The signs of destruction were getting worse the closer to the coastline we got. First, it had only been a few destroyed houses, the odd wall crumbled. But here, the roads were not just cracked but partly caved in, forcing us to go at a crawl and backtrack as often as not. Everything was covered with sand and dust, but that wasn’t enough to obscure the thick layer of soot and ash underneath. In places the fires must have been raging on for days, if not weeks, leaving sand molten to glass, the iron struts visible in some cement walls warped and bent. Nothing could have survived this hell—and still there were signs of habitation everywhere. My guess was that they switched the corridors around regularly, sending their army of the undead over every inch of the basin out here.
It was close to midnight when we made it through the next range of hills, and Nate told me to stop. There was nothing here except the ruins of what could have been a house, or maybe just a walled shed. He eyed the landscape warily before he switched on his flashlight, showing me the points on the map he had drawn after scouring the logs once more with the fifth and sixth corridors we’d come across. “This is the last point in the log for six hours,” he noted. “I guess we’re supposed to camp here.”
“Think it’s safe?”
He considered for a moment before he turned the light off once more, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. “At the very least it’s a good defensible position. Wanna take first shift?”
I was tired enough to nod off right this very second, but I inclined my head as I reached for my shotgun. “You take last, as usual?” Or at least the usual since it was just the four of us. He gave a grunt that I figured was some kind of affirmation, but didn’t do a thing to recline his seat, or unsnap the harness. I hesitated, not exactly waiting for something more from him, but I wouldn’t have minded. When it became obvious that hell would freeze over before that was going to happen, I got out, using that flicker of anger to let it rouse me to full alertness.
After a brief check-in with Pia I spent a few minutes making sure that the ditches around the road were clear, and that nothing was lurking in the shed, either. I found the beacon at the back wall of the shed, partly protected from the elements by the rickety structure, the solar panels that powered it secured to a cracked beam and what might have been the floor of the upper level once. Looking around I realized that the early morning sun rising to the east would hit the panels once it crested the small rise behind us, activating the beacon that way. It made me uneasy to consider that the entire beacon network might be working that way, semi-autonomous, sending silent signals over the landscape without anyone directly controlling them. Someone must have set them up once—and added the log books—but there was no guessing as to where they were now. Or whether they were even still alive. It wouldn’t take much to throw off the timing, either—another earthquake, a few shamblers knocking down a building, heavy rainfall tearing the solar panels off or burying them under too much grime and dirt. They looked clean enough, but not like someone had been here this week to brush them off. Maybe that was the job of the convoy that Nate had been talking about. I didn’t quite buy it, though.
After the heat of the day the cool air whispering over the skin of my face was heavenly, but I didn’t dare unzip my jacket—not out here in the open, with what felt more and more like millions of zombies roaming the countryside. We’d seen parts of the gigantic horde a few more times, but they could have been stragglers. The very idea that someone could live right next to that was unfathomable to me. What if the beacons failed? What if someone sabotaged them?
And who in their right mind had come up with this insanity in the first place?
Of course I found no answer for that, so when it was time, I woke up Burns before I crawled back into the Rover. Still spooked about what had happened earlier with the beacons I strapped myself in before I pulled my legs up to my chest, trying to get comfortable. Nate’s soft breathing let me know that he wasn’t exactly sleeping tight. So much for resting.
I dozed off eventually—quite the mixed blessing when the beacon rather than Nate tore me out of my muddled dreams as the first rays of sunshine hit its solar panels. We’d eaten dinner on the road just after sundown so there was nothing in my stomach that I could hurl up, but I still spent half a minute with my head hanging out of the open door, breathing deeply as I tried to quell the cramping my stomach so artfully performed. Nate took a moment to make sure that I was otherwise okay before he roused the others, and off we went into another awful, dawning day.
Three more pulse series, and Nate had to take over again as the next one wiped me out completely. He tried to veer off the center part of the corridor but it didn’t yield that much of a difference, making me guess that whatever those pulses were, they weren’t just two of a kind, attracting or repulsing. The fact that going off-path also resulting in a good fifty zombies coming for us made Nate drop any further ideas like that. It was either the way they’d intended for us, or no way. I could tell that this realization didn’t sit well with him at all, but by now it was obvious that our only chance to get through this was to play the game by the rules they’d imposed on us—and for us to hope that “they” were even still alive.
We made camp for an hour over noon, with not a cloud in the sky but light wind whipping dust into our faces as soon as we got out of the cars. I refrained from eating anything, even if Nate’s perpetual frown turned into a scowl at my refusing the can of tuna he tried to foist at me. He only tried once, though, not too keen on having to clean up after me once again. While the others ate, I scanned our surroundings with the binoculars, although there wasn’t much sense to it. The ruins were so extensive around here that a horde of zombies could have been hiding less than a hundred yards away. The few unpopulated stretches between the houses weren’t much better. In the last five minutes I’d counted at least seven wrecks that must have been large, commercial airplanes once, and a couple more smaller crafts. Considering how bad things must have been in the first days around here, with millions of people living in the area, I wasn’t sure whether wishing anyone had survived was a good thing.
I was just about to hand the binoculars back to Nate when I noticed something moving in the distance, off one of the debris fields. I’d seen it before but discarded it as just the wind blowing up dust. Now I saw the same again, but about a mile down from the first instance. “Are those cars?”
Nate needed a while to find what I told him to look for, making my hope sink, and he ended up shrugging. “Could be.”
“The convoy you saw yesterday?”
“I doubt it,” he grunted. “The next corridor’s straight west from here. That would make them a good five miles off. If they got this far, I doubt they’d be that stupid.”
I felt like pointing out that we had done exactly that, but considering the lesson we’d learned, I had to admit that he was right. When I checked next, I didn’t see anything, but I kept looking.
About an hour later I found a similar disturbance again, this time ahead of us, if still to the north. If they knew where they were going, it made sense that they would just cut through to the next corridor rather than backtrack to where zombies might be coming back. More than once I’d noticed that happen as we traversed another stretch of higher ground that gave us a better wide-range view.
“I’m not making this up,” I told Nate when he continued to peer skeptically in the direction I gave him.
“Not saying you are,” he retorted. “Just not sure what to make of it.”
“I’m seeing it, too,” Pia confirmed over the com. “There’s a ridge up ahead that will let us see better. I say we make for that and observe.”
“What about the corridors?” I asked.
Both Nate and the Ice Queen remained silent for long enough to make me uncomfortable.
“The next one is the last in the log,” Pia explained.
Not exactly a comforting idea. “Shouldn’t we try catching up to them, if we’re convinced they know more than we
do?”
“Or they don’t and are just as desperate, if not more so,” Nate pointed out. “We head for the ridge.”
The next two pulses upset my stomach just as much as before, but now there was a different note to the anxiety they brought with them. What if this was a trap?
I was still mulling that over as I got out of the Rover once we reached the top of the ridge, leaving us exposed compared to the maze of destruction all around us. While Nate scoured the countryside for signs of the plume of dust, I let the new vista overwhelm me—and overwhelming it was. I’d never been to L.A. before, but everyone knew that iconic skyline with the city sprawling around on all sides, from the mountains to the ocean.
Beyond us lay a charred, destroyed wasteland, the skyscrapers reduced to crumbled ruins barely half the height they had reared up toward the sky, and the grid of buildings all around just one gigantic maze of irregular devastation. I’d seen a lot of destruction over the past year, but somehow this got more under my skin than any other city before. Maybe because we hadn’t come to a city this large yet—and for very good reasons; maybe because my stupid heart had clung to the hope that, somehow, civilization had survived here.
“Got it,” Pia declared triumphantly, quickly rattling off landmarks so Nate could verify her findings. “Three cars, going along that road by the blue building now. Maybe ten miles per hour, fifteen tops.” How anything could be moving at above a crawl was beyond me. The city looked like it had been flattened by earthquakes, burned by fires, and wrenched apart by tornadoes—repeatedly. I didn’t know about the latter, but the other signs of destruction were just the extension of what we’d already seen before. Even without zombies it would have been hard to survive anything. Or it had been the virus that had partly caused the devastation. I couldn’t be sure, but some of the parts missing from the skyscrapers looked awfully like something had detonated up there. Had they bombed the city, tried to contain what was coming out of there? Or had the fires raged long and hot enough to warp the very foundations of buildings that had withstood anything else nature had sent their way?
I doubted anyone was still alive who could tell the tale.
“What do we do now?” I asked, my voice raspy from the emotions trying to wrench my chest apart. “Sounds like suicide to go down there.”
Nate considered, then handed the binoculars to me. “Look for yourself. They know where they are going. Either we follow, or we scout their path now and go down there later tonight.”
Even with instructions, it was almost impossible for me to find the vehicles. From up close, everything looked way worse. No way we would be able to get through there otherwise than on foot, unless we knew the exact path to take. Even now we were missing several miles to catch up to where the vehicles were weaving through the ruins.
“Not quite my definition of fun,” Burns noted next to me, his eyes still busy taking everything in. “This is madness.”
I felt like quipping back that thusly it was exactly the definition of what constituted fun for him, but stopped when I heard something rustling behind me. I told myself that it was just the wind, maybe throwing some loose debris against a wall, but my instincts were already in high alert. Something was wrong—
The telltale, overly dramatic, completely unnecessary sound of someone pumping a new round into a shotgun made me freeze, the binoculars still halfway lifted. Nate on my other side tensed, his hand touching down on his gun holster, but before anyone of us could draw, the mechanical announcement was followed by a verbal one. “At ease, guys and dolls. Everybody relax, and keep those paws off your weapons.”
Chapter 10
My attention zoomed to Nate, trying to get a clue from him what to do. Oh, he was tense—no shit—but when he caught my gaze he gave the slightest shake of the head possible. Not quite a “stand down,” but also not an outright order to take down as many of them as possible.
I was a little disappointed to see only two men as we turned, but then I noticed four vehicles approaching from where they had been parked in one of the ruined buildings about half a mile away. We could have overwhelmed the others and taken off before they got here, but it didn’t really make much sense. Unless, of course, this was going to turn into a repeat performance of the cannibals, but I highly doubted that. Besides, anyone who was stupid enough to come into contact with my blood had what was going to happen to him coming. Then I noticed that both of the guys who held us at gunpoint had three marks across their partially covered necks, making me reconsider my conviction a little.
“How did you sneak up on us like that?” Nate asked what seemed borderline inconsequential to me. I would have gone for the obvious points first—what did they want? Did they have a fucking clue who we were? Did they have a death wish, maybe?
The guy with the shotgun gave a toothy smirk. “Should have let her,” he nodded at me, “pick your observation spot. That we couldn’t have predicted. She’s your wildcard. But you? It’s so damn obvious to anyone with military training that this is the point where you want to observe where the cars you’ve been not so stealthily following might be going. We just had to wait until you were too damn focused on them and sneak up.” His lips curved into another bright grin. “And thanks for not posting a guard. We’re trying to keep this civil, kinda. Hitting people over the head often kills that intention quick.”
None of us said anything, but I could see a muscle in Burns’s cheek twitch. That put me more at ease than Nate’s lack of a reaction.
“You know who we are, I presume?” Nate said, finally skipping to the important parts.
The second guy allowed himself a somewhat toned-down smile. “Everyone knows who you are.”
“They do?” I just couldn’t hold my trap. With Nate and Burns pretty much towering over me I felt a little easy to ignore—not that this would have been a bad thing with hostiles, but the more time passed without anyone getting shot, the more I figured they had been honest about keeping things civil.
The first guy snorted. “Who do you think built the radios you have in your cars?” He let that sink in for a moment. “The Silo has some good mechanics, but that’s about it. They have neither the people nor the resources to upgrade every scavenger group currently out there.”
“And you do?” I presumed.
“You bet,” I got for a short answer, and it sounded rather final. “Why are you here?”
His partner in crime snorted. “And why are you so damn late? We’ve been expecting you for a week now.”
I was tempted to quip that if they knew who we were, why hadn’t they tracked us, but that sounded too much like an invitation. Nate surprised me when he offered the information freely. “We decided to hug the mountains rather than go through the valley.”
“Sound decision,” the first guy admitted. His eyes narrowed, betraying the levity of his voice. “Doesn’t explain how you knew about our maze.” He was obviously referring to the ever-shifting corridors along the beacons.
“Jared told us,” Nate explained. “Or rather, he gave us a location. We figured out the rest.” His eyes briefly skipped over to me before they returned to the guys who were still keeping their weapons trained on us. “We’re good with things like that.”
“Or you’re stellar with springing traps,” the first guy supposed, snickering briefly. None of us reacted, but it took me a lot not to ball my hands into fists. When he realized that he wouldn’t get a rise out of us, he shrugged, checking on the advancing cars. As soon as they rolled to a halt and spewed out an entire entourage of armed men—and women, as I was glad to see—he flashed us another, even less amused grin than before. “Answer my damn question, or the next wave will have some extra chow to sustain itself.”
Seeing as Nate had been candid so far, I figured it was better for us to continue along that route. And really, what exactly did we have to lose?
“We came here for help,” I explained. “And information.”
Smirky Guy was only too happy to beam anothe
r bright one at me. “Then you might be at the right address. Information is kind of our thing.” He paused, lowering his weapon. “I will come with you, and Tad here will ride with your other vehicle. Don’t even think about crashing into something to take me out; the others will kill you without asking questions. Come on, we’re burning daylight.”
That sounded like a weird thing to say, considering that it was still hours until sunset, but I didn’t protest. Nate shook his head when I nodded toward the passenger side, giving me the go ahead to slide behind the wheel. Tanner, as he belatedly introduced himself, climbed into the half-empty cargo hold behind me, bracing himself around both headrests to be able to look at the windshield and give directions. The other cars waited for me to roll forward, and I was a little surprised that they let the Jeep follow us immediately rather than separate us. That spoke of more trust than I’d expected after the boasting before, but the more I mulled that over, the more it sounded like a simple, factual statement rather than a threat.
Two turns, and it became obvious that Tanner hadn’t been shooting shit about us never finding our way through the ruins. He was talking almost nonstop, telling me where to go, and what to look out for. I was a little twitchy at first, none too happy to have someone both breathing down my neck and keeping his rifle presumably ready, but soon I was too preoccupied with not accidentally wrecking the car to care about much else anymore. The path we were taking wasn’t exactly cleared, and the deeper into the city Tanner led us, the worse it got. The only upside I could see was the fact that there weren’t any corpses around, shambling or otherwise, but that still made for impossibly hard to traverse terrain.
Green Fields (Book 6): Unity Page 14