Staring off into the rising sun didn’t help—including my head that was still pounding like crazy—so I went about getting rid of the rope before I carefully made my way down from that branch. My descent was more of a controlled fall but I managed not to damage myself further, which was a plus in my book. The motion was enough to make me both woozy and nauseated, so I spent another ten minutes or so leaning against the tree, staring off across the unfamiliar landscape. Water, food, clothes. Then I would start scouting the territory to find out where the fuck I’d ended up. And then—
Something deep inside my chest seized up when my thoughts drifted to Nate. No one would have given him the benefit of not taking him and his tats seriously. No one would serve him an opportunity to escape on a silver platter. They’d make sure that he couldn’t escape.
Maybe he wasn’t even alive anymore.
That thought cut through the fog of complacency so temptingly caressing my thoughts, forcing my attention to snap back to the here and now. No, that wasn’t an option I’d consider, at all. I knew he was still alive. There was no doubt about that in my mind. If only for the fact that, unlike me, they’d find him useful. Even if whoever these fucking assholes were didn’t know who he was, they’d recognize the potential of a trained soldier and survivor with three marks across the back of his neck. I had no clue what their organization was up to—besides keeping women as prisoners to be raped as they saw fit—but someone like Nate must be valuable, either to sell off or trade with whoever might have some use for him, as a forced laborer, or maybe to recruit him for their cause. The way they’d hit our home spoke of training and coordination, and that fit with what little I remembered of the conversations I’d overheard. Plus they hadn’t hit just us; the other prisoners must have come from somewhere as well.
What the fuck had we stumbled into, and without knowing that it was even existing out there?
Shit, but we should have moved over to the lake house weeks ago, damn that fucking salad.
Exhaling forcefully, I made myself focus on the important things. Water, food, clothes. Since no direction seemed better than the others, I decided to head south since that was downhill the way the meadow sloped gently, and I didn’t particularly feel like doing extraneous work when a slow, staggering walk was fucking exhausting as shit already. Maybe I should make that food, water, clothes instead? Not that I had much of a choice, except if I wanted to switch my diet to full-on herbivore and gorge myself on grass. Since that wasn’t a sustainable option, all I could do was walk.
Water turned out to be the easiest to find once I happened on some plants with leaves large enough for dew to gather on them. It wasn’t much that I could lick up, but when you’re so dehydrated that ripping someone’s throat open and drinking their blood suddenly seems like a legit option, you can’t be picky. Before the rising sun could burn it all away, I found a few shallow pools of water that had gathered in the ruts of an overgrown road. If I didn’t disturb them too much, I could actually suck up some water before my mouth got full of grit and loam—not that I gave much of a shit about the latter. It was still water, and to my feverish brain that was enough. That I couldn’t taste it helped, too.
Next stop: food.
And clothes. Even though the unknotted shirt came down to my thighs, I didn’t much care for having my ass hang out like that.
Food turned out to be problematic. In the back of my mind I’d known this from the second I dropped from that branch, but it had been years since scarcity of food had been part of my life. When Nate and I had set out inland from the Georgia coast, we’d had weapons to hunt, and more so, to clear houses of any squatters that had declared them their dens. Sure, it wasn’t fun to live off rice, pasta, and beans for weeks at a time, but we’d never had issues procuring either. More often, eating what remained of our last kill or preserving the meat before it could spoil had been the issue, and once we stopped being nomads exclusively, neither had mattered anymore.
Now, I had no weapons—not even a knife—and while the proximity to the camp city had the advantage of keeping the land free of apex predators, I soon realized just how much of a good job they’d done establishing themselves here. Car wrecks had been pulled off the roads and stripped of anything useful, and the first three houses I found—and crept through very, very carefully—didn’t even have a hammer or screwdriver left that I could turn into a makeshift weapon. Also no food whatsoever, or clothes; they’d even ripped the sheets off the beds and dragged the mattresses off. As much as I could applaud their craftiness and level of organization, it was a living nightmare for me now. The only loot I found was a cracked plastic measuring cup that had been discarded because it was broken. I took it with me to make drinking water easier.
It was after leaving that third house—reluctantly, because the sun was baking down on the land and my body was still fighting the drugs, and what water I’d found wasn’t enough to make up for yesterday’s dehydration—that I happened upon the first patrol, thankfully far enough in the distance that I had plenty of time to hide. Within the hour, three more followed, always in teams of two or three vehicles, carrying up to ten men, armed to the teeth. I still had no clue in what direction the camp was but must have wandered into their exit corridor. While I kept on foraging, a larger group blasted down a road about a mile from where I was hiding, looking a lot like the raiding party that had been our introduction to this illustrious group. I noted in what direction they were heading but cut down on the impulse to follow. Without weapons or provisions, this was a recipe for disaster, and getting those fucking drugs finally out of my system would be great, too.
I still hadn’t found anything useful by nightfall, which forced me to reconsider my plan. I wasn’t even sure if I’d managed to keep heading in the same direction as my senses were somewhat addled, the pounding headache not helping. There wasn’t any good shelter to be found so I kept on wandering into the darkness, trusting my freak eyes to do their thing better than during the day. A flock of birds taking flight finally led me to a small stream, which felt like a gift from the universe by that time. Sweat during the day had done away with some of the grime sticking to my body but it was an amazing feeling to not just drink until I started puking up water, but to cool my blistered feet and clean up what signs of last night remained that I could. My body had taken more of a beating than I’d realized, and without proper nutrition, healing was as much a curse as a blessing. I didn’t give a shit about my nose but my fingers were still bothering me, mending crookedly if at all.
I spent about an hour at the stream before I got dressed again, shivering in the frigid night air. With no other option in sight, I ended up crawling into an abandoned car’s backseat; at least the closed-off space kept some of the night’s cold at bay, even if there was no blanket to wrap myself up in.
I returned to the stream in the morning to make sure I got enough water to last me through the next day before I set out once more after crossing it. It wasn’t much of a natural border as it was barely reaching to my knees as I waded through, but humans had, for a long time, used mountain ranges and bodies of water as demarcation lines of their territory. Maybe if I went south a little farther, I’d hit pay dirt.
I almost couldn’t believe it when, late afternoon, I found a small cabin in the middle of nowhere that, while ransacked, hadn’t been stripped of absolutely everything. Bingo. I managed to get some water from the well that didn’t smell rotten; while the box of ramen noodles I found in the back of a cupboard soaked in it, I put together a small arsenal of tools and kitchen knives that were better than my bare hands. An old, threadbare blanket and the ratty sofa would make for a great bed, and the oversized, torn shorts would be wearable tomorrow morning after they’d dried from my efforts to scrub them clean. I ignored what little else there was left in here—mostly pots, smashed plates, and old books—in favor of wolfing down the food as soon as it was chewable. Since I found some more rope, I set out a few snares but doubted I’d catch anything
overnight.
And then all that was left to do was curl up on the sofa—for once not either ice-cold or stewing-hot—and feel the weight of the world come crashing down on my spirit.
Two days. That’s how much I had wasted, and I hadn’t even managed to properly feed myself. If nothing changed tomorrow, I’d have to resort to eating bugs to keep my strength up. I still needed more water—and containers to carry it with me—clothes, gear, and a fucking brilliant idea of how to get Nate out of that camp. Two days was a fucking long time in which a lot could happen and go wrong. I didn’t even need my inherent paranoia to come up with options to know that; I’d seen and experienced enough of it firsthand.
Being afraid for his life was one thing—and not something I was used to. But feeling so utterly useless? That was a much harder pill to swallow. In the end, Nate was very capable of taking care of himself, even under bad conditions. Me? I was rapidly failing all the tests that fate had started throwing my way.
I woke up as early dawn light brightened the world outside the dirty window by my makeshift bed, feeling just a little less glum than the day before. Keeping the blanket wrapped around my shoulders, I gathered up my little pile of loot and stashed it in a pillow case before I set out once more, this time heading east. That’s the direction the raiding party had gone in.
My guess about the stream being a natural boundary turned out to be at least passably right as I happened upon a few more houses over the next hours. As with the one I’d slept in, all of them had been looted, but there was enough left that was useful to someone who had literally nothing. My best weapons remained a long kitchen knife and a hammer, but at least I could stock up on clothes that, for the most part, covered my body and fit well enough not to be a hindrance. I hesitated to switch the boots out for running shoes, but since I’d much more likely run for my life than kick someone’s face in, I went with the better-fitting, light option. Food was still scarce, but I now had a small backpack and enough mismatched water bottles to last me two days, if I didn’t spend the hottest hours of the day sweating out in the sun. Days of walking had helped make my body work normally for the most part, although I still got the shakes when I remained immobile for too long.
With little additional food to be found but shelter aplenty, I decided to go hunt for the camp now that darkness was falling, and try to learn what I could in the hours when guards would be tired and cranky from having to pull graveyard shifts. With all the torches lighting the camp, it would also be easier to find than in broad daylight.
It turned out, finding the camp was the least of my problems; getting close to it was a different matter. Lacking binoculars or weapons with optics, I had to rely on my eyes to get the information I required, and since those were still attached to my head, that came with drawbacks. Even at what must have been close to midnight, they had patrols out aplenty, and after the second close call I realized they weren’t just using night vision goggles but some thermal vision imaging shit that made me feel lucky I hadn’t tried in earnest to sneak closer. Even from a distance, I managed to get some information, and it wasn’t looking good, I had to admit, when my nightly suspicions turned all too true once the sun rose.
What I’d thought was the main part of the camp turned out to be just the part near the entrance—one of three entrances that I found. I could have been wrong, but once I realized what the weirdly shaped slopes behind it were, my stomach sank. It was built right in front of a coal mine, and they would have been stupid not to colonize the tunnels as well. That meant I would likely have to drastically increase my idea of how many people lived there—and that also explained why nobody I watched from afar seemed to be in high alert status after I had killed at least one of them. A town of two hundred people would mourn one of their own. In a settlement of several thousand, what was one asshole that had likely had it coming?
The fact that only parts of the camp were aboveground also meant that I couldn’t really do much with what little intel I managed to gather. Before I withdrew toward the nearest shelter to wait out the heat of the day—and get some much-needed sleep—I realized that another of my first assessments had been wrong, besides the size of this operation: while the raiding parties seemed to exclusively consist of male soldiers, there were plenty of women going about tasks, from guarding to vehicle maintenance and more domestic chores. Most of them seemed to give the barn—the one landmark I could pick out without problems even from a distance—a wide berth, but the same was true for a lot of the men as well.
It was on my second return trip, close to sundown, that I noticed another complex of buildings outside of the flux of people moving around. I would likely have ignored them like I did before if not for the string of people that were shooed into them, coming down over a sequence of ramps from what must have been the top of the mine at the north side of the camp. Without any means of magnification, I couldn’t be sure, but they seemed to be walking willingly enough in single file, but that on its own made my hackles rise. Farm workers, maybe? I didn’t expect the mine to be operational still as there likely was no need for that, but food? Food was always vital.
Or maybe that was just my cramping stomach speaking.
True enough, the next morning just after sunrise, the procession started in the opposite direction, mostly ignored by the waking population. I quickly lost count, but that must have been a good thousand people mindlessly slogging up that hill, guarded by only a handful. It was such a bizarre undertaking that I couldn’t help but watch in fascination—and the sinking feeling that no human being, however desperate, would let themselves be led like sheep to the slaughter like this just because they were hungry. Something weird was going on there—well, weirder than drugging people and kidnapping them—but none of that helped me to locate Nate.
I tried a few times to get closer to the camp, but they had their perimeter set up well, and even toward noon it was an impossible task. With no other option, I decided to go the long way around, heading back toward that oak tree, and try to find out what the labor force was up to in the north. Half a day of dashing from cover to cover—and long stretches of walking once I was away from what I’d figured out were their patrol routes—I finally veered toward my destination. My guess had been right—north of the mine, an area about as large as the territory Nate and I had patrolled just a week ago was set up as fields, including irrigation channels and connective roads to make them accessible with smaller machines. Not that I saw any as most of the labor seemed to be back-breaking, hands-only kind of shit. They were growing a lot of vegetables and grain, at least from what I could tell enough to feed their camp several times over. Guards were much scarcer up here than around the camp entrances, and taking my time, I managed to sneak as close as a hundred feet to where the workers did their thing in the baking-hot midday sun. It was close enough that I could have alerted them by shouting, which I, of course, didn’t do. It was also close enough to see that several of the lean-going-on-emaciated figures had dark marks across their sun-burnt necks—and not all of them just a single X but three.
I spent hours looking for a familiar face—or tats; it wasn’t like Nate would have been hard to spot if he’d been shirtless like most of them—but came up empty.
They worked through the entire day without taking a break—the guards went through one more rotation that I could track. None of them slacked off when the guards weren’t looking, and none of them seemed particularly enthusiastic about what they were doing—not a stretch of the imagination there but they looked more like robots than human beings. And once the workday ended and they were shooed back toward the mine, they all went without a single scuffle or fight breaking out.
What I knew was happening at that barn might disgust me on a cellular level, but this? This freaked me the fuck out.
There were no guards posted on the fields once the last worker had trudged away, but I still waited until after full dark before I sneaked into the agricultural space. Why, I couldn’t say—it wasn’t li
ke any of the crops would be ready for harvest any time soon; from what I could tell, they’d been busy with plucking weeds, and in one corner planting more seedlings.
That was until I traipsed across a small connective trek into another field and realized what the bushels coming out of the ground belonged to: carrots! That they weren’t much longer than my palm yet and barely thicker than my fingers, I didn’t care as I tore into them, pulling as many of them out of the ground as I could hold in my grubby little hands. Then I ran, already munching on the first one, swallowing it as soon as I’d chewed it into manageable chunks. I’d never figured I’d be so damn happy to have vegetables back on the menu.
After finishing the carrots—and getting seconds—I waited another hour, sitting in the high grass, before I tried to get closer to the mine complex from this side, but like before, I soon got too close to the perimeter guards and had to backtrack. I tried several more times, wandering south again, but once morning broke, I had to admit one devastating fact to myself: no way was I going to get in there unless it was tied up at the back of a truck or ATV again. With no weapons, and no backup to create a diversion or overwhelm one of the guard teams, my cards couldn’t have been worse. Until then I hadn’t realized how lucky I had been to get away, but the same wouldn’t be true a second time.
With a heavy heart I realized that there was only one thing I could do: I had to get help. As much as I hated leaving Nate behind, lingering out here wouldn’t help him at all, and every hour I remained increased the chances that I would be caught—and that wasn’t an option I could risk. So I did the only thing I could do, and left.
Chapter 5
It took me a good two days to leave the zone of heavy looting and chance upon a house that hadn’t been breached yet, a good forty miles away from the camp, roughly north to northeast of the fields. It wasn’t completely pristine—something had burst through the screen door in the back and left it open to invasion by smaller critters, but I didn’t mind the raccoon feces all over the kitchen floor. The little assholes had made it into the pantry, but I found an entire shelf full of cans and preserves still undisturbed. One of the former inhabitants had been close enough to my size that I could finally grab some underwear that fit and update my gear to something that would help me survive out there. I also found containers useful for travel, and maps. I’d done my best trying to find out in which state I had ended up in over the past day, and that finally confirmed it—much to my heavy swearing. Fucking Alabama. The camp was a good hundred and fifty miles away from our tree house base, which left me with several options, none of which I liked.
Green Fields (Book 10): Uprising: Page 6