I didn’t know the terrain well here, but spending the entire winter out and about had taught me a thing or two, like not tripping over each and every root. I still managed to stumble, catching myself before I could pitch toward the floor, but that killed what little distance I’d been able to keep between me and the shambler. Not waiting for it to tackle me, I whipped around and shot it point-blank in the face, the shotgun recoil hitting my shoulder hard. Gore and semi-coagulated blood sprayed everywhere, while the rest of the body sagged down onto the frozen ground.
Three down, way too many still to go.
My shot might have taken care of this one, but it also served as the perfect beacon for the others. Their enthusiastic howls and screams went up where I’d come from, and the five that I could already see sped up, hurtling toward me. I could have made a stand and downed them for good, but instead I ran on, hoping to spread out the mob a little more again.
Nate seemed to have a similar idea, judging from the barrage of shots coming from somewhere to my right, forcing the zombies to choose which of us to follow. They weren’t stupid enough to come to a halt and consider, but instead those closest to me just kept going, while some of the others veered off in the new direction after the couple that had already been on Nate’s trail. I really didn’t like that tactic, but it sounded like the best idea.
With the sun gone, shadows deepened, making running all the harder. My breath came in fast pants, but I ignored the burning in my lungs and legs. Ahead of me, the forest lightened again and I aimed for that meadow, running out a full ten steps before I turned, ready to shoot at anything that followed.
The first shambler was stupid enough to come straight at me, and got exactly what it deserved. The second’s momentum carried it straight into the dropping body, making aiming for me just as easy. The third and fourth, though, were smarter, splitting up to the left and right, and when the fifth and sixth followed, that left me with four targets that were all running at me in curving paths.
I hit the third in the shoulder and managed to neutralize the fourth by shooting off its left leg, but then it was high time for running, the zombies close enough that I could smell them—and they weren’t that ripe yet to begin with. One almost managed to grab hold of my pack but I wrenched myself free, taking off again. More shots rang out from my right, giving me a good guess where Nate was right now. He was keeping parallel with me but was a little behind, likely because he was trying to draw the zombies to him. Or he’d faceplanted and I hadn’t seen it, and that’s why he lagged behind. Damn.
Reloading while I was running for my life was less funny than it probably sounded, but by the time I was back in the thickening forest, there were eight rounds in my gun again. I would never have admitted so out loud, but I was glad for all the running drills Pia had forced me to do. That shit actually helped when you needed it.
I shot three more zombies over the course of the next five minutes, but by then it became clear that our problem was a lot bigger than I’d thought at first. Even with a few misses, we should have decimated the mob to just the slow ones, which shouldn’t have been fast enough to keep up with us in the first place. But so far I hadn’t shot more than one zombie that had been female in its glory days, and no children, either, and there were still more fast, strong ones coming. What we’d seen out on the slope must have been just the tip of the iceberg—leaving us with unknown numbers and a huge problem. Nate had been right—if we’d gone for the mountains, they might have easily run us down by now. Fighting opponents that felt no pain and never got tired simply wasn’t fair—but that was life nowadays.
Nate emptied another six or seven shots into the undead horde, and I used the sound to hone in on his location. Ten zombies each we could have maybe taken care of on our own. But this? This was a little beyond what I was comfortable with.
The howls and growls helped me map my route, and after another few harrowing minutes, I saw a white shape lope through the woods to my side, the winter camouflage not very concealing here as long as we were up and running. Nate noticed me and hailed me over with a gesture, glancing back briefly to get an estimate of how bad it was behind us.
“We can’t swing back to the bunker with that after us,” he huffed, barely waiting for my nod of acknowledgement. “About five miles from here, there’s that cliff, with some caves in it where we can hold out until daybreak.”
I really didn’t like that idea, but with the zombies now actually gaining on us as they didn’t need to split their attention, it sounded like a good last resort.
“What about that depot?”
“Heading right toward it,” Nate replied, nodding slightly to the right. “About another mile or two this way.”
“Why did you even set up something like that out here? This is, what, ten miles out from the bunker?”
His grin had a certain roguish touch to it. “Because I was hoping that I’d never need it. But it’s kind of our forward bug-out location.”
“I thought the bunker was our bug-out location?”
“For when we have to bug out from our bug-out location.”
I might have sighed with annoyance at that if I hadn’t been busy huffing and puffing along. I didn’t doubt that he’d planted caches all over the area, so why was I even surprised about this?
Two more times we sprinted ahead, turned around, and tried to get the zombies off our backs, but as soon as the dead started piling up, the undead just kept coming. As frightening as that was, what really got the low-simmering panic going in the back of my mind was that, only hours ago, we’d thought we were pretty safe out here, with months of quiet and peace where the latent zombie population would likely have taken care of itself, and hunting them down was more target practice than required culling. There’d even been few enough of them that we’d had good luck supplementing our stocks with hunting. But now that I thought about it, Bates had mentioned that he hadn’t seen a buck in weeks, and today all of the hare snares had been empty.
Maybe those glances Nate had cast toward the mountains were something different than wistful yearning to go off-roading in Yellowstone?
But if this really was a stream of zombies, heading somewhere—like we’d seen on the first few days after the outbreak—where did they come from? And why head to Wyoming, where there hadn’t really been much game to start with even before the virus had turned entire states into desolate wastelands? It was kind of ridiculous that we’d passed by the Chicago metro area and hadn’t gotten accosted by the undead, and out here in the middle of nowhere we were suddenly swarmed?
“How much farther?” I asked, weariness spreading in my muscles.
“Hundred yards, maybe two,” Nate offered, casting another look behind us. “You want to go first or shall I?”
“I have no clue where—“
“Up in the trees, on a small platform,” he helpfully provided.
Shit. I hated climbing trees, particularly the pines that just got me all sticky and never had any good boughs to hold on to.
“You first. I’ll hold them off until you can clear the way for me.”
Yet more running, until Nate suddenly swerved to the left, pointing at a pine tree between three firs that looked just like all the others. “That one. Cover me!”
He sprinted ahead, leaving me to stumble to a halt, my Remington ready. I might have gotten faster with the pump-action shotgun, but still preferred the semi-auto in a tight spot. Getting surprised by way too many zombies sounded like the definition of that.
Trying to force my breathing pattern into more even paths, I exhaled, squinting into the perpetual twilight. It was getting dark quickly now, and while the zombies were good at hunting by sound, I wasn’t. The first few had never lost sight of us, so they were on me rather quickly. I emptied the entire eight rounds into them in under a minute. The deafening racket was too loud for me to keep track of Nate’s progress, but I figured he must have gotten up there by then. Reaching into my pocket, I grabbed the last remainin
g rounds—four of them—and reloaded as quickly as possible. The zombie coming right at me—hurtling over the downed ones as if they weren’t there—growled in triumph, and I barely got the shotgun up in time to bash it into its face. Staggering back, it screamed, but the sound cut off as soon as I shoved the barrel of the shotgun in its mouth and pulled the trigger.
Then it was three more shots and two downed shamblers, and I was officially out of ammo—at least for the Remington.
“Any moment now would be nice!” I shouted, hoping that Nate was ready to cover me now, if not replying. I wasted a precious five seconds to sling the shotgun over my shoulder, getting my Beretta ready instead. As soon as I had the sights aligned, I fired, hitting the next zombie squarely in the chest, straying upward. The fourth shot got its neck to explode, but that wasn’t enough to decapitate. Only when the fifth hit it in the forehead did it drop dead. But five shots was more than I could allow myself.
“Nate!” Still no reply, and no staccato from his assault rifle, so I did the next best thing. “I’m falling back!”
Continuing to fire at the zombies, I started backing away from the pine, casting around for a tree that would be easier to climb than this one. There were firs and spruces around everywhere, too thick to be of any use except to hide the mob that was still streaming into the forest. I needed something better, and quick. If I hadn’t already started to back away from the pine with the depot, I might have chanced that one.
“Run!” Nate called down to me, making me do so without questioning. Yet instead of the rifle fire I was expecting, I heard a few dull thuds as something hit the frozen ground—and before my mind got a chance to catch up, the first of the three grenades exploded, quickly followed by the other two. I was well out of the blast range by now, but the zombies surging after me got hit hard. Entire body parts flew through the air, irritating yet more others, and gave me the window I needed to get away.
Maybe thirty yards over I saw another tall pine, with no boughs until the upper third of the tree. Cursing under my breath, I ran for it, holstering my gun. Unlike Nate’s, it wasn’t that thick, and I discovered that the bark was rather knobby, giving me more purchase than I’d expected as I started pulling myself up. A few more shots followed—semi-auto assault rifle fire—until I was well out of reach, at which point I allowed myself to relax a little. Up here, the pine was still thick enough that I couldn’t have closed my hands around it, but it was thinning out toward the top, and already moving to and fro in the wind.
I really didn’t like this.
Trying to get as good a grip as possible, I looked down, immediately regretting the decision. It was dark enough to make it almost impossible to really see, but that didn’t help the immediate sense of vertigo that hit me. Yeah, me and heights—never going to become fast friends.
Looking over to Nate’s pine, I saw that he had somehow attached himself to the tree with some kind of harness—the likely reason for the long delay—and was still busy shooting down at the zombies. A few had followed me, but while they seemed to have no issues whatsoever identifying me up here as food, they eventually all turned and lumbered back to their fellows, waiting to get shot one after the other. Turning back to the tree, I rested my forehead against the rough bark, and waited. What for, I couldn’t exactly say, but I hoped that it came before I lost my grip and plummeted to my certain death.
Endless minutes passed—hours, really, but I knew that if I’d checked my watch, it would have told me just mere minutes—and the zombies still didn’t quiet down. There must have been thirty or forty dead ones down there already, and still more kept coming. And judging from the wet, disgusting sounds, some of them had started to go for the easy pickings rather than more prickly food.
“Bree? Are you still out there?” Nate called, his voice disembodied in the darkness. Loath to lead the zombies back to me, I just gave a chuffing sound, hopeful that they wouldn’t hear it over the din of their own… meal. Whether Nate heard it was a different thing entirely, but one could hope.
“Gotcha,” he said, somewhat less loudly, but considering that the zombies were all around his tree, there wasn’t really any sense in keeping quiet for him. “I say we stay here for another hour or two, then we move out.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I ground out, caring less about the noise now. “I’ll be lucky if I manage to stay up here for the next fifteen minutes!”
Silence answered me—nicely interrupted by growling, chewing, and other general munching sounds—until Nate replied.
“I can’t climb down until they’ve fed and shambled off to sleep somewhere.” Not that we were sure they were actually sleeping, but they seemed to zone out sometimes. Or maybe that had just been malnutrition and the cold. “But I can try to hop to one of the firs and use that as an escape route.”
That sounded like a recipe for disaster, but unlike me, he wouldn’t join the undead hordes just because he got scratched or bitten. I still couldn’t fathom that he looked forward to almost breaking his neck, and needing thorough wound cleaning and stitches afterward.
“We could split up,” I proposed.
“I’m not keen on spending the next week looking for you, particularly if our outer perimeter has turned into a hot zone now.”
That made me roll my eyes, which didn’t help with the vertigo, either. “I’m not that bad with directions. You know that.”
“In the dark, in uncommon terrain, with zombies chasing you? Yeah, you’ll get lost. You’re also out of shotgun ammo, and if they catch up to you where you can’t shoot them with the sniper rifle, you’re toast. Did I forget anything? Oh, right, you don’t even have a sleeping bag in your pack.”
“And who’s fault is that?” I griped back, hating that he made so much sense. “You told me that I didn’t need it.”
“I told you that you didn’t need it for other things besides sleeping,” he offered, and I didn’t need to see his face in the dark to know that he was smirking.
“So not helping right now!” I pressed out, then fell silent when I heard something move in the grass and needles underneath my tree. Counting to ten, I forced my eyes to open so I could look. Yup, one of the shamblers had decided that it was very curious about this tree. And I couldn’t even free a hand to shoot at it—or likely just drop my gun, which wouldn’t be very impressive, I figured. I really should have tried the other pine.
“How many do you have below your tree?” Nate asked, sounding less concerned than I felt.
“At least one, but probably ten by the time we’re done talking,” I pressed out.
“I have an idea, but I can already tell that you won’t like it.”
“Why, does it entail my sudden but inevitable death?” I hedged.
“Possibly,” he replied, quite conversationally. “If you drop down now, you’ll only have to fend off one or two. And if you run, hopefully enough of them will follow you so that I can clear the ground and come after you.”
Definitely not what I would have chosen for myself, but—
“You think they won’t overwhelm me? There seemed to be quite a bunch of them before,” I objected.
“I think we just scared up some squatters from the trees,” he said. “They’ve stopped now. And the last from the mob that we saw outside on the plain have caught up, I think.”
Oh, great—kid zombies. Theoretically, that should have been good news—smaller bodies meant less strength—but while I had fewer reservations about bashing faces in than, say, a year ago, it was still so much harder with the kids. And their bites were just as infectious as with the adult ones.
But with my arms and thighs screaming from the strain of keeping myself up in the tree, and my fingers getting weaker and weaker by the minute, there wasn’t really much of an alternative.
“When?”
“As soon as you’re ready,” Nate replied, chuckling. “I think I’ll notice when they start making a fuss again, and you probably won’t miss the blasts of a few more gre
nades going off behind you.”
Breathing out forcefully, I just hoped that this wasn’t the last bad decision of my life.
“Okay, then let’s do this.”
And with that, I started easing myself back down the trunk.
At first, things went according to plan, but the closer I got to the ground, the more my arms started to shake. It was dark enough that I couldn’t make out the terrain at the roots of the tree, but I could see the shape crouching there, munching on something—maybe a leg that it had torn off? It was less bulky than most of the zombies that had been chasing us, but still normal sized, so I figured it had been a woman before.
My decision whether to drop down on it or try to shimmy around to the other side of the trunk was suddenly taken from me when I lost my hold with my right foot, and gravity did the rest. Unable to cut off the scream that tore itself from my throat, I fell, my impact somewhat cushioned by the thing I came down on.
I scrambled up as soon as I regained my balance, dancing out of reach of the also rearing zombie. Like most of the others, it was wearing full winter gear, although the once-light parka was torn in places and streaked with what I presumed was blood and dirt. It snapped its jaws, reaching for me, but instead of engaging, I stepped away, bringing more distance between us. That made me trip over something on the ground, but when I realized that it was an old bough, I immediately picked it up. Now armed with my makeshift club, it was easier to fend off the zombie, but it was making enough noise that I could already hear others come closer. Gritting my teeth, I aimed for its head, putting my entire weight into the swing. With uncanny dexterity, it managed to evade me—but not the kick that I aimed at its knee. They might not feel pain, but it still screamed as the leg gave out under its weight, making it fall.
I didn’t linger to finish it off or see how the other zombies might react, but ran off in the direction Nate had indicated for that cliff. Behind me, I heard several grenades go off, the incendiaries briefly painting the darkness bright as day. I screwed my eyes shut, trying to keep my night sight up as much as possible.
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 61
