Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction

by Adrienne Lecter

  “What for?” Nate asked, the surprise in his voice sincere. “That wasn’t even a fire drill for tomorrow. Even before we had the cars, getting rid of a small mob like that was never a problem for us. Since when do you want affirmation for doing your job?”

  I hated it when he turned things around on me like that. He had a point. Still.

  “Sometimes it’s nice to hear that your work is appreciated. Not just to get chewed out when you fuck up.”

  He laughed softly. When I glanced sideways at him, I saw that it reached his eyes, too. “Oh, come on. You know exactly that fear of looking stupid in front of everyone keeps you performing at a hundred and ten percent. Exactly what are you complaining about?”

  “Apparently nothing,” I quipped, tightening my grip on the wheel just a little more, wishing it was his throat.

  “I love it when you turn into such a girl,” he let me know, but didn’t even have the courtesy of smirking in my direction. Instead, he was looking at his topographical maps. “There’s a valley up ahead that we need to avoid. Turn right in about a hundred yards.”

  I slowed down soon after changing course, and we spent the next few hours zig-zagging the countryside—coming close enough to the remnants of the streak to observe, but staying clear where we didn’t have a hill or some trees to cover us and give us a clear getaway route. Jason’s estimate proved to be accurate enough to make me uncomfortable. We soon passed the area where his guys had had to veer off to the side, and that’s about where we finally caught up to the stragglers of the streak. It was hard to tell where the road had been that had once run perpendicular to the river that had created this valley—everything was caked with dirt now. What looked like a couple of houses had stood smack in the middle of where the zombies had moved, now reduced to so much splintered wood and rubble. The sheer extent of the destruction made me swallow hard. How should any settlement barriers stand up to that kind of force?

  Twice more we returned to the valley, and each time more and more undead were in sight, moving north. Adrenaline had become a constant companion, keeping my pulse elevated and my thoughts racing as much as my heart. I doubted that I’d get much rest tonight. And the longer we stood there, staring at the zombies, the more I was asking myself why we were doing this. Sure, killing twenty zombies, or maybe even a hundred, wasn’t much of an issue for us anymore. It was certainly something that needed to be done—and every permanently dead zombie was one less problem out there. But what did twenty, a hundred, or even ten thousand zombies matter when there were likely up to over a hundred million of them shambling across the country? Even as we watched, a few shamblers fell on another that toppled over, too weak to go on and do more than kick feebly as it got torn apart, wrenched limb from limb. They were culling their own population, likely at a much steeper rate than we could. Weather did its own to decimate them further. What, in comparison to that, could any of us do?

  Except die. That we could. Like Bates. Like Innes. Like Brad and Thompson.

  I knew that, compared to other people, we’d been exceptionally lucky and lost only a fraction of the people that had been part of our group. But I really didn’t want to add names to that ever expanding list tomorrow—and for what?

  My thoughts remained glum until nightfall forced us to seek shelter farther from the dried-up riverbed. We were about twenty miles from the rendezvous point with Jason’s people, and Nate didn’t push us to get there today. At first I found that peculiar, but it only took a few minutes after we set up camp for me to realize that he’d done so deliberately. We still had gear to pack, cargo to redistribute, additional armor plates and reinforced grilles to affix to bumpers, windows and doors to secure. On a normal day, the Rover was a veritable fortress, withstanding what a Humvee could, maybe except for explosives. Speed and agility were of the essence, so only the rear was reinforced, letting it get through maneuvers like I’d done earlier with ease. At the end of the day, it was a good quarter ton heavier, the extra weight making it more sluggish and a lot less fuel efficient. It was a good trade-off if that meant that the car was harder to topple and I could plow through a mass of bodies without killing myself on impact. Or so we hoped. So far we hadn’t had a chance to test the extended modifications on anything that went beyond smaller groups.

  If I’d been the praying sort, I might have sent a few words heavenward, but as it was, I really fucking hoped that Martinez and Andrej had known what they were doing when they’d built the gear that turned my agile SUV into a battering ram.

  I might now know more about cars and weapons than ever before in my life, but that still made me the layman in our group, so I spent the evening doing guard duty and distributing food. Come tomorrow, I wouldn’t be able to stomach breakfast, and I wasn’t the only one who believed in loading up the day before not to run on empty when we dearly needed the energy. Our food stores weren’t high, but there was enough canned fish and spam for everyone, and I even found some beans and dried onions to go with that. It was a shame that the zombies weren’t allergic to bad breath, or we would have already won the day tomorrow.

  It was almost two in the morning when I crawled into my sleeping bag in the Rover, hesitating for a moment as I looked over at where Nate was lying in his seat, staring up at the ceiling. He saw me watch him and caught my gaze, staring right back at me. There were a million things I should probably have said right then—and I knew that if he died tomorrow, I would regret not saying them for the rest of my life—but not a single word made it over my lips. It would have felt too much like saying goodbye. I considered asking him if he wanted to have sex, but the last two times I’d done that the night before a mission, he’d teased me for days about getting extra needy when I was afraid. I wasn’t going to give him that opportunity again. So I left it at that glance before I turned over, facing the window. Not because I was showing him the proverbial cold shoulder, but because the middle of the car was the safest place, so that’s where my unprotected back went. If anything tried to come through the window, I had my shotgun wedged between the door and the seat.

  I wondered if there’d ever come a day again when paranoia wasn’t my survival instinct number one.

  Probably not.

  We were up and moving at first light, only taking the time to don our full fighting gear before we were on the road again. It was cold enough outside of the car that I was quite happy to put on the extra layers. Nate and I had a quick spat—that I won—over what pants I should be wearing. I opted for the lighter tactical cargo pants that I usually wore because I needed to be able to fully move inside the car, and the protector pads of the kevlar lined riot-gear pants that we’d acquired on our last raid didn’t have enough give at the hips and knees. It was bad enough that I had to wear my neck brace—as I liked to refer to the reinforced neck and shoulder protector rig I put on underneath my jacket to seal the most vulnerable part of my torso to all manners of attacks. I certainly hoped that I wouldn’t have to get my helmet, goggles, and breathing mask out, but they were stored underneath the weapons in the center console, right at my fingertips. I didn’t plan on exiting the car, but if I had to, for whatever reason, I was ready.

  As soon as we were crawling up the meadow behind the hollow where we’d camped for the night, Nate hailed Jason on the radio, affirming that we were en route and would meet up with them within the hour. That happened closer to thirty minutes later, most of which we spent traversing a small creek. The Chargers had set up their camp well—the only natural barrier that worked against zombies so far was water, and the spot between the creek and the ridge overlooking the valley was perfect.

  It also gave me and idea of what we were up against as soon as I got out of the car and looked out over the riverbed and the settlement below. The view was so unreal that it took my mind a few seconds to process it.

  I didn’t think I’d ever seen that many people in one place in my entire life before the zombie apocalypse turned everything to shit—and they hadn’t all been out to eat
us.

  “Remind me again why we’re doing this?” I asked Nate who’d come to a halt beside me.

  “I know why I’m doing it,” he said, his voice about as flat as my own. “I have no idea whatsoever why you’re doing it.”

  I looked at him sharply, expecting a smirk, but he just held my gaze evenly. When I didn’t reply, he turned away, walking over to the man who was clearly in charge. They all had that certain look to them. Or maybe it was easy to single him out because he was looking at each of us rather than staring at my ass. It happened.

  Nate and Jason shook hands. A quick round of introductions followed. Jason Luke wasn’t quite how I’d pictured him—nothing could account for that shock of ginger hair at the crown of his head, set in even more stark relief as he kept the sides and back shaved to buzz-cut length—but he was tall, he was built, just as most of his guys were. I didn’t quite manage a smile when Jason asked, nodding toward me, “Your wife?” to which Nate replied, completely without deflection, “My pilot.” No one made a stupid remark, and there was a definite air of respect between our groups. I hadn’t expected any lascivious remarks—not with a fuck-ton of zombies just a mile below us—but it was good to know that once the novelty of having women among them wore off, the other mercs mostly ignored me. I still wished I could command that air of calm and confidence that Pia was emanating. She never got those looks that I did.

  Jason and his second in command, Charlie, held a brief meeting with Nate, Pia, and Andrej, while the rest of us grunts remained with the cars. The Chargers had similar equipment as we did, an eclectic mix of military gear and outdoor wear, with the odd motorcycle leathers thrown in just for fun. Also like us, they were armed to the teeth, and it took Burns exactly five minutes to start complaining why we didn’t have car-mounted machine guns yet. I had a certain feeling that his car would soon see some upgrades—provided we made it out of this. Probably not the worst of ideas.

  Wherever I tried to look, whatever I tried to focus on, my gaze kept snagging on the moving mass of bodies down there. I had no idea whatsoever how many there were. Two to three thousand, likely, but that seemed too small a number to describe what was going on there. And they didn’t just stand around like people in a concert hall, with the odd swaying and shuffling going on. They were moving, constantly pressing forward, then changing places when a weaker individual got shoved to the side by a stronger one. From a distance, they all looked the same, but if the stragglers of the horde had been any indication, they had one thing in common: they were all well-fed, which meant that we had to be on top of our game to stand a chance—and that wasn’t even counting what I knew must be hiding in that mass.

  “Recognize anyone down there?” I asked Bailey as he kept scanning the zombies through the scope of his sniper rifle. Like with our command group, there were three X-shaped marks across his neck underneath the black face mask he’d already pulled up that only left his eyes free. That was enough for me to catch the scorn on his face at my teasing, but he didn’t respond.

  Until we went up against them, we had no chance of telling the super-juiced zombies apart from the normal ones. The ones that, like Nate and the others, had gotten shot up with the serum that had turned them into what Burns jokingly referred to as super soldiers. Only that unlike our six, they’d caught the activated version of the virus when they’d consumed contaminated food—and the rest was history. Just thinking back to our little field trip into Sioux Falls made me shiver. I wondered if any of the knowledge we’d gleaned then would help us now. Against a pack with one or two of those, maybe. But this many? The sheer ration of us versus them was so skewered in their direction that even if they’d all been uncoordinated, starved, barely dangerous shamblers they could easily overwhelm us.

  It was then that something occurred to me. Looking toward the east, I guessed that we were only minutes from sunrise now, and except for the natural shadow our ridge threw down into the valley, it would soon be flooded with light.

  Making my way over to where the others were holding their meeting, I nudged Nate softly. “Do we have a time of attack yet?”

  He gave me one of those looks that wasn’t exactly hostile, but let me know plainly that he didn’t appreciate the interruption. If I’d wanted to join, I should have done so from the start. I knew that very well myself, but until now I hadn’t figured I could contribute anything.

  “Why?” Jason asked before Nate could send me off, fuming mad at whatever acerbic remark was about to offer.

  Looking at Jason and his man, I jerked my chin toward the settlement. “Because the zombies are nocturnal. They can function in daylight, but they hunt at night. Did you notice any different patterns in their behavior over the last twenty-four hours?”

  I felt a flicker of triumph when Jason’s eyes widened, and the other guy was quick to ask around their people. I beamed a smile at Nate, but he shut me up with that same look as before. My, someone was grumpy this fine morning.

  “Several of our men thought they were more sluggish during the day,” Charlie reported back a little later. “We didn’t really pay that much attention during the night, except to make sure that they didn’t see us up here. They haven’t torn down the palisades yet, so they can’t have been that active.”

  “Wrong,” Bailey reported from right behind us. “Just looking now, I’ve easily identified four to seven points where the wood is already weakening. Whatever we plan to do, we have to do it quickly, or else they’ll break through.”

  “Shit,” Jason replied for all of us, instinctively staring toward the settlement. “That’s days quicker than everyone estimated.”

  “With a sample size of what, zero and wishful thinking, that’s not really a surprise,” I offered, then swallowed the rest of my remark. Oh great, I was getting as bad as Nate. “Are those the only barriers they have?”

  Jason shrugged. “They seem to have an inner wall, too, right around the buildings, but if the outer barricades fall, our plan won’t work.”

  When I just eyed him curiously, Nate explained. “Jason’s plan is to try to draw as many of them away as possible before we kill the rest. It won’t be as effective as a direct attack, but it has much greater chances of success. Or at least not getting us killed trying. There will still be the remainder of the streak to deal with, but with luck they’ll find a new target if we decimate them enough. Our priority isn’t to wipe them all out, but to get them to stop threatening the settlement. The rest will have to remain a problem for another day.”

  That plan was a lot sounder than what I’d expected—feared, really—but it couldn’t be as simple as that.

  “You think they will just follow us? They seem to be quite happy with tearing down the walls.”

  Jason grinned. “We’ll have to give them some incentives, of course. They have a thing for noisy, moving targets so that’s in our favor. They also don’t like getting killed. I think we can take it from there easily.”

  That much was true. Nate seemed to agree, but still looked skeptical. “We shouldn’t kill too many of them close to the settlement, or they’ll just hunker down and eat.”

  Jason’s second in command got out a hand-drawn map that crudely depicted the village and most of the surroundings. “A little further up the valley there’s a lot of space. A small river delta to the east where another river joins that one over there. Scouted it yesterday. I say we draw ‘em up there, then heap up enough of ‘em to keep the others coming. The terrain doesn’t work for a kill zone, but it’s flat enough that we can speed away once we’re done. There are two bridges over the river. I say we stop them around there. Once there are enough bodies piling up, we circle back around east and west and clear up the barricades. Easy peasy.”

  I severely doubted that, but Nate’s nod after he looked over the maps again instilled some confidence in me.

  “How far up the river is that from the town?” he asked.

  Jason took over again. “About ten miles, give or take. Should take a
bout one hour to get them up there, then another two to stall them and to get back. Even if some try to follow, we’re quicker in the cars over open terrain. They’ll be tired from chasing us, and they have enough fodder for days piled up there if we do our job. Should give us enough time to clear things up here before nightfall. If you say they’re hunting by night, we have to start now. Otherwise we’re just burning daylight.”

  Some murmuring ensued but no one spoke up in protest. Unease continued to hang over our entire group, but then I doubted that would change until we got going. Nate confirmed that guess when he leaned closer and whispered a brief, “It will get better once you’re in the thick of things. Waiting’s always the worst.”

  “I thought getting killed was the worst?” I shot back.

  He shook his head. “Maimed is more like it, but even so, it’s always anticipation that has your nerves all bunched up and overloaded. Inactivity, uncertainty. Once you're out there and doing something, you have a concrete task to focus on. That helps. Trust me. It’s not my first rodeo.”

  Technically speaking, neither was it mine, but this was different. Maybe it was the scale of the undertaking. Maybe it was the fact that with the cannibals, I hadn’t felt quite so helpless and small. They hadn’t been so many. And while I hadn’t doubted that they would have killed me just the same, there’d been a good chance they wouldn’t have done it straight away. As much as considering alternatives like that was not anything I was comfortable with, there was no second chance with zombies. They came at you. They ate you. The end.

  I really didn’t want to die today.

  A few things had to be coordinated, like com frequencies, signals for when the coms went down, alternate exit strategies, but within twenty minutes we were all set and there was nothing left to do but to get in the car, strap myself in, and wait for the signal.

  Nate had been right—as soon as I got the “go” over my earpiece and started the engine, some of the jitters quieted down. We shared a last, lingering look and he gave me a hint of a smile. I hadn’t thought it possible, but I managed to reciprocate, even if mine was likely more of a grimace. We could do this. No, we would do this. And, if not, tonight we were going to dine in hell.