At Any Cost Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by K. M. Fawkes

  “Floyd, the general wants a word with you,” the soldier at the door snapped.

  Garrett’s head jerked up, his heart racing. “What?” he asked. “What does he want?”

  “To see your progress,” the man said with a nasty smile.

  Right. Terrific. Garrett gathered up his papers—which weren’t nearly as complete as he’d like them to be—gave Julia a quick grin, and then stood up to follow the soldier out of the room.

  “What did you say these were?” Green asked, jabbing a finger down on the blueprint Garrett had been explaining.

  “Those are the load-bearing walls, sir,” Garrett answered. “We’re going to be putting up a false ceiling, so it won’t weigh as much as a real roof, but we’ll still need certain walls to bear the load. So to speak. They’ll have to be the walls that we never move, and they’ll have to be the most secure. I suggest using actual construction materials there—steel frames, wood, concrete board. It’ll make the whole thing more secure.”

  “And for the other walls?”

  “Just wooden framing with concrete board should do it, sir,” Garrett answered quickly. “It’s faster. Cheaper. The people in those rooms won’t have a whole lot of privacy, but…” He lifted his hands and shrugged in a gesture that said that really wasn’t his problem, and Green gave a hearty chuckle—just like Garret had thought he would.

  People like him never had a sophisticated sense of humor. Tell enough off-color jokes and they thought you were hilarious. Which was exactly what Garrett wanted Green to think. If he could get the general to like him enough, he might start to get more leeway, and that flexibility would really come in handy.

  Green’s hand came down—hard—on Garrett’s shoulder, and Garrett staggered a bit.

  “You’re doing a great job, kid. Exactly what I had in mind. Exactly what we needed.”

  “Happy to hear that, sir,” Garrett said, nodding. “When I see a worthy project, I give it my all.”

  Green’s smile suddenly died, and the bottom fell out of Garrett’s stomach.

  “Speaking of projects, I hear you’ve been asking about the blueprints for the entire base,” the general said, his voice cold and even. “What exactly do you want with those?”

  Garrett launched into his explanation for why he needed them—which he’d prepared earlier in the day, thank goodness—and how he had ideas for what to do with some of the other spaces, but needed to be able to see those spaces before he could confirm the ideas.

  “Just think of it, sir, we could have a real restaurant in one of the larger rooms. Make it just like home, huh? Maybe even turn one of the meeting rooms into a movie theatre of sorts. I know you want this to be a fortress, but if we’re going to rebuild society from here, we need to make sure the people are happy.”

  God, he was laying it on thick, and it disgusted him. He felt like throwing up at his own antics.

  But I’m only doing it to get us all out of here, he reminded himself. What was letting go of your dignity when it came to saving lives, after all. Heroes didn’t only wear capes. Sometimes they wore masks. And sometimes those masks had to make them into people they would absolutely never have been in real life.

  Green was nodding once again, and Garrett knew that no matter how much he had disgusted himself, it was working. Green was completely buying what Garrett was selling. And little wonder—the man was completely convinced that he was doing what was best for all the people at the base. Or at least for the people he’d chosen to protect at the base.

  “I can’t say I care much about their happiness, Floyd, but you’re right about the space. If we’re going to use this place to repopulate the world, we need to be able to live here for quite a while.”

  He pounded his fist down on Garrett’s drawings and looked up at Garrett, his face still serious and more than a little ferocious. “Do it. I’ll give the orders for you to have those blueprints. I want a list of your suggestions in two days. And make sure they’re worthy of the world we’re building.”

  Ten minutes later, Garrett was leaving the general’s living quarters, feeling slightly dazed, horrified that the man was taking this all so seriously…and also feeling more than a bit victorious. He would have the blueprints for the entire base tomorrow, and that would mean he’d have access to all entry points.

  And all exit routes.

  He skipped dinner, having more important things to attend to, and got back up to his room quickly. There he considered taking some of his pain medication—his hand always hurt worse at the end of the day—but left the pill bottle on the shelf. He’d take one before bed. Right now, he had a list of observations to write down, and he needed to keep his mind sharp.

  The painkillers made his brain foggy. If he was going to carry forward with this plan, he needed to wean himself off of them, and the sooner the better.

  Chapter 20

  Over the next couple of days, Garrett began fleshing his plan out. He’d received the blueprints, as Green had promised, and had spread them out immediately and started memorizing them.

  He might never have been an accomplished architect, but he’d always been very good at blueprints—and at memorizing them. Within an hour he had a working idea of what the base was like, and to his surprised pleasure, he found that it was an extremely large base—with what had to be many deserted halls and rooms on the outer reaches. He’d done enough watching, and asked enough questions of the guards, to know that Green’s immediate circle of soldiers was only twenty men deep. He didn’t trust many people and only kept a select few around him, and that meant that the entire base was being patrolled by twenty men.

  During its peak, this base had probably been guarded by at least two hundred active-duty security members. Twenty men wasn’t nearly enough to secure all the exits. It wasn’t even enough to secure the building they were currently using.

  He’d also been using Julia for whatever information she could give him. Based on the plans she’d been told to draw up, they were able to figure out what rooms might actually be in use, in terms of storage of machinery, food, and supplies, and which were most likely off-limits.

  There was a large tract of land behind the base, and they’d decided that that would be where Green wanted the crops to be planted. The rooms on that end of the complex would probably have most of the supplies he seemed to have brought here—which would mean patrols, or at least cameras. He would have to avoid that end of the base like the plague. He didn’t know whether there were working security cameras here, but if there were, he had to assume Green would have put them with the valuables. And if he was building a farm, the things with the most value would be the supplies for said farm.

  The front of the base was also out, for many obvious reasons—not the least of which was the fact that the front of the base was where Green had established himself. That left the two sides, though, and both looked to have many exits. If he could just find his way to one of those—with the key—he’d be able to get out into the desert. No, he didn’t have any of his supplies. But he wasn’t going to let that stop him. He’d been camping for most of his life and knew how to rough it.

  He’d found the prison room on the map, courtesy of the label, which was in all capitals, and was pleased to see that he did know where it was. More importantly, he’d be able to get to it easily when the time came—as long as he could ditch the guards.

  And he was working on that, as well. He’d been making friends with them, telling them amusing stories—which he mostly made up—about his life before the virus. He’d even started doing rounds with some of them, pretending that he just wanted to talk when he was, in reality, memorizing their routes and figuring out how many of them were on patrol duty at once, and how far out they went.

  The soldiers didn’t seem to mind too much. Some of them even seemed like decent people. But Garrett was constantly reminding himself that these were men who hadn’t hesitated to shoot a teenage boy in his own home when they decided that he wasn’t useful. Thes
e were men who were willingly following a crazy bastard who wanted to set up an authoritarian regime.

  These were the men who had been promised the prisoners as wives.

  They weren’t people he would have been friends with on the outside. And they weren’t people he could afford to feel any sympathy for in here. They were the enemy, and that was all there was.

  Three days later, the one thing he hadn’t seen was the prison. He wasn’t allowed to have any contact with the prisoners, and he wasn’t allowed to go anywhere near the prisoner’s part of the hallway. A deliberate move on Green’s part, he was sure. It must have been obvious that he was going to bond with the prisoners, and his reaction to the soldier killing that boy had shown Green and his men that Garrett could be a troublemaker. A rebel. A revolutionary.

  They were keeping him away from the others so that the others assumed he’d turned. And from the glimpses he’d caught of Alice—and the dirty looks she was throwing his way whenever she saw him—it had worked.

  Chapter 21

  Three days after he started working with—or for, as he thought of it—Green and his men, Garrett was forcibly reminded of just how dangerous the situation was. Though he hadn’t known exactly what the other men were doing or why they were in the factory with Julia and Garrett, he’d assumed that Bob and Kevin were at least important enough to maintain.

  That had evidently been a complete fabrication. Something that his logical and perhaps too idealistic mind had cooked up.

  That morning, when he woke up, he was told that there was going to be a special presentation before breakfast. And he was then frog-marched down the stairs, his hands behind his back, and out into a sort of courtyard that sat off of one of the larger halls.

  There, he found the guards gathered into a group, the prisoners gathered into another. He was forced forward to stand next to Kevin and Julia, and he frowned. Where was Bob? He was the other member of their little club of geniuses—was he not going to be forced into whatever group activity they were doing here?

  Then he looked across at the prisoners and caught Alice’s eyes. She glared at him, and he cringed at her anger, but then her expression melted into fear, and he felt a sudden need to run to her. To protect her in some way. What was she so frightened of?

  He turned his eyes fearfully to the single soldier in the middle of the square. What was going on here, and how did Alice know it was something to cause fear?

  They stood there for some time, the sun beating down on their heads, and Garrett soon grew thirsty. Worse, the longer they stood there, the more concerned he was becoming. What sort of devilry was this? Some new torture device, whereby they were going to be killed by being slowly dehydrated out here in the sun? And if that was true, why were the soldiers out here? Were they being punished as well?

  All thought flew out of his mind when someone emerged from the door on the other side of the square. It was Green…and Bob, who was handcuffed and being shoved along in front of the other man. He looked like he hadn’t slept all night, and like he’d had the daylights beat out of him. One leg wasn’t working correctly, and both eyes were blackened. His horn-rimmed glasses were gone. He looked like a dead man walking.

  And right then, Garrett knew why they’d all been brought out here this morning. Why they’d been forced to stand in the sun for so long. They were here to witness a punishment. To be shown what would happen to them if they got out of line.

  Green got to the middle of the square and pushed a sobbing, wounded Bob to his knees. Then he looked up at the prisoners.

  “You all know why we’re here. You’ve seen this sort of thing before, but I find it useful to remind you. Remind you of what will happen if you’re caught doing anything illegal. If you’re caught”—he shoved Bob’s head—“fomenting rebellion.”

  Garrett didn’t know Bob well. But he’d worked with him for a few days, and he’d seen how jumpy the guy was. Scared. Nervy. That wasn’t the sort of man who fomented rebellion. That was the sort of man who stayed in line just to keep from drawing any attention to himself.

  Green was making this whole thing up. Just to prove a point. And Bob was paying the price for it.

  Then, without warning, Green took out a handgun and shot Bob in the head. When the body fell to the ground, he shot him three more times. Then he turned and walked casually back into the building.

  Garrett stared at the person who had been Bob, shocked beyond belief, and completely disgusted.

  He’d known Green was insane. He hadn’t realized he was also a cold-blooded murderer.

  Ten days later, Garret was starting to feel like he was actually going to make it, despite everything he’d seen—and heard—here. He’d become friends with many of the guards, and had successfully done many of their patrols with them. He knew this area of the complex like the back of his hand—and more importantly, he’d been studying the blueprints of the full base in every second of his spare time. He knew exactly how he was going to get out. He’d also had several days of meeting with Green, who had been complimentary of his work, and had managed to get his list of suggestions approved. That had led to more work, where he was redesigning other halls into new uses of his own making, and yesterday, Green had even suggested that Garrett work in Green’s kitchen, where he had easier access to food.

  The food was nice. The fact that he was locked into Green’s room was unsettling, to say the least.

  He also found that he immediately started missing Julia, who had become a sort of surrogate little sister to him over the last week. She was always smiling and making a joke of things, and when they were living in a recycled military complex, being ordered around by a lunatic with a god complex, the humor had been welcome.

  She’d also become incredibly valuable in the planning, and had been irreplaceable when it came to sneaking information into his hands. He had a good idea now exactly how much material Green had stuffed into those rooms near what would become the farm, and he even had a list in his room of what he thought might come in handy.

  True, the farm equipment would be next to useless. But there was food in those rooms as well, and weapons, if her lists were to be believed. And though his primary goal was to get out, Garrett knew they had to have a way to survive once they got out there. A head start on the food would make that a whole lot easier.

  If they managed to escape at all. And if they had time to make any stops on their way out.

  He was confident about the first but wasn’t banking on the second. Honestly if he managed to find the other prisoners, get them out of their cells, and get them moving toward an exit, without anyone catching them, he knew he wouldn’t bother with any of the equipment at the back of the compound.

  The only thing he’d be thinking about was the exit.

  Unfortunately, he still hadn’t worked out exactly how that was all going to go. He wasn’t allowed anywhere near the prison room, and though he had a plan for how to get out of the complex, and even had the timing down, in terms of when the hallways would be unguarded, he had no idea how they were going to start. They would need a distraction of some sort for him to get into the prison and release the others, and he had no idea how he was going to manage that one.

  The other big problem was the key. He’d seen the key ring multiple times, but it was always attached to one of the guards. And he’d never seen where anyone put it—which meant he had no idea where to look for it. And without those keys, none of this was going to happen.

  Put that all into the framework of the clock he knew was ticking, and Garrett was starting to get extremely nervous. Every room or theater or kitchen he designed was another the prisoners were put to work on, and the moment those bedrooms were done, he knew the general was going to start handing women to the men. Start building his families.

  If he wanted to keep his friends safe, he had to get them out of here before that happened.

  He was just bending down to get back to work on the list he was making right now—an exact time
table of when the guards were in the hallways, and where they were—when the door suddenly opened with a bang.

  Garrett glanced up, stuffing the paper rapidly into his pocket, and was surprised to see Alice at the door with a mop and bucket of cleaning supplies rather than the guard he’d been expecting. She looked thinner than she had the last time he’d seen her, her cheekbones jutting out more sharply, her eyes looking far too big in her face. Her hair was messier, her skin dirty.

  She was also sporting a large bruise across one side of her face. And at that, his blood started to boil.

  “Alice,” he breathed, jumping to his feet and rushing toward her. He put a hand up to her face. “What did they do to you?”

  She jerked her face away from him and shoved him backward. “None of your business, traitor,” she spat.

  “What?” he asked, torn between shock and understanding. From where she stood, he must have looked like the most horrible sort of traitor, selling his friends out for a comfortable bed and warm meals.

  But that wasn’t why he’d done it. And she deserved to know the truth.

  “Alice—” he started.

  She flew at him, nails scratching, teeth bared, and before he knew what he was doing he’d reacted in self-defense and had her pressed up against the wall, one hand on her shoulder and the other holding both of her hands between them. He didn’t even remember how they got there—or how he’d managed to grab both of her hands in his—but it had surprised her enough that she was just standing there, mouth hanging open. This was his chance to talk. Before she came to her senses and started fighting him again.

  “It’s not what you think,” he hissed. “Not at all. I have a good reason for everything I did, but you have to promise to listen to me, Alice. Listen to me and I’ll get you out of here. Do you promise?”