Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction (20 page)

I did a quick estimate in my head. Even subtracting all the zig-zagging we’d done to get here, camp wasn’t just over the next hill.

“It will take us hours to make it back there on foot,” I objected.

Nate shrugged. “Likely closer to a day, if we don’t walk through the night. Got any better ideas?”
 

I shook my head. Neither Burns nor Pia protested, so it was decided. They left us most of their spare sniper rifle ammo before they moved out. Studying Nate for a second to get a better reading of his mood, I gave up. “Let me guess. This is still not the part I won’t like.”

He held my gaze evenly, but I didn’t care for how the corner of his mouth turned up. Humor in these situations was never a good thing.

“Even if they’re great at distracting the zombies, maybe half of them will give chase. That still leaves us with the other half.” He paused, his smirk finally appearing. “We’ll have to disguise ourselves so we don’t stick out. We know that they try to discern whether we are food or not by scenting us, so that shouldn’t be too hard.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was not the most brilliant idea of the century.

“Fuck, no! I’m not going to literally roll around in zombie guts!”

Nate didn’t even do me the courtesy of denying that this was his plan.

“It’s the only way. I can’t go down there and expect to survive. You won’t get halfway there. Even if they’re too dumb to pinpoint our location from the shots, they will be on high alert when they notice that some of their own are dropping dead. The cows may have fed them enough to buy us some time to go investigate, but I don’t doubt that within the first half hour, the corpses we produce will be all but gone. Trust me, it’s not the event of the day for me when I get to smear zombie parts all over you.”

“We both know that it is!” I accused, but after suffering that smirk for another three seconds, I let my breath out in a rush and looked at the horde below. “So, how exactly are we going to do this? I presume we’ll have to move out as soon as we’re done taking them down, so the most macabre paint job in the history of the apocalypse will happen before that?”

He nodded. “I’ll sneak down there, grab that one over there that’s already looking a little unsteady. Drag it back up here. We try to get as much of the juicy parts all over us. The gore should stick. By then, the others will be back with the car. We start taking the ones out that look the most promising while they drive down there to confuse the remaining ones. Once the zombies start giving chase, we go have a look at the bodies. If we find something, great. If not, we only have this one shot. I’m not going to risk your life or my own again on the off-chance that there’s one shambler down there that might have an injection mark on its arm or neck.”

I still didn’t like this, but there was no sense in protesting. “How do we find the best targets?” The two that we’d singled out were a given, but we had enough ammo for another hundred, if I didn’t botch too many shots. “One shot, one kill” might be the sniper motto, but I wasn’t quite there yet, not even on my best days.

“We try to single those out that have gear on that still looks like more than rags,” Nate proposed. “I’ll take the long range, you the short. Once the car is down there, we concentrate on those that react the fastest and give chase. At Harristown the entire mob only moved after the juiced ones took off after us. I don’t think we can rely on that to happen again now, but if there are some of them hiding down there, we might be able to single them out that way.”

“Lots of ‘ifs’ in that,” I noted.

“Let’s just say that if we’ve miscalculated and they come after us, we likely have less than two minutes left to live. A quick, brutal death is still better than what’s happening in camp right now, don’t you think?”

My nod was a reluctant one, but I had to agree with him.

“Let’s do this,” I said after allowing myself another moment of asking myself why the ever-loving fuck I was doing this. Not like my ego would have let me back down.

“Damn straight,” Nate replied, giving me a real grin. “Get your gear ready while I take care of our camouflage. When I’m back, it’s on.”

I had never been so disgusted in my entire life.

Over the course of the last year, I’d come to terms with a lot of things—no running water. No warm water of any kind for anything that wasn’t food. Cat food and stale crackers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sleeping everywhere, in every position, with gear and weapons that weighed just about half as much as I did, strapped to my body. Living with shy of twenty people in a space that usually would have been crowded for more than four.

But nothing could have prepared me for being rubbed down with zombie goo.

It wasn’t just the stench, although that in and of itself was bad enough, breathing mask notwithstanding. It wasn’t the latent fear that if I got into contact with too much of that gunk I’d get infected. There was the consistency of the bits and pieces that adhered to my arms where I could constantly see them. Squish them between my fingers as I dumped the lot of it across Nate’s body armor. It wasn’t just like dead or decaying meat. It was too elastic, too slimy overall, but at the same time strong enough that just tearing off chunks didn’t work. We had to cut them. Stick them under buckles and straps. I wasn’t even sure if dismembering a normal human corpse wouldn’t have been ten times easier, and that was saying a lot.

Nate and I both ended up in our own, private bubble of misery. His smirk disappeared twenty seconds into our gruesome work, but long before we were done, I couldn’t help but crack a smile of my own. As disgusting as this was, it was also hilarious. Then I remembered the sheer lunacy of our undertaking, and gone was most of my mirth once more. We both knew that we had to do this—but that didn’t help. At all. Sometimes, being the one with the bright ideas just plain sucked.

It was a good twenty minutes before the car reappeared and Burns came to a halt next to us, not chancing opening the door or cracking a window as he let out what I hoped wouldn’t be his last, worst one-liner. “Best ghillie suit ever.”

I briefly considered getting up, wrenching that door open, and giving him a good, long hug, but decided that staying stretched out on the ground was more favorable. The less I moved, the less I’d feel what I was covered in. And there was a good chance that I’d need all that energy that was buzzing unspent through my muscles soon enough.

“Can we get this underway? As much as I love my new corpse suit, let’s not prolong this unnecessarily,” I offered, looking over to Nate. How he managed not to retch from the stench was beyond me. The bandana he had tied over his nose and lower half of his face couldn’t make much of a difference. With my breathing mask on I already felt like I would hurl any moment now.

“Your wish is my command,” Nate said, the words understandable because his throat mic picked them up. “Everyone knows what to do? Good. Then let’s hope we won’t get each other killed.”

At a last glance at him, I rolled fully onto my front, getting as comfortable as I could with my sniper rifle. Our first—and main—objective was to take out the two zombies we’d tagged before. The rest was optional. Because she would likely go down with just one moderately good hit I’d gotten assigned the female. It only took me a few moments to get her in my scope again. She—it—was still busy chewing on the cow. Exhaling slowly, I forced my mind to empty and pulled the trigger.

The shot wasn’t perfect, but with the caliber of rounds that the M24 was packing, the torso hit was enough to make the body sink to the ground and stay down. Instinctively I checked the other target, only a few feet away, but the muted thud of Nate taking a shot should have told me already what I could visually confirm a moment later—a perfect head shot. There wasn’t much above the neck remaining, so I figured that was the end of one more juiced-up zombie. Now for the fun part.

The car rumbled down into the valley below as soon as Nate gave them the signal, the sound and motion drawing every zombie’s attention, already alert from the two rifle shots ringing out across the rolling hills. Yet only a few let off from where they were still gorging on cow or sleeping it off to give chase. As I squeezed off round after round, I tried to find good targets, but they were few and far between—in the mass of zombies that waited down there. It should have been easy, really, but I didn’t want to waste ammo on just any undead fucker. And as placid as the horde had seemed en masse, those that sprang up and went for the car made good, if hard to hit, targets.

I didn’t count how many times I pulled the trigger, but I hit at least two out of five shots. I was waiting for Nate to berate me, but he was busy decimating the set-up spare ammo between us, for once focused on something else than bitching at my performance. It was that more than anything else that made me realize that the training wheels were off—today I was expected to pull my own weight, and it wasn’t his problem anymore if my accuracy left a lot to be desired. No pressure whatsoever. Great.

The last of the spare rounds hit, and I took another moment to track the car where it took a sharp turn toward the left, hopping onto a small road that ran perpendicular to the river that had carved its way through the valley. There were a good hundred zombies giving chase, with several more streaming in that direction, but now that they had solid ground back under their wheels, the car was already accelerating. Nate’s sniper rifle gave two more loud barks, and he was done. I was already scrambling to my feet as he slapped my upper arm in a silent signal to get moving. Under different circumstances we would have taken the cartridge casings with us, but we barely had minutes to do what we'd come here for—salvage would have to wait for another day. Or never, as I couldn’t quite see us return for thin loot like that. Maybe some other group would happen upon it in the weeks or years to come. Who knew?

Focus, right. I forced my attention to snap to the zombies directly ahead of us at the valley floor as we half walked, half trotted down the slope to join them. Stealth was one thing, but they were already agitated, and two lone figures moving were a lot less interesting than the loud car in the distance and the screams and howls of the zombies giving chase. I was surprised when we barely drew any attention, and within minutes we’d reached the cow carcass we’d been aiming for. My pulse was racing but—so far—my hands were steady, fear making me focused rather than insane with panic.

Nate quite eloquently used a stone to bash in what remained of the skull of the male zombie, although it was obvious at a glance that this one wouldn’t get up again. There wasn't really much left to be bashed in, but better to be careful. Our little experiment in Sioux Falls had taught us as much—and now more than ever I was happy that we’d gone that extra mile and made sure that a severed spine at the neck was the surefire way to take them out. The first thing I checked on my corpse was her neck—one mark only. She was dead for good—and looked it—but the blood oozing from the huge hole in her chest cavity still looked like what was supposed to come out of wounds, not the goo I was covered in. It was hard to pull my attention away from her sightless, staring eyes, but I forced myself to act quickly, checking her throat first, followed by both arms.

“Nothing,” I whispered, barely loud enough for my throat mic to pick it up. Nate looked up and shook his head. Same over there. I was already about to get up and head for the next sunken heap that used to be a zombie when he knelt down next to me and yanked something from the corpse’s neck. When he saw me looking, Nate briefly opened his hand before he closed it around the two sets of thin metal plates.

“Dog tags,” he murmured. “Whoever they were, if we can tell someone that they died, we will. Let’s go.”

I let him take the lead, following in a lumbering half-crouch. The gesture with the tags made me feel kind of weird. None of the people who’d originally been with Nate had any, but I knew that Burns, Martinez, Cho, and Santos still had theirs. The thought that should they bite it, someone would maybe find them and drop them off at the next settlement was oddly comforting. Me? I didn’t even have a tattoo on my body except for the damn marks that would identify me as anything but a random scavenger, and as much as the washed-out red color at the ends of my hair annoyed me sometimes, it wasn’t enough to make me unique.

A zombie taking a little too much casual interest in me made my mind snap back to what was important right now. It remained hunched over the remains of another cow carcass, but it continued to follow my progress until it was out of my field of vision—and likely didn’t stop there, just because I wasn’t watching it in turn any longer. A few more heads raised, dead eyes following us. So not good.

We reached the next shambler that we’d taken out. Nate was quick to check its neck, pat down the partly torn camouflage jacket, then look for needle marks. Nothing. He took off again and I followed, increasingly nervous as more and more zombies looked at us.

“I really don’t like this.”

“Don’t like what?” he asked as he stopped for a moment, crouching down.

“That they are staring at us,” I replied. “I don’t think our little dress-up attempt is working.”

I’d barely uttered the words when one of our creepy onlookers decided that we were an edible source of protein and fat, and came right for us. I had the butt of my shotgun ready—still unwilling to blow its head off and alert every other, so far subdued zombie—but Nate simply punched it in the throat before sending it to the ground with a kick. Two more to the head followed, turning what was left of its brain to mush. A quick, violent, effective takedown. The zombie gave a last, hard jerk before it stilled, but from my other side I heard a telltale hiss that made me aware that we weren’t out of the thick of it yet.