Retribution: Green Fields #11

by Adrienne Lecter

  In record time, the heat of the day caught up to us, drenching me in new layers of sweat before long. We made progress, but for every longer dash we managed that brought us closer to downtown, we ended up having to wait for a moving corpse to either get close enough so we could kill it easily, or let it pass by. We were the third team from the front today, and before long Richards split us into two parts—Cole and Hill doing their thing, and me getting stuck with Richards. I let him take point for the time being, but when he tried to wrest that privilege from me again after a quick break, I quickly signaled up a storm of threats, although he may have had trouble interpreting half of them from the quizzical look that crossed his face. I honestly couldn’t give less of a fuck if me threatening to slash his throat came out more like an offer for a hand job. He should have gotten the meaning in context. We ended up switching every thirty minutes, although I felt like every time he followed behind me he seemed extra vigilant. It took me hours to realize that, very likely, I wasn’t the cause of that, failed pantomime or not. I had ended up arriving at our temporary shelter long after the others, and I didn’t put it past Nate to have been a thread away from literally tearing Richards apart for losing track of me. How that translated into him getting anxious when I was taking point, I didn’t quite get, as lagging behind him had done the trick last night. I wasn’t vain enough to think that my dirt- and gore-caked ass bobbing up and down in front of him was making Red nervous. That seemed highly unlikely.

  Hours after we’d set out for the day—and a good hundred dead shamblers later—we got to the marker Nate had identified the day before that would become our exit point. The reason became obvious a mile earlier. From what I could tell, there must have been some construction going on right next to the road. That, or the fire that had raged through the charred remains of the skeletal building must have burned hotter than usual. Then again, what did I know about fires? Maybe the fire had come later, and the upper two thirds of the building had ended up across the highway due to an earthquake or tornado. It certainly had created a lot of rubble.

  How wrong my assessment was I only found out when we trudged up the last exit ramp before the highway block, and realized that it wasn’t just the building, and the overpass right next to it that had sealed the highway up for good. It was the entire area around the former building in a radius easily five blocks in every direction, the epicenter of the destruction somewhere east of here. Everything was reduced to rubble and charred black, the years since it had happened doing little to let nature reclaim what had been taken from her.

  If Richards hadn’t pulled me behind the wreck of a truck I would have ended up standing there in the middle of the road, gaping. Signaling to lean close, I asked in as low a voice as I could manage, “What the fuck did that? Gas main bursting?”

  He shook his head. “They must have bombed the city.” When all I had for him was confusion, he mimed what I realized was supposed to be a fighter jet with his fingers, dropping bombs. The resulting explosion didn’t do the actual destruction visible any justice, even though he gave it his best.

  I didn’t even try to suppress a shudder. I hadn’t seen any movie-magic light silhouettes where people had been downright evaporated, but I doubted everyone had already been dead when the bombs hit. We’d seen little to no signs of well-executed evacuation so far, and the car wrecks that were even closer here than farther out proved that.

  Theoretically, I’d been aware that the larger cities must have been true hellholes in the first days of the outbreak—underlined by the fact that I’d barely heard of anyone who’d been in a larger population center surviving. I’d seen the destruction caused in L.A. firsthand on our trip through the rigged maze on our first journey into the city, and few people would have been surprised to hear a city in California crumbling down because of an earthquake or ravaged by fire. In fact, the new settlements had already had to fight those very same disasters, as my friends had filled me in on what I’d missed. From what I’d picked up from group chatter on the way to France and back, and the marines in the camp, all branches of the military must have had a hell of a time mobilizing their troops, and just like the first responders, they were mercilessly decimated once the undead rose in force. No one had confirmed this for me yet but I had a certain feeling that a lot of the bases had been prime epicenters as well since they had been picked as targets ahead of time—just like the larger cities. Most military personnel that had survived had been on leave, and had been stationed in more rural areas. Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Texas of all states had tried to make a stand, but damn, I hadn’t needed to know about that.

  Picking our way through the rubble wasn’t an option as years of rain and storms had done their own to add to the utter destruction. From what I could tell, the epicenter of the bomb drop must have been farther to the east, but that still meant that the highway was devastated for a good two miles, judging by the distance to the next taller building that was still standing in that direction. It was hard to judge at the very edge of the zone of devastation, but it looked like the blast had hit a residential area.

  It was only that when we veered off the road and into the rabbit warrens of streets on the other side of the highway that I noticed what could have been manually erected barriers, obliterated by the blast wave that had turned a part of Dallas into a blackened pockmark on the face of the planet.

  Getting out of the huge ditch that the highway had been sunken into came with one advantage—more shade. Not quite noon, the sun was beating mercilessly down on us, already bad enough to make the air flicker and warp. Maybe it was a simple illusion, but I felt like it was a few degrees cooler as we stepped into the smaller streets, with buildings ranging from one to maybe five stories in height. Only the very middle of the streets wasn’t ankle-deep shit, glass, leaves, and other debris—where it wasn’t covered by yet more cars. On the highway, they had remained more or less in orderly rows; here it must have been each man, woman, and child for themselves, the cars creating a worse maze than the city itself.

  Spread out as we were moving forward, it took us a good three blocks to realize that we were far from alone.

  And we learned that lesson too late for the last two people—Danvers, and another of Scott’s marines, the guy who’d gotten some heat stroke issues yesterday. Richards and I were a good block away so I didn’t hear a thing—not at first. Not when both men were tackled by shamblers that must have been watching us from the second Hamilton stepped into the street, and somehow managed to coordinate an attack ranging across both sides of the corridor we were walking through. Neither of the men managed to get out a scream, and they went down far enough away from any car to hit that.

  What I did notice was the heavy pounding of feet when Scott and his remaining two guys came sprinting forward, running at full speed ahead of what must have been close to fifty shamblers, who were quickly closing the distance.

  Unlike my gape-induced freeze a couple of minutes ago, my body didn’t shut down but jumped right into action. My first impulse was to start running—particularly when, from the very edge of my vision, I caught something stirring on the other side of the car I was right now squeezing past—but before I got more than two steps forward, Richards grabbed my arm and hauled me toward the next building to our right. There was no door close but the ground-level windows were all busted, so I hurled myself through one of those, praying that I didn’t choose a room full of nesting undead. I got lucky, only crashing onto a desk and bringing two flower pots down with me as I rolled onto my feet. Dried-up plants aside, it was better than Richards, who overshot the thin shelf underneath the window he was coming through and ended up tumbling to the floor, hitting his shoulder hard in a bad roll. I grabbed his other arm and pulled, helping him stumble upright. He stopped swaying a few steps later as we hastily retreated deeper into the building, away from the windows. A brief slap on my shoulder from behind told me he had my back while I was on the lookout for what may have bee
n lurking in the apartment. Something had been, at one time or another, but all the feces and gore I saw at first glance were dried up, months or maybe even years old. The entrance door was gone, leaving the doorway a gaping maw into a dark hallway beyond.

  Hill poked out his head from the adjacent apartment just as I stepped out of ours, quickly reuniting our fireteam. I hesitated for a second, but when Richards practically gave me a shove forward, I quickly made my way farther down that hallway, only pausing briefly to check what lay beyond the other doors. I was almost at the very end where it branched off in two directions—toward the street, where I expected the building entrance to be, and toward the back—when something burst into the apartment three doors down, where Hill was bringing up the rear. I didn’t need another push to make me round the corner and move toward the back as fast as I could and still secure the hallway as much as that was possible. There was no exit there but a stairwell instead. In a pinch, that would do.

  I didn’t quite run up into the first floor but took the single steps as fast as I dared. The way up was partly obscured by a trashed bookshelf and two chairs that someone must have hurled out of an apartment. Two shamblers were standing in the hallway that led to the front of the building, just now turning toward the sound of my footsteps. There was one more floor above this one, and since the stairs looked clear enough, I pushed on upward rather than tried to tackle the zombies. Let someone else—like Hill, with his sledgehammer—take care of them. There was even more furniture blocking the stairs up and I dislodged at least one piece as I scrambled over it, hoping that Richards behind me would be quick enough to evade. I was still three steps and half a shelf away from the top when a shambler came hurtling toward me.

  In a bad movie, I would have been able to simply duck and let it pass by me. Sadly, they were more agile than to always bullrush us, and too smart to try, either. I managed to brace myself with one shoulder against the wall as it came for me. The impact still forced me a step down, and my left arm went numb for a few seconds, forced to take the brunt of the impact. Snapping jaws clacked in front of my face, but this once my lack in height was a plus, keeping my head out of reach without me having to duck much. As soon as I found my balance, I pushed away from the wall, up and to the side, forcing the zombie toward the rails of the staircase. It didn’t resist much since I was following along.

  Then Richards was there, shoving his weight into the shambler, and off it went over the rail and down the stairwell. I was breathing heavy enough from exertion that I wouldn’t have tried to talk if being stealthy hadn’t still been imperative, so I gave him a thumbs-up—that he ignored as he vaulted past me up the remaining stairs and right into the next shambler that came toward us. I took a second to make sure the stairwell was safe before I followed, ax at the ready. Richards caved in the skull of that one, leaving the next one for me. More and more undead kept pouring out of the doors, a heap of ten or twelve at our feet as the last one went down. I remained in the middle of the hallway as Richards checked the apartments closest to us. Cole and Hill joined us, both breathing heavily and covered in equal amounts of bodily fluids as I was. None of the shamblers had been super smart or strong, but even so they had used up a good portion of my energy reserves. But that seemed to have been the last of them up here, as our more thorough check revealed.

  Stepping up to the window at the front of the building, I checked the street first. It was once more looking abandoned, but from my elevated vantage point I could see a few shamblers creeping along behind cars and pressed to the side of buildings. They ignored each other, so clearly, we were what was on the menu. The opposite building was only a single story tall, giving me a good view toward the highway and the destruction beyond. From up here, it was even worse than it had appeared on the ground. Damn, but the Texans didn’t mess around.

  Richards came out of another apartment as I returned to the hallway, signaling us to come closer.

  “You saw the stragglers on the street?” I whispered.

  He inclined his head. “Yeah. Even more lurking on this side. There’s a row of balconies on the southern end of the building. Next door is another apartment building, a few stories higher. I say we try that and see if maybe on the other side or to the west it’s more quiet.”

  We were already through the next two rooms and getting close to one of those balconies when I realized what his plan was—and I didn’t much care for it when I saw Hill get a grappling hook and rope ready.

  At least if I broke my neck trying to get from one building to the next, it would be quick.

  Under different circumstances—say, if I still had ten fingers and full grip-strength—I would have gone first, but Cole got that honor now as the second-lightest member of our team. Agile like a monkey, he had no problem crawling over the balcony railing and onto the rope, hanging suspended from it for a second before he had his feet up and wrapped around it, and over the street below he went. A few equally measured motions and he was on the balcony of the other building, unhooking the grappling hook to secure the rope with a few knots. Richards went next, proving that the knots on both ends held well, and then it was my turn. Because we were already attracting enough attention by hanging suspended in the air, three levels up, I didn’t dare ask Hill about advice, but he gave me a supporting thumbs-up as he pushed me toward the balcony railing.

  We’d had a rope in the bunker in Wyoming that the Ice Queen had forced me to scale on a daily basis, even after my upper body strength was at a point where I could do ten pull-ups without dying, but that was a long time ago. I was, without a doubt, stronger and lighter now, even with my pack, but climbing hadn’t exactly been my priority over the past two years. Did I regret that negligence now? Yes, but there was absolutely nothing I could do about that, and stalling seemed more likely to get me killed, so I forced myself to just go for it.

  Unlike the two men before me, I didn’t choose the dramatic “dangle from veiny man-hands” tactic but instead sat on the rail—with Hill steadying me—so I could get my ankles wrapped around the rope first before I trusted my hands with it. I was a little surprised when my fingers managed to hold on without my grip slipping, the extra weight of the pack considered. Around one third across they were already hurting like a bitch, and while my left hand was doing moderately well, my right was becoming troublingly weak. I did my best to shift my grip as far into my palms as possible as I pushed myself forward, agonizingly slow. And that wasn’t just my impression, judging from the growls and howls coming from below me. I was starting to become a liability for my team, and that was absolutely the last thing I wanted weighing on my mind. Well, actively getting one of them killed was worse, but that was usually the consequence.

  I stopped for a moment to let the rope slip into the crook of my right elbow to take the strain off my hands, and made the mistake of looking down. A small mob had formed below me, which was bad but to be expected. What I also noticed—and what disconcerted me far more—were a handful of shamblers that broke away and aimed for farther down the building, where I expected the door to be. Damn, but if they had learned building architecture, we were screwed.

  The need to share the news more than fear gave me a new boost and made me shimmy forward, doing my best to use my leg muscles as much as I could. As soon as I was close enough to grab, Richards and Cole hauled me the last foot or two, also keeping me from some more embarrassing and time-consuming scrambling. As soon as I was off the rope, Hill jumped on, although with less bravado than I would have expected. Whatever he was doing, it was damn efficient, and he reached us in half the time it had taken me to cross the gap.

  We left the rope where it was and moved inside, the interior slightly cooler than the outside. My eyes needed painfully long to adjust to the gloom inside—the downside of great low-light vision. The apartment had been a more upscale place than what we’d been wading through in the other building, but little of that remained now. The stink of death and fecal matter made me gag, and I didn’t protest w
hen Richards signaled me to get to the door and out as soon as possible. Something was nesting in here—or had been a short time ago—and there was no need to alert them to our presence.

  After fighting without having to watch my every movement, making sure not to stir anything or even breathe too loudly now as we sneaked through the busted door and into another dimly-lit staircase grated on my nerves, my heart still beating a mile a minute. Cole went first, followed by Hill, then me and Richards. My ears picked out sounds of movement from deeper into the house, but the howling outside easily distracted from it. Not knowing whether that came from the undead residents or another group, we did our best not to alert anything to our presence as we aimed for the central staircase—and found it occupied. With the rest of us waiting in the hallway, Cole went forward to check, and almost immediately halted and signaled us to turn back. So into a different apartment we went which was in a similar—and thankfully also empty—state as the one we’d come in through. Richards opted to check the balcony that went out into a small yard between this building and the next, as far away from the street we had been on before as possible. It looked clear enough that the next rope was knotted to a railing, and down the outside of the building we went.