“Lead the way,” Nate said, waiting until I took the coffee from him. I took a deep breath through my nose, but smelled nothing. Could shock do that? I tried to remember when I’d last actually scented any food. I’d certainly been able to get more than just a whiff of the not-quite intoxicating mixture of body odor, beer, and stale cigarette smoke last night.
A nudge on my elbow made me look back up at Nate. “Stop overthinking this,” he whispered, pushing me forward into a slow walk. “Give it a few hours to sink in. That still leaves you ample opportunity to freak out. First, we need a plan to get into the Silo. Once we’re on the road and you’ve had time to process things, we can start hashing this out. You’ve been complaining to me that I don’t talk enough when we drive? Well, I’m a stellar listener, and we have over a thousand miles to go.”
Right. One step at a time.
“What did the doc say?” Gita asked, her tone slightly cautious.
“Results are inconclusive,” Nate replied without a hitch in his voice. “Nothing we can do right now, so no reason to worry.”
The way Gita looked at me made it plain that she didn’t buy that bull, but she didn’t comment on it. “You’re going home today, then?”
I nodded. I didn’t really think that I was contagious, but I was suddenly all the more conscious of all the people milling around in the ruins of the city. That thought also hammered home that I wouldn’t be setting foot into our camp, either, and likely neither would Nate. The last thing I needed was for Sadie to catch anything—her, or the baby. With a sinking feeling I realized that unless this would be the most uneventful run in the history of post-apocalyptic endeavors, and Dom only needed to take a look at me to tell me what fucked-up chemical cocktail he needed to put me on to clear up this mess, we likely wouldn’t be around when the baby was due. It hadn’t been something I had been looking forward to, but I could already tell that it would gnaw at Nate—and what it would do to Sadie was anyone’s guess. So far she’d always shown a brave face at the aspect of not having her mother and father around for the birth of her child—not to mention the sperm donor—but over the last few weeks I’d started to feel like Nate and I had become surrogates for them. With us out of the equation…
“Maybe you want to hitch a ride with us after all?” I proposed. “You and Sadie got along well the few times you dropped by. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind the company in the next couple of weeks?”
The horrified look Gita sent me made me crack a smile in spite of myself. “Dude, just because I wear eyeliner doesn’t mean I need to dive headfirst into the female mystery of childbirth,” she protested, crossing her arms defensively over her chest. “Seriously.”
Nate’s snort made me want to tense for a preemptive punch, but all he said was, “Then you’re in the best company.” That earned him a glare. The fact that he didn’t smirk at me made it obvious that he’d come to the same conclusion about our impending scheduling conflicts.
We didn’t really talk about anything else until we descended the stairs to headquarters. This time we were let through the checkpoint without a strip search. In fact, both security doors were wide open as we entered, making me guess that on our first visit here, the entire spectacle had been mostly for our benefit. Inside, Greene was once again perched in his leather swivel chair, but his desk was brimming with food rather than manila folders full of blueprints. Tanner sitting in one of the less fancy chairs that had been set up all around the table was a welcome sight, grinning at us as he got up to greet us. I forced myself to go through the motions—smile, shake his hand, respond to his mild joking in kind—but my heart wasn’t in it. My brain even less, an endless list of possible symptoms and complications starting to compile—but, really, all I could focus on was the mental image of that overgrown petri dish.
“That bad, huh?”
Greene’s quip made me look up sharply. His usual grin resurfaced, but in a toned-down version.
“No idea what you’re talking about,” I deflected, and for good measure reached for a croissant. Nate, about done piling an impressive heap of bacon, sausages, and scrambled eggs onto a plate, gave me a pointed look that I ignored. So what if this fluffy excuse for a breakfast held nothing that would sustain me for long? My soul needed this now. Even if I couldn’t taste it, I remembered, as my teeth sank into the croissant. Crap.
After two tasteless bites I shoved the plate away, and with a sigh let Nate push his plate in front of me. Tanner chuckled, but Greene wasn’t that easily thrown off-trail by our display of matrimonial bliss. “You do realize that we have working short-distance communication in this city?” he remarked.
“I don’t doubt that you’ve talked to the doc before we got there.” Picking up a strip of bacon, I gnawed on it, rather unenthusiastically. At least it had some crunch, and I was sure that my resident bacteria would just love the amount of fat they’d get to break down and subsist on. So much more valuable than cardboard carbs…
My train of thought derailed as something occurred to me. Seeing as stopping with a half-eaten strip of bacon hanging out of my mouth wasn’t that appealing an idea, I quickly chewed up the rest, turning to Nate without bothering to swallow first.
“Have there been any changes in the composition of the food that you’ve been feeding me over the past weeks?”
Tanner snickered again and Gita was hard-pressed to hide a smile, while Greene was still on the verge of wanting to wring my neck for answers. Nate took his time to show some manners as he swallowed his scrambled eggs, giving my question some thought. “Not really. I generally try to cram as much protein and fat into you as possible. Carbs only when I know that you’re about to go for a run or do some other work that needs full glycogen stores.”
That sounded about right. I’d had a suspicion that he heavily spiked what he sold as milk to me with extra protein powder. “Any idea how many calories on an average day?”
A muscle jumped in his cheek, hinting at Nate getting irritated—likely because he couldn’t yet guess what I was aiming for—but he answered diligently. “Somewhere upward of four thousand on a good day. Burns insists he runs best on six and I do well on five, so I figured given the height and weight difference—“
The last bit of bacon got caught somewhere in my throat on the way down, and I quickly washed it down with some orange juice. “Seriously?”
He nodded. “You are aware that your metabolism burns through quite a lot more than before you got infected.”
“Actually, I don’t think that’s true,” I mused, glaring at the OJ for good measure before focusing on Nate again. “I can feel my ribs and hip bones easily without having to suck in my stomach. I am not metabolizing all that shit you’re making me eat.” Four sets of eyes dropped to the heap of food on my plate.
Nate scowled for real now. “Bullshit. I know you girls often like to pretend that your shit doesn’t stink, but I have it on good authority that it does. And you’re producing accurate amounts of it.”
I didn’t want to know how he knew, so I ignored that point. “I’m not saying that my body isn’t digesting food. I’m saying that I’m not getting the energy from it that I should. It fits perfectly with Anderson’s findings. Must be the bacteria in my gut that went haywire, and of course you find them way further down, too. Some of the by-products of what they metabolize must be getting into my blood, leading to a massive immune answer locally. That’s why my blood is weird, but my lymph nodes are okay. We don’t have lymph nodes around our intestines. I don’t think.” Shit, my last anatomy lesson had been some time ago.
“That’s just fucked up,” Tanner offered.
“It’s actually a good theory, and much better than the alternative,” I explained. “All I need to do is give my gut bacteria a good reset, and all should return to normal. I don’t even need any antibiotics because if they’re so out of whack, there’s a good chance they’re resistant. Just not eating anything for a few days should do the trick.”
“You die
if you don’t eat anything for a few days,” Nate aped after me.
I rolled my eyes at him. “Won’t happen that fast. And besides, the body doesn’t give a shit whether it gets its glucose, amino acids, and fats from the diet or a bag and needle for a few days. Any pharmacy should have some nutrient solution in storage, or I can just mix something myself. The guys at the Silo could whip up something that wouldn’t leave me a vegetable for days, I’m sure.”
“Then let’s wait on that brilliant idea of you starving yourself until we get there.” Nate didn’t seem very convinced, and while I tried to put all the levity that flare of hope inside of me lent me into my voice, I didn’t quite buy my own theory, either—but what was the alternative?
“So you’re heading to Montana,” Greene observed. “You are aware that they’ll likely not let you in?”
Turning to him, I smiled brightly. “And that’s where you come in. Don’t you have some ‘open sesame’ lying around here somewhere? Doesn’t have to be much. Just enough of an incentive so they don’t shoot us on sight.”
Greene struck a comically musing pose that made it obvious that, of course, he had something, but Tanner cut right through his antics, providing an answer of his own.
“I’ve heard that there are a few people around who’ve been thinking about heading there for the winter, from the settlements farther away from us but still too far south to set out on their own. Neutral ground’s better if you don’t yet know where to throw your lot in, you know?” His grin was a mirthless one. “You remember Harris from Vegas?”
“He’s going to turn on us?” That sounded rather preposterous to me. Dan Harris might not have become my biggest fan on the way to the base, but he had stuck around for our trip down to Cheyenne Mountain, and I couldn’t quite see him turning his back on New Angeles.
“Not a chance,” Tanner said, laughing. “But he and his guys picked up some stragglers in the desert last week, and they’ve been talking about building a larger trade caravan. One last tour north and south before the winter cuts us off completely. I’m sure that if we give him a call, he’ll wait for us to join him.”
“Us?” I echoed, not missing how giddy Gita once again was.
“Us,” Tanner agreed. “You, him.” He indicated Nate. “Whoever else wants to come along from your camp. And Gita and me. Girl’s got some ants down her pants ever since we got back from Colorado. I’m teaching her some tracking and hunting skills so she can do something more than stand guard at the gates. Might as well get some good real-time practice out there where it’s not just trampled ground from our streaks everywhere you look.”
My first instinct was to balk, but Nate was already nodding. Not oblivious to my gut reaction, he shrugged. “If we look like we’re ready to go on the warpath, trouble will find us. If we just look like a group of people going places, with a few tagging along who must have already succumbed to cabin fever and were itching to take any milk run available just to get out of dodge, trouble might remain lying in the ditch from where they are watching us. Making sure a trade caravan is safe is as good a ruse as any, particularly if it’s an actual caravan needing to go places. Hell, they might have even posted a bulletin tomorrow asking for some heavy hitters to tag along.”
“They did,” Greene interjected, once more doing that villainesque steepling his fingers thing. “Just got conveniently delayed. Surprising how these things sometimes turn out.” When I eyed him askance, suspicion creeping up my spine, he was quick to make a placating gesture. “No nefarious reasons in the works, at least not originating from me. We hadn’t decided yet who to send on the next rotation for our resident moles up north. If possible, we won’t tear apart families for several months straight if a loner will volunteer instead. Just takes a little time to find the right people, is all. That you chose yesterday to show up was very convenient. For you, I might stress. For us, not so much, as now the convoy will automatically be high priority, drawing way more attention than warranted or wanted.”
I couldn’t hold back a chuckle. “Then again, who’d be stupid enough to send spies along when the entire country is watching? Touché.”
Greene shrugged. “I’ve learned to work around any kind of obstacle anyone will throw in my way. Usually those stack up wherever you are involved, but what else is new?” He made an unnecessary pause there before he turned serious again. “We have some stocks that you could drop off at several points on the way to the Silo. Legit business for legit settlements. If you happen to get a few extra tagalongs, who could get suspicious at that? At least I presume that you will stop in Utah to see if some of the Chargers are itching for some action? Last time I looked, neither of your groups tried to hide the fact that you’ve become tight friends.”
“Not that many people out there you can blindly trust with your life nowadays,” Nate offered.
Greene nodded, looking way too calculating for his own good. “That’s true. I presume you’ll set out today so you can take your leave from your camp tomorrow and meet up with Harris and the others from Vegas the day after? That should give us a day to prep our side of the caravan.”
“Two cars, no more,” Nate insisted. “Harris and his gang are usually three to four vehicles. We’ll up that to five, likely. Everything that’s more than ten vehicles is too good a target to ignore for any bandits out there, even if they know who we are. Reduce the goods to a bare minimum and get them all loaded onto a pickup truck that’s fitted with an extra machine gun in the back. We can get the rest of the goods on the way if they are easy to procure. If you have a secure line, fill Harris in and coordinate with them where best to meet up with us. And call ahead to the Utah folks to let them know we have some crates for them. If we can pretend like that’s our actual destination until we move on from there, all the better. Let’s not make it too easy for anyone looking for some fun before the snow will bog us all down.”
“Will do,” Greene agreed surprisingly quickly, his nod to Gita making me guess that it would be her job to do all that. Being just a handful of people came with a lot of disadvantages—like losing sleep on long watch shifts—but I certainly didn’t mind not having to play tour guide or travel agent again. That part about being just a handful of people I didn’t miss, compared to our last, grandiose mission.
Nate and Tanner then succumbed to talking strategy while Gita excused herself, taking a bowl of avocado-feta-mash with her. My mind wasn’t really up to joining the others, and with Greene as my only other option, I chose to continue stabbing listlessly at my food instead. Turned out, he had different ideas.
“Why do I get the sense that you’re not buying your own ‘oh, it’s just like gluten sensitivity!’ bullshit?” he harped my way.
Sighing, I put down my fork, taxing him with my best hostile glare that would hopefully disguise my unease well. “Exactly where do you get off on that?”
“Believe it or not, I like seeing you in good health and of a sound mind,” he professed, massively overdoing it when he put his hand over his heart as he leaned closer. “Like any good attack dog, you’re of no use to me when you’re not performing at a hundred percent. I just never figured you were still into lying to yourself like that.”
I absolutely hated that he saw through me that easily, but then he’d proven time and time again that he wasn’t just an opportunistic sleazebag. “Let’s phrase it like this. What else but grasp at the easy straw should I be doing? Planning for utter catastrophe? I can easily think of ten other causes than an upset gut microbiome that could be responsible for what was growing on that petri dish that Anderson might keep just for thrills and morbid curiosity. Anyone who studies life sciences—and I guess medical personnel as well—has reached a point once where they were convinced that taking the next breath will kill them. That a hangnail will give you sepsis, that your scratchy throat will turn into pneumonia, that your headache is a sure sign of a brain tumor, and that lump in your side has to be parasites burrowing their way out of your intestines after you mus
t have eaten some infected meat. The more gruesome the setup, the more you pay attention, and the better you remember it later in life when, say, someone else is complaining about some random symptom and you can whip out your morbid collection of flesh-eating bacteria-related incidents. So trust me that when I say it makes sense that between getting infected and consequently almost dying and starving to death, and then once more almost starving to death, oh, and being on a less-than-balanced diet for weeks upon weeks, my gut bacteria must be about to form a union and go on strike; it’s not just delusional, let’s-go-for-the-easy-option thinking. The rapid growth rate alone of that culture Anderson’s people did is highly alarming. That his botanist friend is convinced it’s a secondary bacterial infection riding shotgun with the zombie virus opens the floodgates to any fucked-up things bacteria can cause, and let’s just say that they freak me the hell out more than viruses do. Viruses just kill. They either infect a cell and reprogram it to build more viral particles until it explodes and they can spread, or the immune system clears it all out and you’re done. Bacteria? They linger. They form fucked-up biofilms and cultures that use quorum sensing that makes them behave almost like sentient swarms. They metabolize shit and it’s those toxic by-products that make you sick, not just the bacteria in the first place. You can die of complications of pretty much anything related to bacteria. And if that’s not enough, we have more bacteria in our body than cells, by several magnitudes. Any intruding bacterium can turn those fuckers around on us, and guess what happens when you’re outnumbered one to a thousand, or one to a million? You die. So, yes, I fucking hope that it’s just some of my resident critters having gone a little crazy, and that forcing them into collective suicide so they can start fresh from lots of yogurt is the solution. Is that realistic enough for you?”
Green Fields (Book 7): Affliction Page 4
