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“I’ve been passing your picture around since we started scouting, and not one of them ever mentioned seeing you, despite there being at least three at the club.”
Her face falls, and I regret bringing up that god awful place.
“Do you have a leader?”
“We loosely follow Cole. Before the dead breached the city, he ran the Civil Police. Then we noticed management was up to no good, and fuck if we didn’t make it worse.”
“How so?”
“We were essentially a day late with our coup. Someone ended up opening the city to the dead, and once that happened, it was game over.”
“When you kill someone, will they always turn?”
“No, but as time goes by, more and more do. There are all kinds of theories floating around, but it’s impossible to know the truth of it.”
“So…are all your people criminals?”
Her words cut deep, because while I might have been locked away, I committed no crimes.
“We’re a mix of cons and military.”
“What exactly were you charged with?”
My stomach sinks because I don’t know how she’s going to react to what I’m about to say. But I figure she deserves to know the truth.
“I was overseas, and one day the military police came knocking on my door. I was all kinds of confused. They held me for days, never telling me the charges.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Things are different when you’re in the military. I’m not saying I didn’t have rights, but a lot of lines get blurred. You get pressured not to ask for a lawyer, which is bogus, but in the moment, you fall back to your training and your chain of command.”
“What happened?”
“This man comes in with all these pictures. An entire village, every last person dead. They said it was me who did it. That I was involved with foreign nationals and that I’d gotten myself compromised.”
“But you’d never…” she says, her voice wavering ever so slightly at the end.
“Of course I wouldn’t,” I snap.
“How’d you get out?”
“As I’d said, a guy named Saber came and made a deal. He didn’t give me many details. Just that I’d be doing a lot of training exercises for unlikely real-world events. Shortly after I signed on the dotted lines, those unlikely events turned real. That’s when I demanded to transfer up here, so I could make sure you were safe.”
“Were you scared?”
“Of course I was. I’d be stupid not to be.”
“And they never told you how it all happened? That they had people creating the dead plague?”
“Nope. The outposts, the Keep being one of them, have been around a long time, and we’d figured they were put in place in case of an emergency, more specifically, for nuclear fallout. When the dead rose, we believed they were just repurposing them.” I let out a terse breath. “We were wrong.”
A sullen look takes over Brooke’s pretty features, and I hate that I put it there.
“What’s the point of this Keep and procreating if the world is shit? All you’re doing is putting lipstick on a pig.”
I shrug. “I don’t know about that. So far, the women seem to like it.”
“How many are there?”
