“Aren’t you the least bit surprised to find me sitting here?” she asked, her eyes briefly flitting to her brother, but leaving me out completely.
Nate gave the approximation of a shrug, as if he couldn’t be bothered with more. “A little. But I doubt that what I think matters to you, after everything you’ve been up to.”
She pursed her lips, not very satisfied with the answer. “A little birdie told me you were operating under the assumption that Decker was the root of all evil. I can see how you’d jump to that conclusion”—her gaze zoomed to her brother for a moment—“but as you must have realized by now, it’s completely and utterly wrong.” Judging from the satisfaction in her tone, it was obvious she had had something to do with that.
Nate let his gaze skip over the entire group on the dais. “And which traitorous asshole would that have been? Or should I say bitch, since Richards happily let you cut off any balls he ever had.”
The man in question stiffened—and I didn’t miss that the drumming of his fingers stopped, only to start anew… and I had no clue what that could mean. I did my best to widen my eyes at him—my most hilarious owl impression ever—trying to portray cluelessness, but then noticed that, really, all he did was point to his left—to Gita. At the very end of the lineup, she had an easy time using hand signals, and the hand she had partly hidden behind her body was moving, using some of the modified sign language that Nate had adapted after I’d lost a few too many fingers to rely on the usual signals. At first I didn’t get it, but then I realized that she was giving us the “stay put” signal. The bright lights in the room flickered for a moment—nothing remarkable, considering the electricity down here must be requiring an entire bank of generators, if not more—and nobody else seemed to notice, but Gita’s hand stilled, and then switched to a “wait for my mark” signal. I hoped that Nate singling out Richards had been his acknowledgement that he was aware that Red tried to tell us something, and not just plain anger. Then again, if I noticed, chances were good that Nate had noticed as well.
Hamilton’s sister—whose name I still didn’t know, and now that seemed very much like an oversight—wasn’t impressed by Nate’s slander of her henchpeople, but far from fazed. “Of late you’ve been surprisingly open with publicly discussing your suspicions, so it could be virtually anyone. Exactly how sure are you that all the members of your merry band of misfits aren’t actually my band of misfits?”
If she thought she could shake Nate’s confidence that way, she was sorely mistaken—and he let her know as much with a smirk, not deigning to spell out the words. Instead, he took a moment to look around, as if the barren conference room would let him see all the secrets of this installation. “Quite the hideout you’ve built here. I guess leading us around like a menagerie for all to gawk at should have made us feel small, and so very impressed by your accomplishments? I’m not. Anyone can sit on their lazy asses if they have someone else to get slaughtered for them instead.”
All she had for that was a snort as she leaned back on her throne. “And yet, you’re the one who’s out there, losing how many of your closest confidants now? Some of them aren’t even dead. They simply wised up and kicked you out. I must say, I thought Bert and Emma were just putting up a front, but they really must have meant it since they’ve made no move to even contact their daughter, let alone get her back in the fold. Can’t fault them, really, seeing as the girl was so eager to forever soil herself. Guess once this is over, I will personally send them my condolences. They’ve earned that measure of trust.”
At first, I was surprised that she knew the names of our people in Wyoming… but probably shouldn’t have been, I belatedly realized. They were important on the grand scale of things, but that wasn’t what had triggered my memory. Of course she knew—at least of, if not them personally—Emma and Bert since Hamilton had helped build the bunker, the fact that he’d known about the nukes buried underneath it just one more reminder. But it was a different detail that stood out to me—the fact that, for whatever reason I’d never really questioned, there had been an entire set of survival gear in the bunker that fit me well enough although not a single female member of the group was anywhere my size. I didn’t need Nate’s statement from last night about his sister being the only woman Hamilton had ever loved to realize whose box that must have been, although it did make me wonder if now was the right time to say, “Hi, I’m Bree, I may have accidentally crapped your pants twice a few winters ago.” Come to think of it, I doubted she had known about the bunker, considering that she must have been maybe twelve or fourteen when it had been built—and the fact that we had survived there the first winter of the apocalypse was kind of a dead giveaway for that as well.
Nate didn’t react to the name dropping, and instead switched topics.
“I presume Decker is dead?”
She looked very pleased with herself as she nodded. “For years.”
“You killed him?”
She nodded again. “And it was easy, really. Both actually killing him, and getting to him first. You see, that was the one thing I’d been dreading for a long time—facing the man who had given the order that, for all intents and purposes, ended my life. I spent years in therapy, trying to deal with all that shit, but it turns out, all I needed to do was to flay him alive to be able to sleep soundly again. Who would have thought?”
Yeah, who indeed?
Nate took the news without a hint of reaction. “That was before you kicked off the apocalypse, I presume?”
“A while before that,” she replied, almost lost in thought. “You helped with that, incidentally. If you’d stayed with him, after your brother died, I’m not sure I’d have stood a chance. I’d hoped my actions would lead to this, but there was no way I could have planned for it. It was plan B, really. The leads I laid out for you should have led you in a different direction.”
“You expected me to kill him?” Nate presumed.
She made a face, as if the disappointment still rankled. “Hoped is more like it. That you didn’t was confirmation for me that you still were his creature, unable to rise up and rid yourself of your master. You sealed your fate with that, you know? I still would have killed you, eventually, but that kept things on a nicely personal level.” She allowed herself a bright smile. “Oh, how he bled. And how he begged. Pathetic, really. To think that someone so weak did such a good job pretending to be strong. But then he never did anything else but make others do his dirty work. Physically, it wasn’t hard to overwhelm him. It wasn’t much harder to break him, either. But I have to give him that much, until the very end he was too short-sighted to realize where he’d gone wrong. He didn’t even try to recruit me, nor was he wary of me, when I showed up on his doorstep. He recognized me, you know? ‘Ah, you’re that girl that broke my most promising tools,’ he said. He didn’t consider that I was there to kill him. Probably thought I was doing this because my therapist had told me to confront him. For closure, or something. In a sense, it was closure, but it didn’t undo anything that had happened, of course.” Her gaze then turned considering. “I know that you’re smarter than him. At least you were smart enough not to discredit a potential ally just because she’s a woman. Of course you never actually did anything with that intellect of yours. What a shame. But how does the old adage go—boys will be boys?”
Nate shrugged off her criticism, as it was. “I’m not sad to see him go, if that’s a kind of vindication to you.”
“It’s not,” she was quick to state, her voice suddenly ice cold.
Nate shrugged. “If he was weak enough that you could easily have gotten to him, he deserved to die.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she looked pleased rather than antagonized, as if Nate had merely confirmed her suspicions. “And yet, you thought it was him, hunting you, all these years.”
Nate considered his answer for a few seconds. “It made sense that he would. You know this, because that has been your strategy all along—to imitate his style, and to use the power his ver
y name held with so many people.” He paused. “I admit, I was easily fooled because I was vain enough to believe he’d still be after me, had he still been alive. And you picked your allies well.” He ignored those standing beside her, so he must have been referring to someone else.
“Not that I need your validation,” she muttered. “But yes, if I may say so myself. And except for very few people, most of them still don’t have a fucking clue that I’m the one holding their leash—or that they even have a leash around their necks. General Morris has turned out to be a godsend for that, buffoon that he is. He never once questioned whether those were genuine orders I gave him, or if they actually came from Decker. He still thinks I’m his secretary, who so happened to survive the outbreak by his side. And not even my brother dear has suspected anything for the longest time.” Her eyes briefly flitted to Hamilton, and, shit, compared to that look, he and I were really tight friends. “Only that, for whatever reason, he thought it was a good idea to subvert orders rather than follow them, going as far as to warn you. Not only that—he started snooping around. While I was sure to leave no traces for him to find, that kind of disobedience needed to be punished. Too bad that ended up reuniting the two of you, but considering the circumstances, I can’t find it in me to regret that. How does life on the other side of the equation treat you?”
Neither Nate nor Hamilton rose to the bait, but I couldn’t help but feel like she’d just spelled out her motivation—and damn, I hated how that left me feeling conflicted. Not about the certain knowledge that we couldn’t leave her alive—she had killed billions of people, and all for the sake of personal revenge. But while I certainly hoped that the consequences were something I hadn’t been able to ignore, I could kind of identify with her need for vengeance. Shit, but really, this was a dumpster fire of epic proportions.
Without acknowledging her point, Nate steered the conversation in a slightly different direction. “What you did, you needed to do through others. That’s the reason why you fucked up so much, isn’t it?”
Anger sparked in her eyes, but it was a glancing blow at best. “I’m only one woman. To accomplish more than any single person ever in the history of the world is not something you can take away from me, just like that. But yes, I’ve had to rely on others. That ability to delegate is the very reason my plan worked, and why you would have failed. I didn’t need to be the strongest, toughest, most evil bitch on the block. It sufficed that I knew who to give the right tasks to. That has also left me ready to pivot and react to changes as they were required. Just look at us here. While you’ve been crawling in the dirt, life for us hasn’t changed at all. We live in lavish luxury. And, if you were wondering, we will continue to do so through several generations. We don’t depend on your scavengers to bring us garbage. The bunker is outfitted with several layers of hydroponics to grow our own food for generations, and a manufacturing plant for all the goods we could ever need. After all, somehow we need to keep the families and dependents of the staff here busy, too. You wouldn’t expect how easy it is to recruit new people if you just promise them paradise.”
So much for the question of how they kept this institution running. Nate looked about as impressed as I was. “Slaves, whether they still have the capacity to understand it or not.”
“And how is that different from everyday life for virtually everyone before the outbreak?” she wanted to know. “We have fair conditions here. Labor laws, very strict rules for how long anyone is even allowed to work. We have had virtually zero complaints, and a lot of people have professed that their quality of life has much increased. Take away money, and you immediately solve the living-wage crisis. But someone who’s only used to taking everything he thinks he deserves won’t understand that concept.”
Nate ignored that barb as well. “I think I’m starting to see how things could have gone to shit as they did, but there’s still one detail I’m unsure of. Why kill my brother? If you’d ever met him, you would have known that he had no love lost for anything even remotely connected to the serum program.”
A satisfied twist came to her mouth. “And still he was helping them, with fine-tuning the serum.”
“That’s why you killed him?”
She shook her head. “No. Because he was trying to save you.” The smile that followed gave me the creeps. That she wasn’t exactly sane wasn’t hard to guess, but that looked like it was coming from the far side of the psychopath range. “And want to know the best part about it? He succeeded. Not in saving you, of course. But he could have, because he made that breakthrough just days before he met his well-timed end. That forced me to greatly accelerate some of my plans, but as you know, he never got to tell a soul about it.”
So far, it had been easy to keep my trap shut—confusion will do that even to me, and since it was obvious that Nate was putting up some play, it made sense to let him lead without getting in the way—but that was too good a nugget to ignore. “Are you sure? Raleigh Miller actually found a cure?”
Uh, she didn’t like having her little one-on-one with Nate interrupted. The way she stared at me should have made me drop dead on the spot. But after a few seconds of me just looking back as neutrally as I could manage, she gave an imperceptible shrug, as if deigning to include me in the conversation. “For the terminal run of the serum, yes. Him hiring you was the reason why we had to kill him before he could share his breakthrough with you. His own assessment of you stated clearly that he trusted that, with your help, he would be done with testing and troubleshooting within months. Since your name came out of nowhere, I had no way of assessing how true any of that was, so he had to be dead and his research destroyed before you could catch even a glimpse of that. Catastrophe avoided in the nick of time, as they say.” She seemed very pleased with herself for that. Rather than focus back on Nate, she continued to stare at me, now more like a collector scrutinizing a particularly interesting new specimen. “How does that make you feel, knowing that your possible involvement got one of your heroes killed? You know what that kind of research would have entailed. I saved you from having to soil yourself like that. But then, you didn’t exactly show much sense of self-preservation, considering what questionable choices you made going forward.”
I didn’t need to read her mind to know she was referring to Nate. The anger in her voice made that rather obvious. Since she wanted a response, I was ready to give her one—if a cautious one since I still had no clue how Nate wanted me to react. “I hardly knew the man. What I admired was his intellect. I got the job I was officially hired for and loved working on that. Not much to regret there, if I’m honest.”
My response bored her and she looked away from me, which almost made me breathe a sigh of relief. She thought she was so clever? But she was not. Because what suddenly made me want to vibrate with tension was the fact that she believed she’d killed Raleigh’s research with him—but that wasn’t true. Because in the lab in France, we had found the letters he’d sent to his research partner, and I had been able to recover a lot of notes that had gone way beyond what Nate had shown me of his brother’s research. Those notes I had been working on during our return, sending them and my thoughts on to Emily Raynor. If Raleigh really had made that breakthrough, it was in there. I just hadn’t recognized it for what it was. But I had added the contribution he had hired me for, in a sense, so there was still hope for Raynor to make the connection. Maybe it was too late for us, but this was actually the best news I’d gotten in years—and all the better if this bitch here wasn’t aware of any of it.
“None of that changes anything,” Nate said, drawing her attention back to him.
“Oh, but it does. Or did,” she replied, again with that eerily happy smile on her face. “Stopping the research for the cure for the serum was vital. It ensured that you assholes couldn’t simply step away from all the shit you had done. If that had been the case, how could I have systematically targeted you all to wipe you out with one fell swoop?”
I was sure that
the momentary glee on Nate’s face was fake, but it weirded me out. “Huh. So that’s what you tried to do with the weaponized version of the virus? Single us out and kill us? Hate to break it to you, buttercup, but you accomplished the opposite.” He wasn’t done yet, cocking his head to the side, a wry grin on his face. “Actually, what you did was kill billions of innocents, and we are still standing. People see us as heroes because we are the ones who helped them rebuild and continue to provide them with anything they could possibly need that we pick up from the ruins. But you already know that. And that’s the reason why you’ve been doing your very best to poison and kill everyone who might have even a hint of admiration for us.”
The scavengers and the faulty serum—that explained it. And really, it was the extension of the insane explanation that the mad scientist at NORAD, Dr. Alders, had given, his fervor going as far as to infect his own son—who happened to have been one of my favorite people of all time: Taggard. I fucking hated that we’d known this; we’d been right there, and we had made sure this ended with him—or so we’d thought. But we’d missed that he hadn’t been alone, of course, the serum project group under Gabriel Greene’s father still operational. I still couldn’t understand how she’d managed to make them do this—knowingly condemn thousands of good people to insanity, death, and worse.
No time like the present to ask, I figured.
As soon as I cleared my throat, her attention was on me again, and she looked even less pleased than before. “I have a question regarding that,” I offered, and went right on talking before she could tell me to go fuck myself. “How did you get Walter Greene to turn on what must have been the central part of the research of his lifetime? You must know that we found their secret hideout underneath Dallas.” No question, with Marleen standing next to her.
She gave a curt nod. “Yes. They took the ultimate sacrifice to ensure that you couldn’t mess with their accomplishments,” she said, notes of praise and gratitude in her voice. “They accomplished so much. I’m indebted to them, and will never be able to repay them.”
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 106