Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 (48 page)

Or so I kept telling myself.

I couldn’t help but get antsy as the day passed by and still there was no caravan approaching the settlement. Whenever no one gave me anything to do, I went up onto the roof of the dormitory to look out over the rolling grassland outside the palisade. I’d acquired a straw hat in the meantime that helped stem the tsunami of tears somewhat, but it was still a futile task. Just watching the guards should have been enough, really.

A sudden commotion by the shed that housed the chickens that the eggs for breakfast came from drew my attention away from the horizon. Several women were gathered there, getting increasingly agitated. I hesitated but then decided to investigate. It wasn’t like I was doing anything but stand around uselessly most of the day—might as well do it where something interesting was happening.

As I rounded the back of the house, I saw that they were all huddled around a woman who was clutching two chickens to her chest. The chickens didn’t seem to enjoy that a lot, which resulted in a racket of avian protestation, only furthered as the woman kept imitating them between maniacal bouts of laughter. That someone didn’t have all their chickens in the coop was quite obvious—and I felt myself start to grin at that pun, it would have made Burns howl with laughter—until sudden recognition made me stop in my tracks. What were the odds…

“Don’t mind her,” one of the women gathered around, trying to liberate the chickens, told me. “She’s been like that since she got here.”

I ignored that advice, instead stepping closer, sneezing momentarily when the feathers flying around tickled my nose. That made the madwoman on the floor focus on me, cementing my guess when our gazes connected. Oh, she definitely didn’t look sane, but that, right there, was someone I knew.

“Kat?” I murmured, then repeated her name a little louder. She cocked her head to the side, not quite confirming that it was her—or that she still recognized her name—but that was, without a doubt, one of my old co-workers from the lab. But what was she doing here? And how had she survived? Last time I’d talked to her she’d already started showing symptoms, just as she’d been about to go home—

My train of thought was derailed when she suddenly let go of the chickens and surged to her feet, making me back up instantly as she took two steps toward me.

“Why, isn’t that the ghost whisperer?” she crooned, her mad gaze fixated on my face. “Whispering to the ghost at the coffee machine!”

I didn’t know what I had expected after how she’d behaved with the chickens, but that statement made my paranoia rise, and not just because she uttered it in a mad sing-song voice.

Sam appeared by my side, her hand tentatively pulling on my upper arm. “Don’t listen to her,” she told me. “She’s, well. Quite obviously not herself. Just wait a moment until she starts—“

Kat evidently had other ideas than to let Sam explain as she continued her muttering, interrupting her.

“He is dead, so how can he tell you all his secrets? Or is it you who is sharing all your secrets with him?” Her head flipped from one side to the other, but her gaze remained trained on me. “Why do you share secrets with the monsters? The monsters don’t listen! They eat you!” The last part she screamed, spittle flying from her lips, and the laugh that followed was on par with the rest.

“And there she goes again,” Sam grumbled, then explained with a sigh when I still made no move to do more than back away slightly. “It’s always about the monsters. At first we thought she meant the zombies, but it just makes no sense. We don’t think they’re real. They’re just a figment of her imagination.”

Or were they? My mind was racing, but it was hard to make sense of anything with Kat still staring at me like that.

“How did she get here?” I asked Sam. “Were you with her from the start?”

Sam shrugged. “I told you that they came to fetch you? Remember, she only lived down the street from us, in that new high-rise. After they bundled me into a car, they got her, too. She was sick with a high fever by then, but they gave her that same shot they gave me to bring it down. With me it worked, but the fever must have fried her mind. When they got us out of the city she started screaming when she saw what was going on down there. She’s been like this ever since. Always talking about the monsters.”

I remembered her telling me about that, but I had been too exhausted to properly listen to her then—and make any possible connections. “Who exactly was it that fetched you back then?” I asked. “You said they were soldiers?”

Sam nodded, a hint of irritation crossing her face, either at my questioning, or Kat’s unnerving staring. “I don’t remember what branch they were, but some had FEMA patches on their uniforms. I only got one name, from their commanding officer. Captain Hamilton.”

I had to suppress a curse. Of course it had been him—and if I wasn’t completely wrong, Burns, Martinez, and Cho had likely been part of that group, too, before they’d all ended up at the Green Fields Biotech building. I’d never bothered to ask them what they’d been up to leading to us ending up together, beyond a few tidbits that had been related to the spread of the virus. After that it had been all about our continuing survival. Resentment wanted to come up inside of me but I quickly stomped it down where it belonged; none of them could have known about Sam, so even if they’d seen her, none of them would have made the connection. To them the feverish survivor they might have helped rescue had no connection to the woman in the photo that I’d spent way too many lonely nights clutching to my chest. It didn’t matter, really.

But the involvement of the same old parties in the same old shit that kept threatening to drown me was one detail that I wasn’t going to ignore. Of course, just because Bucky had been in charge of the operation that had rounded up Sam and Kat, he didn’t necessarily have to be responsible for the shit that Taggard was up to—but they’d both been at the factory, and those were way too many coincidences to ignore. Just thinking about all that made me tense, my fingers curling into fists.

“Why were you talking to the ghost?” Kat whispered from far too close, making me shy back once more from her. The look on her face was still insane, but the spark of intelligence in her eyes was too uncanny to ignore. “What secrets did you share? I always said, they should have made you a ghost, too. You were too close to the ghost. I always said you could finish what he started, that’s why you should be a ghost, too.”

I couldn’t help it; her words made my heart slam into my throat, my fight-or-flight instinct roaring to life—and not just because she basically had just told me she’d aimed to have me killed.

“Kat, who is the ghost?” I asked, kind of needlessly so. My guess was that she was referring to Raleigh—and that she’d seen me talk to Nate, at that coffee machine, and had rightly identified him as Raleigh’s brother.
 

“Oh, you know. No need to rehash useless details,” she replied, giving me a grin that was way too wide—and proved clearly that with her mind, her sense for dental hygiene had gone down the drain as well. “They said it had to be done. Thecla did it. She knew it had to be done,” she confirmed my guess. “But it broke her. Made her weak. I told her, she had to do it again, with you, but she wouldn’t. Said you were too important a resource to waste.” I had to admit, that did sound like my old supervisor—and it made a lot more sense now that she’d murdered Raleigh if that hadn’t been her idea from the start.

“Who are ‘they’?” I asked. “Who told her to—“

Kat made a hissing sound, cutting me off. “Don’t say it! We’re not allowed to say it where anyone can hear! They already have laid all the leads, the bait is ready. If you say too much where the wrong people can hear, the plan won’t work!” She threw her head back and laughed, but her attention snapped back to me a moment later, all serious again. “The plan has to work! How will everyone know about the monsters if they cannot see them? They are everywhere! You have to know that they are monsters! How will you know if you cannot see?!”

She started crying, tears streaming down her face, fright making her eyes huge. Sam tried to pull me away again while Margo reached for Kat, but in a moment of surprising situational awareness Kat made a lunge for me, her fingers digging into my shoulder so she could keep me in place.

“They are trying to cover it all up! They always cover it up. But not this time! The plan has to work! Lori promised that it would work! She promised!”

Her nails bit into my skin, underscoring her vehemence, but from one moment to the next she let go, sagging in on herself. Tears and sobs turned to laughter as she looked at the sky above, her fingers raised as she seemed to be trying to reach for the single cloud in the sky, smiling like a child. Mary joined Margo and together they pulled Kat away toward the house behind the chicken coop. I stared after them, trying to make sense of anything Kat had said—and a lot of it made sense, even if it was easy to see it as the ramblings of a madwoman.

“She’s usually not that agitated,” Sam explained, worry etched into her features as she glanced from Kat to me. “Recognizing you must have triggered some memories, or what’s left of them.”

“So she’s not always raving about the monsters?” I asked, my own voice shaky.

Sam snorted. “All the time. It’s the rest that’s new.” She paused, a strange look coming to her face. “Can you make any sense of what she said? She sometimes gets this weird when she sees someone who reminds her of someone else, I think. At the base where they evacuated us to, one of the psychologists told me that maybe if we’d understood what she’s referring to we could help her mind find a way out of the labyrinth it’s locked in, but chances are slim if nothing makes sense, you know?”

I shook my head, hoping that the mechanical gesture simply looked like I was deeply disturbed—not like my own mind was tearing apart theories and rearranging the fragments into new images. I didn’t understand everything Kat had mumbled, but two things were obvious, particularly in reference to the small tidbits that Ethan had provided at the underground complex. Kat and Thecla must have been working for the same people, and they’d killed Raleigh… to prevent him from succeeding in his goal to find a cure for the terminal effects of the super soldier serum. My guess was that those were the monsters Kat had been screaming about—the zombie-like, mindless creatures anyone who had been successfully inoculated with the serum turned into. The part about making the monsters visible—could that actually mean that it was whoever Thecla and Kat had been working with had been responsible for the outbreak? That Raleigh’s death had been a convenient dry run? I vaguely remembered that someone—Martinez?—had mentioned that one of the first reported cases of sudden conversion had been a customer in an ice-cream parlor. But wouldn’t he have made the connection to the serum? Or had he already tried to tell me something with that? I really couldn’t remember. I’d been too scared at the time to do much analytical thinking that went beyond how to stay alive.

Another small detail swam up in my mind. Before Thecla had killed herself, one of Nate’s people had insta-converted. All those months I’d thought she’d meant the zombies at large with her cry that “it” was out there, although the large outbreaks had only started to happen that night, and her none the wiser of it. But if she’d known that there was a virus targeting just a few… and it was working, her mission was a success, and she could finally alleviate all her guilt in suicide.

But if their goal had been to expose the super soldiers, why had billions of people died rather than just a few thousand, and another few thousand until they had been taken down? Had they been stupid enough not to do thorough testing on ‘normal’ people? Or was Sam right and a slice of the population was actually immune, and dumb luck had made the test subjects come from that group?
 

Or had something else gone wrong, like the virus recombining with a flu strain, for instance, that had already been infecting the population, thus turning it from a somewhat well-honed instrument into a weapon of mass annihilation?
 

“Bree?” Sam whispered, quickly correcting herself. “Anna? I can tell that there’s a lot going on in that head of yours.” Her eyes narrowed at me. “Are you lying to me? Is any of this really making sense to you?”

My mouth was already open in denial when a loud shout coming from further down the village made all of us turn around.
 

“Caravan approaching! From the east!”

The suspicion on Sam’s face was quickly replaced by a look of sadness. “That must be your husband.”

Or not, as the voice at the back of my mind screamed at me. I didn't know where my people had been so I had no idea which way they’d use to get here, but I knew what definitely lay to the east. And it would be just like Taggard to wait four days to let me develop a good amount of hope that he could swiftly and brutally squash once the hammer came falling down.

Ignoring the weird look Sam gave me, I ran back to the dormitory, quickly taking the stairs at the back to get onto the roof. Unaided my eyesight wasn’t good enough to make out a lot of details past the palisade, but even with my eyes refusing to focus in the bright sunshine, I could make out the silhouettes of the two vehicles approaching. Neither of them was a dark SUV, and when my squinting eyes recognized the front one as a Humvee, I felt my blood run cold. My first impulse was to run, scale the palisade and jump down from there, ignoring that I would likely break my ankle, or maybe even my neck. I could use a rope, or if I had to, knot the sheets from the cots together to craft one. It didn’t have to hold for long, just long enough to let me escape—