Nate gave her a dazzling smile. “Just as we like it.”
I didn’t quite get how that was a hit that landed, but she turned around without saying another word, just leaving it at a small nod to me. I looked after her but decided that I really didn’t have to know everything.
“So you won’t let me sleep my hangover off here? Bastard,” I grunted.
“Should have thought of that before you got wasted,” Nate advised as he turned toward our camp. Looking at the cars, it was evident that Pia had already broken the good news to everyone. We looked about ready to move out.
“Any chance I can still swing by the market and pick up something? That woman at the pastry stall pretty much made me promise to come back at least once.”
He considered, stopping for a moment to let an ATV zoom by. “Take Burns and Romanoff with you. Might as well pick up some additional provisions. While I’m not saying I don’t trust those guys at the Silo, there’s no guessing how long it will take to hunt down and kill us some super zombies. At least we won’t be starving in the meantime.”
“Yes, sir,” I drawled, giving him a bright smile when he flipped me off. At least I was getting my baklava. That was more than I could have wished for a couple of weeks ago. And I should probably swing by the Girls one more time, too, unless I wanted to get pelted with paintballs next time around.
Chapter 19
Our trek across the country to the Silo was less eventful than I’d expected. Except maybe for the four days we spent trying not to get slaughtered while we did some scouting, maneuvering, diverting, and hunting. It was almost scary how we rose to meet our new task in life. Yet after taking well over twenty super zombies out, we had to accept defeat—none of them looked tampered with, and while they were all hard to kill, they weren’t like the ones around Harristown. We contemplated trying to hunt for one of the streaks next, but after a short yet heated debate decided not to. Pia was right when she said that it wasn’t worth it. Twice we’d gotten away clean. Tempting fate a third time was just plain stupid. Andrej pointed out that if anyone really wanted one of the stronger ones, they could always send us after them if something like with Harristown happened again. Should my paranoid suspicions that Harristown had been some kind of dry run turn out to be true, something similar would occur again. It stood to reason that in the event of that happening, we should not take that contract, but for now, packing dismembered super zombie pieces away was enough of a task for us. We ended up filling ten boxes and three trunks worth of trash bags as it was. No one could claim that we weren’t diligent about trying.
Tamara hadn’t been kidding when she’d warned us that on our own we would never have found our destination. Montana had never been known to be a particularly densely populated state. Now, it was empty. Oh, we saw our fair share of wildlife enjoying the balmy weather that a brief cold front brought, but if there were more than a thousand shamblers left in the entire state I’d eat my boot. I’d so gotten used to the overall destruction the Midwest had suffered that seeing everything mostly intact here, if slowly falling into disrepair, was alien. Roads, where they had been flooded, didn’t bear any tire tracks. There was not a hint of decay in the wind. After the hell of Harristown and the chaos of Dispatch, it was a calm, if somewhat desolate, oasis.
If we’d wanted to just drop off the face of the earth, here we could have done so in a heartbeat.
The only sign that things weren’t quite back to how they had been before humans had populated the area was that we still had a radio signal, patchy sometimes but for the most part strong enough to keep checking in with Dispatch. We made it to the foothills of the Rockies easily on our own, and then we followed the directions that Nate had jotted down. So close to the mountains the land reminded me of Wyoming, but then we could have dropped by our folks at the bunker with just a few days’ deviation. After Nate’s explanation of why our exodus had met virtually no protest in the end, I wasn’t too keen on reconnecting with Emma and the others.
It was mid-afternoon when Nate told me to take a right turn—and there was no road to turn into, just a meadow with increasingly higher grass. No signs, no ruts, no nothing. Just the lone fir tree standing apart from the thicket behind it.
“Think that’s it?” I asked, unable to keep my skepticism in check.
Nate shrugged. “Says so here.” He glanced at his notes again. “Tamara warned us not to roam too far off-course. They supposedly got half of the entry vectors mined.”
“Remind you of someone?”
The corner of his mouth perked up. “Not in a bad way.”
There was no ditch that could have wrecked the car, so I went ahead and angled the Rover across the field and around the tree. Still no ruts, but there was a gap in the vegetation that let me breach the cover of the trees. In a car less suited for this terrain it would have been impossible to go on, but I managed, if at a rocking crawl. The others followed, the trees soon swallowing our entire column.
About half a mile later the forest thinned, opening up into a much larger, sprawling meadow. I was almost surprised to find two buildings, a house and a barn, smack in the middle of it. There was also a square of asphalt connecting the two, but no road leading there that I could see. Both looked just as any other building we’d passed, with the paint peeling in places and the windows gone blind from a year—or decades—of no one being around to clean them.
“This is creepy,” I noted as I let the car roll toward the house, not making a move to increase the speed but trying to take in as much of the open space as I could. “Do you see anyone around?”
“Nope,” Nate said, sounding more annoyed than puzzled. “But I’m sure that they are watching us.”
“Did you see a lookout?”
He shook his head. “No. But one of the last trees had scrape marks where a camera could have been attached.”
“Or a rabid squirrel had the time of its life,” I suggested, but doubted that he was wrong.
We reached the asphalt patch, gravel crunching under the tires as grass gave way to harder ground. Still nothing. “Where to?” I asked.
“Park in front of the barn.”
I did. Still nothing. We waited until the other cars had come to a stop behind us before Nate got out, looking around. I followed, leaving my shotgun in the rack. If they really had mines everywhere and surveillance cameras up in the trees, they might not react well to us brandishing firearms like a bunch of lunatics. Then again, like supposedly flocked to like, and we weren’t the ones who had hunkered down in a decommissioned missile silo.
A whirring sound, followed by mechanical grating, made me whip around. Across the asphalt, hidden by the grass, must have been some kind of trap door because a lone figure suddenly appeared from the ground, walking up a flight of stairs. He—the bulk underneath his gear made it plain that it was a man—scrutinized us, his rifle at ease but ready to fire at a moment’s notice. He scanned the surroundings quickly before he focused on us, stepping closer but remaining at a comfortable distance.
“You got a delivery for us?” he called across the lot.
I felt a hint of unease creep up my spine, wondering if this was going to be the next instance of us being left outside of the gates.
“We do,” Nate replied simply, seemingly completely at ease as he stretched.
The guy jerked his chin at the house. “We have our decontamination chamber in there and the cargo elevator that leads into the labs. If you could bring everything over, that would be great.”
He didn’t move, but a moment later the door of the house creaked open, revealing two figures in bright yellow hazmat suits. Seeing that made my brows shoot up, but the soldier was quick to reassure us. “Not because of you. But they can get pretty anal about biosafety procedures. Guess that comes with the territory when you spend over eight months trying to set up a proper lab in a glorified maintenance closet.”
I didn’t know exactly what to make of that, and I was more than happy to just watch as N
ate, Burns, and Andrej got busy lugging over the sacks and boxes containing the rotting remains we’d reduced the zombies to. The hazmat suit troupe even had a lab trolley ready where everything was piled on quickly, before they retreated back into the building, decisively closing the door in our faces.
“Any of you injured?” the soldier asked. “Or need a trip through the bleach bath? If not, please follow me. The hangar’s below the barn.”
True enough, what looked like your run-of-the-mill barn doors hid a wide concrete ramp that led underground, faintly illuminated by strips of lights. The soldier signaled us to drive on while he remained behind. I wasn’t quite sure if this was a good idea, but the barn itself didn’t look too sturdy. I could probably drive the Rover right through a wall without damaging the car too badly. At the bottom of the ramp, maybe three hundred feet in, a cavernous room opened up, and this was where it got interesting.
As abandoned as the area above had been, down here there was a lot more going on. The bustle wasn’t as bad as in Dispatch, but I saw several vehicles—two of them Humvees, if I wasn’t completely mistaken—and lots and lots of spare parts of any kind on shelves lining the walls. Someone was busy welding, the bright sparks making me look away immediately, and as soon as I stopped and got out, the sharp scent of metal and ozone tickled my nose.
We already had a small welcoming committee waiting for us—two soldiers in full gear, another in fatigues but without body armor, and Dom. On screen he hadn’t looked that young, but he couldn’t be much past twenty-five. That immediately gave me a pang of self-consciousness—I’d been a year older than that when I’d defended my PhD thesis. Not that such things mattered now, but it was hard to shake off the feeling that someone had undercut my academic career. I’d kind of gotten used to being the highest educated, most-qualified scientist around. Then again, if that had really mattered so much to me, I should have stayed in Aurora.
The man in the fatigues stepped up to Nate and me, resolutely shaking our hands without a hint of hesitation, although I was sure that he hadn’t missed Nate’s marks. “Commander Jericho Wilkes,” he introduced himself. “Let me welcome you to the Silo. I’m head of military operations here.” He introduced the other two soldiers as Petty Officers Stanton and Meeks, his aides. “And Mr. Curran here you’ve already met, I hear.” He glanced in Dom’s direction. Stanton—barely reaching to my shoulder, but looking all the more grim for what she lacked in height—and Meeks—a rather jovial seeming guy who I wouldn't have pegged as military if he hadn’t been in full gear—ignored us, while Dom offered a small, amused smile. I was trying not to gawk at the sheer size of the hangar, but it was easily rivaling the hangar in Dispatch, if shaped like a dome toward the top. Most of the others didn’t bother hiding their fascination.
“You got a neat hiding hole here,” Nate offered, his attention quickly returning to Wilkes again. “SEALs?”
That assessment made me scrutinize the grizzled commander once more. He certainly didn’t look like I’d always pictured military leaders. Rather than keep his hair short, he had his graying mane tied at the nape of his neck. A vicious-looking scar bisected his chin and narrowly missed his left eye on the way up to his temple. Scruff covered his chin and cheeks, and although he must have been pushing fifty easily, there was lean muscle underneath his fatigues. If I’d met him on the street two years ago I would have pegged him as the typical midlife-crisis rocking former hippie, now on the fitness trip of his life to make up for all the time wasted chasing his corporate dreams—if not for the look in his eyes. They had a certain hard quality to them that I’d come to know all too well from my companions. He gave a curt nod at Nate’s question.
“Ranger cub yourself, Dom here told me. Don’t worry, took our geek squad a full five minutes to hack into the database and get your files. Those of you that have files.” Pia and Andrej shared twin smirks.
“We still have personnel databases to hack?” I asked, not quite taken aback but still wondering.
Dom shrugged. “In the few minutes every hour when the remaining satellites are passing overhead we do. There are still a few data centers with cloud access up and running, but we estimate that they will one by one go dark within the next five years. That’s why we’re trying to rescue any available data on-site. If you want to know more, you have to ask some of our comp science guys. I have more interesting things to bore myself to death with than that.”
Wilkes snorted but left that uncommented.
“Thanks for bringing in the samples. We’ve been posting requests since we thawed out in spring, but so far no one has been insane enough to actively go hunting for any kind of zombies, least of all the strong ones. Shame that you couldn’t bring in one still kicking and biting, but I guess I’ll have to send out my boys and girls on foot if I want some data about how best to off them.”
Nate gave me a look that was short of condescending, but then I still didn’t feel like I’d been wrong to protest our mission to go to Sioux Falls weeks ago.
“We might have some intel on that for you,” he explained to Wilkes.
“Much appreciated. But first, let me show you around,” the commander replied. At his murmur his aides disappeared, while Dom remained with us. “You can leave the cars right here. No one will touch them. Feel free to coordinate with our guys if you want to do some repairs.”
“You mentioned something about upgrades?” Nate asked.
Wilkes smiled. “Of course. Hiro?” At his holler, a head appeared from behind the welder’s mask at the other side of the hangar. “Get Kasumi and show our guests the prototypes. We should be back from the tour in an hour or so.”
“Yes, boss,” the welder acknowledged and went right back to work. No idea how he’d even heard that Wilkes was talking, let alone understood him.
It took a few minutes until everyone was ready to leave the cars. My paranoia was slowly withdrawing into the dark recesses of my mind, exactly where it belonged. That said a lot, considering that we were several feet below ground, with only a dome hewn into the bedrock, supported by iron struts, keeping us from being buried alive. That everything was dimensioned for heavy machinery probably helped, as not even the tunnel Wilkes led us into made me feel claustrophobic.
On the way over to the command center, Wilkes explained that the Silo used to be an Atlas-I missile silo and launch facility. One of those that had officially never existed, explaining why, technically, it was on the ground of the Glacier National Park. A backup plan should the Russians manage to destroy all the missiles stationed farther south and elsewhere in the country. Then technology had outpaced the structures and the silo had been decommissioned, yet remained a training facility—also used for recreational purposes, I learned—since then. Dom explained the latter with a sheepish grin. At my raised brows, he shrugged.
“When the shit hit the fan, I was camping in here with some buddies of mine. Half of us Berkeley alumni, the other MIT. We’ve been doing this every year for almost a decade. Twenty-three nerds with supercharged paintball gear, one weekend of all-out open war. Just so happens that the Commander and a few of his friends had a similar idea, only camping out above-ground. Made sense for us to bury the hatchet and band together to make the best of it when we heard the news. The Commander managed to get the news out that we were staking out here, and more marines came flocking to us. The rest is history.”
It took me a few moments to get the implications of that.
“Have you even been above-ground since then?” I asked.
“Of course,” Dom replied, but the guarded look on his face told me that it hadn’t happened very often.
Nate picked up on another detail. “Did any of you come anywhere close to any zombies yet? Not sure how bad it was before the winter, but we barely saw any in the last two days.”
Wilkes shook his head, while Dom protested. “We sent out a few of the marines with cameras that we had with us for the paintball fight. So technically—“
“You know shi
t squat,” I finished for him before he could further embarrass himself.
“We encountered some,” Wilkes explained. “But we made sure to set up a wide perimeter, and keep it intact from day one on. We’ve managed to bolster our numbers from forty people to over a hundred in the first few months, sending short range radio bulletins whenever we could. Some of our people came from as far as Seattle and Portland, and they got quite the tales to tell. But those that started out here? Why do you think they had a fist-fight over who got to don the hazmat suits? All two that we have here.”
Dom accepted his criticism without comment, but used that last bit to launch into yet more explanations.
“After the silo was decommissioned, it went into private ownership in the seventies. One of our math guys’ uncle owned it. Technically he still owns it, but no one heard from him, so he’s presumed dead. Who knows? Guy was a true conspiracy nut and prepper. We put a lot of work into the Silo since we started rebuilding, but he had some impressive storage units already full of everything we needed during the first weeks. And a lot we’ll likely never need, but there’s space aplenty to keep it all here. You’ll see.”
And see I did—a lot more than I had expected. But who would have thought that their command center actually looked straight out of a space movie? Including an entire two-story tall wall filled with monitors? With electricity enough to keep most of them running all the time, and even enough to spare to watch movies? We lost most of the guys to that display, and I myself had a hard time not lingering. Giving up entertainment had been the least of my concerns last year, but now that it was suddenly back on the menu, it was hard to keep dieting. Nate and I ended up being the only ones who finished the tour with Wilkes and Dom, and I couldn’t fault the others for staying behind.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 26
