by Lolita Lopez
“They looked fine when I saw them,” Chloe lied.
The guilt at lying to Leila ate at him, but it was the right thing to do. She needed to hear the news about her brother from her father. Selfishly, he silently admitted that he needed her calm and in control, just in case they weren’t as secure as they thought.
Max felt Butler’s pulse weakening beneath his fingertips. It wouldn’t be long now.
“He’s one of yours?” Leila asked softly.
He didn’t have to ask who she meant or why she was asking. “We’ve been together since we were born at Gulf Point. He was three series below me, but we went out into the field together, right after the war began.”
Leila shot him a strange look. “You’re really old, aren’t you?”
His mouth quirked. “We don’t age like you. Well—we didn’t.” He wasn’t about to go into a long spiel about their civil war with the Faction or the implosion of GPL and the end of the serums that kept them young and slowed their aging.
“He’s a good soldier,” Leila remarked. “He saved us, me and Gimp over there.”
Butch shot her the finger at that comment. Max didn’t reprimand him over it.
“He gave us covering fire when that truck came out of nowhere. I felt the wind off one of those rounds when it whizzed right by my head.” She touched her temple as if reliving the memory. “He threw me out of the way and saved me.”
“He did his duty.” Max slid his fingers along the clammy underside of Butler’s wrist and searched for his pulse again. “We were created and programmed and indoctrinated to save you. It’s the reason we exist.”
“Not anymore,” Leila replied. “Now you have Emma. That’s your reason for living.”
“Yes, she is.” He didn’t even try to hide the hopeful tone that invaded his voice as the mere mention of the woman who had ensnared him such a short time ago.
But that hopeful feeling was short-lived as he lost the sensation of Butler’s pulse. He squashed the instinct to start CPR. With the damage to the cyborg’s gut, he was a lost cause. Even so, Max didn’t let go of his hand. He held tight.
The others sharing the tunnel with him seemed to understand that Butler was gone. No one spoke a word. Even Grim settled right down and stayed silent. The minutes ticked by, and Max continued to try to engage his transmitter to make contact with the outside world. The concrete walls surrounding them were so thick it was impossible to pick up anything but static.
One hour turned into two. Max was about to head out to scout their surroundings when Grim suddenly leapt to his feet and growled. He scampered to the door, sniffed and snarled. Max was on his feet a second later, a pistol at the ready, and moving toward the door. He heard Leila and Chloe arming themselves and helping Butch stand.
The door popped free from its seal, and a blistering wave of heat rushed into the tunnel. The stench it carried was enough to make Max put his arm up against his nose and mouth to filter the air. He raised his weapon, ready to fire, but quickly lowered it and switched on the safety when Rafe’s familiar face appeared. Lighting silhouetted him in a shadow of rain.
“Shit, it’s good to see you!” Rafe threw the door wide open and stormed into the tunnel, sloshing water and mud with each step. “We couldn’t pick up any of your signals.”
“Where the hell is my girl?” With his arm crudely bandaged in a makeshift sling, Laird Keaton shoved his way into the tunnel. Soot covered his face, and there was blood and grime all over his clothing. All of the Zed team filing in behind Laird and Rafe looked just as filthy. By the looks of it, they had been engaged in a hell of a fight before and after the bombs dropped.
“Daddy!” Leila flew at her father but slowed down and carefully embraced him when she saw his wounded arm. “I’m okay.”
He pushed her back and looked her over from head to toe and right back up again. “The blood…?”
“It’s not mine.” She glanced back at the spot where Butler had been left. “He got hit real bad. We tried….but…”
Max glanced at Rafe. It was no secret that Rafe and Butler had been involved in an intimate relationship for the better part of a decade or that they had lost Alissa, the female cyborg both men had loved and shared, almost two years earlier. For Rafe to lose Butler now? Max wasn’t sure how he would react.
The Zed squad leader slowly crossed the tunnel and knelt down next to Butler’s lifeless body. He reached out with gloved fingertips to touch Butler’s face but pulled back at the last second. After an agonizing moment, he cleared his throat. “Jace?”
“Yeah, boss?” The massively built and highly skilled tracker stepped out of the shadows. Max eyed the Zed soldier who shared his DNA. They both had the same sperm donor as a biological father. In close quarters like this, the resemblance between them was clear.
“We’re going to need a body bag,” Rafe stated. Calm. Disconnected. Aloof.
Max decided to give him space and time. He trusted Rafe to do his duty first and breakdown later, in private and back at the Outpost.
Quietly and reverently, Max, Rafe and Jace lifted Butler’s body into the bag and loaded it onto the stretcher. Butler was carefully secured to a bench in the back of a Keaton cargo truck. They hoisted Butch onto a different bench and helped him prop up his shattered knee and wounded thigh before giving Laird a boost. Leila wasn’t far behind. Grim hopped into the back of the truck and plopped down in front of her.
Jace tapped Chloe on the shoulder. “Your sister wanted me to tell you that she’s mad as hell with you for running outside the wire—and that she loves you and expects to see you by sunrise.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said with a lopsided smile. “That sounds like Zoe.”
“You’re next.” Max gestured to the truck waiting to head back to Purgatory for more survivors before rolling out to the Outpost.
“I’ll stay here with you guys.” She wrinkled her dainty little nose as she glanced at the smoldering grass and crispy zombie bodies littering the ground. “This is going to be a long night. There’s a lot of cleanup and you could use an extra set of hands.”
“You don’t have to—“
“I want a deal,” she interrupted. “If I stay and help? You give me, my sister and Ember a year on the Outpost without forcing us to do whatever it is you do with women.”
Max frowned down at her. “We don’t force women to do anything.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
“I don’t care what you’ve heard. I’m telling you the truth. We don’t force women to stay with us. But—”
“But?” she jumped on the word.
“But we do require that human females on the Outpost join unions,” he clarified. “It’s an issue of security and rationing. We’re not a care facility, and we don’t operate on goodwill. I can’t give you a year. There’s no way the general will sign off on that. Six months?” He shrugged. “I can promise you six.”
She held out her hand. “Deal.”
Max grasped and shook it. He didn’t like to be suspicious but after tonight’s bombings? Everyone was suspect, even someone as helpful as Chloe. “Why is it so important that you and your sister get on the Outpost?”
“You ever been hungry?” she asked boldly. “You ever been so cold that your bones hurt? You ever had to listen to your baby niece hack and cough all night? You ever had to watch your sister hold her little child and cry while she wonders if her sweet baby girl is going to survive the fever burning her right up?”
Max had never imagined having a child, but with Emma now in his life? It was a likelihood that he would be a father someday. The thought of that future child freezing to death in winter or dying from a preventable disease chilled him to the core. “No.”
“Well I have—and I’m not doing it again. Winter will be here soon. We lost our home and our business tonight. I’m not starting over in the cold and snow with a vulnerable little girl who needs hot food, a roof over her head and access to medicine.”
“I resp
ect that, but you have to understand that there are rules on the Outpost. Sooner or later, if you two sisters want to stay, one of you is going to have to become part of our family.”
“I’m not afraid of being a cyborg wife.”
Max noticed the way she immediately assumed she would be the one to mate with and pledge herself to some of his men. Eyeing her more critically, he asked, “How old are you?”
“Old enough.” She picked up her ax and walked away, leaving Max to wonder about these strange and incredibly strong women who inhabited the Outlands.
3 Chapter Three
After hours of backbreaking labor, a torrential downpour and high winds, Max grudgingly but silently acknowledged that Chloe had been right. They had needed every set of hands they could get. Between the dead cyborgs and civilians who had to be bagged, tagged and separated into cargo trucks and the still mobile Biters who had to be put down and pushed into the burn pits, there wasn’t an idle pair of hands to be found.
As the last of the gathered up zombies were shoved into the final pit, Max stood back while one of the Zed boys blasted the doused corpses with a flame thrower. The rain had eased up a short while ago, but everything was so soggy they had to use heavy-duty methods to keep the pits going. Fuel had been siphoned from the broken-down vehicles to keep the fires burning hot.
Max grimaced at the unholy smell rising out of the pits and retreated to a safe distance. He leaned his aching head against the cold metal panel of a transport truck from the base and closed his eyes. That blast kicked my ass good.
“You look like you could use a drink.” Wearing a dust-colored shemagh, Chloe Morgan strolled up with a canteen in her hand. She held it out toward him. “Take it.”
“Thanks.” He unscrewed the cap and swallowed a mouthful of water to rinse the horrible taste from his tongue. After spitting it on the ground, he drank long and deep.
Next to him, Chloe rested her ax against the truck and lowered the scarf covering her mouth and hair. It pooled around her neck and shoulders. She leaned back against the truck and sighed. She was covered in dried blood, soot and mud. That white-blonde hair of hers was smudged and dirty. Some of the braids had come loose. A few of the beads were missing too.
She reached into one of the deep pockets of her cargo pants and produced a small silver case that held hand-rolled cigarettes. Holding it out to him, she asked, “Want one?”
He shook his head and silently declined. “Where the hell do you get tobacco?”
“Really?” She gestured to their surroundings. “You ask me that after seeing all the firepower and fuel the Keatons run through Purgatory? After all the sugar and glass and electrical components up at Emma’s farm?”
“Point taken.” He watched her tap the cigarette ends against the metal box and strike a brittle match against the side of the truck. “You know that shit will kill you, right?”
“Not before they do.” She motioned toward the flaming zombie pit before cupping her hands and lighting up. After savoring that first pull of smoke, she wiped at her nose. “So how’s Emma adjusting to life on the inside?”
He didn’t care for the prison joke but let it slide. “You can ask her yourself in a few hours.”
“Leila and Avery had a hell of a time believing that she went willingly with you and that other guy—”
“Jack,” Max corrected. “His name is Jack. He was the sniper up on the water tower.”
“Right. Anyway. Leila and Avery refused to believe that Emma wanted to go, but I just knew she’d chosen you two as her escape from the farm. After we spent those months at her house, I didn’t have a hard time believing that she had decided a real relationship with warm, strong men in a safe, well-protected home was the way to go.“
Max snapped his gaze in her direction. “You were at Emma’s farm?”
“Not long,” Chloe said, “but she saved us.”
“How?”
Chloe flicked ash into the wind and refused to meet his eye. “After Zoe and I escaped, we were lost. We didn’t know which way was safe or who we could trust.”
Max wanted to ask where they had escaped from, but he held his tongue. He had a feeling it wasn’t a detail he wanted to hear.
“Zoe was pregnant, and we had a hard time finding food and water. By the time we wandered up to Emma’s fence, we were both sunburned and starving. I had a bullet lodged in my thigh from a run-in with some skin traders, and the wound was festering. Zoe was having contractions because of dehydration, and I didn’t know if she was going to drop that baby right there on the grass or make it for another six weeks to her due date.”
She toyed with the cigarette. “Emma found us wandering out there. She was just walking out in the brush and woods around her place. She said she was heading back from an unlucky hunt. She took us in, fed us and gave us water. She dug the bullet out of me and cleaned out the wound. She kept me alive until Avery’s mom and dad got to me and fixed me up right.”
“How long did you stay with her?”
“Five months,” Chloe said. “We left her farm when Ember was four months old.”
Max couldn’t explain it, but the discovery that Emma hadn’t always been alone, even if it was only for a few months, made him happy. “Why did you leave?”
“The farm was lovely, but it was too isolated. We know what isolation does to people. We didn’t want that for Ember.” Chloe finished her cigarette and smashed it under the toe of her boot. “I hitched a ride to Purgatory with the Keatons, won our café in a poker tournament and got it up and running. I went back for Zoe and Ember a few weeks later and that was that.”
Max had a sinking feeling that the isolation Chloe spoke of might be one of those lunatic compounds up north. The cyborg forces gave those freaks a wide berth and avoided them like the plague. Remembering what Laird Keaton had said about Zoe’s baby, he figured the pieces fit too nicely to be a coincidence.
The sight of Jace dragging a dead civilian on a tarp stopped him from asking anymore questions of Chloe. Instead, he barked at Jace, “Civilians go into the red truck.”
“Not this one,” Jace growled back. He changed the angle of the tarp he was dragging and Max got a good look at the ashen skinned corpse now missing its head. The purple veining and black bile covering the dead man’s shirt told him all he needed to know. “We found him in one of the buildings. He got bit last night and his psycho wife had him hidden away in a burned out building. She was protecting him while he foamed at the mouth and tried to bite her. She kept screaming that we had to give her more time because maybe he could fight off the infection. Can you believe that shit?”
“No.” No one ever fought off the infection. A bite was always fatal. Always.
“Jack got her out of the way, and I did what had to be done.” Jace dragged the tarp toward the pit. “She whacked Jack pretty good with a rock during the scuffle.”
Max’s gut twisted with concern. “Did Mario check him out?”
“Yep. He’s good.”
Rubbing his jaw, Max glanced at Chloe. “Why would the wife think that her man could fight off the bite?’
Chloe gave him a queer look. “I guess Emma hasn’t told you everything about her family yet.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” He didn’t like the sound of this at all.
“It means that people like to tell stories.” Chloe picked up her ax and used it to point at the truck that was heading to the Outpost. “Looks like my ride is ready. You coming with us?”
He shook his head. “I’ll take the next one.”
“All right. Be safe.”
“If you have any trouble at the Outpost, use my name or ask for Adam Gray. Tell him that I gave you my word that your family is under my protection. He’ll vouch for you.”
“Adam Gray,” she repeated. “Got it.” With a smile and a wave, she hefted her ax over her shoulder and walked toward the truck. She climbed up inside without any help from the soldiers standing nearby and settled onto the end o
f a bench seat in the cargo area.
“Is it just me or are the women out here a different breed?” Jack strolled over and rested his shoulder against the cargo truck. He carefully prodded his swollen cheek and stretched his jaw.
“Judging by the size of that bruise on your face? The women out here swing harder than Jace.” He reached out to touch it but Jack smacked away his hand. “How bad is it?”
“I’ll live.” Jack looked him up and down as if inspecting for damage. “You got thrown pretty far by that blast. How’s your head?”
“I’ll live.”
“You better.” Jack adjusted the rifle sling digging into his shoulder. “Have you talked to Rafe?”
Max scanned the cyborgs surrounding them and finally spotted Rafe standing on the far side of a burn pit. He had a faraway look in his eyes. Grief hadn’t swallowed him up yet but it would soon. “It’s not the right time. I’ll check in on him when we get back to the Outpost.”
“We have to keep an eye on him. He’s lost so much.” Jack’s gaze settled on the trucks stacked with body bags. “Hell, we lost more than we saved.”
“The men fought well. We were outnumbered and hurt.” He exhaled a ragged breath. “Shit, Jack. What the fuck is happening out here? The main risk to our security here in the Outlands is supposed to be zombies and run-ins with radicalized humans. Bombs? Coordinated attacks? This shit is getting old fast.”
“What do our intel guys say?”
“I contacted Monroe while I was calling in my report a few hours ago. They’ve already sent out a SICO team.” The grim set to his mouth betrayed his feelings about that. “Watch your six, Jack. Gage is the top SICO officer now. He has a long memory, and it’s unlikely he’s forgiven you for beating the shit out of him.”
“Fuck him.” Years ago, Jack and Gage, then only a SICO team captain, had gotten into a bloody brawl that had landed both of them in the infirmary. While Gage received a slap on the wrist and a promotion, Jack had been knocked down two ranks and shipped off to prison. Seven months in the brig hadn’t done much to temper his dislike or distrust toward the SICO program. Even after all this time, Jack had never confided the cause of the fight.