Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation (24 page)

“About twenty-five,” he offered, for once agreeing with me. That alone spoke volumes. Of what, I wasn’t sure.

Wrenching a hand through my hair and getting stuck in the tresses, I sighed.

“Feed five of them. No, make it seven. Stagger them so that we have intervals of two hours. I’ll probably need thirty minutes for each of them.” To find out exactly how their digestive tract worked. They obviously ate, if not very efficiently. And at least the normal ones remained dead the first time they bit it.

“Any preference what we give them?”
 

I shrugged, immediately cursing myself for being so damn stupid. It hurt. “There should still be plenty of candy in the vending machines and the cafeteria here, right? Give them that. Let’s not waste anything we can actually use. We can always catch a few fresh ones tomorrow that have likely fed tonight.” With the field of slaughter that we’d left at the campus, I doubted that many zombies would go hungry, even those too decayed or stupid to hunt. And it would be interesting to see if the digestive system of those that had never fed on anything differed from those who’d been active the entire time.

Interesting. Quite the term to describe that.

Nate held my gaze for a moment longer, a slow smile spreading on his face. “Go catch some sleep. Won’t help your ribs if you fall down and bruise yourself even more.”

I only had a deadpan stare for him in return. “Remind me why exactly I keep putting up with you?”

His smile grew as he let go of the door handle and returned to me, his hands gentle as he cupped my cheeks and kissed me. “Because you’d go suicidal from boredom otherwise,” he replied, wisely not giving me an excuse to ram my knee up where it hurt, just out of spite. Not that he hadn’t given me reason aplenty for that today. But he wasn’t done yet. “And because you’re one hell of a woman. If I were a decent guy, I’d be tempted to ask myself how I deserve someone like you.”

“Well, then be glad you’re not,” I agreed with him, managing a smile of my own.

“Sleep. Tomorrow you’ll have enough time to gather even more images for the best-of edition of post-apocalyptic nightmares. Trust me on that.”

Did I ever.
 

I was fast asleep as soon as I’d crawled onto the hospital bed, not even bothering with a blanket.

We spent an entire week like that. Pretty much the only upside to that was that by the end of it, I had healed enough to be useful outside of the hospital again, which I was damn glad for, and not just because of the obvious reasons.

I’d done about everything I could think of to inflict on the zombies, and we weren’t much the wiser. As homogenous as their population seemed at first glance—zombies, duh!—I hadn’t exactly found too many common denominators. What we’d dubbed super zombies were clearly superior in all aspects, just as I suspected their human counterparts were, but even between the three that we’d managed to catch, there were differences. None of them should have been able to do what they did, judging from how their bodies functioned—which was to say, not very efficient, if at all. Some seemed to be able to digest food—including each other—well enough, which were likely the ones that actually produced excrement. Others just vomited up what they gobbled down, more or less pre-digested. Some did both. In one of the rooms we kept another shambler that had devoured the contents of three vending machines and the remains of all of the previous specimen and still hadn’t produced an ounce of feces. We knew, because we had it under constant surveillance, thanks to one of the gimmicks Campbell had tinkered together. And no, it also didn’t consume its fecal matter as soon as it saw the light of day. We’d made sure to check for that, too, making sure that there could, in fact, be no unsupervised fecal matter expulsion. Don’t ask.

Most survived getting electrocuted, but then with a fried nervous system—judging from the lack of pain sensations that they all had in common—that wasn’t that much of a surprise. They didn’t drown but submerging them in water made them go ballistic, so some instincts were still intact. They ate everything that got anywhere near them and might contain some nutrients—nutrients that they obviously didn’t need to function, although those that did digest were faster and more solid than the others. Heavy sedation worked, but only for a short time, and at drop-a-horse doses for someone twice my body mass. Nate finally admitted that this was a side effect that those subjected to the serum shared with the shamblers, making me wonder again just how high he must have been those first few hours of our flight, back… in another life.

In short, it was a disgusting labor of love that didn’t yield much practical knowledge, but no one dared say out loud what I thought we all agreed on—it had been a massive waste of time, yet a necessary one all the same. But with me not able to make the trip back to the cars, we had to spend the time somehow, and why not torture and dissect zombies in the meantime?

Our time in the city wasn’t a complete waste of time, though, as whoever wasn’t on watch or zombie hunt had opportunity to loot—and that was a much bigger success than Mission: Zombie Entrails. Each day, the guys dragged home heaps of new gear, replacing everything from torn socks to weapon upgrades. I couldn’t help but stare at them in envy, and not just because I’d rather gone raiding than spent my days in the OR. What cushioned the blow was that the guys picked up about every T-shirt in the entire city that might possibly fit me and had some wisecrack sentence or weird image printed on it. That stock would easily last me through three more apocalypses.

And we definitely found enough electronics for Campbell to build portable com units for each of us, plus several backups.

After deciding unanimously that we were done chopping up zombies, Nate took me on one more looting trip, bringing Burns and Andrej mostly to carry all the shit we could possibly find that might be useful—just for me. The quality of our jokes might have hit a new low—whenever we dared to talk, that was; our culling of the zombie hordes seemed to have stirred them up, rendering a good third of them day-active again—but what we managed to scrounge up was impressive. A cobbled-together but still very useful set of light body armor, somewhat of a cross between police riot gear and military battle armor. New holsters and sheaths for all my weapons, with a good stack of surplus for when needed. An assortment of under-armor-wear ranging from thermals fit for an arctic snowstorm to lightweight mesh that pretty much just preserved my decency. New boots, gloves, and a snazzy pair of aviators that Nate kept bitching were so not fit for eye-protection when shooting. The apocalypse had never been so stylish. And practical.

Back at our base, Martinez summed up the new dilemma all that looting presented us with: “How the fuck shall we get all this shit to the cars?”

That was a good question. Even if I was very selective and only took the shirts I absolutely couldn’t be parted from ever again, I alone had enough stuff amassed to need two trips—and that didn’t even factor in the heap of guns and medicine that we’d set aside for trading.
 

“How about we bring the cars to all this shit instead of the other way round?” Nate suggested, making not just me look at him as if he’d gone crazy. That, of course, left him completely unfazed. “Did no one notice anything outside today?”

It had been my first and only sortie since my uncanny contact with the side of a building, but a few of the others looked as confused as I felt. Burns, though, started laughing.

“Shit! You serious?”

Nate shrugged. When I obviously still didn’t get it, he explained, quite belligerently so. “How are you even still alive when you didn’t realize that ever since the first clouds moved in, all of the shamblers cleared the streets?”

“We know that they don’t mind bad weather,” I objected. This still made no sense—although I had felt like we were lucky not to run into too many of the stragglers.

“They’re ducking for cover because we have a tornado cell inbound,” Burns said, stealing Nate’s thunder. “Like animals, ya know? Bright fuckers, the lot of them.”

The conclusion of that was rather obvious, and not one I particularly liked.

“That makes us fucking stupid, wouldn’t you say? To run out into a tornado, get the cars, drive back into the city to load them, and beat it after that?”

Nate and Burns looked at each other, but obviously agreed that their plan was brilliant.

“Don’t see why not,” Nate said. “Even if a tornado touches down near the city, it doesn’t mean that it will be anywhere near us. And a tornado might kill us. If we run into one of the larger hordes, even with the cars, the zombies will kill us. I like the former odds much better than the latter.”

I didn’t even bother protesting. It was just a waste of breath—but I was kind of sick of this shit happening over and over again.

It didn’t help that, two hours in, I had to admit that it wasn’t the worst of plans. It just wasn’t a good plan. Even with my winter face mask and the snow goggles on, I felt like the grit that the storm brought with it was scouring every inch of my face that was exposed, and wearing full gear with as many provisions as I could carry wasn’t making the ordeal any better. Not really advisable actions a week after cracking the better part of your ribs, I could testify to that. But there were no zombies out and about, because even the most brain-dead fucker knew better than to subject itself to this. At least the fact that we were taking everything with us that we couldn’t leave behind made some sense.

My watch claimed that it was barely four in the afternoon by the time we reached the cars, still safely hidden away under the mountain of tarps and foliage that we’d covered them with. It was dark enough that everything was completely leached of color, but that could have been the uniform layer of caked dust and dirt, too. I still felt somewhat relieved as soon as I’d stored away everything and I could climb into my Faraday cage of choice, minimizing at least one risk.

“Question. Exactly how high do you think our chance of survival is if that hose touches down right next to us and sucks us into the air?” I asked, eyeing the sky with trepidation for what felt like the millionth time.

“Pretty much zilch,” Nate confirmed my guess. And of course he was grinning, although that might have been due to my bristling-cat attitude.
 

“Remind me again why we keep doing shit like this?” I went on while I angled the car across the overgrown grass, toward the road we’d come in from. Cho in the car behind me was pretty much glued to my bumper, making me want to step on the brakes just to spite him—absently noting the hypocrisy in my actions. Bree from last year would never have found the idea of risking a car accident funny in any way.

“Because what else is there to do?” Nate asked in return, casually crossing the arms over the chest straps of the belt harness. He didn’t even have his rifle ready, the bastard.

“Pretty much anything else?” I proposed, gritting my teeth as the bump the car made as it slid onto the road jarred my still bruised ribs. I hadn’t known that bones could bruise, too, but that was pretty much what had happened to me, Martinez claimed. “And I’m not deluding myself into thinking that will change any time soon.”

“Not planning on it, no,” Nate agreed.

We spent the next mile of slowly creeping toward the city in silence—not because I was angry or pouting, but because visibility dropped so low that without lights it was hard to even stay on the road, let alone navigate around the few broken-down cars still on it.

“You do realize that we’re on a spiral of escalation here? This is not just survival,” I noted. When he just looked back at me, I felt like I had to elaborate. “On the trek across the country, it was survival, but now? First, we blast into small towns and mow down zombies with our cars. Then we actively go hunt down the fuckers and vivisect them. Now we’re driving around when literally everything else is ducking for cover. Don’t think I’ve forgotten that busting up those cannibals is the next point on our agenda. Have you ever considered where this will lead? Next we’ll jump off bridges because nothing else holds any thrill for us anymore.”

As I’d feared, he was amused more than disconcerted by my objections.

“I don’t see how perfectly normal behavior is the escalation of necessary risks we have to take.”

“My point is, we don’t have to take them,” I replied. “Yes, sure, some risks will always be there. But don’t you think that cutting up zombies that are snapping at us is jumping the shark just a little bit?”

Nate was silent long enough that I risked another glance to the side even with the abysmal driving conditions.

“Has it occurred to you that you’re not actually objecting to all these things, but debating an entirely different point?”

“Please do enlighten me,” I snarked back.

His answering laugh was as annoying as the fact that he didn’t even pretend to consider my view. “I think what actually gets you all riled up is the fact that you like it.”

“Come again?” I asked, not having to feign consternation or surprise.

“You like it,” Nate repeated. “What we do. Sure, not everything is all fun and games, but you’re happy with what we’re doing. How your life is right now. You might rant and complain to me, but really, at the end of the day you feel a hell of a lot more alive than ever before.”

“Yeah, mostly because I’m constantly a step away from losing said life,” I chuffed.