Option one: backtrack to our home and check if they’d left anything useful behind. With luck, the buggies would still be charging at their station, and a usable vehicle would take days, if not weeks, off my trek back to civilization. There was a small chance that they’d left guards behind, but until I got there, well over a week would have passed, which made that more than implausible. Yet considering how well they had been equipped and how thoroughly they had raided the land around their camp, I doubted I’d find anything left behind except one or two of the hidden caches.
Option two: directly make for the nearest settlement that I was aware of and hope I didn’t doom myself in turn.
Scrutinizing the maps spread out on the kitchen table, I couldn’t help but clench my barely mended fingers into as much of a fist as they would go. I was smack in the middle of Alabama now, which was about as no-man’s-land as the southern states went. We hadn’t exactly kept up with the establishment of settlements around the territories we roamed, only making sure we weren’t getting too close to any of the established trade routes. I knew two towns I could be heading for, both over three hundred miles from my current position, and about as far away from the tree house as well. None of our temporary hideouts were en route, but if I took a two-day detour I could make it to one of our oldest caches in four to five days from now. I didn’t remember what exactly we’d left there, but I’d finally be armed again and have some basic survival gear.
Either way, that meant I would spend at least a week out there, on my own, without backup.
For just a moment, I allowed myself to let despair come up from the depth of my soul and envelop me like a weighted-down blanket. Fuck, but I really missed him. For years now, Nate had been a constant in my life, and for the past two of those, the only human being I’d had any contact with. Sure, I’d often been close to murdering him in his sleep, but that didn’t give anyone on this planet the right to just take him from me!
Exhaling slowly, I forced myself to let go of the frustration and anger, but also the latent fear licking up my spine. I could do this. I would do this, no question. I would find help, I would get him out of there, and then I would get bona fide gloating rights for the rest of my life that I’d been the heroine that came to his rescue. I was sure that Nate would graciously accept being the damsel in distress in this scenario.
The very idea—and the grimace he’d offer me when I laid that all out to him—made me crack a smile for a moment. Yeah, that’s exactly what I would do.
As much as I hated having to leave everything behind, there was no sense in returning to the tree house. Everything could be replaced. Getting to the weapons cache was more important, and then connecting to the rest of the world. That came with its own host of issues that I chose to ignore for the moment. First, I had to make it to that settlement; the rest I would deal with as it slapped me in the face. And, who knew? Maybe this would all be over soon in a month from now and we could slink away into the sunset just like we’d done once before already.
I didn’t buy my own bullshit for a second, but that didn’t change anything about the plan. Taking one last look around, I gathered my pack, stowed away the maps, grabbed my hammer, and off into the wilderness I went.
Being all on my own out on the road wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it wasn’t that different from how Nate and I had spent the time since the Georgia coast drop-off from the destroyer. Sure, two people with firearms could deal a lot more damage than I could on my own, but for the most part, we’d relied on stealth rather than firepower. Being on foot had a lot of drawbacks, but it also meant that I was almost silent even if I didn’t try to be stealthy, and it was easy to get sensory input from my surroundings. I often smelled shamblers miles ahead of encountering them—or in those cases, avoiding said encounters—and most larger predators of the four-legged persuasion left humans the fuck alone if they could help it. Loneliness and my own mind were by far the biggest problem, although I did my best to keep the frustration at bay. Walking from early dawn to well into dusk each day helped; there is only so much emotional turmoil you’re capable of when the largest part of your mind is in constant crisis and survival mode. Except for a few brief detours, I made good time and reached the location of the cache a day sooner than I’d estimated.
I still remembered the lone farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. We’d stayed there for a few days, as long as the provisions we’d found in the pantry held up. We’d found a storm cellar out back that had remained sealed throughout the first two years of the apocalypse, and it had made a lot of sense to keep some of our meager belongings and gear there, should we ever need a fallback location. Coming here now on my own made my latent misery return in full force, but I swallowed as much of it as I could and went down the rusty stairs to check on our stash.
Everything was still where it was supposed to be, and I let out a breath of relief I hadn’t realized I’d been holding when my fingers closed around the cool metal of the assault rifle. There were two shotguns and several handguns there as well, but since I had no intentions of letting anything come close enough to me that I’d need a slug to put it down, the M16 it was. Dumping the sparse contents of my pack on the floor, I grabbed one of the stashed backpacks—larger and sturdier than the one I’d picked up earlier—and started repacking it, making sure to grab enough ammo for the rifle and the two handguns I took as well. I hesitated with my—shaking—hand hovering over the first-aid kit but took it, same as the small stash of meds. None of them would do me much good, but it might come in handy for trading. The sleeping bag and spare clothes were tempting but I forewent them, only grabbing two sets of tinted shooting glasses and the modified gloves from the shelf. It was an early pair, barely better than the prototype I’d used in France; this one had all fingers attached, making me look less like a freak, but the chafing inside annoyed me as soon as I put them on. I’d had much better-fitting ones at the tree house base, but there was no use in crying over their loss now. A solid pair of boots, sturdy cargo pants, and a lightweight jacket were quickly exchanged—and then all that was left for me to do was decide whether to set out now or spend the night. Since there was no food left—an oversight that I only now realized was a fucking stupid one—I decided to hit the road. Now that I had firepower again, I could make for a better target than abandoned cabins that had, at best, slim pickings.
I ended up sleeping in another car that night, a broken-down pickup at the side of the road that had seen better days at the end of the last century—but came with mechanical locks on the doors and spare keys under the sun visor, making it one of the most secure hiding places I’d had in a while. Just for kicks and giggles, I tried to start the engine the next morning, but of course it was as much of a useless hunk of metal as all the other cars. Martinez could maybe have gotten it working again but what little skills I’d picked up along the way had become useless by the time any freely available fuel spoiled for good. That had been one of the reasons why we’d built the electric engines of the buggies from scratch—necessity. I idly wondered for a moment if someone with enough manpower had already raided the Tesla factory. That, in turn, made me realize that I had absolutely no clue what was going on all over the country right now—which I had the nagging feeling would come to bite me in the ass very, very soon, if it hadn’t already. I really didn’t care for the glum feeling that spread through me as I realized that maybe it had been simple complacency that had gotten us kidnapped because we hadn’t paid attention to a rising threat outside our borders.
With that positive outlook on life, I hit the road once more, doing my very best to ignore my own thoughts.
Finally being armed again certainly gave me better chances of survival, but it didn’t mitigate the fact that I was just one woman, on her own, against the whole wide world. I’d been lucky so far not to encounter a lot of shamblers, but that changed later that day when I caught a whiff of decay coming from up ahead where I couldn’t see what lay beyond the small rise in the road.
I halted and tried to decide what to do, but ended up moving forward after all; walking cross-country was only an option if it helped my immediate survival, but in the long run it would slow me down too much. I heard them long before I saw them, and eventually retreated into the trees to the south as I inched closer.
And there it was—an entire streak of zombies, the horde a good thousand individuals strong. I’d seen way worse in the past, but usually with backup and cars that made flight much, much easier. They weren’t bothering with the road but the terrain evened out once the road left the sparsely growing trees, giving them room to roam in all directions—and already, a few had halted from their vaguely northeast course and were turning to face me, making me guess that they’d picked up my scent.
Not good. So not good.
I didn’t even think for a second about confirming my suspicion but instead started backing away as quickly as I could do so quietly. As soon as I was back on the road, I started to run, ignoring the alarm going off in my mind about the thunder of my boots on the cracked tarmac. A chorus of angry, hungry screams started up behind me.
Crap. At least I didn’t need to waste any time on checking over my shoulder—that I’d just rung the dinner bell was obvious.
My first impulse was to head for one of the car wrecks littering the road but none of them looked like it would be able to withstand an entire swarm of hungry shamblers. My next best option would have been the trees thinning out all around me, but none looked large enough to support me, and I wasn’t too keen on finding out exactly how bad my already less-than-stellar grip was due to my right hand still needing days, if not weeks, to mend. I had no illusions about winning an endurance race against creatures that were no longer governed by things like exhaustion and energy expenditure calculations. My best bet was to find refuge in a house and pray that it either had a storm cellar or attic.
Too bad the closest building I could make out was a good five miles to the south, cross-country.
To make sure that really was an option, I did look back, finding a good hundred shamblers hot on my heels, a lot closer than I liked. I didn’t bother with waiting for the trees to be replaced by open grassland and took off toward the house, hoping that some of them would get confused. I considered dropping some of the load I was carrying, but I direly needed both my weapons and my pack, and there was no telling in what condition I’d be able to reclaim them later, if at all. So I ran, and ran, and hoped for the best.
A few of the zombies got awfully close, but I managed to stay ahead of them the entire race to the small cluster of buildings that got bigger and bigger way too slowly. I was huffing and puffing by the time I threw myself through the rickety screen door, more falling into the house than stepping inside. I had a split second to orient myself before two shamblers came for me—from behind the couch in the den. With no time to waste and little room to maneuver, I ignored them in favor of sprinting for the stairs I saw up ahead, taking them two at a time. The squatters collided with my entourage, the resulting snarls spurning me on further. Not all of them remained behind, though, their pounding feet on the squeaking stairs a reminder that I wasn’t in the green yet.
There were five doors on the upper level, all ajar and two torn off the hinges, making me guess the squatters might just be the original residents of the house. None of the rooms looked inviting—or a good place to make a stand—so I ran on to the other end of the landing, frantically searching the ceiling. There it was, the trapdoor leading up into the attic—but it was closed, with no cord conveniently hanging down to be pulled open.
Not that I would have had time to pull it right now, anyway.
The first of the shamblers slammed into me, doing a good job screwing with my balance and trapping my rifle between my body and the wall. It was stupid enough to latch onto my pack rather than me, giving me the second I needed to pull my gun. It even did me the favor of wrenching me around so that I could fire the three follow-up nuisances in their partly decomposed faces, felling them all with eight bullets. The zombie still clinging to me let go, either to make another grab for me or because the scent of blood and gore distracted it; two bullets into the back of its skull and I was free to go hunt for the pole that would open the attic hatch—provided I found it in under ten seconds flat. To buy myself a little more time, I leaned over the bannister and emptied the rest of the magazine into the mass of shamblers tearing into each other all over the stairs.
Light came in through four of the doors so I discarded them as bedrooms or bathrooms, and instead kicked at the last door, making the light plywood bang against the wall inside. The free space in the room beyond was barely large enough for me and my pack to fit inside, which would have made it a good alternate hiding space if I didn’t have other options. Shelves full of cleaning supplies and crap nobody needed anymore greeted me—and the pole, leaning against the wall just inside the door. I grabbed it with one hand while holstering the gun with the other, and swung it around just in time for the next shambler to get hit in the leg by it. The pole didn’t make for a good weapon but I still stabbed the end of it not intended to open the latch of the hatch at the shambler’s face, hoping for the best. It didn’t do much damage, but it distracted the blasted thing long enough that a good kick to its abdomen sent it toward the top of the stairs, where those storming up grabbed it and tore it down to the floor. Whipping around, I stabbed at the latch with the pole, needing agonizing seconds to make the parts connect—and finally, the trap door opened, spilling the folded-up ladder down on top of me.
Too slow to sidestep, it hit me in the shoulder, but I wouldn’t be deterred by the brief spark of pain radiating down my arm. It was made of aluminum, sturdy enough to hold my weight well as I scrambled up, vaulting into the attic. As soon as I was through, I whipped around and grabbed the upper rung of the ladder to pull it up. Two zombies made a run for it but got tangled in the bodies littering the floor. The ladder folded with a satisfying “snap” just as the hatch fell closed.
Panting heavily, I allowed myself to sag into a half-crouch as I pulled the rifle around and pointed it at the closed hatch. Below, I could still hear them howl and scream and tear into each other, but unless they got really ambitious and built a stack of bodies big enough to reach the ceiling, I was safe—or as safe as I was going to get inside a stifling hot attic that reeked of decay, badly enough to make me cough now that I’d inhaled enough of the tainted air.
I almost expected another shambler to come launching itself at me, but quickly realized that the source of the stench had long since stopped being a potential menace. Flies were swarming over the mummified lumps of bones with parchment-like skin stretched over them. My heart seized up when I realized that the human one was too small to be a woman, at least not a grown one. Folded in on top of the other, I figured it had been the family’s child and dog—and judging from the fact that the trap door pole had been neatly stored away, someone must have locked them in here. Not to die, presumably, but to buy them a little more time, maybe to be rescued by someone—until they’d run out of food and water, or, more likely, the child had succumbed to the fever but never reanimated. Sealed to the outside elements and baking away in the heat of hot summers, the corpses had been well-enough preserved rather than decomposing completely.
I stared at the mummies for a while before lowering my rifle and sitting down next to the hatch, my heart heavy with someone else’s loss. I remembered all too well how bad those first few months had been, how many tragedies like this one we’d happened upon. If the shamblers had one thing going for them, it was that they were great about disposing of easy prey, and they didn’t mind if it was more decomposed than they themselves if fresh meat wasn’t available. At least the smart ones had learned along the way that, sometimes, houses and cars held precious protein still available to them. If they didn’t turn into squatters, that usually made raiding a house all the more easier as we didn’t even need to smash in windows or kick in doors as they’d already done it
for us. I generally didn’t like to consider how much of a natural selection advantage that must have been, letting the smart ones survive as they feasted on the dumb and the dead.
But most of that easy food was gone now, making me their option for prime rib—a consideration that I was more comfortable with than continuing to imagine how the last days of that child must have been. I had water for a little over three days with me that I could possibly extend to five if I was crafty, or seven if I got really desperate. I hoped that by nightfall, the shamblers would walk off, letting me slink away quietly like I should have done at the first whiff of decay in the air. A rookie mistake that almost cost me my life, and at the very least an entire day.
Sighing, I stretched out on the floor and closed my eyes, waiting for my body to calm down completely. What was a single day to me? Nothing. But to Nate? I didn’t want to consider that, but unbidden images swam up before my mind’s eye. Would they torture him? Try to break his spirit to turn him into a mindless worker drone? Or did they have fucked-up drugs for that as well? I’d never forget what that shit Bucky had shot him up with had turned him into, and while they’d told us we were immune to that now, I didn’t believe that for a second. But it had been a very different kind of mind control than with the workers on the fields—and besides, I didn’t think that anyone still had resources left to waste on a labor force. Some naturally occurring compound that regrew or could be bred made more sense—not that any of it made any sense at all.
Green Fields (Book 10): Uprising: Page 7