Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction (12 page)

“How long do we wait?” I asked Nate, handing the binoculars back to him.

“Why, you getting antsy all of a sudden?”

I shrugged. “If they keep going like this, we’ll be done by noon. That means I could get some chow into the gaping hole where my stomach used to be by one, two latest. What’s not to like about that? Besides, they can’t really get close to the walls without damaging them. Someone has to do the fine work.”

I really didn’t know what to make of the grin I got for that. “Maybe not all hope is lost yet,” Nate observed.

“Of what?”

“Of me turning you into a proper soldier.”

That made me scoff. “Fat chance. I wouldn’t even swear to obey you if you’d ask me to marry you.”

He gave me a weird look for that remark, making me wish instantly I could take it back, but his reply made me relax again. “Yeah, you’d turn writing our vows into negotiations that would make any prenup pale in comparison. I already have to clean the car each and every time you splatter zombie guts all over it. I’m not gonna get myself into any more obligations there.”

“Aw, poor boy, has to do a little washing up. You know, there are enough men in the world who’d never even let their women get anywhere near their car when it gets to cleaning,” I snapped.

“Those women usually don’t drive, either,” he replied, smirking.

“Shut up. You like it well enough that I’m your chauffeur.”

“I’d like it even more if you’d stop questioning my authority at each and every turn.”

“Am not,” I protested. “Besides, you’d just get bored if I didn’t. Admit it. Apocalypse and all that crap aside, you’re having the time of your life.”

His almost benign smile made me roll my eyes, and I was quite happy to fall silent in favor of listening to Burns whoop all over the com frequencies as he zipped across the plain in his turbo tank. Only the periodic updates from Martinez reminded me that what we were doing was a hell of a lot more dangerous than it might have looked.

Jason gave the ABVs about twenty minutes to cut a few nice swaths through the zombies before he sent us forward. I tried to keep in formation with him and his second car, but with bodies heaping up everywhere, making pressing forward difficult at times, it got virtually impossible. Instead I broke away, heading toward the palisades, Andrej to my right. He seemed to have less trouble there, but in the end we both just made sure to strafe any larger group of zombies so our passengers could rain fiery hell down on them.

Things got a little hairy about an hour in when I ran over one of the super zombies, and rather than stay down it started tearing at my fender and windshield. Andrej crashed into it from the other side, wedging it between our front bumpers. That made it go down, but not for good. I tried going over it again, but got stuck in another heap of squashed body parts, momentarily grinding to a halt—giving the juiced fucker the opportunity of a lifetime to start tearing the undercarriage apart. Some excessive rocking forward and back finally finished it off, but when I tried to accelerate, the car gave a series of weird noises—and then it died on me.

Still panting from exertion, I cast around for the next zombie to come after us, but the area around us was mostly quiet. I tried to restart the car twice, then slammed my hands against the wheel for good measure, not unhappy that Martinez had wisely removed the airbags last winter. Nate calmly listened to my string of curses—half in English, the other half in whatever I’d picked up from our merry band of misfits—while he reloaded his rifle.

“Are you done yet?” he asked when I finally ran out of air.

“Not quite,” I huffed, glaring at nothing and everything. “I fucking hate this!”

“We can, of course, remain sitting here and watch while the others finish our job,” he supplied.

“Or?”

His grin wasn’t exactly a nice one. “Or we get out there and finish it the old-fashioned way. You’ve barely emptied a box of ammo yet. Are you really going to say you did your part with that to show?”

“I killed at least fifty of them by grinding them to a bloody mess under my tires,” I grunted, already wrenching on my breathing mask. “But wasn’t it you who told me that I shouldn’t get too close to this?”

“That was before I knew we’d have tanks,” he told me succinctly.

“ABVs,” I corrected.

“Shut up and get your gear on. We’re burning daylight.”

Suddenly anxious to get out of the increasingly tightening cage of the car, I still took a moment to check that my mask was in place, the straps of the helmet were closed, and my goggles sat firmly over the upper part of my face. It was so fucking hot under that mask that I couldn’t wait to get out, even if that meant leaving my cozy seat behind. I just had to do something, and killing zombies sounded like the perfect antidote to that.

Nate waited until I was crouching right next to him behind the seats before he wrenched the hatch open, sending a few bursts of rapid fire around us to take care of the increasing number of zombies that had gotten curious in the meantime. As soon as he gave me the “go,” I straightened, my back almost touching his as I took over that side. As much as I loved my shotgun, I had no intention of getting that up close and personal with anything today, for once using one of our spare AR-15s. The recoil was laughable, and I might have squeezed off a few too many rounds at first, but what were a couple bullets wasted compared to getting my face chewed off?

It took us a good fifteen minutes to level everything that moved in our vicinity before it was safe to exit the vehicle completely. I might have laughed maniacally a time or two when a head exploded somewhat spectacularly. For every zombie that fell, two more followed, but even with reloading, none of them got too close. My back ached from bracing myself, as did my shoulders and arms from keeping the AR up, but I kept on shooting until all the magazines I had in easy reach were empty and nothing was moving in our immediate vicinity.

Damn, but I’d so needed that.

Once we’d run out of targets, we reloaded before we left the Rover. Nate did the groundwork and I followed after pulling the hatch closed behind me. No need to leave it open so one of the shamblers could climb in and leave stinking goo all over what constituted my living room nowadays.

And speaking of the stench—it was unbelievable.

Even through the mask—which I wore mostly because I didn’t want to wipe off any zombie gunk that got on my face, not because I was afraid of infection—a couple of breaths out in the open were enough to make nausea rise inside of me. I swallowed convulsively as I tried to take shallow, even breaths, forcing my heart rate down once more.

I was actually relieved when another group of zombies came for us, because then I had something else to concentrate on than just how vile the air I was breathing smelled. Up at the hatch, the adrenaline rush had made me crazy enough not to notice, but down here it was just bad. So, so bad.

It only took about three minutes after we’d gotten out of the car before Burns’s ABV came to a stop next to us, Burns himself hollering down to us. “You getting bored or something?”

Before I could reply, Nate did. “Bree broke the car.”

“I so did not!” I shouted. “If you’d killed that damn juiced-up freak before it got close, it could never have wreaked havoc on the car’s hardware!”

“Excuses,” Nate huffed, grinning back at me.

“Need any help?” Burns asked.

We both shook our heads. “Keep squishing the last remaining nests and we should be fine,” Nate said. “We’ll start with the cleanup.”

It was only after the ABV drove away again that I realized that there really wasn’t that much to do anymore—except take care of the endless sea of bodies on the ground. I was tempted to keep using my rifle, but really, what zombies were still moving could easily be finished off with good old-fashioned blunt force trauma.

“Do you want the ax or the bat?” Nate asked as he popped the trunk of the car after pushing aside the bodies we’d downed before.

“Ax,” I replied. Why invest extra strength when you could work with a keen edge? And I’d had to split enough firewood all winter long that I’d gotten comfortable enough wielding an edged melee weapon—at least for similarly challenging tasks.

Nate handed me the heavy ax we’d liberated from a fire truck, picking up a sledgehammer himself. Always with the bragging—but I had to admit, that thing was effective. We remained together as we started a slow circuit outward from the car, kicking everything that couldn’t move before we finished off what did. It was a gruesome, monotonous task—but after being tense as hell for hours, locked in a car, it felt oddly liberating—and that probably said a lot about my deteriorating state of mind. Honestly, I couldn’t have given less of a fuck about that.

And then Jason gave the okay over the com that the last nest of shamblers had been eradicated—and we were done. The battle was over. All of us—at least us twelve—were still standing. Tired, sweaty, but alive. The euphoria gripping me was just as strong as the paralyzing fear that I’d felt this morning as I’d brought the Rover down the slope. We’d done it. The impossible. Not us alone, and without the sappers the job would have taken us easily until nightfall, if not well into tomorrow, but we’d done it. Together. As a team. The first untainted triumph since the world had gone to hell.

And I’d been a part of that, just like any other member of my team. And no one had even bothered asking me how I was holding up, because no one had questioned that I could do it. So what if I’d needed a little extra pep talk—all of them had a lot more combat experience.

I let out a whoop that was really a shout of triumph, raising both hands up in the air, gore dripping from my ax blade. Nate laughed before he joined my cheer, and one after the other all my fellow scavengers joined in. The created feedback over the com was deafening, but even when I turned that off I could hear them all across the plain.

Today, victory was ours.

Reality, of course, was just waiting around the corner to punch us in the face, but what else was new?

There was still the threat of the zombies that we’d managed to draw away in the morning to return. To minimize that risk, we had to get rid of the bodies. All of them. As monumental the task of breaking the siege had seemed, that was almost worse. At least until the ABVs proved that they weren’t just handy in running zombies over, but quite versatile where shoving them together into piles was concerned. The sappers had also brought huge tarps, initially to hide their vehicles, but they proved useful as makeshift sledges, tied to the cars, to transport the bodies—and parts of bodies—to the dried-out river bed where Watts declared it safe to simply burn them. So that’s what we did—for the next four hours. For the first time in my life I was glad that I was physically weaker than everyone else in my unit, because that meant I was set to driving duty rather than dragging bodies onto the tarps. My car was still out of order, so I was driving the Jeep, seeing as both Andrej and Pia didn’t have the same excuse.
 

Even with that support, the ABVs did most of the work, pretending to be the world’s most macabre snow plows.

I knew something was wrong when I returned from yet another run to the river bed, the empty tarp flapping behind me, and I found most of our people standing around in a circle. When no one moved to start loading the tarp, I got out and joined them, finding Nate and the Ice Queen crouching over the remains of one of the zombies. It only took me a moment to identify him as one of the super zombies—they just had that slightly more substantial look to them, as if they didn't decay at the same rate as the rest—the head lying a good three feet removed from the body, just to be sure. At first I thought they were continuing the game we’d started in Sioux Falls—what did it take to kill them for good?—but it wasn’t the body itself that they were staring at.

No, it was the vest strapped to its chest, with several blue-blinking devices affixed to it.

“What the fuck is that?” I asked, craning my neck to get a better look.

“No idea,” Nate replied, studying one of the devices that he must have pried from the setup.
 

As my eyes kept roaming over the body, my gaze inadvertently fell to its hands, checking for a mark—and finding it at the left hand, just below where the pinkie finger would have been had it still been attached. Looking over to the head, I saw that enough was intact to identify the marks there—three stark, black X-shaped tattoos. Nate followed my gaze, then caught it when I looked back at him.

“They were new,” he confirmed my guess. “A month old, maybe two. It’s hard to guess with the general decay and all, but that man was alive and kicking in early spring, when he got inked.”

I looked at the devices again. “Something tells me that this wasn’t part of the gear he was wearing when he died.”

Pia shook her head, pulling the vest aside to reveal the jacket underneath about as torn and stained as the rest of the clothes. The vest itself was dirty, but not much worse than my own gear. “No. Someone strapped that on recently.”

Nate handed the device to Campbell, who poked at it with a knife before he dropped it to the ground and smashed it with his boot before he crouched down to study the parts. “Battery powered. It’s only a guess until I have time to study it, but I doubt that battery could have kept that active for more than a week.”