I was still mulling that over by the time I reached the other side of my sector, finding Nate waiting for me, thermos in hand. I accepted it wordlessly but oh, so very grateful to have some hot liquid to help thaw me, or at least make my shift a little easier. For once, I was almost happy that the weather made it impossible to read the look on my face, and maybe the residual tension in my shoulders as well. It was fucking cold, so of course I was miserable, no surprise there. And by the time my shift was over, I was too numb to give a shit about Hill’s misguided comments anymore. Some hot chow, then more shivering in my sleeping bag until sleep finally overwhelmed me.
So far, France really wasn’t shaping up to become my new favorite place on earth.
Chapter 15
It was still snowing when I woke up again, but now it was less of a white hell and more winter wonderland out there, the world cast in a thick layer of fluff. After a little detour west, we continued on our southeast path, now twice as treacherous with the ground hidden by snow and slippery with ice. That we didn’t end up with a slew of broken bones before noon was pure dumb luck. Even my lighter pack was soon perilously heavy, and when I went down the third time and landed on my ass hard enough to bruise, I didn’t really feel like getting up again. Nate didn’t leave me that option, grabbing my wrist and dragging me back onto my feet, but that didn’t help much. The day didn’t get much better after that.
The only thing that brightened my mood—if one could call it that—was the fact that no one singled me out, neither for altercations nor talks that left my skin crawling. What was going on between us was a very long shot from camaraderie, but at least no one was out to ambush the other party. That had to count for something.
One more night of cold and snow, and another day that made me wonder if it had been for the best that I’d made it out of the hell of that operating room. My entire world seemed to consist of cold, with harsh breaks of yet more cold. I dreaded having to step out behind a tree not because of the possible embarrassment, but because that required me to take off my gloves and pull down my pants, exposing way too much of my body to the elements. And it wasn’t like I wasn’t wearing enough layers—underneath it all, my skin was clammy, my underthings sticking to me like the sweaty rags they were turning into. My scars felt stiffer every day, particularly the nightmare landscape that had once been my left thigh, and what remained of my toes and fingers. Fingers mostly as I hadn’t pulled off my boots since back on the ship. I would have killed to spend just one hour in a cozy, warm room, but sadly, nobody gave me that choice. At least I was too numb to give a shit about what Red and Hill had told me. Screw them. Screw all of them, trying to fuck with my mind. I knew what I’d done—the good and the bad. Nothing was going to change that.
The cold front passed, bringing more fog, but compared to the icy sleet that was downright balmy. We passed two more villages but had to stay clear of them, their overrun state obvious from over a mile out. We were lucky when a bridge that we had to cross was still intact, if needing an hour of cleanup to get across the barricades. It got a little better as we went on, a few rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds. This wasn’t so bad, now, was it?
I could tell something was up when Red took our two teams off the rotation, sending a few of the fastest runners ahead instead. I could see a town to the south but that didn’t look very menacing. Besides that, it was flat land with some trees clustered together here and there, car wrecks peacefully rusting in the white-speckled, mostly brown countryside. A signpost nearby proclaimed that the towns in the other directions were even further away, so there shouldn’t have been much cause for alarm.
When Wu and Rodriguez returned, both out of breath but not looking scared, I figured we’d soon find out what was going on. Shit, but I hated being in the dark.
“Road looks clear,” Rodriguez explained after she’d managed to stop panting. “The gate’s a bust, but electricity is out so we can easily scale the wall. Munez and Davis are checking the grounds inside. Should be clear; they haven’t sent up a flare yet.”
“Or something ate their faces,” Wu supplied, grinning. “Doubt it, though. Unless there’s a surprise waiting for us inside.”
“I sure hope there is,” Bucky drawled as he had us head in the direction the others had just returned from. Nate didn’t look particularly happy about not knowing any more than I did, but for once didn’t pull Red back. I figured if this was important, they’d sooner or later tell us. Hopefully.
Maybe two miles later, we hit a winding cobblestone path, barely broad enough for two cars to pass, splitting from the main road that we’d been following since after the bridge. There were no signs, but the underbrush looked overgrown enough to make me guess that whoever had planted the hedges there had valued their privacy.
The gate Rodriguez had referred to came into sight soon after, barred with heavy, criss-crossed struts over the already sturdy-looking, cast-iron fence. Davis was standing on the stone wall that started on both sides of the gate, Munez below him, his eyes roaming over the vegetation outside of the wall just as Davis did the same for inside.
Bucky had barely stopped when Nate got up in his face, not quite confrontational, but a long shot from calm. “Are you finally going to stop bullshitting us and tell us what we’re here for? We can’t find anything that we don’t know we’re looking for.”
Hamilton’s disdainful gaze said quite plainly that he thought that was very well still an option, but he surprised me by giving a different answer. “We’re here looking for a safe. It’s likely located in one of the offices in the main building. But to get there, we’ll have to clear the grounds first.”
Nate took that without blinking, just as if he hadn’t expected anything else from Bucky. “What kind of opposition are we expecting? This doesn’t really look like a place that was teeming with people to begin with, and the lack of additional barricades suggests that it wasn’t used as a last refuge.” I wondered what he thought the reinforced struts at the gate were, but he was kind of right. In Cabourg, same as at the bridge earlier, there’d been a lot of cars, sand bags, and other heavy materials, now rotting in the desolate landscape, to still work as an actual hindrance. Someone had made sure the gate was impossible to bust through with anything short of a tank, but that was it.
Rather than reply right away, Bucky exchanged his assault rifle for a shotgun. That wasn’t buckshot he carried as extra ammo. “Only one way to find out, right? After all, this is a scavenger hunt. We might get to hunt us some scavengers.”
Nate had a rather bland look for that pun; the others didn’t react. I tried to but couldn’t help but scowl. There was some residual grinning going on from Russell and Cole, but they kept it on the down low for once. Red seemed exasperated at best, and, surprise, surprise, it was that which got Hamilton to wise up for once.
“Frankly, we have no fucking clue. We only have a location, that’s it.”
“That you got from the bank vault?” I asked, just to make sure nobody forgot how smart I was.
Hamilton barely acknowledged my presence with a glance. “Bingo. And yes, we need what’s inside that safe. There should have been some guards posted back in the day, but I doubt they felt the need to hold down the fort when everything went to hell. Might just be an easy walk in the park for us.”
I didn’t seem to be the only one skeptical of that, judging from the amount of grenades I saw people put where they were readily accessible.
“What kind of place was this, anyway?” I asked. “In the middle of nowhere, seventeenth-century architecture, lots of old trees? Looks a bit large for anyone’s private residence.”
“It’s a conservatory,” Bucky offered, still feeling talkative. “I hear they specialized in orchids.”
“Orchids? As in flowers?” I didn’t have to face my incredulity.
Hamilton snorted. “And they send you to college for that? What a waste of everything.”
I bared my teeth in a silent sneer at him, but N
ate’s quick shake of the head got me to shut up. Orchids, really. What could orchids have to do with anything that could possibly be of interest to whoever had sent us on this wild goose chase? And why was the address to this place hidden in a bank vault in the middle of a small town in Normandy?
Gita cleared her throat, drawing my attention to her that way. “It makes sense to hide something you want to keep hidden somewhere no one would think to look,” she suggested. “Like keeping your porn stash hidden in your underwear drawer.”
I was tempted to ask her how old she thought I was that I’d had anything to hide that wasn’t already in digital format, but swallowed that remark. “I’m sure mothers all over the world loved to burst that bubble.”
Gita wasn’t deterred. “Bad example, maybe, but the principle holds true. Just as you said, who’d think to look for anything worthwhile to survival at a place that’s likely full of books and dried flowers? Who knows what’s lurking in the cellar?” She suddenly looked vaguely ill. “And botanists have labs, too, right?”
I could tell that Bucky was having the time of his life listening to us speculate, but at my questioning look, he snorted. “Nothing as fancy as that. We’re just looking for the next piece we need. That’s what we came here for. You want me to spell out your task? Clear the grounds, make sure nobody gets jumped by anything, and within a couple of hours we should be on our way once more. Think you can do that?”
“Easily,” I retorted.
He flashed his teeth in a smile. “Then shut your useless trap and get to work. We’re burning daylight.”
I’d honestly expected more of this. The more I learned about this mission, the less I felt I needed to know. Maybe they really had just wanted a few more grunts along who could hold a gun. I wasn’t buying it, but that didn’t change our current situation.
I wasn’t very enthusiastic about having to scale that wall, but Burns boosted me up before I could protest, and dropping down the other side wasn’t that bad, thanks to a heap of leaves that the wind seemed to have blown into that corner. Inside, a sprawling garden scape welcomed us, in clear neglect but lacking most of the signs of destruction that seemed to be everywhere around. The front part, from the gate to the first of the buildings, was easily as large as five football fields. Securing this would take longer than just a few minutes.
“Secure the garden first, then the ground floor inside,” Red instructed us, quickly dividing the fire teams among sectors. As before, he would go with Tanner and Gita, leaving me to roam with Burns and Nate. “Once we’ve established the perimeter, hold your positions. We won’t be staying long, and it would be a shame to find the undead hordes waiting for us outside. So be quiet if you can.” I was hard-pressed not to yell at him that, sure, after almost a week of running and sneaking my first action would be to shoot at everything to attract maximum attention, but by the time the words were on my tongue, Nate, Burns, and I were the last remaining by the wall, the guys waiting for me to take point. Sighing, I resigned myself to my fate, heading through the overgrown garden for the back of the house.
As much as I’d been happy to squabble with Bucky, paranoia was quick to whisper up my spine, making me jump at every crunch of a leaf from behind me—and up ahead where Cole and Parker were following after Russell. Exhaling slowly, I forced my nerves to calm down. I’d done shit like this so many times, I’d forgotten to count… and that was before we’d set out this spring. Just a routine cleanup, with raccoons and other smaller critters our likely foes. The air smelled fresh and the rime-covered leaves were undisturbed except where members of our team had trodden before, making this scene much more undisturbed than most of our camping sites had been. Just a house with a garden, that was it.
Mansion, really, or maybe villa would have been more accurate. I was sure that my high school had taken up less ground than this building—plus its two outbuildings, or whatever those were—did. And there were still two greenhouses that I could see, with likely more beyond the main structures. “Does anyone actually live in a place like this?”
“I don’t think it was anyone’s home,” Nate interjected as he kept scanning the trees over by the wall. “Workplace, maybe, or other representative place later used for something else. Look at the size of that parking lot. You wouldn’t park your Bentley out where rain could leave unseemly smudges all over the glossy paint job.”
He had a point there. “So, left greenhouse first?”
“Looks a little large for orchids,” Burns, closer to the outbuilding, mused. “But there’s too much snow on the roof to see inside.”
“We should check it out. Maybe they have zombie orchids. Could be fun.” I got no response, which wasn’t much of a surprise. “Might also be a good place and time if you want to stage a coup. Just saying.”
Nate glanced over to Burns, who, if anything, was amused by my suggestion. “Last year would have been so much more of a pain in the ass if you’d already known how to handle a gun when the shit hit the fan,” my dear husband surmised.
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“You like to stir up shit when you’re frustrated,” Nate pointed out, but rather than ignore my suggestion—at least the first part of it—he turned toward the greenhouse. “Let’s do this. If it’s empty, we should be out in under ten minutes.”
“What, the coup?” I asked hopefully.
“The greenhouse,” Nate deadpanned. Spoilsport.
I was only too happy to let him take point. My hands might have been steady, but my icy fingers were still acting up. Add to that the adrenaline now freshly flowing in my blood, and I wasn’t too sure just how much use I would be with that rifle. That thought alone irked me enough to want to meet some heavy opposition, well aware of the inherent idiocy of said thoughts.
We paused a few yards away from one of the doors to the greenhouse, listening. It was near silent, our presence having scared away what small critters and birds might have been around before. Our boots crunched softly on the gravel, and coming the main building, I heard someone curse softly, but that was it.
I didn’t like dead silence. It usually meant there were shamblers around, and considering how sneaky some of them had been in the past, I didn’t really like our odds. The greenhouse was one of those elaborate ones that you’d see in a botanical garden, not just a single-story cover for salad. Anything could be lurking in there.
Nate first cleared away what snow and rime covered the glass panes of the door, waiting for something to smack against the other side. When all remained silent, he broke the lock before easing the door open. I’d expected the greenhouse to be warm inside—or, at least warmer than the outside—but somewhere, parts of the ceiling or windows must have been broken because a cool draft met us, carrying only a hint of musty air along. I’d smelled worse in the thicker parts of the forests. The natural decay of plants was enough to mask what else might be rotting inside, making the back of my neck itch. Maybe not my brightest idea to go inside, I had to admit.
Nate went in first, then Burns, with me bringing up the rear. I hesitated, then closed the door behind me. The guys were starting to fan out so I followed, distracted by the crunching of dead leaves under my soles. Despite the cold, it smelled dank and dark inside, like we’d stepped through a portal into a nightmare fantasy landscape.
Burns’s guess proved to be surprisingly accurate. Most of the plants inside the building either grew up to the struts that held the glass panes high above our heads, or covered the ground, a lot of them dead since the specially preserved climate inside was a thing of the past as well, as was whoever had been the caretaker. There were no signs of animals inside, not even nests or tufts of fur that hinted of them having found refuge in months past. The light snow cover on the outside cast the interior into shadows, making me the only one who could easily see unaided—what I could actually see, with dying greenery everywhere.
It was too quiet in here, making me antsy. “We could make a break for it, you know?” I pr
oposed. “Just grab the others and hoof it back to the coast. Wait for the ship to pick us up again, and count on the rest to bite it because they’re lacking several skilled team members.”
Burns snorted, but Nate seemed less enthusiastic about my suggestions. “And you don’t think they have a contingency plan for that possibility?”
I could see where he was going with that. “Yeah, but we’re all together. We have weapons. And compared to last time, I can fight now.”
“I’m sure that the captain has orders to leave us stranded if we’re the only ones who make it back.” Nate exhaled slowly as he kept studying the palm fronds lightly swaying in the cold air currents. “Besides, I gave my word. As did you, as I have to keep reminding you.”
“You don’t,” I snapped. “And what is an oath worth that’s been forced at gunpoint?”
“We’re not having this conversation now,” Nate bit back, real anger visible in his eyes. “Or ever. Let’s secure this building, then get over to the main one. We have a job to do.”
Resentment welled up inside of me, hot and impossible to suppress, so I whipped around to stalk in the opposite direction lest I do something that ended with me on the floor, on my ass, and not in a fun way—and found myself face to face with a zombie. Rather, what was left of its face, the left side looking like it had taken the brunt of a shotgun blast, and not one loaded with pellets. The left eye, most of the nose, and parts of the skull were gone, the jaw slightly unhinged. The sheer fact that it had—obviously—been shadowing my movements for a while and only now got ready to pounce told me that it must be a smart one. When I realized that the rags it wore looked like a dress shirt and suit, on a still rather muscular frame, I figured it had likely been a security guard rather than desk jockey.
I knew I had to act—raise my weapon, shout to alarm the others, drop so I wouldn’t make a prime target—but I couldn’t. My pulse increased, my heart pounding almost painfully fast in my chest… but then it started to slow down, leaving me sluggish and slow rather than alert. It was as if someone had leeched the very adrenaline from my veins—and the fucking shambler, cocking its head to the side as it slowly opened and closed its ruin of a mouth, seemed to feel that instinctively. Crap.
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