Retribution: Green Fields #11

by Adrienne Lecter

  The three of us watched as the body that used to be Mike sagged in on itself, a last pained gurgle leaving him. Hamilton leaned forward, grabbing a shoulder to make the head flop back, revealing the grisly display. I blinked, mostly irritated with myself for not having caught this, but also strangely fascinated. If not for Hamilton, I would have allowed myself to shiver as I wanted to—not sure why, but the eyes always got to me. It stood to reason that losing an eye rather than half of my fingers would have hampered me less, but maybe it was more a thing of familiarity versus fear of the unknown.

  Hamilton’s drawl finally made my attention snap from the idiot formerly known as Mike to him. “Fucked that one up good, didn’t you?”

  “Because it’s just me in here, and I’m in charge,” I pointed out, my annoyance mixing well with the intended sarcasm.

  “Shows why you shouldn’t be,” Hamilton shot back.

  Doing my best to ignore him, I pulled the pad toward me before Mike’s eye goo could ruin what he’d scribbled. I half expected all of it to be nonsense, but I could decipher a few compounds—but none of it made sense beyond the obvious—MDMA, acid, ketamine. Except for the shared value where recreational use was concerned, they had nothing in common on the chemical side.

  Glancing at the shelves around the room, I pushed away from the table and started perusing them. It was easy to verify that they had everything stocked here that Mike had written down. Maybe if we’d just kept him alive a little longer… but the point was moot, and besides, as far as their backyard-chemist approach to drug distribution went, I didn’t give a shit whether they’d managed to synthesize the most pristine crystal meth or not—all I cared about was the serum.

  Getting tired of staring at the corpse, Nate went to the door and called in the guards. Cole took one look at the dead body and burst out laughing, making me wonder just how sober he was—not that I could shame anyone in that department at the moment. “Damn, but that one didn’t last long,” he muttered, also oddly fascinated by the pencil sticking out of Mike’s skull.

  “This can’t be the entire lab,” I muttered after another look around. “Do you know where they keep the rest?”

  Cole shook his head. “No fucking clue. But there’s a supply room down the corridor.”

  At first I thought that this was a stab at our conjugal extracurricular activities, but when no acerbic remark followed, I let him point me in that direction. As expected, it was all crammed shelves, holding mostly white cardboard boxes and plastic containers—all still achingly familiar from my past life, but only so useful. I even checked the walls, hunting for a concealed door, but came up empty.

  As great as it was to have Nate back, this whole endeavor got more frustrating by the hour. The latent sense of doom at the back of my mind—fueled by the knowledge that we were wasting time that we likely didn’t have—absolutely didn’t help. The storm raging on above us sure fit my mood perfectly.

  Chapter 3

  Scott looked up from the maps he had been poring over as we returned, surprised to see us. “That was quick.”

  I let Nate do the talking, instead focusing on what Scott had been occupied with. It looked like a detailed map of the citadel and entire camp beyond—nothing particularly interesting.

  “He didn’t know much,” Nate offered, scratching his chin. “Dead lead either way.”

  I was tempted to speak up in disagreement, but since I’d let Mike kill himself on my watch, there was nothing I could do about that now. Damn, but Hamilton wasn’t exactly wrong with his acerbic remark about me fucking that up. The fact that it didn’t really bother me—except for giving that idiot a chance to reprimand me—was less disconcerting than how my body felt increasingly more sluggish, including my mind. Simply listening to Scott switch topics and prattle off a list of locations to check on was almost maxing out my mental capacity. The jitters were getting worse, and when I checked my forehead, my hand came away clammy. While Nate listened—or pretended to—Hamilton went to investigate the food offerings on a nearby table, heavily scrutinized by the Ice Queen, but she didn’t reprimand him when he went for the stew pot and started ladling the contents with a hunk of bread. While I found the display disgusting on principle—and I didn’t trust the pots here, even after they had been thoroughly cleaned—a couple of female scavengers at a nearby table got very interested. Hamilton didn’t miss that, either, after slaking his hunger—and with a smirk in my direction sauntered over to the ladies to take care of another. I didn’t suppress the harder shiver that ran through my body. Mutilating that bitch I could take, but Hamilton and his groupies? That was too much.

  Only that when I turned around to join Nate, I found that he was about to leave the room through a different door, trailing after Andrej, who was keeping up a loud, animated, if one-sided conversation in Serbian. Looked like I was left to my own devices—and considering that Hamilton was holding court, I felt it was about time that I took my sorry ass elsewhere.

  “Anything left on our agenda for today?” I asked Scott since he seemed to have somewhat of an overview of the situation.

  He considered but shook his head. “Unless you want to have a chat with the freed prisoners and keep adding to your nightmares, not really.” He gave me a small grin when I shook my head. “Thought so.”

  I was about to turn away when my eyes fell on his maps, the one with the building with the Chemist’s workroom where we’d just been on top. “Say, is that all the workspace they had for the drug manufacturing? Considering that the assistant told us they were running a profitable business, they must have had a larger space set up elsewhere. That workspace had barely enough shelf space for small batches, which wouldn’t have produced enough to keep the scavengers stoned for a single day.”

  Scott shook his head without checking. “Not that I’m aware of, but we haven’t checked the warehouses and barns yet. Sounds promising?”

  I considered for a second. “Something that won’t tear down several buildings when it explodes? Sounds right to me.”

  I got a weird look for that assessment that made me want to ask him if he’d never considered why chemistry labs in schools were located on the upper floor or very end of a wing, but left it at a shrug. “I’ll go check that out.” I was sure buildings that size wouldn’t be hard to find—and I had an inkling that I’d in fact already sneaked by them, right next to the barracks where the labor force was locked in. Somehow I didn’t think anyone had been too concerned about what fumes they might have been inhaling.

  I wasn’t halfway across the room to the closest exit yet when Richards fell into step with me, signaling Cole and Hill to follow us. Since he ignored my annoyed glare, I let him tag along, figuring that it wasn’t the worst idea to bring backup if I had to case the warehouses first. With three hulking soldiers in tow, it seemed unlikely that anyone would get any weird ideas, either.

  “You’re looking for the drug manufactory?” Richards asked conversationally as we made our way up the ramp to the ground level, getting closer to the incessant howling of the wind once more.

  “Something like that,” I replied, trying to sound like talking was the last thing on my mind. Hill chuckled under his breath, but while I was sure the three of them knew about how the interrogation had gone south, nobody asked for specifics.

  Richards wasn’t done, though. “Any leads yet?”

  I shook my head. Stepping out into the storm, the wind hitting me hard enough to steal my breath away for a moment, saved me from having to elaborate. Nobody was stupid enough to venture out into the bad weather, leaving the broad road made of hard-packed dirt to us. I tried to avoid the worst of the puddles at first, and didn’t mind when Richards sent Cole forward. Despite our gear, we were drenched to the skin by the time we reached the long, three-story buildings toward the northern quarter of the camp. Cole let me take point with a mock bow as I stepped into the first warehouse, letting my eyes accustom to the gloom before venturing forth. Just our luck that the building we were
looking for was the third of its kind, packed behind the other two and what passed for a garage for the farm equipment around here. Having seen the laborers in the fields before had made me think they didn’t have any larger equipment, but apparently they hadn’t bothered bringing that out when I’d fled from the camp over two months ago.

  I knew we’d hit pay dirt the moment Hill pulled open one side of the large gate, an acrid chemical scent tickling my nostrils. Hill, more intelligent than he sometimes pretended to be, paused immediately, clearly itching to run back for a gas mask. Squinting into the darkness inside, I spied some basic security equipment like gloves and coats by the door, but no full hazmat gear. So maybe they hadn’t been cooking meth in here, after all. I waited a few more seconds to see if my eyes or throat would start burning, and when nothing happened, I stepped inside to get a better look.

  Bingo.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I warned the soldiers as I started down the open space on the left side that was mostly storage shelves. “If you suddenly start puking and bleeding from your eyes and ears, it’s probably too late.”

  Nobody found my advice funny, but that was fine with me. Unlike the smaller workroom, there were fewer tubs of chemicals in here, but most of them were large enough that I would have needed both hands to pull them off the shelves. Next came a few tanks, some for liquid ingredients, but two also for what I presumed was storage of drugs. In the opposite corner, a part of the warehouse had been sectioned off, and it was outside of that cube that three bright-yellow hazmat suits hung, well-maintained but showing obvious signs of wear and tear. The others were smart enough to steer clear of that section, and I had no intentions of venturing any closer, either. Instead, I went looking for documentation.

  Sure that no army of trigger-happy guards or doped-up scavengers was hiding anywhere, Hill and Cole retreated to the entrance, taking up position where they could check outside but were safe from the rain. Richards ambled along for a while, but after a few minutes got bored of watching me read labels and glance into drawers.

  “What are you looking for specifically?”

  I didn’t halt in my so far fruitless perusal. “Anything, really. I think I have an idea what they used to make the crap the scavengers are snorting and smoking, but I don’t really give a shit about that.”

  A sidelong glance was enough to catch his brief smile, but when I turned to fully face him, Richards was all closed-off professionalism. That, like me, he must have been riding the tail end of a massive high now drowning in withdrawal wasn’t anything I could have read off his features. Asshole. Just my luck that every single man and woman in this blasted camp had less issues with that than me.

  I paused when the next drawer was stuffed to the brim with papers, but most of that looked like notes from someone who needed their fingers to add up numbers from one to ten. They were in line with what Mike had explained, making me guess at first that they might actually be his notes—except for the fact that even at a glance I could make out three different handwriting styles.

  “Looks like this was a team effort,” I muttered, a new wave of annoyance coming up inside of me. “That lying piece of shit.” It didn’t really matter, since even having names and physical descriptions of the others wouldn’t have yielded different results. They must have left with the Chemist—days ago.

  Richards cleared his throat, making me look at him. He was still pretending to be Mr. Neutral. “Cole told me your interrogation didn’t work out so well?”

  “Depends,” I offered. “He told us about the drugs they manufactured, and how they beefed up their farm-labor force. That’s ten times what that bitch could deliver. But yes, he managed to get lucky and killed himself before I could get out the pliers.”

  “And how are you dealing with that?”

  I couldn’t help but smirk. “That I didn’t have to torture another ass wipe to the point where pausing was a relief because he’d stop screaming? Not really bothering me a lot.”

  I could tell that Richards wasn’t very convinced of what sounded like a lie even to me, but I had no intention of explaining further. When nothing more came from me, he dropped the point—and went straight for the kill. “And how are you dealing with everything else? You know, you can talk to me if—”

  He cut off when I deliberately closed the drawer and glared at him. “Do you really think I’d do that, now that I have my entire crew back?”

  Richards didn’t look perturbed that I’d pretty much just told him that we weren’t friends.

  “Some things are easier to discuss with a virtual stranger,” he pointed out.

  “Which you aren’t.” I forestalled any possible response he could have given when his mouth snapped open. “Don’t play games with me, okay? My patience is about maxed out by the very presence of your former commanding officer, and that’s without the shakes, and the brain fog, and the fact that this entire place makes my skin crawl. From where I’m standing, I’m happy about every supporting hand readily lent, but I won’t let anyone try to get between me and the people I trust.” I also had no intention of shoving anyone away deliberately, so I waited until my ego let me back down a little. “We need to have a debriefing as soon as we know more, and plan what we’ll do next—and who will be along for the ride. I can have more than two friends, don’t worry. But right now I’m not really in the mood to talk.”

  Red nodded, if reluctantly—or maybe he was battling demons similar to mine. I turned back to my drawers, ready to sift through the next one, but he wasn’t done yet.

  “Hamilton and I talked last night,” he offered. “As you can imagine, that wasn’t a very elevating, light conversation. He didn’t mention any specifics, but extrapolating from what he didn’t say, I can imagine what’s on your mind right now.”

  Strangely, the annoyance ebbed rather than flowed at his words, but that didn’t mean our talk got any less strained. I made a point of catching his gaze before I responded. “And don’t you think I will take all the things that might weigh on my mind that my husband told me to the grave, and gladly? No offense, but again: if I needed to talk to someone, it wouldn’t be you.”

  Richards took my refusal to spill my guts with a curt nod. “I know that you both think that you can’t confide in anyone—”

  “I’d talk to Zilinsky if I needed to bawl my eyes out,” I told him, adding with a not-quite nice smile, “Been there. Done that. And I know she will take my grievances to the grave, too.”

  A look of surprise crossed Red’s features, something that I hadn’t expected. “I didn’t realize that you were that friendly with her.” The way he stressed “her” made me realize the Ice Queen’s reputation preceded her. That very fact made me grin in earnest.

  “She’s been Nate’s right hand for longer than I’ve known them. After making sure I wouldn’t accidentally kill myself with a gun, she started extending that same courtesy to me. I would talk to her if I needed to, and so would Nate. So unless you want to spill the beans on what Hamilton told you in confidence, or need someone to discuss private matters with, we’re done here.”

  Expecting him to keep his tongue, I turned back to my drawer, but paused with my fingers on the handle when Richards spoke up. “He’s leaving command of our soldiers to me. Said he was done with the army. I would be lying if I wasn’t at least a little concerned about his will to live, but when I was watching the three of you interact earlier, he seemed quite happy to be around. Looks like, indeed, he has become your problem rather than mine.”

  On some level, the fact that he was ready to confide in me felt good. His words, not so much, although I had been wondering about that already. Anger, coiled tight and impossible to disband, started roaring in the back of my mind but I did my best to ignore it, turning back to my drawer. More scrawled notes, no new revelations. The same was true for the next drawer. In the last, I found a basic organic chemistry book that had seen better days a long time ago. I leafed through it but the notes scrawled all over the ma
rgins seemed to belong to legions of students rather than give evidence of what they’d been up to here. It was just as bad as the books we’d liberated from that engineering department when Nate and I had been hunting for information on how to build electrical engines for the buggies.

  It was that very thought that made me pause, then check the front of the book. The title page was gone where, without a doubt, the stamp or sticker of the library had been where it had lived before ending up here. That gave me an idea.

  Ignoring Richards and his patient yet imploring gaze, I walked down the row of worktables to where I found a few boxes full of latex gloves. Someone had diligently unpacked them and stacked them, sorted by size, in the overhead racks above the tables. Looking inside the cupboards below the tables, I found them filled to the brim with plastic bags containing centrifuge vials of all sizes, again stacked according to size. I continued to open doors and drawers, skipping over to the central part of the warehouse—until, finally, I was met with brown cardboard rather than see-through plastic. And, wouldn’t you know it—the box even had the initial address label where it had been sent to on top.

  Not bothering with leaving the strangely organized state of the warehouse intact, I tore off the flap containing the packaging label and continued my search. In short order, I had a handful of torn cardboard in my hands, all of them coming from either of two addresses—in Texas. And while the companies didn’t ring a bell, the street names sounded familiar. Definitely something to bring up in the briefing tomorrow.

  “Found what you were looking for?” Richards asked when I looked ready to go.

  “Not really, but I might have found something.” When he kept eyeing me askance, I shrugged. “They must have had all their chemicals and containers from somewhere. Maybe that’s where they kept working on the serum project.” His utter lack of a reaction told me I was breaking new ground for him. “The Chemist’s assistant told us that they were continuing to tweak the serum—that’s what fried the worker bees’ brains and made the scavengers come back. I need to check back with Harris to confirm that guess, but after Colorado, that’s less of a surprise than I like to admit.”