“Thanks,” I said when the silence got too heavy.
“You’re welcome,” Martinez replied with a grin, giving me a sidelong glance. “I figured that if I didn’t at least try to defuse the situation, it was just a matter of time until you’d actually try to castrate anyone who was even looking in your general direction.”
I couldn’t find it in me to deny that accusation—if it even was one. He sounded more bemused than anything else.
Silence settled, until Martinez cleared his throat. “You ever heard how that whole ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ thing works? Or worked, I guess. Can’t expect anyone to give a shit about regulations anymore when there’s no military around.”
I shook my head, at least a little curious. “I thought they’d disbanded that, anyway?”
“Technically, yes,” he agreed, but his smile said something else. “Practically speaking, it takes a certain kind of paper pusher to settle down on base with his boyfriend and insist on claiming full benefits and marrying. But I know from experience—and you can shove that joke right down where it came from, honey—that even before that there were a lot of horndogs in the army who never gave a shit about what ass they were tapping, and what anyone said about that. They just didn’t like it if it happened between people of different rank, or going steady within a unit. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make.”
“It’s not?” I teased, feeling myself relax a little more. “You know, I’m fully okay if you and Burns do the dirty. I just don’t need to see it.”
“Your humor is getting as bad as his,” he noted, giving me a playful glare. “Anyway. Case in point, my last captain was a woman. Miranda Reynolds, although I doubt anyone ever called her anything except Captain Reynolds.” His smile turned a little sad. “Guess she still is a woman, considering that tough bitch is likely holed up somewhere, taking out those undead fuckers one shot at a time. But what I’m trying to say is, guess what happened when after our tour was over and we were back in the states, we all saw her in a dress for the first time, her two-year-old daughter in her arms?”
I shook my head. “No, what?”
“Nothing,” he declared. “If you spend nine months in the dirt, getting shot at, and the only thing that keeps the unit together and our hides safe is your captain, you stop seeing her as a woman, even when she slaps you in the face with her femininity. Which she didn’t, because, I swear, her wife called her ‘ma’am,’ too, no shit.”
“And you’re telling me this why exactly?”
He shrugged.
“Because you don’t need to be afraid that any of the guys will try anything on you. I doubt they would even if you’d never picked up a gun, but as things are now? Burns might rib you about the tampons for another year or two, but I doubt they consider you game for anything. I mean, they’re guys; can’t guarantee that one or another isn’t jerking off to thinking about tapping your ass, but they’d never act on it. And not just because half of them are still guessing whether you’re batting for the other team or swing both ways.”
That this detail was out I was well aware; everyone except Santos, Skip, and Steve had been around when Nate had made it glaringly obvious to me that I couldn’t head back across town to Sam, and I figured that the others probably filled them in at one time or another. I wasn’t delusional enough to think that they didn’t gossip behind my back.
“What do you think?”
Martinez shrugged, clearly stating that it was of absolutely no interest to him in so many words.
“For the first few days or so? Just the ladies. But considering that since then your picture is right next to the definition of ‘woman scorned’ in the dictionary whenever you glare at Miller, I’m pretty sure that you fall somewhere else on the spectrum.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. And there I’d thought I’d been kind of stealthy about it.
“That obvious?”
Another shrug. “Not to everyone, I guess. With some of them, you’d have to hit them with the truth for them to guess correctly. But I didn’t become a medic just because I dropped out of med school after two semesters and figured I might as well do something with that. I have a knack for reading people, and considering that we’re kind of short a shrink, I might as well do that work, too. I mean, can you imagine your typical therapist reasoning with a zombie? ‘Yes, I can see where you’d think my super developed brain would be especially delicious with my wall of degrees and shit, but just think about what that says about you and your relationship to your father,’” he said, forcing his usually low voice into a high falsetto.
“Whatever,” I said, deciding not to add more fuel to his speculations.
“But I’m right,” he insisted, with only a hint of question in his voice. “You and him, you’re a thing?”
I thought about how to reply, and that fact alone was enough to make my stomach seize, and not just because I was hungry.
“Shit, I don’t know what to tell you. I have no fucking idea. Hell, I don’t even know if we were, before.” There was no reason to define what I meant with that. There was only one event now that anything got referenced to, time-wise.
“Well, I’m not too sure how you straight folk do it, but I would think that he’d leave enough of an impression for you to remember whether you had sex with him or not.”
I rolled my eyes at his joke.
“Yeah, we hooked up,” I admitted.
“But?”
“But nothing,” I tried to evade.
Martinez scrutinized me for a moment. “How exactly did you two meet? I don’t really know much about that mission of his, but you don’t really seem like you were familiar enough with any of his team to have been a part of it.”
I didn’t know what to reply, so I just stuck with the truth.
“He figured he’d need my help. So after stalking my credentials for months, he tracked me down. He seduced me, although he claims that it wasn’t his intention, which was just to get kind of friendly with me so when they set their plan in motion, I might be more inclined to help. And that he’s been behaving like a royal asshole toward me since the shit hit the fan I don’t have to explain.” I paused, really not liking how sulky that sounded. “I mean, I get it. Things are bad right now, and, seriously? My relationship status is way down on my list of priorities. Making cat food more edible is way up higher.”
I doubted that much of that was news to Martinez. He and Andrej were chatting enough that I didn’t doubt that Andrej had already provided him with little tidbits here and there.
It came as a surprise when he frowned and shook his head. “That really doesn’t sound much like him.”
“What, that he’s as amicable as a human turd?”
At least I got a grin for that.
“No, that part you don’t have to convince me of,” he admitted. “But I don’t think that he was only trying to get into your pants to convert you to the cause. You said yourself that he told you that it wasn’t so.”
“And you believe that?”
“Do you?” he asked, his smile gentle.
“Honestly? I don’t know what to believe anymore.” Hugging myself while carrying a shotgun wasn’t exactly feasible, but I really wanted to. “But it makes no sense. If he really had a thing for me, why would he completely ignore me now? I’m absolutely not asking for special treatment, but he could at least be friendly once in a while, like you and Andrej are. Heck, right now even Burns is acting like a brother to me, and I think he gets off on being an ass.”
“I doubt that Nate’s feelings for you are exactly those of brotherly love,” Martinez snarked back, still grinning. “And I’m probably the wrong person to ask about shit like that.”
“You’re the only person I have right now,” I offered.
“Well, there’s that,” he admitted, falling silent for another couple of yards. “I just know that he is a decent guy, at least when he gives someone his word. Ruthless, yes, but what you told me really doesn’t muc
h sound like him. I’m not saying that he couldn’t act like that, but I’ve been around him long enough to feel like he wouldn’t. We both know that he can be persuasive as hell, which is what I think he would have done if he’d just needed your cooperation. Sat you down, dished out all the facts, and made you believe that it was in your best interest to help him, or that you already had a common goal. I’m not saying that he can’t be charming, but I’ve never seen him use sex as part of his persuasion methods.”
Stated like that, I had to agree with Martinez, even if that just opened a different kind of emotional wormhole.
“I guess.”
“You guess?” he teased. “Why, did he make you swear to help him however possible before he made you come?”
I really didn’t know if I was comfortable talking to anyone about this, let alone a guy I’d barely known for three weeks and whose boyfriend—or fuckbuddy or whatever Smith had been—I’d killed.
“Nah. Talking wasn’t really a big part of it,” I admitted, and suddenly I felt the dire need to share the entire story with him. Maybe hashing it all out would help me make sense of it. “We met in a park I used to go to after work sometimes. Obviously that wasn’t coincidence. He was there, jogging, with a dog that he’d likely borrowed from someone because I’ve never heard or seen anything of that dog ever again,” I recounted, realization dawning on me. “Anyway, he asked me out for coffee, and I don’t even know why I accepted, but half an hour later we were screwing our brains out in the alley behind the coffee shop.”
Martinez did an appropriate spit-take that made me grin.
“And there I thought you were both responsible adults.”
“We used protection,” I offered, just a tad defensive, but still more or less amused. “And things kind of developed from there. He would call to see if I could get away from work early a few days later. When one of my experiments went horribly awry and I suddenly had some free time on my hands, I asked him if he could clear his schedule. We met in some dingy motel out on the highway, or went at it like horny teenagers in the back of his car. And then one day he texts me, asking if I’m still at work, ragging on me for of course doing overtime on a Friday afternoon when half the city is home sick, and suddenly he turns up in the building when I’m taking a break to get some coffee… and the rest is history.”
Martinez listened with a morbid kind of fascination, and when I fell silent again, he shook his head.
“As I said, I might be wrong, but that sounds like plain old, weird-as-hell, instant chemistry to me.”
“But why—“ I started, frustration clogging my throat.
“He’s protecting you,” Martinez supplied when it became evident that I wasn’t going to continue. That made me look at him sharply.
“Come again?”
Martinez shrugged. “Remember what I just told you? The story about Captain Reynolds?”
“My memory’s not that bad, yet,” I griped.
“It’s practically the same thing,” he explained. “If he was treating you as his girlfriend, or whatever, everyone would see you like that, with ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ as the common denominator. But without that, we all have to form our own opinion of you, based on how you behave. You never whine, you carry your own. You even do your best to learn how to catch up on the decades of combat experience that we all share between us. You eat cat food even when it clearly disgusts you, at least at first. I’ve never been attracted to a woman in my entire life, but I’m confident to say that if I were, I’d still have a hard time even seeing you as one right now.”
“Gee, exactly the vote of confidence any girl likes to hear,” I interjected.
“Unless you’re trying not to be the camp whore,” he shot back. At my pointed look, he gave a noncommittal grunt. “Seriously, I’m not much more comfortable with what is going on over there right now than you are. And neither are most of the other guys. Up until those four attached themselves to us, we had a pretty sweet thing going. Sure, those two college kids are kind of a dead weight, but you? You’re simply part of our group. A dependable cog that does exactly what everyone expects of her, and usually pretty smoothly so. We’ve all served with women, and we all know the potential drama that can start up if things get weird, but as long as you’re acting completely unapproachable, you’re just…” He paused, and his grin dipped toward shit-eating bright. “One of the guys, pretty much. Except for the tampons. But, seriously, they wouldn’t dare rag you about that if they’d consider you anything but one of us.”
I’d more or less guessed most of that already—it just made sense from how the last weeks had been between us all. But hearing Martinez spell it out for me again kind of took the sting out of my own hurt feelings.
“So, let me get this straight. I’m on a never ending dry spell now to keep the peace so most of you don’t kill each other of testosterone poisoning?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Martinez agreed, but chuckled when he caught my glare. “But even with a non-fraternization order in the army, people always found a way to screw with each other. And we’re not in the army now, anymore. My guess is that he’s simply waiting until you’ve established yourself as enough of a presence that, whatever you do, their view of you won’t change anymore. Just take Zilinsky. I doubt that anyone would think any less of her if she’d run through camp naked, dancing around the fire. I doubt anyone would even dare catcall her.”
The very idea of the Ice Queen doing that gave me the creeps.
“Yeah, no shit. I think even Nate treads carefully around her when she’s in a bad mood, and I’m sure that he knows that she’s a hundred percent loyal to him.”
“Case in point,” Martinez offered.
I thought a little more about that, but there really wasn’t anything else to add. His arguments made me feel vaguely stupid for all the bitching I’d done, if only to myself.
“Was I really glaring that obviously?” I asked, a little self-conscious.
“You glare at anyone when you’re angry,” he said, laughing. “Exactly like that. I’d say it’s cute, but you are learning how to use that shotgun really well, and I’m way too fond of my balls to annoy you too much.”
“Gee, thanks,” I chuffed, but already felt more reassured. “Damn. If I’d known that we’re not only heading into the zombie apocalypse but into the dry spell of my adult life, I would have taken a lot longer in that decontamination shower.”
The look Martinez gave me was only describable as weird.
“What shower?”
“Well, technically not the decontamination shower, because I was alone in there. But the one for outside of the hot zone of the labs. Just before we ran into you and all the zombies you let in because you thought it was such a brilliant idea to make new holes into an otherwise completely sealed-off building.” Biting my lip, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the memory, although it wasn’t exactly a joyous one. “Then again, if we had taken more time we likely would have missed the deadline to still make it out of the building and the explosions would have shredded us into tiny, little bits. Either way I’m damned.”
Martinez was still staring at me, transfixed.
“You seriously had sex after you were in that BSL-4 lab where you’d just planted enough explosives to bring down the entire building?”
I shrugged, nodding. “And after I destroyed what was left of the virus strains and that supposed vaccine that you were there to fetch. With one of the gloves of my suit torn, so it was more or less life-affirming, I’m-not-sure-I-won’t-die-horribly-now sex.”
“Okay. And you still think he was only charming your pants off because why exactly again?”
“Just shut up,” I advised.
“Yes, ma’am,” came his reply that made me roll my eyes at him, but also left me with a lingering smile. Sometimes, all you really need is a friend. And even considering that whole debacle with Smith, I had a feeling that Martinez was quickly becoming one of the really tight ones.
An hour and
three parameter circuits later, I dropped back into the grass next to my pack, propped my shotgun up where I could easily reach it, and dug out—oh joy—another can of cat food. I was happy to realize that just talking to Martinez had helped alleviate that vibe of strangeness that had almost driven me insane before. Not completely, because Bates was giving me weird looks, but after a couple of minutes I realized that they were apprehensive rather than appreciative. Was he actually afraid I’d tear him a new one just because he’d taken our newest group member’s offer to “help” however she could?
And judging from the wide berth everyone gave the family, I wasn’t the only one reluctant to view them as part of “us.” It probably made me a real bitch, but I felt rather vindicated by that.
During our circuits, the raiding party had returned, clearly hitting pay dirt this fine, balmy evening. The moment my ass hit the ground, Cho walked over to me and dropped a shotgun into my lap that was somewhat dissimilar from mine.
“Remington, semi-auto,” he explained. “And here’s some more ammo—buckshot and slugs. You can use it for both guns, whichever works better for you.” He consequently sat down next to me and helped me field-strip both guns, pointing out the differences, or where I might even scavenge parts from one for the other if one broke down eventually and we didn’t find another backup. Hungry and still emotionally frazzled, I would have preferred a shorter lecture, but considering Cho was clearly putting an effort into it, the least I owed him was my attention. He left me with the advice to take it easy with the semi-auto at first as it supposedly had a “donkey kick” for a recoil.
With the camp all set up and the guards out and about, I felt moderately secure—or at least secure enough to take off the hat and peel off my jacket. I was again wearing the pony tee, clearly the wrong choice for the weather. It was soaked through and through and plastered to my skin in all the wrong places, but at least the heat took care that nothing could pebble up to peak through my sports bra and shirt. Eyeing my newly acquired boonie hat critically, I made the mistake of inhaling a little too closely to the damp material.
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 45
