It was Elaine’s dog that broke what little tension there was in the air, when he came running straight by me to barrel into Nate, demanding ear rubs and back scratches with a few loud barks—that he immediately received. I watched the spectacle for a few seconds before turning to Elaine. “Glad you still have him around. And glad to see you all made it here.”
She shared my smile, even if hers was a little sad. I was sure that meeting us reminded her of whoever they’d lost that day we’d first run into each other, when we’d helped them get their car rolling again. We’d lost Madeline and her kids—although “lost” was too harsh a word; Erica, Madeline’s daughter, was the only one I felt guilty about—to those idiots behind their fence. Part of me wondered for a moment if we should pay them another visit, but I could already imagine how Nate would veto that immediately. Too much risk, nothing to gain for us, and seeing as we personally hadn’t had any of ours killed, there was no reason for retribution. The cannibals had been different because they’d become so much more of a nuisance. Maybe, if they kept up the fuckery from last summer, they’d find themselves on our shit list soon enough. Hopefully.
When had I turned so vindictive?
“Same here,” she said, watching the dog now go on and jump around Andrej and Burns, leaving Nate to join me. We shook hands with Elaine, her sister, and her husband who’d kept in the back with Steve, while Skip eyed our cars and gear with a hint of interest. “We were wondering if you’d drop by our town any time soon. Dave told us that you’d left when it got warmer, but he didn’t have any news yet the last time we talked.” Which was likely before we’d come to Aurora, depending on how long their radios had been down. We hadn’t really had much reason to call home in the meantime. I could understand why—unless we got confirmation that they’d already known about the new rules the settlements had established but hadn’t told us the few times we’d made contact, we could pretend they’d been just as in the dark as we’d been. And it wasn’t like they couldn’t have reached out to us. Come to think of it, why hadn’t they?
Leaving for Dispatch sounded better by the minute. After more than six weeks out on the road, with no space to feel safe—Aurora excluded, looking back—it was about time I got some R&R to put all that behind me and shut up the raging paranoia in my mind.
I realized that my inner monologue had gone on for too long from how Elaine looked at me, and tried to simply shrug it off.
“None of us got much sleep last night,” I offered, not even having to fake my yawn. “I hope you’ll get your radio working soon? If you have a relay station out there somewhere that needs repair, I’m sure we can work something out, like that we’ll protect your tech team.”
Elaine gave her husband a strange look but didn’t reply. Neither did he, which turned the moment even more awkward. I could understand that after being beleaguered by zombies none of them were too happy to go out there any time soon, but it normally wasn’t that bad. If we’d ditched the cars and put some effort into being silent in a stretch that was pretty much abandoned, we could have gone days without meeting a soul on two legs, shambler or otherwise.
Rescue came from a completely surprising direction when Santos, of all people, came sauntering over, grinning brightly as he and the college kids clapped each other’s shoulders. I hadn’t realized that they’d been so tight, but they looked like they were already on the fast track to rekindling their friendship.
“Hey, man! What you been up to?” Skip asked, the enthusiasm in his voice real.
“Not much,” Santos offered with false modesty. “Just some really crazy shit.” His mouth opened, ready to offer up some examples, but for whatever reason he left it at a low “the usual,” after a glance at me. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean so I ignored them, turning back to Elaine.
“I see you’re already making the best of spring?” I asked her, nodding toward the rows of planted crops between us and the main part of the settlement. Even from where we were standing it was obvious that they would soon get their first harvest in, whatever those bushy green vegetables were that grew right up to the main path. Elaine glanced at where I was looking, the previous tension slowly leaking out of her shoulders.
“We were lucky,” she said, agreeing with me. “By the time we got here, the community was well on its way to establishing itself. We already went through three extensions. The only thing we don’t have is corn, but we can do without. There are even some decent herds of livestock at the other end of town.”
Skip overheard that, grinning brightly. “Every week, we get chicken, and once a month even grilled beef or lamb. Post-apocalyptic barbecue for the win!”
My gorge rose, making breathing hard, and for several seconds all that prevented me from puking up soup and bread was my hand clamped over my mouth and sheer will to keep it all down. Food was too valuable to waste on my finer sensibilities. But if I didn’t get anywhere close to any charred meat in the next decade it would still be too soon. The lingering stench of decay in the air didn’t help.
Elaine and her sister eyed me with a weird kind of familiarity that I couldn’t place, but when I looked over to Santos, he seemed a little green around the nose as well. A month was still not enough time to let any of us ditch those memories.
“Thanks, but no grilled anything for me,” he said, his self-deprecating smile taking the sting out of the words.
“Since when did you get so picky?” Steve wanted to know. “I thought that after eating animal chow for weeks you guys wouldn’t shy away from actual food. You didn’t all turn vegetarian or something like that, right?”
Santos gave me a look, but when I made no move to explain, he shrugged. “Remember those cannibal freaks that we ran from, before we got the cars?”
Steve nodded. “Sure. We heard someone got them last month.”
“That was us,” Santos said, not without pride, but his enthusiasm was duly muted as he explained. “We killed those fuckers off. Torched the entire place, too, bodies included. And damn, that stench is nothing you forget that quickly.” He made a face on the next inhale. “Although, this is coming close. I’m not gonna lie, I’m not too broken up not to have to live around that for the next week or so.”
Under different circumstances I would have smirked at that, and as it was, the villagers all grimaced.
Skip cleared his throat, looking mighty impressed at Santos’s explanation, maybe even a little jealous. “Didn’t know that was you. But guess it figures.” He gave us that weird look again, and it was only when I noticed that Andrej was fussing around with something on the car behind mine that I realized what Skip was trying to do, non too stealthily—check our marks. Crossing my arms over my chest, I took a step forward, drawing his attention.
“Why don’t you just ask if you wanna know? It’s not like anyone’s keeping secrets here.”
I definitely confused Elaine with that statement, but Skip had the grace to not even pretend like I hadn’t caught him.
“Considering the, err, style of your group, I was wondering how many… ah…”
I couldn’t help but feel strangely vindicated when I caught Santos’s smirk. When he didn’t offer up the information, I did.
“Six,” I replied. “Would have been seven, but we lost Bates when we took down the cannibals.”
Skip’s eyes went wide while Steve offered up a low whistle. Elaine’s sister blanched, and both Elaine herself and her husband grew just a little tenser. That didn’t get better when Nate chose that very moment to return, stopping next to me with his back half-turned on them, giving them quite the good view at the back of his neck. He ignored them completely, which in and of itself told me that the time for chatting was over. I didn’t bother asking what was up, but simply waited for him to lean close and whisper into my ear.
“I think the mayor checked up on our credentials. Did a quick headcount, and came up one short. They’ve started nosing around the cars, and it’s only a matter of time until they find our c
ontraband passenger.”
Turning around, I looked out over our little fleet of cars. Sure enough, several of the guards were slowly walking between the vehicles, looking into windows were they weren’t too tinted to let them glance inside. They were still a few yards away from our makeshift ambulance, but there was no way they’d miss anything if they just looked closely enough. Exhaling forcefully, I glanced back at Nate. “Think they’ll give us shit for this? Because I kind of draw the line at shooting at unarmed civilians.”
I’d tried to keep my tone low, but clearly not low enough, judging from the scared look that crossed Elaine’s face. Perfect. I hadn’t even had to elaborate on just how Bates had bit it to make them afraid of us.
Nate considered, but gave a quick jerk of his head to the side. “I doubt it. But I think that will be enough to make them say that we’ve overstayed our welcome. I’d rather not escalate things. We got what we came here for. It’s time to go.”
Turning away from me, he gave Santos a quick nod that made the young soldier scramble to say his goodbyes before he beat it to his car. I stared at the grass for a moment, wondering what I was more annoyed about—the general situation, or that the people here were making it worse. Looking back up to Elaine, I offered her a weak smile.
“Well, guess it’s time to go. I hope that what we did today helps. With luck, all you need to do is wait for the stench to die down, and that’s it.”
She was still warring with herself, but a smile broke through in the end. “Thank you. All of you. We know that what you’ve done is the only reason why we’re still here, even if the mayor’s less than graceful about his general misgivings. But you need to understand why we’re afraid—“
I cut her off before she could get further. “Intellectually, I do. But practically? Not one bit. I haven’t lost a single minute of worry to that concern, and I eat and sleep around six of them each and every day of my life. I know that if I somehow manage to crash the car in a way that will kill Nate but not me, he’ll come after me about thirty seconds later and eat my face before I even have time to be afraid. But do you see me jump at shadows? You all need to get your priorities straight. We are all deadly because we have to be, not because of who we are. If you grab that gun from your holster and shoot me, I’ll be just as dead whether you have a mark on your neck or not. This is really the last place on earth to rekindle the old ‘guns kill people’ debate but it’s still true. We put our lives on the line for you. The least we deserve is your respect.”
I knew that it was useless, but I just had to say something or it would have continued to boil inside of me, eating me up.
Voices shouting behind me kept me from saying more, and I didn’t need to zero in on the center of the commotion to know that Jason and the mayor were laying into each other. Sighing, I forced myself to give Elaine a quick smile that was more understanding than what I’d just told her, and went over to where things were about to blow up.
“This is inexcusable!” the mayor was shouting, pointing at the car in question. “How can you even consider bringing someone in who’s possibly infected?”
Jason seemed ready to shout his reply in the mayor’s face, but closed his mouth when he saw Nate and me joining them. I envied Nate the absolute calm he radiated as he turned to the mayor.
“What seems to be the problem? We have one wounded with our medic, yes. He’s in no condition to leave the car, and last time I looked, bruises and lacerations weren’t transmittable by the air that we all breathe.”
“But he could be infected!” one of the guards piped up, eyeing Nate as if he was expecting an attack any second now. “And no one knows what’ll happen when he dies.”
Nate gave him a withering glare but toned it down to belligerence a moment later. “I can tell you exactly what happens when he dies. He’s dead. It’s been like that since the dawn of time.”
“But we don’t know if he’s one of—“ the guard protested.
“He’s not,” Nate said, talking right over the guard’s protestations. “Else he wouldn’t be dying from a few fractures. You can ask any of my guys what they’ve watched me get up and walk away from. That’s the whole point of us being out there, doing the shit that fragile dolls like you can’t do. Us, and any physically able man and woman who has the guts to walk out these gates; who also don’t shit themselves at the sight of a little blood and the odd broken bone. So what’s the problem? He remained in the car the whole time, and we’re about to leave, so you pussies can stop wetting your pants. Any objections?”
Surprisingly, the guard looked more cowed than pissed, but that didn’t mean that the mayor was ready to step down off his soap box.
“The issue here is that you deliberately violated the rules,” he started to explain, but Nate didn’t let him get farther.
“By doing what? None of us came anywhere near your precious little town. We stayed here, with our cars, while you deliberately shit all over every single item in the agreement we all signed. Now we’re about to leave, and still you treat us like criminals. You must be real proud of your accomplishments.”
The mayor’s face darkened, but sadly, he didn’t go off like I would have. Narrowing his eyes, he looked at all of us again before a satisfied smirk took hold of his features. “Our radios are about to start working any minute now. By the time you roll out of Harristown, the entire network will know that you’re just a lying, deceiving, extorting bunch of scumbags. Don’t expect another town to open their gates for you ever again.”
I really didn’t care for the implications of that, but Nate didn’t even blink.
“You do that. We’ll be happy to report our side of the ongoings as well,” he said, then glanced at Jason. “You and your guys ready to beat it?”
“Hell, yeah,” Jason agreed.
And so it came that as the sky started to turn yellow, our cars left the settlement, one vehicle at a time. Burns went first, driving our most offensive patient outside before any further altercations could arise. Jason went next. We were third. I couldn’t help but sigh with relief as we made it outside and still no shots had been fired at anyone. While the other cars started lining up next to what had once been the road out of town—now terminally churned into mud just as the meadow all around it—I eased the Rover through a few slow maneuvers, then gunned it up to top speed, going in circles this way and that to make sure the steering worked properly again. I might have whooped a little. Nate smiled. As the others took off rolling toward that slope I’d nearly not made it down this morning, I accelerated and rounded the entirety of the settlement one last time. We’d been thorough about the cleanup, but the ground was still drenched with gore and littered with body parts. Carrion eaters—four-legged and winged alike—were everywhere, a black cloud lifting into the air as I threatened to go right through them. On all sides the palisades had held, but there were a few weak spots that I hoped the townspeople would repair soon. In the distance we saw what remained of the pyres send a few last tendrils of smoke up into the otherwise cloudless skies, no traces of the sappers or their vehicles remaining. Upriver, not a single shambler stirred, which was a good thing.
Completing the circle, we closed up to the last car making its way into the countryside, and we left what counted for civilization these days behind us.
Chapter 9
We made it about twenty miles northeast from the settlement before we called it a night. We might no longer have been hungry, but we were all tired, the less than stellar welcome of the townspeople weighing on all of us. We also had a man with less than forty hours left to live, which made all the sneering and suspicion pale in comparison. I hadn’t exchanged more than a word or two with him, hadn’t known he existed more than a day ago, and still I felt a weird kind of bond with him. And unlike the people in Harristown, none of us was shying away from Phil when Jason and Charlie helped him out of the car once we’d set up camp. Seeing him pale and sweaty reminded me so much of Innes that it made me physically sick all over ag
ain, but no one else—not even Phil himself—looked glum so I forced myself to act as if nothing had happened.
Turned out, there was one single advantage to dying like this—you could attend your own wake. And when Phil expressed his immediate concern that he felt like he deserved to get stone cold drunk one last time, we were happy to oblige him. What should have been one hell of a depressing evening quickly turned into a veritable celebration.
I’d had a good feeling about the Chargers from the start, but as evening turned to night, I realized that they really were a bunch not unlike us. Like we had Pia, they had Charlie, who took it as his personal responsibility to bust any ass that might need busting. Each on their own they were a force to be reckoned with. Together, they were unstoppable. Within fifteen minutes a perimeter was established, watch times agreed on, food distributed, and Phil was polishing off his first aluminum cup full of Scotch—the good kind that Jason had pilfered from a liquor store last fall, kept for a special occasion. So we ate, and we drank; we laughed and told stories, keeping a low fire burning in our midst to serve as much as illumination as to keep us cozy and warm. As usual I was sitting between Burns and Martinez, every so often glancing across the fire pit at Nate. Tonight of all nights I might have preferred his company—or at least a hefty dose of that booze going around—but this night wasn’t for us. It was for our new friends. So we took all the night guard shifts, and made sure to remain sober enough to actually be of use when our time was up.
Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction Page 12