That last sentence made me uncomfortably paranoid. “Do you think he actually let himself be caught?”
She didn’t hesitate as she shook her head. “From what you’ve told us, no way. But he didn’t expect to have an insider scientist with him when he went to avenge his brother. Who knows what will come of this? Don’t underestimate your husband, either. He’s a crafty fucker when he needs to be.”
I had a few choice words to say to that but opted to keep them to myself. Instead, I looked back toward the house, visible on the lower rise about half a mile south of where we were standing. “What about the four newcomers? Can I trust them? Do you?”
The Ice Queen gave a rather neutral shrug. “As I said earlier, Rozen came on recommendation from Bert. And before you ask, no, Emma isn’t aware that we’re still in contact. Rozen knows Sadie, too, so that’s a character reference if you don’t trust my instincts.”
“I always do. That’s why I’m asking you,” I let her know.
She gave something between a chuff and a snort. “Cohn and Calveras are friends of hers. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?”
“No suspicion because none of them has the marks?”
Pia shook her head. “No. They’d been part of one of the first settlements. That’s why they got around it at the time. They stayed because all of them had family. Things change—and now they have their own reasons to come along. You can ask them. I’m not at liberty to tell without their permission. But yes, I do trust them.”
“And Marleen? What’s up with her?”
“There is no woman named Marleen Neeson who looks like that,” she offered with a slight smile. “Or any of her other three aliases that I know of. She was a ghost before the world went to shit. I’d say it’s lucky coincidence that I was able to track her down, except it’s not. She tracked me down last year, wanted to get the details on you and Miller. She left some contact details, so that’s what I did when I knew you were showing up.”
“Wait—you called her before I even got to your town? And how’s none of this suspicious?”
I got a knowing look for that—sprinkled with a hint of pride. “With anyone but her, I would have shot her on sight. But she’s different.”
“Why? How?” I felt like those were valid questions, and her evasive answers didn’t help one bit.
I almost expected her to tell me the same as with the others—go ask them directly if I really wanted to know—but at the last moment she decided against it. I knew this was going to be good. “Let’s put it this way—if I was going to assemble a crew that was going to hunt down Decker, she would always be in my top five. With shitty intel about the slaver camp, we need an infiltrator, and she’s good at that as well. The possible combination of our task ahead made her the perfect candidate.”
“What’s up with her and Decker? And does every fucking person in this whole country know about him except me?”
The Ice Queen gave me a condescending look for my outburst. “You might be personally acquainted with half of those still alive,” she said before answering my other question. “That contract that should have ended badly for her—and had her facing us at the wrong end of too many guns for her comfort—was connected to one of Decker’s pet projects. She knew who she’d been pitted against, and chose to become a ghost rather than get a bullet between the eyes. She continued to work with us both out of obligation and need for money, but, looking back, she more than once pointed out a few flaws in the system that seemed obvious to her but our contacts always explained away. Maybe things would have turned out differently if we’d listened to her. Maybe not. My point is, as much as you can trust anyone, she’s on top of that list. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the two of you’d hit it off right from the start. She’s special. So are you.”
“How nice of you to say,” I grumbled, but couldn’t hold it against her. “Mighty convenient that they found the car here.”
The Ice Queen shrugged. “I told them from the start that transportation is our main issue at the moment, so they knew what to look for. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them had found the car months or maybe even years before and just happened to remember it now. Who knows? Quite frankly, I don’t give a shit. I need room for eighteen people and their gear, and with six cars, we now have that. Even five would have worked but I prefer one spare, considering that we will bring one additional man back with us. If the last few years have taught me something, it’s not to ask questions when something is convenient and to just roll with the punches once they land. We’re still short on provisions, and we don’t have sufficient ammo should we decide to storm the camp.”
I shook my head, not because she’d said anything stupid, but because I already had an answer to that. “We can’t storm it. Even if Richards brings more people to that gathering than we expect, we will still be outnumbered over one hundred to one. I know you’re good, but not that good. I’m not even talking avoiding bloodshed, but simple survival. If we have a chance to go in, find Nate, and get him out without anyone the wiser, that’s our best plan by a long shot. With luck, we won’t even need any weapons for that.”
“Let’s not hope it comes to that,” Pia said, rather cryptically. When she saw the confusion on my face, she looked toward the house once more, but it seemed like she wasn’t really seeing it. “Easy plans like that never work. Plans without bloodshed usually never work, either. I’d rather calculate a thirty percent casualty rate and be surprised if only one or two bite it, rather than hope for less and end up with too much blood on my hands.” She paused, focusing back on me. “Or who would you pick should give their lives so your husband is freed? Martinez? Burns? Romanoff? Exactly. But we still have a while, so we’ll deal with that once we get to the Ozarks. If we survive that, we can always draw straws.”
I didn’t like her pessimism, but it closely matched the latent unease that had been riding shotgun ever since I’d realized how fucking huge that camp was. I still didn’t give up hope that Richards would show up with something more important than manpower or weapons—information.
Whether I could trust said information was a different thing.
I couldn’t help but smile for a second when I realized that I really missed the good old days when it was just us against the zombies and no care for anything else in the world. Of course, that had been my perception only, while the others had many more things to guess at and worry about—including how to keep me alive. Maybe those days hadn’t been that much better to begin with, just different.
But, damn, different sounded pretty good to me right now.
Chapter 17
Ten days after I’d gotten to the California coastal town, the miracle finally happened—we hit the road. After more lamenting, much pleading, lots of plotting, and even threats being thrown around, we were finally ready to go. I still only knew half the people who were tagging along, but that was the least of my worries. Five weeks since I’d last seen Nate—and five weeks were a damn long time. Back when the shit had hit the fan, our journey had taken less than twice that long, and we weren’t about to bust down doors soon and be done with it. We were only just beginning to start our rescue mission. Five fucking weeks.
It would be closer to eight by the time we got to the final stage.
Marleen turned out to be a more welcome distraction than I could have expected. That first night at the house with the prototype car, she’d started laughing maniacally when she’d caught a glimpse of my hands, finding it incredibly funny that not only wasn’t I former military, but I was a cripple to boot. I wasn’t even offended since she went right on to crowing about how much more fun it would be to stick it to the man seeing a cripple was doing said sticking. She also found it incredibly endearing how I fondled the sniper rifle Pia had found somewhere for me before we got ready to set out. When it took her all of five minutes to meet Sonia, piss off Sonia, and laugh in Sonia’s face, I knew we’d be friends for as long as fate would let us be. Sonia wasn’t exactly ecstatic to see
her not-quite favorite person—me—pair off with her new even-less-favorite person—Marleen. Burns found it all incredibly amusing but did a good job placating his missus. I knew I’d hit gold when, seconds after those two disappeared, Marleen crowed a loud and carrying, “Well, at least someone is getting laid tonight!” after them, making Martinez choke on his laughter.
Sadly, Marleen was the only one with a sense of humor. The three old soldiers—Rozen, Cohn, and Calveras—took everything with a grain of salt, including my less than-standard military MO, but the four new recruits were oh so serious. Kepler I’d already gotten to hang out with on our two-day sortie to fetch the new car, and unremarkable was the best term I could come up with for him. Sarood, Brook, and Halecki were, like Kepler, very eager to prove to Zilinsky that they were young yet capable, but they had their issues getting over me pretty much running outside the hierarchy the Ice Queen had established. I could kind of understand why—she was running a tight ship, and even after years of being on my own, I was still surprised when she accepted me disagreeing with her on something. But I was the exception and they were the rule, and I could understand where my special status didn’t sit well with them. That Marleen equally did what she pleased, and Sonia, at best, listened to advice that she chose to follow, didn’t seem to count.
And what I really wanted to do was to punch some sense into them and yell at them to stop being such babies—which reminded me awfully of how Zilinsky had sometimes glared at me when I’d been a little too stupid and goofy with the guys. The irony wasn’t lost on me. That Nate wasn’t here to see it and laugh in my face, either. But none of that mattered, I told myself, if only I’d get him back in good time.
With twenty days left and around two thousand miles to go, our trek to what used to be the Ozark settlement should have been a breeze, or so I’d thought—until we left the vicinity of New Angeles and its radius of influence, and things got interesting quickly. Either Red had had intel that we were sorely missing, or we’d just had a lot of luck on the way to California, but the state of the roads was bad. At least once a day, we had to backtrack and find a new route because the old one ended in a minefield or landslide or destroyed bridge or other obstacle that hadn’t been there the last time anyone had passed by. Three days into this, I complained that Dispatch was really slacking off where road safety reports were concerned, only to be met with seventeen disbelieving pairs of eyes. It took me a while to figure out that I was wrong, or rather, because we were trying to fly under the radar, we couldn’t rely on the official trade routes that were open, well-guarded, and heavily populated at times. Well, my bad.
More than being stealthy, keeping the cars running was the real problem. In theory, driving around with solar panels hooked to spare batteries to power the cars was a great idea—particularly in the more arid states where the sun was beating down mercilessly now that spring had turned into summer for good. Because Marleen and I were riding with Martinez in his snazzy Ford, we even had A/C most of the time—when the newly hooked-up solar panels were doing their job. Every single day, one of the cars had some issue or other, forcing a stop to switch batteries, tinker and repair, or plain wait out the noon heat until we could resume driving after six in the afternoon—only to have to stop at around nine because we couldn’t risk lights, and we had to preserve batteries for night vision gear for the mission itself, not lumbering cross-country.
A week into this, and I was ready to walk, sure that we wouldn’t have been much slower if we’d done things the old-fashioned way. It soon became obvious to me why the slavers could do what they did—it was damn hard to get twenty people from one place to another, let alone a group large enough to make a difference. Nate and I had been oblivious to this as we’d either travelled light, or spent, at the most, a few days on the road going from one base to another, with lots of detours for hunting and scavenging. What did it matter that for every three hours driving we’d had to let the buggies charge for another hour, if we’d wanted to go for a swim or crash in the shade of the trees, anyway? What angered me the most was that, as such things go, I hadn’t realized just how close to living free in paradise our days had been—until they hadn’t.
At least I had my friends back, and I appreciated that more than I’d expected every morning when we sat around the fire, meditatively drinking coffee and tea, and every evening, between grabbing some chow and getting ready for bed. Even with so many strangers—and only two of them slowly becoming friends, even if they couldn’t stand each other—it felt like home. Way more like home than where Nate and I had been living for the past two years. That once again reminded me that home didn’t necessarily have to be a building but could be great company just as well—but that also made me afraid of what lay ahead, once we had Nate back. But that was one punch I’d roll with once it hit, as the Ice Queen had stated so perfectly earlier.
Even if the going was slow and tedious, we made good progress, and ended up at our destination with three entire days to spare—only to find that we weren’t the first to arrive. Or second, or third, as it turned out. Pia had expected Richards and his people to come from the north or west, so she’d plotted a course that got us closing in on the ruins of the settlement from the southeast, pretty much the direction we would be leaving in after whatever would happen here had happened. That gave us a few glimpses of the old settlement, burnt to the ground and already surprisingly overgrown, but nobody focused on that once the small city of tents and vehicles came into view roughly a mile north of the ruins, well in sight of the road. Rozen reported in that she’d counted fifteen vehicles and at least three different factions—army, marines, and one she couldn’t place. And while we were still debating how to proceed—well aware that they must have seen us just as we’d seen them—another convoy came down from the northeast, only the front three vehicles veering toward the tents after the rest remained at pretty much the distance we’d assumed.
After handing her binoculars to Marleen, the Ice Queen gave our little six-vehicle group a once-over and started calling out names. “We’re taking two cars over there with us. Romanoff, you hold down the fort here. Two snipers at the very least, three would be better.” She then glanced at me—no need to tell me I was tagging along. “Martinez, Burns, you’re with us.”
Before she could say more, Sonia stepped up to her man. “I’m coming with.”
Pia gave her a pained smile. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.” She kept considering the rest. “Kepler, Halecki, you provide backup. Stick to the vehicles while the rest of us do our thing.”
Marleen was still studying the group, and when Pia didn’t call her name she chimed in. “I’m coming with, too. Mostly for the funny commentary, but might be good to have an extra liaison in the field.” When Pia kept staring flatly at her, Marleen shrugged as she handed the binoculars back. “I know at least three of the guys pretending to be stone cold killers over there. I presume she”—she nodded at me—“can do the army, but who do you have for the marines?” She got a nod, if a hesitant one. I could tell that Pia would have preferred keeping Marleen’s presence a secret for a while longer.
That set, we piled back into the vehicles, Pia hopping into the car with us, and the extra guards sharing with Burns and Sonia. I was surprised that she didn’t leave our gear and provisions with the others, but clearly, she didn’t expect a trap as much as minor altercations that might warrant a third time reloading. And she wasn’t done yet being all mysterious, as the moment Martinez started the car, she got out a walkie-talkie I hadn’t seen in all the days we’d been on the road together. I had no clue who had its twin, but after minimal static, her demand for an update got a gruff, male voice offering, “En route.” What that was all about got resolved several seconds later when two vehicles peeled out of the ruins of the settlement and headed straight for us, drawing up alongside us about a third of the way to the tents. I was more than a little surprised to find them splattered with paint and streaming rags and chains made of bones behin
d them. “Something you care to explain?” I asked her, not sure what to make of this at all.
Pia gave me a rather amused snort. “We need a diversion to get into the camp, right? How about sending a hooting horde of raiders right at them that makes the guards ignore everything else and open up their backdoors to us?”
“And how in the world will you get them to comply and do that? And not turn on us first?” I asked, feeling like that point was a valid one. Marleen looked a little disturbed herself, but the fact that Martinez wasn’t reacting to any of this made me guess that my dear friends had kept a few secrets they might not have wanted to broadcast to their fellow townspeople. “Let me guess—you have contacts to the new scavengers as well?”
The Ice Queen gave me a look that made it obvious that I needn’t have asked—and it made sense, kind of. Their territory had bordered on what had apparently become scavenger central. What I hadn’t expected was her response. “As do you.”
Up ahead, the people already gathered didn’t seem too enthusiastic to see their numbers suddenly double with three new groups arriving pretty much at the same time. Orders were shouted and weapons readied, but at least nobody went into complete defensive mode. After yearning for this day to finally arrive—even ahead of schedule, as it seemed—I suddenly didn’t know how to approach this. Great.
The tents turned out to belong to four groups, with enough room left to let both our two convoys come to a halt and form a wonky circle, large enough to leave lots of cover around the vehicles—not that I figured we’d need it. The scavengers ended up to our right, with most of the remaining free space on their other side since nobody except us seemed to want to come too close to them. Then there was the unidentifiable group, the newcomers from the north, and—closer together—the three more easily identifiable camps, comprised of marines, army, and marines again, closing the circle with Burns’s car once more. That obvious room left between the tents spoke of clear segregation, making me wonder what that was all about. Looked like I would find out soon.
Green Fields (Book 10): Uprising: Page 24