Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation (29 page)

“You’re on the north side of the road now?” Nate asked. I wasn’t sure but Burns confirmed that for me. I was tempted to look around, trying to find his position, but knew not to bother. “See the slope up ahead of you, going east? With the apple trees up there. The farm’s in the hollow on the other side of that. Go up there, I’ll meet you halfway,” Nate instructed. “If you don’t see me, find a good sniper perch on the edge of the ridge where you can overlook the grounds below. Do not engage, do you copy? We need a couple more minutes to get everyone in place.”

A thousand questions zoomed through my mind, but I felt a little too bruised and battered to care right now. “Copy. North ridge, find perch, do not engage.”

“Good. See you in a few,” Nate told me, the cadence of his speech letting me know that he was already running, and from what it sounded, at full speed.

I took a somewhat more sedate approach, even if the panicked voice at the back of my mind told me to just run, run, and never look back. My left ankle felt a little weird, and with my lungs aching even when I wasn’t taking deep breaths, sprinting for no good reason sounded like a damn stupid idea. Not that I wasn’t rocking those today.

Twenty minutes later, I reached the top of the ridge, hunkering low as I made my way toward the eastern side of it where the ground was falling away at a steep angle. Beyond, I could see several buildings, matching the description the guys had given me. Hefting my M24 so I could see through the scope, I scanned the open ground between the barn and the shed, easily making out the electric car and pickup truck. The dust had settled around them already so they must have arrived minutes ago, but the group from inside had barely made it a few feet away. Bates lay on the ground, clutching his injured knee, while the others seemed to be debating what to do.

A rustle in the grass to my left made me jerk around, but even before I could drop the rifle and ready the shotgun, I recognized Nate getting up from where he’d been lying on the ground, studying the same scene as me. The look on his face was unreadable, but anger was sparking from his eyes—anger that I, without a doubt, deserved, but really didn’t give a shit about right now. I set my jaw and stared mutely back at him, challenging him to tear into me right then and there. Of course he didn’t—that would have been too easy.

He quickly looked me over, but except for the dirt plastered to my gear, adding nicely to the cover of the grass sticking out everywhere, he didn’t seem to see anything alarming. His eyes snagged to my light head wound, but he didn’t check on it, discarding it as minor immediately. At the jerk of his head I dropped into the grass next to where he’d been lying, and he took his place beside me.

With the com channel now constantly open, I didn’t feel like distracting the others from getting into position, but I just had to say something when Nate didn’t.

“So what’s the plan now?” I whispered, trying to speak low enough that the mic wouldn’t pick it up.

Still looking through his scope, Nate continued to watch the proceedings down by the farm. “We get in place. We kill them all. We go home.”

“What about Bates?” It seemed like a stupid thing to ask—of course we were going to rescue him—but the fact alone that Nate hesitated before he replied made my stomach seize up.

“There’s not really much we can do,” he said.

“What? Are you insane? We’re close enough that even I could take the shot and hit!”

He physically paused, then turned his head to look at me levelly. “That eager to tidy up your mess, are you?”

“What? No!” I tried to defend myself, but Nate’s humorless grin shut me up.

“He’s as good as dead anyway. If he wanted to be rescued, he could have bought himself time by ratting us out, but it’s rather obvious that he didn’t. So the least we can do to honor his sacrifice is to make sure that the casualty count remains at one.”

My mind was reeling from his words, making me feel as if he’d physically punched me in the gut.

“How can you—“ I started, but then a blood-curdling scream made me whip around, my eye glued to the scope. I was just quick enough to find Bates not to miss the fountain of blood coming from where his right leg now ended in a stump, mid-thigh. He screamed again as they pressed the red-glowing blade of an ax against it, practically cauterizing the wound. For a few seconds I actively had to fight puking all over myself.

Swallowing hurt as I forced myself to look away from where they still held Bates down, but Nate didn’t. “Martinez, I need your ETA and a countdown estimate. Injured leg severed, severe blood loss. And they’re not looking like they’re going to stop there.”

The com cracked with static as Martinez—presumably—cursed under his breath. “We just ditched the car. With Clark lagging behind, Bailey and I should be in position in fifteen minutes.” He paused. “How much blood loss?”

“They cauterized the wound almost immediately but the tourniquet they were using was shitty. No estimate on how much he was bleeding from the bullet wound before,” Nate reported, sounding terribly clinical for what was going on.

“Without seeing for myself, I can’t give you more than a guess,” Martinez tried to explain.

“Just give me a fucking number!” Nate ground out, emotion now leaking into his voice. That wasn’t much better than before, but at least he didn’t sound like a damn robot.

“Thirty minutes,” Martinez offered. “Give or take. He’s a tough bastard. Might be forty.”

“I think that estimate is too high,” Pia chimed in, making Nate’s assessment from before sound perfectly cozy. “He didn’t try to staunch the bleeding from the shot at all. He’s likely down two liters by now. Just look at his skin color.”

Bates was rather white in the face, but it was hard for me to check on him at all. What I didn’t understand was how calm the others were about this.

“I’ll eat my left boot if he makes it to thirty,” Andrej said, strengthening Pia’s vote.

“Affirmative,” Nate acknowledged. “Everyone who doesn’t carry a sniper rifle, move in position. The others, spread out. I want the kill zone covered as much as possible. Wait for my go.”

One after the others, they all checked in, until the line went silent again. I thought I could still hear Bates moan, but we were too far out for that to be possible.
 

Nate finally caught my gaze, his face once again impassive. “Told you.”

“You already said that when the only wound he had was a shot through the knee,” I scoffed, not sure whether I was actually angry at him, or just so fucking scared and frustrated that it was impossible to think.

He gave a noncommittal grunt in reply. “Which would have crippled him in the world we’re living in, making him unfit for active duty. If we’d gotten him out with that, he’d likely have shot himself first chance he had to grab a gun.”

“How can you be so sure about that?”

Nate only hesitated for a moment, his eyes still bare of emotion. “Because it’s what I would do.”

Even with the horror going on right out there, his words made me grow cold. “Seriously? You’d do that to me?”

He shrugged. “Suicide is always selfish. But that’s beside the point now.”

I burned to rage at him that it wasn’t, but I had to agree that it was a discussion for another day. “What’s with the countdown?” And just as I asked that, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, painting a rather gruesome picture. “Bates, seriously? He’s one of you, isn’t he? So you’re, what, counting down the minutes until he’s dead and insta-converts into a zombie?” Without that for a logical consequence, it wouldn’t have mattered exactly how long Bates still had left to live.

I didn’t even get a hint of acknowledgment for my right guess. “Pretty much, yeah.”

“That’s just…” I started, trailing off there because I simply couldn’t put words to what I was feeling right now. Nate’s brows rose, so I finally finished, my own voice dead. “Cold.”

“There’s no room for morals when it’s twelve against forty and they’ve already effectively downed one of our own. They have the advantage in everything, with only the moment of surprise on our side. So if we have one hell of a diversion in store for them that they don’t expect, we’re going to take it. I don’t give a shit whether you like that, or not.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off before I got to it. “It’s your fault that he’s down there. You didn’t have his back. The least you can do is make sure that his death isn’t for nothing.” That shut me up for good, as Nate must have intended. Rationally, I knew that it wasn’t entirely true—they likely would have grabbed us both if they hadn’t found Bates first—but that didn’t change anything about how I was feeling about the entire situation.

“What do you want me to do?” I rasped out when I regained my ability to speak again.

“See those shrubs over there?” He nodded toward a few bushes maybe two hundred yards down from our position; following the softer slope next to that the cliff below us ebbed away. “That’s a good spot. You should be close enough to get a decent hit count, and it’s a shorter, safer distance down to the farm once sniping is no longer an option.” That also meant that anyone coming for me from down there would reach me faster than up here. I wasn’t sure about that trade-off, but gave my acknowledgment. Nate’s thump on my shoulder had me scurrying forward to get into position. And then all I could do was wait—wait and watch what went down below, right in front of my scope.

That they weren’t just plain torturing him was obvious from all the shouting back and forth that was going on, although Bates didn’t really look very coherent by the time they hacked off his other leg—just below the knee this time—and his arm, at the shoulder. I forced myself to keep watching although it made me sick, but my finger was itching to pull the trigger and put an end to it. Nate’s words kept me from it. He was right. As it was, we stood no chance unless we took this opportunity—and with Bates writhing in pain down there it was impossible to even consider slinking off and letting someone else deal with this. Before, ridding the world of these assholes had simply been a decent thing to do. Now it was a personal vendetta. And I intended to get vengeance in as bloody and violent a way as I could manage. That much I owed Bates.

Chapter 18

The waiting time was endless. Even with switching positions, that left me with a good ten minutes until the allotted twenty minutes minimum were over. And Bates, tough bastard that he was, continued to hold out. Even when they threw his cleaved-off leg on the grill—because the entire thing wasn’t morbidly bizarre enough yet. There was no blond glint to his hair left, soaked with blood as it was, and through the scope I could see that the look in his eyes was beyond crazy, but he just wouldn’t die. Bloody spittle continued to fly from his chewed-up lips, and while his voice must long since have gone raw, I still heard the odd bit of profanity carried on a gust of wind. With everyone prepared and in position, I was sure that I wasn’t the only one vibrating with tension, but this felt more physically challenging than running for a day straight.

Then Bates went still, his stumps and remaining arm no longer flailing around. He blinked once, and I could see his lips start to move in his parting words that none of us would ever hear—and it was over. I felt my own body slump as air rushed out of me, but at the same time a different kind of tension crept up my spine and made my fingers grip my sniper rifle harder.

“Wait for my go,” I heard Nate’s order over the com, my finger now physically trembling on the trigger. But I didn’t pull it, just continued to watch on as the seven men who had kidnapped Bates wiped sweat and blood from their hands, talking between themselves as if… as if they’d slaughtered an animal, not a human being. But then that was exactly what we were to them, right?

Time to get payback.

I didn’t check my watch so I wasn’t sure how many seconds had passed—less than two minutes, I guessed—when the fingers of Bates’s remaining hand twitched. At first, I thought that he simply hadn’t been quite dead yet, but then the spasm repeated itself, jerky and disjointed. There was something fundamentally wrong with that motion, jump-starting instincts that had been honed finely over the past months. My higher brain functions might believe that Bates was still dying, but the lizard brain operating underneath knew exactly what was going on. And let’s just say that for the next, oh, hundred hours I was rather happy to let the lizard do its thing.

“Hold it,” Nate’s voice whispered into my ear. I was unsure if he was on the general com channel, or talking only to me. I didn’t care. It took almost more willpower than I could muster not to line up the sights but go on scanning the yard instead.

Fingers fisted, splayed again, digging deep into the earth. I chanced a look at his face, absently wondering if Nate would chide me now if I continued considering Bates as simply the zombified version of himself and not just an “it.” I really didn’t give a shit. That… thing, for lack of a better word, didn’t really look like Bates anymore. His always animated face was completely slack. As I watched, I could see that hunger and boundless anger start to shine in his eyes, so unlike the mischievous twinkle usually present in them. No, that wasn’t Bates anymore—but that didn’t change a thing.

“Hold it—“ Nate repeated, but cut off as soon as the last word left his lips. “Line up sights. Select targets. If you can, call your shots.”

I forced myself to stop looking at Bates, and instead switched my focus to the guy right next to him—a good compromise. He was one of the two who’d found my panties. “Tall guy with the red bandana,” I said, just loud enough for the mic to catch on. In quick succession the other five snipers—Bailey, Pia, Taylor, Burns, and Nate himself—picked their targets.