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

by Lecter, Adrienne

  “It’s okay,” I whispered, trying to keep the world of hurt out of my voice. “I didn’t know until I didn’t die from getting infected. I wouldn’t be alive anymore otherwise. It all happens for a reason.” Without a doubt the worst lie I’d ever told, but I felt like she needed me to say that, judging from the look of guilt that crossed her face. Whatever had happened to me, it should in no way make her feel bad about the life growing inside of her. Swallowing thickly, I forced my voice to gain volume again. “What is important now is that you stay safe. Obviously, what used to be common knowledge is wrong because you are still pregnant, and from the looks of it, you’re going to have your baby. But probably not here.”

  She nodded, vehemence seeping back into her voice. “I absolutely hate this, but I’m not trusting anybody here right now. You’ll help me, right? You’ll get me somewhere safe?”

  I wondered if there was still such a place on earth, and was about to remark that, but Dave cut in before I got to it.

  “One town is markedly absent from those lists. New Angeles.”

  And there it was again—the oasis in northern California.

  “You sure about this?” I asked, doubtful.

  Dave shrugged, giving Sadie a quizzical look. “As sure as we can be,” he admitted. “Dispatch is not an option. Too many people. And we’re not sure about the Silo. We have no way to clear them, and considering you were there last before—“

  I shook my head as he trailed off. “Knowing what we know now, I’m convinced that I was already knocked up when they did our blood screening in Aurora.” Thinking along those lines, something else occurred to me. Looking at Sadie, I asked, “How did you get around the screening? I presume that they screen everyone in the settlements, too, not just us outsiders.”

  Sadie nodded. “It was lucky coincidence, really. I started helping in our triage station the week before, and they kept the samples stored in the fridge right there. I just swapped them out.” She looked guilty for a moment, but disbanded it with a smile. “They rescreened the woman I swapped my samples with. She was well past her fifties. They called it a fluke.”

  “Smart thinking,” I agreed, although I didn’t want to consider what would have happened to that woman had she been twenty years younger.

  “So when are we going?” Sadie asked, looking expectantly at us.

  “We are going nowhere,” Nate said before I could hedge around. Sadie’s face fell.

  “But you said—“

  He sighed, rubbing his eyes in frustration before he glanced around, mostly at the walls but also the mountains to the west. “I’d love nothing more than to make sure that we get you out of here this very minute, but we can’t. We’ve done a stellar job painting a target on our backs. Right now I wouldn’t even take my worst enemy with us on the road.” He thought about this for a few seconds longer, looking at me for help. I gave the smallest of shrugs. He was right with that assessment.

  “We’ll find someone else who’ll get you to New Angeles safely,” I promised. “A couple of people owe us favors, and I’m sure that we can throw around enough weight to find the right group for the job. Are you starting to show?”

  She shook her head, trying hard to swallow her disappointment. “The advantage of good genes, I guess. I saw a few pics of my mom when she had me, and she looked barely pregnant just before giving birth, fully clothed. Being tall and lean helps, I guess. But I don’t know how long I can keep this a secret. I’m trying, but, you know…”

  I nodded, understanding.

  “Do you have paper and something to write with?” Nate asked Dave, surprising me. When Dave extended another crumbled piece of paper and a pencil to him, Nate started scribbling furiously on it, using his palm as support. “Here, give this to Moore if you need help,” he told Sadie as he handed her the note. “He’ll vouch that it’s his child, and he’ll make damn sure that nothing happens to you.” At my raised eyebrows, he shrugged. “You didn’t really think I wouldn’t keep a mole embedded here for emergencies?”

  I honestly hadn’t expected that, but in hindsight I probably should have. Moore had been one of Nate’s people who had infiltrated the Green Fields Biotech building and spent the entire summer trekking with us across the country. He’d often been on watch detail with Bates, I remembered, making me guess that they’d been tight. Ordering him to make sure that his friend’s child was safe was a sound move—not that any of Nate’s people would have refused to heed such a call in the blink of an eye.

  Sadie stared down at the note before she pocketed it. “Let’s hope I won’t need it. I don’t know if I can act like we’re a thing, you know?”

  “Not much acting required,” Nate offered. “No one needs to know that it was more than just a fling.” It took me a moment to get what he meant with that, but the way Sadie’s lower lip started to quiver was confirmation enough. Nate only needed to raise his arm and she mashed herself against him, crying softly as he did his best to comfort her. Seeing her obvious grief tore on the scabbed-over wounds on my soul, but over Sadie’s wheat-yellow head Nate gave me a look of warning. Not that I needed that, but it was a good reminder that just because I still felt guilty over Bates’s death didn’t mean this was the time and place to tell Sadie.

  Dave shuffled from one foot to the other, then cleared his throat. “Sadie, you got the patches with you?”

  It took her a moment to let go of Nate, but she wiped furiously at her cheeks until most of the moisture that had gathered there was gone. “Yeah, sure.” Reaching into the pocket of her jacket, she pulled out what looked like a stack of beigy-pink adhesive bandages, about half the size of her palm. She handed them to me. They were orange on the other side, and had a weird, silky texture.

  “One of the girls from the Black Hills group made them,” Sadie explained. “She used to be a makeup artist. If you stick them on your neck, they should mask the marks, at least for casual inspection. The orange color cancels out the dark ink, and the outside should blend with your skin.” She grimaced. “She only had her makeup stuff for light skin tones, so try not to get tanned. If you happen to drop by a makeup counter in a mall next, can you fetch her foundation, concealer, and eyeshadows in orange and all ranges of skin tones that you find? We’re keeping this on the down-low, so we can’t really do a call on the radio for it. I already gave Jason a couple and wrote down the instructions for him.” Her gaze turned shrewd now. “You do know what foundation—“

  Snorting, I interrupted her. “Just because I don’t mind sticking to natural camouflage colors now doesn’t mean I’ve never worn makeup.” No need to tell her that virtually all my knowledge hailed from Sam bitching and moaning over her bad skin days and makeup companies switching out textures. Or something. If I could find the right caliber ammo for all my weapons, how hard could it be to grab a few bottles of makeup?

  “Thanks. That might come in handy,” I offered, not quite sure if I was lying through my teeth or not.

  Nate, on the other hand, seemed less skeptical. “Might help should we have to pretend to be someone else,” he said. “Switching our radio transponder code out is only so useful if they can still count how many of us are marked up.” He had a point there. Of course he did. When didn’t he?

  I would have loved to chat some more with Dave and Sadie—and try to plug up the hole deep inside my chest by assuring her that everything would be all right—but a loud whistle coming from the cars made me look over there. Pia signaled us that they were all but finished unloading. The people that were busy stuffing everything onto the pickup truck that they’d maneuvered through the gate kept eyeing us with unease, but not the outright hostility that Emma had displayed. Their behavior made me wonder if maybe they were simply not used to being outside of their little wall there anymore.

  Once the pickup was back through the gate, the string of cars that had been waiting on the other side came rolling out, Jason in the lead. He got out of his SUV as soon as he’d brought it to a halt next to the Rover,
grinning brightly as he sauntered over to us. Sadie hugged both Nate and me one last time before she flashed Jason a grin and skipped back toward the gate, looking like a silly eighteen-year-old to everyone who didn’t know her well. Dave followed her at a somewhat more sedate pace. I watched Emma watch them approach, immediately descending on her daughter as soon as she had cleared the gate. They had a brief if heated conversation that ended with Sadie stalking off, sulking. I didn’t buy that act for a moment, but she seemed to do a good job fooling her mother. It was such a display of normal behavior that what Sadie had told us seemed even more surreal.

  “Mind if we tag along with you for a day or two?” Jason said, drawing my attention back to him.

  “If you don’t mind getting shot at,” I offered, but left the decision to Nate. No surprise there when he inclined his head, telling Jason to have his guys take up position at the end of our column. That settled, I glanced over to Emma, wondering if there was any sense in trying to talk to her. There wasn’t much I could say, and even less that I thought Emma would be receptive to. The fact that none of the guards looked like the soldiers that we’d had our differences with of late put my mind more at ease than any promises of hers could have. They were just regular folks, like us. Or not, I reminded myself, as I saw one of the younger guards fumble with his rifle for a second. A new wave of sadness swept through me as I realized that, either way, it wasn’t my business. It took returning here for the message to finally sink in—this was no longer home. Home, if there was such a thing for me anymore, were the people standing at my back. Turning away felt just a little easier all of a sudden.

  Someone clearing their throat at the other side of the once-again closed gate made me halt. Bert was watching us cautiously, a look of worry on his face. “Where are you headed next?” he asked.

  I glanced at Nate, almost smirking when I saw him stiffen with what could only be suspicion. “Not sure yet,” he replied, sounding like he didn’t have a care in the world. “Might be heading back to the Silo. Commander Wilkes seems like he has some use for folks like us.” The first part was true, as was Nate’s assessment, but I doubted that we would be heading north again that soon. It was a good answer, though, particularly if he suspected that such information might end up being whispered into the ears of those we didn’t want to cross paths with all too soon again.

  Bert nodded. It was impossible for me to guess whether he had bought that excuse. “I expect you will be digging in for the winter there as well? There has been talk of amnesty as long as the roads are covered with snow, but we haven’t decided whether we want to be part of that yet.”

  Just that phrasing—as if we required anyone’s pardon—made my hackles rise, but this time I was sure that he was trying to tell us something between the lines. Either someone had indeed brought up the points that we’d discussed with Rita in Dispatch—that, come winter, most settlements would do well harboring a group of scavengers, to take care of minor issues that might arise over the months outside of their gates—or it was just another trap waiting for someone to traipse into. Knowing what I knew now, I couldn’t decide if we could allow ourselves not to expect it to be the latter. That very concept made me feel sick. And there I’d thought last year had been bad. At least with zombies and your random cannibals no one expected to be treated fairly.

  A muscle jumped in Nate’s jaw but he sounded pleasant enough as he shouted back. “Good to know. Keep us updated.”

  “Will do,” Bert promised.

  Then there was nothing left to do than get back into our cars and drive off—and that was exactly what we did.

  Chapter 18

  I spent the next thirty minutes gnashing my teeth in silence. Lightning forked across the sky, momentarily blinding me, but the rain that followed turned the day so dark that I gladly shed my sunglasses. Within minutes the soil washed onto the road by previous rainfalls turned it into a mud slide, forcing me to slow down to a crawl. Nothing moved out there except for us and the wind-swept vegetation. I hesitated for another minute but then reached for the radio, keying it to our team frequency that I presumed Jason and his guys had tuned into as well.

  “Anyone wanna stay out in this, or do we look for shelter?”

  The answer was unanimous, and when Nate pointed out an abandoned farm to the south, I sent the car onto the access road leading there. The summer heat had done its own to kill the high grass growing everywhere, but if I could avoid getting stuck in the sudden mud, all the better. It took us a good half hour to clear out the two barns and the farm house itself, a total number of five zombies, two badgers, and an entire horde of raccoons getting displaced. There was some debate whether we should chance leaving the cars in the barns rather than out in the open—with the land this flat around here, lightning might strike and burn down the barn—but in the end comfort won out over paranoia. It was dark as night by the time all of us assembled in the main house, dragging in enough mud that it made me wince even though I had no intention of cleaning up after us.

  I volunteered for guard detail, but Pia had already called out the rotations, leaving both Nate and me, but also Jason and Charlie suspiciously out of it. She made as if to join us in the small office where Nate directed the leaders of the Chargers to, but at the shake of his head she remained in the kitchen, taking care of distributing provisions. I followed Nate into the room, settling my ass against the desk as Nate remained standing and Charlie and Jason sat down on the sofa.

  “Guess you’ll be wanting to know what you missed,” Jason said, getting more comfortable as he leaned back. A cloud of dust rose, making Charlie cough, but Jason took it with an easy smile. “No offense to anyone, but if all you’ve had to rely on are the squints up at the Silo, you’ve been missing out.”

  I noted that Nate didn’t glance at me as he nodded. “Would be great to be all caught up, thanks.”

  “Well, where to start…” Jason mused. “Radio transmissions and Tamara’s bulletins make it sound as if Dispatch has turned into paranoia central, but it’s still business as usual there. Lots of people, lots of booze, and you can’t take a swing without hitting someone who declares how independent and unafraid they all are. Lots of bullshit, of course, but I think you already got that the time you were there.” We both nodded, Nate smiling faintly.

  “It’s not just talk,” Charlie interjected. “People are suspicious, and the rift between the settlements and the scavengers is getting wider. Not everyone’s out there to do the right thing, or to play hero for the people, and you only get burned so many times before you decide that it’s not worth it. Not saying your speech back in Harristown kicked off a revolution, but you’re not the only one who wasn’t afraid to voice their grievances. And in that town it actually helped.”

  Jason nodded. “Last we heard they kicked out the asshole of a mayor and his flunkies who thought it was such a good idea to police us in good ol’ TSA style. Turns out, they used similar scare tactics to keep their own people quiet. After we left, they started talking, and there’s only so much a handful of people can do against the masses, even if they have the guns. Rita sent three scavenger groups down there when she heard that the assholes left the settlement almost without any defenses. They still say they don’t want any trouble with the government so they won’t declare themselves neutral, but I bet that if you need a place to lay low for a week or two, they’ll gladly let you in.”

  That was a lot more than I had expected. Nate looked impressed as well, but his features darkened a moment later. “On the way over to the Silo we ran into a band of soldiers—as you know, that’s where we got our wanted posters from. We almost ran into another group as we were passing by a mall on the way down south. Looks like they’re out there, scouring the abandoned buildings and towns for anything useful. Got any intel on that?”

  Jason and Charlie traded glances that mirrored the anxiety I felt at Nate’s recount. It was one thing to boast that we were all happy to be out on the road, far removed from what nowaday
s counted as civilization, but a lot of that was based on the fact that it was easy for us to find virtually anything that we might need out there. Bringing loot in was one of very few trump cards that we had to make settlements harbor us in times of need. Lacking that, things weren’t looking quite that rosy anymore.

  Charlie was the one to answer. “We’ve heard of groups disappearing, but with everyone and their mother staying off the long-range frequencies at the moment it’s hard to say sometimes. There have been cases of groups turning up days later, unscathed, not even aware that they gave everyone the scare of their lives. We know of more than one group that has decided to drop off the grid to maybe check in once fall forces us all to make plans for the winter. And the streaks have taken care of at least five groups that we know of by now. With people anxious to stay offline they get the warnings too late—“

  “Or there simply isn’t anyone to warn them,” Jason interjected.

  “That, too,” Charlie agreed. They traded glances, and he sounded dejected as he continued. “There’s also talk that some townies plain out shot a number of scavengers that refused to leave, or might have gotten too pesky with their demands. Rita went ballistic when she learned of that, and she’s started blacklisting settlements because of suspicious behavior. Not sure I agree with the method, but she’s getting a lot of backing for it.”

  Nate didn’t comment on that, so I did. “Sounds like she’s establishing herself as the general of the resistance.”

  Jason snorted, shaking his head. “People talk to her. She listens. Ever since Tamara sent out the emergency bulletins about the settlements no longer being safe, it’s chaos on all fronts. No one knows who to trust, mostly because there is no one to turn to. The government would like to establish itself as some such, but so far they haven’t even managed to let us all know whether we still have a president, and how they intend to govern us, except for the clean divide they’ve established. Or tried to, but look how well that worked. Yet both the settlers and the nomads have Dispatch to turn to, and Rita’s as close to a person in charge there as it gets. And with so many extra people making the town burst at the seams it’s in everyone’s best interest if she sends groups where they might be needed, rather than have to feed them on top of everyone else. Last I talked to her she snapped my head off for suggesting we drop by even for a single day. They’re trying to scale up food production as much as possible, but there’s only so much you can do late in the season.” His grin widened as his eyes skipped to Nate. “She might make an exception for you. Then again, probably not, now that you got hitched.”