I’ll remember them, Adam vowed to himself. I didn’t manage to save their lives, but I’ll always remember them. I won’t put the pain of that out of my heart.
And, he decided, he would tell Ella about it.
He would tell Ella about everything.
There were things she still didn’t know about him. She didn’t know the full story of what had happened on Cody’s yacht. He had never talked to her about how Cody had died, and the part he had played in that.
Now he was ready. Now he wanted her to know.
If I’m going to move forward at all, he thought, I need to accept everything I’ve done in the past. All these things need to be a part of my story. I can’t push them down or try to forget about them. It wouldn’t be right.
And it would be dishonoring the memories of the people who have died on my watch.
He stared out the window as the Humvee rolled eastward, trying not to think about the sound of those gunshots, trying not to think about the cold brutality of the men sitting next to him and the power he was about to try to win for their commander.
At least, if I do this right, that weapon won’t be used, Adam thought. If I complete my mission, they’ll dismantle the bomb, go be an independent state, and never trouble the rest of the world again.
At least, he hoped so.
But there were a lot of assumptions in that hope.
Chapter 14
A few hours later, they stopped for the night.
Adam was aching to be alone after the day spent in the company of White and Briggs. He had been hoping against hope that he would be given a private space in which to sleep when night came.
He shouldn’t have dared to dream it. They camped out in a single tent that was barely big enough to fit three people. Adam crammed himself into one side of it, so far over that the roof of the tent draped over his head and shoulders where it angled down to meet the ground.
At least that sort of felt like privacy. It was like being shielded from the view of White and Briggs, even though he knew perfectly well that he hadn’t really been shielded at all. They could still see him just fine.
The one good thing about the sleeping arrangements was that Adam wasn’t asked to take a watch. It was clear that they didn’t trust him enough to leave him in charge, even for a few hours. They probably thought he would kill them in their sleep or try to run away.
Little do they know, I can’t do anything of the sort, Adam thought. I can’t even think about escape until I’ve got Ella with me. If they knew that, they’d know I’m in this for the long haul.
But it didn’t matter. If their misconception of him meant that he’d get a full night’s sleep tonight, so much the better.
Things didn’t end up going the way he had hoped, though. Maybe he should have expected it. He awoke repeatedly, feeling restless and insecure. More than once, he woke to the sound of White and Briggs talking as they changed shifts. They never troubled to keep their voices down.
They don’t really want me well rested, I suppose, Adam thought blearily as he rolled over and tried to regain the sleep that kept eluding him. The messier I look when I ask to see the president, the less suspicious the government is going to be, and the more likely they are to let me in.
When he did manage to sleep, he was plagued by nightmares. Over and over, he fell into dreams of danger, racing against vague and unknown threats, and Ella, far away and in danger, depending on him to come back to her.
Finally, he woke to see that dawn had lightened the walls of the tent. Briggs and White were already beginning to pack up.
“We wanted to let you get as much sleep as possible,” Briggs said when Adam slowly sat up. “That’s why we didn’t wake you.”
The statement was so laughable that Adam could hardly keep from scoffing right in Briggs’ face. He caught himself just in time and nodded. “Can I help with anything?” he asked solicitously.
“No,” White said. “Go and get in the car. We want to be on the road again as quickly as possible.”
Adam crawled out of the tent, briefly surprised that they were trusting him to go to the car all by himself. It seems so unlike what their M.O. has been up until now, to trust me.
But he should have known that their trust didn’t extend any farther than it absolutely had to. The Humvee had, at some point while Adam was sleeping, been pulled up alongside the tent. It took him fewer than ten steps to cross from the tent’s flap door to the back door of the Humvee. He crawled in and buckled his seatbelt, wishing for a bench seat so that he could stretch out and sleep a little bit longer.
Adam heard thuds and slams as Briggs and White packed up the camping supplies in the back of the vehicle. A moment later, the two front doors opened and they climbed into their seats. White turned the key in the ignition, and Briggs began fishing around in his bag. He produced a packet of jerky and a container of nuts and placed them on the dash between himself and White.
“Can I have some of that?” Adam asked.
“Afraid not,” Briggs said. “We’re under strict orders not to feed you today. General Thompson wants you to look as weak and tired as possible. But never fear—they’ll probably feed you when we get there. That’s what we’re hoping for, anyway. We want them to feel so sorry for you that they really roll out the welcome wagon.”
“I don’t think they’re going to feel very sorry for me,” Adam said doubtfully. “The story about me being a sad loner who’s starving to death is only going to get me in the door. Once I’m in front of the president, I’m going to have to tell the truth about who I am and where I’m coming from. And then any sympathy they would have had for me is going to dry right up.”
“We don’t think they’re going to kill you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” White said. “Once you’ve made it in the door, they’re going to be interested in what you have to say. They’ll hear you out, at least.”
“Yeah, thanks.” Easy for them to gamble when it’s my life that’s on the line. “My point is that we don’t have any reason to think they’re going to feed me,” he went on. “If I really was just a random passerby who happened across their bunker, then maybe. But when they find out I’m an emissary from their enemy—”
“So you don’t tell them who you are until you’ve been fed,” White said, as if this was the most obvious answer in the world.
Adam didn’t reply. He slumped back in his seat. Is White crazy, or is he just that indifferent to how this turns out for me? he wondered. Accepting food from the president and his men before revealing that he had lied about his identity was only going to make Adam’s situation more precarious. The only way this was going to work was if he came clean about who he was and what he was doing there as quickly as possible.
Of course White doesn’t care. White and Briggs had absolutely no reverence left in them for human life. Adam wondered if they knew about the nuclear weapon Thompson had built, and if so, whether they even cared if he used it or not. Do their own lives even matter to them at this point?
They had made it abundantly clear that nobody else’s lives did. That was for sure.
Adam closed his eyes and remembered the things he had seen the previous day. The three soldiers passing by on the side of the road who hadn’t been a threat to them at all, gunned down unmercifully.
He could almost excuse that. Soldiers were soldiers, after all, even if they were walking along peacefully and not bothering anybody. Killing soldiers was something completely different from killing civilians.
And then there was killing children.
If Adam lived to be a hundred years old, he would never forget what White and Briggs had done to the three little girls living in that farmhouse.
How pointless it had been. Those girls had had nothing they’d needed. White and Briggs had poured out the water they’d gotten moments after leaving the house—they hadn’t even drunk it. Nor could Adam realistically imagine them eating the rice they’d taken. The pistol was still resting again
st the side of the Humvee under Adam’s seat, and Adam suspected the soldiers had completely forgotten it was there.
They hadn’t killed those girls to neutralize a threat or to eliminate competition for a resource they’d needed. They were just killing fellow humans because that was what their lives were about now.
And it’s not just White and Briggs who are like this, Adam thought. This is the philosophy of Thompson’s whole militia. This is why they committed those atrocities that Ella and I saw before we ever met them. They’re murderers. I can’t believe I ever thought this group might be a safe place, a home for me and Ella. It’s nothing more than a band of sociopaths.
And Thompson was the worst one of all. Threatening to set off a weapon that would do more than just kill the men he had chosen as his enemies. It would end the lives of those he was supposedly in the business of protecting as well.
I didn’t understand, Adam thought belatedly. Even when he was showing it to me, even when he was telling me what he planned to do, I didn’t understand. I didn’t realize how detached Thompson and all his officers are from their own humanity. Life and death means almost nothing to them anymore. The whole world is just a big shooting gallery.
Was Thompson even trying to survive anymore? Adam couldn’t be sure. He thought it was possible that the man was just trying to make as big an impact as possible on the world on his way out of it.
But then there was what White had said, back in the farmhouse, about survival of the fittest. It was a sentiment Briggs had expressed as well when he had been trying to explain to Adam why they had killed the soldiers by the side of the road.
Maybe that’s what they really believe, Adam thought. Resources are finite. That much is true. Eventually, things are going to run out. It’s already starting. And the fewer people there are to compete, the longer things are going to last.
It was a sickening idea—that every living human being was now just competition for the things they all needed to survive. But Adam couldn’t deny that there was some truth to it.
That’s why we were able to survive as long as we did on the yacht, he thought. That’s why the Santa Joaquina was such an ideal place for us to hide out. Both places had a surplus of resources and a very small number of people. It wasn’t until Ella and I returned to the mainland that either of us came face-to-face with the idea of competition for supplies.
But Thompson and his men had been living with that competition for months now. Probably since the virus had first begun to spread.
Is this what happens to people when they fight for their lives for too long? Adam wondered. Do they turn into murderers, even when the situation doesn’t require it?
And what if they were right? What if the world really did just belong to whoever was willing to be the most violent and cruel now?
That can’t be true, can it? That can’t be what things have come to.
Adam had never been the sort of person to believe that people who were willing to take whatever they could get would prosper in the end. He knew that some people, especially in the entertainment industry, had thought of him as naïve because of that fact. When he’d been an actor, he’d been surrounded at all times by people who were willing to scrap and claw for every advantage. He had been told more than once that that was thinly way to get ahead in such a cutthroat business.
Cutthroat.
As if there had ever been anything dangerous about the life of an actor. As if any of his colleagues had ever risked anything real when they’d talked about how hard they were willing to fight to get what they wanted.
Well, that standard had certainly changed now. Everyone risked something every day. And if that was different now, who was to say that every understanding of the basic nature of humanity that Adam had once believed in hadn’t changed?
Who was to say that Briggs and White weren’t completely correct when they preached survival of the fittest?
Those girls didn’t have anything we needed. We didn’t kill them to take anything. But having people alive in the world, even if they’re empty-handed and weak, does mean that supplies are dwindling more quickly.
It felt insane to think of three teenage girls as competition. But Adam had to admit that there was some validity to the idea. If the world was full of little groups of survivors like that, even if each group was barely getting enough food and water to survive, that would mean that a lot of food and water was being used up on people who almost certainly weren’t going to live very long anyway.
God, am I really thinking this way? Am I really giving credibility to their ideas?
No. He wasn’t. He couldn’t. What White and Briggs had done yesterday, both to the girls and to the soldiers, was absolutely, categorically wrong.
All right, so maybe there was competition for supplies. Maybe the fact that resources were finite was going to make it hard for everyone to survive in the post-virus world.
But that didn’t justify murder and theft.
The question isn’t whether we need to compete for resources, Adam thought. It’s obvious that there’s not enough to go around, and we’re faced with a choice between either a few people living for a while or a lot of people living for only a short time.
But what wasn’t obvious was who deserved to be the ones to survive.
Should Thompson’s militia live just because they had lucked into military-grade weapons and a nuclear plant? Did that make them more deserving than anybody else? Of course not.
Adam wasn’t even fully convinced that it was best to prolong the lives of the few rather than focus on keeping as many people alive as possible in the present. The ultimate goal had to be the survival of the human race as a species. Which strategy would best support that goal?
He didn’t know.
He wished he dared to argue with them. White seemed as immovable as granite when it came to his ideologies, but Briggs seemed to have retained a little more of his humanity. If they could have a real conversation, Adam thought, it was possible that Briggs might be brought around to his way of thinking.
How many members of Thompson’s militia are only there because they can’t find anywhere else safe to go? he wondered. There are so many of them…but how many would defect if they saw another option? How many could I save if I was really willing to put in the effort?
It couldn’t be done, though. Adam sighed and closed his eyes. He had to focus on himself and Ella, and focusing on Ella meant focusing on Julie and her son. Outside of that little group, Adam had no more capacity to help others. He had to save the people he could, and he was just going to have to forgive himself for the rest of them.
He opened his eyes just in time to see a wooden sign bearing the words “Welcome to Nebraska.”
Chapter 15
“Get out of the car,” White said.
Adam looked up. “What?”
“This is where you get out,” White said.
“I haven’t seen any signs for Omaha,” Adam protested. They had been driving through Nebraska for several hours now, but Adam knew that Omaha was on the far eastern side of the state. They couldn’t have come that far yet, could they?
“This is government territory,” Briggs explained. “President Riddick’s patrols will be out in this area, and if they see us—”
“They’ll kill you,” Adam said wearily. It was starting to get old. “All right. But how will I know where to go?”
“Just keep walking straight along the highway,” White said. “That’ll take you to Omaha. You’re probably not going to make it all the way to the president’s bunker, but that’s okay. All you need to do is find one of his patrols. They’ll take you in.”
“What if they don’t?” For the first time since leaving Thompson’s base, Adam was beginning to feel the full weight of what he was attempting. “What if they just shoot me for being a stranger on their land?”
“I don’t think they will,” Briggs said. “There isn’t anything threatening about you. You’re unarmed, and you’re
obviously not here to attack them.”
That didn’t stop you from shooting those girls, Adam thought. But he didn’t speak.
“Do you know what you’re to do when you get there?” Briggs asked.
“He knows,” White said. “We’ve been over it plenty of times. He doesn’t need to hear it again.”
“If he has questions, we should talk about them now,” Briggs said. “It’s our last chance to be sure he knows what he’s doing.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Adam said. “Get an audience with the president. Then tell him I’m here on behalf of General Thompson. Deliver Thompson’s message. Get the president’s response. Come back. Easy enough.”
Except that nothing about it is going to be easy at all, and they could very well decide to just shoot me on the spot.
Adam closed his eyes briefly. Maybe he should have tried to run from White and Briggs. He probably wouldn’t have been successful at it. But if he had gotten away, he could have gone back to the base, lurked around, and eventually found a way to get Ella out.
Or maybe that was a pipe dream.
Maybe he was worrying too much. Maybe this was still the best way to help her and her sister.
“Colonel White and I are going to take the Humvee off the road and camp out in the woods here,” Briggs said. “But we’ll always have one of us watching this stretch of highway and waiting for your return. When you’ve got the president’s answer, you just come back this way and meet up with us, and we’ll all go back to base together.”
Adam swallowed. “Okay,” he agreed.
“It’s going to be fine,” Briggs said. “Don’t be intimidated. You’ve got an important part to play in all this, but at the end of the day, you’re just the messenger. No one is going to blame you for anything, even if they do get upset.”
Well, that’s almost definitely not true, Adam thought grimly. People blame the messenger all the time. In fact, the expression is “don’t shoot the messenger,” and I’m afraid that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
Escape The Dark (Book 4): Caught In The Crossfire Page 11