Since it looked like the others would take a while longer, I fished out a bag of nuts and chewed them meditatively, belatedly remembering to offer Nate some. He stared at the offending nuts with a grimace. “You have to eat something if you don’t want to make their work even easier for them,” I offered. No need to explain who I was referring to.
He hesitated and pushed my hand away. “I’ve… taken care of that.”
My first impulse was to ask “Who?” but I managed to swallow that. He looked tense enough that it didn’t sound like the smartest idea to possibly set him off. My, wasn’t I being all mature and diplomatic today? Sonia’s talk still sat vividly in my mind, making it a little easier to keep my trap shut—for now. “Glad you did,” I said instead.
Nate gave me a look that was one third surprise and two thirds guarded hostility, as if he had geared up for a fight and was now disappointed I hadn’t offered him the opportunity. If I’d felt a little less like death warmed over, I might have changed course now but instead kept munching on my nuts.
“Aren’t you going to ask who ended up on the menu?” he asked acerbically, leaning close enough that I could smell the fresh mint on his breath. Toothpaste—one of the few staples of the apocalypse we were still not about to run out of, and likely not for the next hundred years considering that baking soda made a great alternative.
I pointedly ignored him while I chewed and swallowed, then slowly turned my head to face him. We stared at each other from up close, and I couldn’t help but smile. No, the world wasn’t all roses and sunshine, but we were still standing, and right now, that was enough.
Also, very boring, so I flashed him a grin and asked, “Was it a juicy bit of ham or did you go for organ meat, maybe sliced liver?”
He answered me with a heavy sigh that did nothing to hide his amusement. “You are insufferable.”
“And that’s why you love me,” I quipped. “So, who was it? One of the guards? They were the last to go down. Lots of relatively fresh meat.”
Nate paused, and I could tell that, joking aside, he wasn’t quite comfortable with the subject. “Actually, more like crispy chicken,” he offered. “That’s probably the best analogy, considering we used to douse them in chlorine, too.”
It took me a few moments to make sense of that, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the news. “You went back into the hot lab and ate Stone?”
He didn’t look at me as he replied, instead pretending to check on the progress of the other vehicles. “I needed to confirm that he was dead for good. Which he was, and no sign of reanimation. I figured, possible other contagion chance aside, that would be my best bet, except for eating one of ours—and unlike what you love to accuse me of, I have a moral code, and that’s outside of even my boundaries.”
“Fair enough,” I conceded. “I just wish you hadn’t taken the risk of possibly infecting the others with some shit from inside the lab.”
I got a less perturbed shrug for that. “I left the body in the decontamination shower after washing and slicing it up in the bathroom by the changing room inside the lab. I made sure to cook the meat to well-done before I ate it, using one of the Bunsen burners from the other labs. It tasted like shit but must have been enough since I stopped wanting to tear into anyone who happened to cross my path. I’d hoped I’d manage to hold out until we were back in the wild and try with some freshly killed game, but I didn’t want to risk it.”
As gruesomely fascinating as the entire topic was, that last part made me frown. “When exactly did you do this?”
He paused before admitting, “Last night.” Which accounted for some of the time he hadn’t spent attentively doting on me.
“Smart move,” I said, more because I figured he’d need to hear it than actually believing it.
Silence fell and quickly turned uncomfortable, making it easier for me to start blabbing my mouth off. “I have something to tell you as well.”
Nate cast me a sidelong glance. “If you’d wanted a slice of asshole instigator, you’d only have needed to ask.”
“Eh, I’m holding out for a juicy one, thanks,” I retorted. “Stone was too skinny for me. Maybe we can fatten one up just for that?” And because my mind got weird fast these days, the very idea gave me the creeps—but not because of the cannibal angle. “No, it’s something else. It’s something I should probably have asked you about before making the decision, but then it’s kind of my problem, really, and you’re the one who can, mostly, avoid it, if it goes completely against your grain.”
When I checked Nate’s face, I found him frowning at me, confused and not exactly happy about it. “I’m a little too strung out to play your bullshit games right now,” he said, and it came out somewhat as a warning. Something inside of me wanted to make the warning bells go off, but I quickly reminded myself that I wasn’t the only one who had a reason to be mentally past their breaking point.
“Aren’t you curious about what Hamilton meant about the falsified report?” Nate kept staring at me, the intensity of his gaze willing me to just spit it out, so that’s what I did. “Raynor did exactly what he said. She switched up the physical orientation of everything that hadn’t been damaged before, or so I think. That’s why Marleen managed to give me a good scare and some great new scars on top of scars, but surprisingly little damage. What Raynor left out was that they fixed me up with an IUD. Don’t ask me why—maybe to use it as an incentive for blackmail or some shit. Or, more likely, she had orders to sterilize me but her scientific soul couldn’t go through with it as the idea of us possibly procreating in the future was too tantalizing.”
“That woman doesn’t have a soul,” Nate muttered. I wasn’t surprised that was the detail he chose to respond to.
“Anyway, Richards hinted at it, and when I made a passing remark about me possibly reproducing, Hamilton gave a start, pretty much confirming my guess. And since Sonia already had to have her hands inside my body, I asked her about it, and, well. Surprise! Or, really not that much. No idea if anything can, or will, come of it,” I explained. “But, yeah. Because we have no other worries in our lives and I have all my priorities absolutely, perfectly lined up, there’s that possibility now that I can get pregnant. I kind of thought I’d freak out about it when I realized what Richards was trying to tell me, but just like with that damn serum killing us, I think I’m getting pretty relaxed about all that shit. Chances are I won’t make it into next month, so even if you did manage to knock me up before that, we’d never know. The upside of that is, even if you don’t, I’d likely not get my period before that, either, so that’s a bonus.”
Nate kept staring at something slightly past me, thinking, and I felt myself deflate. Springing that on him, now, might not have been the best of ideas, hence my rambling. I opened my mouth to make a joke—any kind of joke, which would likely just make it worse—but he silenced me as he leaned in, a finger softly brushing my lips as he caught my gaze and held it. Yes, there was fear in his eyes, but that was not the only thing I saw there now.
“I’m not mad at you for making that decision without asking me first,” he said, barely loud enough for me to hear, as if he wanted this to stay just between the two of us, our shared little secret. “Actually, you telling me that we might have another shot at making a baby is the best news I’ve heard all week.”
Nate using phrases like “making a baby” weirded me the fuck out, and judging from his goofy yet twisted grin, I wasn’t alone with that.
“And there I’d thought me surviving would do the trick,” I snarked.
Unlike what I’d expected, he didn’t take the bait, instead turning serious. “Bree, I would not have heard anyone pronouncing you dead,” he said, his tone hard, his eyes boring into mine. “You have no fucking clue how close I was to tearing Hamilton apart when I saw you lying in your own blood with him standing over you. And the urge didn’t go away even when I rationalized that it hadn’t been his fault. The only thing that saved him was the fact that you
would have bled out in the meantime if I’d chosen to come after him, and even if you hadn’t, the others wouldn’t have managed to get to you through us before it was too late. And it all came roaring back at twice the strength when you told me it had been fucking Marleen who tried to kill you.”
He swallowed thickly, licking his lips. I exhaled slowly, trying not to listen to the voice of panic screaming in the back of my mind. “That’s why you went looking for food,” I surmised. “You were hoping that slaking one thirst might quench the other.”
I got a jerky nod from him. “I didn’t dare try one of the guards. Chances were high that they’d gotten the serum, and I didn’t want that to possibly add to my own fucked-up biochemistry. Same with the scientists. I know that most of the serum project staff had been inoculated to cut down on possible work accidents, so they weren’t safe. That left Stone or one of ours, and I told myself, if he really was that insignificant, he would have been clean.”
“Well, otherwise you’d have found him shambling around the viral vault, still knocking over tanks because he didn’t manage to make his way out from between them,” I wisely pointed out.
Nate made a face but let my failed attempt at being funny slide. “Either way, it worked. I wouldn’t call myself calm and centered, but Hamilton’s not the only one with a good measure of self-restraint.”
I just had to interject there. “You mean, unlike me?”
I got a deadpan stare back that was one-hundred percent Nate—and more reassuring than anything he could have said. “Just maybe try not to get stabbed for a minute. You know that I don’t give a shit about your scars, but it might be nice if our kid didn’t come shooting out of your uterus already put back together three times over.”
I made a face, and not just because of the mental image his words created. “I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything. I don’t go looking for trouble nearly as often as it finds me.”
“That’s something,” he muttered before turning around to face forward again, leaning deeper into his seat. I watched him for a few moments, waiting for more, but now he seemed content to sink into one of his endless silences. I considered using Sonia’s diatribe for an excuse to bail and let someone else suffer endless boredom instead of me. I wondered if I should share the joy of what she’d told me—valid, yes, but also unfair; and Nate deserved at least half, if not more of the blame than I’d gotten. I decided against it. That was a conversation for another day, or maybe never.
“So your former lover and sometimes help is working for your former mentor who’s trying to wipe us all off the face of the earth now,” I summed up our most recent findings. “Guess we’re in for an entertaining summer.” Nate scowled at my description of Marleen—or so I thought, until he didn’t stop. “Why, what am I missing?”
He took his sweet time answering, and when he did, his voice was less sure than I would have expected. “Something about this is rubbing me the wrong way.” My mouth was open, ready for a snarky remark about that maybe being connected to them almost getting me killed, but he forestalled me. “Just, listen to me explain and then you can get in my face about it, okay?” he offered, unfamiliarly hesitant.
“Sure. Shoot.”
He did some ruminating before he finally let me have it. “On the surface, it all makes sense. I can see that, mostly because you haven’t uttered a breath of doubt. It’s my gut feeling that’s telling me that can’t be it. Or not all of it. And yes, I’m aware that I’m not omniscient and can be—and frequently am—wrong. But this is Decker we are talking about, and he has never been anything but methodical. If I look at his purported motives now, they don’t gel. There’s something that doesn’t fit, and it’s larger than us not having all the details. I’ve spent over a decade of my life learning to think and act exactly like he wanted me to, and even though I might not like it, his machinations should make perfect sense to me. But they don’t.”
“Could it be because he’s a manipulative asshole and just made you think you can read him that well?” I suggested. “I mean, we are talking about the guy who thought it was a brilliant idea to break both of his top guns by having one’s sister raped and forcing them both to watch it happen.”
Nate’s smirk was brief, but strangely self-satisfied. “Case in point. Take away your moral blinders, and see that for what it really is. He’d spent years of his life grooming and molding two independent, highly competent killers and was about to give them near unlimited capabilities, as close to superpowers as we have. He knew we would become the ultimate weapons, and because of our training and skills even more deadly than the men we were supposed to command. That’s not something you do lightly, and you make damn sure that you will retain absolute control over them. They’re both dedicated, and you trust them in that, but one wildcard remains—what if someone else can pull those strings? For me, it was easy. All I had for family was an asshole, ambitious brother who was a step away from estranged from me, and a mother who likely would have found the entire psychological side of it deeply interesting, maybe even enough so to forget who said subject was to her. I’d formed zero attachments to any women I’d had relationships with, if you could even call it that. But Bucky? He had an entire family, and while he is still the first to tell you that he couldn’t give less of a shit about his parents, his sister was a trigger waiting to happen. He was lying whenever he insisted she meant nothing to him. I knew that, and Decker knew that, and Hamilton himself must have known that as well, but I think he trusted that his act had been convincing enough. And then she ruined it all by showing up there, and Decker had his confirmation—and the perfect tool to teach his disappointing student one more lesson. He miscalculated, and that’s why he later let me switch tracks when he had to realize that his warning misfired. It made me grow a conscience and got Hamilton to lose all sense of self-preservation. A perfect tool needs to be always ruthless but is only useful when you can use it again and again. Decker rolled the dice and lost, but cutting his losses still got him a lot of good use out of us. Is it, without a doubt, the most fucked-up thing in the world to analytically plan shit like that? Absolutely. But his reasoning is right there, written all over it. Kicking off the apocalypse? Perverting the serum? None of that makes any sense. Not in the framework I’m looking at, or anything I can relate to that.”
I couldn’t say that was enough to make me agree with him, but as much as my skin was crawling with revulsion, I couldn’t wholeheartedly dismiss Nate’s concerns. “So what do we do now?” I asked. “Is your gut feeling enough to change our plans?”
He shook his head without hesitation. “No. We regroup. We do our best to weed out what moles and possible traitors we can. And then we come after that miserable old bastard and resolve this, once and for all. Whether we’ll find a bunker at that nav point Cole dug up or not, we will eventually pick up the right leads. They won’t get a jump on us again.”
I didn’t quite share his conviction that we would manage to pull that off, but decided that there was no use in telling Nate that now. Instead, I asked what I should have asked over a week ago, when it became obvious that Hamilton would be coming along for the ride.
“Why does he hate you so much? Hamilton, I mean. Yes, I get the resentment because of your former rivalry. And I get how what happened tore your friendship apart. But there’s a difference between that, and him outright blaming you for what happened. I don’t know how or why, but the more I’m forced to deal with him, the more I think the reason why he hates my guts is also connected to that. You know why, right? Tell me.” The polite thing would have been to ask, but really, almost biting it had a way of killing my patience for that.
Nate exhaled slowly, looking from the other cars over to me. “He hates you because I love you.”
I shook my head, irritated. “That makes no sense—”
“It makes perfect sense, to him,” he corrected me, his voice soft, almost wistful, as it sometimes got when we were dancing around this subject. “He lost the perso
n he loved the most in this world, while you, you’re still here, and not just that. I found you, and I made you fall for me, and whatever fucked-up thing keeps happening to us, you’re still here. You don’t turn on me, and you won’t just leave, and as it turns out, again and again, you’re damn hard to kill. I got what Decker took from him, and he feels like, of all people, I’m the last who deserves it.”
It made sense in a very twisted way, but Hamilton was nothing if not complicated. Completely screwed up, but complicated, even though he loved to pretend he was a very simple, straight shooter. Except for one little detail. “But why?”
I thought Nate wouldn’t answer when nothing came for a full minute, but then he forced himself to respond. Nothing good ever came from moments like that, but I felt like I needed to know. “He hates my fucking guts because Decker added one more level to the whole rape shit. One simple condition. If I’d agreed to do it, he would have been satisfied with that. I wouldn’t even have had to rough her up too badly. Simply fucking his sister in front of him against her will would have been enough. Obviously, I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t have done it to anyone, and I knew Hamilton would never have forgiven me. I think he knows that, if that’s even possible in a scenario like that, I made the right choice. But he needs someone to hate, and that’s my burden to bear. I am deeply sorry for all the pain and grief that has caused you, but unless I kill Hamilton, it won’t stop. You can hate me for that, and for making that choice, but if Decker is still alive and we are going to take him down, I need Hamilton with me.”
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 74
