Nate pushed away from his position by the wall, the motion drawing Red’s interest. “So that’s the lab,” Nate surmised, changing topics. “The much harder part is, how do we get in there?”
“After wading through seas of zombies, you mean?” I offered wisely.
Red pointed at a small maze of corridors at the southern side of the complex. “Electricity should be shut off, and the external generators must have run empty during the last year so the outside defenses should be down.”
“Defenses?” I asked. “Should?”
“Mostly heavy steel doors,” Burns provided, joining Nate by the table. “Nothing that a little C4 shouldn’t take care of. We’ll still try brute strength first to keep the noise level as low as possible. The emergency exits might be problematic but once we get into the building, forcing our way into the elevator shaft shouldn’t be that hard. Then it’s just a twenty-level drop, and we should be in.”
“Twenty levels?” This was getting better and better.
“Don’t worry because of your grip,” Richards, ever helpful, offered. “We’ll get you down and back out, no problem.”
I glared at him, hard-pressed not to hide my fingers in my armpits as I crossed my arms over my chest. “I can rappel and pull up my own weight, thank you very much. Just not too fond of the distance, or the fact that we have no way out if anything happens to that shaft.”
“There’s still the emergency exits—here, here, and here.” Richards pointed to them on the blueprints.
“I still don’t like elevator shafts,” I protested. “Last time I was in one, I got shot. First scar I got when the shit hit the fan.”
Burns seemed a little confused; I was sure he hadn’t noticed. It had been barely more than a scratch, anyway. Nate, ever supportive, leaned in and whispered, “I’ll make sure to not blow the building up all around us this time.” My answering glare made him smirk.
Cole spoke up next. “Depending on what we find down there, we’ll have to bypass the security system so it will let us in. They have three layers of reinforced steel and concrete cages around the entire complex, then again around the hot labs and experimental wing. The generators down there should still be operating but we have enough fuel for our portable ones to gain us around five hours to work with. I’ve been coordinating with our wiz kid here.” He nodded in Gita’s direction, who was still keeping herself in the background. I hadn’t seen much of her during the last few days. “Together, we should hack through their system in less than thirty minutes. That should give the rest of you four hours. I don’t think we should overstay our welcome. I’m not sure we can shut down the automated security measures that will start up as soon as we breach the system, but they have a countdown set for emergency operations like this, giving us four hours and forty-five minutes leeway. Four hours is on the safe side.”
“Four hours it is,” Bucky declared. “Next step—how we get to the location.” He turned to Raphael. “What’s the latest intel saying about the weather and ice on the river?”
Raphael, scratching his stubble, didn’t look too euphoric. “The last confirmed data we have is months old. We haven’t gotten anyone closer than a fifty-mile radius from the city. Our stations upriver and closer to the sea said that the Seine is only partly frozen over. It’s your best bet, so you should risk it. You won’t survive if you try to get to La Défense over land.” He turned to one of the larger maps then. “Ajou is here. The shortest, if not quite safest, route is to head east until Mantes-la-Jolie. We have three fueled-up boats hidden away there that we will take up the Seine, at least three kilometers past the bridge crossing over into La Défense, or as far as the river is clear. There’s an island there, bisecting the river, so that might or might not be a problem. We’ll try to drop you off there, and if there aren’t too many undead close, we’ll stay there until your return. Else you’ll have to wait until we can pick you up, likely downriver.”
I liked that even less than the elevator shaft exit, but I trusted his assessment.
“The weather should be clear for the next few days,” Kris provided, checking the notes she’d brought with her. “With luck, you should be in and out before the next snowstorm hits us. Two of the stations on the Swedish and German coast have called in that bad weather is coming, but as you’re leaving today, you should be good. Might not even get here until the end of the week.”
Hamilton acknowledged that with a nod. “Anything else?”
“Raphael, Antoine, Noah, and Ines will come with you,” Alexandre stated, not even reacting to Bucky making a face. “They are our best scouts, and they know the territory you need to traverse. They will find you the best route to the boats. They won’t come into the laboratory with you, but they are more than capable of holding the position by the boats until they get overrun.”
“I wish I could go with you,” Elle stated, regret heavy in her voice. “I would have loved seeing Paris one more time. But my job is to defend our position here and that doesn’t allow for gallivanting through the winter wonderland.”
“We appreciate your support,” Richards offered, even making it sound honest.
“You’re welcome,” Alexandre responded jovially, if with a certain smirk. Elle inclined her head, but the way she smiled my way made me guess that, without my presence, their cooperation might not have extended this far. Gee, way to make me feel appreciated by my own people.
“We haven’t been able to re-establish connection to your people back home in the States,” Elle continued. “We will try hailing your ship to update them on your ETA plus a week’s travel back to the coast. You will likely be there sooner with the boats drifting downriver. Most of the beaches are clear so you should be able to find shelter until you can rendezvous with them.”
And decide whether to change our minds and stay with them, but she didn’t add that, which I appreciated.
Red thanked her before he cast one more look down at the maps and diagrams. “Anyone got any questions that we can’t discuss on the march? Get ready. We move out in twenty.”
I felt weirdly at a loss at his declaration, not quite sure why. When I’d dressed this morning I’d done so for harsh outdoor conditions, not another day of lazing away in comfortable warmth, yet now that it was time to take our leave, I felt like we’d only just gotten here. It wasn’t even trepidation because of what I knew—and had gotten spelled out to me just now—lay ahead, I realized, but more a latent resentment of leaving friends that we’d only just made and would very likely never see again. I didn’t need a shrink to know that was a lot more about being afraid to be stuck here without a chance to ever see my friends back home, but since that wasn’t a pressing concern at the moment, it was easy to ignore.
Priorities, I told myself. First, I had to live through what was to come. Once that was behind me, I could worry about the rest. Somehow I got the feeling that was the only thing that had kept me going since Dom and Sunny at the Silo had confirmed that I was rotting from the inside out. One of these days that house of cards would come crashing down on me, and I wasn’t sure how I would be handling that.
Taking our leave turned into the somewhat orderly chaos I’d expected. As much as I hated to admit it, Bucky’s people knew how to pack and get ready so it was mostly last-minute holdups that made us ten minutes late. Although they were happy to help us with the boats, I got the sense that the French weren’t heartbroken to see us go. My pack was as large and heavy as I remembered, and while those two and a half days of rest had helped my body heal further, I wasn’t exactly pain free once everything was strapped back in place. More than once I asked myself why I was doing this as I got ready and let Nate do a last check that everything was stowed away neatly. I reminded myself that I hadn’t been lying when I’d told the French that I kinda, sorta believed in what we were doing here, and I didn’t think it beyond Hamilton to gag and tie me up to drag me along if I put up a fight. Being able to defend myself was much preferable to that.
Raphael
held us back before it was time to head from the large entry hall into the cold outdoors, making us all repeat the names of the five checkpoint towns that were close to the route we were about to take, wincing his way through us slaughtering the pronunciation. He insisted on the practice should anyone get lost. If we encountered even halfway as many zombies as they had all claimed still roamed the area, anyone who got separated would likely die before being able to reunite with the rest, unless he turned around and walked back to Ajou. Four hundred million undead all over Europe, and a shit-ton of them clustered together in the central low regions outside of the mountain ranges—my mind still had a hard time wrapping itself around that number. How we’d managed to survive this far, stumbling more or less blindly through the countryside, was a miracle—and one I was afraid would come to a bloody end all too soon.
The sun was only a few inches above the horizon as we climbed up the stairs and through the reinforced steel doors, the air cold enough to make me want to draw up short as it hit my face. Right, more of that. At least my entire body wasn’t frozen solid in under a minute, but I wasn’t exactly feeling cozy.
Red was about to split us into our previous marching order of fire teams once more, but Antoine would have none of that. “One team forward, led by one of us,” he insisted. “The rest of you follow, together. If anyone gets in trouble, strength in numbers is the only way to go.”
“You mean like what happened to your people that we rescued?” Parker asked, the medic’s sunny disposition without a doubt hailing from the balmy conditions.
Noah, who’d been the leader of said group and the one I, and later Bucky, had been talking to, looked less than impressed with that accusation.
“We underestimated how frozen the ground was, yes,” he admitted. “But if we’d been walking all spread out, none of us would have been alive for any of you to notice us.”
Hamilton considered for a second. “One recon team at a time it is,” he declared. “Everyone, keep radio contact.” His gaze zoomed over to me without hesitation. “And I mean absolutely everyone.”
I held eye contact easily but didn’t otherwise react. As far as I knew, the French didn’t have a com system and we hadn’t brought anything except spare batteries, yet with three or four others someone would manage to report in, I was certain.
So we set off, the recon team in advance, the rest of us following in a slightly drawn-out line, East, on our quest to get to the boats on the hopefully mostly ice-free Seine.
Chapter 7
We were up third to do forward recon, and I wasn’t heartbroken that Ines joined us rather than Antoine. She didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone and didn’t comment the few times I misplaced a step and struggled a little, which was fine with me. As much as my body had appreciated the time resting to heal further, it hadn’t done anything for my balance. Before long, I was hurting all over again but not enough to mobilize the full extent of my stored-away energy and stamina. At least I was in moderately good spirits since sorting through the research notes had given me an unexpected purpose I hadn’t realized I’d been missing. One could say I even felt a little loopy with excitement, with only the residual discomfort holding me back. So when Nate wasn’t looking, I punched myself in my remaining kidney, not quite sure if I wanted to whimper with pain or high-five myself when the world around me suddenly snapped into sharp focus.
Ah, much better!
What I’d thought was a measure of stealth turned out to be anything but, as I was still staring transfixedly at a patch of ice glowing brightly in the sunshine when Nate trudged into my field of vision, glowering at me. “What the hell?”
I tried giving him the most innocent, “Who, me?” look I could muster but cut the crap when the ebbing waves of pain made it impossible for me not to make a face. “I need to learn how to control this,” I offered. “Even more so with what’s up ahead. Stop babying me.” Besides, I so didn’t mind the added hint of euphoria slithering through my brain.
Burns, a little farther ahead, ignored us, but Ines was less than amused by our bickering. “We need to stay quiet,” she reminded us. “Stealthy. Keep the foreplay to when it’s no longer my life on the line as well.”
It was impressive just how venomous the look was that Nate sent her, making me smile where he couldn’t see it. It was less amusing when he turned that exact glare on me next, but we would have long ago killed each other if I always took him seriously. Putting one foot in front of the other wasn’t easier with a more acute sense of agony radiating through my body—euphoria notwithstanding—but having a slightly better sense of my surroundings made a difference. I could always wallow in my misery once this was over and we were safely back on the destroyer, en route home, I reasoned. Now I needed to stay sharp. I was sure that Hamilton wouldn’t do anything in the meantime to jeopardize that outcome of us blissfully surviving this mission.
It turned out, we didn’t need Bucky harassing me to turn life needlessly complicated once more—the resident undead population was more than happy to step in. We were less than ten miles east of Ajou when we had to stop and backtrack for the first time because our chosen route was blocked by the undead, shuffling this way and that in the freezing cold. How they could still move, let alone be a menace, was beyond me, but the five we had to do away with had looked dead for good, half frozen in a ditch—but weren’t, as we found out as we passed. They were hard enough to kill as it was. Back to the other side of a low, sloping hill, where we ran into another obstacle, this time a pack of wolves. They didn’t attack us but didn’t back away far enough to be out of shooting distance, either—which we couldn’t do as it would have drawn the attention of the hundreds of zombies that had forced us to take this route. By afternoon, I was so keyed up from watching anything and everything like a hawk that I repeatedly jumped at boughs swaying in the light wind or leaves crunching under a badly placed boot. Maybe making myself that keyed up hadn’t been my brightest idea, but I was loathe to admit that. And I wasn’t the only one, judging from the many wide-eyed looks I caught all through the day.
With our provisions freshly supplemented by the French, there was no need to go foraging, nor to stop before it got too dark to move on. Red led a team that cleared out a small cottage in the middle of what had been a vineyard, and it took us another hour to drag all the corpses of the previous residents far enough away not to draw too much attention to our hideout—and those we encountered while establishing said perimeter. Our home for the night still reeked of spilled zombie guts, but it was so damn cold outside that being on watch detail wasn’t much of a relief. Feeling the difference now, I couldn’t delude myself anymore—I’d been damn near in a constant stupor until Parker had cut me up, only that I hadn’t realized then how much my mind had been running on autopilot. I told myself this was an improvement, but a debatable one at times.
The cottage had a single large room, and once the group up for first watch had exited, it only made sense for me to dump myself in the next available spot as close to the makeshift fire we had going in the middle of the room, right between Cole and Hill. When they both eyed my pack curiously, I smirked. “What, afraid my girl cooties will rub off on you?”
“Still debatable whether you’ve stopped being contagious yet,” Cole grumbled under his breath but shuffled to the side so I could park my ass on one of the makeshift benches—a couple of still-frozen logs we’d dragged inside—next to him. It was a valid question, but nothing I felt like worrying about.
“Not like you could catch it,” I offered. “Nor will you get any chance to.”
Hill guffawed at that—or the face Cole was making—and watched with amusement as Burns, Tanner, and Nate found their own places not too far away but for once not clustered around me. While Burns didn’t seem to mind, Nate was sporting that awfully neutral look once more that he had been donning since the beach.
“Just weird that you don’t keep that cliquey thing up you’ve had going until now,” Cole pointed out.
I shrugged, digging into my pack for some jerky. “The last few days I’ve slept in the same room with you all, with not a single weird comment from anyone, and now you complain about the lack of segregation? Just be happy I don’t ask for cuddles to warm up quicker.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I prefer to keep my hands and dick.” He didn’t need to glance in Nate’s direction to underline who he seemed to be afraid might make him part with the aforementioned body parts.
That made me laugh in earnest. “Trust me, I’m more than capable of doing any required dismembering myself.”
Everyone was too busy to continue talking as the beans and rice were passed around, but as soon as he’d treated himself to seconds, Hill got chatty. “So, what’s the deal with you and Gabriel Greene? Considering how the French were salivating all over him, you did a moderately good job acting like you were happy to hear from him, but I’ve seen that same level of resentment come off you in waves whenever something ruffles your feathers. He’s your closest ally and still you can’t stand him?”
Hamilton was lurking around outside so I didn’t get the chance to offer any nonverbal comparisons, but I wasn’t opposed to the other kind, either. “Does it come as such a surprise that I’m able to work with someone even if I absolutely can’t stand them?” I didn’t even try to make the fake smile on my face look anything but.
Cole snorted, but Hill wasn’t satisfied yet. “There’s gotta be a story in there somewhere. No need to spill all your trade secrets; we know that bunch at the coast like to keep their cards close to the vest. Just dish on your personal dirt. There’s got to be something. People you just don’t like don’t draw that level of ire from you.” He pointedly glanced at where Russell and Parker were hunkered down a good distance from our cozy little corner.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 81