The Remaining: Refugees (56 page)

Lee curled his fingers into a ball and considered attacking. He would need to extricate himself from his sleeping bag in order to be able to use his legs to balance himself—any hand-to-hand would be pointless without his legs, especially against someone as good as Tomlin.

“I know you’re thinking about taking me, Lee.” Tomlin’s voice maintained its calm. “I don’t have a weapon, so I won’t be able to stop you. I didn’t come here to kill you. I came here to help you.
Just give me chance.
”

Lee took that moment to push the sleeping bag off his legs. He moved slowly, not wanting to broadcast an attack, but wanting—needing—to get himself ready. As he moved, he kept his eyes on Tomlin and he could see the faintest of smiles on the other man’s lips, his eyes twinkling slightly in the darkness. When the bag was clear of his feet, he shifted his weight so he appeared relaxed, but Lee could feel the muscles in his
torso
and legs, ready to explode if necessary.

Lee kept his
voice
low. “Convince me quickly. Or I’m going to break your neck.”

“I believe you.” Tomlin’s
face grew serious
.
“I’m going to tell you why they want to kill you. And I’m going to tell you who ‘they’ are.” He leaned forward slightly. “You’re not going to like what you hear. But I’m going to tell you anyways.”

Lee waited, stock-still.

Tomlin traced the lines of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger.
“You
remember the term
‘
non-viable asset
’
?”

Images
came to Lee’s mind
of endless stacks of SOPs, clumped together by sections with a
stapled corner
.
D
o’s and don’ts associated with Project Hometown. What was approved. What was unapproved. The a
cceptable and
the unacceptable. Rules on things and situations Lee thought would never happen to him, and so they were relegated to a dusty storeroom in the back of his mind, dredged up now as though some
servo
in his mind had been cued to pull all documents associated with the term
non-viable asset
.

“Yes,” Lee said thickly.

Tomlin ventured on.
“It’s when someone violates mission protocols to the extent...”

“I know what it is.” Lee cut him off.

The back of his neck
began to tingle
hotly.

He thought about
the map hanging on the wall behind him. The cities and towns, some of them highlighted in red
. The viable, and the non-viable. What could be useful, and what was a waste of resources.

A waste of resources…

Tomlin’s brow shifted and Lee could see the question in his eyes, like an old sadness. When the other captain spoke, his voice was heavy with disappointment.
“Why’d you do it
, Lee
? What the fuck were you thinking?”

Lee
turned his head slightly, finding it difficult to look Tomlin in the eyes now. His gaze went to the office door and rested there
. Even in the dim light he could see the paint peeling, and the metal rusting underneath. Growing old. Wearing down. Breaking. Entropy. The gradual, eventual, and inevitable destruction of everything in the universe.

Nothing was built to last.

He heard his voice, calm and monotone. “It was an accident.”

“An accident?” Tomlin
said, incredulously
. “You left your fucking bunker! Over a week early!”

Lee
pulled himself to his knees
. “Leaving the bunker was a mistake,” he growled. “But not coming back to it was an
accident
. You think I wanted to be lost out here by myself? You think I wanted to lose communication with the rest of you guys?
” He shook his head, the snarl in his voice causing his nose to curl. “It wasn’t a fucking option.
Shit happened, and I had to adapt and overcome to the new situation. And the new situation was that
I was cut off. I didn’t go AWOL. I didn’t abandon the mission.
”

Tomlin nodded. “I know, Lee. I know what happened. I saw where your house used to be.”

Lee shook his head as though he were about to say something else about it, but then stiffened as something
else
had struck him as odd. His brow furrowed and his eyes zigzagged across the ground and then rose to meet Tomlin’s. “How’d you know I left my bunker?”

“They were watching us the whole time, Lee. Sensors in the hatches, and in the bunkers. So they can tell when you come and when you go, and which bunkers you’ve gone to.” Tomlin snorted. “None of us realized it, but we should have.”

Lee rubbed his face. “I don’t understand. We lost communication with Frank. Everyone was gone. Who the hell was watching us?”

Tomlin
didn’t seem to want to answer the question directly
. “
He
sent
me and the others to kill you b
ecause you were a
non-viable asset. H
e didn’t want you using the equipment in your bunkers. He didn’t want you using up the resources.”

Lee
’s mind reeled with possibilities
. “Was it Frank?”

Slowly, Tomlin shook his head. “Frank’s dead
, Lee
. This was one of us.”

Lee found himself stiff as a board. “Then who was it?”

Tomlin exhaled shakily. “It was Abe. Abe Darabie.”

CHAPTER 26:
NEW REALITIES

The blue glow of the computer screen.

Electricity, c
ool
air, running water.

The sensation of being trapped.

The Hole.

He remembered it, felt it, familiar to him like an old, childhood house, even the distinctly cold, cement-like smell of it that no amount of carpet and furnishings and living in could remove from the place. It was a bunker, not a home.

A place of restriction.

Seclusion.

Maddening.

He watched himself from four months ago sitting before his computer, and wrestling with himself whether to send an email, whether to violate those precious policies. It was like he was there in the room, standing behind himself. He could even see the message, though he knew it was just a memory.

You hear anything from Frank?

A message addressed to Captain Abe Darabie.

His closest friend.

He clicked send, and the response did not take long.

Neg on coms with frank. I’m at 48 hours…did you open your box?

Lee’s response:
Yeah, I opened mine. Is this for real?

I hope not…proly shouldn’t be talking…just keep your head down and wait for them to cancel us…I’m sure they will.

Abe Darabie.

His closest friend.

The image of himself sitting at his computer inside The Hole disappeared and instead he was staring at
cement walls and the smell of people and
smoke
and under all of that the rusty smell of old grease and oil
. Before him was a man who wore a uniform so intimately familiar to him. A man who had been his friend, and then his enemy, and now was supposed to be his friend again.

“I don’t believe it,” Lee said hollowly.

Tomlin didn’t react, as though he had expected this response.

His voice calm and even, he went on. “When 48 hours ran out, you and I both got the same mission packet. Same as the other coordinators.” A pause to swallow and moisten his lips. “Except Abe. He got a different packet. When he opened his, he was promoted to
Major
Darabie, and his job was expressly outlined as monitoring and controlling the rest of us.
None of us knew about it until five days before leaving our bunkers. We were able to conference our computers and he spoke to all of us, and explained his mission packet, and what we were to do. But by then, you’d already left your bunker.”

Lee didn’t speak, but he shook his head, breathing through flared nostrils.

Tomlin looked pained. “I know it’s a tough pill to swallow, Lee, but I’m trying to tell you the truth. Abe didn’t like it, but he declared you a non-viable asset, because you violated the procedures and you were out of contact.
He was just gonna drop the whole thing if you came back online before the rest of us left our bunkers. He was just gonna act like it never happened and move on.
He didn’t want to blacklist you, Lee.”

“Then what the fuck happened?”

Tomlin’s face tightened
and his voice grew cold
. “Things got complicated.”

Lee clenched his fist. “Complicated how?”

A long pause.
“When Abe briefed us a week out,
he
put you on the backburner. He didn’t order anyone to find you or kill you—we all had
enough to worry about
. He told me and Mitchell
privately
that if we came across you, he wanted us to detain you so he could figure out what happened.”
Tomlin pushed himself back in the seat
. “He gave you the benefit of the doubt. We all did.”

“And have I not been doing what I’m sup
posed to be doing?” Lee asked quietly, but forcefully
. “Am I not completing my mission?”

“Better than most, actually.”

“Then why is he trying to kill me?”

“Things were a little easier for Abe in Colorado. He maintained steady contact with us throughout August and September. Then about a month ago he found a large group of US Army, just a hodgepodge of various units. They were under the command of a colonel. The secretary of state was with them, along with a few other cabinet members.”

Lee stared on, a question scribbled across his features. “Okay…”

“The secretary of state is number four in succession to the president,” Tomlin said,
verbally
tiptoeing. “Which is currently the highest ranking cabinet member they’ve found. According to the secretary of state himself, the others are dead.”

It wasn’t that Lee didn’t understand what Tomlin was saying. He understood the concept of presidential succession, understood the purveyance of the presidency over the military—namely
commander-in-chief
—and he understood that whoever fell into that office by virtue of their rank, took that job, and everything it entailed.

He understood all of these things, but suddenly the concept seemed repugnant to him.

He’d lived his entire military career with the attitude of, “I may not like it, but if the CIC says go to Bumfuck, Iraq, I go to Bumfuck, Iraq, and there’s really no use overthinking it.” The politics and the reasons were immaterial to him, and generally too convoluted to truly understand anyway.