Nate remained mute, staring at her as if he was waiting for more. She just looked back, then readjusted her scarf and walked away, the clack of her heels quickly disappearing in the distance. Giving himself a visible shake—that I very much empathized with—Nate started walking again, Hamilton quickly following along.
As we passed, the staff with their flashlights backed away, giving us as wide a berth as they could manage. As soon as we reached the first staircase, we saw a few soldiers standing around, but none of them raised a weapon. In fact, they were very quick to keep their hands where we could see them, turning to equally silent bystanders. From the gallery, I saw the rich and powerful below huddled together in clusters around light sources, murmurs and the odd confused shout ringing out. Faintly, I could hear a man in a trembling voice explain something about a temporary power outage, and that a maintenance crew had already been sent to restart the generators. Everybody, please stay calm.
Fuck calm.
When we reached the long corridor leading to the elevator, we found it as empty as the reception desk we’d just passed. Our jackets were still waiting for us. I grabbed them, not wanting to add to the guys’ burden. The elevator was out of commission, frozen here on the lower floor, but there was a door next to it with a staircase behind. It took us several laborious minutes to make it to the top, Nate needing to stop several times but refusing to let Hamilton carry the body alone. I couldn’t help but draw what felt like my first unencumbered breath as Hamilton pulled the door of the shed open, warm evening air blasting in our faces. I trotted on for a few more steps before I let Gita slide from my grasp, with her ending up sitting in the grass. Hamilton dumped the body next to her before he turned to Nate.
“Did I get that last part right? She told us to nuke the fucking exit?”
Nate gave the smallest nod possible.
“How the fuck did she know we had the nukes?” Hamilton asked.
He got a slight shrug for his trouble. “No fucking clue. She might not even have known. She probably assumed we wouldn’t come here without carrying our weight in explosives.”
I waited for anyone to speak up, but all Hamilton did was eye the shed as if to consider whether he should go inside or behind it to drop his pants. At least he was considerate enough that I didn’t need to see his junk again. The day had been bad enough as it was.
“What about the radiation?” I asked when nobody said anything. “Not sure how I feel about giving all those assholes cancer.”
Nate gave me a look that said plainly that he had no fucks left to give. “They won’t be stupid enough to check on the caved-in elevator without taking a Geiger counter along,” he finally said. “They built this bunker to withstand a nuclear war. And if they are? Not my problem.”
We ended up doing the nuke removal behind the shed, taking turns—and no, this time I didn’t refuse Nate’s offer for help. My hands were shaking with more than just exhaustion, and I figured that was the least he could do, considering this had been his idea. We ended up letting Gita cut the triggers out of our palms, with her glaring at us balefully, which all three of us ignored. Nate taped them to the—thankfully still intact—tubes, and then dropped all four into the empty elevator shaft. I cringed as I heard them clank down the walls and land on the elevator cabin, but no explosion followed, so I figured, we’d jumped off that sinking ship alive. Twenty minutes to go.
Just as we reached the Rover—still dragging Red’s body along with us, but Gita now managing on her own—a convoy of cars came racing along the trail we’d followed here, the Ice Queen jumping out of the Jeep before it had come to a halt. I remained standing where I was as someone pulled the rifle from my hands and exchanged it for a bottle of water, telling me to drink. It was only when Martinez started to prod me that I realized my arm was in worse shape than I’d thought, but at least the wound wasn’t beyond what could be sewn back together. It would go well with the scars on my hip—for what little time I had left to enjoy them.
I saw Cole sauntering over to Gita once Sonia let her get up, a bandage on her leg wound. A look from me was all he needed, declaring with a grin, “I presume the trick with the lights-out worked? I’d love to claim that one for me, but all I needed to do was connect my laptop to their central power grid and enter the password she left for me. Damn fine work.” The last was obviously meant for Gita, who even managed a bright smile in return.
“I knew you’d figure it out,” she offered.
“Please. That was child’s play compared to France. You wound me.”
They continued to joke for a little longer. I ignored them, instead watching as Burns and Pia were both working on cutting Nate’s clothes off him so they could get to digging out the bullets. “Uh, shouldn’t we, I don’t know, leave?” I suggested. “There’s a nuke going off in less than five minutes.”
Concerned looks turned to me—and just as I opened my mouth to explain, I felt a dull thud underneath me. Oops. So much for keeping track of time. Pia’s more than slightly concerned look zoomed to Nate but he shook his head. “Airlock on the shed door is tight,” he said. “And I’m sure that now it’s locked forever. But yeah, maybe we shouldn’t linger.”
“Where to?”
It was a valid question that the Ice Queen posed, but none I could answer. We all stared at each other, or mostly the rest of us stared at Nate, who continued to just stand there and bleed.
Gita cleared her throat, looking slightly off. “Aren’t you going to Canada now?”
I couldn’t quite quell the irritation in my tone. “Why the fuck would we go to Canada?”
“Emily Raynor’s base,” she offered, then trailed off, confusion slowly morphing into realization. “Fuck, you don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” I asked. “There’s no cure. We know that.”
Gita started to laugh, but cut herself off when I must have glared too hard. “No, she doesn’t have a cure for the zombie virus, or for the braindead scavengers. But she’s found a way to stop the deterioration, as she calls it.” A snort followed. “She thinks it’s not enough because she’s a perfectionist and this is not a perfect solution, but not turning into a walking menace was more than enough for me.”
It took me a moment to puzzle out what she was saying. “You already got it?”
Gita nodded with a grin. “Before I let myself be found and brought here. We debated whether that was smart, but since I can’t fight for shit, I figured that if I died, at least I wouldn’t turn into a nuisance. I still can’t catch the virus anymore since it’s inactive all over my body, but it can’t activate, even if I catch it anew. Ask her about the details. She told me twice but it went way over my head.” She offered me another grin. “You’d understand. It might even be something from your notes. She kept muttering about them even two years after she got them. I think she’s jealous of your brain. She really doesn’t handle the fact well that you’re smarter than she is.”
That… was about the last thing on my mind right now. I found myself staring at Nate just as he was staring at me, a flicker of hope starting up in my chest.
A second later, he was already rounding on Pia. “Plot us a course to Esterhazy, Saskatchewan. You can sew me up later when we camp for the night.”
And, just like that, we were off, desperate to leave not just this place but all our troubles behind.
Chapter 24
We ended up driving well into the night, silently agreeing that it simply made the most sense to camp in the same spot as yesterday, even if that meant we only got there as the sky was already starting to brighten, and I was getting seriously concerned about both the Rover’s batteries, and the way the entire car was reeking of blood. Nate had refused to waste any time on getting patched up, which was fine with me at the time, but damn, it would take a long while to get those stains out of his seat.
Wound cleaning and sewing had to wait another hour while we established our camp, and Burns and Hill took turns digging a deep-enough hole so we c
ould bury Richards. We all just stood there, silent, bleary-eyed, and swaying with exhaustion, nobody in the right mind to find words that could only be wrong. Gita had filled us in on the few gaps that still existed—that I had been right in guessing that Marleen forced Richards to come along and he reasoned he might be more use to us as accidental infiltrator than dead. From the first day he got there, the two of them had been working together, him mostly standing watch or running interference so she could sneak off and hack into the bunker grid. How Gita had ended up there included a little more subterfuge. Gabriel Greene hadn’t been lying, exactly, but had actually not quite known where she’d been at the time I had turned back up in California. Nobody had known, except for Emily Raynor and a few of her staff, it turned out. After returning to New Angeles when Burns dropped her off there after France, Gita had soon gotten approached by an interested party, as she put it—one of the many spies reporting back to the doomsday bunker. She’d resisted for a while, then hitched a ride back to Canada when Raynor contacted her about what she hoped might be a solution for the serum issues. Gita had agreed to play guinea pig; the reason behind her being ideal was that she had received what was very close to a perfect version of the serum when I’d shot her up with it in France, trying to keep the infection she’d caught at bay, but hadn’t been inoculated for more than a year. It grated on my nerves to have to realize that several people could have been saved from instant conversion for months already, but doubted any of us would have gone for it before the danger that we thought had been Decker was dealt with. The Ice Queen herself was quick to voice that—and include that Andrej would have agreed.
The sun was casting its first rays on the lake as we crawled back into the Rover, the solar panels set up to charge the battery while we slept—or dozed, or simply stared at the roof of the car, trying not to move to keep pain at a minimum. We were well into the second hour of doing that when Nate uttered a low groan before he grabbed me and pulled me close, giving me a somewhat awkward kiss over my shoulder before folding his body around mine, one hand splayed in an almost possessive gesture over my lower stomach. I couldn’t help but smile as I nestled against him, twining my fingers with his. Neither of us said anything, but then nothing needed to be said. We were both still standing—and nothing else mattered.
We were well into the second hour of driving the following day—after checking all wounds again, and Martinez chewing us out for having bullets lodged in body parts that should have needed to be dug out the night before already—when I finally asked the one question I still had no answer to. “Who was that woman? I know you must have met before, judging how familiar you both were with each other.”
Nate grimaced, spending a good ten seconds staring at the road in front of us before he answered. “That was my mother.”
I almost slammed my foot down on the brakes, which might have been smart since I had to swerve hard not to crash into the next tree. “Your what?!”
He looked faintly amused as he cast me a sidelong glance. “My mother,” he repeated. “Contrary to what you may sometimes fling in my face, I didn’t hatch from an egg, or crawl out of some primordial slime.”
My mind was still reeling, incapable of processing this. “But—”
When nothing more made it over my lips, he finished the question for me. “Why didn’t we take her along? She chose to stay. Don’t ask me why. Since she didn’t offer an explanation, she wanted her reasoning to remain her own. I think she was too proud to admit that she was scared of roughing it out on the road. Much more likely, she found the idea of observing the end of what we once called civilization from a seat in the first row appealing. I’ve long ago given up trying to make sense of her. If you think I’m hard to read sometimes, I have nothing on her.”
My mind still refused to catch up with that. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have at least, I don’t know. Said hi.”
His smile turned wry. “I’m sure she knew exactly who you are. If she’d wanted to talk to you, she would have said something. Don’t tell me you’re eager to get her approval. Trust me, that’s not a journey you want to embark on. I didn’t so much give up as accept defeat.” And still, he was smiling, as if his mind was filled with fond memories.
“What was that part about her working with Decker?” I hadn’t missed that, either.
Nate’s smile dipped a little but didn’t disappear. “She was consulting with him on how to handle me.” He looked at me again, that smile turning into a smirk, likely at the look of horror on my face. “It’s a long story.”
“Well, we have a long ride in front of us. And if what Raynor cooked up actually works, much more time after that, as well.”
“I’ll tell you one day,” he promised. “Maybe.”
“For sure.”
He shrugged, which, knowing him, was not a “yes.” I gritted my teeth and started coming up with plans for how I could force him to tell me—but then dropped the point. If he wanted to share with me, he would. If not? Then I would hopefully live a very long life, constantly wondering, but ultimately feeling like it didn’t matter. Somewhere along the way, I’d learned to let things go… and I had zero intention to go back on that. Sometimes, it just wasn’t worth it.
We ran into minimal obstacles on our way northwest into Canada, trying very hard to fly under the radar. Of course we could have swung by Dispatch, if only to let Rita know that we’d taken care of things. We did plug one of our radios in for an hour to sign back in with our people in Utah and California, if only to let them know that we were still alive, and intending to stay that way for as long as possible. Most of the detours required were because of ruined roads and bridges, and the odd shamblers to dispose of. We let the scavengers do most of that since they felt short-changed, not having gotten to kill anyone at the doomsday bunker.
I was still musing about how weird it was that they’d simply escorted us in and then let us walk out again, when Nate finally deigned to offer up his opinion on that.
“She may have been good about hatching out revenge plans that ultimately drove her insane, but the rest? Random acts of anarchy that kept spiraling out of her control, and none of that was her doing. She had been lucky to have found extremely competent henchmen. She didn’t plot the apocalypse, she bumbled into it. I didn’t see the blueprints, but the only reason that bunker wasn’t busted was because nobody knew about it who wasn’t invested in keeping it going. If we’d had to break in, we could likely have managed within a week.” When I just stared at him, he shrugged. “I’m not going to say it’s a scam, but whoever built it paid a lot of attention to turning it into a luxury resort, and little to setting it up as a permanent solution for survival. Maybe they’ll hold out for another five years. Maybe they have already suffocated. I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, I’m trying very hard to forget it ever existed.”
“What about the staff?” I asked. “Everyone who wasn’t loaded and got their special VIP ticket, and who hasn’t even fully realized that we’ve been bashing each others’ heads in out here.”
Nate seemed unperturbed by my concern. “They had several years to make contact with anyone on the outside. They chose to stay in their cozy hideout. Let them rot with the rest.”
“You are mighty cheerful, even for you,” I remarked—kind of agreeing with him. Yeah, maybe that made us both assholes, but really, we’d bled enough for this country. And what for?
Nate gave me a fake grin that made me roll my eyes at him. “Better?”
“Forget I said anything,” I shot back… and couldn’t help but smile. In a sense, life was better. And maybe with enough time passing, it would one day feel good again when that pervasive sense of it all having been for naught would recede into the very back of my mind where I could ignore it forever.
We finally reached the Canadian base a week after burying Richards by the lake. Nothing looked familiar until we reached the gate where, a long time ago, I’d barely been able to stand on my own and was spitting up blo
od. Finding everything not covered in several feet of snow did make a difference. The fact that I’d been hallucinating and not really able to think straight anymore didn’t help, either. I felt a lot less desperate as I sauntered up to the camera above the gate, waved, and told Emily Raynor to get her British-bitch ass out here, stat. Nate was running out of jerky and I was certainly at the end of my patience. I doubted much about either would change, but it was worth a shot.
It took a good hour of soldiers coming, soldiers leaving again after getting yelled at, more soldiers coming with backup and two tanks, Hamilton getting involved in the yelling as well, and us pretty much threatening to go nuclear on their asses if they didn’t send their queen in a white lab coat out here. Then we had to wait another twenty minutes since it took a while for her to get all her gear since we refused to enter the base proper. It was hilarious to watch the procession of five scientists and nurses, looking around them, frightened out of their wits, just because they were walking around topside, with the local soldiers stationed here having made sure that no undead lurked in a thirty-mile radius—and I was sure that all of the scientists were inoculated with the serum to start with. Us they didn’t seem to be very afraid of, which just underlined, yet again, that wisdom and intelligence had few things in common.
I was surprised that Emily Raynor did seem to have a touch of compassion and common sense since she went so far as to hug Gita—which weirded me out on so many levels—and seemed to at least try to appear courteous when she stepped up to Nate and me. Curiosity was burning in her eyes, and I knew we were maybe three sentences away from dropping terms like “mystery meat” and “questionable origin.” My resentment toward her was bordering on physical, although I was the first to admit that I owed her my life—and soon would again, for the second time. I knew that a lot of it was because, in a sense, I blamed her for all the things I’d lost on that operating room table, since it was easier than being grateful for what I’d gained. I also felt like punching her in the throat for temporarily sterilizing me with that IUD she had planted inside of me, but there was that whole matter with her switching up her notes, which was the only reason why Marleen hadn’t ended up killing me. I was more than ready to consider us even if whatever she had come up with worked.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 109