Green Fields (Book 2): Outbreak (35 page)

“I miss it so much!” she chirped, reaching for her pocket although she must have known that her phone wasn’t there anymore. “Chatting with my friends. Listening to music. Watching stupid cat videos, you know?”

Smiling, I inclined my head. “Reading books. Looking up recipes. Catching up with the season finale of… pretty much everything.”

“And we’ll never know who won!” she complained.

“We can still make it up, you know? That’s what people have always been doing. Making up their own stories and telling each other when they were bored.”

“It’s just not the same,” she huffed, but the pensive look on her face spoke otherwise. Then her eyes brightened. “I still remember most of the stories I loved as a kid. We couldn’t really bring any of my books, so I can’t read them to Al and Pete now, but I could just tell them.”

“You should do that,” I agreed.

Erica eyed me quizzically for a moment. “You don’t have any kids, right?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Don’t you want any?”

Looking around at the houses already falling into disrepair, I couldn’t help but shudder a little about the very idea of bringing children into this world. And that wasn’t the only reason why the topic made me somewhat uncomfortable—yet also surprisingly sad. I hadn’t forgotten that part of Nate’s explanation, either.

“Not sure I’m mom material,” I finally said.

“It’s not that hard,” Erica teased, making me smile in spite of myself. “And I’m sure you’ll always find someone who tells you you’re doing it wrong even if it’s the only thing you can do.”

I probably deserved that, but I couldn’t help but glare at the girl for a moment.

“You do realize that I’m not bitching at your mom because I disagree with her choices. I’m trying to show her that she can choose differently. Maybe with those other guys, she didn’t have a choice. But with us, she has. Maybe she feels a little useless right now, but I told you, sooner or later there will be settlements again. People will get back to doing normal chores.”

The girl mulled that over for a bit.

“She used to be an executive assistant, you know? Not just some lame old secretary, but working with many people. Coordinating, supporting, filling all the gaps. She always used to tell me that her boss said that she was the glue that held everything together.”

As much as I disliked Madeline, I could actually see that. Her in a slightly too tight blouse and pencil skirt, but always the first to be there and the last to leave; knowing everything, having files at the ready before they could even be requested. And she probably made more than I did, considering that I still had a chunk of student loans to pay.

Or had had, rather. I didn’t really think that anyone was still around to hunt me down seeing as my payments had stopped now.

“Communities always need people like that,” I told her.

“Just not you,” Erica replied, sounding weirdly sad.

I shrugged, not knowing what to reply. Somehow, I couldn’t really see Nate and the guys wanting to settle down.
 

Silence fell, the sound of the rustling newspaper still dancing down the street the only artificial thing around us.
 

It was then that I realized that it wasn’t just quiet—it was too quiet. There were no birds chirping in the trees and even the cicadas seemed to have disappeared. That might have been just a coincidence—but I no longer believed in those.

“Get in the car.”

“But—“ Erica protested, yet one sharp look from me made her shrink back.

“Get. In. The car. Right now.”

She was still hesitating, and that—more than her silence—tipped me off that something was wrong. Stepping away from my perch against the hatch, I only needed three steps to be able to look into the passenger cabin.

It was empty.

For one irrational moment, I feared that some kind of ninja zombies had snuck up on us and stolen my quarry from right underneath me, but then my brain kicked in, providing a much more reasonable explanation.

“Where are they?” I barked, hard-pressed not to actually shout. Erica eyed me quizzically across the hood of the car, but faltered under my withering stare.

“They’re just over there, by the trees. Mom told me I should distract you because you wouldn’t let us go there on our own.”

“Of course I wouldn’t! Are you insane? There are at least a few hundred zombies roaming around this town!”

Erica’s lower lip quivered and she appeared ready to start bawling any moment now, but the dawning look of horror told me that she’d actually not considered the ramifications.

“I didn’t know! How should we have known? You always—“

“We tell you to stay put because we have a very good reason to!” I grumbled back, rounding the car. “Because we are protecting you! We make sure that you are safe! Did you really think we’re just doing it because we don’t want you to have a good time, sitting under some fucking apple tree?”

She didn’t reply, but then, she didn’t need to. Swallowing my anger, I looked around, but the lawn right where she’d indicated was empty.

“Exactly where did they go? Did you see them sneak off?”

The quizzical look on her face would have been funny if not for the panic crawling up my spine.

“Mom said they were going over there,” she said, her own voice getting thinner and thinner. “They’re probably just around the house. So you won’t see them.”

“Because hiding from the one who’s supposed to protect you is such a smart move,” I ground out, but paused two steps away from the car. “You stay here. The last thing I need is having to hunt in two different directions.”

“You can’t just leave me!” Erica whined, real fear in her voice now.

Sighing, I forced myself to relax as I turned back to her. “The car is the safest place right now. Just climb in and engage the locks. No one can get in unless you let them. I’ll just get your mom and siblings, and we’ll all be back together in no time. Five minutes tops.”

She kept shaking her head all through my explanation.

“I’ll be just as safe with you,” she protested. “And I can help carry them if they don’t want to walk. You need your hands free for your gun, right?”

I hated that she had a point there, but it was more the panic in her eyes than her reasoning that made me relent.

“Okay, you can come. But stay behind me, and don’t run off. And you do exactly what I tell you to. If I tell you to run back to the car and lock yourself in, you do that.”

She nodded, swallowing hard. Resigning myself to my fate, I stalked off in the direction of the trees, careful not to make any more sound than I absolutely had to. Not cursing at the top of my lungs was harder. This was so typical. And it would serve me just right if she didn’t deliberately, but accidentally get me killed.

That thought was sobering enough that it made me calm down a bit, but as soon as I rounded the corner of the house and could look at the lawn behind it, my stomach sank. The long grass had clear tracks through it, but I couldn’t tell if Madeline and the kids had left them, or if they were still there from where Nate and I had cleared this side of the road. At least there were no zombies in sight. But the loud bump sounding from the wall of the house, near the upstairs windows, let me know just how temporary that could be. Erica’s eyes were as large as saucers when I turned to her and put a finger over my lips, signaling her to remain quiet.
 

Beyond the lawn another corn field started, making me guess that Madeline hadn’t chosen that route. There was only a small hedge between this property and the next one over, creating not much of a barrier. Moving quietly, my shotgun swinging this way and that, I approached the hedge, careful to look between the houses first before I stepped over it. The grass was trampled here, too, and judging from the way those tracks hugged the house, it made me guess that they really were Nate and mine from before.

Gnashing my teeth, I stopped and tried to decide where to turn next, but I doubted that they could have gotten far. Next to the compost heap in this garden I saw a small table that I hopped onto once I’d made sure that there were no shamblers in the shade on the other side of the house. From up high, I had a much better vantage point, but that revealed nothing new. They must have gone in the other direction.

Shaking my head at Erica, I hopped back down, then used the gap between the houses to skirt back to the road. Except for that newspaper there was still no motion, but I made sure to be quick as I ran across to the other side, plastering my back to the side of the house as soon as I hit it. Erica was right behind me, panting with fright more than exertion, I was sure. She probably regretted that she’d decided not to stay with the car by now, and I promised myself that if I didn’t find the others in the next four properties over, I’d get her back to safety first. I really would have preferred to hide in there myself, truth be told.

Exhaling slowly, I forced myself back into motion, crawling along the house until I could peek into the backyards. Still nothing to the right—and I could see the field beyond was clear all the way back to the car—but now that I was there, I could hear something from the other side. I’d expected low voices, maybe even singing, but it was something else.

I couldn’t see anything on that lawn—although there was shade aplenty here, even a small sandbox, long abandoned now—but the noise seemed to come from that direction, so that’s where I went next. Another hedge—this one overgrown—kept me from seeing anything beyond. This was also as far as Nate and I had cleared the ground, figuring that if we were quiet, no zombie would just randomly wander farther than that.

With my pulse racing, I pushed away foliage with the shotgun, trying to see beyond. Only more lawn, some overturned furniture, and another hedge. Why were people so obsessed with their privacy here? Very inconvenient.

On the other side, the road looked still clear, so I stepped right through the hedge were it was less thick closer to the house, the rustling noise I caused grating on my nerves. Erica was right behind me, bumping into me in her fright, almost making me pull the trigger. I fought to get a grip on myself as I stepped into the backyard, trying to look everywhere at once. The noise was louder now, the repetitiveness of it grating on my nerves. It was probably just a window shutter that had torn free and was now swinging in the wind.

There was yet another hedge across the yard—oh joy—but not toward the back, where a rolling meadow lay. Beyond, I saw more houses where a side street angled off from this one. And in one of those backyards I saw a swing—one of those rusty, too-old health hazards—with Al and Pete in the seats.

For a moment, I felt elation, but it was short-lived. Where was Madeline? Why wasn’t she pushing her kids? The way they just sat there, clinging to the ropes without any motion coming from their bodies, they couldn’t have achieved the momentum they had right now.

Cursing low under my breath, I stepped off the lawn and into the field, careful to look in all directions first before I angled across toward the swing. The closer I got, the louder the sonorous squeak of the hinges got—and if I could hear it, so could others. A swinging shutter the zombies might have ignored, having gotten accustomed to the constant noise, but this? This must have been ringing the dinner bell for them, or at least pique their interest. They were curious fuckers sometimes, always investigating possible new sources of food.

I made it across the field in one piece, but halted at the border to the lawn again, nervously scanning the backyards as far as I could see. They seemed just as abandoned, but here, the destruction was more obvious. Screen doors lay busted or torn off, windows were shattered, and the scent of decay tickled my nose with every gust of wind. Even just skimming over everything, I could make out the gnawed-clean remains of no less than five bodies. They didn’t look fresh, but from a distance I couldn’t say whether they’d been out here for weeks, or had been rotting inside and gotten dragged into the lawn much more recently. Sometimes, busting into a house and finding the former inhabitants up and moving was a less gruesome sight than when everything remained quiet.

“What are you waiting for? They are right over there!” Erica hissed into my ear, her body shaking like a leaf.
 

“Just making sure that we get a clean exit,” I said, but I couldn’t deny that I was just as anxious to grab them and beat it. Taking a step forward, something crunched under my boot—a plastic wrapper maybe—but something shifted across the lawn beyond the swing, making me keep my eyes trained on that rather than the ground. And, true enough, it was a shambler, taking another step forward. It looked well-fed—for lack of another term—but was slowed down by the second leg it dragged behind, moving with an uneven, awkward shuffle. Its jaws snapped in anticipation, and it let out a crooning sound as it noticed me approaching. The more food, the better—a very simple equation.

A loud hiss coming from my right made me whip around, not forgetting about that zombie, but immediately focusing on the—much closer—source of danger coming right at me. It wasn’t just one dilapidated zombie, no, it was an entire pack of five that were sprinting across the lawns, zeroing in on me. And beyond them, I saw another few come around the corner of two of the houses.

Shit.

Chapter 23

“Erica?” I called, but didn’t wait for her to reply. “Go grab your siblings, and run right back to the car. Do you hear me? Don’t look behind, just run.”

“But—“

“No buts! Just do what I tell you to, okay? Now, go!”

My shotgun was already up and targeting the fastest of the mob, but I waited another few seconds until it was close enough that I wouldn’t miss. I had eight shots, and another twenty rounds in my pockets if I got the time to reload. Fifteen bullets in my Beretta, and four full magazines for reloading—also if I could find time to reload. I had no time to count how many shots that was in total, but it was by far not enough to kill all the zombies coming at me right now, unless they lined up one behind the other with enough time between to reload, or I suddenly turned into Annie Oakley. But it were enough bullets to slow them down enough for Erica to make an escape with the kids.