Lee Harden Series (Book 3): Primal [The Remaining Universe]

by Molles, D. J.

  A steady trickle of fluid. Vapors causing the air beneath the truck to ripple and roil as though they were a heat mirage.

  A tiny tongue of flame flicked out from under the hood, sucking at oxygen.

  Somewhere far behind him, perhaps from another world, Lee heard someone call his name. But he was not that anymore. He was Nobody.

  His pounding feet began to slacken, his pace less rushed.

  No one was shooting. Mateo Ibarra was still alive, and he raised his head, and moved his arms, and maybe said something, but Lee could not hear him, because the passenger’s window was closed and had somehow not been shot to pieces.

  Gray smoke began to fill the truck’s cab.

  Mateo’s movements went from bleary to urgent, in a snap.

  The flames from under the hood grew more dominant.

  Lee slowed to a jog, and then a walk.

  He could hear Mateo now. He could hear him speaking in Spanish. He did not understand all the words, but he heard that many of them were directed at God. But Mateo did not know what Lee knew. That whoever pulled the strings of the universe had allowed Lee to live, and the only reason that Lee was alive was to kill.

  Lee had struck a deal.

  And Mateo was a part of that deal.

  And so Mateo might not know it, but his prayers fell on deaf ears.

  Lee stopped, about three paces away from the vehicle.

  Mateo had found the door latch and was yanking at it, but the cab had crumpled when it hit the pylon, and the door was stuck. Smoke filled the space inside, and Mateo began to gag and choke. He pounded at the glass, and his eyes fell on Lee, only paces away.

  Lee stared at him, and in his eyes was nothing, and Mateo saw it.

  Mateo Ibarra. His eyes wide, streaked with tears born of choking air. A gash in his forehead, dribbling blood down the side of his face. His black hair stuck to it. His teeth flashed as he screamed at Lee—perhaps to curse him, perhaps to beg mercy.

  Lee stepped forward and raised the rifle in his hands.

  Mateo stared at the muzzle.

  Lee slammed the barrel into the corner of the window, shattering it.

  Smoke billowed out.

  Mateo thrust his head out and gulped clean air, gasping and coughing.

  Smoke inhalation could make someone pass out.

  Lee wanted Mateo to be conscious for a little while longer.

  Mateo got control of his lungs and blinked at Lee. Then he reached out a hand. “Pull me out!” he demanded.

  Lee gave no response. He stepped back.

  Under the car, a terrible orange glow suddenly brightened. Lee heard it, like the sigh of a great beast unleashed. And he stepped back further.

  When the car went up, it was not dramatic. The gas tank didn’t explode. It simply flared, and the flames grew bright and hot, and angry.

  Mateo began to thrash. He tried to pull himself out of the window, but he was stuck somehow. Probably his legs. Pinned under the dashboard.

  “Get me out of here you sonofabitch!” Mateo screamed, tearing at his legs like a coyote trying to free itself from a trap.

  Lee squinted against the heat pouring from the truck. Even several paces away, it made his skin feel puckered and tight.

  Mateo gnashed at the air. His eyes wild. “Is this what you want?” his voice shook with an attempt to be calm through what must have been terrible pain. “You want to see me burn alive, you sonofabitch? You want to watch? You want to listen to me scream?”

  And then he screamed.

  At first, he screamed in defiance.

  But then the expression of his face changed. All worldly matters ceased to exist, and there was only the desire to escape the all-encompassing agony that swirled around his feet, growing up his body, engulfing the cab.

  His face, and his screams, became desperate.

  High pitched.

  Mateo Ibarra shrieked.

  And in another life, another time, Lee might’ve had mercy. But the very man that wanted his mercy so bad at that moment, was the same man that had surgically removed that part of Lee’s soul when he’d taken everything from him.

  And so Lee watched, and he felt nothing.

  He watched it like a tired man watches a sunset, knowing night and rest will follow soon.

  The heat was almost too much to bear, but Lee did. He bore witness, and he didn’t look away.

  Mateo found words. They were filled with invocations and invectives, and in the end, they begged. They begged for death. They begged for a bullet.

  Lee did not know if Mateo could see him through the melting skin that was sloughing off his face, but he flipped the safety on his rifle, and he let it hang. He did not raise his hands, but he simply held them at his sides, and he turned his palms out towards Mateo, as though he were bathing, either in the heat, or the screams.

  Somewhere in there, a gulp of air seared Mateo’s throat shut, and he screamed no more.

  Blackened nubs of fingers gripped the sizzling sheet metal of the door, but the muscles that made those arms and fingers operate had been cooked away. Mateo’s body thrust itself back into its chair in a final spasm. And for a moment, the only thing left on Mateo’s body that still moved was his jaw, the flesh bubbling off of it, splitting, oozing, and the fat catching fire, but the jaw still working, like he was biting at the air.

  And then that stopped too.

  Lee stood there for a while longer.

  Until the flames danced in his eyes.

  Until all that was left was blackened bones.

  And then Lee finally stepped back, to stand at the edge of the firelight, where the heat would not singe him, while the darkness gathered at his back, and he heard the calls of Marines, one to the other, like coyotes in the night, and the rumble of their trucks, and sometimes their headlights would splash over Lee, but the glow of the fire was brighter.

  Lee felt that he’d been burned away too. That certain tethers had been immolated, and that what was left behind was something raw and pink—something that had lain under the surface of hard-bought calluses.

  He thought back to another fire, another glowing circle.

  It was the last night they would all be alive and in one place together.

  Lee, Julia, Abe, Nate, and Tomlin, in a circle.

  They’d all left that fire. And they’d never again been whole.

  And between that fire, and this one, something had happened to them all. And the thing that had happened to them was a man, whose bones were now charring to ash. And without him, it was almost as though the past months had been burned away too—that the timeline they’d sat on had disintegrated, and if Lee looked to his right or his left, he would see their faces again, smiling at him over the fire, laughing around a jar of moonshine.

  He did not look. But if he had, he would have seen one of them.

  He would have seen Abe.

  Not No One. Not Nadie.

  Abe Darabie. Who stared, not at the fire, but at Lee.

  The darkness had long-since deepened to black when they both turned away from the faltering fire that still smoked and guttered in the shell of a vehicle with nothing inside of it at all, and the only clue that there might’ve once been something being an oily pile of ash that gusts of wind coming in off the coast would stir and scatter.

  The Marine trucks had positioned themselves around the refinery. More Marines had shown up, these ones in troop carriers. Brinly had command. He had control. Occasional bursts of gunfire told that the Marines were still clearing the refinery.

  Lee and Abe walked without words, down the cracked and potted pavement, towards the ruined Blackhawk.

  They passed, to the right, the wreckage of one of the Apache helicopters. The one that had taken the crossfire from several M2’s at once.

  The cockpit hadn’t held together on impact. The pilots lay in several pieces.

  They continued on.

  In the distance, to their left, Lee saw the glimmer of low flames. He could just make
out the shape of the helicopter lying in the dirt, like a felled beast, about two hundred yards away. That would be the one that he engaged with the M240.

  He wondered if either of the pilots had made it out.

  Probably not.

  And even if they did, there was a lot of unfriendly territory between them and Greeley Colorado.

  If they’d survived at all, they’d had about the same chance of survival that Lee had allowed others.

  The same chance they’d given Julia.

  Lastly they arrived at the damaged Blackhawk, and they stood on either side of the body of Mr. Daniels, where it lay, spread eagle in the dirt, facing the sky with eyes like dusty marbles. In the harsh glow of Abe’s weaponlight, Mr. Daniels’s skin was stark white.

  They looked at him for a while.

  “That’s all of them, I think,” Abe said. He glanced up at Lee.

  Lee nodded. Didn’t say what he was thinking.

  For now.

  A flicker of lights came from where the long, flat road disappeared into the distant tree line. The noise of approaching engines became evident.

  Lee raised his rifle, suddenly exhausted. “Daniels said he had Cornerstone on the way.”

  The headlights flickered.

  Abe stared at them. “Hang on.”

  The lights flashed. The high beams strobing a couple times.

  “Hold your fire,” Abe grunted. “That’s Breck and Menendez.”

  Lee slowly let the muzzle of the SCAR-16 sink back towards the ground. “How are they here?” he looked crosswise at Abe. “How are you here?”

  Abe’s thick, black beard twitched, and it might’ve been a grim smile under there. “You’re welcome, by the way. For taking out the two guards.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  Abe took a breath, as the headlights continued to approach. “I met Brinly’s convoy when I was almost back to Butler. They’d just been deployed to see what was going on. I started trying to get in contact with you to let you know I was coming back with some Marines. Eventually I got into contact with Menendez and Breckenridge. They told me what you’d done. They told me what the message from Mr. Daniels said. On a hunch, I had them access the location of Tex’s GPS device from their bunker control room. Sure enough, it was at Triprock. We tried to make it there. Almost did, but then the location moved to here. Man…” Abe shook his head. “We had to haul ass, Lee. Almost didn’t make it.”

  “Well. You did.”

  “Yeah. We made it.”

  Lee nodded and sighed. “We made it.”

  He could see the vehicles now. It was Menendez’s ratty squad, and the technical that Lee’d left behind outside the bunker. In it was stuffed every man that wasn’t too banged up to fire a rifle, and a few that looked to be right on the edge.

  One in particular, Lee noticed. In the bed of the truck that came to a halt last in the convoy. A soldier with white bandages around his head—bloody where an ear should have been. And a dog that looked more like a coyote, standing beside him, looking at Lee with his ears perked.

  Deuce leapt out of the back of the truck before it stopped moving. He hit the ground running, like a tan bolt of lightning. All Lee could do was lean back, until his knees touched the deck of the Blackhawk behind him, and then he sat, feeling the ashes of something old and used up fly away from him.

  Deuce took a running jump and scrabbled across the metal deck of the Blackhawk, and then planted himself against Lee’s chest, and Lee put his arm around the dog. Deuce gave him one solid lick across the side of his neck—a rare display of affection—and then sat, very close to Lee, and looked out at the bodies, as though he were curious how they got there.

  Lee held onto him. He held on.

  He didn’t say a word as Breckenridge and Menendez both trotted up and saw who it was that lay at the nose of the Blackhawk, half his face gone. They looked up at Lee, like they didn’t believe it could really be Tex lying there on the ground. Or maybe they couldn’t believe it was Tex, and not Lee.

  Eventually, they picked him up, as though they couldn’t bear to see him lying there with the bodies of his enemies. Menendez, Breckenridge, and a few of their soldiers—all men that had served together and worked under Tex—they bore him up, and took him to the back of their truck, and they laid him there with a solemn silence that made it easy to picture him ensconced in a flag-draped coffin.

  A voice reached Lee’s ears. It was Brinly’s, and he was talking to somebody.

  Talking at them.

  Or…

  Lee turned and looked.

  Through the wreckage of the Blackhawk, he saw Brinly stalking towards them with two of his Marines in tow, all of them backlit by the dwindling vehicle fire, and the headlights of the MATVs and Humvees splashing across the refinery structures. But Brinly wasn’t speaking to his Marines.

  He had his hand up to his head. A satphone to his ear.

  “…secured the refinery. Yes. That’s correct…That, I’m not sure about, but whatever we can pump out of this place, you can be sure we’ll be sending back your way. And based on preliminary reports, I think it might be a good amount.”

  Brinly’s eyes flicked to Lee’s, a small communication taking place in that look, and then he angled around the front of the bird, and stopped in front of Lee. Still listening.

  Then, “Yes, Madam President. Actually, I’m looking at him right now. And he is in one piece. Shockingly enough.” Another long pause. A faint twist in the thin line of his lips. “Of course. Standby.”

  Then he held the phone out to Lee.

  “For you, Captain Harden.”

  Lee took the phone. Carefully. Like it was made of glass instead of hardened polymers.

  He wondered where the fear had gone. He should be hoping for another interruption in the satellite connection. He should be hoping for…anything. Anything that would end, or even postpone, speaking to the person on the other end of the line.

  But he didn’t feel that.

  He glanced up at Brinly, still holding the satphone out in front of him, and he said, “Daniels mentioned Cornerstone troops on their way here. He didn’t specify when. We should get in. Batten down the hatches…”

  Lee felt a hand on his shoulder.

  Abe gave him a nod. “I’ll handle it.”

  And then there was nothing else to say or do.

  It was just Lee, and his dog, and a phone in his hand, connected to a person who, on the other side of the country, was somehow still indelibly etched in a part of Lee that he’d long pushed under. But perhaps the layers of himself that had grown over that part of him in the intervening years…

  Well, perhaps those were the layers that had burned up with Mateo Ibarra.

  He put the phone to his ear.

  Heard a breath on the other end.

  Closed his eyes.

  “I’m here, Angela.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  ─▬▬▬─

  RUN

  After nearly twenty minutes, Angela pulled the satphone away from her ear.

  All around her, the streets of the Butler Safe Zone were dark, save for the few street lamps allowed to burn at strategic places. In the distance, the windows of several residences glowed.

  Her ear was hot. The satphone was warm—the battery almost drained now. She would have to plug it in to recharge.

  Not all those twenty minutes had been spent speaking to Lee. She’d also spoken to Major Brinly, and Abe Darabie, and a man introduced as Sergeant Menendez, and another introduced as Breckenridge.

  Things were moving. Things were coming together.

  For the first time in a very, very long time, Angela felt a long-forgotten sensation, that might have been a line to a single buoy of hope, wrapped around her ever-sinking stomach, pulling her back up.

  And for the first time in a long time, she’d heard Lee’s voice.

  Not just a voice that came out of a man named Lee.

  But she’d heard Lee. The voice of the man she’d known
when it was just her, and her daughter, and an orphaned kid named Sam, and a ragtag group of survivors living in a place they called Camp Ryder.

  For the first time in a long time, when she’d spoken to Lee, she’d recognized who she was speaking to.

  She turned around and faced the Sheriff’s Department building. Inside, the lights were on. Inside, there were people moving about, soldiers bustling, officers huddling. Carl Gilliard. Hamrick. Doc Trent. Even Ed himself.

  And, inside one of the interrogation rooms, a man with a Canadian flag patch on his shoulder, who had introduced himself as Captain Maclean Marlin, and told her he was here to “appraise the benefits of an alliance with the United Eastern States.”

  Well. She thought that Captain Marlin might want to know that UES forces had just taken control of a fully operational crude oil refinery on the Gulf of Mexico.

  She walked towards the doors of the Sheriff’s Office, an unfamiliar sensation spreading across her face.

  It was a smile.

  It was a possibility.

  ***

  Lee looked out at the black waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Behind him, the refinery chugged out its product, but Lee couldn’t smell it now, with his face in the wind. All he smelled was salt. And tidewaters changing.

  Beside him, Deuce sat. He was still, for once in his life.

  You’d run until you couldn’t run anymore. And we never did find out where you were trying to get to. Hell, I don’t think you ever reached it.

  Lee wasn’t sure what it was that he’d been running for. It was hard to keep track, when so many things that he’d found had been taken from him.

  The people he knew.

  Good friends.

  Lovers.

  Julia.

  Maybe even himself.

  He looked south, to where the beach stretched out towards Mexico, and then north, towards a country torn in two, and he couldn’t tell the difference. In this place, there was only the constant force of the waves, and all other things knelt to it, and it was the only thing that ever lasted.

  The long sands stretched out to either side, and they didn’t look much different.

  But they felt different.

  So he turned himself toward home, and he ran, and Deuce ran with him.