Catharsis

by Adrienne Lecter

  Back outside, I found Red studying his maps again, half his attention on what else the others dragged out of the houses—mostly blankets and tools for cutting, slashing, and bashing in heads. He looked up when I cleared my throat. “Where exactly do you guys get off acting all abashed now, after you’ve spent half the summer dragging everything useful out of every house you passed in Montana and North Dakota?”

  He didn’t even try to refute the accusation in my voice, but then that was the logical conclusion where all the things in their storage warehouse had come from.

  “That was different,” he claimed.

  “Because whatever you were carrying off, we couldn’t get our grubby little hands on?” I ventured a snarky guess. I so didn’t care for the deadpan stare I got in return. “Seriously? That’s just screwed up. Forget I asked.”

  “So to you it’s okay to take dead people’s possessions?” Red asked, a hint of bewilderment in his voice.

  Could this conversation get any more unreal? “Well, first, they’re dead,” I stated, glancing at the soldiers who were drawing closer to listen in on us bickering. “I’m not sure it really constitutes anything immoral then. Second, even if they were still alive, they won’t be coming back any time soon, and by then all the food would have spoiled, anyway. Already most of what we find comes with some extra protein content unless you want to spend hours picking it all clean. Give it a year or two, and there won’t be enough left to steal. And third, I’m alive and I’d like to stay that way. So unless there’s someone around I can ask—nicely—to share their food with me, I’ll take it. I need to keep breathing to be able to have a guilty conscience.” Red didn’t look impressed by my diatribe, so I paused to scowl at him. “And stop with the fucking hypocrisy. We’ve run into troops of yours that came to raid a mall of all things, fully equipped with vehicles to haul off whatever you need. That wasn’t just a handful of people happening upon a cache. That was planned. Get off your high horse.”

  Before Red could answer, one of the soldiers milling around did. Cole, of course. The fact that I knew his name—and remembered him to be one of Bucky’s closest flunkies—said a lot. I still kept forgetting the names of those that mostly left me to my own devices. “But that’s exactly the difference between us, and scum like you,” he pointed out, sounding very self-satisfied. “We go out there and get what people will need—not just now, but next year, and a decade from now. Designated areas, with designated items to fetch. We store the surplus, and distribute what’s needed at the moment. Do you really think you can meet the needs of a settlement with over five hundred people, as a group that’s, what? Ten people and four cars? Please. Stop deluding yourself.”

  He had somewhat of a point, but not one I was willing to concede. I skipped over the part where what he described was pretty much what Minerva, head of the Utah settlement Jason and his people were from, had proposed for us to do. “Yeah, speaking of help. Where were you assholes when Harristown was almost overrun? Oh, right. You were busy razing that other Missouri settlement in the Ozarks because they wouldn’t bow to your will. And why waste all those pulse-vests you put on the shamblers to do the dirty work for you on just one mission, if you could send them north and threaten the next town over into compliance? I think nobody bemoans not having a boxspring bed if they’re not besieged by a flood of zombies.”

  Cole had the audacity to snort, but Red was far less amused by my accusations.

  “That wasn’t us,” he ground out, sounding like I’d actually gotten under his skin. A sore spot maybe? Interesting.

  “Maybe not you personally—“ I started, but he cut me off before I could get any further.

  “The army didn’t raze any settlements, independent of their acceptance of our help, nor did we sic the undead on anyone,” he stressed, his gaze as adamant as his tone. “We only used the beacons to anchor larger groups of the undead to keep them away from our installations, but never as a weapon.” He paused. “And we only started that in the summer, which was weeks after you pulled that stunt near Harristown.”

  “You sure about that?” I harped. “Because we didn’t just run into them once, but several times over, states away from your little Colorado base. Just a thought—could it be possible that the left hand doesn’t know that the right hand’s trapped in the cookie jar?”

  Red continued to glower while Cole laughed, quickly shutting up when his lieutenant’s ire turned on him. Rather than back down, Cole shrugged. “She’s not entirely wrong about that, LT. There’s a good chance that she and her misfits ran into a few more surprises than we managed to clean up.” Cole’s smirk returned to me. “Too bad that you had to waltz in and shoot Taggard before anyone could compare notes to ask him about the parts that you couldn’t both verify. When they dragged him along to the base, I thought someone higher up in command had lost their mind, but turns out, they knew they could rely on a stupid bitch being stupid.”

  At Red’s glare, he shut up—the frown on Red’s face promising some extra duties in store for that idiot later—but Cole kept gleefully smirking to himself. I felt my cheeks turn warm, for once happy about the cold to mask the whisper of embarrassment making it up my spine. Then again, I could take some—deserved—reaming when it also gave me confirmation that I might otherwise never have gotten. If I wasn’t reading Red’s anger wrong, he wasn’t annoyed that Cole had insulted me, but rather that he’d blabbed too much. I still couldn’t find it in me to gloat. The consequences of my actions kept me in too much pain for that.

  “We all know that I did you a favor,” I huffed when I got my emotions back in check, the words coming out carefully neutral. “And trust me, that’s not a can of worms you want to open with me.”

  “Don’t I now?” Cole jeered, again ignoring Red’s glare. “Why, because you’ll steamroll me with your rightful indignation? Exactly how many times has that worked for you?” Two of the other soldiers gave some supportive chuffs. I could have used some of that myself, but it seemed my people were still very busy looting. Maybe that should have given me some pause, but it really didn’t.

  Spreading my arms to my sides, I did my best to make my grin a real one. “I’m still alive. I’d say that’s as good a definition of ‘working’ as any. And no regrets whatsoever about that.” Cole’s eyes narrowed, making that fake grimace on my face just a little easier to hold. “I mean, I’m not the one who keeps losing people left and right in traps they set themselves and were too incapable of springing properly. You can jeer at me all you want, but you won’t kick me off my soapbox that easily.”

  “Nah, you’re doing a stellar job of that yourself,” Bucky’s voice came from behind me, immediately setting my teeth on edge. I couldn’t keep myself from stiffening, but did my best not to impulsively turn around. After all, I had my M16 in my hands; it wasn’t like I couldn’t shoot him in under five seconds flat if he gave me a reason to. New reason, I amended. When I did turn around, it was with casual, slow motions, doing my best to keep Bucky, Cole, and Red all in my field of vision. Of course the asshole was grinning, making me wonder if there’d been a shared memo before we set out on this shit storm of a mission: annoy the bitch by constantly flashing your coffee- and tobacco-stained teeth at her.

  “I have my moments,” I conceded, not trying to tone down the anger rising in my voice. “But, looking back, my scoreboard looks mighty fine, if I may say so. Haven’t raped anyone, haven’t shot innocent civilians nor doomed them to get eaten. Haven’t eaten any, either. Cannibalism notwithstanding, can you say the same for you and your people?”

  Too late I remembered that damn mayor of Harristown and how me infecting him had wreaked havoc at the Silo, but Bucky refrained from using reason to get back at me. Indeed, he refrained from answering altogether, as Cole effortlessly kept the ball rolling for him. “Makes me think—don’t you regret not coming with us at that intersection after we dragged your sorry ass out of the ruins of that biotech company, back when this all started? One wrong decision
that sent you down a path that led to a lot of awful situations for you. It’s way too late now to change that, but don’t you ever wonder what you could have spared yourself if you’d decided differently?”

  Shifting my focus from Bucky to Cole, I tried to remember if I’d seen him back then, but my memories of that morning were way too clouded to say. I barely remembered the faces of the people who’d stayed with us a while longer and had died as we’d fled from the zombies pouring out of the city. Not only compared to that, finding an answer to Cole’s question was easy.

  “No.” I didn’t appreciate that look of surprise that crossed Red’s face. The other idiots remained impassive, but that was enough to force me to explain. “Never regretted that decision, or any other that ended with me coming in contact with any of you. I don’t regret becoming part of the Lucky Thirteen, and I certainly don’t regret raising an army to show you condescending assholes that half of the country isn’t ready to roll over and die.” Of course, Bucky and Cole had to get smirky at that—because of the consequences that had for me, I was sure—so I couldn’t leave it at that. “If anything, the only thing I regret is that when we tried to decide what to do earlier this year in spring, that I didn’t bring up the idea to just pack our gear, find a nice, quiet spot somewhere with game aplenty—say, Alaska—and say fuck you to civilization. We wouldn’t have had to deal with people who only had scorn for us. We wouldn’t have lost someone every time we tried to actively help and do the right thing. So yeah, maybe you do have a point with that scorn of yours about us risking our necks to bring generators, electronics, or medicine from out there to the people in the settlements. Never got us anything but trouble.” I snorted at my own words, not having to stress that I didn’t really believe that. “Oh, right. I forgot. Virtually all that bullshit happened because you either didn’t do your jobs, like taking out those cannibals before we had to, or you were directly responsible for our people’s deaths, like at that factory. You can try selling that bullshit to the townies at the settlements, but not to us. Sure, push it all at Taggard now, claim he was to blame for every single thing that went wrong because all you ever wanted was peace. If that was true, you had so many opportunities to avoid bloodshed, and you missed every single one of them.”

  Rather than do me the favor of insisting that I didn’t just call him a hypocrite, Bucky snorted. “And you’re any different? Once they realized you were still alive, everyone counted on you to make a difference.”

  Holding his gaze evenly, I smirked. “That old tale? Aimes already tried getting under my skin with that bullshit, back in Colorado. Didn’t buy it then, sure as hell don’t buy it now.”

  I didn’t like the way Bucky’s face lit up. Never a good sign. My fingers tightened a little around my rifle, try as I might to remain relaxed. Where was everyone else? It was very unlike Nate to leave me alone like this. Casting around, I realized that Hill and Murdock were still inside the buildings as well, making this feel a lot like… a setup? But for what? I had a feeling that I was about to find out when Bucky turned to Red. “Tell her. She won’t believe me, seeing as she’s convinced that I’m a scheming asshole—“

  “As you’ve gone out of your way to reaffirm, time and time again,” I interjected.

  Bucky ignored me as he went on. “And I doubt she’ll take it from Cole, either.” A pause followed that I answered with a grimace, no need for fakery there. “But for whatever reason, she seems to trust you, Richards. So, please, enlighten Miss Lewis here why no one has yet wrung her neck like she deserves.” Of course he had to deliver that with a smile, that one genuine. “Oh, my bad. I forgot.”

  I did my very best not to react, even if everything inside of me was screaming to slam the butt of my rifle into his face until all that remained was a bloody, caved-in ruin. For maximum effect, he turned away and walked toward the eastern end of the town, nodding at Cole in passing to join him. That left Red and me standing there. Judging from Red’s frown, he wasn’t overly impressed with Bucky’s antics, either, but when he caught my gaze, he obliged. Or rather, followed an order, I reminded myself. Weren’t they all playing it by the book? I didn’t trust that behavior any more than I trusted Hamilton himself.

  “He’s right,” Red offered, managing to sound neutral, even if his face betrayed him. “Except for a few bits of news weeks after the outbreak, that was the one event that got command scurrying. I haven’t seen Emily that excited since Raleigh Miller joined the project.”

  “Emily?” It was hard not to pick up on that. “That sounds oddly familiar.” Not for the first time I wondered if he and Raynor were a thing—at least passingly. I wasn’t sure that sociopath of a woman was capable of normal human interaction required for any kind of relationship.

  Red ignored me. “Before that, she didn’t have much cause for celebrations. We had less than twenty virologists left once we managed to organize who had survived, and the only other two besides her that had any firsthand knowledge died under suspicious circumstances early on.”

  His pause there was screaming for a guess, and I was only too happy to oblige him. “Alders and his eco warrior flunkies?”

  I got a curt nod in reply. “It took us over a year to find out the cause for that, but that’s beside the point. When Brandon Stone called in that you of all people had popped up at his very doorstep, the excitement that caused was almost enough to make people ignore who you’d been traveling with.”

  “Almost,” I echoed, snorting.

  Red conceded with a shrug. “At that point, the powers that be wouldn’t have been happy to see Miller still around, but they would have been happy to accept you two as a package deal. Communication was still patchy in spring, so it took days to get command to settle on a decision, what offer exactly to extend to you—“

  “And by then I already had the mark tattooed across my neck, and was happily disappearing into the wilderness once more,” I finished for him.

  Another nod. “Of course we could easily track you thanks to the trade network—“

  “Gee, so nice of you to admit that,” I harped—and got ignored yet again.

  “But we didn’t manage to get any of our agents anywhere near you in time,” he went on explaining. “We had people in Dispatch, of course, but no way to easily approach you without raising suspicions. There was talk of kidnapping you then, but you were gone before we could enact that plan.”

  That made me chuckle. “You people really are incompetent fucks.” At his raised brows, I elaborated, only too happy to rub that in his face. “I was wandering through Dispatch, all on my own, for over an hour when we got there. And spent some quality time, drunk, on the dance floor. Except for when we were getting the tattoos and stuffing our faces, I was never around more than two or three people at a time.” Thinking back, it was hard to remember feeling so careless and free—except that it wasn’t. California had felt like that, too. That made me wonder how long it would be until I got to feel like that again.

  Red wasn’t very impressed by my scorn. “It wasn’t that easy to reach all parties involved and coordinate them, and while you can pretend like your husband let you prance around that cesspool teeming with misfits, you weren’t as unobserved as you may remember.” Now wasn’t that a little tidbit to chew on later? “Either way, you were off to the Silo before anyone could snatch you up, so command decided to approach you at a neutral meeting point.”

  “The factory,” I hazarded an informed guess. “Very neutral, with all those zombies locked away to unleash on us, should we refuse to cooperate.”

  Red gave me a weird look, and it took me a few seconds to realize that it was surprise again, even if he tried to cover it up quickly.

  “We were lying in wait for you there, yes,” he acknowledged. “But we found the facility already teeming with stashed-away undead. Hamilton decided that they would work well as an incentive to make you more agreeable, but they were never to be released. That was a knee-jerk reaction based on the fact that your people se
emed ready to fight to the death at a moment’s notice.”

  “Wait.” None of that made any sense. “How do you accidentally unleash a zombie mob that kills way more of your people than we ever could have?” Not to forget, “And if not you, who stashed them there?”

  Disappointment crossed Red’s face, as if I should have been able to answer my own question, at least the latter one. “We never got confirmation, but our working theory is that the facility was used as one of the locations to produce the virus-activated syrup. The zombies likely used to be the plant workers, including the better part of the nearby town’s residents.”

  The implications made my heart sink. “So they were a test run of sorts?”

  “That’s anyone’s guess,” Red conceded. “Fact is, we could have handled the situation better, I agree with your assessment of that.” So Aimes had tattled on what I’d hurled at his face when he’d tried to make me feel guilty about that, back at our base camp for the Colorado assault mission. “By then, everyone knew that command figured you were the next best thing to our salvation. It might have taken days to coordinate for them to reach a decision, but only hours for the news to spread among the men and women who were doing their very best to stabilize the country and work tirelessly on providing security and whatever else the settlements needed.”

  I cut him off with a raised hand. “No need to try to sell me on that bullshit. Still not buying it.”

  Red chuckled softly. “I don’t need to sell anything. I know that you’re lying, but I get it. You might have been high as a kite at those negotiations, but I could tell that you meant it when you said you were there to avoid further bloodshed. You have your quarrels with some elements”—no need for him to glance over his shoulder to where Bucky was joking around with Cole and Parker—“and a lot of that might even be warranted. You’re wary of us as a united front for that very reason, but once you can ignore your own platitudes, you know where to place the blame, and that it doesn’t lie with the bulk of us—or the settlements. You were awfully quick to throw your lot in with Greene and accept his offer to settle down right at his doorstep. You believe in our vision of a better, stronger, united nation, or else you wouldn’t be here.”