Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Read online

  I just really didn’t want to—not today.

  Humming under my breath, I slowly and deliberately made my way forward, the building a few hundred feet to my right. The front lawn looked undisturbed so it hadn’t just been a group of deer trampling through the vegetable patch I’d painstakingly set up there a few weeks ago—it happened, but they were usually deterred by the fence. The light wind came from behind us, carrying my scent forward to any predator hunting by that—a surefire way of making cougars and the likes decide to go linger elsewhere. It was only the stupid bipeds that didn’t heed warnings like that.

  A whiff of decay hit my nose, strong enough to reach me across what used to be a well-manicured lawn from the other side of the house, making me smile. Yup, no cougar cubs to avoid today. Tightening my grip around the black wraps the bat’s handle was covered in, I strode forward with purpose, but made sure to keep my peripheral vision on high. It had been a while since one of the sneaky fuckers had gotten a jump on me, but you never knew.

  As soon as I rounded the building and got a glimpse at the gently sloping meadow behind it, I knew we had some work to do. How they’d gotten the jump on no less than five—no, make that six—deer, I couldn’t say; the resident deer were usually hard enough to track that it still took me two to three attempts with bow and arrow each time we were out for some venison. Even Nate had an even fifty percent chance of startling them. Maybe the small herd had tried to save their fawns? Whatever the cause, the deer had been too stupid to take off, and had become quite the banquet for the undead. I counted eighteen at a preliminary perusal, with maybe a few more hidden further toward the trees by what had been the natural border of the property, back when such things had been of interest to anyone. I waited for Nate to catch up to me, then raised my brows at him. Almost twenty to two—not the best odds. Then again, they were distracted and likely sluggish from decimating their prey to a few tufts of fur and the odd cracked bone; probably a hoof or two, as well.

  Nate considered, then shrugged, leaving the choice up to me.

  There was no telling from where they had come—except not from the east, toward the river, where our base was; we would have noticed that. Even less certain was what they would do once they recovered from their food coma. The last thing we needed was for them to take up residence in the building, or squat somewhere else in our territory. Those deer would have easily fed us for a month, and their reeking presence would ensure that other prey animals would steer clear of the site of the slaughter at least until the next heavy rainfall. That alone pissed me off enough that I could feel the muscles in my upper back tense with anticipation of all the work they were about to do.

  Yup, screwing with my primary source of protein? A surefire way to make me gear up for a fight.

  We wasted another thirty seconds trying to distribute the load between us—which was mostly Nate pointing out which shamblers I should be going for in what order, and me flipping him off—but the undead didn’t mind. Not a single one had noticed us yet, let alone focused on us long enough to see us as a threat. Nate finally gave up, giving my shoulder a light shove in a silent, “You’re on your own, bitch,” if there ever was one, which only served to make me grin in anticipation. Rolling my shoulders and rotating my head from side to side, I exhaled slowly, then let excitement and, well, unbridled lust for violence take over. My pulse sped up, and my amygdala flipped the switch from potential flight to all-out fight mode, adrenaline flooding my system. Euphoria licked at the back of my mind like flames on dry kindling, and a moment later, I exploded forward, coming for the closest zombie. The only thing that would have made it even better might have been screaming at the top of my lungs, but since I didn’t need them all to come for me at the same time, I was okay with a semi stealthy approach.

  Heavy bat met mottled skin stretched over misshapen cranium—haphazardly covered with hair and lesions—resulting in a very satisfying “thunk” as the shambler sagged forward onto the half-eaten deer corpse. Suddenly finding its food source covered by a decidedly less appetizing piece of meat, the next shambler looked up, just in time to let me hit it right in the face, the bat destroying what was left of it. A third zombie was so surprised by what was going on that it didn’t resist as I kicked it in the shoulder, making it sprawl on its back, the prone target even easier to hit. I glanced up for a second, checking that none of the other huddles had become alarmed yet, then turned back to my three targets and did some more bashing in of brains to make sure they’d stay down for good. None of them showed the intelligence or resilience to give even a hint of them being anything but the lowest level of undead—easy to dispatch, and barely smart enough to become a menace to us.

  Obviously, those hadn’t been the masterminds that had managed to slaughter half a herd of deer, but I was happy to start the cleanup with them.

  Nate meanwhile finished off four more, and I moved on to the next cadaver, a little more cautiously now, checking the high grass away from the trampled field of slaughter. I didn’t come up with anything so I went for the next easy target, and the next, and the next—until the last shambler lay dead for good on the ground, none of them putting up much resistance. My muscles sang with exertion but rather than feel satisfied at a task completed, my mind was on fire with alertness as I kept checking our surroundings. Nate, panting a little from the work he’d done, was watching me as much as the grass around us, only outwardly relaxing as he straightened. Any tracks had been destroyed by the feeding frenzy, leaving us nothing except for a clear pointer where the horde had come from—south by southwest, but we’d already known that, seeing as we patrolled the northern and eastern parts of the basin.

  Propping my bat against my leg for a second, I flashed a quick slew of hand signals at him—just coincidentally bad luck for the deer? He shook his head, still scanning the territory. We waited a good five minutes, but except for a few vultures drawing closer to the heap of corpses farthest away from us, nothing moved. I kicked at one of the shamblers, mostly to vent energy and frustration than to get it off the deer cadaver, but as it rolled away from there, I checked on the dead animal. Nothing useful to be gleaned from it anymore, half-eaten as it already was. Nate spent a few moments checking a few of the corpses while I kept scanning the meadow, returning to me with another negating jerk of his head. No signs that any of them had been special—or had been simulating. We’d had a few incidents of that in the past, although not with a bunch like this one. Like many predators hunting in groups, they seemed happy to establish hierarchies, and if any one of them would have been smart enough to be the boss, that one would likely have come for us before we’d had a chance to come for it.

  So where was that boss hiding?

  Since I was already worked up and sweaty—not to mention keyed up and still ready for a fight—I whipped through the ground floor of the building next, using the established room-by-room route we’d prepped in the past, but found nothing. None of our traps were disturbed, not a single stumbling obstacle out of place. Sure, someone as smart as us could have avoided them—which technically included the juiced-up fuckers, but without a reason to, why would it have gone to such lengths? Nate was waiting at the second entry for me, acknowledging my silent “nothing” with a light frown. He didn’t like this any more than I did. The vultures were descending on the corpses in earnest now, and I could see a few coyotes in the field next to the meadow, called by the same signals as us. The birds made enough sound that calling out was useless to try to scare any other undead out of hiding—they would have come had they still been around.

  Well, at least my lettuce was coming along nicely. Next time we’d come by on our usual tour, I’d be able to take the first seven or ten heads with me.

  While I was busy checking on my produce, Nate took out a small, dilapidated notebook and wrote down the date and location of the encounter. Together, we returned to the buggies, and after a routine cleanup, we hopped back in to resume our trek. Whistling under my breath, my fingers kept
drumming on the wheel, tension taking its sweet time to leak from my body. The music remained off—if we had some smart ones in our territory now, I’d need my full attention. Too bad, really—I could have done with a few more tunes for the week.

  It went without saying that we extended our usual route in the direction the shamblers had come from, but we soon lost the trail they’d left behind where it veered off on one of the old highways. Just to be sure that they hadn’t left behind a few squatters in the wrecks peppering the cracked lanes, we wasted a good thirty minutes on that but came up blank. I was still jumpy but the tension was slowly draining from my muscles, leaving me with a thread of exhaustion and a latent need to burn off energy—that other kind of energy that didn’t necessarily require weapons and gear. Unable to do anything about that right now—or unwilling, considering how Nate kept ignoring my imploring glances his way—I felt anger flicker alive in the depth of my stomach but did my best to put a lid on it.

  The noon heat beating down on us only made me cranky, so I hopped back into the buggy so we could finish our round. Roughly three hours after we’d hauled the second set of batteries from the charging station to the buggies, we unplugged them once more, switched out the batteries for the next set, and left everything so it would be ready the next time we’d need it.

  Sweaty and covered in grime from the dust the buggy had stirred up, I would have loved to aim for the river, but Nate’s reproachful look reminded me that we had something else to do before that. Plastering a placid smile on my face, I pretended that I wasn’t still wound up as hell as I grabbed my compound bow and arrows. I was sure I was fooling no one, but I wasn’t quite in the mood to escalate things into a fight that might well end with me getting ignored for the next couple of days straight rather than, well, the much more energetic alternate outcome.

  An hour later, we reached the patch of forest where we’d seen plenty of deer and rabbit trails this morning and waded into the underbrush, separating. I considered finding myself a nice perch high up in a tree and twiddling my thumbs until some game wandered into my line of sight. Hell, I even had a paperback with me that I could read in the meantime. The idea of how much me doing that would vex Nate made me smile, but only for a minute. We weren’t necessarily here to hunt, or not only to hunt; and wasting the exercise like that when I actually needed to clear my head wasn’t exactly efficient. But I really could have done with getting up to virtually anything else than this.

  I couldn’t be entirely sure whether Nate hadn’t turned around and was stalking me rather than any other prey, but since I hadn’t heard a single sound not belonging to the forest, I presumed he was leaving me to my own devices. I was still tempted to forgo trying to center my mind first, but with a loud sigh I dropped my weapon and pack at a nearby tree before parking my ass, cross-legged with my hands partly open on my knees, in the high grass, choosing a patch of sunlight-speckled birch trees to gaze at.

  Follow your breath, my ass. If there was one thing I hated more than meditating, it was meditating when my body and mind were keyed up, but I didn’t need Nate’s silent reminders to know that it was vital that I kept my parasympathetic nervous system in check. It had been a while since I’d almost lost it, but there was no reason whatsoever to provoke a repeat performance today.

  A brief inhale, followed by a long, slow exhale. I forced my eyes to lose focus, instead concentrating on the rustling of the wind in the tall grass, the scent of sunshine in the air, the pounding of my own heart like a steady drum beat, growing slower by the minute. I let my mind idle, doing my best not to chase the millions of bunnies stampeding through my thoughts.

  How had the shamblers managed to kill those deer? Reset.

  Maybe I should redo the wraps on the bat handle. My right hand felt a little bruised… Reset.

  Just how—

  Reset.

  Anger snaked its way into the stampede, a bright, red light so much easier to latch onto than it was to let everything else go. My pulse increased immediately, the world in front of my eyes snapping into laser-sharp focus. Muscles tensed, my body going from somewhat relaxed to alert in a second.

  I forced out the air in my lungs rather than let it escape, the annoyance at my failure to calm down only exacerbating the moment. Two more breaths, equally pressed, and I gave up, coming to my feet in one fluid motion that ended with picking up my gear. I paused for a moment, checking on what was going on around me, before I set out east, letting my mind lose itself in motion and attention rather than nothingness.

  Sometimes, that even worked. Today, not so much, but I stopped caring when I caught sight of something disappearing into the underbrush maybe two hundred feet to my left, toward the river. I welcomed the spike of adrenaline that zoomed through my veins, my feet carrying me faster as I sped up into an easy lope without much thought required. A deer, if I wasn’t mistaken. Venison, not the worst kind of dinner, particularly after today’s find.

  Tracking it was easy enough as I hadn’t startled it and the animal was gravitating toward the river, stopping to graze or listen every so often. I let my feet pick their own way, moving much slower now that I was closing in on it, my attention divided between my prey and the forest ground. Nocking an arrow, I tracked the animal for a while, but eased up eventually, letting it traipse away when I decided to let it fatten up a few more weeks. My thoughts kept snapping back to the shamblers we’d stumbled upon, something about that encounter still not sitting right with me. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake that latent unease that I was missing something.

  A cracking sound came from behind me, alerting me to the fact that I was no longer alone. It could have been a boar but I doubted it; it sounded much more like a hunter giving up on his own stalking. It took me a few minutes until I found his tracks, and a little longer to come upon the man himself. I couldn’t hide a smirk when I caught Nate, crouching in the shade, munching on some early blueberries. He hadn’t seen me yet, and the murmur of the river in the distance muted the inevitable sounds I made well enough. I considered what to do, but only a single option sounded vaguely enticing.

  So I did what was only logical—to do away with my abundance of energy and to calm my mind—and pounced.

  Food-related distraction aside, Nate must have heard me coming—or all that mulling things over in silence that he, too often, had going on was giving him supernatural senses after all—as he reacted a split second before I crashed into him. He couldn’t avoid me, but rather than him going down underneath me, I somehow ended up on my back with him perched above me. Before inertia could pin me to the ground, I did my best to grab him and throw us both into a tumble, but he shamelessly used what strength and reach he had on me, forcing me into a similar position, only now further away from the bushes.

  He allowed himself a slight, if slightly winded, smirk. “Hunting, remember?”

  “Yeah, I’m not really hungry for food right now,” I offered—lied, really, but we still had some leftovers from yesterday, so filling my stomach wasn’t my top priority at the moment. His smirk deepened as he got my meaning, as hard to misinterpret as my words had been. When I reached up, he didn’t try to break my hold on him, same as he didn’t protest when a quick hook of my leg and thrust of my pelvis got him falling onto his back, with me now above him. I grinned down at him, allowing my breathing to slow down for a second before it would, inevitably, pick up once more. “If that’s you protesting, you’re doing it wrong,” I snidely remarked.

  “Not protesting,” he shot back, his hands warm on my sweaty skin as they found their way inside my clothes at my lower back.

  “Thought so.”

  Then we were busy with something other than talking, or stalking deer, or thinking about the damn shambler incursion—and all was right with the world.

  An undefined time later we picked up our discarded clothes and gear and trudged over to the river, following the silver band to where the water had dug out some deeper pools at the shore next to boulders jutting out
into the rapids. The shock as I jumped into the icy depth was jarring, making me feel quite awake as it chased away the last tendrils of the mellowness that had previously spread through my body and mind. I stayed in the water just long enough to sluice away sweat and grime before I swam over to the boulders, using a few familiar hand- and footholds to pull myself out of the water and onto the sun-warmed rock. Nate was already waiting for me, lazing, stretched out in the sun, his head pillowed on one arm. I might have spent a moment longer than necessary following the familiar curves and hollows the muscles and tendons of his body formed as I stood there, letting the cold water drip down my own. It had taken some getting used to not feeling vulnerable and utterly exposed whenever we went skinny-dipping, but the spring had started strong enough that, already, I barely had any tan lines except for my face relative to the rest of my body. Just because I could stand there, unafraid and strong, before plunking down next to him to let the sun dry my shivering skin didn’t mean I was stupid enough to go toe-to-toe with the undead or other predators in our territory. But that easy-to-defend, hard-to-reach boulder jutting out into the river had a lot going for it, that much was true.