Green Fields (Book 10): Uprising:

by Lecter, Adrienne

  It was in the middle of the afternoon that I realized why the landscape, here a little better off, was familiar—we’d been here before on the way to the Silo, with a settlement up ahead that hadn’t let us in for the night, making Nate, Burns, Tanner, Gita, and me camp outside. Oddly enough, I felt myself looking forward to at least catching a glimpse of the assholes again—until I realized why there were no signs erected anywhere pointing the way to the settlement.

  “What happened there?” I asked when we topped another rise and saw the smashed ruins of what had once been the flourishing town off to the side. The landscape looked like the fires hadn’t reached this far, so that couldn’t have been the cause.

  Zilinsky gave me a weird look before she explained. “Scavengers, raiders—you can piece together the rest, I’m sure.”

  I hadn’t forgotten what Martinez had told me, but seeing this firsthand somehow made it more real. “They refused help?” I guessed—not a hard one, since they hadn’t let us in back then, either.

  Zilinsky gave a brief nod. “We weren’t keen on spreading our forces thin, but we could have been here in hours. We offered—they told us to get lost. That was a few weeks after they blew up the docks in New Angeles. Before that, we thought we were all safe down here. Turns out, we weren’t.”

  The former settlement dropped out of view as the road kept angling toward the hills. “Is that the reason why we only have three working cars to take with us on the road? Because everyone thought there was a world of resources out there waiting for them, until there suddenly wasn’t?”

  “Something like that,” the guard—Kepler, I remembered—grumbled. “I’m not saying he knew, but Greene sent us out to raid what we could weeks before. Then shit went down, and suddenly, nobody dared stick their noses outside of their fences. Been like this the entire time since.”

  Zilinsky glared over her shoulder at him before she turned to me. “He’s not wrong—including Greene’s great timing. We hit a factory full of electric car motors hours before a convoy of Humvees arrived.”

  “No coincidence there,” I mused.

  “Exactly. We had just enough time to load everything we could carry onto the trucks and be gone before anyone got close enough to shoot at us. Because there was still more to loot there than to get from us, they didn’t come after us, but that’s why we only have eight cars retrofitted. The other seventeen are in New Angeles.” The look on her face turned sour. “Before you ask, I already tried to get more of them, but they won’t hand them over. Turns out, the doors your name used to open are now firmly shut.”

  I had to admit that stung, but wasn’t a surprise—not since I’d had a brief chance to talk to Greene himself. We kept driving on in silence, Pia only breaking it to let me know when to turn off the road and onto something that resembled a deer trail at best. The only positive thing I could say was that the entire region seemed as devoid of zombies as it did of still-living humans.

  That changed once we drew near a lone house close to the foothills of the mountains—and thankfully only on the living part. Two cars were next to the building, with four armed and armored humans waiting for us—two men and two women, three of them looking well into their fifties, except for one of the women who was roughly my age. The site looked well secured and neither of the cars seemed in bad shape, making me instantly suspicious. Zilinsky was frowning as well but not in a paranoid way.

  As we got out, she introduced the newcomers as Rozen, Cohn, Calveras, and Neeson. The first three were apparently retired army personnel, Joelle Rozen having served with Bert Hughes, Sadie’s father, and the two men friends of hers. Marleen Neeson, the younger woman, got the very brief moniker of “casual acquaintance,” which made her grin and me guess that there was a story behind that I really needed to hear. Before I could ask, she sized me up with a curious expression on her face. “So you’re the woman who’s mad enough to marry Miller? I kind of pictured you differently.”

  “Don’t say ‘taller,’ or I might have to hit you,” I offered, hoping she’d get the joke—at half a head shorter than I was. Put her in a yellow sundress, and she wouldn’t have looked weird as a spunky kindergarten teacher.

  Her smile, bright yet a little crooked, let me know that she was used to people underestimating her because of her diminutive size as well. “More crazy, but maybe you’re just good at hiding it?” Her brows drew together as she studied me more intently—and quite comically so. “I guess you’d have to be. Else, you would have killed each other by now.”

  “You sound like you know my husband quite well,” I observed, not quite sure what to make of that.

  Her smile got a little too knowing for her own good, but she didn’t beat around the bush. “If you mean, did we fuck? Yeah, we kind of had a thing going for a while, but very casual. I honestly didn’t think he could get more attached to a piece of ass than that, and neither did I want to. So, no worries, I’m not going to fish in your pond. Not that I’d dare, present company and likely affiliation considered.” She turned her head and stared straight at Pia, who calmly stared back. It wasn’t amiable on either woman’s side, and still, I got the sense that they liked each other. There must have been a story about that as well.

  “I’m not really worried about that right now,” I said, doing my best to sound like I meant it, too. “We’d have to get him back first, too.”

  Breaking off the staring match—and obviously not considering herself defeated—Marleen caught my gaze once more. “Never thought I’d be part of a rescue mission to spring him of all people, but when Zilinsky called, I couldn’t not get in on the fun. You see, I owe these three buckaroos, and I will repay that debt.”

  She made no move to explain herself further, prompting the Ice Queen to do so for her. “We crossed paths with her on a mission once. That should have ended with her brains going splat all over the wall. Miller decided she was more valuable alive than as a tapestry ornament, and she’s helped with some wetwork during his time working as a free agent. She has a big mouth—and an even bigger ego—but does come in handy in a tight spot.” The way she glanced at the other woman sideways made me think she meant like someone else she knew. Huh. Reevaluating Marleen, I tried to do the obvious, superficial judging thing but came up blank; we had nothing in common except for less-than-giant height. With olive skin, dark hair, and slightly tilted eyes she was impossible to place heritage-wise, but still had a more wholesome than exotic thing going on. Must have been the homicidal tendencies underneath the nice exterior.

  “Valuable how?” I asked the obvious question.

  Marleen perfectly preened. “Contract work.”

  “Let me guess. Not as an event planner,” I proposed, smirking.

  Her bright yet cold grin pretty much confirmed that. “Assassin. Not that keen of a sniper, particularly when I have to lug a rifle around that’s as long as I am tall, but I’m pretty good with poisons and knives. Great infiltrator, because even in plain sight, they never see me coming. So, no worries. I won’t shank you in the back. If I ever come for you, it will be mano a mano.”

  “I’ll make sure to remember that!” It was hard not to laugh despite—or maybe because—of that not-even-veiled threat she’d just uttered. Turning to Pia, I snorted. “I think we’ll get along great.”

  The Ice Queen offered another rare smile. “I knew you would.” She then turned to the others. “So what’s with the BS you sold us about a broken-down car?”

  Calveras jerked his head toward the house. “Never said it was one of ours. Check the garage. When we stopped for a break and stumbled on that, we figured you might want to take a look.”

  The house looked unremarkable enough that his comment further confused me, but it took Martinez only a step into the carport to let out a succinct, “You gotta be fucking kidding me!” before he disappeared inside, soon followed by the sounds of human banging around car parts. Curious, I went to check on him, finding him pretty much hanging over the popped hood of a dusty SUV inside.
It wasn’t a make or model I was familiar with, and it took me looking at the steering wheel to realize that it was a Ford. Judging from the lack of a conventional engine, it must have been an electric car. When I mentioned as much—proving once again how far my immense automotive knowledge ranged—Martinez halted in his gawking for a moment to flash me a boyish grin. “That must be a prototype! I’ve never seen one like it!”

  “Don’t those usually have some kind of dazzle pattern wrapping, or something?” I mused. It was something he’d told me on one of our long hours of me helping with rebuilding the cars in the bunker. While the matte, dark gray paint job of the car looked unusual, it wasn’t that out of the ordinary.

  Martinez paused for a moment, as if that hadn’t even occurred to him. Boy and his car, obviously. “Probably to make it look less like a prototype,” he offered, turning back to the hood. “At least we won’t have to repaint it. And if this isn’t obvious, I’m calling dibs.”

  Pia and Rozen had followed me, the Ice Queen not quite caught up in Martinez’s enthusiasm yet. “Can you get it working? Or do we take it apart?”

  He looked perfectly scandalized at the latter proposition. “Oh, I will get this baby purring smoothly in no time! Battery’s likely shot, but we brought spares. Give me a few hours and we’re good to go.” Glancing at the reddening sky outside, he shrugged. “Let’s make that tomorrow morning. I should have it running before midnight.”

  Rozen spoke up as Pia considered. “We’ve secured the area as well as four people can. It’s safe enough, just needed a little housekeeping a few miles to the north. Nothing remarkable inside the house, and it looks looted several times,” she professed. “Still good enough for a hideout for the night. I’ll tell Cohn to get some chow started?”

  All she got—and needed—was a nod from Zilinsky. Just as she stepped back outside, Andrej and the guard who’d been riding with Pia and me—Kepler, I reminded myself; he looked like he might stick with us, so I might as well try to remember his name—came in, immediately joining Martinez in slobbering all over the vehicle. I quickly followed Pia when she left, lest someone rope me into handing them tools I once again didn’t remember the designations of. It happened. Spending months working on the buggies with Nate had had one advantage: we’d both done our thing, without much talking except what we were planning on doing. Who needed to know what kind that wrench was, anyway?

  After spending the day driving, I was quite happy to loosen my cramping, hard muscles with some bona fide perimeter watch, happy that, for once, I didn’t get the graveyard shift. It was when Pia joined me two hours later that I realized she’d done so for a reason. I half expected her to offer a more in-depth analysis of Marleen’s character or past, but instead she went for something else entirely as we kept strolling through the foothills.

  “I didn’t want to have this talk in town where anyone might overhear us,” she muttered, gaze roaming the countryside for predators we’d already established were long gone. I felt myself perk up, not sure whether this was going to be good or really, really bad. Her attention briefly flitting to check on my face made me guess that it wasn’t anything that would make me feel warm and fluffy.

  “What’s so important nobody overhear that we have to go all countryside clandestine on the topic?”

  She obviously found my joke less than funny—and so did I, as soon as she said, “I know that what actually happened to you while you were gone that first winter wasn’t fun, but it was for the best that you weren’t around when Sadie had the baby.”

  Talk about a gut punch. “Why? Think I would have made a terrible godmother? Not being present is pretty much the definition of that.” It couldn’t have been because of the smear campaign the army had started, because that must have only just started around the time Chris was born.

  Pia sent me a vexed glare but didn’t deny my assessment. “For Sadie and the baby, maybe. But while I generally don’t play favorites, in this, my concern is with you rather than her.”

  Ah. That. I looked away before I could catch more than a hint of sympathy in her gaze—not something I was used to from Pia, and in this case not necessarily something I appreciated. Calling her a hypocrite was much easier.

  “It couldn’t have been much easier for you, either,” I prompted, forcing myself to look her straight in the face. “You lost two children that you watched grow from toddlers to little humans. All I had was a bad aftertaste of a lot of what-ifs and regret.”

  Normally, I would have expected her to get annoyed with me, but seeing her oddly calm and gentle freaked me out on a deeper level. “It’s okay to hurt, you know?” she stressed. “And you would have hurt. I know you did a good job ignoring her while she waddled around, seven months pregnant, huge as a whale. But once she went into labor, once the baby let out her first cry, once the world stopped for all of us and focused on the new life in our midst, you wouldn’t have escaped the knowledge that it could—maybe even should—have been you. You would have likely had your child within a few weeks of her. And you would have hated her, and the child, and Nate for putting you in this situation, and all of us for being happy for her. But most of all yourself, for being human and feeling like that, even if you understood where it came from. That’s why I was glad that you weren’t around. And why I never sent anyone to track you both down. I figured he’d reasoned the same way as I did and took you both out of the equation that would put strain on friendships that wasn’t necessary. I thought he was doing it for you.”

  I knew she was serious not just because of how guilty—downright gutted—she sounded, but also because she used Nate’s given name. Sometimes I felt like they’d both forgotten each other’s, easily. And it was much easier to mull about that than what she actually said—and what was expected from me in return.

  “I’m not that petty. Or small,” I stressed, quickly speaking on when her mouth snapped open to interrupt me—or contradict me, more likely. Fuck, but I really had missed her! “Yes, that’s a rather accurate guess of my mental landscape, I’m not denying that. But I would have found a way to deal with it, likely involving lots of physical exertion, and not necessarily of the horizontal kind.” The brief smile I offered must have been more of a grimace because she didn’t respond, so I went on quickly. “But what I meant is that I don’t hold it against you that you never came looking for us. My guess? He must have reasoned that would be your expectation and used that to his—and your—advantage. When I dropped by here I was kind of surprised that Burns hadn’t breathed a word of what he must have figured was Nate’s true motive, but it makes sense. You’re great about keeping your emotions under wraps, no shit. But I doubt you would have reacted the same way if you’d figured we were hiding from the big, bad wolf rather than our messed-up feelings.”

  Pia let out a sigh that sounded like the weight of the world had lifted from her shoulders. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? And it’s true. If I had even the slightest hint to go on that Decker might still be alive and coming for you, I would have been a lot more defensive in my actions and paranoid in building up our town. Someone would have noticed, and I’d have inadvertently painted a target on all of us. You might have been safe from the slavers, but it stands to reason whether any of us would still be alive—if you are right, and he is still out there.”

  I couldn’t help but shake my head in wonder once more. “Who the fuck is that guy? And why hasn’t anyone taken him out yet?”

  That her face closed down was yet another piece of the puzzle, but at least she answered me. “How does that quote go? ‘The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist’? That sums him up in a nutshell. He’s a dangerous man. Ruthless and manipulating—”

  My grimace made her pause. “Nate told me about Bucky’s sister.”

  Pia’s eyes widened—clearly she’d been in the know as well. That she seemed surprised, if only for a second, that I knew hurt a little, but maybe shouldn’t have. Considering how secretive—and gene
rally closed-mouthed—Nate was about his past, it only made sense. She seemed to come to the same conclusion.

  “Of course he did,” she muttered. “Which means that you know exactly as much as I do. Which is more than either of us want to know, that much is for sure. It shows how serious he thinks the threat is, or else he would have kept his trap shut. Your husband is not someone who likes to admit that there is actually one person in the world who he’s afraid of.”

  “Sounds about right,” I agreed with her. “But that doesn’t give me much to go on, particularly if he is still alive, and somehow connected to this. How can I prepare for something I don’t know anything about?”

  “You can’t. And it’s how you react to something you can’t predict that might just let you get out ahead in the end.”

  That statement sounded a lot like what Nate had told me about our plans for where to go once we’d gotten back to the US—only that it had been a lie, as the fact that Red knew where to go look for us had proven.

  “I really don’t like this,” I hissed after thinking this through once more, still not getting to a different conclusion.

  “Let’s take this one step at a time,” Pia offered, sounding weirdly relaxed. “We have a few aces up our sleeves—like you, like Neeson; like so many others we have picked up along the way who have never had a chance to learn from the same rulebook as our opponents are playing by.”

  “Like the slavers,” I pointed out.

  A thread of contempt was back in Pia’s eyes, making me feel much more at home. “We will find a way to deal with them as well,” she said, confident enough that there was no contradicting her. “Nobody took them seriously as a threat until now, that’s why nobody bested them. We won’t make the same mistake, and we will get Miller back. And, who knows? Maybe we’ll pick up a few more wildcards along the way.”