“Switch,” I repeated. “Without lights you can’t see shit here, and I’ll be damned if I die just because you weren’t man enough to see that I’m better suited for this.”
He relented a few moments later. I felt a lot better back in my seat, even if I was covered in zombie goo. My head had already stopped hurting, the brief vertigo gone. I could always nurse that possible concussion tomorrow, provided I was still breathing then.
“How much further until we meet up with the others?” I asked a while later, trying not to let the madly howling pack behind us irritate me too much.
“About eighty miles,” came Nate’s laconic reply.
I almost spit out the mouthful of protein bar I was munching on, trying not to breathe through my nose to taint the already nonexistent taste with zombie stench. “Are you shitting me? Why did we go so far south?” Sure, theoretically I’d known that from the maps, but that sounded a little excessive.
“So that the others stood a chance to reach the forward rendezvous points without that coming after them,” he helpfully explained, bumping his fist into the roof of the car. Our uncanny passengers banged back. I felt like facepalming myself but resisted, needing both hands to send the Rover into a mad drift around a bend that thankfully shook off the extra weight up top.
“How much time do we have?”
“Just under two hours. We’re going to be cutting it a little close.”
That was one way of phrasing it, but at least we were moving. More like hurtling through the gathering darkness, with who knew how many enraged, hungry undead behind us. Some we’d lost in the twists and turns of the small mountain roads due to them running cross-country and getting stuck in obstacles, but enough of them were smart and just followed the breach in the vegetation and surrounding underbrush. Exhaling slowly, I forced myself to focus on nothing but the serpentine path before me. This was going to be one hell of a long night.
Chapter 25
Everything was starting to blur together—the road, the trees, cracks in the pavement that got the car spinning out of control more than once, and let’s not forget, the zombies. Whichever way we went—up, down, left, right—there always were more zombies flocking to us. More often than not, the route I took was forced by what was coming for us from the opposite direction rather than the hints Nate gave me. Before long even those stopped. The dying light that filtered in through the trees was barely enough to make it possible to orient myself, but I was sure that Nate had no fucking clue where exactly we were. That was frustrating enough on its own, but by far not the greatest issue. Whenever the car hit a bump in the road and I had to scramble to keep us from careening off into the darkness, I felt the frame shudder, and more than once steering was almost impossible. My Rover was dying on me, and considering the circumstances, it wouldn’t be pretty.
My spirit picked up when the radio squawked alive, spewing out static until Nate managed to find a frequency that was working. I’d been hoping for Gita’s voice, giving us the good news that we were zeroing in on the rendezvous point, but Tamara’s message still painted a grin on my face. “—Repeat, incursion groups five through nine are in place. Laying low until mark.” Someone, at least, had managed to make it to their designated points, good news after the endless tally of losses that the trek across Colorado had yielded so far.
“Those are the groups that will head for the barracks and armory, right?” I asked mostly to keep myself preoccupied, not because I’d forgotten.
“Provided we manage to short out the generators and bring down the electric fences,” Nate stated. “I’m sure they will still attack even if we don’t, but they stand much better chances making it into the base if they don’t get shot like fish in a barrel first.”
“Any idea how much farther?” I got a mute glare for an answer, which was quite telling. Oh, someone was pissed off that his infallible sense of direction wasn’t worth shit here.
A short while later, I thought I heard a boom coming from somewhere ahead of us, and as we raced past a small clearing, I could see the residues of a flare light up the sky.
“At least we’re on the right track,” Nate mused.
“Or someone is making their last stand and is trying to be dramatic.”
Another flare followed what must have been exactly five minutes later, making me gnash my teeth. “Looks like they are starting without us.”
Nate checked his watch. “That means they got at least five payloads closing in. We can still make it.”
It wasn’t like the fight would be over any time soon after it started, but I got what he was saying. There was a reason why we had that huge pack of C4 right next to the beacon generator, and that would be direly needed to launch the attack.
A third and last flare went up as we broke through the forest at the top of a rise that gave us a spectacular view of our surroundings. The flare was almost exactly due north of us, giving me a good guess where we were. As the bright red light winked out, the stars came back into focus. To the east, the endless flatlands stretched out, the wasteland of the ruined cities at the feet of the mountains barely visible now. It was peaceful and quiet, and for a moment I wondered how great it must be to settle down here, build a cabin, and live the rest of our lives like this. Of course just then a shambler had to jump onto the hood, making me curse, destroying my idyllic vision.
“We must be about here,” Nate muttered, stabbing his map inside the small circle his flashlight illuminated. “If you head vaguely north to northeast, you should have roads until just before the valley where the meeting point is.”
“And the rest?”
“We’ll take it from there,” he proposed. “First, we have to get close.”
I narrowly avoided clipping a fir as I sent the car downhill, trying to keep my bearings. That there was only one road helped; that it was mostly overgrown and somewhat hard to make out unless the wheels remained in the ruts, not so much. Halfway down the hill I hit a bend in the road a little late, and the car rewarded me with a screech of metal as something in the back broke. Nothing essential, but still worrisome. The ground evened out, letting me go faster, but also helped our train of followers to catch up once more. Up the next hill it was, and down again. More up, and with what I figured were maybe a couple of minutes to spare we crested the rise that Nate had been talking about before. Looking into the valley, I couldn’t make out anything down there beyond the overgrown meadow around the road that went from narrow to unpaved track before it got lost in the grass.
“Ah, shouldn’t there be cars waiting down there?” I muttered, not quite sure what to make of this.
Nate scanned the area through the night vision scope of his sniper rifle, exhaling with frustration, until his breath hitched. “Movement on the road leading by the mouth of the valley. Someone’s coming.”
The radio squawked a second later, making me jump. Gita’s voice was strained, but it was impossible to miss the undercurrent of excitement in it. “Payload teams on delay, get ready, we have the main group incoming. Stand by to fire up in thirty on my mark. Mark.”
“Shouldn’t we be down there?” I asked Nate—rather rhetorically—searching the countryside for a way to get down the mountain. The path we’d taken up veered off to the east after traversing the length of the crest of the hill, leading in the opposite direction. I had maybe another two hundred yards. The only reason we weren’t completely swamped in zombies was because the four-wheel drive of the Rover was more effective in going up steep inclines. Marginally.
“If we had thirty more minutes I’d say go around the back, but we’re clearly out of time.”
As if to underline the truth of that statement, Gita started counting down from fifteen. At “ten” I heard a lone engine roar somewhere in the darkness, barely audible over the clamor of the zombies catching up quickly.
“Well, we can’t just sit here and wait until they shove us off the mountain,” I snarked when a few more shamblers took to climbing onto the Rover, signa
ling that the lead I’d carved out was all but gone. I’d had way too much of that today for an entire lifetime. Something occurred to me. Something insane, but then what about this undertaking was well-planned and within acceptable mission parameters? “Never mind. Brace.”
With that, I inched the Rover forward until I could see the entire way down the slope. That would get rough, but it looked doable—so, without further hesitation, I accelerated, sending the car straight down the side of the mountain.
Nate must have anticipated me pulling a stunt like that because he only cursed under his breath as he got a grip on the reinforced frame of the car, rather than cursing me out at the top of his lungs. And shit, that was quite the ride I was treating us to. Most of the slope had been either grass or small boulders before the shit had hit the fan, with the odd larger tree across the route I’d selected—or, more precisely, that gravity was selecting for me now—but that still made it horribly steep, and about the worst terrain to traverse in near darkness. The metal frame of the car groaned around us, almost drowning out the howl of our undead entourage. Zombies started tumbling by us, cushioning a few of the harder bumps nicely. At the very back of my mind I registered that it wasn’t Gita’s voice but Pia’s that barked the ultimate “go!” order. Moments later, headlights all over the valley came alive, coming from the roughly five streams of cars that were converging on the open space in the middle, the longest of them—now quickly accelerating—heading in from the mouth of the valley. The shamblers around us howled enthusiastically, echoed by many more coming from all over the hills around us.
“If you go a little faster, we can still catch up.” Nate had to shout to be heard over the racket.
I would have loved to glare at him, but keeping the car from smashing into anything took my entire attention. “Faster? I’m already going at break-neck speed!” Yet as I said that, I eased the foot that was almost flooring the brake pedal back a little, letting the car gather more velocity. And then we hit level ground, crashing through a weathered fence. Compared to the slope, it was smooth sailing. What I’d thought was underbrush and more rocks from up above turned out to be silent, dark, turned-off cars, pale faces staring out, waiting for their turn.
I didn’t need Nate’s instructions to shift gears and send the Rover after the forward-advancing cars that were continuing to fan out, building two rows, the first going about double the speed of the second. Nate fumbled with the seldom-used part of the dashboard console, and moments later the Rover’s battery of lights came on, making me squint until I got my shades back on from where I’d tangled them in my hair when night had fallen. Because flying under the radar wasn’t an issue anymore—on the contrary—I blared the horn, prompting the nearest two cars of the slower row to make room, letting me shoot forward between them. Exhaling to get a grip on my galloping pulse, I forced my brain to focus on the new task.
“You ready?” I asked Nate, who was already scrambling out of his seat and into the very back of the car.
“As ready as I’ll ever get,” he barked, pausing dramatically. “If you manage to hurl me out of the cargo hold, you can bet your ass that I’ll turn rather than just get blown up, and I’ll come back to chew you up for being one incompetent fuck of a driver.”
Grinning, I almost blurted out the words I’d sworn myself not to utter in jest—even though I meant them—and instead did my best to fall right into the unevenly spaced line blasting full speed across the floor of the valley. Protocol dictated that we sign in but already the brightly illuminated block of light was reaching the far end of our cavalry rush, the edge of the steep cliff overlooking the base. Whoever had built the base down there had figured they were smart, setting the compound up so that it was hugging the almost vertical wall of rock, making the perimeter all that easier to defend as enemies wouldn’t be able to come from that side.
Well, they certainly hadn’t counted on us and the lengths we were willing to go.
The lights from the second row were bright enough that they blinded me when I chanced a glance in the rearview mirror, but I could see the shapes of a few fast shamblers bob up and down between them, but not too many yet. That was all I needed to know. Ten more seconds, maybe twelve. I forced the Rover to go faster still, trying to pull ahead to get a few extra yards out in the end.
“Unload!” Pia barked over the radio. I wrenched the wheel around hard while getting a death-grip on the handbrake, sending the car into a one-eighty-turn, the momentum carrying the rear close enough to the cliff that for a panic-filled moment I felt the rear wheels spin rather than gain traction, wondering if I’d just killed us. But then they did gain enough grip to shove the car back from the plummet into certain death. I slammed my entire weight onto the brake, bringing the Rover to a jolting halt. The blaze of the lights made my eyes tear up but I kept my attention on the rearview mirror, watching anxiously as Nate shoved first the payload of rigged C4 out of the open trunk, then turned the manual switch of the beacon generator to full, jarring my entire body when the damn thing came to life once more. It quickly followed the way of the explosives. All along the line I could feel the generators engage, doing their own to send my fight-or-flight reaction into overdrive. A second later, the trunk slammed shut and I sent the Rover forward, trying to maximize the distance between us and the cliff. The adrenaline singing in my veins made me feel like my chest was a second from bursting, but that white-out state of panic I was waiting for didn’t come. The beacons in the still-advancing line of cars were on full now as well, their siren song lulling me into a false sense of complacency.
“Hurry up!” I called toward the back of the car, not that I thought Nate needed much of an incentive. I was pretty much driving blindly, the brightness of the lights bad enough to disorient someone who wasn’t as affected by them as me. Cursing between harsh, irregular breaths, Nate pushed himself into his seat, grabbing for the belt harness before his ass had properly hit the leather. The barely audible “click” of the clasp engaging was the sweetest sound imaginable.
Barely a second later, the first of the charges went off, quickly followed by two booms coming from different parts of the cliff—and then I had to clap my hands over my ears as the rest went up, loud enough to feel it in every fiber of my being, pressing air out of my lungs. We’d almost reached the second line of cars, swarmed with zombies trying to reach the beacons as it was. Shamblers were thrown this way and that, not that it slowed them down much.
I allowed myself a shaky exhale, which was more of a pained gasp as there wasn’t much air left to expel. The cars had come to a halt, casting the valley into relative silence, if one was to ignore the racket the undead produced. I waited for the cracking boom that always happened in the movies, but nothing came, making me wonder if our plan had horribly misfired. But then I felt it, an irregular kind of vibration that got stronger and stronger—
And then the car was sliding as the very ground underneath us was tilting downward, megatons of rock set in motion by the explosives all across the mountainside. Burns’s plan to get some people to sneak forward and deposit extra explosives under the cover of darkness ahead of our charge must have worked. Perfect.
Or not, as my mind started screaming as we became part of the rock-and-zombie avalanche that was bringing down the mountain.
There was barely enough room but I somehow managed to turn the car back around, facing downhill. With my vision still screwed up from the bright lights, I shifted to reverse and did my best to stay away from the cliff as long as possible. To me, it felt as if the entire mountain underneath us was moving. Dust was rising quickly, obscuring what little I could see of the light pollution reaching up from the base.
“Remind me again why we thought this was our best option?” I screamed, barely managing to hear my own words. I tried postponing the inevitable by flooring the accelerator to gain a little more hard ground underneath the tires, but we were still sliding toward the crumbling cliff top.
“Because it is!” Nate re
plied, giving me a toothy grin. “Even if we commit collective suicide this way, all that debris will crash right through their trenches, fences, and into the generator banks, shorting out their primary power supply for good. Wasn’t it you who got all, ‘Oh, I can see in the dark, this is an amazing idea’ when Burns proposed it?”
There was some truth to that statement, but I was spared the need to reply when the ground underneath us gave for good, the top layers of the cliff collapsing. I’d imagined this being a slower, more time-lapsed process, but suddenly we—and everything around us—were hurtling downward, the car turning unresponsive as the tires lost what little traction had remained. The steering wheel tried to kick out of my hands so I got a vice grip on it, praying that we would make it.
In a sense, the cover of darkness and dust was a blessing. I couldn’t tell when exactly we went over the side of the mountain as everything was just dark and loud. Then inertia hit my stomach, pressing me into my seat. My instinct was to try to somehow steer the car out of this, but I knew that it was useless. Instead, I reached up and wrapped my arms around my head, neck, and upper torso, doing my very best to protect the more vulnerable parts of me.
The landing jolt was so strong that I not only bit my tongue, but felt like every single bone in my body got pulverized instantly. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t think; it was just one endless moment of agony. I might have blacked out for a second or two, but then something massive slammed into the rear side of the car—either a boulder or another vehicle—sending it spinning. I grabbed the wheel and quite senselessly tried to do something with the pedals, but the Rover had turned into a slab of mindless matter, like a leaf on the wind. Another hit, this one harder still, and we were weightless for a moment, gravity and inertia further addling my senses. I somehow managed to drag in a blissful breath of air, only to have it expelled once more when the car hit the ground. Everything was rocking, metal groaning and screaming in protest. We slammed into something, hard enough that I felt the vehicle get suspended in mid-air for a second. Then we were rolling, sideways, side to side. I screamed when the roof came down first and my side window burst, part of the cracked foil that held it all together smacking me in the cheek. We kept rolling and rolling, my stomach protesting with each flip that soon got too many to count. One last turn and the Rover came to a sudden halt, on its roof, my body slamming into the belt harness and keeping me suspended, upside down, for good.
Green Fields (Book 6): Unity Page 36