We only spent half an hour at the house, but that was still long enough that we had to brush a heap of snow off the cars to get back into them. A weather forecast would have been nice, but so would working road service. All we had were chains for the tires that we’d put on before leaving the Silo. That would have to suffice.
As Colorado residents in their previous lives, Jason and Charlie knew a thing or two about getting around in snow high enough to suffocate in on foot, but just after dark even they gave up and we hunkered down in a house by the road about fifty miles away from the Silo. The light snow of the morning had turned into a storm that made navigating impossible, so it was our safest bet to hunker down before we froze to death out there. With sight down to less than twenty yards, Nate opted for all of us to remain inside, with one guard posted by a window—and me off the rotation, as much as I tried to protest.
Keeping my mind busy during the day hadn’t been easy, but between sorting through the new research files and chewing meds like candy, I’d managed. I’d planned on spending most of the evening with reading and taking notes, but I was pretty much wiped by the time everyone was fed and I found myself swaddled in a heap of blankets in a corner of the room that we’d declared as our home for the night. My head hurt so badly that it was hard to see straight, let alone concentrate on anything, and I dozed off several times before I gave up and succumbed to sleep.
Only my mind had other ideas, and I ended up wide awake at two in the morning. The lights were out and the air outside my cocoon of blankets cold enough that when I touched my nose and cheeks, they stung slightly. The motion made Burns look in my direction from where he kept watch by the window next to the door, half of his face obscured by his night vision gear. I tried to go back to sleep, but the racing thoughts in my head wouldn’t let me so I gave up and, still wrapped in one of the blankets, made my way over to him.
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” he whispered as I joined him, holding out a thermos to me. The tea inside was no longer hot but still warm enough to go down smoothly, making me guess that Nate had left it with whoever was up on rotation in case I woke up in the middle of the night. That level of forethought was downright disturbing.
“Can’t,” I croaked out, downing a second cup to get my voice working once more. To no one’s surprise, it didn’t work, but at least I felt a little less like death warmed over. That pun failed to crack me up. “I think my circadian rhythm is shot for good. My body folds when exhaustion gets too much, but as soon as the batteries are recharged, I’m up again.”
“You don’t exactly look invigorated,” Burns offered, eyeing me critically.
“Gee, thanks. Guess who cares?” Rather than wait for an answer, I looked outside, seeing nothing but white. “Where are the cars?”
“See those lumps over there? That’s them,” Burns pointed out. That didn’t look promising, but it wasn’t like we had time to wait for the snow to stop. If it would even stop; I had no idea how long snowstorms usually lasted in Montana. For all I knew it would be like this until late March.
“Made any progress on the files?” Burns asked when it became apparent that I was too enamored with the white doom outside to comment on it.
“Some.” I sighed. “It’s not really anything I’m familiar with. Different part of the field from Raleigh’s research that I’ve seen so far. From what I can tell, his approach wasn’t to change the serum or virus itself but build a multi-component system to work around it.” I could see that I’d already lost him. Nate was pretty much the only one who ever listened to me prattle about the science of things, and mostly to indulge my thought process, not because he showed any actual interest. “I need more time.”
Burns nodded at the window. “You’ll have at least a few days in that. Too bad you didn’t get that address when it was warmer. We could have made the trip within twenty-four hours if need be.”
“Yeah, too bad,” I grumbled, hating how the paranoia at the back of my mind surged up nicely. As if my ire had summoned him, Nate appeared at my other side, reaching for the thermos to pour me another cup. I must have been too slow in wiping my face of any emotion because he raised his brows at me, silently urging me to spill my guts. “You get what I mean, right?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “That you wouldn’t have had to load your conscience with the guilt of killing hundreds in your little crusade?”
That made me scoff. “First off, it was our crusade, not my personal pet project.” The guilt part I didn’t protest, although I still felt like I was doing a good job trying to ignore it. “But that’s not the point.” When both he and Burns kept looking blankly at me, I chuckled softly. “Don’t you get it? Fucking Bucky Hamilton had that same envelope with him. Likely with instructions to make me come with him in turn for agreeing to my terms. That’s why that bastard was smirking when I didn’t let him offer any conditions of his own. He figured I practically signed my death warrant.”
It was real surprise on their faces that met me, and for once, one-upping them didn’t bring me any satisfaction. Not even the scowl that crossed Nate’s features helped.
“How certain of that are you?” Burns wanted to know, but sounded doubtful of his question.
“Of course I can’t know for sure, but it makes sense, right?” I grunted. “It all makes sense now. I thought at first that Taggard and his men weren’t all immune to the virus because when they first got my blood, they were very careful and wearing hazmat gear. But that wasn’t the reason—they just weren’t sure whether they could get infected with what else was already raging in my blood by then. A day later, they knew—or at least knew they couldn’t contract it—so they dropped the security measures. From what Wilkes said, he got the delivery about a week and a half later. Colorado was a month after that. And don’t tell me that Hamilton isn’t the kind of petty fucker who would pass up a chance like that.” No protest followed.
“It was still an act of outright insubordination that will have cost him,” Nate pointed out.
“To hurt you? I’m sure he’ll go a lot further than getting a slap on the wrist,” I retorted.
Burns listened in silence to us, seeming increasingly more unhappy. “They could have reached you in New Angeles. Must not have been top priority if they didn’t even try.”
I shrugged. My guess was as good as any. “Maybe they were pissed that we let Torres take out his misgivings on Alders. Maybe Hamilton told them I refused. Who knows? Even more importantly, who cares?”
“I care,” Nate bit out, positively vibrating with frustration. “If this is true, I’m going to eviscerate that sorry excuse for an asshole next chance I get.”
Shaking my head, I bumped my hip against his. “Trust me, he’ll see it coming from a mile out, and he’ll be ready for you.”
“And you think that will stop me? Or save him?”
“Already dead set on avenging me?” I joked. “Shouldn’t we at least try to keep me alive first? Just a thought.”
As I’d expected, that drew an exasperated grunt from him, but did the job of derailing his need for vengeance. “First things first. Not sure about their ability to keep communication up, but by the time we get there, they will be expecting us. Let’s hope that makes a difference.”
“The data’s good, so that will help,” I assured him. “And I doubt that they sent out that invitation just because they’re banking on my desperation. They must want something from us, or else they would have gone about this in a different way. If it was just for curiosity’s sake, they already have two bodies. That should suffice.” At Nate’s raised brows I shrugged. “They got Stanton, and they took most of the semi-dissected zombie with them that caused this whole fracas with the Silo. Dom told me they were only allowed a small sample size to use for their own experiments. The rest went into a body bag in the back of a Humvee.” As much as I was sorry for what had happened to Stanton, at least it would likely help me as whoever was waiting in that black ops lab had had weeks to analyze what ex
actly was going on. Now all I could do was hope that it wasn’t too late.
Silence settled, uncomfortable as fuck. I slurped more tea, mostly to have something to do while Nate seemed to glare a hole into the floor he was standing on.
“Any guess how long it will take us to get to Esterhazy?” I asked when no one spoke up.
“In this weather, if we manage to stay on the roads? Three days, maybe four,” Nate estimated.
“If?”
I got a glare for my doubtful tone. “Don’t jinx it. With luck, the weather will ease up in a day or two and we’ll at least know if we’re heading in the right direction.”
“Remind me not to ask next time,” I supplied, trying but failing to suppress a yawn.
“Get some sleep,” Nate more told me than advised. “And don’t forget to take the rest of the meds. There were still some left from the first round you counted out earlier.”
“That shit’s more likely to kill me than cure me,” I complained, but dutifully pulled out the plastic baggie from my pocket. Still ten left, which I swished down with the last of the tea. There were another few doses left in the car.
Even though I felt like protesting it, I was out as soon as I’d crawled back into my cocoon of a bed.
Chapter 17
The next morning didn’t so much dawn as Jason decided that it was time to break camp. It took the guys a good twenty minutes to get the cars out of the heap of snow they’d turned into during the night, and moving tentatively northeast. Burns was driving, following Charlie down what must have been a road as it was too smooth for grass underneath the still-growing blanket of white. It was freezing cold inside the car, even with us bundled up in the blankets that we’d taken with us. At the next town we reached—what felt like fucking forever but was likely closer to an hour—we stopped and busted down a few more doors to get more gear suitable for these conditions. It turned out, the people who had been living here had much better stocks than we’d found in stores so far, if coming with the odd barely-moving, locked-in zombie trying to crawl after us. We didn’t bother killing them—the wolves whose tracks we found all around the houses would take care of that, I was sure. I couldn’t help but frown when I saw that Nate also packed any additional large backpacks that he found and several pairs of snowshoes.
I’d counted on being able to continue working on the files during the drive, but with all the jostling and sliding, snow chains notwithstanding, I was ready to throw up within minutes of trying, thus abandoning that quest until we stopped for lunch. I only realized how much our body heat had warmed the interior of the car when we got out once more and it was even worse than I remembered from our raid. At least the snowfall had lessened, but it was still so overcast that one in the afternoon looked more like just after sundown.
Three spoons into my can of beans, I was hunched over next to the car, hurling not just that up but what remained of breakfast and dinner from last night—that again looked decidedly undigested. The white chunks in between must have been the pills I’d swallowed. The fact that it all came with some bloody slime was ever so slightly disconcerting.
“So much for that,” I muttered as I grabbed some snow to get the splatters off my face and jacket. Nate stood like a glowering pillar next to me, his face as animated as stone. “Liquids still work?” he asked, failing to sound unconcerned.
I shrugged. “I don’t see the three gallons of tea that you force-fed me since yesterday, so, I guess?”
He disappeared from my side, only to reappear a minute later, vigorously shaking the thermos I’d been nursing all day. I recoiled from the brown sludge I found inside when I opened it. “Just hot water and protein powder.” When I kept glaring at him, he gave me a toothy smile. “And some dried eggs, cake mix, mashed potatoes, pesto, and a can of tuna. I’ve dissolved your meds in the tea first before I dumped in the rest. What are you complaining about? You can’t taste it, anyway.”
“There’s still the texture,” I complained—but carefully let some of the sludge dribble into my mouth. The first swallow went down and didn’t make a reappearance right away, so I kept sipping. Except for a belch halfway through that made Burns inch away from me, I downed the entire bottle without incident. Jason and Charlie were more than happy to split my portion of what the others got for lunch, and fifteen minutes later, we were back on the road.
It was getting darker by the time we rolled by a sign indicating the border. Behind it, the remains of a wind-torn Canadian flag were battling the test of time. No one commented on us leaving home; outside, it didn’t look different except for the road signs changing—what little of them we could make out when Jason stopped and wiped one clear, checking with Charlie that we were still on track.
“Don’t forget to dump maple syrup into my dinner,” I told Nate. “Even if they’ve managed to contaminate that as well, I doubt I will turn into a zombie any quicker than at the current rate.”
He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t sure whether the muscle jumping in his cheek was from him trying not to laugh, or gnashing his teeth.
The storm got worse once full dark fell, leaving us no other option than to stop at the next possible shelter—a house just beyond a sign that proclaimed that a town must be somewhere around, but with visibility getting more abysmal by the second, I had no clue how big it was. Small, I figured from the fact that the house didn’t exactly look like a mansion, the doors and windows boarded shut. I was ready to grab my shotgun and bust down the front door, but Nate called me back, unceremoniously locking me inside the car while he, Burns, and Tanner started the cleanup. And quite the cleanup it was, judging from the no less than thirty shots fired. It took them a good ten minutes to reappear, gear splattered with gore.
“We left them out back,” Nate explained as he rubbed himself down with snow before getting his gear from the car. I didn’t check; the first thing I noticed as I stepped through the front door were the many picture frames full of tiny, smiling faces.
While Burns and Charlie made dinner—and Nate “dinner” for me—I got as comfy as possible with my blankets and printouts, and continued going through Raleigh’s files. I stopped halfway through a paragraph in the second file, quickly leafing to the back of it where he’d kept a short literature reference list—once a scientist, always a nerd. Puzzled, I continued to read on, what felt like the frown of the ages appearing on my forehead. Distracted enough not to care, I chugged down the concoction that Nate handed me as he sat down by my side, a silent companion first, then a convenient pillow once he was done eating himself. There were too many layers between us to sense his residual heat, but I still felt my mind calm down as my body snuggled against his. He didn’t ask so I didn’t explain, but when I gave up for the night and turned off my flashlight, I felt just a little bit more optimistic.
What remained of that optimism was squashed the next morning when I only made it a third through the reddish sludge that was pretending to be breakfast before puking all over the well-used hardwood floors of our shelter. I tried tea next, but my stomach was too upset to have any.
“How much of the antibiotics are left?” I asked Nate once I could breathe freely again.
“That was the last of them.”
I did a quick calculation in my head, making myself stop before I got to the conclusion. “Let’s try again at noon with just water and protein powder,” I suggested. “It’s entirely possible that my body’s just rebelling because your culinary skills etched away the better part of my stomach lining.”
Nate nodded silently, getting back to prepping a full battery of thermoses to take on the road.
The moment we stepped outside, we were met with a stunning view—in my case, literally so as the bright sunshine made me stagger back inside quickly enough that I ended up on my ass. During the early hours of the morning, the storm had passed, leaving a snow-bright pristine landscape out of a cheesy winter movie outside. The town, if you could call it that, was a handful of buildings spaced apart, barely iden
tifiable as such only where the wind had blown away some of the snow. It was all soft, and white, and beautiful—at least what I could make out until my tearing eyes turned it all into swirls of white and blue.
“Good news is, we should make better time today,” Jason proclaimed. “Plus, Charlie found us a shortcut that will easily take a day off our tour.” He pointedly didn’t look in my direction, but the message was clear—the sooner we got there, the better.
Even with snow everywhere, we made better time today. It was still icy cold, something I complained about until Nate mentioned that we’d have an ice rink for a road tomorrow if all that powder started to melt, then froze over during the night—not quite that appealing. I hawked and coughed my way through the morning, but the tea I tried just after ten remained down, a good sign.
A little while later, we reached a bridge spanning a riverbed frozen solid below. Like so many other bridges, crossing it was slow going as several cars had broken down there, but someone ahead of us must have cleared a way already as the cars managed to squeeze through the worst of it without scratching the paint jobs terribly. Only days ago, that would have made me cast around, shotgun in a tight grip, but now that realization was close to comforting. Getting picked up by the people we were looking for was not the worst-case scenario I could think of. If they’d built their base up here—and likely reinforced it, judging from the scavenging efforts we’d seen all over the region in summer—they likely had invested in vehicles equipped for the climate. Getting a lift in a well-heated Humvee that someone had turned into a snow plow? Yes, please.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 24
