I chewed on the inside of my cheek for a moment, processing this. “Because you need to give him the chance for revenge. Because if you don’t, you’ll take this guilt to your grave, and if you can avoid that, you will.”
Nate didn’t answer, but there was no need for it. I didn’t want to, but on some level, I got it. It explained so much—also about Hamilton. Like the fact that he was as ruthless as they came, but even he had lines he wouldn’t cross, and often deviated where he felt that maybe nobody would notice. I probably owed my life to that not just once, but several times over—at the factory; at our truce at the Colorado base; getting to Canada, and not dying in France or on the way back. Not letting me bleed to death was the first time he actively helped me, but I would have been lying if that made that much of a difference. I hated to admit it, but in a sense, Hamilton had been acting as my disgusting, baleful guardian angel—if only so I could survive and deliver the killing blow to Nate that he, for whatever reason, wasn’t ready to deal yet.
And there Sonia was giving me shit for being a dysfunctional asshole after dealing with this for the past several years.
One thing was for sure: whatever Decker was cooking up, wherever he was hiding—he was about to meet his match, and we would deliver the resolution we all so desperately needed. Even if Nate was right and something about this wasn’t as it seemed, that didn’t scare me. Between the three of us—and the people who would come along with us—we would find a way to deal with anything and everything that he could throw in our way. And we would succeed. Who cared if it was the last thing any of us did? I was more than ready to face the music, and none of us would go down without a hell of a fight.
Acknowledgments
Wow, book #11—almost done with the series!
Yes, book #12 will be the last—and I’ve already started working on it when you’re reading this (on release day). A few weeks ago, that is, since it picks off right where Retribution ends—and may I say so, I’m so psyched about the ending!
But we’re not quite there yet, so let’s talk about GF#11.
This was an interesting book to write. I thought I would have to make up so much about it—the city with its ravines of concrete and glass, and the tunnels… and a day into researching such things, I happened on an article about the train tunnels underneath Dallas, and that completely blew me away! I’ve also fallen in love with the actual city, and can’t wait to visit it one day. Of course there’s plenty of artistic license in the book, but I was extremely happy to find reality had, unexpectedly, handed me the perfect blueprints for once.
I wrote the second half of the book in under a week, so some of the breakneck speed and exhaustion is definitely my own. If there’s something like method writing (akin to method acting) this book definitely checked that box. It’s one of my favorites, and I can’t wait to hear what you think!
My eternal gratitude goes to my editor—she’s the best!—and my trusty beta readers, who never fail to amaze me with their willingness to help . You guys are amazing! And what would any writer be without her readers? Let it be said here that you continue to blow me away with your eagerness to get your hands on my next book. Thank you so much!
Thank you!
Hey, you! Yes, you, who just spent a helluva lot of time reading this book! You just made my day! Thanks!
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Annihilation: Green Fields #12
Dedication
To M
for being along on this craziest of crazy rides.
What happened in the Green Fields Series so far:
Bree Lewis thinks her life is getting complicated when the biotech company she is working for—Green Fields Biotech—gets taken over by terrorists… but that’s before she realizes that the zombie apocalypse is about to break out. She decides to help Nate Miller, leader of the insurgents, to find out who killed his brother—and might just be responsible for the end of the world. Together, they flee in the nick of time, barely getting out before the city gets overrun by the undead. Bree learns how to survive and fight, and when they reemerge from the bunker where they spent the first winter in, the new world is full of opportunities. With their most trusted friends, they form the Lucky Thirteen, a scavenger group ready to help the survivors in the settlements, always happy to slay some shamblers.
Only that their rise to gory glory doesn’t go unnoticed, and before long, Nate’s past catches up with him. They find themselves caught in a trap that none other than Nate’s former best friend and comrade-in-arms Bucky Hamilton has set for them. Bree gets savaged by zombies and barely makes it out alive, but instead of succumbing to the zombie virus, she survives—but with unforeseen consequences. She doesn’t know it yet, but the infection has taken hold deep inside her body, making it start to rot from the inside out. Civil war is brewing on the horizon, and after Bree gets kidnapped by the very same people who tried to kill her before, she’s had enough, calling on scavengers all over the country to help her end this madness. The assault on the army base in Colorado ends in a truce, all sides agreeing that the senseless loss of lives is not something the world ravaged by the zombie virus can take—but their triumph is short-lived.
When Bree realizes that her body didn’t kick the infection but is, in fact, deteriorating quickly, there is only one hope for her: to get inoculated with the serum that turned her husband and many of their friends into super-soldiers, yet ultimately, at their death, into zombies, and is directly connected to the outbreak of the plague that kicked off the apocalypse. The doctors at the army installation are able to save her life (if not all her limbs, intact) but that comes at a price: Bree and Nate are forced to cooperate with them, and get sent on a mission to France to retrieve information and a possible cure for the zombie virus—and none other than Hamilton is in command.
Raiding that underground lab turns into a nightmare when the former subjects studied there turn out to be a new breed of even stronger super-juiced zombies, and Nate almost gets killed. When he wakes up on the way home, he’s not quite the same anymore. Bree does her best to add her knowledge to the quest for a cure, but she knows it is futile, wishful thinking. She and Nate decide to disappear into exile since Hamilton issued a warning to them while they were in France: The reason why they keep getting caught up in the worst of the fray is because Nate’s old mentor, Decker, wants his favorite attack dog back by his side. Hiding from the world might just be the only way to evade that fate, and to keep their friends safe.
Two years pass until events catch up with them once more, and Bree soon finds out that the world has gone to hell in their absence. The civil war they helped incite but thought they’d ultimately prevented with the truce struck has turned into a nasty battle with multiple fronts, what little civilization had returned after the apocalypse now crumbling for good. Kidnapped by slavers, Bree manages to escape, but now needs the help of her old crew to spring Nate from his gruesome prison. She manages to rally support not just from her friends but other
allied factions, among them the marines from the Silo, the army soldiers from their joint mission to France, but also her old scavenger buddies, now resembling a bunch of violent lunatics. Together, they launch a successfully attack on the slaver camp, liberating the prisoners and putting an end to the drug trafficking operations. Bree is surprised to find none other than Hamilton had also been wasting away in one of the prison cells—and now she’s stuck with him since Nate is adamant that his former friend is a vital asset he intends to put to good use.
Having been locked up and forced to kill in the arena at the camp has left its mark on Nate, and Bree is none too happy about the changes in her husband that she notices. But she has no time to dwell on that, because now the time has come for some payback—and that’s something she knows how to deliver.
Following the only lead they have, they sneak and fight their way through Dallas to an underground lab where they manage to put an end to the serum project for good—but that changes nothing about the fact that hundreds of scavengers have been infected with a faulty version of the serum that is slowly turning them into mindless drones. But they know they are on the right path when Marleen—one of Nate’s former operatives—tries to assassinate Bree, failing because of bad intel only. Someone’s definitely scared they will come for him now…
Chapter 1
The cars were still waiting for us where we’d left them days ago. A few shamblers had taken an interest in them but mostly to find a place to hide from the sun mercilessly beating down on all of us. I remained in the car, my fingers tight around the M4 I’d scavenged from one of the guards in the underground lab below Dallas as I watched Nate and the few others who were more or less uninjured clean up the squatters. My mind was singing with the need for violence, but I was in too much pain to risk it. Nate wasn’t exactly unscathed himself, but at least it had been a full day since he’d last bled through the thick bandages covering half of his torso. I was, at best, two more days away from that.
I’d managed to stay behind the wheel of our car for the first two hours of our journey out of Dallas, doing my very best to concentrate on the lights of the vehicle ahead of me and not crash into the obstacles around the abandoned train tracks we were following. We had to stop then, both to give the drivers some rest to be able to stay focused, and to take care of the injured. It had only taken a single sharp look from Nate for me to lumber over to the passenger side instead, teeth clenched against the whimpers and groans trying to escape my compressed lips. Nobody needed to tell me it would have been best to wait another day to give my body enough time to heal, but there wasn’t a single one of us who didn’t constantly hear the ticking clock breathing down our necks, so we’d left as soon as possible. My injuries were the most acute, and since I managed to remain on my feet—or sitting on my ass—we left.
When we’d entered the abandoned train tunnels, we’d done so through a heavy iron sliding door. It didn’t come as a surprise that our exit was barred in a similar way, although the door was a gate large enough to allow the vehicles to pass through—which made sense since the route had been used repeatedly before. Burns, Hill, and Cole had checked the door cautiously and also made sure there were no booby traps left for us on the other side. The same process had repeated itself twice more until the last section of the tunnel spilled us out into the much wider, debris-strewn drainage tunnel that eventually led us back to the surface—miles outside of the Dallas city limits. There were some zombies around but not enough to be alarming to us, and it had taken us less than an hour to backtrack to the highway and the cars we’d used to get to the city. I couldn’t have been the only one who was angry at the fact that, had we known where to look, we wouldn’t have lost a good portion of our people in the infested labyrinth of the city and could have pretty much strolled right up to the lab. That we likely would never have made it from the tunnel to the garage and on into the lab since it had all been set up like the perfect kill chute was of no consequence, but it made me wonder why they hadn’t secured the other side of their complex better. Realistically speaking, they must have relied on us all biting it long before being able to knock on their front door. That still didn’t make up for everyone we’d lost.
As much as I hated the car for where it had come from, it still had working AC, and I was reluctant to lose that small measure of comfort, electricity demands be damned. I fully expected Nate to chase me out of it and into one of ours, but after they’d made sure the site was as cleared as it would get, he came sauntering right back to me and got behind the wheel. I watched in silence as packs were redistributed and people switched places. With only a few more people than vehicles, we were presented with a peculiar problem of not having enough drivers for all the cars available since several—me included—couldn’t be trusted to do more than, at best, keep a car on the road. Evasive driving was definitely out of the question.
We ended up only having to leave a single car: the beat-up heap of scrap metal that the scavengers had been using. Amos, himself forced to ride in the backseat because of his injuries, didn’t seem heartbroken about leaving it behind. The loss of his three friends must have overridden that.
We didn’t go far, just far enough away from the highway so as not to attract any attention, unwanted or otherwise. This time I followed Nate out of the car, to the vehicle he’d been driving on the way over that Burns had commandeered. Sonia was already waiting next to him, apparently glad for a quick respite from driving the largest of our new vehicles—our makeshift ambulance, carrying those that couldn’t quite sit up yet.
Reaching in to grab the mic, Nate remained leaning against the passenger door, heavily favoring his bad side. It took Burns a good ten minutes to make contact, but once he had the right frequency, we heard the voice on the other side as clear as the radio would make it. Nate was quick to go through the code phrases we’d agreed on, and then demanded to talk to whoever was in charge. It took a few more minutes—presumably for cars to stop and people to gather—until a different voice responded. I was surprised that it was Martinez, but probably shouldn’t have been.
“Thank fuck you’re still alive,” he said rather emphatically. Under different circumstances I would have smirked, but I was too tired and drained.
Nate didn’t comment on that and instead asked, “Romanoff and Zilinsky aren’t with you?”
“No. They went ahead, trying to make it as fast as possible.” Back to the California coast, as we’d agreed. Our destination was likely not a stretch of the imagination, but we didn’t have to make it too simple for anyone who might be listening in. We’d ditched the radios from our three new cars back where we’d left the others, but we had no clue if that was enough, or if anyone had in the meantime bugged the cars left behind. After the most recent events, I wasn’t going to bet my life on anything I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure about. “We have a check-in coming up with them in a few hours from now. We’ll relay the news that you made it.”
Nate grimaced. “Get them on the line as soon as we’re done coordinating. Tell them that we’re on high alert and not to trust anyone they’re not completely certain is on our side. We need to err on the side of extreme caution.”
Stunned silence followed before Martinez acknowledged. “What happened?”
If it had been me, I would have gone for some wisecrack or other, but Nate left it at a simple, “I’ll explain when we rendezvous with you. We’re just outside of Dallas, roughly northeast. Tell us where you’ll be relative to our position at what time.” It took some coordinating, but a few minutes and hastily scrawled lines on maps later, we had two possible spots where the others could be waiting for us. I had no clue how, but I was certain that neither of our groups would get anywhere near those places, and Nate’s finger rested on a part of the map that was a good fifty miles south of any town mentioned. I tried to commit it to memory but gave up when my eyes wouldn’t focus. I was sure that someone else would do a better job acting as our pathfinder.
As so
on as that was done, Nate killed the connection, not even bothering with saying goodbye—not that unusual, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. In short order, we scrambled back into our respective vehicles, but rather than form our usual column, the cars broke up into small clusters of two or three vehicles each, taking different turns wherever possible. Soon we were spread out like a very loose net over a good mile or two, even the clusters breaking up to leave several hundred yards’ distance between the cars. It made sense—we’d send up way less dust this way, and even a well-aimed RPG wouldn’t take out more than a single vehicle at a time. I didn’t expect that to happen, but I was very much on board with going into paranoia mode. Literally getting knifed in the back will do that to the best of us, and it had been a long time since I’d been the exception to that.
I did my best to keep munching on our provisions as Nate drove, but between the heat, exhaustion, and pain, even my stomach was too upset to make it easy to fill myself up. Nate tried munching on what high-protein snacks I fed him, but even well-salted jerky came back up after the fifth piece, forcing him to stop so he could retch out the door. He hadn’t exactly been able to take a snack pack on the road, although if he’d told me sooner about how he’d gone about acquiring his last meal, I would have badgered him into trying. I didn’t quite understand why he couldn’t hold down something as close to meat as the preserved variant—we’d seen enough chewed-up boxes everywhere that shamblers had gotten into, not bothering to do away with the packaging first. If they could smell something moderately edible, they ate it. My suspicion was that he needed fresh meat, the source less important than the lack of cooking or preservatives. Studying him from the side, I didn’t like how sharp the lines of his jaw looked—not exactly gaunt but all extra subcutaneous fat used up. He was still stronger than Hamilton—a little more than a week of regular nutrition hadn’t been enough for either of them to fatten up again, and Hamilton had months of a more severe starvation diet behind him than Nate—but I could have done without that worry on top of everything else. This close to Dallas, no way would we be able to find fresh game to hunt, but maybe I could try feeding him some kibble next. That had worked well enough last winter when our stocks had run dry—but that had been before those hellish nine weeks in the camp with its arena, questionable food sources, and assholes shooting him up with all kinds of chemicals. That we’d happened to find the lab where those had come from—and I was sure, if I’d paid more attention and had more time, I could have honed in on exactly what had screwed in what way with him after finding the documentation—didn’t matter now. The main takeaway for me still was that nothing good would have come of anything there since they hadn’t been working on the original serum project anymore, but instead had done their best to somehow subvert the effects of it. To what end was still anyone’s guess. I didn’t trust what Stone had told us in the hot lab, and since Walter Greene—illustrious senior scientist and asshole extraordinaire—had been dead on our arrival, there was no way to get answers.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 75