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  HARDEN

  LEE HARDEN SERIES

  BOOK 1

  ─

  D. J. MOLLES

  For those who have looked into the woods,

  But decided that they have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before they sleep.

  FOUR YEARS AGO

  It was the damn betta fish.

  The betta fish was the reason for the end of the last meaningful relationship that Lee Harden would have before the world went to shit.

  Of course, no end of a relationship is ever quite that simple.

  But you could say that the betta fish was the beginning of the end.

  Her name was Deana. They’d been dating for about a year at that point. Lee’s overseas deployments were behind him, and he was fresh out of the long and strange training protocol of Project Hometown when he met her.

  They’d tapped him to be a “Coordinator” for Project Hometown because he had no one in his life. No siblings. No close relatives. His parents had died in a car accident in the last few months of his last deployment.

  Project Hometown was a government initiative under the loose umbrella of the Department of the Army. Subvenire Refectus was their motto: Rescue and Rebuild. It was essentially a last-ditch contingency plan for any event that might lead to the fall of American society.

  Nuclear events.

  Invasion.

  Any other shit that the Washington Worry-Warts dreamed up.

  There was a Coordinator in each state, and they lived a quiet life of secrets, in a house that had been designed over top of a bunker. A bunker that the Coordinators referred to as The Hole, in the same spirit that a lifer in an old prison farm might refer to the punishment of solitary confinement.

  Which is, in fact, what it was.

  At first glance, it was just as comfortable as a nicely-appointed apartment. But no amount of trappings and trimmings could make a man long forget that what he really needs is sunlight, freedom, and human interaction.

  Even people that hate people still miss them when they’re gone.

  Anytime the Washington Worry-Warts came up with something that could possibly destroy American society, Lee would go down into The Hole and he would wait there for the all-clear. It never turned into anything. Until it did. But that’s a different story.

  It was a lonely life.

  So he’d met Deana, and they’d dated. She was understanding of his job, which required long absences in which he was in The Hole and not allowed any contact with the outside world. She didn’t know that he was in The Hole. He told her that he was on “business for the government” and she was smart enough not to ask questions.

  “The Betta Fish Incident,” as he came to call it in his mind, occurred on a rainy December 31st, when he was picking Deana up from her job as a paralegal, heading to a New Year’s Eve party.

  Deana was shuffling paperwork. Sending the year’s last few emails. She was auburn-haired, and tall, but not lanky. Filled out. In a sort of warrior-princess way. That was okay. Lee was 6’3” and had a perennial soft spot for women of a healthy size.

  She had already changed from her business attire into a silvery party dress that highlighted her sporting dimensions. Lee thought that he might be underdressed in his jeans and black button-down, but at the same time, he didn’t care.

  It was dark, and through the windows of the office that Deana shared with several other paralegals, the world beyond was slick and black and shimmering with streetlights and stoplights.

  Standing at the side of her desk as she finished up, Lee spotted a flash of purple and blue inside the clear vase on Deana’s desk.

  He leaned down to look in at the small creature inside the fish bowl. “What’s this?”

  “Betta fish,” Deana said, in a manner that suggested the fish was a pothole in the otherwise smooth boulevard of her daily life. “It was a white elephant gift from the Christmas party.”

  Lee knew it was a betta fish. Also known as a Siamese fighting fish. He knew you couldn’t put two of them together because they’d fight and kill each other. He appreciated that about them.

  He put his index finger gently up to the cold, glass fish bowl.

  The creature inside bristled at this intrusion, puffing out its gills to make it look bigger, flashing its colorful fanlike tail. Ready to fight.

  Lee traced his finger across the glass, and the betta fish tracked with it.

  When he withdrew his finger, the fish looked almost disappointed. Here, it had geared up for a big fight and nothing had happened.

  Lee knew the feeling.

  “That’s probably the most excitement he’s had all week,” Deana observed with a smile. “I sometimes forget he’s there.”

  Lee didn’t respond. He was looking at the fish and, stupidly, starting to feel pity for the dumb thing.

  “You ever feel bad for it?” Lee asked her.

  Deana clicked around on her computer. Closing windows. Distracted. “Why’s that?”

  “It just sits there. In a fucking bowl. Day after day. Staring at your desk.”

  Deana pulled herself away from her computer. Looked at the fish. Then raised an eyebrow at Lee. “I think the fish will be okay.”

  “How long do they live?”

  Deana sighed, like she had researched the answer and didn’t care for it. “Up to three years. You see why it was the gift that no one wanted.”

  “So for the next three years, it’s just going to sit there, bored out of its mind. Yearning to fight in the ponds of Siam.”

  Deana snickered at the glimmer of humor. “I think he’ll be okay,” she repeated.

  “What if it’s driving him nuts? Like being in solitary confinement.”

  “He seems to be handling it well.”

  “Maybe he’s just stoic.”

  Deana stood up and grabbed her purse off the desk. “Maybe you think too much, Lee.”

  Then she slipped her arm in his and they left the office. Deana turned the lights out as she went, plunging the room into darkness where the little creature would float aimlessly.

  They went on to the party.

  Lee was surrounded by Deana’s friends. He cracked jokes. Made them laugh. But he didn’t really know them. And they didn’t really know him. They were not really his friends.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about that stupid fish after that. And the idea had become planted in his mind now, the idea of sitting in a fish bowl in the darkness, completely alone, bred to fight, and yet never fighting.

  If Deana couldn’t understand something as simple as that fish, how the hell was she going to understand him?

  It was a silly thought. Ridiculous.

  But it germinated and grew.

  Lee and Deana eventually parted ways, but it was amiable.

  They kept up with occasional texts, phone calls, or messages on social media. Just checking in. Yes, things are fine. Glad to hear it. Blah blah.

  Six months after they had parted, Lee was sent into The Hole because a certain bacteria called Febrile Urocanic Reactive Yersinia was eating away at people’s frontal lobes and turning them incredibly violent.

  The Washington Worry-Warts did their job of worrying, concerned that containment efforts might fail.

  Lee did his job and went down into his fishbowl to wait for the all-clear.

  It never came.

  IN THE PRESENT

  one

  ─▬▬▬─

  Move out and draw fire

  We are born surrounded.

  That’s what he was thinking as his blood-oxygen level reached its terminal low point. Like a seemingly purposeless flash of clarity in the midst of a drug-induced haze.

  We are born surrounded, and spend our lives fighting to the death.

  Then his heart stopped
.

  ***

  Mid-clavicular line.

  This was the mental Mobius strip that looped through Julia’s mind.

  Second intercostal space. Mid-clavicular line.

  A green chemlight jittered from a strap on her shoulder. It was the only light she had to work with. And it wasn’t much. She could see the chest. The ribs. The hair. The blood. Everything else around her faded into darkness.

  “Is he breathing?” A voice called out.

  Julia glanced up from her fevered work.

  At the window to the apartment, Julia could barely see the shadow of Brian Tomlin, looking at her over the stock of his rifle.

  Abe Darabie stopped pumping chest compressions. Gasped for air. “Just watch the fucking road, goddammit!”

  Julia snapped back to Abe. “Don’t fucking stop!” she barked at him, and then she turned back to the inert form of Lee Harden, lying on his back, having taken his last breaths three minutes prior.

  Lee’s long, lanky body began to move limply as Abe grunted and continued with the chest compressions. Continued trying to keep that heart beating.

  But starting the heart wasn’t going to do them any good if Julia couldn’t re-inflate Lee’s lung.

  She pulled the cap off a decompression needle with her teeth, then spat it off to the side. The 14-gauge needle glinted in the low, green light.

  She held it in her right hand, and with her left hand, she rammed her fingers hard into Lee’s left pectoral.

  Her fingers slid across his blood-slick skin. She pressed them harder to get some traction. She felt the bony protuberance of one of his topmost ribs. She pulled her finger down. Felt the hollow between the ribs.

  Second intercostal space. Mid-clavicular line.

  She found the second space between the ribs. Leaned in close. Close enough to smell him. The smell she knew very well. Sweat. Body odor. The metallic tang of blood. The heavy chemical scent of gunsmoke.

  The chest was jumping with Abe’s compressions.

  The needle in her hand trembled, inches from the skin.

  “You need me to stop?” Abe gasped out.

  “No,” Julia said, frowning with the focus of someone disarming a bomb. “Don’t stop.”

  She had the space marked by her left index finger. She pushed the thick needle into Lee’s skin, just below that finger, until it hit the rib beneath that space. Then she angled it, guided it up. She felt the tip of it threading along the top of that rib, right into the space between.

  Slight resistance as it poked against the pleural cavity.

  Then give, as it penetrated.

  Hope, fleeting.

  She fed it in a little further.

  He’s dead.

  Errant thought.

  Her fingers were shaking badly. She got the catheter off the needle. Pulled the needle out.

  “Keep going.” She pointed to the mop of brown hair to her right. “Nate, breathe him!”

  Nate looked terrified, but shoved the CPR mask down over Lee’s face and started pumping the bag. Pressure now, filling Lee’s throat and lungs. Moving things around.

  Black blood trickled out of the corner of Lee’s mouth.

  “Oh, Jesus, shit!” Nate cried out. “He’s bleeding out of his mouth! What do I do?”

  “Just keep going,” Julia commanded.

  She hunched further over Lee’s form, to the hole in his chest. An occlusive bandage had already been stuck to it. The hole was no longer visible behind a thin layer of bright, arterial blood. The one-way valve at the bottom corner of the dressing started to leak more of that bright blood.

  Julia was nodding. “Keep going.”

  Come on, Lee. Come on…

  Blood exiting the pleural cavity. The lung re-inflating.

  Didn’t mean Lee was resuscitated, but it was a step in the right direction, wasn’t it?

  He’s dead, the cold clinician in her said. Been dead for three minutes.

  Julia realized she was clutching the tatters of Lee’s bloody combat shirt in her hands, twisting it like she might wring the death out of him and replace it with life, but all she could do was sit and hope, the cards dealt, the die cast, and hope to God they’d done enough, quick enough.

  “Contact!” Tomlin called out. “Down the road!”

  “Fuck!” Abe shouted at Lee’s unresponsive chest, still hammering the compressions.

  Tomlin and Julia’s eyes connected in the dimness of their little hideout.

  “They’re comin’,” Tomlin said.

  Julia could only shake her head. “We need more time.”

  ***

  Whoever it was had sprung the ambush like an expert.

  They’d hit them hard with automatic weapons, and then funneled them right into a dead end road. They’d had to abandon their two pickup trucks at a defunct and overgrown power substation, and the six of them plunged into the woods, running back east towards the town they’d just come through.

  It was a tiny little burg on the eastern edge of Alabama. According to the map and the ivy-covered Lion’s Club sign that they’d passed on the way in, the town was called Hurtsboro, and Brian Tomlin couldn’t stop thinking, how fucking appropriate.

  They had tried to set up a hasty counter-ambush, but whoever it was had only surrounded them again.

  That was when Lee had been shot in the chest.

  He’d stayed on his feet over the course of another quarter mile of fighting retreat, but had collapsed in the courtyard of a small apartment complex. Which was where they were currently hiding.

  In the dismal dark inside that apartment, Tomlin and Carl Gilliard held coverage on the front windows, as Julia tried to fix Lee.

  It wasn’t going well.

  It was there, crouched at the window, that Tomlin saw moonlight glint off the cab of an SUV, about two hundred yards down the road from the apartment. Headlights off, creeping towards them.

  “Contact!” Tomlin called out. “Down the road!”

  Beside him, at an adjacent window, Carl sank down onto one knee and got behind the optic of his rifle. “I got ‘em.”

  Tomlin looked back over his shoulder. Lee was on the ground, limp, mouth hanging open, eyes closed, and in the glow of Julia’s green chemlight, he looked like a cadaver.

  Oh Jesus, Lee, Tomlin felt his chest tighten.

  Julia glanced up from her work and her eyes hit Tomlin’s. Her usual clinical detachment had fled from her face. She was not able to distance herself from this one. She looked terrified.

  “They’re comin’,” Tomlin reiterated.

  Julia shook her head at him. “We need more time.”

  Beside him, Carl raised his voice. “Julia, you need to stuff that chemlight somewhere. They’re gonna see the glow.”

  Julia seized the chemlight that hung from a bit of strapping on the shoulder of her chest rig, and stuffed it behind her magazines. “I’ve got the decomp needle in,” she said. “But we need more time on CPR or his blood pressure’s gonna bottom out. We gotta give him more time.”

  Carl didn’t take his eyes from the scope of his AR-10 rifle. “Jules, I got two bad-guy-trucks rolling slow up the road, accompanied by about ten motherfuckers on foot. So, you need to take a good honest look right now and tell me whether Lee can be saved.”

  “I don’t…I don’t know, Carl.”

  “Is he fucking dead?” Carl demanded.

  “I don’t fucking know!”

  Carl let out a low growl. “Motherfuck.” Then, to Tomlin, he said, “Alright, Brian. We gotta give them some time.”

  Tomlin turned back to the window. Back over his rifle. His cheek against the buttstock. The same spot where his stubbled face had abraded the rifle’s paint job back down to the original black.

  Out beyond, the trucks had crept closer.

  They weren’t just letting them go. They were pursuing them.

  Who the fuck was it? Was it some of President Briggs’s troops from Greeley, Colorado? That didn’t seem right. From the glim
pses that Tomlin had seen, most of their attackers were wearing civilian clothes.

  Beside the vehicle, ten or so hostiles on foot were fanning out, several on either side of the road, and some of them had disappeared into the trees. It looked to Tomlin like they were trying to surround the apartment complex.

  “We’ll give him another couple of minutes, okay?” Julia called out, her voice on the ragged edge of desperation. “Just another couple of minutes.”

  “Alright, listen up,” Carl called out. “Hostiles are a hundred yards down the road, moving to encircle this complex. Me and Tomlin are gonna run out, guns blazing, and hole up in the apartment directly across the courtyard here. We’ll keep those motherfuckers off your back for as long as we possibly can. Julia, the second you get a fucking pulse back, you take him and get the fuck out the back, do you hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  Carl shifted in place, cast a glance over at Tomlin. “Alright buddy, it’s you and me. You ready for this?”

  All they had to do was run across thirty yards of parking lot, to the apartments on the other side.

  They were a long way from home, and they had no QRF to come and save them. They had no safe place to retreat to. It was up to Tomlin and Carl to break inertia and give the rest of them a chance.

  Move out and draw fire.

  Tomlin nodded, despite a grip of fear that squeezed cold sweat from his brow. “Let’s fuckin’ do it.”

  Carl shoved himself off the window and went to the door. It was closed, but not latched. The frame around the door had been destroyed when they’d kicked it in. Carl put his left hand on the doorknob and held his heavy rifle with the other hand. “Let’s stay tight, okay?”

  “Okay. It’s on you.”

  Carl yanked the door open, let it bang off the stopper, and then sprinted out into the night with Tomlin close on his heels.

  TWO

  ─▬▬▬─

  LAST STAND

  The sweat was pouring down Abe’s dark face, getting in his eyes, and tickling through his beard. But he didn’t dare take his hands off of Lee’s chest. He didn’t dare stop the chest compressions, even though his core felt like it was splitting from lactic acid, and his triceps were cramping.