Trust
Date: 2014-03-25 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Zombies; Post Apocalyptic; Horror; Fiction; Military Fiction; Science Fiction; Apocalyptic; Dystopia; Short Stories; Novella
Description: Dan Molles' stunning Remaining saga continues in this first novella in the series set in a world ravaged by a virus that has turned 90% of the population into ravenous animals. While Captain Lee Harden struggles to fulfill his part in Project Hometown his trusted friend and ally Major Abe Darabie works to hold up his end of the mission. But caught between his responsibility to the mission and the ambitions of a new president Abe must decide where his duty lies and whom he can trust in a country beset by the rabid infected, violent marauders, and fragile allegiances. Book 1: The Remaining Book
Publisher: Orbit

The Remaining: Trust

A Novella

D.J. Molles

www.orbitbooks.net
www.orbitshortfiction.com

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ONE

The biggest decision of Abe Darabie’s life came on a day that started warm and ended cool. October in Coronado was a trick of nature. During the day, the sun baked the sands along the coast but never seemed to have much effect on the cold Pacific. Then the sun would set, and the winds would gust along the beach, and the sand would begin to feel as cold as moondust.

The fact that they’d shipped them all to Naval Base Coronado told Abe all he needed to know about what was in store for them. He felt out of place in his ACUs. A stranger in a strange land. When he’d first arrived, he’d passed one of the SEAL instructors, a stout man wearing his dark cadre sweatshirt. The instructor had smiled and nodded, like he’d known something Abe didn’t.

Just before dawn on the day of that decision, when the sun was still just a red smudge being birthed on the eastern horizon, the sixty candidates for Project Hometown gathered in a classroom that smelled of humid must and salty sea air. White walls and white linoleum that had seen better days. Fluorescent lighting that seemed overly bright.

At the front of the class, a serious-looking man in khakis and a black polo handed out a single piece of paper to each of them as they entered. Written on it was a solid block of text, and at the bottom, a line marked SIGNATURE. When everyone had found their seats and settled into expectant silence, the man in the black polo read them the entire page in a clear, commanding voice.

Then he interpreted it for them.

“This is essentially a gag order.” He held it up. “If you sign this document, you are pledging to the United States Government, under every penalty you can possibly imagine, that you will never talk about Project Hometown. You won’t write about it. You won’t blog about it. You won’t e-mail people or post it on whatever social networking site you’re into. And you certainly won’t use it to pick up chicks in a bar.”

There was an uncomfortable laugh.

“This is a lifetime order,” the man in the black polo said. “That means from the moment you sign this piece of paper until the day you die. No communication whatsoever with anyone not directly involved in Project Hometown, about anything we do, any of the training you’re about to receive, or anything about the mission itself.” The man tapped the piece of paper with his finger. “Does everybody understand what this document is asking them to promise?”

A bunch of yes sirs.

The man nodded. “Okay. Now fold it up and put it in your pocket.”

The classroom filled with the sounds of rustling papers and Velcro pocket flaps being opened and closed. The sixty of them did as they were told, stowing the paper and stealing confused and sometimes worried glances at each other.

The man in the black polo set the paper facedown on a table in front of him. “You men already know why you’re here, and you know what you’re capable of. So I’ll spare you the ‘hand-picked, best-of-the-best, cream-of-the-crop’ bullshit and get right down to brass tacks.” He planted his hands on his hips. “Twenty-four hours from now, there’s gonna be a bus in the parking lot outside this building. You’re either gonna be on the bus or you’re gonna be in this classroom. Which one is completely and totally up to you. If you are in this classroom tomorrow morning, then you’ll sign that paper I just read to you and find out what this whole Project Hometown thing is about. If you are on the bus, you’ll go back to whatever you were doing before, with our blessing and understanding that the life we’re asking you to live is not for everyone.”

The man’s eyes traveled the classroom, his face becoming very sober. “There’s a reason we’re giving you twenty-four hours to make this decision. You’ve got a chance to make history here, to be a part of something that’s never been done before. To be an integral piece of something that we hope will preserve the American way of life. But you’ll never get any credit for doing it, and your future is a life of hardship and solitude and secrecy. And in the end there is a chance it will consume your entire life, and be that way for a very, very long time. I wish I could explain what I mean by that, but I can’t.” He shook his head slowly. “I do not envy the position you now find yourselves in, but it’s just the way this one goes. It’s not a decision to be made lightly, and I would advise that you make it by yourselves, in the solitude of your individual dorm rooms, and not discussed by committee. This is a decision you can only make for yourselves.”

And then the man in the black polo shirt left the classroom.

They all filed out a moment later, back to their rooms. As they walked, they looked around at each other, catching eye contact and throwing it back with tiny shrugs and motions of doubt. Sequestered in their rooms, they spent the remainder of their time thinking and stewing. The rooms were small and the air conditioning felt overabundant. Meals were delivered to their rooms. Lunch was turkey sandwiches. Dinner, a dubious rendition of chicken Marsala.

Abe slept for a while. He did some pushups, then sit-ups with his feet stuffed beneath the corner of the bed. He sat, propped against the plain headboard, for a while and he considered everything he could possibly consider. But in the end, the closeness of the walls became a hindrance to him. He could not focus. He could not remember the things he had just thought.

At 0200 hours he left his room, feeling tweakish with the desire to be free. The cool October wind came off the Pacific, carrying with it the smell of all things ocean. He dipped back into his room long enough to grab a sweatshirt, and then he ran. Not from anything or toward anything. He just ran. It was not a jog, but a long, protracted sprint of nervous energy. He ran to get his heart rate up, to clear his mind in the thundering silence of his pulse, to cleanse himself with lactic acid.

He found himself on the beach, the shifting sands cool under his feet where they had been hot before. Down the coast, several hundred yards from him, he could see the strings of green lights bobbing in the surf, each a glow stick attached to a SEAL recruit pushing his way through BUD/S. When the wind kicked up, it carried the sounds of their misery to him.

He turned and ran the other way.

North, with the beach to his left.

He didn’t know how long he ran. He went until his feet and legs ached. Until each breath didn’t carry enough oxygen. Until his shoes were so full of sand that they abraded the skin off the balls of his feet. Then he stopped and he planted his hands on his hips and bent over, sucking the salty air out of the ocean wind.

It took him a moment to realize he was not alone.

He straightened up, still breathing hard, and he looked to his right where he could see the dark shape of someone standing there, feet planted where the wet sand met the dry. Abe recognized him from the classroom earlier. He was a little taller than Abe and leaner in the build, as taller men often are. He had intense, searching eyes that belied his otherwise relaxed manner of carrying himself. Abe had noticed him earlier simply for that reason. In a sea of type-A, aggressive personalities, it was rare to come across someone who didn’t puff his chest—literally or figuratively. A man who was comfortable enough with his abilities that he felt no need to show them to the world. And he could have passed himself off as any other profession but a soldier.

Except for the eyes. They gave him away.

The man quirked an eyebrow and spoke in a vaguely southern accent. “You lookin’ for me?”

Abe shook his head. “No. Just running.”

“’Cause you ran right to me.”

Abe just shook his head again, smiling as he sensed a bit of latent humor.

The man looked out at the black ocean. “For a second there I thought I was in trouble for leaving my room. Then I recognized you from the classroom. So I figured you’re just another poor sap trying to figure out what the fuck to do with the rest of his life.”

Abe snorted, then spat in the sand. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

The man extended his hand with a small smile. “Lee Harden, by the way.”

Abe took the man’s hand in his sweaty palm and shook it once. “Abe Darabie. Nice to meet you.” Abe dabbed a bit of sweat from his forehead and turned back in the direction he had come from. “Well, I’ll let you get back to thinking…”

“What do you think this is all about?” the man named Lee asked.

Abe hesitated, worked his jaw. “Yeah, I don’t think we’re supposed to talk about it.”

Lee shrugged. “They said they strongly discouraged it. Didn’t say we couldn’t.”

Abe considered it for a while. Would a discussion with a man he didn’t know really have an effect on his decision? For that matter, had he actually reached a decision? Did he already know what he was going to do?

Maybe.

Abe stretched his back a bit. “Fuck, man…I have no idea.”

Lee laughed. “Yeah. Me neither. Honestly, I can’t really make heads or tails out of what that guy was talking about.”

“Hunting domestic terrorists?” Abe suggested.

Lee bobbled his head, not looking convinced. “What’s up with the ‘life of solitude and secrecy’?”

Abe made a raspberry noise. “What’s up with the damn brain test they gave us?”

Lee shook his head. “That was some weird shit.”

Then they stood in silence for a while, contemplating what was ahead of them, and the silence was not strained but almost familial. The man named Lee heaved a big sigh and stepped backward to avoid an encroaching wave. Abe let the water touch his shoes, waited for it to soak through his socks. Felt the cold sting of it on his toes. Then he stepped back as well and joined Lee in the dry sand.

Abe looked at the other man with some curiosity. “You figured out what you’re gonna do?”

Lee smiled grimly. “Yeah. I guess I have.”

*  *  *

The cold, electronic sound of his watch alarm brought Abe out of his sleep. One of those small noises that snuck its way into dreams and memories and implanted itself there, where it grew and grew out of the background, until your dream self could only focus on that one noise. And then you were awake.

He found himself twisted under cold covers. He always seemed to be tangled up these days. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept peacefully. When he did sleep it was interrupted by twitches and jumps.

His breath fogged the air in front of him. Memories from that long-ago and far-away beach frosted in the chill of the Colorado air, and they shattered and broke apart against his stark reality. They had power, but not for such frivolous things as heat. And certainly not before the sun was on the solar panels. The generators could be used in an emergency, but they sucked up valuable fuel that was needed elsewhere. He’d been told that reopening pipelines and oil refineries was a top priority. But these days everything seemed to be a “top priority,” depending on whom you asked.

He rolled out of his bed, turned on a battery-powered lamp. The light sprang out but fell dead against the walls of the room. Textured walls with homogenous paintings of nonoffensive subject matter hanging on them. He wasn’t sure why he’d kept them on the walls. Perhaps to fool himself into thinking this was still a hotel room, and hotel rooms were temporary. This was all temporary. Things would get better.

Maybe that’s what he was trying to make himself believe.

He walked across the small room to the even smaller bathroom, taking the lamp with him. As he took his morning constitutional piss, he inspected himself in the mirror very deliberately. Very critically. It seemed that every day brought more change to him. The temple of his body slowly collapsing in on itself. Ribs were standing out. Shoulders were sharp. Cheeks hollow.

He scratched at his jet-black beard. Smoothed it out.

Shook himself off, sneering at his image in the mirror.

He had a toothbrush. He had a box of baking soda. He had his two jugs of personal use water. There was a sink in the bathroom, but just like he hadn’t flushed the toilet, neither would he run the sink. It was not his day to partake in the marvel of running water. He was on a Tuesday/Saturday rotation.

He took a big mouthful of water from one of his gallon jugs. He swallowed a bit, held the rest in his mouth, and stuck his toothbrush in to wet it. Then he dabbed the toothbrush into the baking soda and brushed away. Toothpaste could still be had, but it came with a price these days.

He dressed in his usual attire—MultiCam pants, brown thermal, brown fleece cap.

He strapped into his rifle. One in the chamber. Safety on.

He supposed it wasn’t truly necessary, as far into the Green Zone as they were. But he preferred it. The security protocols were not perfect and sometimes some starving wretch got through and chased someone down. And there were the regular people to think about as well. Not all of them were of what one might call “upstanding moral character.”

He made his way to mess. It was just beginning to get noisy. He had his ration card in his pocket—good for his daily allotment of approximately 1,800 calories—but still he bypassed the food that had been prepared for everyone at HQ and grabbed a Styrofoam cup of coffee. Black. No sugar. He knew he should have been hungry, but what he felt was just some greasy emptiness in the pit of himself. He chose to kill it with hot caffeine.

Self-punishment, perhaps.

Well deserved, perhaps.

He made his way to the command center, cup of coffee warming his hand, rifle nudging him in the back as he walked. The command center was one of the large conference rooms in the Hampton Inn and Suites in Greeley, Colorado. The hotel had been converted into their headquarters, and most of the command staff had taken up residence in the rooms, just as Abe had. They were situated on W. 29th Street, which had several other hotels within a block of each other. These had all been repurposed as barracks of sorts. And when they had been filled, they had taken over the Greeley Mall about a quarter mile down the road. In about a fourth of the entire mall, soldiers now slept in the walkways between shops. The rest of the mall had been converted into a sort of “air wing,” and the wide-open parking lot was now cluttered with helicopters and refueling stations.

Their little straight section of W. 29th Street was sometimes referred to as FOB Hampton if one were feeling snarky, but more commonly just The Strip, and it was guarded, just like any military installation. Only military went in and out of that section or had access to anything along it, including the nearby warehouses where all the food and supplies were stored. The civilians in the outlying suburban areas—sometimes packed two or three families to a house—were provided ration cards, though their allotted calories were much less than was afforded to the soldiers. Still, between the rations and some creative scavenging, you could avoid starvation.

The command center was dark, save for a few screens that glowed blue on the faces of a few tired soldiers. One screen showed a map of the Greeley Green Zone. The other showed a map of the entire Green Zone, which stretched out into Fort Morgan, Colorado, and then along the I-76 corridor and into Nebraska, where it stopped at the eastern edge of Lexington.

Abe sipped his coffee, felt it burn in his empty stomach.

Captain Lucas Wright appeared beside him, holding his own cup of coffee and rubbing his face. The Coordinator for what had once been the State of New York, Lucas was an odd-looking little redheaded man, but he was one of the best operators Abe had ever met.

Lucas eyed his superior up and down. Knew the look on Abe’s face and gave a wry smile. “Burning couch day?”

Abe cracked a smile back. It was a reference to one of Abe’s favorite comic strips. A guy named Dilbert, aptly describing how “motivation” feels when it so tragically fails to motivate you. An observation that, rather than feeling “light and energetic,” failed motivation felt more like being pinned under a burning couch. It had since entered into the lexicon of Abe and Lucas’s personal communications. A way to express their misery without de-motivating the others around them. A secret language of sorts.

“Yeah.” Abe nodded tiredly. “Burning couch day.”

Lucas drummed his fingers on his Styrofoam cup. “Well. Let’s get to it, then.”

The two of them crossed to the far corner of the command center, where an area had been sectioned off with cubicle walls. Inside were a long table, several chairs, a projector, a small white screen, and a computer. This was the area specifically reserved for Abe and his Coordinators. They went in and closed the door behind them. It was limited privacy, but they made do.

The cubicle walls were cluttered with images. A collage that paid homage to the call signs of all the Coordinators inside the Greeley Green Zone. All their call signs were references to the states they were assigned to. Abe’s state was Colorado, and his call sign was “Rocky.” For him, there was a picture of Stallone, sweaty and black-eyed after a bout with Apollo Creed. Lucas’s call sign was “Yankee,” and for him there was a New York Yankees bumper sticker taken from a sporting goods store. Captain Tyler Bowden, currently on a supply run to his assigned state of North Dakota, had been given the call sign of “Fargo.” His picture was from the movie poster.

Abe took off his rifle and set it on the table, then took a seat. “Go ahead.”

Lucas reclined a bit in his chair and consulted a manila folder lying in front of him on the table. Inside were a few loose pieces of paper that he perused. “Tyler’s convoy is expected today. Probably around midday. Once Fargo Group gets back, North Dakota is pretty much tapped out. We still have two more bunkers in South Dakota to empty out.”

Abe listened distractedly. He inspected his thumb, the cuticles rough and chewed. Finally, when he realized he had completely lost what Lucas was telling him, he made eye contact with the other man. “Lucas.” Abe leaned forward. “Skip the bullshit.”

Lucas clenched his jaw. Then he closed the manila folder. A long sigh, while staring at his coffee. Then finally, “Sergeant Ramirez made contact with us late last night. He claims to have eyes on but that he’s not in yet.”

Abe frowned. “What the hell does that mean?”

“He says Lee has a compound. A couple compounds, actually. Kind of like our Green Zone but not as well protected. Ramirez is just trying to find a way in. But he says it shouldn’t be long. Apparently they’re not picky about who they let in.”

Abe tapped the table. Swallowed to fill the hole in his gut. “Because Lee’s doing his fucking job—rescue and rebuild. Doing Project Hometown how it was supposed to be.” He shook his head and glared at Lucas. “And here we sit. Suckling the tit.”

Lucas shifted in his chair, looking uncomfortable.

“What about the others?” Abe said.

“No word from the sniper team. And none from Tomlin.”

“But they’re close.”

“Yeah.” Lucas nodded. “Close.”

A rap at the door turned their heads.

“Come in,” Abe called.

A younger kid of some Latino descent stuck his head in. He wore ACUs with corporal’s stripes. Name of Nunez. “Sir, Colonel Lineberger and the president would like to see you.”

Abe glanced at his watch, his expression sour. “It’s five thirty in the morning. Isn’t it a little early for their brief?”

The corporal hesitated. “Sorry, sir.”

Abe growled, “I’m coming.”

The corporal left, closing the door behind him.

In the silence, Abe and Lucas stared at each other. Without realizing it, Abe had begun to bite at the cuticles of his thumb. Didn’t even register it until he felt a sting of pain and looked down to see a tiny spot of blood welling where he’d been a little too vigorous. He blotted his thumb on his pants and held it under the table like he was embarrassed by it.

Lucas spoke quietly. “We doin’ the right thing here, boss?”

Abe stood up, took another scalding gulp of coffee. “Fuck if I know what that is anymore.”

*  *  *

The president of the United States of America stayed in the “penthouse” suite at the top of the Hampton Inn and Suites of Greeley, Colorado. Less than lavish, but better than most. They didn’t waste any of their power on trivialities like elevators, so it was a hike up four flights of stairs to the door guarded by the two men in black fatigues and tactical vests.

Abe nodded to them.

“Morning, sir,” one of them said.

Abe just mumbled back, “Yeah. Morning.”

They opened the door for him, and Abe stepped through. Inside, there were a few plush chairs surrounding a table. At the head of the table was President Briggs, facing Abe as he walked in. To his right was Colonel Lineberger. To his left was a man Abe thought he recognized but wasn’t quite sure.

Briggs stood from his chair and smiled. He was not particularly stately. Not what you would picture for a senator. He was tall, but his form was lanky. He had a curly head of salt-and-pepper hair that was plentiful for his age, but it seemed just a little too wild for the grooming standards associated with politics. His facial structure was severe, particularly in his nose and cheekbones, where the skin seemed thinly stretched over sharp rock. But for all of those atypical features, Briggs was pleasantly soft-spoken, and he addressed everyone with a familiar tone that made strangers feel like old friends.

“Major Darabie,” he said. “I apologize for the early call, but I wanted to make sure you had a chance to meet Mr. Daniels before we implemented a small change moving forward.”

Abe stepped forward and, as he reached the table, the unknown man stood up and extended his hand. Abe assumed this was the Mr. Daniels that Briggs had spoken of. He hesitated for a brief moment, almost unnoticeable, and then took Daniels’s hand.

“Small changes?” Abe questioned, looking to Briggs.

It was Colonel Lineberger who spoke up to answer, and the president nodded along with what he said. “Mr. Daniels is actually the CEO of Cornerstone, if you are aware of them. The president and Mr. Daniels know each other from previous contracts, and we have unanimously decided to allow Mr. Daniels’s group to begin taking over some of the jobs our soldiers are holding inside the Green Zone.” Lineberger smiled confidently. “Which will help free up our men for other operations.”

Abe stood there at the end of the table for a moment, somewhat stiffly, his two index fingers tapping lightly on the tabletop as he considered what he’d just been told. He was well aware of Cornerstone, though the current name of the military contracting company was only its most recent iteration. It seemed they changed names each time they became tied to something unpopular, and this was the third one they’d been through in the last decade. Abe wasn’t going to stand there and try to take moral high ground on Daniels. But there were other, myriad concerns that came along with jumping into bed with someone like Daniels and something like Cornerstone.

Abe looked to Daniels. “Mercenaries don’t work for free,” he stated in an open-ended manner, not able to hide the distrust in his voice.

Daniels nodded without offense. “I’ve got eighty-five personnel with me, and almost all of them have families. And, as you’re well aware, food is scarce.” Daniels motioned to Lineberger and Briggs. “They’ve agreed to replace my personnel and their families’ civilian ration cards with military ration cards. So we’re literally working for our food. And the security of my company’s families.”

Abe raised one eyebrow. “Really?”

Daniels shifted in his seat. “Major Darabie, my men are all highly trained operators from top-tier organizations from around the globe…”

Abe smiled without humor. “Mr. Daniels, you don’t have to sell me on anything. It sounds like you’ve already got the job.” Abe turned to Briggs, deliberately ignoring Lineberger. “And can I ask what duties Mr. Daniels and his group will be taking over?”

“They’ll be taking over interior patrols within the Greeley Green Zone.” Slight hesitation. “And some primary guarding functions here on The Strip.”

“Primary guarding functions,” Abe echoed quietly. He became very still. He searched out eye contact from Briggs and spoke directly. “Mr. President, can I speak with you briefly in private?”

Briggs’s congenial smile faltered for just a split second. Colonel Lineberger took a breath to speak, and Abe had no doubt it was going to be swift, and heated, and directed at him, but Briggs held up a hand and quickly spoke over him. “Of course. Major Darabie and I have things that we need to discuss.” He looked at the other men, each in turn. “Colonel Lineberger. Mr. Daniels. No need for either of you to leave. The major and I will get some fresh air and be back in a minute.”

They both nodded respectfully to Briggs.

Lineberger shot Abe a venomous look that Abe mostly ignored.

Daniels just smiled at him. Proof that he wasn’t perturbed at all.

Like Abe’s opinion was just a fart in a windstorm to him.

The president stood and gestured toward the balcony doors behind them. Beyond them, the sky was just beginning to color, and it looked gray and overcast, perhaps promising the first snow of the year. When they stepped out, cold air locked around them and it smelled of wetness and pines.

Briggs spoke first. “What’s on your mind, Major?”

Other words were left unspoken but were clear in tone and expression. Abe liked Briggs as much as he despised Lineberger, but he would never fool himself into believing they were friends. He knew that his status in the relationship was that of “the guy with the supplies.” Briggs and Lineberger would never come out and say as much, but everything they did seemed calculated to take advantage of Abe as much as possible without truly pissing him off to the point that he would disobey their direct orders and not allow them access to the bunkers. Lineberger did it ham-fistedly, but Briggs usually accomplished it with grace.

Or as Lucas so eloquently put it, They’re both fucking us in the ass. But at least Briggs lubes it up and eases it in slowly.

They knew that Abe’s sense of duty was his primary motivation. But Abe also sensed that they were both uncomfortable not having complete control over him. They were both treading uncharted waters here. They came from massive bureaucracies where leadership came from a title or a rank, and not from the character of the man who was leading. If someone in that system didn’t fall in line, the system would deal with him, and there would be hundreds of others waiting in line to take his place. And so the cog work continued on.

But here and now, all of that had been stripped away. Now they led without any real idea of what they were going to do if someone like Major Darabie simply told them “no.”

Abe planted his hands in his pants pockets. He clenched them to warm them. Or perhaps because he was irritated. “Primary guarding functions, sir?” He looked away. “You mean they’re gonna be guarding the food supply.”

“You have concerns about Mr. Daniels’s capabilities?”

What Abe wanted to say was, I have concerns about your motivations, but he decided to err on the side of diplomacy. “I have a lot of concerns, sir. I’m concerned about having people guard something that we’re using to pay them with. I’m concerned that we barely have enough to keep civilians from starving and we’re shelling out military ration cards to complete strangers. And if I’m being completely frank, sir, I’m concerned that this is a political move, rather than a practical one.”

Briggs’s face clouded somewhat. He closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Major, I wish there were some way to make you trust me. But all I can do is assure you that there is nothing political in my motivations. It’s purely practical.” He looked at Abe. “You’re right. We’re stretched thin. But we’re only restrained by our access to supplies. If I could get you and your Coordinators a stronger military presence, we could reach out into the coastal areas—the most populous areas with the largest amounts of supplies—and access those bunkers that we’ve pretty much had to write off. But I can’t get you the man power to take on that dangerous of a mission when they’re all tied up doing police work and guard duty inside the Green Zone!”

Abe spoke calmly. “There’s a reason the bunkers were spread out over the states. Because each was supposed to go to that state, not be all bunched into one area in the Midwest. They were put there as a holdover until rebuilding could occur. Not as a permanent source of supplies.” Abe looked out at the concrete sprawl around them. “The Yellow Zones are almost nothing but cropland. Why aren’t we using them? Planning for agriculture? Why aren’t we looking at the long haul? If you would just let Project Hometown do what it was supposed to do—”

“Major.” Briggs’s voice was a little sharper. “Project Hometown is doing what we need it to do. Sometimes the mission changes. Sometimes the initial plan is not practical, as it is not practical in the situation that we now find ourselves. We have reestablished our central, federal government here in Greeley. And from here we can branch out and reestablish order in the outlying areas. And you know how I know that it’s going to work? Because that’s how we did it before.”

Briggs shook his head. “Project Hometown has all the states divided into their own little microcosms. But you can’t un-slice a damn pie. You think all the little mini-governments that Project Hometown would have fostered would all just suddenly come together in the spirit of American patriotism? No! We’d stay fractured and divided because there would be no reason to come together. If you truly want to rebuild America how it was, then you have to see things my way, Major. You have to see that we need to establish control here and then expand. Not establish forty-eight mini-governments and hope and pray they come together.”

Abe breathed slowly out of his nose and planted his hands on the rail of the balcony. The metal was frigid against his palms. The underside was covered in grime that flaked away onto his fingers. He wanted to argue with Briggs, but the man was making a valid point. There was a certain logic to it.

Briggs eyed his major. “Do I need to worry about you, Major?”

Abe returned the look, letting the affront show on his face. “No, sir. You don’t need to worry about me. But you need to understand that you’re asking me to do things I was never meant to do. I wasn’t trained to sit in a goddamned command center and arrange convoys for supplies. I was trained to be working with people, to be in the field, rebuilding something. Now I’m fucking”—he waved his hand with exasperation—“glorified logistics.”

Briggs smiled. “And I was supposed to be living a senator’s life. Not some hodgepodge president, trying to piece together the scraps of a broken country. Did I ever think about the presidency? Of course I did. But I thought about it in terms of Air Force One and big State of the Union addresses.” He looked around them. “Not the Hampton Inn and Suites in Greeley, Colorado, trying to figure out how we’re going to keep everyone from starving to death come winter.”

Abe chuffed at the dismal irony of the situation.

Briggs put a hand on his shoulder. “I know I’ve asked a lot of you. But I’ve asked a lot of everyone. We’ve all done things we’d rather we didn’t have to do. But these are unforgiving times, and decisions have to be made using logic and practicality unlike any this country has considered in a long, long time.”

Abe nodded.

“How is the North Carolina issue?” Briggs asked softly.

Abe felt just the mention of it stiffen him. He considered his words and spoke them carefully. “We have boots on the ground. We’ve heard from one operative and he says he’s getting close to making contact. We’re still waiting on the other two operatives we sent.”

Briggs just regarded him, and he seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but then decided against it. Knuckles rapping on glass drew their attention to the sliding balcony doors where Lucas was standing, eyebrows raised, looking right at Abe and pointing his thumb behind him rapidly.

Abe felt his stomach clench as he pulled open the door. “Captain Wright,” he said formally. “What’s the problem?”

The words tumbled out of Lucas. “Fargo Group is being hit hard just outside of Cheyenne. Tyler needs backup yesterday…”

Abe didn’t wait to be dismissed and neither did Lucas. They were already heading for the door.

TWO

They took the stairs two at a time, breathing hard by the time they emerged out of the lobby. It was still not quite dawn and everything hung in frosty blues and grays, with just a bare blush to the east. A gray Chevrolet Tahoe idled at the curb—Abe considered it his vehicle, because it was mostly his gear stowed in the back, though all the Coordinators used it from time to time.

Lucas ran to the driver’s side and Abe threw himself into the backseat and immediately began reaching over into the cargo area and heaving his gear into the seat with him. The SUV rocketed forward out of the hotel roundabout, slamming Abe back into his seat. He worked through it, undeterred. Pulled his flak over his head. Started checking magazines and weapons.

The center console of the Tahoe had been ripped out and replaced with a haphazard mount that held a SINCGARS radio on it. Lucas grabbed the handset as he steered them into a tight turn with one hand. He yammered into the handset, hailing their air wing as they accelerated down W. 29th Street toward the mall.

After a brief pause, they acknowledged. “You’ve got Copperhead-Six; go ahead.”

“Copperhead, I’m about two minutes out. What do you have spooled up for us?” Lucas had apparently already called ahead to prep some QRF.

“Yankee-Six, I got you two Blackhawks and a Little Bird. Sorry, but that’s all I can get in the air this quickly.”

“Fuck me,” Abe griped as he slapped his helmet down onto his head.

Lucas shook his head, keyed up again. “Copperhead-Six, I appreciate it. We’re gonna need two open seats on one of those Blackhawks for myself and Rocky-Six.”

“Yeah. Roger. We got you.”

Lucas signed off, tossed the handset on the radio as he pulled into the parking lot of the mall, and gassed it toward two Blackhawks with the rotors already spinning.

Abe glanced at him as he slung his rifle over his vest and worked his shoulders around to settle it down onto his frame. “You’re not goin’ out without your flak, Lucas.”

“I got it.” Lucas threw a thumb behind him. “It’s in the back under all your shit.”

“And I’d rather grab a seat on the Little Bird.”

Lucas threw the vehicle in park several yards out of the rotor-wash of a Blackhawk and yanked the keys out. As they tumbled out of the SUV, the thunderous noise of the machines engulfed them, the wind batting at their clothes, filling their mouths with dust and cold air.

Lucas leaned in close as he moved to the rear of the vehicle and threw open the tailgate. “You’re the boss, boss. You can grab a seat wherever the hell you want.”

“Fine. I’m in the Little Bird.”

“Rog.” Lucas hefted his plate carrier out from under a black duffel containing some of Abe’s heavier equipment. He threw the carrier over his head and grabbed his M4 from the back, slapping pouches to make sure they contained magazines.

Abe poked him with a finger. “You take one of the Blackhawks.”

Lucas looked at him, confused.

“In case one of us goes down,” Abe shouted.

Lucas nodded and the two men ran from the SUV, splitting directions. Lucas went for the first Blackhawk, where ten soldiers were already seated, looking a little too scuffed up to be coming fresh out of the barracks. They all leaned forward in their seats, looking out of the rolling doors to see who would be joining them. They gave no sign of pleasure or displeasure when they saw Captain Lucas Wright heading for them. Maybe a little bit of relief that they weren’t stuck with an idiot. They reached out and offered a hand, hoisting Lucas into the cargo area.

Abe ran by them, ducking instinctively from the rotors whizzing loudly overhead. The Little Bird was positioned just a short jog away, the pilot looking at him and circling his finger in the air—generally used for on the move, but more colloquially used for let’s hurry the fuck up.

Two soldiers straddled the outboard bench on the starboard side, and one on the port, holding up a lanyard for Abe and ready to strap him in. Abe took the bench, interlocked his feet underneath it, and felt the man behind him clip the lanyard to his strap and slap him on the shoulder. Maybe he said something, too, but his voice was washed away with the wind.

The copilot was leaning between the seats, thrusting an extra headset at him.

Abe took it, flexed it over his helmet so the head strap was against the back of his neck. It didn’t fit very well over his helmet and barely drowned out the rotors. He felt the sudden downward thrust, and then the unsettling feeling of being lifted as the pilot dusted off. Abe looked out, saw the ground rapidly falling away beneath his feet, and felt that old familiar tingle of fear in his toes, like at any moment he could just fall off this thing.

He had never been a fan of heights.

Abe cranked the boom mike to his mouth and spoke into it. “Mike check. You copy?”

“Yeah, we got you,” said a calm voice that could only be a pilot. “Welcome, Major. We’re call sign Copperhead-One-Three. Those big fat bastards down there are Copperhead-Two-One and Two-Five. Captain Wright’ll be in Two-Five.”

Abe acknowledged.

With their ragtag air wing consisting of only five MH-6 Little Birds and seven UH-60 Blackhawks, of which they could only seem to keep a third in working order at any time, it had been decided that, for simplicity’s sake, they would all answer under Copperhead, with specific numeric designations under that. “One” for Little Birds and “Two” for Blackhawks.

Under them, Two-Five and Two-One lifted their bulks off the pavement and raced upward with alarming speed for something so big.

The calm pilot’s voice: “Alright, let’s punch it. Copperhead-One-Three to Copperhead-Six, we’re clear the flight line and en route to Fargo Group, about twenty mikes out. We’ll be switching to go direct with Fargo.”

“Copy,” was command’s only reply.

They hit a point in their climb where they escaped from the shadow of the earth and suddenly the cockpit was yellow with sunlight. Abe shivered in the wind but felt a warm patch, glowing on the back of his neck and the side of his face. The landscape below was still dark and blue-green. The Rocky Mountains in the distance looming up out of the darkness, their white-capped peaks flashing brightly in the morning light. In the flatlands under his feet, the strange circular pattern of crops divided the landscape into even sections, reminding Abe of green quilt-work.

“Major, you’re direct.” A voice hovered in his ear.

Abe flexed his hands and toes to keep blood moving in them. “Rocky-Six to Fargo-Six, how copy?”

A smattering of gunfire in the background. Then: “Rocky-Six, you’ve got Fargo-Two. Stand by for a second, Major. Cap’s a little busy.”

Abe waited in the cold, deafening loudness. His eyes watered. He checked his watch and found that it had only been two minutes since they’d left the ground. He had the urge to look behind him at the Blackhawks that he knew were in tow, but he knew it would only give him that strange feeling of almost falling. He kept his eyes straight ahead.

Crackle. Gunfire. “Rocky-Six, you’ve got Fargo Actual. Major, I got us in a bit of a spot right now.”

Abe felt relief at the sound of Tyler’s voice. “It’s all good, Captain. We’re inbound with Copperhead. Gimme that sitrep.”

Tyler’s voice was strained but not panicked. “We’re on the bridge over the rail yard in Cheyenne. Southbound lanes. When we hit the bridge, an IED went off right behind the last vehicle in our convoy. We hauled ass, thinking it was a late fuse, but they had the bridge blockaded with a shit-ton of cars about halfway across. And while we were figuring that out, they blocked the other entrance with another shit-ton of cars. So right now, we’re trapped on a fucking bridge. Break.”

Abe stared at the side of the airframe, began picking at what he had heard. Use of an IED meant some sort of technical knowledge with explosives. Then they used it to spur the entire convoy onto the bridge, because they knew they wouldn’t stop when the explosion went off. And then they had them blocked in on both sides. It seemed smart.

Who the fuck does that? His mind grappled with it. Who knew we were going to be through there? Who knew how to get our convoy locked on the bridge?

They’d dealt with bandits before, but usually bandits popped off a couple rounds and realized they were heavily outgunned. And then they hightailed it. Some of them stuck around and tried to fight it out—the more desperate ones. But they were rare.

This seemed different.

Tyler continued. “Right now we’re all out of the trucks, hugging concrete. We’re taking steady, continuous sniper fire from three…no, four buildings that I can see. We’re down three guys—one KIA, the other two wounded pretty badly. Over.”

“Alright, we are about fifteen minutes out. Can you give us a description of the hostile buildings?”

“Yeah. At the north end of the bridge it’s two bigger buildings—a brownstone building and a red brick building—one on either side of the road. Then we’re also taking fire from a building to the west of us, down in the rail yard. It’s a funky-looking building…trilevel…with metal roofing. Over.”

Abe nodded to himself. “Rocky-Six copies. Hey, Fargo, you think we can land a couple birds on those roofs? Over.”

“Uh…” Something cracked very close to the radio mike, and Tyler let out a yelp. “Whoa…fuck…uh, yeah, reference rooftops…they seem pretty sturdy. You should be good to go.”

“Alright. Copperhead, you copy those building descriptions?”

The helicopter pilots checked in by call sign, indicating they had it.

“Copperhead, I want a top-down assault on the two buildings on the north end of the bridge and the trilevel building in the rail yard.” Abe took a breath, fidgeted with the boom mike again. “Two-One, take the brownstone on the north side of the bridge. Two-Five, take the red brick on the north side of the bridge. One-Three, I want us on the trilevel in the rail yard.” Abe repeated it for clarity’s sake, then asked for acknowledgment.

Everyone copied.

“Two-One and Two-Five, give your gunners a pass around the buildings to soften them up before you hit.” Abe racked his brain, trying to think if there was anything else he was missing. Any little element that would haunt him later as he lay awake, thinking about how he could have done it better. “As soon as we can clear a safe landing zone, we’ll need you guys to medevac the wounded to the Green Zone. That’s all I have for now.”

Abe then sat there, his legs tucked under the outboard benches, his ass beginning to ache from the tension, and the minutes went by as slowly as the creeping landscape below them. It did not take long for the urgency of the moment to give way to being pissed because he’d seen this shit coming. He’d told Colonel Lineberger that they needed to use the Little Birds for daily recon along the convoy routes, but the colonel had refused to approve the fuel usage. Said they needed to save it for QRF situations. To which Abe had responded that if they reconned the routes, they would have less QRF situations.

The colonel had not been convinced.

For him, it was about the longevity of his operations, not the longevity of his men. In his eyes, there was a date somewhere in their black, unknown future, when they would not have any more fuel to run the birds. His only concern was extending that date as far out as possible.

This should have never fucking happened.

The headset hummed and cracked. The pilot spoke. “Copperhead-One-Three to Fargo-Six. I’ve got visual on a bit of a smoke cloud. Is that you guys?”

A momentary wait. “Copperhead, that’s correct. That’s us. Smoke’s from the IED that went off.”

“Fargo-Six, we copy. We’re ETA five mikes out right now. Have your men hold their return fire as we come in. How copy?”

“Yeah, I copy. Hold fire for insert.”

Abe leaned out just slightly, overcoming the sensation that he would fall. Out beyond the bubble of the cockpit, he could see the little brown smudge on the horizon that the pilot had been speaking of. It seemed incredibly far away, but Abe knew they would be on top of it soon enough.

“Rocky-Six to Copperhead group,” Abe called. “Two-One and Two-Five, kick out ahead of us. Take a pass at the trilevel building in the train yard on your way to your buildings. See if you can’t take a few of them out.”

“Two-Five copies; we’ll take lead.”

Almost as an afterthought, Abe raised Tyler quickly. “What floors of the hostile buildings are you taking the most fire from?”

“Stand by,” came Tyler’s strained response.

Abe waited. The black smudge on the horizon had dissipated, but it still marked their objective, and Abe could see the patchwork of farmland beginning to turn into winding, centipedal neighborhood streets, and then into boulevards with businesses clustered along either side.

Tyler came back on the line and gave them a quick lowdown. On the trilevel building, most of the muzzle flashes were coming from the top level. On the brownstone and the red brick buildings to the north, the muzzle flashes were scattered around the top two levels, but they were clustered toward the street.

The two Blackhawks had moved ahead of the Little Bird now, and they began descending toward the gray and brown urban terrain below them. Abe felt the feeling of weightlessness as the Little Bird dropped altitude, trailing behind its two larger counterparts by maybe a mile.

He checked his rifle again. One in the chamber. Safety off.

He turned, looked through the open backend of the helicopter to the soldiers on the other side. He caught their eyes and gave them a thumbs-up with raised eyebrows and mouthed, You good? They both gave thumbs-up. Abe craned his neck to look behind him. The soldier to his back slapped him on the shoulder and thrust a thumbs-up into his face.

Get your mind right. Focus.

He pictured it all. Visualized it. Stepping down smoothly from the helicopter onto the roof. Descending into the building below, silent and unheard. He pictured going through a door and seeing a man shooting from a window. In his mind, he put his rifle on the man and pulled the trigger twice, crumpling him. He was quick and he was accurate. He was controlled.

Abe could feel his heart starting to hammer. Up ahead, the scene came out of the smoky haze like a camera lens focusing. The big, open, dusty space below them was the train yard, with all its long lines of dilapidated trains just sitting, waiting to be loaded and dispersed across the Union-Pacific Railway. Bisecting the rail yard were two bridges, each with two lanes of the highway—north- and southbound lanes. He could see the cluster of mismatched army-green and desert-tan vehicles stranded in the middle of the southbound bridge and the dots of men scrambling for cover around them. In the rail yard, he could see the trilevel building, and just beyond that, he could see what he thought was the brownstone and the red brick buildings to the north.

Abe swallowed, controlled his breathing.

The two Blackhawks banked to the right, then back to the left, flying low. Abe watched the small green figure of the door gunner swing his M240 up and around toward the trilevel building and suddenly the muzzle was spitting yellow. Gouts of smoke flowed from the machine, the tracers lancing out and pounding the top floor of the building, obliterating glass and turning the walls to dust and chunks of concrete.

Copperhead-Two-Five went nose down and sped off as Two-One came in behind it, and then repeated the treatment.

The Little Bird banked, and Abe was stuck to the outboard bench only by centrifugal force. He watched the world pitch up toward him until he was almost staring directly at the ground, and then it fell away just as rapidly, and Abe was staring at sky. It was a dizzying transition, but then they leveled out and the trilevel building was directly in front of them.

Abe felt the lanyard being removed from him. He felt momentarily vulnerable. Forced himself to unhook his legs from under the outboard bench. Why did he want to ride the Little Bird again?

Better view of the battlefield.

He spun on the bench so he was facing out. He leaned over and unclipped the lanyard from the soldier next to him. Both rifles came up, already looking for targets. Going to windows and doorways and any open space or shadow that might hold a threat. Below them, the white roof of the trilevel building grew until it dominated their vision. Abe could feel them slowing for their touch-and-go.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Stay calm and controlled.

Take it to ’em.

For a split second, just before the helicopter touched the roof, it rotated just far enough for Abe to see the bridge on the other side of the railway. And the base of it, on the southern side, clustered with cars and completely barricaded. But the cars seemed to squirm like something alive, and Abe didn’t realize what he was looking at until he was sliding off the outboard bench.

There must be hundreds of them…

His feet hit the ground.

Just before he ripped off the headset, Abe heard the pilot of Copperhead-One-Three say, “Boots down.”

THREE

Infected.

Abe came down in a half crouch. The roar of the rotors kicked up and Copperhead-One-Three lifted off away from them. Abe’s gut immediately twisted up inside of him. There had to be at least a hundred of them—maybe more. And they were moving fast, the frontrunners already hurdling over the gridlock of vehicles at the south end of the bridge. And Tyler and his group were too busy keeping their heads down to notice them coming.

How long? Abe tried to calculate, tried to register how quickly the infected were moving and how much distance they had to cover. It’s a long bridge. But at a dead sprint? Maybe a few minutes max.

Abe scanned the rooftop, urgency punching through his practiced calm. He needed to find a way down into the building, to stop the threat so that Fargo Group could defend itself. And he had very limited time to do it in.

Each of the three levels had its own roof, like a set of tiers, and in the far corner Abe could see a ladder that led to the next tier down. It was the only access point he could see. He didn’t like it because it left them out in the open, but there weren’t many choices at this point.

He ran for it.

The roof around his feet suddenly began to jolt. Black holes began sprouting up, spewing chunks of insulation and plaster into the air like tiny geysers. Abe felt his whole body tighten, like one giant cringe, but he didn’t stop running even as he waited for that bullet to snap up and get him. He planted a hand on the curved rail of the ladder to stop himself, and he looked back.

In the middle of the roof, one of the soldiers was prone, trailing red across the white roof as he crawled toward them. The bullets kept punching up, closer, and then farther away. Someone underneath them, blindly shooting at noises on the roof. One of the rounds exploded right next to the wounded soldier’s head and he became still, unwilling to move anymore.

The other two were crammed in close behind Abe at the ladder. The soldier who had been sitting behind Abe on the ride in lurched out like he was going to make a run for his wounded comrade, but Abe grabbed his arm. He wore sergeant’s stripes, Abe noted.

“Gimme ten seconds!” Abe shouted. “You got a frag?”

The sergeant produced one from his vest.

Abe snatched it out of his hand and pointed at the roof. “Keep his head down!” Then he slapped the other soldier’s arm. “You’re with me!”

The sergeant pointed his rifle at the roof and began letting rounds loose.

Abe grabbed the side rails of the ladder and simply vaulted over the roof. He didn’t know if the other soldier was behind him, but he wasn’t waiting to find out. He hit the next tier of the roof, and he hit it hard, buckling his knees and nearly putting him on his ass. He recovered, stumbling slightly as he pulled the pin and let the paddle fly off the grenade. For a split second he was terrified that he had no place to throw it, but to his right was a long bank of windows, and the ones closest to him were already blown out. He tossed the grenade like a hot potato through the open window, and then he flattened himself up against the wall and hoped it was more substantial than it felt.

He waited, waited, waited, then—BOOM—felt it before he heard it.

Concussion that you could feel in your innards.

The feeling of a full-body impact.

The odd sensation of it ripping suddenly over your skin.

Then he felt a hard slap on his shoulder, and a muffled word came through his ringing, perforated eardrums: “MOVE!”

And he was moving. Rifle up, through the broken bay windows and onto a desk that rattled unsteadily under his feet. Abe looked at the broken jags of glass passing between his legs as he stepped through and thought about them slicing through his inner thigh and opening up his femoral artery. He got both legs in and then jumped off the desk onto a hard linoleum floor.

The interior of the building was dark. Hazy. Billows of smoke stampeded for the open windows. He could see the glow of daylight on the other side of the room. Shadows and shapes flashed across the light. If there were sounds to accompany it—footsteps or shouts—Abe couldn’t hear them. He decided that he didn’t care what the shadows and shapes belonged to.

He was going to shoot them.

One foot in front of the other. Heart heavy and hard in his chest. Like a palpitating brick. He scanned left as he moved. There were cubicles. They were small. Easily cleared with a passing glance. The walls were thin and would provide nothing in the way of cover. He had to keep moving.

The shadows flashed again. Abe fired his rifle through the rapidly clearing haze. Thought he saw a figure fall but couldn’t be sure. He saw a muzzle flash, felt something zip past his face like an angered bee. He resisted the urge to dive for the cubicles and the false sense of protection they gave. They didn’t have time for a firefight. Tyler didn’t have time for it. The wounded soldier on the roof didn’t have time for it. They only had time for quick, decisive action. He had to keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

Muzzle flash again.

Abe fired at it, five shots.

Someone screamed. The sound elated him.

Got him! Got that motherfucker!

He reached a body lying facedown. A young man—that was all Abe registered. Maybe he was dead; maybe he was alive. Maybe Abe had tagged him, or maybe it had been one of the Blackhawk gunners, or maybe it had been the grenade. He still held an M4 carbine. He could have been a threat. Abe didn’t stop to determine. He kicked away the rifle and put a bullet into the back of the skull to make sure.

Abe felt something smack his helmet, and then something punched him in the chest.

Holy shit…

Someone about ten yards in front of him, standing there in the gloom, backlit by the daylight behind him. Pointing a pistol at Abe, his feet dancing. Something that Abe called “happy feet,” which was a bit of a misnomer. When someone was so terrified that they could not decide whether to continue fighting or flee, their legs would dance around, caught in indecision.

Abe was still coming at him. He fired once, then felt the bolt lock back, and the next reflexive trigger pull was just empty movement. The man before him stumbled back and Abe thought he had caught him in the chest, but he was far from dead. He was raising the pistol again. Abe was close, and getting closer. He dropped the rifle, let the sling carry it down to his weak side as he grabbed his sidearm.

Abe came within arm’s distance. He juked left off the X, slapped out at the man’s pistol coming up. The pistol swung away, firing impotently into the haze. Abe was in close now, and he tucked his own pistol up tightly into his body as he bore down on the terrified man. Then he thrust out, pulling the pistol back just before it touched the man’s clavicle, and then fired three shots in a downward trajectory, each one punching through the bottom of the man’s neck and traveling down through his body where they punched through organs and vertebrae and the pelvic bone and came out through the man’s leg, groin, and anus.

He toppled to the ground, structurally unsound.

The look on the dead man’s face was one of fear and confusion.

Just like the young man before him, Abe kicked the pistol from his grip and finished him.

Abe stood there over him and coughed, his chest feeling raw. He forced himself to bring the pistol up, scan around for any additional threats. He registered a few more bodies on the ground. None of them was moving. There were no immediate threats.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. “You good?”

Abe still held his pistol punched out, twisting from side to side, scanning more out of reflex than anything else. His weak hand left his weapon and went first to his head. He felt the divot in his helmet, but it was shallow. Just a glancing blow. Then he touched his chest, aiming for where it ached, but his finger hit his front chicken plate. Felt the little pieces of the smashed projectile still caught up between the fabric and the plate.

Abe coughed again. “I’m good. I’m good. It hit the plate.” He turned to the soldier. “Who’s got comms?” As he said it, he looked out the bank of windows to the southern end of the bridge and could see the crowd of tattered, ungodly souls scrambling over the barricade of cars at the bottom.

The soldier jerked his thumb behind them. “Sarge.”

Abe sprinted back down the hall, over the bodies of men he had not seen at first. There were at least five or six of them. He jumped onto the desk and quickly but gingerly negotiated the broken glass around the frame. Once outside, he could hear the noise of the infected between the beat of helicopter rotors—the grating, screaming, screeching noise that Abe had come to hate so much.

He grabbed the ladder and hauled up it. “Sergeant!” he yelled as he climbed. “Sergeant!”

He reached the top. The sergeant was crouched over the wounded soldier, working a Combat Application Tourniquet onto his bloodied thigh. The wounded man was still conscious, still upright, but he was looking at the sky and his gaze was taking on that drunken and vacant aspect that was a sure sign of blood loss. The sergeant used the tourniquet rod to torque it down on the wounded soldier’s leg, then he looked back at Abe.

“Sir?”

“I need your radio! Quick!”

The sergeant dipped his head toward Abe. “I’m plugged in. You’re gonna hafta grab it.”

Abe could see the man’s hands were occupied trying to keep his man from bleeding out. The sergeant wore the radio headset, with his helmet over it. Abe leaned down over him and removed the man’s helmet, then snatched off the headset. He started searching the sergeant’s chest rig. “Where’s the button? Where’s the fucking button?”

The sergeant snatched a black circle from one of the MOLLE loops of his vest and thrust it at Abe. “Right here.”

Abe grabbed the button and depressed it with one hand as the other put the headset up to his ear, the boom mike jutting out awkwardly. “Fargo-Six! Fargo-Six! You’ve got infected moving up the bridge at you! How copy?”

Tyler’s only response was, “I got it! I got it!”

“Rocky-Six to Copperheads, I need guns on those infected pushing the south end of the bridge. Can either of you respond?”

Calm. “Two-One, copies. We’re en route.”

“Two-Five, we copy.”

Abe stood there on the highest tier of the trilevel building, looking out across a big dirty expanse of rail yard. Off to the left came the heavy beating sounds of the Blackhawks, their door gunners loading fresh cases of ammunition. The two birds angled and pivoted, one following the other. They split as they rode low over the tops of Fargo Group’s vehicles in the middle of the bridge, one Blackhawk taking one side of the bridge and one taking the other. They dipped down low for a brief moment, like a shark might dive so that it can achieve a more powerful breach. The sound of their rotors changed, turned from basal to almost a sharp, knocking sound. Abe watched the dust across the rail yard kick up, the Blackhawks slowing into a hover, and then they rose, cleared the sides of the bridge, and the door gunners opened up.

It was a bloody, chaotic spectacle. The bright streaks of tracer fire flashed in the early morning light, and they chewed through flesh and concrete, sending small figures crumpling and flailing to the ground. The Copperhead door gunners had the bridge in a crossfire that ground those poor, mad bastards to pieces, and then Fargo Group added their own to the mix, someone finally manning one of the fifty turrets on their gun trucks.

Abe stood there watching it. Watching the infected run blindly into the raking cross fire, like their feet were not on the asphalt of a bridge but rather a conveyor belt, pulling each of them to their violent end. He turned his attention to the other two buildings at the north end of the bridge. He squinted to see the details of them, but several things were obvious. Most of the windows facing him were broken out and thick clouds of rapidly dissipating gray smoke were pouring from them.

Frag and clears, Abe noted.

The other obvious thing was the lack of muzzle flashes coming from the building. No one was firing at Fargo Group on the bridge. If they were alive at all, they were focused on the two teams of soldiers inside the building with them.

Abe keyed the radio. “Rocky-Six to Yankee-Six or any other unit that came off the Blackhawks.”

There was a long pause. And Abe had time to think about the men in those two buildings, maybe one or two of them having a radio, looking around, wondering how they should relay to Major Darabie that Captain Wright was KIA.

But then: “Rocky-Six, stand by for Yankee-Six.”

Abe took a deep breath. Felt his heart tapping against the inside of his throat.

Out on the bridge, the gunfire had come to a stop. Abe could no longer see the shapes of the infected running wildly toward Fargo Group’s convoy.

It’s okay. We did it. We got it done.

“You got Yankee-Six. Go ahead, Major.”

“What do you have over there, Lucas?”

“All enemy combatants are down. We have two wounded in need of medevac ASAP.”

Abe nodded absently. “Rocky-Six to Fargo-Six. What’s your situation on wounded?”

“Uh…four wounded. Three in need of medevac.”

“Rocky-Six to Copperhead-Two-One. You guys switch to medevac role, you copy?”

“Two-One copies.”

Abe pointed to the bridge, though he doubted anyone in the helicopter was looking. “Grab Fargo Group’s wounded, then the wounded from the two buildings on the north end, and then we have one for pickup as well. Should be six total.”

Two-One copied and Abe quickly instructed Two-Five to maintain a flyover in case their door gunners were needed again. He watched one of the big birds turn and bank back toward the north end of the bridge, while the other rose and arced into the sky for overwatch. He directed his attention down again, to the sergeant whose radio Abe was still holding, still tethered to the man’s vest by electronic cords. He was bent over the wounded man, now stuffing the hole in his leg with gauze soaked in coagulating agent. The wounded soldier was moaning, but he was close to passing out, just barely feeling the fiery sting of the coagulating agent reacting with his blood.

Abe knelt down next to the sergeant. “He gonna be all right?”

The sergeant shrugged, avoided eye contact with Abe. And Abe saw more tension in it than just a man caring for a wounded. This was a man caring for his friend. His expression and lack of eye contact was not an accusation to Abe, though Abe could not help feel that little question in the back of his mind—Was it worth it? The sergeant simply knew that hope was not something to believe in. He knew it from the ghosts of other dead friends, and dead family. And his expression was the resignation of preparing for another.

A voice from behind them: “Major!”

Abe turned and saw the soldier who had entered the building with him, clinging to the ladder, just his head and shoulders above the line of the roof. His eyes were slightly widened, his face set into serious tones. Abe felt wary. “What?”

“I found something.” The soldier nodded his head to the side, his eyes glancing down into the building as though he had X-ray vision to see inside. “Uh…you need to see it.”

Abe nodded sharply. When he turned to the sergeant, the man was unhooking the radio manpack from the side of his vest.

“Here,” the sergeant said, passing the radio to him. “Take it, sir. I’ll stay with him.”

Abe hesitated for the briefest of seconds, then accepted the pack. He slung the headset around his neck and simply held onto the radio, rather than affixing it to his vest. There was really no room for it there anyway. Then he turned and went to the ladder, leaving the sergeant and his rapidly dying friend on the roof, waiting for their medevac.

The soldier waited for him at the bottom of the ladder. Abe descended, dropping from the last few rungs. He looked at the soldier expectantly, but the soldier simply motioned him forward again, through the broken window, over the jagged glass, and onto the desk once again.

Inside the building, the smoke had cleared. It seemed oddly still and quiet compared to the clash of guns and explosions that had wracked it only moments ago. Abe passed cubicles with bullet holes in them. Paperwork strewn about. Family photos toppled onto the floor. Office chairs overturned. In one of the cubicles, a stuffed animal sat atop a dark computer monitor—a grinning monkey holding a red heart that said BE
MINE on it.

Little ghosts of the people who had once worked here, punching the clock day to day, lost in the mundanity of their existence. Perhaps wishing for adventure and action and not knowing how horrible it would be when it finally came for them. These cubicles like time capsules. These little glimpses into an old world Abe feared would never be brought back to life.

Outside of the cubicles, the world was the chaos of death and gore that Abe had become more comfortable with. It shocked him less now than the sight of forgotten Valentine’s Day gifts and workspace decorations. There were bodies splayed out all along the hall that ran the length of the buildings, between the shattered windows and the bullet-riddled cubicles. Abe counted seven in all, including the two he knew he had killed. They all lay in different poses. Some of them curled up into little balls, huddling in dark corners. Some of them were slouched against filing cabinets. Others lay flat on their backs or stomachs. A few were missing limbs. All were bloody, and that blood was speckled with dirt and dust and chunks of debris. Their weapons had been removed and were piled up in the center of the room, leaning against a windowsill.

The soldier had done what he was supposed to do.

Remove and confiscate the weaponry. Search the bodies.

Still, Abe looked on them with suspicion. “What? What’s the problem?”

The soldier seemed to be taking them in as well. He stared at the bodies with a strange mix of regret and disgust, his head shaking just slightly. He turned to the major and met his gaze directly. He spoke softly. “Sir, every one of these fucks has a Green Zone day pass.” He gestured at them with his rifle. “Every damn one of ’em.”

Abe stood. He stared. And for a moment, the words were just words. Then he felt a hot prickle overcome the back of his neck. He felt warm, then cold. “Greeley Green Zone?” Abe asked, his voice low, almost choked. Stupid question, perhaps, but he could think of no other.

The soldier nodded.

“And you checked them all?”

“Every fucking one, sir.”

“They all have day passes.”

“All of them.”

Abe felt his scalp itching. He scratched it. Rubbed it. Felt sweat on his brow like he’d done something wrong and been caught red-handed. He knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. But the sensation remained. It looped steel cables around his guts and cinched them tight.

His first instinct was to tell someone.

His second was to tell no one.

“Fuck me,” Abe said quietly. Then he pointed a stern finger at the soldier standing in front of him. “Don’t say a fucking word about this. You understand? Not until I figure out what I’m supposed to do with it. Not a fucking word.”

The soldier shook his head. “I ain’t sayin’ shit, sir.”

The headset that hung around Abe’s neck squawked at him. He jerked when he heard it, like he’d been stung. He snatched up the earpiece and set it to his ear. The transmission came in suddenly.

“…runnin’ southwest on a surface street, paralleling the railway. You want us to engage?”

Abe didn’t wait for anyone else to step in and attempt to hand out orders. He keyed the radio quickly. “Rocky-Six to that last unit. Can you repeat your last traffic? I only got half of it.”

Static.

“Yeah, Rocky-Six, this is Copperhead-Two-Five on overwatch. Just spotted two males getting into a blue Jeep Cherokee from the ground floor of one of our target buildings. They’re heading southwest on a surface street, paralleling the railway. Do you want us to engage them?”

FOUR

Abe pinched his forehead, the thumb and index finger of one hand pressing into his temples. He spoke clearly and followed radio protocol very deliberately. “Rocky-Six to Copperhead-Two-Five. That is negative. Negative. You are not cleared to engage. Maintain sight of the vehicle but do not engage it. How copy? Over.”

“We copy five-by-five, Rocky-Six.” The pilot’s voice was casual. “We’re hanging back, maintaining sight.”

Abe was already running for the end of the hall. He keyed the radio as he stepped over the glass and back outside. “Rocky-Six to Copperhead-One-Three. I need a pickup from the roof. Just me.”

“Copperhead-One-Three, we copy. We’re en route.”

Outside, the world seemed bright yellow. Abe could still see his breath in the air as he quickly attached the radio manpack to his rig, but the sun was warm. Once he attached the radio, he scrambled up the ladder to the top-tier roof. The sergeant and the wounded soldier still sat there. Abe had nothing further that he felt he could say, so he said nothing at all to them.

Abe knelt down, shucking off his helmet. He could hear the buzz of Copperhead-One-Three getting louder. He slipped the headset onto his ears correctly, then put the helmet back on over it. He could feel the wind and the sound of the helicopter growing over him. He remained there on one knee as the bulbous, little black helicopter lowered itself to the rooftop.

When the skids touched, Abe ran and saddled one, hooking himself to the lanyard.

He looked to his left, saw the two soldiers still waiting for medevac. The sergeant looked up at Abe, his expression enigmatic. Abe nodded once, and then keyed his mike. “I’m secure on board, One-Three. Punch it.”

“Roger.”

The helicopter lifted, tilted, and fell away from the rooftop.

Abe swallowed against the feeling of his insides lifting into his throat. “Rocky-Six to Copperhead-Two-Five. Where’s the location of the vehicle right now? I’m in One-Three and we’re on the way to intercept.”

“Okay, it looks like we’re heading south on…Interstate 25. Not sure he knows we’re behind him. But he’s hauling ass.”

Trying to get back to Greeley, Abe thought.

He could not let that happen, though he wasn’t sure why.

I have to deal with this, he kept thinking. I have to squash it.

Like it was his fault and he didn’t want anyone else to know.

Was it? Was it his fault?

“Alright, One-Three, get me there,” Abe said, then hung on.

The Little Bird nosed down, rotors charging the air, and Abe felt the acceleration pressing him into the outboard bench. They rose as they gained speed, everything below them falling away frighteningly fast. Abe’s legs ached from clutching the bench so hard. He forced himself to focus on the task at hand and not how far below him the cityscape of Cheyenne was flying by him, all dusky and tan. Dried out like a hide.

The Little Bird pilot spoke up over the radio. “Major, we’ve got a visual on ’em.”

Abe felt his midsection tighten. “Bring me in alongside of them.”

He watched the terrain roil underneath him, the industrial buildings being replaced by houses, and the houses replaced by brown grasslands. Then I-25 floated lazily across his field of view, from right to left, until they were on the western side of it, heading south. Looking straight into the hazy blue distance, Abe could see Copperhead-Two-Five up high and maintaining their visual. On the ground, a speck of a car moving rapidly in and out of the stalled vehicles that peppered the interstate like an obstacle course.

They dropped altitude. Abe felt it in the falling sensation of his stomach and the slight change in the sound of the rotors. The zigzagging speck on I-25 began to grow into a blue SUV, the distance closing rapidly.

Try to get compliance first, Abe thought.

Then, Just remember you’re by yourself.

The gap continued to close, the pilots finessing the controls to get them alongside the erratic vehicle. Power lines were whizzing by now, so close underneath them that Abe wanted to tuck his feet up a little more. The top of every power pole seemed like it was going to gouge the belly of the aircraft and rip him out of his seat.

They came up alongside the vehicle and Abe could just see in the windows. There were two occupants. The driver and a passenger in the back right. As the helicopter pulled abreast of them, and then slightly forward, Abe watched the eyes of both occupants shift first to the bird, then straight to him, eyelids stretched wide, mouths gaping.

Abe held his rifle with one hand, held the other out, palm facing them, and he shouted, though he knew they could not hear him. “Stop! Stop!”

Both occupants just continued to stare.

Eighty miles an hour, going forward.

Eyes affixed on Abe, they didn’t see the vehicle in front of them.

The driver tried to swerve out of the way. Abe watched his hands crank the steering wheel. Smoke flew from the brakes, and the Jeep’s wheels pivoted right, but they slammed into it, taking off the front bumper in an explosion of mechanical parts and bits and pieces of fiberglass.

Abe flinched away from it, swearing loudly.

The Jeep canted, spitting blue smoke as its tires tried to stay on the ground, but the mangled front axle sent them into a counterclockwise spin, leaving black streaks of burned rubber behind them. Then the left wheels lost their grip on the ground and the vehicle pitched onto its side with a horrendous crash. The glass seemed to explode out of the vehicle, every window detonating simultaneously. On its side, the vehicle continued to skid for another fifty yards, turning as it did until it was pointing in the opposite direction. It slid into the dried grass of the median and kicked up a cloud of brown dust that enveloped it like the earth was swallowing it whole.

“Put me down!” Abe ordered.

The helicopter banked left, swung a wide circle across the interstate and back toward the plume of gray and brown smoke that was settling slowly, revealing the bulk of the blue SUV laying like a felled beast in the median. As they raced back toward the vehicle, Abe could see a side window, all the glass shattered out of it, and it sprouted two arms. Then a pair of legs. Then a head.

“Got one exiting the vehicle,” the pilot stated.

“I got him,” was Abe’s only response, though he kept thinking manically, Put me down! Put me down! Put me down!

The Little Bird lowered within five feet of the ground and Abe already had his lanyard unhooked. He slid off the outboard bench, hitting the ground heavily but coming up quickly with his rifle shouldered.

Ahead of him, maybe twenty yards or so, the man was still squirming out of the window.

“Don’t fucking move!” Abe bellowed. “Stay where you are!”

The man—a middle-age black guy—turned to look at Abe. His eyes met Abe’s and relayed the same look of fear and loathing as when they’d seen the helicopter alongside of them. The man was out of the vehicle window now, but he reached back inside, eyes still on Abe as he closed the gap.

Abe knew. He fucking knew. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Lemme see your hands!”

His finger left the magazine well. Touched the trigger.

The man pulled out of the vehicle. He held a rifle. Some sort of AK variant.

Abe put a double-tap into his chest.

The AK fell from his grip, and the man seemed to lose all stiffness in his legs. They went to water underneath him, and then he pitched forward, face-planting into the side of the vehicle, still on his knees, hands clutching his belly. He slid forward just a bit and then lay still, ass half in the air. One arm splayed off to his side. Blood poured out of his mouth and onto the dusty side of the vehicle. He was still blinking when Abe reached him, his mouth still moving like a fish out of water.

Abe didn’t speak to him, because he knew he would get no response. He stared at the man for a fraction of a second, his lips seized down to a bloodless grimace. He just kept thinking, You stupid, stupid fuck! He pivoted as the man’s eyes stopped blinking, their wetness drying over like a glaze. Abe worked his way around to the front of the vehicle, getting low to try to see in through the windshield. It was broken and caved in, and great pieces of it were missing.

The driver was slouched there, his back against the crumpled windshield.

He was moving.

“Hey!” Abe shouted, his finger already on the trigger, expecting a repeat. “Lemme see your hands!”

The driver held up both hands. Empty. He shifted, almost rolling on his back, until he could crane his neck far enough to see who was yelling at him. His eyes were a little hazy, but there was recognition there. His nose looked flattened, his face bearing a thick mustache of blood. A gash on his forehead was bleeding profusely.

Abe transitioned quickly to his pistol. He tucked it in close to his chest with one hand, then reached out with his weak hand and grabbed the man by one of his wrists and dragged him forcefully out of the broken windshield. The man howled, and Abe could feel the separation of the man’s wrist bones, the way they ground together just underneath the skin. Broken in the crash, Abe assumed.

“Shut the fuck up!” Abe yelled at him. He glanced up quickly over the top of the SUV, over the hump of the dead man’s body that lay on it, and could see the Little Bird still sitting there in the roadway, the rotors spinning, the pilot and copilot looking at him.

He crouched down over the man he’d just pulled from the wreckage.

Out of the view of the helicopter crew.

Abe grabbed the man by the face. Felt the slickness of his blood on his palms. “You tell me what the fuck is going on here!”

The man shook his head, still moaning. “I don’t…I don’t…”

Abe bared his teeth and shoved the man’s head into the ground. Then he began to pat the man down, searching for the feel of the little laminated placard. He felt it in the man’s coat and reached into the inner pocket to get it. He clutched it in two fingers and pulled it out.

A green piece of paper, laminated. A four-inch square.

DAY
PASS — GREELEY
GREEN
ZONE, it read.

Abe waved it in the man’s face. “You don’t know? You don’t know? What the hell is that, then? What’s that?” Abe flicked the card at him. “Why are you doing this?”

The man’s face turned abruptly from pain to anger. He leaned up off the ground and shouted at Abe. “Because my family’s gotta eat, too!”

Abe stared at him. He wanted to punch the man in the face—not sure why—but there was something about what he said that made Abe feel suddenly clamped. Like hearing a startling sound and freezing while your eyes searched for the threat.

He shoved the man in the chest halfheartedly. “What are you talking about?”

The sound of rotors beating the air, the wind from them buffeting in his ears. The smell of radiator fluid and gasoline and burned rubber. The taste of dust in his mouth, gritting between his teeth. His own dry throat. All of these things became suddenly and inexplicably apparent to him.

“My family hasn’t eaten in three days!” the man said, enraged tears coming to his eyes. “Do you have any idea how that feels? Do you?”

Abe’s jaw worked.

“Of course not! You’re fucking military! You get all the food you can eat while the rest of us fucking starve!”

That’s bullshit.

What is this guy even talking about?

“What about your ration cards?” Abe felt slightly off-balance.

The man looked at him with an odd expression. Like Abe’s question confused him. “Is that a fucking joke?”

Frustration boiled over. Tension broke. Abe screamed at the man. “Does it look like I’m fucking joking?”

“You’re one of them! You have to know!”

“Fuck this.” Abe put the pistol under the man’s chin.

Wasn’t sure if he meant to do it or not.

Thought that probably he did.

Thought about his soldier on the roof, bleeding out.

But the man cried out when the muzzle touched his skin. “Our rations cards don’t work! They don’t work! I swear to God! Don’t kill me!”

“What…?” Abe blinked dust out of his eyes. “What do you mean your ration cards don’t work? I see civilians getting food all fucking day long! I’m in charge of those supplies. I’m the one who brings them in! I know they go to civilians. You’re so full of shit!”

The man held up a hand for mercy. “Not everyone’s cards! Mine…and the others…and our families.” He stumbled over himself, trying to explain. “We spoke out against President Briggs, and we don’t eat. We spoke publicly against him, and the next thing we know, our ration cards aren’t good anymore. The soldiers check our serial numbers in the system and tell us we’ve already got our rations for the week. I thought it was a glitch at first. But then I found out the same thing happened to every one of the people who spoke out against Briggs.”

Abe was shaking his head.

The man looked terrified. Uncertain. Bewildered. “How did you not know?”

“That’s…” Abe kept pressing on the man with his bodyweight, like he wished the man would stifle and suffocate. “That’s not true. He wouldn’t do that.”

He wouldn’t do that.

He wouldn’t.

I wouldn’t let him.

“He’s using food as power,” the man said, his voice barely audible over the background noise. “He’s using it to control everyone. How did you not know? I don’t understand…”

Abe stood up from the man, his lips pressed so firmly together that they disappeared under his mustache and beard. He just kept shaking his head.

The man continued, shouting to be heard, his voice hoarse. “It’s true! I swear to God! I do. I swear on everything. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“But you’d try to kill me and my men?” Abe barked. Then kicked the man’s legs.

The man yelped. Scooted away from more blows. “Ask him! You know him, don’t you? You know the president? Ask him about it! Look up my ration card number. See what the system says!”

“I don’t fucking believe you.”

“Look up my ration cared!” The man blinked rapidly. “Do what you’re going to do with me. But please don’t punish my family. They didn’t know. They didn’t know about any of this.” He pointed with a shaking finger to another coat pocket. “Take my ration card. See for yourself. But please, don’t let them starve.”

Abe regarded him for a moment, lost in his own thoughts, his mind like a tiny little life raft in a storm surge. His index finger tapped rapidly on the frame of the pistol he still held in his hands, staring the man in the eyes but not truly looking at him.

The radio in his ears crackled.

“Major, you okay over there?” It was one of the pilots.

Abe never took his eyes off the man. He keyed his radio. “Yeah. I’m good. Gimme a second.”

He bent over the man, keeping his pistol tucked in cautiously, still treating him as a threat. The fingers of his weak hand quested through the man’s coat pocket and came up with the laminated white card, similar to the green day-pass placard. It had a name and a serial number on it. The number of dependents related to that serial number. The letters stacked, one on top of the other: A/F, J/M, J/M.

One adult female, two juvenile males.

Adult males received rations for 1,000 calories a day.

Adult females were 800.

Juvenile males were 700.

Juvenile females were 500.

“Blake Donahue,” Abe read aloud. “Three total dependents. Wife and two boys.” He put the card slowly into his own pants pocket. “What the fuck am I supposed to do right now, Mr. Donahue?”

The man looked blank. Out of ideas.

“What am I supposed to do with you?”

“Just let me go.”

“Let you go? After you killed US soldiers?” Abe gritted his teeth. “Leave your family by themselves?”

“I’ll go back for them.”

“You’ll never go in the Green Zone again. You’re an outsider now. You’re a fucking bandit.”

The man was beginning to cry. “You killed everyone. All their families are going to starve.”

Abe shook his head. “You and your friends went out to scavenge. You went a little far. Hit some bandits. Called in a distress signal. We responded and killed all the bandits, but you and all your friends were already killed. Your families will mourn. Then they will apply for new ration cards.”

The man wept openly now. “I want to see them again! I want to see my family!”

“No,” Abe said. Then he pointed his pistol and pulled the trigger.

Before he could talk himself out of it.

Just kept thinking, Not true. Not true. Not true.

Abe holstered and walked away. He walked numbly, like his feet were not touching the ground. He leaned into the wind. Dirt and scrabble stones and dried brown grasses passed underneath his feet. The residue of them clung to his boots like memories and fell away just the same. The dirt turned to dust-covered asphalt. He crossed over worn and barely visible road lines. Lines that had once been bold and plain, but now you didn’t even know you were crossing them until they were already under your feet.

He climbed onto the outboard bench. Secured himself with the lanyard.

One hand lying loose on his rifle.

He keyed the radio. “I’m good to go, One-Three. Good to go.”

FIVE

The Little Bird landed him on the bridge. The smoke cloud from the IED had mostly blown away, but the wind had kicked up and stirred a layer of fine dust that seemed to have settled over everything in the Midwest. Little dust devils spun up in the rail yard below them. Trash skittered along the bridge. The sun was high over the horizon, dispelling the shadows. It dimmed and brightened rapidly as clouds raced across the sky, sailing the wind from northwest to southeast.

Both Blackhawks were nowhere in the sky. They had already loaded up the troops and the wounded and were headed back to the Greeley Green Zone. Abe instructed the pilots of the Little Bird to check the convoy’s route back and make sure there were no other hang-ups. They acknowledged, and then lifted off, and then they were gone.

The bridge was a mess of military vehicles, all of them being shuffled around like a tile puzzle as they tried to make way for the HEMTT with the wrecker attachment to get through and clear a path through the south side of the bridge. The soldiers from Fargo Group stood on perimeter, sweating despite the cold and bearing that certain edginess that came from being in a firefight. They huddled in small groups that spewed cigarette smoke and tobacco juice, cussing and bitching.

Abe found Lucas and Tyler at the front of Tyler’s Humvee.

Tyler shook his head when Abe approached, a sign of relief. He was a thickly built guy, with a head that seemed a bit large for the width of his shoulders—a source of amusement for all of his fellow Coordinators. At thirty-two years old, he was prematurely gray, and his short salt-and-pepper hair was matted on the sides in perfect squares that would match the inner padding of his helmet.

Tyler extended his hand. Abe took it, slapped the man’s shoulder.

“You good?” Abe asked.

“Yeah,” Tyler said. “Could’ve been worse.”

Abe glanced left. Met Lucas’s gaze.

Lucas seemed to know. “What happened out there?”

Abe lowered his voice. “We need to talk.” He looked around them. There was no one within earshot. No one watching them or concerned with them. Everyone was doing their job. Abe cleared his throat. “You find anything when you were clearing your rooms?”

Lucas pursed his lips. “Yeah. Green Zone day passes.”

Tyler’s eyes ricocheted between the two of them. “Wait…what are we talking about?”

Abe scratched his beard. Wondered how to say it, but then decided to just come out with it. “The people who attacked you,” he said to Tyler, still keeping his voice down. “They were all from the Greeley Green Zone. They all had day passes.”

Tyler’s expression said that he thought this might be an ill-conceived joke. “That…uh…that doesn’t make any sense.” He shifted his weight. Seemed to grow a little agitated. “Why the fuck would they do that? It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

Lucas still stared at Abe. Waiting.

The conversation with the man out on I-25 rattled around in Abe’s brain. The truth loud in his ears, struggling to get out of him. Like a punch in the gut, the air wanting to be expelled from his lungs. Or maybe it wasn’t the truth. Maybe it was just the words of a desperate man who wanted to live. Maybe he would have said anything to keep from having Abe pull the trigger on him. Statements given at the point of a gun can’t really be trusted.

He wanted to share that information with Lucas and Tyler. But here were muddy waters. They could be knee-deep and easily navigated. Or they could be a layer of silt hovering on the surface of an abyss. There really was no way to tell.

Keep it to yourself.

Abe swallowed it down. Ugly bits and all.

With a look of distaste, he shook his head. “I have no fucking idea. All I can tell you is that this shit cannot get out. I want you both to understand that. No one talks about this back inside the Green Zone.” Abe drew himself up a bit. “I’ll pass the debrief along to the others. Bandits attacked Fargo Group. QRF responded and helped neutralize the threat. And that’s as far as the story goes.”

Tyler rubbed his face. “Holy fuck, man…”

Lucas’s eyes narrowed a bit. “Why are we doing this?”

Abe glared at him. “Lucas…”

“Why can’t we just tell the truth here? They attacked us. It doesn’t get much clearer than that. There’s no way anything we did here can be construed as anything but them ambushing us.” Lucas shrugged and lifted his eyebrows. “That’s not our fucking problem.”

Abe leaned toward his friend, heat coming in his words now but his volume still low. “It is our fucking problem, Lucas!” He stabbed the air with an index finger as he said it. “And it’s a big one. It’s got a dozen dead bodies behind it, and a dozen starving families behind that.”

“Starving families?”

Abe gritted his teeth. Closed his eyes. He just kept thinking about what the man had said. How convinced he’d been that Abe was a part of it. That all of these soldiers were a part of it. Some military conspiracy against the civilians. How many people shared that view? And if they heard even a rumor about this, could they be convinced that it wasn’t just a massacre?

Abe took a deep breath to cool himself off a bit. Lack of sleep. Lack of eating. Stress. His fuse was short, but that wasn’t an excuse. He didn’t need to bark orders right now. He spoke much calmer. “Lucas. Tyler. I need you both to trust me on this one. I wouldn’t tell you this if I didn’t think it was necessary. Please. At least until I have some things sorted out. Just keep it bottled up.”

Lucas seemed miffed that Abe was holding something back. “Abe…it’s us.”

Abe just shook his head. “Trust me, guys. Let me handle this one.”

*  *  *

They rode back with the convoy.

Abe took the shotgun seat in Tyler’s Humvee. Lucas sat in the back right. They flew down deserted streets and dusty lengths of highway, heading south with the wintering sun glaring at them, reducing everything to browns and tans. Like the world was bleaching and weathering before their eyes.

They rode in silence.

The gates were opened for them by men they didn’t recognize, who wore Greeley Green Zone identification but were not uniformed soldiers. Instead they wore black tops and green pants and their tactical vests bore the patch of a red logo that Abe had trouble making out.

The convoy rode quickly through American streets that had once been alive with the calm coolness of a Midwestern town, but now they teemed with refugees. Camps took up entire shopping malls and continued to sprout up like some strange and aggressive plant among the short, squat buildings. The roofs of them were uniform in height and gave the appearance of large, flat leaves covering the earth. They were made of metal and wood and tarp. Some of them were tents and others were shanties. Campers. Anything that could be turned into a place to sleep.

People mulled around. Washed clothes in giant troughs of sudsy brown water. Built fires in trashcans. Ripped apart old buildings to find supplies for themselves. Things to burn to keep them warm. Things they could use to build other things they thought might make their lives easier. They worked on cars to help them scavenge outside of the Green Zone. Dirt bikes were popular tools for that, though they obviously couldn’t carry much. Whatever vehicle you chose, it had to be a gasoline engine. All diesel fuel was appropriated by the military. Your ration card could be revoked for a period of two weeks if you were found hiding diesel fuel. But not much in the military ran on regular gasoline, so if you could find it and reinvigorate it, then you could use it.

As the convoy rolled through the streets, some of the people stood and watched them.

A few excitable children waved. Yelled for the candies from MREs. They’d learned quickly about some soldiers’ superstition on eating Charms candies out of an MRE, and they knew that it was the most likely treat to be thrown out.

“Mr. Army Man!” they yelled. “Got any Charms? You guys got Charms?”

“They’re bad luck! Throw them out!”

Someone in the truck behind Abe threw one, pegged a kid in the forehead with it. Abe wasn’t sure whether the aim was deliberate or not, but the kids didn’t seem to care. They hooted and hollered and mobbed the kid with the candy, all trying to get a piece.

Abe disliked how much all of it reminded him of the Middle East.

His eyes stayed on the adults now, slightly narrowed, his jaw clenched. In his seat, behind his door, he had gone “southpaw” on his rifle so he could more easily bring it up through his open window. He watched their hands for weapons. Made eye contact with a few of them. And he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing.

The Greeley Green Zone had seemed hopeful to him at first.

He could ride through the streets and see the positive sides of it. The people getting back to basics. Using their ingenuity. Being resourceful. Working on the same team as the military to try to rebuild what they had lost.

Whether or not it actually was, or was only perceived that way, it all seemed different now. Darker. Oppressive. The people seemed resentful. In their eyes he saw the thoughts of insurgents, waiting for Abe’s Humvee to wander into the blast radius of a cleverly disguised IED, sitting under a heap of trash on the side of the road.

One big boom, and then ball bearings through your brainpan.

Abe saw stacks of concertina wire and knew they had reached The Strip.

The gate to The Strip was guarded, but only one of the men guarding it was a soldier. He wore ACUs and he stood back, a rifle slung on his back. He seemed to be in a supervisory role. The other two guards were the men in black and green with the red logo patch on their vests. They approached Abe’s Humvee, one on each side.

“Who the fuck are these guys?” Tyler griped.

Abe waited for them to draw close enough that he could read the patch. Then he answered, a mix of disdain and disappointment in his voice. “Fucking Cornerstone.”

“Cornerstone?” Lucas spoke up from the backseat. “Like the military contracting company?”

“Yeah.” Abe nodded, pulling out his Greely Green Zone ID.

The two men reached the driver’s and passenger’s side windows.

“ID, please,” the man in front of Abe said.

Abe handed it over, eyeing the man in front of him. “That was pretty fucking fast. They were just talking this morning about using you guys.”

The man looked at Abe’s ID, then handed it back with a shrug and a raised eyebrow. “They’ve been talking about it for weeks, actually. You guys are good. Have a nice day.”

Abe pulled his ID from the man’s fingers, a little sharper than was necessary. He wasn’t known to pull rank on people, but he resented this newcomer ignoring any pretense of military formality. No “sir” or “major.” Just “you guys.”

“Yeah,” Abe said under his breath, feeling a brick forming in his gut. “You, too.”

The gates were rolled back and the convoy proceeded through.

They passed empty parking lots where soldiers were dousing heaps of trash in diesel fuel and tossing road flares into them. Trash collection and general public sanitation were basically still nonexistent in the Greeley Green Zone. Another one of the “top priorities,” depending on who you asked. Right along with water treatment plants, power grids, oil pipelines, and everything else that people missed.

They reached the warehouses, and here again were the men in black and green, with only a few soldiers in ACUs standing around to watch them. Abe wondered how long it would be before the soldiers were not needed anymore and the men from Cornerstone were in complete control of everything.

Control, Abe thought. It all comes down to control.

He who has the gold makes the rules.

Except for nowadays, it’s food. Food and medicine.

Tyler pointed the Humvee toward one of the warehouses, and the Cornerstone men opened a large rolling door for them. Abe stared at them. Reading the writing on the wall. Seeing the signs as clear as day.

“Let me out here,” he said.

Tyler stopped the Humvee.

Abe opened his door, glaring baldly at the mercenaries.

“You okay, boss?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah.” Abe stepped out, slammed the door behind him. “I’ve got some shit to take care of.”

*  *  *

He entered the command center, helmet in hand, sweat-covered, smelling of dust and the musty smell of gun smoke when it permeates your clothing and sits on your skin. Corporal Nunez was still in the command center, and he half stood up, looking a little surprised to see the major.

Abe glanced around, saw they were alone. “Corporal, I need you to do me a favor.”

Nunez followed Abe’s cautious glance. He seemed to understand instantly what the look meant, and that what he was about to be asked would be…sensitive. “Yes, sir,” he said with a note of hesitation. “What do you need?”

Abe went to Nunez’s desk, set his helmet down, and then began fishing in his pockets. “You have access to the Green Zone census lists up here, right?”

Nunez’s index finger tapped nervously at the side of his keyboard. “Uh…yes.”

“Can you plug in a ration card number and tell me what shows up?”

“Yes.”

Abe waited.

Nunez stared.

“Okay.” Abe pointed at the computer. “Do it.”

“Yes sir.” Nunez spun in his chair and hunched over his computer. Cursors flew and the keyboard was rattled on and windows popped up on the screen and gave way to other windows. Abe watched but didn’t really follow. He’d never really mucked around with the census lists, which were strictly civilian. Come to think of it, he didn’t even really know how many people were in the Greeley Green Zone.

Imagine that, he told himself. A Coordinator who doesn’t know how many people he’s taking care of.

Because he wasn’t taking care of them anymore.

He wasn’t in control.

That had been taken from him. It had been whittled away in subtle chips and scrapes by something called Good Intentions. And Complacency. He’d been complacent. He’d allowed it all to happen because it was easier. It was easier to just give in to full bird colonels and acting presidents. But what the fuck was he supposed to do about it now?

“Okay,” Nunez said. “What’s the number?”

Abe brought the ration card out of his pocket. He read the number, deliberately refusing to look at the designations under it. The man’s wife and children. Who would be alone. Who would wonder tonight, and the next night, and the night after that, what had happened to their husband and father.

He brought it on himself, Abe tried to tell himself.

But he failed to convince himself.

“Alright.” Nunez leaned forward, squinting at the screen. “Number comes back to Donahue, Blake. Family of four. Wife and two kids, it looks like.” Nunez shrugged. “But the number got terminated two weeks ago. It’s not even good anymore.”

Abe sucked on his teeth. Looked on with a stony expression. “Could they have been suspended for something? Hoarding diesel fuel or ration fraud?”

Nunez shrugged. “All this shit’s typed in by hand, so somebody could have made a mistake, but usually if that’s the case, it will show ‘suspended’ instead of ‘terminated,’ and it will have some comments in it. Such as the reason for the suspension and the time period until it’s reinstated.” Nunez looked up at the major. “I’ve only ever seen it say ‘terminated’ when the family is dead or if they decided to move out of the Green Zone for whatever reason.” He sniffed. “Chasing relatives in California or whatever.”

Abe stood, still and silent as a monolith. He stared at the screen but didn’t really see it. His arms had crossed over his chest as the corporal had given his explanation, and his right hand clutched his bearded chin tightly. Brow furrowed.

Nunez grew uncomfortable. “You mind if I ask where you found that card, sir?”

Abe’s eyes gained focus again. He directed them at Nunez. “I mind.” He put the ration card back into his pocket. “Don’t talk about this. With anyone. Don’t even bring it up with me again. Understood?”

Nunez nodded and went back to his computer screen. “Understood, sir.”

Abe turned away from the corporal, but not before noting the address on the screen. The address where the Donahues were supposed to live, according to the most recent census record. Then he grabbed his helmet and headed for the door.

A ringing telephone stopped him.

He stood there, facing the doors to the command center and gritting his teeth. Already knowing what the ringing phone was for. Who it was from. What it was about. You didn’t mess with a system like the Green Zone census and not get noticed. Computers were such treacherous things.

Corporal Nunez answered the phone.

A brief pause.

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

Abe closed his eyes, still not looking behind him. What did he feel in that moment? He wasn’t so sure. Anger. Betrayal. The sense of being used. Being lied to. Having one pulled over on him. But those were low-burning embers, buried under a thick crust of complacency. Of being tired. Of just wanting all of this to end. And those feelings…those were the ones that rooted his feet to the floor, that slouched his shoulders and sank his guts.

The creak of an office chair.

“Major,” Nunez called. “The president would like to see you.”

SIX

Abe found Briggs much in the same way he’d seen him when he’d left earlier that morning, in a rush to save Tyler and Fargo Group. In a rush to run headlong into problems that were not of his creation but that he was expected to deal with anyway.

President Briggs stood at the head of the table this time, rather than sat. He was alone. Some papers were spread out on the table, and it seemed to Abe that the table had become his preferred workspace. When Abe came through the door, he was still dirty, still stinking like smoke and exhaust, hair still matted from his helmet, face still locked—unyielding even to his own emotions. The face of a man deliberately “switching it off.”

President Briggs did not smile or greet Abe in his usual cordial manner. There was a tension in the air of the room that was immediately apparent to Abe. The president leaned on the table with one hand, the other planted firmly on his hip, and he looked up at Abe from underneath his brow. His usual stately expression was slightly pinched. His forthright eyes appeared now to be veiled and suspicious.

Abe stood still, just a single pace off of the doorstep.

The gap between the two men seemed ridiculously long.

What do you say? What do you say to fill all that empty space when you both know, but neither of you want to put it out there? To make it real by speaking it into the void. Words are such pesky things. How they can lift you up and crush you down and make grand ideas seem very small indeed. Why speak them when they can so easily be left unsaid?

Abe cleared his throat. “You called for me, sir?”

His helmet began to feel heavy in his hands. The sling of his rifle felt like it was digging into his skin. He was hungry, though he knew his appetite would be gone by the time he reached food. He could just feel the acid scraping at the bottom of his throat.

Briggs stood up from hunching over the table. Up to his full height, stretching backward a little bit, and then he regarded Abe with a frank look. “Major, I wanted to talk to you privately, because I’m having some concerns that we’re not on the same page anymore.”

“Not on the same page?”

“Do you trust me?” Briggs asked point-blank.

Abe didn’t immediately answer.

Briggs shook his head, just slightly. “Losing your trust was not my intention, Abe. You’re an integral part of everything we’re trying to do here, and if things were done without your knowledge, it was not because of any particular desire to hide them from you. Or Colonel Lineberger.”

Abe shifted slightly. “Colonel Lineberger doesn’t know?”

“No, of course not.” Briggs half smiled, but it was with a note of sadness. “I wouldn’t tell him something and not tell you. But sometimes…” He seemed to grow exasperated. “Sometimes there are things I do not want the military to be a part of. Because you soldiers are everything these people have. They don’t have homes or belongings or stock portfolios anymore. They have a military. They have fighting men and women such as yourself who are keeping them alive. That’s the only thing they can be proud of anymore. And if I were to make a decision that put that pride in jeopardy…well, that would be a terrible mistake.”

Abe’s thoughts were muddled.

There was logic to what the president was saying, but it seemed a pretty veneer on what was essentially manipulation. There was the sense that Abe’s ego was being subtly stroked. Abe had learned long ago that if someone was stroking your ego, chances were they were lying to your face or trying to get something out of you.

Briggs stared at his table. “Sometimes there are problems that I simply have to handle on my own, Abe. I firmly believe, with every fiber of my being, that I was meant to do the job that I am doing. I believe in the choices I am making. I believe that they are the right ones. That even though they are sometimes ugly, I am doing what needs to be done in order to rebuild this country—and not only rebuild it, but make it better than it was.”

The president looked up. His eyes were hard. “But some of these decisions are tough. Some of them are dirty. Some of them are bloody. And many of them I do not want to make.” He frowned, balled a fist, and tapped his knuckles on the table once. “But I simply cannot make my decisions based upon the popularity of their results. I cannot do it. I am bound by things more serious than popular opinion. I am bound by a duty to rebuild this place, to make it safe again, and before any of that happens, there is going to be goddamned hard times, just like there has been.”

Abe regarded the man standing before him, unsure of what to think.

Briggs met his gaze straight on. “I talk, but I’m not sure I’m making myself understood.”

Abe tapped the dome of his helmet against his leg. “Sir…I’m a simple, direct man. Perhaps you could speak simply and directly. It’s just us.”

Briggs nodded slowly, as though sizing up the situation. After a moment, he spoke, and his voice was flat, bereft of its usual sonorous qualities. “I cannot be beholden to the people,” he stated. “In order for us to survive and once again thrive, and for democracy to have a place here, we have to reestablish our civilization—our civilized society. But we can’t do that with a democratic system in place. Because the people are incapable of leading themselves out of this mess. We have to first make this country a place that is safe enough to harbor democracy again. And right now, it is not.” He leaned forward slightly. “So until it is, the people who speak out against me, the people who undermine my position as president, my right to hold this office…they have to be dealt with harshly. They cannot be allowed to continue speaking out. And the tools with which I can affect them are very limited.”

“So they starve,” Abe said quietly.

The president’s lips pursed slightly. “They’re deprived of the benefits of being a part of the Greeley Green Zone. If they refuse to be a cooperative member.”

Abe wanted to tell him that those “benefits” were not meant to be controlled by the president as leverage for cooperation. The “benefits” were not meant to feed the military and be rationed out to civilians only if they shared the same political views. Those “benefits” were food and water and medicine that had come from Abe’s bunkers and the bunkers of other Coordinators, and they were meant to help people survive. Not to keep them in line or to consolidate power.

But why would he say these things? Why would he alienate himself?

He had now dug himself into a hole from which there were very few options of escape. And shouting and cursing the man at the top of the hole, who was his only way out, was not the way to do it. It benefitted no one to continue this argument. Save for his own conscience.

“Do you understand why I had to keep this from you?” the president asked him.

The president.

The acting president.

But Abe only nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Briggs looked pained. “Do you trust me?” he asked. “Are we still friends?”

Friends? Abe thought. Still friends?

As though they had ever been friends to begin with? What did a man like Briggs know of friendship? What did any politician know about friendship? It was not something that could be bought. It did not pledge allegiance or devotion. It was not an arrangement of convenience. It was not something that was given or taken away based upon mutual beliefs.

Abe had never called an acquaintance a friend. He’d been friendly with many people, but only a spare few he had ever considered friends. And Briggs was not one of them. Lucas Wright was a friend. Tyler Bowden was a friend. Lee Harden was a friend.

But again, why would Abe say these things?

So he just nodded slowly. “I trust you.”

*  *  *

The next few days were strange for Abe Darabie.

He went through the motions. He woke up and he brushed his teeth with baking soda and he got coffee from the mess hall, and on the second day he actually took some eggs as well. Rehydrated eggs. An odd, almost grainy texture, though he barely noticed.

President Briggs did not request his usual morning brief. At least not from Abe, though a few times Abe saw Mr. Daniels and Colonel Lineberger heading up to the top floor, chatting together like old chums. Abe resented it. He resented it to his core, though he had a hard time explaining to himself why he felt that way. He only knew that he was beginning to hate this place. He was beginning to hate what he had become.

Just an armchair commando.

A slot machine for his superiors—pull the handle and hope Major Darabie comes up with some goodies for us.

The day of his…enlightening conversation with Briggs, he’d sincerely tried to stomach it all. He’d tried to submit himself to it. To accept it. By the morning after that, it had all coagulated in his mind and left a bad taste in his mouth. Over the course of that second day, he’d picked through his feelings and discovered he did not have much warmth left in him for President Briggs.

And by the day after that, he felt that he hated the man.

On that day, Abe skipped his breakfast once again. After his usual morning meeting with Lucas—a lackluster three-minute conversation about how it was very quiet in the Greeley Green Zone—Abe went back to his room. He riffled through a dresser and found some old civilian clothes. A pair of jeans and a red fleece pullover. He put them on.

He snuck out of the hotel like he’d committed some crime and walked quietly and unassumingly out of The Strip and into the surrounding civilian area. He went to the address he’d taken from the census records and found three families crammed into the house. None of them was the Donahue family.

You know, the Donahues? he thought.

A/M, A/F, J/M, J/M? Entitled to 3,200 calories a day?

The families who lived there stared at him suspiciously and claimed they did not know the Donahues. They claimed they had lived there the entire time and never knew a family by the name of Donahue. But he could see the truth in their eyes. And his civilian clothes were not fooling them. They knew he was military.

He wandered around the civilian side for a bit. The people all knew what the families in that house had known, and when he walked upon them they became quiet and reserved. Like they did not trust him. Like he was a spy sent to take something away from them. He grew angry with them and wanted to shout, This isn’t North Korea, you fucking assholes!

But he knew better, didn’t he?

He came to a whorehouse and he stood in front of it. It looked like any other house on the block, except for none of those houses were occupied or registered, and neither was this one. It had a red sash hanging from the front door to signal what it was. Like it was a secret, though everybody knew. Everyone knew that the soldiers would come here and the women inside would trade themselves for rations. A business that was beginning to boom inside the Greeley Green Zone.

He wondered if Donahue, A/F, was inside.

He didn’t go in to check.

He went back to The Strip. Men in Cornerstone tactical uniforms checked his ID and let him back in and gave no indication of what they thought about him roaming around on the civilian side. He changed into his regular military clothes, stuffed the civilian ones in the bottom of the drawer, like he wanted to hide them.

He found his way to the mess room to catch some late lunch. He walked hollow. Empty. Boneless, like a straw man. What could there possibly be left of him when every strong thing he’d ever been and felt had been sold and given away? In the name of complacency. In the name of peace. In the name of not rocking the boat.

Always with the best of intentions had he completely lost himself.

Burning couch, he told himself. You’re just trapped under that burning couch.

He took a divided plate and he slid down. What he saw on the plate was not food but calorie counts. Rations for survival. Protein. Vegetable. Starch. Divided into the approved meal-portion size of roughly 600 calories. After breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you’d be right around 1,800 calories. Give or take. Usually give.

At the end, he presented his ration card. The soldier in the white apron at the end typed the number into the computer, recording Major Darabie’s calorie intake for the day. His eyebrows rose, and he glanced at Abe.

“You’re down a meal portion for the day, sir.” The soldier handed back the ration card. “You can come back for seconds. Or get a double portion at dinner.”

Abe took the card and slipped it back into his pants pocket. He hadn’t really been paying attention when the soldier spoke, so he just nodded absently. “Okay. Thanks.”

He found a quiet corner of the mess hall and sat.

He shoveled food into his mouth but didn’t taste much. His mind was elsewhere.

Lucas joined him. “Been lookin’ for you, Major.”

Abe looked up, chewing. “Yeah?”

“Mess hall was the last place I thought I’d find you.” The captain smirked at him, then sighed as he took a seat. “Breaking your vows of starvation, I see.”

Underneath the sarcasm was concern. The type that you can’t just tell another man about. So you poked at it until you got the point across without actually sounding concerned.

“I just forgot breakfast. Got a little busy.”

“Sure.” Lucas nodded.

They sat in silence while Abe forced down the last few bites. He leaned forward on his elbows, interlaced his fingers. Rested his chin on his protruding thumbs. He could feel the roughness of that one thumb—the one he unconsciously chewed. He stared off in no particular direction, not really seeing anything that his eyes rested on. He remained that way for a time. Absent in his thoughts.

Finally, he mumbled from behind his locked palms. “Do you know the difference between something that’s right and something that’s correct?”

Lucas raised an eyebrow, confused by the question.

“Yeah.” Abe’s hands fell apart, slapped flat onto the tabletop. “Me neither. Or maybe I know, or knew at one point in time, but I’ve spent so long doing the correct thing, I’ve forgotten how to distinguish it from the right thing. But the two aren’t the same, are they? Sometimes they’re the same. But sometimes they’re opposed.” He shook his head slowly, exhaustedly. “You know who knew the difference?”

Lucas cleared his throat, seemed slightly uncomfortable. “Who’s that?”

“Lee.” Abe nodded resolutely. “Lee knew the fucking difference.”

Lucas tapped his finger. But he said nothing.

Abe had a million other things he wanted to say. About Lee. About the mission to take him down. About turning a blind eye on things. About the cost of your own conscience, your own pride, your own shame. About allowing yourself to whore out your own morals, for payment in the form of comfort. He had many of these things to say, and they ran through his head all at once, clamoring for attention, and Abe finally dismissed them all with a growl and a dismissive wave.

“How’ve you been sleeping?” was Lucas’s response to it all.

Abe opened his mouth to respond but first noticed the sound of rubber boot heels hitting the carpeted floor behind him, coming to a stop there. One finger in the air, as though to hold his thoughts, Abe turned and looked over his shoulder. Corporal Nunez was standing there beside him, a little out of breath.

“Major,” Nunez said on a big exhale. “Ramirez is on the line. He needs to speak to you immediately.” Nunez looked around conspiratorially. “He says he has it.”

SEVEN

The command center had two more people in it by the time Abe jogged back in. He did so quietly, and the two soldiers—a man and a woman—remained in their seats, focused on their computers, both in communication with some other element. But Abe didn’t care about anything else that was going on in any other Green Zone. His mind was completely consumed by what was currently happening somewhere in North Carolina.

He made straight for Corporal Nunez’s desk. The phone was lying facedown in front of the keyboard. Lying there like a crime scene. Abe approached it feeling almost sick with dread. But he had no hesitation. He snatched it up immediately and put it to his ear.

“This is Major Darabie.”

The sound on the other end was crackly and unclear. There was a slight metallic echo, like someone was speaking through a tin can. Abe knew that Ramirez had been equipped with a satellite phone to maintain contact. The other two times Abe had spoken to him via satellite phone, the connection had sounded similar.

“Major, it’s Ramirez.” He sounded slightly out of breath. Or stressed. There was also the sound of barking in the background. “I’ve got the device. I had to shoot Captain Harden to get it.”

Abe was surprised at his own gut reaction. For someone who knew that such a thing was imminent, it still choked him. It still made his hair stand up and his neck and scalp tingle with heat. The edges of his vision darkled just slightly.

His mouth hung open, void of words.

“I’m ready for exfil, but”—more barking in the background—“I don’t think Captain Harden is dead.”

Abe turned, heart thundering. Lucas was standing there next to his side. Nunez was beside him. They were both staring at him, as well as the other two soldiers in the command center now. Maybe they could see the expression on his face. Maybe they’d heard the tension in his voice when he answered the phone. They looked quickly away when Abe met their gazes.

Into the phone, Abe just said, “He’s not?”

Some heavy breathing again. “No, no, he’s not. I mean…I shot him in the head, but he’s still…damn, he’s still rolling around. He’s breathing and moaning. Shit…can the president clarify whether he wants me to finish him off?”

“No,” Abe blurted. He looked at Lucas. At Nunez. Knew they could only hear what Abe was saying. They would not know the context of Abe’s negative response.

Hesitation on the other end. “Uh…is there any way I can speak to the president directly?”

Abe took a deep breath, trying to keep himself steady. “Negative at this time. The president wants the device. If you have that in hand, then proceed to the extraction point.”

“I believe I copy,” Ramirez said, sounding a little unnerved. “To confirm, the president has expressed that he does not want Captain Harden dead. Just the device.”

What are you doing, Abe? What are you doing?

“That’s affirmative,” Abe said. “Proceed to extraction.”

“Yes sir. I’m on the way.”

Abe turned stiffly, hung the phone in the cradle. He straightened. Turned back to Lucas and Nunez. This is foolish, a part of him kept saying. But another, larger part had a more convincing argument: This is right. This is the right thing to do.

The implications were lost in a haze of momentary disbelief in himself. The understanding and the fear of what he had just done would come later, and it would come heavy, he knew. Like buyer’s remorse, it accompanied every decision this monumental, whether that decision was right or wrong. It would always be there, and only time would tell whether those choices were wise or foolhardy.

Abe spoke to Nunez first. “If Ramirez calls back, no one speaks to him except me. Understand?”

Nunez nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Then Abe turned to Lucas. “Get your stuff ready. We’re going to Tennessee.”

Meet the Author

D.J. Molles is the best-selling author of The Remaining series. He published his first short story, Darkness, while still in high school. Soon after, he won a prize for his short story Survive. The Remaining was originally self-published in 2012 and quickly became an Internet best seller. He lives in the southeast with his wife and children.

Photo by Tara Molles

Also by D.J. Molles

THE
REMAINING

The Remaining

The Remaining: Aftermath

The Remaining: Refugees

The Remaining: Fractured

The Remaining: Book 5 — Coming Spring 2015

THE
REMAINING
SHORT
FICTION

“The Remaining: An Empty Heart”

“The Remaining: Trust”

If you enjoyed
THE REMAINING: TRUST,
look out for

THE REMAINING
by D.J. Molles

In a steel-and-lead-encased bunker twenty feet below the basement level of his house, a soldier waits for his final orders. On the surface, a plague ravages the planet, infecting more than 90 percent of the populace. The bacterium burrows through the brain, destroying all signs of humanity and leaving behind little more than base, prehistoric instincts. The infected turn into hyperaggressive predators with an insatiable desire to kill and feed. Soon the soldier will have to open the hatch to his bunker and step out into this new wasteland to complete his mission: SUBVENIRE REFECTUS.

TO RESCUE AND REBUILD.

CHAPTER 1

The Hole

Lee Harden stood in the center of a knockoff Persian rug. The soft polyester fibers felt like sandpaper on his bare feet. The seventy-two-degree temperature of the room felt hot one moment and too cold the next. His cotton T-shirt clung to his chest. The walls of the room were cloying and stale. Everything was frustrating. Monotonous. The sameness of his prison buzzed in his ears and drove him mad. His body begged him to break free.

His clammy left hand planted in the pocket of his jeans while his right bounced a tennis ball in front of him. To the side, his German shepherd, Tango, sat and regarded the bouncing ball with quiet intensity, his eyes following up and down with the even rhythm of a pendulum counting the endless seconds.

He closed his eyes and tasted brine in the back of his throat. Sand crunched between his teeth and lactic acid coursed through his legs and arms. His lungs clawed for air like someone buried alive. Words punched through the riptide of blood rushing past his ears: The only easy day was yesterday!

He opened his eyes and the salty sea and gritting sand fled from his mouth, but the words still hung before him, tangible now. Carved into wood. The “plaque” was big, about three feet long, and the words were hacked out, like a convict had gone to work with a penknife. Crude and simple. Like the sentiment it bore. Below the chunk of wood was a large steel door that looked like the entrance to a vault.

But it was Lee who was inside the vault.

The only easy day was yesterday.

He wondered how true those words were going to be.

Lee had spent the better part of the day in front of his computer, reading the same news bulletins that had been displayed for the past week. No one had updated the stories. Images of burning cities, overcrowded refugee camps, and violence on the scale of genocide remained untouched. No turnaround. No good news.

No cure.

He had spent most of the past hour lost in thought, gazing at a picture of a very young Honduran child standing in the middle of the street, wearing no shoes, dirty blue shorts, and a yellow shirt stained with blood. He held a half-empty water bottle, likely given to him by one of the humanitarian aid stations. The look on his face was that of someone recovering from a knockout punch: eyes open but not seeing.

Behind the boy and out of focus was a leg. No body to accompany it. It had been sheared off just above the knee and now lay in some dirty Honduran street. The caption under the picture read, Honduran boy outside Red Cross shelter. The picture was dated June 28.

It was now July 3.

Most articles on the news websites were dated June 28. One or two were dated June 29. The ones from the twenty-ninth were just blurbs. US military recalling all overseas troops back to the homeland. Martial law was in effect.

Frank had confirmed all of this yesterday, but despite the look on his face, he had reassured Lee that it would all be over soon. He even apologized for keeping Lee in The Hole for this long. Maybe another week at most.
I’ll send you a gift card to Ruth’s Chris, he had said. Just hang in there.

Lee realized that he had inadvertently been tempting Tango with the bouncing ball and tossed it in the air. Tango let it bounce once, then snagged it in midair. He smiled and wagged his tail, looking deeply satisfied. Completely ignorant. But that was the beauty of a dog.

Pets were strongly advised as companions while in The Hole, a place where Lee had spent many days. Usually two or three weeks at a time. There had been occasions when national disaster was foretold but averted. Such as when Fukushima melted down after the earthquakes off the coast of Japan. The Washington Worrywarts said fallout could reach mainland USA and cause agricultural collapse, which would in turn collapse the stock market, the economy, and the government.

They kept him in The Hole for eighteen days.

A month after that, Korea created a little nuclear scare that rippled through the various offices in Washington but never reached the press, which always surprised Lee, since the people controlling him made it out to be the next Cuban Missile Crisis.

On that occasion, they kept him in The Hole for a week.

Not that The Hole was a bad place. It contained almost every creature comfort one could think of. It was a little over a thousand square feet, with a great kitchen, fully stocked bar, den with a big TV, a bedroom with a king-size bed, and a bathroom with a large Jacuzzi tub and a sauna next to the shower. It was stocked with a week of fresh food, three months of freeze-dried meals, and three months’ worth of water. A battery bank, trickle charged from solar panels on the surface, could run every electronic in the place for nearly a year, and Lee kept it full of entertainment, from books and magazines to video games and movies.

Yes, Lee’s bunker had everything. Except human interaction. And the freedom to leave. So far, the Washington Worrywarts had always been wrong. A few weeks after he locked himself in, Frank’s face would appear on Lee Harden’s computer screen, smiling and telling him to “come back to the land of the living.” That was his signature it’s-all-over phrase.

But Frank would also be on Lee’s computer every day at 1200 hours to give Lee an update. Not once in all the days Lee had been restricted to his bunker had Frank been even a minute late to update Lee.

Frank had not appeared today.

Lee checked the digital clock on the wall above his computer.

18:34.

His stomach flip-flopped as he considered the possibilities. His mind took him to a place without controls or any central government. A place where a disease, or a virus, or some kind of plague had brought humanity back to the Stone Age. Complete collapse of civilization. People going crazy, murdering other people, looting and pillaging, warlords seizing control in power vacuums created by fractured governments.

This could be his reality in thirty days. Picturing it all, he felt sick. But anxious. He looked down at Tango, who sat clenching the tennis ball in his mouth and waiting for Lee to do something. The thought of the end of the world was like trying to swallow a mouthful of vinegar. His mind completely rejected it.

“Fuck it,” he told Tango. “He’ll call.”

*  *  *

Before all the hell weeks—the pounding, cold surf; and the hot, muggy swamps; and the arid, craggy mountains—there was Primary Selection. Lee was approached, along with 237 other candidates, the proposition coming in the form of a letter, pre-typed and unsigned. It came on the heels of his parents’ funerals, and he would later discover that he and many of the others had been chosen due to several factors, not the least of which was the fact that they had no family.

The letter gave no details, but instead spoke of an opportunity to be involved in a top-tier government initiative and some such nonsense about being elite. It provided a number and extension to call, and that was essentially it. When Lee asked his superiors about the weird letter he had received, they just stared blankly and shrugged, apparently not in the loop.

Of the 237 to receive letters, Lee was one of the 191 who called the number. A polite female voice on the other end scheduled a session for what she referred to as the Primary Selection process. Still, she gave no details of what the process would be about or what the government initiative was.

Of the 191 who showed up to their appointments, only 169 signed the waiver that explicitly stated that Primary Selection was a mental test only and would be conducted under the influence of some legally prescribed narcotics, closely supervised by a medical professional.

Lee could never remember the test. He remembered lying down, and the IV in his arm, and something odd flooding his system. Then there was a block of time, filled with snippets and pieces of something terrifying that never made sense to him, and which his conscious mind was unable to make sense of. Then he remembered waking up, heart still pounding.

Of the 169 who took the test, 60 had a conversation with the doctor afterward.

Lee was one of them.

The doctor was a skinny black man. Rather than a white lab coat, he wore cleanly pressed  ACUs with no division markings and just a nametag that read COOK and single black bars on his collar. Dr. (or Lt.) Cook was of average height with close-cropped hair and a mouthful of large, incredibly straight teeth. He had a relaxed manner, and he seemed perpetually curious.

“Do you have any questions?” Dr. Cook had asked.

Lee remembered testing his own thundering pulse—touching his fingers to his carotid artery. His skin was clammy and sweaty, his collar wet. “When do you guys tell me what this is about?”

“Well, today you sat in a chair and received visual stimuli for a period of ninety minutes. Kind of like a virtual reality game. The drugs were to help your mind interpret the visual stimuli as reality.”

Lee stared blankly, not quite sure what to ask from there. He had plenty of questions but really couldn’t categorize them or prioritize them.

Dr. Cook smiled and leaned forward, clasping his hands. “We’re testing something I like to call mental flex.” Dr. Cook looked thoughtful, as though trying to come up with an apt description, though Lee got the impression that he had already given this speech dozens of times. “Imagine a dream where you are faced with a life-or-death struggle—a literal fight for your life. Now imagine that this dream fight is against something terrifying, something that you know cannot be real. Even as your logical forebrain is thinking, This can’t possibly be real, is your dream self still fighting? Or do you stop and wait for the dream to be over?”

Dr. Cook leaned an elbow on his chair’s armrest. “We’ve found that in certain scenarios or situations, a sense of denial is unavoidable. You actually can’t really train it out of someone. It doesn’t matter how elite of a soldier, how much of a badass he is; certain things the brain simply refuses to believe. So when that happens, we’ve found that most people fall into one of two categories—the flexible or the inflexible. If a person is inflexible, he will mentally stop, almost like he is refusing to entertain the thought because it is so unbelievable.” Dr. Cook laughed a weird little chuckle. “I’m talking about top-tier operators here. I’ve seen it happen. Now, granted, the better trained they are, the harder it is to get them to that denial. But you keep pressing the boundaries of someone’s reality, and eventually he will reach it. And then most people pop. Like an overloaded circuit.”

Here he stopped and held up a finger. “But a few—probably about a third—will keep fighting, even when their brain is in that state of denial. And if you’re still fighting then you are flexible. You have mental flex.”

Lee swallowed, felt cold. “So do I have it?”

Another big, toothy grin. “Oh, you’ve got it.”

*  *  *

Lee lay in his bed, still awake at 0200 hours on the morning of July 4.

He had not eaten for the remainder of the evening, not having the appetite. His mind kept replaying his concerns in a dizzying cycle, like a short, annoying song set on repeat. What if this is it? I can’t believe it’s the end. It can’t possibly be the end. That’s bullshit.

You’re overreacting. Frank will call. He’s never missed a call before. But what if this is really it?

What if? What if?

Lee tried to turn off his mind but couldn’t, and he failed to think of a reason that he needed to sleep. It wasn’t like he had big plans, despite it being Independence Day.

That’s a first. Locked in The Hole on Independence Day. That’s fucking un-American, he thought. I swear to God, I am going to chew Frank the fuck out…I hope he’s okay. He’s gotta be okay. I am a contingency plan. Contingency plans are for contingencies. Contingencies don’t happen, at least not on this scale. Not on the scale that requires me to get involved.

He recalled his commission for this job. He remembered thinking, at first, that it was total horseshit. But in the end you couldn’t beat the pay, and you couldn’t beat the benefits. The government built his entire house on three acres in the central North Carolina countryside. From the outside, the house didn’t look overtly rich, but the inside was large and comfortable. The bunker he now found himself restricted to was a part of this house, buried almost twenty feet beneath the basement. They also paid him an amazing salary to go down into his bunker when they told him.

Seal the doors, they said. You’ll receive more information from Frank during your restricted periods. If you stop receiving communications from command, you will wait in your secure bunker for thirty days from the date of command’s last communication before exiting to begin your mission.

The mission.

The thought of that massive undertaking made sweat break out across Lee’s forehead. The parameters of his mission, the whole reason he was sequestered away from what was going on outside, bordered on the impossible.

He shook his head. Frank would call. And so the thoughts cycled and cycled until they had blended into a slur of white noise in his mind, and somewhere around 0330 he fell asleep.

*  *  *

When he woke up at about 0930 he felt great.

For a moment he was truly convinced that the previous day had not happened and that it was the morning of the third, only a few hours from Frank’s scheduled call, which he would undoubtedly receive. He eventually realized this wasn’t the case. But the greasy knot in his stomach didn’t return. He felt more agitated, slightly angry. He took a hot shower and thought of all the choice words he would say to Frank when he finally called, which he was sure he would. Lee hoped Frank had a most excellent and entertaining story to explain why he was twenty-four hours overdue for his call.

He hoped Frank was safe.

He air-dried after his shower. There was really no point in rushing to clothe yourself when you were alone, twenty feet underground in a cement-and-lead box.

He made himself a protein shake while Tango dutifully sat next to him in the kitchen. After the shake, Lee put on a pair of athletic shorts, because there was something privately disturbing about doing calisthenics in the nude. He knocked out his sit-ups, push-ups, felt lazy as he looked at his chin-up bar. Then felt guilty and did the pull-ups. He turned on the sunlamp while he did these. It wasn’t the same as the sun itself, but it was better than nothing. Being in a sunless environment could mess with your head and your health.

After that he made some egg whites and toast with peanut butter. Then fed Tango. He made some coffee and took it to the computer. He didn’t sit down. Just touched the mouse. The screen saver vanished. The homepage of CNN.com was still displayed. It had not changed.

Just to make sure, Lee refreshed the browser window. This time it gave him an error message about the site being down. He checked the status of his Internet connection and found it displaying a good connection. He tried Yahoo! and managed to get the home page, but it was still the same old news.

Nothing posted since June 28. He drank his coffee in silence. It was 1030. He sat down in his computer chair, lifting his feet onto the desk. He rested the warm coffee mug on his bare chest and regarded a flat, rectangular metal box to the right of his computer screen. It contained his mission brief. This was the predetermined contingency plan given to him directly from the Office of the Secretary of Homeland Security. It outlined in detail what they projected the situation would be like on the thirtieth day. Due to the sensitivity of the information contained, Lee was not authorized to open the box until forty-eight hours after his last communication with command.

Frank was Colonel Frank Reid of the United States Army, assigned as liaison between the Secretary of Homeland Security and the forty-eight “Coordinators” stationed in bunkers in each of the states across the Continental US. Lee was stationed in North Carolina.

Colonel Frank Reid was command.

At 1200 hours today, he would have to open that box and read its contents. That would be it. Project Hometown would do what it was meant to do. He could only assume that the other forty-seven Coordinators had not received communications from Frank either and would also be opening their boxes at their respective forty-eight-hour marks.

The thought of it scared him shitless.

He drank the dregs of his coffee, grabbed a water bottle, and sat down on the couch, facing the gigantic TV. He turned it on and scanned through the cable channels. TV had gone much sooner than the Internet news. Most channels had been displaying an emergency broadcast screen with a ticker at the bottom looping the same information: the major metropolitan areas that were under evacuation order and which FEMA shelter to report to for each area.

Now the channels displayed blank blue screens.

Lee sank back onto the couch and stared, unsure of what he was waiting for. Perhaps for the channels to start transmitting again. Perhaps for his computer to chime, informing him that Frank was on the other line. Maybe he was just waiting to wake up from a bad dream.

The blue screen staring back at him felt surreal. He shook his head. Frank would call. He had to call. A virus couldn’t knock out the United States government. There were scientists, whole departments whose sole purpose for existing was to identify and eliminate these types of threats before they even became a problem. He wondered fleetingly if this were a joke, but dismissed it. Colonel Frank Reid would never play that tasteless of a joke. Lee didn’t even think Frank would play any joke at all.

He didn’t strike Lee as the joking type.

Something was keeping him from calling. The Internet signal could have been damaged or destroyed where Frank was, causing him to be unable to contact Lee for the past two days. Techs would be working overtime to reestablish contact with the Coordinators so Frank could tell them to hold off on reading their mission packets.

In the meantime, Lee had no idea what to do with himself. He would usually busy himself with a book or a movie, but watching a movie seemed inappropriate and he would not be able to focus on reading a book with his mind running through scenarios of what the hell was happening in the world outside his bunker.

He drank the rest of his water bottle and went to his treadmill. He left the incline flat and brought it up to an eight-minute-mile pace. He needed to waste some time and planned on running for a while.

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Table of Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Welcome
4. One
5. Two
6. Three
7. Four
8. Five
9. Six
10. Seven
11. Meet the Author
12. Also by D.J. Molles
13. Bonus Material
14. About Orbit Short Fiction
15. Newsletter
16. Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by D.J. Molles
Excerpt from The Remaining copyright © 2012 by D.J. Molles
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto, cover photo by Arcangel Images.
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

First eBook edition: March 2014

ISBN: 978-0-316-40430-3

E3

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Welcome

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Meet the Author

Also by D.J. Molles

Bonus Material

About Orbit Short Fiction

Newsletter

Table of Contents

Copyright