My thoughts ground to a halt for a second, the pain deep inside of me flaring back to life, but it was annoyance that made me make a face rather than misery. I had no way of knowing just how much Sunny or whoever else from the Silo had related to them, but this sounded a little too close to home to be a coincidence.
“Why are you telling us this?” I asked, trying hard to sound neutral. Nate gave me a sidelong glance but remained mute. Belatedly I remembered that, just before we’d left for the Silo, Rita in Dispatch had warned us about the very same thing. Maybe that was why Dave brought it up now.
The loud, forced exhale that left Sadie made me focus on her instead. Her gaze latched on to Nate but then skipped over to me, her forehead furrowed as she hugged herself. “We’re telling you this because I’m pregnant. And Chris is the father. Well, was.”
I blinked in momentary irritation, not sure why she’d think that I’d know who around here she was referring to, until the last part jogged my memory.
“What, Bates?” I asked, not having to feign surprise. Nate’s reaction was more visceral, a shudder running through him that ended in a silent snarl, but when he realized that Sadie was already tense as hell with apprehension, he forced himself to relax. She eyed him cautiously, but turned back to me with her answer.
“Yes, Bates. Exactly how many Christophers did we have in the bunker over the winter?” She kept rubbing her arms, trying to comfort herself, but as she went on, her voice gathered more strength. “You can both keep your speech to yourself. I’m an adult, and I get to make my own decisions.”
“You were seventeen last winter,” Nate pressed out, obviously losing the fight with his temper.
Now that the cat was out of the bag, Sadie seemed relieved enough that she managed to stand up to him, her chin jutting out defiantly. “You’re such a hypocrite! But it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t like it was going anywhere. And that part wasn’t planned.”
Nate looked ready to continue berating her, but I cut in before either of them could say something they’d regret later. “So, it happened. No big deal.” Now I was on the receiving end of Nate’s glare, but I ignored him. “You’re sure it’s Bates’s?” I went on, feeling just a little shabby asking for confirmation.
Sadie snorted, agreeing with me on that point. “Of course I’m sure. I’ve only had sex with one guy, so unless we now all believe in immaculate conception—“
“Can you please not say that where I can hear it?” Nate griped, but shut up when Sadie gave him a humorless grin.
“What, that too crude for you? Deal with it. We fucked.” That she actually blushed at that last part would have made me laugh under different circumstances. So much for her mother’s insistence on her keeping her language clean. Nate winced, which made Sadie’s jeer brighten. But all too soon mirth left her again, and she turned back to me, wringing her hands.
“I didn’t know, when you left. But I suspected it, because it was the first time ever that I skipped my period. I know that I sent you guys out to fetch me protection but my cramps got worse from it, not better, and as we all know, all of you are sterile, so…” She trailed off there, shrugging. Nate’s jaw stood out from how hard he clenched his teeth, trying not to say anything, so I jumped in.
“Are you feeling okay? You’re how many weeks along now?” Eyeing her critically, I couldn’t be sure with her dark blue windbreaker, but she didn’t look pregnant.
“Going on four months now,” she hedged, biting her lip. Then her face fell and she reached out to me, her fingers like vises around my forearm. “Bree, I’m afraid. I’m scared shitless. I don’t know what to do! I haven’t even told Mom because I’m afraid that she will tell one of those weirdos that keep dropping by, and—“
“And all over the country pregnant women are disappearing,” I finished the thought for her.
She nodded, but it was Dave who replied, although he looked mighty uncomfortable because of the topic at hand. And they obviously didn’t even know just how loaded a topic it was.
“We can’t be sure, of course, but I’ve been listening in to what the folks over at Dispatch are chatting about. Not all of the women that disappeared fooled around with scavengers, but an overwhelming majority were known not to discriminate too much. That includes those that no one could confirm whether they were knocked up or not.”
The news kept getting better and better. Turning to Nate, I tried to ask him with my gaze what he thought of that, and the look I got in return was laced with the same pain and confusion that I felt. At least that confirmed some of the things I’d been speculating about since that trap at the factory.
The silence between us stretched, and seeing as Nate had apparently swallowed his tongue, I turned back to Sadie.
“You were right not to tell anyone. Anyone but Dave and us. I presume no one else knows?” She shook her head. “Good. Try to keep it that way. I don’t think your own mother would sell you out, whatever her animosities may be, but right now I wouldn’t trust anyone.”
Sadie looked unhappy getting confirmation for that, but she took it with a nod. “So you think this is connected? That there’s someone out there snatching up pregnant women? Particularly if there’s a chance that the father was part of the serum program?”
Nate and I shared another look, and this time I just couldn’t reply, so he did. “No need for guessing,” he said. “We know.”
Sadie’s eyes widened. There was no thinking that she didn’t jump to the right conclusions. Her eyes skipped from Nate to me and back, taking in just how exhausted and downright haggard we both looked, even after a week of regular meals and sleep. “Oh God, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, her hands convulsing around each other. Then she was hugging me again, her body shaking. I squeezed back for a moment but then pushed her away at arm’s length.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, trying to keep the world of hurt out of my voice. “I didn’t know until I didn’t die from getting infected. I wouldn’t be alive anymore otherwise. It all happens for a reason.” Without a doubt the worst lie I’d ever told, but I felt like she needed me to say that, judging from the look of guilt that crossed her face. Whatever had happened to me, it should in no way make her feel bad about the life growing inside of her. Swallowing thickly, I forced my voice to gain volume again. “What is important now is that you stay safe. Obviously, what used to be common knowledge is wrong because you are still pregnant, and from the looks of it, you’re going to have your baby. But probably not here.”
She nodded, vehemence seeping back into her voice. “I absolutely hate this, but I’m not trusting anybody here right now. You’ll help me, right? You’ll get me somewhere safe?”
I wondered if there was still such a place on earth, and was about to remark that, but Dave cut in before I got to it.
“One town is markedly absence from those lists. New Angeles.”
And there it was again—the oasis in northern California.
“You sure about this?” I asked, doubtful.
Dave shrugged, giving Sadie a quizzical look. “As sure as we can be,” he admitted. “Dispatch is not an option. Too many people. And we’re not sure about the Silo. We have no way to clear them, and considering you were there last before—“
I shook my head as he trailed off. “Knowing what we know now, I’m convinced that I was already knocked up when they did our blood screening in Aurora.” Thinking along those lines, something else occurred to me. Looking at Sadie, I asked, “How did you get around the screening? I presume that they screen everyone in the settlements, too, not just us outsiders.”
Sadie nodded. “It was lucky coincidence, really. I started helping in our triage station the week before, and they kept the samples stored in the fridge right there. I just swapped them out.” She looked guilty for a moment, but disbanded it with a smile. “They rescreened the woman I swapped my samples with. She was well past her fifties. They called it a fluke.”
“Smart thinking,” I agreed, although I didn’
t want to consider what would have happened to that woman had she been twenty years younger.
“So when are we going?” Sadie asked, looking expectantly at us.
“We are going nowhere,” Nate said before I could hedge around. Sadie’s face fell.
“But you said—“
He sighed, rubbing his eyes in frustration before he glanced around, mostly at the walls but also the mountains to the west. “I’d love nothing more than to make sure that we get you out of here this very minute, but we can’t. We’ve done a stellar job painting a target on our backs. Right now I wouldn’t even take my worst enemy with us on the road.” He thought about this for a few seconds longer, looking at me for help. I gave the smallest of shrugs. He was right with that assessment.
“We’ll find someone else who’ll get you to New Angeles safely,” I promised. “A couple of people owe us favors, and I’m sure that we can throw around enough weight to find the right group for the job. Are you starting to show?”
She shook her head, trying hard to swallow her disappointment. “The advantage of good genes, I guess. I saw a few pics of my mom when she had me, and she looked barely pregnant just before giving birth, fully clothed. Being tall and lean helps, I guess. But I don’t know how long I can keep this a secret. I’m trying, but, you know…”
I nodded, understanding.
“Do you have paper and something to write with?” Nate asked Dave, surprising me. When Dave extended another crumbled piece of paper and a pencil to him, Nate started scribbling furiously on it, using his palm as support. “Here, give this to Moore if you need help,” he told Sadie as he handed her the note. “He’ll vouch that it’s his child, and he’ll make damn sure that nothing happens to you.” At my raised eyebrows, he shrugged. “You didn’t really think I wouldn’t keep a mole embedded here for emergencies?”
I honestly hadn’t expected that, but in hindsight I probably should have. Moore had been one of Nate’s people who had infiltrated the Green Fields Biotech building and spent the entire summer trekking with us across the country. He’d often been on watch detail with Bates, I remembered, making me guess that they’d been tight. Ordering him to make sure that his friend’s child was safe was a sound move—not that any of Nate’s people would have refused to heed such a call in the blink of an eye.
Sadie stared down at the note before she pocketed it. “Let’s hope I won’t need it. I don’t know if I can act like we’re a thing, you know?”
“Not much acting required,” Nate offered. “No one needs to know that it was more than just a fling.” It took me a moment to get what he meant with that, but the way Sadie’s lower lip started to quiver was confirmation enough. Nate only needed to raise his arm and she mashed herself against him, crying softly as he did his best to comfort her. Seeing her obvious grief tore on the scabbed-over wounds on my soul, but over Sadie’s wheat-yellow head Nate gave me a look of warning. Not that I needed that, but it was a good reminder that just because I still felt guilty over Bates’s death didn’t mean this was the time and place to tell Sadie.
Dave shuffled from one foot to the other, then cleared his throat. “Sadie, you got the patches with you?”
It took her a moment to let go of Nate, but she wiped furiously at her cheeks until most of the moisture that had gathered there was gone. “Yeah, sure.” Reaching into the pocket of her jacket, she pulled out what looked like a stack of beigy-pink adhesive bandages, about half the size of her palm. She handed them to me. They were orange on the other side, and had a weird, silky texture.
“One of the girls from the Black Hills group made them,” Sadie explained. “She used to be a makeup artist. If you stick them on your neck, they should mask the marks, at least for casual inspection. The orange color cancels out the dark ink, and the outside should blend with your skin.” She grimaced. “She only had her makeup stuff for light skin tones, so try not to get tanned. If you happen to drop by a makeup counter in a mall next, can you fetch her foundation, concealer, and eyeshadows in orange and all ranges of skin tones that you find? We’re keeping this on the down-low, so we can’t really do a call on the radio for it. I already gave Jason a couple and wrote down the instructions for him.” Her gaze turned shrewd now. “You do know what foundation—“
Snorting, I interrupted her. “Just because I don’t mind sticking to natural camouflage colors now doesn’t mean I’ve never worn makeup.” No need to tell her that virtually all my knowledge hailed from Sam bitching and moaning over her bad skin days and makeup companies switching out textures. Or something. If I could find the right caliber ammo for all my weapons, how hard could it be to grab a few bottles of makeup?
“Thanks. That might come in handy,” I offered, not quite sure if I was lying through my teeth or not.
Nate, on the other hand, seemed less skeptical. “Might help should we have to pretend to be someone else,” he said. “Switching our radio transponder code out is only so useful if they can still count how many of us are marked up.” He had a point there. Of course he did. When didn’t he?
I would have loved to chat some more with Dave and Sadie—and try to plug up the hole deep inside my chest by assuring her that everything would be all right—but a loud whistle coming from the cars made me look over there. Pia signaled us that they were all but finished unloading. The people that were busy stuffing everything onto the pickup truck that they’d maneuvered through the gate kept eyeing us with unease, but not the outright hostility that Emma had displayed. Their behavior made me wonder if maybe they were simply not used to being outside of their little wall there anymore.
Once the pickup was back through the gate, the string of cars that had been waiting on the other side came rolling out, Jason in the lead. He got out of his SUV as soon as he’d brought it to a halt next to the Rover, grinning brightly as he sauntered over to us. Sadie hugged both Nate and me one last time before she flashed Jason a grin and skipped back toward the gate, looking like a silly eighteen-year-old to everyone who didn’t know her well. Dave followed her at a somewhat more sedate pace. I watched Emma watch them approach, immediately descending on her daughter as soon as she had cleared the gate. They had a brief if heated conversation that ended with Sadie stalking off, sulking. I didn’t buy that act for a moment, but she seemed to do a good job fooling her mother. It was such a display of normal behavior that what Sadie had told us seemed even more surreal.
“Mind if we tag along with you for a day or two?” Jason said, drawing my attention back to him.
“If you don’t mind getting shot at,” I offered, but left the decision to Nate. No surprise there when he inclined his head, telling Jason to have his guys take up position at the end of our column. That settled, I glanced over to Emma, wondering if there was any sense in trying to talk to her. There wasn’t much I could say, and even less that I thought Emma would be receptive to. The fact that none of the guards looked like the soldiers that we’d had our differences with of late put my mind more at ease than any promises of hers could have. They were just regular folks, like us. Or not, I reminded myself, as I saw one of the younger guards fumble with his rifle for a second. A new wave of sadness swept through me as I realized that, either way, it wasn’t my business. It took returning here for the message to finally sink in—this was no longer home. Home, if there was such a thing for me anymore, were the people standing at my back. Turning away felt just a little easier all of a sudden.
Someone clearing their throat at the other side of the once-again closed gate made me halt. Bert was watching us cautiously, a look of worry on his face. “Where are you headed next?” he asked.
I glanced at Nate, almost smirking when I saw him stiffen with what could only be suspicion. “Not sure yet,” he replied, sounding like he didn’t have a care in the world. “Might be heading back to the Silo. Commander Wilkes seems like he has some use for folks like us.” The first part was true, as was Nate’s assessment, but I doubted that we would be heading north again that soon. It w
as a good answer, though, particularly if he suspected that such information might end up being whispered into the ears of those we didn’t want to cross paths with all too soon again.
Bert nodded. It was impossible for me to guess whether he had bought that excuse. “I expect you will be digging in for the winter there as well? There has been talk of amnesty as long as the roads are covered with snow, but we haven’t decided whether we want to be part of that yet.”
Just that phrasing—as if we required anyone’s pardon—made my hackles rise, but this time I was sure that he was trying to tell us something between the lines. Either someone had indeed brought up the points that we’d discussed with Rita in Dispatch—that, come winter, most settlements would do well harboring a group of scavengers, to take care of minor issues that might arise over the months outside of their gates—or it was just another trap waiting for someone to traipse into. Knowing what I knew now, I couldn’t decide if we could allow ourselves not to expect it to be the latter. That very concept made me feel sick. And there I’d thought last year had been bad. At least with zombies and your random cannibals no one expected to be treated fairly.
A muscle jumped in Nate’s jaw but he sounded pleasant enough as he shouted back. “Good to know. Keep us updated.”
“Will do,” Bert promised.
Then there was nothing left to do than get back into our cars and drive off—and that was exactly what we did.
Chapter 18
I spent the next thirty minutes gnashing my teeth in silence. Lightning forked across the sky, momentarily blinding me, but the rain that followed turned the day so dark that I gladly shed my sunglasses. Within minutes the soil washed onto the road by previous rainfalls turned it into a mud slide, forcing me to slow down to a crawl. Nothing moved out there except for us and the wind-swept vegetation. I hesitated for another minute but then reached for the radio, keying it to our team frequency that I presumed Jason and his guys had tuned into as well.
Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 Page 20
