Beyond Green Fields | Book 6 | Red's Diary [ A Post-Apocalyptic Story] Page 17

  Guinevere gave that very little thought and instead told Marleen again to set things in motion, but as she left, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d just wedged my foot in the door for good. Gita was quick to scurry off as well, leaving me alone with Marleen once again. She continued to stare at the maps some more before turning to me, not just facing me but also turning her body toward me. “You think you’re really clever, eh?”

  I did my best to make my smile a real one, if with a certain edge to it. “I’m not lying. How many times do I need to tell you, I absolutely want to help?” When she didn’t respond right away, I let out a sigh. “Sure, I get it. You hate that your plans fell short. It gives me no satisfaction to see you fail.” Maybe that was harsh, but since Guinevere had already used that very phrase—several times—it only made sense to build up on it. “Besides, what do I stand to gain from having Miller run loose out there? They must know I’m a traitor. At the least, once they find your troops ready to gun them down before they can make it into the safety of the Utah settlement, they will know for sure. It’s in my best interest to see the three of them dead. Let me help being a self-serving asshole, if enjoying the creature comforts in here isn’t enough.” I hadn’t tried to sound quite as sarcastic as that came out, and my stomach rumbling loudly that very moment didn’t help. Too late, I caught myself laughing at the actual lack of said comforts, but when I saw that Marleen allowed herself a small smile, I made the best of it. “Come on. Give me a chance to prove my worth. And, damnit, woman, feeding me might be a good idea as well! I get it. You established quite obviously who is boss. I’m not going to usurp your position, but I’d really like to help you turn the tide.” I paused as if to consider what to say next. “You and me, we both know that your failure isn’t actually a failure. Nobody ever successfully sent forces against Miller’s people and won—which includes Hamilton and others at least three times in just one year. You succeeded where every man in the army failed—you got through their defenses, and you killed one of Miller’s top lieutenants with Romanoff. It was only bad luck that their morale was high and they came blazing in with double the expected numbers. Use me and my intel, and your next strike will be victorious.”

  Marleen considered for another moment before she got up. “What do you say to some proper dinner?” she suggested. “Only downside: you’ll have to ditch the sweatpants. I can’t let you out in public as my right-hand man looking like you just rolled out of bed. I’m sure we’ll find some BDUs in your size, because the gear you came in with? Also not cutting it. We don’t deal with people in rags in here.”

  “Sounds perfect,” I offered, having no idea what she was talking about—but dinner? Few things had ever sounded better than that.

  I was surprised when rather than call the guards to bring me to my room, she handed me a key card. “You know the way back to your quarters by now?” I nodded. “This will open the door and all the others of the common areas. We’ll talk about an increased security clearance for you after Utah. Let’s get you set up with what else you’ll need. A word of warning? Don’t stare when you step into the common areas. It just makes you look stupid, and we can’t have that.”

  Common areas? It made sense that there were parts to this bunker that I hadn’t seen yet, but that sounded rather ominous. And why would I be left staring?

  I had an idea I would find out soon—and as my growling stomach reminded me, that couldn’t happen soon enough.

  Part 5

  What. The. Everloving. Fuck.

  That pretty much summed up what still went through my head whenever I left the rabbit warren of corridors on the administrative side of the doomsday bunker and ventured out into the common area, as Marleen had titled it. A week wasn’t enough—not by a long shot—to wrap my mind around it.

  She hadn’t been kidding about me staring, possibly with my mouth open, for the entirety of our dinner that evening after she finally let me out of my prison and gave me the keys to the kingdom… although it was a keycard, and more of a zoo. Even with brand-spanking-new gear, I stood out like a sore thumb except for her wearing pretty much the same getup. As much as I might have stared, I drew just as many if not more looks every single time that I ventured past the corridors. Maybe it was my beard and lack of a proper haircut. Maybe it was the tanned skin on my face and hands. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t pasty and pudgy and my clothes actually fit on my frame. Quite possibly, it was because I was Joe Nobody instead of a rock star or Fortune-500 CEO millionaire. I had no fucking clue—and no real intention of finding out. Except for my dinner with Marleen in what looked like a three-star restaurant, I only came here for the bar in the back of the lower level that had a non-chatty bartender and an early-1900s vibe going on.

  Tonight, I absolutely needed a drink.

  Just thinking about why made my skin crawl.

  It was all because I had been right. Usually, that shouldn’t have made me feel bad, but it kind of did. To a point. But that was only the beginning of the issue.

  Well, at least now I knew why Gita was constantly acting like she was walking on eggshells. That should have been a warning for me from the start, but I went the entire last week of my perceived new freedom ignoring her many hints and clues—except for when she pulled me into a server room on the second day and directly got in my face, not mincing words when she went all, “Are you fucking insane?!” on me.

  I had been so blind. High on my own supply, I’d shrugged off what was obviously her concern. “You know Lewis and Miller as I do, right?” To which she had nodded, grudgingly. “Then why don’t you trust them to keep kicking ass and surviving? At worst, they’ll cut a swath through the opposing forces.”

  Which they did, as expected… by me, and Gita, and everyone who hadn’t been blinded by the light. Meaning mostly Guinevere herself.

  And that was where the real atomic bomb lay buried; or not quite so buried anymore.

  Some of my disjointed thoughts must have been plain on my face as Stuart, the bartender at my now-favorite haunt, already turned to get a shot glass and a bottle of tequila ready for me. I signaled him wordlessly to leave the bottle. I had memories to annihilate tonight, even thought I knew my fucked-up metabolism wouldn’t let me.

  A couple sitting next to where I plunked down at the bar gave me a rude look before they took their drinks and retreated to one of the tables. I remotely remembered the woman. She’d earlier this week advised me to keep out of the sun more with my “natural complexion” as she had called it. All that tanning would just give me sun spots and premature lines. I didn’t tell her that I would, long before that could happen, be dead for good.

  After today, I didn’t give myself much of a chance to make it into next month, let alone see if I could ride out the decade or not.

  The sharp twang of the liquid hitting my tongue and throat kicked off a familiar cascade of emotions and reactions that should have led to relaxation and satisfaction. Instead, it only got more noticeable how much my hand was shaking when the clear liquid almost sloshed over the rim of the glass before I slammed it down my gullet and went for a refill.

  Gita… yes, she had been right to question my sanity, selling Marleen and the bitch in command on the idea that I was the leading expert in all things Lewis and Miller now. It had sounded like a great idea, really—and I had been right; they had started heading toward Salt Lake City the very day Marleen had finally cut me loose. Satellite coverage might have gotten sketchy at times but a column of several quads and cars was easy to follow if you could dedicate an entire three-man team to mapping their progress. I’d thought Gita’s concern was for our friends to get killed. Her only concern, really.

  And then today, just as we’d gotten the first set of images as the sun rose, my world had gone to shit… again. You’d think that, by now, I’d have gotten used to this happening, but, no. Not quite yet.

  For the first time since my arrival, I got to see the full staff of the military operational side of the bunke
r—or so I’d thought when Marleen called me into the briefing room. Except for Marleen and Guinevere, there was only a single man older than me present—and as we watched the satellite coverage of Marleen’s force first being incapable of keeping the scavengers from successfully reaching the settlement, quickly followed by joining the fight yet again to utterly decimate what had rightfully appeared like overwhelming, impossible odds, he had gotten quieter and quieter, until at the very end he had been little more responsive than the braindead drones standing guard in the background.

  After the dust had settled in the late afternoon on thousands of corpses, now no longer moving, all it had taken was Guinevere’s mad stare at him, her well-manicured nails clacking on the table, as she leaned toward him, a simple, “Well, General?” uttered in the otherwise dead-silent room. After hours of staring sightlessly at the table, he’d looked up at her briefly, muttered a barely audible, “I’m sorry to have disappointed you, ma’am,” and blew out his brains with his service pistol.

  At her continued glare, the three satellite techs followed suit, looking relieved rather than anxious at the prospect of finally getting out of this madhouse.

  Judging from how ramrod straight Gita had held herself through it all, this hadn’t been the first occurrence of this kind, but certainly a first for me.

  I could have been wrong, but I now had the certain feeling that this was the very reason why the bunker was so utterly understaffed—four years of expected suicides for failures you weren’t even responsible for would do that to you.

  Why they had done it, I still had no clue, but I had an idea from a conversation between two guards I’d overheard afterward. Apparently, down here you got only one chance to fuck up, led by your free will. Then, it was either death by your own hand, or pretty much the same by injection that left your body alive but your mind just as gone. The fact that, so far, I’d identified less than thirty personnel who were still thinking freely down here—and now four less—should have been a clue to how exceptionally stupid that strategy was.

  Quite frankly, I didn’t give a shit—and I was very much aware that it was likely just Marleen’s whim that still kept me a reasoning, thinking being. Nobody had uttered an explicit warning to me, but that I was on my absolutely last chance had been obvious.

  Yeah, I could understand why they’d uniformly decided to blow their brains out.

  I slammed down another shot of tequila. All it did was sour my already sour stomach further.

  I wasn’t stupid; or at least, I usually thought of myself as pretty smart. While I’d fumbled my introduction here, for the past week I had been rather sure of my importance and strategy. I still hadn’t had a chance to ask Gita what the fuck she was doing here—our talk had been minimal except for her asking me if I’d gone insane, painting such a large target on our friends’ backs. The moment that had been resolved—or rather, I’d blown off her concern—she’d muttered that she would contact me later, and had ducked back out into the corridor.

  Maybe it was just my latently increased paranoia, but I had a feeling she wasn’t wrong about both of us being under too much scrutiny. So all I could do was pray that she had a plan—and maybe if I finally had a real goal, a plan to set in motion, I’d stop feeling so fucking useless!

  “While I understand the circumstances, that bottle isn’t to blame for the troubles you find yourself in,” a female voice observed wryly, coming from slightly behind and next to me.

  Rather than respond right away, I poured myself another shot before prying my—admittedly white-knuckled—fingers from around the tequila. Bringing the glass to my lips, I glanced at her, surprised to realize that she was in her sixties, if not older. It wasn’t that everyone was young and spunky around here—on the contrary—but few older people had approached me in the past week. She was wearing a demure, dark gray dress and matching plaid scarf artfully draped around her shoulders, her gray hair coifed in a precisely cut bob. She screamed elegance and sophistication, and could have been a philanthropist’s widow as well as a small nation’s prime minister. Her body language was inviting and open, but her gaze was shrewd, her eyes boring straight into mine. What she saw, I could only guess at—but she was cut from a very different cloth than the woman who’d been concerned about my possible premature aging.

  “True,” I admitted, turning back to the bar for yet another refill. “But considering this is the extent of my personal freedom right now, it will have to do.”

  Rather than look appalled—or confused—she barked a brief laugh and took the seat to my right. As soon as she had righted herself, a tumbler filled with whisky appeared in front of her, Stuart obviously well-versed in her tastes. He silently offered her the bottle as well, which she declined with a brief shake of her head.

  Had I just gotten tracked down by another kindred spirit? Considering how the flavor of women ran down here, I didn’t trust her not to be a discerning cannibal, if the other company I kept was any indication. How much worse could things get?

  “You are right to distrust me,” she observed, my thoughts rather obvious. When I stared blankly at her, still hoping she would go away, she raised one slender shoulder in a shrug before leaning on the bar, facing me now. “Misguided, yes, but she would hardly trust you if you were too stupid to look out for yourself.” She paused, then quickly iterated, “The girl genius, of course. Not the misguided monster that will, ultimately, be responsible for our collective demise. Some of us haven’t quite understood that yet.”

  She glanced at the rest of the room—and, by extension, the entire bunker—behind us, her gaze scathing as it passed over the few revelers still out and about at this hour of the night. Evening, I corrected myself. Just because I felt as if I’d been awake for days on end and was ready to drink myself into a stupor didn’t mean that, technically, it wasn’t much past dinnertime yet.

  “Who are you?” I asked when her gaze returned to me.

  It freaked me out just how casually her expression morphed into one of open pleasantry as she held out her hand to me, maybe because I’d seen the very thing a time too many on Marleen’s features of late—only that this woman made Marleen appear like a bumbling child in comparison. “Malory,” she said as she shook my hand, her grasp firm but without the bullshit show of strength some men had going on. “Miller, if you haven’t guessed that yet. Which you have absolutely no cause, I presume, since I highly doubt my son is aware that I haven’t left this fucking mortal coil behind yet.”

  That… warranted another shot. Those seconds well spent barely gave my mind time to wrap itself around the revelation, even more so as a rather childish—and a little insane—part of me wanted to chuckle at her use of profanity. She didn’t appear like a woman who ever used such terms, let alone drinking Scotch that was likely older than I was. None of this made any sense—except for the paranoid part of me immediately jumping to conclusions, and those weren’t pretty.

  “Let me guess,” I said once the tequila burn had subsided. “Your son also doesn’t know that you’ve been betraying him for quite some time.”

  If that hit home—which I doubted it could—she didn’t show it. “On the contrary,” she remarked, her tone both conversational and wry. “He has been aware of that fact for years. Seven, to be precise. What I presume he remains oblivious to is the fact that I didn’t die with billions of other people the day he took his revenge on the wrong people. Although, that point is debatable. The leagues of those who have wronged him—us—are more widespread than I once thought. From what little I hear, safely ensconced in my gilded cage down here, few of them are still alive.”

  If she expected me to comment on that cryptic statement, she didn’t appear taken aback when I remained silent, yet consequently decided to lay off the booze now. Somehow I got the sense that I should keep as much of my mental faculties as possible for this conversation.

  How had Gita phrased it? She would contact me. What she hadn’t said was that she would talk to me.

&nb
sp; “I take it you’re not a guest here of your own volition?”

  Malory shook her head. “I’m afraid not. It’s not a fate I would have chosen; to persist when others more deserving of preservation were left to fend—and die—for themselves. Even less so that my ultimate purpose is to be used as a weapon against my son. Trust me, if I didn’t expect to be able to subvert that cause and in fact use it against dear Guinevere, I would have long ago taken my own life. Then again, so many people down here are ill-equipped to deal with the harsh reality of the world they have been thrust into. They need my guidance.” Her tone had dipped into deep sarcasm territory toward the end, while the accompanying smile remained looking warm and real.

  What was it with the women down here? Although, I figured it made sense, considering the monster in charge already trusted one psychopath… Come to think of it, emotionally void people seemed to be the only ones she trusted.

  As much fun as cryptic remarks might have been under different circumstances, my nerves were too frazzled tonight to appreciate them. Since she seemed in a conversational mood—and Stuart the bartender had disappeared from sight—I figured I might as well get chatty.

  “How did you betray your son? And how is it that you ended up here?”

  She gave me a look as if to ask how much time I had as she took a sip from her drink. “Simply put, when Decker realized that he had single-handedly screwed up his perfect soldier, he approached me for help in correcting that. It didn’t take long for me to realize who said subject was, yet that didn’t stop me from lending my expertise. A different woman would now tell you that she did it out of love for her son and in the hope of bringing him back to the light. I won’t lie; I was fascinated by the possibilities. Not that I found myself capable of affecting change since by then, Nathaniel had realized that he would never again allow anyone to manipulate him—that he was aware of. With Decker, that was obvious and thus easily avoided. I’m afraid he will soon realize that he wasn’t completely immune to other people’s machinations.”