One dose of the glue and booster were hidden in the dashboard console now, the remaining doses with Pia and Burns. Martinez had been ecstatic about the news, while the rest had taken it with indifference.
It took us about thirty minutes to make it through the gauntlet of traps and mine fields. Now that Nate knew what to look for, it wasn’t that hard to find the way, but the very idea of just how well secured the area was gave me the creeps. Maybe not that good an idea to bug down here for the winter after all.
Then it was back to the empty roads, the desolate, beautiful landscape streaking by our windows. Nate kept studying our surroundings as usual, but I couldn’t help but feel like he was avoiding me.
“So they didn’t just turn you all into potential walking suicide bombs, but they also experimented on you?” I said when I just couldn’t hold it in any longer.
I got his typical shrug back that could have meant anything.
“A lot happened that’s not important anymore now,” he replied eventually.
“Wanna talk about it?”
He shook his head, still not glancing in my direction. “Not particularly.”
“Why not?”
A muscle jumped in his cheek, and when he did look at me, his expression was unreadable.
“Because I can’t very well complain about something I did to myself, right? I’ve told you so before. I signed up for this shit. I wanted this. I volunteered. It was no last chance for me, or some kind of salvation. Just inane eagerness to get myself killed for someone else’s ideologies.” He smiled, but it held no humor whatsoever. “Even got my brother killed in the end. So what is there to talk about?”
“You said you’d explain?” I hedged, not sure if I even still wanted that explanation.
Nate sighed, stretching out in what seemed awfully close to stalling. “I think you know me well enough that you can read between the lines. Didn’t Stone give you that very same file, back when he tried to lure you into complacency in Aurora?”
“I only read the science part,” I admitted.
“And that’s all you need to know, really,” Nate stated, finality heavy in his tone.
I probably should have continued to bug him about it, but let it slide. He obviously didn’t want to talk, and if I was honest, the idea that they hadn’t just doomed all of their test subjects to eventual zombiedom but also used them as guinea pigs was making me physically sick. And chances had been so damn good that I would have been a part of all that if things hadn’t happened the way they did. That thought, more than any other, made me realize that any lure the labs still had on me was all but gone. I could get behind Dom’s idea of trying to keep everyone vaccinated so that the next generations wouldn’t have to fear measles again, but the rest? However I looked at it, cure or no cure, it always boiled down to that virus that should never have been created and the disaster it ultimately caused. No, thanks. Even if I might have been complaining about the AC again, I’d rather spend my days in an overheating car, out here in the open, than locked away in some bunker, propagating the horror that had already killed billions.
Nate’s soft laugh made me focus on him again. “Do I even want to know why you’re frowning like this?” he asked.
I shook my head. “It’s not about you, for once.”
“Then, please, keep on frowning. I’ve always had a thing for wrinkles.”
“Oh, just shut up,” I advised.
Much to my surprise, he did.
Chapter 21
We made good progress, and two days later we were in Minnesota. Even in the western parts I could see why they were all about the water here. If not for our—somewhat haphazardly—coordinated meeting place and time with that other scavenger group—the Raiders; very creative—I would have loved to spend a few days at one of the many lakes that we passed, and often had to make detours around. With the zombies not particularly fond of water, this region wasn’t as overrun as we’d gotten used to from Missouri and Illinois, making it downright cozy here, if not as quiet as Montana. The weather held up except for a tornado at the eastern horizon on day three, but we were far enough away that we didn’t get more than a few rain spatters. Well fed and with a purpose on our minds, bickering remained at an all-time low, to the point where I started to get bored. But I’d take that kind of boredom over starvation and constant fear for my life any day, thank you very much.
We’d arranged to meet the Raiders about ten miles southwest of the facility that we were about to hit. Rendezvous should have happened in the morning but we were running a little late, for no other reason than that no one seemed in a particular hurry. Worst that could happen was them getting irritated and hitting the factory on their own—their bad, really, if they had to do all the cleanup themselves and we’d just have to waltz in later. Actually, waltzing in later didn’t sound that bad. If this facility was anything like the production facilities I'd been to before it would be full of vats of chemicals, way more than an army of trucks could have carted off within a day or two. Even if they left none of the produced antibiotics that we were here for behind—also ranging in the truckloads, so that scenario was doubtful—we would still return to the Silo bearing gifts aplenty.
In the end we were four hours late, finding the bunch of mercs lazing in the shade of a small forest at the bank of a lake near the crossroads we’d agreed on as meeting point. As we rolled to a stop, the first thing I noticed was that their vehicles were even better equipped than ours. Three had started out as Humvees, and the other five remaining SUVs were all larger than ours. They were certainly equipped for heavy hitting and taking a lot of loot with them. That should have set my mind at ease, but the opposite was the case. That all of them were armed and looked more than just competent wasn’t it, either. From what I could tell they had a single woman with them, a dirty blonde girl just shy of her twenties who kept herself in the back, eyeing us with mistrust that I didn’t care for. I couldn’t quite point the finger at it, but something about them set me off.
“Are you going to laugh at me if I say that I don’t like this?” I murmured to Nate, trying not to scowl too hard in the off-chance that anyone could see through the windshield.
He kept his eyes on the scavengers but gave the slightest shake of the head possible. “No.”
Not just because we weren’t exactly in a safe zone I took my shotgun with me as I slipped out of the car, packing a few extra magazines for my Beretta. Normally I would have greeted them standing right next to Nate, but this time I let him do all the talking. It could have been pure coincidence that Andrej was suddenly glued to my side, but I didn’t buy it. Burns took my usual place, laying on the humor extra heavy while Nate was jovial if a little distant.
The only one that introduced himself was their leader, Chino Torres, a guy about my age. The porn stache he was rocking was the only likable thing about him. The only soft thing, too, judging from the downright hard look he taxed us with. I hadn’t expected everyone to be as welcoming as Jason and his guys, but this was bordering on ridiculous. The only explanation I could think of was that they had a beef with us because we’d decided to tag along. But why team up with us if we were inconveniencing them? They could have made it plain as day that they didn’t want us anywhere near their target, and we would have waited until they were done.
With someone else we might have postponed the hit on the facility for another day, but with still more than eight hours of daylight left, it made sense to go right ahead. The Raiders had arrived here the day before, giving them time aplenty to case the facility to get a good look at what was ahead of us. Torres explained that they’d had to get rid of some shamblers on the grounds, but none seemed to have penetrated the building.
We piled back into our cars and moved out, the Raiders taking point. No protest from me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
“Did you notice that all of their marks are new?” I asked about a mile to the facility.
“Could be coincide
nce,” Nate said. “Would have been the same with us a month ago.”
Sure, but… “Not a single one of them had three marks,” I went on pointing out. “And I don’t remember seeing their name up on the Wall in Dispatch.”
Nate snorted. “You remember all the names up there?”
“The stupid ones I do. Never thought I’d think our call sign would turn out to be one of the more original ones.”
“You never know,” he said, his tone still light, but turning hard a moment later. “If anything goes wrong in there, or if I give you the word, you run right back to the car and take off. You don’t stop for me or anyone else. Understood?”
So much for just me being paranoid. I gave Nate a long look before I replied, trying to judge exactly how serious he was.
“Do you really think—“
He cut me off before I could say more.
“This is not up for discussion. You don’t get a say, and you don’t get a veto. This is an order. Understood?” he repeated.
My mouth snapped shut on its own accord, and I couldn’t help but feel the unease settle more firmly in the pit of my stomach. “Understood.” That begged the question why we didn’t just take off, but I could see where Nate was coming from. Paranoia was one thing. Being prepared quite another. And so far the Raiders hadn’t given us cause to just drop the contract and take off across the country. Running scared wasn’t anything we were known for.
Still. Something was off. If I’d learned one thing since the shit hit the fan, it was to always trust my instincts.
The facility lay outside of a small town—not much more than a huddle of houses in the middle of nowhere, near a stream that connected two lakes. There was a fence around it, but it was so flimsy that I could easily have broken through it with the Rover. There was no need for that because the gates were open. In the parking lot I saw the charred remains of what were likely the zombies Torres had been talking about. The factory consisted of a main building, housing the production facility itself, with two adjacent, smaller ones. Offices and testing labs, probably. Two abandoned trucks were parked at the other end of the lot near a loading dock. Not exactly interesting to us as, even with somewhat less congested streets around here, there was a reason why most vehicles moving nowadays had four-wheel drives and could go just as fast off-road than on it. But their cargo holds were worth checking out.
At Torres’s advice—not quite an order, but coming close—we spread out. They parked their vehicles close to the loading bay while we left ours near the entrance to the offices. I did another thorough check on my gear before I got my pack ready to stuff it with magazines for the handguns and the carbine, but Nate shook his head when he saw me reach for the latter. “Take the shotgun,” he told me. At my raised brows, he gave me a deadpan stare back. “Indoors means close quarters. If there ever was a situation calling for a shotgun, it’s that. Besides, you’re a way better shot with it than the M4. If we need some doors blasted open, it will come in handy.” The fact that the last part sounded suspiciously like he’d added it more to soothe my nerves than because he thought it was a valid point did not make his effort pay off. I left it at a jerky nod and packed more slugs instead. I also grabbed my ax and strapped it to the outside of the pack, and on second thought dropped another pistol in, just for good measure. If the factory was as abandoned as it looked from the outside, I could always go back and drop my arsenal in the car when I got the larger pack for loot gathering. Better safe than sorry, right?
My brows took a hike as I watched Nate get his own gear ready. “Exactly how much opposition do you expect?” I asked when he not only dropped a shitload of grenades into the backpack, but also the sawed-off shotgun that he kept under his seat. I’d never seen him bring that with him anywhere.
His ambivalent shrug didn’t tell me anything. “It’s not about what I expect. It’s what I don’t want to miss having with me should I need it.”
“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” I asked. It was one of my usual barbs, but this time I actually meant it.
Nate gave me a humorless smile back. “Bite me, I can be paranoid, too. Feel free to laugh your ass off later if all we stir up in there is a nest of raccoons.”
I wondered if I should tell him that his behavior set me off, but then swallowed the remark. We’d made it out of the insanity of Harristown without getting more than an emotional black eye and the odd scrapes on our cars. What could possibly go wrong?
The moment we were out of the cars, Nate silently grouped us into four fire teams, using our own hand-gesture code that we’d worked out over the winter. If my nerves hadn’t been strung tight before that, now they were, but I had to admit, being teamed up with Burns and Andrej alleviated some of that unease. There was something to be said about having two of the heavy hitters at my back as I took point of the second group.
After a brief sweep of the parking lot, we entered the facility through what must have been your garden variety security checkpoint at the office building. Half of the doors were busted now, the glass crunching under our boots, mingled with leaves and debris. Something scuttled away from one particularly massive heap in the corner, but the foyer was in remarkably good condition, except for what the wind and small animals had dragged in here. No signs of shamblers anywhere, not even a whiff of decay in the air except for the stench of animal excrements and mildew. Beyond the tables and gear that had been used to scan the employees’ bags even that receded, until there was barely a crumbled, brown leaf on the floor where the building proper began.
The hallway beyond the foyer was empty except for the usual office detritus. This was the first office building we’d raided, I realized. But in a world where only a handful of towns had electricity, let alone might need computers, there was no sense in scavenging for office supplies. Maybe they all looked like this—as if the staff would be returning tomorrow, only to find that the cleaning lady had been rather lax, and the windows needed a good cleaning. It made me feel oddly sentimental to bust open doors and find the room beyond looking so pristine that it could have served as a time capsule. As much as I didn’t mind not getting a face full of corpse, this wasn’t what we’d come here for, and even made me feel like I was defiling the place somehow.
I made a brief stop in the office kitchen on the first floor to raid their small medicine cabinet, but that was about the extent of our looting for the first thirty minutes. We met up again at the door that led to the production facility, and that’s where things were starting to get interesting. The Raiders had had some time now to case the place, but as soon as I stepped into the huge, hangar-like room I realized that we could easily spend days in here checking every nook and cranny, and weeks to lug everything useable away. All around the walls I could see smaller rooms leading off to who knew where, likely labs and smaller storage rooms. To the right and front there was a railed gallery running along what would have been the second floor otherwise, with a few more doors. The entire room was packed with the production line machinery, and I guessed that the huge doors opposite our entrance were leading to the loading dock.
We all took a moment to orient ourselves before Nate sent us off again. It didn’t come as much of a surprise that my team got to hug the walls and investigate the doors. A few were locked, the keypads making me guess that those must be leading to storage. Behind the others were either normal maintenance rooms, or labs small enough that they could only have served to test a batch taken directly from the line outside. Burns made short work of one of the locked doors—one that becomingly displayed huge biohazard signs—breaching it with the heavy battering ram he’d brought. The beam of my flashlight revealed shelves upon shelves inside, full of orange and red labelled plastic containers. Chemical storage. Bingo.
Sunny hadn’t been wrong about me being the perfect personal shopper for what they needed to replenish their stocks, although I’d refrained from noting that if they were actually as good as they claimed to be, they could have likely synthesized
half of the chemicals in here. But why bother when you could just pick them off the shelf rather than spend hours, if not days, producing them in much smaller quantities, and likely with a much lesser grade of purity? I quickly scanned what was available and then pointed at almost random to the other two to store this and that away in their packs. Unlike me, they hadn’t brought the light, small packs, and I felt almost relieved when I saw that, while armed to the teeth of course, their packs weren’t bristling with explosives and ammo. There was way more in here to be salvaged to take with us now, but if we had to leave early, at least our loot run wouldn’t turn out as a complete bust.
With already tons of loot that we had to leave behind in that one room, we didn’t bother with breaching the others, but ever the careful one, I made sure to knock hard on any door that we passed, listening for a resounding answer. None came, making me feel even more stupid about my paranoia. Why should there have been zombies locked up in storage rooms? The facility didn’t look like it had been invaded, so anyone who might have turned would have done it the slow way, after fighting infection for at least a day, if not two. If anything, they would have ended up locked in the infirmary, wherever that was in these rabbit warrens—or, much more likely, in their own home or the nearby hospital. The Raiders seemed to think along similar lines as they investigated the store room we’d opened up, but left the others as they were. The really interesting stuff was likely stored closer to the loading dock, and that was where we headed next.
The moment I stepped through the doors, I felt my unease spike. Not because I was psychic or some shit, but because of the layout of the room. They really seemed to be fond of doors and small rooms here as the entire left side of the longish hall was lined with them. The gallery from the production room went on here, straight across those doors, with yet more rooms leading away downstairs. At the other end light streamed in through the open dock, barely filtered by the heavy plastic partly obscuring the parking lot beyond. Palettes stacked with wrapped and partly unwrapped boxes lined the walls where no doors were obscured, and Torres was busy looking them over one at a time. That wasn’t what made me halt just inside the gate, warily scanning the room. Andrej stopped at my left shoulder, giving me a blank look.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 29
