They exchanged glances again. The woman turned back to us. “Is that where you’re headed? We were… warned against going there.”
“Why?” I asked, just as Nate wanted to know, “By whom?”
Her discomfort rose, but it was the man next to her who answered. “People. They are talking. Not everyone is as happy about these new developments out there as you folks are.”
“Excuse me?” Now I had to fight not to get annoyed for real. “What are you talking about?”
The woman gave her companion a hard look that made him shy back. “There is talk out there that the Silo is militarizing their operations. We want no part in that. It is already dangerous enough out here without anyone starting some guerrilla war.”
Were they for real? Next they would start blaming us for what had happened to their group! I was just about to spew some venom at her when Nate grabbed my arm, giving me a look that made me back up this time. There was warning in his gaze, but also that angry look of defeat that I’d seen time and again regarding the stupidity of the settlers. Apparently that hadn’t stopped at the palisades but had infected those that were willing to hang out more with the settlements than we did. I still found her standpoint weird considering that Dispatch had easily three times as many armed personnel as the Silo, not counting the civic population. But now it was probably more along ten to a hundred times that. Not our business, though.
“Good luck on the way to Dispatch,” Nate wished them. “But you should really consider keeping your radio off as much as possible.”
The woman nodded, but she looked less than convinced. So much for trying to do the right thing by saving them.
We parted ways with another round of grim nods before we hiked back up that small hill while the traders drove off, leaving the burning Humvees and dead soldiers behind.
The Rover was already in sight when Nate muttered a teasing, “You know, your interrogation techniques suck,” that made me crack a smile.
“Yeah, so what? My strategic planning skills aren’t much better.”
He snorted. “Don’t even get me started on that. Exactly what was so hard to understand about circling the camp and not running head-on, blindly into the fray?”
“Oh, I understood. I just chose not to follow your suggestions.”
“Suggestions?” He scoffed. “I’ll show you suggestions.” He taxed me with a calculating look. “You know what? If you can mouth off and disobey my orders, you can very well take over driving again. And first thing tomorrow morning we do drills. You’re moving with the agility of an octogenarian.”
It felt so damn good to return to the right—left—side of the car and stash my share of our loot in the forward cargo hold.
“You’re just cranky because you’re not getting laid,” I answered once I heaved myself back into the driver’s seat. Nate shook his head, sighing with exasperation, but the look he gave me was not the cautious-bordering-on-anxious way he’d been glancing at me since I’d woken up in that motel.
And all was right with the world again. Now all we had to do was exact bloody, brutal revenge.
Chapter 8
Thanks to my superior night vision we made it to the lake region before we decided to crash for the night. Or rather, before I could total the car and sink it in one of the lakes when exhaustion made my vision swim. We managed to find a small peninsula that was mostly obscured from the road with access only across a narrow strip of land that the last flooding hadn’t completely washed away, making it the ideal camp site. We left the Rover by the trees at the shore, a tarp secured over it to break up the silhouette. Zombies didn’t really do well with open water, and while the treeless peninsula left us somewhat exposed, the grass and reeds were tall enough that, as long as we remained sitting down or crouching, we were safely tucked away from roving eyes. I didn’t protest when Nate told me to just go to sleep. I would have been next to useless for watch detail that evening.
I was surprised that when I woke up to the early morning light I found him curled up in the sleeping bag next to mine, snoring softly. Then again, if something surprised us here, we could always flee into the water. There must have been hundreds of water fowl nesting all around the lakes, so why go for the target that had teeth if you were a predator that was smart enough to have survived the zombie uprising? A vague sense of unease remained, though, and I decided to take up watch while I let Nate sleep.
I got up and stretched, wincing when my left thigh protested. I’d expected worse, but it wasn’t exactly comforting to need five minutes or more until I could walk comfortably. It was only then that I noticed that Nate had set up some makeshift fishing rods. Two of the lures were gone, but the third had caught something. I quickly pulled the fish off and whacked it with a stone, leaving it in the silty grass for Nate to filet later. It wasn’t large but would make a nice addition to our breakfast. I’d made enough of a racket for Nate to briefly rouse, but after blinking at the fish, he flipped over and continued to doze. I sat back down on my sleeping bag and waited for the new day to brighten.
What I very soon realized was that I wasn’t good company. It wasn’t that I was bored, exactly. But my mind was empty. Not relaxed, no worries kind of empty, but that ground-to-a-halt, shock-in-the-later-stages kind of empty. That worried me, and not just because sooner rather than later the other shoe would drop, and if I’d learned anything in the past year it was that my conscience always caught up with me.
I’d killed people yesterday. I hadn’t even hesitated. It was by far not the first time, but it was different. The cannibals had dug their own grave by shooting and later maiming Bates. At the factory, there was only fight or die, and I couldn’t have escaped the latter by a narrower margin than I had. Sure, there had been that part where I pretty much stopped giving a shit to get my people out of there, but in the end it had been easy to justify my actions. They had started it. I had only done what I had to defend myself. But yesterday? Who were those traders to me, who, once out of the thick of the fray, had been rather quick to judge us and turn against us—or would have, if they hadn’t just watched us kill ten times our numbers. It could be argued that we’d protected them, helped them—but I should have felt hesitation. Remorse. Guilt.
But there was only emptiness.
Was that part of how the virus was changing me? Did it turn me into a psychotic killer? Or was that just the next step in my journey? The inevitable progression from civilian to survivor to… whatever came after that? Was it something that had always been inside of me and only now broke free after I’d been pushed beyond my breaking point? I’d never considered myself a particularly good person. I’d hung on to a relationship that had run its course within months rather than years only because I wanted to spare myself the inevitable fallout of the breakup. I’d cheated, and I had never really felt remorse for it. I’d always tried to be ethical at work, but I’d killed my fair share of lab animals in experiments. “Decent” was probably the best I had ever aimed for, rather than “good.” But I would never have deliberately hurt someone. Tortured someone. Killed someone in cold rage, without looking back.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been the worst that could happen if I’d died in that horribly beige motel room.
The sun eventually rose, forcing me to grope for my sunglasses and hat once more unless I wanted to spend the next hours half blind and tearing up. At least the insane headaches seemed to lessen from day to day, but I was still so freaking light sensitive that it wasn’t funny anymore. I should probably have cleaned my gear—yesterday I had been too tired to care once we got here—or studied the maps, trying to find the best route to the Silo. I could have dug out one of the increasingly more flimsy paperback novels that we kept lugging around with us, but I didn’t feel like reading. I didn’t feel like anything, really.
I didn’t really feel anything.
The sun was well in the sky when rustling sounds behind me alerted me to the fact that Nate had rejoined the world of the awake. He uttered
an amusing cadence of groans and grunts as he stretched, got up, took care of business, returned to me—without washing his hands, but who cared?—where he dropped into a crouch by my side.
“Yesterday getting to you?” he asked, staring out over the lake.
I glanced from him back to the water. Sometimes I hated it that he could read me so well. “It should, shouldn’t it?”
“Ah,” he wisely replied, his mouth quirking up into a smirk.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, not having to feign annoyance.
The look he shot my way was too knowing. “You feel guilty because you don’t actually feel guilty anymore.”
Damn him. “That obvious?”
“After spending the last, what is it now? Fourteen months together? Fifteen? One might expect that I’ve gotten a hang of this. Besides, you may be a very complicated woman sometimes, but you’re seldom hard to figure out.”
It would have been so easy to misinterpret that and take offense, but I was too glad that he finally stopped handling me with kid gloves only to let him bait me just yet.
“Yeah, well, I’ve never claimed otherwise.” He didn’t reply, clearly waiting for me to go on. I idly wondered how long I could have dragged this out, but eventually picked up a stone, threw it into the water, and did just that. “It’s not that I feel like my moral compass has been screwed up for good. I just don’t… give a shit? First it was the zombies, now it’s hostile idiots in uniform. What’s next? And where is this going? Until it’s just you and me against the rest of the world?”
He shrugged, unperturbed by my words. “Still like those odds better than if it was you against me.”
“Would you kill me? If you had to?”
Nate turned his head, studying me long and hard. “I honestly can’t think of a scenario that would warrant it. As long as you’re you, I’d lay down my life for you. And that includes suicide, if that’s the only way.”
I’d wondered when—or if—he would punch the elephant that had been lurking in the room since Bailey’s sacrifice. After my comment from yesterday it only made sense to tackle it now.
“How does that even work? Do you all draw straws every morning, and whoever gets the short one packs the sugar bomb?”
His lips quivered, but that wasn’t a smile that crept onto his face. “Something like that. Not my choice, though.”
“Are you going to add my name to the pot now?”
Anyone else might have been scandalized about such a suggestion, but of course his answer had to be condescension. “Don’t be stupid. We’ll never know if you can even convert, let alone instantly. Would be such a bust if we’d had to depend on it, and then it didn’t happen.” He paused, and when I just kept on staring, he looked back at the water. “Can’t fathom they’d let you join. Pia and I are exempt, too. Can’t treat the team mascot worse than the command staff, now can we?”
As he’d intended, that made me scoff. So maybe I wasn’t completely dead inside yet. Bite me. “I am so not the mascot,” I protested.
“You might as well be, considering how they all tucked in their tails and slinked off, knowing they’d never see you again.”
“Gee, I always hate to disappoint everyone,” I replied, but couldn’t help but steer the conversation back to serious territory. “Who knows that I’m alive? Besides you, me, and some traders who likely won’t make the connection?”
“Why, having second thoughts about rejoining society? No one else knows. If we never make it to the Silo, they’ll just assume I changed my mind and found my timely end somewhere in the vast wilderness out there.”
I shook my head, feeling a hint of a smile come to my face. “Nah. As tempting as that might be, being just the two of us sucks. We can never really get a good watch detail working, and it’s only a matter of time until one of us bludgeons the other to death, simply out of spite. Never thought I’d say that, but I really miss the guys.”
Nate nodded, again not seeming surprised in the least. “It’s always hard to get used to the silence after spending months living practically on top of each other.” When he saw me frown, he laughed. “Welcome to experiencing what every soldier goes through sooner or later after his deployment ends. For months you can’t wait to finally be on your own again, and the day you get your wish is the day you realize that silence easily becomes your own worst enemy. That, and stupidity. I think I’ll take the silence any day.”
“Because you have me for the stupid?” I suggested.
Chuckling, he came to his feet. “Your words, not mine. What about breakfast? Shouldn’t you cook for us, wife?”
I wasn’t sure if I should have been annoyed or amused by that suggestion. “You really want to leave cooking to the one who has no sense of taste left and has to be reminded to eat so she doesn’t starve? I rescind my previous comment. You have the stupid part covered all right.” He held out his hand to me and I let him pull me to my feet. “Why don’t you provide for us, husband? Isn’t that hunting and gathering your chore? If we ever settle down somewhere, I promise I’ll keep a vegetable patch as a stand-in for tending the fields.”
Nate gave a theatrical sigh, but rather than grab the fish, he wrapped his hands around my hips, pulling me closer. “Wanna know something really weird? The part about you losing the baby that I regret the most is that I’ll never see you sitting on a porch, huge with swollen, bare feet, yelling at me because you’re annoyed with how I do everything wrong that you believe you could do better, while we both know it isn’t so. I swear, I don’t have a domestic bone inside of me, but somehow that mental image got stuck in my head.”
My heart skipped a beat as the sudden pain ebbed away once more, but I managed a smile, if a sad one.
“We could get a dog, if you really want to do that family extension thing. The way the car reeks on a good day, wet dog smell won’t make it worse. And you know that I’ll always be happy to yell at you, for whatever reason. Not that you don’t give me cause aplenty, because you do.”
He answered with a smile of his own. “And that’s why you love me.”
I was just about to melt—just a tiny, little bit—when I realized what he was doing. “I’m not cleaning that fish,” I protested. “I may eat it later, but you do the disgusting work. You can cut the crap, mister. I’ve seen right through you.”
Of course he had to make it all worse by throwing his head back, laughing, but that did wonders to brush away the last tendrils of lingering pain in my chest.
“It was worth a try,” he protested. “Don’t make such a face. If I’m not getting laid, I might still hope for you to show some kind of affection for me.”
“I didn’t kill you in your sleep. That has to suffice.”
Nate made a considering face, then shrugged. “Guess you’re right.”
“Why do you need to guess? I’m always right. That was in the fine print when you asked me to marry you. Wife equals always right. That’s one of the fundamental laws of nature.” He heaved a long-suffering sigh at my jeering. I figured I should give him something to lessen the sting, so I placed a soft kiss onto his chin. “Next time we get anywhere close to soap and a mirror, get rid of this awful mat of hair. Makes you look old, and I’m not the kind of girl that fucks old geezers. Might increase your chances exponentially, just saying.”
I loved the devious grin that stole onto his features. “I can do that right now. I mean, you’re not getting hungry and I can prioritize my needs if I have to.”
Chuckling, I thumped his shoulder hard. “Go clean that fucking fish!”
He finally let go of me to—surprise!—for once do what I told him to. We continued to banter all through prepping breakfast, with me heating water for tea and him taking care of the solid parts. Half an hour later we were back on the road, heading west—and it was a good hour after that when I realized that I was still smiling, the morose mood from early morning completely forgotten.
Chapter 9
We ended up deciding that
getting to the Silo as quickly as possible was the way to go. That still included a lot of detours and taking routes that left us the least exposed, but that was a necessity after the stunt with the soldiers and traders. What wasn’t quite that necessary was to stop for food, now that we had a small stock of provisions again. Nate’s estimate was that the last leg of our journey would take us three days, and we could make the food last that long, if we had to. I didn’t object. The sooner it wasn’t just the both of us, the better. He might have done a good job cheering me up that morning at the lake, but my mood remained rather dark as we kept finding our way through the North Dakota wilderness. The heat became more unbearable from day to day, forcing us to add extensive downtimes over noon to keep the car from overheating, and me from going completely blind. Trying to get some rest during those stops was all but impossible, but we still tried to make up for them whenever we could, often driving deep into the night and breaking camp long before morning had dawned. Nate was doing most of the driving while the sun was glaring down on us while I took the night time shifts. Even with that lending both of us some extra downtime, I still felt like I was dipping into my last energy reserves by the time we made it into the western part of Montana. We ended up driving through the last night because I simply didn’t want to spend another day out there if I didn’t have to. It was only when I narrowly avoided falling out of the car when I had to stop for a toilet break that Nate stepped in and enforced a mandatory three-hour stop.
There was no telling what exactly would be waiting for us once we reached the Silo, and it was not just stupid, but plain fucking idiotic to do it completely exhausted.
I would have probably slept through half of the day if Nate hadn’t shaken me awake at eight in the morning, where I half sat, half lay in my seat behind the wheel. We were back on the road five minutes later. With the last of our food eaten last night, there was no sense in postponing anything.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 42