Green Fields (Book 9): Exodus

by Lecter, Adrienne

  Hamilton’s orders had been clear—we needed to get to the boats, but it wouldn’t do us any good if the shamblers came after us the moment we stepped outside. From their sheer number it was obvious that creating a diversion wasn’t something that would work, so avoidance was the name of the game. At least the bite of the cold chased away the blanket of exhaustion that kept spreading through my thoughts.

  I signaled Munez that I was going to check to the right—toward the horde. Everything inside of me screamed to go the other way, but if there was a chance that we could sneak out through the back, someone needed to check on what we might be running from if the plan went to hell. I used slow, deliberate motions to inch my way along the front of the buildings, hating how heads all over turned in my direction, eyes watching me—yet none had that focus and intelligence in them that the freaks had shown. That didn’t change a thing about their immense numbers, and after watching them for a good five minutes I decided that this wasn’t the way out.

  Munez had returned from his brief check the other way, and when he gave me a quick nod of confirmation that the straight route down the plaza was still the better option, we started scouting that way. “Clear” was relative as even getting to the other end of the building took us several minutes and seven downed shamblers. The cold left them sluggish and easier to kill, but all that was relative.

  While Munez secured the gap between this building and the next, I sneaked back inside to give the others the all-clear. I didn’t get more than a glimpse at Nate before I had to go back out. Wu and Murdock would be carrying the makeshift stretcher, and Burns had Gita partly draped over one shoulder. I forced a lid on my worry and stepped out to make sure the way ahead was clear.

  Our cleanup was already drawing attention, the first enterprising shamblers falling on their now permanently dead brethren. The wet sounds they produced made me sick—but they also did a good job masking the sounds my movements inadvertently produced. More and more crept closer to investigate, and I realized that they’d likely been drawn by the dead bodies we’d left on our way in. It wasn’t that hard to keep adding to that, so that was the strategy I proposed in hushed tones over the com. The rescue effort ceased for a while, a small group of guards remaining with the wounded while the rest swarmed out to bash in heads and sever spines. It was a grueling, painstakingly stop-and-go effort, and more than once it was luck that my too-quick motions in downing a zombie didn’t get the entire mob to come after me. Before long, I was sweating from both tension and exertion, my muscles twitching all over. I felt myself sliding ever so slowly toward that crash that I knew was coming, but I couldn’t let myself succumb to that yet.

  It was close to midnight by the time we’d created two grisly, bloody lines along the sides of the plaza, and none of the undead bystanders paid us any heed anymore. My leg was killing me, and I doubted I would have managed to run even if my life had depended on it. Thankfully, it depended on being slow and stealthy, instead. We finally reached that ramp by the park deck, and I allowed myself a last, lingering look across the bridge at central Paris. Even though it was twice as deadly at night, it looked so fucking peaceful in its grand old splendor.

  I couldn’t wait to be out of here and never see any of it ever again.

  The squatters were still inside the park deck, and several of them had come out to investigate. Cole made as if to come after them but I signaled him to back down and instead wait until they had passed and joined those repurposing the shamblers we’d done away with. One group passed, giving us a few minutes respite. That was enough to get Hamilton, Richards, Burns and his burden, and Munez past them to clear the lower parts of the ramp. Up here, we had to wait another fifteen minutes to let the next group of four through, plus the makeshift stretcher. I forced myself not to follow their progress but watch the undead instead, who were still watching us. Then we caught another break and the last of us took their chance, crossing onto the ramp. Just before ducking behind the balustrade, I caught a last look deeper into the vast, open space, and that’s when I saw them—an entire huddle of a good thirty of the emaciated, smart ones. Only half of them were naked, their skins darkened with what must have been fresh blood. But rather than come after us, they kept watching as well—waiting for us to finally vacate their territory. I was more than ready to oblige them.

  I was one of the last to make it off the ramp and across the road between the car wrecks, all still swarming with shamblers but with enough cover to avoid them if we just took enough time to let them walk past. Everyone was already in the boats—that were still where we’d left them—and I was grateful for Cole helping me down. I was again riding with Ines although Noah had switched over to the boat that Hamilton had commandeered as his. It was hard not to notice that none of the possibly infected was in that boat—Parker and Russell were with Burns and Gita in the one piloted by Raphael, and Munez climbed in behind where I sat down in the middle of the cargo space, pulling Nate onto my lap—after drawing my Beretta. I wasn’t stupid enough to expect to survive should Nate die and convert, but I sure as hell was keeping him from killing anyone else.

  Once everyone was stowed away, we cast off, the engines still silent. That made steering problematic, but since it kept us from drawing attention—such as from the bridge jumpers—it was the best way to go. It only took a few minutes for the last skyscraper to fall out of sight as the gently rocking boats were swept away by the black waters of the Seine.

  Chapter 19

  Traversing the locks on the way upriver had been a chore. Now, it was all but impossible. We only had to make it across one barrier before we reached a small, uninhabited island where we moored the boats and crawled on land. I barely managed to drag my own weight up the gentle slope. Helping Cole and Hill get the stretcher out of the boat made me hunch over and dry heave. I found a cozy tree trunk where I dropped my pack and Nate’s, and then settled in next to his prone body. No guards this time, not that they were necessary. Richards made a last round, forcing everyone to eat a few bites from their provisions before he let us crash—and crash hard we did.

  I forced myself to remain awake—or at least something resembling that—but my muscles turned to liquid gelatin, not even trembling with the shakes I’d had before. Small things like blinking felt like a tremendous task. Two or three hours in, the idea of simply no longer breathing so I could die felt like a great concept, but my lungs kept expanding whatever I did. The gun in my hand started calling my name loudly, but raising that arm was too much of an effort. Besides, I had to stay alive to make sure Nate did, too. Somehow, that thought kept me going through the night and into early morning. From what I could see of the others, none of them felt much better, but most refused to show it so I very well couldn’t publicly fold in on myself. I’d never done hard drugs, but this felt like the worst kind of withdrawal ever.

  And that was just the physical punch to the gut. Only fourteen of us were left, and if I’d miscalculated with the serum I’d grabbed from cold storage, that number would very soon drop to nine. Eight, if Nate didn’t pull through. Eight out of twenty. Except for Tanner, I hadn’t exactly enjoyed the company of those no longer with us, but that number was like a beacon of horror searing into my mind. How could anything warrant casualty numbers like that?

  Things didn’t get better as the sun rose, but the strain on my bladder became too much, and the hole where my stomach used to be needed to be filled. On the way back from relieving myself, I checked on Gita and Munez, mostly because they were less than five steps of deviation away. Gita was still burning up but her body seemed to have quieted down—no more violent shaking, and since she hadn’t started vomiting blood, I took that as a good sign. Munez was tired but since he hadn’t received the booster, it was normal exhaustion and he was actually doing better than the rest of us, starting a small fire for warming water for tea and getting some rice and beans going. I left Russell and Parker to be someone else’s problem, instead returning to my comatose patient.

&n
bsp; It was still cold as fuck but I forced myself to check on Nate’s wounds. The glue was doing its thing but it was obvious from the swelling and how pliable the barely healed wounds were that yes, there was pus building underneath the fresh scar tissue, and I’d get to go back in soon enough to clean them out. Some of the bites looked slightly infected—which was alarming to a point—but none got worse. His breathing was still slow but sounded clearer now. His eyes were swollen and crusty from tears constantly leaking out of them; nothing I could do about that.

  Getting some hot liquid into myself helped; eating, not so much, but I would have had to keep something down for more than a minute at a time to get some sustenance. Mid-morning, Munez made the rounds, distributing bags of what looked like saline solution but must have packed more of a punch than that since I felt immediately better after a third of the infusion had made it into my veins. At first I wondered why they hadn’t hooked us up to those right away, but it was kind of obvious—as long as there were still traces of the booster in our system, it made no sense to try to replenish anything if it would just burn up immediately, anyway. Nate got a bag as well, but I didn’t see any change.

  I would have loved to spend the rest of the day—and the coming night—on the island, but Hamilton called for us to break up camp soon after the first soldiers managed to more than simply drag themselves from one spot to the next. It was only after we got the first boat into the water that Russell broke down, hurling up rice, beans, and what looked like a gallon of blood. His eyes were feverish and bruises started forming on his neck and cheek, his wet coughing a dead giveaway that his lungs were filling with phlegm. Nobody said anything—not even Hamilton, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d pulled out a gun and shot Russell at the first sign of infection. What he did do was cold-cock Parker who was about to descend into a panic attack.

  Two more locks, and we found another cozy island with only a handful of shamblers on it, but something we absolutely needed—shelter. My body felt weighed down with lead as I helped clear the buildings, tasked with killing the undead so someone else could drag them to the shore and hurl them into the river. My muscles felt frozen stiff even after an hour of heavy work, and it took a good thirty minutes inside for my skin to start itching as it slowly thawed to more normal temperatures. And still no change from Nate.

  Gita started getting better during the night, although it wasn’t that noticeable. She remained curled in on herself, staring at the wall of the small hut, not responding to anything going on around her. Which wasn’t much, at first, until Russell slid into the last stage of infection. At his request, Hamilton and Cole helped him up so he could drag himself outside. Richards and a few of the others followed. I didn’t; I really didn’t need to see this, and since we’d barely exchanged ten words since we’d met, it felt right not to intrude on their moment. I still felt my throat seize up as a single shot rang out through the night, answered by fifteen minutes of howls and screams from the riverbanks. Burns cast me a questioning look but I didn’t respond. What was there to say?

  I finally slept a couple of hours that night, but never deep enough not to rouse when anyone moved too much somewhere around me. That helped somewhat, but I still didn’t refuse another infusion bag when offered. We got ready in the morning, shortly after the sun rose, to set out on the next step of our journey.

  That was, until Parker started to babble maniacally about having a sore throat, and for someone to check his temperature, and oh no! We were all gonna die! Richards tried to reason with him that he was fine—he would have shown signs had he been infected hours ago, but he and Munez both were doing okay. None of the others showed any weird signs, either, but Parker wouldn’t listen. Richards finally forced him to swallow a handful of pills—or rather, had Cole and Hill hold him down and cut his air off until he swallowed them—that left Parker borderline catatonic, but the game was on again once Parker pushed through the effects of the drugs late afternoon. We were past the last stretch of the river that was familiar to us, passing the riverbank by the golf course in somber silence. We still didn’t use the engines, relying on the currents of the Seine alone to sweep us toward the ocean. We still had four days left until our rendezvous on the beach, so why invite trouble?

  Not that trouble wasn’t usually quite happy to invite itself.

  Two more times Richards filled Parker up with whatever happy pills he had with him—I suspected it was part of what they’d dosed me with at first but I’d never know as I didn’t deign to ask—but Parker wasn’t stupid; or a different kind of stupid, rather. After we made camp the next evening, he appeared calm and docile—or only as hostile as he usually was, letting everyone forget about him. That was, until he jumped up in the middle of dinner and ran screaming from the camp, past the guards, and into the night. That wouldn’t have been such a big issue—at least not for me—if not for the fact that we weren’t camping on an island this time but at the northern river shore, and Parker had a lot of way to run—but chose the one trail that led him straight into a pack of shamblers that must have been sneaking up on us for a while. Bad for him, good for us—if not for the fact that they only managed to kill him, not tear him apart, so we had to do away with over fifteen shamblers and one overcharged fresh one that packed a hell of a punch. My annoyance had long since turned to rage by the time Hamilton finally put Parker down for good, several knocked-out teeth, one broken arm, two sprained shoulders, and a lot of bruises later. Hill had borne the worst of the brunt, putting one more of our heavy hitters mostly out of commission. After that, we decided to stay on the river until we hit the ocean, which meant another sleepless night with me having the honor of directing three boats through the increasingly broadening Seine.

  We arrived at the river delta early in the morning, the thick fog coming in from the ocean hiding most of the towns of Le Havre and Honfleur from sight. Pretty much all we saw besides a few wrecked cruise ships was the huge bridge spanning the harbor, connecting both riverbanks to each other. We finally engaged the engines as we jetted around the town and into the ocean, then down the beach until we found a spot that was deserted enough that drop-off wasn’t a required hurried five-minute job. The French scouts didn’t seem too sad to be rid of us, forced as they’d been to go through the motions with us. I still got an unexpected hug from Ines, too baffled to respond. Then they hopped into their boats and took them back into the fog, never to be seen again.

  The racket we’d made didn’t attract much attention but because we were down to six people without major injuries, Hamilton had us scour ten miles of beach and the land behind it for the rest of the day. I absolutely hated spending hours away from where I could check in on Nate, but Gita gave me faithful if uninspired hourly updates. She didn’t attempt to hide that she was heartbroken and grieving, but at least she wasn’t a coward like Parker. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find her gone when I returned that night but she was still there, hanging on tightly. While we’d been out and about, Hill had managed to establish communication with the destroyer, and we got the first good news in what felt like fucking forever: they were cutting short their patrol route to pick us up the next day. Considering that I doubted that said patrol duty had been more than a ruse to hide the real reason for this trip across the world, that didn’t come as that much of a surprise to me.

  I spent the night huddled under blankets and sleeping bags, curled around Nate’s unresponsive body, trying to keep him warm. It was in the late hours of the night, when it was darkest and coldest, that I felt that veneer of exhaustion and sheer stoic will to keep going finally cracking.

  “You can wake up now, you know?” I whispered into his chest, counting to five on my own heartbeats before I heard his heart beat once. “You did it. The impossible. You’re still alive, and we pulled this fucking mission off. Now come back to me, will you? Because I really, really need you here, with me.”

  I didn’t expect a response but that I didn’t get one made me feel sick.

/>   There was no sleep to be caught after that, and once I was sure that I didn’t look like I was about to fall into a million pieces, I got up and walked over to the small fire we had going on, telling Cole to get lost. I half expected a pep talk from him but he beat it without uttering a single word, leaving me to my glum thoughts.

  I was still tending the fire by the time everyone else got up and the final guard shift came in. Together, we waited on the beach for the boats to arrive. I heard their even drone long before I saw them, and still, the relief I had been waiting for didn’t flood my mind. All I felt was emptiness, and a dash of wry humor when I realized that all of them were in full hazmat suits—both the sailors driving the boats and the two marines each they had with them for support.

  It didn’t take long to load us and what remained of our gear onto the RHIBs. On the way to the shore, they had been so full with people, packs, and weapons that I’d kind of been afraid something—or someone—might fall overboard; now there was empty room aplenty. They might even have crammed us onto a single boat. It was still easier this way. I didn’t look back at the beach disappearing into the fog. As much as I didn’t look forward to hashing out the issues ahead of me, there was nothing for me back there.

  It took us maybe twenty minutes to reach the destroyer, and another few to get everyone and the boats back on board. Right there on deck, Sgt. Buehler and her marines were waiting for us, also in hazmat gear, and increasingly tense as they saw the amount of bandages our people were wearing.

  “I presume we’ll need a quarantine zone?” she asked while we were still unloading.

  “You bet your ass we do,” Hamilton told her, for once sounding more tired than out for a fight. I was sure that Richards would do his best later to smooth any feathers that remark might have ruffled, but for the moment, Buehler herself just gave a nod and pointed down the deck.