Because the Rover was way too obvious, we left Clark in charge of it, opting to take our two largest vehicles instead. That meant redistributing cargo in the noon heat, but it made no sense to risk losing most of our medical supplies and a lot of ammo and explosives. We then split up, only to stop about a mile later when Nate spied a farm off the road that he insisted we shouldn’t pass up. After making sure that it was actually abandoned, I was set to washing my hair while the others gathered all sorts of useless shit from the house. Pots, containers, but also a few sacks of rice, beans, flour, and a box of seeds. I had to admit, it made sense for traders to pick up things like that as it was easy loot. I still hated that Nate practically told me to “pretty up,” but now unrestrained my hair made me resemble a scarecrow.
It was the middle of the afternoon when we finally veered onto the road that led toward the settlement, my drying hair loose around my shoulders. We were still wearing our usual jackets but had changed our more utilitarian pants for jeans, combat boots for hiking boots or running shoes. I felt exposed and naked, itchy to keep checking on the concealed holsters on my calf and lower back. We’d also slapped the patches on at the farm, and whenever I felt a trickle of sweat make it down the back of my neck I couldn’t help but reach up and check that the thin membrane was still in place. It felt impossible to ignore to my touch, but whenever I eyed Nate’s neck my gaze kept latching onto the strangely bare sides of it, with only the middle X remaining. As much as I often resented what the marks meant, suddenly having them concealed didn’t just feel like we were cheating anyone, no. It felt as if we were betraying what we stood for.
It stood to reason that if it worked subconsciously on us, it would do the same on the good folks of Yuma, Colorado.
About a mile out we stopped once more so Pia and I could trade places. We didn’t expect anyone to recognize Nate or me, but just to be sure it was likely a good idea not to make anyone connect us to each other more than they had to. Taylor seemed highly amused by how I kept staring balefully at the wheel from the passenger side of the car as he angled it forward, taking the lead.
“You know, if you keep scowling like that playing dress-up won’t make a difference,” he observed wisely.
“It’s not that easy,” I grumbled, but did my best to smooth out my features. “Got any other great ideas while you’re at it?”
“A lot,” he replied, smirking at me sideways. “But you’re not enough of an actress to pull off half of them.”
That sounded like a challenge, but I didn’t feel like right now was the time nor the place for that. “Again. Not that easy.”
He gave something that I thought was a shrug. “How about you pretend to be someone else for the day? Like the bubbly, carefree girl you were before you had the choice to either throw your lot in with us, or die.”
So much for not frowning. “I wasn’t bubbly,” I complained.
His snort was shy of derisive. “I was there, at the checkpoint, right when Miller did his best to charm your panties off—again—with that coffee. Maybe you’ve always been hard on the inside, but on the outside you were all fluff and giggles.”
I knew that he said that to get a rise out of me, but somehow that statement made me feel melancholic rather than angry. “Yeah, maybe there’s some truth to that,” I admitted. “Fluff, sure. But not bubbly. Sam always said I was too stuck-up for that.” Why of all times did I have to think about her now?
Taylor seemed to get that the conversation was taking a nosedive, and the small laugh he offered sounded forced. “Maybe you should just try it now? Not saying that you should pretend to be an airhead. But they are painting you as a hard, unforgiving criminal. No one will mistake you for a monster if you are just plain old nice. Maybe if you pretend hard enough some of it will stick? Would be nice to see you smile again.”
I knew that he was still goading me on, but this time the humor sparking from his eyes was real. That more than his words made me realize that he really did care. It should probably not have been that much of a surprise. He'd taught me quite a bit about cars and how to keep my sniper rifle working at top performance. Even if I’d logged way more hours on watch with Andrej or Burns, Taylor was still family.
“Thanks,” I offered when silence stretched too long not to become heavy. “I appreciate it.”
“What, me making fun of you?” he teased.
“You giving a shit,” I clarified. “Even if it’s a totally misguided attempt at humor.”
We were close enough to the gate now that Taylor only took his eyes off the road for a second. “You’re welcome.”
Getting into Yuma turned out to be easier than I’d expected. Sure, they filched us, and I would have had to be blind to miss that during their “control” a few items disappeared from the cars, but they let us in without protest. At first I expected a trap, but our fake transponder signal matched up with one of their trader code lists, and as we didn’t try to haggle much over the parts of our cargo that they officially wanted to acquire, things smoothed out within the first twenty minutes. People were curious but didn’t regard us as a threat, it seemed. We were offered food and a place to stay for the night immediately, although one of the guards warned us that he would keep an eye on us. That seemed to count for the most part where my tits and ass were concerned, but I did my best to follow Taylor’s advice and smile at him rather than offer up a knee to his junk. Nate neither scowled nor pulled any grandstanding moves, acting a hundred percent the part of just one of the guys and not my misguided husband. It was still extremely weird to think of him as such. It made me wonder exactly what had to happen before that sank in.
About an hour after we brought the cars through the gate we were mostly left to our own devices. Nate and Martinez headed toward the local tavern, Taylor was debating with some guys over car parts that he might trade for something else, and Pia had disappeared off the face of the earth. I debated sticking with Taylor but their conversation was boring me to tears, so I decided to set out on my own. Yuma wasn’t large—at least the part that had survived and was now inside the dug trenches and fences—but must have easily a thousand inhabitants from the looks of it. It was likely a more thriving community than before the zombies had razed us to the ground, the town inheriting a feeling not unlike the bazaar in Dispatch. One thing I noticed was that trade was still going strong, even among the people. Currency might be a thing of the past, but from the many items being offered from small stalls everywhere it looked as if everyone was trading for goods and services among themselves, with outsiders welcome. Nate had decided that it was safest to let Martinez do the asking around where Gussy was concerned, pretending that he was more of a doctor than the medic he really was. Even before he stepped away from the cars, a crowd of people had started to gather around, and I was sure that he’d get quite the amount of pus to drain and small wounds to inspect. With antibiotics mostly a thing of the past, doctors and nurses were even more in demand than ever.
But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t randomly bump into Gussy, if I was lucky. She was supposedly living here now, so chances were that she might be curious about the traders dropping by.
Under different circumstances, my first stops would have been the weapons dealers and gear traders, but I could see where that was too predictable. So instead I stopped by a few stalls, looked over pottery and pans, and at the third asked, while chatting about stew recipes, if they’d maybe seen a friend of mine that I’d met a couple weeks ago. At first, no one had heard or seen anything from Gussy, but at the fifth or six round I got lucky, and an older woman mentioned that the local seamstress had a sister who might be fitting that description. I didn’t head right there but when the woman noted that someone like me—living on the road all the time—might appreciate some clothes that weren’t badly mended once in a while, I was happy to let her show me the way.
The seamstress’s shop—or rather, the two-room large hole in the wall that served as both her work place and private living
quarters—wasn’t what I had expected, but I couldn’t remember if I’d ever been to such an establishment in my life. There were clothes everywhere, as were bolts of fabric and other supplies, covering every available surface. The girl meeting me there—she couldn’t have been much past eighteen, if at all—didn’t look much like I remembered Gussy, but then she was wearing a light summer dress rather than combat gear. Before I could try to come up with a good excuse, my guide helpfully supplied that I was a friend of “dear Augusta,” which made the girl look both irritated and conflicted.
“You know my sister?” she asked doubtfully once the woman had left once more.
“Gussy and I met,” I offered, then decided that it wasn’t worth anything if I continued to hedge around. “I didn’t think it was a good idea to advertise too loudly where and under what circumstances.”
I knew that I’d found the right woman when rather than eye me askance her face took on a slight frown. “Yeah, that was probably wise,” she admitted. “People here aren’t that bad about it, but they’re a suspicious lot.” She then continued to appraise me in a new light, her eyes skipping from my jeans over my tank top. I was sure that this time she didn’t miss how prominent my collar bones had become, or that there were muscles moving under my skin rather than just sinews. “Why are you looking for my sister?”
I shrugged, trying to appear more jovial than I felt. “As I said, we met a while ago. Thought it would be nice to chat again as we were already here. Last time I didn’t get a chance to congratulate her.”
The girl froze, and it took her a few moments to bring emotion back onto her face. Was that fright that widened her eyes?
“Well, she’s not here right now,” she stammered. “And I don’t know when she’ll be back. You can leave a message if you want. Just tell me your name, and I’ll make sure that she gets it next time she drops by.”
Her rushed tone made my hackles rise, but I forced myself to calm down. The way she kept eyeing me now made me guess that she was trying to get a good look at the back of my neck, making the skin underneath the patches itch like crazy. I had to admit, it wasn’t easy to quell the disappointment at hearing the news.
“It’s not that important,” I assured her, pretending like I was interested in the dress that was draped over a chair. “I’ll just tell her next time I meet her.” Pausing, I made sure that I looked as non-threatening as possible as I turned back to the girl. “Just, you know. It’s great to hear that not everyone has given up on having kids nowadays. Last year made it look like, zombies or not, we’d get wiped off the face of the earth within two generations. Someone’s gotta make a difference, right?”
My attempt at sounding joyous must have been worse than I’d feared because the girl didn’t look any less tense now. “Maybe,” she admitted. “I’d just rather it wasn’t happening to my sister, you know? We don’t have a midwife here,” she explained.
“There’s still your mom, right?” I asked, perplexed. “She’s living, what, a week’s drive away?”
For whatever reason that seemed to alarm her even more, but she caught herself a few moments later. “In a pinch, that’s a week too far away.” She offered me a somewhat apologetic smile. “When you grow up with a mother who’s a midwife, you get to hear a lot about what can go wrong. But I’m likely boring you with that.” Her eyes flitted to the door, then to where she’d been sitting at her sewing machine. “So if you don’t need anything else…?”
Biting my lip, I tried to come up with a good reason not to leave yet. Gussy was likely not the only one who could answer the question who the father of the baby was. My eyes fell on that dress again, and I picked it up before I could look like the worst weirdo. “Actually, now that I’m already here I might look for something special. I don’t think my husband has ever seen me in a dress.”
It was an excuse, but as I kept running the soft, almost flimsy fabric through my fingers I couldn’t help but ask myself if it wasn’t the truth. Thinking back to how things had started with Nate, I tried to remember, but came up blank. Generally, wearing clothes hadn’t really been a priority in those first weeks. It was then that I realized—not without mirth—that the first time I’d remained dressed for an extended amount of time around him had been the day when he and his gang had taken over the Green Fields Biotech building—and for various reasons he’d gotten me out of my clothes, repeatedly, that day as well. And after that anything I’d picked up along the way had always been chosen for utilitarian reasons, and more often than not came with layers of tear-resistant materials and extra protective inserts.
Stepping up to me, the girl looked me over again before she eyed the dress critically, but her underlying nervousness didn’t dwindle. “What’s your size? Not sure that will fit you. But I can, of course, tighten the bodice if you stay for a day or two longer.”
Looking down at myself, I shrugged. “I don’t have the slightest clue. My weight’s been kind of fluid these past months.”
She nodded absentmindedly as she turned around and started going through dresses on a pole. “How about you try this one?” She held a navy blue something out to me, followed by a green one. “If you like any of them, we can take it from there.”
“Sure thing,” I said, accepting the garments from her. On the way over to what I thought was supposed to be the changing room I caught a whiff of sweat, making me scrunch up my nose. I should probably have washed more than my hair and the cursory wipe underneath my arms. It felt suddenly sacrilegious to slip on fresh clothes that weren’t my own, but pointing that out now seemed like a true faux-pas. She’d likely realized that earlier, which would explain why she'd seemed so reluctant.
Trying on a dress over a sports bra wasn’t exactly my definition of sexy, and one look into the mirror that was propped up against the wall and I discarded the very idea of the blue dress. I still turned around and struck a pose, should the girl intend to look in, thinking I needed help.
“Say, when exactly is your sister due?” I asked, trying for a light, conversational tone.
“Uhm, December, I think?” came the reply from beyond the curtain, hesitant once more.
I did the math in my head. Should the father be someone other than just your average Joe, she must have been beyond that fabled eight weeks bullshit that Sunny had been dishing out. I wondered how I should try to weasel out of her who he was, but then decided that there was nothing like asking directly.
“Is the dad still around? When I met her she didn’t look like she was attached to anyone, at least not outside of her unit.”
Silence answered me, and while it was hard to judge without seeing her, it seemed thick enough to cut. Her voice was pressed as she replied. “No, he’s not around, far as I know. At least I hope not.”
I couldn’t say what it was about that statement that sent up red flags, but suddenly I had a very different explanation for why Gussy had kept in the background when we’d rendezvoused with the Raiders. It made me feel insanely stupid to have expected something a little more harmonic. So much for being idealistic.
Swallowing thickly, I ditched the dress, suddenly no longer incensed to keep up this charade. Glancing beyond the curtain where her voice had come from, I looked for the girl. “Listen, I’m sorry if I said something incredibly stupid and insensitive. I didn’t know—“
She shook her head, making me trail off there, but somehow her anxiety seemed to increase. “Did any of the dresses fit?”
“I haven’t tried the second one yet,” I admitted, and ducked back into the changing room mostly to avoid having to look at her. Peachy.
I was still deliberating whether I should pull an utter asshole move and plain ask for how it had happened and if Gussy might appreciate some backup in the form of my trusty Mossberg when suddenly the girl pulled up part of the curtain at the very back, her eyes wide with panic. Alarm slammed into me as I instinctively looked for where I’d deposited my guns, but the stool where I was sure I’d put them down was empty.
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“I’m so sorry. Please don’t hate me,” she whisper-hissed. “They already nabbed our mom and Gussy, and they said they’d take our little sister if I didn’t comply with them! I didn’t rat you out, I swear! They probably made you the second you came here. I’m so sorry—“
That was about as far as she got. I felt the air stir behind me and immediately lashed out, throwing my weight behind the punch, but it was too late. My fist collided with an unshaved jaw the moment before strong hands closed around my shoulders like a vise. The biting scent of chemicals filled my nostrils but before I could begin to struggle, the cold, drenched cloth was pressed over my nose and mouth, the fumes alone enough to make my eyes water. I immediately held my breath and screwed my eyes shut, but a punch in the gut made my body react on autopilot, drawing air deep into my lungs—
And then, nothing.
Chapter 20
Awareness returned gradually. The first thing I felt was cold. Cold, hard tiles underneath my palms and cheek. Yet more of the same from my hip down my thigh to my knee, part of my calf, and the outside of my foot. Cold air whispering up my spine, the entire way up from my tailbone. Even before I managed to pry my eyes open I realized what that meant. I wasn’t wearing much, only thin, scratchy cotton between my torso and the tiles. But even through my closed lids I could tell that the light around me was harsh, not that warm tint of sunlight.
The air smelled wrong. Clean, but too clean. Familiar. Like the clean air in a lab, circulating through banks of filters. There was a diffuse ache coming from my stomach—they’d punched me, I remembered—but much more acute stinging from the insides of my elbows.
I finally managed to pry my lids open, crusted closed from tears as they were. Right in front of my nose there was only white—a tiled floor, as the haptic feedback from the pads of my fingers confirmed. More tiles on the wall, although several of them looked cracked from old age.
Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 Page 23
