Beyond Green Fields (Book 1): Beginnings [A Post-Apocalyptic Anthology] Read online

  We made it across the highway with minimal swerving but soon had to slow down to a crawl as the brown, rocky meadow didn’t lend itself to blast toward the town. We might have gotten away with using the highway for a mile or two but there were wrecks aplenty across both lanes that made going more or less straight cross-country easier—until even that drew too much attention. Martinez and I had long since fallen silent, both of us concentrating on our tasks. I knew that the rumbling of the engine rather than the very-muted tones of my voice inside the car was what drew the shamblers, but I really didn’t feel like talking.

  The lead car going maybe ten miles per hour stopped when we got to where our teams’ paths split, waiting for me and our wing car to pass by before they aimed farther east. We continued north, my right thigh painfully tense with every tap on the accelerator rather than the brakes. There was a lot of movement between the wrecks now, also from those that had spilled from the highway onto the even banks left and right of the road. Ahead, I could see the first buildings of a small industrial area, and farther east brown grassland turned to the lusher greens of a residential area, although “lush” really was pushing it after months without irrigation. A hint of green rather than the omnipresent brown was more like it. It would have been so much easier to simply use the road, but rocking over the brown grass in between the highway and the houses looked like the safer route.

  A few months ago, it would have taken us ten minutes and a drive right up to the gate to get where we wanted. Now, we spent half an hour slowly rocking toward our destination. A good mile south of the lake I could see glistening in the sunlight I stopped, turning to Martinez. “Suggestion: we walk the rest of the way and check out what we can find in the warehouses first, then get the cars if we need to.”

  He considered for a moment. “You mean, if we can’t just load everything into a truck right then and there and use that to get it out?”

  I nodded. “We don’t have to drive it back to the bunker. Just away from the city will be enough. You heard Miller; we can always return for the cars later. Same goes for the goods we haul out. It’s not the fastest way to do a grab and dash, but with luck we only need a single round and a few days at the most to get it all done.”

  Martinez looked happy enough to let me make the call, but still glanced over to the other car. Bates and Burns were debating animatedly—if in hushed tones—Bates again sucking on one of his cancer sticks. “Yeah, let’s do this,” Martinez agreed. “No use in running it by them.”

  Grinning, I shut off the engine, taking a moment to check that nothing was close enough to chew my face off before I got out and got ready. The others followed suit, Burns waiting for me to make my way over to him and quickly explain my plan. He gave his silent agreement a moment later, and off we went, me taking point just for the hell of it. Anxious I might have been, but that didn’t mean I had any intentions of being the cowering git everyone needed to look after.

  Just south of the airport, the highway we’d been following for most of the morning met the road leading to Greybull, easy to make out as it was jam-packed with wrecks. My gut screamed at me to turn around and go hunt for an easier target—or try to approach from a different direction—but I forced my pulse to slow down as I gave the others time to take in the vista.

  “Must have been the tourists streaming out of Yellowstone,” Burns observed, whispering low under his breath. “I don’t see the residents being stupid enough to go for the next bigger residential area.”

  “I doubt they were,” I replied. We hadn’t been out and about a lot, but signs of looting had been obvious—at least Nate had proclaimed as much, and I trusted his assessment. That was one of the reasons why we’d come up here to Cody rather than scour the small towns closer to the bunker first—here, we’d still find loot aplenty even if other raiders had hit before. Besides, I had a feeling that the reason why Pia and Andrej had been gone most of last week were some extensive exploratory missions. It was easy to guess that the Ice Queen had been the first to go stir-crazy—and Emma’s penchant for ordering her around had certainly not helped that—but I doubted she would have given in to that in such a short time.

  Bates cleared his throat, drawing our attention to him. “Looks quiet enough down there,” he observed. “I don’t trust it, but we’ve made it through worse. I say, I go first, then Martinez, and you two bring up the rear.”

  I felt like protesting but swallowed the words when Burns was already nodding. “We’ll go two minutes apart, fifty feet to the left of the one before. We’ll meet up at the cargo buildings,” Burns declared.

  Martinez was the only one who noticed my vexation but wisely kept it to himself—as he got ready to follow Bates, who was already heading out in a ducked sprint toward the road ahead. I didn’t need Burns lightly tapping my shoulder to get going but didn’t mind as it felt like a pat of support more than a hostile shove forward. Ahead, Bates slowed down as he approached the cars, and a moment later, he was gone.

  A loud growl coming from farther east made me come to a stumbling halt, instantly on high alert as my heart slammed up into my throat. About a hundred yards away, next to an overturned, burned-out truck I saw a huddle of shamblers hunched over something on the ground; one of them was rearing up and growling at the others, still oblivious to our presence. As I watched, one of the crouchers sprang at the standing one, taking it down, and they disappeared between the wrecks while the others watched. Dull thuds soon turned into wetter sounds, interspersed with growls that soon became yowls—I really didn’t need to see what was going on. Swallowing thickly, I told myself that it was the best distraction we could have hoped for as I forced myself to move forward—but it was impossible not to imagine them all coming for me, and it being my body that was rent apart as they literally took chunks out of me.

  I paused behind a van as I reached the wrecks, crouching down to look across the road at tire level. There was a desiccated husk that had once been a human a few feet beyond the van but nothing else—least of all anything moving. The shamblers were really going at it now, making my stomach turn, but nothing I could do about that except ignore it. Another tense minute of creeping forward and I was through the wrecks, the wire-mesh fence surrounding the airport the only thing keeping us out.

  By the time I joined them, Bates had finished creating a hole large enough to let us pass with his bolt cutters, and we were ready to head through when Burns crouched down next to me. Nobody mentioned the shamblers but I caught the others casting uneasy glances in their direction a few times until we were on the other side of the fence. We were a good two hundred yards away from the next entrance so it was easy to avoid the two burned-out trucks that effectively blocked it—and kept us from seeing what might be hiding behind them.

  The first few hundred feet we still moved in stealth mode, but when nothing came shambling after us, Bates soon straightened and started walking upright, still alert but more relaxed out in the open. From what I could tell, there were five planes forever grounded here, only one of them a passenger plane, going by the markings. It was by far the largest, obviously having had to do an emergency landing where it had ended up, sideways, at the very end of the landing strip, the nose hanging over the grass. One of the blow-up emergency slides was still attached, making me guess the passengers had had one hell of a time leaving the plane. I considered suggesting checking it out to see if we could find anything interesting in the cargo hold, but it was a long walk over there to look through someone’s dirty laundry. Maybe on the next trip.

  Maybe it was simply luck, but the entire area of the Yellowstone Regional Airport seemed to be utterly deserted. As we got closer to the warehouses, I saw that on a smaller strip next to them a small fleet of private planes was parked, with several prominent spots empty. “Must have fled when they realized the shit was hitting the fan,” Bates mused.

  “Doesn’t sound that smart,” I pointed out. “Where would you go from here that’s more deserted but still got some infra
structure that you can raid?”

  He gave me a tight grin for that. “Only somewhere that doesn’t have anything.”

  “That’s just boring.”

  He seemed to agree with me, but a crash coming from the warehouses made us both shut up and halt in our tracks. Bates and Burns quickly exchanged looks, then Bates gave us the sign to hang back and sprinted forward. The knot of anxiety was back in my stomach as I followed, but I did my best to ignore it. Unlike the air force base we’d raided in summer that had ended with Innes biting it, there was only a small chance of anyone actually dying on the premises, and while there were residential areas aplenty in walking distance, the airport didn’t look like a good hiding spot for the undead. The wind was coming from the south, carrying a whiff of decay over from the roads, but so far we hadn’t found any remains—or anything trashed for that matter. Raccoons, I told myself. And unless they were six feet tall, undead raccoons, they wouldn’t be a problem for us.

  Bates reached the building and sprinted toward the nearest exit. Rather than wait for me to cover his back, he slipped inside just as I got to the corner, pausing for a moment to listen. His stupid bravado move made me want to curse under my breath, but I swallowed the exclamation—the sound of our voices might have triggered whatever was going on in there, so better keep it down. I sidled over to the door but waited until Martinez stopped next to me before I eased it open, peering inside.

  The door opened into a small office space rather than the warehouse itself, the ceiling of the narrow hallway low enough to make me feel claustrophobic. There were two doors leading away before the hallway took a turn toward the warehouse, both of them open. I eased forward and glanced into the first, finding some employee lockers, the door of one of them torn off the hinges. A tidy office was behind the other. Bates must have done a cursory check on the way through as I saw his dirty bootprints on the light tiles a few feet in. I still made sure that nothing was hiding in there while Martinez moved past me to investigate beyond the corner. A break room, also empty, and then the open door into the warehouse. Burns went through first so all the two of us could do was follow.

  As eager as he had seemed to commit suicide, Bates was waiting for the rest of us a few feet away from the exit of the hallway, intently studying our surroundings. Most of the warehouse was taken over by shelves reaching up to the roof, except for the south-western corner where two delivery trucks were standing, their cargo compartments half-full. It looked like someone had stopped loading them midway through the activity, but there were no signs of anyone leaving in a hurry. There were also no signs of anything else, and while the air didn’t smell fresh, it lacked that sharp scent of decay that made you want to hurl and run at the same time. At a first glance, I didn’t see anything that could have caused the noise we’d heard, but I wasn’t even sure if that had come from this warehouse.

  We still took our time clearing all the open space that was easily accessible, and making sure to peek into the parts that weren’t. The most suspicious thing I found were some animal droppings and torn cardboard boxes where small rodents must have found a new home in what looked like a box full of sawdust, going by the spill the small holes they had gnawed had caused. As soon as we were sure that we were alone, we started checking labels on boxes, but I was hesitant to tear anything open after Bates was less circumspect and the crackle and pop his knife caused made me jump several feet. I got a grin for my bother, but thankfully nothing else reacted to it.

  Most of the shelved stuff seemed to be building materials or other stuff you’d find at Home Depot—not exactly what we were shopping for. I left Bates and Martinez to climbing the shelves to check the upper levels and instead went to look at what the trucks had been loaded with. One held boxes full of garden furniture, but as I heaved myself up into the cargo compartment of the other, I found a lot of smaller boxes, at least half of them with the telltale perpetual smirky-smile printed on the packing tape. Bingo.

  Slicing the tape rather than the cardboard might have taken more time but was a lot quieter, and it only took me three boxes to find one that held something useful: supplements, protein powder, and a weight-lifting manual. I chucked the latter and the packing materials but kept the other stuff in the box, pushing it to the side so I could fill it with what other treasures I might come across. In short order, I had a small collection of useful items lined up, including more food stuff but also tools, limited medical supplies, and other things that might come in handy like a few pairs of boots and some batteries. It wasn’t a huge truckload—pardon the pun—but more than we could easily stow away in our packs and still run unhindered. I hated the idea of having to leave half of it behind if we couldn’t take one of the trucks.

  That nobody intended to hoof it back out of here became obvious when the others started dragging large boxes toward my truck, Bates already starting to heave them up before I could offer a hand. Said hand wasn’t needed, judging from the relatively light weight of the boxes, it seemed. I was still puzzled about that when Bates pointed at the logo printed on one of them. “Mattresses. We can’t cram half of the bunker full with beds, but we sure as hell don’t have to sleep on the ground forever.”

  “It’s great insulation for when it gets cold,” Martinez added. “And since we have the trucks handy, why not take them?”

  I couldn’t help but grin, the very idea of sleeping on something softer than my sleeping bag on bare concrete making me weirdly excited. “Why not take that porch swing while you’re at it? I’m sure Emma will appreciate it.”

  Burns seemed actually tempted, making me want to roll my eyes at him, but it remained at the mattresses and the boxes I’d weeded out, besides whatever the guys had stuffed into their no-longer-empty packs. Judging from how Bates elbowed Burns, I would have bet one dinner ration that some of it was adult magazines or a calendar they’d found. With the nine mattress boxes, the truck wasn’t exactly full, but it wasn’t a bad result for two hours of searching.

  “Are we done here?” Burns asked, making as if to cast around one last time.

  Martinez shrugged. “We should check the office and bathroom for first-aid stuff, but otherwise I think, yeah.”

  “Fire extinguishers,” Bates offered. At my weird look, he shrugged. “Plan’s to do a lot of body work on the cars, right? Sparks flying, lots of shelved stuff—never a good combination.”

  “You do realize that we have shitty ventilation in there already? Not the best environment to use carbon dioxide if you don’t want to suffocate everyone,” I opined—but he had a point.

  Martinez seemed to agree with Bates. “We’ll see what we can get,” he promised, nodding for me to lead the way.

  I was just about to turn around when Burns said, “I think I saw some stairs over there by the corner. Check if they lead up to the roof. Would be great if you’d find a spot going south where we can drive the truck across the road, because otherwise this is going to be one shit-job of ramming wrecks to get through.”

  “Good point.” I inclined my head, hating that I hadn’t even considered that. Things had been so much easier when I’d only ever had to do what the Ice Queen told me to. Damn independence and shit.

  While Martinez checked for possible medical supplies, I hit the lockers, using the bolt cutters we’d brought to get rid of the locks keeping most of them closed. Inside I found a lot of spare clothes that, in most cases, smelled bad enough that I was surprised not to find a shambler sticking in them, but in the last locker on the right side I hit gold—or at least a small nugget. Grinning, I slipped the blister pack into my pants pocket. That wouldn’t be enough to get Sadie into her twenties without exploring the joys of motherhood, but it was a start. I was sure we’d find more on a later exploration run.

  Done, Martinez and I went looking for the roof access, only to realize that the “stairs” were on the outside of the building, and Martinez had to boost me up so that I could pull the last piece of the retractable ladder down. Grumbling under my breath,
I climbed up, not really too keen about the height once I looked back onto the tarmac surrounding the warehouse. It was just after noon, the sun blinding where it hit the lake by the highway, but at least that did a good job keeping the undead out of sight as well.

  I was just about to get my binoculars out to scan the road for patches where we might get the truck through when a series of shots coming from the west made me duck for cover, Martinez swearing beside me as he dove down as well. We stared at each other for a second before I crawled to the edge and looked in that direction, just in time to see a massive explosion turn a knot of cars into a fiery ball and blast a hole right through the backed-up lanes. More shots, and then two familiar cars came blasting out from between the industrial buildings and aimed right for the newly created gap. Even across the distance, the sky-blue color of the Rover stood out like a sore thumb. Yeah, we’d really need to do something about that.

  “Guess that explains why Miller didn’t take you with him,” Martinez mused, watching the spectacle as a string of shamblers came hurtling after the cars, their numbers immediately bolstered by several more emerging from underneath the wrecks.

  “Why, because I would have told him not to deliberately kill himself?” I grumbled under my breath, trying but failing to see who was driving my car. Martinez was grinning brightly when I glanced his way. He didn’t even tone it down when he realized he was caught. “What?”

  “You’re mad because someone else is driving your car, right? Not because your guy might bite it, or any of our people might end up dead, no—because someone might scratch up your ugly-ass behemoth of a vehicle.”

  I wasn’t sure what I should object to first—the assessment of my relationship with Nate or that the Rover was a true beauty, even more so considering how much it had already survived without ever giving me grief—but ended up giving him an ambivalent shrug. “Beats getting stuck with a delivery van.”