Beyond Green Fields | Book 6 | Red's Diary [ A Post-Apocalyptic Story] Page 3

  Too bad that, just like I had underestimated her, she was quick to underestimate Hamilton, swallowing the persona he portrayed hook, line, and sinker.

  I knew that, technically and quite practically, they were supposed to be our enemies, but with thousands of undead outside and streaming into the breached complex, it was harder than usual to make that distinction. With Miller, it was easy to let knowledge—or what I had been fed—answer that dilemma for me, but Lewis turned out to be a different case altogether. The conviction shining in her eyes made it quite obvious that she had few qualms with putting a bullet between my eyes if I forced her hand, but she absolutely believed in doing the right thing—and I couldn’t exactly disagree with her, considering what I knew Taggard and his people must have gotten up to. This was not the army I had joined, and certainly not what I and my people had stood for—and fought hard to retain. Yes, they were wild, chaotic, and borderline disorganized, yet a single woman’s actions had led to gathering a force that would have been hard for us to oppose had we put actual effort into annihilating them. Part of me still couldn’t believe they hadn’t yet seen through who we’d stationed in the corridors outside of our negotiation point. I felt sick to my stomach thinking about all the needless bloodshed, but I agreed with Hamilton when he’d pointed out that once brain-dead, those soldiers weren’t of any use to us anymore… and maybe killing them swiftly was the most merciful thing to do.

  When, at the end of our negotiations, Lewis demanded we take care of them in a more humane way, I couldn’t help but think that if she’d been just a little more lucid—if she hadn’t shot herself up with the booster—she would have looked right through our charade and handed our asses to us. And, just maybe, we would have deserved it.

  It was hard not to admire her courage.

  It was harder still to ignore that, in many ways, she embodied everything that I tried so hard to hold on to—honor, valor, bravery.

  Too bad that history had played us against each other, but maybe that farce of a truce would remedy that. I didn’t believe it for a second, but it was something to pray for.

  A thread of hope remained that Hamilton would wise up and hand Lewis that letter when, after an entire night of cleaning up the infested hell that the installation had been staged as, he trotted over to their beat-up vehicle for a few last parting words. I stood idly by as he threw them some last scraps, ultimately finishing up the mission we had come here to complete—to cut out the ulcer that had, somehow, festered in our midst for months.

  I waited until the last of the scavengers had cleared out, certain that this was the last I’d ever see of Bree Lewis, less than a day after I’d officially met her.

  “Why didn’t you tell them?” I ask, deliberately forgoing any protocol to let him know just how little I thought of his dick move.

  Silent laughter sparked in his eyes as Hamilton turned to me, disregarding my insubordination, probably to show me just how little he gave a shit about me or my opinion, but he didn’t say anything.

  “She could have been a truly invaluable asset,” I felt the need to point out. “If, for no other reason, to keep the peace after they realize just how much that truce is a heaping pile of garbage.”

  His amusement continued, but his voice was neutral as he finally deigned to respond. “I did you a favor, boy. You and that hag you are banging. Think they’d let her continue running what’s left of our science division—she, a surgeon, who hasn’t done much research since the apocalypse forced her to pick up everyone else’s slack—when they could have one of the people they’d actually hired to do the job instead? Your doctor would have become nothing more than an over-qualified nurse, forced to stitch up idiots who cut themselves shaving, day in, day out. Instead, my actions let her continue to delude herself into playing God. I’m sure that your dick will thank me down the line.” He paused, as if to give me a chance to speak up, yet when I didn’t, he smirked and went on. “You’re deluding yourself if you think that cunt would have contributed anything useful to our rebuilding effort. I recognize a war monger when I see one. She has licked blood, and there’s no going back from that once you embrace it. Just too bad I won’t be around to see Miller lose his mind while she dies. Maybe I get lucky and get to hunt him down like the dog he is afterward. None of that is the army’s concern, and, hence, not yours.”

  He allowed himself another moment to gloat before he stepped away, leaving me fuming—and hating myself, because deep down I knew he was right. I’ve always loved to claim that I’m a “the good of the many” kind of guy, but Emily’s place of power—and the consequent benefits I reap—wasn’t something I would have enjoyed seeing evaporate into thin, cold air.

  Consequently, dealing with her tantrum when she heard that we had neither delivered Ms. Lewis herself nor given her the missive was something I could do easily, more so as Emily was quick to lay all the blame on Hamilton. I was preoccupied with the new mission I got—or rather Hamilton got, but since he officially made me his XO, it was my job to get the ball rolling. That team I built for him was coming together well but we still needed to train for what absolutely sounded like a suicide operation—and it wasn’t like I was unaware of the fact that I was the rookie on the roster. It was ludicrous to expect seasoned fighters—including two former Delta operatives—to follow my lead. But they were readily following Hamilton, and if I didn’t make an absolute nuisance of myself, it stood to reason they would let me pretend like I was in charge of them, too.

  With resources running out—and Canada in the middle of yet another nightmare of a winter season to start up not being the ideal place for any operation, not even training for one that might put us under equal stress—we had a clear-cut deadline: by the end of the year, we ship out. Was it a hail-Mary, last-ditch effort? Absolutely, but if the debacle with Taggard had shown us one thing, it was that we really needed to get into that laboratory in Paris and see if we could find a solution there.

  I honestly didn’t have time to think, let alone worry, about what was happening to one Bree Lewis, no longer a priority to us now that the scavengers were starving, and more and more of them showed up at our bases every day, ready to be recruited in exchange for warm meals and better gear. She had made her mark on history; now it was time to let the world forget about her, even though that thought saddened me. I’d only been in a room with her for less than thirty minutes without a chance to talk to her, and yet I could tell that she was a flame that was shining too brightly to be simply forgotten.

  It was only when Hamilton kicked me out of my bunk in the middle of the night, his mood as foul as ever, barking at me to get a small group ready to drop off some ATVs in the middle of nowhere, that I realized that something else was going on.

  It was after my return in the afternoon, feeling like I’d been frozen down to my very bones, that I got the complete rundown of the news. A message came through from the Silo last night letting us know that we are to expect some company. I didn’t need anyone to explain the details to me as all it took was a quick visit to the medical wing where not only Emily was fuming, but a team of engineers was busy checking that all the security measures of one of the cells in the block were still functioning. It was hard for me to hide a smile at all the profane variations of “utter waste of resources” Emily kept muttering under her breath, as usual ignoring that she was, indeed, speaking of a human being instead of a subject. Then again, for months now everyone had gotten used to being quiet and traipsing through these halls with downcast eyes, all to avoid the newest resident, waiting for us here when we came back from Colorado. I always tried to be not just civil but outgoingly friendly whenever I got to talk to former Petty Officer Stanton, but it was hard not to cringe at the sight of what was left of her.

  It made me want to hurl considering that another once-so-bright light was about to be reduced to not much more than a haphazardly patched-together heap of meat and bones.

  I didn’t need orders to know that I would be running the
show—and a show it was, I was sure, that we would enact once again for our not-so honored guests—but still I checked in with Hamilton when we got confirmation that one of the vehicles I was sent out to drop off had been disconnected from its charging station.

  “I presume since you’re insisting on playing worst cop, sir, it’s up to me to play good cop?” I asked, trying hard to sound a little less disrespectful than I was feeling. Did I admire him for his accomplishments, before but also since the apocalypse? Yes, but the longer I dealt with him, the more I was convinced that Miller’s animosities might stem from a simple conviction that the world would be a better place without the likes of Hamilton—but since he didn’t want to kill his former friend, he decided to remove himself as far and as vehemently from his sphere of influence as possible.

  Hamilton left it at a smirk, but by then I’d spent enough time around him to see through the machismo facade he put on like a second skin. His animosity toward Miller was the only real part of it that I’d seen so far, even surpassing the disgust he must have felt at taking care of Taggard and his band of not-so merry men. I figured it was up to me to run interference where possible.

  Not that I expected much to come from that. Considering the state our other guest was in, my hopes for Lewis were low to start with.

  Come morning, our guests arrived at our gate, loud and boastful as ever—but it didn’t take a genius to realize that Lewis was hanging on by a thread, and Miller was running on wishful thinking paired with desperation. It hurt deep down to see her, spitting blood and barely able to keep herself upright, juxtaposed to the memory of her forcing the stalemate in Colorado weeks earlier. But it was Miller’s reaction that sealed the deal for me—or lack of a reaction, really. It was impossible to ignore that he was acutely aware of the fact that this was his last resort and he was trying his best to sell himself—and his soul—for a chance for the woman he loved to survive. I nothing shy of hated myself for playing along with Hamilton’s farce of hospitality, but I had my orders, and not much leeway to act on.

  That didn’t excuse the fact that Hamilton kept smirking at her while Emily had her strip down to her skin. It was obvious that Lewis herself was beyond giving a shit about anyone’s attempt to humiliate her, but watching Miller falter at having to realize just how far the decomposition of her body had already moved on was harder still to observe. At least we should have given them some privacy, little of that was still possible.

  She must have known for days, if not weeks, what was happening to her body. I didn’t want to think about the pain—physical but also psychological—she must have been in. Yet all that paled in comparison to what I knew was still ahead of her… provided the serum wouldn’t instantly kill her. The bleak look on her face—rendering her impervious to anything Hamilton could have said or done—told me that she knew exactly that her best bet was her worst nightmare.

  Of course, Hamilton had to make it worse when he not only had them shoot Miller up with the mind-control shit but ordered him to strangle Lewis on the spot.

  I would have been okay with Hamilton and Miller going toe to toe and watching who would survive, but this was where I drew the line. Yet before I could more than tense, Hamilton’s attention whipped over to me, the look of warning in his eyes impossible to ignore. If it had been the expected “back down, boy” he’d all too often shown toward me, I would have ignored it in favor of doing my humanly best to get between Miller and his increasingly more helpless wife, but what I saw in his gaze was something entirely different. There was, of course, a lot of gloating, but underneath that, sadness, understanding, and something I hadn’t thought him capable of feeling, least of all for the two strangers in our midst: compassion. It startled me into inaction, leaving Hamilton free to call Miller to heel once more.

  Lewis did not take that well. Gasping for breath and too weak to attack, her eyes were blazing with fury, knowing exactly where to put all the blame in the world: with the man who had humiliated her yet again, but out of motives neither of us could understand.

  I knew then that she would survive. She’d accept Hamilton’s backhand attempt at throwing her a lifeline wrought of indignation, hate, and the need to be able to demand vengeance later. But it sure as hell wouldn’t be pretty.

  I followed the procession to the surgical suite, slumping down in one of the seats in the observation area, strangely prompted to hold a ghastly kind of vigil. As Lewis came shuffling into the operating room, for all intents and purposes a lamb led to the slaughter—and a lot too literal in that sense not to make my skin crawl—I could tell that the serum was already doing its thing. Resentment welled up inside of me when I realized that they hadn’t bothered to waste even a milligram of sedatives or painkillers on her; sure, the serum would have burned through it long before they were done, but they could have made the first hour or two a little more bearable for her.

  The irony wasn’t lost on me that it was the woman who I infrequently shared a bed with who was one of the real monsters down there; not the one who had been a major pain in our asses for months and would forever be forced to bear the quite visible scars of the atrocities we had enforced on her—and still, officially she was one of our top ten to be hunted down and killed on sight.

  And here I sat, hoping she’d find the strength to pull through, and save us when we put our lives on the line thousands of miles away from here.

  Watching her paralyzed body get dissected—alive, and feeling every slice and prod—I knew one thing for sure: No, I did not want to fuck Bree Lewis. Even more so, I had no intention whatsoever to fuck with her, either.

  Why? Because unlike anyone else I’d ever met, her sheer force of will demanded my respect. She hadn’t chosen to be a soldier; hadn’t signed up to be unmade and forged into a superhuman nightmare. When what few people that had survived the outbreak had cowered behind walls and had idly stood by when others had been kidnapped, tortured, and slaughtered, she had taken it upon herself to put an end to it, quite possibly at the price of her own sanity. And while I didn’t doubt that, once she recovered, she would have loved to tear Hamilton limb from limb, I realized that she wouldn’t go that far, if only because Hamilton could still be useful in the grand scheme of things.

  I also didn’t doubt for a second that if Miller was able to forgive himself for the actions he hadn’t been responsible for, he would absolutely kill anyone who would ever dare to harm a hair on his wife’s head, or look at her in a less than respectful manner. How Hamilton would survive that, I had no clue… or maybe I did. It was all too easy to fall for the obvious and chalk up Hamilton’s stunt with the mind control to him acting like an absolute asshole—but if I, after weeks around him, could already see through his mask, Miller must have been able to read him like an open book. It was entirely possible that I’d missed a lot of nuance that had been plain as day for Miller.

  That meant they were both playing a game, and both putting on a show—but that begged the question, for whom? So far, I knew I had been wrong about Miller in one thing only—his wife had absolutely turned him around, and she was the one person in this world he would do anything for, including give up his own life, or subject her to the nightmare of being cut apart and put back together. I doubted that he and Hamilton were engaged in some kind of long game, so the only thing that made sense was that Hamilton’s stunt must have been a warning. But a warning of what? Or of whom?

  I had the sickening feeling that I wouldn’t like the answer to that once I found out.

  Either way, I was sure I would live to see it all play out.

  So far, so good—until everything changed.

  Part 2

  I can’t exactly pinpoint the moment when things changed—but change they did.

  At first, dealing with Bree Lewis was easier than I expected, but some of that could have been the simple consequence of me doing my best to treat her—and her people—as if we hadn’t stood on opposite sides of a conflict mere months ago that could have wiped humans cl
ear off the map of North America. Not carrying a decade worth of prejudice and baggage made that a task not hard to accomplish. Having the very vivid mental image of her body, paralyzed and bloody, on that operating room table ingrained in my brain made it downright easy. For me, disassociating from a subject has always helped, and nothing like morbid fascination at someone being still alive, let alone able to move, to stave off displaying the sympathy I was definitely feeling for her.

  Damn, but that woman had balls of steel.

  The briefing we had where we forced them to commit to accompanying us on our mission to France was exactly the farce I expected—and Lewis made no effort to play along. How she was able to sit upright and talk around her swollen jaws was beyond me. She not only managed that but also went along on the brief sortie to pick up the rest of their people where they were camping outside our base. Watching her physically relax around them was fascinating. The others were tense as hell but taking their cues from her. I filed that observation away for later. Until now, I’d presumed Miller was the one they always followed with blind faith. Turned out, this was only the start of me realizing exactly how wrong I had been.

  Lewis might have been one determined bitch, but that only got her so far, which turned out to be our prep area in the hangar. After making sure that she was set up as comfortably as he could make her, Miller took me up on my “offer”—coming with the heavy implication that he’d better, or else, that I thankfully didn’t need to verbalize—to upgrade their gear. Watching him and Burns interact made it clear that, unlike us, they’d pretty much ditched any command structure or hierarchy except for Miller—and Lewis, presumably—having to bear the brunt of the responsibility of any decision they made for the lot of them. I’d read Burns’s file, too, of course, back when Hamilton had me do the psych profile for Lewis. Not once but twice demoted, it was obvious that he must have been one hell of a soldier or else the army would have gotten rid of him, serum or no serum. Tall, broad, and loud, he was impossible to ignore wherever he went, but I didn’t miss how a lot of that also must have been a schtick he used, because he was rather quiet in sifting through our inventory after Miller chased his concerned ass off, the two men barely exchanging a word, hyperaware of me lurking in the background.