Retribution: Green Fields #11

by Adrienne Lecter

  “Yes!” he pretty much shouted, his attention still split between the three of us. “Please, there’s no need to hurt me! I’ll tell you whatever you want to know! I’ll tell you everything!”

  That was a nice change of pace—not that I necessarily trusted it, but after repeating the same questions over and over for hours and never getting anything to work with, far was it from me to protest.

  “Fine with me,” I told him, mostly so his eyes would finally stop alternately snapping to one of the guys and quickly skimming away once more, a new wave of horror making the prisoner shake like a leaf in the wind. “Let’s start with who you are and what you’ve been doing here, and maybe what you think is the most useful information for us.”

  It didn’t exactly work, but he did include me in his mad looking-around for a moment. Bucky let out a grunt, which made my annoyance spike. Glancing to the side, I realized that he was now leaning against the closed door at my back, staring with bright-bordering-on-crazy eyes at the guy in the chair, which made me guess he’d seen him before. “Yeah, I do remember you,” Hamilton growled, which made the guy actually whimper. I checked with Nate next but he remained standing, his expression hard but neutral—and by itself no less threatening than Hamilton’s grimace. Great—looked like I was going to have to pretend like I was the mature one. Again.

  “Talk,” I told our prisoner. “You have about ten seconds before either of them decides that—”

  I didn’t get any further than that as the guy started stammering immediately, his tone high-pitched in real panic. “My name’s Mike. I got here around two years ago, in summer, just when they were getting started. I used to be the Chemist’s assistant but I don’t know his name or where he went, and…” He had to stop there to catch his breath—or take one, for starters—and I used that to silence him with a quick, raised hand.

  “Okay, Mike,” I offered, trying to be jovial but really, it came out more like a taunt. It was hard to step out of the confrontational mindset I’d been in most of the day, and Hamilton’s presence didn’t exactly help with that. “Let’s start from the beginning. How did you become the Chemist’s assistant? What did you do for him? And is there anyone else around that we could ask as well?”

  He shook his head at first—likely in answer to the last of my questions—but quickly stopped when Hamilton leaned a little closer. “I didn’t have a choice, you know?” he stuttered, his words still coming out pressed and too fast. “They signed me up for guard duty first but I knew I wouldn’t survive that. You have no idea how horrible it was!?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Nate more growled than drawled, apparently deciding not to sit this one out after all.

  Mike’s eyes went wider still, a visible shudder running through him as he realized what he’d just implied. I hadn’t thought I’d ever meet someone who was scared out of their wits, but he seemed pretty close to the definition of that idiom.

  “It was either that or the arena,” he explained, slowing down a little when his stammering got too bad to get the words out. “None of the guards do it because they want to. Well, most don’t. Cortez has a few who do. But the rest of us, we don’t. They caught me stealing—food, because I was so fucking hungry, and back before the scavengers came to trade and we had the fields producing, there barely was food for anyone. Of course I chose guard duty, but they accused me of slacking off when I got beat up good by a few of the prisoners as we subdued them.” His gaze again flitted between Nate and Bucky, but this time he managed to focus on me before anyone could threaten him further. “My supervisor was warning me off just as the Chemist came with a new round of drugs to test, cursing under his breath that he never had enough hours in the day to get the work done. I used to teach basic chemistry in school so I offered to help. It sure beat getting killed.”

  I was tempted to give him a “cry me a river” response but let the guys do that with their mere presence. “Exactly what was it that you did for him?” I hadn’t had time to check if there was any documentation to be found, but judging from the empty spaces on the desk and few shelves that weren’t full of tubes and flasks, I didn’t hold my breath.

  Showing a first hint of possessing a spine, Mike blinked in irritation. “I mixed up whatever he told me to. Some solutions were straight-up basic organic chemistry. We also did a lot of plant extractions and distillation. More often than not, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing—he just had me follow the instructions he gave me. Sometimes he tested the results on me, too—you know, so I wouldn’t deliberately screw with the outcomes. You’ll likely not understand half of it if I tried to explain it to you.”

  I could practically feel Hamilton’s silent laughter beside me, vexation sneaking into the relative relaxation that had settled over my mind. “Try me,” I shot back, doing my best not to sound—and look—as offended as I felt.

  Mike’s beginning ire increased but he obliged me. “Some of the compounds I could guess at because of how he had me mix them—esters for the most part, some salts. The plant extractions were almost all psychedelics. Once the first batches produced stable results, that’s what he had me use as a base for large-scale production. Most ended up crystalized. What the scavengers love to get high on comes from that.” And whatever Cortez had shot me and Richards up with that gave me the hangover of a lifetime right now, if my guess wasn’t completely wrong. That much made sense—the few glances I’d gotten at the shelves were enough that I could cook up a batch of acid if I found a basic recipe somewhere… not unlike the shit we had gotten up to in college sometimes, after hours, with the help of a TA who had dutifully signed out the respective chemicals from the general list that had existed to prevent that very use of them. I’d always had the suspicion that had come with decades of tradition.

  My absentminded nod seemed to annoy Mike further—as did my next question. “That all you did?”

  “I helped with injections, too,” he professed, sounding a lot smaller now.

  “And?”

  He blinked—and that’s when I started to suspect that at least some of the shuddering and stuttering was an act. “Producing drugs large-scale takes up a lot of time.”

  “Actually, it doesn’t,” I pointed out. “Only if you don’t schedule the batches right. But yeah, it takes a day or two if you laze around on your ass, pretending you’re doing something other than twiddling your thumbs.” He didn’t react, which in itself was confirmation enough—although not for anything I felt like further blaming him for. So he’d been a slacker. Considering the consequences—particularly for those who seemed to have been the guinea pigs for the test batches—that might have saved lives. “What else did you do for him? And before you keep on digging that hole you’re in, we know that wasn’t everything.”

  He drew up short but tried to hide it in another wide-eyed shake. “I swear, I—”

  Nate let out another growl—this one nonverbal, and of the kind that made the hair all over my body stand up—and Mike thought better of it. “Yes, he had me synthesize other shit, too, but I bet all of that is way above your pay grade. And it wasn’t like he was sharing his plans with me. I just got to do the lab monkey work.”

  “Like what?”

  He sighed, exasperated—and I didn’t miss how his focus dropped from my face to the side of my neck, where thanks to my tank top being my only clothing on top, the very ends of the X-shaped marks were visible. Ah—now things were about to get interesting. “You do know about the serum project?” A stupid question, as I was about to point out, but he went on before I got a chance to. “He was working on some improvements, from what little he told me. I won’t bore you with the details.”

  Now that was where he was wrong. “Please do.”

  He actually went so far as to grunt before he caught himself—and it was that last bit of annoyance that made me realize where this came from. He did a good job hiding the arrogance in his gaze, but not good enough, now that I knew what to look for. “Why waste my breath—” he s
tarted, but cut off when I gave him a bright, albeit cold smile.

  “You have no fucking clue who I am,” I observed.

  It was almost comical to watch him pause. Again his attention snapped to my marks, and he looked nervous for real as he licked his lips. “One of the scavengers, obviously,” came his hesitant response.

  Leaning back, I allowed myself a self-satisfied huff, then let my smile turn bright and toothy and possibly quite hostile. “The Lucky Thirteen sound familiar? I’m Bree Lewis, and this here is my husband.” Mike’s eyes went wide—no further explanation needed. Cocking my head to the side, I held on to that smile, but I could tell there was only sadistic glee in it now. Ah, how good it felt to, for once, get the recognition I deserved. “So when I tell you that I do, in fact, know a thing or two about the serum project—and basic chemistry—you know that I’m not lying. And if you don’t spill the beans this fucking second, I will start to take you apart limb from limb and feed you to my husband, and make you watch how he will eat every strip of flesh, muscle, and tendon that I cut from your body.” I chanced a look at Hamilton—less to gauge his reaction and more to indicate him—and found that, for once, he was playing along nicely, a look of gleeful if violent anticipation on his face. “He can do whatever he wants. He obviously has his own beef with you, but I don’t expect that to go down any less painful or gruesome for you. We have been working quite well together all morning when we were cutting up that traitorous bitch.” I considered if that was enough, but since he hadn’t gone completely white in the face yet, I added, “And if their reputation around here isn’t enough for you yet, let me explain that back before the zombie apocalypse, the entire serum project had somewhat of a reputation because of the people they recruited for black ops shit—and these two were, without a doubt, among the worst of what the army had no official knowledge of. Well deserved from what I heard, which is but a fraction of the shit they actually got up to.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten so much satisfaction out of scaring Mike—and some of the glee I felt was definitely due to the last dregs of the drugs in my system making all kinds of things funny to me—but the sharp scent of urine tickling my nose was definitely rewarding. I didn’t look down at his crotch to confirm; that wasn’t exactly necessary. Before, he had been uneasy but putting on a show. Now, his panic was real.

  “I didn’t lie, I promise!” he cried, finally dropping the stuttering act. “I really don’t know what that asshole was up to! I just did what I was told!”

  I gave him a one-shouldered shrug to let him know I really didn’t give a shit. “Then speculate. Please.”

  He swallowed convulsively, his attention only straying from me for a second. “I’m not sure how the two are connected, but from what I can guess, he was trying to find substances that cut through the protection the serum conveys, and to develop different stable versions going forward. We didn’t work with the live virus here, obviously, but in the notes he gave me, a few version numbers were mentioned, in ascending order.”

  “What for?” I felt that question was more important than possible details.

  Mike looked a little perplexed, as if he’d never asked himself that question. “Why what?”

  “Why mess with the serum that’s already working?” I asked, not hiding my vexation with having to spell it out. “I presume that’s why you kept testing that shit out on the prisoners? To see if it had any effect?” That explained why they had a plethora of shit that worked on us. Nate hadn’t gone into details when he’d talked about the drugs they’d shot him up with, but judging from the track marks on his body, it hadn’t been just an occasional thing.

  And it also fit with what Hamilton had said—that he’d dropped off the weaponized serum we’d brought from France with the Chemist.

  Mike hesitated, his unease becoming apparent when he finally did speak up. “They would have had a much harder time subduing the surviving fighters otherwise,” he pointed out, his voice cracking. “That it helped with the workers was mere coincidence.”

  That last bit grabbed my attention. “Say what?”

  “The workers,” he explained. “You do get that they are mindless, almost brain-dead worker bees?”

  “Enough so to want to beat the shit out of anyone connected with forcing that state on them, yes,” I let him know.

  More convulsive swallowing followed. “It’s not what you think.”

  I gave him my best naive expression. “So they aren’t the soldiers who got inoculated with the wrong version of the serum that was meant to turn them into mindless drones?”

  “Not all of them,” Mike insisted—as if that didn’t make everything worse. “Those were the first workers. But there weren’t enough of them to work large-enough fields to sustain a larger settlement.”

  “So you, what? Accidentally shot up people with more of the same shit?”

  He shook his head vehemently at the sharp tone of my voice. “Of course not!”

  I couldn’t help a derisive snort. “No. A bunch of assholes who hold arena death matches would never do that.”

  The guys got another round of fearful attention. “It wasn’t that same serum variant,” Mike said, trying to correct himself. “It’s the side effect of one of the working ones, I swear! We discovered the downsides after the damage was done, and it wasn’t like we could warn people after that, or they would have killed us.”

  “Wait, is that shit the reason why most of the scavengers are raving lunatics now?” This really got better and better.

  “Some,” Mike muttered under his breath, but was quick to speak up at my frown. “Most of it is the drugs—that we’ve had to test, extensively, beforehand. One in ten to thirty gets like that, but most not at first, or even for the first few months. Shit, how deranged do you think we are to condemn thousands of people to brain-dead slavery?”

  “Exactly that much,” I pointed out. But I had to admit, his agitation raised some doubt in me.

  “Well, you’re wrong,” he protested. “They shot all of us up with that shit, too! And their command crew as well. Shit, I get why you don’t trust me, but why would they have risked it themselves?”

  He had a point—if I ignored my experience with Taggard and his boys. It stood to reason someone had learned from that—or not. “And the scavengers just let you do this.”

  “Let us?” Mike’s voice took on a shrill note that I belatedly recognized as amusement. “They demanded that we do it. Almost rioted twice when there weren’t enough doses for everyone right when they found out we had a working serum.” He looked conflicted for a moment, as if trying to remember some detail or other, but finally gave up. “You know how dangerous it is out there. Weren’t you damn glad you were immune to the zombie bites and scratches?”

  I was the wrong one to petition for agreement with that. “I didn’t get the serum until well over a year past the shit hit the fan,” I succinctly told him, hard-pressed to pass up the opportunity to sneer at Hamilton, as he deserved. “It’s convenient, but it’s not the be-all, end-all, and it does come with some massive downsides.”

  Mike looked satisfied for a moment—making me guess that the status of my immunity had been what he’d been trying to remember just now; being what counted as a celebrity these days came with weirdness like that, I figured—but it quickly passed, leaving him wary and scared once more. “Well, most people thought differently. So we gave them what they demanded. There are still new ones dropping by every week, even with rumors about the brain-dead workers circulating aplenty. Scared people don’t give a shit about consequences when there’s only one hope for them.”

  I was so tempted to pull Hamilton out of the room and ask him if he could verify any of that—what suspicions I had in that aspect were mostly based on what he’d said—but cut down on that impulse. He likely wouldn’t tell me, and it was a topic better suited for a briefing involving everyone else. None of that helped buffer the level of frustration and disgust that came up within me at Mike’
s explanation—if he was telling the truth, that was.

  “Do you still have doses of that shit left?” He shook his head. “Any documentation?” More of the same. I let out a slow breath to keep from punching him in his face. So much for side effects. “So what you’re pretty much telling me is that you deliberately shot up thousands of scavengers with some shit that makes some of them non-functioning and leaves the rest susceptible to all manners of shit that gets them addicted and coming back for more?”

  A nod, and he definitely cringed away from my glare now, expecting retribution. “I swear, we didn’t know at first, and then we had no choice.”

  “Just like you didn’t have any choice with the prisoners?” I asked way too sweetly.

  Mike’s eyes widened as he realized that he couldn’t win, but at least that didn’t make him clam up. “I still remember some of the compounds he had me synthesize! And I know the recipes of the most common drugs by heart, too! Please, you have to believe me, if I knew more I’d tell you!”

  I was tempted to taunt him that this was hardly enough, but then thought better of it. Straightening, I looked around, finally settling on a pad and pencil on one of the tables. “Don’t you dare leave anything out,” I instructed as I handed him both, abusing one of the tables to lean against—also to be out of his reach should he attempt to use the pencil for anything else.

  “Sure, sure,” Mike mumbled, already bent over the pad, setting to work.

  I watched him scribble for a few minutes, the drawings easier to make sense of than his scrawl. The guys remained hulking over him like two threatening pillars made of muscle and hatred, but I didn’t miss the vacant look on Nate’s face that soon pushed away his general state of alertness. My own thoughts started to wander, stress and sleep deprivation doing its own to make it hard to concentrate—

  So none of us caught the moment when Mike switched the grip on the pencil, and rammed it straight up into his skull through what used to be his left eye seconds ago. He was dead before I could do more than startle back into alertness.