“I understand.” Adam ground his teeth together, but he held back from arguing any further. Briggs’ point made sense, even if Adam couldn’t imagine ever believing the things Briggs seemed to believe. I’d rather go barefoot than turn into a man who kills weaker men just to take their shoes away from them, he thought.
I can’t stand these men. I hate sitting in this vehicle with them. I hate breathing the same air they breathe.
It was bad enough that he was here on General Thompson’s errand, bad enough that he was about to risk his life for a cause he cared nothing about. Bad enough that he was going to threaten the use of a nuclear weapon, which would cause irreparable harm to an already bleeding world. But to have to do it in the company of these two was almost more than Adam could bear.
He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, doing his best to pretend they weren’t there.
Some time later, the Humvee came to a stop again.
Adam kept his eyes firmly closed. We’re stopping for the night, he told himself. We’re going to set up a tent and camp out. We’re definitely not going to murder a bunch of innocent people who are just trying to go about the business of surviving.
He opened his eyes.
The sun was starting to go down, but Adam didn’t think it was dark enough to warrant stopping. What’s going on? he wondered, squinting out the window. There’s nobody out there. Why have we stopped this time?
“Everybody out,” White said.
Automatically, Adam glanced at Briggs, half hoping the lieutenant would intercede and tell White that Adam should stay here.
Briggs said nothing, just unfastened his seat belt and slid from the car.
Maybe it’s just a chance to stretch our legs. Adam undid his own seat belt and got out, lifting his arms over his head to release some of the tension in his back.
White was standing by the side of the road and gazing off into the distance. “See that?” he said.
“What?” Adam asked.
“That house.”
It was a ramshackle, dilapidated old place, the kind of house Adam couldn’t imagine anybody actually living in. A ruin. “What about it?”
“Might be something in there,” White said.
“I doubt it,” Adam said.
“No, there could be,” Briggs agreed. “You never know where people are going to decide to hole up these days. And it’s the kind of place most people would overlook if they were raiding. We should check it out.”
White turned to Adam. “You come with us on this one,” he said. “We might need someone to watch our backs.”
“What good could I do?” Adam asked. “I’m not armed.”
“That’s your problem,” White said. “If it comes down to a fight, I’d rather have three on my side than two, even if one of us is unarmed.”
“Give me a gun,” Adam suggested. “I’d be a lot more help to you if I had one.”
White laughed. “I’m not stupid. You’d shoot us and take our things.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Adam protested, surprised. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. He wanted to have a way of defending himself against attack, that was all. He had no interest in killing White or Briggs. Much as he disliked the two soldiers, he needed them if he was to get to Omaha, complete his mission, and return to the militia base for Ella.
But apparently White was sure that Adam couldn’t be trusted, because he just shook his head again and beckoned them onward toward the crumbling old farmhouse off in the distance.
For a moment, Adam considered refusing to go along. Why not? he thought. It’s not like they can kill me, and if they didn’t know that before, they definitely do now.
But maybe by going along with them this time, he could make a difference. It was possible that there was someone alive in that old house, and if there was, Adam might be able to save the situation from coming to violence.
Not that I love my chances, he thought ruefully. They have guns and I don’t. What am I going to do, fuss at them about it?
He didn’t know. But if he stayed here at the car, things definitely wouldn’t go the way he wanted them to.
And, he realized suddenly, the conditions that were keeping him safe now wouldn’t always apply. Yes, they had to refrain from killing him for now. They needed him to complete the mission General Thompson had sent him on. But what about afterward?
Once I’ve spoken to the president, they won’t need me anymore. They’d be just as happy to carry the president’s answer back to Thompson themselves and to leave me dead by the side of the road.
He would have to restrain himself. He couldn’t allow himself to push White and Briggs too far, or they might decide it wasn’t worth the trouble to keep him alive after he’d finished serving them.
So that settled it, then. He would go with them. He would do whatever they asked. What choice did he have, really?
I promised Ella I would come back to her, he reminded himself as he trudged across the field that lay between the highway and the house, following in White’s and Briggs’ footsteps. I promised I’d do whatever it took. And I’m going to keep that promise, even if it means putting up with the violent and terrible antics of these men.
He supposed, in one sense, that they had something in common. Briggs had said that he would do whatever it took to survive, to thrive, even if it meant murdering people who meant him no harm. As for Adam, he knew that he would do what he had to to protect the little survival unit that was himself and Ella. He would be silent in the face of atrocities, if that was what was required.
But every death he could have prevented felt like a stain on his heart, and Adam knew that he would never again be the person he’d been before all this had started.
Chapter 13
Adam had expected that they would circle the house first, maybe try peeking in the windows to see what they could see, but they didn’t. Instead, Colonel White marched right up onto the porch and kicked in the front door.
It opened on an empty kitchen that looked as if it hadn’t been used in months. Which made sense, Adam supposed. He doubted any of the utilities in this room still functioned in the wake of the EMP.
Still, White and Briggs searched the place with all the subtlety of a parade of elephants. They threw open cabinets and poked around inside with their guns. They checked the refrigerator, which was essentially a large cabinet itself now thanks to the lack of power. They even looked under the sink.
“Nothing,” Briggs said unnecessarily. Of course there was nothing. They could all see that there was nothing.
The more relevant point, Adam thought, was that if anyone was in this house, they would definitely be aware that they had visitors after all the noise Briggs and White had made. Didn’t they care that they had just announced themselves?
Maybe not, Adam thought. If anyone shows themselves, they can just shoot first. But Adam was in a different situation. If shooting started, he was just going to have to hit the deck and pray that none of the bullets went rogue.
He wished Briggs and White would be a little quieter.
“Come on,” White said, approaching the stairs. “Let’s see what’s on the second floor.”
“Watch your step,” Briggs cautioned. “This place looks like it could collapse at any minute.”
Just as he was about to start climbing, White stopped and held up a hand.
“What?” Briggs asked.
White pointed.
Adam looked down. There were footprints in the dust on the stairs. They were ill-defined, as if the same spots had been trodden over repeatedly, but they were there nonetheless.
White pointed upward, then held a finger to his lips.
Too damn late for that now, Adam thought. He seriously wants us to start worrying about being quiet after they’ve kicked up such a ruckus in the kitchen that it could have woken the dead? If there’s anyone up there, they absolutely already know we’re here.
Still, he couldn’t argue with Colonel White. He
followed the two soldiers, who were now creeping up the stairs so slowly and carefully that it was laughable.
The landing at the top of the stairs was surrounded by closed doors—one on each wall—and Adam knew immediately which door they were going to try, because the footprints led right there. Still, White went through a whole production of pointing to the footprints, unnecessarily shushing them, and creeping slowly toward the door.
Just don’t let them be waiting for us on the other side of that door with guns, Adam thought, hanging back a little, ready to dive out of the way if this turned into a shootout.
White stood beside the door with his back to the wall and motioned with his gun for Briggs to open it.
Briggs approached the door slowly, then threw it open. White pivoted inward, gun thrust into the room.
Adam gasped.
The three girls in the room couldn’t have been older than sixteen. In fact, he thought the youngest of the three was probably closer to thirteen. They were stick thin, as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks, and their skin was ashy with malnutrition. All three of them were wearing ragged coats that looked as if they’d been scrounged from a dumpster, and they were huddled together in the corner farthest from the door, clearly trying to avoid being heard or seen.
Adam walked into the middle of the room, toward the girls, but they shrank back from him. He froze in his tracks. Of course they’re terrified, he realized. They’re little girls, and I’m a man here with two other men who have guns in their faces. What did I expect?
“Stand up,” White barked.
Nobody moved.
White glanced over at Adam. “Get them up,” he barked.
Adam approached the girls slowly, doing his best not to scare them, but one of them looked as if she might burst into tears.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly. “Just do what he says, okay? And you’ll be fine.” He tried to keep his voice calm. He had no reason to believe that what he was saying was the truth after seeing Briggs and White gun down those soldiers earlier.
Except that those were soldiers, he reasoned, and these are little girls. Even these two bastards couldn’t possibly justify killing a bunch of scared little girls.
Besides, Adam was standing between White and Briggs and the girls, and the men definitely couldn’t kill him. As long as he held his position, he could keep them from escalating.
Slowly, one of the girls got to her feet.
“No, Maddy,” one of the others whispered.
“Maddy?” Adam asked. “Is your name Maddy?”
The girl nodded slowly.
“Okay, Maddy. I’m Adam. We’re all just going to talk, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, looking up at him with wide eyes.
“Do you think you could get your friends to stand up by the wall there?”
Maddy nodded and looked down at the other girls. She didn’t speak, but they must have understood something by her facial expression, because after a moment each girl got to her feet.
Adam backed up toward Briggs and White, controlling his own expression very carefully. He was tempted to give them a dirty look. They shouldn’t involve me in this, he thought resentfully. This wasn’t part of Thompson’s mission. I shouldn’t have to be here.
He stopped a few feet away from Briggs and White, so that he was still shielding the girls with his bodies, and faced the soldiers. “Okay,” he said. “They’re up.”
White nodded. “Search the house,” he said. “Find any weapons and food they have and bring it here.”
That was a step too far for Adam. “Hang on,” he objected. “You can’t do that.”
White raised an eyebrow. “I can’t? I’m pretty sure I can.”
“You’d leave them with nothing?” Adam demanded. “Come on. They’re kids. You can’t do this.”
“Survival of the fittest,” White said coolly.
Briggs nodded. “I don’t like it, but he’s right. Resources belong to those who can claim them and hold them. If you can’t hang on to what you’ve got, you’re probably not going to make it anyway. Think about it. If we don’t take the food and weapons that are here, someone else is going to come along and do it. The girls still don’t get to keep what they’ve got in that scenario, and we don’t have it either.”
“Yeah, but in that scenario we’re not monsters,” Adam said.
“I don’t have time for this,” White snapped. “Either you search the other rooms in this place, get whatever you can find, and we all leave, or else I shoot these girls right now and go do it myself.”
The little one, the one who looked about thirteen years old, make a sound that was somewhere between a whimper and a scream. Maddy wrapped her arms around her and said nothing.
“Okay,” Adam said, his heart racing. “Okay, okay. Just…just don’t do anything. I’ll go find what they have. Jesus.”
“Hurry,” White said. “I want to get back on the road.”
Adam ran from the room, frightened to leave the girls alone with White and Briggs too long. He hurried into the next room, and then the next, not troubling to keep quiet as he searched.
They hardly had anything. In one of the adjacent rooms, Adam unearthed a single pistol and a plastic bag that had probably once been full of rice but now contained only a few small servings. In the next room he found two plastic water bottles, both opened and half consumed. It looked as if the girls had been carefully rationing water. There was also a moldy old blanket.
Adam gathered everything together and brought it back into the room where White and Briggs were waiting with the girls. To his relief, the position hadn’t changed. The three girls still stood huddled against the wall, the small one now sobbing quietly.
“Put everything down on the floor,” White said.
Adam did so, taking his position between the men and the girls again. “This is it,” he said, laying out the rice, the water, the blanket, and the pistol.
“Is that thing loaded?” Briggs asked.
Adam picked it up and checked it. “Yes,” he said.
“Fully?”
“Yes.”
“Do you girls know how to shoot that gun?” Briggs asked.
“N-not really,” Maddy stammered. “It was my father’s. He gave it to me before he died. But I’ve never actually used it.”
“You probably shouldn’t have it, then,” Briggs said. “There you go, Adam. You’ve got a gun now.”
Adam shook his head. “I don’t want that.”
“We’re not going through this again,” White said. “Take everything down and put it in the car. If you don’t want the gun, fine. One of us will have it.”
“You said you’d let them go,” Adam reminded White.
“Did I say that?”
Nervous energy surged through Adam. “You said if I did what you said, we’d all leave. They’re part of that.”
“You’re not doing what I say now,” White pointed out. “Take the supplies down to the car. I’m not going to say it again.”
Adam gathered the things he’d found in his arms. “I’m sorry,” he said to the girls. “I’m so sorry.”
Maddy was shaking. He couldn’t tell if she was enraged, terrified, or simply so starved that her body couldn’t handle the effort of standing up this long.
Adam loathed himself.
He turned his back on the rest of them and walked out of the room, out of the house, and out to the Humvee.
And then he heard a sound that made him stop in his tracks, a sound that made his heart leap into his throat and nearly caused him to drop everything he was carrying.
It was the sound of gunshots.
Three quick shots.
He knew without having to ask, without having to be told, what had happened. They sent me out of the house so that I wouldn’t put up a fight or get in the way. They were never planning to spare the girls’ lives.
This was never about survival of the fittest. None of what happened here was about getting resources. Ada
m looked down at the meager bag of rice in his hand, at the stupid little pistol that neither White nor Briggs was even going to use. We have so many supplies that we’ll probably just throw these ones away. None of this needed to happen.
They had gone in there and killed those girls—those children—for absolutely no reason at all.
Adam remembered the day he and Ella had found a pile of bodies in the middle of the highway and had noticed that some of them had belonged to children. They had speculated then on what might motivate someone to kill a child. They had agreed that there could be no good reason for such a thing.
Now Adam had seen it play out.
We could have left those girls alone.
But White and Briggs were obviously so used to killing everyone they happened across that it probably hadn’t even occurred to them that leaving somebody alone was an option. They had killed those girls because they were there, and not for any other reason.
The two men emerged from the house, looking thoroughly unbothered by what had just happened. White crossed the field to Adam, took one of the water bottles out of his arms, unscrewed the cap, and poured it over his face.
Adam was thankful he had an armload of supplies right now. It was the only thing keeping him from punching White in the face.
“Let’s get on the road,” Briggs suggested. “We can still cover a lot more ground before we stop for the night. I want to get to Omaha as soon as we possibly can.”
Adam felt detached as he got into the car. He dropped the remaining water bottle and the bag of rice on the ground and put the pistol beneath his seat. He longed to pull the blanket over his head and shut out the others, but he didn’t dare let them see just how bothered he was by what had just happened.
Besides, he thought, his heart twanging, the last people to be under this blanket were those girls. I bet they huddled up under it on cold nights, and I bet Maddy told the little one that everything would be all right.
The world was such a messed-up place now. Would anyone even remember that those girls had existed? Would their lives be completely forgotten? He didn’t think it would stay with Briggs or White, what had happened today. Already they were talking about how much farther they should travel before stopping to rest for the night.
Escape The Dark (Book 4): Caught In The Crossfire Page 10
