Green Fields (Book 2): Outbreak (26 page)

Within seconds, the others followed, Andrej pulling the door closed behind him. My panting was almost loud enough to drown out that noise, but it still made me jump.

And then we waited, locked in the complete dark, with not a glimmer of light anywhere except for the colors swirling in front of my eyes.

A click sounded next to me and Burns fired up his industrial strength flashlight, immediately blinding me. Turning my head away, I blinked, but my night sight was shot for good.

“Fucking asshole,” someone voiced the sentiment for me, receiving a chuckle in return.
 

“Complain if you will, but this baby will get us through here without us banging our toes anywhere.”

“Or it will be their beacon to where dinner is served,” Nate observed dryly.

“Nah, don’t fret it. We have the Zombie Whisperer with us, we’ll be okay.”

Opening my eyes, I glared at Burns, hefting my shotgun slightly higher. “You know that I’m not afraid to use this?”

“Counting on it,” he quipped back, nodding toward the end of the huge cone of light he shone into the hangar. “Take point. If you stay just out of the cone, your night vision will work again in a minute or two.”

“You’re only doing that so you can ogle my ass,” I ground out, but with tension draining from me now, it wasn’t hard to end that with a leer of my own.

“My only goal in life,” he assured me, jerking the light to signal me to get going.

There was a certain reassurance to walking ahead of four men carrying assault rifles, and I wasn’t even sarcastic as I thought that. My shotgun had the shorter range, but carried more of a bang, and if something was coming straight for me, I’d take that any day.

But the hangar was empty, at least of zombies. As I crept forward, Burns’s light swept over the hulls of two huge, stocky planes, both outfitted with a weird kind of nozzle extending from them. “Stratotankers,” Nate supplied when I looked back in their general direction. “For refueling in mid-air.”

The idea that they would likely never fly again was strangely saddening, but my moment of melancholy passed quickly enough when Andrej muttered, “At least we can torch them to the ground if we need a distraction.”

There were support vehicles aplenty standing around all over, clearly abandoned rather than set apart after a full day of work. A few pools of dried blood hinted at the fact that more had happened in here than people just running off. Yet no zombies, and no torn-apart remains.
 

We reached the other side of the hangar within a few minutes, where we spread out, Nate and Cho getting out their own flashlights. There were all manners of tools there and what looked like the lunch of one of the techs who’d been working here before, but that was it. There was a small part of the huge building walled off, looking like an office, but the computer was gone, and no weapons or ammo were in the desk. They’d even taken the first-aid kit. Someone had clearly been here before us, and they’d left the space tidier than it had likely been before.

I felt kind of disappointed as I followed Cho through the door at the back of the hangar, back out onto the base proper. The wind blowing in my face was fresh, chasing away the lingering stench of zombie from the few more corpses that lay rotting on the ground. I was about to discard them as unimportant, but Nate bent over one of them, then looked around, searching. His eyes seemed to fix on something and he motioned us over, down the other side of the hangar.

True enough, behind what I’d thought was an industrial sized dumpster were a few crates—brimming over with magazines and handguns, enough of an arsenal to last a small army for weeks. I barely contained a whoop of triumph, and even in the dark I could see the bright grin on Burns’s face.

Pulling off the empty packs we’d brought, we stuffed them as full as we could get them, and kept shoving ammo into every available pocket on our gear. My pants alone were weighed down enough that I had to readjust the belt to keep them from sliding down my hips.

There was no sense in lingering with no clue where the second half of our team was, or into how much trouble they’d run into. We had what we came for—likely assembled by what was reduced to heaps of torn flesh and bone right outside the back door—and now our only objective was to get it back to our camp.

Chapter 17

Getting out of the base was a lot easier than getting in, and within an hour we were back in the relative safety of our camp. The other team followed about an hour later, laden down even heavier than we were, but we’d definitely scored the better loot. Although I didn’t complain about the huge tub of dehydrated mashed potatoes and several crates of apples that they’d liberated, mind you.

I spent the better part of ten minutes scrubbing my right hand with bleach, until it burned too much in the few scrapes and cuts I’d inflicted in the process for me to continue. I couldn’t deny that I was concerned about that, but there was nothing I could do about that now. If I’d been infected, I’d know it soon enough.

Although none of us caught more than three hours of sleep, we were up and moving shortly after first light. Warmed up potatoes with a side of full magazines was definitely the breakfast of champions.

My own good mood was up to par with most of the group’s. The fear of running out of ammo had clearly been weighing on more than one mind. In hindsight, I should probably have been more worried, but it wasn’t the first time since we’d left Lexington that I’d realized that I still had to get my priorities straight. In that, Nate had been right—even if I didn’t like that one bit.

By the time we took a quick break over lunch, Burns had regaled everyone who couldn’t flee quickly enough with the tale of my newfound skill, as he called it. I still wasn’t sure if it was that or just dumb luck, but I minded less than I pretended to. Even Madeline didn’t rain on our parade, and we covered a good chunk of ground before we dug in for the night.

The day would have been perfect if not for the fact that over dinner, Innes keeled over, sweating and choking on his own vomit.
 

He’d been unusually quiet the entire day, but I hadn’t really noticed because he wasn’t one of the guys I usually walked next to, and with Burns running his mouth up and down nonstop, there hadn’t been any reason for anyone else to try to entertain the lot of us.

Martinez got up, ready to check on him, but Pia shoved him out of the way.

“Stay put. I’ll handle this.”
 

I couldn’t help but stare at Innes, the need to inch away making my skin crawl.

Laboriously pushing himself back onto the log he’d been sitting on, Innes stared up at the Ice Queen, panting from even that little bit of exertion. “I’m good. Just some food gone bad. And dehydration, probably.”

“Doesn’t look like sunstroke to me,” she said, her voice hard, but with a note of compassion that was as unfamiliar as it was frightening. If anything, it was that which made Innes blanch. Not that he sounded very convincing—or convinced—but no one spoke up. Within seconds, Pia had him bent over, first checking his hands and neck, ignoring his feeble protest.

“I’m fine! Really. Don’t you think I would have noticed—“

He cut off there when she halted, squinting at his thigh. I wondered why she was staring at his gun or holster, but when she got out her knife and sliced through the sturdy material of his pants, unceremoniously cutting away the fabric, she revealed a festering gash several inches long and deep enough that I thought I saw bone glinting down there. Part of my dinner was ready to resurface, but I held my breath until the urge to hurl passed. Everyone was staring now, Innes’s labored breathing the only sound.

“It’s just a scratch,” he insisted, not that anyone was listening.

Back in his full gear and wearing latex gloves, Martinez joined Pia then, inspecting the wound. The fact that Innes didn’t seem to feel any pain when Martinez poked the edges of the ragged gash was bad; that enough pus to fill half a cup oozed out of it when he pressed down finally did the trick, and I was violently sick where I managed to lean away from my pack. Murmurs started up and people moved out of the way, but none of the panic rose that I’d expected. Innes seemed as shocked as everyone else, but when he looked up and glanced at the rest of us, resignation was already plain on his face. Resignation, and fear that made him look decades younger than his thirty years.

“Don’t leave me. I don’t care what you do, but just don’t leave me to die alone,” he rasped, the words partly obscured by another coughing fit.

Nate and Pia shared one of those looks before he got up and crouched down next to Innes, taking one of his hands in his. “Don’t worry, man. We won’t leave you.”

Innes sagged in on himself, clearly weaker than he’d pretended to be, but relieved now.

I honestly couldn’t say for myself that in Nate’s place, I wouldn’t just have shot him and be done with it. That realization came with its own special kind of unease, and not just because it was no longer easy to ignore how hostile our world had become. Back on that first—no, second—day of our flight, with Thompson and Brad, we’d lucked out in many ways. I’d barely known either of them, and Thompson had handled the whole thing in a way that left the rest of us almost free of guilt. Now—after weeks together on the road—things were different.

But that didn’t mean that I had to like the very idea that one of us was slowly turning into one of them while we were all sitting around, watching.

Nate, of course, wasn’t that stupid. Barking orders, he quickly had the entire camp scurrying, finding tasks for everyone until the worst of the shock had worn off. The perimeter was increased and a second team of guards set up, making sure that nothing could surprise us here while we were sitting ducks. Someone was to stay with Innes at all times—two people, both armed, with at least one of them keeping watch. All of us needed the rest, but it went without saying that this was not going to get very restful.

Feeling like a lowlife but also like this wasn’t my responsibility, I remained as far away as possible from the makeshift triage station that Pia and Martinez set up together. Innes wasn’t my friend and not really my comrade, at least not like Bates and the others who had served with him for years. I did my share of the duty—went on perimeter watch twice, first in the night, then around noon the following day—but otherwise kept a low profile.

As the hours passed and we waited for Innes to die, morale plummeted with every hacking cough and pained groan. I couldn’t deny that the scientist in me was morbidly fascinated by the entire process, but I realized that I’d given up on that life more than I’d thought when it didn’t even occur to me to take notes or samples. His decline was similar to Raleigh Miller’s from the video, at least on the outside. Lesions, bruising, delirium—but at least he didn’t seem to feel any pain. Not from the wound that got worse with every hour, putting gangrene to shame, nor from his increasing disability to move properly.
 

Then the second night came, and it was obvious that Innes wouldn’t see the light of day ever again. He was barely coherent in the moments when he managed to keep his eyes open, and couldn’t even keep down water. I figured that he was nearing the end when Pia sent me for another extended route around the camp at around midnight, but he was still alive—if no longer kicking—by the time I returned. The guards from before were rolled up in their sleeping bags now, and it was only Nate who sat at Innes’s side, his Glock in his hand and the AK resting on the ground, close enough to scoop up if he needed it. At my hesitant approach, he looked up, the light from the camping lantern casting his face in a stark contrast of white panes and deep shadows. We normally didn’t keep a night light around—barely even dared to light a fire during the day to heat up food, as not to draw any number of predators—but it was obvious why it was needed.

Like the rest of us, he’d lost weight, but he looked practically gaunt now. He’d shouldered most of the watch time over Innes, giving order to wake him up if things got bad in the few hours he’d caught some sleep. Everyone else had been avoiding Innes, but Nate didn’t seem to share that very visceral fear that—even now, at a healthy few feet of distance—made my heartbeat increase as my body instinctively powered up to kick into fight or flight mode.

He didn’t say anything, and neither did I, but after a few moments I crossed the distance between us and hunkered down in the grass next to Nate, keeping my shotgun across my thighs. And so we waited.

It was minutes after the first light of dawn tickled the horizon in the east and a few early birds started to sing when Innes took a last, rattling breath and went quiet. Nate waited for about a minute, then leaned over to check for a pulse. Not looking away, he raised his gun and fired a single shot straight between Innes’s eyes, startling the birds into taking flight, and scaring everyone else in the camp wide awake.

And that was that.

There was a short debate whether we should bury Innes, but it was easier—and quicker—to burn the body instead. Wrapped in the sleeping bag he’d died in, he was doused in some gasoline that someone had siphoned off a car the day before, and as the sun rose, we watched as flames consumed his remains. No one said anything, but the mood was sombre. As soon as the fire had died down, we kicked out the ashes, grabbed our gear, and were back on the road.

Losing Innes had changed something, although I couldn’t quite put a finger on it. I was sure that all of us—even Madeline and her kids—were aware of the latent danger, and we’d by far lost too many already to keep up any pretense of safety in the first place. But this, this was different, and it wasn’t just me. As we trudged through the day, physically rested but emotionally mauled, I could tell that I wasn’t the only one who kept repeatedly checking their weapons, or jumped at even the smallest sound a scurrying animal made. I didn’t know about the others, but the very thought that an injury that I couldn’t even feel could kill me like that was scary as hell.

It also made me wonder if it had been like this for all the others, those who’d died in the initial phase of the outbreak. Fever, delusions, but not much else. Had they simply fallen asleep and never woken up again?