The Valley: A Lee Harden Novel, page 30
“Did they target me?” she said, much softer than before. “I was out of it. Still kinda am, to be honest.”
“They ignored everyone else and came straight at us.”
“Maybe it was just chance. Maybe they would’ve taken anybody.”
The way she said it smacked of deflection.
“Bea, what are you not telling me? Don’t try to convince me that they didn’t come directly for you. I was just an afterthought. It was you they wanted. And I can tell that you know why. So cut the bullshit. Now’s not the time to lie to me.”
Another suspiciously long silence.
Then, finally: “We were working a cornfield,” she said, somewhat nonsensically. And then she clarified, and it began to take an unpleasant form in Sam’s mind. “Me and James. We knew it was getting late. We knew to get inside by the time the sun hit the horizon. But we only had one more section to plant. And the sun had just gone down. We…we thought we had more time. And the infected—we hadn’t seen a single one in our area for almost a week.”
Sam took a heavy breath, realizing where this was going. But still, the shape of it was indistinct. “James was killed by primals?”
“No,” Bea answered. “No, we got away. We saw them coming over the ridge. One was much closer than the others. The pack leader, I guess. And James’s rifle was right there.” A long pause. “There was no way we could have gotten back to safety without shooting that thing. It was too close. So, I took the rifle, and I killed it. Then we ran. Got the doors barred. And we were safe.”
Sam frowned, but didn’t say anything. Obviously, that was not where the story ended.
“They told us when we came to the Redoubt—Ted, and everybody else—that things were different in the Valley. If we didn’t make waves, the infected wouldn’t mess with us. We didn’t know how it worked at the time, but they told us never to shoot one of the infected. That would be making waves. It seemed crazy, but everyone insisted that was how things worked in the Valley. Don’t make waves, and you’ll be safe.
“We found out how it all worked the next morning.”
Bea remembered it all with the perfect clarity of a life’s most traumatic moment. Every detail of it was cut into her, bone deep, and they refused to even scar over, let alone heal. They were as fresh and bloody and raw as the day they had been given to her.
The first cut was betrayal. How quickly the Redoubt turned on her, even as a chiding voice in the back of her head reminded her, They told you not to make waves. How foolish she’d been, standing amongst the other people that she lived alongside, thinking they were on the same team, thinking that there would be some solidarity amongst them, that they’d tell this monster who’d shown up with a horde of his beasts, that they didn’t know who had done it.
She even remembered worrying about them. Worrying about what Lander would do if no one fessed up. Would he let it be, or would he resort to more draconian measures to get the truth out of them?
She needn’t have worried.
Lander stood there, front and center with his horde of creatures lurking behind him, and that bitch, Freya, at his shoulder. Or more appropriately, at his heel. Because that’s all she was. An attack dog. She’d only seen the man one other time, and that had been from afar. Up close, she could see the strangeness all over him, like an aura that exuded from his pores.
“Someone killed a member of my family,” Lander announced, furious eyes scanning the gathering. “You know the rules of the Valley. You take one of mine, I take one of yours. Who did it?”
He didn’t even issue a threat. And yet, he’d barely finished the question before one, then two, then four, then twenty, and then every single fucking person who called the Redoubt home was pointing at her and James. And backing away from them. Distancing themselves. Creating a circular no-man’s land all around Bea and James.
Bea opened her mouth to protest, but it caught in her throat.
Lander and Freya moved towards them, the gathering of people that should have been their friends parting before him with absolutely no resistance. Not even hard eyes. They couldn’t even look at him.
Couldn’t look at Bea or James either.
Lander stopped about two paces from them, frowning back and forth.
Bea’s heart didn’t feel like it was following any pattern, just thrashing about in her chest. Her breathing kept on speeding up until she was practically panting, though her mouth was shut up tight, and it all went whistling through her nose. In-out, in-out, in-out.
She cast a sideways glance at James and saw his fear was no more controlled than hers. And that terrified her.
“Did you both do it?” Lander asked, quietly. “Or just one?” He was looking right at James.
“It was me,” James said, almost instantly. “I did it.”
And that was the second cut: Shame. Shame that she’d taken a moment to think about the consequences of confession, while James didn’t have to think at all. He didn’t want her to be punished, even if she was the one that had done it.
Lander’s face grew dead cold. “Kill him,” he snapped.
Freya lunged.
“No!” Bea didn’t even realize what she was doing until she’d rammed her body into Freya’s, halting her clawed hands inches from James’s throat. But, God! It was like running into a brick wall! Bea rebounded and staggered backwards, her fists swinging wildly and connecting with nothing.
Freya weaved her head away from the blows like it was a minor nuisance, and then flashed out an arm that was almost too quick to see, backhanding Bea across the face. Her vision went mottled and gray and all sense left her for the span of a second or two, until she realized she’d toppled onto her ass…
Scuffling feet. Growling and grunting.
James screamed.
Freya was on top of him, pinning his arms down as easy as if James were a child.
Something erupted in Bea. Or, more accurately, it imploded. Like all of her life energy suddenly condensed down into a pinpoint that burned like a newborn star in her chest. She came off the ground like gravity could not grip her and launched herself at Freya’s head, not bothering to take wild swings, but instead going for the throat like she was one of Lander’s beasts.
The fury in her blotted out any capacity to remember what had actually happened in those few seconds. All Bea knew was that she’d latched onto Freya’s head and shoulders, and clawed and bit until she could feel the skin clotting up beneath her nails and taste the bitch’s blood in her mouth…
Then came a slam that took the breath out of her. Felt like every disc in her spine had been rearranged. Like she might have been paralyzed. And then a great strain blasted into her consciousness, coming from her right shoulder. She was yanked onto her belly, with a foot in her back, pressing her down, while her arm was wrenched backwards until—
POP
The pain was so huge and immediate that she didn’t even cry out. She couldn’t cry out. Everything in her body seemed to have short-circuited. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. All she could do was feel, and fear.
And hear.
Snarling. And screaming. And a wet, rending sound.
She knew what it was, but she couldn’t do anything about it. And oh, how she tried. Screaming in her own head to Move! Get up! Fight! Do something, Beatrice, fucking DO SOMETHING!
Her body chose to give her only tiny increments of control back. First, her hands, but she could not use her right arm—it was dead at the shoulder. And then her lungs, as she began to gulp air. And then her legs.
Her legs writhed against the ground until they’d managed to turn her over onto her back again. Her head lolled to the side, and she saw it.
James. Freya standing over him. Her claws gripping a bloody mass. James, with sightless eyes, staring up at nothing, not moving. A gaping hole in his throat.
No. Absolutely not. He couldn’t have died already. He’d been alive only moments before. How was it even possible? Had she been out of it for so long? Had she missed her one and only chance to say goodbye to him?
Goodbye?
The third cut: Severance. A connection to another human being that could never be had again, because they’d been removed from existence. And this was a wholly different pain, a pain that transcended and blotted out the pain in her body. A reality she could not even fathom, even as she stared at it.
This simply wasn’t possible. No one had the power to extinguish him. He was…James. He was her husband. They had a past, and a future. Together. All of it, together.
Was this even real?
Ever since the collapse, Bea had had nightmares. Ones where she knew she was in a nightmare, even as the panic drenched her, laying heavy on her chest like a blanket made of lead. Entombing her. Paralyzing her. And this was so much like that.
Because she was lucid enough in those nightmares to know they weren’t real, she would cry out. In her dreams, she would be screaming, but in reality, it would only come out a low moan. But it would always be enough to wake James. And then he would put his hands on her shoulders and shake her awake, and rescue her from the fear.
She screamed like that now, hoping to wake James up, so he could wake her up.
Except it didn’t come out a moan. It ripped her throat out. It ripped her heart out.
And James did not wake up. And no one rescued her from the fear.
But she did feel someone’s hands on her, as the breath ran out, and she started to hyperventilate, and her throat began spasming and she couldn’t tell if she was going to sob or vomit. Someone’s hands, cupping her face.
They turned her head, peeling her unwilling eyes off of James’s lifeless form. Forcing her to stare up…
At Lander.
Who smiled down at her as though she were a heavenly vision.
“The fire,” he husked, his voice trembling with excitement. Gripping her head almost painfully between his filthy hands. “You…are the future.”
Then he produced a little, pearl-handled pocket knife.
And then she was given her final cut.
For a long moment, Bea said nothing. But Sam could hear the thickness in her shuddering breaths. Then a wet sniff.
Her voice was strained when she spoke again. “They gave us up to Lander almost immediately. They…they didn’t even try to protect us. And James…” she sounded like she was being strangled. “What the fuck did I think was going to happen? I just stood there, Sam. I just stood there, and I didn’t say a goddamn word. While James took the blame for it.”
Sam realized he’d been holding his breath, waiting for this last part. Then he let it out in what would have been a groan, if he’d dared to use his voice. The only thing he felt appropriate to whisper in that moment was “Shit.”
He could imagine it. He could imagine her sense of powerlessness.
And then a lot of things about Bea came into focus. The latent resentment towards the people she lived with. Her evident hatred for Lander. Her distrust. All of the things that Sam had simply written off as “prickly.”
“That’s when I got this scar,” Bea uttered. “I remember barely feeling it. Not caring. Just staring at James. And all I could feel was…” she trailed off. When she spoke again, her voice was distant. “It was Lander that did it. Lander who came over and…just stood there. Staring at me. And all I remember is that I just wanted to touch James. I wanted to…I wanted to touch him before he got cold. I don’t know why. It was all I could think about. Like if I touched him while he was still warm, then maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe I could take it back.”
Sam wanted to tell her that there was nothing she could have done, but he already knew what her response would be to that. Because it’s what he would have said too: I could have told the truth. I could have been brave instead of cowering in fear.
Sam was intimately familiar with the bitterness and self-loathing that came from watching your family members die while you were too scared to do a damn thing about it. He could tell himself that he’d only been a boy, but that never seemed to matter. Just like it wouldn’t matter to Bea to point out that James probably would have taken the fall for his wife, whether she’d spoken up or not.
“When he cut my face with that knife,” Bea continued, slowly, almost as though she were puzzled by the memories. “He was…marking me. He wanted me. But he left me there. Said my shoulder had to heal before I was any good to him.”
A sudden bolt of alarm pierced the fog of shared grief in Sam’s mind. “What’d he mean by that?”
But didn’t he already know? Hadn’t some part of him already known it, and didn’t want it to be real?
“You asked why they targeted me,” Bea murmured, haunted and bitter. “And that’s why. They did it for Lander. Because he wants me. He wants to…breed me.”
Chapter 30
Angela Houston let the young woman behind the counter swipe her ration card through the reader, then took her steaming cup of coffee with a smile, and turned to look at the expanse of Colorado mountains all around her.
These days she found it easier and easier to believe that life beyond the enclave of Aspen was just as it should be. Just as it was a little over six years ago. It was a pleasant fiction that Angela felt no need to disrupt. And, apparently, everyone else in Aspen thought the same.
After all, the only reason they “sold” coffee and old-fashioned donuts in a street kiosk, as opposed to making people go through the mess hall, was to maintain that veneer of a peaceful, functioning society.
Angela was just fine with that. She’d done the hard shit. She’d survived three years of it. As a mother, as a liaison between civilians and military, as a representative of North Carolina, and finally, as a president. Madam President, of the United Eastern States. Which was to say, the handful of secure settlements throughout North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
She’d hated all of that. Now she was just “Mom” again, and perfectly content to be so, thank you very much. Not that “Mom” was without challenges, particularly as the mother of a teenage daughter who was, at least on good days, trying to learn how to walk again after a bullet had partially severed her spine three years ago in Greeley, Colorado.
But the late afternoon was Angela’s me time. And sorely needed. Abby had been depressed the last few days and hadn’t even bothered with the walker. A situation that somehow made Angela both compassionate and infuriated. Compassionate, because…well, it was her daughter for chrissake. Infuriated, because Abby was going to throw away the progress she’d been making, and Angela knew her daughter was going to regret it when she got out of her funk. But she also knew there was shit-all she could say to convince her daughter to tough it out.
Hell, Abby had toughed out enough. And that’s really what it came down to. She had a right to feel overwhelmed and depressed, without people trying to convince her that she was wrong to feel that way. Just like Angela had a right to take a goddamned nap and follow it up with an afternoon coffee. Which she’d probably regret around 10 P.M. when she tried to fall asleep.
She smiled at that thought, as she took a sip of the scalding and not-that-great-tasting-but-who-gives-a-fuck brew. It was a wonderful thing when all you had to worry about was whether an afternoon dose of caffeine might prevent you from a full eight hours.
Wonderful, beautiful normality.
And that was when the little two-way radio on Angela’s hip chirped, and Abby’s voice came over, sounding a bit confused.
“Uh, Mom? You there?”
Angela frowned, shifted the coffee to her left hand, and plucked the radio up with her right. “Yeah, Honey. Do you need something?”
“The, uh…” Abby lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “The thing in your office? It’s ringing.”
Angela snapped her wrist around and checked her watch. It was four o’clock. That was an hour ahead of time.
She started walking, fast. “I’ll be right there.”
“Do you want me to answer it?”
“No. Don’t answer it. I’ll be there in five.”
The “thing” in her office was a satellite phone. And the only person that had the number was someone who, on her documentation, was only referenced as “Archangel.” But his identity was no secret to Angela. She’d lived and fought and bled alongside him for three years.
He was, in a way, her only remaining connection to the reality of the madness that still lurked beyond the borders of the Interior States.
She tried to sip her coffee twice, but she was walking too fast and only wound up burning her lips. Then, about a quarter mile from her house, she realized the only reason she was walking at all was to try to save the coffee. At which point she swore, dumped it out, and started running.
When she burst in the front door, Abby was in her wheelchair at the base of the stairs. For a flash, Angela wondered, Damn, if I’d’ve told her to answer it, would she have had the gumption to try the stairs again? The curse of parenthood—to forever feel like you fucked up, no matter what decision you make.
“He’s calling an hour early,” Abby exclaimed, needlessly. She was just nervous and feeling the need to speak. Which was probably why she also said, “What’s going on?”
To which Angela snapped, “How the hell should I know?” as she mounted the stairs, and then felt guilty for it by the time she reached the top.
She could hear the muted bleating of the satphone from down the hall. Slowing to a walk now, trying to get her breath back so she wouldn’t be huffing into the phone. He called an hour early, and obviously hadn’t stopped calling for the last five minutes.
This was bad. Something had gone wrong.
Every single one of their faces flashed through Angela’s mind: Lee, Sam, Marie, Abe, Jones. And then back to Sam. And then Lee again. And then Sam once more.
Sam who’d been like a son to her. And Lee who she’d both loved and hated, depending on the day. Of course she loved Marie, and had been friends with Abe, and even the loud-mouthed Jones. But it was Sam and Lee that she couldn’t let go of. It was them she feared the most for.
