But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t randomly bump into Gussy, if I was lucky. She was supposedly living here now, so chances were that she might be curious about the traders dropping by.
Under different circumstances, my first stops would have been the weapons dealers and gear traders, but I could see where that was too predictable. So instead I stopped by a few stalls, looked over pottery and pans, and at the third asked, while chatting about stew recipes, if they’d maybe seen a friend of mine that I’d met a couple weeks ago. At first, no one had heard or seen anything from Gussy, but at the fifth or six round I got lucky, and an older woman mentioned that the local seamstress had a sister who might be fitting that description. I didn’t head right there but when the woman noted that someone like me—living on the road all the time—might appreciate some clothes that weren’t badly mended once in a while, I was happy to let her show me the way.
The seamstress’s shop—or rather, the two-room large hole in the wall that served as both her work place and private living quarters—wasn’t what I had expected, but I couldn’t remember if I’d ever been to such an establishment in my life. There were clothes everywhere, as were bolts of fabric and other supplies, covering every available surface. The girl meeting me there—she couldn’t have been much past eighteen, if at all—didn’t look much like I remembered Gussy, but then she was wearing a light summer dress rather than combat gear. Before I could try to come up with a good excuse, my guide helpfully supplied that I was a friend of “dear Augusta,” which made the girl look both irritated and conflicted.
“You know my sister?” she asked doubtfully once the woman had left once more.
“Gussy and I met,” I offered, then decided that it wasn’t worth anything if I continued to hedge around. “I didn’t think it was a good idea to advertise too loudly where and under what circumstances.”
I knew that I’d found the right woman when rather than eye me askance her face took on a slight frown. “Yeah, that was probably wise,” she admitted. “People here aren’t that bad about it, but they’re a suspicious lot.” She then continued to appraise me in a new light, her eyes skipping from my jeans over my tank top. I was sure that this time she didn’t miss how prominent my collar bones had become, or that there were muscles moving under my skin rather than just sinews. “Why are you looking for my sister?”
I shrugged, trying to appear more jovial than I felt. “As I said, we met a while ago. Thought it would be nice to chat again as we were already here. Last time I didn’t get a chance to congratulate her.”
The girl froze, and it took her a few moments to bring emotion back onto her face. Was that fright that widened her eyes?
“Well, she’s not here right now,” she stammered. “And I don’t know when she’ll be back. You can leave a message if you want. Just tell me your name, and I’ll make sure that she gets it next time she drops by.”
Her rushed tone made my hackles rise, but I forced myself to calm down. The way she kept eyeing me now made me guess that she was trying to get a good look at the back of my neck, making the skin underneath the patches itch like crazy. I had to admit, it wasn’t easy to quell the disappointment at hearing the news.
“It’s not that important,” I assured her, pretending like I was interested in the dress that was draped over a chair. “I’ll just tell her next time I meet her.” Pausing, I made sure that I looked as non-threatening as possible as I turned back to the girl. “Just, you know. It’s great to hear that not everyone has given up on having kids nowadays. Last year made it look like, zombies or not, we’d get wiped off the face of the earth within two generations. Someone’s gotta make a difference, right?”
My attempt at sounding joyous must have been worse than I’d feared because the girl didn’t look any less tense now. “Maybe,” she admitted. “I’d just rather it wasn’t happening to my sister, you know? We don’t have a midwife here,” she explained.
“There’s still your mom, right?” I asked, perplexed. “She’s living, what, a week’s drive away?”
For whatever reason that seemed to alarm her even more, but she caught herself a few moments later. “In a pinch, that’s a week too far away.” She offered me a somewhat apologetic smile. “When you grow up with a mother who’s a midwife, you get to hear a lot about what can go wrong. But I’m likely boring you with that.” Her eyes flitted to the door, then to where she’d been sitting at her sewing machine. “So if you don’t need anything else…?”
Biting my lip, I tried to come up with a good reason not to leave yet. Gussy was likely not the only one who could answer the question who the father of the baby was. My eyes fell on that dress again, and I picked it up before I could look like the worst weirdo. “Actually, now that I’m already here I might look for something special. I don’t think my husband has ever seen me in a dress.”
It was an excuse, but as I kept running the soft, almost flimsy fabric through my fingers I couldn’t help but ask myself if it wasn’t the truth. Thinking back to how things had started with Nate, I tried to remember, but came up blank. Generally, wearing clothes hadn’t really been a priority in those first weeks. It was then that I realized—not without mirth—that the first time I’d remained dressed for an extended amount of time around him had been the day when he and his gang had taken over the Green Fields Biotech building—and for various reasons he’d gotten me out of my clothes, repeatedly, that day as well. And after that anything I’d picked up along the way had always been chosen for utilitarian reasons, and more often than not came with layers of tear-resistant materials and extra protective inserts.
Stepping up to me, the girl looked me over again before she eyed the dress critically, but her underlying nervousness didn’t dwindle. “What’s your size? Not sure that will fit you. But I can, of course, tighten the bodice if you stay for a day or two longer.”
Looking down at myself, I shrugged. “I don’t have the slightest clue. My weight’s been kind of fluid these past months.”
She nodded absentmindedly as she turned around and started going through dresses on a pole. “How about you try this one?” She held a navy blue something out to me, followed by a green one. “If you like any of them, we can take it from there.”
“Sure thing,” I said, accepting the garments from her. On the way over to what I thought was supposed to be the changing room I caught a whiff of sweat, making me scrunch up my nose. I should probably have washed more than my hair and the cursory wipe underneath my arms. It felt suddenly sacrilegious to slip on fresh clothes that weren’t my own, but pointing that out now seemed like a true faux-pas. She’d likely realized that earlier, which would explain why she'd seemed so reluctant.
Trying on a dress over a sports bra wasn’t exactly my definition of sexy, and one look into the mirror that was propped up against the wall and I discarded the very idea of the blue dress. I still turned around and struck a pose, should the girl intend to look in, thinking I needed help.
“Say, when exactly is your sister due?” I asked, trying for a light, conversational tone.
“Uhm, December, I think?” came the reply from beyond the curtain, hesitant once more.
I did the math in my head. Should the father be someone other than just your average Joe, she must have been beyond that fabled eight weeks bullshit that Sunny had been dishing out. I wondered how I should try to weasel out of her who he was, but then decided that there was nothing like asking directly.
“Is the dad still around? When I met her she didn’t look like she was attached to anyone, at least not outside of her unit.”
Silence answered me, and while it was hard to judge without seeing her, it seemed thick enough to cut. Her voice was pressed as she replied. “No, he’s not around, far as I know. At least I hope not.”
I couldn’t say what it was about that statement that sent up red flags, but suddenly I had a very different explanation for why Gussy had kept in the background when we’d rendezvoused with the Raiders. It
made me feel insanely stupid to have expected something a little more harmonic. So much for being idealistic.
Swallowing thickly, I ditched the dress, suddenly no longer incensed to keep up this charade. Glancing beyond the curtain where her voice had come from, I looked for the girl. “Listen, I’m sorry if I said something incredibly stupid and insensitive. I didn’t know—“
She shook her head, making me trail off there, but somehow her anxiety seemed to increase. “Did any of the dresses fit?”
“I haven’t tried the second one yet,” I admitted, and ducked back into the changing room mostly to avoid having to look at her. Peachy.
I was still deliberating whether I should pull an utter asshole move and plain ask for how it had happened and if Gussy might appreciate some backup in the form of my trusty Mossberg when suddenly the girl pulled up part of the curtain at the very back, her eyes wide with panic. Alarm slammed into me as I instinctively looked for where I’d deposited my guns, but the stool where I was sure I’d put them down was empty.
“I’m so sorry. Please don’t hate me,” she whisper-hissed. “They already nabbed our mom and Gussy, and they said they’d take our little sister if I didn’t comply with them! I didn’t rat you out, I swear! They probably made you the second you came here. I’m so sorry—“
That was about as far as she got. I felt the air stir behind me and immediately lashed out, throwing my weight behind the punch, but it was too late. My fist collided with an unshaved jaw the moment before strong hands closed around my shoulders like a vise. The biting scent of chemicals filled my nostrils but before I could begin to struggle, the cold, drenched cloth was pressed over my nose and mouth, the fumes alone enough to make my eyes water. I immediately held my breath and screwed my eyes shut, but a punch in the gut made my body react on autopilot, drawing air deep into my lungs—
And then, nothing.
Chapter 20
Awareness returned gradually. The first thing I felt was cold. Cold, hard tiles underneath my palms and cheek. Yet more of the same from my hip down my thigh to my knee, part of my calf, and the outside of my foot. Cold air whispering up my spine, the entire way up from my tailbone. Even before I managed to pry my eyes open I realized what that meant. I wasn’t wearing much, only thin, scratchy cotton between my torso and the tiles. But even through my closed lids I could tell that the light around me was harsh, not that warm tint of sunlight.
The air smelled wrong. Clean, but too clean. Familiar. Like the clean air in a lab, circulating through banks of filters. There was a diffuse ache coming from my stomach—they’d punched me, I remembered—but much more acute stinging from the insides of my elbows.
I finally managed to pry my lids open, crusted closed from tears as they were. Right in front of my nose there was only white—a tiled floor, as the haptic feedback from the pads of my fingers confirmed. More tiles on the wall, although several of them looked cracked from old age.
I forced my muscles to relax from where they’d started to tense up as soon as my foggy mind had cleared enough. No need to alert anyone to the fact that I was back among the living. At least not until I had a few more minutes to try to find out where the hell I was—or for my legs to start moving.
The harsh fluorescent light made more tears well up in my eyes but I forced myself to blink them away slowly, trying to see beyond the floor and wall without moving too much. The wall ended a few inches past where I guessed my toes were, only to meet a pane of glass. Beyond that more of the same, although the floor looked darker—concrete. A sloping floor, with a drain right in the middle of the room. That was all I could see and focus on, but I got the sense that the main part of the room went on way beyond my very limited field of vision.
“Are you sure that you didn’t use a dose that was too high? What you had in that syringe could knock out an elephant.”
A male voice, higher, sounding nervous but trying hard not to.
A second male voice answered the first, this one deeper, gruff. Confident.
“If she’s not awake yet she will come to within the next ten minutes. Don’t trust me or the blood results? Why don’t you go in there and check for yourself? But don’t say I didn’t warn you when she’s choking the very life out of you.”
A sadly rather apt assessment, I had to admit. So much for hoping that wherever I was, whoever had brought me here would sorely underestimate me.
“Nah, I’m good,” the first guy said, his voice even higher. Heck, I knew that voice from somewhere. Only not that scared-shitless cadence. Just where had I—
“See that twitch? She’s awake,” the second voice confirmed. “Told you that her metabolism is fast enough to get the drugs out of her system within the hour. Keep that in mind if you need to shoot her up again. Just because she looks harmless like that doesn’t mean she is. Thought you’d have learned that lesson with that wildcat over there.”
So I wasn’t alone in this… cell? I still hadn’t had a chance to make out what was behind my back, but the partition I was in didn’t have the feel of much space. Curled up as I was, I would probably hit my head on the back wall if I pushed my toes onto the glass panel.
“But why isn’t she moving?” Twitchy Guy protested. “Are you sure that you didn’t paralyze her? What are the side effects of that drug—“
“She’s not moving because she’s listening to you piss your pants,” the other guy jeered. “And she’s trying to learn as much about her environment as she can before she has to give away that she’s wide awake, just as she’s been taught. She’s probably still a little sluggish or else she would have tried to keep her breathing under control. See how the side of her ribcage expands?”
I immediately held my breath, realizing that I was a hint away from hyperventilating, but the damage was already done. Taking a deeper, more measured breath helped clear the last of those cobwebs from my mind. Not that it improved my current situation any—but when Twitchy Guy responded again, I could finally match that voice to a face. Ethan, one of the scientists from Aurora.
Shit.
I debated with myself what to do now, but seeing as my playing possum had already been debunked, there was no sense in continuing this. I briefly flexed my muscles, trying to get a feel for how well they responded, before I pushed myself up, needing only a single sidestep to steady myself. The cotton that I’d felt before turned out to be a typical hospital gown—if atypically short, barely hitting the tops of my thighs. And on top of that it was only held closed in the back by the single tie at the back of my neck. My uselessly unbraided hair hung into my eyes and I pushed it away, but let my hand fall back to my side as soon as I could see moderately well. It cost me a lot not to assume any kind of defensive stance, but staring outside with what I hoped was a blank face was easy. Panic roared through my mind but it was that same kind of fright that I’d gotten all too used to over the past year. Fright that let me mobilize my full strength and speed, adrenaline ready to punch my body into action.
My assessment of my prison had been too accurate for my liking. I could have easily touched the walls to either of my sides, the longest dimension of the partition being the vertical one. It was all tiled walls except for the glass pane, and that looked sturdy enough that I didn’t try kicking it in—yet. Not with the two assholes standing right in front of it, staring at me. At a first glance I couldn’t tell whether it would swing into the room or the cell, and it seemed to seal on three sides except for the bottom where it ended about two inches from the floor. That was likely the reason why I could hear them well enough, if somewhat dampened.
As I glowered through that glass, I did my very best to take in the details of the large room beyond, just like that second guy had assessed. He was wearing standard combat fatigues but no armor, his knife and sidearm the only weapons I could see. But he was tall, buff, and well-fed, and the fact that he knew about my increased metabolism made me guess that there was a good chance that he was speaking from experience. He wouldn’t need any w
eapons to be more than a match for me, and he knew it. As he kept watching me watch him, he leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest, cocking his head to the side, yet he remained mute. The name tag on his uniform read “Taggard.”
Ethan looked exactly like I remembered him, down to the lab coat and shirt he was wearing, if with an extra healthy dose of respect toeing the line to fright. I felt a sick kind of amusement well up inside of me, and I was tempted to bounce at the glass just to see him shrink back. Well, that impulse was new, but then it had been some time since someone had locked me in a glass prison. Story of my life.
As senseless as this staring contest was, I was not going to be the first to back down. If they were waiting for me to cower at the back of my cell, this was going to be a long day. Or night. I had no idea whatsoever how long I’d been out, and with my body incapable of feeling hunger or thirst I couldn’t even go by that. Not that I would have given in to either urge had there been anything provided. From what I could tell there was nothing but me in my cell, not even a toilet or bucket. I thought I’d seen a drain in the corner, making me wonder if they intended to just hose everything down—probably me included—every once in a while. But hygiene standards? Not exactly at the top of my list of priorities right now.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 56