Well, at least we didn’t look like a group of highly trained professionals.
Getting some hot food helped establish peace eventually, and the two bottles of moonshine making the rounds further quieted dissatisfied voices. I was just about to relax when Richards dropped down next to me on the log that I was abusing for a bench, not even waiting for an invitation.
“You know that they’ll sniff us out if we stay segregated like this?” he stated, pointedly looking at the—clearly kept-apart—groups around our two small fireplaces.
“Why? Miss hitching a ride with me?” I asked, well aware that we’d never actually been part of anything, not even a fire team, except for when he’d helped me drag Nate’s lifeless body out of the lab.
Richards inclined his head nevertheless. “Actually, I’m here because of that. You and me, we should stick together. One of my men will establish contact with our people on-site, so I’m free to lend a hand if you need it.”
“Hardly.”
If my immediate rebuke surprised him, he didn’t show it. “You can’t waltz in there with your people,” he pointed out. “They will jump to the right conclusions if they find the same tats on all three of you. Her?” He glanced over at where Marleen was busy joking around with Buehler and her marines, next to Santos and Clark. How had I managed to end up on my own, I wondered? I’d obviously set myself up for this. Richards going on drew my attention back to him. “We can take her along, but I think she works best on her own. But you and me, we’re a team.”
I was about to protest, but then thought better of it. “That part of my husband’s contingency plans as well?”
Red shrugged, not quite denying my accusation. “Not outright, but I think he would prefer you to have someone around who may very well keep unwanted attention at bay.”
That very idea made me guffaw. “Really? You’re volunteering to be my knight in shining armor?”
“More like meat shield, if you need one, but you make it sound a lot more valiant,” Richards joked. At least I hoped he was joking.
Did I want to stick with my people? Yes, but he had a point. He was also a head taller than either Clark or Santos, and that might come in handy in a crowd. Santos and Clark were a well-oiled machine working together, and there was a chance I might throw them off as a third wheel. Maybe I should have thought of that first. I realized the only reason I was protesting was because Red had been the one to approach me, not the other way round, and even on my worst day I could admit that this wasn’t a good enough reason to decline his offer.
“Very well, you and me as a team it is. Your people are going to be okay with that, I presume?”
I grinned at the hint of condescension leaking into his expression. “That’s what orders are for,” he observed succinctly.
I was just about to ask how we would do that with the cars when Harris came sauntering over, followed by my two favorite scavengers, Amos and Eden. They still had yet to speak a single word to me since the docks at New Angeles, but I’d caught them staring at me on more than one occasion. It seemed suspicious to have them trailing him now. At least their open hostility had decreased somewhat.
“Mighty fine to find the two people I need to talk to already involved in conversation,” Harris drawled as he rocked to a halt in front of us.
“What’s up?” I hoped that sounded sunny enough. I still didn’t quite know what to make of all of them, and now was not the time to add dissent to the already volatile mix.
Harris’s smile broadened—not very assuring. “We need to make sure that you don’t all stick out like sore thumbs. Nobody would want to get caught right at the gate.”
I didn’t try to hide my confusion. “We’ve painted the cars and downgraded our gear wherever possible. Feel free to try to get that stick out of Scott’s ass that keeps him from behaving like a normal person. I’ve tried. I won’t try again.”
Chuckling softly, Harris shook his head. “Your gear is fine. We’ll sell them some bull about having gotten our grubby hands on some prime merch a few weeks ago. That’s not the problem. But you’re the problem.”
Not the first time someone told me that. Cocking my head to the side, I squinted at him. “Me specifically, or me as a general entity?”
That did a thing or two to confuse him, but Harris shook that off a moment later. “You as in your entire bunch of stuck-up, look-down-your-noses, yessiree do-gooders.”
“You’re not making any sense whatsoever,” I told him rather emphatically.
Red, ever the smart cookie, answered before Harris could. “He means we’re too sober to blend in.”
Just that moment, Buehler let out a shriek of laughter that told a different story, but I got the sense he wasn’t talking about the booze making the rounds. “Not really much we can do about that, for at least half of us,” I pointed out.
I really didn’t like how Harris was grinning now. “And this is where you’re wrong, Ms. Bree,” he was happy to inform me. “The truly good stuff cuts through that mighty fine serum you’re all so proud of. We might have to tweak the dosage a little, but double the whammy should even send one of you fine specimens to your knees.”
“And we want that?” I tried to keep my hands still, but I felt my left one tremble ever so slightly. Yup, still rocking the after-effects of that shit—I had no intention whatsoever to get any chemicals into my system, even if they weren’t designed to knock me out or leave me helpless, presumably.
Harris sure looked very gleeful about his proposition. “If you want to get into the camp, and not get picked out right at the gate, you will want to fit in perfectly with us. No worries. I’ve told my fine fighters a week ago to lay off the high doses so that you’ll only need to take a small hit to blend in.”
“And by that you mean all of us?” I asked.
He nodded. “Sure thing.”
I really didn’t like this, but I doubted he’d suggest this just to spite us. After all, they were losing out on whatever we were consuming. “One dose only,” I agreed.
“No can do,” Harris was quick to inform me. When I frowned, he raised his hands in defense. “I’m sure that a woman of such keen senses as you, Ms. Bree, has noticed that unless we’ve hit up very recently, most of our fine warriors display certain signs of…” He trailed off, casting around for the right word.
“Withdrawal symptoms?” I suggested sweetly.
“Close enough,” Harris admitted. “Although you’ll soon see that’s not quite it. You will also do well with some extra time to get accustomed to the sensation. I say you hit up now, and again tomorrow before we get going. No worries, my folks know how to drive under the influence well so we’ll take over driving the vehicles. I’ve wanted to talk to you about splitting your groups up, as well. Didn’t sound like a smart move when we were still in the camp, but it will help a lot.”
Richards had remained mostly mute next to me. He only offered up a shrug when I turned to look at him now. “Do I like the idea of being high with my men split up over several vehicles, hitching rides with people whose affiliations I’m somewhat dubious about? Not exactly. But he’s right. We need to fit in, and it’s the easiest way to reach the camp. What’s the worst that can happen? We lose a day or two in there before we’re sober enough to operate.”
“Or we get caught at the gate, and executed on the spot because of who we really are,” I suggested. “And that’s the best-case scenario.”
Surprisingly, Amos found his voice to interject. “Won’t happen. Just like you, they tolerate us, but they never completely trust us. So they leave us the fuck alone once they’ve made sure we’re legit. Eden here has tangled with the guards a few times, and never turned out to be a problem. They’d likely get suspicious if you’re all too meek and well-behaved. That’ll get you killed.”
I still wasn’t convinced. “I don’t exactly have a history of doing well on stimulants.” I caught Richards grinning faintly to himself, making me guess that, one way or another, he was al
ready privy to this information that I was about to share. “Ever heard of my grand stand that ended in the truce with these idiots at the Colorado base? I was fucking tripping balls, and that was just the damn booster that should have let me run a little longer and lift a little easier. It’s been weeks since I got away from this damn camp, and I still get the tremors. I’m less concerned that I will make an ass of myself and more with turning into a homicidal maniac hell-bent on cutting a literal swath through the masses until I find what I’m looking for.”
Amos actually seemed impressed while Harris did his best to alleviate my concerns. “The Glimmer, it works differently, no worries. You may feel a slight sense of euphoria, and some impressions are, well, way more impressive than without, but it’s not going to turn you into a hyperactive killer squirrel. Might actually mellow you out, going on what I’ve seen you do in the past. And if you take the first hit now, you’ll have the entire night to see how you react. Trust me when I tell you that I’ve thought of everything.”
There was so much about this that I felt like objecting to. That Harris’s suggestion didn’t really surprise me that much didn’t help. At all. But that didn’t change the fact that I kind of agreed with them.
“Looks like we should go over the plan once more before we do this,” I said when nothing else came to mind to prevent it. Richards nodded his agreement. Harris grinned.
This was so going to turn into a shit storm, I just knew it.
Chapter 19
It turned out, I had been wrong—the Glimmer, whatever it was, didn’t completely turn me into a psychopath, and the marines didn’t wholeheartedly threaten me with mutiny, but both were a closer call than I liked to admit. It took a good two hours of heated debating until everyone had agreed to take the drugs, and as soon as the shit hit my lungs and thus got into my blood, things got really weird. It definitely wasn’t like what they’d tried to subdue me with at the camp before—and nothing like weed, which had been my first guess since the application worked about the same. But the fine powder didn’t look like it came from dried and ground-up plants. My guess was that someone had gotten their grubby hands on a chemistry textbook and started cooking up their own versions of whatever cool stuff they’d seen on TV once. I vaguely remembered the organic chemistry lab I’d had to take in college, and the weird shit we’d produced there. What baffled me was how potent it was, and that the single dose I got seemed to cut right through all the defenses the damn serum should have given me. The reason seemed obvious—the serum did a great job screwing up pain receptors, which went hand in hand with why specific painkillers didn’t work anymore, but this compound must be working on a different system.
It made me feel pretty good, and if not for the killer headache, dry mouth, and general sense that I needed to punch the next person in the face who looked at me the wrong way, I wouldn’t have minded partaking so much. But withdrawal set in swift and brutal, and that seemed to be something that affected me way worse than our marines—and at least with Buehler I was sure she wasn’t kidding when she offered that she felt a little groggy but otherwise fine. So it probably was some downstream metabolite of the drug, not the drug itself, that screwed with my brain—and faster metabolism meant more broken-down poison at a much quicker rate. Just as if someone had engineered it to sucker-punch those who normally got up and ran where others could only drag themselves forward. I kept that thought to myself, not sure if heightened paranoia wasn’t just another side effect, but it sure didn’t make me happy to get another hit in the morning.
That was, until that really set in and the world turned bright yet mellow once more.
Since switching up the driving and seating order required some redistribution of gear and packs, I used the time to limber up a little and try to stretch the various kinks out of my body. I missed not having Nate around to help—for some reason, helping me bend over until my spine cracked and cut-apart-and-reknitted muscles did once more what they were supposed to had always seemed like fun to him—but I managed well enough on my own. That was, until I noticed I had not one or two, but closer to ten salivating bystanders as I did my very best—in a near-split—to get my damn thigh muscles to loosen up. Rather than getting in their faces, I found myself grinning stupidly to myself. Huh. Yeah, those drugs were packing more of a punch than I’d thought last night. I was sorely tempted to drop my pants and show them the scars in all their horrifying glory so they actually got something to ogle, but restrained myself. Leader, and all that shit.
Damn, but I needed Nate back, because I so wasn’t going to do this shit, on my own, for long.
“Okay, everyone know what they are supposed to be doing when we get to our destination?” I asked when everyone was as ready as they were going to get. Thanks to Harris and his people we had a somewhat reliable overview of buildings and troop strength, but only for the areas visitors were allowed in—almost exclusively concerning entertainment and food. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
I got way more stupid grins than nods, which didn’t bode well. Actually, the scavengers were the ones best responding to questions. We were so fucking screwed.
I would have felt better riding with Harris but he insisted that Eden and Amos made a much better match, so it was them I shared the car with, besides a rather doped-out Richards. Since we were driving crap cars running on all kinds of fuels—only three had electric motors, one even had its own extra huge tank of vegetable oil—there was no AC, and as the midday sun beat down on us, I started to regret pretty much every single decision of my life. More to distract myself than because I was burning to know, I started a conversation with Eden and Amos, who’d been mostly quiet in the front row of the car.
“How many times have you been to the camp?” It was as neutral a question as I could come up with.
Eden considered as she glanced back to me from the passenger seat. “Five or six times? Something like that. You, Big A?”
“Six, I think,” Amos offered, mostly ignoring us in favor of following the cars driving ahead of ours.
I knew I should have kept it at that but couldn’t stop myself. “Why go there? I mean, I get it. You’ve all told me repeatedly they treat you as guests. But you must realize what’s going on there.”
I thought I caught a weary sigh from Amos, but Eden wasn’t so curt with her response. “Why don’t you get off your high horse, bitch?” she suggested, ignoring her friend’s warning glance when he briefly looked over to her. “It’s true! It’s so damn easy for her to be so fucking ignorant. After all, we’re not doing this because she has anyone’s best interest at heart other than her own.” Another warning glance went ignored, but when Eden fully turned back to face me, she’d calmed down a little.
“Never said I was trying to make the world a better place,” I offered.
“Not this time, you didn’t,” she admitted, frowning. “But rather than call us hypocrites, maybe check yourself first. We go there because it’s fun. Because it’s easy to ignore the shit that’s going on in favor of letting down our guard. It’s not like we can do that anywhere else. And if you have getting eaten by zombies or wolves as the alternative, you fucking learn to not see what else they get up to. They don’t even want much from us in return, just some junk we pick up on the road. They treat us much better than the settlements ever did, and they don’t sneer down at us like Dispatch does. So what if we want to party a little too hard? Who said this had to be fucking Puritania just because the world went to hell? I dig this way more than what I’ve been up to before.”
“Which was?” I had a hard time gauging her. For all I knew, she could have been a software engineer or something boring like that.
Eden looked surprised at the question but dutifully supplied an answer. “I was a woman of many trades. Guess I should say waitress because that’s the single one constant. I was the queen of side hustles. You name it, I tried it. Selling shit online, selling shit door-to-door, blogging, being an influencer, lots of temp work. Always tr
ied to make it all look so great and free and glamorous. The reality was, I was neck-deep in student loan debt, nobody understood how many hours of work went into a fucking ten-minute video, and I didn’t even get health coverage. Now I can live life to the fullest and never give a shit about anyone’s fucking opinion of me. Tell me that’s not a million times better.”
I hadn’t expected that response, and there wasn’t much in it that I could use, so I dropped it. “Never had any issues at the camp?” I asked instead. “Nobody disappearing? Particularly the girls?”
Amos was quick to break his silence. “We take care of our own,” he told me in no uncertain terms. “And they know not to mess with us. They don’t need to, as is. They know we could mess them up good if they gave us a reason to. That’s why they like to play nice, and let us trade merch for Glimmer and other drugs. And it’s not just us they trade with, you know? Last year several settlements closed up and moved because they didn’t have enough food. No scavenger has gone hungry in a long, long time.”
“You do know that the food they produce comes from slave labor,” I pointed out.
“Is it really?” Amos shot back.
“I’ve seen it myself. Pretty obvious. And you yourselves told us that the barracks where the workers live are lovingly called ‘sheep pens.’”
He chuckled under his breath, as if I’d said something funny. I really didn’t get why. “You’ll see when you get there,” Amos promised.
Green Fields (Book 10): Uprising: Page 28