Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction (7 page)

I thought about lingering—or asking about breakfast—but the idea that any moment a zombie could stumble into our camp and draw attention to our position shut me up and got me scrambling like the rest of them.

Less than ten minutes later we were on the road, heading south, the sun just topping the low, rolling Missouri hills to the east.

How do you sneak driving a car? The simple answer is, you don’t. But driving at a slow crawl of about five miles per hour, trying to stay on soft ground like grass, or a gravel-free road, can almost accomplish the trick. At least when you’re shadowing a sheer endless stream of zombies that make enough noise to drown out the occasional crunch or squeal. Mechanical noises they tended to ignore. Mostly.

Nate’s estimate hadn’t been that far off. It only took us about twenty minutes to top a small rise and come face to face with the mass of zombies—thankfully still at a distance. I stepped on the brakes immediately, my pulse jumping into uncomfortably elevated territory, but except for a few heads turning, they didn’t react. “They” were a good few hundred zombies, shambling along the highway about half a mile away from where we’d come to a halt. They were moving slowly, almost sluggishly, but their numbers made them menacing enough. From what I could see, most looked the worse for wear—limbs torn off, clothes in stark disrepair—but I didn’t doubt that should they make out something edible, their slow progress would surge into a vicious attack. With so many around, they didn’t need to be skilled to hunt—a few quick ones would suffice to bring down the animal, and the rest was history. I tried to gauge whether the ones we’d come across in Iowa had looked about the same, but really couldn’t say so at a distance.
 

They were moving more or less as a mass, but the odd outlier was dragging itself along next to the road, or even in the fields bordering it. It was some of those that noticed us, but our approach must have been stealthy enough not to brand us as a target. I still hated halting there like a sitting duck. Nate studied the horde for a few minutes, then gave me the silent signal to turn back around and find another road leading south. The other cars followed at a crawl, only halting for a moment in their turns to study what was going on across the plain.

Half an hour later we had to do another detour, and twice more before we noticed that the streak was definitively thinning out. Where hundreds had been before, it was only a few handfuls now, ever moving northwest. With fewer bodies moving, the destruction they left behind became more evident—churned earth where grass used to grow, asphalt torn apart where the winter had left it cracked. And the stench. The stench was enormous, even inside the car with the air circulation shut off. It was that cloying scent of decay, heavy enough to make me want to puke up my impromptu breakfast on the road. I was wise enough not to, because opening the door would have made it ten times worse.

Even with fewer zombies on the move here, we still went further south before we chanced crossing the path of destruction they’d left. I really didn’t care for how close to St. Joseph and Kansas City that put us, but immediate danger went before presumed threats. As soon as Nate gave me the go, I took the next east-bound access road, heading into less populated land again. It still took us another twenty minutes to be outside of the red marks on our maps, designating a population center. That we barely saw a zombie anywhere didn’t ease my mind much. The sun was beating down on us, making any sensible being seek shade—us the exception. Yesterday had proven all too well that they had started adapting to that, too. If they were still around and hadn’t joined the streak, that was.

We passed a few completely destroyed houses, splintered wood everywhere. Erosion hadn’t had much chance to take hold yet so I presumed the damage was recent, likely from one of the last winter storms or a tornado. If not for the zombies, we might have looked through what was left—tools and pots usually survived even the harshest conditions—but today we kept driving on.

Just after noon we hit another path of devastation, this one looking slightly less sprawling than the first. There were no moving zombies anywhere in sight, but the odd lump on the road had remained behind, reduced to nothing more than some dirty fabric and cracked bones. I wondered if they’d waited until their undead comrade had stopped moving, or started tearing it apart before that happened. Either way, not the most comforting thought. With their trail mix practically shambling alongside them, the stronger zombies in these groups could easily go on forever. They might have preferred fresh meat, but if none was available, they’d found an alternative. Not a very comforting idea, that.

We went on further east before Nate told me to turn into one of the north-bound roads. We topped another rise, and suddenly, there was a group of about twenty zombies in front of us. I braked, but they had seen us, and they definitely liked what they saw. Within moments, they were all coming at us, howling and screaming.

Wrapping my fingers more firmly around the steering wheel, I exhaled forcefully to help myself focus, and sent the car forward. Right before the first zombie could jump on the hood, I forced the car into a sharp turn, making the zombie slam into the rear armor plates—right where I’d hit the cow. Unlike yesterday, the Rover drifted right on, slamming against two more of the undead, crushing bones and dropping the zombies to the ground. The squeal of tires to my right and left made me guess that the following two cars had conducted similar maneuvers. Throwing the car in reverse as soon as it lost its momentum, I backed right over the downed zombies, the resulting bumps most satisfying. That didn’t keep two from jumping onto the hood, but I ignored them for now, accelerating backward until I was clear of the crowd, decimated as it already was. The whine of the motor made me grimace, but it stopped as soon as I switched gears once more—maybe a little too soon, making the gear shift groan—before I let the Rover jump forward again, sending the zombies off the hood. Two more rounds of reversing, and the tires had ground them to so much disgusting gore.

Looking around, I saw no more shamblers standing. The entire action had happened in under five minutes, start to finish. Glancing at Nate, I waited for a thumbs-up at least, but he just pointed at the way northward. Chuffing under my breath, I turned the car back toward the road, and once I had solid ground underneath, floored it. The resulting high-pitched whine until I shifted up made a few more zombies pop up from the bushes, but the last of our cars was long gone by the time they’d made it to the road. Cars did come with some advantages.

“You could have at least said ‘good job,’ you know?” I grumbled, mostly to myself because things like that usually fell on deaf ears.

“What for?” Nate asked, the surprise in his voice sincere. “That wasn’t even a fire drill for tomorrow. Even before we had the cars, getting rid of a small mob like that was never a problem for us. Since when do you want affirmation for doing your job?”

I hated it when he turned things around on me like that. He had a point. Still.

“Sometimes it’s nice to hear that your work is appreciated. Not just to get chewed out when you fuck up.”

He laughed softly. When I glanced sideways at him, I saw that it reached his eyes, too. “Oh, come on. You know exactly that fear of looking stupid in front of everyone keeps you performing at a hundred and ten percent. Exactly what are you complaining about?”

“Apparently nothing,” I quipped, tightening my grip on the wheel just a little more, wishing it was his throat.

“I love it when you turn into such a girl,” he let me know, but didn’t even have the courtesy of smirking in my direction. Instead, he was looking at his topographical maps. “There’s a valley up ahead that we need to avoid. Turn right in about a hundred yards.”

I slowed down soon after changing course, and we spent the next few hours zig-zagging the countryside—coming close enough to the remnants of the streak to observe, but staying clear where we didn’t have a hill or some trees to cover us and give us a clear getaway route. Jason’s estimate proved to be accurate enough to make me uncomfortable. We soon passed the area where his guys had had to veer off to the side, and that’s about where we finally caught up to the stragglers of the streak. It was hard to tell where the road had been that had once run perpendicular to the river that had created this valley—everything was caked with dirt now. What looked like a couple of houses had stood smack in the middle of where the zombies had moved, now reduced to so much splintered wood and rubble. The sheer extent of the destruction made me swallow hard. How should any settlement barriers stand up to that kind of force?

Twice more we returned to the valley, and each time more and more undead were in sight, moving north. Adrenaline had become a constant companion, keeping my pulse elevated and my thoughts racing as much as my heart. I doubted that I’d get much rest tonight. And the longer we stood there, staring at the zombies, the more I was asking myself why we were doing this. Sure, killing twenty zombies, or maybe even a hundred, wasn’t much of an issue for us anymore. It was certainly something that needed to be done—and every permanently dead zombie was one less problem out there. But what did twenty, a hundred, or even ten thousand zombies matter when there were likely up to over a hundred million of them shambling across the country? Even as we watched, a few shamblers fell on another that toppled over, too weak to go on and do more than kick feebly as it got torn apart, wrenched limb from limb. They were culling their own population, likely at a much steeper rate than we could. Weather did its own to decimate them further. What, in comparison to that, could any of us do?

Except die. That we could. Like Bates. Like Innes. Like Brad and Thompson.

I knew that, compared to other people, we’d been exceptionally lucky and lost only a fraction of the people that had been part of our group. But I really didn’t want to add names to that ever expanding list tomorrow—and for what?

My thoughts remained glum until nightfall forced us to seek shelter farther from the dried-up riverbed. We were about twenty miles from the rendezvous point with Jason’s people, and Nate didn’t push us to get there today. At first I found that peculiar, but it only took a few minutes after we set up camp for me to realize that he’d done so deliberately. We still had gear to pack, cargo to redistribute, additional armor plates and reinforced grilles to affix to bumpers, windows and doors to secure. On a normal day, the Rover was a veritable fortress, withstanding what a Humvee could, maybe except for explosives. Speed and agility were of the essence, so only the rear was reinforced, letting it get through maneuvers like I’d done earlier with ease. At the end of the day, it was a good quarter ton heavier, the extra weight making it more sluggish and a lot less fuel efficient. It was a good trade-off if that meant that the car was harder to topple and I could plow through a mass of bodies without killing myself on impact. Or so we hoped. So far we hadn’t had a chance to test the extended modifications on anything that went beyond smaller groups.

If I’d been the praying sort, I might have sent a few words heavenward, but as it was, I really fucking hoped that Martinez and Andrej had known what they were doing when they’d built the gear that turned my agile SUV into a battering ram.

I might now know more about cars and weapons than ever before in my life, but that still made me the layman in our group, so I spent the evening doing guard duty and distributing food. Come tomorrow, I wouldn’t be able to stomach breakfast, and I wasn’t the only one who believed in loading up the day before not to run on empty when we dearly needed the energy. Our food stores weren’t high, but there was enough canned fish and spam for everyone, and I even found some beans and dried onions to go with that. It was a shame that the zombies weren’t allergic to bad breath, or we would have already won the day tomorrow.

It was almost two in the morning when I crawled into my sleeping bag in the Rover, hesitating for a moment as I looked over at where Nate was lying in his seat, staring up at the ceiling. He saw me watch him and caught my gaze, staring right back at me. There were a million things I should probably have said right then—and I knew that if he died tomorrow, I would regret not saying them for the rest of my life—but not a single word made it over my lips. It would have felt too much like saying goodbye. I considered asking him if he wanted to have sex, but the last two times I’d done that the night before a mission, he’d teased me for days about getting extra needy when I was afraid. I wasn’t going to give him that opportunity again. So I left it at that glance before I turned over, facing the window. Not because I was showing him the proverbial cold shoulder, but because the middle of the car was the safest place, so that’s where my unprotected back went. If anything tried to come through the window, I had my shotgun wedged between the door and the seat.

I wondered if there’d ever come a day again when paranoia wasn’t my survival instinct number one.

Probably not.

We were up and moving at first light, only taking the time to don our full fighting gear before we were on the road again. It was cold enough outside of the car that I was quite happy to put on the extra layers. Nate and I had a quick spat—that I won—over what pants I should be wearing. I opted for the lighter tactical cargo pants that I usually wore because I needed to be able to fully move inside the car, and the protector pads of the kevlar lined riot-gear pants that we’d acquired on our last raid didn’t have enough give at the hips and knees. It was bad enough that I had to wear my neck brace—as I liked to refer to the reinforced neck and shoulder protector rig I put on underneath my jacket to seal the most vulnerable part of my torso to all manners of attacks. I certainly hoped that I wouldn’t have to get my helmet, goggles, and breathing mask out, but they were stored underneath the weapons in the center console, right at my fingertips. I didn’t plan on exiting the car, but if I had to, for whatever reason, I was ready.