Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation (4 page)

“So now we wait?” I guessed, not too enthusiastic. It wasn’t as cold in here as outside, but after spending the entire day out in the open, I wouldn’t have minded hunkering down inside—as in, inside a real house—rather than spending the night in a cave. My heart rate was still elevated from the chase, and it wasn’t even seven yet—this was set to become one long night.

That Nate had different ideas I realized when he not only moved closer, but brushed his hand up underneath my jacket at my lower back. Turning to him, I snorted as I caught the grin on his face.

“Seriously? We’re in a cave. And there are zombies down there, crying for our flesh and blood.”

“Not sure they’d know what to do with our blood,” he replied, leaning in to capture my lips in a kiss. I thought about shoving him away, but instead pushed against his shoulders, making him lie flat on the ground, with me now perched above him.

“Whatever,” I said, cutting his reply off before he could say something incredibly stupid. Turned out, we didn’t need sleeping bags to keep warm.

Undressing down to the important parts had been moderately feasible in the tight space of the cave. Putting everything back to where it belonged turned out to be much harder, particularly as I couldn’t get up to properly settle the pants around my ass. Nate, of course, had no such issues, but then he hadn’t needed to shove everything down to at least his knees—if not completely ditch it—to get it on. Ah, the eternal unfairness of clothing. I could go on and on…

“Are you bitching me out in your head again? You know, you get that look on your face sometimes—”

Glaring at him, I gave up, figuring that the pants were as well in place as they were going to get until I had sure ground under my feet again.

“I’m not,” I replied, maybe a little sharply, but who could fault me for that?

“But you are bitching about something.”

“Wasn’t.”

“Liar,” he teased. At that, I huffed, plucking on the much-too-loose overwhites. With only five sets between us, I should have been glad that one set fit me moderately well, but it was still annoying as hell to always have to adjust them everywhere. And that the pants underneath weren’t really fitting me anymore didn’t help.

“So what? It’s none of your business what I’m thinking.”

“True,” he admitted. “But I have a feeling that even if you weren’t bitching me out yet, you soon will.”

“Do I even want to know?” I asked, feeling like I was already admitting defeat.

“Probably,” he said, reaching for his pack—but not to get something out, but to pull it back on.

“Wait. We’re not going to continue climbing up that cliff now that it’s even colder and windier out there and I’ve spent my remaining stamina?”

“Of course not. I’m sure you can still mobilize some reserves,” he replied, still too nice for this not being something I would—indeed—bitch him out about any minute now.

“Then what’s with the pack?”

“Why, do you want to leave it here?” he asked. When I just kept staring at him, his grin spread. “The cave goes straight through the cliff and ends close to the bottom on the other side.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that already?”

Nate shrugged. “If you’d known, would you still have had sex with me in a cold mountain cave over an abyss brimming with zombies?”

Looking down the cliff, I couldn’t help but snort. “That’s not really an abyss, and thirty or so can’t really be considered ‘brimming.’”

“You’re avoiding the question,” he prodded.

“Because you don’t deserve an answer,” I grumbled, squinting when he switched on his flashlight. “Just how long is that cave, anyway?” Now, with light, I could see the narrow yet clear way leading deeper into the hill.

“Oh, not far. Just a hundred yards or so,” he offered, making me groan.

One of these days I was so going to make him suffer for all this. But today? Today wasn’t that day. Today was just another day that we did the only thing that was still left to us—survive.

Chapter 2

We made it back to the bunker at around eleven—half-starved, tired, but unscathed. I felt myself relax as we passed that special kind of shrub about half a mile out from the bunker, and couldn’t resist kicking some extra snow in that direction. A ripple went through what might have been mistaken as foliage, and a single, gloved hand appeared out of it as Bailey gave me the finger. He’d scared me shitless more than once with that damn ghillie suit, but now that I’d learned what to look for, I could even find him when I wasn’t almost tripping over him. He and Nate shared nods, and off we went toward the cabin.

We weren’t at the porch yet when the door opened and Pia came out, her usual frown firmly in place tonight.

“You’re four hours late,” she griped.

I opened my mouth to relate the news—marauding mobs were not something left ignored—but Nate was faster.

“Not sure whether it was just a fluke or if springtime is driving them out of the mountains, but we ran into an entire horde of ‘em. Send someone after the evening round. We both ran out of ammo.”

Well, that explained why he hadn’t already taken care of the issue, firing from up high. I certainly felt a new bout of fear zoom through my mind at the realization that, had we had to make a stand, we both would have ended up torn apart and eaten. Not really the nice, cozy thought you want to head to bed with.

Pia nodded, her grim demeanor not changing a bit.

“Will do. Next time, pack more ammo.”

The fact that she said it to him, too, not just me, helped, but it still rankled.
 

Without another word, I went inside, Nate following me as soon as a blast of heat hit his face. “Heat” was probably a little too ambitious, but we had a fire going in the main upper room that left the air moderately warm, and compared to outside, it felt like a sauna. Martinez and Andrej were still up, playing cards, squinting as the general lack of light kept them from seeing much. Everyone else was already curled up in sleeping bags on mattresses, creating a maze that was hard to navigate on a good day, and I felt way too tired for that.

“I do get that you need to spend some time alone, but maybe not stay out hours after your watch is over? Pia was about to send us out after you,” Martinez complained.

“I’m so happy to know that you’re this concerned about my physical well-being,” I griped back, starting to ditch my clothes. “I promise, next time we run into a mob of zombies, we won’t take four hours to trudge the fifteen miles back to the bunker.”

Martinez’s eyes widened comically, but of course Nate had to rain on my parade.

“In all fairness, we would have been half an hour quicker if we hadn’t been rutting around in a cave.”

That got the glare it deserved, but as I finally got my feet out of my boots, I left it at that in favor of shucking a good few inches of isolation.

“You ever wonder what you’d do if I suddenly got fixated on the principle that celibacy is the idea of the century?”

Nate just grinned.

“You wouldn’t make it four days. If you want to make that a challenge, bring it on. I don’t mind jerking off in a room full of guys, but you seem to have certain reservations about that.”

Gnashing my teeth wouldn’t help, so I tried to keep a sweet smile plastered on my face instead.

“And wouldn’t you be the first to object to that,” I shot back as I made my way across the room, over to the hatch that led into the downstairs part of our bunker—the actual “bunker” part of it.

The cabin above might look a little weathered and old-fashioned, but down here it was all steel and formica, and not the fast-food-joint grade, either. The walls were lined with shelves except for where the emergency bunks of what could double as the med bay were located, currently holding stacks of winter clothes. Theoretically, we even had electric lighting in here, but kept it to a pair of rechargeable LED bar lamps that could easily be carried everywhere.
 

As I climbed down the stairs, I realized that I didn’t need to fire up the lamp as it was already in use, Sadie and Emma sitting at the table down below, cracking nuts. And judging from Sadie’s grin and her mother’s frown, my voice had easily carried down below.

“Sorry for that. Didn’t know you were still up,” I said to no one in particular. Emma gave me one of those looks that told me that she was not impressed by my terribly mature behavior, while her daughter grinned on.

“I don’t get why you always do it outside. It’s not like mom and dad don’t have sex indoors.”

“Sadie!”

I couldn’t help but smirk at Emma’s outrage—fake as it likely was—and the typical teenage pout in return wasn’t helping.

“I’m eighteen, Mom! Besides, I’ve heard worse even before dealing with this lot on a daily basis.”

“You still have three more weeks until then,” her mother let her know. “And besides, that’s absolutely no justification for being so crass.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sadie mumbled, not appearing in the least bit chastised. “Same as I’m sure any zombie that wants to bite me will brush its teeth beforehand.”

“You, young lady, have quite the mouth on you,” Emma griped.

“And guess where I got that from?”

Still smiling, I did my best to give the two the privacy their conversation needed and stepped up to the cooking station. For obvious reasons we couldn’t keep a stove down here, but as long as the generator was up and running, there was electricity for the two heating plates that made cooking almost normal. By now, what was left of the stew was long cold, but I didn’t mind as I got cooked rice from a separate pan and ladled a generous amount into a bowl. On second thought, I filled another for Nate. He might be a jackass sometimes, but he’d still gotten me out of that alive today.

Before I could turn away from the station to bring the bowls over to the table, Nate stepped up behind me. Yet instead of what anyone else might have done—hugged me, or at least groped me—he just reached around my body and picked up his bowl, stepping away before I could even protest. Grumbling under my breath, I took the other and sat down next to Sadie while Nate remained leaning against one of the shelves. They’d been full enough that we’d had to keep a lot of everything on the floor in front of them. Now, half of them were already gathering dust, and the rest were very scarcely stacked.

“I heard you ran into some trouble?” Emma asked him, not looking up from where she was still busy cracking walnuts for Sadie to sort out the edible parts.

“An entire mob, yeah,” Nate replied. “Fresh ones, too. Tomorrow we’ll head out to take care of them, don’t worry.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Emma pointed out. At Nate’s raised brows, she shrugged. “Just look at our storage. We’re running out faster than we can wait for the roads to completely thaw.”

“It’s not that bad yet,” Nate said, but didn’t sound very convinced. “With snow chains, we should be able to make it to the next town. Thermopolis, maybe, or if we don’t find anything there, Riverton or Cody. The signs of looting that we found couldn’t have been from more than three or four raiding parties. I’m sure that they had to bug in about the same time as us, and they won’t have been able to go scavenging much earlier, either.”

Emma didn’t look happy at that prospect, but she’d learned to keep her objections to herself. The only reason why we still had food was because we’d been getting everything together that we could find until the last possible day, always ignoring her insistence that it wasn’t necessary to make one more run. Sadie was a lot more practical there.

“You think the zombies you encountered today are one of those parties?” she asked.

Nate shrugged, but I hadn’t forgotten the way he’d looked at the mountains.

“Don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

When he hesitated, I took over for him. “Because when we were raiding, we left messages on the stuff that we didn’t think was edible anymore, but they likely already knew to stay away from the sugar, because the entire sweets aisle was virtually untouched. If we found enough other food, so did they. But the zombies we saw today, they didn’t look like they’d been savaged and killed. It’s more likely that the group was at the very end of their provisions, and when they went hunting for something else, they all ate contaminated stuff. Else, I doubt there would have been so many children among them.”

Sadie looked horrified for a moment, but shook it off way too easily.

“Shit.”

I nodded, just as her mother provided an acerbic, “Language!”

Sadie made a face but didn’t correct herself. Ah, the joys of having a teenage daughter. As usual, that thought gave me a brief pang deep inside, but I’d learned to ignore that.

Nate picked up where I’d left off. “They must have been pretty desperate, because otherwise they had good gear. So my guess is that they were dug in somewhere in the mountains; either Yellowstone or somewhere just beyond the border to Montana or Idaho. Even with the roads still backed up, they could have made it. They’re damn resilient fuckers.”

Emma looked ready to snark at Nate next, but held herself back; less so because he was a grown man and thus not really under her maternal jurisdiction, but because provoking him like that would just lead to more swearing, as she’d found out in the past. I wasn’t the only female around he loved to drive insane.