Highway 85, through La Salle, was the only entry point on the south side of Greeley. The signs on the other roads in made that much explicitly clear: ANYONE APPROACHING GREELEY ON THIS ROUTE WILL BE FIRED UPON. IF YOU ARE SEEKING ASYLUM, TAKE HIGHWAY 85 NORTH TO LA SALLE.
The Cornerstone operative in the pickup bed traded a few comments over a radio, and then returned his attention to Sam’s group. If he found them suspicious, he didn’t show it. This was just another day at the office for him. Another group of pathetic peons to be dealt with.
But he did heft his rifle. As did the operative next to him.
“You six,” the first operative said, projecting his voice at them, unnecessarily loud, as they were only ten yards away from him. “First thing you need to do is raise your hands up above your head.”
Sam felt the eyes of his squad flit to him, but he stayed focused on the operative in the truck. “Uh, sir, why do we have to--?”
“Raise your hands if you want to get into Greeley,” the operative said, sounding annoyed. “If you’re not going to comply with the security procedures, then you can just turn your happy ass around and get the fuck out of here.”
Sam raised his hands, and the others in his group followed suit.
“Alright, one at time, starting with the Macho Man with the big mouth, step forward.”
Sam assumed that was him, so he stepped forward, out of line with the others.
“Do you have any sidearms on your person?” the operative said.
“No, sir. Just my rifle.”
“Roger that. Listen to my commands very closely. The rest of you listen as well, so I don’t have to repeat myself. You’re going to take your right hand. You’re going to use that right hand to take the barrel of your rifle and hold it straight out in front of you. Go ahead and do that.”
Sam did that. They all had their rifles slung on their backs, rather than across their chests, in yet another attempt to look less like the squad of soldiers that they actually were.
“Now, take your left hand and remove the magazine of your rifle.”
Sam complied with that as well.
“Stow that magazine in your back pocket. Now, with your left hand, work the bolt and eject the round from the chamber.”
Sam slid the charging handle back and the brass cartridge clattered out onto the roadway.
“Good. You can sling your rifle now. Pick up your cartridge and fall back in line. Next—the lady.”
It proceeded like this for all six of them, until their weapons were emptied and their magazines stowed.
The operatives in the pickup bed lowered their rifles. The one that had been doing all the talking pointed down the road. “You may proceed to the checkpoint. Do not touch your weapons until you’re instructed to do so by the soldiers at the checkpoint. If you don’t comply with that, they will chew you the fuck up. Have a good day.”
Sam did his best to look meek and started walking towards the checkpoint, his group jumbled up around him.
“What a douchebag,” Jones murmured once they were out of earshot. “Is that like a Cornerstone requirement? Part of their training regimen?”
“Just be cool, Jonesy.”
“I’m always cool. Just sayin’.”
Sam glanced over his left shoulder to Frenchie and Johnson. “You guys alright?”
They looked worried. But they both nodded.
“Yeah, we’re good,” Frenchie said, trying on a rickety smile.
Frenchie and Johnson had been a sticking point between Sam and Lee. Lee didn’t know them. Didn’t trust them. Didn’t want them on the op. But Sam had bled with them. He knew they were solid. And so he’d vouched for them. Gave Lee a guarantee that he’d make sure they got the job done, that they’d be assets, and not liabilities.
Sam turned to his right, where Marie strode beside him. Her sharp eyes watched him shrewdly. She didn’t look worried, exactly. More…circumspect.
“How about you, Marie?”
She shrugged her narrow shoulders, her lean features drawn into a pursed expression. “Right as rain. Just another refugee, looking for a safe place to stay.”
“That’s all we are,” Sam agreed quietly.
Sam took stock of Pickell last, but he needn’t have. Pickell looked as calm as ever. His expression was that same neutral good humor with which he navigated everything. He could’ve been in the turret of a Humvee driving through primal-infested countryside, or hanging out around a campfire. His attitude seemed to always remain the same.
God has fixed the time of my death, he’d told Sam. That was how he made his peace with everything.
Maybe he was a little off in the head, but it seemed to work for him.
The only thing that Sam could tell from Pickell’s sweaty, slightly pale face, was that he was hurting. The wound he’d taken during the fight for Butler wasn’t even close to healed. Sam had tried to get him to stay behind, but Pickell insisted he could hack it.
Up ahead, the group of four refugees that had preceded them had made it through the checkpoint and now continued on towards the squat little sprawl of buildings that made up La Salle. Sam saw people moving about in there. Thin smoke trails rising up from cookfires. The scent of woodsmoke and latrines, faint on a light breeze.
The soldiers at the checkpoint turned their attention onto Sam’s group as they approached. Sam took a quick count, though he was painfully aware that there was nothing he could do to fight them at this point. He and his entire group was at the mercy of ten men. Five soldiers in OCPs. Five Cornerstone operatives. One of the soldiers covered them with an M249 from behind a barricade of sandbags on the left side of the road. Another covered them from an M2 on the top of a MATV on the right.
Sam didn’t like staring down all those muzzles. He felt powerless. Vulnerable. Subjected to the will of others, his life in their hands. It hung upon a few ounces of pressure from ten triggers. It was not a pleasant situation in which to find yourself.
Two Cornerstone operatives stood in the very center of the road, waiting for them. To either side of them stood concrete Jersey barriers, bottlenecking the road so that a vehicle couldn’t get through—only people.
One of the operatives stepped forward and put a hand out for them to stop. He held a clipboard. His rifle was slung to his chest. He didn’t wear sunglasses like most of his compatriots. His dark eyes ranged across the group, evaluating them, taking a reading from their expressions.
He must’ve been okay with what he saw, because he looked down at his clipboard and thumbed a pen. “Names.”
They gave their real names, one after the other, giving the operative time to scribble them down. The only change was from Sam. He gave his actual real name. Not the Sam Ryder he’d become. But Sameer Balawi.
It felt strange to let those words out of his mouth. He hadn’t introduced himself by his real name in so long, it didn’t even feel real anymore.
Sam expected some sort of remark from the operative about his ethnicity, but the operative just wrote it down, then raised his eyes to the group again.
“Any doctors, nurses, paramedics or EMTs?” he spoke quickly, rattling them off out of rote habit.
No one spoke. He didn’t seem surprised.
“Engineers, electricians, or metal workers?”
Silence.
“Anyone with military experience?”
This time the silence felt strained. At least to Sam. Was it his imagination or did the operative stare at them for a few beats longer than he had after his other questions?
He clicked the pen a few times. Then grunted. “Any of you got family inside Greeley at this time?”
Sam shifted his weight. Again, no one responded.
“What state are y’all coming from?”
“Oklahoma,” Sam answered.
The operative fixed his eyes on Sam. “You speak for everyone?”
Sam shrugged. “We’re all from Oklahoma.”
“What part?”
“Little set
tlement on the eastern side.”
The operative’s eyes cinched tighter. “What was the name of the nearest town to your settlement?”
Sam found his throat getting dry. “We were about an hour outside of Tulsa.”
The operative’s lips flattened. “Don’t dance with me, kid. Gimme the name of the nearest town to your settlement.”
“Centralia.”
“What happened?”
Sam felt his chest flutter, feeling a wrong answer might swing things into areas he didn’t want to go. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what happened to your settlement, kid? Why are you standing here in front of me right now?”
“We ran out of food,” Marie broke in.
The operative turned his attention to her.
“Crops didn’t come in last harvest,” she continued. “Settlement broke up over the winter. Didn’t have enough people to keep it running this spring. So we left. That’s why we’re here.”
The operative bobbed his head. “And what are you? Like, the mom of the group or something?”
Marie managed a smile. “Something like that.”
“Any of y’all relations?”
“No, sir. We just all decided to make the trip here together. For protection.”
The operative regarded her for a moment, then gave a look to all of them in one sweep of his eyes. “Have any of you, at any point in time, been a part of, or know someone that has been a part of, a group calling themselves the United Eastern States?”
They had all agreed beforehand that the safest answer to a question like this would be dumb silence. But now, with the question hanging in the air between them, Sam felt his skin prickle with nervous heat, like no matter what he did, he looked suspicious. As though something as stupid as how he held his hands might be a dead giveaway.
“Those communist fucks?” Jones suddenly belted out. “Fuck them. I heard they eat babies and cornhole each other.”
Full-on panic engulfed Sam’s head like feedback in his brain. For a moment, everything was nearly too bright to see. He didn’t dare look around at Jones, even as his hands suddenly twitched with the urge to slap the shit out of him.
The operative looked at Jones, his brow furrowing. “That a fuckin’ joke or something?”
With the operative’s attention off of him, Sam shot a wide-eyed glance at Jones, but found him standing there, staring at the operative with wild eyes, shaking his head with a sort of fervent hysteria.
“Nah, man,” Jones said in a spooky voice. “Ain’t no joke. Fuckin’ horror show out there, that’s what people say. Never been. Never want to. Hope y’all nuke their asses or something. Why haven’t y’all nuked their asses?”
The sheer, earnest insanity with which Jones threw these words out seemed to have the opposite affect that Sam had expected. Rather than grow more suspicious, the operative seemed to lean away from Jones, with an expression that said he wanted to move things along a little quicker now.
“Right.” The operative looked down at his clipboard and gave a minimal shake of his head, as though clearing it. “Well. I regret to inform you all that, unfortunately, none of you have any of our fast-track skills.”
Sam felt his stomach plummet.
The operative held up a hand. “That doesn’t mean you can’t get into Greeley, but it means you’ll have to wait until we can find a place for you. Don’t ask me how long the wait might be, because I don’t know.” He hiked a thumb over his shoulder. “That lovely little burg behind us is what we call ‘The Tank.’ You’ll have to find yourself a place there while you wait to see if we can fit you into Greeley. No, there’s no food there. You’ll have to fend for yourselves—”
A shout in the distance cut the operative off.
Sam’s eyes focused past the checkpoint, down the quarter mile of roadway to La Salle. Movement caught his eye on the northwestern corner of the sprawl of buildings. People running.
Just three of them. What looked like two adults and a child.
Running towards Greeley.
“Christ,” the operative muttered, shaking his head.
An amplified voice lilted over to them across the distance: “Stop, or you will be fired upon.”
It wasn’t shouted. Whoever said it just…said it. Casually. Like you might tell a kid to stop jumping on their bed.
The figures didn’t stop running.
A single burp of automatic gunfire rattled through the air.
Dust sprouted around the figures. And they toppled.
Sam stared at where they’d been. They’d fallen so flat that he couldn’t even see them anymore. He kept waiting for them to get up, to raise their hands over their heads, to surrender. But they didn’t. A gust of wind swept across the ground and pushed those little dust clouds away, and then there was nothing there.
The operative let out a heavy breath. “And there was a fucking kid in there. Who the fuck takes their kid with them to pull a stunt like that? Buncha fuckin’ animals.” He turned back to Sam, his expression severe. “That brings up my next point. There are fucking ground rules in The Tank. Don’t try to make a run for Greeley. When we’re ready to come get you, we will come and get you. You try to run for it and we will take that as hostile intent.”
Sam’s eyes drifted out to the little empty spot in the fields between La Salle—AKA The Tank—and Greeley. Then he dragged them back to the operative. Words rushed into his mouth with the sudden force of a burst pipe. None of them were wise things to say.
Remember the mission. That’s what you’re here for. That’s your only reason for existence right now. Nothing else matters.
He clenched his jaw to prevent himself from speaking, and nodded his head to indicate that he understood.
The operative sniffed. “Moving on. You need to turn over your weapons.”
Sam’s hand went involuntarily to the sling of his rifle, but remembered the warning given by the other operative and pulled back before he touched it. “We gotta give you our guns?”
The operative huffed. “Yeah, that’s what I said.” He jerked his head to the left. Sam looked and found a stack of weapons leaning up against the back of the sandbag wall. “Everyone gets disarmed before entering The Tank. Those are the rules.”
Sam grimaced, looking over to La Salle. Refugee camps weren’t known for their civility. A lot of desperate people crammed in together, with no food and no prospects, and no idea how long they would have to remain in that purgatory.
The operative let out a dry chuckle. “If it makes you feel any better, no one else in there has guns. But we do let them keep their knives. So…you know. Watch your back.”
Sam glanced back at his group and found their faces as doubtful as his. But he forced himself to nod. “Go ahead, guys. Give ‘em up.”
The operative pointed to the left shoulder of the road. “Just stack them up right there.”
With a slow, mournful clatter, six rifles were laid on the shoulder of the road.
“Alright, last thing,” the operative announced. “Take off your packs, lay them at your feet, and open them up.”
This just keeps getting better and better.
Sam’s heart kept a steady, hard rhythm in his throat as he laid his pack down on the ground and opened it up, and prayed to whoever might by listening that he’d disguised the contents of it well enough. They’d known they’d likely be searched. But that didn’t mean his attempts at camouflage were going to work out.
The other operative that so far hadn’t done anything but stand there and stare at them, now stepped forward and began to pat each of them down, while the one that had asked all the questions rifled through their packs.
Sam stood, spread-eagle, but the guy frisking him kicked his ankles anyways, so Sam spread them a little further, even as his gut tightened with anger. Fuck these people. Fuck every one of them.
He didn’t make eye contact with them for a moment, because he knew that his eyes would betray what he was thinking. And he w
as thinking that he was going to burn their house down.
“The fuck’s all this?” the operative said, hefting a jumble of electronics out of the bottom of Sam’s pack. Sam stared at them, instead of at the man. He saw what was in them. But did the operative?
“Just…stuff,” Sam mumbled. “I tinker with electronics. Thought maybe I could trade some of the stuff if I could get it working right?”
The operative turned the jumble over in his hands a few times, then let it fall carelessly back into the pack. “Sure. Whatever.”
After they’d all been frisked and their packs rummaged through, they slung them back onto their shoulders, and the two operatives stepped to the shoulder of the road, leaving the opening in the barricades exposed.
The operative that had asked all the questions plastered on a rigid smile and swept a grandiose hand down the road. “Welcome to the Red Zone.”
THREE
─▬▬▬─
ADAPTATION
Angela sat in the assault module of Brinly’s MATV. A windowless, tan cell, smelling of metal and heavy grease and stale body odors, crammed with hard-faced young men in Marine-digital camouflage.
And Abby.
Her daughter sat beside her in what had become Angela’s mobile office of sorts—it was armored, at least, and Brinly and the squad of Marines he kept with him had become her impromptu protection detail. Every time that Angela found her eyes straying to Abby, she kept expecting to see that old, uncomfortable fear in her daughter.
But Abby looked at ease. Thoughtful, but not worried. She sat cross-legged in one of the jump seats, with a tattered paperback forgotten in her lap.
She’s getting used to this, Angela thought. But it brought her no relief. Looking at how comfortable her eleven-year-old daughter sat in this Spartan, military environment, Angela realized that she didn’t want Abby to get used to this. She wanted Abby to be…normal.
Was this the best life that Angela could provide for her daughter? Was this a new normal for her? Had she adapted to being a part of a war machine, rather than simply being an eleven year old girl and thinking about the things that eleven year old girls should think about?
Lee Harden Series | Book 5 | Unbowed Page 2