Before Nate could get cute and pile food on my plate, I set to the task myself, going mostly for fat and protein-rich leftovers that others seemed to have avoided—or hadn’t gotten to yet. It all looked delicious, but after a week of hearing the guys complain about the MREs—that they always devoured right down to the very last crumbs—almost anything would have. There was also an abundance of steamed and grilled vegetables that I made sure to get a heap of as well, much to Nate’s amusement. While I started stuffing my face, Elle and Red kept a conversation going about 19th century French literature that was only fascinating because of the people having it. I welcomed Antoine shooing a cute girl away so he could sit down next to his brother, much to Alexandre’s apparent dismay—and Elle’s continuing ignorance. Far was it from me to speculate, but as far as I could tell, the French weren’t exactly prudes.
Or circumspect, as I was about to find out.
“What’s up with that,” Antoine asked, gesturing with a piece of bread in my direction. At first I thought he meant the now somewhat stained report that sat mostly forgotten next to me except for Nate idly looking at it once in a while. When he saw my confusion, Antoine clarified, “Your fingers.”
“Ah. That. Well,” I started, chasing some peas around my plate to come up with a good answer. “It’s kind of a long story.” And not necessarily one that I wanted to recount, in present company, when both Hill and Cole visibly perked up and even Red took some interest. It wasn’t like they didn’t know the details.
Antoine leaned back as far as his perch on the bench would allow. “We have time. There’s still food on the table, and lots of wine for when it’s gone.”
I wondered if I should have told him that alcohol wouldn’t do a thing for me anymore, but eventually gave in.
“Long story short, I got infected by the virus but because dying would have been too easy, I survived, yet what I thought was full immunity I’d gained was only immunity to the virus, not the secondary bacterial infection I got from the zombies gnawing through my hip right down to the bone. Not the most sanitary thing, rotten undead mouths. The infection spread slowly enough that it took me months to realize that I had it, and then there was nothing else to do but scrape and cut all the necrotic bits off. Even got my left femur partly replaced with titanium because the fucking critters ate away everything down to the bone.”
Alexandre and Elle both looked fittingly impressed—and more than a little skeeved out—but Antoine barely batted an eyelash. “How does a virologist—no less the woman who knew all about what was going on just as it was unfolding—end up getting bitten by zombies? Shouldn’t you have been sitting safely tucked away in a lab or bunker somewhere?”
I didn’t much care for his openly chiding tone, and less so for the obvious agreement from the peanut gallery next to him.
“Not quite my style,” I offered when telling him to go fuck himself didn’t sound like the smartest answer in the book. “I spent my first year out in the apocalyptic wilderness and being locked inside didn’t sound that appealing anymore after that. They even offered to let me run one of their labs, but that would have come with more fine print than I was happy with at the time. Plus, I didn’t quite agree with the direction they were going at that lab, and all over. Some of us do still take that ‘land of the free’ thing more seriously than others.” Cole looked less than impressed with that statement while Hill chuckled into his beer. Red, awfully neutral, reminded me more and more of Nate when he didn’t want to let me look into his cards.
“So rather than help your people, you chose to get eaten by the undead,” Antoine surmised, continuing on that train. I wondered if he’d already spent too much time with Hamilton and his flunkies.
“Well, I wouldn’t have gotten eaten if some assholes hadn’t set up a trap for us and decided that it was worth getting killed just to annoy us,” I pressed out, maybe a little more harshly than warranted. Then again, maybe not.
Elle didn’t miss the baleful glance I sent the soldiers, in turn scrutinizing them before she turned back to me. “And yet, you are working with them now?”
I shrugged, feeling strangely chastised by her statement. “Why, just because I lost two of my friends, almost my own life, the life of my unborn child, and a good fifth of my semi-vital body parts doesn’t mean I have to hold a grudge, right?”
While Hill kept nursing his beer, Cole had about enough of my snark. “That might explain the chip on your shoulder, I give you that. But don’t forget the part where you rallied a good thousand of your miscreants to kill anyone who might be disagreeing with your kind of frontier outlaw lifestyle.”
That made me laugh out loud, but likely for a different reason than he expected. I couldn’t tell whether it was the food—or having the French as a buffer between us—but rather than anger me, that assessment was strangely amusing.
“There’s that,” I agreed, gifting Cole the sweetest smile I could manage. “If some of you hadn’t spent the summer killing scavengers and kidnapping and raping women, I wouldn’t have been able to rally anyone. So, there.”
Cole and I kept glaring at each other across the table, prompting Nate to assume the role of commentator. “We’ve had quite the interesting summer, if you were wondering.” Red toasted his silent agreement, making Burns laugh.
“That we did,” I agreed, trying to step off the soap box once more before the French could start thinking about taking sides. “Lots of misunderstandings and some bad eggs that needed to be cracked. Why are we here now? You heard what Greene and Hamilton said. If there’s a chance that we can find some kind of a cure or whatnot, it would be a waste not to take it.” There was no need to stress that our agreement had pretty much been forced at gunpoint; the more time I spent around the soldiers, the more I started to believe my own half-lies. Part of me still felt like a traitor, even more so now that Greene had told me the reaction most of the scavengers seemed to have when they’d heard the news. For the first time it occurred to me that Raynor’s carrot-or-stick offer kind of absolved me of any direct guilt in a sense—at least to myself.
Antoine, still riding the blunt train, honed in on that. “Doesn’t seem like that made you incredibly popular to your own people.”
I shrugged, still not quite sure what to make of that myself. “Nothing I can do about that now. I first have to survive this suicide mission before I can worry about what someone I’ve probably never met thinks of my motives.”
For whatever reason, that response mollified Antoine somewhat, and got me a nod from Elle. “You’re welcome to stay with us,” she repeated her previous offer. “Whatever happened in your country, you will find that people here don’t much care about it.”
“My friends are back home. My family,” I corrected. “As much as the idea rankles that my attempt to ultimately help people might get me their anger, I’m not afraid of a possible lynch mob waiting for me back in the States. It’s a huge country, and as you’ve probably guessed from our reactions, we’ve lost a lot more people than you did. That also means there are entire states with close to single-digit inhabitant numbers. That’s a lot of opportunity to keep from inciting another witch hunt.”
“Fair enough,” Alexandre offered, breaking his silence. “We would never want to keep you from your family. But if you decide that living between a rock and a hard place isn’t the end of all things, there’s a reason the Germans coined the saying, ‘living like God in France.’” True to that sense, the French toasted each other and thankfully moved the conversation into a different direction.
“Mountain fortresses,” Red inquired a while later. “That’s enough to feed that many people?”
Alexandre, his tongue loosened by wine quite a bit, shook his head, laughing under his breath. “Without a lot of the valleys that we managed to wall off, we wouldn’t be able to get enough food for half of the people we need to keep alive. We have no predators left in those regions so breeding livestock is what helps quite a lot. And we’ve secured most of t
he islands in the Mediterranean, particularly in Greece and what used to belong to Spain.”
“We’ve had to give up on Ibiza,” Elle said with true remorse swinging in her voice. “The outbreak hit hard there, and with no survivors it made little sense to try to reclaim the land. Cyprus and Malta were a close call but the hard winter helped, made the undead sluggish enough that the defenders managed to push them back enough to eventually get rid of them.”
“Fishing has helped as well,” Alexandre picked up from her once more. “We’ve struggled, but people learned to adapt quickly. Our biggest losses were our first responders and hospital staff. Those we cannot easily replace.”
The same was true for the US, although with the company I kept, I hadn’t felt the sting of it much—and now likely never would, I reminded myself.
“How did you manage to stave off the zombies in the first place?” Cole wanted to know. “Without weapons, it must have been a bitch.”
Alexandre and Elle gave him blank stares that were somewhere between insulted and confused, until Antoine let out a loud guffaw. “You really think we have no weapons just because we’re not Americans?” His almost-accusation made him laugh all the harder. “You maybe couldn’t buy them in a supermarket here, but we’ve all had proud traditions of hunters. Maybe not in the cities, maybe not in the media, but when the need arose, we knew how to defend ourselves.”
Kris, the slight, brown-haired girl from the war room, agreed with him, her German accent getting stronger the more drunk she got. “Don’t forget all the old weapons left over from World War II. For a while I ran with a guy who claimed his neighbor kept a tank in his barn. A fucking tank!”
Elle gave her a soft smile that disappeared when she turned her attention back to Cole. “Besides, guns are not always the best. Shots are loud. They attract attention. We’ve had quite some success setting spear traps and using javelins and arrows for ranged attacks. And nothing recovers from a smashed-in skull. Noah told me that except for your sniper, you barely used guns when you helped our people this afternoon. I see that you’ve come to a similar conclusion as we did very early in the fight. Attracting attention is the last thing you want.” She paused to let her statement gain the weight it deserved before she turned to Nate, Red, and me. “You need to keep that in mind when you go into Paris. A shout might be enough to bring tens of thousands of undead down on you. If you open fire with an assault rifle, you’re as good as dead.”
“Duly noted,” Nate supplied more wryly than I thought was appropriate.
“We don’t always go around shooting at everything,” I tried to defend myself. Nate cocked an eyebrow, making me snort. “Okay, not exclusively. Just whenever we can get away with it. But we have larger hordes of shamblers at home as well. We’ve started calling them streaks because you can usually tell at a glance where they passed through. Not a lot because they don’t seem to congregate without someone making them—”
Richards heaved an exasperated sigh at my barb. “I told you before, it wasn’t us.”
“And yet, I don’t believe you,” I harped, yet rather than pursue this, I continued my explanation. “Be that as it may, particularly when it’s just a handful of us, edged weapons or anything that does massive blunt force trauma is the way to go. Or, you know, just good old running away until they can’t keep up with you anymore. I had the pleasure of having to resort to that for almost an entire day when I was out there on my own.”
Elle looked impressed while Cole and Hill traded glances—a little too curious yet at the same time too knowing for my comfort—while Antoine guffawed in disbelief. “Nobody survives a day out there alone, whether you have less of the undead roaming the country or not.”
“Did, too,” I insisted. “Guess I’m a lot tougher than I look.”
For the umpteenth time, Antoine glanced at my hands. I wondered if he and Hamilton shared a common ancestor somewhere down the line. “Not that tough.”
I had no clue why I cared, but with present company, I couldn’t very well let that slide. “Wanna bet? I may only be a month out of my deathbed—for the second time in under one year—but I can easily take you on in a fight.”
Antoine looked ready to accept the challenge, but Alexandre put an end to it before things could escalate. His brief remark to his brother in French sounded less than friendly, and I could tell I was trying his patience with my antics. I couldn’t help but feel a little chastised, but at the same time strangely vindicated that none of the strong men at my side had felt the need to jump in to defend me. Well, they had watched me almost eviscerate Hamilton, and that was before my body had started working properly once more.
“I would appreciate it if you didn’t,” Alexandre told me. “Please excuse my brother. He gets like this when he’s drunk.”
I waited for Nate to offer up a remark that would get him to sleep all on his own tonight, but Cole was quicker. “She’s always like this,” he offered, miming the informed character witness. “At least she’s been like that since we left the base, and considering the events of the last summer, it’s not a new development. If you ask me, we lucked out, considering she’s one of our chief scientists who’s still alive. None of the others survived out there, and when some of those hiding away in a bunker got presented with a recently deceased infected, they ended up getting eaten when he reanimated. I feel a lot safer knowing that our squint isn’t necessarily someone we have to take extra care of protecting.”
I blew Cole a kiss for that, then turned to Nate, giggling. “See, he thinks I’m awesome, too! I think I could get used to that.”
“Then again, sometimes she’s just fucking annoying,” Cole added, looking very satisfied with himself. Nate appeared less than threatened in his masculinity. Oh, well. You win some, you lose some.
“Oh, come on! You’d all be bored as hell if there was no friction, no in-fighting, just lots and lots of shamblers day in, day out,” I claimed. “Keep it at ‘we lucked out’ and be done with it.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Nate offered, raising his cup that contained water rather than anything stronger. The French were quick to toast, as were Burns and I, and the soldiers obviously didn’t want to be left out. I couldn’t help but smirk. That was too easy—but I’d take easy over complicated any day.
I figured conversation would veer off to something ridiculous next, but Elle clearly wasn’t done with the bits and pieces of interrogation she’d snuck in all evening. “Do you actually believe you can find a cure in that laboratory?”
I’d kind of been waiting for that question, but still hadn’t found an answer that was satisfactory—so I kept it at the truth. “I don’t know. But we won’t know unless we try, right?”
I was surprised at the somber nod she gave, but even when I kept looking at her, she didn’t volunteer anything further.
When I asked Nate the same question a few hours later, curled up on our corner mattresses under a heap of blankets as we were, the room around us filled with the soft—and not-so soft—sounds of snoring, he took his time answering. When he finally did, what he said wasn’t what I’d expected.
“Part of me wants it to be true, simply because that would mean my brother hasn’t died for nothing. But I’m not sure that there should be a cure.”
“Not even if it means that there won’t be any new infections?” I proposed. “Whatever might keep us from insta-converting will likely be the same thing that keeps everyone else dead, infected or not.”
Even in the near dark of the room, it was impossible to miss his stony expression. “Every last one of us who got the serum did unspeakable things. We don’t deserve salvation.”
He waited for my reply, and when I didn’t give one, he turned onto his back, staring at the ceiling yet kept his arm outstretched so I could continue to abuse it for an extra pillow. Part of me wanted to get angry at his claim—and what sounded too much like accepting defeat—but eventually I snuggled into his side and closed my eyes. Maybe he was right. I certai
nly didn’t feel like I deserved anything except a bullet between the eyes, eventually, after a hopefully long, long life. Yet at the same time, this was a possibility for redemption in so many ways. And it wasn’t like either of us had to accept a cure even if we found something that could, further down the line, be used as such. Maybe it was just the unease and resentment roiling in my stomach at the idea that, once we got back home, we wouldn’t be celebrated as heroes but instead regarded as traitors, but redemption? That sounded pretty sweet to me.
Chapter 6
Three days passed quicker than I would have thought possible. Back on the destroyer when sleep had been impossible and every motion hurt, hours had stretched into eternity. Now, I was barely through all the documentation Hamilton had dropped in my lap before it was time for one last strategy meeting on what was reportedly a cold, early dawn back in the war room, and then the comfort and warmth of the bunker complex at Ajou would be a thing of the past for us. Everyone was present, including Elle, Alexandre, Antoine, and Raphael, but also their doctor, two of the people we’d helped rescue, and Kris, the German with the contraband tank neighbor friend. The table was once again covered with maps, but also a stack of blueprints that I presumed was of the lab we were about to break into. I didn’t know as I hadn’t been a part of any of the previous strategy meetings—that had been Nate’s job. My days had been filled with numbers, and consequences that I forced my mind to back away from. Pretty much the only times I hadn’t had my nose stuck in the reports was getting fed—and even some of that had happened with some extra reading material on the side—or when Nate and I had been getting it on. The latter had taken more time out of my days than the former, which was rather telling of just how much and how strongly my libido had roared to life. Far had it been from Nate to protest, and last night I’d finally voiced my suspicion: that had been a side effect of the serum as well. Not even the idea that he’d likely field-tested that theory with Rita back in the day put a stop to that. It wasn’t like we’d get another chance until we were back on the destroyer. His only response was a shrug, but that was in itself very comforting—as was the fact that previous, recent issues seemed to have become a thing of the past.
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