“Run?” he suggested, snapping his own harness on.
“Run,” I agreed.
As soon as the engine roared alive, heads all over turned. My left leg protested vehemently as I stepped on the pedal, but I ignored it, kicking the car into reverse. The back bumper hit something, the entire car rocking as I backed right over it. As soon as I had enough room in front, I sent the Rover forward, accelerating as quickly as I dared. We tore out of the parking lot with a swerve around a bunch of zombies that were coming for us, narrowly avoiding most of them. One came right at me, but I plowed through it, wincing when the resulting bump shook not just the car but every single bone in my body. My vision went hazy with pain but I blinked until I could see the road properly again. A little more swerving around and we were in the open. Flooring the pedal, I sent the car into the dark night, praying that I hadn’t misjudged just how well I could see. The zombies fell away behind us, first from view, and finally that buzzing in my head stopped as well. I went another five miles before I allowed myself to relax, and finally slowed down to a less than breakneck speed, the plains around us coming into focus again.
I heard Nate exhale beside me, making me guess that I hadn’t been the only one not quite convinced of the soundness of our plan. Glancing over to him, I smiled weakly, but was sure that it got lost in the darkness of the car.
“Think that was it?” I asked, still a little winded.
Looking over his shoulder, he checked with his scope through the rear window before he nodded. “Let’s hope so.” I relaxed a little more, feeling a hint of elation slither through my exhaustion. Of course it was just like him to break the spell when he turned back to me and asked, “And now you tell me how exactly you knew that they were coming for us.”
I could have lied, but I didn’t really see much sense in that. As it was, things couldn’t get much freakier than they already were.
“I felt them,” I admitted after a long pause. “First one, coming from the back, then another down the road. I think they’re what’s left of the streak that hit Harristown.”
The look on Nate’s face was grim as I chanced a glance at him, trying to gauge his reaction. I hadn’t really expected him to freak out, but he still looked surprisingly disturbed. His tone was wry as he replied. “Guess that means we have our destination cut out for us already.” At my questioning grunt, he shrugged. “Remember that tech we recovered from that zombie? As far as I remember, we left it at the Silo. And that’s exactly where we’re going now.”
Chapter 6
I had no idea how far we made it until I had to stop, too exhausted to go on. It was still dark outside, and we must have been on the move for at least two hours. Nate didn’t protest when I simply let the Rover roll to a stop and cut the engine. Cool air streamed in through the open windows—something I definitely could get used to, but still had to stop being paranoid about as well. We were in the middle of nowhere, close to a small rise that would hopefully hide our silhouette except from something standing right next to us. It was a quiet night, but the sounds of nocturnal animals going about their business let us know what we’d already guessed—we were all alone out here. Or rather, what Nate guessed. My mind wasn’t exactly capable of grasping details anymore. My leg was killing me, and while I didn’t exactly have cramps in my lower abdomen, that entire area didn’t feel too good, either. Punching that zombie in the face hadn’t helped the residual bruises on my chest, all but invisible as they were. Getting shot, not an experience that bore repeating any time soon. My temperature was down but I felt as if I was burning up again, paranoia making me twice as jumpy than I had a reason to be. Agitation and exhaustion were not two states that went together well.
After getting out and giving the area a generous sweep with his night vision scope, Nate grabbed a flashlight to check my arm. The scratches were deep and had bled somewhat during the first half hour, but now they were scabbed over and starting to heal. That was freaking me out as much as I was happy about it. Nate dabbed at the scabs to make sure that there wasn’t any dirt embedded in the wound—apparently residual bits of zombie were not good for keeping scars small—but eventually declared that he thought I didn’t need stitches. What he didn’t say was that, like me, he could only hope that I wasn’t hours away from dying again. Time would tell.
I considered starting the car again after five minutes, but my leg wouldn’t quite cooperate. There was a house about half a mile off the road, barely more than a hovel. We’d slept in sheds that were larger. Nate watched me shift tenderly for about a minute before he told me to shoot at anything that wasn’t him, got his AK and sniper rifle ready, and left for the house. It took him forever to return, although the dashboard clock insisted that it had been less than twenty minutes. Nate’s pack, previously empty except for some spare ammo, was stuffed to the brim, and he’d even went as far as juggling a six-pack of water bottles with his rifle. He dropped the water in the leg room of his seat before he went rummaging through the pack in the back, dropping a shitload of medicine bottles into my lap. “Not sure what all that is,” he offered. “I took everything that I could find. Not that I’m positive that painkillers will still work for you, but it’s worth a try.”
A lot of the loot was useless to me—blood thinners, statins; other prescription drugs that made me guess the inhabitants of the house had been elderly, or hadn’t exactly hit the genetic jackpot—but there was also a bottle of Ibuprofen and some Motrin. Nate made a joke about “vitamin M” that I didn’t get as I swallowed a handful of the Motrin pills, washing it down with what was left of our water. I didn’t ask, instead waited for the pain meds to kick in.
They didn’t.
Half an hour later I gave up and started the engine again, gritting my teeth until the worst of the pain had eased up in my leg. Nate looked ready to shoo me over into the passenger seat, but it was still pitch black out there, and we were too close to the streak to risk stopping yet. Besides, I had no idea where we were, and Nate could, at best, take a guess until we found some signs, so we just kept on going. I figured that the worst that could happen was us ending up in Canada. Maybe Canadian zombies were more friendly than ours?
The sky started to lighten in the east by the time I had to stop again, this time to follow nature’s call. Getting out of the car was much easier than getting back in, and I debated taking Nate up on his offer to take over driving. As it was, it was still too dark for him to see, and I had a certain feeling that I wouldn’t be doing too well once the sun was over the horizon. So on we went, him checking more on me than our surroundings, and me in too much pain to concentrate on anything but keeping the car on the road. It helped a lot that backwater Minnesota was about as much of a wasteland as could be.
“Take that right over there,” Nate said a while later. At my frown, he nodded toward the small access road branching off from the somewhat larger access road I’d been idling along. “Looks like it’s leading to a house. I say we stop there, at least for an hour or two. We need more water, and maybe we’re lucky and no one has raided it yet.”
I was, quite frankly, too tired to protest, so I went right ahead. There was no house, but the road led right by a small creek that was just as well for refilling our bottles. I wondered if I should have asked Nate about washing up in the small stream, but the very idea of stepping into ice-cold water wasn’t too enticing. He returned soon, yet instead of getting in on his side, he opened my door, leaning against it as he studied me.
“Wanna scoot over?” he suggested. “It’s light enough now that I can drive.” I shook my head, making him utter an exasperated sigh. “Bree, stop being so fucking stubborn—“
My harsh laugh cut him off. “Can you, maybe, for once not be such a fucking asshole?” I asked, exhaling forcefully as I stretched out my legs. “I can’t.”
“Can’t step down for once?” he asked, still angry.
I bit my lip hard, counting to ten in my head before I replied, hopefully not as sharply as I wanted
to. “Can’t scoot over. Do you have to make this so hard on me? Do I have to swallow my last bit of dignity? Really?” He just kept looking back at me, daring me to say it out loud. Sighing, I sagged deeper into the seat. “Don’t have the strength left to pull myself over the center console,” I explained as I glared up at him.
The look of guilt that crossed his features made me crack a smile, but that disappeared soon enough when he picked me up, my entire body protesting vehemently. At least he tried to be gentle as he deposited me in his seat. This time I didn’t protest when he buckled me in before he returned to the other side.
We drove another two hours, half of that I spent more or less sleeping. I knew that I should have tried to stay awake, but whenever I startled, Nate told me in a quiet voice to go back to sleep. Neither of us was very happy with that arrangement, and shortly after eight he finally called it quits. There were a few houses scattered across the plain but Nate deliberately chose a small copse of trees for our temporary camp. I was asleep before the engine had cooled off completely, hiding my head in a black shirt of Nate’s to keep my eyes away from the sun.
Although I got some sleep, I didn’t feel very rested when I peeked out of my cocoon again just after noon. Nate was awake, studying the maps splayed out over the steering wheel. He wordlessly held out my aviators to me, followed by the Motrin and some more water. I took it all without comment, swishing my mouth out with the stale water once the pills were down.
“Why do I even bother with these?” I asked as I handed the bottle back to him. “They do absolutely nothing.”
“Welcome to my world,” he jeered, but softened his voice a moment later. “Strong intravenous painkillers still work. I just don’t know where to get any morphine right now.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Remember that ketamine you idiots used for the tranq gun for cattle hunting? Would have come in mighty handy now, wouldn’t you say?” The look he gave me was way too bland for his own good. “What?” I asked, not sure what to make of that.
“Actually, we had some left,” he explained.
“Had?”
He nodded. “I shot you full of it before I cleaned up the wound on your thigh. The last thing I needed was for you to come out of your coma while I was scraping bits of necrotic flesh from your femur.”
“You what?!”
Rather than look at me, Nate got busy refolding the maps. “You heard me right the first time. Trust me, you didn’t want to be awake through that. Been there, done it, don’t exactly recommend it. Next time I’ll only use up half so you can complain later why it hurt like hell.”
I didn’t know what to reply to that, and eventually settled on a subdued, “Thanks.”
Nate’s brows took a hike up, but he acknowledged it with an equally low, “You’re welcome.” Of course he had to destroy the moment by foisting some disgusting tuna at me, but for once I didn’t feel like protesting and just munched down the food.
“Found out where we are?” I asked after chucking the can right out the window. Littering? Not on my list of concerns right now.
“More or less,” he replied. “If we head west long enough we should be good. Three to four days, depending on how many miles we make each day.” He gave me a considering look. “Or maybe five to a week. If you don’t mind, I’d rather you not drive unless you have to, at least until you feel up to it again. We can stay here until it gets a little cooler. Then we drive until full dark and hunker down in a house. Depending on how well you are, we break camp after sleeping a few hours, or once it’s light enough that I can drive safely. Rinse, repeat. Any objections?”
I shook my head, which seemed to surprise him greatly. Concern, too, which made me stretch my leg experimentally. “Just give me a day or two with some downtime and I’ll be back in the saddle,” I promised. “Just don’t want to push my luck.” I knew that I was being wildly optimistic there, but I didn’t want to consider the alternative. Then again, I should have been dead, or at least suffering from one, possibly two massive bouts of infection. Instead I was ramping up a rather considerable count of scars, but that was about it. Pain and exhaustion I could deal with; death, not so much.
There was one more thing to do before we hit the road in the afternoon again—check in with the guys at the Silo. I was a little surprised when Nate clarified that, besides him, no one actually knew that I hadn’t died. After his explanations of how he’d checked in with Sunny, I’d kind of guessed that they knew that I’d survived. Alas, no, it turned out. Nate had been close-mouthed as ever. After what had happened in that factory, I didn’t exactly fault him for it.
It took some fiddling to reconnect the radio. Apparently, Nate had ripped the entire thing out after we’d settled in the motel. Why he didn’t say, but then again, he didn’t need to. It was one thing to trust Tamara and the mechanics in Dispatch when they’d explained to us that our radio couldn’t be tracked if we didn’t set the transponder to online; but someone had planned a scheme elaborate enough to get the better of us and hadn’t shied away from killing a substantial amount of their own soldiers. Getting someone to rig car radios to make them appear to be offline but actually sending was not that far-fetched. And until we had an idea of how anyone could have gotten confirmation that I had been pregnant, neither of us was ready to take any risks.
Considering all that, it didn’t come as much of a surprise that Nate hesitated before hooking up the radio once more.
“Are you sure that you want to do this?” he asked, surprising me. When he saw the weird look I gave him, he offered me a slight smile. “Rejoin civilization, as it is. We could just drop off the map completely. Go north, where even in summer there can’t be that many undead around. Build our own little fortress, stock up for the winter. People a lot less skilled than us did it centuries ago. We can do it, too. That is, if we want to. It’s your choice.”
My, my, wasn’t he agreeable these days. I mulled over his proposition, but as pseudo-idyllic as it sounded, I shook my head in the end.
“I’m not sure what exactly I want,” I admitted. “But I can’t just let this slide. Bates and the cannibals were one thing. But losing Cho and Bailey… this is just too much. Someone did this, deliberately, and I don’t think I can go ahead and ignore this. I’m not saying I want to exact bloody, brutal revenge on them…“ I cut off there, reflecting on what I’d just said. “Actually, scratch that. I want to exact bloody, brutal revenge on whoever fucking did this. Starting with Bucky, and slicing and dicing my way up right to the top. I know it’s stupid, and we’ll likely all die in the process, but as things are right now, that’s a likely outcome whatever we do.”
I waited for him to laugh in my face, but his grim nod of satisfaction was giving me quite the feels.
“See?” he prompted. “I didn’t just ask you to marry me because of your nice rack.”
That got the snort it deserved. “Yeah, or what’s left of that. So, warpath it is?”
He shrugged. “First, you need to get better. Which, incidentally, means I need to keep us both alive long enough that we make it back to the Silo. Don’t glare at me like that. You know that right now you’re next to useless. You need more rest, and you need lots and lots more nutrition. I need to eat, too. I’ve been basically starving for the past days, and while that wasn’t much of a concern to me while I thought you were dying, I need to bulk up again. So what we’ll do, after calling in, is to go short distances, get as much rest as we can, and get some more provisions. Any complaints?”
“Can it please not be tuna?”
He gave me a pained look before he focused back on the radio. “Always with the nagging. Burns is right. We already sound like an old couple, whether we’ve been married for less than a day or not.”
I was content with just watching him work, keeping my thoughts to myself. It was probably better this way.
When he finally had the radio hooked up again, Nate needed a few minutes to get on a frequency that worked. The momentary feed
back made me wince, but I wisely kept my trap shut when he gave me a warning glance.
“This is Silo actual,” a male voice came over the speakers. “Unidentified radio, who am I talking to?”
Nate grimaced, but there was a hint of humor in there, too. “Good to hear your voice, Silo actual. This is Thirteen alpha calling in. Can I leave a message with you for my unit?”
There was an audible pause, followed by some unintelligible chatter in the background. My, someone was getting excited. When whoever was manning the radio came on, he managed to pitch his voice appropriately mournful, though. “Sure thing, Nate.” Clearly, we were celebrities enough to be known by name. “Whatcha need?”
“Can you tell them to come back out of whatever hole they’ve drunken themselves into and meet me back at the Silo? My ETA is a little sketchy but I’d say in a week from now should work.”
“Will do,” the radio guy acknowledged. “Listen, how are you holding up—“
That was as far as he got before Nate shut the radio off with a succinct, “Thanks.” I watched as he quickly dismantled the contraption he’d previously taped together.
“You know, you could have left that on for a few more minutes,” I noted. “Would have been fun to listen to them gush all over my cold, dead body.”
Nate shook his head, sighing under his breath. “Only you could find that funny.”
“Oh, come on! Don’t you see the humor in it? I refused to go to my own wake, and now I can, theoretically, listen to the world mourn for me! That is, if you let them. Really quite disappointing.”
He spared me the answer that I likely deserved and instead reached for one of the refilled water bottles. “Ready to get on the road? I probably won’t even need you for navigating, but it’s kind of nice to still have you around. A little less boring this way.”
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 38