Out of habit I checked one last time that the canisters of gas were filled to the brim—and well secured where they were wedged right next to the explosives, oh joy—before I got in, snapping the belt harness in place. Nate sank into his own seat, his tense mood of the past days either gone, or well hidden. I could feel a similar thrill of purpose lick along my veins as I started the car, waiting for Tanner to get in and give us the final “go.”
The gate in front of us grated to the side, revealing the dark, half-demolished city streets. “Ready?” I asked my passengers the same as the New Angeles gate control that was patched into our radio, and the other cars in line behind me. I felt my heart lift further as the seconds passed, vehicle after vehicle calling in. Being out there alone—or with only the Jeep as a constant shadow—had made it easy to feel small and defeated, clinging to one last hope with the certainty of annihilation becoming stronger each day. How things could change in a matter of days. I couldn’t help but smile in feral anticipation of what we would be able to accomplish in the next few weeks.
Chapter 16
Gita’s estimations of how fast we would need to move to stick to our schedule were surprisingly accurate for someone who hadn’t left the base in months. Navigating the maze by day had been daunting. In the dark, it was a nightmare. We had to backtrack several times, losing at least an hour, but that was still faster than I’d expected. That left us with an extra twenty minutes of rest before actually leaving the city—half of which I spent hanging out of the car, barfing up trail mix, hoping that the near constant pulsing of the beacons would shut off soon. Turned out, not telling anyone that they affected me hadn’t been my brightest idea, but Nate had agreed with me that it was the kind of vulnerability that was too good not to abuse should anyone want to do away with us before we even made it out of the region. So suffering it was.
As soon as the beacons turned off, we were back on the road, heading northeast. Thanks to my new uncanny ability to feel the corridors shift, getting in had been easier for us than most groups, but it was neat to have a guide in Gita how fast or slow to go, her rattling off exact coordinates and velocities nonstop. Our semi-random route was also a lot straighter than the one we’d followed in, gaining us easily a day of traveling. I tried to catch some shut-eye at both extended breaks we allowed ourselves, but it was useless. Now that we had a plan and were on the move, it was impossible to quell my latent excitement. I thought I was good about hiding it, until Nate snorted at me when we got ready to take off in the scorching afternoon heat once more.
“Good to see you’re back.” I raised my brows at him, silently demanding an explanation, and got a bright grin in return. “As much as I get that what happened put a damper on your spirit, I’m happy to have the real you along.”
“Even with the constant complaining?” I teased, unable to hold back the smile that wanted to take over my face.
He grunted with exasperation. “I’m not going to live that down, am I?”
“Nope.”
With the setting sun, we left the last of the beacons behind, the temperatures finally dropping into bearable territory. So far, both humans and cars had dealt moderately well with the heat of the desert, but I wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow. Not being plagued with thirst, I felt like I had an advantage, at least until I’d keel over. As much as speed was of the essence, tomorrow we would have to pace ourselves, or our little uprising would grind to a halt long before anyone could shoot at us.
During the day, Nate and I had switched places a few times, but driving completely in the dark was my job. Although, “driving” turned out to be a bit of a stretch, seeing as I barely breached the fifteen miles per hour mark. The Jeep was at tops three car lengths behind me, following the lead of the deep blue light of the lamp affixed to our rear bumper—another addition thanks to the engineers of New Angeles. I still wasn’t comfortable using lights, but with so many cars it was too dangerous to let them follow unaided. To me it had appeared way too bright, but the guy who’d beta tested them assured me that zombies mostly ignored them. “Mostly” still wasn’t comforting, but it wasn’t like driving in daylight only where everything could just come after us was any better.
At around midnight, I saw movement on the road in front of us, letting the Rover come to a halt. A look through the binoculars affirmed what I’d been dreading—we were far enough away from the last beacon that shamblers were roaming the countryside, unchecked and unchallenged. How anything could survive here, out in the open, during these temperatures was a mystery to me, but that didn’t change a thing about our position. With only two cars, it had been easy to simply veer off the road and try to stay outside of their range of focus, but I could tell from the way they’d aggregated straight ahead of us that this time we’d have to risk confrontation, unless I wanted to drive, more or less blindly, off-road.
Making sure that my throat mic was on, I asked, “Anyone up for some target practice?” We had sniper rifles. We had night-vision scopes. It was an easy solution to a simple equation. I was still stunned when it took all of five minutes to clear the road, making me feel a lot less anxious about the general endeavor on which we were embarking.
Hours passed, with the odd group of shamblers annoying us along the road. After the third cluster, Pia ruled that we were only wasting ammo, so small strike teams were sent out to decimate them the old-fashioned way. It also made sense as a training exercise, even I could see that. We hadn’t really had a chance to vet the people joining us, and seeing them in action would be the easiest, fastest way to do that.
Even with the occasional stop we were about an hour ahead of schedule to leave the highway and start our detour around Las Vegas when Gita hailed us. “I’m getting signals from roughly two o’clock. Can you confirm?” Her voice was strained with exhaustion, underlining just how much all of us needed a breather once we made it to our next checkpoint. If not for the latent paranoia about anyone tracking us via satellite we would have made camp last night already. Faced with that compared to the relative lack of free-roaming shamblers around, we’d opted to go on for one more night. There hadn’t been much opposition, but what grumbling I’d caught hammered down just how much we’d overexerted ourselves on the way south. No one else was that crazy.
I glanced in the direction she’d indicated, but without binoculars even my semi-nocturnal eyesight wasn’t enough to catch anything. Nate took a good minute until he responded. “Something’s moving over there, but it’s not bright enough that I can confirm. Are we expecting company?”
“Yes and no,” Gita hedged. “We were in radio contact with the locals, but they shouldn’t know that we are coming. I planned on hailing them once we’ve broken camp tomorrow, and rendezvous with them further north.”
Nothing she explained put my mind at ease. Was this a trap? Were we already too far in to still avoid it? We hadn’t expected to start as a convoy of over twenty cars; had anyone else been able to predict it, waiting with forces easily large enough to eradicate us?
“Have you tried hailing them now?” Nate asked, a little exasperated.
“Not sure if I can, if they are outside of their base,” Gita replied.
“How about you try?”
It was amusing, for once, not to be on the receiving end of his scorn, but I did my best to hide my mirth. Nate noticed, of course, giving me a hard look.
With still no answer from Gita, I let the Rover come to a halt, waiting until I saw the car behind us stop as well before I motioned for the binoculars. I quickly found the disturbance in the moonlit landscape that he’d mentioned, but couldn’t discern more than the existence of something irregular—either lights, signaling to us, or some smooth surface reflecting the moonbeams. Just as I was about to lower the binoculars and hand them back to Nate, I saw something brighter flare up for a moment, then repeat itself three more times.
“Gita? Do they have the same blue lights that we use?” I asked, letting Nate have a look for himself.
“We sent a few over with our last shipment,” came her timely answer.
“I think your call just came through. At least someone over there sent a five-pulse signal back.”
Thus it was decided, although I felt like grabbing for my shotgun the entire way over. I needn’t have bothered, it turned out, once we came to a halt next to seven sturdy vehicles, waiting at the side of the road. Nate got out to meet them, Tanner joining him as his car drew up next to the Rover. Words and handshakes were exchanged, and ten minutes later we were off again, heading deeper into the night.
“Can we trust them?”
“We’ll see,” was all Nate offered on that topic. “Head east at the next intersection. We’re camping near Lake Mead, at Echo Bay.”
That made me frown, but I didn’t protest. “Wasn’t the plan to go north, then east?”
Nate shrugged. “That was before we picked up seven additional cars. Just a precaution.”
Exhaustion soon lessened the tension in my shoulders as I continued on, taking the southern route around Vegas instead of our previously planned approach to the north. As we got closer to the city, we had to stop more frequently, to the point where Pia took the Jeep and four more cars to build a vanguard for the group, going faster to be able to dispatch lingering obstacles before the main convoy got there and had to stop. Soon the sky started to lighten, then turned a brilliant red and orange above the far mountains as we ambled through Boulder City, eyeing the buildings around us warily. Something stirred here and there, but with sunlight soon flooding into the valley, the resident population must have decided that the moving tin cans weren’t easy food. Or maybe the New Angeles people had put up beacons around Vegas as well, keeping the general area around mostly free. The tinted windows helped to keep me on the road, but my head was nevertheless pounding as Nate finally told me to stop, having found a suitable place to camp. The air was already starting to heat up as I got out, happy to just stretch and not sit behind the wheel for a few seconds. I knew I should drag myself over to Pia to report in for perimeter and clearing duty—we had two campgrounds and a trailer park to strip of both zombies and anything that might be valuable to us on the road—but it was hard to remain standing upright, let alone shake myself back into full awareness. I dropped those plans when I saw a group of people sauntering over to us, the fact that I recognized none of them making me guess that they were the guys from Vegas. Like the rest they looked fit enough for the job, making me wonder if I should tense and grab my shotgun from the car, or go for relaxed and unfazed by their swagger. I ended up opting for the latter, simply because I was too tired to put up a good front, and bungling this didn’t sound particularly appealing.
“You Bree Lewis?” one of the guys at the front of the group asked. He was a good head taller than me and kind of on the scrawny side, and I didn’t much care for the look he taxed me with. Not like I was a piece of meat, exactly, but more like he was a vegetarian.
“In the flesh,” I replied, leaning back against the warm side of the Rover, mostly to keep from staggering. He definitely wasn’t the type of guy I wanted to show just how tired I was. “Don’t tell me you expected someone taller. That doesn’t really fly with us girls.” It would have with Pia, but I didn’t feel the need to explain that.
“Dan Harris,” he introduced himself. “And these are my guys. Been holding down the fort in Vegas for over a year now.”
I took that in with a nod. “From what I hear you’ve been doing a stellar job of it, too. You’re one of the few groups people always talk about on the radio.”
A little flattery seldom hurt, and from the way his gaze turned serious I could tell that he had decided I was someone worth taking seriously.
“Same could be said about your folks. A shame about what happened up north.” I accepted that with another nod. Apparently not the right reaction this time, seeing as Harris’s eyes narrowed. “We’re ready to join your cause if it’s really about freedom, and fighting to secure what’s ours.”
“But?”
He flashed me a toothy grin, his teeth stained from years of nicotine abuse. “But I’m not going to die just because some bitch has a stick up her ass and needs some extra backup now that she got half of her people killed.”
It wasn’t like I hadn’t been expecting something like this to come up, but it still annoyed the heck out of me.
“This is not my private crusade,” I said, pushing away from the Rover to take a step toward Mr. Know-it-all. “If revenge was what I was after, I’d get myself some more people with that on their necks,” I explained, pointing at my own marks, “and hunt down the asshole that really has it coming. If need be, I’d lay in wait for months, maybe even years, to get my chance to first eviscerate him, then strangle him with his own guts. Slowly. I don’t need an army for that. Maybe I’ll still do that once we’re done here. But the reason I went to New Angeles and got up on that stage was because I believe every single word I said. This steaming heap of bullshit that our country has turned into needs a proper cleanup. No one else stepped up and did anything, so now it’s our turn. I don’t need settlements, and I need someone to guard the open roads even less. But there are a heck of a lot of people that do; people that can’t pick up a gun and change things for themselves. So, if in so doing for them I happen to get a chance for some personal payback, I won’t spill any tears. But you better think again if you believe that I’m just a fucking prude with a chip on my shoulder.”
I’d kind of worked myself into a little frenzy there, but would have accepted it if he'd smirked in my face. Instead, Harris threw his head back and laughed, then held out his hand for me to shake. “Well, glad to be along for the ride then, ma’am,” he offered, his smirk just a hint too leery for my comfort, but nothing I couldn’t live with. I grasped his hand, making sure to squeeze hard enough to make him wince slightly.
“Good to hear. Glad you could join us.”
Harris and his guys then turned away to join the party that got ready to set up camp, leaving me standing there, wondering how many more times I would have to give that same answer. Nate scrutinized the Vegas group as he stopped beside me, squinting. “I don’t want you on your own in camp from now on. Make sure that someone you trust is with you at all times.” He must have anticipated that I would bristle immediately at such a statement, but before I could spew some vitriol his way, he shut me up with a hard look that reminded me a lot of his belligerence that he’d just last week claimed he didn’t use anymore toward me. “I know you can take care of yourself. It’s just not good for morale if someone actually manages to sneak an assassin into our growing convoy and you end up bleeding to death with us only yards away from you. We’re uniting the freedom-loving fighters out there? Let them see that unity isn’t just a word we use for propaganda. If they see us stand united, they’ll have a much easier time falling in line themselves. Besides, I can do a lot more planning if I don’t have to go after every single asshole who thinks he can stare at your tits or ass just because I’m not hulking over you twenty-four/seven.”
He kind of had a point there, even if I didn’t like it. Nate didn’t look surprised when I nodded.
“Do we have a guard roster yet?” I asked before my irksome nature could make me question whether I’d given in too easily.
“You’re not on today.” At my glare, Nate snorted slightly. “Don’t worry, I won’t keep you in a gilded cage, away from the masses. But you’ve been up for well past thirty hours, and I need you sharp when we break camp in the evening.” With that, he turned away, hollering to Pia for an update on the campgrounds. After spending the last few nights in an actual bed, sleeping in the car sounded about as inviting as hitting the ground, but I didn’t protest. I even got a couple minutes of dozing in before Nate opening his door roused me once more. With the trailer park now cleared, it was easy to maneuver the cars between the semi-derelict trailers, tarps suspended between them to create a semblance of shade. I spent the day mostly tossing and turn
ing, my mind too alert to shut up, and my body still running on high because of the overabundance of food I’d shoved into my face over the course of the last week. My stunt running through backwater Nebraska had taught me one thing: never let myself run on empty if I could avoid it.
Someone had started coffee and some abomination of beans by the time I slid out of the Rover, glaring at the sun that was still bright in the sky but already dipping toward the horizon. Gita was waiting for me with a cup of coffee, looking like someone had wiped the floor with her.
“Not used to pulling long shifts?” I teased as I accepted the liquid ambrosia from her. The bleak look I got back was answer enough, making me smirk in spite of myself. “Don’t worry. Once we’re sure that we can’t hide anymore, we’ll do shorter days. Can’t fight when you’re barely awake enough to stay on the roads.”
“Is this what life has been for you for the past year and a half?” she asked, trying to hide a yawn.
I shrugged. “Pretty much. Last year we stuck to daylight hours, of course, particularly before we had the cars. And someone had to be on perimeter watch at night, too, so that was fun. Trudging through the dark forest, more likely to kill yourself by running into a tree than getting eaten by half-frozen zombies…” I trailed off there, unable to keep from making a face. “It’s so easy to glorify having a set home when you’re constantly on the road, but it wasn’t less strenuous. Just different.”
If anything, that made her seem even more impressed. “And you never thought about sticking with one of the larger settlements? Even before, you know…” Her eyes snagged to my neck.
I shook my head. “I guess on some level I realized the very nature of our group would make that impossible even before getting exiled to the road. Crashing in a place with creature comforts for a day or two is nice, but I don’t think I’m cut out for that life. Not anymore.”
“Most of our guards say the same thing. Like you get too paranoid when you know there’s always something hiding out to get you. When you’re not hunkering down, you’re prepared to meet it head-on. It’s the sneaking doubt that you’re missing something when you’re inside the walls that drives you crazy, not the actual danger.” She shuddered visibly. “Can’t say I care much for meeting the undead fuckers head-on, though.”
Green Fields (Book 6): Unity Page 22
