Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation (2 page)

“Guess that’s my clue to beat it,” Dave said, his cold-reddened face paling visibly. “You guys got this?”

Nate nodded. “See you next week.”

“And thanks for the coffee!” I called after him, not caring to pitch my voice low now. Considering that Dave mostly carried that hunting rifle because it made him feel protected rather than actually did a good job doing so, it made sense to draw the attention of the zombies away from him. I just would have preferred not to use myself as bait.

“How are we doing this?” I asked, hoping that—for once—Nate wouldn’t turn this around and make a training exercise of it. Hungry and cold, I could think of a much better way to spend my time.
 

“We can’t pull back east. That would just lead them closer to the bunker.” Which was the last place we wanted them. The whole point of establishing and keeping a perimeter was to not have to worry about zombies on our porch.
 

That left us with two choices: farther into the mountains, or through the forest that hugged the slopes, but lay ultimately in the opposite direction of home—a good idea in general, but not if that meant a fifteen-mile trek home through territory that we didn’t stake out regularly.

“Woods,” Nate decided. “I’m not sure if they wouldn’t hunt us down eventually up in the snow. We have a small depot over in the forest, and there’s a cliff that we can scale if nothing else helps.”

I so didn’t look forward to climbing in the dark, but maybe we’d be in luck and it wouldn’t come to that. Yeah, right.

I didn’t need any further incentive to take off, aiming for the pine trees and firs that lay beyond the stretch of stony plateau we were standing on right now. Dave had already ducked out of sight, using one of the small mountain trails to retreat toward the bunker he shared with Kevin. A real bunker, not like our cabin with the extended basement. I hadn’t had the chance to get there—and doubted that I would, unless a state of emergency broke out that went way beyond the zombie apocalypse. The guys were like that. But at least they brought coffee to our weekly meetups. That counted for something. And it wasn’t like we needed a second bunker, even if Burns and Andrej had some kind of project going there that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about.

The zombies were faster than I’d given them credit for, the first two almost catching up with me before I hit the woods. Two quick, successive shots ringing out behind me took care of the fastest ones, making me realize that Nate was hanging back, his AR switched for his sniper rifle now. I didn’t protest, and didn’t hesitate—we might have each other’s back, but out here it was each for his or her own.
 

A howl went up from the third zombie, hot on my heels still, not distracted by the potential meal the two dead bodies on the ground might pose. It clearly wasn’t hungry enough to consider that opinion. Or it simply loved giving chase too much. Just my luck.

I didn’t know the terrain well here, but spending the entire winter out and about had taught me a thing or two, like not tripping over each and every root. I still managed to stumble, catching myself before I could pitch toward the floor, but that killed what little distance I’d been able to keep between me and the shambler. Not waiting for it to tackle me, I whipped around and shot it point-blank in the face, the shotgun recoil hitting my shoulder hard. Gore and semi-coagulated blood sprayed everywhere, while the rest of the body sagged down onto the frozen ground.

Three down, way too many still to go.

My shot might have taken care of this one, but it also served as the perfect beacon for the others. Their enthusiastic howls and screams went up where I’d come from, and the five that I could already see sped up, hurtling toward me. I could have made a stand and downed them for good, but instead I ran on, hoping to spread out the mob a little more again.

Nate seemed to have a similar idea, judging from the barrage of shots coming from somewhere to my right, forcing the zombies to choose which of us to follow. They weren’t stupid enough to come to a halt and consider, but instead those closest to me just kept going, while some of the others veered off in the new direction after the couple that had already been on Nate’s trail. I really didn’t like that tactic, but it sounded like the best idea.

With the sun gone, shadows deepened, making running all the harder. My breath came in fast pants, but I ignored the burning in my lungs and legs. Ahead of me, the forest lightened again and I aimed for that meadow, running out a full ten steps before I turned, ready to shoot at anything that followed.

The first shambler was stupid enough to come straight at me, and got exactly what it deserved. The second’s momentum carried it straight into the dropping body, making aiming for me just as easy. The third and fourth, though, were smarter, splitting up to the left and right, and when the fifth and sixth followed, that left me with four targets that were all running at me in curving paths.
 

I hit the third in the shoulder and managed to neutralize the fourth by shooting off its left leg, but then it was high time for running, the zombies close enough that I could smell them—and they weren’t that ripe yet to begin with. One almost managed to grab hold of my pack but I wrenched myself free, taking off again. More shots rang out from my right, giving me a good guess where Nate was right now. He was keeping parallel with me but was a little behind, likely because he was trying to draw the zombies to him. Or he’d faceplanted and I hadn’t seen it, and that’s why he lagged behind. Damn.

Reloading while I was running for my life was less funny than it probably sounded, but by the time I was back in the thickening forest, there were eight rounds in my gun again. I would never have admitted so out loud, but I was glad for all the running drills Pia had forced me to do. That shit actually helped when you needed it.

I shot three more zombies over the course of the next five minutes, but by then it became clear that our problem was a lot bigger than I’d thought at first. Even with a few misses, we should have decimated the mob to just the slow ones, which shouldn’t have been fast enough to keep up with us in the first place. But so far I hadn’t shot more than one zombie that had been female in its glory days, and no children, either, and there were still more fast, strong ones coming. What we’d seen out on the slope must have been just the tip of the iceberg—leaving us with unknown numbers and a huge problem. Nate had been right—if we’d gone for the mountains, they might have easily run us down by now. Fighting opponents that felt no pain and never got tired simply wasn’t fair—but that was life nowadays.

Nate emptied another six or seven shots into the undead horde, and I used the sound to hone in on his location. Ten zombies each we could have maybe taken care of on our own. But this? This was a little beyond what I was comfortable with.

The howls and growls helped me map my route, and after another few harrowing minutes, I saw a white shape lope through the woods to my side, the winter camouflage not very concealing here as long as we were up and running. Nate noticed me and hailed me over with a gesture, glancing back briefly to get an estimate of how bad it was behind us.

“We can’t swing back to the bunker with that after us,” he huffed, barely waiting for my nod of acknowledgement. “About five miles from here, there’s that cliff, with some caves in it where we can hold out until daybreak.”

I really didn’t like that idea, but with the zombies now actually gaining on us as they didn’t need to split their attention, it sounded like a good last resort.

“What about that depot?”

“Heading right toward it,” Nate replied, nodding slightly to the right. “About another mile or two this way.”

“Why did you even set up something like that out here? This is, what, ten miles out from the bunker?”

His grin had a certain roguish touch to it. “Because I was hoping that I’d never need it. But it’s kind of our forward bug-out location.”

“I thought the bunker was our bug-out location?”

“For when we have to bug out from our bug-out location.”

I might have sighed with annoyance at that if I hadn’t been busy huffing and puffing along. I didn’t doubt that he’d planted caches all over the area, so why was I even surprised about this?

Two more times we sprinted ahead, turned around, and tried to get the zombies off our backs, but as soon as the dead started piling up, the undead just kept coming. As frightening as that was, what really got the low-simmering panic going in the back of my mind was that, only hours ago, we’d thought we were pretty safe out here, with months of quiet and peace where the latent zombie population would likely have taken care of itself, and hunting them down was more target practice than required culling. There’d even been few enough of them that we’d had good luck supplementing our stocks with hunting. But now that I thought about it, Bates had mentioned that he hadn’t seen a buck in weeks, and today all of the hare snares had been empty.

Maybe those glances Nate had cast toward the mountains were something different than wistful yearning to go off-roading in Yellowstone?

But if this really was a stream of zombies, heading somewhere—like we’d seen on the first few days after the outbreak—where did they come from? And why head to Wyoming, where there hadn’t really been much game to start with even before the virus had turned entire states into desolate wastelands? It was kind of ridiculous that we’d passed by the Chicago metro area and hadn’t gotten accosted by the undead, and out here in the middle of nowhere we were suddenly swarmed?

“How much farther?” I asked, weariness spreading in my muscles.

“Hundred yards, maybe two,” Nate offered, casting another look behind us. “You want to go first or shall I?”

“I have no clue where—“

“Up in the trees, on a small platform,” he helpfully provided.

Shit. I hated climbing trees, particularly the pines that just got me all sticky and never had any good boughs to hold on to.

“You first. I’ll hold them off until you can clear the way for me.”

Yet more running, until Nate suddenly swerved to the left, pointing at a pine tree between three firs that looked just like all the others. “That one. Cover me!”

He sprinted ahead, leaving me to stumble to a halt, my Remington ready. I might have gotten faster with the pump-action shotgun, but still preferred the semi-auto in a tight spot. Getting surprised by way too many zombies sounded like the definition of that.

Trying to force my breathing pattern into more even paths, I exhaled, squinting into the perpetual twilight. It was getting dark quickly now, and while the zombies were good at hunting by sound, I wasn’t. The first few had never lost sight of us, so they were on me rather quickly. I emptied the entire eight rounds into them in under a minute. The deafening racket was too loud for me to keep track of Nate’s progress, but I figured he must have gotten up there by then. Reaching into my pocket, I grabbed the last remaining rounds—four of them—and reloaded as quickly as possible. The zombie coming right at me—hurtling over the downed ones as if they weren’t there—growled in triumph, and I barely got the shotgun up in time to bash it into its face. Staggering back, it screamed, but the sound cut off as soon as I shoved the barrel of the shotgun in its mouth and pulled the trigger.
 

Then it was three more shots and two downed shamblers, and I was officially out of ammo—at least for the Remington.

“Any moment now would be nice!” I shouted, hoping that Nate was ready to cover me now, if not replying. I wasted a precious five seconds to sling the shotgun over my shoulder, getting my Beretta ready instead. As soon as I had the sights aligned, I fired, hitting the next zombie squarely in the chest, straying upward. The fourth shot got its neck to explode, but that wasn’t enough to decapitate. Only when the fifth hit it in the forehead did it drop dead. But five shots was more than I could allow myself.

“Nate!” Still no reply, and no staccato from his assault rifle, so I did the next best thing. “I’m falling back!”

Continuing to fire at the zombies, I started backing away from the pine, casting around for a tree that would be easier to climb than this one. There were firs and spruces around everywhere, too thick to be of any use except to hide the mob that was still streaming into the forest. I needed something better, and quick. If I hadn’t already started to back away from the pine with the depot, I might have chanced that one.

“Run!” Nate called down to me, making me do so without questioning. Yet instead of the rifle fire I was expecting, I heard a few dull thuds as something hit the frozen ground—and before my mind got a chance to catch up, the first of the three grenades exploded, quickly followed by the other two. I was well out of the blast range by now, but the zombies surging after me got hit hard. Entire body parts flew through the air, irritating yet more others, and gave me the window I needed to get away.

Maybe thirty yards over I saw another tall pine, with no boughs until the upper third of the tree. Cursing under my breath, I ran for it, holstering my gun. Unlike Nate’s, it wasn’t that thick, and I discovered that the bark was rather knobby, giving me more purchase than I’d expected as I started pulling myself up. A few more shots followed—semi-auto assault rifle fire—until I was well out of reach, at which point I allowed myself to relax a little. Up here, the pine was still thick enough that I couldn’t have closed my hands around it, but it was thinning out toward the top, and already moving to and fro in the wind.