Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation (7 page)
The other thing that changed was the general air inside our camp. During the winter months, cabin fever had been an issue, but one that was usually dealt with swiftly, either through exercise, extra guard duty, or a quick smackdown on the training mats in the bunker basement. I’d found that kind of hilarious at first, until one too many of the guys had teased me on those certain days when I had a particularly short fuse—and not always for the reason they expected—and even if I lost a lot more fights than I won, just being able to punch someone in the face without expecting to get reprimanded for it later had a certain cathartic feeling to it. Now, everyone was turning restless to a certain degree, but it was a different kind of dynamic, a different kind of energy. It took me a few days to pin down, but eventually I realized what it was.
We were all looking forward to being out on the road again—even if that meant sleeping rough, maybe not eating for days, and certainly risking our hides. But it also meant to be free, out under the endless sky, and with the ultimate chance for some much-needed payback. Sure, we might not be able to hunt down and kill every fucking shambler from the Rockies straight to the Appalachians, but we certainly could cull them if they were stupid enough to cross our path.
It went without saying that Emma wasn’t too thrilled about the developments, but as an Army wife she knew better than to try to talk us out of it. I was well aware that this kind of bloodthirstiness wasn’t healthy—at least to me it was as strange as it was sick—but I didn’t feel like it was an alien part of me any longer. Maybe that should have bothered me—and on some level it did—but I knew that the day I started denying that part of me was the day I was going to bite it.
There was a lot more debate about how many people—and who—should go to the meeting this time, and I expected things to escalate into a real fight before Nate and Emma agreed that they would both bring some of theirs—six people who would leave, and three who would stay. I was surprised when both Collins and Moore decided to remain at the bunker rather than go with us. Bailey and Clark—who’d arrived on their own at the bunker, weeks before us—were on board, though, equalizing our numbers again. Bert was confident that he could work with just the three of them for guards while Sadie and Emma would do most of the other stuff. Then again, I’d seen both of them shoot; in a pinch, they could easily do a cleanup circuit all by themselves. It still sounded unwise to broadcast just how few of us would remain behind, so we decided to simply not tell anyone. Emma, Bert, and Collins would come to the meeting, and take it from there. The rest of us was just there for show.
This time, we arrived much closer to noon, finding several cars and the people who’d driven them already waiting for us. Even more gathered as we got out of the cars, until there were almost fifty people standing in the street along what had been the food strip of this fine town once. A few had come on their own, others had packed up their entire family, it seemed. All—without a fault—were armed, and more than one face was gaunt after a long, hard winter spent with not enough food, and that second rate quality at best.
Within five minutes of the official greeting round, Emma had taken charge, explaining her—or rather, Sadie’s—plans for farming, and Bert took over where it came to security. Nate and I remained standing behind them and to the side, listening but not really participating. We would be gone in a few days, and they’d have to fend for themselves until we returned. Yet as I continued to listen to the many voices that were speaking up, both confident and timid, the sense that this wouldn’t be a problem became stronger and stronger. I probably wouldn’t have trusted any of these people to stay over at the bunker and not murder me in my sleep, but they sounded sincere as they agreed to work out plans for patrols and farming alike. In the end, five people alone might have a hard time surviving, but two hundred stood a much better chance, particularly well-spread out over western Wyoming as they were. Names were exchanged, as was food, medicine, knowledge, and ammo, and by the time we split up again to return home, a new sense of purpose hung in the air. And unless something similar started up in the east of the state, I had a certain feeling that the next governor—or what came close to that—would bear the name of Emma Hughes.
We also left the meeting with an entire bunch of papers covered in lists containing the most obvious and obscure item requests imaginable. Some of them were so non-practical that I was sure that Nate would strike them off as soon as he read them, but, all in all, people’s requests weren’t too strange. I still found it a little peculiar that Nate hadn’t batted an eyelash at the idea that we, of all people, would set out on an altruistic quest to feed and clothe our people, but then again, it made sense. We weren’t going to play heroes for nothing, and in our absence, the promise of goods and trade would keep the others of our group safe.
When all that remained of a good tenth of a million of people were a few hundred, it was hard not to try to save as many as possible.
The day the first neighborhood patrol hit the roads, driving a sixty mile circuit with four pickup trucks carrying more ammo and weapons than people in weight, we set out as well.
Chapter 5
With no clear destination in mind but a shopping list spanning five pages, we set out east. The effort of gathering intel of who was squatting where had come with one benefit—we could now say just how far the state had turned into a wasteland, and where zombies were possibly still roaming. We hadn’t been the only ones who’d been trying to keep their doorsteps free, if probably the most organized about it. It was likely that there were still more people out there in the eastern part of the state, but the Interstates served as a rather efficient demarcation line. So the practical first step was to traverse I-25 and go looking for both signs of habitation and possible locations to find what we were looking for somewhere between Casper and Gillette. Depending on how bad—or not—the zombie problem was near the larger population centers, we might even try to hit them next, but I didn’t expect that this was a good option—at least not yet.
Staying cautious as usual, we kept to the small roads, only skipping onto wider thoroughfares if we couldn’t avoid it. Remaining exposed to the elements for months now, most of the cars we passed were in rather desolate states of destruction. As we’d seen before, the zombies had been smart enough to escape their steel confines and ravage everything edible and easily accessible inside, adding to the damage, but also making sure that there weren’t any decomposed corpses in there anymore. No, those were all over the sides of the roads, scoured down to bare bones that scavengers had picked clean. We passed up the cars completely, only checking the odd truck to see if there was anything left in there, but we clearly weren’t the first ones who’d had that idea.
We spent the first night huddled together in an abandoned barn, happy to be out of the wind. None of the excitement about being finally free of the bunker and our rigid schedule had worn off yet, and I couldn’t help but feel just a little idealistic. Most of the people that Emma had started to organize into the watch detail had looked at us as if we were crazy, but I really didn’t mind being out in the open. The cars had done a great job protecting us, even before all the upgrades, so I felt pretty confident about weathering out almost anything fate could slap in our faces.
The next morning, we rolled out early, and reached our first prospective looting place about an hour later. We stopped on the last rise of the road, about a mile away from the town. Wright used to have a population of just under two thousand, and hopefully most of them were dead now. Permanently, not the temporary kind. I was well aware of just how morbid that sounded, but that was the new normal.
“How are we going to do this?” I asked Nate, drumming my fingers against the steering wheel.
“We could case the town. Approach slowly, find the best entry vector, clear possible exits first. Or…” He let that hang in their air between us, a hint of a smile making his eyes glint even through his wraparound sunglasses.
“Or we could just drive in, drive over any shambler in sight and gun down the rest until they stop coming,” I replied, feeling a grin tug up the corners of my mouth.
“And there you keep wondering why I’m putting up with you,” he snarked back.
Chuffing, I glanced back at the town in front of us as I replied. “Not wondering. I’m sure that by now I’m the only woman left in the world who can even aspire to meet your standards.”
Shaking his head as he chuckled, Nate disengaged the belt harness and slipped out, briefly talking to Burns and Andrej in the other two cars that we’d predestined as our advance. With five cars—two of them outfitted with larger cargo holds that made them potentially too valuable to destroy in a harebrained attack plan like this—it only made sense to work out a strategy—even if that strategy was barely more than a driving order so we wouldn’t end up careening into each other. That would just be stupid and inconvenient.
Three minutes later, Nate was back in his seat, giving me the “go” with a nod. Exhaling slowly, I gripped the wheel harder, disengaged the handbrake, and gunned the engine. The car surged forward, howling with similar glee as I felt. I should probably not have been that excited about driving over zombies and potentially totaling our car and killing us in the process, but there were so few joys left in the world.
Not bothering with sticking to the right lane as the road was clear and we didn’t exactly expect anyone to drive in the other direction, I sped the car into town, Burns closing in on my left while Andrej hung further back to my right. We’d plotted this formation—and I’d spent a good fifty hours learning to drive with the updated gear box and steering gimmicks that Martinez had outfitted the car with, and another hundred doing what Nate casually referred to as “more active driving,” which included more than just a few stunt driving moves, I was sure—and it was about time to put my new skills to the test.
Even before we blasted through the city limits at over fifty miles per hour, I saw the first few shamblers turn toward us. Not many, maybe ten or fifteen, but the town had clearly not seen any action since the plague hit it. That boded very well for our plans.
With no internet—and no one local who could point us toward the stores at hand—we were left to find our own way around, old school. That meant simply sticking to the road I was driving on until Nate called out for me to take a right turn, and I swerved into the other street without reducing the speed significantly. The left rear wheel went off the road, spitting gravel behind me as it found traction again, and off we went, right past a zombie that came galloping toward us. Another turn, and we were sailing into the mostly empty parking lot of what looked like a supermarket—jackpot. There were three shamblers up and about, all rearing up to or already running toward us. Instinct made me want to step on the brakes, reverse, and flee, but instead I kept right on. Just before I was about to hit the first one, I wrenched the wheel to the side hard, using the handbrake to force the car into a hard left drift. The reinforced back passenger side slammed right into the zombie with a loud crunch, throwing it toward one of the abandoned cars on the lot. From the corner of my eye I saw it crumble to the ground but it was still moving, trying to reach us by dragging itself forward with its one good arm. Letting the momentum bring the car to a halt, I slammed in reverse and went right over the zombie, the skull and hip bones breaking under the easily two tons of the car. Looking back through the rear window, one arm flung over the headrest of Nate’s seat, I was just in time to see Burns ram one of the remaining shamblers full-frontal, splattering gore all over the steel cage at the grill before going over the remains just like I had. That left the third zombie; yet before I could gear up to dispose of that, too, Nate wrenched open his door and fired across the lot, making me wince from the racket—and effectively taking care of the problem.
And then we waited for the remaining shamblers in the region to come to us so we could either gun them down or otherwise end their miserable existence with clubs and baseball bats. After all, why waste bullets when you could get in some good upper body workout instead?
Fifteen minutes later, the air was clear, the lot somewhat more gory than before, and we were gearing up to raid the store. Through the windows we saw a few more shamblers, locked inside and drawn magically to the noise, that still needed taking care of. Cho and Santos took point, reducing the locks to so much scrap metal with a shotgun blast.
Adrenaline was pumping through my veins as I stepped over the now inanimate corpses into the store, helping make sure that there weren’t any stragglers lurking behind. I’d learned the hard way that zombies could be sneaky fuckers, so before anyone turned their flashlights on the prospective loot, we made sure that we were the only thing moving inside.
The store hadn’t been raided, but it was far from well stocked. Days of what the news had tried to sell as an influenza outbreak had gotten people antsy to stock up on all the things that might be in short supply within a day or two. The stench of rotting corpses and what used to be fresh produce lay heavy in the air, and even after Pia smashed several of the windows, it didn’t get much better. The zombies had gnawed on all manners of things, also getting into the cereals and flour for whatever reason, but the cans had been left pretty much unscathed. We spent an ungodly amount of time with reading labels to make sure not to grab anything that might be contaminated, and didn’t pass up the animal chow section, either. While the guys were busy lugging palette after palette of what had been marked as good for consumption into the cars, I went through the other aisles, looking for more things to check off our lists. Cleaning supplies and tools were right up there, just below food, weapons, and ammo. With the first taken care of and the other two lacking completely, that left me lugging out soap and other knickknacks until my arms felt ready to fall off. Just before we left, we packed another two boxes off the book and magazine racks, cramming those into the last remaining space still left in our cargo holds. Turned out, spending a long winter locked in where you could do nothing whatsoever and most people had no electricity, that paperbacks and games were suddenly all the rage again. Oh, the irony.