by K. M. Fawkes
As building after building began to catch fire, he heard shouting from the men in the building, and a second later, a row of soldiers emerged from a side exit and went fleeing into the desert, evidently forgetting entirely about the commander they’d been fighting for minutes earlier.
Garrett and his team were free. They’d made it. He blew out his breath, hardly daring to believe it, and then rose up and started climbing down the stairs.
Chapter 26
The rest of his team met him at the base of the turret, Alice leading them, and Garrett grinned at them and threw his arms around Alice.
“I can’t believe that worked,” she whispered.
“Me either, honestly,” he answered, laughing. True, he’d hoped it would work. And he’d planned on it working. But that didn’t mean he’d truly believed it would be successful.
Still, he’d realized the first day they were here that it would be better to be shot trying to escape than spend the rest of his life in forced labor. He supposed that had colored his decision to run rather than just staying and dealing with things.
Now, it seemed, they actually had to figure out what they were going to do next.
Alice cast a glance back at Green, who was on the ground, blubbering about his life and how much he would be worth to the authorities.
“So what are we going to do with him?” Alice asked, quirking an eyebrow.
Garrett knew the answer she wanted. And he knew she was likely right. Green had committed crimes against his country and against humanity itself. And as long as there was no law except for them…
“I suppose the best and kindest thing to do is to take care of him. For humanity’s sake,” he said quietly.
Alice gave him an amused look. “I suppose you’re right. Let’s go.”
She tossed him back his gun, and when he popped the clip out and opened it up, he saw that there were two bullets left. Just two. Enough for this task, and yet not enough for anything more. That didn’t make him feel any more confident about what they were going to do.
“You boys stay here, we’re going to go take care of this,” he said to the rest of the group. “Julia, you too. You’ve already seen too much. You don’t need to see this.”
The others all nodded, evidently more than okay with leaving this execution to their leaders, and Alice and Garrett strolled toward the gate and the desert beyond, Green between them.
By the time they got ten paces outside of the front door, Garrett was already tired of hearing Green beg for his life. The man, it seemed, had absolutely no pride, and wasn’t worried about his reputation.
“You can’t kill me!” he sobbed. “I’m an important man, there are plenty of people who will pay to keep me safe.”
“Say we believe you about that—which we don’t. What are we going to do with something like money, fool?” Alice asked, shoving him to his knees. “Where do you think we’ll spend it?”
“You can sell me to the government!” the man blubbered. “They’ll want to have me back.”
“Have you back for what?” Garrett asked, mystified. Did Green’s delusion run far enough to make him think he was actually valuable to the government for anything more than information about how he had done what he’d done?
He held his gun up to the man’s head, ready to end the diatribe. But then he hesitated. Yes, killing Green would eliminate the man as an enemy, and that was important. Even if Garrett and his team escaped, he had a feeling Green would find a way to come after them, if he was still alive. This sort of man didn’t give up on his crazy dreams that easily, and he certainly didn’t let go of power once he’d had it.
But could Garrett live with himself if he just killed a man in cold blood like that? Was that really who he was—or who he wanted to be? True, he’d killed men in the battle in the base, but that had been different. Those men had been trying to kill them. Green was a helpless, unarmed man.
This wasn’t about Green, Garrett realized. This was about Garrett himself.
And he wasn’t a man who killed helpless people.
He drew his gun back, prepared to give some sort of speech about how he was better than Green, and was shocked when Alice grabbed the gun from him, held it to Green’s head, and shot twice.
She was cool and casual when she handed the gun back, as if she hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, and looked up to meet his eye. Then she nodded once.
“For people like him, there’s no room for mercy. He never showed any for us. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They turned and walked back toward the fort and the rest of their team, leaving Green’s body in the sand of the desert for the buzzards to pick clean. And as they walked, Alice slipped her hand into Garrett’s, paused a second, and squeezed.
He squeezed back, his heart suddenly full, and kept his face toward the team who was suddenly starting to feel a whole lot like the family he thought he’d lost to the virus.
TO BE CONTINUED
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