Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6

by Lecter, Adrienne

  Even through the mask—which I wore mostly because I didn’t want to wipe off any zombie gunk that got on my face, not because I was afraid of infection—a couple of breaths out in the open were enough to make nausea rise inside of me. I swallowed convulsively as I tried to take shallow, even breaths, forcing my heart rate down once more.

  I was actually relieved when another group of zombies came for us, because then I had something else to concentrate on than just how vile the air I was breathing smelled. Up at the hatch, the adrenaline rush had made me crazy enough not to notice, but down here it was just bad. So, so bad.

  It only took about three minutes after we’d gotten out of the car before Burns’s ABV came to a stop next to us, Burns himself hollering down to us. “You getting bored or something?”

  Before I could reply, Nate did. “Bree broke the car.”

  “I so did not!” I shouted. “If you’d killed that damn juiced-up freak before it got close, it could never have wreaked havoc on the car’s hardware!”

  “Excuses,” Nate huffed, grinning back at me.

  “Need any help?” Burns asked.

  We both shook our heads. “Keep squishing the last remaining nests and we should be fine,” Nate said. “We’ll start with the cleanup.”

  It was only after the ABV drove away again that I realized that there really wasn’t that much to do anymore—except take care of the endless sea of bodies on the ground. I was tempted to keep using my rifle, but really, what zombies were still moving could easily be finished off with good old-fashioned blunt force trauma.

  “Do you want the ax or the bat?” Nate asked as he popped the trunk of the car after pushing aside the bodies we’d downed before.

  “Ax,” I replied. Why invest extra strength when you could work with a keen edge? And I’d had to split enough firewood all winter long that I’d gotten comfortable enough wielding an edged melee weapon—at least for similarly challenging tasks.

  Nate handed me the heavy ax we’d liberated from a fire truck, picking up a sledgehammer himself. Always with the bragging—but I had to admit, that thing was effective. We remained together as we started a slow circuit outward from the car, kicking everything that couldn’t move before we finished off what did. It was a gruesome, monotonous task—but after being tense as hell for hours, locked in a car, it felt oddly liberating—and that probably said a lot about my deteriorating state of mind. Honestly, I couldn’t have given less of a fuck about that.

  And then Jason gave the okay over the com that the last nest of shamblers had been eradicated—and we were done. The battle was over. All of us—at least us twelve—were still standing. Tired, sweaty, but alive. The euphoria gripping me was just as strong as the paralyzing fear that I’d felt this morning as I’d brought the Rover down the slope. We’d done it. The impossible. Not us alone, and without the sappers the job would have taken us easily until nightfall, if not well into tomorrow, but we’d done it. Together. As a team. The first untainted triumph since the world had gone to hell.

  And I’d been a part of that, just like any other member of my team. And no one had even bothered asking me how I was holding up, because no one had questioned that I could do it. So what if I’d needed a little extra pep talk—all of them had a lot more combat experience.

  I let out a whoop that was really a shout of triumph, raising both hands up in the air, gore dripping from my ax blade. Nate laughed before he joined my cheer, and one after the other all my fellow scavengers joined in. The created feedback over the com was deafening, but even when I turned that off I could hear them all across the plain.

  Today, victory was ours.

  Chapter 8

  Reality, of course, was just waiting around the corner to punch us in the face, but what else was new?

  There was still the threat of the zombies that we’d managed to draw away in the morning to return. To minimize that risk, we had to get rid of the bodies. All of them. As monumental the task of breaking the siege had seemed, that was almost worse. At least until the ABVs proved that they weren’t just handy in running zombies over, but quite versatile where shoving them together into piles was concerned. The sappers had also brought huge tarps, initially to hide their vehicles, but they proved useful as makeshift sledges, tied to the cars, to transport the bodies—and parts of bodies—to the dried-out river bed where Watts declared it safe to simply burn them. So that’s what we did—for the next four hours. For the first time in my life I was glad that I was physically weaker than everyone else in my unit, because that meant I was set to driving duty rather than dragging bodies onto the tarps. My car was still out of order, so I was driving the Jeep, seeing as both Andrej and Pia didn’t have the same excuse.

  Even with that support, the ABVs did most of the work, pretending to be the world’s most macabre snow plows.

  I knew something was wrong when I returned from yet another run to the river bed, the empty tarp flapping behind me, and I found most of our people standing around in a circle. When no one moved to start loading the tarp, I got out and joined them, finding Nate and the Ice Queen crouching over the remains of one of the zombies. It only took me a moment to identify him as one of the super zombies—they just had that slightly more substantial look to them, as if they didn't decay at the same rate as the rest—the head lying a good three feet removed from the body, just to be sure. At first I thought they were continuing the game we’d started in Sioux Falls—what did it take to kill them for good?—but it wasn’t the body itself that they were staring at.

  No, it was the vest strapped to its chest, with several blue-blinking devices affixed to it.

  “What the fuck is that?” I asked, craning my neck to get a better look.

  “No idea,” Nate replied, studying one of the devices that he must have pried from the setup.

  As my eyes kept roaming over the body, my gaze inadvertently fell to its hands, checking for a mark—and finding it at the left hand, just below where the pinkie finger would have been had it still been attached. Looking over to the head, I saw that enough was intact to identify the marks there—three stark, black X-shaped tattoos. Nate followed my gaze, then caught it when I looked back at him.

  “They were new,” he confirmed my guess. “A month old, maybe two. It’s hard to guess with the general decay and all, but that man was alive and kicking in early spring, when he got inked.”

  I looked at the devices again. “Something tells me that this wasn’t part of the gear he was wearing when he died.”

  Pia shook her head, pulling the vest aside to reveal the jacket underneath about as torn and stained as the rest of the clothes. The vest itself was dirty, but not much worse than my own gear. “No. Someone strapped that on recently.”

  Nate handed the device to Campbell, who poked at it with a knife before he dropped it to the ground and smashed it with his boot before he crouched down to study the parts. “Battery powered. It’s only a guess until I have time to study it, but I doubt that battery could have kept that active for more than a week.”

  I really didn’t like where this was going.

  “But what is this thing? Some kind of tracking device?” That seemed ludicrous, particularly as there were at least five of the small, black boxes with the blue lights still on the vest. For tracking, a single one would have been enough. Besides, why track a zombie? If you were close enough to strap on a vest, you killed it instead, particularly one of those special fuckers. But someone had done exactly that.

  A moan rose behind us, making not just me whip around and ready my weapon, but the zombie that tried to come for us was little more than a head, one arm and part of the second shoulder, entrails dragging behind where its torso must have been blown apart by a grenade. My ax was up and ready, but Nate’s shout of “Wait!” made me freeze in mid-motion, then step aside as I eyed him askance. “I have an idea,” he offered, signaling us to step away.

  We all watched as the zombie continued its painfully slow way forward. It should
have come for me or Taylor—the living, breathing food that was the closest—but it kept right on, aiming for the corpse of the juiced-up shambler. When Nate kicked at what remained of that second shoulder it barely reacted, not even snapping at him. It stopped once it had managed to drag itself right next to the corpse, its one hand reaching for the vest.

  “It’s a homing device. Or something that draws them closer,” I murmured, my voice so flat that it sounded like someone else’s in my own ears.

  “Looks like it,” Nate confirmed, catching my gaze again. “That’s why it was impossible for us to draw their attention when we started the chase. I bet that’s not the only one wearing this shit. They were all just trying to get closer to them. Only when Bailey shot one and it came after us did they follow.”

  Andrej finished Nate's thought with a succinct, “And because we were good about alerting them, many of them chased after us. All of them are now upriver, eating each other if we’re really lucky.”

  With that revelation hanging in the air between us, I suddenly didn’t feel very lucky anymore.

  “Someone did this. Deliberately,” I pressed out. “Someone built this. I’m sure that just like we do, they know that the juiced ones are smart enough to find the next settlement.”

  And there I’d thought that things were going so well.

  Jason, standing a little to the side, crossed his arms over his chest, his gaze directed at the settlement. “I’ve heard and seen a lot of fucked-up things since this shit started, but this tops it all.”

  “You think I’m wrong?” I asked.

  He hesitated but shook his head. “No. I think you’re exactly right. I’m not saying that someone’s controlling these fuckers and sending them at our towns, but this comes close enough to give me the creeps. If we hadn’t come in time—“

  “But we did come,” Nate replied, his tone wry. “Which, if you think about it, is no coincidence.”

  “How come?” Jason wanted to know.

  “Didn’t you mention you had communication trouble? I remember Tamara telling us that Harristown had gone dark days ago. One of the larger settlements, in a state that still has some military presence left on patrol.” He nodded toward where the ABVs were still driving to and from the building heap of zombie parts by the river. “It’s the ideal testing ground. To test whatever this shit is, and to see how fast we’ll respond. I doubt that whoever did this gave a shit about whether we survive, or if the town goes to hell. But there are a few too many coincidences going on there for me to believe in them anymore.”

  The following silence was deafening.

  Burns was the first to break it, asking, “Do we tell the town people of this?”

  Nate considered for a moment, but shook his head. “I don’t think we should. We don’t know shit, and it’s questionable that they’ll believe us. What we should do is see if we find a few more of those and check if they’re wearing any, too.” Looking at Campbell, he asked, “Can you disable a couple of them and take them with us for further study? But only if you can be absolutely sure that if it includes a tracker, it won’t be active anymore.”

  “I can try,” Campbell offered. “Give me an hour or so.”

  “Do it.” To the rest of us, he went on, “We still have cleanup to finish before night fall, so get going. If you find anything, bag it. There’s still the one zombie wedged under the Rover that we can check, and if anyone’s bored, you can go through the heap over by the river. But let’s not do anything that alerts anyone who doesn’t need to know.” He paused. “And that includes the sappers.”

  A few of Jason’s guys looked at him with surprise, but it was Burns who replied.

  “None of them have the marks. They helped us, but they don’t belong to us. Who knows. Maybe they were sent in as the cavalry to make sure the town makes it.” Which made so much more sense than them miraculously appearing just when we needed them.

  I loved my random bouts of paranoia when they kept me alive, but looking at everyone as if they were hiding a knife behind their back, ready to come for me, was not the sanest thing to do.

  Nate looked around us, letting out a frustrated breath. “Everyone, get back to what you were doing. We have our task to finish. If you find anything else, report in. We’re all tired and hungry, and we need to think this through. For now, let’s finish here. Then we get some chow, clean up, and decide what we do next. Until we know more, this stays between us.”

  The euphoria from before was gone, leaving all of us trudging along, weariness taking over. It seemed to take forever to do the last couple of runs to get all the dead piled up by the river. All that driving had depleted our fuel resources, but there was still enough in a few extra canisters left to douse parts of the heap and light it up; if anything, the stench got worse, the note of roasted meat tickling my brain into thinking there was food around. A growling, upset stomach wasn’t anything I wished on my worst enemy.

  The crews of two of the sapper vehicles remained by the pyre, declaring they were happy to watch it and call for reinforcements should any of the zombies from upriver come south again. The third ABV returned to the settlement with us, giving my poor, broken-down Rover a lift. It was frustrating as hell to sit behind the wheel and be reduced to so much dead weight, not even the steering working. The ABV stopped right next to the gate, and it took four of us to roll the Rover through once the gate was opened. The other cars were already inside, building two long, dirty, disgusting lines along the inner wall of the barricades. As soon as I got out, Burns and Andrej descended on the vehicle, jacking it up so they could start checking out how bad the damage was. It felt as if I’d received a deep wound, gushing blood, as I watched them inspect my car. Maybe it was stupid, but I’d gotten attached to that vehicle, same as my guns. It wasn’t just a tool anymore, but a part of me.

  “Can you get it fixed?” I asked when Andrej emerged from underneath the car.

  His nod made some of the dark clouds that had descended on my mind with the recent revelation about the attack lift a little.

  “Tore right through everything it could reach, but the engine’s unharmed. Just some lines to replace, a few minor things to patch up.” To Nate he added, “We should look into reinforcing them better. There’s also some heavy damage from going over the rocks in the riverbed. If we want to keep doing that, we need to do something to prevent possible damage.”

  Jason, having watched the proceedings, cleared his throat. “They’re having some damn fine mechanics in Dispatch. You guys been there before?” We shook our heads. Jason smiled. “We’ll probably head there next, once we know how Phil and Ahmed are doing. You could join us. I’m not saying it’s the best place on earth right now, but they got gear, weapons, ammo, gimmicks, you name it.”

  “Not to mention the whorehouse,” his second in command supplied, grinning sheepishly.

  Glancing around, I couldn’t help but smirk at how many of my own people were avoiding my gaze right now. Looking at Nate, I got a shrug from him. It was as good an option as any other, and Tamara had invited us over the day we’d joined the trade network.

  “We don’t have anywhere else to go,” I offered. “Might as well get our boys laid. Never mind the mechanics and gear and shit.”

  They didn’t exactly cheer, but I noticed the grins following in my wake. Well, at least someone had something to look forward to.

  Now that the important stuff was taken care of, I allowed myself to relax and take in our surroundings. The gate had been barred again as soon as we were through, leaving the remaining sappers to return to their unit. They’d plain refused to enter the settlement, and I couldn’t fault them for it. We’d seen ourselves what strings came attached to that deal. And right now, dirty, stinking, sweaty as hell, I didn’t mind that I could make someone feed me.

  Between us we were almost thirty people with eleven cars, which took up only a fraction of the open space behind the gate. From what I could see, the settlement was set up similar to Aurora with
a central core holding the houses, with fields and open spaces around, all inside the sturdy wooden barricade. They didn’t have the trenches dug that we’d seen in Aurora, but I was sure that it wasn’t all fresh fields and meadows. Harristown was larger than Aurora by easily a factor of three, and I could see a couple of barns, silos, and two garages for cars in the distance. There were also people here, of course, and unlike in Aurora, they didn’t keep their distance. There were a good hundred scattered around us and the road leading to the gate, children and women scarce but present between the men. They eyed us with caution, but not the outright fear and hostility we’d received in New Town.

  They certainly didn’t look at us as the heroes who’d just pulled their bacon out of the fire.

  To the right of the gate, they had assembled what seemed to be a cleaning station. Several of the Chargers were already down to their underwear, washing their gear, and two let themselves be sprayed down by the town people. That there was water pressure to work a hose distracted me long enough that it took me a moment to realize that the mercs were naked. Oh well. At least I got to enjoy the view.

  A small group detached itself from the onlookers and came toward us, all men, I noticed. They must have watched us long enough to have figured out who was in charge because they aimed straight for Jason and Nate, completely ignoring me—as usual. I still wasn’t sure if that should have made me glad or pissed me off. It ultimately didn’t matter. And they’d learn about the error in their ways soon enough, if Nate’s behavior at the last settlement had been any indication.

  One of the guys stepped forward as the others halted, looking like he was going to extend his hand, but he refrained in light of exactly how all our gear looked. And smelled. Fuck, but that smell was driving me insane…

  “I’m Mayor John, mayor of this fine settlement,” he said. “Harristown thanks you. We cannot express how grateful we are to you—“

  Jason took that with a bright smile, while Nate looked a lot less inclined to offer pleasantries. “You can start repaying us by feeding us,” he ground out.