Hamilton’s voice grating across my conscience brought me back to the here and now. “Oh, she’s big on forgiveness. Don’t forget, she married the reject that not only betrayed every single value he ever stood for, but also used her life like any other poker chip in the game.”
Letting go of Gita, I did my best to hold on to that residual glimmer of warmth inside of me, trying hard not to let the anger seeping back consume it all at once. “Well, I haven’t killed you yet although I had a good three chances. I must be really big about forgiveness of late.”
Hamilton snorted but didn’t add anything that made me want to hurl myself across the table at him. He left it at that—which made me instantly suspicious—and instead bent down to get something from below the table… only to resurface with a stack of manila folders, dropping what looked like a few hundred pages in three neat piles in front of me. “The documentation of the project that you left on your bunk. All the update notes that Raynor had of the lab before it went dark, dating up to two days before that. And a list of the viral strains she thinks might be the most interesting. If your new friends here have a working printer, we can add the decrypted files we got from the conservatory; else, Cole will hook you up with a laptop so you can review them digitally. That is, if you find the time between screwing your brains out. After all, we have you along to be our scientific advisor.”
My first impulse was to shy away from the stacks of paper as if they were poisonous snakes, but my curiosity won, making me pick up the folder in the middle—presumably the notes from the lab—after a moment’s hesitation. I refused to react to Hamilton’s barb, even less so as I still felt mellow enough that it was more of a glancing blow than a direct hit. “How much time do I have for this?” I asked absentmindedly, already soaking up what felt as close to the Holy Grail as anything I’d ever come across in my life. I sure as hell wasn’t going to look that gift horse in the mouth, not after weeks of going insane from not knowing what was going on.
“Depends on how long we’re welcome to stay,” Hamilton said, his gaze skipping to someone—presumably Elle or Alexandre—behind me. “Two days, maybe three. We need to recuperate before the next leg of our journey, and if it gives us an edge, we have a day or two to spare.”
“So Greene’s assessment was right. You are running out of fuel,” I surmised, momentarily looking up from the data.
Hamilton didn’t answer, but that was saying a lot in and of itself. I suddenly felt a little stupid with my constant resentment clouding my judgment; I absolutely didn’t put it past him to annoy me for the heck of it, but it made a lot more sense that he’d been closed-mouthed because desperation wasn’t always the best motivation, particularly when getting stranded in a foreign country was suddenly also a very real possibility. It sure explained why he’d been pushing onward as if we had flames licking on our very heels.
As if he’d read my mind—a truly disconcerting idea—Hamilton offered, “Before yesterday, you hardly seemed up to reading two consecutive sentences, let alone understanding anything that’s in there. No one’s expecting miracles from you, but it will make our job a hell of a lot easier if you can point at things or rattle off numbers rather than spend hours searching. This is not a computer game where you just have to run up to the blinking quest icon on the map. We have no idea what’s waiting for us in that lab. The sooner we’re done, the better.”
My, didn’t that sound nicely cryptic? “I presume you know a thing or two about what might be lurking in there?” Greene’s hint was enough to make my blood run cold, but human experiments were one thing; juiced-up super zombies quite another.
Whether it was that he wanted to appear diplomatic now that our French friends were listening in, or he’d gotten tired of being an obtuse ass to me all the time, Bucky surprised me by giving an answer. “Know? No, and I doubt they would have marked these things in their update notes. But if I was head of security in a super secret lab that suddenly found itself shut down because of a security breach of some kind, I would unleash hell on whoever caused that incident. If that meant shooting up a kennel of test subjects with the latest version of whatever fucked-up shit that had been part of the ongoing research, I would do it in a heartbeat. Or if someone was about to kill us all by unleashing a deadly gas or other agent, I’d make sure something was set free to avenge us.” He paused, offering me a humorless grin. “I’m sure your husband told you a few of the old wives’ tales the men like to tell about the serum project headquarter that Raynor has taken over? Most of that’s just stories. Because where they actually originated, that’s where we’re headed.”
This was getting better and better. I was almost happy when he shut up, clearly done with the question-and-answer session. Picking up the folders, I briefly inclined my head. “I’ll see what I can find in this.”
Hamilton acknowledged that with a nod and without the usual verbal abuse, already turning back to the maps. I hesitated, wondering if I should stick around for planning, but I was the first to admit that I knew next to nothing about how to best find a way to infiltrate a zombie-overrun city. So I left, Gita the only one trailing behind me as I made for our new living quarters.
Chapter 5
I briefly considered claiming one of the two smaller rooms that the French had set aside as our quarters, but then ended up joining the others in the much larger room that sat in between—partly because one room had already been allocated for the contents of our packs and weapon maintenance, and the other was claustrophobically small, barely wide enough to fit two mattresses next to each other. Burns would have had trouble stretching out lengthwise across them. It also felt weird to be closeted away from the others, a fact I only grudgingly admitted. The entire last week I had been happy for every single moment away from them, but there was safety in numbers, even if the French hadn’t given us even a hint to be concerned about anything.
Or maybe it was that, given the news Bucky had sprung on us, I really didn’t want to be alone right now.
I ended up parking my tired ass in the corner by the door that had, so far, not been occupied. All along the walls of the room lay mattresses dressed with fresh sheets, and haphazard stacks of pillows and blankets in between—in short, luxury I hadn’t expected to ever find again anywhere on the road but so very appreciated. Gita moved a little farther into the room down the left wall, leaving me the corner including two mattresses that quickly got covered in stacks of papers as I started going through the files Hamilton had so graciously handed over. Cole came in shortly thereafter—probably an hour or two later—and stopped short at the other side of my paper fort, another stack of papers, smelling tantalizingly like fresh printer toner, in his hands.
“Just drop that somewhere,” I told him, not bothering to look up from the table I was perusing.
He gave a short laugh. “Don’t tell me there’s a system behind this mess.”
“Sure is.” Focusing on him, I was ready to tell him to stop screwing around, but then realized that I’d managed to cover my entire vicinity with paper, leaving nothing but the very end of the mattress to my right free, precariously close to the door and prone for anyone walking by to accidentally kick things over. “Gimme,” I said instead.
Bemused, Cole idly pushed papers aside with the tip of his boot until he could reach me, dropping another three hundred odd pages into my lap. And a sandwich—well, baguette, to be precise—filled with what looked like roast beef and brie, wrapped in a threadbare cloth. “Miller says you should eat this, unless you want him to stuff you like a goose. I was considering not telling you because that spectacle would sure be entertaining.”
Glaring at the food first, then Cole, I nevertheless unwrapped it and started digging in, not bothering to close my mouth as I chewed. “I’ve seen at least seven women since we came in here, and that was without visiting any of the common areas deeper inside the base yet. Don’t you have anyone else you can annoy? Or, you know, do more entertaining things with?”
Excep
t for Davis, still nursing his hurt leg, and McClintock, who seemed to have pulled an extra long shift last night, the rest had fled the sleeping quarters quickly enough. Even Gita had abandoned me after she realized I meant business with the files.
Cole made a face. “Hamilton warned us not to antagonize the natives. So unless a buxom French mademoiselle is going to plunk her ass in my lap, I’d better keep my hands to myself.”
I couldn’t help but snort. I was sure that the warning looks Elle had taxed the lot of them with had done more to scare them straight. “So in the meantime you’ve set your sights on annoying me? Get lost. Unlike you, I have actual work to do.” Cole inclined his head, still grinning, but paused when I held him back. “Thanks for dropping that hint on the trek over,” I offered, meaning it. “It sure helped not to sound like I was bumbling in the dark with the powers that be—or rather, wannabe—all knowing.”
Cole hesitated but then relented. “You’re welcome. And it was quite funny to see both Greene and Hamilton fed up that you’d pretty much figured out everything by yourself already.”
“Helps to have friends sometimes.” I knew it was a cryptic statement and I didn’t even know myself what exactly I wanted to say with it, but Cole took it as the olive branch that it was.
“Sometimes it does.” He left me to my baguette and notes, looking as bewildered as I felt.
Dropping the section I had been perusing before, I quickly leafed through the file Cole had brought me, now a little less at a loss of what I was reading than when the files had still been encrypted, and I hadn’t had the full documentation spread out all around me. A lot of it was the same information as in the notes—weekly update reports for the most part, and a monthly summary of each project, from what I could tell—but there were a few nuggets of gold strewn in between endless tables of experimental conditions and raw data. As much as my curiosity still burned bright, what I’d read so far had done a few things to make sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep well going forward. They’d been doing experiments on human subjects all right, and while they’d used assigned numbers rather than names, it was impossible not to cringe at what was evident if one simply read between the lines. Twenty-three numbers had been mentioned so far, five of which had expired. Considering that one of them had been assigned dates more than twenty consecutive months, I wasn’t sure if those five hadn’t been the winners.
Another hour passed, and while I would have loved to be able to taste the food I devoured, I didn’t mind not losing the appetite I didn’t have anymore to what I kept finding in the files. Yet it wasn’t the superficial dread of compassion for the victims of the trials that made me uncomfortable, no. It was the almost certain knowledge that if Thecla and her maniacs hadn’t killed Raleigh Miller when they did, I would have sooner or later ended up connected, on some level or other, with the research that had been going on at that lab—and very likely managed to justify it, somehow. I really didn’t want to contemplate what that would have done to me. From that point of view, Raynor’s utter lack of compassion and empathy looked more like a survival trait than a trade secret.
And there I’d thought Hamilton would be the worst thing I’d have to deal with on this trip.
Burns dropping by to claim one of the remaining mattresses—next to the ever-spreading piles of papers—was as good an excuse as I’d get to drag myself back to the here and now, and I was more than happy to let him physically pull me up and along toward where dinner had been set up in one of the larger rooms of the complex that I hadn’t visited yet. I still took one of the reports with me, but mostly so Hamilton wouldn’t have any ammunition against me and my purported lack of interest in helping with the mission.
The room—or hall, as it turned out—was about five times as large as the communication center, or war room, that we’d been in before, housing two long lines of tables and benches, haphazardly cobbled together to form some kind of a banquet setup. Both tables were covered in more food than I’d seen in one place for a very long time, and buzzing with people dropping in and switching places to grab a bite but mostly to shout on top of each other in good-natured conversation. I stopped right inside the door, the general level of noise making me draw up short. Burns, as usual, grinned at my obvious moment of overwhelm before he pushed me on toward the right of the tables where I saw Elle and Alexandre talking animatedly with—or rather, at—Nate and Red among a lot of unfamiliar faces. Bucky sat farther down the same table, stuffing his face while Aimes, Russell, and Parker were bickering among themselves. I ignored them in favor of squeezing in next to my dear husband, not quite sure what to make of the fact that both Hill and Cole dropped down on the bench opposite us when a few of the French vacated the premises.
Before Nate could get cute and pile food on my plate, I set to the task myself, going mostly for fat and protein-rich leftovers that others seemed to have avoided—or hadn’t gotten to yet. It all looked delicious, but after a week of hearing the guys complain about the MREs—that they always devoured right down to the very last crumbs—almost anything would have. There was also an abundance of steamed and grilled vegetables that I made sure to get a heap of as well, much to Nate’s amusement. While I started stuffing my face, Elle and Red kept a conversation going about 19th century French literature that was only fascinating because of the people having it. I welcomed Antoine shooing a cute girl away so he could sit down next to his brother, much to Alexandre’s apparent dismay—and Elle’s continuing ignorance. Far was it from me to speculate, but as far as I could tell, the French weren’t exactly prudes.
Or circumspect, as I was about to find out.
“What’s up with that,” Antoine asked, gesturing with a piece of bread in my direction. At first I thought he meant the now somewhat stained report that sat mostly forgotten next to me except for Nate idly looking at it once in a while. When he saw my confusion, Antoine clarified, “Your fingers.”
“Ah. That. Well,” I started, chasing some peas around my plate to come up with a good answer. “It’s kind of a long story.” And not necessarily one that I wanted to recount, in present company, when both Hill and Cole visibly perked up and even Red took some interest. It wasn’t like they didn’t know the details.
Antoine leaned back as far as his perch on the bench would allow. “We have time. There’s still food on the table, and lots of wine for when it’s gone.”
I wondered if I should have told him that alcohol wouldn’t do a thing for me anymore, but eventually gave in.
“Long story short, I got infected by the virus but because dying would have been too easy, I survived, yet what I thought was full immunity I’d gained was only immunity to the virus, not the secondary bacterial infection I got from the zombies gnawing through my hip right down to the bone. Not the most sanitary thing, rotten undead mouths. The infection spread slowly enough that it took me months to realize that I had it, and then there was nothing else to do but scrape and cut all the necrotic bits off. Even got my left femur partly replaced with titanium because the fucking critters ate away everything down to the bone.”
Alexandre and Elle both looked fittingly impressed—and more than a little skeeved out—but Antoine barely batted an eyelash. “How does a virologist—no less the woman who knew all about what was going on just as it was unfolding—end up getting bitten by zombies? Shouldn’t you have been sitting safely tucked away in a lab or bunker somewhere?”
I didn’t much care for his openly chiding tone, and less so for the obvious agreement from the peanut gallery next to him.
“Not quite my style,” I offered when telling him to go fuck himself didn’t sound like the smartest answer in the book. “I spent my first year out in the apocalyptic wilderness and being locked inside didn’t sound that appealing anymore after that. They even offered to let me run one of their labs, but that would have come with more fine print than I was happy with at the time. Plus, I didn’t quite agree with the direction they were going at that lab, and all over. Some of us do sti
ll take that ‘land of the free’ thing more seriously than others.” Cole looked less than impressed with that statement while Hill chuckled into his beer. Red, awfully neutral, reminded me more and more of Nate when he didn’t want to let me look into his cards.
“So rather than help your people, you chose to get eaten by the undead,” Antoine surmised, continuing on that train. I wondered if he’d already spent too much time with Hamilton and his flunkies.
“Well, I wouldn’t have gotten eaten if some assholes hadn’t set up a trap for us and decided that it was worth getting killed just to annoy us,” I pressed out, maybe a little more harshly than warranted. Then again, maybe not.
Elle didn’t miss the baleful glance I sent the soldiers, in turn scrutinizing them before she turned back to me. “And yet, you are working with them now?”
I shrugged, feeling strangely chastised by her statement. “Why, just because I lost two of my friends, almost my own life, the life of my unborn child, and a good fifth of my semi-vital body parts doesn’t mean I have to hold a grudge, right?”
While Hill kept nursing his beer, Cole had about enough of my snark. “That might explain the chip on your shoulder, I give you that. But don’t forget the part where you rallied a good thousand of your miscreants to kill anyone who might be disagreeing with your kind of frontier outlaw lifestyle.”
That made me laugh out loud, but likely for a different reason than he expected. I couldn’t tell whether it was the food—or having the French as a buffer between us—but rather than anger me, that assessment was strangely amusing.
“There’s that,” I agreed, gifting Cole the sweetest smile I could manage. “If some of you hadn’t spent the summer killing scavengers and kidnapping and raping women, I wouldn’t have been able to rally anyone. So, there.”
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 79