Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9

by Lecter, Adrienne

  Looking at the very top of the page, I quickly scanned the text, but it was next to useless gibberish. I checked the next few where yet more version numbers were listed, but this barely held up for an inventory, no explanations whatsoever.

  “Why does someone in a super fancy office in an orchid conservatory have documentation about the serum project?” I asked, glancing at Red and Bucky but also keeping an eye on reaction from the others. No one looked surprised, confirming that really, we were the only ones not knowing what this was all about. Maybe another late-night talk with Hill would help with that. From the bland stare I got from Bucky, I knew he wouldn’t be the source of information.

  Red glanced at the papers in my hands. “What did you find?”

  “Nonsense,” I offered, shoving the stack at him. “It’s all nonsense.”

  “Yeah, that’s what science shit looks like to the rest of us,” Cole grumbled from where he was bashing away on his laptop, obviously frustrated.

  “Usually. Helps to have a degree or two,” I quipped in his direction, but turned serious at Red’s frown. “Is it possible that this is written in some kind of code? Because this looks like an email that wants to sell me penis enhancement pills, in particularly bad grammar.”

  I heard Rodriguez snicker in the background—maybe she was finally warming up to my charms. Red continued to stare at me for another second, then shook his head. “It actually is.”

  “Trying to sell—“ I started, but he cut me off before I could get any further. Really, did no one have a sense of humor left?

  “All the printouts are encrypted,” he explained. “And it sure as hell doesn’t look like the cypher will be in any of these books.”

  “Basic-level text replacement,” Cole chimed in. “If I can get inside this fucking system, find the right files, and run the cypher app on them, we should get the original text.”

  Red dropped the papers, obviously agreeing, so I didn’t bother with the rest of them. Bucky did the same, glaring at the safe one last time before slamming the door shut. “Then why is it that you incompetent asshole are still talking, and not getting the job done?”

  “I’m trying,” Cole muttered, never taking his eyes off the screen, his fingers flying over the keys. “But it would take me a good ten minutes to explain to you what I’m working with here. Ten minutes I’d rather concentrate on getting in.”

  Bucky didn’t look abashed at his outburst, but also not like he gave a shit that Cole gave as good as he got. For a while, the only sounds in the room came from people carefully shifting from one foot to the other, and the incessant clicking of the keyboard.

  Someone cleared their throat behind us. When I turned, I found Gita hesitating by the door, looking both eager and terribly apprehensive. Before Hamilton or Red could bark at her, I asked, “What’s up?”

  “Maybe I can help with that,” she offered, her eyes dancing from me to the setup at the desk.

  Hamilton gave a derisive snort that was usually reserved for me, but Cole paused, glancing at her. “This is a little above writing apps in Java or Objective-C.”

  Gita beamed a smile at him that was full of derision, but said nothing. Cole hesitated, then motioned her over as he stepped aside, launching into an explanation that sounded about as cohesive as what had been printed on the papers. Gita listened for a few moments, then started spewing gibberish of her own as she usurped the laptop and began typing without missing a beat.

  Glancing at Red, I found him returning my gaze with a slightly bemused smile. “It’s like listening to little baby birds chirping in their nest, isn’t it?” I wisely provided, earning myself a good-natured snort for once.

  Seeing as there wasn’t anything for me at the moment to do, I dug through the pockets of my pants until I found some pre-packaged jerky, almost spilling a bunch of magazines on the floor in my attempt to get there. Hill laughed at what I guessed was my ammo packrat habit, but cut off when Red gave him an admonishing stare. “Now that the generator’s already running, why don’t you do something useful and try the radio frequencies again? You said you almost got something in last night?”

  Hill dutifully dropped his—enormous, once it hit the ground next to his equally large frame—pack, getting out his equipment. Cole ignored him as Hill dropped it all on the remaining free space of the desk next to the generator and set to work. Watching him scan frequencies was only so interesting as I meditatively chewed my jerky. Everyone else seemed to be content to be inside a room that was, for once, not cold enough that rime covered everything, paying just enough attention not to be caught off-guard should anything undead come barging through the guards outside and into the room.

  “What is this about, anyway?” I asked Red while pretending that Hamilton wasn’t in the room. I could do that for five more minutes, no biggie. Red ignored me, but I could see a muscle in his cheek jump. “You know, contrary to what some people believe, I’m not stupid. I can put two and two together. Eventually, I’ll figure it all out, and then the big reveal won’t really be much of a surprise anymore.” Still no reaction, but that didn’t keep me from prattling on. “We ran into a security guard in the greenhouse outside.” Now he did look over, but his lips remained sealed. I beamed a bright smile at him. “Judging from the fact that he was missing half his head but was still moving, I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t a normal shambler. Oh, and he had some freaky jumping action going on.” Still nothing. “A guard, at a site that has garbled papers referring to the serum project. Come on, give me something to work with here. Or all you get from me once you decipher those files is a nod that yes, I can read that, but I won’t tell you what it really says.”

  As expected, that got his attention, but also that of the idiot in charge. “You will talk,” Hamilton said with the kind of conviction that was begging for a punch in the face.

  “I might be lying,” I offered rather than the claim that I wouldn’t, which would have just given him an opening to explain exactly how he would facilitate his part of the deal. “You have no way of checking if what I tell you is true, unless one of your grunts has unexpected previous life experience. Which I know they don’t, or else you wouldn’t be stuck with me.”

  Gita let out a triumphant whoop, she and Cole high-fiving each other, which put a halt on my attempt to weasel more information—or any, really—out of those recalcitrant assholes. “We’re in!” she proclaimed, a little out of breath with excitement. “What files do you need decrypted?”

  “Well, isn’t that the question,” I grumbled while Red walked over to them so he could look at the screen. He seemed to have more of a clue than the printouts let on, seeing as it took them all of a minute to find something to be printed—only that the ink in the printer had dried up, nobody had brought a replacement, and there were no other cartridges to be found.

  “Copy all that to your laptop and on some external drives for backup,” Red ordered, still scanning the screen.

  “You know, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on so many possibilities with that idiotic strategy of yours,” I remarked, waiting for Red to bite. He didn’t. “I mean, I get it. The bitch had to be put in her place first. But sawing your own arm off just to spite me won’t really do you much good.” When I still got no reaction, I turned to Hamilton. “Or did you get a gag order? Blink twice, or stare at the left upper corner if you can’t confirm it verbally.” Bucky’s gaze kept boring into mine, not even a single eyelash quivering. “Need me to elaborate? You didn’t know that she’s a hacker.” Well, neither did I, but I didn’t need to admit that. “And back when you were all, let’s kill ‘em all if you don’t cooperate, you didn’t know that Tanner’s one of you. No need to deny that, I saw Richards’s reaction when he noticed that he had the three marks across his neck. Trying to execute them would have ended with several casualties for your people. We’re in this together, whether you like it, or I like it, or whoever the fuck came up with this plan likes it. Let’s pool resources. Exact
ly what do you have to lose?”

  Sadly—but not surprisingly—my vote for rational thinking went ignored. All Hamilton had for me was one of those sleazy smiles. “Then I wouldn’t get to see you squirm all the time with indignation and frustration, and trust me, that’s the biggest satisfaction I’ll ever get from anything.”

  I was tempted to snark at him that he really must be needing to get laid, but I was not going there. So I let my silence—relaxed, and as far from indignant and frustrated as I could make it, which likely wasn’t working—be my answer.

  “Lewis, take a look at this,” Red said once Cole was done feeding no less than four flash drives to his laptop. I didn’t miss that Gita let something disappear up the sleeve of her jacket, her attention seemingly wandering to the view of the garden but I didn’t buy the disinterested act. I absolutely felt like refusing, or at the very least stomping over there like a petulant child, but that would have negated my demonstrated willingness to cooperate, so I was stuck with doing so willingly.

  Gita and Cole moved to the side as Red indicated me to park my ass in the desk chair previously pushed to the side. “We have about another thirty minutes until we need to move on,” he explained. “See if you can make any sense of anything on here.”

  I glared at the stupid dainty computer mouse but decided that making a fuss that would cause me to backtrack would be even worse than going straight for the kill and trying to swallow my dignity. Using my teeth, I pulled my gloves off, dropping them next to the keyboard. Yup, using the mouse with a three-fingered hand was about as awful as I’d expected; it worked, scrolling and all, until I forgot that I was missing the fingers that stabilized it, and the first time I made a stronger motion to the side, it went flying off the desk, landing on the papers littering the floor. Someone snickered but I didn’t catch who. By the time I was about to heave myself out of the chair—which was painful enough thanks to where the zombie in the greenhouse had pummeled my side—Gita had already picked it up and was putting it back on the mouse pad. Swallowing thickly, I told myself to get a grip and resumed. Random scrolling didn’t lead to much so I went for searching the text. Yet when I tried to open the search window with the usual keyboard shortcut, I missed three times—not because I would have needed my left index finger for that which wasn’t available anymore, but because I had absolutely no sensation in the fingertip of the middle finger next to it. Well, that was promising. Pretending like nothing had happened, I used the mouse to navigate the menu to accomplish the job, but at the back of my mind my paranoia screamed. Forcing myself to concentrate on the text helped only so much.

  “It looks like a proposal for new trial runs,” I muttered a few minutes later. “Clearly written by someone who expected the reader to be up to date with the proceedings. There are a lot of references to previous discussions and alternative shit. It’s almost like they didn’t want anyone not in the know to be able to make any sense of this.”

  Red ignored my sarcastic remark. “But it is about the serum project?”

  “Presumably. You know, a smidgen of context—“

  “Not going to happen,” Hamilton interjected, not that Red had appeared in the mood to volunteer anything. “Are you done? Because there’s no need to waste any more time if you’re just uselessly sitting on your ass.”

  I clicked over to the folder view and checked a few more files, but it was about the same. One contained experiment conditions and ingredient lists, but it wasn’t like I could just read that and find some hidden clues in there. Just to annoy Bucky, I tried to spend as much time as I could looking preoccupied—which wasn’t hard, as no one was actually paying me any attention—but eventually had to give up. This wasn’t like Raleigh Miller’s data on that flash drive that Nate had been hogging all through the apocalypse, full of information, carefully vetted, set up to be read by someone else. This looked more like a backup data dump, only to be later checked on for one specific detail or another by someone who was very familiar with the overall concept.

  As soon as I pushed away from the desk, Bucky ordered the others to pack up so we could get going. I narrowly avoided getting plowed over as the room exploded into activity. After grabbing my pack where I’d left it by the shelf, I pulled on my gloves and retrieved my weapons, without a further word slinking outside to join Nate and the others downstairs. Gita was still busy filling them in, adding a lot more details that, even with her explanations, still made no sense to me. I shook my head at Nate’s questioning look in my direction. Nothing new, except shit he already knew himself.

  I fully expected that Red would keep us in the dark about where we were headed next, yet once we were all assembled at the foot of the central staircase, he turned to us at large. “We’re heading south next, toward Ajou.” I remembered that this was the name of the town Gita had found spelled out all over Cabourg as the place for the resistance to meet. “Hill’s still getting a repeating message in several languages on one of the frequencies. We have no clue if we will find anyone alive there, but they need to have some kind of setup to power their radio station, so that likely means a secure shelter at the very least. Depending on what we find there, we will decide on how to proceed. We shouldn’t meet with much more opposition than before until we get there, but try to conserve your energy. The next leg of the journey after that won’t be quite such a walk in the park.”

  The way his gaze lingered on me, I knew he was waiting for me to ask about details—or where, at all, we were ultimately headed—but I kept my trap shut. This was getting old—and if they didn’t want my input, why bother? Yet until we were back outside the wall, and even for the next two hours of marching, I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder repeatedly. Of course that could have been a fluke—one security guard, certainly a beefcake before he turned, getting the jump on me. I sure wasn’t in the best shape of my life, and Burns had taken care of the issue quickly enough. But it hadn’t been the first zombie I’d encountered after not dying on that operating table, or even the fiftieth. Something about this was very, very wrong, and if I’d learned anything in the past year, it was that consequences always came back to bite me.

  Chapter 16

  Something was indeed very, very wrong, but not with anything lurking in the shadows. I was barely lucid from exhaustion by the time we shacked up in a small farm house and adjacent barn, and expecting me to actually stand guard was an idiotic undertaking. For once, Nate didn’t shadow me as Red seemed to have him tied up with yet another important meeting I wasn’t a part of, and by the time he came to relieve me, I only nodded at him in passing as I dragged my sorry ass over to the house to force some chow into my body so I could curl up in my sleeping bag. I was dozing off as soon as I had zipped it up to my chin, trying to get comfortable—yet instead of actually falling asleep, my body froze. It wasn’t exactly like with the zombie attack—looking back, that had felt more like a stalling engine—and only took me one sluggish minute to work out what was going on: my body had reverted to falling into a coma rather than real sleep, like at the very beginning of this damn mission. Panic started clawing at my mind, powerful enough that my pulse should have skyrocketed—but it didn’t reach beyond my racing thoughts, and even those disappeared like dandelion seeds ripped from the flower’s stem in a storm, every few seconds. It felt as if I was locked inside a meat suit, with a heavy damper on my brain on top of not having control of my body. Fucking hell. Add to that more than just a dash of delirium—that I barely recognized as such—and I would have been tempted to go for my Beretta to put an end to this had I been able to move, or even blink.

  Burns and Tanner were sitting closest to me, and when Burns remarked that I’d been really quick to fall asleep tonight, looking over his shoulder to me as he said it, my hopes went up that he’d realize what was going on with me. Yet I was barely able to blink, let alone move or croak out something, simple breathing a Herculean task. Tanner muttered something I didn’t get, making Burns laugh and glance back once more, as i
f to make sure I hadn’t caught it. Our gazes crossed and he winked, as if to make the fact that I had presumably caught Tanner’s derogatory reply our secret, but he was facing forward by the time I managed to close my eyes a second time. Damnit!

  More chatting, more soft laughter, until Burns suddenly went quiet. I managed to pry my eyes open, but it took me forever. He was looking my way, only now with a frown creasing his forehead. “You doing all right there, Lewis?” I tried to blink, but even that didn’t work anymore. My breaths evened out, turning shallow enough that the edge of my vision blurred, then went dark. It was hard to focus. It was hard to keep breathing. It…

  “Bree?” Burns, now coming from much closer. A large hand enveloping my shoulder, shaking me softly, then not so softly. The motion got my head to snap to the side, my eyes flying wide open and remaining that way. Burns leaned over me, his gaze skipping over my face until it landed on my eyes. “Shit,” he muttered, tearing off the glove of his free hand so he could check my temperature on my forehead. As soon as his skin came in contact with mine, he shied back, then checked more thoroughly, his hand almost ice cold against my skin. “You’re burning up.”

  Tanner’s head appeared next to mine. He looked as concerned as Burns sounded. “She’s running a fever?”

  “Not just that, I think.” He leaned closer, snapping his fingers right next to my ear. I wasn’t sure what that should have accomplished but it seemed to make sense to him. “Girl, wake up,” he said, shaking me a little more. I tried to tell him to stop, but only got as far as opening my mouth. Nothing came out.

  Letting go, Burns looked around, thinking for a second. “Gita, your watch shift is up next, right? Good. Go fetch Miller. Tell him to hurry. Make sure you’re easily heard when you explain, loudly, that you changed your mind and want to trade watch with him. Now, go.”