He wanted to kill something. He needed to feel the empowerment of destroying other lives as his had been destroyed. He—
Suddenly, Grady understood. That was what they’d done to him. Aside from the experiments and whatever else they’d done to him physically, it was the mental anguish that they’d preyed upon. His mind had been torn apart and patched back together in a misshapen approximation of reality. That was why he had no memories of events and a certain smell or a visual would bring them flooding back to him. They’d experimented on his mind, turning off the pain receptors and altering his memories.
He relaxed, laying calmly on the bed once more. With the knowledge that they’d messed with the chemicals in his brain, Grady knew he could beat this. He would beat this. He wasn’t a serial killer. He wasn’t a madman. And he sure as hell wasn’t one of those wretched infected creatures. He would beat this.
The adrenaline subsided and his heartbeat slowed over time. Grady allowed himself to feel the pain of Lucy’s loss once more. This time, the feelings were cathartic instead of detrimental. He would be the man his daughter thought he was. For her.
31
FORT BLISS MAIN CANTONMENT AREA, EL PASO, TEXAS
MARCH 11TH
“Good morning, Mr. President,” Neel said into the Tandberg’s camera. It had been weeks since he’d talked to the man running what was left of the country.
“Morning, General Bhagat. How’re things?”
The general looked past the small personal video teleconferencing device resting on his desk to the men and women seated at his conference table. Lately, he’d taken to inviting them all in to hear the president’s orders directly, even if they were off camera. The mandate to reduce the refugee population had come directly from the president, but it had been Neel Bhagat who’d taken the heat for the tragic events that led to the deaths of more than two hundred thousand Americans. Not this time. He didn’t think he’d survive another event like that. One of his officers would shoot him in the back.
“They’re better, sir. The long winter helped to further reduce the infected population in the area and we’ve been able to steadily increase our food supply by sending troops to the FEMA camps for the stockpiles there. We’ve had a decrease in malnutrition-related illnesses and—”
“Good, good. We need to preserve our population now, more than ever.”
Neel gritted his teeth. “Yes, sir. Of course.”
“Listen, Neel. I don’t have a lot of time to discuss what’s happening here at Cheyenne, so I’m just gonna tell you flat out that we’ve been targeted multiple times by enemy forces. The Mountain’s security force has been able to repel them so far, but we don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to hold out.”
“Enemy forces, sir?”
“It’s those goddamned Iranians. They were granted a position on the UN Security Council because they were one of the only nations that seemed to be unaffected by the disease and had the troops to help out. Now we know that it was all an elaborate plot to destroy the world while they remained safely behind their borders. That information your team discovered down in Brazil was the final bit of evidence that we needed to convict both Iran and North Korea on the international stage.”
“Good, I’m glad we were able to help out, sir.”
There was a loud rumble over the Tandberg’s speakers and the picture went fuzzy for a moment before clearing up.
“Damn bastards stopped trying to breach the blast doors when they realized they were designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Now they’re tunneling directly through the side of the mountain.”
“What do you need us to do, sir?”
“Keep up the good fight down there and keep our people safe. Thankfully our enemies haven’t targeted you yet, and that’s due to the brilliant work of your soldiers as they’ve shown the world what they can do over the past year. Our intelligence estimate puts the number of foreign troops on US soil at somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand, but that’s based almost exclusively on satellite imagery, so there’s a plus or minus of up to twenty-three percent they say.”
“That’s certainly more than we’d expected, sir.”
“You ain’t gotta worry about them for right now. Just keep on defending your location. The infected are still very much a threat and it only takes one of those bastards to start a whole new infection cycle.”
“Understood, sir,” Neel replied, beginning to wonder what the point to this call was.
“So, I’m gonna get down to brass tacks with you, Neel. We’re on the ropes here. Even with all of our small little enclaves of troops stationed strategically across the nation, we’re outnumbered over three-to-one. We have to level the playing field, really find a way to force them into disarray and make them leave.”
“That seems like—”
“Let me finish, goddammit.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President.” This was probably the most irritable that he’d seen the man. He must be under incredible stress— Aren’t we all? Neel thought.
“I’ve discussed it with the British Prime Minister. At 7 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time today, we are launching a joint attack on the Iranian and North Korean nations. They’ve attacked us and we’re going to hit them back, hard.”
Bhagat looked away from his Tandberg and raised his eyebrows. Somebody on his staff needed to tell him what that time translated to for the Mountain Time Zone. He refocused his attention on the president.
“…they’ll be forced to withdraw and return to their nations to provide aid.”
Dammit, Neel chastised himself. He’d missed what the president had said. It was a two- or three-second distraction and he’d missed the most important part.
“Excuse me, sir. Can you repeat that?”
The man in his monitor looked perturbed that he needed
