Southlands

by D. J. Molles

  Sam nodded. “She got away. You need to contact command and tell them she’s still alive. If they evac the Safe Zone, she might try to sneak out with one of the convoys.”

  “Alright, Ryder,” Billings said, cracking a hesitant smile. “You fucking psychopath. We gotta go get Chris before the primals find him.”

  ***

  Captain Perry Griffin stood before the glowing monitor, one arm crossed over his chest, the other perched on his chin.

  They were positioned in a small, abandoned strip mall, eight miles from the gates of the Fort Bragg Safe Zone. The monitor was perched on the bed of a pickup truck. A younger soldier sat before a complicated control apparatus that was attached to the monitor.

  On the monitor there was a thermal-imaging view of the power substation in the Fort Bragg Safe Zone. It was a bird’s eye view, looking down through a screen of black pine boughs. But the images on the ground were clear enough.

  Bodies. Shredded. Eviscerated.

  They were already slightly dimmer than a human body should have shown. Growing cold. At least compared to the white-hot signatures of the creatures that fed on them.

  Griffin’s eyes coursed over the scene, looking for any signatures that didn’t move in strange, animal ways. The way they moved…like a chimpanzee sometimes. And then other times like wolves.

  There had been one human signature, huddled behind one of the substation’s transformers. But he’d been sniffed out. The creatures had dragged him out. Latched onto his throat until he stopped kicking. Then a few of them had carried him off a short distance and fed.

  That was it. There were no more humans at the power substation.

  He wondered if Elsie Foster had foreseen that her little coup could end up like this? Those scattered bits of gristle, growing cold, were all the fighters she’d sent to take over the power substation.

  Well.

  She probably had anticipated a little more support from Greeley.

  But Griffin had only ten men dispatched with him. He was not about to plunge them into the soup of carnage that Fort Bragg had devolved into. Elsie Foster should have thought a little harder about it before she cut the power. She’d held the Safe Zone hostage for her demands, and it sounded like Angela Houston had called her bluff. Yes, it would have made Elsie look weak if she hadn’t cut the power. But looking weak was better than being dead, Griffin thought.

  On the other end of an infected’s digestive track, a weak man and a strong man both looked like a pile of shit on the forest floor.

  Poor choices. All the way around.

  Griffin waved at the monitor. “Alright. Fuck them. Zoom out. See where all the people are.”

  The soldier operating the small reconnaissance drone did as he was told. The image on the monitor zoomed out, then began to pan. It was high altitude, so it took less than a minute for the image to move into the center of the Safe Zone.

  There, they could see how things were shaping out.

  There was a large building—what appeared to be a hangar—that was surrounded by heat signatures. Upon zooming in, those signatures revealed themselves to be human soldiers. They had a defensive perimeter, and a steady stream of other signatures—civilians, Griffin guessed—flowed past them, and into the hangar.

  Griffin let out a low whistle. “Shit. Couple Hellfires would solve a lot of problems.”

  The drone operator smirked, but said nothing.

  The drone was for recon only. It wasn’t big enough to carry munitions.

  Too bad.

  “Alright,” Griffin said, with a sigh. “Pull it back. Charge it up. We’ll check the situation out later.”

  Griffin’s operations team leader leaned out from the other side of the truck. “We gonna move in tonight?”

  Griffin shook his head. “Probably not. Earliest might be tomorrow morning. But I’m not putting us in there unless they evacuate.” Griffin nodded to his team lead. “Post watch. Get a few hours of sleep.”

  “Hey Cap,” the drone operator said.

  Griffin looked over.

  The operator pointed to the monitor. “Look at this shit,” he breathed, a note of awe in his voice.

  Griffin frowned at the monitor, and for a moment he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Some sort of thermal-imaging Rorschach test…

  No. The operator had zoomed the drone all the way out.

  From its high-altitude vantage, the monitor now showed a massive swath of the Fort Bragg Safe Zone. At the center of the screen, Griffin could see the box that was the hangar they’d just spied on, where everyone seemed to be gathering.

  But at the edges of the darkness of that screen, there were blobs. Blobs of white, made by groups of eight, ten, sometimes a dozen heat signatures. And there were hundreds of these blobs. Moving like individual units, but also, as a whole, they seemed to be encircling Fort Bragg. They seemed to be following some basic strategy.

  When Griffin squinted at the monitor, he could see the individual shapes. He saw how they ran, often on all fours, like wolves, and then sometimes like chimpanzees.

  “Holy shit,” Griffin whispered, then reached up with a single hand and touched his mouth. “It’s gonna be a goddamned bloodbath.”

  ***

  Things had gone downhill at an alarming speed.

  It had started with “You may want to keep evacuation in mind,” and it had ended with “Angela, we need to evacuate. Immediately.”

  They were being overrun.

  Maybe if they’d told Angela about the goddamned colony of primals living right outside the gates, she wouldn’t have made the decision to call Elsie’s bluff.

  Or maybe she would have.

  Angela didn’t know anymore, and didn’t care to analyze it. It did no good to her now anyways. The situation had devolved into shit, and she couldn’t hand-wring it back to being okay.

  The Blackout Plan had officially turned into the Evacuation Plan.

  Angela stood in the center of the chaos, on the bed of a truck, in a hangar rapidly filling with people. All around her the people milled and formed lines, herded by soldiers. They argued with those soldiers, and yelled at each other, and sometimes at Angela, though she barely heard them.

  Kurt stood beside her, tense, glaring out at all the people. He didn’t like Angela to be surrounded like this. It was only a small sect of people around them that were hostile towards Angela, but even a small sect could do damage.

  The huge main doors of the massive hangar were closed, but the man door on the north side of the structure was open, and a steady stream of people bustled through with terror-stricken faces, mouths agape and sucking wind from running here.

  Outside, a strong defensive perimeter had been set up. But how long would that hold?

  They would evacuate to the Butler Safe Zone. But they wouldn’t be able to take everyone. They would have to come back. Which meant that there would be people stuck in this hangar overnight. Maybe longer, if the convoy had to fight its way back to the hangar upon it’s return.

  What did you do? Angela wondered, but she did not feel the self-condemnation that she once would have felt.

  She watched the people being herded in, and she didn’t see people, she saw cattle. She didn’t hear their complaints and cries, she heard mindless lowing and bleating. They stared at her, and at the soldiers, and they didn’t understand.

  They never understand.

  And she hated them.

  She pitied them, and hated them all at once.

  And somewhere out there, somewhere in that scrum of people jostling for a spot on the first convoy out, there were going to be Lincolnists. They were like a virulent mold spore. If only a few of them managed to make it out to Butler, then they’d begin to spread again.

  Nearly a hundred people had failed to show up for work when Elsie Foster had initiated her plan to oust Angela. And based on the reports she was getting, her troops had encountered and fought half that many.

  Which meant that they were out there.<
br />
  In this hangar, right now. Trying to use Angela’s evacuation plan to save their skins.

  There was a list with all of their names on it, but that was back in the command office of the Soldier Support Center. Which meant it was as good as gone, at this point in time.

  A hand slapped the side of the pickup bed on which Angela stood. She jerked and looked. Marie stood there, her brown hair looking frizzier than usual.

  “I got her secure,” Marie said, speaking of Abby. “She’s in that bus right there. Number three-twenty-two.”

  Angela looked and saw the bus, and then nodded. “Thank you.”

  Marie watched her for a moment, but Angela didn’t notice. Her eyes went back to the crowd, back to watching them, scanning across them with a look of focus, combined with a seed of contempt.

  “You need to get to a vehicle,” Marie said.

  Angela shook her head. “Not yet. I’m doing something.”

  Beside her, Kurt shifted. He wanted her out of here ASAP. He’d already made his case on that point. Angela had already shot it down.

  Townsend, who’d received a temporary battlefield promotion to replace Lieutenant Derrick who’d been murdered, ran up to the side of the truck, and called up to her: “Ma’am, I got word from Master Sergeant Gilliard!”

  Angela nodded and motioned him up.

  Townsend climbed onto the bed with her, so that he could speak without shouting over the din of the hangar.

  Out near one of the buses, a scuffle broke out, drawing Angela and Townsend’s attention for a moment. There was a burst of shouts, and then several soldiers piled on, and several other soldiers surrounded them and immediately started moving people back to what they were supposed to be doing.

  That was the third time.

  The soldiers were doing a great job keeping a heady situation from sparking into a riot.

  Angela thought about if unrest started to happen inside the hangar. Thought about how it would slow everything down. How everyone would suffer, because a few malcontents, and she felt that ugly burning thing in her chest rekindle.

  She pointed to where the scuffle was being covered. “Townsend, I want you to tell the troops that they’re authorized to use whatever force necessary to keep people in line. If they have to drag someone to the wall and execute them to get the buses moving on time, then that’s what they need to do.”

  Townsend blinked rapidly, processing what he’d heard.

  Angela stared at him, waiting for his comprehension.

  “O-okay. I mean, yes, ma’am. Um. Gilliard just called in.”

  “Yes?”

  “And they’re on the way right now. Mitch is wounded.”

  Angela’s core tightened. “What happened?”

  “Gilliard says they hit what he thinks was Elsie’s house, and Mitch got shot during the firefight.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “Did they kill Elsie Foster?”

  Townsend looked sheepish. “Unconfirmed, ma’am.”

  Angela nodded and looked out again.

  How did this all happen? How did everything get so out of control? Why couldn’t they stop themselves from being like this? Why couldn’t a Safe Zone just be safe?

  “These people,” she muttered, her voice just a breath of wind in her chest, and she didn’t think that Townsend heard her. Her eyes scanned over the crowd. A thousand people, forming lines, shuffling about, arguing, crying, yelling at each other, at the guards, at her, at the people that were trying to keep them from dying.

  What was it in human beings?

  Why were they like this?

  Her eyes went over to the entrance again, but this time, about halfway across the crowd of people, she caught sight of a face she recognized.

  It was that girl. Sam’s girlfriend. What was her name?

  Shit, Angela had only met her once…

  Charlie.

  Well, at least she was safe.

  At least…

  Angela’s eyes narrowed.

  Charlie squirmed her way through the crowd with her hood pulled up and her head down, like she was trying not to be noticed. And the line of people that followed her were doing the same thing.

  Hiding in plain sight.

  She might not have recognized Elsie Foster if she hadn’t memorized the woman’s face with the forced focus that only hatred can bring. Because Elsie’s face looked very different now. It was a swollen and misshapen and smoke-smeared thing. Blood and soot made half her face a mask. One eye was swollen shut.

  Which explained how she got past the guards.

  She looked so unlike herself, that for a moment, Angela just stared at her, and her heartrate hadn’t even sped up, because she was half-convinced she’d made a mistaken ID.

  But it was her.

  Elsie Foster.

  Trying to slip through the crowd, unseen. Trying to get away. Trying to escape the situation that she herself created. She was going to sit on a bus, and take a seat from someone who might actually be worth a shit.

  She was a goddamned parasite. She was a cancer.

  She needed to be cut out.

  Without speaking, Angela slid off the tailgate of the truck. She pushed into the crowd of people, rudely breaking through their lines. Sometimes they scooted out of the way, and sometimes she had to shove them, but she kept her eyes on the last spot she’d seen Elsie, and she kept marching forward, making a B-line there, with Kurt marching after her, protesting.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am.” His voice became sterner. “Angela.”

  Angela ignored him.

  She didn’t even look at a man that cursed her out as she passed him.

  She didn’t even feel a hint of satisfaction when he cut off his foul-mouthed diatribe against her as he saw her draw the pistol from her hip.

  She was the bow of a ship, slicing through water.

  She lost sight of Elsie for a moment in the scrum of people. She raised the pistol so that it could be seen by everyone, and the crowd parted away from her the way oil parts from water.

  “Angela!” Kurt went on. “What are you doing?”

  Angela saw Charlie first, unaware of Angela’s approach. And all she had to do was look back in line, three hunched figures behind Charlie, and there she was.

  Still, Angela said nothing.

  Still, Kurt kept protesting.

  Angela’s whole body shook with the pounding of her heart, as she finally laid eyes on this woman, and she watched as Elsie laid eyes on her. Face to face.

  “Elsie Foster,” Angela said, and the only way to keep her voice from shaking was to speak loud, nearly yelling.

  And everything got very quiet.

  Even Kurt finally shut his mouth.

  From the epicenter of these two women, the quiet spread through the hangar like a silent shockwave.

  Elsie’s eyes jagged in a hundred directions, but they all told her the same thing: She was penned in. She thought she’d been clever sneaking into the hangar. But now all eyes were on her, and there was no way she was going to get out.

  Backed into a corner, she became defiant.

  A sneer crept up to the woman’s mouth.

  Crinkled the corners of her nose.

  She tilted her chin up, looking down her nose at Angela with her one good eye, the other purple, and oozing red from what looked like a smattering of glass shards embedded in her skin.

  And yet, she looked at Angela with contempt.

  She looked at Angela like she was the piece of shit.

  Elsie brought her hands forward, wrists together. As though inviting handcuffs. “Guess you got me, Angela,” she said, loud and calm and confident. “Guess you got the one person who was willing to speak out against you.” A smirk, hiding in the sneer. “What’re you gonna do, Angela? You gonna—”

  Angela shot her in the face.

  The bullet struck Elsie Foster in the corner of her right eye.

  Her head snapped
back.

  Her body wilted.

  Hands still held out, with the wrists touching.

  Angela didn’t hear the gasp that went through the crowd.

  Her ears were still ringing.

  No one moved for a moment, too shocked. Too surprised at what Angela had done. This weak woman. This housewife.

  Angela took a breath, and found that it entered her chest easier than before, as though she had been trying to breathe past a heavy weight for the last several months, and suddenly she could.

  Not because the weight had been lifted, but because she’d suddenly grown strong enough to bear it.

  With that breath, she projected her voice. Loud and calm and confident. “Get on your prescribed buses. We are evacuating to the Butler Safe Zone.” She looked around her at all the people, at their fearful faces. She looked at them as though she were the only person in the world that knew what to do in that moment. And they listened. “If you do not like that, you are welcome to stay here at Fort Bragg. But do not get in the way.”

  Then she strode back through the crowd to where she’d come from.

  They needed to get moving.

  And they needed her to lead them.

  TWENTY-NINE

  ─▬▬▬─

  DEATH LEAVES NO DOUBTS

  John Bellamy strode through the dark streets of the Greeley Green Zone, out to the edges, where the Yellow Zone began.

  He wore a pair of khaki workpants, a gray hoodie, and a black backpack. The only things that marked him as military were the tan watch cap on his head and the tan boots on his feet.

  And, of course, the identification badge around his neck.

  He tried not to walk like a guilty person. He tried not to seem like an escapee.

  He was avoiding the checkpoints on the main thoroughfares. The border with the Yellow Zone was porous as hell, but they made up for it with a lot of roving guards that had the freedom to stop and question anybody in the Green Zone.

  Being safe in the Green Zone was a privilege, not a right.

  Fact was, there weren’t many rights in Colorado anymore.

  Up ahead, two soldiers walked, one of them with a canine on a lead.

  Bellamy tried not to make eye contact with them, tried to look down the street with a neutral expression on his face, like he could care less that he was being approached by guards that might be on the lookout for him.