Green Fields (Book 7): Affliction

by Lecter, Adrienne

  “Made any progress on the files?” Burns asked when it became apparent that I was too enamored with the white doom outside to comment on it.

  “Some.” I sighed. “It’s not really anything I’m familiar with. Different part of the field from Raleigh’s research that I’ve seen so far. From what I can tell, his approach wasn’t to change the serum or virus itself but build a multi-component system to work around it.” I could see that I’d already lost him. Nate was pretty much the only one who ever listened to me prattle about the science of things, and mostly to indulge my thought process, not because he showed any actual interest. “I need more time.”

  Burns nodded at the window. “You’ll have at least a few days in that. Too bad you didn’t get that address when it was warmer. We could have made the trip within twenty-four hours if need be.”

  “Yeah, too bad,” I grumbled, hating how the paranoia at the back of my mind surged up nicely. As if my ire had summoned him, Nate appeared at my other side, reaching for the thermos to pour me another cup. I must have been too slow in wiping my face of any emotion because he raised his brows at me, silently urging me to spill my guts. “You get what I mean, right?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “That you wouldn’t have had to load your conscience with the guilt of killing hundreds in your little crusade?”

  That made me scoff. “First off, it was our crusade, not my personal pet project.” The guilt part I didn’t protest, although I still felt like I was doing a good job trying to ignore it. “But that’s not the point.” When both he and Burns kept looking blankly at me, I chuckled softly. “Don’t you get it? Fucking Bucky Hamilton had that same envelope with him. Likely with instructions to make me come with him in turn for agreeing to my terms. That’s why that bastard was smirking when I didn’t let him offer any conditions of his own. He figured I practically signed my death warrant.”

  It was real surprise on their faces that met me, and for once, one-upping them didn’t bring me any satisfaction. Not even the scowl that crossed Nate’s features helped.

  “How certain of that are you?” Burns wanted to know, but sounded doubtful of his question.

  “Of course I can’t know for sure, but it makes sense, right?” I grunted. “It all makes sense now. I thought at first that Taggard and his men weren’t all immune to the virus because when they first got my blood, they were very careful and wearing hazmat gear. But that wasn’t the reason—they just weren’t sure whether they could get infected with what else was already raging in my blood by then. A day later, they knew—or at least knew they couldn’t contract it—so they dropped the security measures. From what Wilkes said, he got the delivery about a week and a half later. Colorado was a month after that. And don’t tell me that Hamilton isn’t the kind of petty fucker who would pass up a chance like that.” No protest followed.

  “It was still an act of outright insubordination that will have cost him,” Nate pointed out.

  “To hurt you? I’m sure he’ll go a lot further than getting a slap on the wrist,” I retorted.

  Burns listened in silence to us, seeming increasingly more unhappy. “They could have reached you in New Angeles. Must not have been top priority if they didn’t even try.”

  I shrugged. My guess was as good as any. “Maybe they were pissed that we let Torres take out his misgivings on Alders. Maybe Hamilton told them I refused. Who knows? Even more importantly, who cares?”

  “I care,” Nate bit out, positively vibrating with frustration. “If this is true, I’m going to eviscerate that sorry excuse for an asshole next chance I get.”

  Shaking my head, I bumped my hip against his. “Trust me, he’ll see it coming from a mile out, and he’ll be ready for you.”

  “And you think that will stop me? Or save him?”

  “Already dead set on avenging me?” I joked. “Shouldn’t we at least try to keep me alive first? Just a thought.”

  As I’d expected, that drew an exasperated grunt from him, but did the job of derailing his need for vengeance. “First things first. Not sure about their ability to keep communication up, but by the time we get there, they will be expecting us. Let’s hope that makes a difference.”

  “The data’s good, so that will help,” I assured him. “And I doubt that they sent out that invitation just because they’re banking on my desperation. They must want something from us, or else they would have gone about this in a different way. If it was just for curiosity’s sake, they already have two bodies. That should suffice.” At Nate’s raised brows I shrugged. “They got Stanton, and they took most of the semi-dissected zombie with them that caused this whole fracas with the Silo. Dom told me they were only allowed a small sample size to use for their own experiments. The rest went into a body bag in the back of a Humvee.” As much as I was sorry for what had happened to Stanton, at least it would likely help me as whoever was waiting in that black ops lab had had weeks to analyze what exactly was going on. Now all I could do was hope that it wasn’t too late.

  Silence settled, uncomfortable as fuck. I slurped more tea, mostly to have something to do while Nate seemed to glare a hole into the floor he was standing on.

  “Any guess how long it will take us to get to Esterhazy?” I asked when no one spoke up.

  “In this weather, if we manage to stay on the roads? Three days, maybe four,” Nate estimated.

  “If?”

  I got a glare for my doubtful tone. “Don’t jinx it. With luck, the weather will ease up in a day or two and we’ll at least know if we’re heading in the right direction.”

  “Remind me not to ask next time,” I supplied, trying but failing to suppress a yawn.

  “Get some sleep,” Nate more told me than advised. “And don’t forget to take the rest of the meds. There were still some left from the first round you counted out earlier.”

  “That shit’s more likely to kill me than cure me,” I complained, but dutifully pulled out the plastic baggie from my pocket. Still ten left, which I swished down with the last of the tea. There were another few doses left in the car.

  Even though I felt like protesting it, I was out as soon as I’d crawled back into my cocoon of a bed.

  Chapter 17

  The next morning didn’t so much dawn as Jason decided that it was time to break camp. It took the guys a good twenty minutes to get the cars out of the heap of snow they’d turned into during the night, and moving tentatively northeast. Burns was driving, following Charlie down what must have been a road as it was too smooth for grass underneath the still-growing blanket of white. It was freezing cold inside the car, even with us bundled up in the blankets that we’d taken with us. At the next town we reached—what felt like fucking forever but was likely closer to an hour—we stopped and busted down a few more doors to get more gear suitable for these conditions. It turned out, the people who had been living here had much better stocks than we’d found in stores so far, if coming with the odd barely-moving, locked-in zombie trying to crawl after us. We didn’t bother killing them—the wolves whose tracks we found all around the houses would take care of that, I was sure. I couldn’t help but frown when I saw that Nate also packed any additional large backpacks that he found and several pairs of snowshoes.

  I’d counted on being able to continue working on the files during the drive, but with all the jostling and sliding, snow chains notwithstanding, I was ready to throw up within minutes of trying, thus abandoning that quest until we stopped for lunch. I only realized how much our body heat had warmed the interior of the car when we got out once more and it was even worse than I remembered from our raid. At least the snowfall had lessened, but it was still so overcast that one in the afternoon looked more like just after sundown.

  Three spoons into my can of beans, I was hunched over next to the car, hurling not just that up but what remained of breakfast and dinner from last night—that again looked decidedly undigested. The white chunks in between must have been the pills I’d swallowed. The fact that it al
l came with some bloody slime was ever so slightly disconcerting.

  “So much for that,” I muttered as I grabbed some snow to get the splatters off my face and jacket. Nate stood like a glowering pillar next to me, his face as animated as stone. “Liquids still work?” he asked, failing to sound unconcerned.

  I shrugged. “I don’t see the three gallons of tea that you force-fed me since yesterday, so, I guess?”

  He disappeared from my side, only to reappear a minute later, vigorously shaking the thermos I’d been nursing all day. I recoiled from the brown sludge I found inside when I opened it. “Just hot water and protein powder.” When I kept glaring at him, he gave me a toothy smile. “And some dried eggs, cake mix, mashed potatoes, pesto, and a can of tuna. I’ve dissolved your meds in the tea first before I dumped in the rest. What are you complaining about? You can’t taste it, anyway.”

  “There’s still the texture,” I complained—but carefully let some of the sludge dribble into my mouth. The first swallow went down and didn’t make a reappearance right away, so I kept sipping. Except for a belch halfway through that made Burns inch away from me, I downed the entire bottle without incident. Jason and Charlie were more than happy to split my portion of what the others got for lunch, and fifteen minutes later, we were back on the road.

  It was getting darker by the time we rolled by a sign indicating the border. Behind it, the remains of a wind-torn Canadian flag were battling the test of time. No one commented on us leaving home; outside, it didn’t look different except for the road signs changing—what little of them we could make out when Jason stopped and wiped one clear, checking with Charlie that we were still on track.

  “Don’t forget to dump maple syrup into my dinner,” I told Nate. “Even if they’ve managed to contaminate that as well, I doubt I will turn into a zombie any quicker than at the current rate.”

  He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t sure whether the muscle jumping in his cheek was from him trying not to laugh, or gnashing his teeth.

  The storm got worse once full dark fell, leaving us no other option than to stop at the next possible shelter—a house just beyond a sign that proclaimed that a town must be somewhere around, but with visibility getting more abysmal by the second, I had no clue how big it was. Small, I figured from the fact that the house didn’t exactly look like a mansion, the doors and windows boarded shut. I was ready to grab my shotgun and bust down the front door, but Nate called me back, unceremoniously locking me inside the car while he, Burns, and Tanner started the cleanup. And quite the cleanup it was, judging from the no less than thirty shots fired. It took them a good ten minutes to reappear, gear splattered with gore.

  “We left them out back,” Nate explained as he rubbed himself down with snow before getting his gear from the car. I didn’t check; the first thing I noticed as I stepped through the front door were the many picture frames full of tiny, smiling faces.

  While Burns and Charlie made dinner—and Nate “dinner” for me—I got as comfy as possible with my blankets and printouts, and continued going through Raleigh’s files. I stopped halfway through a paragraph in the second file, quickly leafing to the back of it where he’d kept a short literature reference list—once a scientist, always a nerd. Puzzled, I continued to read on, what felt like the frown of the ages appearing on my forehead. Distracted enough not to care, I chugged down the concoction that Nate handed me as he sat down by my side, a silent companion first, then a convenient pillow once he was done eating himself. There were too many layers between us to sense his residual heat, but I still felt my mind calm down as my body snuggled against his. He didn’t ask so I didn’t explain, but when I gave up for the night and turned off my flashlight, I felt just a little bit more optimistic.

  What remained of that optimism was squashed the next morning when I only made it a third through the reddish sludge that was pretending to be breakfast before puking all over the well-used hardwood floors of our shelter. I tried tea next, but my stomach was too upset to have any.

  “How much of the antibiotics are left?” I asked Nate once I could breathe freely again.

  “That was the last of them.”

  I did a quick calculation in my head, making myself stop before I got to the conclusion. “Let’s try again at noon with just water and protein powder,” I suggested. “It’s entirely possible that my body’s just rebelling because your culinary skills etched away the better part of my stomach lining.”

  Nate nodded silently, getting back to prepping a full battery of thermoses to take on the road.

  The moment we stepped outside, we were met with a stunning view—in my case, literally so as the bright sunshine made me stagger back inside quickly enough that I ended up on my ass. During the early hours of the morning, the storm had passed, leaving a snow-bright pristine landscape out of a cheesy winter movie outside. The town, if you could call it that, was a handful of buildings spaced apart, barely identifiable as such only where the wind had blown away some of the snow. It was all soft, and white, and beautiful—at least what I could make out until my tearing eyes turned it all into swirls of white and blue.

  “Good news is, we should make better time today,” Jason proclaimed. “Plus, Charlie found us a shortcut that will easily take a day off our tour.” He pointedly didn’t look in my direction, but the message was clear—the sooner we got there, the better.

  Even with snow everywhere, we made better time today. It was still icy cold, something I complained about until Nate mentioned that we’d have an ice rink for a road tomorrow if all that powder started to melt, then froze over during the night—not quite that appealing. I hawked and coughed my way through the morning, but the tea I tried just after ten remained down, a good sign.

  A little while later, we reached a bridge spanning a riverbed frozen solid below. Like so many other bridges, crossing it was slow going as several cars had broken down there, but someone ahead of us must have cleared a way already as the cars managed to squeeze through the worst of it without scratching the paint jobs terribly. Only days ago, that would have made me cast around, shotgun in a tight grip, but now that realization was close to comforting. Getting picked up by the people we were looking for was not the worst-case scenario I could think of. If they’d built their base up here—and likely reinforced it, judging from the scavenging efforts we’d seen all over the region in summer—they likely had invested in vehicles equipped for the climate. Getting a lift in a well-heated Humvee that someone had turned into a snow plow? Yes, please.

  Of course, that didn’t happen.

  But what did happen was that the bridge started to collapse when the lead car had barely traversed the very middle of it.

  At first, I didn’t quite understand where the vibrations that shook the car were coming from. The high-pitched whine of steel beams bending was a giveaway, but by then onsetting panic made logical thinking hard. Concrete crumbled, asphalt tore apart, and suddenly the car was sliding sideways off the tilting road, the rails coming closer and closer to my window. I caught a glimpse of Jason’s car trying to shoot ahead, off the unstable middle part, only to be swallowed by the gap that appeared when the bridge fell apart. Then we smashed into the rails, the impact hard enough to drive the air from my lungs. More shocks, followed by that weird weightless sense of being airborne before we smashed into the riverbed below, the sound of ice cracking barely audible under the groans of the frame of the car being smashed—and then pelted by blocks of concrete, the first one landing hard enough to reduce any headspace I’d had above my seat.

  I didn’t need Nate’s frantic shout to know that we couldn’t stay like this for long. Grabbing for the buckle of the belt harness, I tried to free myself, but it wouldn’t budge. While I still tried, Nate was already leaning over and slicing through the belts with his knife. Another hard impact sent the car rolling onto the passenger side, Nate’s knife slipping. I felt the bite of the blade along my left arm but ignored it as I worked on tearing myself out of the harnes
s. I managed just as the car stabilized once more, making me tumble against the door.

  I was just about to heave myself into a semi-upright position when Nate came crashing down on me, narrowly avoiding crushing me against the smashed door by bracing himself against the seat and forward support struts. “Stay down,” he hissed at me. “It’s not over yet.”

  A groan coming from the back row made my hackles rise, but a moment later Burns followed it up with a pained but clear, “I’m good. Just a little banged up.”

  That we were. There was a cut on Nate’s forehead that dripped single drops of blood onto my shoulder, but rather than reach up I did my best to brace myself where I was crouching. Several more blocks of concrete came down on the car, making the entire frame shudder, but it remained upright.

  Then I felt it—cold water seeping into the foot room of my seat, soaking my pants and gloved hands, slowly inching toward my right foot. “Uhm, we have a problem,” I noted, splashing my hand into the water rather than relying on a verbal explanation.

  Nate cursed under his breath, craning his neck to try to get a look outside for a better grasp on the situation. “I don’t think it’s deep enough to fully fill the car. We would feel the currents if they were about to sweep us away.”

  He was probably right, but I still didn’t like sitting in freezing cold water on top of everything else.

  Above us, metal continued to groan, pelting the car with yet more debris—until it stopped, the quiet that settled over everything eerie. I was about to relax, opening my mouth to ask Nate whether he thought it was safe for us to crawl outside—or at least for him to move his knee off my hip—when the loud boom of an explosion made me cry out. The entire car rocked as it was hit by the shockwave, tilting precariously toward the side before it settled again. Over the ringing in my ears, I could hear male voices shouting, making me both anxious and relieved.