Beyond Green Fields | Book 6 | Red's Diary [ A Post-Apocalyptic Story] Read online

  Beyond Green Fields #6: Red’s Diary

  A post-apocalyptic story

  Adrienne Lecter

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Patreon

  About the Author

  Books published

  Beyond Green Fields #6: Red’s Diary

  A post-apocalyptic anthology

  by Adrienne Lecter

  Copyright © 2021 by Adrienne Lecter. All rights reserved.

  http://adriennelecter.com

  Produced and published by Barbara Klein, Vienna, Austria

  Edited by Marti Lynch

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read her work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it, to help spread the word.

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  To my supporters on Patreon.

  Without you, none of these stories would exist. You made this possible.

  Thank you!

  Introduction

  Round Six: Red’s Diary

  Ah, the intrepid Lt. Richards—one of my favorite characters in the Green Fields world that only popped into my head a page before I needed him, and ended up being one of the most vital cogs in the machine.

  Because of how the novels were written, a lot of his life and actions remained off-screen—this is his chance to tell you all about them!

  Part 1

  Do I want to fuck Bree Lewis?

  I keep asking myself that question. I know I shouldn’t, for so many reasons, the first among them the fact that I don’t think the option is on her radar. Her husband is another.

  If I’m honest, I don’t think it’s actual sexual attraction I feel toward her. So, technically, I’m likely more interested in screwing with her than screwing her. But, what can I say? I have a thing for decisive, strong women who don’t take shit from anyone. It’s only natural that I would ask myself that question.

  She fascinates me, plain and simple. Not obsession-level fascination, but I’ve spent too much time dealing with her—in theory and real life—not to be curious. Dealing with her face to face has only added questions to the ever-growing list rather than resolved them.

  Maybe I should start from the beginning.

  The first time I came across her name wasn’t about her at all. It was a name on a list—a rather extensive list, and hers was in the low-priority column. For her, it would have been the day before the shit hit the fan, I guess. For me, it was day three of the end of the world, and a day before I saw the chain of command around me fall apart in the most impressive way possible. On Monday, I had been occupied with banging the TA of the last class I’d had to take for my degree—after she finished grading, of course; else it would have been inappropriate. All I cared about was getting laid, getting drunk, and pretending I wasn’t ten kinds of hungover for the upcoming graduation ceremony. On Tuesday, a harassed-looking private was banging on my door, telling me to come with him. On Friday, I was three days into being scared out of my wits, running on coffee fumes and some pills I didn’t ask about nor want to know the contents of, playing right-hand man to a general who knew just enough to be assured—rightly so—that the evacuation effort he had to oversee was a lost cause. I knew we were in really deep shit when none other than Cpt. John Hamilton came strolling inside our tent to report in, giving an update on said evacuation list. Seeing him, I actually thought things would get better. They didn’t. I’ve learned that lesson since then.

  Hamilton is a legend—and deservedly so, for better and for worse. He’s not the only legend I’ve had the joy of dealing with—and I’ve since had first-hand experience observing that even legends are only human, very much so sometimes—but his reputation is absolutely earned. If not for him, a lot of people wouldn’t have survived that first week, me among them. But if you need someone to hold your hand and tell you everything will be all right, he’s not your guy.

  Anyway, I digress. That night—and the following day—Bree Lewis was nothing but a name on a list to me. When Hamilton and his men returned from their last mission mid-morning, I had just enough time to cross her name off the list of people we had been told to rescue. I didn’t pay any attention to it—she was simply a line among many, with billions more to soon join them. I was way more concerned with making it into the back of the transport plane before the airfield was overrun. A good third of our troops didn’t make it. Then we were off, and I had many more pressing concerns than lists full of dead people’s names.

  Almost a year passed until I came across her name again. I’d honestly forgotten she ever existed, never having had any real context of who she was supposed to be. I was stationed at the Esterhazy base up in Canada at the time, getting ready to haul ass and lead another group south to check up on and clear out five more towns, fresh out of the shower after washing the scent of Emily Raynor’s cunt off my dick and counting down the days for a repeat performance.

  “Lieutenant, you were tasked with keeping the evacuation lists updated, correct?” General Morris asked right as he came barging into the locker room, expecting to find me there and ready to answer any inane question he could come up with. I had to cut down on my immediate ire; he had been the next-to-useless general who almost got all of us killed—and he should have remembered that he had set me to that very task. But even though now I was technically a 2nd lieutenant—and had been for nine months—he still treated me like a random ROTC college kid. Such is life, even in the apocalypse.

  “Yes, sir. What about it?”

  “You messed up,” he told me as he handed me a manila folder. In it was the crumpled printout I’d been using back then, names crossed out in a shaky hand on the run. Next to it was one of the official scavenger unit sign-up sheets, filled out in unnaturally crisp, actually legible writing. Their chosen unit name—Lucky 13—didn’t tell me shit, but I would have been blind not to recognize the top name on the list: Nate Miller. Another legend—definitely not one we had expected to still be alive, and had even less of a reason to rejoice. Mostly out of curiosity, I read the entire list. Only a few names didn’t ring a bell—but I did remember Bree Lewis from somewhere. Right—the evacuation list.

  I couldn’t tell Morris that it wasn’t my fault, so I took his “rebuke” for what it was—and as soon as I was dressed, I backtracked to find Emily in her office. “Can you explain this to me?” I asked, pointing to the illegible scrawl below a badly scanned lab results… something, pinned to the back of the unit sheet.

  The look she cast me was nothing shy of condescending. “Why, do you still not know how your own blood screen would come back?” she asked in her usual clip. That was one woman much easier to handle when I could shut her up with my dick rammed down her throat. And no, she didn’t approve of me volunteering to get one of the last doses of the serum—not that I had asked her approval.

  “I don’t mean those six,” I pointed out. “I’m referring to hers.” Meaning Bree Lewis.

  Her reaction didn’t change. She barely wasted a second looking at the results again, already turning back to her computer. “They’re banging each other
. How is that so hard to comprehend? You’d think that was a rather easy concept to understand.”

  Interesting.

  Or not, since I had places to be and towns to clean of the undead so we could call for backup and collect all salvageable things from the houses that our blossoming new civilization would be needing eventually. That was way more important than wondering about some traitorous scum and the whore he was fucking. I was sure someone else would keep track of them if the brass thought this information vital. One could never know, and it wasn’t my place to question their wisdom.

  Three weeks and eleven towns later, not an hour off, I got stupid and ended up breaking my left leg when a house we had been checking up on turned out to be less statically stable than it had appeared from the outside. I was raging mad at myself. For months, I had been jonesing for a position in one of our strike teams rather than remain sidelined to being a glorified janitor, and the day before I could assume my new position—and as Hamilton’s XO no less—I had to slip and take myself out in the most clumsy fashion! Even being in prime health and aided by the serum, that meant I would have to sit out at least one tour. It felt like a cruel taunt that they let me sit in on the mission briefing—that I joined, still gnashing my teeth. Until Hamilton told us their objective: to squash the cockroaches that had scurried out from underneath our boot heel when the apocalypse had fragmented our force. I didn’t need Hamilton to spell out that the secondary objective—to bring the scientist back alive—was very unlikely to happen. Before he left, Hamilton, smirking like the asshole he is, dropped an inches-thick folder, barely held together with string, on my table. “Why don’t you keep yourself busy while you’re lazing on your ass here as we get the job done? The brass wants an updated psych profile.” His smirk deepened. “Have fun with that.” I didn’t need to check the file to know what it would say on the front: Nathaniel Miller.

  I had to admit, I didn’t mind at all getting that file on my desk. Of course I’d heard the stories. Reading up on one of the most notorious traitors in our own ranks beat listening to Morris droning on about the quality of the coffee for days on end.

  It was only a week later—after the mission that Hamilton had called a “sure thing” went south in the most spectacular but maybe not-quite-unpredictable fashion—that Morris told me to compile a second profile, this one for Bree Lewis. Enough of our men had survived the SNAFU at the factory to report in that it had been she who had mowed down ranks of them with her car to extricate Miller and his XO when Hamilton should have already taken care of them by then. Nobody had a clue where they had disappeared to, but I had a certain feeling that they would pop up again sooner or later—and considering that they had survived a direct hit on them, I couldn’t imagine it would be in the most peaceful fashion. Some people you either kill—or you leave them the fuck alone.

  Reading up on Bree Lewis was boring at first. We didn’t have much in our archives on her since she’d never been part of the army, not even as a consultant. It took one of the computer techs days to drag up her work files from our archives—which only existed because she’s been slated to work with one of the external groups that had been connected to the serum project. Apparently, she’d never done anything warranting an update beyond her CV and a new employee photo. The woman in the photo did not look capable of plowing through a group of highly trained soldiers, let alone pull off the stunts that she supposedly had.

  Then again, if working through Miller’s file had taught me anything, it was that almost a year’s worth of time was more than enough for him to turn anyone into a ruthless killer.

  Consider my interest piqued.

  Things only got more intriguing when Emily called me into her office late one night, greeting me with a curt, “You fucked up.”

  This was getting annoying.

  “Did I?”

  She gave me a mirthless grin and motioned me to look at what she had on her screen. “One of our people at the Silo just sent this over. I can’t be sure, but I think when that imbecile bungled the mission you should be happy you never got to go on, he signed his death warrant.” No question who she was talking about—Emily might not have been the most agreeable woman around, but only Hamilton drew that level of anger from her. I refrained from asking why and instead looked at the scans. “What am I looking at?”

  As if she hadn’t already made up her mind, she scrutinized them herself. “I can’t be completely sure, but I think that the Lewis woman must have been pregnant. Earlier today, they changed her credentials to serum-incubated and deleted the old entries stating otherwise, so my guess is that she got infected when they fled from your botched ambush, and the mix of latent immunity conferred by exposure to bodily fluids of someone incubated plus the fetus’s innate genetic immunity saved her life.” She paused briefly. “It makes sense that getting infected would have led to an immediate miscarriage. Else, they wouldn’t have had these samples to evaluate.”

  Consider me impressed—not necessarily on anything Lewis or Miller had done or gotten up to, but Emily’s deductive capabilities. How she could guess all that from a handful of samples that were only labeled with single letters, I had no idea—but the file name was “BLewis,” so it was easy to guess whose samples those must have been.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to debate her findings. Even if it turned out that it was all complete bullshit, I wasn’t going to let her tear into me for doubting her brilliance.

  “Is that a thing? Transferred immunity?” I asked instead—and made a mental note to pick up some condoms on our next sortie. So much for the serum sterilizing us.

  She cast me another condescending look, this one likely earned. “Apparently, it is. Or do you have any other explanation why she’s suddenly showing up as serum-positive? Look, here’s a side-by-side comparison of her sample from when they registered their unit compared to the new ones. Something massive happened with her body in the meantime.”

  The splotches she pointed at did look very different from one another—and still unlike the others. I wasn’t sure what to make of this—not the findings themselves, but the fact that the Silo just went ahead and screwed around with the scavenger registry. We’d established it for a reason.

  “Interesting,” Emily kept muttering as she continued to stare at the results, clearly seeing things I didn’t. She looked almost excited when she finally glanced to me. “Any chance you can charm Morris into extending an invitation to them? I’d really like to have a chat with her.”

  I was certain that by “chat” she didn’t mean an actual conversation.

  “I’m not sure they will be on speaking terms with us after the factory ambush went south,” I pointed out.

  Emily gave me a “duh!” stare. “That’s exactly why you should go ahead and extend the proverbial olive branch. I know that you’re all shitting your trousers over the fact that Miller is still alive. Now he might have a reason to unearth the hatchet he seems to have buried after splitting from you. Explain that it has all been a mistake. Offer them reparation, or even welcome the lost son back into the fold.” Her expression turned shrewd. “This woman might very well be the key to cracking the serum. Or do you really want to die as a rampaging viral bomb?”

  I couldn’t help but smirk. What she really meant was that she didn’t want to suffer that fate. As unlikely as I thought it was that Miller would accept, this might be an opportunity worth pursuing. The assholes had wasted no time alerting their entire faction about what had gone down at the factory, completely ignoring that it had been a personal issue rather than faction versus faction. Nothing bad had happened since, but I’d been a part of daily briefings summarizing the scavenger communications—that we were privy to. The fact that they had more than halved made me guess they must have found a way to cut us out of the network.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I promised.

  “Good boy,” Emily trilled, her attention back on her screen.

  I considered for a moment if this was really worth it
. The base was large enough that it didn’t just have army personnel but a lot of support staff. It would likely have taken me less than a week to find someone else and get laid, even if I made damn sure I stayed outside of our rank hierarchy. The thing was, for some unfathomable reason I liked her, even if she was one cold, dismissive bitch. I decided my ego could take it for another round of hits, and left.

  My suggestion wasn’t met favorably when I brought it up at the evening staff briefing. Hamilton glared at me as if I’d suddenly turned into a traitor. Morris, of course, dismissed it outright and went as far as to call my note of caution trivial. I didn’t protest since, as junior officer in the room, unless I wanted to end up demoted, there was no room for me to. My gut told me they were wrong—particularly Morris—but I decided that this was not my fight. If Emily really wanted her samples, maybe she could sweet-talk the Silo geeks into sending some over. While Wilkes—the Silo’s commander—was keeping his distance, the science departments had been in cahoots with each other from the very beginning… or as soon as they’d managed to get a radio working and found kindred souls out there.

  I wasn’t surprised when I barely made it around the next corner outside of the briefing room before a hand came down on my shoulder, and I consequently found myself slammed against the wall, my body pinned down with Hamilton’s forearm against my throat. He looked livid, which wasn’t that out of the ordinary, particularly since he came back from the botched mission.

  “Trust me, boy. You want to stay out of this mess,” he grunted.