Cole visibly shook himself while Hill guffawed. I really couldn’t remember if I’d told them the tale of the great cat food cache before. “Still sure you made the right decision not joining up with us? The very least they do is keep us fed.”
I didn’t justify that with a response and instead fished around in the extra small packages that were part of the MRE and started dumping everything else into the main bag, much to Hill and Cole’s horror. Watching them watch me spoon it all out and devour it without batting an eyelash was so worth it.
“And there they say women are dainty creatures,” Cole muttered once I was done.
That made me laugh. “Nobody has accused me of that… ever, I think.”
Hill chuckled softly. “I can’t imagine why.”
As much as it was fun teasing them like this, I decided it was only fair that I let them in on the secret of my culinary ambivalence. “I can’t taste any of this shit, so it’s literally all the same to me.”
Hill and Cole traded glances. “Seriously?” Hill sounded both incredulous and filled with pity—a first, if I remembered correctly.
“When I got infected, the virus must have fried my taste buds. Explains why the shamblers really don’t discriminate what they subsist on. Good for them, I guess, but it sometimes does suck for me. Not with the MREs, though.”
Cole shook his head, muttering something to himself that I was sure I didn’t need to hear. Richards seemed to be the only one interested in this topic. “Guess that fits with the analysis of your saliva. Even when we were already on the way to France on the destroyer, Emily was still bitching that she still hadn’t managed to completely decontaminate the operating room equipment.”
I pursed my lips, considering what I should quip at first, but Cole was quicker. “Well, that explains why in our briefing they told us to make sure not to get bitten by you.”
“Very funny.” At least I presumed that had been a joke. Cole’s grin about confirmed that. Turning back to Richards, I figured I might as well try to get more out of him since he was already so talkative. “Speaking of which, what else is in that file you have on me?”
Richards took his time chewing and swallowing—the only one here still showing manners, which I really wasn’t accustomed to—before giving me a startlingly white smile. “That’s classified.”
“Oh, come on! It’s my file! I should know what’s in there!”
“That’s kind of the point,” he drawled.
“Well, maybe one of these days you’ll realize that if you gave a little, you’d get a lot.”
His amused grin looked surprisingly real. “You wouldn’t trust me if I handed you the entire tome of a manila folder, so what are you even complaining about?”
He kind of had a point. My right hand, currently wrapped around my mug full of cool water, gave a painful spasm, reminding me that I had way more important things to consider.
“I’m going to hit the sack, if you gentlemen don’t mind. I have some sleep to catch up on and several more days in your company to look forward to. If I’m expected to survive that, I need some rest.”
Red wished me a good night—which I found rather sarcastic since it would end two watch shifts from now—while Hill nudged Cole’s knee. “See, you even put the girls who don’t want to screw you to sleep. You really need to up your game.”
I hid my grin at the retching sound Cole made while I unfurled my sleeping bag. Well, at least not every single person in the world hated me. That was something, right? Yet as I lay there, trying to fall asleep while listening to the dying-down flames and the soft murmur of conversation, I couldn’t help but feel even more alone than the previous nights out in the wild.
Waking up at two in the morning was never fun, but at least Richards had a steaming mug of coffee ready for me as I took over from him. Nothing happened during my watch, and while I tried going back to sleep once it was time for Cole to take the last shift, my mind wouldn’t clock out once more. So I got up again and got a fire and some water for coffee going. Since that took only so much of my attention, I went over to the Humvee and retrieved one of the weapon maintenance kits I’d seen in the back, and set about undoing the damage of a week of dust from the road on my trusty firearms. Because I didn’t want weapon oil all over my gloves, I took them off, which also helped with fiddling with the smaller parts. I was so focused on my task—and knowing that someone else had my back helped lull me into a false sense of complacency—that I didn’t realize that Gallager was already up and moving toward the canteen full of coffee, until he let out a partly horrified, “What the fuck?” as he stopped, staring at me.
I looked up at him, puzzled and just a little annoyed at myself for letting him startle me, then down at what he was staring at. “Sheesh, I almost forgot I was missing three of my fingers,” I muttered, then grinned up at him with somewhat feral intent. “Make sure you never see me naked, Babyface. The damage doesn’t stop at my wrists.”
Cole, coming from behind him, gave Gallager a push that made the young soldier come out of his trance. “Nobody wants to see you naked, Lewis,” he called down to me. “Stop traumatizing the rookie. We still need him, and he’ll be useless if he spends the next days trying to figure out how you look in your skivvies.”
“Hell, I don’t want to see me naked,” I muttered. When that hit a little too close to home, I did my best to aim for a real grin. “I’ll do my best not to accidentally flash him. It’s so hard to keep all my million layers of clothes on around such fine specimens as yourself.”
Cole, still grinning, gave a brief bow over his M4. “Much obliged, ma’am.”
“If you keep this up, I will drop my pants right here and now, I swear.”
Gallager looked still a little shell-shocked as he got his coffee. I decided to take pity on him and finished up quickly so I could clean up and pull the gloves back on. “Better now? You really need to toughen up a little if you want to run with those guys.”
He didn’t even react to that barb, and instead burped out the next thing that must have been on his mind. “How did it happen? IED?”
It was only then that I realized just how little he knew about me. Normally, that might have maybe been a relief, but my ego just wouldn’t let me shut up. “What, you think I got blown up? Nope. And to clear up something else: I’ve never been part of any military organization, least of all the army.”
Now he seemed even more confused. “But you were part of the serum program. That’s what the three marks mean—that you’re a deserter.”
“Excuse me?” Leaning forward so I could look around Gallager to Cole, I quipped, “You really have to educate your young better, or else someone will shoot them in the face out of spite.” I went on addressing Gallager when Cole just grinned back. “Seriously, get some perspective. Medical personnel were inoculated as well, particularly those part of the program. Which I never was. I got infected when I was shot and savaged by zombies, and only survived because of a partly conferred immunity that I got from doing the dirty with my husband apparently often enough that his immunity rubbed off on me. The only reason I eventually got shot up with the serum was that I was rotting from the inside out as it wasn’t the full bandwidth of protection as my body was just producing antibodies, not the serum virus itself. I’m sure there’s a line of people truly regretful that they had to waste that dose on me.” I paused for a second. “Anything else you wanna know? Now’s your chance.”
Gallager wisely kept his trap shut, although I didn’t miss that the previously incredulous looks he’d shot me had turned a little more cautious. I briefly considered apologizing to him, but I really wasn’t in the mood. I wasn’t all that surprised when, as soon as the rookie disappeared to take care of business, Richards hunkered down next to me, presumably to get some coffee—but that obviously wasn’t everything.
“Something you wanna talk about?” he asked.
I cast him the most caustic look I could manage, which was likely medusa-level strengt
h. “Do I look like I have something on my mind?”
“Besides murder and bloody mayhem,” he joked. At least I thought he was joking. I hoped he’d drop it if I didn’t respond, but that had only worked with Gallager. “It might surprise you, but you don’t constantly need to convince everyone that you’re a badass. It’s okay to simply be yourself.”
“Does that mean you don’t think I’m naturally a badass?” I teased, but went on before he could respond—better this way. “You’re wrong. All I have left is to be strong. To look forward, and never, ever slack off. This world eats you as soon as you let up. But even if it wasn’t a tough choice between zombies or civil war, I still couldn’t ease up on myself. I did that twice in my life, and it almost destroyed me. Thanks, but no thanks. And you can stop trying to shrink me now.”
Never that easily deterred, Richards tried again. “Let me guess—after the factory, and Canada?”
I blinked for a moment, irritation warring with surprise—that he was so far off. Normally, he was much better at reading me. I was tempted to let him stew in his misconceptions, but then decided to set him straight after all. “After I was recruited to work with the man I had nothing short of hero worship for, and then he died the weekend before I started on the job. And after my new boss poisoned me so I’d have a breakdown and lose my BSL-4 security clearance so she wouldn’t have to kill me, but I read that as utter failure of myself. Everything that came after the shit hit the fan? Sure, there were some setbacks I wish I didn’t have to work my way through. And it was hard more times than not. But do you seriously think I’d still be alive if I let any of that drag me down?”
Red didn’t look disappointed that he’d been wrong. I wasn’t quite sure, but that could have been a self-satisfied look in his eyes. Damnit. When would I ever learn to keep my trap shut?
“When do we leave?” I asked, mostly to turn the conversation in a different direction. “Camp life is nice and all, but the sooner we get to the coast, the better. No offense, but I don’t need a shrink, and I need a shoulder to cry on even less, if that’s your next move. If spending the last two years alone with my husband has taught me anything, it’s to work through my own issues—on my own. You wouldn’t believe how much time there is for self-reflection between hunting deer and chasing rabbits.”
“Half an hour,” Red told me nonchalantly—and ignored the rest. “Be ready by then. I presume you’ll want to drive again?”
“I’d love to.”
And that was that, as they said.
Either Red had gotten the message, or he was trying to go for the silent treatment to get me talking. Fat chance on the latter—nothing beat Nate in a bad mood only communicating with grunting sounds and vexed glares for three days straight. Cole kept making fun of me whenever he could, with Hill sometimes running interference. Gallager continued to have a hard time dealing with me, flip-flopping between pissing me off and being pitifully green behind the ears. Since we had a lot of miles to make in just enough time not to force us to drive into the night, every new day was mostly the repetition of the previous one. We only needed to stop to stretch our legs and refill the water tanks in the back of the Humvee, no additional stops at any settlements required. We saw few caravans on the move, and even less shamblers, which surprised me, but we were headed into the hotter states now that already made driving with the AC on full an annoyance. Any shambler smart enough to make it through several winters in a row would have learned that summers weren’t any less lethal in the southern states.
And then, finally, what would be our last day on the road dawned, bright and early. Richards had informed us the night before that, should we catch the boat, we’d get to New Angeles tomorrow morning, and if nobody shot me in the head, further up the California coast later that same day. Before his little diatribe about what had happened in the meantime, I would have considered the chance of that happening slim, but now? I had one more reason not to want to cross paths with Gabriel Greene. On some level that annoyed me; I may never have liked the man himself, but knowing that we had New Angeles as a possible safe haven to fall back to was always nice. With that option now, presumably, gone, I felt oddly displaced once more—and that wasn’t anything I’d expected.
Our schedule said that we needed to reach the dock by three in the afternoon; the boat would be gone by four at the latest to make a few miles before stopping at an undisclosed location before moving on in the morning. I would have figured that a little paranoid, but I could see how losing their docks once made them cautious; and, after all, they were the people hiding behind a gigantic maze of a destroyed city, full of traps and kill chutes. At least coming from the sea would spare me having to traverse that ever-shifting maze of beacons—or so I thought, until suddenly, I felt a pulse coming from somewhere to the south, making me step on the brakes hard enough to draw a few choice curse words from the others.
“What’s wrong?” Richards asked, eyes darting across the horizon. We were in the middle of nowhere on a dusty road in a dusty landscape pretty much abandoned by all life except for some recalcitrant shrubbery that I felt could have been my spirit plants.
The pulse hadn’t been a strong one, just unexpected, but it still left my stomach upset. “Fuck. I’d kind of hoped they wouldn’t be using those down here, too,” I mostly muttered to myself. When no one got my meaning, I sighed, reaching for the belt buckle to free myself of the driver’s seat. “The zombie deterrent beacons? I can feel them, too. Did I ever mention how much fun it was for us the first time we got into New Angeles?”
Richards still looked moderately alarmed, while Cole asked, nasty laugh included, “Do you ever ask yourself how much human you still are, Lewis?”
I shot him a sharp look back. “What, you accusing my husband of necrophilia?”
Cole grimaced, but the stricken expression on Gallager’s face was so worth it. Ignoring them both, I turned to Richards. “I can drive through that but I probably shouldn’t. Switch early?”
“Move on over,” he told me, reaching for his own belt.
The next pulse hit what I figured was five minutes later, and they remained at that interval. It was all deterrent beacons, which made me feel like crap but I much preferred that to the beckoning ones that had almost made me walk into the midst of a gigantic zombie streak once. I’d take puking over that any day. Thankfully, it didn’t seem like it would come to that, at least if I just kept my eyes trained on the horizon and the coastline that got closer and closer—
Until a cloud of dust, a few miles to the north, caught my attention.
“Does that look like trouble to you, or someone catching the same boat as us?”
Hill already had his binoculars out, checking on where I was pointing. “Impossible to say from a distance, but probably a bit of both,” he surmised.
“Are we expecting a little bit of both?” I felt like it was a valid question.
Red gave a mirthless grin. “With you along? Always.”
“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence. I can behave myself, you know?”
Cole chuckled softly. “That I need to see.”
Three more pulses, and the dust cloud turned into a group of cars—three if I wasn’t mistaken. They looked like two gigantic SUVs and a pickup truck, the truck with not one but two mounted machine guns on the flatbed. Since Richards didn’t act tense, I told myself to relax, but I didn’t exactly like what I saw through the binoculars—and soon enough by just squinting over there through the bright sunshine. While not as bad as before, my eyes still didn’t like sunshine, and the heat mirages going on didn’t help it.
“Please tell me I’m wrong when I assume someone tried to dose them with some calming meds and ended up driving them insane,” I muttered as I kept studying the getup of the cars. All three were painted black—which wasn’t that out of the ordinary—but had acquired interesting hood and door ornaments. When nobody answered me, I glanced into the back row, meeting three sets of stoic—and clueless—eyes. “Bab
yface is excused in favor of that likely happening before his time, but, seriously? Doesn’t ring a bell?”
Cole snorted. “That no one knows your obscure pop culture references? Not really our loss.”
“Oh, it is,” I grumbled, but dropped the point. “Exactly how crazy have things gotten in the months since you picked us up and carted us to France?”
Red’s expression was slightly bemused. “Did you listen to anything I told you?”
“Listen, yes. But if that’s the new normal now, it didn’t sink in yet.”
He didn’t gloat; Cole didn’t have the same qualms. “Still that upset we picked you up? Or that anyone would associate you with us rather than them?”
I had to admit, if this was what the scavengers had ended up turning into, I wasn’t so sure about my allegiances anymore. All we’d tried to do was carve out a niche to exist in; even Burns and Bates in their most raucous moments wouldn’t have gotten it into their heads to create hood ornaments out of shamblers—and I wasn’t quite sure if they were dead for good and that was only the velocity of the moving vehicle that made it look as if they were moving.
“I think I may need another refresher on some of the finer points of what happened. But I’m not sure you’re the right people to give that.”
Now Richards seemed rather amused. “And you think your people will tell you something less biased?”
“No, but their bias might be more in line with my own,” I offered—but with less conviction than I would have preferred. “Who knows? More than half of them have been part of your more clandestine operations for quite a while. If you’d never come after me and tried to kidnap me several times, they might even have agreed with you in the first place.”
I didn’t miss the hint of ire in Red’s expression, although he evened out his features almost immediately. “How long are you going to keep beating that dead horse? Is what a few bad eggs on our side did really worse than what the same misguided elements on yours have done?”
Green Fields (Book 10): Uprising: Page 13