Primal

by D. J. Molles

  Benjamin fidgeted in his seat.

  He had a sense of urgency about getting his mother. But…it wasn’t like she was going anywhere, was she? And Captain Marlin seemed like the type of guy that wasn’t going to give an inch until he got what he wanted.

  So Benjamin took a deep breath, and started at the beginning.

  “Angela fucked up.”

  ***

  Maclean Marlin stepped out of the office and closed the door behind him. His brow beetled, hazel eyes on the old industrial carpet tiles under his feet, but he wasn’t seeing it. He was picturing everything he’d just been told.

  The kid had been a gold mine of information.

  Provided that his information was accurate.

  The building they occupied used to be a call center on the far eastern edge of Fayetteville. The area was more corporate, and therefore, had suffered less from looting, because there wasn’t much in a corporate building that could help people survive.

  Marlin and his team had taken over the third and highest floor of the building. They’d barricaded all the entrances, and all the ways up to that level except one. Their egress, should their single entrance get compromised, was a pile of repelling ropes near a bay of windows on the opposite side of the building. Bust the window and descend. That was the plan of action.

  Marlin had no idea what to expect here in what used to be the USA, so he operated out of an abundance of caution.

  Most of the southeast of Canada was a shit-show, and had suffered a similar fate to that of the American northeast. But Canada’s north and west had been so sparsely populated that it hadn’t been too difficult to survive there and reseat the government in areas less affected by the plague.

  There were even a few areas so isolated that they hadn’t been affected by the plague at all.

  So the Canadian government had taken its time, consolidating itself and saving what it could. Only within the past year had they begun to turn their attention outwards again.

  Marlin and his small team were one of two fact-finding missions that had been deployed to recon the lay of the land here in the wreckage of the United States. And the more that Marlin learned, the more complicated he believed the situation here was.

  The kid was sequestered in one of the managerial offices on the third floor.

  Marlin walked over to the middle of the call center floor, where his team had set up their little base of operations in a tight grouping of desks and short cubicle walls.

  There were ten men total, including Marlin.

  Marlin grabbed one of the ubiquitous rolling chairs and plopped into it, still looking contemplative.

  His second in command, Lieutenant Thomas Wibberley, was perched on one of the call center desks, leaning back against the cubicle wall and watching his captain with curiosity.

  “What’s the word, Mac?” Wibberley asked. “The kid have anything good?”

  Marlin nodded, bringing his attention back to the present. “Yeah. He had a lot to say.”

  Wibberley gave him a knowing look. “But you’re not sure it’s accurate.”

  Marlin shrugged. “Hard to say for sure. He seemed like he was being honest. But it’s also pretty obvious that he’s not a fan of whoever was leading this United Eastern States thing.”

  “Angela Houston,” Wibberley noted from the small amount of intel they’d been given before coming south. “So is it as bad as Greeley is making it sound?”

  Marlin pushed his chair back and forth and waffled a hand in the air. “I dunno. Some of the shit they say smacks of propaganda, you know? Like they really want us to believe that Angela is off the rails or some shit. But…it seems like the kid agrees with that. So maybe we are dealing with some crazy warlord bitch after all.”

  Wibberley smirked. “Angela Houston,” he said, as though testing the flavor of the name. “That doesn’t sound particularly warlord-y.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Marlin said. “If it’s a viable ally that the prime minister is looking for, I’m not sure Angela is it. She had her shit pushed in for sure. Apparently they had a group of detractors—folks that wanted to ally with Greeley—and they sabotaged Fort Bragg. That’s what brought the grid down and let the eaters in.”

  “So is there even a United Eastern States anymore?” Wibberley wondered.

  Marlin nodded. “At least, according to the kid there is. He says there are several cities—safe zones—that are a part of the United Eastern States. The kid claims they evacuated to one of these places, further south. He called it the Butler Safe Zone. In Georgia.”

  “Shit,” Wibberley looked crestfallen. “We gotta keep going south?”

  “It would seem that way,” Marlin said. He stood up from the rolling chair and seized his helmet and rifle where he’d placed it on a nearby desktop. “But first, we gotta try to find this kid’s mom.”

  Wibberley raised his eyebrows. “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, I’m not kidding you,” Marlin said, buckling his chin strap. “That was the deal I made with the kid.”

  “Fuck the kid.”

  Marlin shrugged, slinging into his rifle. “The kid and his mom might get us through the door down in Georgia.”

  “I think the Canadian flag will probably get us through the door.”

  Marlin sighed. “What do you want me to say, Wibberley? I told the kid I’d find his mom. I’m at least gonna roll in there and give it a good faith effort. You stick around for QRF if we need you. Otherwise I’ll just take Team One with me.”

  Wibberley grunted, but stood up. “You went in on the last recon. Let me and Team Two take this one.”

  But Marlin shook his head. “Nah, you sit tight. We’re more familiar with the street layout now. Makes more sense for us to do it. Besides, shouldn’t be a big deal. We’re gonna pop in, see if we can’t find her, then pop out. If shit looks squirrelly, I’ll call it and the kid’s just gonna have to deal with it.”

  Wibberley didn’t look too pleased with this, but he raised his hands in surrender, then shook his head. “All to get in good with a bunch of rebels in Georgia. Jesus. The things we do for the Queen, right?”

  Marlin smiled as his Team One began to strap up again for the trip back out. He gave Wibberley a reassuring wink. “Dressed in green, livin’ the dream, servin’ the Queen.”

  SEVENTEEN

  ─▬▬▬─

  FACE TO FACE

  The tiny town of Mosquero, New Mexico, stood out to Daniels’s eye.

  He peered out of the window of the UH-60 Blackhawk as it sped southward, the desert spread out beneath them, vast and flat and atonal. And there, right smack dab in the middle of all that nothing, was a something.

  Mosquero.

  Perhaps a square mile—if you were being generous—of small dwellings. A school. A church. And one gigantic hangar in which to park…farm vehicles, Daniels guessed.

  But what made Mosquero stand out the most were the three plumes of black smoke rising from it and mingling with the crystal clear desert air.

  Daniels wasn’t a cruel person. He hadn’t been the type of kid to torture the neighbor’s cat, or pluck wings off of flies, or even burn ants with a magnifying glass.

  Daniels was simply practical.

  He was a utilitarian to his core.

  And so he smiled at the columns of smoke, because he knew that this town was his, and that owning this town put him one step closer to having his hands around Terrance Lehy’s throat. Figuratively speaking, of course.

  And having Tex was the key to Daniels’s whole plan.

  A delicate plan. A bit of a house of cards.

  Complex plans always carried a large amount of risk.

  But the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. And the reward was astronomical. The reward was everything from an official position for Daniels, to oil independence for Greeley, to a strong bargaining position with their maybe-allies in Canada and the UK.

  Conversely, failure would mean the annihilation of everything he
’d been working for.

  And probably death.

  The Blackhawk slowed its steady progress across the desert and began to drop in altitude. The fuel was nearing the halfway mark, so the pilot would return to Greeley.

  That was fine. Daniels anticipated that Mosquero might take him a while.

  The helicopter roared in, just over some long-defunct power lines, and set itself down in the center of the Mosquero Municipal School running track. Two of Cornerstone’s technicals awaited him on the other side of the brick-colored running lanes.

  “I’ll call for pickup,” Daniels said into the headset before he took it off.

  The pilot nodded and gave him a thumbs up.

  The crew chief pushed the door open and Daniels slid out into the buffeting downdraft and trotted across the field. Even with the rotor wash whipping at his clothes, the midafternoon sun was hot.

  Behind him, the Blackhawk dusted off again, and the buzz and clatter of its rotors dwindled as it headed back to Greeley.

  Daniels’s lead man on the ground met him at the front of the two technicals.

  “Mr. Daniels,” the man greeted him. He offered no salute, and Daniels expected none. They were all mercenaries here. All Cornerstone operatives, dispatched and directly controlled by none other than Daniels himself.

  “Mr. Griesi,” Daniels nodded back, pronouncing it gree-uh-see. He removed his sunglasses and cleaned the dust off the lenses with his shirt before replacing them. “How many?”

  “Forty-five total,” Griesi responded. “We have them gathered in the hangar.”

  Forty-five was good. Human lives were like dollar bills. The more of them you had to spend, the more you could accomplish.

  Griesi opened the passenger’s side door of one of the technicals and Daniels slipped into the seat. Griesi closed the door and then stood on the running boards outside the open window.

  He smelled like gunsmoke and dirt and body odor.

  The two technicals cut a tight U-turn in an almost synchronized formation, and then accelerated. They didn’t have far to go. The giant, white hangar was the largest thing in Mosquero, both in girth and height.

  The massive bay doors on one end stood open, and peering through the bright glare from the white metal siding, Daniels could make out more of his men inside. And civilians.

  Forty-five of them, to be exact.

  The technicals drove straight into the hangar and stopped in front of the line of people, a wash of dust following them in and then billowing over the gathered people, who squinted through it and coughed and waved their hands in front of their faces.

  Griesi opened Daniels’s door and he stepped out again.

  Was it truly necessary that Daniels was here?

  Perhaps not. And, he had to admit, it was a contradiction of his usual ethos of “delegate, delegate, delegate.”

  However, since literally everything rode on the success of a delicate plan that existed only in his head, he forgave himself for micromanaging, and his men would have to as well.

  Daniels stood, between the two running engines of the technicals. The wind from the outside didn’t quite make it into the massive hangar, and so the heat from the two engines simply clustered there and baked him.

  His attention was outward, on the pathetic people lined up before him.

  Griesi had done it right. He’d put them all in one long line.

  Forty-five men, women, and children. A smattering of elderly.

  They all stared at Daniels. Squinting. Glaring. Whimpering.

  Daniels took off his sunglasses. Sunglasses dehumanized you. It was best to let people see your eyes. The eyes, they said, were the windows to the soul. And Daniels was unafraid of letting them see what was inside of him. Most of the time, it made people more cooperative.

  They could see that to Daniels, their lives didn’t mean much.

  Daniels spoke loud and clear, so that all forty-five of the captured civilians from Mosquero could hear him and understand exactly what he wanted. “I know for a fact that you have had contact with Captain Tully of Project Hometown. I would also like to have contact with Captain Tully. One of you is going to tell me how to make contact with him. I only need one person, brave enough to stand up and save the lives of your friends. Otherwise, we start killing.”

  A shockwave of murmurs and cries rippled through the forty-five people facing him.

  None of them had the balls to fight back at this point. They’d already done that, and now their homes burned, and their loved ones lay dead, killed during Cornerstone’s takeover of the town.

  Now they were surrounded by Cornerstone men, and their options had dwindled.

  Daniels counted to twenty. Ample time for someone to make the decision.

  But no one did.

  Daniels turned his head towards Griesi. “Kill the elderly first,” he said, loud enough for all to hear, and amid another wave of cries, he lowered his voice. “Save the children. They might be a good motivator for Tully.”

  Griesi stepped forward and gave a nod.

  Two of the Cornerstone operatives that stood behind the line began to move. They started at opposite ends of the line of people. No one fought back. No one tried to stop them. They were sheep, trapped in a corral of wolves.

  Seven shots rang out, slow and deliberate.

  Seven bodies fell. Four older women, and three older men.

  The remaining thirty-eight civilians devolved into hysteria.

  Daniels let them sit in it for a moment. Let them think about what they were doing. Let them look at the scattered brain matter of their grandmothers and grandfathers and think about what they actually were trying to accomplish by staying silent.

  “Contact with Captain Tully,” Daniels reiterated, having to raise his voice to be heard over everyone’s mewling.

  He waited. Again, counting to twenty. A good long time.

  Still, no one stepped up.

  “Kill seven more,” Daniels said. “Your choice.”

  The two Cornerstone operatives moved to opposite ends of the line again.

  “Wait!” someone shouted. “Stop!”

  Daniels frowned, eyes scanning the line until he came to one man who had his hands out, pleading for mercy, his eyes locked onto Daniels’s.

  “Yes, sir?” Daniels prompted. “You have something to tell me?”

  The man took a tentative step forward. “Captain Tully. He gave us a satphone. We use that to contact him. I’ll show you where it’s hidden.”

  Daniels nodded, then beckoned the man forward.

  The man hesitated, looking to either side of him, first at his fellow civilians, and then at the Cornerstone operatives. When no one moved to stop him, he shuffled forward, his steps becoming more confident as he went, until he stood there, right in front of Daniels.

  Daniels dipped his head, looking at the man from under his eyebrows. “You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you?”

  The man shook his head. “No, sir!”

  “And you realize that if you are lying to me and you don’t produce this satellite phone, then I’m going to kill all the people behind you and make you watch?”

  The man paled. His lips trembled. He seemed to have lost his voice, so he simply nodded.

  “Good,” Daniels said. He looked past the man and raised his voice again. “The rest of you are free to go back to your homes. I’m a man of my word. But listen carefully.” He held up a hand to keep them from fleeing just yet. “My men are going to remain here in this town for some time. I have a flight of gunships on standby. If even one of you raises a finger against my men, I’ll have your entire town wiped off the map.” Then he shooed them with a flippant hand. “Go.”

  The gathered sheep moved, much as the man standing before Daniels had: Slowly at first, cutting a wide berth around the technicals and the Cornerstone operatives around them, and then, as they reached the bay doors of the hangar, they quickened their pace, some of them breaking into a run.

  Daniels watc
hed them go, thinking absently of how his two Apache gunships were old as hell, and hadn’t even been up-armored. But what did you need armor for against a bunch of sheep?

  He turned to the man standing before him. “You did the right thing, sir. Now show me where this satphone is hidden.”

  ***

  The man took them to a house that looked like it had been ground zero for a good amount of the fighting. Which made sense to Daniels. The occupants had clearly been allied with Tully, if they were the ones hiding the satphone. They would’ve been the ones to fight back the hardest.

  It hadn’t worked out for them.

  The front of the structure was riddled with large caliber bullet holes. The machine guns on the backs of the Cornerstone technicals had raked it hard.

  The inside still stank of spent propellant. And faintly of shit.

  Five bodies lay, in various poses of death. The structure had already been cleared by Cornerstone, and the weapons that the five dead men had used to defend themselves were stacked up in a corner, away from the dead bodies.

  The man that led them into the house trembled, but, to his credit, remained focused on his task. He led Daniels and Griesi and two other operatives upstairs into one of the bedrooms. Here, a dingy, gray carpet covered the floors under a collection of mattresses with tossed bedding.

  The man went into the far corner of the room and began to hunch down.

  “Stop,” Daniels said. “That’s far enough. I’m assuming it’s under a floorboard?”

  The man stood, raised his hands, and nodded, backing away from the corner.

  Daniels gestured to Griesi. The Cornerstone man stalked to the corner and squatted down. He used a knife to peel back a corner of the carpet that was already obviously loose. Beneath it, there was a floorboard that had been cut away.

  He jammed his knife into the gap and pried the floorboard up. Then peered into the cavity below. “One satphone,” he reported. “And a pistol.”