Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation (22 page)

“Of course not.”

“Then why are you complaining?” he asked—and quickly stepped through the closing doors of the prepped operation room before I could shout my answer.
 

Martinez was clearly fighting to hide a grin, and when I glared at him next, he shrugged. “What did you expect? A box of chocolates and a note that he’s sorry he went after the mission objective?”

“Not getting ridiculed for hurling myself from the roof of a building would be nice,” I offered, hating how petulant that sounded.

“Come on. Let me get a look at what makes you wheeze like a chain smoker,” he insisted instead, turning to one of the small offices that—thanks to a window—needed no generator-powered lights.

I dropped my pack and fought with the strap of the shotgun for a moment, then started unzipping the jacket. Reaching up hurt, and with the remainder of the tension and adrenaline leaking from my system, it got harder to ignore the pain.

“Here, let me,” Martinez interjected, pushing my fingers away so he could help me along.

“First time you ever undressed a girl?” I jeered, unable to keep the wisecrack in.

His eyes flickered up to my face, but he was still gentle as he pulled the sleeves down my arms. “You make it so easy to forget you’re a girl that it doesn’t even bother me,” he replied, keeping the banter going.

“You say the sweetest things,” I shot back.

“Trust me, chica, if I had a straight bone in my body, I’d get a mighty hard-on for you right now.”

I might have replied that he was an asshole, but he proceeded with peeling the other layers off my body, the pain making talking impossible. He paused for a moment when it was just my bra remaining, but then pulled it over my head, too.

“Can you keep your arms up?” he asked. I tried, gripping the door frame. The moment he lightly pushed against my ribs, I almost fell to the floor. It took everything I had not to scream. “Cracked, probably,” he murmured, and rather than probe somewhere else, he continued until he made me gasp and whine for real, gritted teeth or not. He also checked my sternum, clavicles, shoulder blades and the soft spots in between, but while his prodding wasn’t comfortable, it was still bearable. My hip didn’t feel so good, either, but the fact that I’d walked back to base without support had already established that it was just badly bruised.

“Verdict?” Pia’s voice came from behind me, making me tense, if not outright jump.

Martinez checked my ribcage again, drawing a few more pained sounds from me.

“Without an X-ray I can’t say for sure, but you have at least several cracked ribs, likely some fractured ones, too. Rest is just bruises,” he said, talking to me but looking over to her briefly. “Nothing I can do about that except a really tight bandage and some painkillers. Maybe don’t smack into any more buildings until you’re fully healed, okay?”

“I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything,” I hissed between clenched teeth. Looking down at my discarded clothes, the very idea of wearing a bra that would push down on my ribs inevitably was hell.

As if she’d read my mind, Pia held out one of the tank tops she usually wore instead of underwear to me. Snug on her already, it would be ridiculously tight on me—but it beat the torture instrument currently lying at my feet.

“Patch her up and help her dress,” she told Martinez. To me, she said, “We rigged up OR-3. You can check the progress from the observation lounge above. Once it’s dead, come in and help.”

My tongue was burning with protest, but I quickly swallowed it down. Getting more involved was what I’d wanted, right? So protesting at the first chance I got was likely not the best idea.

“Will do.”

She nodded as if she hadn’t expected anything else—which, considering our track record of disobeying her orders was about zilch, she likely hadn’t—and disappeared in the direction she’d pointed me.

Martinez got out the bandages, and what followed was in no way sexual or pretty. About ten minutes later, I imagined I had a good idea of how a mummy must have felt, and even the thin layer of the tank top was hard to bear and breathe at the same time. Martinez helped me shrug on one of my clean short-sleeved shirts and a zip-up hoodie, leaving everything but my jacket on the floor. I paused for a moment, but then followed him. I could always get new clothes later; some that actually fit and weren’t stained from months of sweating into them.

“I’ll check again tomorrow morning. It would be better without bandages, but I know you. Telling you to just take your pills and lay low for a week won’t happen.”

Shrugging hurt, but so did breathing deeply. “You do know me,” I agreed.

It wasn’t hard to find the right operation room. The presence of no less than three guards gave it away. We passed them by and went up the stairs to the observation lounge, where Burns and Cho had set up camp. Cho was busy cleaning his weapons, while Burns was leafing through what I realized was a stack of women’s magazines, dated last May. At my pained but quickly widening grin, he held up one hand defensively. “Hey, don’t judge. They’re full of sex stories. It’s been a mighty long winter.”

Rolling my eyes, I sagged into the seat beside his, pointedly not leaving a spare in between.

“You’re so pathetic,” I observed.

“Says the girl who got so desperate that she’s making out with concrete walls now?”

That got the glare it deserved, and I plucked the magazine from his fingers, quickly scanning the last opened page.
 

“Can’t you get any decent porn? I mean, seriously. ‘Ten ways to make him beg for it in under five minutes’? I’d be surprised if even a single one worked.”

His shrug could have meant anything. “You just want me to hunt down some real porn because you want to stare at tits, too,” he accused.

I raised my brows, feigning innocence.

“Can you blame a girl after all she saw for the past ten months is dick? And even more dick? You guys aren’t exactly circumspect when you dress. Or wank.”

Martinez chuckled, while Cho looked vaguely uncomfortable—and rightly so. I pointedly ignored that he was still there.

“You’re seriously complaining about that?” Burns wanted to know. “I thought you liked cock? Don’t you like pretty much everything?”

I flipped a few pages, grinning at the ridiculous poses in the ads. “Unwashed, hairy, dirty anything is not what I get off on,” I let him know.

“See, that wall had a clear and unfair advantage,” Burns scoffed.

Downstairs, Nate and Andrej were about done strapping the seemingly lifeless body of the zombie to the steel table. “You do realize that we can hear everything you say up there?” he remarked, not bothering with looking up.
 

I glanced at Burns, waiting to see if he looked bashful, but his bright grin easily mirrored my own.

“Why, all that talk about cocks distracting you?” I asked, smiling sweetly on the off-chance that he would glance up after all.

“Depends. Do you want me to start dishing on what I know for a fact turns you on? I’m sure I can scrounge up some anecdotes,” Nate not-quite threatened.

“You’re such an asshole,” I grunted, looking over at Cho. “You done? Then hand me that kit.” Cho dutifully let me borrow his gear to set to work on my shotgun. Burns meanwhile reclaimed the magazine, happily leering at a spread about tankinis and one-piece swimsuits with clever cutouts. I might have snuck a glance or two, but mostly focused on my cleaning.

Now that they had the zombie in place, the three of them—Nate, Andrej, and Pia—took turns pulling it apart. Literally, which also proved the quickest method of letting the tranquilizer wear off. Within minutes, the entire room was soiled with zombie blood, vomit, shit, piss, bile, and a million other things I didn’t want to look at too closely. I would have expected them to be more methodical and slow in their approach, but except for not going for its spinal cord, they weren’t squeamish. While I didn’t feel outright sympathy for the creature getting vivisected down there on that table, I wasn’t exactly comfortable with the proceedings—particularly as Pia had already made it clear that they expected me to participate once the high risk of infection was cleared.

Cutting into a zombie? No, that idea didn’t make me uncomfortable.

What made my skin itch was that now that we had it right here, I couldn’t quell the sense of fascination and curiosity that was rearing its ugly head.

Ever since the shit had hit the fan, I hadn’t really felt like needing the details of what was going on beyond where it was pertinent to my survival. How not to get infected, how to find food, shelter, weapons, ammunition. How to make it another hour. Another day. Another week. At first, the very prospect of traversing several states and a good two thousand miles and survive the insane amount of time that undertaking would require had seemed just overwhelming. Within days, it was impossible to remember a time before this new reality had existed without feeling my heart seize each and every time. Within weeks, just remembering what had happened
Before
was hard. And it wasn’t important, either. Why cry over something that was gone forever?

Sure, part of me had remained curious. That part had gobbled up every little tidbit it could grasp—but those were few and far between. Most of what I knew came from Nate—and that mostly about the serum he and a few others had been inoculated with, rendering them pretty much immune to zombie bites, but not the sugar-laced food that infected all of us—and beside the fact that it was mighty convenient that I knew that if he got bitten, he wouldn’t turn, there was no sense to dissecting that further. Not getting infected was easy—just don’t get chewed on. Maybe under different circumstances, with the right means, things might have been different, but whenever that deeply rooted side of me—the scientist—fought herself to the forefront of my mind, only one thing came of it: bitterness and resentment. I had the knowledge, and probably the skills, to tackle the issue if I had a fully staffed lab and unending resources—but what good would that do me to find out exactly what that virus was and how it worked? I’d just get confirmation for what had led to this event of mass extinction that we called reality now. There was nothing I could do about it, and I wasn’t sure if that useless knowledge would simply lead to one conclusion. Suicide.

Glum as that thought was, it was easy to push away. Because I had survived the apocalypse, and even if every breath I now took reminded me vehemently of my own mortality and vulnerability, I was still around, still kicking, and I intended to keep it that way. Acquiring useless knowledge would in no way contribute to my continuing survival. But find out how the zombies worked, in a visceral, physical sense? Find out what could hurt them, kill them?
 

Nate had been right, as much as admitting that made me want to choke on my own arrogance. The more we knew, the better our chance of survival. And so far, doing everything to ensure that survival had been a very good thing to bet my life on. If that meant that I’d have to breach one more moral gap, so be it.

Below, the zombie arched up, threatening to break the restraints as Pia sawed its left leg off in the middle of the femur, a spray of blood, bone, and tissue making the wound disappear for a second. I’d never seen a live amputation, but there was barely anything leaking from the wound—also proving that puncturing the femoral artery wouldn’t even slow the fuckers down. Disgust welled up inside of me, but I did my best to swallow it down as I leaned forward, trying to get a better look at the situation. My own experience today with the knife had proven about the same—anything short of crippling injury didn’t hinder zombies a lot. And while it had howled loud enough to rattle the glass, it hadn’t sounded like pain, just rage at being unable to fight, to hunt, to eat. A sword was likely the better weapon, but considering I’d just be frightened—rightly so—of accidentally chopping off my own limbs, close-range shotgun blasts still sounded damn good. I filed that away for the next time Nate would start nagging me again about why I always chose the shotgun over the assault rifles he kept foisting at me.

It took almost an hour until they’d reduced the zombie to simply so much meat that whatever kept it alive—as alive as it was—gave out. Some more poking and prodding ensued, but no reaction followed. Nate looked up, his hands still dripping… something. “You two can suit up.”

I was surprised at first, but likely shouldn’t have been about Martinez coming to his feet. He popped the lid of the bottle of painkillers that he carried and shook out two pills for me that I swallowed with some water on the way down.
 

“How are we going to do this?” I asked him as we passed the guards right in front of the operation room. Rather than go through the swing doors, he nodded toward the room to the side that was where the doctors had prepped themselves for surgery.

“Scrubs do have the advantage that they don’t just keep the patient from getting contaminated by the doctor, but the other way round, too. Do I really have to give you a lecture on standard hygiene in medical environments?”

I shrugged, following him. “I’d rather have a hazmat suit, thank you.”

His laugh was a little shaky as he started pulling out blue pants and shirts from the stacks in the anteroom, strangely untouched—but then I could see where they hadn’t been important enough to anyone to pilfer.

“Well, yeah. But lacking those, this is likely the next best thing we can work with,” he said.