His reply eased the paranoid fear inside of me a little, but I couldn’t help but feel like it still took a very special kind of people to set something like that up. And tagging along with that kind of people was the only reason why I was still alive.
“So even if we find something on the way there, we won’t stop?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“Someone else’s bug-out bunker?” I suggested.
Nate looked amused by the idea, but not in a belligerent way.
“First off, the chances are extremely slim that we would stumble over something that was already set up. More likely would be something that we could convert into a shelter.” He paused, thinking that through for a moment. “I’m not saying I want to stay in that bunker forever. Actually, the thought of being there for the entire winter already gives me the creeps. Maybe next year we’ll set out to find something else. Something that can accommodate more than ten people easily, or up to thirty if we have to make it work. Then again, do we want to stay anywhere with a larger group? There are more questions to consider than obvious practicality and short-term survival.”
I had to admit, until now I hadn’t spent a single moment thinking about that. Just getting somewhere safe had already sounded like a Herculean task.
“You think we’ll make it there?” I asked—a much easier question.
Nate hesitated before he replied, but he did it with a nod. “Not all of us. And very likely not without having to make a whole slew of hard decisions and sacrifices. But yes, I think that we’ll make it.”
Since considering the alternative wasn’t an option, I was ready to believe him.
Chapter 11
I used the next hours to catch up on some much needed sleep. What I should have done instead was sort out my pack and tape up my feet.
When gunshots coming from outside the building made me startle and dive behind the counter, I knew that our time of respite was up.
Not bothering with finding an entrance that was unlocked, Pia and the two men following her busted up the glass windows at the side of the cafeteria, climbing in as soon as they’d cleared away enough slivers not to cut them up too much. One of the guys was bleeding from a wound in his shoulder, and when she turned around, I saw that the—new?—bulletproof vest that Pia was wearing had several holes in the back where the plating shone through the material. If there’d ever been a reason to get alarmed instantly, that was one.
The fact that they’d headed out as a group of five was another.
Nate was on his feet, striding over to her, before I had even fully realized what was going on.
“Status?”
“We need to get out,” she replied, a little winded. Wincing, she arched her back, but didn’t take off the vest. “Call back the others. We need to be gone as quickly as possible,” she told one of the guys who’d started stowing away the load of weapons and magazines that the three had brought back with them.
“What about Aimes and Turek?” She silently shook her head, making it clear that they others wouldn’t be coming back. “Zombies?”
“Ambush,” she bit out. “They watched us raid two broken-down police cruisers at the main intersection in town, but the moment we were clear of cover, they gunned us down. No idea of their numbers, but they had it all perfectly planned out. We need to be gone by the time they decide we might have something worth pursuing here. The shots alerted the shamblers, so we might have enough time to get away until they clear up again, but that still leaves us to deal with them.”
Nate nodded, and Pia ducked away to get her own pack. The sound of running footsteps approaching made me jump, but it was only the remainder of our people who were lugging back what they’d found.
“Why would anyone shoot at us when we’re clearly not zombies?” I asked. While not all of them were covered in gore, their mindless rage—or general mindless stares—were a dead giveaway, pun intended.
Shouldering his own pack, Nate gave me a look that held way too much pity for the occasion.
“Just because we’re not dead yet doesn’t mean they don’t prefer us that way. Get used to the idea—not everyone out there is looking for company.”
Exhaling forcefully, I tried to quell the horror that message brought with it—and not for the first time I felt like my two bats were entirely inadequate for personal protection. Starting for my own pack, I halted when I realized I’d forgotten something, but Andrej was already there, holding the backpack up so I could easier slide my arms into the straps—much quicker, too.
“Wait. I still need to get something,” I started, but Nate cut me off before I could step around him.
“Like what?”
“Uhm,” I started, then just said it, because we were clearly in a hurry. “Toilet paper.”
The look on his face was so incredulous that I already knew that it was a lost cause.
“Wiping your ass in comfort is really worth risking your life over?” he asked, turning away to start shooing everyone out. “Priorities, Bree. I think you need to reevaluate yours.”
Grumbling under my breath, I finished snapping the backpack in place, quickly catching up to the others where they were almost done wrapping up breaking camp. Nate was smiling faintly at my huffing and puffing, but as I caught up with them, he turned to Andrej, who was busy inspecting one of the new shotguns that Pia had brought with her. “Remind me that the next time we get a chance, I start teaching her how to clean a gun.”
“Will do, boss,” Andrej replied, sounding way too eager for the occasion.
“Do I get to have a say in that, too?” I asked, glaring at Nate when he looked at me again. It wasn’t that I was opposed to the idea—on the contrary—but I was standing right there, next to them.
“Not really,” he replied succinctly, already turning away.
“And you really want to give me a loaded gun and walk behind you with that attitude?” I called after him, making him stop for a second.
“Always,” was his reply. If anything, the smile he was beaming at me had widened. But that was all the attention that I got for now, which I didn’t mind as Pia gave the comment to set out. We left the school through the back entrance, simply shooting the lock off with a shotgun. The racket was deafening, and the moment the door was open, Pia hollered at us to run for the trees next to the track that I could see across the parking lot. We took off as one disjointed huddle, quickly spreading out due to our different levels of fitness and tactical decisions I wasn’t privy to. At the trees, we waited for everyone to follow, but already I was itching to move on when I saw the first zombies round the corner of the building, drawn to the origin of the gunshot.
“Which way?” Nate asked Pia. Normally, it was his or Andrej’s decision, but she had been the one to lead the team who’d explored the territory.
“North, following the river,” she said, already setting out at a brisk pace now that Steve had trundled in behind me and Andrej. “The obvious way out for us is back across the bridge and south of town. They will lay in wait for us along that road. If we cut around to the east and north, we’ll be gone by the time they realize that we ran that way.”
And off we went.
After days of mostly sticking to roads for convenience, it sucked to be back wading through the thick undergrowth of the forest. Through the cover of the trees, I could just make out the buildings of the village, a little miffed that I didn’t see that famous basket Dresden had been renowned for—or not. About a mile along the river, a smaller stream joined in, and we continued to follow that instead. I would have preferred to put more space between us and the people who had already killed two of our group, but no one asked me.
There were a few zombies lurking around the backyards and fields between the forest and the town, but nothing we hadn’t encountered before. Those at the school didn’t manage to catch up to us, or had found more interesting targets elsewhere—one could only hope. About half an hour into our flight, it started to rain, which turn
ed into a veritable downpour. Slogging along through the mud and wet leaves didn’t improve my mood, but it came with a clear advantage—by the time we had to leave the trees behind and cross the two streets leaving Dresden to the north, visibility had turned so bad that I didn’t even see the first people of our group anymore. We switched onto the smaller road that branched off from the second to head west again, soon leaving civilization behind. When the road started running parallel to train tracks, we switched to those, and at the first sign of houses of the next town, we cut through the fields due north. The sight of a highway ahead made me panic for a moment, but it was almost deserted, with only a few cars left abandoned, the odd shambler between them. They never saw us as we made it across safely due to a road crossing overhead, and then we were back in the nowhere land of Ohio.
It was hours after full dark when we finally made camp, huddling together under a group of oak trees that let barely any of the rain through. Between us, we ate the granola—unsweetened—that we’d taken from the cafeteria, and Martinez got busy bandaging the wounds that the team that had gone into town had brought back. Even with the newly-liberated bulletproof vest, Pia had two shallow wounds where the bullets had barely penetrated, and half of her back had turned black and blue from the bruises of where they hadn’t. It certainly served as a good reminder to me that knowledge gained from watching movies didn’t hold up in the real world.
Thankfully, both Nate and Andrej didn’t think that—tired, cold, and scared—I was in the best position for my first “how not to shoot myself in the foot” lesson in handgun maintenance, and I got to fall asleep with a few grains of granola still stuck in my teeth.
Chapter 12
The moment I woke up—bolted awake was more like it—I knew that today would be even worse. It hadn’t stopped raining during the night and even through my clothes I could feel the clammy cold. My joints were stiff and my muscles ached, and when I slinked away from the heap of bodies that hadn’t really kept me warm at night, I realized that there was another aspect to what exactly might turn this day into a bad day—I’d gotten my period overnight. And let’s just say that toilet paper wasn’t the only thing I was lacking.
Shit.
I still had half a pack of tissues from one of our looting expeditions, but that was it. How I could have forgotten about this was beyond me, but now that the more or less inevitable had arrived, I couldn’t even find it in me to be happy about the fact that I wasn’t about to horribly die in childbirth eight months down the road—and considering what Nate and I had been up to before the shit hit the fan, I should at least have spent a minute worrying about that. But it was so typical that, even with everything else going on, I was still haunted by the one problem every woman knew all too well—being stuck somewhere without a tampon.
While the granola tub was making its rounds and was consequently finished off in record time, I was wrecking my brain about what to do, but there was really no sense to this. Yet when I approached Pia where Martinez was checking on her bandages, I couldn’t help but feel a different kind of ennui spread, darkening my already not too bright mood. I knew that—realistically—it was stupid to think of her as invincible, particularly after what had happened to Nate with the rebar, but somehow her constant stoicism about our situation had made me put faith in her that was severely shaken up now. She’d always been the first up, the one to kick us into gears, making sure that everyone knew what to do and that we were pulling our weight. And now she was sitting on a wet stone, hunched over, whimpering with pain as Martinez reapplied the bandages, wrapping them as tightly around her torso as possible. Before, she’d looked lithe and powerful to me—and now she was just a woman with lots of muscle but increasingly less subcutaneous fat on her body as lack of proper nutrition took its toll on her. Suddenly, she was small, insignificant, vulnerable. And I was about to make it worse with my inane hunt for female hygiene products.
I almost didn’t ask her, but that realization made me feel even more stupid, so I forced myself to go ahead with my initial plan. I still waited until it was just the two of us, and she’d shrugged into her black fatigues again.
“Is there a reason why you are hovering there, or are you just enjoying the view?” she asked as she turned, scrutinizing me with a shrewd look.
“Does it hurt? The bruises I mean,” I started, then cut myself short before I could ramble on even worse. “I mean, of course it does. But I always thought the vests were there to, you know—“
Thankfully, she interrupted me right there before things could get worse.
“Still hurts less than not wearing a vest,” she supplied succinctly, then gave me a somewhat more intent stare. “What do you need?”
At least she wasn’t going to draw this out needlessly. Taking a deep breath, I tried to steel myself, overly conscious of the fact that I was acting absolutely ridiculous.
“I need tampons and a pad.”
If her eyes widened even a fraction, it was probably due to a change in the cloud cover above us. I doubted anything that silly could faze her.
“And you’re telling me this because?”
Her question surprised me.
“Well, you’re the only other woman in the group. If anyone has any, it would be you, I figured.”
“You figured wrong,” she replied, her already cool tone turning sharper than I’d expected. Looking beyond me, she called out a loud, “Martinez!” that made me shy back.
“Whatcha need?” he shouted back, straight across the entire camp. It wasn’t like we were in the middle of a fucking zombie apocalypse.
Pia opened her mouth again, but I quickly spoke up before this could go on.
“Thanks, but I think I’ll ask him myself.”
With that, I beat it, not the least bit mollified when a light cramp made me want to hunch over and roll into a ball around myself. That now everyone was watching me with that bored kind of interest that was born of not having anything else to occupy themselves with until we had to be up and moving just made my day.
Martinez looked more confused than curious as I walked up to him.
“Anything wrong?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Just…” I hesitated, leaning a little closer to try not to let anyone else in on our conversation. “I know that it’s probably a stupid question, but do you have tampons in your kit?”
He looked at me a little cross-eyed, his eyes scanning my face.
“Why, you got a nosebleed or something?”
For a moment, I thought he was joking, but then the realization set in that I was actually traveling with a pack of hostile imbeciles.
“Why the fuck—no, don’t even answer that. What do you think why a thirty-something woman might ask you for tampons?”
If I hadn’t been so annoyed it would have been funny to see the realization dawn on his face.
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh,” I echoed, unable to keep the sharpness out of my voice.
“And you’re asking me because…”
“You’re our medic,” I replied.
He gave a harrumph at that and started rooting around in his pack, the fact that he had no easy answer already quenching that last glimmer of hope.
“I have some gauze here,” he offered. “And tape. I guess ear plugs are not quite the right fit?”
And there I’d thought that my irritation couldn’t find new fodder.
“Seriously? Just because I also like the ladies doesn’t mean I have the underdeveloped vagina of a five-year-old!”
And because my day wasn’t bad enough already, Burns took that exact moment to walk by us from where he’d been taking his morning dump, a stupid grin already splitting his face in two.
“Always good to know,” he offered, his teeth shining white in the gloom underneath the trees.
“Not that you will ever get anywhere near said parts of my anatomy,” I called after him—pretty much including the entire camp in our conversation.
Cursing under
my breath, I ignored the looks and stupid stares, and instead stalked back to my pack. I figured I could always use one of the used panties that I had in the trash bag at the very bottom and stuff them like a makeshift diaper into the pair I was wearing right now, even if the very thought was disgusting. It still beat bleeding all over my pants, which I only had one backup for and was much harder to come by.
Snickers and weird looks followed me—or at least it felt like that—and about five minutes later I gave up. Stalking over to where Nate and Andrej were discussing the route for today, I barged right in.
“We need to talk,” I told Nate in no uncertain terms, waiting until Andrej had gotten the hint and beat it. Nate looked less than thrilled to get accosted by me, but when he realized that I was actually anxious, he toned down the irritation plain on his face.
“What’s up?”
“We need to make a quick detour,” I started, trying to come up with how to go about this in the most circumspect way. The worst thing really was that—just yesterday—I could likely have gotten everything from the girls’ lockers or the nurses’ station.
“Do we now?” he questioned, the hint of humor in his eyes making me guess that he wasn’t oblivious to my plight.
“Damn right we do,” I hissed, leaning closer to make sure that this stayed between us as much as possible. “I have absolutely no fucking patience right now for playing games. You know that I wouldn’t have come to you if it wasn’t important.”
That he considered that for a moment was bordering on an insult, but he gave a curt nod of acknowledgment. “Shoot.”
Exhaling slowly, I steeled myself for what was to come. “I need tampons.”
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 40
