Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction (16 page)

I definitely confused Elaine with that statement, but Skip had the grace to not even pretend like I hadn’t caught him.

“Considering the, err, style of your group, I was wondering how many… ah…”

I couldn’t help but feel strangely vindicated when I caught Santos’s smirk. When he didn’t offer up the information, I did.

“Six,” I replied. “Would have been seven, but we lost Bates when we took down the cannibals.”

Skip’s eyes went wide while Steve offered up a low whistle. Elaine’s sister blanched, and both Elaine herself and her husband grew just a little tenser. That didn’t get better when Nate chose that very moment to return, stopping next to me with his back half-turned on them, giving them quite the good view at the back of his neck. He ignored them completely, which in and of itself told me that the time for chatting was over. I didn’t bother asking what was up, but simply waited for him to lean close and whisper into my ear.

“I think the mayor checked up on our credentials. Did a quick headcount, and came up one short. They’ve started nosing around the cars, and it’s only a matter of time until they find our contraband passenger.”

Turning around, I looked out over our little fleet of cars. Sure enough, several of the guards were slowly walking between the vehicles, looking into windows were they weren’t too tinted to let them glance inside. They were still a few yards away from our makeshift ambulance, but there was no way they’d miss anything if they just looked closely enough. Exhaling forcefully, I glanced back at Nate. “Think they’ll give us shit for this? Because I kind of draw the line at shooting at unarmed civilians.”

I’d tried to keep my tone low, but clearly not low enough, judging from the scared look that crossed Elaine’s face. Perfect. I hadn’t even had to elaborate on just how Bates had bit it to make them afraid of us.

Nate considered, but gave a quick jerk of his head to the side. “I doubt it. But I think that will be enough to make them say that we’ve overstayed our welcome. I’d rather not escalate things. We got what we came here for. It’s time to go.”

Turning away from me, he gave Santos a quick nod that made the young soldier scramble to say his goodbyes before he beat it to his car. I stared at the grass for a moment, wondering what I was more annoyed about—the general situation, or that the people here were making it worse. Looking back up to Elaine, I offered her a weak smile.

“Well, guess it’s time to go. I hope that what we did today helps. With luck, all you need to do is wait for the stench to die down, and that’s it.”

She was still warring with herself, but a smile broke through in the end. “Thank you. All of you. We know that what you’ve done is the only reason why we’re still here, even if the mayor’s less than graceful about his general misgivings. But you need to understand why we’re afraid—“

I cut her off before she could get further. “Intellectually, I do. But practically? Not one bit. I haven’t lost a single minute of worry to that concern, and I eat and sleep around six of them each and every day of my life. I know that if I somehow manage to crash the car in a way that will kill Nate but not me, he’ll come after me about thirty seconds later and eat my face before I even have time to be afraid. But do you see me jump at shadows? You all need to get your priorities straight. We are all deadly because we have to be, not because of who we are. If you grab that gun from your holster and shoot me, I’ll be just as dead whether you have a mark on your neck or not. This is really the last place on earth to rekindle the old ‘guns kill people’ debate but it’s still true. We put our lives on the line for you. The least we deserve is your respect.”

I knew that it was useless, but I just had to say something or it would have continued to boil inside of me, eating me up.

Voices shouting behind me kept me from saying more, and I didn’t need to zero in on the center of the commotion to know that Jason and the mayor were laying into each other. Sighing, I forced myself to give Elaine a quick smile that was more understanding than what I’d just told her, and went over to where things were about to blow up.

“This is inexcusable!” the mayor was shouting, pointing at the car in question. “How can you even consider bringing someone in who’s possibly infected?”

Jason seemed ready to shout his reply in the mayor’s face, but closed his mouth when he saw Nate and me joining them. I envied Nate the absolute calm he radiated as he turned to the mayor.

“What seems to be the problem? We have one wounded with our medic, yes. He’s in no condition to leave the car, and last time I looked, bruises and lacerations weren’t transmittable by the air that we all breathe.”

“But he could be infected!” one of the guards piped up, eyeing Nate as if he was expecting an attack any second now. “And no one knows what’ll happen when he dies.”

Nate gave him a withering glare but toned it down to belligerence a moment later. “I can tell you exactly what happens when he dies. He’s dead. It’s been like that since the dawn of time.”

“But we don’t know if he’s one of—“ the guard protested.

“He’s not,” Nate said, talking right over the guard’s protestations. “Else he wouldn’t be dying from a few fractures. You can ask any of my guys what they’ve watched me get up and walk away from. That’s the whole point of us being out there, doing the shit that fragile dolls like you can’t do. Us, and any physically able man and woman who has the guts to walk out these gates; who also don’t shit themselves at the sight of a little blood and the odd broken bone. So what’s the problem? He remained in the car the whole time, and we’re about to leave, so you pussies can stop wetting your pants. Any objections?”

Surprisingly, the guard looked more cowed than pissed, but that didn’t mean that the mayor was ready to step down off his soap box.

“The issue here is that you deliberately violated the rules,” he started to explain, but Nate didn’t let him get farther.

“By doing what? None of us came anywhere near your precious little town. We stayed here, with our cars, while you deliberately shit all over every single item in the agreement we all signed. Now we’re about to leave, and still you treat us like criminals. You must be real proud of your accomplishments.”

The mayor’s face darkened, but sadly, he didn’t go off like I would have. Narrowing his eyes, he looked at all of us again before a satisfied smirk took hold of his features. “Our radios are about to start working any minute now. By the time you roll out of Harristown, the entire network will know that you’re just a lying, deceiving, extorting bunch of scumbags. Don’t expect another town to open their gates for you ever again.”

I really didn’t care for the implications of that, but Nate didn’t even blink.

“You do that. We’ll be happy to report our side of the ongoings as well,” he said, then glanced at Jason. “You and your guys ready to beat it?”

“Hell, yeah,” Jason agreed.

And so it came that as the sky started to turn yellow, our cars left the settlement, one vehicle at a time. Burns went first, driving our most offensive patient outside before any further altercations could arise. Jason went next. We were third. I couldn’t help but sigh with relief as we made it outside and still no shots had been fired at anyone. While the other cars started lining up next to what had once been the road out of town—now terminally churned into mud just as the meadow all around it—I eased the Rover through a few slow maneuvers, then gunned it up to top speed, going in circles this way and that to make sure the steering worked properly again. I might have whooped a little. Nate smiled. As the others took off rolling toward that slope I’d nearly not made it down this morning, I accelerated and rounded the entirety of the settlement one last time. We’d been thorough about the cleanup, but the ground was still drenched with gore and littered with body parts. Carrion eaters—four-legged and winged alike—were everywhere, a black cloud lifting into the air as I threatened to go right through them. On all sides the palisades had held, but there were a few weak spots that I hoped the townspeople would repair soon. In the distance we saw what remained of the pyres send a few last tendrils of smoke up into the otherwise cloudless skies, no traces of the sappers or their vehicles remaining. Upriver, not a single shambler stirred, which was a good thing.

Completing the circle, we closed up to the last car making its way into the countryside, and we left what counted for civilization these days behind us.

We made it about twenty miles northeast from the settlement before we called it a night. We might no longer have been hungry, but we were all tired, the less than stellar welcome of the townspeople weighing on all of us. We also had a man with less than forty hours left to live, which made all the sneering and suspicion pale in comparison. I hadn’t exchanged more than a word or two with him, hadn’t known he existed more than a day ago, and still I felt a weird kind of bond with him. And unlike the people in Harristown, none of us was shying away from Phil when Jason and Charlie helped him out of the car once we’d set up camp. Seeing him pale and sweaty reminded me so much of Innes that it made me physically sick all over again, but no one else—not even Phil himself—looked glum so I forced myself to act as if nothing had happened.

Turned out, there was one single advantage to dying like this—you could attend your own wake. And when Phil expressed his immediate concern that he felt like he deserved to get stone cold drunk one last time, we were happy to oblige him. What should have been one hell of a depressing evening quickly turned into a veritable celebration.

I’d had a good feeling about the Chargers from the start, but as evening turned to night, I realized that they really were a bunch not unlike us. Like we had Pia, they had Charlie, who took it as his personal responsibility to bust any ass that might need busting. Each on their own they were a force to be reckoned with. Together, they were unstoppable. Within fifteen minutes a perimeter was established, watch times agreed on, food distributed, and Phil was polishing off his first aluminum cup full of Scotch—the good kind that Jason had pilfered from a liquor store last fall, kept for a special occasion. So we ate, and we drank; we laughed and told stories, keeping a low fire burning in our midst to serve as much as illumination as to keep us cozy and warm. As usual I was sitting between Burns and Martinez, every so often glancing across the fire pit at Nate. Tonight of all nights I might have preferred his company—or at least a hefty dose of that booze going around—but this night wasn’t for us. It was for our new friends. So we took all the night guard shifts, and made sure to remain sober enough to actually be of use when our time was up.
 

It was well past ten—usually the time when things started to quiet down, mostly because early sunrise meant more hours of daylight we could spend on the move, and Pia didn’t believe in letting us waste any—when Burns asked how the Chargers had all found each other. Jason and Charlie shared a few glances, and it was Charlie who launched into the story.

“Easy, really. Most of us were members of the South Colorado militia. We had an informal exercise planned for the weekend when the shit hit the fan. So we found ourselves, armed to the teeth, food and preserves ready, with our children and wives in the middle of nowhere, in the woods north of Grand Junction. Took us a few days to realize what was going on. The first wave passed us by without us even knowing anything had happened. We lost a couple of people when the Denver area started to empty out, but the warnings about the contaminated food hit us before that could become a problem. We did well until the winter.”

His marked pause made my stomach sink, although the general air of levity remained.
 

Jason picked up where his friend had left off.

“People got sick. The real flu, not this zombie crap. We did well with fortifying our hideout, but we didn’t expect the winter to get so cold so soon. Lost about a third to the cold and diseases that, a year ago, would have barely been a reason to keep the kids home from school for a couple days. That drove us out to look for meds, which got another bunch of us killed. If we hadn’t run into some traders heading east from Utah, we wouldn’t have made it through the winter. They convinced us to pack everyone up and come with them. Best decision we ever made.” The others seemed to agree with him, even though the mood remained—understandably—subdued.

Charlie took over once more when the booze reached Jason.

“Then spring came, and it got harder to ignore that there wasn’t really a place for us in the town anymore. All of us, we lost every relative that we had. Those who still had families, they stayed, but we decided to leave. The town needed everything from clothes to preserves to electronics, and who was better suited to go out than those who didn’t have much left to lose? When we heard about the treaty, things were a done deal for us. After months of inactivity, being out here sounded like a damn good alternative to planting crops and bringing in the harvest. Although we might still help with that in the summer. Our people agreed that we could come home and stay for however long we want any time. I’m sure they’d be happy to extend the same to you if we tell them we sent you.”

Nate shrugged but didn’t look very tempted by the offer. Utah, not a state I’d figured I’d want to settle down in. Then again, I’d never been there, and after last winter, hunkering down somewhere with a little less than several feet of snow wasn’t the worst idea. Just made me wonder how much the warmer climate would draw the shamblers come fall. Unlike me, Nate managed to keep his tone level as he replied. “Thanks, man. Maybe we’ll take you up on that later in the year.”