The last time we’d come through here had been to deliver a stack of what we’d hoped had been secure radios, at the gate to the central town of the collective, formerly a handful of houses in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t head for that but instead, Nate pointed me to one of our old roads that led directly to the bunker, a few miles to the south, into the foothills of the mountains. I could have found that road blind in a snowstorm—also because I’d, more than once, had to drive it, blind, in a snowstorm—but if not for memory, I could have easily missed it now. Someone had taken great pains to erect some fences and even rerouted one of the dirt tracks, prompting us to wait for the Humvee to catch up so they could waltz them down, sparing my snazzy new car’s paint job. It belatedly puzzled me that Hamilton had no problems finding the road. Then I remembered that just because he hadn’t come here after the outbreak didn’t mean he’d forgotten all about the bunker’s existence. The last two miles of winding road I took point again, letting Hamilton follow what I hoped was still the one true pass through the gauntlet of mines and traps we had prepped the territory with. Somehow, I couldn’t see Bert ordering anyone to risk their lives disarming their best forward line of defense.
We arrived, unscathed and unhindered, at the meadow in front of the cabin sitting atop the bunker, a strange kind of feeling bouncing around in my chest—homesickness, I realized, with quite a lot of bewilderment. Since the last stretch of our journey had been slow going, the other vehicles were right behind us, with the Jeep bringing up the rear. Grabbing a shotgun from the rack in the middle console—old habits were very easy to pick up again, it turned out—I followed Nate out of the car. He swung by the trunk to get a sledgehammer out of the back—not disconcerting at all, that move—before he aimed for the door, Hamilton falling in step right behind him, equally armed.
The door burst open when they were still a few feet away from the steps leading up onto the porch, two guards accosting them, looking nervous as fuck. I couldn’t hold it against them; it was unlikely that there hadn’t been any random, unannounced visitors here for a long time, maybe even years. As governor—or whatever she called herself these days—it made sense that Emma, Sadie’s mother and another one of my favorite people in the world, albeit not one I wanted to kill, was living in the town now rather than out here. Still, it was a bunker, the entire setup a refuge for fifty people if necessary, and easily housing twenty on a permanent basis, if they didn’t mind sitting on top of each other. The good old days, for sure.
“Stop right there,” the older one of the guards said, trying to sound like he meant it. That he did was obvious, but he also seemed to be aware of the fact that their guns wouldn’t help them much if we decided not to heed their order.
Nate had no intention to do so, it seemed, but he paused for a moment, looking up at the guards, exasperation plain on his face. “You know who I am?”
The younger of the guards looked puzzled, but the one who’d spoken gave a grim nod. “You’re not welcome here.”
Nate flashed his teeth at him in something that wasn’t even an approximation of a smile. “If you know who I am, you also know that I helped build this fucking bunker, and I will come and go whenever the fuck I please.” He let that sink in—and didn’t even go so far as to raise his hammer to add to the unspoken threat—before he went on. “We won’t be long. If you stop being a nuisance, you’ll be back to your lonesome selves out here before the sun sets.”
The guards still hesitated, but when Nate continued forward, they let him brush by, then quickly stepped away when Hamilton aimed to plow right through them. I followed, because, damnit, I was so fucking curious about what we were here to fetch. A few more people followed me although most remained outside, and the high whine of a dirt bike disappearing into the hills made me guess that at least one of the guards was getting backup.
While Nate went straight down into the lower level, Hamilton followed at a slightly slower pace, curiously looking at everything. The interior hadn’t changed much, the location clearly no longer in use. I could see a few familiar coffee mugs by the sink, waiting to be washed, and what little furniture was in here was still the same. I caught up to Nate in what used to be our bedroom, or rather, dormitory—one of two large rooms that made up the bunker portion of the building. The other had been used as a pantry and alternate living space. A glance into the pantry revealed that food stores were minimal but the armory was still stocked, and some older gear was stashed on the shelves beside it—spare clothes and things that would still work in a pinch. The dormitory was empty except for a threadbare mattress in a corner with a disheveled comforter and sleeping bag on it—another emergency setup, or maybe what the guards used, one at a time, to crash.
Nate ignored all that, instead walking to the very back of the room. There, he turned, and took three measured paces toward the middle, where he stopped—and started to smash the concrete floor underneath us. Hamilton joined him, the two of them falling into an easy, alternating pattern that soon had the surface cracked, cement chunks and dust flying everywhere.
“Exactly what have you hidden underneath there?” I asked after watching them for a while. “A thermonuclear warhead?”
Nate paused, drenched in sweat from the hard work, briefly glancing over to me. “Depends on what you consider as a warhead.” He picked up the sledgehammer again and continued. “And drop the ‘thermo’ part.”
My teeth made an audible “clack” as they snapped together. I had been joking, obviously. Apparently, he hadn’t.
“Are you for real? You buried a radioactive bomb, or whatnot, underneath the place where we slept for more than half a year? I know you weren’t that concerned about the possibility of procreation at the time, but the cancer risk alone…” My thoughts trailed off there, and you could have definitely considered me alarmed. “Are you fucking kidding me?!”
If anything, Hamilton was amused by my outburst. Nate paused again to give me a vexed look. “Basic physics. And chemistry, too. Did they let you skip that in school? Alpha, beta, gamma radiation—and how to contain it? Stop making such a fuss. The background radiation in the ground from the mountains here is way above what this could produce if it was leaking—and it’s not leaking.”
I stared at him for another moment, ready to whip around and run outside, but I was way too curious to pass this up—and the fact that both of them seemed relaxed despite the heavy physical labor helped set my mind at ease… somewhat.
“I still can’t believe that you never told me that we were sleeping on a damn atomic bomb.”
Nate went on working until he needed a break, a now sizable portion of the floor ruined. “It’s not an atomic bomb. And as for why I never told you, well, it kind of never came up in casual conversation,” he said, doing a very bad imitation of me.
Hamilton chuckled under his breath. “This is just too precious.”
Ignoring them, I looked at who else was in the room, realizing that only Amos and Adalynn had followed us into the house and were still upstairs, well out of earshot. I turned back to Nate. “So what is it, then? And, you know, I didn’t pass up basic chemistry or physics, so feel free to go into as much detail as you like.”
I had to wait another five minutes until Nate was tired enough to need another break, letting Hamilton have a go in the meantime. “Actually, it’s a case inside a case—both made of lead, of course.” He paused, smirking at me. I rolled my eyes at him, not hiding just how annoyed I was right now. “And inside of that, there are four vials filled with enriched, weapons-grade plutonium that can be inserted into a small, detonatable device that’s also included in the outer of the two cases. It’s all safe to handle since I have no intention whatsoever to add radiation burns to my current collection of scars.”
If anything, that explanation left me confused. “What’s that useful for? And don’t you dare say to make shit go ‘boom,’ or, I swear to God, I will make you regret that you haven’t used that shit on yourself yet.”
&n
bsp; Hamilton smirked at me between two swings. “You should ask him how he got it. That’s the better question.”
I pointedly glared at Nate, prompting him to do as his bestie had just suggested. The fact that Nate was reluctant to do so made my interest flare up. Maybe Hamilton wasn’t that useless after all if it meant I finally got to hear about some of the shit they had gotten up to long before most of the others had ventured into the picture.
“That case was the backup case a bunch of terrorists were using, trying to get some very important persons killed. We busted their operation, secured the primary charges before they could come to use, and saved the world.” That part Nate said in an appropriately wry tone. “And later, we found the backup case when we were rounding up a few more leads. The paperwork was already filed and we didn’t want to sit through yet another endless debriefing, so…” He trailed off there, and gave me a surprisingly boyish grin.
“So you just happened to make it disappear in your pocket and nobody has missed it since?” I hazarded a sarcastic guess.
Nate snorted. Hamilton laughed. “We did cause an international incident but not because of that,” Hamilton told me—and promptly shut up. Typical.
Nate had a hard time not chuckling himself but turned back to me as he continued his explanation. “It really has very limited use. You’d need the proper facility and at least two hundred of those vials to make an actual fusion bomb out of it. But what makes atomic bombs special is based on plutonium’s properties, and that also goes for quantities too small for a weapon of mass destruction: it’s an insanely powerful explosive, several times more so than C4 at a fraction of the size. Those devices in there are pretty useful as anti-personnel explosives.”
I was still fuzzy on that, but Hamilton was only too happy to enlighten me on their use. “As in, if you’re in the same room with someone you want to kill by turning yourself into a small, vaporized dirty bomb, this is what you need.”
I almost heard myself deflate, or at least that’s what it felt like to me. “So that’s what you meant with that talk about how much exactly our potential sacrifices are worth,” I noted.
Nate inclined his head. “If my suspicion is right and the invitation that Rita is holding for us says something along the lines of going to a face-to-face meeting, I will make sure that Decker has no chance of walking away from it. My preferred plan is to not blow myself up, but if I only get one chance, I’m not going to miss it.” He snorted. “We’re fucked if that letter tells us to kill each other, and once we’re dead Decker might consider letting the rest of our people live, but that’s not his MO. I’m ready for pretty much any concession, if it means I can trigger that bomb. I hate to say this, but I hope so are you.”
I was saved from giving an immediate answer by the arrival of more people, suddenly turning the vast, empty space into a crowded room. I would have been alarmed otherwise but was sure that Pia would have called down had it been someone out to get us. And it wasn’t hard to guess who would come knocking, guards riding off or not.
Bert managed a modicum of authority even though the dust cloud he stepped into made him cough. He focused on the guys first—“Nate, John”—before giving me a slight nod. I considered being just a little offended but since we were technically trespassing, I cut down on the impulse, mostly playing off Bert’s relaxed demeanor. The guards from before were with him, and two more we hadn’t seen yet, all a lot more tense than Bert himself. He remained standing just inside the door while his guards tried to fan out. They looked absolutely miserable when neither Nate nor Bucky dropped their sledgehammers and pretty much ignored them—but also made no move on them, either.
“Hi, Bert,” I offered conversationally when the incessant pounding stopped for a few moments. “Nice to see you.”
He offered me a sardonic grin. “I’d say the same if it was under different circumstances.” He watched the proceedings for a moment before gesturing me to precede him. “Why don’t we take this outside? I’m not sure anymore whether we used asbestos in the insulation, but either way, I can do without inhaling any more of this shit.”
His use of profanity made me smile, if only for a moment. It looked like Nate and Hamilton would be busy for a while here still. Also, Bert and me exiting meant the guards had no reason to linger, which I presumed was the reason why Bert was doing this. Still curious, I kind of wanted to see what they’d unearth, but I had a certain feeling I’d see more of it in the coming days than I liked—after making sure that box got nowhere near the Rover.
Back in the early evening sunshine, Bert stretched, then made a show of walking over to my car and looking at it from all sides, drawing the guards farther from the bunker as they tagged along at a distance. The rest of our people were spread out and mostly relaxed, lingering in the shade or enjoying a few rays of sunshine that weren’t baking us alive anymore.
“Martinez mentioned that he’d found a wreck to restore,” Bert noted after his circuit was complete. “He and Clark dropped by with a bunch of traders to get some tools and the odd spare part still left in the garage. Looks like their work paid off.” The fact that he didn’t mention Andrej’s name made it obvious for me that he knew what had gone down a week ago. No way Andrej hadn’t been involved, considering he loved cars as much as Martinez. Had loved, I corrected myself, my heart giving a painful pang.
“Sadie’s okay,” I more muttered than told him, hard-pressed to change the topic to something he must have been more interested in than my ride. “Not good per se, and I’m sure she’ll need a while to deal with the trauma, but she’s physically okay, and she’s with people who care about her. Chris is doing just fine. I think the fact that in Utah, there are easily five times as many kids her age than she’s used to makes it easier to forget what she’s been through. For Sadie, too, probably.”
Bert nodded, almost pensively, but I could see the pain plain on his face. “I hate that it’s come to this,” he offered. “My own kid feeling the need to run off to save her own kid—and she wasn’t wrong.” The way he glanced at me made me guess he wanted me to protest. When I didn’t, he sighed, suddenly looking ten years older than he actually was. “You don’t need me to tell you this, but end it, if you can. I understand it if you have little love left for us—settlements in general, but us in particular—but we’ve all lost people and paid a terrible price for sins we didn’t commit.” It struck me as strange that Nate had, just this morning, used almost the same phrasing, but maybe they were quoting from a poem that I wasn’t familiar with. Stranger things had happened.
“We’ll try.” That statement didn’t seem enough, so I did my best to lend my voice conviction that I didn’t necessarily feel. “You know Nate well enough that he wouldn’t lie to you concerning something as important as this, and neither will I. I can’t tell you that we will put an end to this—but you have my word that I will do my very best to make it happen. You know the same is true for those two assholes currently ruining the floor of the bunker.” That, in turn, made him grin. “You knew what was underneath all that concrete, didn’t you?”
Bert nodded. “Who do you think had the idea to bury it there?”
“And you let your wife and daughter sleep right above it?”
Bert gave me a smirk that lured me to expect him to point out they had slept in a different corner of the room, but in actuality, he was way too much like Nate to go for it. “We have a Geiger counter in the pantry, if you want to check. I wouldn’t have risked Sadie’s health for anything in the world. But I don’t need to tell you that none of us ever thought we’d need this bunker—or any of its secrets—not in a million years.”
“Hey, we also thought the zombies would be the real problem, and look at us now,” I joked.
I got a smile for my trouble, but I knew he was just humoring me, not really feeling it.
“You can stay the night,” Bert offered when I didn’t have anything else to say. “We can send over some provisions, if you want any. I hope you underst
and why we can’t invite you over to dinner.”
As a matter of fact, I still didn’t, but kept my comments to myself. “Thanks, but we’re only wasting daylight if we stay. We’ll camp somewhere out in the plains. It’s been a while since we’ve been here but I still know a handful of good locations that I doubt have changed much in the meantime.”
Bert looked relieved, then guilty. Nate and Hamilton returning from the bunker was a welcome distraction for both of us, although in my case, it was short-lived.
“That thing won’t come anywhere near my car,” I shouted when I saw the case Nate was carrying in his left hand, the sledgehammer in his right. He cast me a sidelong glance as he continued toward the cars. At first, I thought he was aiming for the Humvee, which didn’t sit right with me, either. Did I trust Cole and Hill? With my life, yes, but maybe not with other things. I needn’t have worried since he passed by the behemoth without stopping, only to hand the case to Clark. Part of me wanted to protest that I didn’t want Martinez and the other two irradiated, either, but it was a good choice. The Rover, same as the Jeep—and, in a sense, the Humvee—were the obvious choices, leaving the snazzy Ford as a good alternative.
Bert had meanwhile used the opportunity to leave my side and was standing next to Hamilton, who, at best, seemed vaguely uncomfortable in his presence, if he was even capable of such an emotion. I hated that I was starting to be able to read him. Things had been so much easier before I’d seen little more than the caricature he so loved to portray. “It’s good to see you two working together again,” Bert offered.
Hamilton pretended to ignore him but then answered nevertheless. “Don’t get used to it.” Bert looked slightly disappointed but was quick to hide it when Nate returned. The two men stared at each other for a few seconds before Nate extended one cement-dust-caked hand. Bert shook it, and whistled for his guards to leave with him. Only the two who had already been here upon our arrival stayed. Ten minutes and a quick wash-up later, we were back on the road, my bewilderment on a higher level than it had been in quite some time.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 100