by D. J. Molles
Breckenridge stopped in front of Lee. He pointed to Deuce. “He got caught in the crossfire.”
Lee nodded stiffly.
Between his knees, Deuce let out a barely-audible whimper.
“Breckenridge, that you?” A voice called out from behind Lee.
It was Menendez, emerging from the elevator.
Breck’s face split into a shaky grin. “Holy shit, Menendez! I didn’t think I’d…”
The rest of it faded into a blur of noise and movement.
Lee looked down at Deuce. The dog’s wounded leg trembled, and deep inside of Lee, something twisted, and maybe it fractured. Lee was too numb to tell. Only reason asserted itself right then.
Do the wounded need my help?
Around him, Menendez and his squad bustled down the hall, like Lee was a stone in a fast moving river. They rushed to help their own wounded, and Breck’s wounded down the hall.
Someone called “Got a live one!” behind Lee, and then a security shot shook the air of the hallway. “Nevermind!”
No one seemed to care or notice.
Everyone was busy.
The wounded were being cared for.
Except for one.
Lee stooped, and put his arms around Deuce’s chest, and under his rump, being careful not to grab his wounded leg, and he hefted the dog up. Deuce grumbled, but didn’t resist. He had never been a very affectionate dog—Deuce was much too concerned with business, with smelling out primals, and with alerting his team, to worry about such inanities as human affection.
Deuce was a working dog, through and through.
Just like Lee.
But as Lee carried the dog down the hallway, Deuce craned his head back and stuck his muzzle in the crook of Lee’s sweating neck. Lee felt the cold, wet nose. And he felt Deuce inhaling him, as though remembering for the first time how much comfort he had taken in the past from this human.
Lee spoke for the first time, and it was only a whisper: “I got you, buddy.”
Lee trudged across a few dead men. His eyes went down to their eyes, and saw the dim half-lidded gaze, and knew they were gone, and he continued on.
He kept passing doorways, and in those doorways, he would look into the room to see if there was a place to put Deuce, but the armory was filled with wounded men on crates of ammunition and on the stainless work table, and the storage room had two other wounded laying on boxes of freeze dried food, their blood marring the cardboard.
At the rear of the bunker stood a small common area with a single shower stall and several cots. Lee wasn’t sure whose cot it was that he was about to use, but he swept a blanket off so it wouldn’t get bloody, and then he knelt and laid Deuce on the cot, so that his wounded leg was facing up.
Deuce tried to bend to lick the wound, but Lee pushed his muzzle out of the way. “No. Stay.” He touched the leg, and saw that the bullet appeared to have gone in the back of Deuce’s thigh at an angle, and exited on the other side of what would be Deuce’s hamstring.
It must’ve happened at the outset of the firefight, because the wound was already clotting. The blood that came out of it looked dark.
Around Lee, the post-combat chaos swirled.
And yet he stayed kneeling next to the cot, eyes on the dog.
He probed Deuce’s leg bones, to see if anything seemed broken. No way to be sure without an X-ray, but nothing crackled or crunched and Deuce didn’t cry out or give a pain reaction.
Lee had very little on his person. He wished that he was still well-equipped enough to be carrying tourniquets and combat gauze or an IFAK, but it had been a while since he’d gone into a gunfight with anything more than the weapon in his hands.
If he’d had the gauze, he’d have used it on Deuce’s wound.
Instead, he used the old t-shirt that he wore, because that was what he had.
He set his rifle on the floor next to him and used his teeth to rip through a section at the bottom of the shirt, tore it free, all the way around.
Lee balled up a section of the shirt, placed this against the wound, and then wrapped the leg as tightly as he could manage. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do for the moment.
Lee pushed back from the cot, looking around, wondering if there was anything else that he could do. There was a liter-bottle of water, half-full, at the base of the cot. Lee took this. Uncapped it. Cupped his hand under the mouth of the bottle, and poured water into his palm, holding it next to Deuce’s muzzle.
Deuce leaned into Lee’s hand, and lapped at the water. His tongue was dry and raspy against Lee’s skin.
“There you go, buddy,” Lee said. “Get some fluids in you.”
Lee felt himself shake again. This time not from the cold.
He bit down against it.
Hissed through his clenched teeth. “You stupid mutt. Don’t you run off like that. Don’t you do that shit to me.” Quieter: “I told you to stay. I told you. On the hill. I said ‘stay.’ Do you not understand what that means? None of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t run off!”
Lee stopped talking when he realized he wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about.
Or perhaps simply didn’t want to look too closely at it.
It’d been a while since he’d bothered to look inwards.
In a way, it had been nice to be free of that.
Deuce finished taking water just before the bottle was empty.
Lee recapped the bottle and then thrust himself up onto his feet.
He became aware of a harsh ringing in his ears. He cringed against it.
A voice behind him. He jerked, and whirled around.
Menendez stood behind him. “You alright?”
Lee stared for a moment like he didn’t recognize the man, but then nodded. “Yeah. Tinnitus. I’m fine.”
Menendez’s eyes jagged down to the dog on the bed, but he said nothing about it. His face was serious. He threw a thumb over his shoulder. “You need to come with me, Cap. To the control room.”
Even the control room had not been spared from the tide of wounded, though the few men inside this room did not appear badly injured. They were whole enough that when Lee walked into the room, Breckenridge nodded to the wounded men and their buddies helped them stand and shuffle out.
Menendez closed the door behind them.
It was only the three of them in the room now.
Breck slumped against the workstation. “What happened? How the hell did the cartel get in here?” he looked right at Lee. “How could they have done that?”
Lee frowned and brought a hand up, sliding it down his face. His skin was greasy. His palm smelled of dirt and gunsmoke. He pushed through that sudden exhaustion that had overcome him out of the blue. Tried to get the ball rolling again.
You don’t have time to be slow. You don’t have time to be tired.
You need to figure out how the cartel got an access code.
He blinked a few times, and found Breckenridge and Menendez both watching him.
“You sure you’re alright?” Breck asked, his gaze narrowing.
“Fine,” Lee grunted. “Just…trying to get my thoughts in order.”
“We’ve been down here the whole time,” Breck continued, as though he thought maybe filling in some blanks might help. “About a week after y’all’s strike on the power plant, your dog showed up, and we went out and got him. But that was the last time we were able to get in and out.” Breck looked significantly at Lee. “We got shut out of the system. Couldn’t get access to shit inside this command room, because the code that Tex originally gave us wouldn’t work. We were afraid to go topside after that because we figured we wouldn’t be able to get back in.”
Lee nodded. “You were right. If the code to the mainframe had changed, then the code to get in would have changed with it.”
Menendez perked up. “Well, you got the code to get in, right? You got it from that cartel motherfucker. Does that mean you can get back into the mainframe?”
Lee nodded,
and started towards the main computer terminal, then stopped. He drew back, frowning.
“What’s wrong?” Breck demanded, looking at the computer briefly, as though it had done something to scare Lee away.
“I’m just…” He bit his lip, trying to force clarity on himself. “There’s only one way the security codes would have changed in the first place—and that’s if Tex gave the command to put the security settings back to their default. The default being that Tex would need to actually be present, with his GPS device, to get access to any bunker.”
“Right,” Menendez said, trying to see where Lee was going with this. “We talked about that being likely. Tex was running blind, probably didn’t know who to trust, and didn’t want to leave the bunkers open to whoever might’ve betrayed him.”
Lee nodded, but waved Menendez down. “Yeah, I know. But what I’m getting at is…there’s only one way the security systems can change, to default, or from default.”
Breck looked at the ceiling, halfway there mentally. “And that’s if Tex makes the change.”
Lee nodded. “Because the changes require the Coordinator in charge—they require a whole shitload of biometric scans and codes only the Coordinator knows.”
“So, again, we’re back to the original question,” Breck said, bringing his gaze down. “How’d the cartel have the code to get in?”
“Exactly,” Lee said. “And there’s only one answer: Tex gave it to them.”
Menendez immediately rebelled. He shook his head and waved his hands. “No. Hell no. Tex wouldn’t do that.”
Lee stood very still, looking at the monitors of the computer stations.
Breck blew a perturbed breath through his lips. “I gotta agree with Menendez here. Tex would never.”
“I didn’t say that he betrayed us,” Lee murmured.
“What?” Menendez looked like he was about to start taking personal offense.
Lee rounded on him, a tiny flash of irritation restarting the engine in him that had stalled out. “What if he was forced to make the change? Did you think about that possibility? I’m not saying he dimed you out like a coward. But what if they got him locked up somewhere, hanging from his toenails?”
“He wouldn’t,” Menendez asserted, but it was hollow.
Lee looked at him like he’d revealed a belief in some childlike fantasy. “He would, under the right combination of time and pressure. Trust me, Menendez. Everyone breaks if you torture them long enough. Or if you have the right pressure point.”
There was a great, hollow silence that suddenly filled up the room like a noxious gas.
Lee saw Breck and Menendez both turning the concept over in their minds.
And he saw when they realized that it had to be the truth, because there wasn’t another way. The only way the security systems would ever change was if Tex held his thumbs to the readers, his eyes to the scanners, and inputted the proper codes that only he knew.
They weren’t willing to admit that Tex would have done it outright—Lee didn’t believe that either.
Which meant the only other logical conclusion was that Tex had been coerced into it.
“But how?” Breck groaned, managing to voice the very thing they were all thinking.
“Could be anything,” Lee spat, the spark inside of him beginning to smoke again. Flare. Burn. “Could be torture. Could be that they’re holding something over him.”
“Easy way to get an answer.” Menendez pointed to the computer that Lee had decided not to unlock. “Send a message. See who answers up. See what intel they give.”
Lee grimaced. “I’m afraid we’re going to give more intel than we get.”
“What are they gonna learn that they don’t already know?” Breck pointed out. “That we’re down here? Shit, man. I’m pretty sure they’ll figure that out when they realize that the squad they sent here to route us out is all dead.”
Lee had to admit that he was right.
In fact…
“Shit.” Lee snatched out and smacked the small web-camera that sat on top of the monitor, sending its lens pointing backwards at the wall.
“Could they see us through that thing?” Breck gaped.
“Maybe—”
The computer chimed.
The black screen blinked, came to life.
On the screen, a main window, requesting authentication in order to get access to the computer. Behind that prompt, another window, slightly smaller.
(1) Message Received
All three men stared at it.
Lee didn’t want to do it. But it suddenly felt like it was out of his hands now. He had to do it.
He leaned forward. Poised his fingers over the keyboard. Looked at the little cursor, sitting in the blank white box that requested the passcode to get access to the system.
He typed it in.
Hit enter.
The password request disappeared.
The message automatically populated the screen.
It was marked as coming from Tex, but that was only because it was originating from one of Tex’s bunkers. Lee had no doubt that he wasn’t speaking to Tex in that moment—and if it was Tex typing the message, then he was only doing it under duress.
Too late, Lee. I already saw you there.
Lee’s finger’s twitched over the top of the keyboard. His eyes coursed over the message several times, trying to think of how he wanted to play this, what exactly he wanted to say, or should say. Hell, maybe he should say nothing at all. Maybe they should all just grab as much as they could from the bunker and get gone before—
By the way, this is Mr. Daniels, CEO of Cornerstone Military Applications. Before you get pissed and shut me down, I should tell you it’s really in your best interest to stay with me online and talk things out. Life or death, you might say.
Menendez thrust a knife hand at the computer. “Who the hell is this?”
Lee grit his teeth. “Exactly who he says. He’s the one in control of Greeley—more or less.”
He’s the one with all the mercenaries. He’s the one that sent them down here to kill you. He’s the one that set the trap at the power plant.
He’s the one that killed Julia.
Lee swore hotly at nothing and everything.
He shouldn’t have let Abe take the stupid tanker and drive back to Georgia. Abe knew this Mr. Daniels—had worked with him during his time in Greeley before defecting to North Carolina. He could’ve provided invaluable insights into what type of man that Lee faced right now.
As it stood, Lee would have nothing to go on but his gut.
Goddammit, Abe! The one time I need you…
Lee took a breath through his nose and quelled the urge to bash in a response out of pure emotion. For the last month, he’d been the wolf. He’d been the one calling the shots. He’d been the one putting others in terrible dilemmas.
Now, for no other reason than a deep and abiding suspicion in his gut, he felt that he’d been outmaneuvered. Like finding yourself suddenly on a rickety platform that might crumble if you moved too aggressively.
No.
Best to be reserved.
Play it cautiously.
He typed his response: This is Harden. Say what you’re going to say.
He clicked send. And then waited.
The response took a long time coming.
Long enough that Lee began to wonder—was this some sort of trap? Was this Mr. Daniels just stalling, while ground troops moved in to surround the bunker? But then, that would create something of a stalemate, wouldn’t it? He, inside the impregnable bunker, with enough supplies to hold out indefinitely. Cornerstone or Nuevas Fronteras, stuck topside, in the heat, with the primals.
No, there has to be something else happening here.
The computer let out its low chime.
The response had arrived.
Getting right to the point: Tex is agreeing to work with me in exchange for the lives of a certain civilian population in New Mexico. I would s
uggest that you do the same. Last night, my Cornerstone operatives were able to pacify the settlement called Triple Rocker Ranch. There are still approximately 100 civilians present. They are alive and well. We were able to take the settlement with minimal resistance.
That was it.
Lee stared at the message, re-reading it, because he thought there must’ve been a point to it that he’d missed. Clearly, Mr. Daniels intended to manipulate Lee into cooperation with him, but he hadn’t said exactly how that was going to go down…
A second message followed.
You have until 2000 hrs (that’s roughly sunset) to turn yourself in to my men at Triple Rocker Ranch. If you don’t show, I kill everyone, including Tex. If you try to fight, I kill everyone. If you try to trick me, I kill everyone. You get the point. And if you’re wondering if I really will, just remember: Tex believes me, and that’s why he’s cooperating. See you at 2000 hrs. Best, Mr. Daniels
TWENTY-FOUR
─▬▬▬─
DOMINOES
Daniels waited patiently to see if there was going to be any response.
It didn’t seem like there was.
He pushed himself back from the workstation and took a look around his environs, giving a small smirk of appreciation for the typical overkill of the United States government that had constructed this bunker.
Project Hometown had been quite the basket to put their eggs into.
The weak point had been the operatives. Hard to say what people will do when the world around them comes crashing down. But even so, it had been marginally successful—more than half of the Project Hometown Coordinators had come over to Greeley.
Unfortunately, it only took a few to screw things up, as Lehy and Harden had proved.
Not for long, though.
Daniels stood up from the lone chair that occupied the bunker’s control room. One of his operatives stood behind him, waiting for orders.
“Stay here,” Daniels told him. “Monitor the messages in case they contact back, but I don’t think they will. You’ve got the satphone. If anything happens, contact me immediately.”
“Understood, sir,” the operative said.
Daniels left the control room. The doors to the elevator were almost right across the hall. Daniels called the elevator and then rode it topside. He couldn’t help but bounce on the balls of his feet as he waited. Part of it was nervous energy, and part of it was satisfaction.