Shadows Have Gone (26 page)

Lewis shrugged. “She’s Justin’s wife.” He dropped the pen to the desk and walked around to look down at Carly. His gaze was one of mild curiosity. “Are you all right?”

Carly just glared at him as she sucked in huge breaths to try to get her wind back.

“I’m going to beat the tar out of whoever searched her,” Craig said.

Lewis smiled at Carly. “Men who aren’t used to frisking people are sometimes overly delicate when it comes to searching women. That’s why I told you to wear the vest.”

“Well, what if she’d tried to stab you?”

Lewis raised his head, and his smile broadened.

“Yeah, okay.” Craig scratched his head. “What are we gonna do with her now?”

“She and I are going to have a chat. You are going to go out and draw all your people inside. Put the FNGs out on the fence line. No one you don’t want to risk losing.”

“Really?” Craig gnawed on his lip and seemed like he was on the verge of protest but thought better of it.

Lewis returned his gaze to Carly. “I don’t think he’ll kill them. He’ll go for stealth instead of bloodbath, but his emotions are going to be running high, which makes him just a bit unpredictable at the moment.” He extended a hand to Carly, and when she didn’t take it, he grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet.

“Please, have a seat, Carly.”

Carly dropped back into her chair. She eyed the pen lying on the desk, but this was the man who had trained Justin. She wouldn’t even have a chance to get near him with it.

“Tell them not to resist if he encounters them,” Lewis said. “But have them walk their regular patrols. We don’t want to raise his suspicions. If he captures anyone, tell them to lead him here.”

“You got it, Chief.”

“I hate it when he calls me chief,” Lewis said to Carly in a low tone as Craig closed the door. He gave her a smile, but Carly just looked away.

She sat back in her chair, and Lewis sat down across from her, looking vaguely amused, as though he had watched her weighing her options. Smug bastard. But she would find a way. She wasn’t going to let Justin walk into this man’s trap, whatever it was.

“It’s nice to meet you, Carly. You can call me Lewis. No need to be formal.”

Carly kept her gaze on the window. She wasn’t going to call him anything. Through the window outside, she could see the outline of a huge propane tank in the darkness and hear the chug of the generator that ran off it.

“I don’t know how much Justin has told you about me . . .” He paused for a moment, as though waiting to see if she’d fill in the gap.

“Why are you trying to lure him here?”

“Because asking nicely didn’t work.”

“He won’t join you. We have a family, a community.”

Lewis gave a small wave of his hand as if to say,
We’ll see.

She stared at him, this oddly ordinary man who had loomed so large in their lives. He stared right back, his gaze unwavering on hers. It was Carly who finally looked away.

“I just want to know
why
,” Carly said. “Will you tell me that, please?”

“Why what?”

Carly gave a soft huff of impatience. “Why all of it. I want you to tell me why the Crisis happened.”

“I can’t,” he said, and she saw something like real regret in his expression. There was no way of knowing whether or not it was sincere. “It’s classified.”

Carly looked up into his eyes, about to argue with him. This was the closest she would ever get to an answer, to someone in the high echelons of power who had the answer to that single, burning question. But when she looked into his eyes, she saw nothing but stone. He was as implacable as a marble statue. He would not be moved by begging. Looking into those eyes, she knew even torture would not wrest it from him.

The breath she’d drawn for words left her in a soft sigh. The answers were so close yet as unreachable as the moon for her.

“Classified.” She repeated the word in a tone of disbelief. “It’s the end of the world. Everyone is dead. Your commanders . . .
everyone
. Who are you keeping the secret
for
?”

“I assure you, the United States is very much alive. But even if it weren’t, a vow is a vow, and even scoundrels like myself have a code of honor.” He gave her a small smile, and she hated him for his amusement at the situation, the cruel way he was playing with their lives. She forced herself to put the anger aside. Lewis would underestimate her, just like Marcus had, and Marcus’s ashes were now scattered in the weeds around Clayton.

“So you’re trying to tell me the government is still functioning.”

“Yes.”

“The president is still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Why haven’t they . . .” Carly waved a hand. “Why haven’t they reestablished order, then?”

“Logistics. Reestablishing communications is the most difficult aspect.”

“Why weren’t you in Washington in their bunker?”

Lewis gave her an appraising look. “You know about that?”

Carly nodded. She heard her dad’s voice in her mind:
“Things fall apart, Sugar Bear. The center does not hold
.
”
He’d given her a glass of whiskey as they watched the president plead for order, and she could still taste it in her throat, smoky and burning. She remembered her despair, because if the president had abandoned the White House to broadcast from a sealed and concealed bunker, there was no hope the Crisis would be over quickly.

Carly leaned forward in her chair. “Why weren’t you in that bunker?”

Lewis shrugged. He seemed to do that a lot, she thought. “Perhaps I wasn’t important enough to merit a spot.”

“How do you know they made it? That they survived the Crisis and are still alive now?”

“That’s classified.”

Carly weighed her chances of being able to hit him. “How do I know you’re not just making it all up?”

He arched an eyebrow. “You’ll just have to trust me, I suppose.”

“I don’t trust you,” Carly said. “And neither does Justin. As soon as he saw your signature on those shipment orders—”

“What orders?” Now Lewis was interested. His gaze sharpened and his muscles tensed slightly. He wasn’t as impenetrable as he thought he was. Every poker player had tells. The ones who thought they didn’t sometimes were the most obvious.

Carly waved a hand and enjoyed being as dismissive as he was. “It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that he knows you were in on it. Whatever horrible thing you people cooked up. You’re evil.
Evil
is too light of a word. There isn’t a word for how disgusting and terrible you are.”

Lewis’s eyes flashed. “What do you know about evil, little girl?
Nothing
. Your husband could tell you about evil. He’s stared it in the eyes. But you? You have no concept of what real evil is.”

Let him think that, Carly thought. “But they did know it was going to happen.”

“That’s classified.”

“You
knew
.” Carly said. There was no denying that when he had sent out the vaccine beforehand. “That itself is enough. You knew someone was going to do this monstrous thing. And—”

“And what?” Lewis said, his mouth twisting in a parody of a smile. “What would you have me do? Run to the media and tell them to broadcast it to the world? Set the nation into a panic over something they couldn’t stop? What you experienced was horrible, but trust me when I say it could have been a hundred times worse. I did what I could. We all did.”

“You mailed vaccine to your friends.”

“To the right people. To the people the world would need if the human race is going to survive.”

Carly tilted her head. “Except you didn’t make sure everyone actually got it. There was the fatal flaw in your master plan.”

“I did what I could,” Lewis repeated. “You can lead a horse to water, as they say. I offered the option.”

“How could they have known what ‘option’ they were choosing if you didn’t tell them what would happen if they didn’t take it? They thought they might run a little bit more risk of getting the flu that year by not getting vaccinated, not a virus that killed most of humanity.”

“Classified means classified.”

“You couldn’t have picked up the phone and told my dad he
needed
to get his shot? He would have done it if you’d told him to, even if you didn’t spell out the reason.”

“No. I was being watched. I did what I could.”

Carly grimaced at him in disgust. “Bullshit. If you went along with it, you’re evil. You’re a
traitor
. You destroyed our country. Worse than being just a traitor to our country—you’re a traitor to the whole world, to our species.”

“You would blame me for being unable to stop a crashing plane from the ground and call me a traitor for trying to get as many people away from the crash site as possible beforehand. Should I have thrown away my life trying to run to the media with a story that would never be printed? I am telling you it couldn’t be stopped and that I did what I could. Take that as you will. I don’t particularly care if you believe me or not.”

“But you do care if Justin believes you,” Carly said. “That’s why I’m here. Because you want to force him to talk to you because you think you can convince him. You want him to believe you because you want him to come back to under your command.”

“Justin understands the way the world works.”

“And you understand he’s not as amoral as you’d like him to be,” Carly retorted.

Lewis smiled. “I see why he married you. But Justin knows his duty.”

“You want us to put our town and our resources under your command?”

“I’m saying that your town is already part of the United States. There was a disaster. A horrific disaster of unprecedented proportions. But our nation will recover. You need to be part of that recovery.”

Carly wanted so badly to believe him. She wanted her child, the children of Colby, to grow up in the safety and security she had known. A nation of law and order.

“Yes, I brought you in so Justin would be forced to speak with me.”

“How do you know he won’t just slit your throat?”

“Because I know Justin.”

“People change. Especially when they’ve been through a horrific trauma. And especially when they know that you had a hand in creating that horrific trauma. How did you find us? I mean, I know about the radio signal, but how did you even know where to start looking?”

“I knew Justin would have headed in this direction. I know the way he thinks. Part of it is the way I trained him to think, but other parts of it . . .” Lewis shrugged. “I knew he would head south for the better climate. And I knew he’d have enough sense to avoid areas contaminated by reactor meltdowns. And then when you factor in which climates are arid and unsuitable for farming without reliable irrigation . . .” He spread his hands and smiled at her. “The geographical area he’d head to is actually quite small.”

Carly shook her head. “You’ve been looking for him? Why?”

“As you know from building your own community, surviving in this world requires having the right kind of people with you. Would you have survived without Justin?”

“No.” Carly didn’t offer anything else.

“I’d prefer to have all my men with me, if I can find them. If they’re alive, they’ll head in this direction. I’m sure of it.”

“Why didn’t you keep them with you in the first place?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“I wasn’t the one calling the shots.”

“What if he doesn’t want to be with you?”

“I’m his commanding officer.”

“
Were
.” Carly’s fingers dug into the arms of her chair. “In case you haven’t noticed, things have changed.”

“Some things, yes. But others will always remain.”

Lewis folded his hands on the blotter. “How much did you know about your father’s work, Carly?”

“Very little. I knew he used to work for the military, but he retired when I was in grade school. It was never really a part of our life.”

Lewis opened a drawer on the desk and withdrew a framed picture. Carly stared down at her father’s face and couldn’t hold back the tears. The only pictures she had of her family had burned in the house fire a few months ago. She had kept them tucked inside the case of her
Lord of the Rings
DVD, though she rarely looked at them. It hurt too much.

This image was of her father as a younger man than Carly had known him. It was a candid shot of her dad with his head turned to the side, smiling at something outside of the frame. He wore an olive drab T-shirt with a pair of sunglasses tucked into the neckline.

“Your father once saved my life. It’s a story I can’t tell you because it involves some highly sensitive operations in a country where we weren’t supposed to be, but he saved me from what would have been a very unpleasant demise at the risk of his own neck. Because of him, we were able to complete the mission and likely saved the lives of countless people from dying in an unnecessary conflict in the future. That was what we did, Carly. We did the unpleasant jobs no one wanted to do—no one wanted to
admit
doing—terrible things that prevented even more terrible things from happening. You know that sometimes there’s a very ugly price that has to be paid for security and safety. We were that ugly price. A few months ago, you and your community went to war to protect your safety. If you could have prevented that, would you have?”