I didn’t need to glance at Nate to know what he thought of that, but the look on his face was closed off enough that it made me hesitate for a moment, doubt sweeping through my mind, the sour taste of betrayal riding shotgun. I was aware that he’d only ever chatted me up because he knew who I was, where I worked, and could potentially be useful to him, which should have nullified everything that had happened between us since. But at the same time I knew that what he’d said down in the hot lab—when he’d asked me to join him in continuing his crusade against the people who had led to his brother’s murder—was still true. I realized that he tried not to influence me now, but when I caught his gaze again, I could see that he was itching to open his mouth—likely to tell me not to be stupid and fall for Bucky’s bullshit.
“Same goes for everyone else,” Bucky went on meanwhile. “We’ll need everyone who knows how to handle a gun in the coming weeks. And you all know that there’s strength in numbers.”
I was surprised to see a few of Nate’s people hesitate before they crossed the intersection, while a couple did so with confidence, even. The Ice Queen made a face but remained mute; otherwise stoic at Nate’s side, it was obvious why she was his second in command.
By then Bucky must have realized that I wasn’t buying what he was selling, but he still tried again.
“No offense, but do you really want to stay with the people who gave you that nice temporary makeup?”
He was referring to the bruises on my face—and wouldn’t you know it, it just took that mention to make my cheekbone and nose twinge uncomfortably, but I did my best to ignore it. It was impossible not to single out Gabriel Greene in between the scientists, and I felt my face twist into a sneer.
“Thanks so much for your concern, but I think I’ll stay with the people who didn’t try to bash my head in,” I said, taking a step back which brought me right up to Andrej. Greene didn’t try to avoid my gaze although he did glare back, and the way his right hand twitched I wondered if he was itching to protect his junk from my knee. It was then that I realized that he still looked scared shitless, his previous sleazy demeanor crumbling under the emotional turmoil. But then, he must have known exactly that he’d been sitting on a ticking time bomb all along, and now that the shit had hit the fan, he likely had a much better grasp on what was going on than I could imagine. And I had a very vivid imagination.
Bucky seemed confused, but he took it in stride.
“You really sure that you want to hang with a bunch of second-rate criminals and army rejects? Because, let me assure you, they’ll sell you out as soon as they find something worth bartering for.”
“And you won’t?” I asked. “I mean, you’re working for the people who built this fucking plague. Why should I trust you?”
It was a wild guess at best, but the fact that all I got out of him was him gnashing his teeth was the kind of confirmation I really hadn’t needed. What was equally disturbing was that neither of the scientists spoke up, but then it made sense that—as group leaders—they’d been in the know of what their company had actually been working on. In fact, Greene was still eyeing the intersection as if he was thinking about bailing, too, but one look at Nate and he remained firmly rooted in his spot.
Maybe it had been that exclamation, or they had just been biding their time, but four of the soldiers joined us, pointedly not looking at their comrades. One of them, a six-foot-and-then-some bear of a man with skin so dark that even in the direct sunlight it looked black nodded at Nate and Pia, and received a similar nod back. Clearly, Martinez hadn’t been the only one who’d met Nate before. Another I recognized as one of the soldiers who had run into Nate and me when we’d hightailed it out of the hot lab, and he joined Martinez, the two of them briefly bumping fists. It looked like that was all, until another soldier joined those two, who I guessed was their commanding officer. He looked about as confused and frightened as I felt, and he kept eyeing Nate with a similar kind of distrust he reserved for the bodies lying dead on the sidewalk, but he had switched sides, and that counted for something.
Nate took a brief look over his assembled people before he turned to Bucky again.
“Looks like we’re done here.”
“You actually have a plan?” Bucky grunted, his tone derisive.
“I always have a plan,” Nate shot back. “And if Plan B goes up in flames, there’s still the entire rest of the alphabet.”
Bucky seemed to consider, but then simply turned around, facing his people. “Move out!” Clearly, we were dismissed.
Nate allowed himself the hint of a smile—or a wince that he only showed now that the other guy wasn’t looking at him anymore—but it froze when Dolores gave him an apologetic look and started walking toward the soldiers.
“You know that I can’t shoot for shit, and I’m not exactly the survivalist type,” she said, sounding like she knew how hollow that came out. I was sure that I would have gotten a glare for that, but Nate just seemed sad.
“If you say so.”
“If this really is the end of the world, I’m sure I’ll be much more useful with the guys who still have electricity, and likely a working internet connection,” she offered, but had to look away. “I’m sorry. I did what I could, right? I helped you avenge Raleigh.”
Nate just kept looking at her blankly now, but a muscle jumped in the Ice Queen’s cheek. Contrary to Nate, she looked the opposite of broken up with losing their tech wizard.
“You did,” Nate finally replied. “And I thank you for that.”
“You’re welcome. And good luck.”
Her goodbye sounded final, and once the mumbled words had left her lips, she quickly turned around and ran after the soldiers, joining the huddle of scientists in their midst. Nate looked after her for a moment longer before he tore his gaze away and addressed the group around him. Altogether, I counted nineteen heads now—a bare fraction of the people who had made it out of the collapsing building.
“I think on one thing I can agree with that asshole—let’s get out of here.”
He looked at Pia, who immediately started calling out names, the designated people swarming out to build a loose guard team around the core group of the rest of us. Andrej was busy typing away on his phone, but after a moment he put it away, cursing.
“Signal’s down. Paper maps it is from here on out.”
Nate acknowledged that with a quick nod.
“We need maps then. Provisions, and gear.” Looking around, he absentmindedly pressed the hand that wasn’t carrying the gun against the wound in his side. “But most of all, we need to get the hell out of here before things get worse.”
That this was even possible seemed like a stretch to me, but judging from the grim faces all around me I was still too optimistic, even with doom and gloom whipping each other into a panic attack at the back of my mind. Nate looked at Pia and Andrej, then to Martinez, but when he just got shrugs back, his eyes found me.
“Do you know where the next mall is? Sport or camping supplies stores is what we’re needing to hit first.”
I was surprised that he asked, but then it made sense. Just because I’d run into him in a park a few weeks ago didn’t mean that he or his people had been living in the city for long—or had time for shopping when they were busy infiltrating the corporation and plotting their mission. Not that my knowledge of this side of town was much better, but my addled brain finally came up with something.
“There’s a kind of mall by the interstate close to the edge of town,” I offered. “I think they have a sports supplies store there.” I certainly knew that they had no less than three coffee shops, one right next to the makeup store Sam always dragged me through—
And that was when my mind snagged on a detail that I had successfully ignored for the past estimated half hour, but now that I’d thought of it, there was nothing else that I could think about. Grief so visceral that it made my chest hurt gripped me, but I just couldn’t quench the small flicker of hope that came
with it. Looking in the opposite direction from where the mall lay, I stared sightlessly back toward the city center, and the part of town around the university campus beyond it.
“Sam…”
I hadn’t realized that I’d fully turned around until Nate suddenly stepped into my field of vision, reaching up to grab my arms and still me, his gun now holstered. The look on his face was unreadable, but he didn’t put effort into chasing emotion out of his gaze, looking at me with understanding.
“Bree, listen to me,” he started, squeezing just a little harder until my eyes focused on his face rather than continue to stare off into nothing. “When was the last time you saw her?”
The girlfriend I hadn’t thought about for a second although the world seemed to be about to go down the drain? Sure, I had been running for my life, and then almost got buried underneath tons of concrete and steel, but shouldn’t any decent person have thought about what happened to their loved ones the moment they were in relative safety again? But I had the sinking feeling that therein lay the real issue.
“Bree, answer me,” Nate repeated. “When did you last see her?”
Swallowing thickly, I forced myself to reply to his question, my stomach sinking further.
“Thursday night, just before I went to bed. She fell asleep on the couch, watching TV. I didn’t even kiss her good night because I didn’t want to catch—“
A sob wrenched itself from deep inside my chest, and I quickly stifled it with my right hand, barely feeling my teeth as they sank into my knuckles. Knuckles of the hand that was barely scabbed over from the cuts that I’d sustained while I’d crawled through the destroyed bottles in the hot room where I’d been hiding; the hand that still had the angry red burn across the back of it from where the coffee had spilled when the first round of explosions had gone off that had turned a usual Friday afternoon into a nightmare that I would likely never forget—
The way Nate kept squeezing my arms felt more supportive than the gesture had a right to be, and when I looked at him again, I could clearly see that he was hurting for me. That alone seemed so at odds after his mostly no-nonsense behavior of the past day, but then he had been on a mission. Now, all that was left for us was to survive—those of us who were still alive.
“You can hate me for saying this now, but we don’t have time to sugar-coat it,” Nate suggested, his voice hard but still kind of gentle. “There is nothing you can do for her.”
I knew that—rationally, but my heart still wanted to dance to a different tune. I still didn’t know how the infection was spreading all around us, but if the way Raleigh had died was any indication, anyone would be dead within two days—or worse. And Sam’s two days had run out even before I’d seen that video.
“She… she was—“ I started, swallowing hard when I just couldn’t go on for a moment. “She came home sick on Wednesday afternoon. She called me to pick up some chicken soup on the way home but I forgot—“
Nate cut me off before I could go on.
“You know that you can’t help her,” he said. “Even if you could make it across town—and I honestly don’t think that we have any time left—trust me, you don’t want to. If she was lucky, she’s dead. And if not, she’d just come after you the second you unlocked the door to your apartment.”
The cynic inside of me supplied a third option—that she hadn’t remained home but instead stayed with whatever latest girl she was cheating on me with. If you could call it cheating considering that I suspected and had always been too placid to get in her face about it. And who was I really to throw stones? But the fact was the same—she was likely dead.
Martinez stepped up to us, remaining a little to the side as if to lend us some privacy but clearly intent on butting into our conversation.
“From what we know, most infected have died within the first twenty hours. The latest numbers are giving a ten-hour window for incubation, and less than thirty average until it’s over.” He cleared his throat, avoiding my gaze. “And about one in ten… well, you know.”
“Comes back as a zombie?” I asked, my voice still pressed but a little less frail now. There was no sense to sugar-coating that, either.
“Yup,” was all he provided, clearly uncomfortable. The very idea was too absurd to consider, and still—even the looters were wearing face protection, not that it would change anything.
Nate cleared his throat, making me focus back on him. “I know that this is hard for you—“
I interrupted him before he could go any further.
“I get it. She’s dead. And we need to go. So, let’s go, right?” I hated how hollow and cold that sounded, but it was the truth. The fact that all of them were still tense and clearly ready to move out told me that lingering wasn’t an option, either—even if it felt like I was abandoning everything I’d ever believed in. Everything I’d ever loved.
Nate gave me a single, slow nod. I could see that he wanted to say more, but, really, what was there to say? If this was as bad as it seemed from the three blocks we’d seen of the city so far, there was no telling how much worse it would be elsewhere—and that very likely meant that everyone I’d ever known—family, friends, acquaintances—were either dead, or out to kill those who had miraculously avoided infection so far. Looking around at the others, I could see that same knowledge in every pair of eyes that I met, only none of them chose to act on the grief they must be feeling. Somehow, that made it just a little easier to suppress that wave of emotion and push it to the back of my soul, to leave there until a later time when I might have the opportunity to wallow in it.
“Let’s go,” Nate agreed, and after lingering for another second, he turned to Pia. “Get us the fuck out of this city.”
Chapter 2
With the bulk of the soldiers gone now and most of the mercenaries dispersed to the seven winds, there were only twenty-two of us remaining. I was the only civilian, but Nate not the only one more or less out of commission for the moment. Several of the remaining people were limping or holding an arm a little closer to their bodies than needed be, and there was no one around who wasn’t sporting a bruise or stain on their clothes that hinted at a cut or worse. Still, we didn’t linger at the intersection, but Pia had us move out in the direction of the mall within the minute Nate gave her to “go.”
Maybe we were just lucky, but the entire stretch to the mall, we didn’t encounter any problems. There were the occasional looters or other people who quickly faded into the shadows as soon as they saw the amount of weapons and body armor our group was toting. As the buildings started to thin out, the obvious destruction seemed to increase, though, with more burned-out cars, broken windows, and a fair share of bodies clustered together—but it didn’t look that different from what I figured the aftermath of a riot would look like. The wail of sirens remained behind, only audible now when the wind turned.
The mall we were aiming for was not much more than a cluster of maybe twenty stores with a huge parking lot around them, mostly deserted now. A few of the parked cars held what looked like the remnants of someone’s bug-out gear—minus the food, from what I could tell. Of the stores, the only one that was obviously emptied out was the supermarket, with torn-open packaging and no less than ten dead on the sidewalk in front of it. The lights inside were off but from what I could see through the smashed glass front, even the racks had been torn down, not just looted, with debris littering the floor ankle-deep in places. I kind of expected Nate to dispatch a couple of people in that direction, but they completely ignored the store as they swarmed out. Instead, five fatigue-clad figures entered the outdoor goods store, while Pia took Martinez and the two soldiers that had come with him into the pharmacy. The rest of us remained in the parking lot for the moment, until the all-clear came from both sides.
That was Nate’s signal to hail me over, and I followed him into the store. He was still cautiously walking through the aisles while his people were busy pulling backpacks and assorted camping gear from the rack
s, but when no one shot at us or came to rip our faces off, he relaxed and pushed me toward the women’s section.
“Grab everything that’s sturdy but lightweight, at least two sets of everything that’s not outerwear, if possible in muted colors,” he hollered at me while he dove into the men’s section.
I had to admit, I was a little hesitant at first—likely because while some parts of the store looked ransacked already, the clothes were pretty much in order as I’d come to expect from normal shopping experiences. It just felt… wrong to grab clothes off the rack and not pay for them. Not that the register seemed to be working, with even the indoor lights turned off.
“Do you need an extra invitation?” Nate said from right behind me, making me jump and shriek. He flashed me a brief grin as he thrust a lightweight backpack at me. “Here, for your stuff. Now get going. You don’t want to get caught with your pants around your ankles, right?”
I eyed him critically, but then turned back to the rack of T-shirts. “It’s just weird.”
“Better get used to it. I don’t think that we’ll have this luxury for much longer.”
“Luxury?”
“Getting fresh new clothes that haven’t been raided from someone’s corpse.”
With that, he ducked back into the men’s section and disappeared from view as he started unlacing his boots. The very idea made a shudder run through my body, and suddenly, the pristine clothes looked a lot more inviting.
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 29