Vici was clearly organized. Clearly not a friend of Greeley—at least if Dave was to be believed. And they were clearly aggressive about protecting themselves from outsiders. Those were all things that Lee could work with. Provided that he could convince them of who he was.
Being fairly confident in his identity, Lee was willing to take some risks he might not have taken in other circumstances. But he got the vibe from Dave that, if he could prove he was Lee, Vici would be an instant ally.
Who was it that they had that could identify him? Someone he knew? Someone who simply claimed to know him? What if they didn’t really? What if they called him a liar?
Well, they hadn’t taken Lee’s pistol from him, so that was always an option.
Dave and his two companions were in the bed of the pickup with Lee, their rifles trained on him because he had refused to give up his sidearm. In a way, Lee thought it was a good sign that they hadn’t argued harder to disarm him. Maybe they wanted to believe him.
The first thing that Lee noted as the pickup pulled into the southern edge of Vici, was the fact that they had no fences. No walls. Nothing to keep out the primals—or whatever they called them around here.
Tex had been a proponent of a similar strategy. All the little settlements that made up his coalition of Texans had simply had a vested interest in killing all the “teepios” they could.
“Your defenses,” Lee said, speaking loudly to be heard over the growl of the truck. “You don’t have a problem with the infected?”
“You mean the teepios?” Dave asked.
Interesting. The colloquialism from Texas had spread.
Lee nodded.
“Define ‘problem’,” Dave grunted. “They’re smart puppies. They know not to fuck with us. Every time they do we leave their pack scattered out on the field. I think they’ve learned at this point.”
Lee pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Never more than ten or so?”
Dave eyed him. “Why do you ask?”
“Because in Georgia we ran into hordes of hundreds. And they weren’t shy about fucking our shit up.”
Dave frowned, a look of disbelief passing over his face, but he didn’t respond. “How bout you just quiet down for now, m’kay? You’ll have your chance to talk.”
The people of the settlement were already hanging around, watching with curiosity as the pickup truck pulled into their midst. Their gazes crossed over Dave and his people and settled on Lee. His first instinct was to grow uncomfortable under their scrutiny. But his second instinct was to hold up under it. To not only be who he was, but to embody the myth that he had become.
A myth was a powerful thing. Dave clearly thought that the real Lee Harden should be some muscle-bound killer, so good at fighting that he didn’t have any scars. That was fine. Lee could harness that unrealistic expectation and use it to his advantage.
And who are you, really?
Just a man of violence, always seeking an outlet for his anger? Was he wrath? Was he vengeance?
Yes, I’m all of those things. I am a violent man. I have sought out the evil and executed violence on it. I have been wrathful. I have been vengeful. And perhaps I am a little off in the head.
But was that all that lay at the center of him? Was his core just a vicious animal, trained to go for the throat, looking for opportunities to be let off the leash? Or was he, perhaps, something a little bit more than that?
The pickup truck stopped in the middle of the street, towards the center of Vici. Dave stood up in the truck bed and moved to the tailgate. “Make sure he doesn’t move from this spot,” he growled to his companions, then hopped down.
Lee looked at the woman to his right, and slightly behind him. She glared back with no trust in her face, the muzzle of her rifle held steady on him.
“Don’t even fuckin look at me,” she snapped.
Lee smirked, but looked away.
In the reflection of the back glass of the pickup truck, he could see her and her male comrade exchange a worried glance. So, all the bluster was to mask a genuine fear. Perhaps fear of who he really was. Because if he was Lee Harden, if he was the myth that they believed about the man, then the very fact that he still had a pistol strapped to his hip might be quite worrisome.
After all, Lee Harden could apparently kill a platoon of men with a toothpick. Give him a gun and he might wipe out this whole settlement if they incurred his wrath.
Dave walked around the front of the pickup and met several others that appeared to be waiting for him. There were five of them. What looked to Lee like an entourage, with a woman in the center who appeared to be in charge.
Dave dipped his head and spoke in tones that Lee couldn’t hear.
The woman, a stubby little thing with short-cropped brown hair, looked over Dave’s shoulder and met Lee’s gaze. She held it, defiant.
In his kneeling position, his left hip and leg began to slowly tighten into a cramp. Lee tried to keep the burgeoning pain off his face, but there’s something very insistent about an incoming cramp.
“I’m going to pull my leg up,” Lee said to the woman on his right.
“Don’t move.”
Lee ignored her and drew his left leg up. “I’m keeping my right knee on the ground.”
“I said don’t move.”
Lee looked over his shoulder at her, his expression mild, but undeterred. “I took a bullet to the hip about a week ago. You ever been shot?”
She didn’t answer. She seemed to really want him to obey her, but she also knew that she wasn’t going to force the issue. Because she was afraid of who he might really be.
“I’ve been shot a good bit,” Lee sighed, stretching his left leg as best he could and massaging the cramp out of his upper thigh. “Muscles around the wound like to bind up. They never quite feel the same after something’s gone through them.”
“If you’re such a fuckin badass, why’d you get shot so much?”
Lee smiled without looking at her. “Honestly, I’m surprised I’m even alive. Died one time, after getting shot in the chest. I was lucky to have a good doc—” Julia “—to bring me back to life.”
The man on his left scoffed out a snort. “So the great Lee Harden gets his shit pushed in on a regular basis. That’s disappointing.”
Lee shrugged. “Not a fan of it myself.”
The quiet conference at the front of the truck ended. The stocky woman that appeared to be in charge departed with her entourage, and Dave circled back to the truck bed. He looked up at Lee, his eyes still full of suspicion.
“They’re goin to get em now. We’ll have this sorted out real quick.”
“Am I supposed to know these people?” Lee asked.
“You’ll see.”
“Right.” Lee shook his head. “I’ll see.”
A few minutes passed in relative silence. Lee looked around him, meeting the eyes of the people of Vici. Some of them stared back. Others shied away and found their shoes or the sky much more interesting.
Lee imagined that word traveled pretty fast in a settlement like this. He could hear the subtle murmurs around him, like the trickle of a stream, carried from mouth to ear, coursing through the people gathered at the edges of the street. The rumor of who he claimed to be making the rounds. Who knew what elaboration was being added to each iteration of the rumor?
People. They never change.
A stir brought Lee’s attention front and center. Over the cab of the pickup, he saw the stocky woman approaching again. Two men had been added to her entourage, trailing behind her. They wore civilian clothes. One was black. One was white. Lee had never seen them before in his life.
“Hey, Dave,” Lee said, tilting his head to the man on the ground. “I hate to break it to you, but if those two are the ones that claim to know me, you’re about to be disappointed. I don’t recognize either of them.”
Dave was unimpressed. He spat off to the side again. “Dudn’t mean they don’t know you.”
Fantastic.
So now Lee was being put on trial based on two fuckheads who claimed to know him, and were likely lying through their teeth. Possibly to ingratiate themselves with the populace.
How was he going to handle this?
The woman in charge hung back a few paces from the front of the pickup truck. The two strangers continued forward and stopped beside Dave, looking up into the truck bed at Lee. He made eye contact with them, his expression calm. Neutral.
The white guy put his hand on the side of the bed. “Who are you?”
“Lee Harden.”
A quirk of an eyebrow. “No rank?”
“Well…I’ve been a captain and a major, and God knows what I am now.”
This was apparently strike one against Lee. The man exchanged a knowing glance with his companion. Then back to Lee. “Alright, hot shot. Tell me something only Lee Harden would know.”
“Considering the fact that I don’t know either of you from Adam, I can’t see how you’re going to verify anything I say.”
“Try me.”
Lee smiled. “I once had a girlfriend named Deanna who kept a betta fish in her office.”
Silence.
“What?” Lee squinted at them. “Was that too personal? Hm. Guess you don’t know as much about me as you thought. Should I try for some shit that two random dudes who claim to know me can verify? Okay. I was a Coordinator for Project Hometown. I left my bunker early. That pissed off President Briggs, who saw Project Hometown as his personal honeypot. He’s had it out for me ever since. Labeled me a ‘non-viable asset’. Sent a bunch of people to kill me, but I killed them first. Sent one of my good friends to kill me, a man named Abe Darabie, but Abe rebelled and now we work together. A little more than a month ago, me and Abe spent some time in Texas, killing all the cartel we could find. Then I got called back to the east coast just in time to get invaded by Greeley. And now we’re here.” Lee tilted his head, challenging them. “How’s that for starters?”
“Common knowledge,” the man replied without missing a beat.
“Of course.” Lee looked skyward. “Well, why don’t you just ask me some questions then. You want proof of who I am, you’re gonna need to be specific about what you consider to be proof.”
The man was ready. He held up two fingers. “You met two men. One was from Canada. The other was from the United Kingdom. What were their names?”
Lee reared back, taken off guard.
The man’s expression became vindicated, like he’d finally caught the imposter in a lie.
Lee’s heart slammed a few times in his chest. Who the hell were these guys and how the hell did they know about that? Should Lee even tell them anything? Had he completely misread the situation? Was Vici as anti-Greeley as they had appeared, or had he let himself get lured into a trap?
The silence hung. The man shook his head, his nose curling as though Lee disgusted him. He began to turn away, and Lee could already see, in the span of just a few seconds, what was about to happen next.
He was about to be labeled a liar. And then everything would go tits up.
Lee pulled the bottom out of his hesitation. Plunged forward. “Marlin and Wibberley,” he spat out.
The man froze, his mouth still open in preparation to tell Dave that the man in the pickup bed was full of shit. He turned back to Lee, his eyes widening.
“Marlin was from Canada,” Lee said. “Wibberley was from the UK.”
“Holy fuck,” the man murmured.
Dave fidgeted, his head pivoting rapidly between Lee and his questioner. “What? What’s going on? Is that right?”
A shocked smile crept onto the stranger’s face as he stared at Lee. And something like awe. “I can’t believe you’re still alive.”
Lee frowned. “Yeah, we were just talking about that. Now who the hell are you?”
The man immediately thrust his hand out. “My name is Worley, Canadian Armed Forces. This is Guidry, British Army.”
***
“What’s going on out there?” Frenchie worried, hovering over Sam’s shoulder as he leaned out the window, trying to put eyes on the cause of all the bustling about that he heard.
Straight down the road that their apartment flat sat on, Sam could see the next three intersections. Through the farthest intersection, coming straight out of the compound known colloquially as “FOB Hampton,” a series of guntrucks roared by, heading south.
Following the guntrucks, a motorcade of dark-colored SUVs flew by, bumper-to-bumper in their urgency.
Sam shook his head. “Well, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but someone fucking kicked the hornets’ nest.”
He drew his head back out of the window and frowned at Frenchie’s complete disregard for personal space. He gained some distance by putting a hand on Frenchie and pressing him back.
Something had happened. What that something was, Sam could only guess. But in the last five minutes, the relatively quiet streets of Greeley had suddenly become inundated with the refrains of big engines roaring to points unknown.
Sam looked back across the cramped confines of the flat. Marie and Jones hung out the window on the back side of the apartment. Pickell and Johnson huddled near the kitchen counter, the satphone sitting there between them.
Jones pulled out of the window. “Something’s got ‘em all hot and bothered. Bet you don’t need twenty questions to guess why.”
Sam met Jones’s eyes, which were serious for once. “You think they caught wind of Lee?”
Jones raised his hands in a shrug. “Yes? Why else would they be sprinting for the perimeter?”
Sam shook his head, approaching the kitchen counter. “We don’t know that. We don’t know shit. This could be normal for around here.”
Marie negotiated herself out of the window frame. “All the civilians out there rubbernecking tells me this isn’t normal.”
Pickell looked grimly thoughtful. “It was bound to happen at some point, Sam. Lee’s got an army heading this way. He couldn’t go unnoticed forever.”
Sam grimaced. “This soon, though? Hell, we just left them a few days ago. The army couldn’t have gotten that far north.”
Marie and Jones took positions on either side of Pickell. Marie seemed confident in her assessment of the situation, and it appeared she agreed with Pickell. “There’s no telling, Sam. Greeley could have agents in the settlements that Lee is trying to talk to. It would only take one to sound the alarm.”
“It could be primals,” Johnson offered. “Like when they tried to rush Butler.”
Sam shook his head. “It’s not the same out here. Intel says the primals out here don’t horde up. They’re just packs. That’s why Greeley and every other settlement around here doesn’t have walls or fences.”
Johnson looked put out. “Well. It could happen. First time for everything.”
Marie tapped a finger on the satphone. “Sam, you might want to make the call to Lee and tell him what you can. There’s no telling when you’re going to get another opportunity if shit breaks bad around here. We’re already under scrutiny. With this shit coming down the pipe, things are only going to get worse.”
Sam nodded and stepped up to the kitchen counter. He’d hoped to have some actionable intelligence to give Lee when he called, but at this point Marie was right. Lee didn’t even know that Sam had gotten inside Greeley yet. He reached for the satphone.
“Yo!” Frenchie called from the front, where he had taken Sam’s position in the window. “Sam! Incoming!”
Sam’s whole body flushed with adrenaline at that little word: incoming. He snatched the satphone from the counter and bounded to the window. Frenchie retracted himself, thrusting a hand out and pointing down onto the street.
A convoy of pickups laden with armed men had split off from the main intersection and now approached at high speed. Sam’s eyes snatched from vehicle to vehicle. Men in the beds. Men hanging onto the running boards. Some of them wore black polos. Others wore fatigues. All of them wore white armban
ds—with a red Delta symbol on them.
Cornerstone.
The satphone became a lead weight in Sam’s hand. His palms and the small of his back began to sweat. But still he watched. Perhaps because he didn’t want to believe it. He wanted to believe that all these troopers were speeding their way to some perimeter…
They weren’t.
Tires locked up. Men clung to handholds, as pickup after pickup curbed itself in front of buildings. The very same sets of buildings where the newly-minted conscripts had been housed only hours before.
And yes. One pickup, right below them.
A man in a black polo hopped off a running board, rifle in hand, and looked up. Right at Sam.
He pointed. “You!”
Shit.
Sam snatched himself out of the window. Spun around. Frenchie looked terrified. The others were confused, not sure what it was that Sam and Frenchie had just witnessed.
The satphone. In his hands.
The sound of boots on the ground. A door slamming.
Footfalls on the stairwell leading up.
“They’re coming,” Sam breathed.
Frenchie and Johnson were paralyzed.
Marie, Jones, and Pickell sprung into action. For a moment their movements seemed nonsensical: They raced about the kitchen, ripping open the small set of cabinets and drawers, as though they were trying to prepare refreshments for their imminent guests.
It only made sense to Sam when Jones looked at him, clapped his hands together, and held them up in a catching position. “The phone!” Jones hissed.
Even as Sam realized what they were doing, he tossed the satphone in an arc. Jones snatched it out of the air, then spun, looking for a place to hide it.
Pickell yanked a kitchen drawer out, bent low to look into the cavity, then straightened. “Jones! In here!”
Jones twisted, looked into the space where the drawer had been removed.
Footfalls pounded closer and closer.
Jones made a face, and Sam knew in an instant what it meant: The hiding place wasn’t great, but they didn’t have time to find better.
The footfalls reached the landing, right outside their door.
Lee Harden Series | Book 5 | Unbowed Page 18