Harden (Lee Harden Series (The Remaining Universe) Book 1) Read online

  And the body that had flown out the window.

  “Who was he?”

  “Some fuckin’ guy.” Lee rubbed the three-day growth on his cheeks that was starting to irritate him. “John Burke, apparently. Name means nothing to me. I didn’t know him.”

  “Lincolnist?”

  “Mitch said his last words were ‘Preserve the union,’ so that’s a safe bet. Carl and Mitch and the guys are investigating it. Seeing if there’s any more like him.”

  Julia let out a long, discontented sigh. “The fuck’s wrong with these people?”

  “They think we’re the bad guys. They hear ‘secession’ and they think that history is going to find them on the wrong side of it. Like the Confederacy, I guess.”

  “That’s bullshit. Fucking President Briggs left us all to die out here. Did they forget that?”

  “We got the power plant running again,” Lee said. “They’ve got high-voltage fences between them and the primals. They think they’re out of danger now. And, yes, I think that makes them forgetful.”

  Julia folded her arms over her chest. “Two years ago we’d’ve kicked their asses out. Let the primals have them. Shit, if they want to go to Colorado so bad, why don’t we just let them?”

  “Angela wants to be civilized.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Maybe.” Lee compressed his lips. “But I’ll tell you one thing: The second that bitch Elsie Foster fucks up—I mean, the goddamned second we get a shred of evidence linking her to these people that she claims weren’t following her orders—she’s gonna disappear.”

  Julia’s nose curled. “Yeah. I wonder who all’s gonna be dead by the time that happens.”

  Lee looked away from her. Out the window. Towards the school building. There was caution tape over the broken window now. They would board it up later. Couldn’t fix it. Not like they had spare windows laying around.

  “No kids got hurt,” Lee changed the subject. “So that’s good.”

  “Sure.” A pause. “How’d he get into the building?”

  “He was one of our electricians. Told the principal there was a drain in the power grid coming from the school.”

  Julia made a raspberry noise. “Fucking drain in the power grid. The fuck’s that even mean?”

  Lee shrugged.

  He glanced sidelong at Julia.

  She was watching him with sharp, searching eyes. He looked away. Restrained a grimace. Knew what was coming.

  “Where’s your head at?”

  Lee felt his core tighten at the implications. He turned his head and met Julia’s gaze. “My head’s fine, Jules.”

  She held the eye contact, unabashed. Arched that damn eyebrow. “It’s cool, Lee. I’m not the jealous type.”

  Lee grunted. Looked out the window again. “You act like she’s my ex-wife or something.”

  “Yeah, well. She kinda was.”

  “There was never anything between us.”

  “Maybe not physically. But emotionally…”

  Lee clenched his jaw.

  Things were complicated. They’d been complicated between him and Angela. And now they were complicated between him and Julia, although you might say for the exact opposite reason.

  Julia took his hand. Gave it a gentle squeeze. “Look at me.”

  Lee took a breath and looked at her.

  Her eyes were very earnest. Not evaluating anymore. “I’m just saying…you had something with Angela. It’s okay to react to her being hurt. You don’t have to hide that from me. I get it.”

  Lee gave her hand a squeeze back. “I know you do.”

  Someone cleared their throat.

  “Excuse me.”

  Lee held onto Julia’s hand for a fraction of a second longer. Then he turned to the voice.

  It was Doctor Trent, standing in the doorway of the waiting room.

  He was an older man of middle height with a paunch that seemed to stick to him despite reduced rations. He had a crown of gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose.

  He nodded to them. “Captain Harden. Miss Julia. I was told that you have something for me.”

  Lee stared at the man, and for a moment, had no idea what he was talking about.

  Then he remembered the body in the back of the truck.

  The dead primal.

  “Yeah,” Lee said. “We’ll get it. You got an autopsy room or something?”

  “Aut…” Doc Trent trailed off, blinking like he wasn’t quite understanding something. “Uh. Well. We don’t have autopsy rooms, per se. But I’m sure I can come up with something workable.”

  ***

  “Oh, Jesus!” Doctor Trent exclaimed. “You can’t bring that thing in here!”

  It was lying face up on the stainless steel table of an unused operating room.

  The harsh light from the overhead lamp made the shadows extreme.

  It was a table meant for an adult. It seemed to accent the thing’s small size.

  It was as dead as dead could be. But Lee still felt weird standing next to it.

  He remembered as a child, visiting a science museum, and in the Africa exhibit there was a stuffed male lion. He recalled looking up at the animal and knowing that it was not alive, could not hurt him, but feeling something deep inside his subconscious that wanted to run away from it.

  He felt that same way now.

  If Julia was perturbed by it, she kept it hidden.

  “Well, it’s here, Doc,” Julia said. “And now you need to take a look at it.”

  Doc Trent had backed up a step. “Alright. Fine. I’m looking at it.”

  “No, I mean really look at it.” Julia made a motion as though cutting her chest open and scooping her organs out.

  Doc Trent recalled what they’d said in the waiting room. He blinked rapidly again. “You want me to autopsy this thing?” He shook his head. “We don’t need an autopsy. It died of a gunshot wound to the head. That’s pretty evident.”

  Lee cleared his throat. “We’re not looking for cause of death.”

  Doc Trent rubbed his face. “Okay. Alright. What is it that you want?”

  “I want to know how old it is,” Lee said.

  Doc Trent looked at the body. Then at Lee. He quirked his head, and his mouth twitched. “You’re still stuck on this juvenile primal bullshit.”

  Lee gestured to the creature on the table. “I wouldn’t call it bullshit. You can see how small it is.”

  “So it’s a small primal.”

  “Look at its mouth. Look at its teeth. Look at its musculature. It’s not an adult.”

  Julia nodded at the body. “We told you these things were out there. You didn’t believe us.”

  Doctor Trent swiped his glasses off his face like they’d offended him. “What do you want from me, Julia? I’m a fucking doctor. I believe what I see. You guys are out there in tense situations. Sometimes tense situations cause us to see things differently than reality.”

  Lee watched the older doctor carefully. “You’ve read Jacob’s notebook, haven’t you?”

  Doctor Trent was very still for a moment. Like he was sensing a trap.

  Doctor Trent didn’t care for Jacob’s notebook. He didn’t care for Jacob’s findings. Despite the fact that Jacob had in fact been Doctor Jacob, a CDC microbiologist that had actually studied the infected, Trent referred to Jacob’s findings as “unsubstantiated.”

  Unfortunately for science, Doctor Jacob was no longer living.

  He was not available to defend his research.

  “You know my opinion on Jacob,” Doctor Trent said.

  “Sure,” Lee gave him a bare nod. “A quack. Someone who’d lost his mind in the chaos. Someone who was grasping at straws to explain the unexplainable. An alarmist, I think you’ve called him.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, did you read the notebook?”

  A disgruntled huff. “Yes. I read the damn thing. Who hasn’t?”

  Lee watc
hed the old general practitioner. A man of reason. A man very far out of his depth, too. “Well, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Jacob wasn’t a quack. Let’s assume that what he observed was true. The notes he made. All true. Just assume that for me.”

  Doctor Trent pursed his lips and said nothing.

  “If you accept the notes as true,” Lee continued. “And then you take a look at what’s lying on the table in front of you…I mean, I don’t think we’re being crazy here, Doc. Just look at it. Don’t you think it’s reasonable to conclude that the infected are breeding and developing abnormally fast?”

  Doctor Trent’s agitation seemed to reach its peak. He crossed, then uncrossed his arms. Let them hang. Then finally clasped them together in front of him and was still. “Yes. If you take all the rest of it as fact—which I don’t—then that would be a…reasonable conclusion.”

  Julia leaned on the table, looking at the primal’s face, its glassy eyes staring dead at the ceiling. Its jaw gaping open. “More like what you’d see in the animal world,” she said, almost as though speaking to herself. “Animals that have to hunt to survive don’t have time to develop slowly.”

  Doctor Trent pursed his lips. “Humans evolved delayed development in their offspring to accommodate for our complicated social structure…” he trailed off, as though realizing he was making their point for them and he didn’t like it. “But I protest your conclusions. In the strongest possible terms.”

  Lee nodded. “I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

  The doctor’s nose wrinkled like he’d smelled something bad. “You’re going to start a panic.”

  “I’m going to be realistic,” Lee responded. “It’s my job to address threats. Just because something is bad doesn’t mean we deny it until it comes back to bite us in the ass.”

  Doctor Trent considered both of them for a moment. “I’m not an unreasonable man, Captain Harden. But people around here don’t need their hopes crushed any more than they already are. They don’t need more bad news.” His face became plaintive. “Promise me that you’ll keep this quiet. At least until I can cut into this…this thing and…hopefully disprove you. No offense.”

  Lee raised his hands in surrender. “No offense taken. I would love for you to disprove me, Doc. That would make my life a helluva lot easier. But we’re beyond believing in easy things. We need to see the truth and confront it for what it is.”

  Doctor Trent sneered down at the body, his face a splatter-painting of disgust. “Fine. Fucking fine. I will…look into it.”

  “That’s all we’re asking,” Julia responded.

  Doctor Trent had nothing else to say to them, and they had nothing else to say to him.

  So Lee and Julia simply gave the thing on the table one last look, then turned, and departed the room, leaving the doctor to his disturbing task.

  Walking down the brightly lit hallway, Lee felt the reality of everything begin to settle on him. Like seeing funnel clouds form in a stormy sky and knowing your home was in the path of something supernaturally destructive.

  His gut felt sour. Jumpy.

  His head felt heavy. The weight of everything, compressing him down.

  “What do you think?” Julia asked him, earnestly curious.

  Lee’s voice was hollow and distant. “I think that we may have won the war against the regular infected. But I think we’re losing against the primals.”

  SEVEN

  ─▬▬▬─

  THE GULF

  Angela was in surgery for three hours.

  She was conscious the whole time. They didn’t have an official anesthesiologist. And even if they did, they’d run out of most of their good drugs a long time ago. What they did have was a surgeon who was familiar with nerve blocks, and so that’s what Angela got. Just like if she was giving birth and had asked for an epidural.

  Three hours she spent staring up at the bright lights of an operating room while she felt the distant tug of things in her middle section being moved around, stitched up, put back together.

  Occasionally one of the nurses, a woman a little older than Angela, with her body and head and face all covered in sea-green garments, would lean back from the curtain separating Angela from the sight of her own body.

  “You okay, hon?” the nurse would ask.

  “Yeah,” Angela would nod, her voice faint. “Thank you.”

  She heard the steady blip of her own heart on the monitor that they’d hooked up to her, and she thought it was very odd that it was so even, so relaxed. She didn’t know why she was so calm.

  She kept thinking about that sunny parking lot. Kept picturing the little puffs of rifle shots from up on the third floor of the school. Kept thinking about the feeling of being hit in the gut with a bullet. But for some reason, it never made her pulse spike.

  I’m dead inside. I can’t feel anything anymore.

  And she thought that maybe she was okay with that.

  Because what good would it do her now? Cause her heart to race? Cause adrenaline to spike through her system? Cause her to cry out and weep?

  What good did that do anybody?

  Why do they want to kill me? she wondered. Detached from the issue, like she was considering someone else’s life. That won’t accomplish anything for them. I guess it’s just symbolic. If they kill me they’ll feel like they won something.

  Well…

  Sorry to disappoint.

  “Almost done, Miss Houston,” the nurse said.

  Angela stared at the ceiling.

  She thought about what Jeff—her Director of Agriculture—had told her.

  Bad news on bad news.

  That’s what was keeping her from feeling. There was only so many times you could deal with bad news before you stopped reacting to it. Before you just shrugged when it came. You almost expected it, really.

  “I need to speak to Captain Harden,” Angela said.

  The nurse peeked back around the curtain. “What’s that, hon?”

  It was difficult to speak with volume. The nerve block seemed to make it hard for her to use her diaphragm to push the words out of her, so most of what she said came out in a murmur.

  She blinked a few times. Frowned. Focused on making her anesthetized body work. “I need to speak to Captain Harden.”

  “Okay, hon,” the nurse said, slipping back behind the curtain. “Just let us finish up here.”

  Angela got the feeling that she was being humored.

  “Hey.”

  “Yeah?” the nurse’s head again.

  Angela fixed the woman with a frown. “I’m fucking serious.”

  The nurse’s eyes behind their protective glasses blinked a few times. “Alright,” was all she said.

  The last hour ticked by. They gave her the basic play-by-play. Infused it with some good-humor: “Hey, Humpty-Dumpty, we’re just gonna put you back together again, and you’ll be done. Just a few more stitches…you feeling okay? Alright. Great. That’s great. There we go. Almost done…”

  And so on and so forth.

  They finished. Cleaned her up. Wheeled her from the operating room into a recovery room.

  The nurse was setting up her IV stand. Her name tag dangling from her large-ish breasts.

  SULLIVAN, it said.

  “Now, it’s gonna be best if you get some rest, Miss Houston…”

  Angela cleared her throat. Already the nerve block was wearing off, and she felt a spike of pain go through her. She ignored it. “Sit me up.”

  “No, you need to stay lying down.”

  “Nurse Sullivan,” Angela said, sharply. “Sit me up right now.”

  Nurse Sullivan gave her another long look, like she was trying to decipher how serious Angela was. How sober she was. “Ma’am, with all due respect, even though you’re conscious doesn’t mean the nerve block hasn’t gotten you a bit loopy. It might be impairing your judgement.”

  Angela stared at the nurse for a moment. Took a ponderous breath that caused her midsecti
on to ache. “Do you enjoy living here?”

  The nurse responded with another flurry of blinks. She shifted her feet. “Of course, Miss Houston.”

  “And you enjoy having fences to keep you and your family from being eaten?”

  No response to that one.

  “And you enjoy having food, instead of becoming food?”

  The nurse swallowed. Looked around, like she was searching for help, but they were alone in the room.

  Angela leaned herself upward, ignoring the dull throb that it caused. “Then sit me the fuck up and get Captain Harden.”

  ***

  Lee stepped into the hospital room, alone.

  The nurse had retrieved him from the waiting room with a matronly look that told him she was fetching him against her better judgement. It was rare that Angela got pushy, but Lee had seen it a few times. Because she was usually so nice, it shocked people when she put niceness aside for a moment.

  Lee had never really had that problem.

  Most people seemed convinced that he was a violent machine of a man. That kind of reputation was useful to him.

  But perhaps he spent more hours than he wanted to admit, trying to convince himself that there was more to him than that. That there was still something kind and good inside of him. That the inner workings of his mind hadn’t been completely reduced to steel and ash.

  Of course, you could tell yourself all kinds of nice things about yourself.

  People are best at lying to themselves. Oftentimes we are the only ones who fall for our own deceptions.

  “You rang?” Lee offered up as he entered the hospital room.

  Angela was sitting up in her bed, with a blanket covering her from the waist down. She was wearing one of those tie-in-the-back hospital gowns. Thin and gauzy. Her blonde pony-tail was tangled and askew. Her face was drawn and exhausted.

  “Are you okay?” he asked in earnest. “How are you feeling?”

  “Hm.” She squinted skyward, as though she really had to think about it. “Feels…like I got shot.”

  Lee smirked. “Hey. Welcome to the club. You’re one of us now.”

  Her eyes became serious. “I didn’t hear about the shooter. Did they get him?”