And there was, of course, the possibility that this was just the quiet before the storm, and somehow Taggard had managed to use me as bait for the trap that would break our collective necks once the jaws snapped closed. I doubted that the lives of ten recalcitrant scavengers could be worth the price in blood that his men had to pay, but I would have said exactly the same about the setup at the factory. No longer did I feel stupid for letting my paranoia set the limits of what I thought anyone was capable of—it was reasonable to do so. I couldn’t let that happen. Already, there was too much blood on my hands. I would not be responsible for anyone else to have to lay down their lives for me.
It was that realization that got me sneaking over to the building that housed the radio station. I’d watched Hamish turn that damn thing on. I was sure that I could get it working with some trial and error. The station at Dispatch was always manned, and even if I got that fool on the line again, this time I would make sure to get the right message across. I knew that it was impossible for me to dissuade Nate from coming for me, but maybe if I managed to warn him just what a hornet’s nest I’d maneuvered myself into, he’d ditch the others and come alone. A very slim chance, but better than doing nothing.
The door stood ajar, a good sign as I’d seen the lock on it before, but I was still a few yards away from reaching it when a soft, male voice coming from right behind me made me freeze.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Hamish.
Exhaling slowly, I made myself relax, although every fiber of my being was singing with tension, ready to unleash some of my freshly recharged energy. Turning around, I found him lounging against the wall of the adjacent building, just inside the shadows of an alcove that I hadn’t seen from the direction I’d come from.
“I was just—“
He shook his head, silently telling me to cut the crap.
“I’ve been waiting for you all evening,” he told me, still speaking softly. “To keep you from doing something incredibly stupid.” He gave me a chance to deny his assessment, and when I didn’t, he inclined his head. “They are monitoring our frequencies. Just trying to get a message out will likely get you killed. Shy trader Anna wouldn’t be sneaking around at midnight, trying to warn her people.” Another pause, and I guessed his slight smile stemmed from how I was failing to keep a straight face.
“You know who I am?” I asked, figuring that if I had to take him down any moment now, I might as well find out just how much he knew first.
Hamish gave a noncommittal grunt. “Keeping your hair down was a good idea. They are stupid enough sometimes to go with obvious visual clues only. Makes it easy to sneak certain things right underneath their noses if you just hit the right notes.” He laughed softly to himself before he went on. “Ignoring the weight you’ve lost, you still look a lot like your picture.” He raised his hand placatingly, anticipating that I was about to make my move any moment now. “Only two of the guards have seen the wanted poster, and none of the villagers. As I said, they tend to run ignorant. That’s how they are selected. Thugs that follow orders and don’t know how to think for themselves. None of them would have made a good soldier before, and nothing has changed about that since.”
That assessment rang true to me from what I’d seen of Taggard’s men so far—and sounded awfully close to something Nate would have sneered out.
“You former military?” I guessed.
I got a bright smile in turn. “US Marine Corps, ma’am. Retired for ten years now, but as they say—“
“Once a soldier, always a soldier,” I finished for him.
He nodded. “I trust that your people are smart enough not to waltz up to the gate as they are?”
“I sure hope not,” I admitted, letting out the breath I’d been holding slowly. “Are you and me going to have some issues now?”
“Are we?” he asked back, but shook his head in silent answer to my question. “Truth is, I’d rather see you gone now rather than later, but my quarrel isn’t with you or your people. But you have to understand that I have a responsibility to my people.”
“You mean the guards?”
His snort was derisive enough to almost make me smile. “They are not my people.”
“Then why put up with them?” I had no intention to incite a riot here, but any distraction might be useful.
Hamish continued to smile, but it took on a sad twinge. “If you cause any trouble, you have only yourself to blame. It’s in my interest to keep the peace. I can’t help you,” he clarified. “But I can keep you from doing something incredibly stupid.”
So much for the glimmer of hope his words had ignited inside my chest.
“But you won’t rat me out?”
He shook his head. “I won’t rat you out. I can tell that you are an intelligent, capable woman. Use that smart brain of yours to lay low, don’t cause any trouble, and get on your way again once you have recovered. That’s as far as I can help you.”
It sounded like damn bullshit to me, but that was disregarding what he didn’t tell me. If he knew about me—and could likely guess where I’d gotten the fading bruises all over my body—he also must know about their guards. As much as I wanted to brand him a coward, I could see where he must have reasoned for himself that he was doing what was best for his people—and that was to keep the peace.
“Does your wife know?” I asked. “Does Mary know?”
He confirmed my lucky guess with a low chuckle. “Of course she does,” he replied. “But her hands are as tied as mine.”
It was too easy for me to jump to conclusions, I knew that. They could all be prisoners, trying to make the best of what little freedom they had left. They could all be co-conspirators, deserving swift, cruel punishment. That the truth likely lay smack in the middle of both extremes—and with so many connotations that I could never grasp even a tenth of them, and thus would never get the whole picture—was much more likely.
Either way, I got his message loud and clear. As long as I kept my trap shut and didn’t stir up shit, he would do the same.
That knowledge grated, but if I was honest, Sam was my only reason why I even considered being stubborn and still going my way, even though I knew that potential harm lay down that road. But even without a warning I could tell that this was the sure-fire method to put her in harm’s way—and that was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Thank you. For the warning,” I said, nodding toward the radio station. Hamish acknowledged my words with a nod of his own before he turned away, melting into the shadows of the building. I stared after him for a few more minutes before I retraced my steps back to the dormitory, where I spent the rest of the night staring up at the ceiling, trying to come up with a plan how I could survive the next days—and be able to live with myself.
Chapter 32
Hamish kept his word. No one accosted me during the night, or over breakfast the next morning. Alert, rested, and fed, boredom soon became my number one enemy, or so it felt to my overactive imagination. The guards mostly ignored me. John and one of the others kept pestering the women, but as the day passed, I realized that they’d become most proficient at avoiding the guards. Usually one or two of them eventually happened to disappear with some of the men, but the majority of the women spent their days doing normal household chores without being bothered. At first that didn’t look very effective from me—clinically speaking—but on the evening of my third day in Halsey I realized that there must be more behind it, a pattern, and that made things quite obvious. Mary was tracking the fertile days of her herd, thus deciding who got to bite the bullet. It still seemed like a degrading exercise to me, yet not just Sam’s protest but also the general air of the group at large made me guess that I was the only one convinced of that. Maybe they’d brainwashed them all. Maybe there was something in the water. Whatever it was, by that third evening in Halsey I was ready to give up any urge to incite rebellion. Let them do their thing. They weren’t my responsibility. So what if they all ended
up raped and slaughtered for the sake of one man’s cruel sadism?
Then the fourth morning dawned, and still no one had accosted me. I kept watching everyone like a hawk—the guards, the men, the women—but except for not going out of their way to be nice to me because I was an outsider, they were all more or less pleasant enough. Sam wasn’t that much of a difference there, I realized with a sinking feeling in my heart. As it was so often the case, my memory of her, colored by grief and guilt, was different than the actual person. All curiosity about my life seemed to have been satisfied on day one, and either she didn’t know how to handle what I’d told her, or she was plain indifferent to it. As much as that hurt, it made what I knew I had to do a little easier—to leave her to her own devices.
Or so I kept telling myself.
I couldn’t help but get antsy as the day passed by and still there was no caravan approaching the settlement. Whenever no one gave me anything to do, I went up onto the roof of the dormitory to look out over the rolling grassland outside the palisade. I’d acquired a straw hat in the meantime that helped stem the tsunami of tears somewhat, but it was still a futile task. Just watching the guards should have been enough, really.
A sudden commotion by the shed that housed the chickens that the eggs for breakfast came from drew my attention away from the horizon. Several women were gathered there, getting increasingly agitated. I hesitated but then decided to investigate. It wasn’t like I was doing anything but stand around uselessly most of the day—might as well do it where something interesting was happening.
As I rounded the back of the house, I saw that they were all huddled around a woman who was clutching two chickens to her chest. The chickens didn’t seem to enjoy that a lot, which resulted in a racket of avian protestation, only furthered as the woman kept imitating them between maniacal bouts of laughter. That someone didn’t have all their chickens in the coop was quite obvious—and I felt myself start to grin at that pun, it would have made Burns howl with laughter—until sudden recognition made me stop in my tracks. What were the odds…
“Don’t mind her,” one of the women gathered around, trying to liberate the chickens, told me. “She’s been like that since she got here.”
I ignored that advice, instead stepping closer, sneezing momentarily when the feathers flying around tickled my nose. That made the madwoman on the floor focus on me, cementing my guess when our gazes connected. Oh, she definitely didn’t look sane, but that, right there, was someone I knew.
“Kat?” I murmured, then repeated her name a little louder. She cocked her head to the side, not quite confirming that it was her—or that she still recognized her name—but that was, without a doubt, one of my old co-workers from the lab. But what was she doing here? And how had she survived? Last time I’d talked to her she’d already started showing symptoms, just as she’d been about to go home—
My train of thought was derailed when she suddenly let go of the chickens and surged to her feet, making me back up instantly as she took two steps toward me.
“Why, isn’t that the ghost whisperer?” she crooned, her mad gaze fixated on my face. “Whispering to the ghost at the coffee machine!”
I didn’t know what I had expected after how she’d behaved with the chickens, but that statement made my paranoia rise, and not just because she uttered it in a mad sing-song voice.
Sam appeared by my side, her hand tentatively pulling on my upper arm. “Don’t listen to her,” she told me. “She’s, well. Quite obviously not herself. Just wait a moment until she starts—“
Kat evidently had other ideas than to let Sam explain as she continued her muttering, interrupting her.
“He is dead, so how can he tell you all his secrets? Or is it you who is sharing all your secrets with him?” Her head flipped from one side to the other, but her gaze remained trained on me. “Why do you share secrets with the monsters? The monsters don’t listen! They eat you!” The last part she screamed, spittle flying from her lips, and the laugh that followed was on par with the rest.
“And there she goes again,” Sam grumbled, then explained with a sigh when I still made no move to do more than back away slightly. “It’s always about the monsters. At first we thought she meant the zombies, but it just makes no sense. We don’t think they’re real. They’re just a figment of her imagination.”
Or were they? My mind was racing, but it was hard to make sense of anything with Kat still staring at me like that.
“How did she get here?” I asked Sam. “Were you with her from the start?”
Sam shrugged. “I told you that they came to fetch you? Remember, she only lived down the street from us, in that new high-rise. After they bundled me into a car, they got her, too. She was sick with a high fever by then, but they gave her that same shot they gave me to bring it down. With me it worked, but the fever must have fried her mind. When they got us out of the city she started screaming when she saw what was going on down there. She’s been like this ever since. Always talking about the monsters.”
I remembered her telling me about that, but I had been too exhausted to properly listen to her then—and make any possible connections. “Who exactly was it that fetched you back then?” I asked. “You said they were soldiers?”
Sam nodded, a hint of irritation crossing her face, either at my questioning, or Kat’s unnerving staring. “I don’t remember what branch they were, but some had FEMA patches on their uniforms. I only got one name, from their commanding officer. Captain Hamilton.”
I had to suppress a curse. Of course it had been him—and if I wasn’t completely wrong, Burns, Martinez, and Cho had likely been part of that group, too, before they’d all ended up at the Green Fields Biotech building. I’d never bothered to ask them what they’d been up to leading to us ending up together, beyond a few tidbits that had been related to the spread of the virus. After that it had been all about our continuing survival. Resentment wanted to come up inside of me but I quickly stomped it down where it belonged; none of them could have known about Sam, so even if they’d seen her, none of them would have made the connection. To them the feverish survivor they might have helped rescue had no connection to the woman in the photo that I’d spent way too many lonely nights clutching to my chest. It didn’t matter, really.
But the involvement of the same old parties in the same old shit that kept threatening to drown me was one detail that I wasn’t going to ignore. Of course, just because Bucky had been in charge of the operation that had rounded up Sam and Kat, he didn’t necessarily have to be responsible for the shit that Taggard was up to—but they’d both been at the factory, and those were way too many coincidences to ignore. Just thinking about all that made me tense, my fingers curling into fists.
“Why were you talking to the ghost?” Kat whispered from far too close, making me shy back once more from her. The look on her face was still insane, but the spark of intelligence in her eyes was too uncanny to ignore. “What secrets did you share? I always said, they should have made you a ghost, too. You were too close to the ghost. I always said you could finish what he started, that’s why you should be a ghost, too.”
I couldn’t help it; her words made my heart slam into my throat, my fight-or-flight instinct roaring to life—and not just because she basically had just told me she’d aimed to have me killed.
“Kat, who is the ghost?” I asked, kind of needlessly so. My guess was that she was referring to Raleigh—and that she’d seen me talk to Nate, at that coffee machine, and had rightly identified him as Raleigh’s brother.
“Oh, you know. No need to rehash useless details,” she replied, giving me a grin that was way too wide—and proved clearly that with her mind, her sense for dental hygiene had gone down the drain as well. “They said it had to be done. Thecla did it. She knew it had to be done,” she confirmed my guess. “But it broke her. Made her weak. I told her, she had to do it again, with you, but she wouldn’t. Said you were too important a resource to waste.” I had to admi
t, that did sound like my old supervisor—and it made a lot more sense now that she’d murdered Raleigh if that hadn’t been her idea from the start.
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked. “Who told her to—“
Kat made a hissing sound, cutting me off. “Don’t say it! We’re not allowed to say it where anyone can hear! They already have laid all the leads, the bait is ready. If you say too much where the wrong people can hear, the plan won’t work!” She threw her head back and laughed, but her attention snapped back to me a moment later, all serious again. “The plan has to work! How will everyone know about the monsters if they cannot see them? They are everywhere! You have to know that they are monsters! How will you know if you cannot see?!”
She started crying, tears streaming down her face, fright making her eyes huge. Sam tried to pull me away again while Margo reached for Kat, but in a moment of surprising situational awareness Kat made a lunge for me, her fingers digging into my shoulder so she could keep me in place.
“They are trying to cover it all up! They always cover it up. But not this time! The plan has to work! Lori promised that it would work! She promised!”
Her nails bit into my skin, underscoring her vehemence, but from one moment to the next she let go, sagging in on herself. Tears and sobs turned to laughter as she looked at the sky above, her fingers raised as she seemed to be trying to reach for the single cloud in the sky, smiling like a child. Mary joined Margo and together they pulled Kat away toward the house behind the chicken coop. I stared after them, trying to make sense of anything Kat had said—and a lot of it made sense, even if it was easy to see it as the ramblings of a madwoman.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 70