Green Fields (Book 2): Outbreak (19 page)

“I just got jumped by what used to be a thirteen-year-old girl, and the only reason why she didn’t get me was that she was probably too starved to act smart enough to just tear into my arm instead of trying to get to my neck,” I replied. “I don’t think that ‘okay’ qualifies as an option.”

He held my gaze, acceptance and recognition clear in his eyes.

“She bite you?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Good,” he agreed, turning away to scan the bathroom one last time. He reached out to grab something from under the sink, resurfacing with a box of tampons. “And look, it was even worth something.”

The statement that nothing was worth this, least of all some feminine hygiene products, lay heavy on my tongue, but I swallowed it instead. I just took the box, shoved him out of the room, and went to look what else there might be stashed under the sink. And as I was already there, I might as well use the amenities, too.

Five minutes later, I joined the others downstairs, and we left the house without another word exchanged.

I was sure that the snarling grimace that once sweet girl’s face had turned into would haunt me for the rest of my life.

The rain didn’t ease up, but as soon as we were back in camp and had distributed what food we’d scavenged, we were back on the road. I didn’t really feel like talking, and thankfully the others left me to my own devices as I trudged along, barely alert enough not to fall over my own feet.

That night when we made camp in another thicket, I didn’t really have an appetite even though my stomach was growling and protesting loudly enough that I was sure that it drew a few looks. Without much gusto I forced myself to eat a can of soup and some nuts someone handed to me, and rolled up in my sleeping bag as soon as I was done.

Part of me was waiting for Nate to come over, to—I didn’t even know what. Comfort me? Chide me for being stupid enough not to check the bathroom better first? Even his snide, somewhat derisive comments would have been welcome. Just anything that proved to me that he still cared. That he realized that I felt like shit and needed some support, someone to distract me and get me out of that terrible, dark hole spreading through my mind. But I remained alone, all alone. And once that realization truly sunk in, I got the by now cracked, abused photo of Sam out of my pocket.

She’d had that same wheat-colored hair. Those same light eyes. She could have been Sam’s younger sister.

I cried myself to sleep that night, not a single sound making it over my quivering lips, but my soul hurt all the more for it.

In the morning I got up, walked over to Andrej, and shook him awake.
 

“I need you to show me how to use a gun.”

Chapter 13

Asking Andrej to show me how to use firearms was like giving candy to a small child—there simply was no end to the deluge of information he—and all the others—heaped on me now, more than I could have ever wanted to know, or would possibly need. With zombies everywhere, there was no chance of me actually firing a gun, but as our first week of tracking through backwater Ohio turned into the second, I got a very thorough education in the theoretical aspects of it. Even Cho—who had so far been keeping his distance—joined in the talks. For a while, Skip and Steve seemed to listen in as well, but they soon dropped to their usual spot at the end of our column, leaving whoever was not out on recon duty free to impart their wisdom on me.

It all washed over me like a wave. I knew that I should have soaked up every little tidbit—tried, too—but I was simply too numb to fully concentrate. My experience with that girl in that house had somehow kicked loose an emotional avalanche inside of me that was still rolling. On some level I realized that I was just traumatized—and in the world I was living in, “just” didn’t really matter anymore.

It was probably a strange thing that it had taken me an entire week to fully realize what was going on.

In a matter of mere days, the greater part of the world’s population wasn’t alive anymore. We still didn’t know exactly how, or why, it had happened, and I doubted we would ever get a clear estimate of just how many survivors were still out there. That we weren’t alone we’d already come to realize—painfully so, when we’d lost two of our own—but how many more were hiding in their basements or were on the move? Hundreds? Thousands? Even if there were still a million people around the continental US—and that number seemed far too high from what little evidence of looting we’d seen so far—that still meant that we were just a fraction of what had been there before.

That should have made us the lucky ones, right?

I didn’t feel very lucky.

As the days went by, I thought about giving up more than once. What would happen if I just remained behind one morning when the others moved on? Would I even make it through the day? Would I starve to death? Somehow get infected and turn?

Would anyone even care?

Did I care?

But whenever I was about to throw in the towel and find out, something kept me going. And as hour after hour on the road passed, a new realization dawned.

We weren’t the lucky ones. Or those with the best survival skills—although the company I was keeping definitely had a leg up there. No. We were simply too stubborn to give up, roll over, and die.

I guessed it said a lot about the state of my mental health that this thought greatly amused me.

Yet as the days went on, the dark stupor my mind had descended into began to lift as horror turned to routine. No longer did my body protest when I shouldered the pack that was too heavy to lug around with me, day in, day out. When we stopped at the end of the day, I wasn’t so damn tired that I could barely keep awake to eat before drifting off into a fitful sleep. I still had nightmares, but morning after morning, I woke up a little less drained. Going long stretches—days sometimes—without food and likely not enough water was still hell, but even that I was slowly getting used to.
 

Each morning before we broke camp and each evening before it was time to tuck in, Andrej had me practice dis- and reassembling all kinds of firearms. The first few rounds, I still got thorough explanations what all the parts were and what they were good for; soon, encouragements were yelled at me, to the point where I figured they were trying to distract me. By day two my lessons had started gathering a crowd, serving as entertainment in a world where poking dead people with sticks was next up to be elected an Olympic discipline.
 

One afternoon, nearing the end of week two, we split up. While the others were trudging on to a previously agreed upon camping point, Nate took Andrej, Burns, and me in a direction veering off from our route. Our destination was an old barn that stood on a low hill, with fields stretching around as far as the eye could see. The slight elevation of the position meant that we could see anyone—and anything—approach from more than a two-mile radius, giving us a potential head start for when—not if—we had to run. The purpose of the exercise became pretty clear when Nate walked up to the side of the barn—after we’d made sure that it didn’t house anything above rodent-size—and spray-painted target circles onto the weathered wood.

My first live-fire weapons drill. Yay!

With more than just a hint of curiosity I discovered that my enthusiasm wasn’t even that fake. I still had a healthy dose of respect, if not outright fear, of firearms, but pragmatism had long won out over idealistic, pacifistic ideas. In hindsight, it was surprising that Nate hadn’t put a gun in my hand as soon as we’d made it out of the city, or at least after our brief stay at the radio station. He hadn’t really participated in my teaching lessons so far, usually keeping his distance, but now it was he who stood beside me after we’d all plugged up our ears and handed me gun after gun, briefly explaining what it was and how it worked, but otherwise expecting me to do my thing.

Lining up the sights of the Glock he handed me first after pushing in the magazine, I braced myself, and with the muscles in my arms and shoulders tense as hell, I pulled the trigger. The shot was startlingly loud, and I hadn’t expected the kickback to be strong enough that I actually felt like gyrating my wrists to relieve some of the tension. We were standing about thirty feet away from the barn wall—that I’d hit, although I wasn’t quite sure exactly where—and I couldn’t help but look around, frightened that the next mob was about to descend on us. The only thing startled by the noise seemed to be me, though, not even a flock of birds taking off somewhere. Then again, except for carrion eaters we hadn’t really seen that much wildlife around.
 

When I looked at him, Nate was smiling slightly, although he wiped it off his face quickly enough that I wondered if it had been just my imagination. At his nod, I emptied the other sixteen bullets of the magazine into the wood, chipping the paint away in a few clusters.
 

Instead of giving me a new magazine, Nate handed me another gun, and the same spiel began. This one had a stronger recoil, and I was happy when the last round was shot. Two more .45s followed, until he handed me another 9mil.
 

The moment I pulled the trigger, I knew that I’d found my gun. Not only did the sleek gun fit perfectly into my hands, no—it also fired with an ease that I’d missed with the others now that I had this baby in my grasp. The recoil was soft enough that my wrists didn’t hurt when the last bullet ended up in the barn wall, and it just felt more organic to use.

Giving Nate a grin, I looked more closely at the weapon.

“You like the Beretta?” Andrej asked from behind me, eyeing me critically. I nodded.

“Of course she digs the girl gun,” Nate chuffed.

Glancing at him, I gave him a sugar-sweet smile. “Considering you’re all such manly men, it’s probably for the best.”

That made him grin for a second, while Burns let out a loud chuckle. “Did she just call us gay?”

Grinning at that, I slammed another magazine into the Beretta, and only lowered it after it was empty again.

“Definitely.”

As we still were’t overrun, the assault rifle came next. It took a much larger chunk of courage to pull the trigger after lining up the sights, and my entire body jerked not just from the recoil, but because letting loose actually frightened me. Not in a “oh God, oh God, what am I doing here?” kind of way, but I just wasn’t comfortable with that thing in my hands. For one, it was huge; and even shooting single-action, I was afraid that I’d somehow accidentally switch mode and hail destruction on everything around me without wanting to. Every line of my body probably screamed that, and I wasn’t surprised when Nate’s lip curled with disdain after he took the rifle back with only five shots fired.

Looking out over the fields, I thought I saw something move over there, but it was still far enough away that I couldn’t see it clearly without binoculars, so I forced myself to ignore it.

Next, Nate handed me one of the pump-action shotguns Pia had liberated from the police cruiser in Dresden. It was just as heavy and stocky as the assault rifle, but for whatever reason, it didn’t hold a similar amount of animosity for me. Wordlessly I pushed the buckshot cartridges into the tube, then brought the shotgun to my shoulder and aimed.

Damn, but that recoil wasn’t for sissies.

Wincing, I eased up so I could rotate my shoulder, but didn’t hesitate much to pump the next round, and fire it. Bracing better helped, and by the time the last shot chipped still more wood out of the already abused target, I felt pretty confident that I wouldn’t drop the weapon any moment because it scared the fuck out of me. Andrej held out the ammo box to me and I reloaded, emptying another eight shots into the barn.

Done, I wanted to hand the shotgun back to Nate, but he shook his head. “Keep it.”

That made me smile, but when I looked beyond him to where I’d seen motion before, I couldn’t help but tense as I saw the five zombies a lot closer now, only half a field away from us.

“Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, beat it?” I suggested.

“Reload first,” Nate griped in my direction, checking his AR one last time before readying it. I quickly scooped up the remaining shotgun rounds, shoving the surplus into my pants pockets after the gun was full. Seeing that the other two also had their rifles out rather than keeping to the usual MO of clubbing the zombies to death, it dawned on me that my lesson wasn’t over yet.

“You planned this!” I hissed at Nate, bringing the shotgun up to my shoulder again.

Now he was grinning—of course—not bothering to deny my accusation.

“Giving you the chance to stop being afraid of the gun is only step one,” he explained. “Making you lose the fear of shooting something is an entirely different thing.”

The five had in the meanwhile drawn as close as a hundred feet, close enough to make out the mindless rage in their eyes.

One good thing the encounter with the girl zombie had brought with it—it had been the first time that we’d realized that not being able to feed had an impact on them. Even now as I watched them lumber closer, my mind filed away details. Two weeks out and about—supposedly, of course they could have gotten infected later, but they looked about as ripe and dirty as most of them did—had clearly left them with enough opportunity to feed. While their clothes showed some wear and tear and there was dirt and other things crusted on their faces, hands, and chests, they didn’t really look… decomposed or anything. Sure, the skin didn’t appear healthy or human anymore, having taken on a strange yellow-brownish tint like a faded bruise, but they still looked remarkably whole. The girl’s body had been worse off without any food since she’d turned, the sheer memory of how squishy her flesh had felt still making me shiver. Since then we’d encountered a few similar examples, lending credence to the theory that if they didn’t feed, they started rotting away. We still didn’t know exactly if they were alive or not, but the fact that the worst one had ended in a ragged spine with entrails streaming out of its torso, partly gnawed off where it had apparently resorted to chomping on the only thing it could reach with its arms—itself—showed that they didn’t die because of blood loss or some shit. Sheer blunt force trauma like a shot to the head—or severing the spine high up enough to damage the brain stem—was the sure way to go.