Beyond Green Fields #5 - Survive: A post-apocalyptic anthology Read online

  I should be relieved. At the very least, I should be feeling accomplished now that everything I’ve done for the past two years is coming to a close.

  Then why do I keep having a bad feeling about all this?

  Bree isn’t happy with me—but then I haven’t given her much cause to be. I don’t know what soured her mood—maybe making her film that report and assessment about the virus wasn’t the smartest thing to do. Maybe it’s simply the truth settling in for good—and the implications that had Thecla Soudekis not killed my brother, Bree would have, sooner or later, gotten her own hands dirty. While she’s still eyeing me cautiously once in a while, gone is the trepidation from earlier. My people’s presence keeps her on edge, but she no longer seems to think that I’ll be the one to kill her. As much as that’s a good thing, it also annoys me.

  Or she’s just pissed at me since my presence here reminds her of the fact that my brother was just as fucked up as I am in my own way, as she explained earlier when she got in my face about that.

  As we’re lugging the bags full of explosives into the hot lab, I can’t help but think that, just maybe, I was wrong not to tell her about all this the last time we fucked. Well, maybe not before or during that; and she definitely needed some sleep afterward. But I could have woken her up at 4am and sat her down to explain… something among the lines of, “See, this is the reason why I approached you in the first place, but I’ve since come to the conclusion that you’d make a very valuable contribution to my team…”

  Yeah, she’d be just as pissed at me had I done that. Timing doesn’t really seem to be of that much importance to her.

  Just her luck that her mood is the last thing I need to be considerate of.

  I’m glad to have her along because it makes applying the adhesive to the C4 bricks much easier. Eventually, she gets curious about my background, and I tell her exactly the parts that fit into the narrative she must have going on in her head about me—that I know how to blow shit up, and that I don’t give a rat’s ass about her or anyone else’s academic achievements. I can’t help myself and add a few details about my army career, if you can call it that, since she’s seen me in uniform at my brother’s funeral. I’m sure she couldn’t read the rank insignia—or has long since forgotten about that—and it’s kind of funny to watch her have the epiphany that if she’d just kept her trap shut back then, we wouldn’t be standing here today.

  Hope flares up inside of me as we prep the outside of the viral vault, but I already know what takes Bree a few moments to figure out—she doesn’t have clearance, and with Thecla Soudekis having blown herself up, there went my last chance to get inside. It won’t matter, but I hate that I won’t get this one last level of satisfaction.

  Then we’re done, but I’m reluctant to leave just yet. Maybe it’s simply because I’m a glutton for punishment and want to see the end of that video myself—watch how my brother turned into the very monster I know I will eventually turn into myself after I die. Maybe it’s because on some level I feel like I owe it to Bree to let her see how far-reaching this shit is. Dolores and I agreed to cut that part out of the video that she’s sharing, so unless she kept a copy of the full version, she and I are the last living people to have witnessed my brother’s true end. Call me a sentimental fool, but for whatever reason, I suddenly feel like Bree deserves to know. If I’m not completely wrong, the hero worship she had going on for my brother would have, eventually, ended in his bed; she’s not his type, but if you add working endless hours to the lack of other options those very same endless hours construct… I’m aware that it’s abso-fucking-lutely idiotic to be jealous of a dead guy when I am actually the one who got to hit that, but I’m sure that once she sees the last five minutes of that video, she’ll forever be cured of that puppy love.

  I try to tell myself transparency is the reason I tell her I need to show her something else, but deep down I know that’s a lie.

  And her horrified expression as she shies away from the terminal as we watch what used to be my brother go ape-shit on the hospital beds should not be so damn satisfying, but it is. I actually need to keep pushing against her back to keep her from running off. Her eyes are wide as she finally turns to me, asking exactly the right question: “What the fuck was that?”

  And I tell her—not everything, but I mention the serum, and I hate that she hones in on exactly what has my instincts running circles on high alert at the back of my mind: what did Thecla Soudekis mean by, “it’s out there.” Of course she also jumps to the right conclusions now about what happened to Jones—but in the end she seems to agree with me that her former boss was a fucking coward, Jones was a fluke… oh, and yes, I’m an ass, which she deserves to call me. But at least now she’s no longer brooding at megawatt strength. She asks a few more questions about the explosives, but I get why she feels she needs to change the topic.

  At the airlock, she asks me why I didn’t at least try to recruit her, and I almost laugh because that question still ricochets through my mind. I can’t very well admit that to her now, so my answers tease her more than is likely smart—

  And then she gives me a shove inside the decontamination shower, runs by me with more agility than this fucking space suit should make possible, and locks me inside—with her remaining in the lab.

  What the ever-loving fuck does she think—

  Since I don’t have the answer for that, I shout at her where I can see her standing on the other side of the window, panting hard enough that her suit visor is fogging over slightly. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Instead of answering me, she rambles off a list of details that she already shared earlier and I’m well aware of—that the shower cycle takes eight minutes, cannot be stopped from the inside, and so on. She also makes it plain that whatever she’s up to, it won’t take her long, so I needn’t bother barging back into the lab proper.

  To say I’m seething is an understatement. What the fuck does she even think she can do in there—in the eight minutes until I’m back? “I repeat, what the fuck are you doing? All the detonators are activated. I've told Dolores to remotely trigger them if anything goes wrong, right fucking now.”

  If anything, she looks offended. “I don't give a shit about your detonators,” she hisses, and sounds like she means it. “You asked the wrong question, or answered the wrong one. When I asked you just now why you didn't ask me, I meant why you didn't ask me about the vault.”

  That makes even less sense. “We checked your clearance. You are not authorized to go into the vault.”

  She grimaces, which I belatedly realize is supposed to be a smile. “Your brother did a lot more than rant on that log. He already had all the papers I'd need to take over compiled. Did I mention that I was supposed to work as his assistant? Yes, you knew that already. Well, guess what? I might not be authorized to go into the vault, but I'm damn sure I know his access code.”

  In perfect timing with the last word she utters, the shower comes on, obscuring my view as I get pelted with chemicals that would kill me—twice, in quick succession—were I to inhale them. I know that I have to accept defeat—at least for now—but that doesn’t mean we’re done. “You could have told me that five minutes ago,” I tell her—and I really don’t get why she didn’t.

  “Yes, I could have.” That’s all I get from her—and judging from the utter silence that follows, not even the sound of her breathing audible over the line, she must have switched off her mic.

  Fuck.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  If she’s telling the truth—and right now I give it a fifty percent chance that she is—whatever she’s up to won’t make a difference. Half the C4 we’ve planted is enough to vaporize everything biological inside the shell of the lab, and fill in what’s left with the soil that will slide down into the newly created crater. It’s not as easy as pulling the detonators out of the C4 bricks; cautious bastard that I am, I’ve rigged half of them to go off if anyone tries to manipulate them after they have been activated, so I’ll know pretty soon if she did anything stupid when one of them goes off and reduces her into so much minced meat. Going on what I just showed her—and explained about the virus and serum—it’s way more likely that, somehow, my speech was weirdly inspirational to her and she’s right now busy getting into the vault so she can directly dispose of the samples, making my work ten times easier and the method of destruction foolproof. That’s pretty much what I would have counted on had I recruited her.

  But what has me wanting to crawl up the sides of the decontamination shower is the possibility that I’ve been wrong—completely and utterly wrong. What if Bree isn’t who I think she is? Her CV is solid, and she has been behaving almost exactly along the lines of the psych profile I compiled on her before I chose to intrude in her life, except for the surprise of finding a much brighter and more interesting mind behind those inquisitive eyes. I feel so fucking stupid right now that it chokes me, but I really thought I was the only one who caught this. That, somehow, I was destined to help her fulfill her full potential, or some shit like that.

  But what if those flashes weren’t what makes her special, but should have triggered the alarm bells in the back of my head? I’m not seriously thinking that Brianna Lewis, PhD, is a master manipulator and spy, or a planted operative—but what if the woman who I’ve been fucking isn’t actually Brianna Lewis? What if, along with killing my brother, whoever set that in motion swapped her out, maybe anticipating that one day I would come here to exact bloody revenge? Or they swapped her out after her supposed freakout down here. The more I pace, the more that theory takes shape in my mind. It’s an explanation for why she was content to do little more than menial tasks for so long, after being driven to the point of obsessive before; it also explains
her non-relationship with her girlfriend. Because of Bree’s age, it wasn’t quite that easy to fully reconstruct her sexual history, but what I’ve found fits very much into the “a little late-blooming lesbian” stereotype—loser boyfriend in high school who must have been her first and only guy in the sack, making it tantalizingly easy for her to switch sides the moment she went to college and found herself confronted with an entire buffet of experimentation-happy, man-hating women her age. The woman I fucked—repeatedly—was definitely not repulsed by my dick. I’ve also never understood why she’d stand to be around a serial cheater—but, of course, if that wasn’t a real relationship and just for cover, why would she care who her roommate had sex with? And here I thought so much of my prowess and charms that made her fall for me in under half an hour—when it’s so much more likely that she recognized me the moment the dog came crashing into her, and she was the one who played me, not the other way around.

  As soon as the shower shuts off, I’m out of the claustrophobic room—and stop in my tracks. Do I want to rush back into the lab? Yes, but that might be exactly what she’s waiting for. Just as she locked me out, she’s now locked in, and the shower exit is the perfect kill chute if I’ve ever seen one. I can be ready with my gun the moment she gets out of the shower—while she could be up to anything inside that lab.

  I hesitate for another second, then tear off the fucking suit, exhaling in relief when my sweat-soaked skin meets air again. The shower behind me is still off, the airlock engaged, so I do the smart thing and arm myself. Since I’m already in the outer room, I leave the lab proper and check on the detonators that I can see through the viewing windows. No sign of Bree, but then both the vault and her workspace are in the middle part of the complex, around two bends in the corridor that I can see. The C4 blocks and detonators look undisturbed. I want to check in with Zilinsky, but hesitate next to my com once I’m back inside. If I’m right and Bree really isn’t who she is pretending to be, there’s a good chance she’s not the only infiltrator. Tipping other potential moles off now could turn everything into a damn shit-show. Then again, if Bree is the real deal and is right now performing the single most heroic stunt of her life, there’s no reason to send everyone into a frenzy.

  As I keep mulling over my options, I see something blue move in the corridor by the airlock. Stepping up to the window, I catch her last three steps before she disappears into the contamination shower, the chemical spray almost immediately coming on as she must have slammed her hand down on the button to activate it even as the airlock was still sealing itself. That was not the careful kind of slow motion I’ve been watching her use on both trips into the lab—but that could be a simple sign of her trying to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  I have another seven-and-a-half minutes to decide what to do, and that doesn’t help at all. I end up giving her the benefit of the doubt, but I stash my gun where I can easily reach it. I doubt she will come out of the shower with guns blazing, so even if she is an infiltrator, she will try to pretend to play along.

  I decide that’s how I’ll play it—see how she reacts. Is she calm and composed, ready to fold and play scared again, like she did earlier in the day? Then I know something is up. But if she comes out of there, nerves hanging by a thread, panicking because of what she did but also afraid of any repercussions from my side? Then I can likely make out that her emotions are real and she’s not pretending.

  Fuck, but I hate the possibility that she’s been fooling me—and not just because that would mean my perfect woman doesn’t exist. Come to think of it, that makes the infiltrator option sound way more likely. I’m not stupid; I also know what the people I’ve been dealing with in the past are capable of. Because he let me walk away, I figured that Decker couldn’t have been behind my brother’s death. Why bother if he not only had me right where he’d wanted me if he actually intended to kill me, but also had all the right in the world to make me disappear? My plan to get out was solid, but it failed massively in some details, and I know I narrowly escaped not just the proverbial firing squad. One of my theories on why it’s even been possible for me to pull this mission off was that, somewhere far in the background, Decker had given his blessing. But I wouldn’t put it past that asshole that he spent the past year watching me plan every single detail, only to let the noose close around my neck just as I think I got away with it.

  The countdown of the shower is endless, making me tense as hell and twice as annoyed. I’m ready when the shower shuts off and the door opens, but Bree doesn’t even seem to notice me where I’m standing next to my discarded suit. She almost falls over in her haste to get her own suit off, then uses her teeth to help with the tape that keeps the gloves secure underneath. As soon as they are off, she’s dousing her hands with sanitizer, frantically scrubbing at the quickly-reddening skin. My first impulse is to question whether I should have done that myself—but she skipped that step the first time we came out of that lab. Also, her behavior is a very long shot from the cautious, measured motions she’s been using before, belying her underlying anxiety—whether that was false or real, I can’t say. But the panicked behavior now? That’s a hundred percent real, and already I feel my mind ease up.

  Yup, my girl here had to play the hero, and obviously, now she’s having a panic attack. Just to be sure, I check the glove of the suit, and while there is a tiny nick in it, the discarded gloves are whole. Unless she cut herself—or injected herself with some shit—she should be okay.

  It’s the elation that I must have been overreacting with my wild theories about Bree that makes me step up to her without dropping the menacing asshole facade first. She barely tenses when I offer up with an appropriately pissed-off voice, “You have sixty seconds to explain to me what exactly you just did, or I swear, I will make you rue every single one of those twenty minutes until your last breath.” I admit, some of that isn’t even pretense. I am mad at her for going off on her own. But with every passing moment, I’m more convinced that I wasn’t wrong about her in general.

  She stops in her frantic motions, then reaches forward to switch to normal water, still ignoring me. Her hands are both angry red, and I almost wince when I realize how much the harsh chemicals must have been hurting on her burn marks from the coffee spill. With near measured pace, she slowly turns to face me, almost bumping into me because I’m absolutely intruding in her personal space. She’s quite the sight to behold, her face white from panic but also covered with red blotches from overheating inside the suit, wisps of sweaty, red hair plastered to her forehead where they escaped her bun. There’s still some of the panic left but it quickly gets replaced by rage, and damn, anger suits her much better than cowering fear. Most of all, I can tell that it’s all real—raw emotion spilling out after hours of her trying her best to suppress them.

  “Forty seconds left,” I remind her, more to fuck with her than anything else now.

  “What I did, you want to know? I did your fucking job for you, that's what I did,” she grinds out, her voice shaking with anger rather than fright. As much as my ego wants to protest because I’m clearly no longer intimidating her, my soul wants to give me a high-five.

  I lean in until we’re almost touching, hard-pressed not to simply tear off her scrubs and fuck her right there over the sink. I know she’d be up for it—but likely only after a certain startup period. She looks ready to blow, but that means it’s much more fun if I do this the right way… and make her come for me rather than the other way round.