good partnership.

  “Eat,” Lee said.

  Deuce attacked his bowl with reckless abandon.

  Lee sat himself on the edge of his bed, and smiled at Deuce. And for the first time that day, he didn’t have to force it. The smile came out, genuine and unstrained.

  It felt good that this animal didn’t think Lee was a psychotic killer. It felt good that this animal appreciated what Lee had brought him.

  Deuce knew what survival was about.

  Deuce was a kindred spirit.

  But more than that, it simply felt good to bring life to something.

  As Deuce ate, which never took long, Lee pulled off his hoodie and slung it to the foot of his bed. Then took off the Glock and set it next to him.

  He stared at it for a few moments, sitting there next to him. The black, polymer handle. The dim sheen of the dark metal slide.

  The simple practicality of it…

  Lately, an image had begun coursing its way through his brain, and when that image came to him, he felt the click of the trigger in his right index finger, and he visualized the striker pin hitting the primer, the primer lighting the propellant, the gases expanding, shooting that bullet out, and that bullet flattening as it met his own skull, pulverizing his brain matter, and then…

  Lights out.

  Release.

  The image didn’t frighten him.

  Nor did he crave it.

  It just sort of…came to him sometimes.

  In fact it was looping through his head right at that moment.

  He didn’t think he would ever do it. But he had to admit, if only to himself, that what he felt most strongly when he imagined that bullet snuffing the life out of him, was relief.

  Then again, when he thought about somebody else trying to put a bullet in him, he got angry. So he figured that meant he still had some fight left in him.

  He pulled his eyes off the pistol. Reached over to the nightstand. Took a black composition notebook from it.

  He opened it to the first page. His own handwriting filled the spaces.

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

  But I have promises to keep.

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  His handwriting, perhaps. But not his words. They were the last lines from a poem by Robert Frost called Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening. And, frankly, the only words from the poem that he could remember.

  He had transcribed them into his notebook because they gave him a measure of comfort.

  They served as a reminder to him. And he felt that he needed that reminder now.

  He looked up, and found Deuce watching him, as though he knew his master’s mind.

  Lee smiled at his dog again.

  But I have promises to keep.

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  He took a heavy breath and flipped the notebook to one of the middle pages. The last page that contained any writing.

  Lee didn’t write in a consistent hand, he’d found. Sometimes his writing tilted to the left. Sometimes to the right. Sometimes it was neat. Sometimes hasty and nearly illegible.

  In a rare display of humanity, Carl had given Lee the notebook a few months ago.

  “You should write stuff down,” Carl had said, in his typical aloof manner.

  Lee had frowned at the notebook. “What kind of stuff?”

  “Your thoughts. Drawings. Whatever’s on your mind.” He’d sniffed, as though not wanting to get too personal, God forbid it. He concluded with, “It helps.”

  So Lee had started writing down…whatever was on his mind.

  Most days he didn’t write. But somedays he did.

  He didn’t bother dating any of the entries. That made it feel too much like a diary. He just separated the entries with a line in between them.

  An entry from several weeks ago read, Wonder what I would’ve done if I hadn’t signed up for Proj. Hometown. If I’d just taken my fucking dd214 and gotten the fuck out. Would I be dead now? Would I have survived? I think I would have. Maybe would’ve ended up in Fort Bragg anyways. Maybe would’ve ended up doing the same shit. Who knows right? Maybe this is my fucking destiny. Maybe I couldn’t have avoided it if I’d tried.

  The next entry after that was, This is fuckin dumb. I got nothing to say.

  There were several entries like that. Except that he never did throw the book away.

  Maybe Carl was right. Maybe it did help.

  Today, he’d thought a lot about wires, and boundaries, and barriers, and the fact that they were all clustered here in this little military installation in the middle of a world that wanted to wipe them out. They were an enclave. An island. Everything beyond their electrified fences was hostile.

  And now it seemed that even some of the things inside the fences were hostile, too.

  He wrote a single sentence that day, as the world outside dipped into darkness.

  We are born surrounded, and spend our life fighting to the death.

  That was the last entry he wrote.

  He slept that night with the Glock underneath his pillow.

  BACK IN THE PRESENT

  TEN

  ─▬▬▬─

  HURTSBORO

  Julia and Abe were holed up in the small house in the northeastern corner of Hurtsboro with Lee’s unconscious body.

  Nate was dead.

  Tomlin and Carl were captured.

  Over the course of the last three days of hiding out in the basement of that little house, Julia had managed to sneak out to where they’d abandoned their pickup trucks. The first day, she just watched for hostile movement. The second day, she recovered one of the trucks.

  The other had four flats and a shot-up radiator.

  She scavenged as much gear as she could, and packed it back to their little hideout.

  She found it odd that whoever had ambushed them had not looted the pickups.

  If not to rob them, then why the hell had they ambushed them in the first place?

  In the basement of the split-level house, Lee lay on the lumpy mattress of a pullout couch, his chest rising and falling. But he still hadn’t woken up.

  Deuce lay alongside his right leg. They’d lost the dog during the ambush. But he’d found them on his own. Sniffed his master out in the basement of that little house. Since being reunited with Lee, he’d refused to leave his side.

  Julia and Abe sat on the floor. Abe had his leg propped up on a cushion borrowed from the pullout couch. His leg was bandaged at the calf. His pants cut away at the knee. He kept his boot on. He’d been shot thro
ugh the calf, but it was muscle only, and he could move if he needed to.

  As Julia unpacked an MRE, her gaze went from Lee’s body to the small basement windows. Through the overgrown natural area that the windows peered out from, she could see that the light was fading from the sky.

  The basement was sinking into darkness.

  “I’m going out again tonight,” she said.

  Abe tore open his own MRE. He gave her a sidelong glance. Then nodded. “You want me to come with?”

  She shook her head, dumped the contents of her MRE out. Located the entrée box and peered at it in the gloom. Chicken and rice. She was okay with that. “No, I want you resting.”

  “I’m fucking rested. What I want is to hurt somebody.”

  “Yeah, me too. But I’m just trying to put eyes on. You know I won’t make a move without you.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She located the side dish. Found it to be jalapeño cheese. She didn’t care for that. She passed it to Abe. He passed her his Skittles. No negotiation necessary. This was standard operating procedure.

  “You goin’ back to the airfield?” Abe asked, then started shoveling his own cold entrée into his mouth.

  “That’s my best guess.” She took a few bites of chicken and rice. Swallowed. “Somebody was out there.”

  At first, Julia had figured that Carl and Tomlin were dead. She’d gone back to the apartment complex when she’d felt it was safe, and gone into the apartment where Carl and Tomlin had held a base of fire to try and let the rest of them escape.

  The evidence of the gunfight was there.

  But…

  No bodies.

  And no blood either.

  Which meant that Carl and Tomlin hadn’t died.

  The next, most logical possibility to Julia, was that they’d been captured.

  Julia had spent the previous night searching the surrounding area outside of Hurtsboro for signs of habitation, figuring that whoever mounted the ambush might have a base nearby. She was looking for light and listening for sound, but what she got instead was the smell of cigarette smoke.

  She’d been out near a small, local airfield. Maybe a mile outside of Hurtsboro proper. Airfields were popular for squatters. They had fences, which meant you were at least slightly insulated from the primals.

  It was a good bet that the cigarette smoke was coming from someone at that airfield. And it was also a pretty good bet that it was the people that had ambushed them.

  If she found them, she might find Tomlin and Carl.

  Julia felt her throat thicken. Tighten.

  She stared at the dim contents of the foil pack in her hands.

  If they’re still alive.

  Abe watched her for a moment. Seemed to read her thoughts. “There’s no reason for them to capture Tomlin and Carl and then kill them. They coulda killed them when they ran out of ammo, and they chose to take them alive.”

  Julia didn’t respond. She was thinking, Take them alive so that they could hang their heads from trees, or their bodies from power poles, like the fucking Followers did?

  But she didn’t want to give voice to that.

  The truth was, the act of the cold clinician that she put on was just a façade. It was her armor. Her protection against the terrible truth that…she had very little left.

  The unconscious man on the bed, and the one sitting next to her sharing a shitty meal—they were all that was left in her world.

  Over time, Julia’s “interest” in combat medicine had become an obsession. It began with the fact that Lee wanted her to be the medic for his team. And it progressed further and further, as she began to view each member of the team as a member of her family.

  She tried to distance herself from it, but it was too difficult. The demands of the constant operations had whittled her down to nearly nothing. It had carved her down to one ultimate goal: keep them alive.

  Part of it was because she was actually good at medicine. But the darker part of it was that she did not think she stacked up to some of the other operators on Lee’s team. She felt the desperate need to become irreplaceable in the one area where she excelled.

  That’s all you gotta do, she would tell herself, to focus through the fear that stalked her nearly every waking minute, and sometimes into her sleep as well. You just gotta keep them alive. You just gotta keep their hearts beating.

  Up until four nights ago, she’d been able to do that.

  Then she’d lost Nate.

  And she might lose Lee.

  And Tomlin and Carl were captured.

  The very foundation of who Julia was as a person had been so utterly shaken that for the last few days she’d often felt like her legs might just give out on her. Simply crumble to dust underneath her, and her chest would cave in like a heavy stone arch that’s lost its keystone.

  The only thing that kept her moving, the only thing that kept her holding on, was Lee on that sofa bed, and finding Tomlin and Carl. Because as long as Lee was breathing, then she still had a purpose. And as long as she didn’t find Tomlin and Carl’s bodies, then they were still alive in her mind—which meant she could still save them.

  The blow of Nate’s death felt like ruination in a part of her that she could never hope to rebuild. But as long as there were lives that were counting on her, then she had a reason to press on.

  “You sure you don’t want me to come along?” Abe asked.

  Abe was the one that wanted to come along. He was going stir crazy in that basement all day.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’m just reconning, and you’re gonna slow me down.” She glanced at him, like she was gauging how deeply her words might’ve cut. “No offense.”

  Abe seemed hurt, but he said, “None taken.”

  What Julia was really thinking was I can’t lose you too, Abe. I can’t do it again.

  What she said was, “Besides, if the primals show up again, you won’t be able to run fast enough.”

  Abe gave a single nod as he chewed, recognizing the unpleasant truth.

  “How is it feeling?” She asked around a mouthful, nodding towards his wounded leg.

  “Fine,” Abe replied.

  Which was probably bullshit. He’d said it was fine ten minutes after being shot, too.

  That was another thing that made her job difficult: none of the hardasses on her team would ever admit to being in pain. They ignored hurts, which sometimes turned them into injuries that could’ve been avoided.

  Julia cradled the contents of her MRE in her lap and leaned carefully forward towards his leg and gave the bandage a sniff. Then she leaned back. “Well. It’s not gangrenous. So that’s good.”

  “Super,” Abe mumbled.

  They ate the rest of their meal in silence.

  She washed it down with some water from her Camelbak. They kept 8-gallon water jugs in the beds of the pickup trucks. Four jugs per pickup. Only two of the jugs had managed to make it through the firefight unscathed. But it was enough to see them through.

  Julia rose from the floor and pulled her armor back over her head again, tightening the straps down. The inside of the plate carrier was still moist from the day’s sweat.

  She checked her gear with a few pats of her hand. Then stooped and took up her rifle.

  She nodded at Abe. “Needa shit?”

  Abe shook his head. “Nah. You?”

  They didn’t stand over each other while they did their business or anything like that, but it was nice to have someone with a rifle close by when you were in a compromised position.

  “I’ll be fine for now.” Julia pulled the strap of her rifle over her head. “Alright. I’ll be back in a while. Three shots if I need you.”

  “I’ll keep an ear out.”

  Yesterday, the batteries on their radios had died. They’d plugged them into the little solar recharger that they carried and stationed it on the south-facing side of the house, but, of course, it had been cloudy all day, so they were still without comms.

&nb
sp; As she reached the door, she heard a groan behind her.

  Her heart leapt up into her throat. She turned and looked at Lee.

  On the pullout couch, Lee’s head bobbed back and forth, and his eyes flickered open for a second, and Julia thought that maybe he was going to speak to them, but then they closed again. His leg kicked once, and he was still.

  Chest rising and falling, evenly.

  Deuce had perked up and was looking back at his master, expectantly. After a moment, he laid his head back down, disappointed.

  Abe and Julia watched Lee for almost a full minute.

  He didn’t move again, or make another sound.

  Abe looked back at her. “I can take care of him,” he said. “Go find our guys.”

  ***

  It was fully dark by the time Julia made it to the other end of the town.

  She could no longer distinguish between the sky and the trees. The temperature had dropped. Downright chilly when the wind blew. A few stars had shown up. But no moon yet.

  She slipped between buildings and stopped often to watch and listen.

  She did not like the darkness, but it would hide her. And she needed to be hidden.

  They’d come to learn that the primals preferred to nest in pre-existing structures. And why shouldn’t they? Why would they dig a den out of the dirt when they could easily live in the convenient shelter of one of these abandoned buildings?

  Julia wondered if it was some passing instinct from their time as normal humans that made them seek out these manmade shelters. Something that whispered to them of home and civilization and things that they could no longer feel, like love, and comfort.

  The thought always made Julia melancholy. But she brushed it away.

  They hadn’t seen any primals since the night of the ambush, but that didn’t mean much.

  The best bet was to be quiet, listen carefully, and trust your gut if it told you something was wrong.

  Julia squatted on her haunches by a dumpster on the side of a Dollar General building. She peered down the road where the blackness of night had swallowed everything up.