More hushed debate between them followed, until a different voice—this one decidedly female—replied, coming from a car to the right.
“We’re from South Dakota. Thought we’d check out how things are on this side of the Black Hills. And no, we don’t want directions to your shelter.” She paused, before she added, “We can talk, but we’d rather you don’t stay.”
“Very well,” Nate agreed. “There are a few small towns around where you might find food and gear, but I have to warn you. We’ve been looting them since the snow started to melt, and likely you’ll find the larger cities completely overrun. We just came up from Douglas today, and I wouldn’t advise going anywhere near it right now.”
More silence, until the woman spoke up again. “Thanks for the advice.” She didn’t really sound tense, but she clearly would have preferred not encountering us. But then curiosity won out. “So you guys are from around here?”
“We’ve spend the winter in Wyoming,” Nate replied, which could have meant anything, really. The fact that he was ready to hand over some of our spare ammo and food but not any details about the bunker—or the neighborhood watch, it seemed—was telling.
“It’s just you guys?” the woman asked, and I saw her head swivel around as she looked over our cars. “What, six to nine people?”
“No,” Nate told her succinctly, making her pause.
“No to not just you around here, or no to just you around the state in general?”
“Both.”
There was no menace in his tone, but the answering silence made it clear that the message had been received. It was too dark to see whether anyone was grabbing their weapons tighter, but I presumed that they were. Sighing, I couldn’t help but feel like this conversation was veering off in the wrong direction.
Unbuckling my harness, I slid out of the car, careful to keep the reinforced door between me and the group, but leaving my shotgun inside. Raising my arms, I leaned one onto the door and the other on the roof, trying to look as open and relaxed as possible. Let Nate do the posturing; I felt like some de-escalation was in need here.
“We’re part of a larger group, but we thought if all of us came over at once, we’d scare you. We didn’t manage to scout the entire state this spring yet, but there are small groups all over. You’ll likely run into them if you move further west.” Which wasn’t really revealing anything, considering that we had to be close to the border to South Dakota.
“Oh. Okay.” The woman’s voice was still pressed, but her tone a little lighter now.
“So where does that leave us?” I wanted to know, unable to keep a slight smile off my face. “To be honest, we’ve had quite the shitty day, and if I don’t have to spend the night crammed into the car, I wouldn’t mind. We haven’t really heard much from outside the state since we got here last summer, so would be nice to catch up with someone. Share news, you know? What news there is.” Looking over to where the fire was still crackling merrily, I couldn’t help but feel a certain unease creep up my spine. Lights in the dark really were a bad idea. “And you should do something to shield the glow of that fire. It will attract attention before the night’s over, and you don’t even have guards posted. That’ll get you killed in no time.”
More silence, until the guy from the other car spoke up.
“We’re kind of new to this. Camping out, I mean. We spent most of the winter up in the caves where fire was more a necessity than a nuisance.”
“Sounds cozy,” I replied, waiting.
Another bout of hushed conversation happened, until the woman ended it with a rather decisive “Shush.” To us, she asked, “Are you guys really not out to rob and kill us? Because we don’t really have much that you can take, and I don’t see what use you’d get out of murdering us. There are plenty few of us left as it is.”
“Unless you attack us first, none of us will raise a weapon to you,” Nate replied, cryptically enough for me to roll my eyes at him.
“Promise,” I said, before he could drop another such bomb on them. “And we were honest about the food and ammo, if you need it. Can’t say it’s gourmet quality, but it’s not all cat food. That’s something.”
The woman laughed, probably in spite of herself, but I could tell that she realized that I wasn’t joking. “Actually, cat food doesn’t sound too bad. We’ve been living off jerky for most of the winter because that’s what we could easily prepare ourselves and it wouldn’t spoil. I’m Bo, and this is Cooper.” I figured she meant the guy who’d been part of the conversation.
“Bree, and the cryptic McGrumpster beside me is Nate. Do you mind if we signal the rest of our guys to join us? We’re thirteen altogether.”
I could tell that Nate was gnashing his teeth over my reveal—yet likely not the moniker—but Bo sounded even more relaxed as she replied.
“No, no, it’s good. There’s always strength in numbers. If you’re not out to reduce ours, that is.”
I’d been wondering how Nate was going to accomplish that, but he simply got out one of our industrial strength torches and flashed a quick succession of short and longer signals in the direction we’d come from, and within two minutes, I heard the faint growl of car engines approaching. There were still a few tense moments following, like when the others realized just how much of our gear were weapons and assembled bits of body armor, but things got better once Burns got out an entire palette of beans and chili. Except for the four guards that were sent out to make sure that the field around us was still clear, the rest of us settled around the fire, Pia and Andrej busy stacking up stones to further shield the fire in the pit from the outside. That killed some of the comfortable warmth, but no one protested. Bo got out some of the aforementioned jerky, and when they heard that we had a medic with us, several of them grudgingly kicked off their boots and shrugged off their parkas, letting Martinez check out a few old injuries and scrapes.
As evening turned to night, things eased up further. Like us, Bo and Cooper were rather closemouthed about the exact location of where their main group had settled in, but from the few details that they dropped, I figured that they’d retreated to the Wind Cave region, likely wintering in those exact caves.
While they were rather fuzzy on the details, they still shared with us how they’d banded together. Most of them were from the region, and once the shit hit the fan, they’d flocked into the hills and national parks, trying to get lost in the woods there. With Rapid City the only population center around, a surprisingly large number of people had made it, at least until the second wave had hit them hard as too many had looted the wrong food from the stores. I’d heard similar tales from the people around here, too, but it was hard to grasp that most of them hadn’t realized what had been going on more than two weeks into the fray. By then I’d already been forced to kill a zombie girl with almost my bare hands, and had fired my first few shots with a gun. It was surreal to hear Bo explain that she thought it was just her neighbors finally losing their shit, not the end of the world as we knew it.
One after the other, we all tucked in when the food was gone and the tales were told. After the stunt we’d pulled in Douglas, I felt the distinct need to reassure myself firsthand that Nate was indeed very much alive, but instead of at least cuddling up with me, he took one of the midnight watch shifts, and with me up for the early morning one, we didn’t even share a single hour of sleep together. So much for that. But at least I got to observe one more glorious sunrise.
In a world where every sunrise could be your last, every sunrise was glorious.
The somewhat cordial air from last night didn’t really translate well into the next morning. As the sun rose and the light of the morning revealed the full extent of our gear, Bo and her people got increasingly wary of us, and it only made sense not to wait until things could escalate. We gave them another palette of food that would last them a week and a half if they rationed it, and they were on their way—heading west—before we’d finished our morning coffee. I didn�
�t know what to make of that, but in the end it was likely for the best.
“Where to now?” I asked when we were ready to break camp, Nate and Andrej as usual studying the maps. One thing Nate had managed to liberate in Douglas was an entire stack of them, giving us detailed intel about the surrounding states—and in Martinez’s pack they had survived, unlike whatever Nate had had in his. I couldn’t not tease him about that.
“How does South Dakota sound to you?” Nate asked, not even trying to hide a smile.
I couldn’t help but frown. “Why is the first thing you do after we meet people who are as cautious as we are about the company they keep and the secrets they spill is to go hunt down the people they were trying to protect?”
“Not planning on hunting anyone down,” Nate offered. “I was just thinking that if they’re dug in good in those caves, they are likely there to stay. People around these parts have never been shy to go hunting, and that they have jerky in abundance tells me that they haven’t changed their minds about that. We were talking about going to look for others elsewhere already, so why not start with a region where people sound like they already know what they are doing? Besides, the area east of the Badlands is where agricultural land really starts, so we have the best chances of finding the seeds that Sadie asked us to look out for. At the very least, we can clear a route for others, maybe establish a few trading posts along the route.”
“You really put some thought into this,” I said, unable not to sound at least somewhat impressed. Nate gave me a harrowing glare back that I deserved.
“Why does it surprise you that I’m not just eager to go poke some cave people with a stick?”
“Because that’s exactly the thing that you’d do,” I replied, grinning at him as I turned toward my side of the car.
“You’re just grumpy because you don’t get poked as much as you’d like,” he called after me, making Burns snicker on the other side of the camp. I didn’t even bother rolling my eyes.
So off to South Dakota it was.
Chapter 7
It took us the better part of two days to reach what used to be the grassland just beyond the Badlands National Park. Well, they were still grasslands, and we even saw a herd of bison in the distance, but as soon as we’d left the southern outskirts of the Black Hills, it was clear in what direction the zombies from Rapid City had gone. Avoiding the hills, they’d poured straight south across the prairie, leaving behind an easily visible trail of destruction and carcasses that had been cleaned to the bones. They hadn’t really bothered with roads, likely just running after anything moving that they’d glimpsed. The few cars that we saw were little more than scrap metal, unable to withstand the blind anger of the horde. Before Douglas, the sheer size of the trail that they’d left—months old that it likely was—would have made me guess that a city worth millions must have been to the north. Now, it just underlined that our estimates had been dead wrong.
I for one couldn’t be gone from the flat grasslands soon enough, yet Nate had me stop every few miles to check something on the side of the road, usually a carcass. I tried to distract myself with studying the rolling hills of fresh spring grass, flowers starting to bloom here and there, but my eyes kept snatching back to the carcasses.
“Any idea how long since they went through here?” I asked, figuring that Nate would get that I was referring to the zombies.
“A few months,” he offered. “Late fall to early winter. That would explain the excessive evidence of cannibalism.”
That was something I just had to ask about. “How can you tell that they started to eat each other? Those bones could be from non-zombies, too.”
Nate shrugged. “Unlikely. A few here and there, yes. But over there in that ditch are at least twenty skulls. I doubt that out here in the middle of nowhere they found that many of us, and in one place. It’s much more likely that once food ran out, they started culling the herd. That way, the strong would survive, with no weak to slow them down.”
Just one more fact about zombies that endeared them to me so much more—but at the same time, it kind of was good news.
“Do I get this right—this means that we basically just have to wait them out until they have eaten the last shambler out there?”
“Not sure it would work quite that smoothly, but yeah. If this continues, sooner or later it’s a problem that will take care of itself. Likely not in our lifetimes, considering that with less human predation, the wildlife will explode all over the country, thus further feeding the zombies. But eventually, they’ll be so few and far between that they’re no longer the scourge of the Earth. We just have to keep them from generating more along the way.”
It was strange to see such a bleak idea as a glimmer of hope on the horizon. But we were easily decades away from that point, so what sense was there in dwelling on that?
“There are signs of scavenging here, too,” he noted as he got back in the car and signaled me to drive on.
“Like what?”
“Someone’s been disassembling stuff. There are also tire tracks that are less than a week old. My guess is, someone’s building a fort or something.”
“And where?”
Nate gave me a look as if I’d asked a rather stupid question. “How the fuck should I know? I can only tell you that something between three and ten heavier cars drove by here since the last heavy rainfall, which was likely sometime during the last week. They didn’t leave us cute little notes with where they’re staying.”
I didn’t reply, too used to being chided like that. It had been a rather inane question, true. Still.
We drove on for another five miles or so until I stopped again, this time to take in the view in front of us. We’d been driving through prairie most of the day, but now we’d reached the beginning of the Badlands, reddish rock formations rising in front of us. Of course I’d seen them on TV before, but from up close they were even more stunning. It was easy to imagine the water runnels carving valleys into the softer layers until nothing but the harder parts were remaining, erosion at its best. Even now, the light wind blowing tendrils of my hair into my face made it easy to imagine how the forces of nature were continuing their work.
But what was even more impressive was how utterly congenial the rocky hills turning to mountains were for hiding, particularly from foes that weren’t the most agile in navigating the terrain. All that constant up and down left a million places to hide and take cover, or simply disappear in a nearby valley. A whole horde of zombies could likely pass by just a hundred feet away and never be the wiser of someone crouching there, scared shitless yet safe. Bo’s explanation why so many people had fled to the national parks all around the western part of the state suddenly made a lot more sense. If I’d been living in the city and had known this existed, I’d have made my way here, too.
Yet as beautiful and terrific the terrain was for hiding, even here at the outskirts it was obvious that the area the Badlands spanned was gigantic, at least in a world where walking on foot was a viable option of transportation.
“Just how shall we find someone in here who doesn’t want to be found?” I asked, still scanning the hills for signs of human habitation.
“We don’t,” Nate explained. “They will find us.”
“And if not?”
He gave a noncommittal grunt. “Would you tolerate a bunch of armed strangers on your doorstep?”
I shook my head. “No way.”
“I bet you a bag of jerky they won’t either.”
I wasn’t stupid enough to take him up on that, instead getting into the car again.
Over the course of the next three hours, we didn’t see any—absolutely any—sign that anyone was here. No tracks, no broken-down cars, no parts, and also no corpses. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was so different from Before, but figured that a region that relied so heavily on tourism would never have been that deserted. Now it felt like we were the first humans to walk this moon landscape.
We made camp at one of the parking lots, watching the sun set over the plains. Exposed as we were—and waiting to be found, as Nate had explained it—it only made sense to sleep in the cars. It seemed hilariously paranoid, but so were many things that we did on a regular basis. So far the fact that we were still around and kicking boded well for our strategies.
By morning, we were still completely alone in the mountains, and I spent my part of the watch detail sitting on the hood of the car, watching the sun rise one inch at a time. With the scenery quiet bordering on idyllic, minimal wildlife scurrying around—a sure sign that there were no zombies nesting here anywhere—it was easy to forget that there were places out there that were very different. I knew that this couldn’t go on much longer, but it was nice to let my guard down for once.
Which consequently bit me in the ass—figuratively—as I was caught with my pants down—literally—twenty minutes later as I went behind a rock mound to take care of my morning business.
I had about a second to realize that the gravel sliding down behind me wasn’t caused by the wind before I heard the telltale sound of a shotgun round getting pumped into the barrel. Part of me wanted to laugh because it was such an amateur move—really, if you wanted to shoot something, you should have a round ready. Months of weapon drills took care of that, while the much greater part of me was scared shitless. Also literally, because they’d given me enough time to finish that part at least.
“Do you mind if I wipe first? Because this is kind of awkward,” I called out over my shoulder, for a second almost expecting Burns or Bates to start laughing at me—but it had been months since they’d even tried to sneak up on me, and it made no sense to do it here, with my own gun close enough that I could grab it and shoot before asking questions. Only that it was just far enough away that I couldn’t grab it. Shit. Nate was so going to have my ass for this.
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 67