Lee Harden Series (Book 3): Primal [The Remaining Universe]

by Molles, D. J.

  Perhaps wondering what had put him on the long, and violent road, right to the shadowed, death-filled valley that he now found himself in.

  EIGHT

  ─▬▬▬─

  TOWN HALL

  They watched him the way gazelles watch lions: Wary. Unsure if the lion is hunting or not.

  The gazelle doesn’t immediately run just because it spots a lion. But it waits, its entire body on a hair trigger, ready to start sprinting if the lion makes a move.

  But this particular lion was not hungry today.

  Today, the lion needed to deal with the prey it had already taken down.

  Carl Gilliard moved through the Butler Safe Zone, straight-backed and steady.

  The morning was overcast and humid, and already he was beginning to sweat. His icy, gray eyes slid this way and that, from crowded building to crowded building, and saw the prey-eyes of the people watching him back as they went about their daily doings.

  The Butler Safe Zone now resembled nothing so much as a refugee camp. People everywhere. The adults sullen and irritable, squabbling at the drop of a hat over the tiniest things. The children running around heedless, or sitting, blank-faced, wondering when this purgatory would be over and life would go back to normal.

  They were jam-packed in. And that was a problem. People were social creatures. But problems always arose when there were too many of them in one place, and Carl didn’t need any more problems. Neither did Angela.

  A little more than a month ago, the Butler Safe Zone had housed a little over a thousand people, and been about two-thirds full. Now it also housed the two-thousand survivors that had made it out of Fort Bragg as it had fallen.

  Butler was not the closest safe zone to Fort Bragg, but it was the quickest to get to. The Charleston Safe Zone in South Carolina—which was not actually in the old city of Charleston, but west of it—had been closer. But a few bad hurricane seasons had wrecked some of the main roads and turned them into impassable swampland.

  With busloads of refugees fleeing from Fort Bragg as their defenses went down and massive clusters of primals beginning to infiltrate and hunt, the Butler Safe Zone had been the easier alternative.

  The Charleston Safe Zone would have had more room, but that ship had sailed, and now Carl was crammed in here in the massively over-crowded Butler Safe Zone, and all these watching eyes made his job very difficult.

  Carl arrived at the only private place there was left in this Safe Zone—the jail.

  Attached to the Sheriff’s Office where Ed, the elected leader of Butler, shared power now with Angela Houston, the elected leader of all the Safe Zones, the jail provided Carl with a few things that he needed in order to do his job: A building with no windows, places to keep people that didn’t want to be kept, and a way to come and go without being observed, which was fulfilled by the jail’s underground sally port.

  Carl didn’t go through the sally port that morning though. He went straight into the front entrance, and he nodded to Ed, who sat at what had once been his secretary’s desk, back in the day when he had actually been Sheriff.

  Angela hadn’t wanted to take Ed’s office because she thought it might undermine him. She was always considerate of other people. That was the nice thing about her.

  And, unfortunately, one of her greatest faults as a leader.

  Carl had pushed on Ed, and Ed had insisted, and so Angela now sat in Ed’s office, and Ed sat outside of it.

  Ed nodded his balding head of snowy hair, and his expression was mostly unreadable beneath the white handlebar mustache that dominated his face.

  “Master Sergeant,” Ed acknowledged.

  “Ed,” Carl muttered back.

  Through the glass front of the office, Carl saw Angela sitting at Ed’s desk. She held a sheet of paper in each hand, like she’d been studying them, but now watched Carl approach from underneath her arched eyebrows.

  She was different now.

  Harder. Colder. More Machiavellian.

  Regrettable, Carl felt. But necessary.

  The change might not make her a better person, but it made her a better leader. From Carl’s perspective, she was finally doing her job correctly, worrying less about what people thought and approved of, and more about how to keep all these assholes alive.

  “This isn’t the full list,” Angela said, the second Carl stepped into the office.

  Carl closed the door behind him. “I’m aware.”

  Angela slapped the papers down on her desk. “That would’ve been useful information to pass on.”

  Carl shrugged. “Ma’am, it doesn’t make much difference whether you knew it was the full list or not. It changes nothing. The names on it are the names on it. Yes, there are more names. And we will eventually recover those. When we can get back inside Fort Bragg.” Carl gestured towards the papers on Angela’s desk. “As for right now, that is the best I can provide, working from the memories of Lieutenant Townsend and the surviving foremen.”

  The fall of the Fort Bragg Safe Zone had been the fault of a group of dissidents called the Lincolnists. On the day of their attempted coup, ninety-eight of them had failed to show up to their assigned jobs. The foremen had called in the absences, as was required. But, unfortunately, the list of names now languished in Fort Bragg somewhere. And Fort Bragg was overrun by primals.

  The sheets of paper that Angela now had was the best that Carl could re-create based on the memories of the foremen and forewomen, and Townsend, the soldier they’d called the absences in to.

  Angela eyed the papers again. “Thank you,” she said, somewhat begrudgingly.

  “Shouldn’t you be practicing your speech?” Carl asked.

  Angela shot him a look. “It’s not a speech. It’s a Town Hall. Question and answer.”

  Carl studied Angela, searching for her intentions, for her emotions. Angela saw his look and leaned back in her chair. “Relax, Carl. We’re in the same boat.” She sighed and looked back at the desk. “Besides, even if I wanted to come clean, now would not be the time. Not with Charleston out of comms and Georgia and Florida wavering.”

  “Agreed,” Carl nodded.

  Angela’s lips pressed down to a line, and she leaned forward and placed her fingers on both sheets of paper, turning them so they now faced Carl. Then she took a pen and laid it on the desk between them.

  Carl stepped up to the desk and took the pen. Then he bent over the papers. The tip of the pen went down the names. Occasionally it stopped and marked an X next to the name, and then continued on. When he was done, there were five X’s on the two papers.

  Angela watched him work with an expression of distaste.

  “Anyone new?” Angela asked, when he was done.

  Carl nodded and reached into the sleeve pocket of his combat shirt. He drew out another piece of paper, this one folded in fourths. He placed this on the desk, between the two other papers. “Six additional. But only two confirmed. They’re highlighted.”

  Angela looked at the folded piece of paper the way you looked at a shot of bitter medicine that you knew you had to take. Eventually she nodded.

  When she looked up at Carl again, her eyes were almost pleading. “How many more now?”

  Carl gave her a comforting smile. “Not many.”

  He left Angela’s office, said nothing to Ed on the way out, and then proceeded down the stairs into the basement, which was where the majority of the jail structure sat.

  The jail was a simple building, created for simpler times, in a small town that didn’t have much crime. There was a drunk tank, two communal holding cells, and two solitary holding cells. In the main area, where sheriff’s deputies used to intake prisoners and fill and file paperwork, Carl’s team had now made their home.

  The intake counter was a square island in the middle of the large main room. Inside the confines of the chipped Formica counter, the island overflowed with all manner of gear, equipment, and surveillance and investigative notes. The notes were written in long hand on
whatever paper was available, often the unprinted backs of other documents they’d raided from various buildings and businesses.

  It was crowded, but at least Carl and his team had their own space.

  The equipment for Carl’s team of operatives had spilled over the counter and onto the floor, like lava flows from a volcano. On the outskirts of their equipment pileup were two cots, a mattress, and two sections where the heavy, rubberized seating provided for prisoners to await their intake paperwork had been crammed together and covered with poncho liners and blankets to make beds.

  It was on one of these that Carl slept each night. If he was actually sleeping.

  Half the time he stared at the ceiling with his heart bumping around inside of him, like a tireless beast that wanted to get out. When sleep descended, he would often jolt awake with a full-blown adrenaline dump, and lay breathless and stiff for a time, hoping he didn’t wake the others.

  Not that any of the others were free of demons.

  Rudy spent most of the night rolling over and over—what he called “rotisserie-ing” himself.

  Logan, the youngest of their crew, had been dealing with sleep paralysis nearly every night. He would try to scream, aware that he was trapped, but unable to move his body. His screams would come out as groans and whimpers, until someone finally kicked him awake.

  On the positive side, Logan had become more accustomed to these episodes, and now his groans had less of an edge of panic to them.

  And then there was Mitch.

  Poor Mitch.

  Mitch stood at the corkboard they’d liberated from a roll call room upstairs, staring at the notes pinned there. Carl approached from the side, and he could tell from the look of Mitch’s profile, that the man wasn’t quite there at the moment.

  “Mitch,” Carl gruffed, even as he felt a stab of pity.

  Mitch jerked, then looked at Carl with a stare that started out a little vacant, and then gradually honed back into reality. “Fuckin’-hey, Carl.”

  Mitch had died.

  He’d taken a round to the neck during their last firefight in Fort Bragg before they evacuated. He’d lost a lot of blood, and by the time they got a transfusion into him—taken from Carl, who was a match—he’d been dead for a few minutes, his body kept viable only by a load of IV fluids to bump his blood pressure up, and Rudy’s constant chest compressions.

  Then he’d been in a coma for two days, and when he’d come out, it was obvious he’d suffered some brain damage. It’d taken him nearly a week to start speaking full sentences again, and even now, he spoke out of the corner of his mouth with a strange drawl, and started nearly every sentence with a grunt or a “fuckin’”.

  He’d lost a lot of weight. Carl saw it in his hollow cheeks and the way his shirts hung off of him where they used to be snug across his well-muscled chest.

  Mitch knew that he wasn’t quite right, and he hadn’t done operations with them since then, concerned that his physical tremors and occasional mental fugues would put the team in jeopardy. Mostly he stuck to the basement, and tried to keep things organized and help with the investigations as much as he could.

  Carl was a hard man, but it broke his heart to see Mitch this way. And he couldn’t help comparing it to Lee, who had also died for a short time, and been saved, and spent time in a coma, but come out the other side mostly fine. Carl didn’t begrudge Lee, but there was a part of him that thought it…unfair.

  Carl had so few friends, and it seemed they were all being taken away from him, piece by piece.

  “Are they all packed up?” Carl asked of Mitch.

  Mitch nodded. “Mm-in the pickup. With the camper shell.”

  “Why don’t you ride shotgun with me?”

  Mitch looked unsure.

  Carl jerked his head towards the sally port door. “Come on. Grab your stuff. That’s an order.”

  This wasn’t an operation. There was minimal chance that anything would go wrong. And Carl wanted to get Mitch working again, even if it was just to give him something to do. Maybe it would steadily rebuild his confidence.

  Mitch turned and went to his cot, his gear stuffed underneath it.

  Carl’s armor and rifle leaned against the intake counter. He pulled his gear on, then grabbed one of the radios from the charger and tested it with a quick, “Check, check.” He heard his voice echoed back to him from one of the other radios on the counter.

  Logan sat on the other side of the intake counter, his feet up. He peered over at Carl. “You need anything?”

  Carl shook his head. “Just keep an ear out.” He looked over to where Morrow and Rudy lounged on a bed, playing a card game. “You guys stay ready as QRF. You’ll have the Tacoma. We’ll be back within an hour.”

  Morrow, Rudy, and Logan all nodded.

  They knew the drill.

  With armor, rifles, and pistols, Carl and Mitch exited the sally port and went to the pickup with the camper shell. Carl took a quick look into the back and saw the forms stacked in the back. He counted five.

  Carl took the driver’s seat, and Mitch took the passenger’s seat.

  The back glass was open, and Carl heard a quiet mewling noise coming from the camper shell.

  Mitch whirled on it as Carl started the engine. “Fuckin’-shut up!” he growled.

  And all was silent.

  They drove out of the basement garage and into broad daylight, and the people of Butler and the people of Fort Bragg, all crammed in together, watched the pickup truck with the camper shell pass them by, but they didn’t see what was in the back, because Carl never stopped. He slowed as he approached the gates to the Butler Safe Zone, but the guards were aware that Carl was coming, and the gates were open, and then Carl drove them out into the world beyond, as the gates slid closed behind them.

  He took Highway 19, heading north into the empty Georgia countryside, surrounded on all sides by forest. After perhaps twenty minutes, he came to an overgrown dirt road on the left, and he took that heading west. The tire marks showed the red clay beneath, but the weeds that grew up between were high, and they tickled and scratched at the undercarriage.

  They stopped in a place where nothing was.

  Carl did a three-point turn on the narrow road so that the truck faced back the way they’d come and the tailgate faced west.

  Carl left the truck idling, and stepped out.

  Mitch met him around the back of the truck and opened the camper shell. His face impassive. Empty.

  Five pairs of bare feet faced them.

  “Out,” Carl commanded, and began grabbing them by the ankles and hauling them out, dropping them on the ground like a careless baggage handler.

  Mitch stood by with his rifle in his hands, covering them.

  The figures groaned and whimpered when they hit the ground.

  Three men. Two women. Their hands bound behind their backs with zip ties that cut into their skin, and their mouths gagged with cloths knotted at the backs of their necks.

  Carl turned to look into the faces of the Lincolnists now huddling on the ground before him. Their eyes were fixed on him, terrified, knowing that death was coming for them sooner rather than later. They all wept, save for one woman who simply stared, like she was already dead.

  Carl pointed to where the dirt road meandered endlessly back into the trees. “That is west. If you want to live, that’s the direction you should go. You are banned from the United Eastern States. If you show up at any Safe Zone, you will be shot on sight. Nod if you understand me.”

  All five heads nodded, a glimmer of hope in their eyes. A possibility for survival.

  How stupid of them.

  “Word to the wise,” Carl said, as he closed the tailgate. “You’ll be tempted to scream for help, or to scream at us as we drive away. But there isn’t anything in these woods that’s going to give you help. So my recommendation to you would be to stay quiet, and move fast.”

  Maybe they expected Carl to cut them loose.

  But that was th
eir problem, not his.

  Carl and Mitch got back into the truck, and sped away, leaving a cloud of dust to settle over the huddled and miserable forms of the five Lincolnists.

  As they drove back towards Highway 19, Carl looked out into the dappled shade of the forest to his left, and thought he saw sinuous shapes slipping through the trees.

  ***

  “Master Sergeant Gilliard is completely within his legal boundaries, I assure you.” Angela stood on the top step of the Butler United Methodist Church.

  On the large concrete patio at the front of the church, and crowding the street beyond, Angela was surrounded by several hundred of the three thousand people that were now crammed into this Safe Zone together. The day was hot, and the sun glared down on them, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky to give them shade.

  It smelled like the sweat of a crowd, and hot concrete.

  Beside Angela, and slightly behind her, as though to give her deference, stood Ed. His hands clasped in front of him. His steely cowboy’s eyes squinting out into the bright daylight. His expression hidden behind the mask of his white mustache.

  In the crowd stood a man with sweat rings showing under the armpits of his gray t-shirt, who had asked Angela some uncomfortable questions, and didn’t seem to be happy with her answer.

  Angela was about to try to shift to a different question—and hopefully a different topic—but the man with the sweat rings wasn’t going to let her go that easy.

  “Excuse me,” he called over the rumble of the gathered crowd, forcing Angela’s attention back onto him. “You talk about legal boundaries, but what laws are you referencing, specifically?”

  Angela’s gaze narrowed at the man, and she tried to play it off as a thoughtful squint, or perhaps the fact that the sun was in her eyes.

  She thought she recognized him from Fort Bragg.

  Maybe he was a Lincolnist himself. One of the many that had weaseled their way into the evacuation convoys, in order to escape the catastrophe that they themselves had caused, when they’d taken out the power to Fort Bragg’s high voltage fencing and allowed them to be overrun by primals.