“What happened to you?” I asked under my breath, more to myself than her, but at the repeat sound of my voice, she gave a jerk.
And then she was coming at me in a surprising burst of speed that belied the former shuffling motion of her feet, her face turned into a feral grimace.
“Bree! Get down!”
I instantly dropped to the ground on Nate’s command, and not a second too early as a series of shots rang out from behind me, hitting the girl in the legs and chest. She went down without making a sound, but instead of bleeding out on the ground, her head snapped back up, her eyes still focused on me, and she started dragging herself forward, her legs useless from a bullet that must have ripped through her spinal cord. Scrambling back, I tried to put distance between us, but she only stopped when a last shot turned the right side of her face into so much bloody gore.
Panting heavily, I looked up at where Nate was standing above me, a shotgun braced against his torso, his fingers white around the black metal and plastic of the weapon. Behind him, Andrej and the Ice Queen lowered their rifles, while Martinez put his pistol away.
At the shots, several of the soldiers had come running, Bucky among them. If he’d looked grim in the atrium before, his face had turned to stone now, and he glared at the body of the girl for a moment before he glanced at our huddle of people.
“Everything in the green over here?”
Nate nodded. I thought he was trying to relax, but his fingers were shaking even now that he’d let go of the gun and let it dangle from its shoulder strap. Sweat stood heavy on his brow, but his eyes were clear, belying the pain he must have been in.
“A-okay,” he ground out.
“Get ready. We’re moving out in five,” Bucky told him, about to turn away, but stopped when I called after him.
“Care to tell us what the fuck is going on?” He shot me a long look, then glanced at Nate, what little emotion there still was on his face closing down. “Don’t bother with any bullshit! Where are the first responders? Why aren’t there even any people? And what the fuck is going on with these maniacs?” I didn’t need to point at the corpse close to us to indicate what I meant.
Bucky gave me a humorless grin that made me even more uneasy.
“Just how long have you been holed up inside that lab?”
I shrugged, not sure what that had to do with anything. “Since yesterday morning when I went to work. Why?”
His snort was dismissive in a way that made my hackles rise, but I could keep my tongue if it meant finally getting some answers.
“So you missed the whole fun of when the shit hit the fan?” Bucky jeered and laughed, a hard, short bark. “You’re a smarty-pants scientist, right? Just what does this look like to you?”
He walked over to the corpse and lifted it by the back of the nightshirt the girl had been wearing, thrusting the ghastly thing in my face. I jerked away, trying to put as much distance between me and that as I could. Death really didn’t become her. And from up close, it was impossible to ignore the blood stains on her teeth and lips that were way too massive to just come from bleeding gums.
“Exactly what does this look like to you?” Bucky repeated, and when I still didn’t reply, he was only too happy to fill in the blanks for me. “Like a fucking zombie.” Taking a step back, he dropped the thing in front of me and spread his arms wide.
“Welcome to the fucking zombie apocalypse.”
The story continues in Green Fields #2 - Outbreak
Acknowledgement
Like so many other things, writing a book takes a village. Or at least a bunch of very patient souls, some of them needing relentless badgering to dip their toes into the zombie / post-apocalyptic horror genre (or simply a gentle nudge because they are awesome like that.)
Foremost, I’ll be forever grateful to my guy for keeping me hooked on an infinite caffeine drip, and listening to me rave and rant about the idiosyncrasies of made-up characters.
Shayla and Jaana, you’re the best beta readers anyone can wish for.
A round of applause goes to all the people who slogged through this manuscript one time or another in any of the stages. Thank you!
Green Fields #2
Outbreak
Adrienne Lecter
Chapter 1
“Welcome to the fucking zombie apocalypse.”
A day ago, these words would have made me laugh; or at least frown, and look around to see where the camera crew was hiding as I clearly was getting punked, no doubt about that.
But a lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Heck, even the last hour was enough that denial died on my tongue as I stared up at the bloody corpse that Captain Hamilton—Bucky—was holding out to me. Because what had looked like a sick little girl from afar was clearly—undeniably—a zombie. Or had been, before it had found its timely end, before it could sink blood-stained teeth into any part of me, thanks to the people who I owed my life to—in one case more than one time over, but then again, he was likely to blame that it had been threatened in the first place.
Before the world went to hell.
Although my thoughts were racing, it was hard to grasp that concept. It scared the living shit out of me, while at the same time the scientist in me couldn’t help but wonder about the hows and whys. But, right now, with the “evidence” literally staring me in the face with filmy, dead eyes, there was only a single thought on my mind.
We were so fucking screwed.
His message delivered, Bucky let his macabre puppet drop into a heap at his feet and turned to his soldiers, clearly expecting no protest from us. “Us” was the small huddle of people I’d thought were terrorists—and really, although I knew now what their mission had been, the evidence didn’t exactly exonerate them—and a few of Bucky’s soldiers.
Next to me, Nate uttered a curse low under his breath and hunched over, propping the shotgun he’d just used to turn the zombie girl’s head into so much minced meat onto his thigh to keep himself upright. His features—dirty from the dust of the building that had pretty much come down on us minutes ago, smeared with sweat and blood—were scrunched up in a painful grimace, and he had his free hand pressed to the bandage that spanned his torso from his ribs down to below his waist. That he even remained standing was a miracle—I’d seen the rebar that had speared him, going clean through his side. Just the force of the blast had been enough to knock me silly and screw with my balance—he shouldn’t have been able to do anything except bleed out on the ground.
Pia—the Ice Queen, as I’d titled her, and she hadn’t given me a good reason yet to drop the moniker—relieved him of his weapon, but only to reload it. Her own rifle she had slung across her chest over her black on black combat fatigues. She caught me watching, and after a moment held her hand out to me to pull me up. Staggering to my feet, I made sure to give the corpse as wide a berth as possible.
A zombie. How could that even be possible—
“You okay?”
I turned my head to look at the soldier who’d asked the question. We’d picked up Martinez on the way out of the building, after Nate and I had attached enough explosives to the hot lab deep underneath the complex to make sure that nothing down there survived—among other things. I still had no clue why he was milling around with us rather than his fellow soldiers, but the brief exchange between him and Nate spoke of the kind of familiarity between men who had been to war together—and just like everyone else around, he seemed to know what was going on.
Everyone except me.
“I think,” I replied, my voice thick with trepidation. Martinez gave me a nod—and a rather sympathetic look that made me like him just a little more—before he turned to Nate.
“Just saying, do you really think it’s wise to get kicked by a mule right now?” I figured he was referring to Nate’s weapon of choice.
Nate gave him a humorless grin back. “Not sure I can properly aim at anything that’s beyond twenty feet right now.” He still slung the shotgun o
ver his torso and instead got the pistol out of his chest holster, briefly checking the magazine, then accepted a stained T-shirt one of his men had produced from somewhere. Just watching him shrug into it looked painful.
Before anyone else could say something, Bucky hollered a loud, “Moving out!” to his men—and, I guessed, to us by extension—making the soldiers break up the defensive perimeter they’d set up and adopt a loose formation centered around the few civilians in their midst—a disparate crowd in lab coats and business attire. I couldn’t help but glare at Gabriel Greene’s back, but it gave me a hint of satisfaction that he looked as scared as I felt right now—or probably even more so. That made me instantly suspicious, but for now I was happy to be surrounded by people who hadn’t tried to bash my head in or strangle me—although the jury was still out where the Ice Queen was concerned. She’d seemed civil enough once she’d stopped shooting at everything around my hiding space—what felt like a million years ago right now.
All in all, there seemed to be about a hundred of us who’d made it out of the collapsing building—about half of them Bucky’s soldiers. Even as I watched now, several of Nate’s people slunk away into the buildings and streets around the field of rubble that the explosions had reduced the Green Fields Biotech complex into. The core group that had been in command remained. Next to Nate and Pia, there was also Andrej—who’d been posing as a security guard—and Dolores—their child prodigy hacker—and a few other guys who were vaguely familiar looking as they’d guarded the atrium. Nate and the Ice Queen exchanged a few words before she gave a jerky nod and motioned the remainder of their people to follow the soldiers.
There wasn’t really a question whether I’d follow, so I fell in step beside Martinez, overly conscious that I was the only one of the group not armed.
That realization hit home even harder as we passed the last remaining concrete boulders and stepped out into what had been a side street running along the complex before. In the immediate vicinity, not a single window had remained whole, the glass blasted to a million shreds by the massive explosion. But outside of that radius of destruction, things looked just as grim, if not worse. There were broken-down and ruined cars everywhere, debris littering the streets. Even at just a glance I could see looters run out of stores down the street, their faces obscured by pieces of cloth they’d wound over the bottom half of their heads. Gunshots rang out in the distance, making me shy back momentarily, and the wail of sirens could be heard from all around us. Someone shouted, more screams followed, but they all sounded decidedly… human. In haphazard intervals the road was blocked with barricades. Some looked like heavy-duty gear that the police or the national guard might have used, others just blocks of wood jammed between cars and street lamps.
To think that just twenty-four hours ago I’d walked down the sidewalk from the bus stop over there to my workplace, everything looking as more or less tidy as usual, was eerie bordering on incomprehensible now. Sure, there had been few people out and about, and I’d had to wait for twenty minutes until a bus had picked me up as they were down to emergency schedules with only a fraction of the drivers not out sick, but everything had still been normal—not like out of the set of a war movie. Even last night, when my flight from the terrorists had ended up on the roof of the building and I’d gotten a last glimpse at the city around us, things hadn’t looked much different than normal.
“Just how long have you been holed up in that building?” Martinez asked where he’d fallen into step beside me, his assault rifle ready but the muzzle pointing down right now. More of his fellow soldiers were spreading out around the core group now, building a loose perimeter around us—not quite coincidentally, it seemed to me. That still didn’t hinder yet more of Nate’s people to disappear.
“Yesterday morning, when I went to work,” I said, my eyes snagging on a dead body lying on the sidewalk. Not that I was a good judge of that, but it looked like the man hadn’t been infected, just shot and bled out. That this gruesome image was kind of soothing to me while at the same time appropriately horrifying still left me quite disturbed. But it did look less horrifying than the three dirty, blood-smeared corpses that were grouped around another body a little farther down the street.
Martinez gave me a neutral look that made me realize that he probably still didn’t know where to place me—former lab geek or terrorist—before he replied.
“Things started going bad late last night, just before they shut off the television stations.”
“They did what?”
He shrugged. “Last I heard, some hacker group hijacked the program for their own emergency bulletin, warning everyone not to trust the police and national guard. Someone thought it would be better to cut off the feeds completely, but that just caused everyone to try to log into the ‘net. That went down just late enough for everyone who cared to watch the few YouTube videos someone managed to upload from New York and LA, and the rest is history.”
Our whole group stopped when we reached an intersection, and Bucky waited for several of his recon team to return before he gave the all clear to cross and proceed farther down the street. In the middle of the crossing, I got a good look toward the city center of Lexington, where yet more of the same was visible—people slinking from building to building, ruined cars and storefronts, and the occasional heap on the ground that used to be a person. Several plumes of smoke rose into the sky, and the wail of sirens suddenly seemed twice as prominent.
“Let me guess—that wasn’t about civic unrest?”
His teeth looked very white in his olive-skinned face as he gave me an approximation of a smile.
“That depends entirely on how you define the term ‘civilian.’ But no one seemed to care much anymore if the police and national guard shot into the masses if they got their faces torn off the second their magazines clicked empty.”
A shudder ran through my body that I didn’t even try to suppress.
“So this isn’t just a local thing?”
He shook his head.
“Nope.”
That one word confirmation was more than I ever wanted to hear. It was still hard to come to grips with this—whatever exactly “this” was. Thinking about something else was much easier. Anything else, really. A few looters came out of a building across the streets, bristling with weapons, but one look at the soldiers streaming down the street and they ducked right back inside. Behind another half-blown-off door I could see a woman clutching a small child to her chest, her eyes impossibly wide with fear. I half expected her to join us, but she shied further back, out of sight.
Then we reached another intersection and Bucky directed his troops to turn left—toward the river, if I wasn’t completely turned around—yet stopped when Nate and his people didn’t follow along. Orders were given to halt, and Capt. Hamilton himself came swaggering back to our huddle, his soldiers gravitating to the sides to open a space around him. His eyes were fixed on Nate, who still looked deathly pale but had no problem oozing his own kind of self-assurance all over the place.
“What’s the holdup?” Bucky wanted to know.
“Where exactly are you leading your merry little group here?” Nate asked instead of answering.
Bucky hesitated for a moment, but it looked more like he considered whether he should reply at all—not what exactly to say.
“We have a camp south of town. Our orders are to fall back there now that our objective has been pulverized.”
Nate’s return grin held just a hint of mocking satisfaction, but it was enough to make Bucky gnash his teeth.
“Yeah, thought so,” Nate replied. “The hound heeling, as he’s supposed to.”
“Coming from a traitor, that’s not really much of an insult,” Bucky shot back.
Nate considered for a moment, then looked around as if he was actively surveilling the intersection.
“Yeah, I think I’ll not join you. I haven’t spent the last fifteen years busting my ass to end up as someone’s pet lab p
roject.” I knew that there was a lot more to that statement than I understood right now, but the message was loud and clear, even for me.
At Nate’s exclamation, people tensed all around him—his people readying their weapons, while the soldiers seemed to back away and into a more defensive position. Suddenly, the before tense but mostly neutral air seemed to have turned hostile, making me want to run for cover. It didn’t escape my notice that Martinez had stepped closer to me, but he was eyeing the soldiers critically, not the former terrorists. Only Nate and Bucky remained relaxed, facing each other across the widening open space between the two groups.
“So what are you going to do?” Bucky asked, his words dripping with scorn. “Strike out on your own? You and what army?” He looked after two more people who were silently disappearing down the road we’d come.
“I don’t need an army, just competent people,” Nate replied, then looked around at the gathered soldiers. “And everyone’s free to join me.”
It wasn’t like a murmur ran through the soldiers, but I could see a few stealthily glancing at the people standing beside them.
“Join you?” Bucky jeered, doing a wide sweep with his arms. “Look around. The city is lost, and out there it’s a fucking battlefield. There’s strength in numbers, and guess who has them? The army. We already have a camp established that is right now starting a well-coordinated evacuation. Everyone’s best bets are with us.” He looked to the huddle of civilians with his soldiers, but they didn’t seem to need convincing in the first place, so it was no surprise that instead he focused on me. “You’re a scientist, right?” Defiance—born of what exactly I didn’t know—made me want to remain stoically unresponsive, but instead I gave a jerky nod. “You helped them?” He indicated Nate, but his eyes didn’t leave my face. Now I chose not to reply, which in itself was an answer. Yet Bucky didn’t wait much longer than a few seconds before he went on. “I don’t care, and neither do my superiors. That’s all water under the bridge. Right now it is important to secure as many important people as possible. You know shit? You’re important. Come with us, miss, and we’ll make sure that you get to safety unharmed. Our secondary objective is to bring everyone with scientific background to the camp, too. You will be most useful there.”
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 28