It turned out, we didn’t need Bucky harassing me to turn life needlessly complicated once more—the resident undead population was more than happy to step in. We were less than ten miles east of Ajou when we had to stop and backtrack for the first time because our chosen route was blocked by the undead, shuffling this way and that in the freezing cold. How they could still move, let alone be a menace, was beyond me, but the five we had to do away with had looked dead for good, half frozen in a ditch—but weren’t, as we found out as we passed. They were hard enough to kill as it was. Back to the other side of a low, sloping hill, where we ran into another obstacle, this time a pack of wolves. They didn’t attack us but didn’t back away far enough to be out of shooting distance, either—which we couldn’t do as it would have drawn the attention of the hundreds of zombies that had forced us to take this route. By afternoon, I was so keyed up from watching anything and everything like a hawk that I repeatedly jumped at boughs swaying in the light wind or leaves crunching under a badly placed boot. Maybe making myself that keyed up hadn’t been my brightest idea, but I was loathe to admit that. And I wasn’t the only one, judging from the many wide-eyed looks I caught all through the day.
With our provisions freshly supplemented by the French, there was no need to go foraging, nor to stop before it got too dark to move on. Red led a team that cleared out a small cottage in the middle of what had been a vineyard, and it took us another hour to drag all the corpses of the previous residents far enough away not to draw too much attention to our hideout—and those we encountered while establishing said perimeter. Our home for the night still reeked of spilled zombie guts, but it was so damn cold outside that being on watch detail wasn’t much of a relief. Feeling the difference now, I couldn’t delude myself anymore—I’d been damn near in a constant stupor until Parker had cut me up, only that I hadn’t realized then how much my mind had been running on autopilot. I told myself this was an improvement, but a debatable one at times.
The cottage had a single large room, and once the group up for first watch had exited, it only made sense for me to dump myself in the next available spot as close to the makeshift fire we had going in the middle of the room, right between Cole and Hill. When they both eyed my pack curiously, I smirked. “What, afraid my girl cooties will rub off on you?”
“Still debatable whether you’ve stopped being contagious yet,” Cole grumbled under his breath but shuffled to the side so I could park my ass on one of the makeshift benches—a couple of still-frozen logs we’d dragged inside—next to him. It was a valid question, but nothing I felt like worrying about.
“Not like you could catch it,” I offered. “Nor will you get any chance to.”
Hill guffawed at that—or the face Cole was making—and watched with amusement as Burns, Tanner, and Nate found their own places not too far away but for once not clustered around me. While Burns didn’t seem to mind, Nate was sporting that awfully neutral look once more that he had been donning since the beach.
“Just weird that you don’t keep that cliquey thing up you’ve had going until now,” Cole pointed out.
I shrugged, digging into my pack for some jerky. “The last few days I’ve slept in the same room with you all, with not a single weird comment from anyone, and now you complain about the lack of segregation? Just be happy I don’t ask for cuddles to warm up quicker.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I prefer to keep my hands and dick.” He didn’t need to glance in Nate’s direction to underline who he seemed to be afraid might make him part with the aforementioned body parts.
That made me laugh in earnest. “Trust me, I’m more than capable of doing any required dismembering myself.”
Everyone was too busy to continue talking as the beans and rice were passed around, but as soon as he’d treated himself to seconds, Hill got chatty. “So, what’s the deal with you and Gabriel Greene? Considering how the French were salivating all over him, you did a moderately good job acting like you were happy to hear from him, but I’ve seen that same level of resentment come off you in waves whenever something ruffles your feathers. He’s your closest ally and still you can’t stand him?”
Hamilton was lurking around outside so I didn’t get the chance to offer any nonverbal comparisons, but I wasn’t opposed to the other kind, either. “Does it come as such a surprise that I’m able to work with someone even if I absolutely can’t stand them?” I didn’t even try to make the fake smile on my face look anything but.
Cole snorted, but Hill wasn’t satisfied yet. “There’s gotta be a story in there somewhere. No need to spill all your trade secrets; we know that bunch at the coast like to keep their cards close to the vest. Just dish on your personal dirt. There’s got to be something. People you just don’t like don’t draw that level of ire from you.” He pointedly glanced at where Russell and Parker were hunkered down a good distance from our cozy little corner.
I waited to see whether Nate or Burns wanted to offer up something, but Nate had gotten busy mending a tear in the side of his pack, while Burns—and, surprisingly, Tanner—were all ears. I signaled Burns to hand over a tea refill, cradling the cup in my hands more for warmth than sustenance.
“Not much to tell, really. He tried to bash my head in and strangle me, and I’m known for being a vindictive bitch.”
That got me some surprised looks, Hill choking on his beans for a moment, eyes wide. “And you didn’t kill him for that?”
Strangely, his surprise felt rather satisfying. I allowed myself a small grin to go along with the sentiment, even though the memory made me want to frown.
“I did dump a bucket of shit on him for that,” I offered. “Literal bucket of shit,” I clarified when I got more odd looks. “Long story.”
“We got all night,” Cole remarked.
“It’s a good one,” Burns chortled under his breath. At my less than nice glare, his grin spread. “Not sure I ever got the full version. You weren’t quite that talkative in the early days.”
“Suddenly finding myself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse kind of took precedence,” I harped, but his continuing grin worked to mollify me, as usual. Several of the other soldiers had stopped pretending like they weren’t listening in, so I heaved a theatrical sigh and resigned myself to my fate… until I caught Nate’s smirk. “It’s all your fault, asshole,” I griped.
I got a very bland look from him back. “It’s a good story,” he insisted. “And my plan worked better than I could have set up on my own.”
A few of the soldiers looked surprised, among them Aimes and Rodriguez, so I decided why not put the blame where it belonged? But Greene first.
“You all know that Greene was the CFO of the biotech company I used to work for? Daddy owned it, that’s why he had the job.” Although, knowing what I knew now, I wasn’t quite that sure about his lack of qualification, yet I didn’t need to tell them that. “Until the day before the shit hit the fan in that part of the country I never really had anything to do with him. We had a weird company policy going on, enforced by our HR hag, where it was the women’s fault somehow that the sleaze ball that was the boss’s son was oozing his charm all over them. Spending most of my time in a lab coat and scrubs, or T-shirts and jeans, kind of kept me off his radar as long as he had the office staff to harass.” I briefly wondered what had become of that woman, until I remembered that she’d been eaten by shamblers. Or had she stepped on a mine? Almost being buried by a detonating building will do that to your short-term memory, I figured. “Anyway, I clashed with the HR hag a few times but I don’t think Greene knew I was working for his father’s company until that day.”
Surprisingly, Aimes was the first to interrupt my merry tale. “You and clashing with authority figures? Who would have thought.”
The sentiment behind that statement made me feel all gooey and warm. “I was wearing shirts she deemed as inappropriate. That’s the most offensive thing I ever did.”
Nate was trying to hide a smile, pro
bably for the very same reason as me. Ah, how things had changed. When he caught me looking, he saluted me with his mug. “They were borderline questionable shirts.”
“They had funny slogans on them,” I insisted. His smirk let me know that he must have seen more than one of them, although I’d made sure that I’d dressed a little less dorky—most of the time—on the few occasions of our clandestine meetings. “Do you still remember which one I was wearing that fateful Friday? Because I sure as hell don’t.”
“Sure do,” he drawled, spiking my ire some more.
“It was the periodic table of elements one, right?” That flicker of a memory came up for a second.
Hill looked downright confused. “Nerdy, sure, but that doesn’t sound like a dress code violation to me.”
Nate’s smile was a bright one. “It had the periodic table printed on it, but the script was the questionable part. ‘Chemists do it on the table—periodically’ might rub some people the wrong way.”
I suffered through the round of laughter with as much grace as I could muster, which wasn’t a lot. “Har, har, I get it. At least I’m not a stuck-up prude.” The general amusement continued, also spreading to Burns and Tanner. Couldn’t let that fly. “Well, at least I gave those yahoos a run for their money when they tried to round me up. More than anyone else, far as I remember.”
Cole, if anything, found that statement hilarious. “You tried to hide in a supply closet?” he ventured a guess.
“Nope, I escaped into the ventilation ducts. Twice, I should add. Made them chase me all across the building, including Zilinsky shooting me out of the ducts. And if I hadn’t managed to run into the wrong staircase that ended on the roof, I might have escaped you altogether.”
More laughter, but this time semi-appreciative. Burns in particular found that part hilarious. Cole was still a little doubtful. “How did that shark of a woman miss you?”
“On purpose, I’d guess,” I had to admit. “She was trying to scare me, not actually kill me. I wouldn’t be sitting here otherwise. She changed her mind after I bashed Greene in the head with the bucket full of shit and tried to kick the living crap out of him. Start of a wonderful friendship.”
It was weird to see the round of nods now after they’d made fun of me just moments before.
Aimes scrunched up his face, confused. “I feel like I’m not getting half of that. You two were screwing around before he blew up the building? And what exactly is his fault?”
Nate had abandoned his busywork in favor of the conversation so I let him fill in the blanks. “Yes, and she blames me for Greene coming after her.”
That version was way too edited. “First off, we weren’t just ‘screwing around,’” I clarified. “He had the bright idea of befriending me first because he thought he might need my help to pull off that mission.”
Cole’s answering grin was bordering on nasty. “And then you just slipped and ended up on his dick, or what?”
“Pretty much,” I said, not giving him the satisfaction of flinching. “Went on for a couple of weeks before, one Friday afternoon, he strolled into my workplace just as I was getting coffee, and minutes later, they blew up all of the possible entrance points and let everyone except a choice few people go.”
“While you were hiding in the ducts,” Aimes filled in, still sounding skeptical.
I didn’t try to hide my vexation. “Exactly. One of the new security guards tried to fetch me and when I got suspicious, I figured I might as well be a little cautious. I overheard a few conversations, then made the mistake of not being stealthy enough and they caught me. They threw me into that damn glass cube of a temporary prison with the others—the previous company reception. After the only other scientist qualified for the high security labs blew herself up—”
“Wait a minute,” Hill interrupted. “How did that happen?”
Nate responded this time, scratching his head. “I left a bunch of grenades lying around. One of my guys insta-converted when he ate a contaminated chocolate bar and she used the moment of distraction to kill herself.”
“She was the one who murdered his brother,” I helpfully supplied. “We think she was part of those idiots who caused all this. When she realized her plan was working, she chose to absolve herself of her guilt. Coward to the last second.”
Glances were exchanged until Cole picked up the thread. “So Greene realized that your Missus was your backup plan, and to avoid playing into your hands, he came after her.”
Nate nodded. “I made that rather obvious.”
“And you beat him up,” I added. Nate allowed himself a small, satisfied smile that made me roll my eyes at him. “You provoked him. He reacted. And I ended up having to scrub shit and piss out of my hair.”
“A true modern love story,” Burns enthused between bouts of chuckles.
Nate made a placating gesture that I ignored. “As I said, couldn’t have planned this any better. Admit it. By the time you realized what was going on, you were already convinced that helping me was the right thing to do. I just added a dash of self-preservation to your motives to make the bitter pill a little easier to swallow.”
I didn’t give him that point, instead continuing my recount, jumbled as it had gotten. “Long story short, I did help him. Also to place the explosives down in the hot lab to make sure that any material stored down there would be destroyed for good. Then it occurred to me that I actually knew how to get into the vault where they stored the frozen viruses, so I locked him in the decontamination chamber, manually destroyed what remained of the shit his brother had been tinkering with, and that’s that.”
Cole looked less than enthusiastic about my deeds than they still made me feel. “You do realize that if you hadn’t done that, we might not have to be freezing our asses off here?”
“Doubt it,” I opined. “The woman who was helping him likely destroyed anything of value of his current research seeing as she was actively sabotaging it all. And from what little I’ve seen of what they were doing, none of that would have done anyone much good. It was child’s play compared to what they did where we’re headed now.”
A few glances were exchanged, lending Burns time to drop another bomb. “You left out the part where you tore one of your gloves pulling that last stunt, and that’s why you went all YOLO on his ass and fucked him right outside that decontamination shower and the shit ton of C4 that you had planted all over the place.”
While I waited for the laughter—some of it disbelieving—to die down, I snorted at Burns. “It’s disconcerting sometimes how much you know about my sex life.”
“It’s entertaining,” came his answer, making me shake my head with mirth. He kind of had a point, I had to concede that much.
Yet Aimes still wasn’t done. “Pardon my French, but I still don’t get what the huge deal was about you.”
“Gee, you’re so sweet,” I shot back.
“Seriously. Anyone can walk into a lab and blow shit up. You don’t need expertise for that.”
It was only then that I realized that I’d hashed over too many details. “Not a normal lab, asshole. A BSL-4 lab. That’s biosafety level four, as in, everything in there will kill you. That’s where they keep shit like ebola. You know, with the funny-looking positive-pressure suits? Even though they’d tried to clean it all up beforehand, he was shitting his pants having to go in there alone, on his own. He wanted me along because I’d been working in such environments for a long time, and I knew exactly how to get everything right to keep him from accidentally killing himself. I wasn’t just some random trained lab monkey. I was a superhero lab monkey, damnit.” Something else occurred to me as I looked at the faces around me. “You guys realize that the lab we’re headed for is one of those labs, too? Yes, they need my retina scan to make it easier to get through the front door, but the reason Richards out there is playing good cop is because he knows that it will be his ass on the line with me right next to him when we go in there. At least I presume he’ll c
ome with me to collect what we need, because I don’t see Hamilton being stupid enough to risk being in there alone with me.”
Silence answered me, and it was a heavy, uncomfortable one. I got the sense that, somehow, their briefing hadn’t contained all the specifics. That even Aimes seemed to back off now made me mad rather than happy—I’d spent the last year being a huge pain in their asses, and it was that detail that made them suddenly respect me?
Nate, for once, turned out to be the mitigating voice of reason. “I think they knew that. It’s just easier to ignore it when what might kill you isn’t something you can stare down and actively fight.”
“Is that supposed to impress me?” I huffed.
His silent warning told me to back down… and for once I decided to heed it.
“It’s not like they’ll make all of you walk into the high-risk zone,” I explained with a throwaway gesture of my tea mug. “My guess is, they’ll test that the air isn’t contaminated, and leave the potentially hot zone for me. Whatever may be lurking outside of that is definitely something you can shoot and kill, if it doesn’t kill you first. Those labs are built to withstand pretty much everything shy of a direct hit with a nuke, maybe even that. That’s why we needed several bags full of explosives just for the inner shell of the hot lab to make sure it would be completely destroyed, including any possible contaminants.” It wasn’t lost on me that I now freely associated myself with Nate and his lot, and although it still felt like a lie, considering what other lines were drawn here, it made the most sense.
Green Fields (Book 9): Exodus Page 10