At Any Cost Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Fawkes, K. M.

  Worse, there was no way to let them know what Green had just told him, or what his plans for the prisoners were. He’d known they had to escape, but it had just become even more important. They were in more immediate danger than they’d ever realized, and Garrett had started to think of those prisoners as his own gang. Something, somehow, had brought them together, and he wasn’t going to let them come to harm.

  The problem was, those people needed a hero if they were going to escape. And he was the only one available.

  He wasn’t sure he was a big enough person to do it. He also wasn’t sure he had any choice in the matter.

  Chapter 18

  The next morning found Garrett in what he quickly began to think of as the factory. Really it was just a large room that might once have been a cafeteria and had now been changed into a sort of community office, full of desks and bookshelves and chairs. He didn’t know anything yet about Green’s team or who exactly was on it, but it included enough of a range that he’d found three new characters in this room, all of them dressed in what could once have been business attire. These guys were nothing like the soldiers, who all wore something that at least looked like it belonged outdoors—and all had boots on, as if boots were their only form of uniform.

  No, these people looked like they were the brains of the outfit. One of them was even wearing traditional horn-rimmed glasses.

  It made Garrett, in his khakis and Hawaiian-print shirt, stand out like a sore thumb.

  He’d quickly tried to make friends with them, though, thinking that the more people he knew—and the more they told him—the better chance he had of figuring out a way to get the hell out of there.

  The first guy he’d talked to, who had introduced himself generically as Bob, had seemed too nervous to be of any use to anyone. He’d just mumbled something about it being nice to see a new face around here, and gone back to whatever it was he was doing at his desk. The next guy—the one with the glasses—called himself Kevin, and while Bob had seemed nice enough, but jittery, Kevin was downright standoffish.

  “You come in from the outside?” he’d asked, staring at Garrett’s hand as if it was going to start spouting flames. He looked up and met Garrett’s eyes, his own blue eyes cold, flat, and unblinking. “Then don’t touch me,” he said, his voice monotone. “I don’t want any of your dirty air around me. Probably brought it in here already, didn’t you? Probably sentenced us all to death just with your presence.”

  Garret was both surprised and a bit defensive at this unprovoked attack. Weren’t these people prisoners here, just like him? Shouldn’t they have been banding together and fighting it out, back to back, rather than throwing judgment all over the place?

  “Actually, I—” Garrett started.

  The man’s hand jerked up, palm out, cutting him off.

  “Don’t want to hear it,” he snapped. “We were better off without you. We’ll be better off when the place is secured and people like you can’t get in anymore.”

  “Riiiight,” Garrett said, drawing out the word as he started to spin on his heel. Evidently Green wasn’t the only psycho around here. He’d captured one of them, too.

  Actually, Garrett realized, he’d probably captured more than one. Because it looked like every one of those soldiers was also on his side—which meant they bought into his crazy authoritarian scheme. Bought into the idea of trying to start a whole new civilization right here in Camp Paine, or whatever it was called.

  He stopped turning when he saw the third person in the room. She wasn’t anything special, and probably wouldn’t have caught his attention in his life before. Mousy and small, with a snub nose and rounded cheeks, she looked like she couldn’t be more than twenty-five or so. No supermodel, but there was something about her…

  It was the fact that she was obviously fighting a grin, he realized suddenly. She’d heard the conversation with Psycho Kevin and had found it amusing.

  When she looked up to meet his eyes, he lifted one brow in an eloquent question—“I’m sorry, did you think that was amusing?”—and the smile she was fighting got stronger, bringing a dimple out in her cheek.

  Yep, definitely interesting. And, if he could play his cards right, perhaps an ally. Perhaps someone who could tell him the truth about what was going on around here.

  He walked up to her, stuck out his hand, and gave her his most charming lopsided grin. “Garret,” he said. “I can see that you’re laughing at me, and I’m hoping that means we’re going to be friends. Because I could use a friend right now.”

  She put her hand into his and smiled enough to show him the other dimple. “Julia,” she said, her voice somehow childish.

  “And how did you get here, Julia?” he asked, dropping into a seat next to her. “What’s your story?”

  Before she could answer, Green himself came charging into the room and stalked right toward Garrett, who pushed back into his chair and tried desperately to decide whether he should get up and salute or not. It didn’t seem like protocol, but when you were living with a dictator, respect was always the right choice. The smart choice.

  He got to his feet and waited for the other man—but drew the line at saluting. The man might be the head honcho around here but that didn’t make him God. And that didn’t make him worthy of a salute.

  “Soldier,” Green snapped, coming to a stop.

  “General,” Garrett answered, tipping his head in greeting.

  The other man threw a stack of papers on the table and put his hands on his hips, looking so much like a child’s army man that Garrett had to pinch himself to keep from laughing at the image. He broke eye contact with Green to look down at the papers and saw a set of eminently familiar drawings.

  “Blueprints?” he asked, then looked up at Green with a frown.

  Green nodded. “Time to earn your keep, boy,” he said gruffly. “That’s the old dining hall. You’re going to turn it into a new set of living quarters. Make sure it’s large enough to hold one hundred people. And make sure there are residences for families in there, too. Not just singles. You have three days.”

  He spun on his toes and marched off before Garrett could even think of an answer to that, and Garrett watched him go, trying to give his brain a second to process the information before he started asking it to figure out how to do it. Living quarters. For one hundred people. Including apartments for entire families.

  Families. Because Green was going to have children in his utopia.

  The thought brought Garret crashing back toward the earth, and he completely forgot about the slash of hope he’d felt at Julia’s presence, and the idea of an ally. Because that ally was a woman. And he had a bad feeling that he wouldn’t be allowed to keep her for very long—or that he’d be forced to take her in a way he didn’t want to imagine.

  Six hours later, and Garrett had learned that Julia had been in college when the virus hit, making her even younger than he’d thought. She’d been studying business, and had managed to make it out of the outbreak on the campus by hiding in the library and surviving on food out of the vending machines.

  “No one else really went to the libraries if they could help it, so there wasn’t anyone there to infect the air,” she’d said with a shrug as they whispered over their work. “I never got to go back to my room for my things, and I’ve been wearing the same clothes for weeks.”

  She pulled her blouse away from her neck with a grimace of distaste, and then flashed him a quick grin.

  “But I’m alive, at least.”

  “What about everyone else?” he asked.

  He’d seen so few people since the outbreak, and almost none of them had actually been in one of the cities. He wanted to know what it was really like out there. Wanted to know if society had actually crumbled like it looked to have done. If Green was telling the truth—and if there was anything left to run to.

  Julia’s expression turned incredibly sad. “All dead,” she whispered. “Or most of them, at least. My parents both
died. I heard them die on the phone. My friends are mostly dead, or at least I think so.”

  She looked at him, her eyes brimming with tears. “It was horrible. Everyone just sort of… It was like everyone’s bodies started rebelling against them. Like the air we were all breathing was poison. Like we’d forgotten how to live. I wanted to help, I did, but I… I was scared. And I wanted to live more than I wanted to help, I guess.”

  She lifted her chin and stared at him as if she was daring him to judge her, and Garrett suddenly saw the stubborn streak, the bravery, that had ensured she did live.

  Her thoughts matched his own so closely that he couldn’t judge her. Not for a moment. He’d done the same thing at the bunker.

  “You did the right thing,” he said.

  A loud cough from the other side of the room told him that Kevin had noticed that he and Julia were having a conversation that didn’t include him, and further, that he didn’t approve.

  Garrett turned and stared at the man, his injured hand in his good one. It itched and ached at the same time, and though it was properly set now and he’d had painkillers, he didn’t think he could count himself as truly functional.

  He narrowed his eyes at Kevin anyhow. He might only have one useful hand at the moment, but that didn’t mean he was going to allow himself to be bullied. Not by a guy like that, who seemed to legitimately think he was better than everyone else.

  “What do you know about this place?” he asked Julia out of the side of his mouth, maintaining his eye contact with Kevin. “Know anything about the campus itself? The grounds?”

  He felt her grow extremely still next to him, and knew he’d struck a nerve. If her reaction was any tell, then she knew exactly what he was actually asking.

  “Haven’t been allowed out to the outer reaches of it or anything, but I know a thing or two,” she said, her voice deceptively casual.

  Well that was promising.

  “Know anything about what these guys are actually doing?” he asked, deciding to go with the biggest question first. “He told me he was building a fortress.”

  He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and saw that she was gesturing to the report in front of her. A list of numbers, from what he could see, with different labels next to the numbers.

  “Considering he has me drawing up plans for a fully functional farming community, I suspect that’s what he’s doing,” she said quietly. “And I don’t know why he’d lie about it. It’s not like any of us is going to run out and tell the media or the local cops or anything.”

  Well that was a good point. Garrett had assumed that he was still hiding something, but if he’d been willing to tell Garrett about his plans for the women, it didn’t seem likely he’d kept anything else up his sleeve. He couldn’t have been expecting the prisoners to stage some sort of rebellion and rise up against him.

  Which, Garrett thought, meant he’d never see it coming when they did.

  Garrett stumbled through the hallway toward the stairway that he thought would lead him back to his room, exhausted after a full day of working on blueprints and scheming. He’d stopped in the cafeteria for some food—real food, at least—but hadn’t been able to choke down more than a hamburger and fries. He’d been too tired, and too distracted by the plans that had been forming in his mind all day.

  He’d been given access to the blueprints of the place—well, not all of them, but he suspected he’d be able to get them if he asked, as long as he had a good reason—and that meant he might be able to figure out the lay of the land. He’d practically grown up reading blueprints. If he could see the layout of the entire base…

  Then he could figure out how to get the hell out of there.

  Of course, he had to assume that any of the gates into the outside world were locked. Particularly given Green’s paranoia about the virus, and people trying to break in. But if there were locks, that meant there had to be a key. He just had to find it.

  He was just trying to get his fatigued mind to tackle the problem of how to convince Green that he needed the plans for the whole base when he came around a turn and almost ran into Raoul and Alice, who were mopping the hallway.

  He almost melted in relief.

  “Oh my God, you guys, am I glad to see you,” he said, stepping as close to them as he dared and dropping his voice. “So much has happened, and I—”

  He didn’t get a chance to say anything else.

  “Sellout,” Raoul snapped.

  Alice gave him a scathing look, dunked her mop back into her bucket, and started to move quickly away.

  Garrett, confused, turned to follow them—but then saw two soldiers walking down the hallway toward them, chatting. One of the soldiers took the time to shove Raoul on his way by, while the other pressed Alice up against the wall and pretended he was going to kiss her.

  “Hey!” Garrett shouted, starting toward them. He might be trying to play nice with Green, but that didn’t mean he was going to stand by and watch his soldiers abuse people.

  “What, new guy?” one of the soldiers snarled, turning on him.

  “Uh, just wondering if you can direct me up to the rooms, actually,” Garrett stuttered, coming quickly to the conclusion that if he could distract the soldiers and give his friends a chance to get away, it would probably do just as well as actually getting in a fight. “I’m all turned around in here, any chance you could show me?”

  Seeing that the soldiers were getting ready to argue, Garrett shrugged one shoulder. “I’m sure General Green wouldn’t want to hear about me being left on my own in here. Never know what sort of trouble I might get up to.”

  He lifted one brow in the soldier’s direction, wondering if the guy was bright enough to catch on to what he was hinting, and was rewarded by the sight of the soldier suddenly turning a shade whiter—and Alice and Raoul turning and heading in the other direction.

  It hurt him to see his friends treating him that way. He couldn’t blame them, but he wished he could tell them what was actually going on.

  His bigger issue right now, though, was the soldiers in the hallway with them. They’d both moved way too close to him, now, and were standing over him, grinning like idiots.

  “Right, we were actually just coming to find you. Take you to your room,” the first soldier said. “We’ve got orders to lock you up.”

  The guy held a ring of keys up in front of Garrett’s face, jangling it, and both soldiers laughed. Garrett, though, was too busy counting the keys to pay attention. Lots of room keys, there, and one that didn’t quite look like the others. One that was an enormous skeleton key, good for old locks—and big locks.

  Locks like those you’d find on the gates that led into a military compound.

  Chapter 19

  He split the next day between the factory, where he went back to work in the morning, in his desk next to Julia, and Green’s quarters. The morning consisted of a quick breakfast—which he enjoyed immensely, given the amount of cheese available to him—and then several hours at his desk.

  The project was turning into something far more challenging than he’d expected, and that was made more complicated by the fact that he’d been given such a tight timeline for the work. Although the space itself seemed like it could easily accommodate the number of people Green had demanded he accommodate, the idea of making the residences separate meant a lot of construction, including ceilings, and the engineering aspect of that was going to be a challenge.

  Garrett had never specialized in building in this manner, which equated starting from the ground up. Once he’d finished his schooling, and then his internships with the large firms, he’d jumped right into what he considered specialization: kitting out existing buildings to fit a client’s idea of what he or she wanted. In truth, it was a lot more like interior design and planning—up to and including machinery and systems like solar power—than actual architecture.

  Still, that architecture tag had been his ticket out of the dungeons, and he wasn’
t about to tell Green that he couldn’t handle the task. Not when it was giving him such a good shot at escape.

  He’d already started working on the soldiers in charge of the factory in terms of getting the blueprints for the entire base.

  “It will make it easier for me to see where else we can build,” he reasoned with the soldier at the door. “Tell the general that if I can get a look at the entire base, it will mean I’m more likely to know what else we can do. I’ll be able to come up with a list of recommendations—options,” he quickly amended, seeing the look on the guy’s face at the idea that Garrett might be making demands. “Options for what the general might be able to do to further his goal.”

  It didn’t look like the soldier was going to agree, though, so Garrett added the carrot he’d been preparing.

  “If you’re the one who takes him the idea and he ends up going with it, it’s going to make you look pretty good,” he murmured, as if it was an afterthought.

  That had the soldier nodding, his eyes narrowing down to thoughtful slits, and Garrett congratulated himself. If it worked, he’d have the blueprints for the entire base tomorrow. And from there it would be quick work to figure out the best place to get out.

  Which meant he just had to figure out how exactly he was going to do that.

  He knew the soldiers patrolled the place regularly, though they weren’t nearly as regular about it as real military patrols would have been. He would have to figure out whether they were on a regular schedule, and where their paths took them, so he could avoid them. With luck, there would be some window of opportunity when he could slip through the cracks and right out the door.

  But that brought up a bigger problem. He still hadn’t been allowed to see the prisoners, and he knew for a fact he’d never be able to find the prison room on his own. Even if he did, he didn’t have the keys to get them out. He knew what the key ring looked like, and suspected the general was stupid enough to keep all the important keys on one ring, and in one place, but unless he knew where to find it…