Mostly to do away with that certain awkwardness hanging in the air, but also because the realization that somehow I’d risen to top dog status in mere months, I hastened my step so I arrived in front of Rita a moment before Nate, and much to her—and everyone else’s—surprise didn’t just shake her offered hand, but pulled her into a quick, tight hug. “It’s good to see you,” I said loud enough that everyone in the vicinity could hear, making as much of a clear statement as I could.
Rita relaxed at my words, offering a slightly shaky laugh. “Never thought I’d say that,” she murmured, then went on much louder, “it is.”
There was a little cheering involved as quick introductions were made, everyone eyeing each other with interest and barely hidden appraisal.
“As you can see, I brought you as many people as we could spare,” Rita went on after the formalities were concluded, turning around to indicate the entire camp. “I will remain here with the support, but everyone else is at your disposal, if you will have them.”
I was just about to make a stupid joke about that when tension around us surged, the Dispatch people in particular falling silent, hands reaching for weapons, if not outright drawing them. Looking around, I pinpointed the epicenter of that wave of resentment to the east, where the crowd parted as if by magic, letting a group of five people through. Four men and a woman, all dressed in well-maintained fatigues, their uniform gear made them stand out just as much as the precision they moved with. Rita’s lips pressed into a thin line as she glared toward them, and under different circumstances it might have been funny to see both Nate and Burns drop their usual casual if attentive demeanor in favor of a hostile, alert stance. My, didn’t the sight of those uniforms, paired with those uppity, “we’re so much better than you” expressions make me want to hurl—and shove my shotgun in their faces. In their defense, none of the soldiers were actually smirking, but that was likely sheer survival instinct rather than manners.
Wouldn’t you know it, of course Nate had to be acquainted with the next asshole begging for a punch in the face. Again.
“Aimes,” Nate offered coolly, a breath away from a growl.
“Why am I not surprised to see scum like you here, Miller?” the soldier he’d talked to flung back.
I couldn’t help but snort. “You’re not the smartest cookie in the bunch, right?” I observed with a too-bright smile. When Aimes’s—admittedly well-deserved—scowl hit me, I shrugged. “Kind of hard to stay low when you’re forming the tip of the spear of the rebellion.”
“Rebellion my ass,” Aimes spat. Rather than continue to come after Nate, he aimed his ire at me. “This is all your fucking fault, you know that? Considering the damage you’ve done, one might expect you to show a little more humility.”
“Not gonna happen,” I harped back, crossing my arms over my chest. Why were these shitheads even running around, unrestrained no less, in camp? At first I’d presumed they were prisoners, maybe picked up on patrol, but while everyone was keeping their distance, no one actually guarded the soldiers. “Besides, someone had to stand up in the face of genocide. If it hadn’t been me, someone else would have risen to the occasion. We’re like a hydra. Mythically badass with more heads cropping up the more you slice off.”
Sadly, Aimes didn’t let me get away with my boisterous bullshitting.
“I’m not talking about this pathetic attempt at organizing the rabble out there on the roads. I’m referring to you, specifically. You, yourself, could have prevented all this if you hadn’t decided you’d rather play soldier instead of doing your duty. Especially when humanity is still facing extinction.”
That sounded more personal than I was comfortable with. It was also highly confusing.
“And where, pray tell, have I done wrong? You mean, for the sake of science, I should have just rolled over, played dead, and let Taggard try to have his zombie pawn rape me? I don’t need a PhD in virology to tell you that no gainful information would have come of that.”
It was kind of funny to watch Rita blanch, and the low murmurs rising around us were definitely not in Aimes’s favor. Aimes himself looked vaguely sick, but that didn’t diminish the fervor of his accusation.
“Three times you had the opportunity to do what is right. You should have come with the other scientists when we picked you up in Lexington on Day Zero. You already agreed to take over the Aurora lab, but went back on your promise for, what? Some traitor’s dick who got your ego all bloated up with his idiotic conspiracy theories? And lastly at the Alexandria factory. Command mobilized all available free troops to ascertain your cooperation, but you had to turn it into a slaughter of unbelievable dimensions.”
“Yeah, I was the one who locked up, and consequently unleashed, an army of zombies,” I bit out. “Besides, what did you think would happen if you all but threatened to lock me up and rape me? And again, still don’t see the scientific benefit of that.”
Aimes had the audacity to sigh and roll his eyes at me. “No one would have laid a finger on you. Hamilton runs a much tighter ship than letting anyone even consider such unbecoming behavior.”
That claim made me scoff. “You sure that everyone got the memo? Because I hate to break it to you, but there’s a huge faction of you assholes out there who do nothing but violate and torture women.”
This time it wasn’t Aimes but the soldier standing to his left—his name tag read “Wu”—who replied. “We know. And that’s the only reason we are here.”
Aimes was still gnashing his teeth at being interrupted, by one of his own, no less, but deigned to explain. “It wasn’t an easy decision for us, but sometimes you know that what is right goes against your orders.”
Now it was Nate’s turn to snort. “And still you call me a traitor.”
What little goodwill Aimes had built toward us immediately went up in flames. His face darkened as he sneered at Nate. “Don’t get me started on you, asshole. I lost three of my best friends just because you needed to ramp up enough shit for a dishonorable discharge so you could go off chasing ghosts.”
Huh. Now wasn’t that a gold nugget of news? Judging from the set of Nate’s jaw—and the fact that he didn’t immediately launch into a well thought-out defense—made me guess that Aimes wasn’t necessarily lying. I vaguely remembered Nate ranting about something like that the night we’d blown up the Green Fields Biotech building, but back then I had been preoccupied with other things, like trying to judge whether he’d just up and kill me the second I stopped being useful to him.
Rather than refute Aimes’s accusation, Nate protested the other half of what he’d flung into his face. “It wasn’t just ghosts. I found my brother’s murderer, and in a sense got my revenge. If it had all just been a theory in my head, we wouldn’t be standing in a zombie-infested wasteland now.”
Aimes kept glaring at Nate until what he’d just said sunk in. “What, you think someone from our side ordered a hit on your brother? He was one of the lead scientists working on the serum project! His death set the entire division back years! No less coming with the twin strike of missing out on recruiting the most promising candidate of becoming his assistant, maybe one day future leader of the project! You had to outdo yourself and single-handedly eradicate the entire division we had working in that branch.”
I didn’t need Aimes’s glare to know that he meant me by that. The frown furrowing my brow wasn’t because of that, though. Too much wasn’t adding up—but then again, it kind of was. Only that both Nate and Aimes were obviously lacking some important details to correctly connect the dots—as much as there was to connect.
“Wait. What do you mean with entire division?” I asked Aimes before I turned to Nate, feeling just a tad bit guilty at forgetting to fill him in on the things I’d learned in Halsey, from the raving madwoman that I’d thought had been my friend. “Thecla didn’t kill Raleigh because he’d gone rogue, or gotten maybe a little too close to a cure for the side-effects of the serum, which might have made it less eff
ective as a weapon. She was part of some kind of underground group. They forced her to kill him, and I would have been next on her list, only that she couldn’t do it. That’s why she must have put something in my coffee that morning that made me hallucinate and got me banned from the hot lab, and thus out of immediate danger. I still don’t have a clue why they did all that, but it wasn’t an ordered hit coming from higher up the chain of command.”
Nate’s stony expression gave me nothing, but his silence told me that he was considering the ramifications of what I’d just said. Aimes couldn’t possibly understand half of my explanation, but his cold stare was fixed on me with a new kind of fervor that I could have done without.
“See? You know that it was your duty to take over. Instead, you threw your lot in with the asshole that killed almost everyone else associated with the project!”
That was one accusation too many, it seemed, judging from Nate’s bark. “I have done a lot of shit in my life that I’m not proud of, but I did not murder civilians!”
“Then who did?” Aimes harped. I opened my mouth to respond—what, I wasn’t sure—but he talked right over me. “Right, that ‘underground group’ you were referring to. A bullshit excuse, if you ask me, that he fed you and you swallowed it, like so much else, I imagine.” Of course he had to smirk there, but it disappeared when I didn’t rise to the bait. “Have you never wondered why he was there, that very day the world went to hell? It’s so damn easy to lie in hindsight when something like the fucking zombie apocalypse conveniently wipes out all evidence that could prove otherwise.”
That I had an answer to, even if I didn’t like voicing it. Shit, why hadn’t I talked with Nate about this beforehand?
“It was a setup. Someone was using his need for vengeance for a dirty cleanup operation.” Great, now I had both of them glaring at me, but the milk was already spilled, so I might as well go on. “You can make fun of me all you want, but this entire shitfest isn’t just black and white. Raleigh Miller wasn’t simply killed with the virus he was working on to disguise his murder as him accidentally infecting himself. He turned into a zombie, more than a year and a half before this shit here happened.” I jerked my chin at the world in general. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we all know that’s the really illogical part in both your theories. The serum only turns you when you get killed after having been inoculated with it weeks or even years before. And if he’d been inoculated, infecting him with the live strain of the virus wouldn’t have done a thing, least of all kill him. There are a shit-ton of people in this camp with healed bite marks that can attest to that.”
Nate’s silence spoke volumes, and it was quite satisfactory to see doubt cross Aimes’s face. “Whoever killed him could have used something else,” Aimes protested.
I shook my head. “I saw the video that Miller recorded to document the progression of the infection. Trust me, that shit went down exactly as it did with me after you idiots shot me at the factory and the shamblers got to me. I know what it looks like when people die from any number of infections, including ebola, and that shit’s different. Unique.” I paused, trying to read Aimes right. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but what I just explained is news to you?”
He clearly didn’t want to, but Aimes gave me a grudging nod. “Still doesn’t explain why everyone but two people from the team working on the project were dead weeks before the shit hit the fan.”
I expected Nate to repeat his claim that it hadn’t been him, but he left the honor to me.
“If I had to take a guess, the same people who did away with Raleigh Miller. I mean, you just tore me a new one because I shirked my responsibilities? I wasn’t even part of the core team yet. It would have taken me months, maybe even years, to be familiar with everything they’d been working on. Any other member of the team would have been a better replacement on the short run, and invaluable to you once the zombie virus broke out.”
“A very convenient excuse,” Aimes stated, but he no longer sounded like he meant it.
His insistence on holding on to his denial made me scoff. “Shit, these people somehow managed to poison a huge chunk of our entire nation, and you think they had issues with killing, what, fifteen people? Twenty? It was likely child’s play to them, selecting a handful of employees in a company that had a workforce of several thousand. Personnel changes are a daily occurrence. Nobody noticed when he,” I explained, glancing at Nate, “exchanged a good chunk of the maintenance staff for his people. Scientists are veritable butterflies where their workplace and projects are concerned. A grant goes through, a new position opens up, and general envy at someone else getting a raise keeps people from being too nosy.” I wracked my brain, trying to remember who else had been working in the hot labs in my few months there who’d disappeared. “There was one guy whose wife got cancer, and he quit because he wanted to spend her last few months with her. Nobody questioned his decision.” I’d long since believed that Mike Jenkins had been the one to leak the transcript of Raleigh’s last video to Nate, which had set his crusade in motion. Considering what I knew now, it made a lot more sense that it had come from Thecla—a silent plea to set in motion what she hadn’t been able to herself. Or it had come from whoever had used Nate’s fervor for vengeance to tidy up after themselves.
I was convinced that I had Aimes there, but it was the woman glowering at his other side who responded, keeping the satisfaction of knowing that I was right from me. “Doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is that three days’ march from here there’s a facility guarded by hundreds of good men and women that you want to slaughter, and because neither side is completely incompetent, the bloodshed will be immense if you go through with your plan. I really don’t give a shit about your idiotic motivation, but I can’t stand by idly and let so many people die. Even if some of them deserve a good punch in the face.” That last bit might have been aimed at me. I didn’t give a shit.
“So you came here to dissuade us of following through with our plan?” I hazarded a guess.
The woman was about to reply but closed her mouth when Aimes glared at her. “No. We’re here to give you intel on the exact guard positions and troop strengths so that when you strike, it will be brutal and swift, and in the end conserve lives. In return you will promise to negotiate a truce rather than keep fighting to the last man standing.”
I was about to object that we really had no reason to agree to that bullshit, but Nate cut me off before I could get there.
“We have the blueprints, and it can’t come as much of a surprise that we already have a recon team out there that will give us exactly that information.”
Aimes’s mouth quirked up at the corner. “Yeah, I was already wondering where your two attack dogs were. How exactly are your Russian communist friends?”
It took me a second to realize that he must have been referring to Pia and Andrej, and I could just picture how either of them would have loved to shove their fists into his teeth for accusing them of belonging to the regime they’d both, at different points in their lives, fought against.
“If he’s lucky and all the breaks healed moderately well, Romanoff might start to learn to walk again right now,” Nate ground out.
“So it’s just that emotionless bitch,” Aimes guessed.
Torres took that moment to insert himself into our mud-slinging-fest. “And a good many other, very capable people,” he said, stepping up to us. “Who all have very good reasons to slice any asshole’s throat that they encounter.”
The female soldier looked ready to spring into action, but Aimes made her back down with another look. Who was in charge was obvious. In many ways that made the entire situation even worse. It was funny that when Aimes turned back to us, the way he studied me in particular made me wonder if the same hadn’t just occurred to him. At least he sounded somewhat less hostile as he went on, picking up an earlier thread that had gotten lost in the accusations being flung either way.
“It’s the same now. The damage
is done. And it gets worse with every passing day when yet more humans get infected, not even counting the idiotic crusade that you’re mounting. All misgivings aside, we don’t want a war, and going on what I’ve heard from people all around since we got here, neither do you.”
“And that’s enough for you to turn into a traitor yourself?” I hazarded a guess.
That he didn’t like to hear. “If there was another way, I’d have advocated for that, but the situation has escalated beyond where mere words can stop it. The only option is to bring it to a close and force peace. The same as you’re not a united front, my people aren’t, either. There are a lot who think like us; that useless killing when we’re already too few to survive as a species won’t help anyone. But they’re not keen on getting slaughtered out there, either.”
“And you think that truce will hold, if we manage to get there?” I asked, not having to feign doubt. “The winter will put a hold on any actions anyone could set, but I doubt that words will survive the moment it’s a free-for-all again next spring.”
Aimes looked appropriately pissed at my accusation that his people would break their word just as much as the scum he thought we were, but managed to swallow his ire. “You have the power to ensure that it will.”
Green Fields (Book 6): Unity Page 27