Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction

by Adrienne Lecter

  He gave an approximation of a shrug. “You probably could. Me, not so much.” He paused. “Do you really want to discuss this now? Because we both know that you’ll get annoyed, and we still have another twenty minutes or so.”

  It was a valid concern, but I could already tell that not knowing wasn’t any better. I could take an educated guess as it was. “Emma?” Bert’s wife, Sadie’s mother—part of the group that had made it to the bunker ahead of us. Unlike me, she’d never made an attempt to fit in, but had seamlessly taken command of what her husband liked to describe as logistics and provisions. To me, she’d always seemed more the benevolent dictator than concerned quartermaster. We hadn’t exactly seen eye to eye on everything that she’d deemed necessary, but then I could admit that it probably hadn’t been her fault alone.

  “Who else?” Nate admitted, laughing softly. “Because you need any more reasons to hate her.”

  “Hate’s too strong a word,” I said.

  “Dislike then,” he amended. “Can’t say I fault you much.”

  “Much?” I echoed.

  Another laugh answered me. “Come on. You have to admit, you do behave like a prickly pear whenever another strong, dominant woman might infringe on your territory.”

  “I never have any issues with Pia.”

  “Yeah, because you know that she’d drop you straight on your ass if you tried,” he said, not bothering to pause so I could deny the truth of that. But that wasn’t the only reason. Her no-nonsense approach to everything didn’t necessitate me putting on airs. Now, Emma was a different case. “You didn’t get along from the first day on.”

  That topic had been a point of contention between Nate and me on more than one perimeter watch, but considering that it usually ended with him giving me a very good way to vent my frustration, it had never actually become a problem. The guys had kept me way too busy to have time to dwell on every barbed remark she’d dropped around me.

  “What happened?”

  Nate took his time to formulate his reply—never a good sign. “There’s a chance that you’re going to be mad at me all over again if I answer truthfully.”

  “Spit it out. You’re starting to annoy me with all this hedging,” I said, settling more comfortably against him.

  “As you wish,” he responded, grinning faintly at my groan. “Let’s just say that I might have had somewhat of a clue what was going to happen in Aurora.”

  “You knew about the lab?” I asked, momentarily confused. He gave me a blank stare, making my mind skip on to that other thing that had happened there. “Oh. That.”

  “Yeah, that,” he said, his fingers momentarily contracting against my stomach. “Kevin picked up a transmission when he tried to find new frequencies. It was partly cut off but the essential details were obvious. He told me a week later when I was doing the circuit with Romanoff, figuring that it was better to wait until neither you nor Zilinsky would hear of it, if I decided not to share the news.”

  “Why?” I just had to ask. It made no sense. I might have had my issues with Emma but I usually wasn’t irrational.

  Nate shrugged. “You because I think he was struck with a weird sense of chivalry. Her because he figured that she’d never go anywhere near an established settlement if she knew what was in store for her then.” I couldn’t quite deny that he was right with that assessment, at least somewhat.

  “But you discussed it with Emma?” I asked, guessing where this was headed.

  “Her and Bert,” Nate said. “He took it with his usual stoicism, but she went off in my face when I explained.”

  “You could have lied,” I pointed out.

  “And what would that have changed?” Nate wanted to know. “Sooner rather than later, someone would have sent a convoy over to us. It was easier this way. It also left us with the chance not to get exiled for life by the people we consider friends, but instead some random assholes we can scoff at much more easily.”

  I hadn’t even thought of that. My mind was still stuck on Emma’s reaction.

  “Why did she go ballistic? You can’t tell me she didn’t know that something was different about a certain few of us. She was there when Martinez bandaged up Andrej after that last loot run to Cody cut it a little close.”

  “Know, yes. But getting confirmation is a different thing than guessing. Maybe I should have told her before, but that would have made me feel like a hypocrite. I didn’t even tell you all the details, and I share a lot more with you than her.”

  I laughed when he playfully bit into my shoulder.

  “Yeah, thankfully. Jealousy is the last thing I need.”

  His grin brightened. “Did you seriously think I’d ask you here to have sex with someone else? You should know me better than that.”

  “You didn’t ask, you ordered me here,” I clarified. “And it’s not like you never dropped a joke about having a threesome just because I’m not averse to the ladies in general.”

  He had the grace to appear a little chagrined, but the look he gave me wasn’t playful.

  “Joke about it, maybe. But I’m not the kind of guy who’s into sharing.”

  That made me smile—even more so when I realized that he wasn’t talking about me.

  “Is this about my sniper rifle again? You can’t be serious.”

  “My M24,” he pointed out. “That I loaned to you because it was the only one you marginally hit anything with.”

  “Don’t you think that over half a year is enough to make it my M24?” I teased.

  “Nothing you will ever do will make it your rifle,” he said, sounding final.

  “Okay. But I’m not giving it back. And you don’t need two.”

  His grumbling let me know that he disagreed, but he didn’t explicitly tell me that I couldn’t use it anymore, so I considered the point moot.

  “When was that? The transmission, I mean.”

  “I told her the day before we went to Douglas,” Nate explained. Went, and had never returned, I realized.

  “You knew that we were going for good, and you didn’t tell me?”

  “It’s not that final,” he offered. “They have to shelter us for five days, and Emma’s not stupid enough to force me to press the point. She knows that I would if she tempts me.”

  “Yeah, you seem to have that effect on women,” I offered, laughing when he snorted. “I’m not mad at you. For not telling me before, I mean. Guess I see why you felt like keeping it to yourself. But why go to Aurora? Or why stay, rather? In hindsight it’s obvious that Amy was trying to give us a way out if we wanted.” Thinking back, the fact that Nate and Andrej had both debated when the paths over the mountains would clear up suddenly made a lot more sense—and it didn’t go by unnoticed that he didn’t say when exactly he’d first heard of our great new world order.

  Shrugging, he replied, “There was no sense in postponing it any further, unless we wanted to stay on our own. I know you still think that Sioux Falls was a bust, but we got a lot of essentials there. Also proved that it’s not a complete suicide mission to stay out of the settlements.”

  “So that was a dry run?” I asked, getting a little annoyed now. He could have told me that, at least. So much moping, and for what? Nothing.

  “Kinda. And with no turning back, it made sense to bite the bullet before anything forced us to. You saw the gate control here. What if one of us broke a leg or hand? Or, for us, got a little too up close with the fuckers. You saw how they reacted to Jason’s guy. If that happened to one of us, they couldn’t have claimed any risk for infection, but would have been obliged to help. We had a couple close calls as it is. I didn’t want to risk it.”

  “So it was a military decision,” I said. “Nothing you felt like sharing with me.”

  He chuckled. “See, now you’re mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad—“

  “You are, and I guess this once I can’t fault you.”

  “No?” I didn’t have to feign surprise. “Can I use that for som
ething else instead?”

  “Nope,” he said. “But it doesn’t change anything. If I’d asked your opinion, what would you have said? And remember, that conversation would have happened after the cannibals, where you barely even said ten words and chose to find comfort at the bottom of a bottle rather than cozying up to me.”

  He was right, of course. I hadn’t been in the best of places back then.

  “It probably would have been the same to me,” I admitted.

  “See? No reason to ask whatsoever. And don’t tell me you weren’t suspicious from the start when Stone brought up the blood samples. Your objections were enough to make Zilinsky sucker-punch me twice once they’d squirreled us away.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at the idea. Served him right. But I could see why he’d left her in the dark, too, even though I still didn’t know what exactly had happened to her to make her act like that.

  “Besides, would you really want to hunker down in one place again?” Nate asked.

  I considered that for a moment. “Sometimes having a home would be nice. A place to feel like it’s safe. Ours.”

  I was surprised when he didn’t laugh at me for that notion, but seemed a little melancholic himself.

  “Sometimes I wish I could turn back time and do things differently.”

  That made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, so I tried to break the tension with a joke. “So sick of me yet that you want me dead? Because if you hadn’t held me hostage that day I would have died with all the others back in Lexington. And don’t tell me you actually think you could have single-handedly prevented the apocalypse from happening.”

  “The plan was for you to stick with me after that,” he reminded me.

  “And become a criminal on the run. I remember that much.”

  “Not that different from how things are right now,” he said. “But we could have hidden somewhere for a few weeks. Not saying I had that many connections, but I knew people who knew people. A couple months on a tropical island in a territory with no extradition treaties? Not that hard to pull off.”

  “You would have gotten bored within a week,” I griped.

  “Two weeks, maybe,” he agreed. “For the first one I would have come up with something to keep myself busy.”

  “If I felt like forgiving you for pulling that number on me,” I reminded him. “You do realize that I never got to lay into you as you deserved?”

  “Zombie apocalypse trumps hurt sentiments, eh?” he guessed, chuckling.

  “Something like that,” I admitted.

  “Still. Sometimes I wish I could just pluck you up and keep you somewhere safe,” he resumed his previous point. “Where no one’s out to kill you. Rape and dismember you first—or was it the other way round?”

  “Stop it,” I complained. “That one’s getting old.”

  “Whatever. You get my point. I know that you can take care of yourself. That you don’t strictly need me anymore. Which is a good thing, because as much as it strokes my ego that you want me around, I’d rather have you self-sufficient than depending on me. But there are days when I just hate the fact that I can’t give you that. That I can’t make it all go away, even for an hour.”

  “Wouldn’t you say that we’re pretty safe here?” I asked.

  “They did a good job with their defenses,” he admitted. “But there will always be idiots behaving like idiots. And there will always be the risk of infection. Or you’ll do something incredibly stupid just to spite me, and the rest is history.”

  “Glad you have such a high opinion of me.”

  “Remember, I’m still sticking around,” he replied.

  Our conversation trailed off there, yet I couldn’t help but smile. Yes, he was still sticking around. As was I. And that wasn’t going to change, even if sometimes he drove me up the walls with his recalcitrant ways.

  “So no going back to the bunker,” I surmised. “There’s no jacuzzi there so who cares?”

  That got me another laugh, and we spent our remaining time soaking in silence.

  And once we were back in the other room, we didn’t really talk much, either. Because that we could do any day. But roll around on a king-sized mattress without having to check all the time whether a random zombie was hell-bent on destroying the moment? No, talking wasn’t really what was on my mind right then.

  Chapter 16

  By the time we strolled out of the whorehouse—me still kind of apprehensive, but definitely more relaxed and at ease—the sun had started to sink, but it was still hot outside. Inside, too, as air conditioning was a thing of the past. Warm water was all the luxury we’d ever get, I figured—and I realized that I was strangely okay with that. I was healthy. I had Nate—and for once wasn’t ready to bite his head off. He seemed to be feeling the same way about me as he kept one arm slung across my lower back, an unfamiliar act of PDA that I wasn’t used to. I couldn’t help but smirk up at him, which he requited with a lopsided smile and a squeeze of my hip.

  Sometimes it was fun just being us.

  We took an extended stroll across the base, swinging by the markets and making sure that all cars were back where they belonged. The other cars were all done but the Rover had another slot booked tomorrow morning. Apparently my somewhat full-frontal approach to most obstacles had done more damage than I’d thought, and the resident chief mechanic had a few ideas what to do about it. I was sure that Martinez and Andrej would have a field day with teasing me about that once someone told them, if they didn’t already know.

  On the way over to the mess hall we decided to spend one of our shower tokens and get cleaned up, if with some added entertainment value. Because after spending the afternoon like that, someone needed an encore. Which would have been me, mostly, as Nate teased me as we got dressed again and continued honing in on our dinner. Sated—and with freshly washed hair, a first since Aurora—it was easy to ignore him. Like he had a reason to complain.

  We heard the music long before we reached the tents that now served as a huge outdoors cantina. I’d expected rock as that was what the consensus on the radio station seemed to be nowadays, but there was definitely a lot more bass thrumming through the air. The entirety of Dispatch was still in a chaotic frenzy, but everyone not strictly working seemed to have congregated around the tents, to chat, eat, drink, and dance. Or rather, as Nate noted with a hint of derision, grind against each other, because talent didn’t seem to have survived the apocalypse. I was burning to ask him if he could actually dance, as in the ballroom variety, but wisely refrained. Chances were that, considering all his other somewhat random skill sets, he could, and the last thing I needed was for him to tease me because I couldn’t waltz in combat boots. I couldn’t waltz in heels, either, but he didn’t need to know that.

  We were almost at the tent when someone behind me called my name, which was enough to make me halt in my tracks. Even more so when it only took me a moment to recognize it as Jaymie’s voice. True enough, the quirky girl stepped out of the mass of people, pulling another woman along behind her. She was a little older than Jaymie, and not quite that exuberant, but they looked alike enough that I guessed that she must be her sister, Tamara. Jaymie confirmed my guess when she introduced as, giving Nate a shrewd look.

  “That smile tells me I don’t stand a chance,” she finished with, smirking.

  Nate glanced sideways at me briefly, but that was enough to let me know that I was busted. Not that I’d actually done anything. Damn, I hated it when he did that. “What did I miss?” he asked, his voice deceptively soft.

  Tamara, still trying to overcome the shock of meeting us—Jaymie had mentioned that she’d apparently been really excited about it—rounded on her sister, squinting angrily at her. “Jay, what did you do?”

  Jaymie had that innocent look down pat. “What? Why should I have done anything? You hurt me.”

  Her sister didn’t buy it. “I know you. And I know that look. I can’t believe that you actually came on to her! How can you do s
omething like that?”

  Nate’s beginning smirk deepened, earning himself a scoff from me. “Your fault if you leave me standing on the tarmac like that. Not that anything happened. We were just flirting, is all.”

  “The fact that you feel the need to defend yourself is very telling,” Nate surmised.

  Jaymie’s laugh was definitely agreeing with him. When his gaze skipped from me to her, she shrugged. “I don’t think she really meant it, if that’s what you need to hear to save your manliness. She got all awkward and red in the face. Really cute. Did make me wonder if she flushes like that when she comes, too.” She paused for a moment. “Does she?”

  Nate opened his mouth to reply, but I did my best to cut him off before he could. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Always,” Jaymie enthused, but dropped the point when her sister seemed ready to slap her.

  Turning to me, Nate’s grin widened. “It’s so like you that it takes you what, all of an hour to find the one woman on the entire base who has the same whacked-out humor like you?”

  “More like ten minutes,” I confessed, but couldn’t just let this slide. “You know, if you hadn’t left me standing there, fuming, things might have gone down differently.”

  My words didn’t faze him one bit. “It’s not my fault that you deliberately misunderstand every single thing I say. Besides, wouldn’t be the first time for you to cheat.”

  That made me gulp like a fish on land. “You did not just say that.”

  “Did, too,” he replied, then turned to the others. “It was nice meeting you, but I’m hungry, and I have absolutely no idea what the other idiots I’m supposedly responsible for have been up to in the meantime. Why don’t you join us for dinner? That is, if Bree’s going to talk to me again before midnight. Booze might help.”

  “We already ate,” Tamara offered before her sister could say something, but that didn’t hinder Jaymie much.