Pia shared a quick, true smile with me that was gone as soon as I’d caught it. “I know. And it’s not without mirth to see how similar to him you’ve become. No wonder, being stuck together day in, day out, for years, but—” She paused, considering me for a bit. “You have changed, no doubt there.”
I couldn’t help but laugh softly under my breath. “You mean because I no longer let you boss me around, unchallenged?”
She gave me a vexed look for that, but followed it up with a shrug. “That, too. But you’re no longer the woman who left the camp at the coast in fall to find out what was wrong with her. I’m not quite sure what to make of the woman who came back to us, yet.”
Her statement confused me, and I would have been lying if I’d said that it didn’t set my teeth on edge—but no way around this, I figured. “A lot happened since then. I can’t change any of it, so why dwell on whether the change was for the better or not?”
“That’s not what I meant,” she insisted, the way she kept studying me remaining critical. “I guess just like I didn’t think we’d meet again to launch a rescue mission, I didn’t expect that you’d lose all remaining will to bow to authority—although I should have expected that, particularly if Miller was convinced that Decker is still in the game. In that case, the last thing he’d want was to make you susceptible to following anyone’s orders ever again.”
“Or, you know, it could be a side effect of being married for three years and spending most of that time just with each other,” I suggested, playing for levity that I didn’t necessarily feel. “I honestly don’t think we would have survived if we’d continued to take each other too seriously.”
“There’s that,” she agreed, snorting.
Looking around—as if that would, miraculously, make more vehicles appear—I realized that a young man, in his early twenties at most, came sprinting toward us, eyes fixed on Zilinsky. She visibly drew herself up into a commanding posture as he came into shouting distance.
“We got news from the others,” he called out to her as soon as he came to a skidding stop. “They called ahead to say one of their vehicles broke down, and if maybe you’d want to head out and fetch them?”
Her brows drew together as she looked less than happy. “Where are they now? Are they in any danger, or just too lazy to pile into a single car?”
The boy shook his head. “They said they secured the location but you’d want to head out with spare parts and a mechanic. They got stuck west of Yosemite. I have the coordinates right here, and the parts they were asking for.”
Pia took the paper he offered, giving me a slightly exasperated look—that I could now see for what it was: the same frustration I felt at yet another delay.
“I’m coming with you,” I insisted more than offered. I was useless in the settlement as it was, unlike everyone else she could have asked for. She didn’t protest, likely having expected as much already. “We’ll take Romanoff, Martinez, and three of the local guards,” Pia declared. “You wanna drive?”
This time, I didn’t have to force a smile. “You bet I do.”
And, just like that, twenty minutes later, we were off, heading north with two solar-powered pickup trucks and enough weapons and ammo for a small army.
With two hundred miles to go, it was obvious that this would turn into a longer field trip that didn’t end with us back in the settlement by sunset. I didn’t mind, although I had gotten rather fond of the couch in Martinez’s cabin, to say the least. Even though it was a reason for further delays, driving north gave me something to do, and distracted me from what was going on—at least for the first few miles, until we cut through a swath of land that, while lush green now, showed signs of terrible devastation everywhere. The heat of the summer hadn’t started yet so the vegetation that had reclaimed the burnt ground was still here, but it wasn’t enough to hide the destruction that the fires had left behind. Even with no personal loss and connection to what had happened, it put quite the damper on my mood.
It was in the middle of the afternoon that I realized why the landscape, here a little better off, was familiar—we’d been here before on the way to the Silo, with a settlement up ahead that hadn’t let us in for the night, making Nate, Burns, Tanner, Gita, and me camp outside. Oddly enough, I felt myself looking forward to at least catching a glimpse of the assholes again—until I realized why there were no signs erected anywhere pointing the way to the settlement.
“What happened there?” I asked when we topped another rise and saw the smashed ruins of what had once been the flourishing town off to the side. The landscape looked like the fires hadn’t reached this far, so that couldn’t have been the cause.
Zilinsky gave me a weird look before she explained. “Scavengers, raiders—you can piece together the rest, I’m sure.”
I hadn’t forgotten what Martinez had told me, but seeing this firsthand somehow made it more real. “They refused help?” I guessed—not a hard one, since they hadn’t let us in back then, either.
Zilinsky gave a brief nod. “We weren’t keen on spreading our forces thin, but we could have been here in hours. We offered—they told us to get lost. That was a few weeks after they blew up the docks in New Angeles. Before that, we thought we were all safe down here. Turns out, we weren’t.”
The former settlement dropped out of view as the road kept angling toward the hills. “Is that the reason why we only have three working cars to take with us on the road? Because everyone thought there was a world of resources out there waiting for them, until there suddenly wasn’t?”
“Something like that,” the guard—Kepler, I remembered—grumbled. “I’m not saying he knew, but Greene sent us out to raid what we could weeks before. Then shit went down, and suddenly, nobody dared stick their noses outside of their fences. Been like this the entire time since.”
Zilinsky glared over her shoulder at him before she turned to me. “He’s not wrong—including Greene’s great timing. We hit a factory full of electric car motors hours before a convoy of Humvees arrived.”
“No coincidence there,” I mused.
“Exactly. We had just enough time to load everything we could carry onto the trucks and be gone before anyone got close enough to shoot at us. Because there was still more to loot there than to get from us, they didn’t come after us, but that’s why we only have eight cars retrofitted. The other seventeen are in New Angeles.” The look on her face turned sour. “Before you ask, I already tried to get more of them, but they won’t hand them over. Turns out, the doors your name used to open are now firmly shut.”
I had to admit that stung, but wasn’t a surprise—not since I’d had a brief chance to talk to Greene himself. We kept driving on in silence, Pia only breaking it to let me know when to turn off the road and onto something that resembled a deer trail at best. The only positive thing I could say was that the entire region seemed as devoid of zombies as it did of still-living humans.
That changed once we drew near a lone house close to the foothills of the mountains—and thankfully only on the living part. Two cars were next to the building, with four armed and armored humans waiting for us—two men and two women, three of them looking well into their fifties, except for one of the women who was roughly my age. The site looked well secured and neither of the cars seemed in bad shape, making me instantly suspicious. Zilinsky was frowning as well but not in a paranoid way.
As we got out, she introduced the newcomers as Rozen, Cohn, Calveras, and Neeson. The first three were apparently retired army personnel, Joelle Rozen having served with Bert Hughes, Sadie’s father, and the two men friends of hers. Marleen Neeson, the younger woman, got the very brief moniker of “casual acquaintance,” which made her grin and me guess that there was a story behind that I really needed to hear. Before I could ask, she sized me up with a curious expression on her face. “So you’re the woman who’s mad enough to marry Miller? I kind of pictured you differently.”
“Don’t say ‘taller,’ or I might have to hit you,�
�� I offered, hoping she’d get the joke—at half a head shorter than I was. Put her in a yellow sundress, and she wouldn’t have looked weird as a spunky kindergarten teacher.
Her smile, bright yet a little crooked, let me know that she was used to people underestimating her because of her diminutive size as well. “More crazy, but maybe you’re just good at hiding it?” Her brows drew together as she studied me more intently—and quite comically so. “I guess you’d have to be. Else, you would have killed each other by now.”
“You sound like you know my husband quite well,” I observed, not quite sure what to make of that.
Her smile got a little too knowing for her own good, but she didn’t beat around the bush. “If you mean, did we fuck? Yeah, we kind of had a thing going for a while, but very casual. I honestly didn’t think he could get more attached to a piece of ass than that, and neither did I want to. So, no worries, I’m not going to fish in your pond. Not that I’d dare, present company and likely affiliation considered.” She turned her head and stared straight at Pia, who calmly stared back. It wasn’t amiable on either woman’s side, and still, I got the sense that they liked each other. There must have been a story about that as well.
“I’m not really worried about that right now,” I said, doing my best to sound like I meant it, too. “We’d have to get him back first, too.”
Breaking off the staring match—and obviously not considering herself defeated—Marleen caught my gaze once more. “Never thought I’d be part of a rescue mission to spring him of all people, but when Zilinsky called, I couldn’t not get in on the fun. You see, I owe these three buckaroos, and I will repay that debt.”
She made no move to explain herself further, prompting the Ice Queen to do so for her. “We crossed paths with her on a mission once. That should have ended with her brains going splat all over the wall. Miller decided she was more valuable alive than as a tapestry ornament, and she’s helped with some wetwork during his time working as a free agent. She has a big mouth—and an even bigger ego—but does come in handy in a tight spot.” The way she glanced at the other woman sideways made me think she meant like someone else she knew. Huh. Reevaluating Marleen, I tried to do the obvious, superficial judging thing but came up blank; we had nothing in common except for less-than-giant height. With olive skin, dark hair, and slightly tilted eyes she was impossible to place heritage-wise, but still had a more wholesome than exotic thing going on. Must have been the homicidal tendencies underneath the nice exterior.
“Valuable how?” I asked the obvious question.
Marleen perfectly preened. “Contract work.”
“Let me guess. Not as an event planner,” I proposed, smirking.
Her bright yet cold grin pretty much confirmed that. “Assassin. Not that keen of a sniper, particularly when I have to lug a rifle around that’s as long as I am tall, but I’m pretty good with poisons and knives. Great infiltrator, because even in plain sight, they never see me coming. So, no worries. I won’t shank you in the back. If I ever come for you, it will be mano a mano.”
“I’ll make sure to remember that!” It was hard not to laugh despite—or maybe because—of that not-even-veiled threat she’d just uttered. Turning to Pia, I snorted. “I think we’ll get along great.”
The Ice Queen offered another rare smile. “I knew you would.” She then turned to the others. “So what’s with the BS you sold us about a broken-down car?”
Calveras jerked his head toward the house. “Never said it was one of ours. Check the garage. When we stopped for a break and stumbled on that, we figured you might want to take a look.”
The house looked unremarkable enough that his comment further confused me, but it took Martinez only a step into the carport to let out a succinct, “You gotta be fucking kidding me!” before he disappeared inside, soon followed by the sounds of human banging around car parts. Curious, I went to check on him, finding him pretty much hanging over the popped hood of a dusty SUV inside. It wasn’t a make or model I was familiar with, and it took me looking at the steering wheel to realize that it was a Ford. Judging from the lack of a conventional engine, it must have been an electric car. When I mentioned as much—proving once again how far my immense automotive knowledge ranged—Martinez halted in his gawking for a moment to flash me a boyish grin. “That must be a prototype! I’ve never seen one like it!”
“Don’t those usually have some kind of dazzle pattern wrapping, or something?” I mused. It was something he’d told me on one of our long hours of me helping with rebuilding the cars in the bunker. While the matte, dark gray paint job of the car looked unusual, it wasn’t that out of the ordinary.
Martinez paused for a moment, as if that hadn’t even occurred to him. Boy and his car, obviously. “Probably to make it look less like a prototype,” he offered, turning back to the hood. “At least we won’t have to repaint it. And if this isn’t obvious, I’m calling dibs.”
Pia and Rozen had followed me, the Ice Queen not quite caught up in Martinez’s enthusiasm yet. “Can you get it working? Or do we take it apart?”
He looked perfectly scandalized at the latter proposition. “Oh, I will get this baby purring smoothly in no time! Battery’s likely shot, but we brought spares. Give me a few hours and we’re good to go.” Glancing at the reddening sky outside, he shrugged. “Let’s make that tomorrow morning. I should have it running before midnight.”
Rozen spoke up as Pia considered. “We’ve secured the area as well as four people can. It’s safe enough, just needed a little housekeeping a few miles to the north. Nothing remarkable inside the house, and it looks looted several times,” she professed. “Still good enough for a hideout for the night. I’ll tell Cohn to get some chow started?”
All she got—and needed—was a nod from Zilinsky. Just as she stepped back outside, Andrej and the guard who’d been riding with Pia and me—Kepler, I reminded myself; he looked like he might stick with us, so I might as well try to remember his name—came in, immediately joining Martinez in slobbering all over the vehicle. I quickly followed Pia when she left, lest someone rope me into handing them tools I once again didn’t remember the designations of. It happened. Spending months working on the buggies with Nate had had one advantage: we’d both done our thing, without much talking except what we were planning on doing. Who needed to know what kind that wrench was, anyway?
After spending the day driving, I was quite happy to loosen my cramping, hard muscles with some bona fide perimeter watch, happy that, for once, I didn’t get the graveyard shift. It was when Pia joined me two hours later that I realized she’d done so for a reason. I half expected her to offer a more in-depth analysis of Marleen’s character or past, but instead she went for something else entirely as we kept strolling through the foothills.
“I didn’t want to have this talk in town where anyone might overhear us,” she muttered, gaze roaming the countryside for predators we’d already established were long gone. I felt myself perk up, not sure whether this was going to be good or really, really bad. Her attention briefly flitting to check on my face made me guess that it wasn’t anything that would make me feel warm and fluffy.
“What’s so important nobody overhear that we have to go all countryside clandestine on the topic?”
She obviously found my joke less than funny—and so did I, as soon as she said, “I know that what actually happened to you while you were gone that first winter wasn’t fun, but it was for the best that you weren’t around when Sadie had the baby.”
Talk about a gut punch. “Why? Think I would have made a terrible godmother? Not being present is pretty much the definition of that.” It couldn’t have been because of the smear campaign the army had started, because that must have only just started around the time Chris was born.
Pia sent me a vexed glare but didn’t deny my assessment. “For Sadie and the baby, maybe. But while I generally don’t play favorites, in this, my concern is with you rather than her.”
Ah. T
hat. I looked away before I could catch more than a hint of sympathy in her gaze—not something I was used to from Pia, and in this case not necessarily something I appreciated. Calling her a hypocrite was much easier.
“It couldn’t have been much easier for you, either,” I prompted, forcing myself to look her straight in the face. “You lost two children that you watched grow from toddlers to little humans. All I had was a bad aftertaste of a lot of what-ifs and regret.”
Normally, I would have expected her to get annoyed with me, but seeing her oddly calm and gentle freaked me out on a deeper level. “It’s okay to hurt, you know?” she stressed. “And you would have hurt. I know you did a good job ignoring her while she waddled around, seven months pregnant, huge as a whale. But once she went into labor, once the baby let out her first cry, once the world stopped for all of us and focused on the new life in our midst, you wouldn’t have escaped the knowledge that it could—maybe even should—have been you. You would have likely had your child within a few weeks of her. And you would have hated her, and the child, and Nate for putting you in this situation, and all of us for being happy for her. But most of all yourself, for being human and feeling like that, even if you understood where it came from. That’s why I was glad that you weren’t around. And why I never sent anyone to track you both down. I figured he’d reasoned the same way as I did and took you both out of the equation that would put strain on friendships that wasn’t necessary. I thought he was doing it for you.”
I knew she was serious not just because of how guilty—downright gutted—she sounded, but also because she used Nate’s given name. Sometimes I felt like they’d both forgotten each other’s, easily. And it was much easier to mull about that than what she actually said—and what was expected from me in return.
“I’m not that petty. Or small,” I stressed, quickly speaking on when her mouth snapped open to interrupt me—or contradict me, more likely. Fuck, but I really had missed her! “Yes, that’s a rather accurate guess of my mental landscape, I’m not denying that. But I would have found a way to deal with it, likely involving lots of physical exertion, and not necessarily of the horizontal kind.” The brief smile I offered must have been more of a grimace because she didn’t respond, so I went on quickly. “But what I meant is that I don’t hold it against you that you never came looking for us. My guess? He must have reasoned that would be your expectation and used that to his—and your—advantage. When I dropped by here I was kind of surprised that Burns hadn’t breathed a word of what he must have figured was Nate’s true motive, but it makes sense. You’re great about keeping your emotions under wraps, no shit. But I doubt you would have reacted the same way if you’d figured we were hiding from the big, bad wolf rather than our messed-up feelings.”
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 23