The Valley: A Lee Harden Novel, page 6
Lee felt like a fish in a bowl.
A betta fish, to be exact.
“Alright,” Abe grumped from the front passenger seat. “I’ll go ahead and get this ball rolling. I say we ghost this shitheap and head on to the next town.”
“Bold statement,” Lee noted. “You seem very sure of your decision.”
Abe shook his head, eyeing the people outside. “Man, fuck these asshats. I don’t know what’s going on between them and this Colin Horner guy, but maybe he’s got a good reason to be pissed at them. I feel strongly that we just saved their asses, and that little bitch with the rifle can’t say a damn nice thing to us.”
“She’s just worried,” Sam said from the backseat.
Lee raised his eye to the rearview mirror and looked at the younger guy. Sam didn’t look terribly offended by what Abe had said, but if you were the type to get offended, then you probably wouldn’t last long on a team with Abe Darabie. Sam was looking out the side window at nothing in particular, but he had a set to his face that looked to Lee like concern. Like he was concerned for this place.
Or maybe just Bea.
“Well, she should be worried about Colin Horner, not us,” Abe huffed.
Lee’s gaze lingered on Sam for a moment more before he shifted to Marie. “What’s the matriarch say?”
Marie took a deep breath, her expression neutral. “I’m tempted to side with Abe on this one. Like you said, Lee, cooperation from the settlement is the most important element of success. And I’m not getting overly cooperative vibes.”
Jones stretched his back and sighed. “Don’t y’all think you’re getting a little assed up over nothing? You’re painting it like this entire settlement came out to haggle with us. But the only person that’s had anything bad to say to us is Sam’s new girlfriend.”
Sam made a small noise of exasperation.
Abe jerked around in his seat, eyeing Sam. “What’s he talking about? You got a thing for the Scarface girl?”
“Jesus,” Marie hissed, shaking her head. “You are an offensive twat.”
Abe looked briefly put-upon. Which was something only Marie had the power to do to him. “I was just trying to figure out if he was legit into her, so I could filter any further derogatory comments about her. I was trying to be sensitive.”
“Oh, yeah. Sensitive. That’s you.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Sam said, as though it was something he’d already addressed several thousand times. “And I’m shocked at you for taking anything Jones says seriously. But, to Jones’s actual point…I mean, yeah, we’ve really only talked to Ted and Bea at this point. We can’t just go making broad statements about the entire community.”
Abe sat back in his chair with a disconsolate grunt. “Don’t like ‘em.”
Marie gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Hon, when do you ever like them?”
Jones, all relaxed into his seat with his head lolling on the headrest, rolled it over to look at Lee in the mirror. “What about you, Boss?”
Lee saw Jones looking at him, and then he caught the barest little glance from Sam, and saw the hope in it before Sam quickly looked away. He considered that for a moment before answering. Ran his rough hands over the steering wheel. Feeling how smooth the vinyl had been worn in the three years of driving it.
Abe and Marie would only ever be convinced with hard facts and logic. They were supreme pragmatists. And that wasn’t a bad thing to be. In fact, it was great. Great for the team, and great for Lee.
Was Lee a pragmatist? Well…no.
Everyone likes to think of themselves as a pragmatist. Because what’s the alternative? To be some plastic-bag-caught-in-a-breeze-type jackass that just goes with how he “feels” about every situation? No one wanted to be that guy. Certainly not Lee.
And yet, Lee had been forced to realize a whole lot of things about himself. That happens when you confront your own mortality on a regular basis. He was absolutely capable of rational judgment, and the majority of the time, that was how he operated.
But if Lee were being honest with himself—and he always tried to be—then when he looked back at the pattern of his life, at all the decisions that had led him down the path to where he currently was, he couldn’t help but notice that a lot of those decisions had been emotional ones.
Not weepy emotional, or flying into a rage emotional. Because Lee was always controlled. But you could control emotions and still make decisions by them.
Running after that woman who was being carried away by the primals? That’d been an emotional decision. He’d been furious at the creature, and scared for the woman. A pragmatist would have said, “I only have a pistol, and there’s too many threats.” But Lee ran out there anyway.
And years before that, when Lee had been a member of the tiny, secretive Project Hometown, and was sequestered in his underground bunker while the plague ran rampant on the surface, Lee made the decision to break protocol and leave his bunker early. That particular decision had some logic to it—he wanted to recon his area of operations. But it was still a decision based on worries of what awaited him topside. Ultimately, it was an emotional decision, and it altered the course of his life. He was blackballed by the remnants of the US government, and labeled a “nonviable asset” and a domestic terrorist. Which was no small part of why he didn’t go by Lee anymore.
But not every emotional decision was a bad one. Soon after leaving his bunker, he stumbled across a young man and his father, being hounded by a group of men. Watching them kill that kid’s father, Lee made another emotional decision. The pragmatic decision would have been, “Oh well, there’s too many of them, and only one of me.” But instead, Lee went with “Fuck that,” killed them all, and saved the boy’s life.
That boy now sat in the seat behind him, no longer a boy, and no longer the Sameer Balawi that he’d been. Somewhere along the line, he’d grown up, and now he was Sam Ryder.
It’s funny how emotions and logic eddy and swirl around each other to create the paths our lives flow through. Seeing the hope to stay in Sam’s eyes, Lee knew what his decision would be, and he knew it was an emotional one. But he also knew he’d have to defend it with logic.
“We need a win,” Lee finally sighed, staring straight ahead. “Northern California, Oregon, Washington—they were all great. Everything after San Diego? Complete trash.” He let his hands flop down onto his thighs. “We need a win. And I’m not just talking about morale.”
He twisted to put his one good eye on his team. First Abe. Then Sam, Marie, and Jones in the back. “The border? Rampart? I know we did everything we could, but we still got our shit pushed in. And it doesn’t reflect well. If it keeps happening, we might get cut off. We might lose The Deal.”
Oh, The Deal, The Deal. Lee’s perennial blessing and eternal curse. One that he’d conjured up himself, starting from the moment he’d broken protocol and left his bunker ahead of schedule. He had one job as a Project Hometown operative. Their motto was Subvenire Refectus—Rescue and Rebuild. The state that he was assigned was North Carolina, and it was his job to save who he could, and try to re-establish a constitutional democracy in the event of complete social collapse.
But then things got out of control. Almost as though he were caught up in a strange tide against his will, he found himself leading a rebellion against the former Secretary of State—a man named Erwin Briggs, who’d appointed himself as the President of the United States, and then tried to run it like a fiefdom.
When Canada and the United Kingdom got involved, Lee hoped and prayed and tried his damndest to get them on his side of the conflict. But he made the mistake of giving one of his men a little too much leash, and a few civilian massacres later, Lee was branded a war criminal, and lost any chance for foreign aid.
The Canadians and Brits didn’t back Erwin Briggs, though. By that time, Lee had already tracked him down, and Abe had put a bullet between his eyes. Instead, they backed another Project Hometown operative named Griffin. A former friend of Lee’s, who had become the commander of Briggs’s army, and then spent years trying to track Lee down and kill him.
But then a funny thing had happened. When Griffin finally had Lee dead to rights, he didn’t do the deed like Lee thought he would. Instead, he offered Lee and his team the chance to redeem themselves.
Officially, they were considered dead. Incinerated in the blast of a small-yield nuclear warhead, courtesy of the Brits. Unofficially, they worked for Griffin, though they never spoke to him directly—only ever through a secret liaison stationed in Colorado.
By that time, three years after the complete collapse of American society and government, warlords and two-bit dictators had popped up like mushrooms in a damp back yard, particularly along the coastal states. Griffin knew that he’d have to eventually oust those people, once he shored up some semblance of democracy in the slightly-calmer Interior States. But the longer he left them, the stronger and more entrenched they’d become.
Griffin found his solution in the man he’d hunted for so long. A man who’d been damn near impossible to catch, and left a trail of bodies and destruction behind him every time Griffin got close. But that was just what Griffin needed—someone who knew how to do a lot with a little, stay under the radar, and operate without oversight.
And just like that, yesterday’s bitter enemies became today’s unlikely allies.
And that was The Deal: Lee would go out and find the problem children of America, and correct them, by any means necessary. Pave the way for whenever the hell Griffin finally decided to expand civilization back to the edges of this wrecked country. And any time Lee needed anything—weapons, ammo, ordnance, medical supplies, food, fuel, etcetera—all he had to do was pick up the battered old satellite phone, and call his liaison in Colorado.
The prospect of losing The Deal and getting cut off was a heavy thing for them all to consider.
Lee pressed on. “I’m here for a reason—because this is what I’m good at. I’m not going to find some place to hide in a hole. As bad as this sometimes is, this is our life. And if you didn’t love it, you’d’ve been gone a long time ago.”
No one said anything for a moment. Lee could tell that his words had struck a thoughtful chord in them. No one challenged him on the fact that they loved it, as odd as that sounded. Lee and his team, they were born fighters. Without a fight to fight, what were they going to do with themselves?
The world was a fucked-up place, and in that truck there were five people who were driven by their desire to pull the shattered pieces of it back together.
It was a wonderful fantasy to believe that you could be happy living a peaceful life. Lee had wanted to believe that about himself for a long time. But right around the time when Griffin hadn’t executed him outright, and had offered him The Deal, Lee had realized that a quiet existence was, for him, just as much a prison as if it were made of concrete and iron bars.
Besides all that, they were good at this—recent failures notwithstanding. And people like to do what they’re good at.
Abe made a weird face, glowering out the windshield at Ted and Bea, with his lips pursed so they stuck out from the confines of his beard. “You’re talking like this is going to be an easy win.”
Lee shrugged. “I guess I am.”
Abe flicked a look at him. “What makes you think it will be easy?”
“Well, easy’s a relative term,” Lee answered, shifting his bum leg around to a more comfortable spot. “Compared to Rampart on the Border, though? This looks easy.”
Marie sniffed. “Looks can be deceiving.”
“They can,” Lee admitted. “At Rampart, we faced down a whole lot of cartel and ex-military. And, yeah, we had to cut and run. But we gave them something to think about. This?” Lee waved a hand at their environment. “I’m seeing some asshole ranch owner, whose toughs are a teenage girl that don’t talk, and a middle-aged man with a shotgun.”
Abe’s gaze listed to him, laconic. “We’re middle-aged.”
Lee reached across and patted the rifle strapped to Abe’s chest. “But with rifles. And armor. And explosives.”
Abe made a dissatisfied noise, but then said, “Alright, fine. Fuck it. We’ll save these bastards, even if they don’t want to be saved.”
Lee smiled. “Oh, I’m sure they want to be saved. They’ll just be weird about it.”
Jones clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “It’s only weird if you make it weird, Boss.”
Lee looked to the back, cognizant of the fact that he hadn’t heard fully from Marie. “Are we all on board, then? We gonna do this?”
Marie squinted past Lee to the outside world. “Meh. I was tired of driving anyway. One oppressed shithole is as good as the next, huh?”
“Well then.” Lee turned forward again and looked at Bea, their new host. She was standing a good distance away, with her arms crossed over her chest, mouth shuttered up tight, staring right back at him. “This should be fun.”
Chapter 7
Here’s something funny: Growing up, Bran had thought he wanted to be a cop. His dad had been a cop, and when he had his guys come over and they got to smoking and drinking, they’d tell all their hilarious stories about the job, and Bran thought that it sounded real nice to do all that crazy shit, and have friends as close as the ones his dad had.
But then his dad had a massive heart attack and died when Bran was in his freshman year of high school. And Bran learned all about the other side of things—how that job ate away at the good parts of you, and left a whole mess of resentment and bitterness that eventually stopped your heart. And then being a cop didn’t sound so great anymore.
Throughout high school, Bran discovered that his second-hand knowledge of policework made him a popular guy amongst other kids that maybe wanted to avoid being the subject of policework. One thing leads to another, and before you know it, you’re twenty-two years old, standing over some asshole you just shot in the leg during the course of knocking over an ATM. Everything was all in a panic, and the next hour went by like a nightmare, and wound up with Bran in a high-speed chase. It ended in their getaway car being upside down on the interstate, and him being face-planted onto the blacktop by a very pissed-off State Trooper that, oddly enough, reminded him of his dad.
The armed guard that had stupidly tried to be a hero survived his leg wound, and Bran ended up with a prison sentence of 150 months, which he served every damn day of, despite his impeccable behavior—except for that one time, but that wasn’t his fault. You can’t stop every idiot from picking a fight with you, and sometimes you have to fracture a man’s skull to convince him to leave you alone.
Being a thirty-five-year-old felon, there weren’t many prospects for Bran after he got out. Work release had him shoveling cow shit at a stockyard and cattle auction for minimum wage. And that’s where he met Colin Horner, who, owning a ranch in a fine area of California, found himself beset on all sides by land developers, and needing someone who didn’t mind doing some shady shit.
Bran was tired of shoveling cow shit, and he needed the money. Whaddaya gonna do?
That was only two years before the plague came stateside and everything went to shit with such surprising speed. He remembered watching it spread on the news, how it started at the major airports and cities, and bled out from there. Entire population centers turned into seething masses of insanity, people rendered down to vicious animals that seemed to want to do nothing but feed.
And then there wasn’t any news anymore.
On the one hand, the plague certainly solved the problem of the land developers. On the other hand, that kind of put Bran out of a job. But, as it would turn out, Bran was still very useful to Colin when it came to dealing with the streams of refugees that thought a quiet place in the California countryside was just the spot to escape to. Colin, for his part, had no intention of letting such a trivial thing as a society-ending plague ruin his family’s three-generation hold on the land.
“Just weather the storm,” Colin was fond of saying. That, and, “People are always gonna need meat.”
See, Colin didn’t see himself as a man bitterly clinging to his birthright. He saw himself as the scrappy progeny of his ancestors, who, upon encountering trying times, made lemonade out of lemons.
In Bran’s opinion, Colin was the type of person that would have come out the other end of the Great Depression richer than he’d been going into it. He was a pragmatist to the core, and a genuine opportunist.
Not that any of that had necessarily worked out for Colin. The storm hadn’t ended, and, outside of a few trips to larger nearby settlements—all of which garnered lackluster profits—no one was buying beef. Which wasn’t particularly shocking to Bran, but he wasn’t the one running the show, so he kept his mouth shut about it.
Now, as Bran drove the little ATV over the crest of a hill, and saw the ranch appear in the mirage-rippled distance, he wondered how long Colin was going to keep trying to weather a storm that had raged for six years straight, and showed no signs of letting up.
Oh, sure, the hordes of crazy people pouring out of the city centers were no longer a problem. They’d all died out within the first year or so, due to starvation and exposure. They were just people, after all—people that’d had a bacteria burrow its way through their frontal lobe, leaving them incapable of much outside of the instinctive need to feed and fuck.
And, much to Bran and Colin’s chagrin, fuck they did. And the new generations weren’t like the stupid urbanites that’d just gone crazy and roamed around chasing anything that moved and eating anything that was edible. These new creatures were born into this world, running after their first day, and ready to fuck shit up by the time they were a year old. Oh, and also, spawn more feral animal-babies.
He glanced at Kat, sitting in the seat next to him, with that neutral expression in her pretty eyes. “When you think your dad’s gonna realize that there’s nobody around to buy his beef?”
