Beyond Green Fields | Book 5 | Survive [A Post-Apocalyptic Anthology]

by Lecter, Adrienne

  The thing is, I knew it was a mistake to let Madeline and her kids join us from the moment it happened. They slow us down; they are an immense security risk. But after days of decreasing morale I was well aware of the fact that if I refused, everyone would have felt as if we’d reached the point where we were now throwing helpless women and children under the bus, and I needed to put a stop to that before it could escalate into full-scale mutiny. Madeline’s soft yet constant complaining also puts Bree’s shut-up-and-take-it approach in stark relief—something that surprised even me. The line of demarcation between the two women couldn’t be more obvious—and still, whatever the guys do, Bree keeps rolling with that skittish sense of unease at times that drives me insane. I could have understood it for the first week, particularly if anyone had given her any reason to be uneasy about being surrounded by men only too happy to embrace a rough, tough lifestyle, but it didn’t even require Martinez, Burns, and Andrej playing babysitter and instructor at the same time to make it quite obvious for the rest that they’d better forget very quickly that there’s a nice pair of tits to possibly ogle under the layers of dirty clothes. The guys accepted her as one of their own; sure, she’s the rookie and she’s not as skilled nor dependable as the rest, but just as I’d hoped, that provides some good distraction for them and a hell of a raised bar to live up to. But I wouldn’t have needed Madeline’s whiny presence for that since the two college kids also don’t try to live up to the same standards. I don’t think Bree really gets how well she gels with the team. Her motivation is stellar, and her self-discipline about rivals my own. I see it whenever she makes a mistake, or sheer exhaustion brings her to her knees; that wince there, that frown she tries to hide. While I’m sure she’d be happy to shrug it off with someone else, she expects herself to always give one hundred and ten percent. It’s a stupid expectation that might very well get her killed, but I can’t fault her for something I admire in her. I can’t say if she’s good leadership material yet because she hasn’t been put in a situation where she’s had to make a tough or impossible call, but she’d make a good NCO down the line.

  Also, I really want to go over to her and drag her behind that tree, and being forced to endure Madeline’s presence instead is torture.

  After the close call we had earlier with what sounds like a bunch of cannibalistic assholes, it makes sense that we’re trying to find a way to hightail it out of here—and, I have to admit, having the added shelter that cars provide sounds great as well. Right now it’s warm and humid, making sleeping outside on top of our sleeping bags a pleasant endeavor, but it wasn’t that great last week when rain drenched us to the bone, or when there’s only hard rock underneath us. It would be suicide to go blasting down any road, but even at a creeping pace, we’ll be much faster than on foot. Finding fuel shouldn’t be an issue this summer—and right now I refuse to plan much beyond getting to the bunker in Wyoming. I mostly listen to my people discuss options over dinner as my attention keeps straying to Bree. For the first time, I notice that she’s watching me back—and she’s damn good about hiding it as well. If not for her frown when Madeline approaches me—again—I might have missed it. Interesting.

  What’s much less so is the topic Madeline chooses. For the past three days she’s started insinuating that it’s unfair that she’s the only one to put out, and now she must have gotten tired of me completely ignoring anything that she doesn’t spell out. My first impulse is to shoot her down, but then I see that Bree has turned away from the fireside conversation and is glaring in our direction—and it’s quite obvious that tonight she won’t let this slide. Good for her—and if her track record is any indication, great for my blue balls. For someone of her level of intelligence, Bree has a hairline trigger once one of her buttons is pushed—and I have very fond memories of the consequences of that when it happened in the decontamination shower before everything went to shit.

  Waiting for Bree to get up and lay down the law is the only thing that gets me through Madeline’s incessant prattling.

  I fully expect her to physically assault Madeline when she finally comes to her feet and stalks over to us, but her attention focuses on me only when she quips, “Can we talk?” It’s not a question but a demand, and the mix of hot anger and cold restraint makes my balls itch. Moreover, her near-complete ignorance of Madeline is twice as effective as if she’d grabbed the other woman and slammed her face into her knee. While I can tell she’s livid, she is composed enough to appear as if her reason for coming over was to set a mistake straight rather than a need for bloody violence.

  I can’t help it. I know I should nod and step away into the night with her, out of Madeline’s earshot, but teasing Bree has become one of my favorite things in the world. “I think we are already engaging in conversation? You know, that thing where I say something and you say something—“

  She snorts, her body language switching from angry cat with a swishing tail to a confident swagger. “It’s so cute that you actually think that I was asking nicely,” she tells me—and then gives Madeline the most hostile, possessive side-eye I’ve seen in my life. So much for thinking that Bree is insecure about what is happening between me and her. On an intellectual level, she may have doubts, but her subconscious lizard brain pretty much just wrapped herself around me and declared me hers. I usually hate possessive behavior—in men just as much as in women—but this is actually kind of hot. Probably because my lizard brain is happy to spread his arms and say, “All yours. Come and get it.”

  How exactly Madeline can misunderstand what’s happening is beyond me, but I ignore her self-satisfied gloat in favor of dragging the woman I’m lusting for into the woods. No actual dragging involved since she follows me easily enough, and we’re barely out of earshot of the center of the camp—security comes first.

  I’m surprised—and just a little annoyed—when Bree doesn’t immediately come for me, verbally nor physically. It doesn’t need more than one scathing remark and her defenses come up like an impenetrable wall. As much as I enjoy bantering with her, I hate that it takes her all of five seconds to swing from confident warrior queen back into insecure gray-mouse territory. Not for the first time I ask myself what happened to her to make the latter her default comfort zone, since she was rocking the former the entire time when her survival—including during the Green Fields Biotech takeover—was at stake.

  She recovers when I state quite plainly that I have zero interest in Madeline—but interest definitely exists—and rather than smirk and jump my bones, Bree wants to know what I have been asking myself more and more each day: why we keep putting up with Madeline. Going into this, I had no intention of having that much-needed reality-check conversation, but since Bree insists, I don’t hold back and lay it all out for her. I’m absolutely using the college kids and Madeline and her brood as buffers so we can abandon them in favor of getting away. And the woman herself has been a welcome distraction to give Bree something to focus on… so that the overwhelming knowledge of how our lives have changed forever doesn’t break her spine, and she loses all will to fight since it’s very likely that, before long, all of us will be dead. I hate watching her deflate, but she takes it better than I’d feared. She’s not stupid. She must have come to that very conclusion on her own already, but hearing me confirm it is a mental blow. I can almost see her processing this, dread leaving her emotionally naked and so fucking vulnerable that it makes my chest ache.

  I know I should be giving her the “toughen up” speech now, but instead I touch her face and lean in to kiss her. Words are spilling out of me that are connected to emotions that I’ve tried very hard to bury for good, eons ago. I tell her that it kills me to see her hurting; that I wish I could whisk her away and make sure that nothing bad has a chance of touching her. Instead, I have to be the one who keeps kicking her forward, right into the thick of it, and hope that she learns to swim before she sinks. What I hate even more is that I have to tell her that she needs to stop relying on me and the
others; that only she can save herself. I want to be her boulder in the raging sea; I absolutely want to be her knight in shining armor. Instead, I need to be the one who holds out the sword to her and points her at the dragon that she needs to slay herself. I’ve never felt anywhere close to as protective of anyone as I do of her, and her very survival likely depends on me herding her in front of me so she can learn rather than to let her hide in my shadow. If anything, my life has shaped me to never second-guess myself and to always be extremely clear about my motives and what little emotion I allow myself to feel—until she bungled into my way and left utter destruction and chaos in her wake.

  Thankfully, Bree is about as comfortable as I am with my emotional diarrhea, quick to ignore the emotional impact and joke about needing a babysitter. It takes her all of a minute to call me an ass—and the smile she delivers that line with is all the invitation I need.

  Fuck, but I wish we already had the cars, because it’s a nightmare to sort out logistics for me while she’s amazingly quick to get into my pants. How exactly should we go about this? No way am I leaving her back exposed—we have a good perimeter set up, but if anything comes through that, it should be my literal ass a shambler chomps into, not hers. An extended rough-and-tumble on the ground is out of the question for the very same reason—I’m not leaving her prone on her back, with her pants tangled around one ankle, to be eaten a second after they get me. The logical consequence is to do it standing up, from behind, with her pressed against a conveniently close tree—leaving me to guard most of her body with mine, and her technically able to watch out for what might come up from our three and six. Realistically, her focus has narrowed down to my hand between her legs and my fingers finding their way underneath all her layers as they are aiming for her breast, and I can’t find it in me to regret it when I feel her get wet, her juicy ass rubbing fervently against my hard dick.

  Talk about needing a release—both of us.

  There’s no self-consciousness in her now, and I love how responsive she is to my touch. It’s only when I grab her hips that I realize how much weight she’s lost over the past month, hard muscles having replaced a good portion of her soft curves. I never gave a shit about that—and she needs those muscles to run, fight, and survive—but the fact that I’m not the only one who’s not eating enough rankles. She still has substance enough to last until winter, but if we don’t get better nutrition soon, she’ll starve to death just like the rest of us.

  And yes, I’m definitely asking myself why I’m thinking about that while I’m doing my very best to drive her insane and make her come. It does help with pretending that I’m a gentleman—ladies first—but also makes me want to laugh at myself.

  I guess things aren’t that dire yet when I can still do that.

  A few minutes later, we’re done, both content and with our mutual need slaked for now. Some women have the annoying habit of turning awkward afterward. Bree gets chatty. Considering the topic before, I’m happy she’s not about to sink into her own gloom and despair—and it’s about time that I set her straight about why I’m still alive. She takes it well—and gee, does my ego love being compared to agricultural seeds—the scientist in her taking over immediately. I’m surprised she doesn’t make me spell out all the minutiae of what protection the serum confers—and how it does so, which is not something I can easily explain to her in the first place. I even get to show her where my arm got mauled the week before—which is also a good way of letting her know that if things come to a head, Burns and Romanoff are her best bets where meat shields are concerned. She’s quick to figure out that the same goes for Zilinsky as well—and Bree’s nickname for her makes me crack up. Ice Queen. I can already see her stare me down when I share that little tidbit, not letting me see a hint of the mirth it must stir up inside of her. It fits, although I know there’s a lot more humanity in her than she ever lets on. Bree’s probably a year or two away from getting a first glimpse behind the mask Zilinsky wears. Don’t get me wrong—she’s absolutely the hardass she acts—but like everyone who has perfected the art of bending in favor of not breaking so they can continue to survive, there’s way more to her than meets the eye. That’s a lesson Bree still has to learn—and I hate that it’s a mandatory one. I doubt she’ll ever be able to fool me, but if nothing else, the world we’re living in now will teach her that lesson soon enough.

  We keep joking around a little longer—at least I’m joking. Bree goes through another round of playing stupid and refusing to acknowledge that she herself is the reason why the guys are respecting her. I love the steep blush that darkens her cheeks when she realizes that whoever is on perimeter duty has absolutely been subjected to us rutting around like animals, but am wise enough not to rub that in her face.

  When we finally rejoin the others, she’s once more the lioness on the prowl, but I can tell that her thoughts keep snapping back to the “no place is safe” part of our surprisingly extensive chat. I don’t miss how absolutely everyone’s attention snaps to us upon our return. The speculation on Zilinsky’s face is decidedly not about what we’ve been up to but instead about whether I’ve—finally!—set things straight. I give her a curt nod to state that yes, we’re in the clear. Romanoff catches it as well—and uses the moment to rib us both about not doing a good job. Martinez is quick to jump to my “defense.” Bree’s hint of apprehension melts away and she’s just as happy to foulmouth me as the rest—and five minutes later they are all back to discussing cars. There’s absolutely no difference in how the guys treat her—but I don’t miss how she looks perfectly at ease where there’s been an edge before. I leave it to Bree to gloat in Madeline’s direction, hoping that this means that chapter is closed forever.

  No question—our talk was necessary on so many levels, and getting off on top of that was a very pleasant byproduct. But seeing her at ease now is definitely worth any possible ramifications. Damn, but I’m happy that’s behind us. No offense, you annoying, juicy little minx, but you have an amazing talent of getting in your own way like nobody else.

  We get the cars—no problem. Most are not first-choice material, but considering that I’ve been prepared for our search to take days, if not weeks, what we find in the first village we hit is a good-enough catch. I didn’t expect Bree to insist on driving our sky-blue Rover, but that’s fine with me. I know she’ll tire of it eventually—and, if not, I’m happy to play navigator and lookout for the time being. It’s great not to have to walk anymore, and I’m not missing the weight of my pack and weapons—not at all. But the cars come with two downsides—we’re much louder and can’t go cross-country like before, so getting good maps is essential. And while we’ve been able to siphon off gas to refuel them easily enough, we need to do so continually, which means additional time to be spent in high-risk areas. Romanoff is the first but not last to suggest that we hit a town large enough to have a gas station—not just for the fuel, but to stock up on canisters so that we can stretch the time we can go without needing more from every few days to almost the entire distance to the bunker.

  Going on six weeks on the road also means that what gear we’ve started out with is showing some wear and tear, and now that we have the cars, we can stock up on spares of anything we could possibly require down the line. I don’t expect Wyoming to be completely looted by the time we get there, but we won’t have much of a chance of hitting the larger towns, and who knows what’s left of the smaller ones? I don’t intend to go out of our way to start scavenging what we can now, but if we just so happen upon a cache of something, we might as well take it with us.

  Much more pressing—we’re low on food. Benning, Iowa seems like the perfect target. In short order, Zilinsky has our perfect plan of attack, including several exit routes, and there’s only one thing left to do: break the news to Bree that I need her to guard Madeline and her brood.

  She takes it like I knew she would—angry, annoyed, and without verbal protest. I don’t spell out to her that the reason I’m tak
ing the college kids over her to guard the cars is that they are expendable while she is not. We have no fucking clue how overrun the town is, and there’s a chance that if we bring the cars in, we’ll have to abandon them right there and flee on foot. I need everyone sharp and ready to haul ass, and not losing anyone’s attention by having to help Bree is a relief for once.