She gripped the steering wheel, tried to breathe slow. "Stupid, stupid, stupid!" she shook her head. But what else was she going to do? Perhaps she had acted too fast or too recklessly. Or maybe if she had waited, her opportunity would have escaped and she would be locked up right alongside Angela.

Angela...

The rest of her worries melted into the background. All the maybe's. All the bad possibilities. They didn't matter because right now she was free, she had escaped, and she wasn't hurt. She'd been successful, so why think about all the ways she could have failed? Now her focus needed to be Angela and Abby and Sam.

And reaching Lee before that sonofab.i.t.c.h Jerry hurt them.

Lee slept like he'd been knocked unconscious. His dreams ran amok in his head, no cohesive imagery or dialogue to them-just a haphazard mish-mash of this day and a million others in his past, little bits and pieces of his entire life floating around nonsensically and in no particular order. He slept greedily, like his body was sucking every last bit of recovery that it could from the downtime, as though it was just certain that at any moment the b.a.s.t.a.r.d brain that enslaved it would snap out of its dream state and force it into action once again.

Despite all the excitement, Lee had been dead on his feet the moment they'd gotten back to the old showroom where the rest of Old Man Hughes' and Jacob's group slept. Jacob and some twenty-something girl with a desperate-looking set of c.o.ke bottle gla.s.ses were the only ones awake, she having drawn the short straw for guard duty, and he simply keeping her company while he waited for Tomlin and Lee to return.

Lee thought he remembered mumbling his way through some basic questions about his well-being, having a light shined in his eyes, and being asked for a brief explanation of what had happened. Lee stumbled through it, just remembering how badly he wanted to sleep, how much effort everything took. Even just to answer a simple question. The opening of the mouth and the expelling of air to form vowels and the movement of the tongue to form consonants...all incredibly exhausting.

So he'd gone to his little section of blankets near the back wall, or perhaps Tomlin had helped him get there, recognizing the extreme fatigue overcoming his friend and maybe keeping an arm around his shoulder. Lee just remembered the sensation of lying on the blankets, like that thin piece of cloth with a cement floor underneath it were as soft as a cloud and he could have slept there for days on end.

He was completely shut down in seconds.

Sometime around four in the morning, bustling feet nearly woke him, familiar voices speaking loudly enough that he would have normally shot bolt-upright, gun in hand. But now his mind simply pushed them away, paid them no attention. Still deep in the process of piecing itself back together.

It was the sound of the bay door rolling up that finally woke him.

And he awoke violently, confusion taking its toll again, his eyes wandering over everything that was going on around him, but not truly seeing or comprehending it. His hand groped for his gun and eventually found it, his heart hammering because his mind had not yet connected the dots to tell him where he was or what the h.e.l.l was going on.

A hand fell on his rifle.

He looked up into Tomlin's face. "You good?" Tomlin asked.

Lee stared, slack jawed for a moment. Said, "I'm good," out of habit, though he wasn't.

Tomlin motioned him up. "You look like s.h.i.t, but you need to be awake."

"What's going on?" Lee asked, hearing in his voice the sound of a child lost in a crowd.

Tomlin pulled him up out of bed. "That chick you were talking to at the fence?"

"Marie?"

"Yeah." Tomlin pointed. "She's here."

CHAPTER 36: THE MISSION.

LaRouche wandered through the darkness while night turned to morning. The sky began to gray. A few cold, ruffled birds made lonely noises from trees all around him as he crashed clumsily through the woods beneath them, as though the very sight of him saddened them.

He clutched the Berretta pistol in his right hand, held his wounded arm close to his chest, shivering violently in the cold as he tried to scan the woods around him but only lost himself in the darkness, everything made worse by the tricks of whiskey. His mouth was dry as parchment, tasted ashy in the back of his throat. His stomach roiled violently and he almost wished to vomit, if not just to wet his tongue.

He stopped all at once and fell against a tree, not for loss of balance, but for loss of everything else. His mind, his friends, his family, his entire world. He felt it like he was shrinking, just shrinking down to nothing, until blades of gra.s.s would be as tall as trees and he would be lost among them, lost with no way out and no one that could hear him or save him.

He didn't speak to himself, didn't curse, or question himself why he had done what he had done. He just wept. He wept until the sobs hurt his chest, until they tore at his face, ripped at his abdomen. He did so quietly, though in his own ears it howled like a hurricane wind. To the rest of the indifferent world, it was a rustle amongst the dead leaves and sightless trees.

He did not have any clear, coherent thoughts. It was as though everything had been distilled down to its essence. Remorse. Anger. Self-pity. All boiled down to their most primal, most elemental states. The feelings that human ancestors felt before they could put them into words. And after a time, even that was gone and it was as though he had exhausted every cell of himself and was simply reduced to mindless, organic matter.

He stayed there for a while. Hours, perhaps. Maybe he slept. Maybe he just existed.

Sometime around dawn a man appeared.

LaRouche heard his furtive movements through the woods, but did not react. At least, he did not react in any reasonable way. He did not raise his pistol, did not rise to his feet and prepare to run. He simply turned his head in the direction of the noise-just a soft crunch of dew-damp leaves that could have been a small animal moving through the forest but had the steady rhythm of a man's pace.

The man stopped about ten yards from LaRouche, and the two men stared at each other. The stranger carried an a.s.sault rifle-what looked like an old HK 91. He was tall, middle-aged, heavily bearded with gray shooting through at the corners of his mouth like he had been sloppily drinking milk. Short hair, wild and in all directions. He wore a gray and black parka with the North Face emblem over the left breast. A white cloth tied around his right arm, scrunched so that LaRouche could barely see the red cross-and-circle that it bore.

LaRouche must have looked as empty as he felt because the man cleared his throat and asked in a clear, almost eloquent voice, "Are you sane?"

LaRouche blinked slowly. His voice came out like sand. "Do you have water?"

The stranger lifted his rifle. "Let me see your hands."

LaRouche looked down where his right hand-and the pistol that it still held-lay numbly under his leg. "I...I have a gun."

Silence.

"I'm going to throw it away." LaRouche tried desperately to work some moisture into his mouth. "Don't shoot me."

"Okay. Throw it away."

LaRouche lifted the pistol very slowly, gingerly, with his thumb and forefinger and the rest splayed out wide. Then he tossed it about a yard away.

"Roll onto your belly and put your hands behind your back," the stranger said, his voice showing a bit of nerves.

LaRouche did as he was told.

The soft footsteps behind him. Hands clasping his wrists together. The click of handcuffs. LaRouche's chin rested on a gnarled root of the tree he lay against, and he breathed steadily through his nose, feeling nothing but the sickness of his own body, the burn of his ulcer, the queasy feeling of the bloom falling off the whiskey rose.

The stranger pulled him to his feet. "You're a prisoner of The Lord's Army."

Lee stalked back to the place where he'd slept. There wasn't much there but his rifle-not even his rifle, really. Just a rifle he'd taken off of a dead man. Besides that, there was nothing else that belonged to him. Everything else had been taken away.

Tomlin followed behind him, head lowered. "Lee, talk to me. What're you thinkin'?"

Lee s.n.a.t.c.hed up the rifle, checked the chamber, then slung into it. "What am I thinking?" Lee's tone was clipped. "I don't know, Brian. I'm thinking about a lot of f.u.c.king things right now." He spun on Tomlin. "That motherf.u.c.ker killed Bus! He killed Bus. And now he's got Angela?" Lee made a strained noise, grabbing his forehead with one hand. "And Abby and Sam? f.u.c.k me, Tomlin. What the h.e.l.l am I supposed to be thinking right now? I'm gonna slit his f.u.c.king throat. That's what I'm thinking."

Tomlin planted his hands in his pockets. "So you just gonna ride in, storm the castle?"

"Yeah, somethin' like that."

"Seems reckless."

"Guess it does."

"Lee!" Tomlin snapped. "Enough of this bulls.h.i.t. You need to slow the f.u.c.k down right now. You need to start thinking about the big picture here, brother. I know you don't wanna hear this right now, but I'm sayin' it anyway." Tomlin set his feet like he was prepared to receive a blow for it. "Is taking back Camp Ryder our primary concern right now?"

Lee stared at him for a long moment. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that rushing in is stupid." Tomlin stabbed the air with a finger. "It's stupid, and you know it is. At the end of the day, what does it gain you?"

"What does it gain me?"

"Yes! Quit being dense!"

"No, no." Lee waved a hand. "I'm not being dense. Why don't you just come right out and say it? I'm sure I'd love to hear this."

Tomlin looked off, exasperated.

Lee took a step towards him. "Were you about to ask me what good it does me to take back Camp Ryder? What tactical advantage it gives me? We barely have any weapons or supplies back there, and only a dozen friends. So why risk two dozen people for their sake? Why risk my own life?"

Tomlin met his eyes again, accepting the challenge. "It was one thing when we had the element of surprise. But that's f.u.c.king gone now. You can try to make it sound bad all you want, Lee. But one of us needs to think about the mission. I'm not saying that we can't go back and take Camp Ryder back when the time is right-I'm fine with that. But Jerry knows we're comin'! He knows that we're out here and he's gonna have that place locked down and on high alert, my friend. Trying to take Camp Ryder right now is an unnecessary risk! Are you willing to put the mission in jeopardy for this s.h.i.t?"

"f.u.c.k the mission!" Lee suddenly shouted.

Tomlin looked like he'd been slapped. "Lee..."

"No." Lee held up a finger. "You think this is about the mission anymore? Jesus Christ, Brian! Were you even listening to the words that came out of your own mouth?" Lee pinched his fingers together, enunciating his words. "Eddie Ramirez stole my GPS! And we're not getting it back! Not now, not later, not ever! It's in the f.u.c.king wind!" As if it weren't deafeningly obvious enough, Lee drove the point home. "There's no f.u.c.king mission anymore! Abe Darabie betrayed us! The f.u.c.king government that we were supposed to be somehow resurrecting out of this s.h.i.t pile that they left us-they f.u.c.king betrayed us."

Lee let his hands fall and the sound of them slapping his sides echoed in the perfect silence of the room. Lee could feel the dozens of eyes on him, but didn't really care. It was just him and Tomlin now, and none of these other people, through whatever trials and tribulations they had faced in the previous months, none of them could understand what Lee and Tomlin felt in that moment.

To give so much of yourself to a cause, to believe in something so whole-heartedly, so blindly, that you willingly suffer the scars, and you do not complain when the little parts of you are chipped away. You keep telling yourself that it is for a greater good, that there is a higher purpose. And you do not think to read deeper until there is so little of you left that you cannot survive without it and be the same person. And it is then, when The Cause, with its greedy mouth, tries to take more from you, tries to take that part of you that you cannot give away, it is only then that you realize all of your sacrifices have been for nothing. You have given yourself to a fraud. And what is left to replace what has been taken is not a hero's pride, but a bitter emptiness that sours even that last little core of yourself that you cling to.

This is the destiny of the man who serves, the man who stands for others. This is the lot of the ones who go out to confront the wolf. This is the disillusionment of all those who protect the flock. This is their secret: that they have allowed their instincts to be used, not for the protection of others, but for the gain of a few. And their "honor" is a monument to the ashes of all those little pieces of themselves that they never got back.

"It's not about the mission anymore," Lee said. "It's about the people that are counting on us. Angela, and Marie, and everyone else that's waiting for us to get back. And Harper's group going up north, and LaRouche's group heading east. All the people that have come to see the Camp Ryder Hub as a place where they can live again. They're all counting on us. That's who I'm unwilling to fail, Brian. And the only way I can fail them is by standing around here and not taking the fight to Jerry."

Tomlin looked hard at Lee, and seemed to be taking a hard stock of himself. Lee let him have the moment, because what he asked the other man to process was not easy. But he knew he was right. He had to be right. There was no other way.

Finally Tomlin looked over. Old Man Hughes and Jacob stood at a safe distance away and Tomlin waved them closer. "Hughes, Jacob, bring it in." He situated himself so he stood abreast of Lee. "If we're gonna do this s.h.i.t, we're gonna do it right. Give ourselves the best chances for success." The others came in, created a closed circle behind which the rest hovered to eavesdrop. Tomlin pointed at Jacob and Hughes. "That means we need everyone. If they have a gun and a finger to pull the trigger, we need them. The only way this doesn't become a bloodbath is if we can take it quick and fast and that means we need the numbers on our side, which is gonna be a stretch anyways." Tomlin ma.s.saged his temples. "But we'll work with what we got."

Jacob nodded. "I'm in. The folks that came from Smithfield with me..." he made a face. "...I don't really know them that well. But I imagine they'd be willing to help. And honestly, they don't have much of a choice."

Tomlin nodded. "Hughes?"

The old man just nodded, adjusted his ancient trucker's cap on his head. "You can count on us."

Tomlin gestured to Lee. "We're all here, Lee. I hope you got a plan."

And that was all that needed to be said. With Tomlin on board, Lee had nothing else to discuss, nothing else to consider. There was no hesitation, no second-guessing. It was everything he had said to Tomlin, but it was more than that. It was Angela. It was every night she'd been there beside him when his nightmares woke him up screaming. It was every time he returned to Camp Ryder and she was waiting for him, just to make sure that he was okay. It was the quiet and unspoken connection between them. It was the fact that they knew each other through all of this, and had somehow become each the other's support. Lee did not have family-his family had died while he fought in a desert thousands of miles away. But Angela was here. Angela had become his family. He had adopted her, as she had adopted him. And he could no more spend an extra second thinking about the benefits of rescuing Angela, as he would if she were truly his blood.

He raised his head and called to Marie, who stood just behind Old Man Hughes. "C'mon, Marie. You're our intel. We need the most up to date info possible." He turned to the others. "We're gonna keep this real simple. Simple is best, because the first plan never survives first contact. So when s.h.i.t hits the fan, just remember: your objective is the Camp Ryder building. We have to take that building. If we own that, we own Camp Ryder."

LaRouche walked ahead of the well-spoken stranger. He could feel the heat of the man's hand on his shoulder, guiding him through the woods. He'd tied a half-a.s.sed blindfold around LaRouche's face, but LaRouche could still see out the bottom, so he was able to walk the forest floor with some accuracy, avoiding roots and brambles and keeping his feet.

His mind was still a slurry of remorse, self-hatred, self-pity. He had not gotten around to thinking about how he was going to get out of this mess, how he was going to get away from this guy. In fact, he just kept thinking, as though it was a foregone conclusion, that they would either execute him or convert him, and he did not think much past that point.

Either they would execute him.

Or they would convert him.

As though he had no choice in the matter. As though it had already been decided. And perhaps it had. Perhaps he had already decided what he would do if that option was presented to him. So he just kept walking along through the half-dark woods, wondering when he would reach the point of no return, when he would reach that ultimate decision. To continue living, or to convert?

Because that was what these people did. They converted, or they killed. So the only question that needed to be considered was whether LaRouche wanted to continue to live or not. Perhaps a sidebar question-was it worth living anymore, or was it time to just give up? Throw in the towel? Say that enough was enough?

He kept picturing in his head, his throbbing, slowly sobering head, the moment when he'd pulled the trigger. How sure he'd been at that time that Father Jim had been trying to kill him with a rock. So undoubtedly sure.

Now? He wasn't so sure. He kept replaying it in his mind, and every time he did he came up with a different conclusion. Perhaps Father Jim hadn't been reaching for a rock. Perhaps he had only sought some traction, trying to get out from under LaRouche. Maybe he'd just killed the man for no reason.

The man?

Let's not mince words, LaRouche thought bitterly. He was your friend. You killed your friend. And now what do you have? You have nothing. Nothing but a big decision coming up on you, and no one there to help you make it. Do you want to live, or do you want to die?

He remained undecided.

The ground pa.s.sing beneath his feet, the narrow window that he had of it through the s.p.a.ce between the blindfold and his cheeks, it grew lighter. The colors grew bolder. So slowly, so steadily, you almost didn't notice it happening. There was the smell of dawn-the oaky smell of dew rising up from the ground and carrying with it all the particulates of dead and fallen plant matter that they rose from. There was also the smell of the salt water-LaRouche could not mistake that. It made his heart ache and brought to mind all the summer vacations he'd ever taken to the beach and would never take again.

In that moment he wanted to walk on warm sand more than anything. But he knew he would never have the opportunity to do so. He tried to remember back to the last time he had gone to the beach, because that would soon become the last time he ever went. Tried to remember the shifting of the sand underneath the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. The feeling of the grit between his toes. The heat of it. The sun beating down on his face. The sound of the gulls crying greedily as they rode the cross breeze. The steady pounding surf.

But it was a half-finished painting. No sooner had he conjured it in his mind than he was pulled back to the real world and its cold, damp, November chill. And the reality that he would never again walk on those beaches, never again be carefree. Those times, those times that he'd stupidly thought were the toughest of times, when he'd complained about such normalcies as rent and girlfriends and his ancient, ailing pickup...those times were gone.

All of this heartache, this remembrance, it was in the air around him, unavoidable. But there was something else in the breeze that caught his attention, something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, but he wasn't sure why. Something that he couldn't quite put his finger on, but that his subconscious brain had somehow decoded and was apparently concerned about.

"You smell that?" LaRouche asked his captor.

"Smell what?"

"I don't know."

"You trying to f.u.c.k with me?"

"No...it's..."

"Just keep walking. We're almost there."