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

  Quite the opposite was true.

  I guessed I had finally uncovered what drew them to each other. They weren’t like magnets—polar opposites attracting each other, poetically completing each other. No—it was where they were alike that made them snap and stick together, come what may or what others might attempt to bring between them.

  As I realized that, my first thought was that if Decker was actually still alive and out to get Miller, he had no idea what was coming for him, particularly if he succeeded.

  But then my thoughts went further, to Hamilton. It was so tantalizingly easy to see him as a simple devil’s advocate, driven by character flaws and weakness. But if I had figured all that out about Lewis, mostly thanks to watching her and Miller interact, it stood to reason that Hamilton had been miles ahead of me, having the advantage of probably knowing exceptionally well what made Miller tick, and consequently having a much easier time searching for the right clues. I was convinced that back at the factory, he really hadn’t known what was coming for him, but sifting through reports and seeing Lewis in action in Colorado had given him ample time and opportunity to test his theories. Was there a method to the madness that had been his behavior at our Canadian base? Had mind-fucking Miller actually not been about Miller at all but instead his wife? I only had rumors to go on, but from what I knew about how the serum project had trained its officers, I one hundred percent knew Hamilton was capable of doing pretty much anything he set his mind to, including a universe of ulterior twists and motives. But why and to what end?

  Before I got an answer to those questions, Lewis and Miller disappeared, to possibly never be seen again.

  At first, I didn’t think anything of Burns flagging me down in the middle of the night. For weeks he had made a point of being the social animal of the group, and with Lewis constantly poring over notes, Miller out of commission, and Gita hiding away from the world so no one would see her constantly crying her eyes out, it made sense that he went to roam around the ship on a quest to combat boredom. He was at ease and gave off a relaxed vibe, so there was no reason to suspect anything. So when he handed me a piece of paper with frayed edges—clearly ripped out of a manual or something similar—with two lines of numbers scrawled onto it, I was confused at first.

  “Memorize these,” he told me, his voice deceptively soft. “Obviously, this conversation isn’t happening.”

  Glancing at the numbers again, I realized that they were GPS coordinates.

  “What’s this—”

  “Memorize them,” he stressed again, his voice taking on a hard edge. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up, my first instinct to tense and prepare for an attack, but cut down on the impulse. Instead, I did what I was told, feeling mighty stupid about it no less.

  When I was sure that I had the numbers down pat, I looked up at Burns once more. Grinning—and it wasn’t a warm, nice gesture—Burns took the paper out of my hand, ripped it up, put it in his mouth, and swallowed it. That was one way of disposing of it. I would have simply burned the strip. I tried to ask what this was all about—again—but he cut me off before I got any further than before.

  “You know what a dead-drop is? Good. If you wait a few months, at this location you will find a bundle of intel with further instructions, or, more likely, simply more coordinates. Read them, memorize them, destroy them. The fewer people know about this, the better. If you ever need to reach them, leave a message in the box. Yet it would be better if you didn’t. The purpose of this exercise is for them to be out of the equation. Nothing shy of the rest of us biting it, or confirmation that someone is coming after them and knows where they are warrants compromising that. Understand?”

  Did I absolutely hate being talked to as if I was a dim-witted private? Yes, but it was easy to keep my trap shut now that the enormity of what was going on set in. I had a feeling that less than ten people in the entire world knew about this—and, come to think of it, I wasn’t sure if Lewis herself was one of them. She had been awfully distracted over the past days, and while I had learned that she was a better actress than I’d given her credit for, I doubted she would have managed to continue to appear that scatterbrained had she known.

  When I did nothing except nod, Burns cracked a smile, which was much closer to his usual easygoing nature—which I suddenly questioned just as much as Lewis’s deception skills. “I knew they weren’t wrong about trusting you,” he enthused.

  “Both of them?” I didn’t bother with hiding my surprise. I’d spent a lot of time and effort befriending Lewis—until that had become increasingly uncomfortable—and felt I had done a passingly good job, yet Miller was a nut I couldn’t crack.

  Burns gave a shrug that could have meant anything. “I’m here, giving you this information, aren’t I?”

  That kind of answered that question. “The rest of you—”

  “Are coming with you, as planned,” Burns quickly interjected. “Someone needs to check out the girl and make sure she’s as okay as she seems.” Meaning Gita. “And I need to make sure you didn’t screw up our medic.” He paused, then gave me a shit-eating grin that set my alarm bells off once more. How had I never realized how damn scary this man could be? “I maybe shouldn’t stress this since I don’t want to contribute to your gruesome, painful demise, but if you fuckers are stupid enough to have done anything to Martinez that compromises his health, Lewis will come after you, and she won’t leave any one man or woman standing. You made a huge mistake once trying to use him against her. She won’t let you do that again.”

  I was hard-pressed not to point out that our intentions had always been to help her friend—and, at worst, to ensure that one more medically trained person would continue to be able to use his skills—but refrained. It hadn’t been my idea, and it had never sat right with me. It had been an unnecessary, cruel move. When the two of them had shown up here, Lewis more dead than alive and Miller ready to sell his soul to save her, they’d freely handed us all the power we’d ever need. It wasn’t like anyone had asked my opinion.

  I couldn’t help but feel strangely validated now that I realized Miller was trusting me more than probably anyone else on my side of the fence—a fence that had mostly been torn down by their actions as much as ours, if one superficially disregarded Hamilton. I was sure Miller wasn’t subscribing to that notion, though.

  “So, that’s it?”

  Burns nodded. “No one will notice that in the bustle of docking and embarking, there are two people not accounted for.” Meaning, since it was my job to do a head count, I would have to make sure not to set Hamilton off. “And yes, that’s it, if all goes as planned.”

  In a sense, I guessed it did. If I hadn’t known we were two heads short, I wouldn’t have noticed myself. There were no packs or weapons left unattended, and everything was going smoothly. That we docked in the middle of a snowstorm that cut visibility down to zero didn’t hurt. The plane was still waiting for us in the hangar, and once the storm cleared a few hours later, I gave the “ready for take off” signal, including all men accounted for. By the time Hamilton noticed that he had no one around who was gloating back at him, we were already off the runway, and it was too late to turn back.

  Did I get my ass kicked for that? Yes. Three times. Didn’t regret a second of it, though.

  Then spring came, and things went to shit.

  For weeks, I held out hope that the rising rage of the scavengers would sizzle out—or Lewis and Miller got their act together and put an end to it. Their demands soon switched from setting her free to giving her up for them to take revenge on her, and suddenly I was rather happy that, technically, I wasn’t lying when I told everyone I had no fucking clue where they might have run off to. I hadn’t looked up the coordinates yet, so I didn’t know exactly—and that was a good thing.

  Several settlements burned. Then they blew up the New Angeles docks, instantly losing any favor they had gained from Gabriel Greene and his people. The California coast settlements continued
to grow but kept mostly to themselves.

  It was another month later, in the middle of another stiflingly hot summer, when we were en route back to the base from giving support to one of the northern settlements, when out of the blue—well, green of the forest—three figures stepped, clad in heavy, dark fatigues despite the heat. I’d only seen Pia Zilinsky and Andrej Romanoff once—in Colorado—but Burns I was more than passingly familiar with, of course. He didn’t give a clue what this was about as I stepped out of the passenger side of the lead Humvee, signaling my men to be alert but back down a bit. Hill and Cole appeared unprompted behind me, mirroring the trio in front of us. I nodded at my sergeant that it was okay as I stepped forward, addressing Zilinsky since she was the one glaring at me as if I’d personally murdered her puppy.

  “Fancy meeting you here.”

  She wasn’t impressed, no surprise there. “No coincidence is involved,” she let me know.

  “Didn’t expect anything else,” I replied. “Why the meeting in the middle of the woods? You must know how to reach us. Or you could have dropped a note at the settlement we just came from…” And this was when I realized what the BS mission we had been sent on had really been about. “You did drop a note,” I confirmed. All she had for me was a smirk, but it passed quickly.

  “I needed to talk to you without any outside interference getting in the way,” she offered.

  “Like Hamilton?”

  Her lip twisted with derision. I could see how Lewis must have gotten along great with her from the start.

  “We’re here to offer you our help,” she said. I wasn’t the only one who perked up at the statement. She watched us with more amusement shining from her eyes before she explained. “I can’t—and wouldn’t—throw our lot in with you, but I have it on good authority that not all of you are complete and utter asswipes.” I didn’t need to look at Burns to realize where she got that notion from, but still did. He gave me the barest of nods, almost like a token of appreciation. “We’re not going to openly work for or with you, but there are some tasks that you are ill suited for that we can lend a hand with. And we can vet some of the craziness for you so you know whether you need to be concerned or can disregard a rising issue.”

  “You mean like those lunatics blowing up the docks?” I asked. It was only natural to go for the obvious part first.

  She grimaced. “Something like that, yes.”

  Since she didn’t volunteer any more information about that, I dropped the point. This was one gift horse I wasn’t going to look in the mouth but buy as a complete package instead. “What do you want in exchange?”

  Zilinsky smirked. “That you owe us one isn’t working for you?”

  I shook my head. “I never want to be indepted to the likes of you.”

  “Smart boy,” she muttered, much to the silent but impossible-to-ignore mirth of my escorts. I did my best to grin through my anger until she continued. “We can vet contacts for you, and get you the inside scoop on a lot of things that are running underneath your radar. We can also go where you can’t. In exchange for all that, we’d like a heads-up whenever you hear whispers about things that might concern us.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I agreed without needing much time to think about it. She didn’t look like she would have accepted a different response, anyway. “How do I contact you?”

  She thought about that for a moment. “If you can pass it through official channels, that works for us. Else, the Silo and New Angeles will pass messages on.” Her smirk was a harsh one. “I’m sure you have channels through their backdoors.” I didn’t deign to confirm that.

  Figuring we were done, I set to turn around and walk back to my vehicle, knowing they wouldn’t be the ones to present their backs to us, but Zilinsky jerked her chin hard to the side, motioning for me to follow her when she stepped off the road and into the thicket. I felt my stomach knot up but chose to follow her nevertheless. She had no reason to do away with me now that we had found such an amicable agreement—and it wasn’t like I was a defenseless little babe.

  She was waiting for me out of earshot and opened her mouth as soon as I rocked to a halt in front of her. “I hope you are aware that this agreement comes with one condition.”

  I thought about playing stupid but then rejected the option. “Nobody knows I have the coordinates. And I haven’t checked up on them yet, if that’s what you’re getting at. I won’t, not until things get much worse.” Considering how this summer had been ramping up, I didn’t dare phrase that as a challenge.

  Surprise crossed her face. “You can. Just be discreet about it.” She kept studying me critically. “I don’t understand why they chose to trust you but they must, or else we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But let me stress one thing clearly. They are two of very few people who mean a lot to me. If you are the reason why harm finds them, I will hunt you down, and you won’t enjoy it.”

  Her phrasing made me wonder what exactly she knew about me, or whether it was just a weird idiom that had gotten lost in translation. Zilinsky wasn’t exactly someone I’d point that option out to, though.

  “I get that,” I quickly assured her to keep further threats from being hurled my way. “This may surprise you, but I actually value their friendship as well. I won’t abuse their trust. And trust in me they do.” No harm in reminding her of that, although I did expect some form of repercussion to follow.

  Instead, I got a smile from her, and it was a surprisingly real one. “I can see why she’d like you,” Zilinsky pointed out, obviously talking about Lewis. “And you’d fall right for it until she bit your head off and spit you out in little chunks.”

  “Probably,” I admitted, allowing myself a small smile. “She gave her word that she’d help us. If anything, it was her being with us that made a difference for the outcome of the mission. And she went above and beyond what we’d expected in adding her opinions to the data we took with us. That’s something I can admire.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “So it’s not just her pert ass and tits that turned your head around, huh?” I must have looked as shocked about the accusation as I felt—also because it was kind of true, if in a very different sense than the literal meaning—making it utterly obvious how I felt about the claim. Zilinsky snorted, cutting off my attempt to assure her that things weren’t so. “Don’t bother denying it. You do know you don’t stand a chance, don’t you? She’s likely completely and utterly oblivious of it all. And Miller… let’s just say he isn’t the kind of guy who’d fight for a woman’s loyalty, not like that. If she hadn’t chosen him and didn’t continue to do so, he wouldn’t be interested in her. I’m telling you this so you don’t get any weird ideas. Do not press your luck. Make a difference and you might just come up ahead.”

  If anything, that statement confused me. “Why doesn’t that seem to irk you?”

  “Irk me?” she echoed, as if that very notion was ridiculous. “It makes me want to throw my head back and laugh hard enough to scare up all the undead in the state. I’d pay good rations to watch this play out if you’d ever get stupid enough to act on any of it. Good comedy is rare.” She paused, giving me a chance to protest, but when I didn’t, she nodded. “Why the warning? Consider it as an offer. By now you must know that you’re on a dead-end trajectory, yes? The army you joined is a festering nest of snakes that needs to be burned out—and either way, eventually it will. You’d be smart to cut your losses once you come to the same conclusion as me. There’s always room with us for smart, capable people. But I can’t have you around if all you do is pine over the single woman in this country who will never be yours.”

  “She’s the only one, huh?” I joked.

  Zilinsky snorted, getting my innuendo well enough. “You’re cute,” she assured me with a harsh drawl. “Cute can’t handle me.”

  I was tempted to ask who—or what—could but decided I could very well live without that answer. “Thanks for the offer—about joining you—but I have absolute
ly no intention of defecting.” I couldn’t help it; I thought I understood where she was coming from, but my sense of honor wasn’t quite dead enough yet not to feel at least a little offended. “They won’t recover without having good people that make an effort in their midst.”

  “They won’t recover,” she agreed, stressing that part. “When you talk like that, you almost sound like Miller.”

  “I don’t.” No offense, but I really couldn’t see the connection there.

  “Oh, not verbatim,” she assured me. “But you do realize that the only reason why we left our cozy bunker after the first winter was because he wanted to make a difference? Because he thought this was his one chance of redemption, even if he could never pay back enough to get rid of all the guilt he’d been dragging around for years? And what did you assholes do? You tried to kill the only person he gives a shit about. He’ll never forgive you for that. You don’t want those two working against you.”

  No, I didn’t; that was true. “So what do you propose I do?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever Miller told you to do. But watch your back. Only stupid people go down with the ship. The smart ones jump off in the nick of time.”

  With nothing else to say, she gestured for me to precede her back to where the others were still waiting for us. The tension in the air had lessened considerably, I realized, Burns and Romanoff shooting the shit with Cole and Hill, and one other seasoned veteran had also dared join in the fun. Now that the parents were coming back, they fell silent, but it all seemed in good faith. We parted ways soon after, the scavengers waiting until we were gone—presumably—as not to give us a clue where they went.