Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation (25 page)

“And? That’s not necessarily a contradiction.”

Contradict him I itched to, but I dropped the point, realizing that nothing I could say would change his mind. “Are you never afraid that one of your stunts will end up killing me? That drop from that roof was a close call, even if you keep ribbing me about being a klutz.”

“You’re not a klutz,” he replied, pausing as he considered. “Is fear of losing you the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I consider before I fall asleep? No. Hate me for saying that if you will, but I trust that you’re competent enough that you will get yourself out of any situation I get you in. Case in point, our little zombie hunt between the campuses.”

“Campi,” I corrected.

Nate snorted. “No way.”

“Yes way. Campus is derived from latin, ergo the plural is formed accordingly.”

“Last time I looked, we were still speaking English, Miss Fancy-Degree-Pants.”

His objection made me chuff. “Just because I’m smarter than you are—“

“You’re not smarter than me,” he grunted. “You just spent way more time learning theoretical shit rather than practical skills.”

I shot him as long a look as I dared under these conditions. “Are we seriously fighting about how intelligence is measured? Because I think not even the shit hitting the fan put an end to that.”

“As all academic discussions, it’s entirely pointless, so of course there is no end to it,” he remarked.

“You’re such an asshole,” I replied.

“Never actually denied that.”

Silence fell when I didn’t put up an objection, unable to quell the smile spreading on my face over having won that round.

“Just for your information, you did not win,” he said, reading my smugness correctly.

“I did. I’m competent, and right. Of course I win.”

Nate laughed. “You always get so grumpy when you need to get laid, you know that?”

I pointedly ignored his reply—mostly because fighting over that would just lead to me putting myself in celibacy jail just to spite him, consequently increasing the predicament and coming off as a petulant child, neither of which I was particularly aiming for right now.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” he said about a mile closer to the city. At least in the suburban sprawl the storm couldn’t whip up quite so many dust clouds.

“What questions?”

“I’m right, aren’t I? Even with all the moaning and groaning, you’re having the time of your life.”

I hated to admit it—particularly driving through a zombie-infested metropolis in the epicenter of a storm—but if I thought about it, finding my answer was easy: he was right.

Damn.

Chapter 15

After fetching the rest of our newly liberated gear—and not getting torn to shreds by the tornado from hell—we spent the next days rolling through Minnesota and Iowa, making sure to steer clear of anything that could get too hairy on a pinch. Done that, ticked that off our bucket lists, no reason to tempt fate to bitch-slap us. About two weeks after we’d sent the seed-laden pickup trucks back to Shayla and her people, Campbell got the first portable long-range radio prototype up and running, spending half an evening trying to find any frequency that was in use. We lucked out the next morning, actually getting Dave on the radio for five minutes, although the sound quality was next to useless.

No, they still had no clear count on the cannibal numbers. Yes, he was sure that they were still running their morbid little operation. He and Kevin had managed to get over fifteen confirmed recounts of people running into them, almost all of them narrowly escaping capture. It was a problem, and it was increasing, judging from the fact that in this month alone, two more families had gone missing in the general area.

The static was too bad for any further communication, but in a world where just walking up to someone and talking to them was the easiest way of getting messages across, it felt like we’d just regained a hallmark of civilization—at least a small one. Ridding the world of the cannibals was only a logical next step. Someone had to take care of them. Might as well be us.

It took us another week to make it back into Illinois. The state didn’t hold particularly good memories for me, but then that wasn’t really anyone’s fault. The very thought of the weeks we’d spent on the road, with not enough weapons and ammo to feel safe, and with not enough food to feel satiated, still made me want to check on the provisions I carried with me. Enough time had passed since then to cushion some of the horror and desperation I’d felt back then, but I still remembered all too well. Hell, I doubted I would ever forget—but that wasn’t always a bad thing.

We tried to stay as far away as possible from the Chicago metro area, but even with the wide swath that we cut, it was impossible to ignore the signs of destruction everywhere. There wasn’t a more or less clear path the zombies had taken like we’d seen in South Dakota—if they’d even shown the same behavior here—but wherever we went, it was impossible to pretend that something devastating hadn’t happened. In the less populated areas that we’d stuck to since last fall, an entire day could pass by with only the typical signs of nature retaking what was hers, making it easy to pretend that it was just an abandoned barn over there that had fallen in disrepair. Here, there was no barn left standing, only the torn-apart building blocks of it strewn over a good square mile around what remained of the foundations. Buildings were destroyed, cars reduced to so much scrap metal rusting in the rain; even power lines were down. Everything but the very roads seemed to have been a target for their incomprehensible wrath.
 

More than anything else, looking at what had been a small town of maybe two hundred houses, now appearing as if a tornado had torn right through it, hammered down the knowledge that if we’d been much slower in our voyage across the country, we might very well have gotten caught up in this. How the cannibals had weathered these conditions was beyond me, but so were a few other things about their continuing existence.
 

We crossed the Illinois River north of Peoria, aiming further east. Another two days of traveling, and it was time to start putting plans to action.

One line from Nate, and I was even less ecstatic about the whole undertaking than before.

“Lewis, Martinez, you two stay with the cars.”

Martinez took the news with a stoic look and a curt nod, but I wasn’t happy to get excluded like that.

“What the fuck? Not only do I have to stay here, but you set me up with a babysitter?”

Burns seemed mighty amused about my protest—at least until he caught my death glare—but Nate didn’t even react.

“From a tactical standpoint, it makes the most sense,” he explained.

“Why, because I’m a woman? Because I’m the rookie?”

The corner of his right eye twitched, but he seemed set on not letting me goad him. “Because you still wince whenever we hit a bump in the road. I need everyone out on recon at full capacity. You would just slow us down.”

It made sense, but I still didn’t like it.

“That’s bullshit.”

Instead of continuing to argue with me, Nate looked at the others. “Who’s for leaving Lewis and Martinez with the cars?” All hands—even Martinez’s—went up. “Who’s against?” I was tempted not to vote, but still raised my left arm, just because. Nate’s gaze returned to me. “See? Majority vote is cast. Have dinner ready for us when we return, baby.”

With that, they moved out, leaving me fuming next to my car as I watched them disappear into the undergrowth. Considering that it was a lot of flat land here, that meant almost three miles for the last team. Martinez bothered himself with dragging a few more tarps between the cars, breaking up the silhouettes even more than the camouflage covers that were already all over them. So far, the planes that had taken off from Lexington airport just before the wave of zombies had descended on us were the last flying objects I’d seen, but I didn’t hold it against anyone to still have a drone in their garage, hooked up to solar panels or a generator. With virtually no intel about the cannibals, it made sense not to push our luck. Note: ask Campbell about drones.
 

“It’s going to be a damn long day if you keep pouting like that,” Martinez remarked as he joined me, his AR casually in his hands, leaning his ass against the ram guard at the front of the Rover.

“Big words, coming from a traitor,” I replied.

He grunted. “Oh, come on. You know that he’s right.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to support him,” I griped.

Martinez’s usual easy smile spread on his face. “Actually, it does. And if you’d finally get rid of that chip on your shoulder, you’d agree with me. This is nothing against you personally. Someone has to guard the cars, and it makes the most operational sense to leave the weakest links.”

“You do realize that you’re including yourself in that?” I pointed out.

“So what? I can be realistic. I can’t take on Burns or Miller in hand-to-hand combat, and considering that my skills make me more valuable than, say, Santos or Clark, it makes sense not to throw me into the thick of it, needlessly risking my hide.”

I wondered why he hadn’t tried to sell it to me like that, playing on my vanity. “You never stay back in any fight.”

“Because it’s a medic’s job to run out into the line of fire when everyone else is taking cover. It’s what we do,” he replied, his smile turning a little wry. “Don’t worry. I’m sure that once they’ve scouted out the region, you’ll get to do enough lying around behind your sniper scope, bored out of your mind.”

“Still sucks.”

Martinez wasn’t fazed by my continuing complaints. “You do realize that of all of us, we both stand the least chance not to make it onto the barbecue?”

“Because we’re not tall as a tree or look as if we’re dropping steroids?” I guessed. His shrug pretty much confirmed that.

“Just look at it without your pride messing with you. If they’re still recruiting—which is a huge ‘if’ in the first place—they’d take the strongest hunters. Although, they might make an exception for you.” I raised my brows, daring him to go on. His mouth twisted into a hard line. “Quite frankly, if they really live off people as their main protein source, I wouldn’t count on them killing you first.”

That again. Even though I wasn’t delusional about the moral state of the survivors on the whole, I was kind of sick of the ever same topic coming up time and again.

“Honestly? I’d take getting raped over being eaten any day. That’s not the worst thing I can come up with, if that was your intention.”

Martinez looked me up and down, which made me frown. “What?” I asked, maybe a little sharply. He was the last one I expected to check me out.

“You don’t exactly need your legs or arms for them to get that from you,” he said.

For several seconds, all I could do was stare at him. I looked away first, gripping my shotgun a little more firmly.

“Awesome. Because I don’t have enough fodder for nightmares already.” He didn’t reply, and about a minute later, I just had to break the silence, glancing back to him. “Do you really think they’d do that?”

He pulled up his shoulders in a “who knows?” gesture. “Where do you think people who eat other people draw the line? I wouldn’t count on them being stupid enough to leave you capable of escaping, or grabbing some weapon or other and coming after them. If they’re going to dismember you anyway, why wait until you’re dead? You’re a damn lot more helpless when you can’t kick or flail.”

I felt like my breakfast wanted to make a reappearance any moment now.

“I doubt that would even work, outside of someone’s sick fantasy. I’m not a juiced-up zombie that won’t bleed out,” I replied.

I guessed it said a lot about our mental state that Martinez considered the issue for a second, likely weighing medical facts against each other.

“Sure, there’s a chance that you’d bleed out, even if they used tourniquets well and cauterized the wounds immediately. You could still die of systemic shock, too. But there are enough people who’ve survived stepping on an IED and got both of their legs blown off.” He paused, and now his smile was positively sadistic. “You’re a tough bitch. You’d survive on spite alone.”

I couldn’t quite suppress a shudder. “Yeah, not sure I’d want to. Besides, what kind of a sick fuck do you need to be that you’d want to fuck something that’s just a cunt with stumps? I mean, seriously. I’m not saying that someone who eats human flesh is right in the head, but that’s an entirely different kind of deranged.”

“Don’t look at me for answers. I don’t even want to screw you with all limbs attached,” he replied, gifting me one of his sweet grins. I just shook my head and returned to looking at the vast nothingness around us. It was a good place for a temporary camp, but there was only so much joy to be gleaned from looking at trampled earth.

It was close to noon when Martinez cleared his throat, pulling my attention back to him once more. He’d been fidgeting for a good fifteen minutes, so I figured that what he was about to say was something that didn’t come too easily to him. I could only think of a few things that qualified as such—our medic was neither squeamish nor very self-conscious. Then again, who of us could still afford such luxuries?