Green Fields (Book 6): Unity

by Adrienne Lecter

  All that seemed logical, but told me absolutely nothing. “And how exactly does that tell us where to go?”

  Pia shrugged. “Could be a perimeter schedule. Or pickup route. There has to be a reason why they guard their location so well, and manage to do so, too.”

  “I’ll get the portable GPS,” Nate said, handing his maps to me. “Let’s hope we get some reception.”

  “Wouldn’t it make sense that you do, if they leave this list of whatever these points are here?” I wanted to know.

  It took Nate a while for the device to spit out our exact coordinates, and then another few minutes flipping through the pages to find an entry that coincided with said location. The list wasn’t periodical, to the point where the different coordinates seemed to be used almost at random. Taking the maps, Nate did his best to estimate where the other coordinates were, circling areas on the map. When he started tracing patterns, following the list, I realized what this was all about.

  “Those are corridors!” Nate gave me a bland look, making me pull the map from his fingers. “See, here. The sequences aren’t random. They always go in threes and fours, if you ignore the directions but stay right outside of them.” I still got only an unblinking stare back, making me sigh. “Here, give me that list—“

  The second my fingers touched the notebook, it was as if a truck slammed straight into me. I doubled over, my hands holding my head while breakfast left my stomach in one violent heave, but there was nothing to guard myself against. My teeth hurt. My bones hurt. The very blood in my veins hurt. It was over about two seconds later, but the aftereffects had barely started to dissipate when the next pulse went out, sending me to my knees.

  Fuck, that hurt.

  Belatedly, I realized that Nate was shouting at me while the other two were searching around us, rifles at the ready. It took me a moment to realize that the reason he was talking so loudly was because he was trying to be heard over a strange, keening noise—that came from me. Clamping my hands over my mouth, I did my best to stifle my scream, but it took me five more pulses to get a grip on myself.

  “It’s like those anti-zombie pulses they had in Isabella,” I ground out between gritted teeth. “Only a million times stronger!”

  Nate gave me a frustrated look, then held out a hand to help me up, but I could barely stagger over to lean against the Rover’s side. I checked my eyes behind my shades in the side mirror just to make sure they weren’t bleeding. It certainly felt like they should be.

  “Guess that means we’re on the right track,” Nate said, still hovering behind me to keep me from ending up on the ground.

  “I’m fine,” I bit out, the next pulse proving that I was anything but, yet I was determined to somehow tough this out. “Just think how much this affects the shamblers if it brings me to my knees,” I told him. “And I was right. Just check the locations versus the directions. Those are corridor coordinates, where it’s safe to be because they’re chasing all the zombies out.”

  “Safe, provided you didn’t marry a zombie girl,” he offered, flashing me a quick grin that I ignored. “Sounds legit. I don’t see any other way that they would keep their city from being constantly overrun.” He continued to eye me critically, the mirth from before gone. “Can you drive? If you can feel where the zombies might be—or not—that would make you our ideal compass.”

  I waited for two more pulses to rock through me before I gave a hesitant nod. “I think I can. If I don’t have to go fast.”

  “Simply not getting eaten should be sufficient as a goal. With so many shamblers around, I wouldn’t want to go much faster than at a crawl, anyway.”

  It was settled then, and five minutes later I started rolling down the access road leading west, seeing as that’s where I felt the most amount of resistance. I soon realized why—a second pulse generator, or whatever that thing was, had been posted about half a mile from the first. About halfway between them the worst of the urge to purge my stomach dissipated to a queasy feeling, but very soon picked up intensity once more. Five more times I forced my body to go through the same cycle before I had to stop, sweating like a pig while my skin felt clammy and downright cold to the touch at the same time. Nate’s concern was visible in every line of his body, but the odd movement we caught behind windows and busted-down doors kept me rooted in my seat. No way I could fight or shoot in my current condition, so we were stuck like this. I still had to allow myself a few minutes of respite, until one of the shamblers started trotting out of that house over there, looking like barely more than a skeleton with bits of parchment-thin skin adhering to its frame. That sight freaked me out enough to send me braving the next rise in the road, hoping that the increasingly stronger pulses would deter the zombie.

  “Can you tell where we are in that list yet?” I asked Nate when we made it past the next beacon.

  He shook his head, frustrated. “There’s nothing in this entire area. They only added certain points in their defenses.” It made sense; else that list would have been books long, not contained within a few pages for sequences that ran for days.

  I was just about to ask where the next beacon might be located when I felt it—an even stronger wave of aversion coming from up ahead but more to the south. When I mentioned that to Nate he continued scouring the maps until his fingers hovered over a point between two letters on the tattered paper. “Look about accurate to you?”

  I gave a noncommittal shrug. “Guess so?”

  “Head in that direction,” he went on, then paused as he gave me another critical look. “Provided you can keep it together?”

  I gave a curt nod and sent the Rover off the road and across the dried grassland bordering on dirt.

  We spent a good three hours like that, chasing beacons that continued to make me rue my very existence, until suddenly, the last pulse dissipated into nothingness, leaving me shaking in my seat. Nate barked a short order for the other car to catch up to us as we stopped, and he and Pia spent another few minutes comparing notes on their copies of the beacon list. Burns held out some chewing gum to me which I ignored with a snort, but when he didn’t budge I finally accepted a strip and started listlessly pushing it around in my mouth. It did nothing to stem the lingering nausea, but it didn’t make things worse, either. One upside of being unable to taste anything was that this also included the barf and bile that I was sure was still heavy on my breath.

  “I’m starting to wonder if this really is worth it,” I murmured, only realizing I’d voiced that thought when Burns gave a brief scoff.

  “A few hours of being a little green around the nose and you’re already throwing in the towel? I’m starting to think they actually managed to brainwash you in that lab.”

  I flipped him off, earning myself a loud laugh, but somehow that remark made me feel a little better. He was right, of course. Short of actually biting the dust, nothing would make me stop—and feeling that conviction still simmer in my guts lent me a surprising amount of comfort.

  “Where to next?” I asked Nate as he got back into the car.

  Still frowning, he showed me the map. “We’re still not sure exactly where we are on that list, but it makes the most sense to get across the mountains here...” he traced the path with his finger “...and hope that once we get to the other side, we can extrapolate where the next corridor opens up.”

  “So, off-road?” I summed up his instructions.

  “Not sure we could use the highways, even if we wanted,” he replied, the hint of a smile on his face. “Still too many cars broken down there. Doesn’t look like anyone tried to do any cleanup in the entire state.” Not a surprise, really, considering how many undead were around.

  “Off-road it is,” I agreed, and as soon as Pia and Burns were back in the Jeep, we went on. The heat of early afternoon was unbearable, making the air all around us flicker and dance, but I didn’t dare unzip my jacket. Nate kept foisting lukewarm water bottles at me, but even so I could feel the sun leach the very life right out
of me. My lips felt like someone had sanded them down, and my eyes and throat hurt worse than when I’d actually been dying—or at least, they felt like that. Minute after excruciating minute went by as I bumped my way across the range of hills, ambling further southwest. A few times I glimpsed a four-lane highway bisecting the hills, proving that Nate’s assessment had been right; cars had broken down everywhere, making the roads look like a sick kind of art installation rather than the veins of traffic they used to be.

  Nate pointed at a rise off to the right of us. “Stop about halfway up there. We take the short hike to the top on foot.”

  Getting out of the car was actually a relief. At least the air was moving around us, if softly. A faint whiff of decay tickled my nostrils, but it was below the threshold where my fight or flight response kicked in, so no undead near us. I left my car door open, hoping that the perpetual stench of sweat would dissipate—and should we have to beat a hasty retreat, those extra seconds might make a difference. I trudged after Nate, hanging back to join Burns while Pia hiked up ahead. There were no buildings nearby, or even a bush large enough to hide anything above the size of a coyote. I still didn’t feel safe out here. Something was going on, and it wasn’t sitting right with me. Maybe it was just the beacons, but I doubted it.

  I was still considering that when I caught up to Nate, his eyes glued to his binoculars. Below the mountain we were standing on—if one wanted to call it that—there were a few foothills, but the soft slopes soon opened into a basin that stretched the entire length of our view. At first I thought it was just the heat mirages again that made it seem as if something was moving down there, but then I realized that the angles were all wrong for that.

  “Please tell me I’m hallucinating this,” I croaked, my throat no longer parched just because of the temperatures.

  Nate cast me a wry glance as he held the binoculars out to me. “Nope.”

  One look down below and my thoughts ground to a halt. I’d seen loads of zombies before—the streams leaving the city centers on the East Coast at the very beginning of our flight. Streaks like that one at Harristown that we’d somewhat decimated—but all of that paled in comparison to what was swaying to and fro all across the land up to the next range of hills. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Probably more. They were too far away to make out details, but some looked more substantial than others. Either they’d had better luck keeping themselves fed, or they had come here later. It didn’t matter, really. There was no fucking way we could ever attempt to get through those numbers.

  “We’re screwed,” I summed up what I knew everyone else must be thinking.

  Pia scowled at me, while Nate gave a hint of a shrug. “Guess that explains what Jared meant when he said there’s no easy way to reach the city.”

  “You guess?” I echoed, incapable of holding back a snort. “Exactly how do you think—“

  That’s as far as I got. Something slammed into me—like the wind, only softer—and a moment later I found myself standing right at the edge of the slope, my foot raised to start the descend down. Someone was shouting, and it took me a disoriented moment to realize that Nate had grabbed my arm, forcibly keeping me from hurling myself down the slope. I turned my head, looking at him in disbelief and confusion, but another pulse rang through me, wiping my mind of all intentions except to move, forward.

  “What the fuck?” Burns’s shout came from somewhere behind—above?—Nate, but I couldn’t see him. Or anything, really, with the sun right overhead, searing my retinas. My ears were ringing, and the left side of my face felt decidedly tender.

  “Did you just hit me?” I asked Nate when he came into better focus. He was frowning, his eyes roaming over my face as if he would find his answers there.

  “Nothing else seemed to help to shake you out of it,” he explained, his hands remaining on my upper arms where he kept pressing me into the ground. “Can you stay—“

  Another pulse.

  When my head cleared once more, my world was upside down and looking decidedly dirty. Craning my neck, I found Pia walking beside where Burns had slung me over his shoulder, the side of the Rover just coming into view. I tried to protest, but he dumped me right into the passenger seat, strapping me in while ignoring my feeble protestations.

  Pulse.

  My body rocked to the side, the car moving underneath me. The crest we’d been standing on was right ahead of us—or one that looked similar, for all I could tell. Nate gave me a brief glance, but then focused back ahead. “Do you think it’s wise—“

  Pulse.

  Halfway down the slope, I saw movement ahead of us, but the dusty ground of where the last of the foothills evened out into the basin was empty, the first of the shamblers a good few hundred yards away. I could see them moving, trudging north as a single, if uneven mass of bodies. The limping, slow ones, most reduced to barely more than bones and rags were those closest. Ahead, I could see the beefier ones, running.

  Pulse.

  The ground was even now, the zombies way too close for my own comfort, but as far as I could tell none of them reacted to us, although they should have heard us approach, Nate going slow but still about twice as fast as the stragglers were moving. I saw a few look back, but the ones moving around them pushed them along, quickly diverting their attention.

  Pulse.

  The basin lay to my right now, zombies still streaming north, yet up ahead I could see the better half of our surroundings abandoned already, opening up the view of the roads—or what was left of them and the buildings they had once run by. Everything was reduced to rubble, the destruction far greater than anything mere hands could have caused.

  Pulse.

  “Fire, maybe an earthquake,” I heard Pia’s voice over the com just as the world came into focus around me once more. “Doubt they had time to bomb the cities.”

  Burns seemed to agree with her. “Looks natural to me. So far no craters or anything that makes this look like it didn’t all happen at the same time.”

  I let my head loll over until I could look at Nate. He was ignoring me, his eyes focused on the way ahead. We were going faster than before, no more zombies in sight, but the destruction forced him to pick his path rather than blast right across the basin.

  “We’ll know more once we get there,” he replied.

  Pulse.

  More destruction all around us, but the hills we were aiming for didn’t seem that much closer than at my last lucid moment. Looking back, I still saw the wreck of the red fire truck we’d passed just before I’d blacked out seconds ago.

  “They’re getting weaker, aren’t they?” Nate asked. I raised my brows, having to wait a few seconds before he had a moment to spare to glance my way. “The pulses. It’s the reverse from before. They attract rather than repel.”

  I grunted. “They sure do something.”

  Another pulse, but this time it just made my vision go blurry, the world coming into focus a few moments later. Reaching up, I gingerly touched my cheek, but it barely hurt, if at all. “Let me guess. You couldn’t quite slap me out of it, right?”

  Nate’s lips remained pressed tightly together rather than curving into the smile I’d expected. When I gave him a curious look, I got a brief, if deadpan, stare back. “That surprising that the very concept of something having so much power over you that I can barely keep you from hurling yourself into your certain death isn’t exactly comforting to me?”

  That realization was enough to sober me up, too, but I didn’t let that get to me. “Deal with it. There are things out there that have a stronger pull on me than your dick.” At least I got a snort for that.

  Things didn’t pick up over the next hours, but at least I managed to remain conscious. It was certainly a relief when we came around a bend in the broken road, and rather than drag my mind down a rabbit hole, I felt the next pulse—coming from up ahead and to the south—make the nausea return. “I can drive again now,” I told Nate, but he wouldn’t have any of it. My protest coul
d only be described as feeble, and went mostly unheard.

  It was another mile or two farther when Nate finally spit out why he refused to stop, or move over. “Just before you tried to take the plunge down the hillside, we saw a caravan cross the basin, farther to the south.”

  Now that piqued my curiosity. “Other people like us?” I proposed, but didn’t really believe it.

  He shook his head. “I doubt it. They knew exactly where they were going, and they did it at much greater speed than I could manage in here even if I had someone tell me where the roads are blocked. They’ve been through here before.” He paused, then added, “They also knew exactly when it was safe to go into the basin, and they went straight for the corridor that we’re traversing into just now. Unless you believe someone left better maps at different points…” He let that hang between us.

  “Nah. They knew the timing because they know the underlying plan,” I agreed with him. “So what now? You’re trying to extrapolate the path they took and go after them?”

  “Tempting, but I’m not suicidal,” Nate replied. “Chances are that they also time their trek so that anyone trying to follow them will inevitably land in a hot zone sooner or later. No, we have our log, and so far following that worked well enough.”

  “If you ignore the fact that it almost made me kill myself.”

  He shrugged. “That’s why you stay strapped in your seat until further notice.”

  “Kinky,” I huffed, but with my skin still crawling from the memory I didn’t feel much like protesting. I really didn’t care for how powerless that made me feel.

  We had to stop eventually so Nate could stretch his legs, but we were back in the cars before long, following the ever-changing pattern of corridors opening up before us. Twice more we passed through a zone that made me positively black out for minutes at a time, but at least we weren’t jumped by any shamblers there. No, that only happened in the brief stretches between the corridors, and with enough frequency that it was disconcerting. It was after one such attack that Nate finally let the Rover roll to a halt and switched places with me, the dying light of dusk making it too dark for him to drive without the lights on—and with the mere presence of our cars being enough to attract unwanted attention we couldn’t very well shine a beacon into the night. Following with night vision gear on was possible; finding the only way through the rubble, not so much.