So many revelations, and none of them pleasant, I figured, considering Nate’s somber tone.
“What happened?”
Nate rubbed the back of his neck, a nervous tick if he had one. “For a long time, it wasn’t that hard for him to pretend like he didn’t care about her. And I guess, right when he signed up, he didn’t that much. She was several years younger. To a late teenage boy, that’s millennia.” He paused, catching my gaze once more. “Is. She’s still alive, spoiler alert. The rest of his family cut ties with him easily enough. He wanted to do everything they believed was the downfall of modern civilization, but to her he was her big brother who she adored. Idolized. She tried to write him several times but he managed to always undermine that somehow. I don’t even know how she found out about where we were stationed for the inoculation trials, as they called it. They had an official family meeting day before that started. We both knew, of course, that nobody would come to see us. We’d both, each in our own ways, made sure that nobody would come.”
I could tell where this was going. “But she showed up.”
He nodded, a slow, painful gesture. “That she did. Apparently she’d signed up for some extracurricular program her high school ran just to be in the same state that weekend. It was late evening when she showed up at the base. Why they even let her in, I have no fucking clue. My guess is that they were tracking her for a while already. Else I can’t explain how they could organize this on such short notice. We were in the mess hall.” He paused, snorting. “Dining facility, of course, at the time.”
“So you were getting drunk after all,” I intercepted. Damn that uncanny impulse of mine to cut the tension.
“On coffee,” he obliged my curiosity. “We both knew that we could die tomorrow. Didn’t want to miss a second of what could be our last night easily. Of course we knew we’d make it. You don’t live in that world expecting the worst to come true, not after the shit we’d already been through together. I think we both wanted to reminisce about our families but seeing as we didn’t dare, we were just shooting shit. Not sure what tipped us off. I think I saw the lights go on over in our barracks. We had our own comfy twenty-bunks building all to our lone selves, seeing as we were the only two officers of the bunch to get shot up the next day. The waiting time would have been so much easier if they’d just stuck us in with the rest.”
This time when he fell silent, I didn’t prompt him with inane tangents. Nate licked his lips before he resumed.
“They had her bound and gagged, naked on the floor. It didn’t take a genius to make the right connections. I’d never seen a picture of her before so at first glance I thought, shit. What are they going to make us do to that poor girl now? Hopefully she’s a stripper and they pay her well. But she had his eyes, and his hair. And there was no mistaking his reaction. It was the two of us against seven of the officers who’d gone through the program initiation the week before. We’d had dinner with them once before their great day, with us being envious and jumpy because we still had a week of tests ahead of us, any one of them could have disqualified us for the program. They hadn’t really had time yet to completely figure out their enhanced abilities, but it didn’t matter. Just meant that half the punches were twice as hard as intended. I managed to take one of them out, Bucky two more. That still left four of them to tie us up and force two bottles of hard liquor down each of our throats. They took turns, and they took their time. Maybe if we hadn’t fought so hard they wouldn’t have felt like they needed to let off steam on her. You know the irrational anger I warned you about? Two of them weren’t even trying to get a handle on themselves. The worst part? Except for the odd kick in the ribs to make sure neither of us managed to roll over and look away, they didn’t touch us again. I’m not saying I would have welcomed being sodomized but it would have given me something else to concentrate on. I think you learned that lesson in that white tiled cell.”
I nodded, incapable of saying anything else. Hell, not puking up dinner was hard enough.
“It was early morning when whoever was in charge of the program came to fetch us. They dragged us across the base, still trussed-up like Thanksgiving turkeys, and only removed our gags long enough so we could give verbal consent to being admitted to the last stage of the serum program. I almost didn’t go through with it, but the general who was presiding over the legal matters was giving us enough warning looks to make it obvious that if either of us refused now, the girl wouldn’t make it out alive.” He rubbed his neck again. “If it had been my sister, I would have done exactly what Hamilton said I’d do if anything happened to you. I would have waited, and then waited some more, and then I would have killed everyone who was even passingly connected to this, right to the very top. Maybe easy for me to say as I never had a baby sister, and, damage done or not, she was still alive, so they still had leverage on him. I think he eventually accepted his fate. He’d paid the piper. Now all that was left to do was reap the benefits.” He gave me a considering look. “I know you don’t agree with his side of things. That’s one of the reasons why I married you. If you still consider that being a thing.”
I knew he was baiting me to tear me out of that nightmare scape of mental images, but that last sentence still perplexed me.
“Why, think that the fact that you had to watch your best friend’s sister get raped by the people you most admired would make me want to file for divorce? Try harder next time.”
“It’s not just that,” he hedged, the hint of a sheepish grin crossing his features.
I had to look away for a moment, warring with myself whether to give him a pass or not, but decided that, in the end, it didn’t matter.
“That you were, or are, PSYOPS? I’m sure your mother must have been proud.” That gave me a pause. “Did you ever tell her?”
He nodded. “After I dropped out. Five months into my freedom, after I’d made sure I was out for good, I tracked her down at a conference she was speaking at. You know, public space, giving her all the chance to just ignore me if she’d wanted. Turns out, she didn’t. She had a lot of blame to lay at my feet, some rightfully, some not. Didn’t matter. I told her everything. She listened. Then she started asking the questions that no mother should ask but every psychologist will.” He grimaced but it turned into a smile. “You know, most people assume that someone with questionable psychopathic tendencies gets that from their father. With my brother and me, it was our mother. And yes, she tested us both, and I hate to break it to you, I can do empathy with the best of them. I just sometimes choose not to. She never told me about herself, but I’m ninety percent sure that she was just acting all our lives, pretending to be the stern if loving parent. That talent I have from her as well. I couldn’t connect with her at the funeral. That would have been too dangerous.”
That reminded me of something else. “Didn’t you tell me that Hamilton had it out for you because you still had a brother and mother who cared for you? How did that work out, when you woke up in the hospital with Raleigh ranting his head off because he found out about the serum.”
Nate shrugged. “I woke up. He was there, immediately calling for our mother. Gave me the scare of my life. I needed all of sixty seconds to spill the beans and explain to him why it was impossible for them to be here. He caught on quickly and laid on the outrage very convincingly. I don’t think he was acting much, he really was personally offended someone would do something like that to anyone, friend or foe. I never found out how he learned about this to begin with. My guess is someone wanted to recruit him and he took the bait. They must have given him immunity because he joined the research program, and likely made sure to negotiate that our mother was untouchable. You know the rest.”
Which answered a question I hadn’t expected to ever get an answer to.
“You thought they’d gone back on that promise not to harm him. You thought it was that Decker guy who had simply bided his time to teach you a lesson and had him killed.” Nate slowly blinked but otherwise didn’t
answer my question. Well, that wasn’t really needed anymore. “Does that mean that Bucky was right? The only reason we are both still alive is because he was kind of protecting us?”
“He was certainly protecting his own interests. And his own hide,” Nate growled. “Don’t think I would have passed him over on my way up the chain.”
“You really didn’t know?” That much was obvious but I still needed him to acknowledge it.
“I didn’t,” he confessed. “I didn’t, and I still can’t believe that the old bastard is still alive.”
“How can something like this be a thing?” I asked, feeling new anger well up inside of me. “You’re all part of the fucking Army! How can there be some systematic, planned, ongoing shit like that inside an organization that’s built on the very foundation of protecting the civilians?”
Nate gave another shrug. “It only takes one bad egg to spoil the cake. And that’s just it, a few people in the right places, living the power trips of their lives. Not everyone who was working with the program was bad. I’m convinced that the overwhelming majority—staff, soldiers, command, scientists—were decent people trying to do the right thing. That’s why I stayed. That’s why, once I dropped out, I didn’t go on a rampage and went for the soft, easy targets first. I only needed to know where exactly those rotten eggs were hiding.”
“Are you sure that it wasn’t Decker after all? He could have been pulling Alders’s strings for all we know.”
“And to what end?” I’d missed that chiding sarcasm from Nate, and almost welcomed it now. “Decker was never officially, directly involved with the program except for recruitment. We were his pride. And no, me disappointing him wasn’t enough to change his mind, I’m not delusional enough to even consider that. He’s responsible for a lot of shit that went down, but not dooming the world.”
“We’ll never find out who did that, huh?” I said, half joking—but then stopped. “You caught that part about Raynor trying to alert everyone two weeks in advance of the shit hitting the fan, right?” Nate nodded slowly, trying to guess what I was hinting at. “And now we’re here, in France, where she sent us, literally the day she got her hands on me, who she thought was valuable to her efforts.” Another nod. “I’m not being paranoid when I’m saying that that’s a glaringly obvious connection.”
Nate shook his head slowly. “No, you’re not.”
“So what am I supposed to do now?” I asked again. The first time we’d been at this point in our conversation felt like it had happened to two different people, a lifetime ago. Maybe that wasn’t as far off as I liked to think, judging from the latent fear still ghosting through Nate’s eyes.
“About your vitamins?” Of course he remembered. It was impossible to sidetrack him, now I knew that for sure. “Keep the pills but don’t take them. If in a day or two, you feel any adverse effects, you take them and check if that goes away. Easy as that.”
I really didn’t like Nate’s fatalistic tone. “Trial and error doesn’t sound so enticing considering I could have died last night.”
“But you didn’t,” Nate insisted, giving me a hint of a grin. “That was a minor setback. A hiccup, if you will. You’ve had those before. Your usual MO is to bounce right back from them. You don’t need me to tell you that.” No, he didn’t. I’d come to that very same conclusion. He paused, then shook his head as if coming to a negative conclusion about something he had been wondering about but didn’t feel like sharing with me. Ah, so we were back to that. Same business as usual. “Let’s get back to the others. If they’ve actually kept your metabolism firing on only half its cylinders, we need to get more food into you. We still have some extra left that we found at that village.”
I thought about holding him back but the moment had passed, and I wasn’t sure I wanted confirmation for my guesses. So like the good little soldier that I would never be, I followed him, pretending that I wasn’t deeply disturbed.
Chapter 19
Switching to a late watch shift wasn’t that bad, at least not tonight. I wasn’t sure that I would have been able to sleep after that talk even if I’d tried. Having to take care of food prep and weapon maintenance kept me physically busy and my mind from locking up in memory loops. I was still sore as hell, but as we returned to our packs, I checked on both the wound on my stomach and left hand, finding them healed shut, the scars still angry red and itching but without the threat of tearing the wounds open again. As much as that was a relief, the fact that Parker wasn’t a neat sewer didn’t exactly make me more fond of him. Well, so much for Bucky trying to shove a wedge between Nate and me by claiming that he’s indoctrinated me—which I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could refute, or wanted to—at the very least, that confirmed that my dear husband saw more in me than a pretty face.
Burns had already filled Gita and Tanner in—as much as he’d thought they should know, which likely amounted to barely more than the heavily abbreviated version, so there was no need to rehash anything. I couldn’t help but shudder every time my gaze skipped over to where Bucky was sharing his dinner with Hill, Cole, and Russell. I absolutely refused to feel bad for him—nothing had changed about his actions—but he’d given me food for thought. Nate didn’t volunteer any further information and he remained quite somber throughout the evening, but I wondered if anyone but me really picked up on that.
We retired late, and I spent almost two hours tossing and turning before I had to get up for my watch shift. Crunching my way through frozen leaves and grass was easier than I remembered from the days before, but that could have been all in my mind. Yeah, right. I did my best not to overthink this shit. That was about as easy as ignoring Cole’s muttered taunt when I slipped when we crossed paths in the southern sector, but I forced myself not to give a shit. Nothing I could do about my situation in general, and bristling at every remark only cost me energy that was better spent elsewhere. Right now, someone making fun of the slight mishaps that still happened when I didn’t pay attention was really low on my list of priorities. And maybe Burns was right after all. They wouldn’t have taunted a nobody they thought far beneath them. I just couldn’t sort out my thoughts tonight to make peace with that.
At just after two, I caught a whiff of decay, making me pause and listen. At first, I didn’t hear it over the soft sounds of snoring and people turning in their sleep, but there was something out there, slowly drawing closer. I switched on my night-vision goggles, easily making out a few shapes maybe a hundred yards further into the trees. With luck, they might have passed the camp without noticing us, but it was kind of the point to make sure those who weren’t on guard didn’t have to play guessing games. I hesitated, wondering if I should let Cole know, but we were a good ten minutes from meeting up again, so I decided to set out on my own. Only four zombies, and judging from how dim their signatures were, those weren’t fast or strong ones. As a backup plan, I left my M16 leaning against a tree trunk for easy access, then readied my axes. Tactical tomahawks. Whatever. Rolling my eyes at my own silliness, I waded through the snow, aiming for the shamblers, my body singing with the need for some carnage. Anything, literally anything to shut up my mind was welcome.
I didn’t try to sneak up on the first but it pretty much happened. I came at it from behind as it bent over to examine something on the ground. The ax embedded itself nicely in its temple, and all it took after that was a shove with my boot against one disintegrating shoulder. It flopped to the ground without even uttering a sound. The other three had seen the motion and started toward me. From up close, I saw that they really were in dismal shape, worse off than most of the shamblers that we’d had to deal with so far. I wondered if maybe they had been locked in somewhere, lack of sustaining food making them rot away faster. I went for the tallest first, to my right, coming for it with a running start. The one next to it followed quickly as it had closed up to its undead companion by the time it fell, lifeless, to the ground. And then it was just the last one. Judging from the height, I figured i
t had been a woman, but without any hair left and the clothes turned to rags that barely covered the skeletal body, it was hard to tell. It didn’t matter. It went down under two hacks with my right arm, and that was it.
Except that, as I stood panting over the corpse, details jumped to the forefront of my mind that I could have done without. Like that left upper arm, the bones visible through the skin where a huge lesion had eaten away what remained of skin, muscles, and tendons, very much resembling my left thigh before Raynor had fixed it up. Or that the hand on that side was missing several fingers, the remnants looking chewed-on and ragged. Or that now that it lay permanently dead before me and what was left of the blouse it had been wearing torn, the torso was half-exposed, showing that the body must have almost completely eaten itself up, reducing everything to whitish, brittle skin, with tendons and what little remained of the muscles standing out starkly. Looking at the face, I found the cheeks sunken in, high cheekbones prominent, not just hinting at the skull underneath. In my memory, the mirror image of how I’d looked just a few weeks ago came up, making me shy away from the corpse fast enough that I tripped, ending up on my ass, still scrambling back—
Until I hit a pair of legs.
Looking up, I found Red standing behind me, an assault rifle in each hand, the one in his left partly covered in powdery snow—presumably mine.
“Having some issues there?”
That was putting it mildly. Swallowing hard, I pushed myself to my feet, absentmindedly brushing snow off my ass and legs after cleaning the ax blades. I tried to school my face into a neutral mask while I was busy. When I turned around, I extended my hand to accept my rifle. “Everything’s a-okay,” I said a little too cheerily. “Why, any reason it shouldn’t be?”
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