Savages (17 page)

Anderson, Great Hawk, and Gabe searched the marauders’ bodies and rucksacks. Since I had nothing else to do, I paired up with Stewart and helped him re-hang the window coverings. While we worked, he said, “So what’s your story?”

I glanced at him. “
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
and
The Cold Equations
are tied for first.”

“Huh?”

“Hemingway, Tom Godwin, ever heard of them?”

“The fuck are you talking about?”

I let out a sigh. “Never mind. Guess you’re not the literary type.”

He gave me a confused look and we worked in silence for a while. Halfway through the windows on the opposite wall, he tried again.

“So you’re ex-military?”

“No.”

“Could have fooled me.”

He waited for me to respond. I did not. He said, “So what, CIA, FBI, ATF, one of the other acronyms?”

“None of the above.”

“You a cop?”

“No.”

He taped his side of the heavy blanket to the wall and turned to face me. “Look man, I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I just like to know who I’m working with.”

I studied the young man. He was medium height and build, dark hair, eyes, and beard, and he had a narrow, unassuming face. The kind of man a person might pass on the street a hundred times without noticing. I would have said he was unremarkable, if not for the fact he was a member of the 10
th
Special Forces Group.

“I don’t think the truth will make you feel any better.”

“Try me.”

“Fine.” I pointed at Gabe. “You see that overgrown wad of scar tissue over there? The one with eyes like a Siberian husky?”

“The Marine, yeah. Garrett.”

“He trained me, for the most part. A few others helped later on. But most of what I can do, I learned from him, or on the job.”

“So you’re … what, a civvie?”

“Yes. I am a mere civvie.”

He looked confused again. “Then what the fuck are you doing on this mission?”

“I’ve been asking myself that very same question lately.”

“You’re full of shit. No way would the head of ASOC send a civilian on a job like this.”

“Listen, Stewart. I don’t have a problem with you, but I sincerely do not give a shit if you believe me. I also don’t feel obligated to prove or explain myself to you or anyone else. So if it’s all the same, how about we hang these blankets before sunrise? I’d like to get a couple more hours’ sleep.”

He stared a moment longer, shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

“I told you the truth wouldn’t help.”

He spoke to me no more. We finished hanging the blankets. He gave me a last skeptical glance, and the darkness swallowed him as he walked away. I thought about the guys from Delta Squad, and how telling one soldier something was as good as telling his whole platoon.

Great
, I thought.
By morning, they’ll all distrust me
.

I looked back in the direction of the dead bodies. Small pools of ashen light slipped down from the slight gap between blankets and windows, illuminating the way only a few feet. The rest of the factory floor was smothered in inky blackness.

I withdrew a flashlight from my vest, slipped a red filter over the lens cover, and pressed the switch. A weak scarlet cone helped me find my way along without bruising a shin on something metal and unyielding. At the row of bodies, only Gabe remained. Great Hawk and Anderson had gone elsewhere.

“Learn anything?”

“Definitely marauders.”

“How do you know?”

The big head swiveled. “Weren’t you the one so sure of himself a little while ago?”

I stared at him blankly. When he did not get a rise out of me, Gabe said, “We found things in their packs.”

“Like what?”

“Tampons, toilet paper, preserved food, a few guns in varying calibers. Typical salvage stuff.”

“Doesn’t exactly convict them of highway robbery.”

“No. But the trophies do.”

I closed my eyes and turned away. My stomach went heavy with soul-sickness. “Fingers? Ears?”

“And then some.”

Gabe was right. There could be no doubt. Marauders liked to keep trophies from their victims and make necklaces out of them. The more bits and pieces on the string, and the fresher they were, the more respect marauders got from their fellow scumbags at the secret hell-pits where they gathered to trade.

“How many do you think they got?”

“Hard to tell. I’d say at least eight. Maybe more.” Gabe turned away and began walking toward the offices.

“Women and children?”

“A few.”

I looked at the dead bodies with renewed disgust. Their victims had probably been travelers, the kind of tough, gritty people who band together for safety and survive by hunting, scavenging, trading, and staying on the move. There are a lot of them out there. Far more than people living in secure communities. Often they are mixed family groups, the children hunting and fighting right alongside their parents.

There were a few such people living in Hollow Rock. When travelers’ women get pregnant, they seek the safety of walled villages and towns to have their children. I knew three of them who shopped regularly at the general store. The women travelers in Hollow Rock had formed their own little community—or pack, as they called it—and their sincere intention was to teach their kids what they needed to know to survive out in the open, and then rejoin their original pack.

Sadly, these people often fell victim to large, well-armed groups of insurgents and marauders. And since the Alliance had thrown in with the ROC, things had been getting steadily worse. It did not pay to be a traveler anywhere east of the Appalachians or west of Kansas. Even Kentucky and Tennessee were no longer safe.

I followed Gabe to the office where Great Hawk was speaking to the prisoner. The door was closed and locked.

“What do you think is going on in there?” I asked.

“I don’t hear any thuds or screaming,” Gabe said. “He’s probably just talking to her.”

We waited. I retrieved a blanket from my bedroll, tucked it under my head, and lay down on the floor. Something scraped and thudded against the wall next to me. I heard the occasional croak and groan, the rustle and slap of bodies colliding. Muted scrapings and thuddings increased in frequency until the cinder blocks against my shoulder began to vibrate rhythmically from the impacts.

Infected. They had smelled the blood.

A few minutes later, from outside, a gunshot fractured the air. I remembered Great Hawk saying Taylor had volunteered to lead the horde away. I wished him luck and closed my eyes. I did not dream.

Voices close by woke me up. A few feet away, Gabe sat with his back against the wall, chin against his chest, breathing slowly. I nudged him on the arm.

“Hey, wake up.”

He did, instantly. His eyes cleared and he looked toward Great Hawk. “Let’s go see what he found out.”

Before following, I reached a hand under one of the blankets and peered at the window. The curtain of night had withdrawn and given way to a pale gray dawn. I caught up with Gabe and said, “I knocked out at four in the morning.”

“I wasn’t far behind you.”

“They been in there this whole time?”

“Looks like it.”

When we reached the office, Great Hawk’s skin was drawn tight against his face, there were dark circles under his eyes, and his upright posture looked forced and unsteady.

“Must have been a long conversation,” I said, pointing the office door. “Learn anything useful from yon fair maiden?”

“Yon maiden,” Great Hawk said, “is about as fair as a knife to the scrotum. Come on. We need to wake the others.”

He started walking. Gabe and I looked at each other, shrugged, and followed.

We gathered in the clear space in front of the entrance, and Great Hawk gave us the short version.

In the beginning, there were questions. The prisoner heard these questions, and saw that they were bad. Great Hawk persisted. He received no answers. And if looks could kill, he would have been impaled from anus to mouth on a thorny pole.

He told her we were federal agents working undercover to root out bands of marauders. He told her the Union was through messing around with marauders, sick of them raiding and slave-hunting in Union territory, and ours was a search and destroy mission. He told her he was not going to torture her. But if she did not talk, she would be taken to a detention camp where she would be. Still nothing.

Great Hawk asked more questions and received no response. An hour passed. He threw his hands in the air and told her, “Fine. Have it your way. But when they shove that feeding tube down your throat when you refuse to eat, and waterboard you to within an inch of your life, and lock you in a three-foot metal box in the blazing sun, remember this: you were warned. You had a chance to save yourself, and you blew it.”

With that, he left the room.

But he did not go far. He waited outside the door for what he knew would eventually come. She held out half an hour. She called out to him. Great Hawk did not respond. Nor did he on the second, third, or any other attempt for fifteen minutes. It was necessary to make her desperate. To let her sit tied down and helpless awaiting a fate she probably took as a lie on its face. The longer she was alone, the more plausible the lie became.

I can only speculate as to what broke her. Maybe it was the darkness, or the silence, or the realization that this was really happening. Her men were dead, she was in federal custody, and she was about to be shipped off to some hellish Guantanamo-esque torture pit. Only now there was no news media, no congressional inquiries, no judicial oversight, and no outraged public to petition for clemency on her behalf. Just her and a lot of people who wanted to know what she knew and would pull no punches to get it. Literally.

The shouts became cries, and the cries became sobbing. Her throat grew ragged with desperation. Her voice broke. Great Hawk burst into the room and told her if she did not shut the fuck up he would shove a dirty sock in her mouth and duct tape it shut. People were trying to sleep.

Then came the begging. The bargaining. He knew he had her. He turned an old metal chair around backwards and folded his arms across the top.

“Fine. Spill, if it will stop your sniveling.”

She spilled. What she told Great Hawk was something none of us were expecting. The silence was not shocked, but it was close. Perhaps unpleasantly surprised is more accurate.

She was a high-ranking member of a paramilitary wing of the Alliance government. Her squad, and others like it, had spent six months training with KPA special operations troops and a menagerie of defected Union operatives. Their job was to operate under the guise of marauders, raid Union communities, capture Union loyalists, and forge alliances with marauder groups.

“Sleepers,” Gabe said. “They’re trying to plant sleeper agents among the marauders.”

Great Hawk waved toward me. “What do you infer from this?”

Another test. This was getting irritating. “I infer the Alliance is trying not to make enemies of the marauder groups the way the Union has. I infer they’re planning an offensive against the Union and want to minimize the number of people raiding their supply lines. I infer these fake Alliance marauders are doing recon as much as anything, and looking for people they can use to carry coded messages during the offensive.”

Gabe nodded. “Makes sense.”

“I see a problem there,” Anderson said. “What’s to keep the marauders from keeping their word to the Alliance? It’s not like they have a fucking sanctioning body. Supply lines are easy pickings; a marauder’s wet dream.”

“The Alliance is probably offering them something better,” I said. “Something more lucrative, acquired with less risk.”

“Like what?”

“First crack at conquered towns would be a good start. It’s not like the Alliance needs the spoils. Not with the ROC helping them out.”

Anderson scratched his cheek and crossed his arms. “Okay. But the part about messengers still seems shaky. A marauder’s word is worth tits on a turtle.”

“True. But for them it’s still a low-risk venture. Think about it. They know the territory, they’ve been avoiding Union forces for a couple of years now, and if the messages are coded, the messengers can’t tell anyone what they mean if they’re captured. With no way to prove it’s an Alliance message, the Union can’t do much to the messenger except hold him on suspicion of conspiracy.”

“They can do a hell of a lot more than that,” Bjornson said. For once he sounded professional. “I’ve been to one of those detention centers. Wouldn’t wish that shit on my worst enemy.”

A few of the other Green Berets nodded along.

“Nevertheless,” I said, “it won’t do them much good. A man can’t tell you something he doesn’t know. The Alliance is counting on that.”

“Then there’s the ROC,” Gabe said. “We need to remember how they fit into this whole thing.”

“So far, supplying weapons and personnel,” Great Hawk said. “Our intelligence sources believe the Alliance is supplying food and grain in return. It is likely when the attack comes, it will be coordinated from both sides.”

Anderson said, “The ROC has aircraft.  I bet they have fuel and they’re saving it.”

Great Hawk nodded. “You are probably right.”

I stood up, stretched, and said, “Well, this is all very interesting, but it’s academic. As soon as we complete this mission, the Alliance will fall apart and the ROC will be left twisting in the wind. Then the political dynamics will shift and we’ll have a whole new set of problems to deal with. Nothing we can do about that from here. For now, we should focus on the job in front of us.”

The Hawk agreed. The Green Berets nodded and looked at me like I was talking sense for once. It made me feel better. I was beginning to worry they had dismissed me out of hand.

I looked at Great Hawk. His face remained dark, lips pressed into a frown. The mohawk shook slowly from one side to the other, and he muttered so softly I had to read his lips to understand him.

This is not going to end well.

*****

We waited another day. The intelligence asset said that was fine, and to avoid the western gate when we arrived. At least that’s what Great Hawk told us.

A stealth helicopter came in the night and whisked away Crocodile Lady. I never did learn her name. Gabe and I stood under the full moon, grass swaying around us in a warm breeze, and watched the silent aircraft disappear over the treeline. I wondered what the rest of her life would be like, and did not envy her. It occurred to me if our mission failed, and I was captured, my fate would likely be far worse.

Nope
, I thought.
That’s what the backup revolver is for.
Failing that, I had the cyanide pill. Put the little plastic canister in my mouth, bite down hard, and say
sayonara
.

“Get some sleep,” Great Hawk said to everyone not going on watch. He turned to walk back into the building. “Tomorrow, we make for Carbondale.”

Lying in my bunk that night, I thought about Allison. I wondered what she was doing. Was she still at the clinic? At home? Having dinner with coworkers? Prosaic things. Things that didn’t involve guns, and politics, and dodging hordes of undead. It did not seem possible I had left home only three days ago. My life, and everything in it, felt light years away. I thought about the way perception can bend time and wondered if distance is subject to the same mental warping.

It was very warm in the processing facility, but I bundled up anyway. The coldness inside me was getting worse.