Green Fields (Book 6): Unity

by Adrienne Lecter

  For thirty minutes, that’s what we did. In regular intervals we got updates about what was going on behind us, and twice from the next group north of us. By then the mob of shamblers after us started to stagnate, weaker stragglers falling behind more than fresh, strong ones joined. The horde we drew wasn’t as large as I’d feared—maybe four to five hundred strong—but still an issue if anything went wrong. We decimated it somewhat when we drove through a small town with the follow-up group heading around it, the narrower field of vision between the buildings making a few zombies lose interest when we tuned down the beacon signal to the lowest possible setting. Then it was back out into the open endlessness of the prairie where we were the sole target for them to focus on, and we quickly lost our momentary lead again.

  “How many miles do you think they’ll be able to follow us?” I mused a while later, not liking that I could pretty much discern a lead group in the shamblers that had caught up to us, sometimes even managing to get between the cars. My bet was that at least a handful of them were either fresh, or the super strong ones previously inoculated with the serum before an untimely milkshake had turned them.

  Nate shrugged. “The bulk, maybe fifty miles. Wouldn’t surprise me if the weak ones falling back there will eat each other to regain strength. The rest we should shake from time to time. There’s a bridge coming up ahead. We could use it to do just that.”

  “Shake them how?”

  From the edge of my vision I caught his bright grin. “The good, old-fashioned way. We blow up the road behind us and keep them from following. We did bring explosives for a reason.”

  A short burst of communication later, I slowed down the Rover to let the two following cars overtake me so that it was just us and the Jeep in the back. I didn’t much care for one of the fast zombies taking that maneuver as an opportunity to jump onto my hood just as I swerved back in line, obscuring my sight enough to almost smash into the Jeep. It flopped off the vehicle when I zig-zagged a little more, disappearing in the thickening crowd closing in on our cars. Cursing, I accelerated, only to get another undead spider monkey plastered to the front grill. “Yeah, shaking them sounds like an idea.”

  Just to make sure to keep the main group safe, we all upped the beacon intensity, drawing a few extra zombies out of hiding along the way as we separated further from the others. Nate unsnapped his harness so he could climb into the back, releasing the catch on the trunk so he could distribute our care packages once it was time for a little surprise. Glancing into the rear mirror, I couldn’t help but be afraid he’d pitch right out with his explosives if I rocked the car too much.

  Like so many bridges we’d encountered, this one was crowded with cars, leaving barely enough room to squeeze through. Slamming right into one as I went on, I bit off a curse and gunned the engine harder, making it whine in protest. “Can you maybe not try to kill me before we get to the good part?” Nate griped over the com, steadying himself.

  “I’m trying,” I shouted back, swerving to avoid another wrecked car.

  “Slow down!” he called. “On my mark, turn the beacons to full strength for ten seconds, then switch them into reverse. I’ll detonate the charges on three.”

  The slowing down part was easy—with not much room to maneuver, squeezing the Rover through the gap between a truck and the left-side concrete wall was feasible at best at twenty miles an hour, and a little like threading a running sewing machine at thirty. I could barely reach the switch to put the beacon on full, scraping along the wall for my trouble when I couldn’t quite keep the car steady. I winced, trying not to picture my poor car getting pulled apart. It only had to get me to our destination, not a yard further.

  “Punch it!” Nate called as soon as we cleared the truck. The Jeep was suddenly beside me, driving in perfect synchronicity. There was a stretch of maybe ten yards free of debris, but that was all we needed. Something crashed on the road behind us, and a moment later I felt the car rock slightly as Nate pulled the trunk shut again. “Go, go, go!” he shouted, flattening himself against the floor of the car rather than attempting to climb back front. I floored it, narrowly avoiding another heap of junk. Forgetting to count didn’t matter. As soon as the cars in front of me hit the reverse switch on their beacons, I did the same, throwing up a bit in my mouth when my body got hit by the sonic waves. But my hands remained on the wheel and my right foot down, making us fly off the bridge a second later, the road ahead pleasantly sprinkled with only a few cars.

  A loud boom went off behind us, the shock wave barely rocking the car. Checking in the side mirror, I saw smoke billow up, a few of the cars that had gotten caught in the explosion settling back into their new places. It wasn’t as dramatic as making the entire bridge collapse, but only a handful of shamblers came staggering out of the cloud of debris, disoriented.

  “Looks good,” Nate confirmed as he climbed back into his seat. I allowed myself a deep breath of relief, but before I could take another, Nate turned the beacon back to ‘attract,’ giving me another inevitable punch in the gut. “Back to business as usual,” he ordered over the com before switching to the main radio frequency. “Looks like we did some cleanup. You guys still around?”

  “Affirmative,” Gita replied a few moments later. “One of the cars broke down but we managed to get everyone out and redistributed before the undead fuckers got too curious. Just got a call in from Tamara. The beacons failed on two of the vanguard cars in the northern convoy. The zombies fell back, right onto the lead car of the following group. We’re down seven people. The others managed to get away.”

  “Shit,” I mumbled, briefly glancing at Nate.

  “Tell them to maximize the intensity of the beacons and increase the distance,” he told Gita. “Everyone else still on track?”

  “More or less,” she reported. “The middle group is lagging behind a little, but overall good progress.” A notable pause followed. “Tanner tells me to ask if you want to give that turtle idea a trial run? You know, with all the cars driving close together, beacons on full?”

  “Nah. With luck, none of the larger groups will have to resort to that. We’ll lose too much time that way.”

  While they talked, I angled the Rover back to where it belonged—the front of the line. We topped a small rise, and beyond I could see the four columns of our main convoy spread out to the north, several lines cutting through the fields where shamblers waited to get picked up again. And thus the game started anew.

  We went through several cycles of pretty much the same. Over noon, the tally of broken-down cars approached twenty, then passed thirty frighteningly quickly when one of the vanguard trains ran into trouble—and that was it for fifteen more people. Stops had to be planned for refueling, and more than once that turned into a close call. The few hundred zombies from the morning turned into thousands by the time the mountains of the Front Range started to appear on the horizon. Nate had me on a steady supply of food and water, keeping my level of energy up, with only the discomfort of sitting too long in one position bothering me.

  Then we went around a bend in the road that led into a larger basin opening up in front of us—a basin that was teeming with enough zombies that they came close to the masses in southern California. My foot was on the brake before I could fully process what was going on, Nate’s cursing a nice backdrop to the tires squealing to a halt.

  “Turn off the fucking beacons!” I called out, immediately hushing myself, as if the sound of my voice would attract attention that the moving car hadn’t so far. It was hard to gauge, really, with so much jostling going on what looked like right in front of my nose. There was no way the shamblers hadn’t felt the beacons, but they weren’t coming at us yet.

  Nate was quick to flip the switch, and grabbed for the radio next. “All cars stop where you are. The route to the south is closed off. I repeat, the southern route is a no go.”

  My eyes remained peeled on the zombies as I waited for a reply. None came, until Pia’s low cursing sou
nded over the com. “Signal shouldn’t be patchy here. We’ve had good strength so far.”

  Exhaling slowly, I tried to come up with a list of options that wasn’t just “run” in all caps. “Any ideas?” I asked my usually so talkative passenger.

  “Forward isn’t exactly an option—“

  I couldn’t say what drew my attention south, to the patch of trees beyond the thick of the mass of bodies. Movement, maybe. Or sheer luck. Whatever it was lost all significance when deep inside my brain the flash, followed by a thin streak of smoke propelling something toward us at high speed made my instincts kick into action. I floored it, sending the Rover right into the zombies ahead of us, no longer bothered by the possibility of getting drowned in the sea of decaying flesh.

  The tires had barely found traction when the RPG hit the boulders next to where the Rover had been idling, sending a cascade of rocks raining down at my roof and the cars behind us. The force of the explosion slammed me into my belt harness, but having had that split second to brace was enough to let me keep control over the wheel. The driver of the car behind me wasn’t so lucky, but wrenching the car to the side hard kept it from being hit by the worst of the rock avalanche. A second projectile came toward us, better aimed and only seconds after the first. It hit the third car square in the side, throwing it right off the road as it smashed into yet more boulders.

  “Go!” Nate shouted, quite unnecessarily so as I was already crashing into the closest shamblers. Within seconds I lost sight of the road, but the uneven bumps coming from underneath us told me that I was rocking into the field—right over the zombies in front of me. I tried to orient myself and at the same time get an idea of what was happening to the other cars, but no chance. A third explosion coming from my side told me they were still targeting us, and that was all I needed. I aimed for it rather than away, using the momentary opening in the press of bodies to give the engine a moment of respite. Driving through zombies that wouldn’t budge? Not the brightest idea, even if it was our only option.

  “Should we put the beacons to repelling?” I suggested, my voice coming out in a pressed whisper, adrenaline making my heart beat a mile a minute. “Might make us a target, but I’m not sure how much farther I can go like this without getting stuck.” Already the back wheels were churning out zombie gore rather than gaining real traction on the ground, and I didn’t much care for the no less than three shamblers—and several partial ones—wedged onto my hood and windshield.

  Rather than answer, Nate did just that, starting with a high pulse that was strong enough to make me want to puke, but toning it down to low as soon as the mass around us tried to surge away rather than forward.

  “Status!” Nate barked into the com, no longer bothering with the radio. Whoever was launching those RPGs at us must have been using a scrambler, too.

  I kept going forward blindly, holding my breath until reports came in. “About fifty yards north of you,” Burns’s raspy voice answered. “Got a cracked window but we’re still moving. Didn’t look good for Guinness and Tack. That was a direct hit.”

  The other car reported in a few seconds later. “Something’s wrong with our brakes, but as long as we can go forward, I’m not too concerned about that. Where are those fuckers?”

  “Southeast, on that ridge,” Nate replied, craning his neck to look through my window, but I doubted he could make out anything except the mass of zombies around us.

  “They’ll decimate us if we go straight for them,” Pia offered.

  “No shit,” Nate retorted. “I say we keep heading northeast. The sooner we get out of range, the sooner we can alert the others.” Tapping my thigh lightly, he pointed straight west, then made a round-about gesture south and back in the direction we’d come from. I nodded my understanding. He reached for the beacon switch, tuning it to mid-strength. The zombies got a little close for my comfort, but they were still leaving me enough room to move forward, even if it was at what felt like a crawl. A slight bump on my rear passenger side made me jump, but it was only the second car, closing up to ours. Directly behind us the sea of undead parted until the Jeep was barely a body width behind us, the vehicles building a tight knot. A perfect target, but at least the combined force of the beacons let me increase my speed from a crawl to a moderate, leisurely pace.

  That worked well for all of a minute. Two more RPGs came down on us, splattering zombie parts everywhere, narrowly avoiding us. The first I tried to ignore, but at the second I reached for the beacon control, switched it to maximum strength, and floored it as soon as the disoriented shamblers started moving out of the way. The other cars followed suit, staying close enough that we managed to smash several zombies between us. I figured it made the most sense to try to flee, and couldn’t exactly refute that we weren’t.

  Finally the mass of bodies started to thin out, letting me shift up and accelerate further. I found the road a good hundred feet from where I’d expected it to be, aiming for it to get out of the field that made driving a less than smooth experience. Even when the tires hit asphalt, the car didn’t quite run as smoothly as it was supposed to, making me guess that mowing over that many shamblers had damaged the suspension and undercarriage. Great. Nothing I could do about that now except run. One more RPG sent dirt and stragglers into the air behind us, but we were already out of range.

  But not for long, if I had my way.

  I tried to check if anyone was following us, but Nate tapped the bridge of his nose before pointing straight ahead, silently telling me to concentrate on the road and let him do the spotting. He didn’t report back with any findings so I presumed there were none. At the next possible opportunity I sent the Rover straight north, the other two cars following, the distance between us slowly increasing. I hated going for over three miles until the land stopped being so damn flat at the other end of the basin, letting me disappear from sight of the ridge for good so I could backtrack. I wasted a precious quarter of an hour until I could head south once more, gnashing my teeth the entire time. Maybe it was foolish to do this, but I couldn’t just leave that ambush behind us for someone else to run into. The fact that no further explosions happened made me guess that our lack of reporting in had been enough of a warning for the main group we’d been preceding, making them find a different route. They should still have the other group, and the next one from the middle convoy as well.

  Nate gave me the signal to turn once more, and I increased the speed as much as the shamblers sprinkled all over the rolling meadows allowed. Part of me was convinced that we wouldn’t find anything once we got back to that ridge, but even so it would be half an hour wasted for a good cause. In the distance I could still see the massive group swaying to and fro, but mostly busy eating the remains of those that had gotten chewed up by the cars and grenades, pun intended. I couldn’t help but snicker at my thoughts, drawing a weird look from Nate. I opened my mouth to explain, but remembered that we had a reason to remain silent, so that’s what I did.

  I slowed down once we got closer to the back of the ridge and disappeared into the thicket of trees that covered most of it, then brought the Rover to a halt when Nate tapped my shoulder lightly. I debated leaving the car running but turned it off, hoping it would start up again later. Grabbing one of our surplus assault rifles, I followed Nate out into the wilderness, relying on the others guarding me for a minute or two until my burning eyes adjusted to the glare of the sun. Damn, but those tinted windows really did come in handy. Because I wasn’t exactly at top notch during the day, Nate and Pia took point, leaving me to trudge after them, with Burns and the other three guys bringing up the rear. I didn’t protest when two of them passed me by.

  We only had about half a mile to go, and it soon became clear that we weren’t just here to twiddle our thumbs. Pia took care of two soldiers who were busy slacking on their guard rounds, and Nate quietly dispatched a third mid-shit—a very fitting end. Neither bothered with checking their gear except for taking their weapons and ammo—both things
we would dearly need later today. The trees were starting to thin and I could see people standing around ahead, with three smaller armored vehicles half-hidden in the underbrush to the side. Nate signaled us to hang back as he crept closer, but I was too pissed off to care much. Pia gave me a hostile glare for disobeying a direct order but was rather quick herself to close up to Nate, readying a grenade.

  There were ten of them and seven of us, bad odds in their favor on a good day. With us pumped due to our mission and angry because we’d just lost an entire car and its occupants, they didn’t stand a fighting chance. I didn’t even get to reloading after firing most of my magazine into the two soldiers that tried to run for cover. It was over almost as soon as it started, a brief burst of fire after three well-placed, small explosions—not even enough to draw any of the shamblers from below, too busy with the carnage as they were. I could have done with a longer fight to vent some of my anger and frustration. A quick search turned up the mobile scrambler unit that Burns took apart with just a few moves. I would have blown it up, but Nate noted dryly that it might still come in handy later. At least we liberated another ten RPGs and three launchers, making me guess that they’d settled in here to wait for more groups to run straight into their trap. There was nothing remarkable about the soldiers, and none of them turned and came after us in the ten minutes it took to search them and their vehicles. Not Taggard’s people, I presumed, but then what Aimes had told us was likely true—they’d called for reinforcements, and lots of those had already arrived.

  With a last look at the carnage in the basin below—and what remained of our fourth car—we went back to our vehicles, Nate taking a few moments to hail Gita and get a quick update. It was a little disheartening to hear her explain that the other vanguard group had caught a glimpse of the basin teeming with zombies and had thus rerouted the main group, only that they hadn’t been able to reach us in time. Now they were a good hour ahead of us, and three more cars down.