We ended up stripping the dead soldiers of most of their gear for that very same purpose, throwing what couldn’t be put to any use by us or the traders into the flames. Nate offered to help them with digging graves, but they declined. “We’ll take them with us, and cremate them once we feel we are a safe distance away from here,” the woman explained. Suddenly, the look on her face turned hopeful. “Won’t you come with us, at least until we reach our destination? We’re heading for Dispatch.”
Before I could come up with a good reply, Nate shook his head. “We have to be on our way. We did all we could.”
She nodded, her disappointment gone almost as quickly as it had appeared. “Of course. Thank you again. Will you at least tell us your names?”
I couldn’t help but snort. “Names are not important.” It wasn’t like I was downright paranoid or anything, but the longer it took for the news of my continuing existence to spread, the better. I had a certain feeling that it was a moot point. The moment they told anyone in Dispatch what had happened here, Rita would start asking questions, and even if they didn’t get a good look at us, it was probably sufficient to identify us.
“Is there anything else we can do?” she offered, looking somewhat quizzical but then visibly disbanded whatever concern had crossed her mind.
I started to shake my head, but then thought better of it. “Actually, there is something.” When she gave me an eager look, I cleared my throat. “Do you have any food to spare? We’ve tried to scrounge up something today but didn’t find anything edible in any of the towns we hit.”
The traders looked at us as if both of us had sprouted a second head, mistrust plain on their faces. That unnerved me, but Nate defused the suddenly volatile situation with a self-deprecating laugh.
“We got ourselves in kind of a bind. For the past two weeks we’ve been living off rations that were intended for one person for maybe five days, with the odd can of beans we found far off the beaten track. Anything you can spare will get us to where we need to go. We have absolutely no intention of leaving you with just enough so you will starve to death.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me that their concern could be hailing from fear that we would do something like that after keeping them from a more sudden kind of harm, at least those that had survived. It took them a few moments to decide, but the woman was actually looking guilty when she agreed with a nod. “I’m sorry. It’s just so hard to know who you can trust these days.”
She and the guy who had shown less of a temper rooted through their vehicles until they returned to us, carrying cans and several containers full of nuts, rice, and what turned out to be a pre-cooked pasta dish, likely leftovers from their lunch. Nate tore into it without bothering with a fork, and only sent me a brief, warning look. I wasn’t stupid enough to let my lack of working taste buds make anyone suspicious, and did my best to decimate the second heap of noodles. What had remained of the traders’ distrust dissipated as they watched us wolf down the food, Nate’s stomach doing some impressive growling and gurgling along the way. I was just glad that it had been days since I’d last puked up anything.
As soon as we were done eating, we tried to hand the dishes back to them, but they declined, clearly antsy to get going. The sun was dipping toward the horizon already, and while food might have been scarce, food containers were not. If we could have sustained ourselves on plastic, we wouldn’t even have had to raid a single town.
“One more thing,” Nate noted when the traders were done storing everything away. “We don’t have confirmation for this, but we think they hunt us via the radio signals. If you want to stay off the radar, you better unplug your gear.”
What little relief our rescue operation had brought the traders was quickly wiped off their faces by that message.
“Seriously?” the girl asked, while the guy who hadn’t shot before scratched his chin.
“How are we supposed to find a secure way back to Dispatch if we can’t call in with them?” he wanted to know.
The look Nate gave him was one I was all too used to seeing. It was usually reserved for some of my brighter moments. “What would you rather encounter—a few zombies that might kill you, or a bunch of gun-toting lunatics that will kill you? Your choice,” Nate responded. The trader seemed to see the truth in that, but his unease was quickly infecting the others. I was starting to wonder what they’d been doing out here in the first place, and how they’d survived that long.
“It’s not that hard to avoid the zombies,” I offered, not quite sure why I was even trying to alleviate their concerns. “Drive slowly, try to stay either well covered or out in the open where you can keep watch all around you. Keep a window cracked so you can smell their reek before you get too close. If you’re careful and stay away from former population centers, you should be fine.”
A muscle jerked in Nate’s temple, making me guess that he was hard-pressed not to roll his eyes at my babysitting attempts. “What are you even doing out here?” he asked. Not an unwarranted question, considering that there wasn’t really much of anything to be found here, and as today had proved, most of what little had been here had long since been carried away.
“We’ve been up in Canada since spring,” the woman explained, ignoring the cautioning looks her companions were giving her. “Then we got the news over the radio that everyone is rallying in Dispatch, and we decided to return. We haven’t had problems so far, until…” She trailed off, but there was no necessity for her to explain.
Still, her story was getting sketchier by the minute. “Why don’t you go to the Silo?” I asked. “Depending on where you started out, you’d probably already have gotten there if you’d headed straight for it. And it’s only a few days’ drive from here.”
They exchanged glances again. The woman turned back to us. “Is that where you’re headed? We were… warned against going there.”
“Why?” I asked, just as Nate wanted to know, “By whom?”
Her discomfort rose, but it was the man next to her who answered. “People. They are talking. Not everyone is as happy about these new developments out there as you folks are.”
“Excuse me?” Now I had to fight not to get annoyed for real. “What are you talking about?”
The woman gave her companion a hard look that made him shy back. “There is talk out there that the Silo is militarizing their operations. We want no part in that. It is already dangerous enough out here without anyone starting some guerrilla war.”
Were they for real? Next they would start blaming us for what had happened to their group! I was just about to spew some venom at her when Nate grabbed my arm, giving me a look that made me back up this time. There was warning in his gaze, but also that angry look of defeat that I’d seen time and again regarding the stupidity of the settlers. Apparently that hadn’t stopped at the palisades but had infected those that were willing to hang out more with the settlements than we did. I still found her standpoint weird considering that Dispatch had easily three times as many armed personnel as the Silo, not counting the civic population. But now it was probably more along ten to a hundred times that. Not our business, though.
“Good luck on the way to Dispatch,” Nate wished them. “But you should really consider keeping your radio off as much as possible.”
The woman nodded, but she looked less than convinced. So much for trying to do the right thing by saving them.
We parted ways with another round of grim nods before we hiked back up that small hill while the traders drove off, leaving the burning Humvees and dead soldiers behind.
The Rover was already in sight when Nate muttered a teasing, “You know, your interrogation techniques suck,” that made me crack a smile.
“Yeah, so what? My strategic planning skills aren’t much better.”
He snorted. “Don’t even get me started on that. Exactly what was so hard to understand about circling the camp and not running head-on, blindly into the fray?”
“Oh, I unders
tood. I just chose not to follow your suggestions.”
“Suggestions?” He scoffed. “I’ll show you suggestions.” He taxed me with a calculating look. “You know what? If you can mouth off and disobey my orders, you can very well take over driving again. And first thing tomorrow morning we do drills. You’re moving with the agility of an octogenarian.”
It felt so damn good to return to the right—left—side of the car and stash my share of our loot in the forward cargo hold.
“You’re just cranky because you’re not getting laid,” I answered once I heaved myself back into the driver’s seat. Nate shook his head, sighing with exasperation, but the look he gave me was not the cautious-bordering-on-anxious way he’d been glancing at me since I’d woken up in that motel.
And all was right with the world again. Now all we had to do was exact bloody, brutal revenge.
Chapter 8
Thanks to my superior night vision we made it to the lake region before we decided to crash for the night. Or rather, before I could total the car and sink it in one of the lakes when exhaustion made my vision swim. We managed to find a small peninsula that was mostly obscured from the road with access only across a narrow strip of land that the last flooding hadn’t completely washed away, making it the ideal camp site. We left the Rover by the trees at the shore, a tarp secured over it to break up the silhouette. Zombies didn’t really do well with open water, and while the treeless peninsula left us somewhat exposed, the grass and reeds were tall enough that, as long as we remained sitting down or crouching, we were safely tucked away from roving eyes. I didn’t protest when Nate told me to just go to sleep. I would have been next to useless for watch detail that evening.
I was surprised that when I woke up to the early morning light I found him curled up in the sleeping bag next to mine, snoring softly. Then again, if something surprised us here, we could always flee into the water. There must have been hundreds of water fowl nesting all around the lakes, so why go for the target that had teeth if you were a predator that was smart enough to have survived the zombie uprising? A vague sense of unease remained, though, and I decided to take up watch while I let Nate sleep.
I got up and stretched, wincing when my left thigh protested. I’d expected worse, but it wasn’t exactly comforting to need five minutes or more until I could walk comfortably. It was only then that I noticed that Nate had set up some makeshift fishing rods. Two of the lures were gone, but the third had caught something. I quickly pulled the fish off and whacked it with a stone, leaving it in the silty grass for Nate to filet later. It wasn’t large but would make a nice addition to our breakfast. I’d made enough of a racket for Nate to briefly rouse, but after blinking at the fish, he flipped over and continued to doze. I sat back down on my sleeping bag and waited for the new day to brighten.
What I very soon realized was that I wasn’t good company. It wasn’t that I was bored, exactly. But my mind was empty. Not relaxed, no worries kind of empty, but that ground-to-a-halt, shock-in-the-later-stages kind of empty. That worried me, and not just because sooner rather than later the other shoe would drop, and if I’d learned anything in the past year it was that my conscience always caught up with me.
I’d killed people yesterday. I hadn’t even hesitated. It was by far not the first time, but it was different. The cannibals had dug their own grave by shooting and later maiming Bates. At the factory, there was only fight or die, and I couldn’t have escaped the latter by a narrower margin than I had. Sure, there had been that part where I pretty much stopped giving a shit to get my people out of there, but in the end it had been easy to justify my actions. They had started it. I had only done what I had to defend myself. But yesterday? Who were those traders to me, who, once out of the thick of the fray, had been rather quick to judge us and turn against us—or would have, if they hadn’t just watched us kill ten times our numbers. It could be argued that we’d protected them, helped them—but I should have felt hesitation. Remorse. Guilt.
But there was only emptiness.
Was that part of how the virus was changing me? Did it turn me into a psychotic killer? Or was that just the next step in my journey? The inevitable progression from civilian to survivor to… whatever came after that? Was it something that had always been inside of me and only now broke free after I’d been pushed beyond my breaking point? I’d never considered myself a particularly good person. I’d hung on to a relationship that had run its course within months rather than years only because I wanted to spare myself the inevitable fallout of the breakup. I’d cheated, and I had never really felt remorse for it. I’d always tried to be ethical at work, but I’d killed my fair share of lab animals in experiments. “Decent” was probably the best I had ever aimed for, rather than “good.” But I would never have deliberately hurt someone. Tortured someone. Killed someone in cold rage, without looking back.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been the worst that could happen if I’d died in that horribly beige motel room.
The sun eventually rose, forcing me to grope for my sunglasses and hat once more unless I wanted to spend the next hours half blind and tearing up. At least the insane headaches seemed to lessen from day to day, but I was still so freaking light sensitive that it wasn’t funny anymore. I should probably have cleaned my gear—yesterday I had been too tired to care once we got here—or studied the maps, trying to find the best route to the Silo. I could have dug out one of the increasingly more flimsy paperback novels that we kept lugging around with us, but I didn’t feel like reading. I didn’t feel like anything, really.
I didn’t really feel anything.
The sun was well in the sky when rustling sounds behind me alerted me to the fact that Nate had rejoined the world of the awake. He uttered an amusing cadence of groans and grunts as he stretched, got up, took care of business, returned to me—without washing his hands, but who cared?—where he dropped into a crouch by my side.
“Yesterday getting to you?” he asked, staring out over the lake.
I glanced from him back to the water. Sometimes I hated it that he could read me so well. “It should, shouldn’t it?”
“Ah,” he wisely replied, his mouth quirking up into a smirk.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, not having to feign annoyance.
The look he shot my way was too knowing. “You feel guilty because you don’t actually feel guilty anymore.”
Damn him. “That obvious?”
“After spending the last, what is it now? Fourteen months together? Fifteen? One might expect that I’ve gotten a hang of this. Besides, you may be a very complicated woman sometimes, but you’re seldom hard to figure out.”
It would have been so easy to misinterpret that and take offense, but I was too glad that he finally stopped handling me with kid gloves only to let him bait me just yet.
“Yeah, well, I’ve never claimed otherwise.” He didn’t reply, clearly waiting for me to go on. I idly wondered how long I could have dragged this out, but eventually picked up a stone, threw it into the water, and did just that. “It’s not that I feel like my moral compass has been screwed up for good. I just don’t… give a shit? First it was the zombies, now it’s hostile idiots in uniform. What’s next? And where is this going? Until it’s just you and me against the rest of the world?”
He shrugged, unperturbed by my words. “Still like those odds better than if it was you against me.”
“Would you kill me? If you had to?”
Nate turned his head, studying me long and hard. “I honestly can’t think of a scenario that would warrant it. As long as you’re you, I’d lay down my life for you. And that includes suicide, if that’s the only way.”
I’d wondered when—or if—he would punch the elephant that had been lurking in the room since Bailey’s sacrifice. After my comment from yesterday it only made sense to tackle it now.
“How does that even work? Do you all draw straws every morning, and whoever gets the short one packs the sugar bomb?
”
His lips quivered, but that wasn’t a smile that crept onto his face. “Something like that. Not my choice, though.”
“Are you going to add my name to the pot now?”
Anyone else might have been scandalized about such a suggestion, but of course his answer had to be condescension. “Don’t be stupid. We’ll never know if you can even convert, let alone instantly. Would be such a bust if we’d had to depend on it, and then it didn’t happen.” He paused, and when I just kept on staring, he looked back at the water. “Can’t fathom they’d let you join. Pia and I are exempt, too. Can’t treat the team mascot worse than the command staff, now can we?”
As he’d intended, that made me scoff. So maybe I wasn’t completely dead inside yet. Bite me. “I am so not the mascot,” I protested.
“You might as well be, considering how they all tucked in their tails and slinked off, knowing they’d never see you again.”
“Gee, I always hate to disappoint everyone,” I replied, but couldn’t help but steer the conversation back to serious territory. “Who knows that I’m alive? Besides you, me, and some traders who likely won’t make the connection?”
“Why, having second thoughts about rejoining society? No one else knows. If we never make it to the Silo, they’ll just assume I changed my mind and found my timely end somewhere in the vast wilderness out there.”
I shook my head, feeling a hint of a smile come to my face. “Nah. As tempting as that might be, being just the two of us sucks. We can never really get a good watch detail working, and it’s only a matter of time until one of us bludgeons the other to death, simply out of spite. Never thought I’d say that, but I really miss the guys.”
Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 Page 9