“Realistically, closer to four days,” Hamilton corrected. “Unless we never need to find shelter, which I doubt will happen. A handful of people could maybe do it in one go, but a group as large as ours will inevitably attract attention. Depending on that, we will need to split up to maximize the chance that any one group will make it to our destination.”
I really didn’t care for the sound of that, but judging from the grim nods all around me, it didn’t come as a surprise. Nate’s attention turned to me, and I could guess at his question before he posed it. “Still want to go with Richards?”
Judging from how my gut was twisting in knots, I was far from certain, but I forced myself not to hesitate as I inclined my head. “Yes. Makes more sense from a tactical point. Besides, I wouldn’t want to risk over two thirds of our chances for the propagation of the species in one fireteam.” I didn’t know why I added that—Nate certainly ignored it, as did Richards—but Hamilton gave an almost imperceptible jerk before glancing at Richards, then me. Oh, he knew. And now he knew that I knew. I stared back, the twisting, snarling beast of anger in the back of my mind growing cold, and for once there was no taunt in his gaze, either. It was so easy to forget that there was a reason why he’d been in the position I’d met him in, time and time again, and that hadn’t been because he’d excelled at kissing ass. His brash demeanor, particularly toward me, made it so tantalizingly hard to remember that there was a ruthless kind of intelligence lurking behind those eyes that likely came close to rivaling Nate’s. I absolutely didn’t understand why Hamilton acted the way he did, particularly around me—but obviously, he had been snooping around the updated file that they had on me, and he knew about that note that Richards had told me about in his needlessly cryptic remark a few days ago…
And now was the worst time to let my mind get sidetracked with what-ifs and maybes, and letting what amounted to my arch nemesis see into my cards wasn’t that smart. More to remind myself to prioritize than because I thought it was needed, I added, “Plus, I don’t trust Hamilton not to knife me in the back.” The moment passed—if it had even existed outside of my imagination; Hamilton was that good about shutting down his expression when he wasn’t going out of his way to behave like an ass—and the possible culprit in question offered up a brief smirk and returned to mostly ignoring me.
Nate glanced from one of us to the other—and there was a certain warning in his expression that neither of us missed—before he turned to the group at large. “We likely won’t get much use out of our coms as remaining as silent as possible will be key. Everyone up to date on their hand signals?” Kudos to him for not singling out the scavengers, but he did check in with them. Once everyone had nodded, he went on. “If you get lost, try to make your way to our destination, or if you’re wounded or running low on ammo, retreat to the cars. I had a few possible rallying points underway in mind but since we have no idea how we will get into the city and be able to move forward, this is it. The idea with the highway is a good one—if it works. That will get us close, but downtown Dallas will be a nightmare every which way we look at it. These here are the exact coordinates of our destination.” He prattled them off, also including the street name and number. It took me a little to find it on my map, particularly as it was lost in a cluster of buildings—and, if I wasn’t mistaken, none of them would be small ones or easily accessible.
“How exactly are we supposed to make it there?” I asked when no one else posed the obvious question.
“Likely with very slow, very deliberate movements,” Nate responded, showing humor that I really didn’t feel. “But we may have one more ace up our sleeves that we didn’t expect, and might explain how they managed to keep a lab running there.” He pulled up a different map, this one crudely hand-drawn. Because of the position of the highways, I could more or less imagine what area it covered. Pointing at marks and connective lines drawn in red on the black and blue outlines of the city, Nate added, “Tunnels.”
Danvers, Scott’s second in command, perked up. “You mean the underground pedestrian network?” When most of us eyed him with confusion, he explained. “The city of Dallas built connective underground tunnels between key buildings to keep pedestrians out of the heat. A few sky bridges are also included. It’s somewhat close to an extension of public transport access.”
Nate shook his head. “We may have to cross through there as well, but I’d presume those tunnels are full of nesting shamblers since they give them shelter from all elements, not just the heat. No, I mean the closed railroad tunnels beneath what used to be the Santa Fe Freight Terminal. Luckily for us, the building we are aiming for was part of that at one time. They barricaded and walled off the tunnel entrances when the railroads went out of order decades ago, but I bet not all of them, or not permanently.”
“Exactly how sure are we that this is the right address?” I asked. This was sounding more obscure by the moment.
Nate gave me a surprisingly acerbic smile. “Exactly how paranoid do you want to get?”
I already had plenty of that going on, but that was an easy answer. “Shoot.”
Switching back to the street map he’d been using before, he circled four spots—three buildings and what looked like a parking lot. “Those are the sites that used to make up the Terminal. One building has been torn down and turned into a parking lot. One’s in use by the federal government. One has been converted into apartments, and the last is a hotel. I bet that if the internet was still working, we’d find old listings for those apartments—but I doubt more than a few have ever been rented out or sold. That’s the building we’re headed to.”
“What’s the part about this that should make me all paranoid?” It sounded very convenient, yes, but France had been worse, really.
Nate flashed me a quick smile. “The Santa Fe Terminal Complex railroads have also been used to transport soldiers right from where they’d been recruited by the army for World War II.”
And with Decker being an army recruiter himself, and the lab part of the complex…
“Exactly when did they start the serum program?” I asked, trying not to sound a little bit hysterical. “From what Alders said, I thought in the late seventies to early eighties, and it didn’t go into full swing until the nineties.”
“That’s what I know, too,” he mused. “But some things do make one wonder, right?”
While that connection—purely speculative as it was—freaked me out, it helped underline the theory. “Decker as a recruiter would have heard of that story, even if we are seeing ghosts where none are,” I extrapolated from there. “And with the tunnels, it sounds like a good hiding place to weather out the first waves of the apocalypse.”
Nate agreed with me. “That, and don’t forget, there’s still the possibility that it was never supposed to get that bad. Confusion, a few months of civil war, and nothing more was likely closer to the plan. Having access to a large city for possible looting should things continue on is a good contingency plan. And who would have bothered to go looking there? Even if things escalated further, Texas is a great hideout for the winter.”
I looked at the tunnel map again. “Do we know how far out they extend?”
He shook his head. “That’s what we found of the official, historic tunnels. I doubt we’ll find any mention of any possible extensions, and even if we were to scour the archives at City Hall, I doubt we’d find blueprints of that. Since we have no way of knowing, we can’t plan for that. It may make for a good exit strategy after we’re done.”
This was more information than I had expected to be able to go by. I did my best to memorize the hand-drawn map while Richards noted all the locations mentioned on the map I had been abusing before.
Once Nate had made sure everyone was up to date, he resumed the briefing. “It’s as simple as this—we make it to the building aboveground, or we use what tunnels we know lead there, if we can access them. All of that depends on us getting into the general downtown area first, and not
getting killed out on the streets. I don’t need to stress how much depends on this. We don’t expect heavy opposition once we are in the lab, but hiding in a former city of millions that are now guarding it is more of a defense than we can hope to overcome. We have no real numbers from Texas for the metro areas, but even the rural areas had over seventy percent conversion rate—which means they were hit hard at the very beginning of the outbreak.” That could be a further clue that we were on the right track—and also meant that most people who had eaten contaminated food had turned rather than simply died.
“Anyone got any questions?” Nate wanted to know. “No? Good. Try to get as much rest tonight as you can. There’s a good chance you won’t get any shut-eye until we have made it to the lab and shut it down. Maybe not even until we’re back outside the city.”
Things looked about concluded when one of the scavengers whose name I still didn’t know spoke up. “What should we do with the bodies? Of anyone who dies, I mean.”
Nate cast him a sidelong look. It was Hamilton who responded. “There won’t be any bodies. Whoever goes down will get torn to shreds.”
My, didn’t that sound lovely? I couldn’t help but glance at the assembled clumps of people. Who of them would still be alive tomorrow by this time? And the day after?
Nate got up, officially ending our meeting. “On that cheerful note—make sure to pack your packs tonight so that whenever we need to abandon the cars tomorrow, you will be ready. We start out at sunrise. By the time we’re out there, the sun will beat down on us mercilessly, so pack enough water and make sure you have your filtration systems with you. We’ll be hard-pressed to find anything we can use that isn’t foul from having something dead in it. Dismissed.”
Finishing what was left of my dinner wasn’t exactly high priority for me right now, but I made myself gulp down the nutrients my body would likely be screaming for come tomorrow if it didn’t get them. Nobody seemed up for a chat, and those who had the last guard shift in the early morning were already hitting the rack. I tried to gauge if Nate looked ready for something—including talking but not necessarily that—but he continued to ignore me. Fine by me. It wasn’t like we were walking into our near-certain doom or anything.
Annoyed more than angry, I eventually called it a night myself.
Sleep was hard to come by even though I knew I needed it and would miss it dearly tomorrow, but my mind was still in overdrive—mostly churning ruts around the sheer idiocy of our endeavor. I couldn’t have dozed more than a few minutes at a time when Cole woke me up for my shift, and I forewent the coffee I usually got to make sure I remained alert. No problem with that now, but if I could catch another ninety minutes before we left, I wouldn’t be devastated. It was cool enough to blast the tendrils of sleepiness from my mind, and I did my thing while I listened into the quiet night—or as quiet as the night ever gets when every damn nocturnal animal is out and about and screaming to get laid. Every animal but me.
It was close to the end of my shift when I turned, and suddenly Nate materialized out of nowhere. He’d always been a quiet, deliberate mover, but I’d noticed in the past days that he’d upped his stealth game. Part of me wondered if that was a byproduct of what Hamilton had mentioned—our unmistakable deterioration into the perfect, unnatural hunter. More likely, it stemmed from having been locked in for weeks with brief intermissions of violent unpleasantries of all kinds. Or he’d always been like this when it hadn’t been just the two of us, and I only noticed it now because that had been a while. Whatever the cause, some subliminal part of me must have noticed him as I didn’t startle, just stopped and waited for him to close the distance between us. The faint moonlight was the only illumination, the other guards with their flashlights far enough away not to impede my night vision. Since everyone present had heard Hamilton’s assessment I hadn’t bothered with bringing something that would more blind and hinder than help me—and I’d noticed that I hadn’t been alone with that. Hill had been the only one of those who I knew were inoculated with the serum who had bothered with a flashlight. Theoretically, that should have boded well for the mission ahead, tunnels and all, but that was one detail I couldn’t help but freak the fuck out about. Nothing much had changed for me since I’d woken on what should have been my deathbed, but that had been just me, and knowing that my blood must have been teeming with viral particles at the time. Nate’s change had been easy to explain away with all the other small details he’d brought with him after we’d dragged him out of that blasted lab in Paris. But the others? As far as I knew, Burns, Richards, Hamilton, and Cole hadn’t gotten bitten or scratched there. None of the scavengers had been with us, and they had no problems navigating in the darkness, either.
We were all so fucking screwed, Dallas or not.
Nate didn’t say anything at first, just stood there and stared at me. I knew what he was doing—committing my face to memory. Why? Because I was doing the same, although my rational mind screamed at me not to—it felt too much like jinxing us. I couldn’t help it. Losing him for an endless nine weeks once was too much. Deep inside of me, a different kind of resentment welled up that had been simmering for a while but that I’d managed to keep at bay until now. Damn it, but I’d only just gotten him back! A little tarnished and chipped around the edges, but I didn’t give a shit about that at all. I deserved more time. We both did.
I opened my mouth to ask him… what exactly, I didn’t know; somehow, “Wanna fuck?” went miles by where my head was, and other body parts as well. He shut me up when he brought his hands up and cradled my face before leaning in, the kiss passionate and deep but not the kind that urged for the prompt removal of at least some of my clothes. No conscious thought was required to join and lean into him, desperation clawing at the back of my mind that my body was slow to translate.
I was the one to break away first, and the words spilled out of my mouth before I could think about holding back. “Promise me that this isn’t the end,” I whispered, my voice hoarse and pressed. “Promise me that you will survive.”
I expected him to laugh—or at least make fun of me—but while Nate hesitated, it wasn’t from trying to be diplomatic. “I promise,” he murmured back, the same desperation in his tone that I felt. I hadn’t expected him to say that; it actually weirded me out on some level since his usual MO was to insist not to make promises he knew he couldn’t keep. Maybe that occurred to him as well as a wry smile made it onto his expression. “Or I’ll do my very best to make that happen. I don’t think that this will turn into the last stage of our journey, and at the very least, I want to be around to see that miserable old fuck bite it.” No need to explain who he was referring to.
“You don’t think he’s hiding out in there?”
He shook his head. “If he ever was there, I doubt he’ll be there now. It doesn’t matter. We have our mission, and even if the odds seem overwhelmingly bad in our favor, we’ve survived worse.”
I wasn’t sure about either, but didn’t dare voice my doubt. Some things better went unsaid, particularly those where no one ended up alive to say “I told you so.” Instead, I licked my lips, trying to decide what—and how much—to say. I was burning to tell him about my recent discovery, but now was not the time to bring up my possible fertility status, even though it felt weird to think that now three people in this camp were aware of it and Nate wasn’t one of them. I told myself I’d have plenty of time to share the news—and very likely complicate everything—later, after we were back out of the hellhole waiting for us over the horizon. Instead, I went for a different kind of confirmation. “I know this is likely a very silly question, but I need to know this before we head out in the morning. You’re not actively withdrawing from me, right? This is just you playing your usual underhanded game of manipulation, right?”
There was a hint of condescension in his gaze as he studied me, a wry twist coming to his lips. “I thought we were years beyond the point where I needed to—repeatedly—express that I’d lay do
wn my life for you in a heartbeat, and there is nothing and no one in this world that will change that.”
I hated how much I’d needed to hear him say that. “Why not tell me?” I waited for a moment, but then answered my own question since I knew he was about to offer up one of his favorite sayings—why ask when I knew, anyway? “You needed my authentic reaction. You needed me to strut around and throw a succession of hissy fits, particularly after how the three of us worked together interrogating our prisoners. But why? Everyone here knows that Hamilton and I will never see eye to eye, and I honestly don’t know how I feel about knowing you wanted to delegate me to the B team.”
Nate’s expression turned hard, to the point where reading him was impossible. “Last time I looked, you and Richards did a great job springing both Hamilton and me, so it stands to reason you’re not exactly playing second fiddle,” he observed. Was that anger in his voice? And regret? Like he hated the fact that it was true? The notion was so strange that it took me a little to wrap my mind around it, but it made sense in a way—and there was something else. I hadn’t missed how he’d pretty much growled Red’s name. Far was it from me to accuse my husband of being jealous—and I was sure that it wasn’t concerning romantic feelings in the least—but I figured, in a way that made sense, too. As grateful as he must be about the rescue—and he’d only ever been happy to see me grow more proficient and stronger—it must rankle that he didn’t feel like the unbeaten, unchallenged top dog anymore. Considering what I knew about Nate’s past, and how bitter and costly so many of his triumphs had been, it struck me as peculiar that he’d act like this now, but maybe that was just one more sign of just how thin his patience was wearing.
Either way, his obvious confidence in me was something that felt great to hear, and I hated that on some level I’d needed to know he was okay with all this. But that still didn’t explain why the subterfuge. “You know that I don’t need much acting talent to make it look real that I don’t want to be anywhere near Hamilton.”
Retribution: Green Fields #11 Page 14
