It was another two months until I got a chance to check the coordinates that would forever be burned into my brain, and then yet another until I could find an excuse why I needed to send a patrol into the Alabama / Tennessee region. Summer had gone and turned into fall by then, which should have made it a quite enjoyable trip—as enjoyable as checking up on a string of settlements that only had complaints for us could be. That still left me with the issue that we were four vehicles and I couldn’t exactly take one in the middle of the night and drive off—or so I thought.
I must have been more antsy than I realized because in the middle of a particularly boring graveyard shift, I found Hill walking up to me, glancing at the camp before turning to me. “You know, LT, you can simply ask us.”
“Ask you what?”
Cole, suddenly appearing out of the night—and scaring the shit out of me—answered with a wry smile. “To create a diversion. Or excuse. Whatever you want to call it. Like one of us noted something on patrol, and then of course you’d need to take a small party out to check, and then, maybe, we’ll finally get a good night’s sleep without you being all jittery on patrol every single fucking night.”
So much for that. I stared at them long enough to make them fidget—and when that didn’t work, finally gave in. “How do we get rid of Gallager?”
Cole stared at me as if to say, “you’re in charge, you take care of it.” Hill had a better idea. “We still have some of that Rohypnol that we found in that one scavenger stash. I’ll put some in the coffee, and we won’t have to deal with him for the rest of the ride.”
Did I like the idea of intentionally drugging one of my soldiers, which only worked because the other three of us were immune to the drug, thanks to the serum? No, but it was a quick, easy solution, and I couldn’t think of a better one.
“Let’s do it.”
The next day, it just so happened that we needed to take a detour where Cole noticed something suspicious that needed to be checked out. The others set up camp, we stayed long enough to dig into some rations and get coffee started… and half an hour later, with a softly snoring Gallager in the back, we finally made it to the coordinates Burns had made me memorize what felt like a decade ago. They led us to the middle of nowhere—which wasn’t much of a surprise, considering the region. I figured we’d have to go look for treks leading to a half-hidden house or something, but Cole stopped the Humvee smack in the middle of the road adjacent to a strip of forest. When I didn’t get out right away, he cast me a sidelong glance. “You do know it’s that mailbox over there, right?”
I glanced from him to the box, and back. “You got to be kidding me.”
He snorted. “You do know how these things work? Dead-drops?”
“Of course I do.” Cole gave me a look that heavily debated that. “But isn’t this a little too obvious?” I protested, finally giving in.
“That’s exactly why it works,” Hill chimed in. “Nobody would be stupid enough to use a bright yellow mailbox in the middle of nowhere to exchange intel. So that’s what you use, if you’re an asshole like Miller.” When I glanced over my shoulder back at him, he grinned. “I really don’t give a fuck about him. But I’ve kind of grown fond of the antics his wife puts on. Considering we’re down to roofying our recruits now for entertainment, keeping her alive as a backup option sounds like a plan.”
I didn’t reward that with an answer and instead got out of the car, slowly making my way to the mailbox. I wasn’t surprised to find them following me, and was happy to leave checking for booby traps to Hill. The only thing that was inside were two pieces of paper, securely wrapped in plastic to protect them from the elements. One was a simple list of yet more coordinates, the other split between that and remarks about possible cashes and alternate pick-up points.
“Think I should leave anything for them?” I asked my intrepid companions.
“Nah,” Cole offered. “It’s not necessary. The fact that the papers are gone is indication enough that you got his messages.”
“His?”
Cole chuckled softly. “You really think Lewis would be okay with playing cloak and dagger like that? I’d be surprised if she’s even considering leaving a way to get in contact with anyone, let alone us. They must have one for their people as well. My bet is Miller never told her about this one.”
It made sense—and I could perfectly picture her anger when she found out. I had a feeling it really was down to “when” rather than “if” considering how things were shaping up.
I hesitated for a moment but then turned back to our ride. “Let’s go.” I had some numbers to memorize and paper to burn—and hopefully for the first time in a sequence of many more to come. “And, I swear, I can hear the mental ‘good boy’ you’re both thinking. That shit doesn’t fly.”
Hill snorted while Cole had the audacity to throw a cheeky, “Yes, Sir!” my way. I probably deserved that.
Of course, things turned out very differently than any of us could have expected, even after a summer of scavengers terrorizing the world. But that’s a different story for another day.
Part 3
I knew something was wrong.
Not wrong in the sense of prophetic foresight, but something was definitively going on. Something pervasive; something that set my teeth on edge and made the hair at the back of my neck stand on end. It wasn’t a recent development, but things were getting progressively worse.
Well over two years after our return from France—what should have been a triumphant, glorious mission of hope had ended with half of our people dead, no real progress, and one of the few balancing powers in the world gone. Back then I would never have considered calling Bree Lewis anything close to that, or even of profound importance. Sure, she’d been the tip of the spear of the scavengers that we had forged a truce with in the nick of time to prevent a civil war, and it had been only after I actually got to know her that I realized that she had been way more of a driving force than the figurehead we had thought her to be. But she was just one woman, albeit a very outspoken, loud one when she wanted to be. Technically, there hadn’t been anything special about her in that movement, except maybe that she had become really good at surviving and was done taking anyone’s shit. Any number of people could have slipped into or taken over her role, among them virtually anyone who had belonged to the Lucky Thirteen scavenger outfit, any of the other top dogs among the scavenger ranks, or even half of the leaders of the settlements. Her actions had yielded exceptional results, but there had been nothing special about the woman herself.
Yet when she and Nate Miller had disappeared off the face of the earth, the fragile balance of power between the many interest groups all over the country had crumbled rather quickly—or, more to the point, exploded. What had appeared like solid factions had fractured into a thousand tiny pinpricks in our side, each one on its own insignificant but all together utterly destructive. That very first year after the apocalypse, things had looked hopeful for everyone, even the scavengers who had felt betrayed and exiled by most established strongholds. There had been safety in numbers, and security behind walls. All of a sudden, numbers meant possible traitors and assassins hiding in the crowd, and walls just locked you in so you couldn’t escape when they came for you.
It wore heavily on everyone. The most visible split was among the scavengers themselves. Some gave up civilization and manners altogether, becoming a ragtag band of savages, embracing their insanity. Some went the opposite direction and merged with the settlements to help secure what hadn’t yet been destroyed. Some chose to stick with their nomadic ways, acting as extra mercenary guards for traders, or picking up the trader hat themselves. All of them were constantly suspicious of each other, rarely trusting anyone they hadn’t learned to trust in the past already.
But it didn’t stop there.
Half of the settlements of year one didn’t make it into year two, one way or another. A few got abandoned as they hadn’t turned out to be sustainable for m
any reasons. Some bowed under the force of nature beating them into submission. Others got raided, torched, torn apart, leaving nothing but scorched, salted earth behind. Virtually no new ones were established anymore, people instead flocking to the larger, more secure cities—until those were hit as well.
It hit us just as hard.
Returning from France, I found myself in the peculiar situation of not quite knowing where my head and heart belonged. The utter disgust I still felt for Hamilton putting the mission above all his men and it taking the cast-out traitor—Miller—to virtually sacrifice himself for us to survive had left a bad taste in my mouth. The two people who had set themselves apart for the greater good had been Miller and his wife—the designated troublemakers. I still had my issues with them—oh, did I ever—but while everything had come apart, it had been their people who had reached out to us and forged what fragile peace there was still to be found, allowing several of the settlements and cities in the Midwest and along the West Coast to either grow or grow new roots after burning to the ground or getting smashed to pieces by earthquakes. The Silo, New Angeles, the Salt Lake City settlement, and the Wyoming Collective continued to keep things in the balance. They gave us intel, news about caches too large or overrun for them to raid, and even a trickle of new recruits. None of that really helped. Each month, soldiers died, yet it was the even larger number of defectors that kept twisting the knife lodged in the army’s back. For every new recruit that joined, two died, and three to five disappeared. And that was just the beginning of our problem.
After France, I never thought I’d say this, but the day Hamilton disappeared into thin air was when I knew that we really were in deep shit.
I’d always wanted to become a bad motherfucker of a soldier. Not just a bureaucrat, or to jump-start a political career. No. Special Forces, PSYOPS—that had been my goal. Since I tested well and had a serious interest in exactly how the human mind worked, it made sense to go get a degree in psychology and go the officer route. The apocalypse had seriously derailed that career track, but as it turned out, learning the last part of practical leadership on the job had not been the worst that could have happened to me. As soon as the dust of the outbreak had settled, the army had officially designated me as a second lieutenant, also because we had been terribly understaffed and anyone capable and willing to lead men was needed. That had been years ago. Four fucking years. I hadn’t exactly expected to have made it to captain by now, but a first lieutenant and a few pats on the back would have been more than deserved. Yet, collectively, all of us seemed to have gotten stuck in the ranks we’d had pre end-of-the-world, the gap between the handful of remaining senior officers securely stashed away on their bases and everyone else constantly in peril out there becoming insurmountable. As much as I had come to dislike Hamilton for many reasons, his mere name was often enough to pick up spirits and straighten spines. The myth, the legend, the man—not a shining beacon but the personified “we got this” that this new world needed. And then he was gone—for reasons that barely made any sense—and that, somehow, broke our collective backs.
When I realized that, officially, the end of my four-year “commission”—whatever that was worth in the times of the zombie uprising and scavenger apocalypse—rolled around, it took me one endless, dark night of the soul to reflect before I filed my official paperwork to request not to renew my commitment. It felt like I had stabbed myself in the heart and was twisting the knife as I handed in the papers. I had no idea what I’d expected, but General Morris barely acknowledged it, mumbling something under his breath about undeserving quitters. Honestly, what hurt more was the fact that when I told Emily that I was just about done, she only took the time to look up from her notes, regarded me levelly, and then wished me good luck with whatever I would do next. No questions, no pleading with me to stay—nothing. I felt very justified in the effort to get raging drunk that night, which of course was a futile quest. All it did was make me cranky as hell when I went to brief what was left of my—formerly Hamilton’s—men, only to find that two more had disappeared, and Hill and Cole had tendered their resignations as well. Gallager—no longer Private but now Corporal, pretty much the only soldier I knew who had advanced through the ranks to a point—looked dumbfounded when he realized he would be the most senior member of the group in a month’s time when we were officially out. To add insult to injury, my last mission was a milk run patrol along a few of the Appalachian settlements, then curving west above Texas, cutting all the way to New Angeles—provided they let us in—and back up the other coast. Destitute as I suddenly felt, I figured I might as well check on the dead-drop box one last time so I could get the latest update on Lewis and Miller’s whereabouts so that, once I was out, I might return and tell them both what fucking assholes they were. Part of me was hoping that when I got to my last station, close to the Silo, I’d find Sergeant Buehler slumming it there to maybe talk some sense into me—or at least appreciate that I still had something to offer to anyone out there. All in all, my expectations weren’t grand.
We ticked off four settlements, finding the fifth abandoned months ago. We tried to tag along with a trader caravan, only to have them tell us to go fuck ourselves. We checked on the dead-drop—this time without roofying Gallager—only to find the box empty although the last update had been from late fall last year, over seven months ago. The other things rankled, but it was the last part that set me off. Angry to the point where I started to feel my self-control slipping, I stalked back to the Humvee, chased Gallager away from the wheel, punched in the coordinates to their last confirmed location—never mind who could scrape that shit from our SatNav system—and floored it…
Only to find what must have been a treehouse burnt to ash, several graves dug hastily in the forest soil next to it, and six more bodies deeper in the woods around. My gut sank as scenario after scenario of what must have happened here zoomed through my mind. I didn’t need Cole’s acerbic, “Well, that doesn’t look good,” to know that chances were very slim that Lewis and Miller had survived an ambush, torched their old home, and dug fucking graves for the assholes that had come after them—but only those that had been conveniently close.
Doing a quick calculation in my mind, I tried to figure out how many days of our schedule this detour had cost us, and how many more I could allow myself to waste. I knew about the rumors, of course—none of them good, and most bad enough that they couldn’t have been founded in reality—but this location was easily a hundred miles outside of where the slavers that plagued this corner of the world roamed. It made no sense for them to have come this far north, and even less that they had stumbled across the treehouse. Even scorched down now, it had taken us a good hour to find, and I had known what I was looking for.
“You wanna check the other locations?” Hill inquired when I came stalking back to the Humvee.
“Nah. If they got away, I’m sure they are in lockdown mode now and we’ll never find them. Or they’re already halfway back to their people. Get me an update on what caravans are close and heading toward New Angeles. We might as well make ourselves useful.”
It took Hill half a day to find one that would put up with us, if grudgingly. I really wasn’t in the mood to socialize, but the prospect of warm food that someone else cooked for me lifted my spirit a little. Gallager still put some effort into befriending the traders—particularly the younger, female, seemingly less-attached ones—but Cole, Hill, and me remained sitting around our own fire, not giving a crap about whether they liked us or not.
Then, two days later, we listened in to a call on the open trader frequency—a call that I almost ignored, until a certain name made me perk up. “Did they just say ‘Anna Hawthorne’?” I asked Hill, who was driving and probably the only one paying any attention.
He cast me a sidelong glance. “I think. Why?” He followed that up with a smirk. “Old flame of yours?”
I shook my head, laughing softly to myself as I felt my foul mood lift just a
little. “Not exactly.” When I didn’t follow that cryptic BS up with anything, he raised his brow at me, making me snort. “You’ll see.”
And so it came that, not a day later, we rolled up to a suitably well-fortified settlement to wait until a sun-tanned, devil-may-care relaxed Bree Lewis stepped out of the gate’s kill box, not passing up the chance to hurl what must have been one last insult at the settlers who came out with her, presumably to guard her fragile, vulnerable hide, my ass.
It was true elation that flooded my soul, driven almost entirely by the sheer gratitude to find one more person I still gave a shit about still alive, ignoring that only days ago I had been so quick about cursing her out in my head. She looked good; healthy, that was. She’d gained some weight back, no sign left of the gauntness in her features from right after we’d set out to France. She even had a healthy tan going, but that shouldn’t have been a surprise considering how much time year-round they must have spent out and about. Unbidden, the question came up in my mind whether she had tan lines like she used to—pretty much only her face, and to a lesser degree her hands left exposed. Not my concern, I quickly reminded myself, and none of my business. I could tell that she was happy to see us, not just relieved that our reunion wouldn’t instantly turn into a fight to the death. And she was her usual charming self, effortlessly scandalizing Gallager before she’d even commandeered the wheel of the Humvee and pretty much usurped my role.
At the same time, it was impossible to miss the signs that she’d been through something awful recently. Even relaxed, she remained alert and tense to a point, her reactions that little bit too quick that spoke of jitteriness borne of paranoia. I also quickly found out that she was still battling withdrawal symptoms from one of the scavenger drugs we’d all become way too familiar with—in others. As she explained what had happened—confirming my wild guess about the slavers—and that she needed to get back to “her people” to mount a rescue effort for her husband, my first reaction was a different kind of elation, quickly followed by a massive gut-punch of guilt.
Beyond Green Fields | Book 6 | Red's Diary [ A Post-Apocalyptic Story] Page 7