“Nothing?” I asked, just to be sure.
“Nada.”
Exhaling forcefully, I did my best not to shiver in the cooling evening air as I crossed my arms over my naked chest. “You know, I can think of a place where you haven’t checked yet. Two, actually, but only one really lends itself to this.”
I’d seldom seen him look so conflicted—and angry. “Me too,” he agreed.
Without another word, I put on my bra and shirt again before I flopped down on my back, spreading my thighs as Nate knelt down before me. “You know, I never thought I’d be this happy for you to fondle me.” Putting the bare heels of my feet up onto his shoulders, I exhaled slowly as I stared up into the sky still painted in red and purple. “If you’re waiting for me to get wet, we’ll still be here ten years from now.”
“You think this is easy for me?” Nate grunted, then spit on his fingers and went to work. Or tried to. “Can you relax a bit?”
All I could do was scoff. “Not gonna happen. But I think we still have some WD40 in the cargo hold—“
Nate’s glare shut me up, not that it did either of us much good.
“Do you think it would help if I…” He trailed off there, his other hand gently running up the inside of my thigh.
“If you ever want to have sex again, no,” I advised, but rather than shake off his hand, I pulled it away so I could lace my fingers with his. “Just do it.”
And about two minutes later full of wincing and uncomfortable shifting, I felt Nate’s fingers still as his shoulders tensed. His eyes, previously staring at nothing, caught my gaze. I exhaled loudly as he swallowed. “Yup, there’s something hard there.”
Part of my mind was still struggling to hold on to rationality, supplying a million different options—down to irrational things like that it could be scar tissue from the miscarriage, fuck anatomy and all that shit—but the wave of panic swelling deep inside of me overrode all that within moments.
“Get it out!”
My fingers tensed so much around his that he uttered a low, pained gasp, but he didn’t let go. “I don’t want to hurt—“
“I don’t give a fuck!” I screamed right over his protest. “Get this thing out of me right fucking now! I don’t give a flying fuck—“
I cut off when I felt his nails dig in, doing my best not to cry out. Any pain was welcome, if it only meant that he got that tracker out of me.
Nate cursed low under his breath as he withdrew his hand, his fingers lightly coated with blood—and a small metal rod pinched between thumb and forefinger, about half an inch long. I scrambled to my feet quicker than he could let go of my hand, almost pulling him with me. My throat threatened to close up on my short, ragged breaths as I did my very best to get fully dressed in record time, not even wincing when there came another twinge from downstairs as I slammed my pants on with a little more force than strictly necessary. Nate gave me a helpless look, then focused on the object he’d just retrieved. I expected him to crush it under his boot, but instead he pulled out a tissue and wrapped it up, storing it in his pocket.
“Why the fuck would you do that? Get rid of it!” I shouted, my voice barely more than a toneless scratch.
“I will. Once we find the next super-charged fucker I intend to shove it down its throat. That should turn out as a nasty surprise for anyone actively trying to catch you again.”
Protest lay heavy on my tongue, but I forced my rampaging mind to grind to a halt so I could at least attempt a semblance of rational thought.
“But they could be catching up to us any minute.”
“If they do, we’ll come up with a plan B,” Nate offered. “I know that you don’t like that idea—“
“To hell with that idea! I don’t give a flying fuck about it!” That wasn’t even a lie. All I really could think about was exactly how that tracking chip had gotten there. Bile rose in my throat, and this time I didn’t try to swallow it, instead hurling up what had constituted a late lunch on the road.
Fuck. This was the last thing I needed. That thought was so overwhelming that it pushed everything else away, even the paranoia driven by the fact that they had tracked me. They’d known where I’d gone after I’d escaped the complex. Known the entire time I’d hunkered down in Halsey, afraid that any moment someone would accost me…
Whipping around, I stalked off toward the cars. “Burns, Zilinsky, get back in the Jeep!” I called out to them. “We’re not done for tonight.”
Neither of them said a word as they followed my order—a first, as far as I knew, but then it must have been impossible to ignore what had just happened. Nate came after me, catching my elbow before I could reach the Rover.
“Bree, wait—“
Whipping around, I stared at him. I could only guess how crazy I must be looking right now. “Can’t,” I bit out. “I’ll go crazy if I have to just sit here and wait, doing nothing. And considering there’s no roving band of zombies conveniently on standby so I can work off my anger and frustration, why don’t we use the time to get a few more miles done? I’ll slow down so that the Jeep can go bumper to bumper with us, and we can virtually drive through the night.”
“Yeah, not sure you should be driving right now,” Nate started, the barest hint of condescension in his voice.
He must have seen me tense because when I threw a punch at him, he easily sidestepped, catching my fist where his face had been moments before. I growled as he pulled me around into something between a hug and what might have turned into a headlock if I had been less wound up, anger lending me strength I normally didn’t possess. I ended up with my arm wrenched back, caught between our bodies, staring out over the grassy plains while Nate had a hard time subduing me. In that moment I might have easily risked a wrenched shoulder if he’d put any more pressure on my arm.
“Calm the fuck down!” he hissed, his other arm tightening over my chest when I tried again to wrench myself free. “I get it, okay? You’re freaked out, and the only way of coping with this is to let your anger run free. But that’s exactly the kind of behavior they’re expecting from you! This will get you killed, if you don’t have the strength to calm down and go about this in a calculated, sane manner.”
That he was right didn’t do a thing for me. With nothing else left to me, I screamed, a feral, savage sound that echoed across the landscape. Nate let go of my arm for a second, but as soon as I’d brought it up front to cross my arms over my stomach, he grabbed it again, shifting our position even more from grappling to simply holding me up as I threatened to fold in on myself. Yet I remained standing somehow, locking my knees, taking a deep breath, then another. My mind cleared a little, the haze dissipating around the edges.
“It was all one gigantic trap,” I whispered as I kept staring at nothing, hoarse from screaming. “They knew. They could have snatched me up at any moment. But why bother, when they could make it a package deal and kill all of you off at the same time?” Exhaling hurt—less in a physical sense, but coming from the very bottom of my soul. “I didn’t get away. He let me get away. And all the time I thought that I’d managed to rescue that last, infinitesimal bit of my dignity—“
I cut off there as I had to swallow a sob trying to wrench itself from my chest, but I wouldn’t let myself utter such a pathetic sound. Not now. Not ever. Not like this. Not because of this. I knew that I wasn’t making too much sense, skipping from one thought to the next before it had fully formed, but the very idea that someone had… while I was naked, defenseless. Out cold. And really, did I know that was all they’d done?
“It’s okay,” Nate whispered into my hair, trying to calm me, but the tension in his body as he held me had long shifted from simply trying to restrain me, possibly keep me from hurting myself, to something more visceral.
Letting another breath escape me in a strained huff, I forced myself to shake it off. If I wanted to come out ahead, I needed to keep my cool, as impossible as that seemed at the moment. We were in no position to defend oursel
ves here, out in the open, and as long as we still had that tracker there was a neon sign pointing at us at all times. Nate was right. Somehow getting a zombie, and one damn hard to kill at that, to swallow the chip was a great idea, particularly as the plan to track me from afar had already worked once. I told myself that this at least meant that no one at the Silo had necessarily betrayed us, and we still had people out there that we could count on. And suddenly, Nate deliberately pissing off Emma made sense—he must have suspected that someone might be listening in, and the apparent rift between us and our people could only help keep them safe. Maybe. Or at least take them off our list of possible destinations where someone might get killed as collateral damage if they tried to spring another trap on us.
“You can let go of me now,” I told Nate when I felt like I had gotten a grip on myself. My tone was still pressed but calmer now, measured. He hesitated but then loosened his grip, letting me step away from him. I didn’t turn around because right then I just couldn’t look at his face. I couldn’t look at any of them, really, shame and anger making my cheeks burn. “I still think we should go on, at least until full dark. We need to find a place that is defensible, at the very least to make anyone following us think that we don’t know about the tracker yet. They can’t be sure that we know about it. The zombified soldiers must have torn that doc’s body apart by now, so there’s no gear to recover, even if they go to collect the Humvees.” That made me pause. “Can you check if that was really the only tracker they put inside me?”
Nate nodded, telling Burns to get the device from the Rover as he walked away from me. Burns studied the display intently, walking a few steps toward me, then over to Nate. “Only receiving a signal from your position,” he told Nate. That wasn’t enough to alleviate my fears, but it was the best we could do on short notice—and with Campbell, the only one who might have cobbled together some kind of scanning device, dead.
“It’s a sound plan,” Pia agreed with me. “They would know something is up if we waste the last hour of daylight. And end up slipping in a ditch on the side of the road.”
Burns left it at a nod, and when the three of us looked at Nate for confirmation, he finally acceded. “One hour. That leaves us six hours of sleep until it gets light again, ninety minutes per watch shift. We go on at first light.”
With that decided, there was no sense in wasting daylight—literally—and less than thirty minutes after we’d left the highway, we were back blasting along the wide, paved road. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was running—not from anything physically chasing after us, but from my own thoughts.
Chapter 9
No one accosted us at night, and the landscape was completely devoid of dust clouds as we set out as soon as Pia kicked the rest of us awake. I hadn’t slept much and barely felt rested, but my thoughts were a little less bleak this morning. I had a goal, a destination, and in a sense, purpose back in my life. For now, that had to be enough to keep me going.
We reached the Montana border just after Nate and I switched places mid-morning, then kept following I-94 until Billings where it merged into I-90. It was still weird to be using the interstates again, but the heat of summer seemed to have done away with the last shamblers that had clung to the buffet that the highways had turned into. The pavement was cracking everywhere, and more than once we had to make a detour where trees had fallen over the road or mudslides had buried it. Even speeding right by the towns and cities along the way didn’t get us chased by shamblers. For once I would have welcomed that. It wasn’t like there were no undead at all up and about, but the largest group that I saw was only five to seven individuals strong. Either a passing streak had depopulated the cities, or the resident mass of undead had dwindled to numbers where it made sense to send people for a cleanup run to eradicate them for good. When I mentioned that to Nate, he only had a grunt in reply, but I couldn’t quell the hint of excitement rising inside of me. Fall would start in a few weeks, making the window of opportunity that we had to find a place to dig in close rapidly. But if we could access the cities again without turning it into a nightmare like our stunt in Sioux Falls, maybe even living there was a possibility.
If we survived today, that was. And tomorrow. And the next week, and the one after that.
Then it was time to head toward Idaho, and Nate drove the Rover into the next larger town that we would have otherwise passed. A few rounds driving too fast with too much engine revving, and we’d managed to gather a small hoard of the undead. I refused to get anywhere near the tracking chip so it was Nate’s task to vault out of the car once it had stopped and play tag with the zombies, trying to get real close and personal with one of the stronger ones. The latter was easily done; getting away from them was the harder part, but with some strategic culling of the herd and giving them other targets to chase he eventually managed. Driving in the middle of the day was hell for me, but it was still the better task. Nate grumbled for half an hour about the bite marks on his arm, but I ignored him. I still thought that it would have been better to crush the chip instead, but no one had asked my opinion.
We went on south, reaching I-15 just as the sun set beyond the hills to the west. It grated having to camp out in the open yet again when both the Silo and our people in Wyoming were just a few hours’ drive away. I felt gross and drained after spending two entire days in the car from sunup to sundown with only minimal stops during the day, but there was nothing I could do about that. We didn’t even need to find a supermarket or other supplies with our stocks still high.
The next morning we held a vote whether to go down to Utah and attempt to contact Jason and his guys, or go further west toward Oregon and avoid Nevada that way. We ended up choosing the second option, but Nate tried to hail anyone on the local frequencies before we took the turn west. No luck, but that wasn’t much of a surprise. There was only dust and heat out there, and endless miles of roads.
Two days later we finally reached the part of Oregon that was actually green, but the high temperatures held, the sun continuing to beat down on us. We had to stop a few times to syphon gas to keep our stores high, and before we headed into California, Nate had us raid a few houses to stock up on water bottles. Even for the others, the contents tasted stale going on tepid, but we didn’t want to waste time to find a working well or freshwater spring.
More than a week into our trek from hell we finally reached the Golden State, although to me it looked like just more of the same dusty brown. We skipped by Redding before we headed toward the Sierra Nevada, hoping that the mountains would be clear of all the undead we knew must still be roaming the state. That killed our breakneck speed, but at least I got a chance to clean up in one of the many lakes we passed.
And then it was time to face the music as I drove the Rover down a road, leaving the mountain range behind us, and heading toward what, to me, looked like certain doom.
From the very first time we’d heard of New Angeles, I’d always assumed that whoever had settled around here had hunkered down in one of the many coastal towns, way up in northern California. That piece of information had been dead-on wrong. I should have figured, as usually whoever had talked to whoever had been there had mentioned the desert and slow going out of the city. But I hadn’t figured that anyone had been mad enough to plant themselves smack in the middle of what must have been one of the most densely populated centers in the United States, somewhere between L.A. and San Diego. The only concrete instructions that Jared had been willing to give us was to head to a certain crossroads just outside Palm Springs, and then wing it from there.
I wasn’t convinced he wasn’t deliberately sending us into our certain death.
I was driving, after winning an intense ten-minute argument with Nate this morning. In the perpetual glare of mid-morning he couldn’t really see that much better, but he might have an advantage spotting something we should possibly avoid. After almost two weeks of eighteen hours on the road with only six hours of rest, a quarter of that spen
t on watch, we were all weary enough that “fight” was really an exaggeration. At this rate, we would soon all be dead from exhaustion alone, no zombies required.
The indicated intersection proved to be little more than an access road crossing the meandering road we’d been following for the past hour, driving slowly enough not to draw too much attention from the local wildlife. And wildlife there was aplenty, of the two-legged, somewhat desiccated variety. Every town we’d driven by, every larger group of rusting cars, had been full of sluggish movement. If not for the sun overhead, I was sure that the shamblers would have already run us down and torn us to shreds.
I brought the Rover to a halt, glancing around, but the only thing I could see was a mailbox a few yards back from the main road. Nate hesitated before he got out, walking over to the aluminum-and-wood construction sitting on top of a weathered pole. He took another look around before he eased open the door on the side, peeking in. I half-expected that entire thing to blow up, but instead he pulled out what looked like a tattered notebook. Leafing through the pages, the light scowl on his face deepened, until he checked his watch.
“I think you should see this,” he muttered into the com. “And bring something to write with.”
I was the last to join him, needing a little time to find some paper and a pencil—not exactly the emergency stash we kept in the center console. Pia was busy looking over the notebook Nate held out to her, while Burns had taken over keeping watch. Glancing over Pia’s arm, I studied what was written on the yellowed pages.
“Are those GPS coordinates?”
“I think so,” Nate replied.
“And those are directions,” Pia pointed out. “East, southwest, north. The last columns could be intervals, as the numbers are too low to be hours in the day.” She did a quick calculation. “They add up to twenty-one hours. Either I am missing something, or—“
Unity: Green Fields book 6 Page 12