He mulled over that longer than I figured was warranted before he started wheezing—a laugh, I belatedly realized.
“Yeah, guess I can see that.” Another long pause. “Wanna fuck? That’s the appropriate reaction now, isn’t it?”
Snorting, I tried to stretch, but my body just wouldn’t cooperate. Scrunching up my nose, I whined, “Do I have to? Kind of wiped here.”
“Definitely yes,” Nate offered with conviction, somehow managing to push himself up so he could crawl over to me. Well, spreading my legs and wrapping them around his body was something I still accomplished, but his arms gave in before we got the required parts aligned. We ended up lying on our sides, mashed together—hey, warmth was important—both of us laughing softly. He kissed my forehead—not because that was such a cutesy moment but more because with my head tucked against his shoulder and neck he couldn’t reach any other part of me, and I was so not going to move another muscle—and tightened his arms around me, for a few moments holding on as if I was the rock that kept him from being swept away. Maybe I was. I didn’t know how I felt about that—certainly not happy about how much inherent destructive power that gave me—but far was it from me to protest.
“I miss him so fucking much,” he mumbled into my hair. I tried to make sense of who he might be referring to, my mind too sluggish to make the connection. “My brother,” he explained when nothing came from me. “I never had the opportunity to mourn him. I barely made it to his funeral—the funeral that my mother had to organize all by herself. I should have been there to help. After that, my mission to find out how it had happened and to avenge his death was all I allowed myself to concentrate on. Then the world went to shit, and I was barely hanging on as it was. I couldn’t allow myself to ease up. There was always a more important task. Get everyone to safety. Make sure you learned to survive on your own. All the other shit that happened in the meantime. Guess some part of me wanted to hang on to the hope that he had died for something. Something else than petty squabbles.”
“He did,” I offered when Nate fell silent. “Even if it proved futile in the end, he stood up and opposed those insane fucktards. If he’d just waited a few more weeks before confronting Thecla…” But he hadn’t, and even so, she probably would have killed us both to silence him forever. He’d likely saved my life that day, confronting her.
Nate didn’t respond, but the way he kept clinging to me told me that he was thinking along the same lines.
“How do you feel, now that you got your answers? I still can’t believe that utter nonsense they were telling us,” I offered.
His slow exhale was a painful-sounding one, but his voice was even as he responded. Nate, not a man used to dwelling on things for long. “Numb, mostly. Not just because of the booster.” He paused, considering. “It doesn’t matter in the end. The damage is done.”
Consider me surprised. “Really? What about detonating entire buildings, or threatening the good of the nation with your need for blood?”
His answering chuckle was a wry one. “Would you believe me if I claimed that I’ve become a new person since then?”
“In the last two hours? Fat chance.” But I had to admit, it wasn’t the most peculiar notion I’d been confronted with today. “Still. Must suck to learn that it was one of your closest friends who betrayed you like that. At least that’s the sense I got from her that night in the Green Fields Biotech building.”
It took a while for his reply to come. “Suck doesn’t even begin to cover it. But knowing doesn’t change a thing, and neither does moping around. I’ve wasted so much time holding grudges, and what good did that ever do me? I have to let go sooner or later. Might as well be now. If you can do it, I might as well give it a try as well.”
There was a finality to that statement that I didn’t want to debate, so I dropped the point. In the end, it really didn’t matter.
“Do you think I should have demanded more? From Bucky,” I added when Nate eyed me askance.
A muscle jumped in his cheek but he left it at a shrug. “You certainly made it easy for him to agree. None of us would be alive right now if you hadn’t.”
“But he didn’t even try to offer any conditions himself. Not really.” I gave that some more thought. “It’s as if he was only there to listen and agree. Like someone sent him there to do just that.”
Nate’s derisive snort answered me. “And how that must have grated.”
“You think I’m right?”
He shook his head. “Not while it happened, but in hindsight? He might not have expected you to be able to look past your bruised ego, but he was quick to throw Taggard to the wolves. Didn’t you say so yourself? You were there to clean up his shit, and that you did. We might never have made it that deep into the base had they actually reinforced it.”
Now that I didn’t like hearing. “We did a damn fine job with bringing down the mountain.”
“Let’s rephrase it. We would have all died well before breaching the parameter if I’d been in charge of the defenses. And as much as it pains me to admit, Bucky’s shortcomings are few. He’s always been a good strategist.”
“But we must have killed well over a hundred of his soldiers.”
Nate snorted. “Did we? Or did we blast through the infected, half-mad cannon fodder left from Taggard’s experiments?”
I snapped my mouth shut, swallowing the protest what a waste of life that had been. Shit. I hadn’t even considered that. “That’s cold.”
“Not the first time he stood idly by, watching good men get killed, only to ingratiate himself with his superiors.” I waited for Nate to explain, to tell me more about what had become that insurmountable issue between him and Bucky, but he didn’t. In the sake of letting sleeping dogs lie, I remained silent.
“Any idea what we’ll do once we get off this island?” I murmured into the warmth of his collarbone, not missing how visible it was underneath the layers of muscles and tendons. I felt like barely more than a bag stretched over bones myself.
“Eat. Sleep. Fuck. Repeat,” Nate supplied dryly. “Haven’t seen many signs of shamblers around so there should be game that we can hunt.”
“And once that gets boring?”
His silence stretched long enough that I had to check whether he’d dozed off, but he was still staring into the gathering darkness. At noting my motions his gaze dropped to my face, unreadable. “You mean, should we even try to rejoin civilization, or rather, what’s left of it?”
I raised one shoulder in an approximation of a shrug. “Something like that.”
He continued to mull that over. “No fucking clue.” He took my silence for the agreement it was. Eventually, he let go of me, flopping onto his back. Following the dwindling warmth he’d just rid me of, I snuggled closer again, resting my head on his pecs. The steady motion of his chest rising and falling was as lulling as the sound of his heartbeat, but I could tell that sleep was a long, long way from overwhelming me. Would have been too easy to just sleep this off. Figured.
“You’re not going to go all catatonic on me, are you?” he whispered, fingers gently stroking over my hair.
“No. Just not sure what to say,” I admitted.
“That’s a first,” he joked, smiling. “Then again, what can you say after you’ve found out that it only takes an egomaniac with a God complex and a bunch of hippies to wipe us clean off the planet?”
“Yeah. That.” I didn’t want to think about it. There was no sense to glean, no arguments to stack against each other. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after, but I doubted it. It was hard enough to keep the bleakness that knowledge had planted deep inside my soul from spreading. So much senseless misery and death—and for what? And from the fervor in Dolores’s voice I could tell that she still believed her actions had been justified, maybe even for the greater good. Somehow, that was so much worse than some undefined, anonymous evil that had unleashed hell just because it could…
And I’d gone through too much shit to l
et that drag me down any further. Thumping Nate’s chest, I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “Enough with the wallowing. What do you want, tuna or sardines? I might have seen some beans at the bottom of one of the boxes, too.”
Nate considered for a moment, then sat up with a loud groan. “I think the fact that we beat the odds and made it out of that base warrants a real meal. I still have some MREs from the Silo stores. I’ll grab them, you get the camping stove burning for the hot water.”
Snorting, I heaved myself onto unsteady feet. “With how you wine and dine me, how could I ever think of leaving you?”
He paused, halfway through his pack, the look on his face comically stricken. “You did? I’m the best catch still alive out there. Wise up.”
“Yeah, keep telling that to yourself if it helps you sleep,” I teased, plonking my ass back down, only to get chased up once more when Nate lugged over our sleeping bags.
“Shut up and eat.”
That we did, both of us, snuggled into layers of insulation, leaning against each other as the last light of day winked out. The stars were out in full force tonight, the light band of the Milky Way stretching endless above us. In the grand scheme of things, looking up there made me feel small and insignificant—and free to do whatever I pleased, with no expectations or responsibility weighing me down. Taking the first free, deep breath in what felt like fucking forever, I let myself fall onto my back, concentrating on nothing else but breathing in and out.
We’d done it. And we were still alive. What did it matter what some shitheads had done that I couldn’t change anything about now? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Maybe my soul was still raw, but, same as my body, that weariness would ebb to the point where it was easy to ignore, and then it would puff out like the satellite-turned-falling-star zooming across the night sky above me. Until that happened I could get by on telling myself that I had everything I needed—food, shelter, the skills and knowledge to get through this brave new world—and I was damned if I’d let anything get in my way.
Chapter 30
We ended up spending just over a week at the lake before we decided that we’d had enough of spending all our time with each other and no real outside stimuli. Besides the massive hangover of my lifetime, I’d relished every second of quiet the first few days, after spending way too much time around way too many people for way too long. As usual, Nate was quite content not to have to put up with anyone’s crap—including mine, at least when he finally stopped moping around on day four—lending the entire endeavor an almost vacation-like vibe.
Then we decided we’d spent enough time hiding from the world, lest anyone start cheering that we hadn’t made it.
The only two destinations up for discussion were Dispatch and New Angeles, and considering that neither of us was particularly fond of traipsing around in front of Rita, we went south. Or west, for the most part, cutting through the mountains and meandering our way through more national parks than I could count until we ended up on a low hill looking down at I-70 where it crossed from Colorado into Utah. We’d lost another few hours trying to scavenge parts for the Rover, but considering that the worst of the damage concerned the chassis itself, it didn’t make much sense trying to get it road-worthy in the long run. It continued to rumble along for now, and I was sure that some of the fine folks down south would love to equip us with new wheels. Fall was advancing in huge strides now that the last heatwave of late summer was but a memory in the cool morning air, but I wasn’t really concerned about that. I welcomed it. It heralded a different kind of change, one I was happy to embrace. City life didn’t sound so bad, after all.
The reason for our detour ambled along the Interstate below, a good hundred cars, swarming like ants around the extra cargo they must have picked up along the way—two yellow school buses and several huge combines. How they got those fueled up was beyond me, but someone must have had a plan as they’d made it a few hundred miles already. My guess was that they were headed for northern Utah.
“Ready?” Nate called out from the other side of the Rover. I debated heading straight south instead, but we’d caught a transmission two days ago, alerting us to who else had joined that convoy. While part of me was filled with apprehension, excitement won.
“Always.”
Thirty minutes later we had real road underneath the tires again, accelerating as we caught up to the tail of the convoy. We were still about a mile out when the radio lit up on the local frequencies.
“Mike, can you verify this for me? That’s one damn-ugly car coming in at the rear.”
“Man, that’s an atrocity on four wheels. Does it even still have four?”
“I think, but not sure what keeps holding that together. Duct tape, likely.”
I felt the need to defend my poor, tormented Rover, but when I caught Nate’s grin I kept my paws on the wheel. Instead I shifted up and floored it, shooting by the rear guard with somewhat disconcerting puffs of smoke trailing after us. Several people waved at us from the cars we passed as we headed toward the front of the convoy, making sure to steer clear of the busses and combines not to slow them down further. Ahead, there was some kind of rest stop to the right side of the road, the convoy splitting up between the slowing cars that remained on the straight road and those taking the loop, with several more rolling to a halt on the gravelly ground in between. I dropped the Rover into one of the designated parking slots by the glorified cabin, figuring that even with my car more dead than alive we’d still go a lot faster on our own, so hanging back didn’t make much sense.
I’d barely made it out of the door to join Nate when a blonde whirlwind in a tan colored jacket came hurling herself at us—or as much as her half-run, half-waddle let her. I hugged Sadie tightly, laughing when she didn’t lose a moment to start talking at the top of her voice.
“I’m so fucking happy to see you guys! Jason assured us that you were doing okay when you split up but I know from Dad how much those chemical cocktails can screw you up, and no one knew where you’d disappeared to or whether you’d ever turn up again, and—“
“Breathe!” Nate offered when she broke off, huffing. “You can take enough time to formulate words so that other people might be able to understand, you know?”
She rolled her eyes at him as she finally extracted herself from our lopsided embraces. “Ain’t nobody got time for that! Besides, you’re already getting that chased look in your eyes again that you had last time you dropped in on us. Not quite used to hanging out with people anymore?”
That last part was directed at me. I shook my head, yet before I could explain, Nate did, snorting loudly. “You’re not the one she’s trying to avoid.”
I was saved from having to defend myself when the other occupants of the car Sadie had been riding in joined us. Collins left it at a curt nod, while Moore was all too happy to let Nate congratulate him on successfully “abducting” Sadie from the Wyoming Collective the day they’d learned about the ambush our guys had blindly traipsed into. “It was really scary for the first couple of miles,” Sadie professed. “Over the winter I completely forgot how shitty it can get out there on the road, particularly if you’re cutting right through the mountains and have to live from the provisions you can pick up along the way. We couldn’t bring much gear, with me being all bloated and clumsy even on a good day.”
Collins interjected with a low laugh, “They looked rather well-fed when we picked them up on the side of the road last week. Like bears, eating everything they can find when they get ready to hibernate.”
Sadie chuckled, rubbing her back absentmindedly with one hand while the other dropped down on her belly, no longer able to hide the bulge even with the oversized jacket. “It does look like that, doesn’t it? The way this bundle of joy is growing and kicking me, I’m ready to believe that once he drops, he’ll be up and running, ready to go hunting his own food right away.” Her bright smile dimmed when her gaze returned to me, and a hint of guilt crossed her features. I quick
ly shook my head, letting her know not to worry about me. I actually felt happy for her, the thoughts lurking at the back of my head easily pushed away. She smiled, but then a light frown appeared on her forehead. “What’s with your fingers?
It took me a second to remember. Raising my right hand, I scrutinized the bruises that were still visible halfway up to my knuckles. I’d first noticed them the morning after getting to the lake. “Don’t worry about it. Must have sprained them when we attacked the base. Doesn’t really hurt, and I think I can survive losing a fingernail or two.” Sadie nodded, turning her attention back to the others.
As more and more cars drew to a halt, more and more people came crowding in to shake our hands—a very peculiar thing I wasn’t exactly sure how I was feeling about—and to exchange a few words. Many had been along with us in the attack on the base, but a surprising amount were from settlements or had been sticking it out on their own over the summer. Even a few soldiers were milling around, easily picked out by their uniform gear, and how they were still somewhat uneasy, as if they expected someone to come for them. I couldn’t help but whoop with delight when Clark and Santos came lumbering over, dragging Andrej along between them who kept insisting that he could walk on his own but very obviously wasn’t quite there yet. Damn, but it felt so, so good to see them again. Another dark cloud disappeared from the back of my mind.
“You’re headed for New Angeles?” I presumed once the first wave of shooting shit was taken care of.
Santos nodded. “Or wherever Sadie’s going. We’ve been talking to some of the other folks who’ve been out on the road a little too long to want to bug down in a real city. It’s still early in the season.” I had a certain feeling that, wherever they’d end up, Pia and Burns would already be waiting for them. Back in New Angeles, both of them insisting to want to return had sounded like borderline betrayal to me, but considering that all of us had hoped to find Sadie there—or at least en route—it made much more sense for them to jump at the opportunity. Who better than Nate’s second-in-command to look after his Goddaughter’s child? And I hadn’t forgotten that Bates used to be one of Burns’s best friends.
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