The Valley: A Lee Harden Novel, page 9
She’d only kept his jacket because…well, because she liked to put it on when the nights got chilly. Even though the smell of him had long since faded. Even though it never made her feel better about things. Seemed she put it on when she was already feeling down, and it only drove her into a deeper melancholy. And yet she kept doing it. As though to punish herself. As though the grief she felt wasn’t enough.
“Something wrong, Hon?” Marie asked from over her shoulder.
Bea realized she’d been staring down into the steaming mound of yellowy-orange. She blinked and pulled her head up. Forced a smile. “Yes, fine. I was just…it’s been a long time since someone else cooked for me.” She felt the smile strain at her mouth, her teeth clamping down. Just that one, small compliment—if you could call it that—felt like she’d betrayed her decision to protest their presence by giving them the cold shoulder.
For a moment, she considered doubling down on that and claiming that she wasn’t hungry this evening. But what would she prove by doing that? That she was an idiot, with too much pride to accept the first good meal she’d had in…oh, probably since the world went to shit.
“It smells good,” she mumbled, looking down at her plate again. “And you gave me so much.”
“We’ve got plenty,” Marie said, putting the cookpot back on her stove and stepping over to seat herself at her own place. “If no one has the balls to join us this evening, then there’s no reason we shouldn’t fill up ourselves.”
The table was a tight fit for all six of them. Shoulders scrunched, and elbows touching. Only two chairs, and Bea noticed that they were occupied by herself and Marie. Jones had appropriated an empty plastic crate, and Sam, Jax, and Lincoln—the guy with the big beard—were all sitting on their packs. It almost made her laugh. She hadn’t seen a nod to chivalry in God-knew how long. Probably about as long as it’d been since she’d had a good meal.
Funny, she was almost insulted by it. But that may have been her residual prickliness at the invasion of her personal space. It seemed she was determined to interpret everything they did in the worst possible light.
Maybe she was being unfair.
In the midst of all this, she realized that they weren’t eating. They were all sitting there with their spork utensils in hand, watching her patiently.
Bea frowned, picking up her own fork. “I’m sorry, am I supposed to bless the meal or something?”
Jax shrugged languidly. “Is that what you normally do?”
“No,” she said. “I usually just eat.”
Jax nodded, and without further comment, everyone else dug in.
Still frowning, Bea hefted a forkful, her mouth betraying her by watering profusely. She swallowed it back and said, “But if you’re the praying sort, don’t let me stop you.”
Jax shook his head as he shoveled food in. Waved her off as he chewed, and then spoke around the mouthful. “We’ve stayed with some more…religious settlements. We try to be respectful of folks’ customs.”
“Plus,” Jones put in. “If you make a good show of praying over your food, they’re much less likely to try to convert you.”
Sam gave him a wry look. “You didn’t mind it when Misty tried to convert you.”
Jones gazed at the ceiling. “Oh, sweet Misty. If only she’d had looser morals.”
“And lower standards,” Marie said.
Jones looked at Bea. “You see what I have to deal with? The constant insults. Always being beaten down. It hurts.”
Bea raised an eyebrow. “You seem to ask for it a lot.”
Lincoln barked out a laugh, using the back of his wrist to scrub not-really-cheese sauce from his chin. “She’s only known you a few hours, and she’s already got you pegged.”
“I am what I am,” Jones announced, flourishing his spork. “These other four, they like to be all mysterious. But not me. I’m an open book. You’ll always get a straight answer out of me. I’m honest to a fault.”
Bea considered asking him about who they worked for, but even as a joke, it was a little too soon after being stonewalled. She wasn’t trying to make her evening any more awkward than it already was.
“Bea—” Jax started, then stopped. “Can I call you Bea?”
“You already have been.”
A rather stale smile stretched Jax’s lips. “Can I continue to call you Bea, then?”
“Well, that is my name, and I don’t have another.”
“No last name?”
“Drye,” she said, warily.
His eye strayed over her shoulder. Was he looking at the jacket? “Missus Drye?”
Everything cinched up tight in her chest. Her fork stopped, halfway to her mouth. She eyed Jax. He stared back, waiting. “Bea is fine,” she said, rigidly.
“Well, Bea,” Jax said, returning to his food. “I don’t want to impose any more than we already have, but it’s usually good to get to know the folks you’re staying with. What’s your story? Or, at least, the parts of it you’re willing to share.”
“What makes you think I’ve got secrets to keep?”
Jax hefted a sporkful. “It doesn’t have to be a secret to be something you just don’t feel like talking about. At this point in pretty much everyone’s life, we all have a few parts of our story that we’d rather skip over.” He ate and chewed in silence for a moment. “Point being, I don’t want to pry. I only want to know who you are.”
Bea considered this for a moment. It was a reasonable request, objectively. Subjectively, she didn’t like handing out information about herself to people she knew so little about, and who were so close-mouthed about their own details.
“Alright,” she finally decided. “How about this? You ask me something, then I get to ask you something. I’ll keep my answers as honest as I feel you’re keeping yours.”
Jax smiled again, but this time with some genuine humor. And maybe a little mischief. “Sounds fair. But I still won’t tell you who we work for.”
“We’ll leave that out for now.” She took a big bite and nodded at him. “Shoot.”
Casually enough, he said, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Damn. So you were only nineteen when everything happened.”
“I was,” she said, then immediately took her own shot. “Where are you from?”
Jax pushed a hand to his chest. “Me, specifically? Or us, generally?”
Bea glanced at the others. “Let’s start with you, specifically.”
“North Carolina.”
“Long way from home.”
Jax shrugged. “These days, my home is wherever I lay my head.”
“Oh, a vagabond, then?”
“Vagabond,” Jax mused, tasting the word. “I like it. It’s got…romance. What about you?”
“Where am I from?”
He nodded.
“Here,” she answered. “California.” She could have been more specific and said Encinitas, but he’d only given a state, so she repaid him in turn. “What was the last settlement you were at before us?”
That got a reaction she hadn’t been expecting. Sporks stilled. Chewing slowed. Eyes glanced around, and connected, and spoke entire conversations in brief moments of contact. This was not a topic they were comfortable with, for some reason. Which, of course, only made Bea more intrigued.
“The border,” Jax eventually said, slightly stiffer than before, but trying to sound nonchalant. “Place called Rampart. Have you been here in the Redoubt the whole time?”
“Pretty much. A few weeks in a FEMA camp before it got overrun. We barely made it out. Wandered around the hills for a while before we found this place.” She realized her mistake only after she’d finished speaking. It seemed that Jax had realized it too.
Feeling vulnerable now, Bea leveled a cold look at him and poked at the discomfort that she’d seen in the group. “What happened to Rampart?”
That same reaction, but moreso. Lincoln stabbed his spork into his plate with unnecessary force and leaned back in his seat, giving her a hard look. She held it, defiantly, until she realized that it wasn’t anger she was seeing in his eyes. It was pain.
Abruptly feeling unsure of herself, she looked away from Lincoln. Found Jones staring at his food like a kid that’s been scolded by their parents at the dinner table. Sam was watching her carefully, but when she caught his look he glanced away.
Marie, for her part, had continued to eat, but it looked forced. Robotic. Like she couldn’t taste the food anymore.
Bea’s eyes wound up back on Jax, who was slowly stirring his spork around in his food. Chin lifted slightly as he looked contemplatively at the ceiling. The light from the lantern caught his face sharply at that angle, causing the mess of scars along his left jawline to stand out.
The silence drew on to the point that Bea almost—almost—told him to forget it. But then she thought, fuck this guy. He’d come swaggering into their settlement talking like he was God’s gift to oppressed peoples, but it sure as shit seemed like the last settlement that they’d “helped” hadn’t wound up too good. Bea had a right to know if the Redoubt was headed in the same direction.
“Well,” Jax said with a small smack of his lips, looking back to his food like it had suddenly lost its appeal. “They didn’t make it.”
Bea waited for more, but Jax just languidly took up another sporkful of food and ate it without relish.
“Care to elaborate?” Bea said, forcing some steel into her voice, though she now felt a little awkward. And a lot outnumbered. She was sitting at a table with five other people that clearly didn’t want to elaborate.
Annoyingly, Jax gave no indication that he’d even heard her. He just stared down at his plate with a smile so wan it might’ve been a cringe.
Bea leaned forward on her elbows. “Shove the question game for now. As a member of this settlement, I think I’ve got a bit of a duty to ask for more details. And I think I’m entitled to an answer.”
“Oh, you’re entitled?” Jax echoed, softly, still not looking at her.
“I’m entitled to know your success rate, especially if you want everyone to hop on board and cooperate with whatever it is you have planned.”
Jax’s one eye did the job of two and skewered her hard. “Our success rate? Well, let’s see.” He leaned forward on his elbows, matching Bea’s posture. Except that he hadn’t been very intimidated when she’d done it to him, but with the lantern light turning both his good and his ruined eye into shadowy caves, Bea felt downright frightened of him.
“Over the course of three years,” Jax said, his voice grinding out without any hint of the friendliness he’d shown up to then. “We’ve been with seventeen settlements, up and down the west coast. Of those seventeen, there’ve been two instances that I would categorize as abject failures.”
Bea summoned some intestinal fortitude and didn’t back down. “Abject failures on your part?”
Lincoln slapped his spork down, causing Bea to jump. He glared at her, shifting about on his pack like he couldn’t decide whether to stick to the table and argue it out, or get up and walk away. “And what have you been doing, huh?”
Bea swallowed. “This isn’t about me.”
Lincoln leaned in, expression severe. “No, it is. Because right now you’re sitting atop your high horse, judging us pretty hard over some shit you have no clue about.”
“Lincoln,” Jax warned, quietly.
Bea stuck her chin out. “You’re right. I don’t have a clue about it. That’s why I’m asking. You want us to cooperate with you? There’s going to need to be some transparency. And I’d sure like to know how two other settlements that cooperated with you wound up dead.”
Lincoln’s hands balled together into a single clenched fist, from which one finger protruded, pointing right at her. “Nah, see, you’re dodging my question now. My question was, what the fuck have you been doing this whole time? Because while we’ve been out trying to make life better for other people, you’ve been here, doing…what, exactly?”
“Lincoln,” Jax said, slightly sterner.
“No.” Lincoln shook his head at Jax. “I wanna know. I want her to tell me what she’s been doing that makes her so goddamned righteous.” Back to her. “Scraping out a living? Trying to survive? Looking out for number one? And then you have the fucking balls to try to come down on a group of people that have actually been trying to fix shit? You think you’ve uncovered some deep dark secret? Guess what? It’s not a secret. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes the best laid plans get torn the fuck up and shit goes sideways.” He sneered at her, shoving himself back from the table. “But I guess I can’t really expect some civvy hiding in a metal box to understand that shit.”
Jax’s hand moved quickly, grasping Lincoln’s wrist. The two stared at each other for a moment. There wasn’t any aggression in that look. Jax simply looked up at his friend, mild but serious.
“That’s enough,” Jax said.
Lincoln grunted, pulling his wrist away from Jax. “Didn’t want to stay here in the first place,” he murmured, then snatched up his plate and spork. “I’m gonna get some air.”
Bea almost came out of her seat. “It’s not safe out there.”
Lincoln cast a withering glance over his shoulder. “Primals would be better company.”
No one spoke as Lincoln stalked over to the door, undid the security bar, and disappeared outside.
Jones rose. “I’ll lock it back,” he said with a voice a tad too eager.
He took his time doing it, too, like he wanted to waste as much time as possible before returning to the table. So the rest of them—Bea, with Sam to her left, Jax directly across from her, and Marie between them—sat in tense silence. A cloud of emotions and recriminations hovered around Bea’s head like gnats, occasionally dive-bombing her with thoughts of Screw this shit, go tell Ted to get rid of these idiots, or Dammit, did I just fuck over the entire settlement because I couldn’t play nice?
It was Sam that broke the silence, leaning on a single elbow and scooting a few sodden macaroni pieces around his plate. “There’s a cartel down south. They call themselves Nuevas Fronteras. It mean’s ‘new frontiers.’ For a while, they were in the fuel business—pirating refineries and pumping stations along the Gulf, and trying to expand further north and lay claim to the country while it was down. Hence their name.”
He laid his spork down. Wiped a bit of something on his pants.
“Rampart on the Border had sixty-eight people,” Sam continued. “They were being pressed by the cartel to be a new outpost for them, because Rampart was decently defended, had solar power, and was positioned pretty ideally just north of the cartel’s territory. They were giving the people the old plato o plomo schtick—silver, or lead. Basically, you cooperate, they make you rich. You don’t cooperate, you die.
“When we got there, they were right on the cusp of giving in, and…” Sam sighed and looked skyward with a faint, grim smile. “…and it was like a sign from the Universe. Because we just happened upon Rampart. We didn’t know about the cartel until after we’d already introduced ourselves and offered to help. And the whole sign from the Universe thing was that…well…” Finally, he lowered his eyes to hers. “We’d dealt with Nuevas Fronteras before. Or, at least, Jax and Lincoln had. It all just seemed so obvious. Like this was a path that had been laid out for us. Here were these people, dealing with this threat, but it was a threat that we knew, and a threat that we’d beaten before. I remember feeling so optimistic about it. Serendipitous. Like it was meant to be, and we couldn’t fail.”
He smiled again, and it was a haggard, desperate thing. “But we did fail. Five of us. And forty-three others that could fight. We brought everything we had to that fight. But it wasn’t enough. Cartel found out about Jax and Lincoln being involved. It got personal for them, and they threw everything they had at us. Which included several hundred fighters, and a whole lot of armored vehicles that they’d scooped up after the Mexican government fell.”
Sam turned and looked at Jax, who was watching his young teammate with a strange expression of loss, and bad memories, and powerlessness, all rolled into one. “Jax saw the way it was going and tried to get Rampart to fall back with us. It was obvious we were gonna get our shit kicked in. But they just didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want to leave their homes. We told them they’d die if they stayed. They told us to stay and die with them. We told them that didn’t make any sense.” Another big breath, and another big exhale. “And then we left, and they stayed. And they died.”
Bea swallowed hard. “If you left, you don’t know if they all died.”
“No, they did,” Sam said, simply. “I watched it happen.” He made a pained face and a grunt, like something had just pricked him. “We set up an overwatch, in case anybody from Rampart came to their senses and decided to retreat, so we could cover their escape.” A slow shake of his head. “But no one retreated. They all hunkered down and fought it out to the last person.” He sniffed, then tilted his head towards Bea, his eyes looking hollowed out of any youth that she might’ve seen in them before. “I say fought, but it was just a slaughter. And once the people with guns had all been slaughtered, they gathered up what was left—every old man, old woman, and every kid—and they decapitated them. Right there in the middle of Rampart. Right where we could see it happen. Like they knew we were out there, watching.”
Sam craned his neck around, his vertebrae audibly popping. “And that,” he said, tapping his spork onto his plate. “Is how we lost Rampart.”
Jones had wandered back by then, and stood over his place, his arms crossed over his chest, looking at Sam. “We tried to take shots from our overwatch,” he said, quietly. “But we’d positioned ourselves to cover a retreat, not cover the settlement, and they were…” he bared his teeth and held up a thumb and forefinger, nearly touching. “Just too far out of range.”
Bea realized that she’d barely eaten her food with all the talking back and forth. She could feel the emptiness of hunger still holding onto her belly, but her appetite had fled. She fully intended to eat that plate of food at some point this evening, but for now she couldn’t bear to stuff her face.
