“What for?” I felt that question was more important than possible details.
Mike looked a little perplexed, as if he’d never asked himself that question. “Why what?”
“Why mess with the serum that’s already working?” I asked, not hiding my vexation with having to spell it out. “I presume that’s why you kept testing that shit out on the prisoners? To see if it had any effect?” That explained why they had a plethora of shit that worked on us. Nate hadn’t gone into details when he’d talked about the drugs they’d shot him up with, but judging from the track marks on his body, it hadn’t been just an occasional thing.
And it also fit with what Hamilton had said—that he’d dropped off the weaponized serum we’d brought from France with the Chemist.
Mike hesitated, his unease becoming apparent when he finally did speak up. “They would have had a much harder time subduing the surviving fighters otherwise,” he pointed out, his voice cracking. “That it helped with the workers was mere coincidence.”
That last bit grabbed my attention. “Say what?”
“The workers,” he explained. “You do get that they are mindless, almost brain-dead worker bees?”
“Enough so to want to beat the shit out of anyone connected with forcing that state on them, yes,” I let him know.
More convulsive swallowing followed. “It’s not what you think.”
I gave him my best naive expression. “So they aren’t the soldiers who got inoculated with the wrong version of the serum that was meant to turn them into mindless drones?”
“Not all of them,” Mike insisted—as if that didn’t make everything worse. “Those were the first workers. But there weren’t enough of them to work large-enough fields to sustain a larger settlement.”
“So you, what? Accidentally shot up people with more of the same shit?”
He shook his head vehemently at the sharp tone of my voice. “Of course not!”
I couldn’t help a derisive snort. “No. A bunch of assholes who hold arena death matches would never do that.”
The guys got another round of fearful attention. “It wasn’t that same serum variant,” Mike said, trying to correct himself. “It’s the side effect of one of the working ones, I swear! We discovered the downsides after the damage was done, and it wasn’t like we could warn people after that, or they would have killed us.”
“Wait, is that shit the reason why most of the scavengers are raving lunatics now?” This really got better and better.
“Some,” Mike muttered under his breath, but was quick to speak up at my frown. “Most of it is the drugs—that we’ve had to test, extensively, beforehand. One in ten to thirty gets like that, but most not at first, or even for the first few months. Shit, how deranged do you think we are to condemn thousands of people to brain-dead slavery?”
“Exactly that much,” I pointed out. But I had to admit, his agitation raised some doubt in me.
“Well, you’re wrong,” he protested. “They shot all of us up with that shit, too! And their command crew as well. Shit, I get why you don’t trust me, but why would they have risked it themselves?”
He had a point—if I ignored my experience with Taggard and his boys. It stood to reason someone had learned from that—or not. “And the scavengers just let you do this.”
“Let us?” Mike’s voice took on a shrill note that I belatedly recognized as amusement. “They demanded that we do it. Almost rioted twice when there weren’t enough doses for everyone right when they found out we had a working serum.” He looked conflicted for a moment, as if trying to remember some detail or other, but finally gave up. “You know how dangerous it is out there. Weren’t you damn glad you were immune to the zombie bites and scratches?”
I was the wrong one to petition for agreement with that. “I didn’t get the serum until well over a year past the shit hit the fan,” I succinctly told him, hard-pressed to pass up the opportunity to sneer at Hamilton, as he deserved. “It’s convenient, but it’s not the be-all, end-all, and it does come with some massive downsides.”
Mike looked satisfied for a moment—making me guess that the status of my immunity had been what he’d been trying to remember just now; being what counted as a celebrity these days came with weirdness like that, I figured—but it quickly passed, leaving him wary and scared once more. “Well, most people thought differently. So we gave them what they demanded. There are still new ones dropping by every week, even with rumors about the brain-dead workers circulating aplenty. Scared people don’t give a shit about consequences when there’s only one hope for them.”
I was so tempted to pull Hamilton out of the room and ask him if he could verify any of that—what suspicions I had in that aspect were mostly based on what he’d said—but cut down on that impulse. He likely wouldn’t tell me, and it was a topic better suited for a briefing involving everyone else. None of that helped buffer the level of frustration and disgust that came up within me at Mike’s explanation—if he was telling the truth, that was.
“Do you still have doses of that shit left?” He shook his head. “Any documentation?” More of the same. I let out a slow breath to keep from punching him in his face. So much for side effects. “So what you’re pretty much telling me is that you deliberately shot up thousands of scavengers with some shit that makes some of them non-functioning and leaves the rest susceptible to all manners of shit that gets them addicted and coming back for more?”
A nod, and he definitely cringed away from my glare now, expecting retribution. “I swear, we didn’t know at first, and then we had no choice.”
“Just like you didn’t have any choice with the prisoners?” I asked way too sweetly.
Mike’s eyes widened as he realized that he couldn’t win, but at least that didn’t make him clam up. “I still remember some of the compounds he had me synthesize! And I know the recipes of the most common drugs by heart, too! Please, you have to believe me, if I knew more I’d tell you!”
I was tempted to taunt him that this was hardly enough, but then thought better of it. Straightening, I looked around, finally settling on a pad and pencil on one of the tables. “Don’t you dare leave anything out,” I instructed as I handed him both, abusing one of the tables to lean against—also to be out of his reach should he attempt to use the pencil for anything else.
“Sure, sure,” Mike mumbled, already bent over the pad, setting to work.
I watched him scribble for a few minutes, the drawings easier to make sense of than his scrawl. The guys remained hulking over him like two threatening pillars made of muscle and hatred, but I didn’t miss the vacant look on Nate’s face that soon pushed away his general state of alertness. My own thoughts started to wander, stress and sleep deprivation doing its own to make it hard to concentrate—
So none of us caught the moment when Mike switched the grip on the pencil, and rammed it straight up into his skull through what used to be his left eye seconds ago. He was dead before I could do more than startle back into alertness.
The three of us watched as the body that used to be Mike sagged in on itself, a last pained gurgle leaving him. Hamilton leaned forward, grabbing a shoulder to make the head flop back, revealing the grisly display. I blinked, mostly irritated with myself for not having caught this, but also strangely fascinated. If not for Hamilton, I would have allowed myself to shiver as I wanted to—not sure why, but the eyes always got to me. It stood to reason that losing an eye rather than half of my fingers would have hampered me less, but maybe it was more a thing of familiarity versus fear of the unknown.
Hamilton’s drawl finally made my attention snap from the idiot formerly known as Mike to him. “Fucked that one up good, didn’t you?”
“Because it’s just me in here, and I’m in charge,” I pointed out, my annoyance mixing well with the intended sarcasm.
“Shows why you shouldn’t be,” Hamilton shot back.
Doing my best to ignore him, I pulled the pad toward me before Mike�
��s eye goo could ruin what he’d scribbled. I half expected all of it to be nonsense, but I could decipher a few compounds—but none of it made sense beyond the obvious—MDMA, acid, ketamine. Except for the shared value where recreational use was concerned, they had nothing in common on the chemical side.
Glancing at the shelves around the room, I pushed away from the table and started perusing them. It was easy to verify that they had everything stocked here that Mike had written down. Maybe if we’d just kept him alive a little longer… but the point was moot, and besides, as far as their backyard-chemist approach to drug distribution went, I didn’t give a shit whether they’d managed to synthesize the most pristine crystal meth or not—all I cared about was the serum.
Getting tired of staring at the corpse, Nate went to the door and called in the guards. Cole took one look at the dead body and burst out laughing, making me wonder just how sober he was—not that I could shame anyone in that department at the moment. “Damn, but that one didn’t last long,” he muttered, also oddly fascinated by the pencil sticking out of Mike’s skull.
“This can’t be the entire lab,” I muttered after another look around. “Do you know where they keep the rest?”
Cole shook his head. “No fucking clue. But there’s a supply room down the corridor.”
At first I thought that this was a stab at our conjugal extracurricular activities, but when no acerbic remark followed, I let him point me in that direction. As expected, it was all crammed shelves, holding mostly white cardboard boxes and plastic containers—all still achingly familiar from my past life, but only so useful. I even checked the walls, hunting for a concealed door, but came up empty.
As great as it was to have Nate back, this whole endeavor got more frustrating by the hour. The latent sense of doom at the back of my mind—fueled by the knowledge that we were wasting time that we likely didn’t have—absolutely didn’t help. The storm raging on above us sure fit my mood perfectly.
Chapter 3
Scott looked up from the maps he had been poring over as we returned, surprised to see us. “That was quick.”
I let Nate do the talking, instead focusing on what Scott had been occupied with. It looked like a detailed map of the citadel and entire camp beyond—nothing particularly interesting.
“He didn’t know much,” Nate offered, scratching his chin. “Dead lead either way.”
I was tempted to speak up in disagreement, but since I’d let Mike kill himself on my watch, there was nothing I could do about that now. Damn, but Hamilton wasn’t exactly wrong with his acerbic remark about me fucking that up. The fact that it didn’t really bother me—except for giving that idiot a chance to reprimand me—was less disconcerting than how my body felt increasingly more sluggish, including my mind. Simply listening to Scott switch topics and prattle off a list of locations to check on was almost maxing out my mental capacity. The jitters were getting worse, and when I checked my forehead, my hand came away clammy. While Nate listened—or pretended to—Hamilton went to investigate the food offerings on a nearby table, heavily scrutinized by the Ice Queen, but she didn’t reprimand him when he went for the stew pot and started ladling the contents with a hunk of bread. While I found the display disgusting on principle—and I didn’t trust the pots here, even after they had been thoroughly cleaned—a couple of female scavengers at a nearby table got very interested. Hamilton didn’t miss that, either, after slaking his hunger—and with a smirk in my direction sauntered over to the ladies to take care of another. I didn’t suppress the harder shiver that ran through my body. Mutilating that bitch I could take, but Hamilton and his groupies? That was too much.
Only that when I turned around to join Nate, I found that he was about to leave the room through a different door, trailing after Andrej, who was keeping up a loud, animated, if one-sided conversation in Serbian. Looked like I was left to my own devices—and considering that Hamilton was holding court, I felt it was about time that I took my sorry ass elsewhere.
“Anything left on our agenda for today?” I asked Scott since he seemed to have somewhat of an overview of the situation.
He considered but shook his head. “Unless you want to have a chat with the freed prisoners and keep adding to your nightmares, not really.” He gave me a small grin when I shook my head. “Thought so.”
I was about to turn away when my eyes fell on his maps, the one with the building with the Chemist’s workroom where we’d just been on top. “Say, is that all the workspace they had for the drug manufacturing? Considering that the assistant told us they were running a profitable business, they must have had a larger space set up elsewhere. That workspace had barely enough shelf space for small batches, which wouldn’t have produced enough to keep the scavengers stoned for a single day.”
Scott shook his head without checking. “Not that I’m aware of, but we haven’t checked the warehouses and barns yet. Sounds promising?”
I considered for a second. “Something that won’t tear down several buildings when it explodes? Sounds right to me.”
I got a weird look for that assessment that made me want to ask him if he’d never considered why chemistry labs in schools were located on the upper floor or very end of a wing, but left it at a shrug. “I’ll go check that out.” I was sure buildings that size wouldn’t be hard to find—and I had an inkling that I’d in fact already sneaked by them, right next to the barracks where the labor force was locked in. Somehow I didn’t think anyone had been too concerned about what fumes they might have been inhaling.
I wasn’t halfway across the room to the closest exit yet when Richards fell into step with me, signaling Cole and Hill to follow us. Since he ignored my annoyed glare, I let him tag along, figuring that it wasn’t the worst idea to bring backup if I had to case the warehouses first. With three hulking soldiers in tow, it seemed unlikely that anyone would get any weird ideas, either.
“You’re looking for the drug manufactory?” Richards asked conversationally as we made our way up the ramp to the ground level, getting closer to the incessant howling of the wind once more.
“Something like that,” I replied, trying to sound like talking was the last thing on my mind. Hill chuckled under his breath, but while I was sure the three of them knew about how the interrogation had gone south, nobody asked for specifics.
Richards wasn’t done, though. “Any leads yet?”
I shook my head. Stepping out into the storm, the wind hitting me hard enough to steal my breath away for a moment, saved me from having to elaborate. Nobody was stupid enough to venture out into the bad weather, leaving the broad road made of hard-packed dirt to us. I tried to avoid the worst of the puddles at first, and didn’t mind when Richards sent Cole forward. Despite our gear, we were drenched to the skin by the time we reached the long, three-story buildings toward the northern quarter of the camp. Cole let me take point with a mock bow as I stepped into the first warehouse, letting my eyes accustom to the gloom before venturing forth. Just our luck that the building we were looking for was the third of its kind, packed behind the other two and what passed for a garage for the farm equipment around here. Having seen the laborers in the fields before had made me think they didn’t have any larger equipment, but apparently they hadn’t bothered bringing that out when I’d fled from the camp over two months ago.
I knew we’d hit pay dirt the moment Hill pulled open one side of the large gate, an acrid chemical scent tickling my nostrils. Hill, more intelligent than he sometimes pretended to be, paused immediately, clearly itching to run back for a gas mask. Squinting into the darkness inside, I spied some basic security equipment like gloves and coats by the door, but no full hazmat gear. So maybe they hadn’t been cooking meth in here, after all. I waited a few more seconds to see if my eyes or throat would start burning, and when nothing happened, I stepped inside to get a better look.
Bingo.
“Don’t touch anything,” I warned the soldiers as I started down the open space on the lef
t side that was mostly storage shelves. “If you suddenly start puking and bleeding from your eyes and ears, it’s probably too late.”
Nobody found my advice funny, but that was fine with me. Unlike the smaller workroom, there were fewer tubs of chemicals in here, but most of them were large enough that I would have needed both hands to pull them off the shelves. Next came a few tanks, some for liquid ingredients, but two also for what I presumed was storage of drugs. In the opposite corner, a part of the warehouse had been sectioned off, and it was outside of that cube that three bright-yellow hazmat suits hung, well-maintained but showing obvious signs of wear and tear. The others were smart enough to steer clear of that section, and I had no intentions of venturing any closer, either. Instead, I went looking for documentation.
Sure that no army of trigger-happy guards or doped-up scavengers was hiding anywhere, Hill and Cole retreated to the entrance, taking up position where they could check outside but were safe from the rain. Richards ambled along for a while, but after a few minutes got bored of watching me read labels and glance into drawers.
“What are you looking for specifically?”
I didn’t halt in my so far fruitless perusal. “Anything, really. I think I have an idea what they used to make the crap the scavengers are snorting and smoking, but I don’t really give a shit about that.”
A sidelong glance was enough to catch his brief smile, but when I turned to fully face him, Richards was all closed-off professionalism. That, like me, he must have been riding the tail end of a massive high now drowning in withdrawal wasn’t anything I could have read off his features. Asshole. Just my luck that every single man and woman in this blasted camp had less issues with that than me.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 47
