It was just a wild guess, but even crouching here, right next to it, made my skin crawl. “Could this be like the shit we found on that vest on that zombie at Harristown?” I asked him. “Just, I don’t know, in reverse?” He gave me a weird look before he bent over the box again and looked it over more critically.
“You mean like some kind of zombie repellant?” He asked. I nodded.
“Take it and look it over on the road,” Nate ordered before he squinted at me. “You feel that, don’t you?”
I shrugged, not entirely at ease with the underlying concept. “Let’s just say that when I came running this way, something almost made me turn back, and it did a good job stopping the three shamblers that were still after me. And that was the day after I managed to run right into a room crammed with zombies who were all standing around something that I couldn’t get a good look at, none of them wandering off until I gave them something to chase. Call me paranoid, but—“
“I don't,” Nate replied, keeping me from having to rehash all the details. “Whatever this thing is, we’re going to find out.”
We waited until Campbell had successfully unhooked the device from the solar charging unit, and then we were back on the road.
Chapter 34
Finding the underground complex turned out to be easier than I’d expected, although the hours it took us to get there were hell for me. Nate didn’t pry but his silent presence at my side screamed all the questions he must be having at me. I knew that I should have asked some of my own—like what had happened to them in the meantime—but it was hard enough to keep it together as it was, and not send the Rover into the next ditch.
I knew we were on the right path when the third gravel road that I veered into snaked its way through a plateau that ended with some trees on its western edge—the very trees I had passed in the first hours of my flight. The sun was already deep in the sky by then, painting everything in warm orange and ochre tones, lending the landscape a tranquility that I didn’t feel.
As we drew closer to where I guessed I had started from, I noticed the charred earth where someone must have built a pyre. A lone figure stood at the very edge of it, gnawing on a half-burnt arm—Gussy. I brought the car to a halt a good fifty yards away from her before I grabbed my shotgun and reached for the com. “This one’s mine. Stay back.”
The easy thing would have been to shoot her from a distance, but I couldn’t—not before trying to confirm a suspicion that had taken hold in my mind during my flight. As I walked up to her, I felt the familiar unease crawl up my spine that getting close to any of the undead always came with, but my heart was heavy with a different kind of emotion—regret. Regret that I had to do this. Regret that all I had been able to do was run.
There was no doubt about her being a zombie, but then I’d seen enough evidence of that when I’d escaped. She still looked fresh but her body was mottled with bruises, none of them having started to heal since she’d sustained them. I couldn’t say why that surprised me; I hadn’t exactly expected anything different. But she didn’t come right at me like most of them did, but remained standing there, watching me, as she continued to chew on the arm she was clutching.
“Gussy?” I asked, feeling just a little stupid. “Do you understand me?” Then, “Do you recognize me?”
She kept on chewing, her blank stare trained on me but not turning that viciously hostile yet. A car door slammed behind me, and I could hear the grass rustling as Nate started following me. Immediately the zombie’s focus snapped to him and lips curled away from stained teeth, making me throw up my arm. “Stay back!” Yet the damage was done, and the moment had passed—if there had even been one. She charged me a second later, just in time for me to shoot her head right off her body. She took another step toward me before she crumpled to the floor, a lifeless husk remaining.
I was still staring down at her as the others joined me, Burns not the only one giving me a weird look for my behavior. I wasn’t sure if any of them had recognized her and didn’t really feel like explaining.
Then the lower half of her naked torso gave a twitch, something beneath the skin moving, making all of us shy back collectively. My heart gave another painful twinge as I raised my shotgun once more and sent a slug into the zombie’s abdomen. At Martinez’s stunned look I offered up a simple, “Her child.” That about shut off any questions anyone might have asked.
Except for Nate, of course, who took a few moments to look over the body, taking in the state it had been in when Gussy had died, including the bruises and myriads of track marks. When he glanced back to me, I gave a one-shouldered shrug. “She didn’t attack me when I came across her on my escape. That’s why I thought that maybe there was something left in there, some remainder of her brain still working. I was likely just too diminutive a target.”
“Why would you think she was any different than all the other shamblers we’ve encountered along the way?”
“Because she’s been infected with a different strain,” I replied, having to force the words to make it over my lips. “They’re tweaking the serum. Reverse-engineering it. She seemed like she was stronger than most normal zombies, but have we ever encountered a really fresh one since last May?” Nate’s answering grunt didn’t sound affirmative.
Martinez hunkered down next to the body but didn’t quite touch it as he looked her over. “If it was a different strain should we maybe take samples—“
“Don’t you fucking touch her!” I shouted, way more vehement than I’d intended. Martinez’s eyes snapped up to my face, but rather than get pissed off he looked increasingly alarmed. Exhaling forcefully, I shook my head. “We burn her. That’s the least she deserves.”
No one corrected me that I was still using female pronouns, or that I kept skipping into referring to her in present tense. While Burns got one of the spare fuel canisters out of the car to douse the body, Nate had the others fan out to secure the perimeter. I lingered at the makeshift pyre—just some dry grass thrown over the body, the entire thing catching on quickly thanks to the fuel—until the skin was charred and her form no longer recognizable. Then I joined Nate at the open trapdoor that led into the complex. It was dark and quiet below, but that didn’t have to mean anything.
“There may be some zombies lurking still in there,” I offered, my memories way too vivid for me to want to go anywhere near that door. “There were four of them. No, five,” I quickly corrected myself. “With one more infected before all hell broke loose. Several personnel got bitten so it might be up to thirty, although I doubt it.”
Nate took that all in with a stoic look on his face before he told Pia and Andrej to advance. The Ice Queen threw a flare in first and we waited for the harsh green light to die down before first she, then Andrej, jumped inside. The rest of us—except for Santos who was guarding the pyre, and Clark who got perimeter watch—followed once we got the all-clear for the first four rooms.
My skin was crawling as I looked around, the view both familiar and completely distorted thanks to the lack of electric lighting, with only our flashlights illuminating the walls. There was blood everywhere, but someone had taken the time to remove the bodies. And that wasn’t the only thing they’d taken, it turned out, as we penetrated deeper and deeper into the facility.
It was all gone. Personal items. Gear. Weapons. Any shred of paper, down to the napkins in the mess hall. What was left was furniture, most of it destroyed, likely by the rampaging zombies. Even those were gone now.
The last place I wanted to revisit were the cells, but something drew me back there, and that had nothing to do with devices of any kind. I ignored the other cells—and the mangled remains of the chair—and went right over to the one on the left side, slightly off center. It looked oddly pristine compared to the rest of the room where it was hard to find a tile not stained with dried blood. I could make out where two puddles of vomit had been, but that was it. No other trace of its former occupant was left.
At the very edge of
the cone from my flashlight I caught Nate eyeing me askance, and this time I couldn’t ignore it. “Maybe she survived,” I murmured. “Although I doubt it.”
“Who?” he asked simply.
“Erica.” He continued looking flatly at me, making me frown. “Madeline’s daughter? They shot her up with my blood. Infected her with it.” Doubt crossed Nate’s face, making me snort derisively. “I’m not making this shit up.”
“And I didn’t say you were. But have you considered the possibility that maybe you were hallucinating—“
“I saw what I saw!” I shouted, but shut up before I could blab on. “Whatever. Let’s move on.”
The other room I wanted to avoid like the plague was the lab that we found, to the right of the exit—that dark room where I hadn’t dared venture on my escape. It had likely been a well-stocked, more or less orderly lab, but not much remained of that. All the bottles had been emptied, likely down the drain as there wasn’t much spillage among the broken glass on the floor. I checked the refrigerators and nitrogen tank—all empty. There wasn’t a single note or lab journal anywhere, neither on the desk in the corner nor in any of the cupboards or drawers. We checked. Halfway through the process Pia managed to yank too hard on a drawer and sent it crashing to the floor, making me chuckle despite myself—or maybe exactly because I was tense as hell. “Just like old times, eh?” She sent me a look that reminded me a lot of the madwoman who’d shot at me repeatedly as she’d chased me through air ducts, but that was the extent of our interaction.
I’d had enough trips down memory lane to last me a lifetime, so far was it for me to object.
We were just about done finding nothing in there when Campbell’s voice called us over into the room across from the lab. It was where their electronic equipment had been stored. Now there was only a bank of wall-mounted monitors and a single laptop on an otherwise empty desk. The setup screamed trap from a mile away, but before I could protest, Campbell made a calming gesture.
“I’ve looked it over from all sides. It doesn’t look like it’s rigged to explode.”
Nate mulled that over for a moment. “Turn it on. Let’s see what kind of present they’ve left us.”
It seemed to take forever for the device to boot up, my skin crawling so much that I was tempted to take my shooting gloves and jacket off and start scratching my arms. The moment the display came on, it was mirrored on the screens above, giving us all a good look. There was a single file on the desktop. Campbell quickly checked the hard drive but came up empty.
“That’s all there is on it,” he confirmed after doing some typing in the console. “Unless they’ve hidden something in the OS files, that’s it.”
“Open it,” Nate ordered.
It turned out to be a video file, and one look at it was enough for me to recognize it as a recording from one of the surveillance cameras. “Turn it off!” I said, not quite shouting, but vehemently enough to make Nate’s head snap to the side. At his raised brows, I shook my head. “You don’t need to see this.”
“I think I do,” he told me, turning back to Campbell. “Press play.”
I didn’t need to watch it. Actually, I couldn’t, my eyes immediately zooming away when I glanced at the grainy image. I knew well enough what had happened, and doubted I would forget, ever. I didn’t need to rewatch the whole drama take its course as Taggard first taunted me, then ordered his men to drag me out of my cell and tie me to that fucking chair. The audio was better than the video, picking up every single word. I so could have done with not listening to that again—and for almost my entire group to watch this shit. I tried to distract myself with anything, but my mind was blank, except for the memories running through my head. I forced myself to remain calm and immobile, although it took everything I had not to shoot that damn laptop to bits and pieces
The video ended with the frozen frame of the zombie looming right over me, not even cutting back to the blank screen.
“Oh, come on!” I chuffed, glaring at the screen in earnest. “That wasn’t even the best part yet!” But I could see why Taggard had made sure to cut the tape off right there. It was tantalizingly easy to jump to conclusions what had happened next—and as I caught Nate’s gaze once more, I could see that false knowledge sinking in right there, as he fought hard to compose his features. Just seeing that horror there made my blood boil, my barely suppressed anger bubbling right to the surface.
“Want to know what happened next?”
His pause was noticeable, and he sounded very careful as he responded. “Bree—“
“Actually you do,” I talked right over him, seething. “What that abominable fucker didn’t want you to see is that about two seconds later I managed to get one leg free, and that was all it took to kick all hell loose. Literally. I dislocated the zombie’s jaw, which made it decide to go for a target that wasn’t about to maim it, with all that less-infected flesh standing around. Taggard managed to get in a few blows but I bashed his head in. Or almost, which means he’s likely very much alive right now. I should have taken those few seconds to make sure, but I really needed to get out of there.” Taking a much-needed breath, I tried to rally my racing thoughts, but that was impossible. Just as breathing got increasingly harder. I was vaguely aware that I was starting to hyperventilate, the walls of the room suddenly closing in on me.
“I need some air,” I wheezed out before I whipped around and ran back into the corridor, scrambling up the ladder until all I could see around me was the open sky and the prairie. I staggered a few more steps away from the trap door before I bent over, about ready to puke up the trail mix that Nate had handed me in the car earlier. I managed to keep it down, but that wasn’t much of an improvement.
“We need to talk about this.”
I straightened but refused to turn around to face Nate, instead staring at the line of the horizon where the sun was about to set in the west.
“No, we don’t,” I tried to dissuade him again, but this time he wouldn’t let me.
“We do,” he insisted. “Look at me.” I shook my head, still not turning around, which made him reach for my arms and physically pull me around. I stiffened, jerking away when he tried to tighten his grip on me. But the move made me glare at him, so in the end he won. Not that I cared. His jaw was set and I could almost see the waves of frustration coming off him, the fact that all this was eating him up enough to dampen some of my ire, but absolutely inconsequential in the end—and that realization made me want to cry. Not break down and sob like before, but just weep for all that I’d lost.
“What the fuck did they do to you?” he asked, his tone low and gentle, but he was incapable of keeping a certain edge out of it.
“Nothing,” I replied, my own voice hoarse.
The look I got for that was absolutely insane. I kind of understood that. “What I just saw, on that video, wasn’t nothing, and that was only the very end of it. What happened? You know that you can tell me everything. You know that I won’t judge you. That you’re not responsible for anything that happened to you—“
“They did nothing!” I screamed, loud enough that in the distance a flock of birds took flight. “That’s exactly my point!”
I knew that he didn’t understand but finding the right words was so damn hard that I almost gave up. I realized that I must have been sounding like a raving lunatic, so I tried to explain, my voice shaky with emotion.
“That fucking asshole knew exactly how to get under my skin. You think they raped me? Beat me? They didn’t.” I paused for a moment. “Technically, they did beat me, but only when I put up a fight, and I dealt out a lot more than I got back. I spent days in there, scared out of my mind, without sleep, or food, and not nearly enough water. Sure, I did most of that to myself because I didn’t dare to even doze off, and I wouldn’t give them the chance to poison me with the food, which, I know, is insane because I did drink the water…”
Taking another calming breath, I tried again. “I’m not saying I reg
ret that they didn’t rough me up and beat me to a bloody pulp, like they did with Gussy. But I think I could have dealt with that a lot better than what they actually did. He used the girl to force me into compliance. I held out my fucking arm for them when they drew blood, and then stabbed her with that same needle! Remember when you told me that I’d always play the hero? Well, I did. I tried to. He gave me an ultimatum, and I hurled myself at it. I would have done anything to keep them from raping her. I wouldn’t even have fought back if that meant they’d leave her alone. But that would have been the easy way out. Instead he turned my compliance into her murder weapon. I killed that girl. And they didn’t even rape me after they infected her, so that I could have had something to take my mind off of what I did. So I could feel sorry for myself, or just plain hurt and forget about the world. He left her right there, in the cell opposite mine. So she could thank me, for being pretty much the only person who ever gave a shit about her. All I could do for hours was listen to her cough as she got sick. I couldn’t even take her with me when I escaped. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? Because I got away and I’m still alive, while either way, she’s dead now. And that’s all my fault.”
Nate kept staring at me all through my rambling—my confession—not moving a muscle as he listened to every word I said. I could tell that more than once he was tempted to interrupt me, but he didn’t, probably realizing that it was hard enough to tell him all this as it was, without having to resume and gather my thoughts. I didn’t know what I had expected—not that he’d laugh at me; we were beyond that. No scorn, because if he didn’t do one thing it was judge people for the tremendous fallout they produced, as long as it wasn’t all coming from the most blatant stupidity possible. He also didn’t offer any empty words aiming to console me, because he must have realized that, right now, I was inconsolable.
What I hadn’t expected was that he’d just step up to me, embrace me, ignoring whether I tensed up or not, and hold me, like a silent pillar that I could both lean on and glean any emotional support and strength from that I wanted—but that’s exactly what he did. I stood there, stiff as a stick, for several seconds before I allowed myself to relax against him. I didn’t cry, because all the tears I was going to spill had already run down my cheeks. I didn’t ask for his absolution because we both knew that he couldn’t give me that. He was simply there for me—and that was exactly what I needed.
Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 Page 41
