The Price We Pay (Life After War Book 7)

by Angela White

  Angela’s sneer was a surprise. “He still thinks men can be controlled with sex,” she pointed out. “I know it takes blood. I’ll set you to cleaning out our country, cleansing it of the evil he represents.”

  She paused to let Donner reply; not expecting him to as he realized she’d tricked him into triggering radios and locations.

  Angela hung up her mike, almost able to feel the blood barreling towards her on the edges of the next black storm cloud. It was about to get very ugly. Someone’s group had chosen to go forward and it would trigger the others.

  “Welcome to the One Day War of the new world,” she whispered.

  Behind her, Adrian was trying desperately to figure out why Angela was doing everything she could to stir the pot instead of stopping it from boiling. He knew she had to have an ulterior motive, something larger than defeating Donner, who they both knew wasn’t really a match for either of them.

  What prey are you hunting? he wondered. And why do you need bait like Donner? And me?

  Angela felt his curiosities and stayed facing the battlefield, glad he wasn’t shoving into her mind yet for details. If he discovered her true plans, he would try to interfere and that would ruin everything she was doing. So far, only he or Seth could do that. Seth, she trusted to make the right choice. Adrian, she was set to sacrifice.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  9/9/2013

  1

  “Here they come.”

  Theo’s team had been in the field since the alarms sounded and the noise of the explosions was something of a relief. They were ready to go home and the small group watched the soldiers fleeing towards them with little compassion. It was life or death now, and Theo nodded to Candy, who had worked surprisingly well with them on this run.

  Candy, feeling better with time around a solid group, pushed the button as she’d been shown and the land below them exploded in a hail of wooden shrapnel as the trees blew apart.

  Theo had timed it to come in stages, as one group ran by and made it, the next was hit. As those who made it through the gauntlet of exploding trees came toward the ledge, Theo and his team was there to open fire.

  The shots rang between the explosions of the chain that had nearly reached their altitude and Theo nodded again.

  Candy hit the last button with a small measure of satisfaction. “For Lee!”

  The bottom of the ledge rumbled as the charges went off, the entire cliff rattling, groaning, and then giving way to roll down and crush the survivors.

  Theo and his group spun around to flee and found another group of strangers standing behind them with their hands full of stones.

  Theo didn’t like the look of them, but they clearly weren’t soldiers and he didn’t draw his gun.

  “Who are you?” Everett asked, staring at the Eagle uniforms. “You from Safe Haven?”

  “Yes,” Candy confirmed, tone soothing despite the chaos coming for them next. “We are. Are you?”

  Everett didn’t answer, except to motion toward the faint path that Theo had been leading his team toward.

  Theo didn’t wait for a second invitation. The stone throwers looked dangerous and he needed to get Candy to camp before the final battle.

  “Tell your boss we’ll be hanging out here, catching the strays.”

  “I will,” Theo answered, letting all of his team go first. As the strangers disappeared behind the trees and boulders, Theo shuddered a little and got moving faster. The chain would reach them in the next minute and he had to have them under cover now.

  “There!” The small cleft of boulders provided a tiny space that the five people crammed into and held onto each other as the mines in their zone started blowing. The ground shook, dirt and mud flying and then explosions were going off right next to them and the sky went dark with debris.

  2

  “That’s disgusting,” one of the new female Eagles complained, scowling at the males who were telling dirty jokes.

  “What is?” Shane asked. He had only been back for a few hours and was glad Marc had sent him to help keep an eye on the boss.

  “Calling it a crotch.”

  “What about gap?” Allan asked snidely from the circle of males.

  “No!” Nancy bristled. “Not a gap, slit, hoochie-coochie, or any of those other gross names.”

  “What’s your problem with slit?” Shane asked curiously. He found the word…erotic.

  “It’s so ugly!”

  Shane considered it for a second and then gave a slightly embarrassed, half-flirting grin. “That’s because you haven’t spent your life trying to get inside it.”

  There was a slight pause and then laughter rolled across the group.

  Startled, Nancy snickered. “That’s hard for me to argue with.”

  Shane took his hat off and stepped forward, hand out. “Hi. I’m Shane”

  “I’m not shaking that,” Nancy stated, pointing.

  Shane glanced down to discover he had crushed the cup in his grip and was dripping coffee through his fingers. How did I miss that? he wondered.

  Nancy giggled, drawing instant attention.

  Who could be happy at a time like this?

  Shane wiped his hands down his jeans, chuckling with the witnesses. He looked up to see her walking away, hips swinging in that special rhythm that made his heart thump. “Hey!”

  Nancy turned around, brow raised, and Shane shouted, “What about sweetspot?!”

  The men around him hit the ground laughing, immediately grabbing the term for their jokes.

  “He said sweetspot!”

  Amusement covered their area as Nancy and Shane both vanished, going different directions.

  “Incoming! More of ours!” the gate spotted called and the men in charge of opening and closing rushed to sallow the large group of Indians to flood through.

  The returning team was Atolius and his small group of braves, minus Bridget, Angela noted. That was another dark place that had filled itself in as she watched a pair of lovers vanish into a shower camper. Again, Angela chose to let it play out. Right or wrong, there was no going back now. If she tried, they would only fail and cease to exist.

  The hell-hound rounds were taking out Angela’s traps, destroying everything dangerous and not, but it also made the mountain more unstable and rock slide noises began to echo across the cliffs. The extremely destructive rounds packed twice the normal punch of a grenade and laid waste to anything in its target zone, including the roads these soldiers needed to be able to reach her

  Angela was glad to discover that Atolius and Natoli had met up on the way back. Any soldiers they’d come across hadn’t lived to make it here.

  Instead of going to meet them, Angela stepped to the rear of her water-logged command tent and listened. Her chain reaction was ramping up now, thanks to the ants. The large insects were triggering the final rings of traps, of pipe bombs, claymores, small chemical explosions, and other indiscriminate killers. The ants only had to walk across the trip wires, but they gave their lives knowingly.

  It had been impossible to get the chain to meet in some places and still allow her fighters to escape through the damage. Once Jennifer had given her the idea, Angela had recruited the ants. They wanted future protection and they would get it. Jennifer’s plan had been without compassion and the quickly evolving ants had brokered a truce through Dog. They’d promised to provide soldier ants to die in her plan and in return, the ants would never be hunted in the new society that would come. Angela had made the deal without provisions, but listening to the inner rings blowing sent more horror into her veins. She was killing across species barriers. She could never be forgiven.

  “The boss looks rough,” Greg stated as he and Shawn made a long round of the over-guarded perimeter. Angela had sent some of the fighters to help at Safe Haven’s undisclosed dens, but all the others were gathering here, where the final battle would take place when the soldiers made it through her death traps.

  “Would you look good right n
ow?” Shawn asked, motioning to the tents of wounded that were full. Angela was only healing the life or death wounds, and the moans and screams of the wounded who were under the care of the few team medics was awful to listen to between the explosions. It was too much like a war movie to want to watch another one again for some of these men. There was no way a camera and a set could capture the complete lack of normalcy and absolute daze of combat and its bloody aftermath.

  3

  Neil and Jeremy were protecting a laptop, both men hunched over the blue screen that few of them had seen since the war, and Angela went that way before they came to her.

  Angela glanced over their shoulders to discover that they’d accessed the internet.

  “Nice work.”

  Neither man spoke to her, though both of them stiffened.

  Angela didn’t have the time or the patience to have this conversation right now and she motioned Shawn closer. “We have two teams moving up in zone four. What can we do about that?”

  Shawn stared in surprise at the satellite images Neil and Jeremy were receiving. “Atolius came back. I can send him down. He won’t mind.

  Angela nodded. “Do it. We can’t let any group sneak up here yet. We’re not ready.”

  All three of the men had questions, protests, and accusations, but none of them spoke. The sounds of the slaughter going on below them was too real, too important, to distract her.

  “This is cruel!”

  Both guards stopped at the angry shout, on high alert even though they’d heard the same sentence repeatedly over the last hours.

  “Let me out or put me somewhere else!”

  Greg and Shawn snickered and kept walking. When the wounded had started coming in, Angela had told them to erect the tents around the cells of their pows. Conner was surrounded by their injured men and it was killing him to resist healing any of them.

  “I hate you!”

  A bright light flashed through the camp, one that had every man there turning to protect their loved ones and Angela dropped her personal shields to absorb Conner’s healing blast. She’d counted on the boy not being able to resist the pain of others and she groaned as the energy rushed through her parched body.

  The light faded and the first ting the fighters noticed was the silence. The screams and moans were gone, and so was the background noise they’d grown accustomed to over the morning and afternoon.

  Angela used her radiophone to tell them, “Brace for it!”

  It felt like the mountain exploded.

  The rumble didn’t grow under their feet, but blasted through them and spun out of control, scattering the debris into the storm. Cliff walls shifted, dropping, and the sounds became distorted as the final part of the chain was reached. Brady’s last bomb was bigger than the rest and meant to disable any force sneaking up behind them as it climaxed.

  “Two more groups coming in!” the spotters called, motioning for them to open the gates in a hurry.

  Angela was behind a wall of Eagles before she could move and she wanted to chuckle at their thoughts, but couldn’t summon the amusement.

  “After what I’ve done, and what I’m still set to do, Sebastian doesn’t even register,” she stated, shoving her way through the guards to meet the small team of Mexican’s.

  Theo’s team had also come in, but Angela didn’t glance at them. Theo’s chores weren’t finished yet, and he would know it if she spoke with him. Hiding was almost beyond her now. She was saving her resources for meeting Donner.

  Sebastian stayed by his men, respecting the glowers and threatening stances as Angela came toward him, but couldn’t resist the obsession that had cost him a brother.

  Angela stopped at a distance her guards would be comfortable with, monitoring his mind with a frown. Like Caesar, he was dark to her, but in a much harder way to penetrate. It was almost as if she was trying to get into a door with no room attached to it.

  She stopped prying and rocked on her heels, as she’d seen Marc do so many times when he was contemplating something unknown. “Are you a threat to me?”

  The sound of her voice hit Sebastian like a bell, ringing into his soul and dredging forward the evil within. It wasn’t her shape or looks or even the delicious smell of sweaty vanilla that drifted over him with the mist. She glowed with power, her entire form lit up to him like a fountain of youth and magic that could never be emptied. He would have her.

  “Yes,” he answered slowly, eyes glazing. “That may be so.”

  Angela knew what Brady would have done, what her protectors wanted her to do, and glanced to his men. “You’d spare them?”

  Sebastian nodded as if in a daze. “I’d leave too.”

  Knowing what it would cause, Angela shook her head, pointing at one of the empty cells. “You will join the others who cannot choose the right line to walk. Your men can go.”

  Sentries muttered and the reaction from the top Eagles was done together, without planning or even eye contact to confirm support.

  Shawn and Greg rushed up behind the eight confused Mexicans as Jeff and Neil came in from the front, pulling their guns, locking onto a too-slowly reacting target and firing low to minimize crossfire hits.

  The Mexicans went down screaming and reaching for weapons they hadn’t known they needed and the four Eagles stepped over them and ended the future threat.

  Angela waited for all of her rule-breakers to glance over before giving a nod of approval. Some of Sebastian’s men hadn’t been guilty of much and she’d needed a group choice on this execution.

  To start punishing herself for it, Angela joined the body crew against the wishes of everyone and helped to toss the dead men off the cliff. Sebastian’s body went first.

  “Hey, wasn’t Lilly supposed to be with them?” Greg asked. It was his job to keep track of those names she’d given him this morning, and he was trying hard to keep up.

  “She didn’t go with them,” Angela said gravely. “There was nothing about her in his mind.”

  Lilly had volunteered for that place, saying it was to conquer her fears, but Angela hadn’t missed the gleam of interest in Caesar’s much more stable older brother.

  “When can we start sending out search parties?” Neil wanted to know.

  “After Donner comes,” Angela answered tiredly but her rough voice said not to argue.

  She moved toward the tents of wounded men. A couple of them would be able to get out of these awful-smelling canvas coffins soon, but many of the three dozen or so here wouldn’t see morning if she didn’t help them. And it would drain her to nothing for facing Donner, something they couldn’t have. Their only healers were Conner, herself, and Kendle, who there hadn’t been any word from. Kevin’s team was also MIA and the worry had begun to set in for Angela on that link in her chain. She’d counted on the former movie star wanting to live deep underneath, but if she’d been wrong, Kevin and his team would be unprotected right now, the most dangerous part of her plan for those still outside these gates. The surviving soldiers would be few in number, but kill anything that moved without giving time for questions or manipulations.

  “Come on, Kendle,” Angela whispered furiously. “Be what I was promised. Rejoin the living.”

  4

  “I was the one who snapped and started hurting people. It was my messes they had to clean up.”

  Kevin spun around; startled to hear a female voice in the tiny cave they were crammed into.

  Kendle stood in the dusty entrance, shoulders slumped

  “Luke was teaching me to control it when they others began to flip out. We…killed them. And for a little while, it was us again,” she said wistfully.

  “And then?” Kevin prompted, motioning his team to clear her place to sit that was near the dripping water. He was hoping she would use it to scrub off some of the blood and gore she was coated in.

  “Then he got sicker even when I healed him every day. I couldn’t keep up and he was dying, and I was drained…” Kendle’s voice broke. “I to
ok him. He was begging me not to by the end, but I couldn’t stop.”

  Kevin was horrified and still able to find sympathy for her. Others probably wouldn’t, but he now understood why Angela had put Kendle with him. He’d lost Cynthia, a possible girlfriend that he hadn’t even claimed fully, and he’d almost chosen to act like a child over it. Kendle had lost her life mate through her own inability to control herself, and she’d still summoned the courage to pick being alive and doing her given duty. It was humbling and Kevin was able to put his arm around her to offer comfort when she started sobbing.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he whispered and she dissolved in his arms, crying like a baby.

  Kevin’s team wasn’t as forgiving. Kendle was clearly a dangerous woman with issues that needed to be sorted out or handled by a bullet, was the consensus.

  Kevin also felt that way, but he vowed right there that he would spend time helping Kendle adjust to living with herself after committing such heinous crimes. Safe Haven was supposed to be a place for second chances and none of it was Kendle’s fault. She hadn’t chosen to be infected, abducted, or any of the other terrible things he’d heard through the vine, and he would remind people of that.

  Kendle didn’t miss it, but she was too upset to respond and she didn’t try to stifle the flow. She’d already held it back too long. Luke’s death had broken her, killed something deep inside that she didn’t think could be replaced. She would fight for each day from here. She’d made her choice and would now begin the climb, but inside, she knew she’d died with Luke and nothing would ever change that.

  Boot steps echoed and Kevin blanched. “Get down!”

  Kendle darted out of the cave and above it, sliding into the narrow space between boulders as the team of soldiers came up the hill.

  “In there! We’ll wait it out!”

  The soldiers rushed toward the hole where Kevin’s team was huddled and Kendle found herself standing up to draw their attention.