With everyone settled down now, Nate did a quick head-count, coming up three short. Blake had lost two of his men, and Richards was one Gallager short. Since I’d seen what had happened to him, I reported that one in, hating how dispassionate my voice sounded. Sure, I hadn’t exchanged more than a handful of words with the kid—beyond grossing him out with my fingers—but he’d deserved better than that. I was surprised when Cole spoke up as soon as I fell silent. “You couldn’t have done anything for him,” he assured me, his usual penchant for noting my shortcomings, if in a different way from how Hamilton did it, missing. “I was hunkering down behind a car a few vehicles in front of where you were. I saw him get up, and I saw the two zombies that took him down gear up to come for him. I couldn’t prevent it any more than you could. Wrong move at the wrong time. Bad for him, but we got away. No sense in crying over spilled guts.”
Something similar had happened to Blake’s guys. One had died right at the beginning of the frenzy like Gallager, the other had bit it in the very middle of crossing the intersection. My accidental route to the western area had likely saved my life as the eastern parts had ended up the epicenter of the shambler incursion. I must have gotten turned around more times than I’d realized, accounting for why I’d ended up one of the last to reach our hideout. I was surprised that Hamilton didn’t point that out but was instead staring blankly at the wall, not engaging with anyone. Fine by me—and pretty much what I fell into myself when exhaustion finally claimed its due.
We didn’t set up any official watch, but since we were jam-packed into the room with only that single exit, there was not much sense to it. Tired as I was, I wasn’t sure I would be able to fall asleep. That didn’t matter much as simply being able to sit there with my pack between my knees, weapons in easy reach, and right now not about to get eaten sounded great. Once enough of the old, bottled water had been purified, it made the rounds and I forced myself to dig into my provisions to give my stomach something to cramp around, but exhaustion remained the general name of the game. After the last strip of jerky was munched down, Scott switched off the single flashlight we’d been using for illumination, turning our little bunker into even more of a tomb than it already felt to me.
I may have dozed off a few times but deep sleep was impossible. About two hours in, I felt my body shut down when the adrenaline-fueled kick of the serum finally dissipated. The exhaustion deepened but didn’t knock me out as I’d wished for. At least that would make getting up in the morning a little easier, or so I hoped. Every few minutes I glanced over to the windows, trying to gauge how long until daybreak it still was. The irregular grunts and shifting sounds all around me made me guess the others weren’t getting any more true rest, either. It didn’t matter, really. Most of us were still alive, but I had no expectations that we would remain that way. This was, without a doubt, the stupidest undertaking of my life.
The sky started to brighten eventually, but nobody made a move to get up. It was only when sunshine glinted somewhere in the distance, reflected on a window, that Nate let out a low sigh next to me and, gently but insistently, pushed me off his side so he could get up. I remained sitting as he first straightened and stretched before starting the short trek to the stairs, stepping over feet and legs until he got to where Hamilton was getting ready himself. They both only took their melee weapons, leaving guns and packs behind to get a brief look around outside. I waited for my heart to seize up or some shit, any indication of loss or whatever, but all I felt was exhaustion still clinging to my body and soul. As long as I didn’t need to get up, I might not even have cared if a shambler had started gnawing on my boots. An eerie silence settled over the basement, as if everyone was collectively holding their breaths, waiting for the inevitable scream, or just the heavy thump of a body hitting the ground.
Nate returned a good twenty minutes later to get the rest of his things and tell us to get going. He barely more than glanced at me because his pack had remained next to mine, and he was gone as soon as he had strapped it on. I went through my gear cross-check with Richards, which made more sense since our fireteam was now down to an even number. While we waited for the others to finish getting ready, I ended up idling next to Eden, who looked a lot more chipper than most of the guys strapping on their gear. It took me a second to realize why—she was smirking at the guy who’d almost lost it last night because of that scrape that he continued to prod now, still wincing. She didn’t outright call him a baby, but it was hard to miss the message. I couldn’t help but agree with her.
“I get it now,” I whispered to her, leaning close to make sure the sound of my voice didn’t carry since the doors to the outside were open now. “What your people said when Hamilton shared that crap about the version of the serum that you got. Why that still wouldn’t have changed your minds.”
Her smile got a little twisted at my words, but her shrug was a light, offhanded one. “You’re worrying too much,” she murmured back. “None of us will be alive long enough for that shit to kill us. So why give a shit?” Her gaze fell on my gloved hands, and if I wasn’t mistaken, on to my left thigh where that landscape of scars was. “None of that would have happened to you if you’d gotten the shot earlier—but all those things made you who you are. Maybe you would have bitten it in the very first week of the apocalypse because you’d have trusted you could survive easily? Or you wouldn’t have dared to be brave in the face of certain death. Complacency kills more fools than anything else.”
I snorted at the fervor—and hint of reverie—in her voice. “I can one-hundred percent say that everything I’ve done that you’d call brave was fueled by fear or stupidity.”
“If it works for you, why change now?” she quipped. Great—now the crazies were giving me life advice. What did it say about me that I kind of agreed with her?
Sanity was definitely overrated.
Five minutes later, the last of us stepped out of our hideout into the bright sunlight of late dawn, the distinct knowledge hanging over us that by the time the sun would set once more, not all of us would still be alive.
Chapter 11
It took us a good twenty minutes to make it back to the highway. The rising sun did a good job chasing away shadows, but there was still movement going on occasionally between the cars. I’d been afraid to find it completely overrun, our retreat from the intersection somehow drawing streaks of shamblers after us. Whether we’d gotten lucky there—or terribly unlucky to run into them in the first place—nobody knew. Looking around, I noticed more destruction in these parts—cars not just mangled from accidents but windows smashed, hoods and sides dented as if someone had used them for anger management and failed. The odd cadaver—animals, for the most part—lay torn apart between the wrecks, some still buzzing with flies, others years old. Most were smaller than humans, making me guess they’d been beloved family pets at one time. Out there, in the small villages, most critters had escaped relatively unscathed, leading to a rising population of wandering—if mostly shy—packs roaming through their own kind of paradise. That here the shamblers had been skilled enough to hunt down dogs and cats made the hair at the back of my neck stand on end. That didn’t bode well for us—but then, what else was new? Gallager could attest to their hunting skills. Seeing a partly torn-down sign at the front of a supermarket made me wonder if they’d been smart enough to realize what bounties lay in there. Likely, since we’d more than once had to clear out a store we’d raided before we could check on food boxes. Cereals and rice were often the last non-canned goods left, their plastic packaging keeping enterprising shamblers from smelling the contents. From what I could tell, the undead masses had raided the houses in suburbia as well, or maybe just used them for nesting. As much as those details burned on my curious mind, right now wasn’t a good time to dwell on them. Skipping from cover to cover took my entire focus, and although I felt more rested than last night, it was still a physically demanding task.
In record time, the heat of the day caught u
p to us, drenching me in new layers of sweat before long. We made progress, but for every longer dash we managed that brought us closer to downtown, we ended up having to wait for a moving corpse to either get close enough so we could kill it easily, or let it pass by. We were the third team from the front today, and before long Richards split us into two parts—Cole and Hill doing their thing, and me getting stuck with Richards. I let him take point for the time being, but when he tried to wrest that privilege from me again after a quick break, I quickly signaled up a storm of threats, although he may have had trouble interpreting half of them from the quizzical look that crossed his face. I honestly couldn’t give less of a fuck if me threatening to slash his throat came out more like an offer for a hand job. He should have gotten the meaning in context. We ended up switching every thirty minutes, although I felt like every time he followed behind me he seemed extra vigilant. It took me hours to realize that, very likely, I wasn’t the cause of that, failed pantomime or not. I had ended up arriving at our temporary shelter long after the others, and I didn’t put it past Nate to have been a thread away from literally tearing Richards apart for losing track of me. How that translated into him getting anxious when I was taking point, I didn’t quite get, as lagging behind him had done the trick last night. I wasn’t vain enough to think that my dirt- and gore-caked ass bobbing up and down in front of him was making Red nervous. That seemed highly unlikely.
Hours after we’d set out for the day—and a good hundred dead shamblers later—we got to the marker Nate had identified the day before that would become our exit point. The reason became obvious a mile earlier. From what I could tell, there must have been some construction going on right next to the road. That, or the fire that had raged through the charred remains of the skeletal building must have burned hotter than usual. Then again, what did I know about fires? Maybe the fire had come later, and the upper two thirds of the building had ended up across the highway due to an earthquake or tornado. It certainly had created a lot of rubble.
How wrong my assessment was I only found out when we trudged up the last exit ramp before the highway block, and realized that it wasn’t just the building, and the overpass right next to it that had sealed the highway up for good. It was the entire area around the former building in a radius easily five blocks in every direction, the epicenter of the destruction somewhere east of here. Everything was reduced to rubble and charred black, the years since it had happened doing little to let nature reclaim what had been taken from her.
If Richards hadn’t pulled me behind the wreck of a truck I would have ended up standing there in the middle of the road, gaping. Signaling to lean close, I asked in as low a voice as I could manage, “What the fuck did that? Gas main bursting?”
He shook his head. “They must have bombed the city.” When all I had for him was confusion, he mimed what I realized was supposed to be a fighter jet with his fingers, dropping bombs. The resulting explosion didn’t do the actual destruction visible any justice, even though he gave it his best.
I didn’t even try to suppress a shudder. I hadn’t seen any movie-magic light silhouettes where people had been downright evaporated, but I doubted everyone had already been dead when the bombs hit. We’d seen little to no signs of well-executed evacuation so far, and the car wrecks that were even closer here than farther out proved that.
Theoretically, I’d been aware that the larger cities must have been true hellholes in the first days of the outbreak—underlined by the fact that I’d barely heard of anyone who’d been in a larger population center surviving. I’d seen the destruction caused in L.A. firsthand on our trip through the rigged maze on our first journey into the city, and few people would have been surprised to hear a city in California crumbling down because of an earthquake or ravaged by fire. In fact, the new settlements had already had to fight those very same disasters, as my friends had filled me in on what I’d missed. From what I’d picked up from group chatter on the way to France and back, and the marines in the camp, all branches of the military must have had a hell of a time mobilizing their troops, and just like the first responders, they were mercilessly decimated once the undead rose in force. No one had confirmed this for me yet but I had a certain feeling that a lot of the bases had been prime epicenters as well since they had been picked as targets ahead of time—just like the larger cities. Most military personnel that had survived had been on leave, and had been stationed in more rural areas. Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Texas of all states had tried to make a stand, but damn, I hadn’t needed to know about that.
Picking our way through the rubble wasn’t an option as years of rain and storms had done their own to add to the utter destruction. From what I could tell, the epicenter of the bomb drop must have been farther to the east, but that still meant that the highway was devastated for a good two miles, judging by the distance to the next taller building that was still standing in that direction. It was hard to judge at the very edge of the zone of devastation, but it looked like the blast had hit a residential area.
It was only that when we veered off the road and into the rabbit warrens of streets on the other side of the highway that I noticed what could have been manually erected barriers, obliterated by the blast wave that had turned a part of Dallas into a blackened pockmark on the face of the planet.
Getting out of the huge ditch that the highway had been sunken into came with one advantage—more shade. Not quite noon, the sun was beating mercilessly down on us, already bad enough to make the air flicker and warp. Maybe it was a simple illusion, but I felt like it was a few degrees cooler as we stepped into the smaller streets, with buildings ranging from one to maybe five stories in height. Only the very middle of the streets wasn’t ankle-deep shit, glass, leaves, and other debris—where it wasn’t covered by yet more cars. On the highway, they had remained more or less in orderly rows; here it must have been each man, woman, and child for themselves, the cars creating a worse maze than the city itself.
Spread out as we were moving forward, it took us a good three blocks to realize that we were far from alone.
And we learned that lesson too late for the last two people—Danvers, and another of Scott’s marines, the guy who’d gotten some heat stroke issues yesterday. Richards and I were a good block away so I didn’t hear a thing—not at first. Not when both men were tackled by shamblers that must have been watching us from the second Hamilton stepped into the street, and somehow managed to coordinate an attack ranging across both sides of the corridor we were walking through. Neither of the men managed to get out a scream, and they went down far enough away from any car to hit that.
What I did notice was the heavy pounding of feet when Scott and his remaining two guys came sprinting forward, running at full speed ahead of what must have been close to fifty shamblers, who were quickly closing the distance.
Unlike my gape-induced freeze a couple of minutes ago, my body didn’t shut down but jumped right into action. My first impulse was to start running—particularly when, from the very edge of my vision, I caught something stirring on the other side of the car I was right now squeezing past—but before I got more than two steps forward, Richards grabbed my arm and hauled me toward the next building to our right. There was no door close but the ground-level windows were all busted, so I hurled myself through one of those, praying that I didn’t choose a room full of nesting undead. I got lucky, only crashing onto a desk and bringing two flower pots down with me as I rolled onto my feet. Dried-up plants aside, it was better than Richards, who overshot the thin shelf underneath the window he was coming through and ended up tumbling to the floor, hitting his shoulder hard in a bad roll. I grabbed his other arm and pulled, helping him stumble upright. He stopped swaying a few steps later as we hastily retreated deeper into the building, away from the windows. A brief slap on my shoulder from behind told me he had my back while I was on the lookout for what may have been lurking in the apartment. Something had been, at one time or a
nother, but all the feces and gore I saw at first glance were dried up, months or maybe even years old. The entrance door was gone, leaving the doorway a gaping maw into a dark hallway beyond.
Hill poked out his head from the adjacent apartment just as I stepped out of ours, quickly reuniting our fireteam. I hesitated for a second, but when Richards practically gave me a shove forward, I quickly made my way farther down that hallway, only pausing briefly to check what lay beyond the other doors. I was almost at the very end where it branched off in two directions—toward the street, where I expected the building entrance to be, and toward the back—when something burst into the apartment three doors down, where Hill was bringing up the rear. I didn’t need another push to make me round the corner and move toward the back as fast as I could and still secure the hallway as much as that was possible. There was no exit there but a stairwell instead. In a pinch, that would do.
I didn’t quite run up into the first floor but took the single steps as fast as I dared. The way up was partly obscured by a trashed bookshelf and two chairs that someone must have hurled out of an apartment. Two shamblers were standing in the hallway that led to the front of the building, just now turning toward the sound of my footsteps. There was one more floor above this one, and since the stairs looked clear enough, I pushed on upward rather than tried to tackle the zombies. Let someone else—like Hill, with his sledgehammer—take care of them. There was even more furniture blocking the stairs up and I dislodged at least one piece as I scrambled over it, hoping that Richards behind me would be quick enough to evade. I was still three steps and half a shelf away from the top when a shambler came hurtling toward me.
In a bad movie, I would have been able to simply duck and let it pass by me. Sadly, they were more agile than to always bullrush us, and too smart to try, either. I managed to brace myself with one shoulder against the wall as it came for me. The impact still forced me a step down, and my left arm went numb for a few seconds, forced to take the brunt of the impact. Snapping jaws clacked in front of my face, but this once my lack in height was a plus, keeping my head out of reach without me having to duck much. As soon as I found my balance, I pushed away from the wall, up and to the side, forcing the zombie toward the rails of the staircase. It didn’t resist much since I was following along.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 60