Chapter 9 #2
He flicked a finger at Simmons. “Restrain her so that we can take her to the lab,” he said, walking away.
“Let’s stay on the outskirts. I’ll tell Kowalski he can leave his post, and I’ll have him round up some guys to ensure none of the citizens see us bringing her through. Wouldn’t want to cause a stir.”
Knowing I would have to wait for them to leave before returning to Larke, I inspected the area to see if I could find any clues as to how Solana had gotten inside.
The first thing I came upon were footprints.
There was an organized pair, Simmons’ prints, which were easily distinguishable from the disorganized, barefoot imprints Solana made.
She’d had on a pair of sweatpants and a tank top and was covered in dirt.
So, in all likelihood, she’d been on her own for a while.
Like the rest of the team, she had no children, and she’d kept her private life away from work.
Based on a few phone conversations I’d walked in on, it had appeared as if she’d had a lover of some sort, but that was as much as I’d learned.
I didn’t ask, and I never urged the team to tell me.
They were a good group.
Still, they weren’t like the team I’d had with Gage at the helm.
My security team and I grew close as coworkers, whereas Gage and the rest of our team were the closest thing I had to a family.
We’d all stared death in the eyes and rescued each other from its claws, so knowing details about each other’s lives eventually became unavoidable.
I walked to the edge of the development, where the fence was about eighty percent finished.
At first glance, everything looked on the up and up, but then I noticed that the hinges were different on one of the older gates, which wasn’t an immediate issue; supply chains were a thing of the past, and it wasn’t unusual to have to work with what the development had on hand.
What I didn’t like was that the screws that secured the hinges looked brand new.
Next, I noticed clean, precise cuts in rolls of barbed wire on the ground.
Cuts that didn’t make sense.
Then, on the other side of the fence, I noticed a slab of wood that looked out of place, although it didn’t look out of place for an area undergoing construction. It looked out of place for an area I’d already surveyed, especially when there’d been a drain grate underneath where the slab lay.
Finally, the breach made no sense.
If the area was recently secured, why would it suddenly be hit by a single infected human unless someone had funneled Solana in this direction?
I squeezed the back of my neck.
If there was humanness inside Solana, she might have been drawn to the promise of other human life.
If not, someone had purposefully led her to the camp.
Whether it was to wreak havoc or test something small for a more significant intrusion later wasn’t clear.
However, in times like these, the best person to bounce theories off of was Larke Tapley.
I headed back.
On the way, my radio went off:
Harding, it’s Cerner. Go to 4.
I switched radio channels. “Go for Harding.”
“I need you for a meeting with some of the other generals,” Cerner said. “It’s nothing big, just a debriefing about the breach. You don’t have to mention anything you found today, if you did end up finding something, but we like to get feedback from our best guys. After that…”
I breathed through my irritation.
There was no “after that.”
I had shit to do.
“…but you won’t have to do any combat training directly,” Cerner continued.
“Just observe the combat drill for some QA. Then, I’ll need you to fill in for a couple of hours on Tower 3.
Honestly, I might pull you off patroling indefinitely so you don’t lose your skills.
But I’m getting off-topic. Come straight to my office. Over.”
I nearly crushed the radio.
I didn’t know how much longer I could do this shit.
Realistically, I knew I had to play the game.
I would be no good to Larke dead, and I wanted to be alive as long as she was living.
I wanted to do everything I’d withheld myself from doing—holding her, breathing her in, telling her the real reason I keep building higher and higher walls between us.
I’d failed before, and it cost me the life of someone I cared about.
Grief was the hardest battle I ever fought.
But losing someone I loved?
It would end me.
So, grinding my teeth so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised to swallow enamel dust, I headed for Cerner’s office.
By the time I was done being shuffled from a meeting to supervising a training and then to tower duty, it was nearly midnight.
I went straight to the laundry, only to be equally relieved and disappointed that the building was empty. On the one hand, I was disappointed because I wanted to see my girl, but I was relieved because had she still been there, I would have set LaSalle on fire while alive.
I returned to my apartment unit only to find it empty, and I swept it three times as if Larke would suddenly crawl out of one of the kitchen sink drains. Once satisfied I hadn’t overlooked her presence, I left and headed down to LaSalle’s floor.
When he saw me coming down the hallway, his face paled.
It pissed me off how normal he looked, standing with a spoon in his mouth and carrying a small carton of ice cream, wearing shorts and a United States Navy T-shirt.
None of what Larke had endured was explicitly his fault, but I was out for blood.
“I won’t ask you,” I said. “You know why I’m looking for you.”
He sighed, lowering the spoon. “Look, I just…I couldn’t bring her to Woodhaven, man. It’s too risky for me and her.”
“And how was she feeling when you left her?”
He sighed again. “Worse. Right before we split up, she said she was feeling worse. She told me she would stop by the medical office in Sanitation to see if there was anything they could do for the pain.”
“Pain? She’s in pain?”
“Look, man, I know what you’re thinking.” He looked around before dropping his voice to a whisper. “But I don’t see how she would have gotten infected. She is sick, though. It’s not unusual for sickness to move through Sanitation.”
It was grueling, dirty work.
Then, they didn’t have access to adequate healthcare.
The generals wanted a survival of the fittest situation, but I planned to kill every last one of them the second I got the chance. If Larke didn’t pull through, it would be sooner rather than later.
“I have some information that might be useful,” LaSalle added.
“Some guys on the tower got sick today, so they’re short-staffed on three and six.
They’re also doing shift changes an hour later than usual.
I heard about the breach, and foot patrol’s going to be next to nonexistent tonight.
They’re moving extra men toward the fence. ”
“Which is in the opposite direction of where I need to go,” I said. “You know this place well?”
“Well, enough. Not as well as you, probably.”
“I need your help with something then. Follow me.”
“Are you…you’re not going to kill me, right?”
“Just follow me.”
We went up to my unit, and after he crossed the threshold as if expecting an axe to swing out from the door trim, I walked him over to the map.
I’d spent most of my time focusing on where Larke could be, so I hadn’t paid much attention to surveillance.
On the route I planned to take, I only knew of a few blind spots.
If LaSalle and Larke weren’t meeting up for sexual reasons—and I couldn’t bring myself to believe they were, or else I would off us all—their meetings served another purpose.
I turned off the lights, grabbed a blacklight, clicked it on, and aimed it at the map. All the locations I’d tracked lit up like a flare in a dark sky, transforming the complex into my very own grid system.
“This is freakin’ amazing,” LaSalle said, walking closer. “This is how I know I’ll never reach Class One.”
The hierarchy was fairly static.
Even if he excelled, his chances of advancing were slim.
“It’s UV ink,” I said. “Now, the dots? Those are the spots where I know there are eyes. The circled areas are where I’ve already looked for Larke. And this?” I trailed my finger along a path. “That’s the route I’m thinking of using to get to Larke’s building.”
LaSalle aimed his spoon at the map. “Okay, so, in Zone 3, you’ve got here and…
here. Those are two more surveillance areas, and I’m one hundred percent certain about those.
But here’s my suggestion: go through Zone 6.
Start at your original point of origin and then,” he slashed his hand across the paper, “cut through right here. The only issue you might run into is that there’s still some settled water from the little bit of rain we got the other day, so it might make you guys’ footsteps easier to track. ”
I had a workaround for that.
“What else can you tell me?” I asked.
He marked every surveillance point he knew of, and then we finalized my route.
It would extend my trek by roughly twenty minutes both ways, but it was twenty minutes that would get me to Larke and safely bring her home with me.
If everything worked out the way I hoped, she would never go back to that building, that role, or that life.
LaSalle headed for the door.
“Thanks for the help, LaSalle,” I called after him. “But, before you go, what were you and Tapley doing in the laundry today? Because I know she lied to me. At least, you better hope she did.”
He nodded. “She did. We were only talking. I respect her and you. Plus, I know how you feel about her.”
Although I was on borrowed time, I had to know what he meant. “How do I feel about her?”
“Come on, man. It’s so obvious. Larke means the world to you. Unless…” He frowned. “Am I wrong? There’s no way I’m wrong…am I?”