by D. J. Molles
Walter burned, but clenched his jaw and no words got out.
Roy propped a hand up on his knee. “You think I don’t know that you just met these people yesterday? And yet you point a rifle in my face to save one of them.” Roy looked genuinely troubled by that. “We had enemy fast movers inbound on us. If we’da tried to pick your person up, we would’ve all been blown out of the sky.” He sniffed and looked away. “You forced my hand.”
Walter frowned at him. “Why were you even there? I don’t understand.”
Something flickered around behind Roy’s eyes. “We were on our way to try and extract a different group of fighters.” He paused there for a long moment, and the anger in his eyes melted into something like sadness. “But we lost them before we could get there. Good people. Friends of mine.” He gave Walter a pointed look. “Friends that I’ve known for some time.”
Walter felt his own brandished anger wavering as he saw that hollow sense of loss in his brother’s eyes. He still knew very little and understood less about his brother’s story, but he knew that look. He had lived that look oh-so-recently, and it stung him like a fresh cut.
Roy cracked his knuckles hastily. A habit that Walter didn’t recognize. Perhaps a nervous twitch he’d developed after a decade in DTI. “We couldn’t save them. But you broadcast at just the right moment, right before we were about to kick dust. And we were able to save you. And your two…friends.” A sneer twitched at Roy’s mouth. “I’m sorry we couldn’t save the other, but we ran out of time. We did what we could do.”
“Where are they?” Walter asked.
“They’re safe,” Roy said. “They’re in other rooms, just like this one. You’ll see them soon.”
“Where are we?” Walter said, casting another glance around him, trying to level his breathing out, trying to disguise the unease and the fear.
Roy considered the question with his mouth open, then shook his head. “No, I can’t tell you that. Not yet.”
“Roy…”
“You’re safe,” Roy said, for the umpteenth time, and this time was no more convincing to Walter than any of the other times. “Relatively, anyways. I will tell you this—we are bunking with a lot of Fed troops. So don’t be shocked when you see them.”
Walter swallowed and realized that his throat was dry, his tongue was pasty, and his lips were like paper. He tried to work some moisture into his mouth. “Defected?”
Roy nodded. “As of yesterday. Do you want some water?”
“Yes,” Walter said, trying not to sound desperate for it.
Roy pointed to the ground next to Walter’s bed, just to his right.
Walter leaned over and looked and found a white plastic tray sitting there with two bottles of water, a few boxes of juice, and some fruit-cups. Quick and easy calories.
He bent down, grabbed a bottle of water, opened it, and took a light sip.
The water wasn’t cold, but it was cool.
It was glorious.
He drank another sip, thinking of not overloading his stomach so soon.
He was hungry though. And when he capped the water, he looked down at the fruit-cups.
“Drink up first,” Roy said. “If you keep the water down fine, then eat. How’s your face feeling?”
Walter reached up to the left side of his face.
Just before his finger’s touched, he recalled in harsh detail, the sound of Rat’s rocket launcher going off, spewing hot gasses into the side of his face and knocking him back into the door frame. Remembering this, his fingers hesitated before they touched his own skin, and when they did touch it, they did so lightly.
It surprised him that he felt no pain.
Quite the opposite, actually.
The left side of his face felt numb. Almost like he was touching someone else’s face. It felt a little greasy. A little puffy. He couldn’t feel any of the beard stubble that had begun to prickle the other side of his face.
“How’s it look?” Walter ventured.
Roy’s eyes traced it over without much concern, and then he shrugged. “The NeoSkin is still melding. You don’t look like a monster or anything. But you can tell something got you. And I don’t think you’ll be growing a beard anytime soon.”
Walter nodded soberly, withdrew his fingers from his face.
His brain reasserted itself to the situation at hand.
The hurricane of questions still blew madly in Walter’s mind but he was finding a bit of a groove now, snatching some pertinent ones out of the air. It was causing things to be more linear. It was abating the confusion.
Every question answered took a little more of the darkness away, shed a little more light, made him feel a little less lost.
“What happened to you?” Walter suddenly choked out. “Where’d you go?”
“Where did I go?”
“They took you.”
Roy smiled unpleasantly. “They did. They took me to DTI.”
“How long…?”
Roy watched his little brother, nodded slightly as he saw the connections being made. “Do you know who the Eudys are, Walter?”
Extremists, fucking extremists.
“Yes. Kind of.”
Carolyn’s parents.
Fucking extremists.
Roy leaned forward, hunched onto his elbows. “The Eudys and I were housed in the same block of Sweetwater DTI. It’s some God-forsaken place in the middle of Wyoming. Even if you found a way out, you’d just be stuck in the Rockies. You wouldn’t get far.” The smile still hung on his face, almost a rictus now.
“But you did get out.”
“We were busted out,” Roy said, quietly. “Or the Eudys were. And I managed to hitch a ride along with them.”
Walter eyed his brother carefully. “How’d you manage that?”
“I slit the throat of a guard that was about to shoot them during the escape. Then I took his weapon. Then I invited myself along. Maybe they would have invited me along anyways. I like to think that they would have. We’d not talked much—they don’t allow much talking in DTI—but I felt that we were good friends after ten years of being in that place together. Can you make friends with someone you barely speak to? It’s possible. It’s surprising how much you can communicate in looks. Ha.” Roy’s smile became marginally more genuine. “Just like you, Walter. Like your special skill.”
Walter nodded, slowly.
More dots connected.
More light shined into dark, obscured places.
“When did all of this happen?” Walter asked.
“Two months,” Roy said. “Closer to three now.”
“And are you still with them?”
Roy nodded. “I am. We all are.”
Extremists.
“Why would someone call them extremists?”
A twitch of Roy’s eyebrows. “Who said that? A Fed?”
Virgil, your old best friend.
Do you know he’s dead now, Roy?
“Nobody you know.” Walter said.
Roy thought for a second, then gave a half-lidded look as if to say tom-AY-toe, tom-AH-toe. “I suppose that some folks view them as extremists. I suppose that to some people their methods, back before they were captured, seemed to be extreme. They didn’t differentiate between Fed and CoAx troops, like everyone else did at the time. But who turned out to be right on that one? And some of their attacks took civilian casualties. But how many more has the CoAx taken?”
Roy leaned back in his chair. His feet fidgeted underneath him, then lay still. “It’s war, Walter. The best thing you can do is fight tooth and nail, kill everything that might help your cause to kill, and get it done quickly. That’s what the resistance has been missing.” His eyes thrilled with a devilish light. “For ten fucking years, they’ve been missing that. But they’ve got it back. They’ve got it back, and we have a chance. We’re gonna fight dirty. We’re gonna fight however we can. And we have a chance now, Walter. A chance against the New Breeds…” he trailed off, as though re
alizing he was treading into something he should keep silent about.
“The Eudys,” Walter said. “They’re the ones that’ve been kidnapping the New Breeds.”
Roy looked back, and he didn’t answer in the affirmative or negative, but all the same, Walter saw that he’d struck upon the truth.
“Why?” Walter asked, echoing the thoughts of his dream. “Why are they doing it?”
Roy shook his head. “Can’t tell you about that. Not yet.”
Walter sat up fully in his bed now. Enough light. Enough peripheral questions.
He swung his legs out of his bed and touched them to the floor. It was a steel floor. It had the feeling of something temporary. Maybe it was. Maybe this whole place was temporary, ready to pack up and move on at a moment’s notice. Walter wasn’t sure how defected troops were keeping themselves hidden from the rest of the Fed military and the CoAx. But that wasn’t the thing that he wanted to ask.
His question, the most important question.
His thought, the most important thought.
He cleared around it, like exposing a fossil and brushing away all the dirt around it.
“The Eudys,” Walter said again, thickly. “They’re Carolyn’s parents.”
Roy watched his brother. Then nodded marginally. “Yes. They are. I didn’t know about that until—”
Walter’s heart surged in his chest for a reason he couldn’t define. He squared his body at Roy, almost like he was about to launch himself at his brother, but the look on his face was one of desperation, of pleading.
“Are they gonna find her? Are they gonna find where they took her? Are they going to break her out?” Walter could feel the heat rising through his bones. “They have to want to find their daughter.”
My Carolyn.
My one good thing.
Because Roy is here.
And Roy was sent to DTI.
And I know they always say that NO ONE COMES BACK FROM DTI, but Roy did, and so did the Eudys, so why not my Carolyn? Why not my one good thing?
All of this other stuff he could not find the words to say. His throat clamped up mercilessly on him. He thought to reach for his bottle of water, but his hands were shaking a bit, and he needed to clasp them together to steady them.
And besides…
Besides…
Roy was looking at him strangely.
“Walter,” Roy said, very carefully. “Carolyn’s not in DTI.”
Walter stared back and was so muddled by everything that he couldn’t even read the truth in Roy’s eyes, and his mind delved into the worst, the very worst, because that seemed to be the thing that Walter had a knack for landing in.
She’s dead. He’s about to tell me that she’s dead.
Oh, fuck…No, no, no…
“She was never disappeared.”
Walter’s mind immediately attempted to brush that aside—Roy didn’t know, he wasn’t there, he hadn’t seen the scorch marks in the floor—but Walter’s mouth said nothing, in the same way that hearing something that makes absolutely no logical sense will somehow strip the words out of your brain for a moment.
Silence. Walter searched his brother’s face and saw nothing but confusion and honesty.
Roy searched Walter’s face and saw a madness he had never seen before.
Roy spoke, and he spoke gently, like you would to settle a madman down.
“The Eudys knew that Carolyn was going to get disappeared. Their break out of DTI was the reason the CoAx wanted Carolyn in the first place, Walter. They wanted to use her as a bargaining chip against the Eudys. And the Eudys found out about it.” Roy peered at him, eyebrows up, almost a hopeful cringe. “That’s why my team was there in the first place. They got Carolyn out, but they didn’t manage to get themselves out before the CoAx shut the District down. I was embedded with this unit of Fed troops that we knew would collaborate, and when the CoAx shut down the District, we activated them.”
Walter didn’t care. He didn’t care about who was loyal to whom. Not in that moment.
His only concern in that moment was where his wife had been taken.
“Where’s Carolyn now?” he choked out. “Where did they take her?”
“Carolyn’s with her parents, Walter.”
Walter found his head moving, even as his throat seized up and something light and almost effervescent came surging up his chest. Or perhaps it was just the feeling of dropping the brick of cement that he’d been carrying in his guts.
“But the door,” he croaked. “The scorch mark…”
“The CoAx still hit your house,” Roy said. “But we’d already taken her out.”
“You got her?” Walter said, sliding down to the foot of the bed, not really knowing what he was doing until his grasping hands found his brother’s shoulder and clutched at his clean, unbattled clothes. “You saved her? You saved Carolyn? She’s safe?”
One of Roy’s eyebrows twitched upwards. “Safe?” He chuffed. “Of course not, Walter. None of us are safe. Not really. And her least of all. She and the Eudys are going to ground. They’re going to be hunted like dogs. They’re going to be constantly moving. Never resting. Never in one place for very long. And any communications we get from them are going to be basic commands.” He looked at Walter pointedly. “You cannot communicate with her.”
Walter realized his hands were clenching and unclenching. “She’s my wife, Roy!”
Roy’s eyes bore down into a scrutinizing squint. “And do you love her, Walter?”
Walter laughed, frustrated, mad, bitter. “Yes! Of course!”
“Then you need to let her go for now, Walter.”
Walter felt his frustration turn black. “Let her go?”
“Ayuh,” Roy replied flatly. “Every communication between us and them puts them in danger. We’ll be straining to even maintain command. We certainly can’t afford give you conjugal-fucking-visits.”
“Roy…”
“There’s a war on, Walt.” Roy snapped. “And you’re right smack dab in the middle of it. Lives are hanging in the balance. Millions of them. And three of those lives are the Eudys, and their daughter—your wife. You wanna see Carolyn again?”
“Yes,” Walter said, like wind in a hollow.
“Good,” Roy replied with a stern nod. “That gives you something to fight for.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Roy let out a growling noise. Abruptly he stood up. Hesitated. Turned to the door, and then stopped himself, and turned back to his brother. He pointed a finger at him. “You fucking stop it, Walt.”
Walt sat there, dumbstruck.
“Stop acting like an idiot. We all know that you’re not. I can see it in your eyes, Walt. I can see that things have changed. And it’s not just the time that’s passed. No, you’ve changed. I can see that thing inside of you that you’ve been denying all this time, for all those years. I can see that they’ve poked it awake.” Roy nodded. “That’s good. You can use that. You’ll need to use it.
“You want Carolyn back?” Roy asked him, leaning forward, both angry and earnest. “You want things to go back to the way they were?” he laughed, harsh and bracing, like a winter wind had suddenly come in and chilled Walter to the bones. “Then you better help us win this war. You better help us fight.”
Walter felt his hands. They’d already curled into fists. They ached, the knuckles, the split skin, where bullet fragments and concrete chunks had gone into him, or had taken the flesh off of him.
He felt that hot, black something, the burning thing, that catalyst of change buried so deep somewhere in the abyss of him. And he realized that he felt relief that it was still there. He felt relief, because this burning thing was so much better than the fear, so much better than the longing.
This burning thing was a thing that he could have right now.
It was already his.
And, magnificently, it could not be taken away.
Changing tides.
Changing pola
rity.
Summer into winter.
Equatorial heat into frigid poles.
“I can fight,” he said.
Roy opened the door to the room and looked back at his brother. Again his eyes searched, again they scrutinized. “I sure hope you can,” he replied. “But we’ll see. We’ll see soon enough.”
“Ayuh? And how’s that?” Walter demanded hotly.
Roy’s face was deadly serious. “They took Pops, Walt.”
Walter felt a wash of heat go over his head. A panic sickness. “What?”
“They took Pops,” Roy repeated. “They took him because of his connection to you. To us.” Then Roy raised a finger and pointed it at Walter, and the look in his eyes was one of intense conviction, the two Baucom boys, each watching the other.
When Roy spoke, his voice was quiet, as though he did not want anyone else to hear: “I’m gonna get him out. And you’re gonna help me.”
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A Grower’s War
Book 2
COMING SOON!
DJ MOLLES is the New York Times bestselling author of The Remaining series. He published his first short story, “Darkness,” while still in high school. Soon after, he won a prize for his short story “Survive.” He got started self-publishing the first books in The Remaining series while working full time as a police officer for a major metropolitan city. Since then he’s had the good fortune to retire, and lives a semiquiet life with his wife and children in the southeast.
Follow him at facebook.com/djmolles
Want more from DJ Molles?
Try the Bestselling The Remaining series:
The Remaining
The Remaining: Aftermath
The Remaining: Refugees
The Remaining: Fractured
The Remaining: Allegiance
The Remaining: Extinction
Also by DJ Molles:
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