Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 (21 page)

Who I did see were several of the scientists, sitting at a table with Mako, and I made it a point to completely ignore them. I shouldn’t have blabbed like that to the nurse. It hadn’t done me any good, and there was a distinct chance that she would tell someone else. Just one more reason to be gone from here as soon as possible.

“Any idea what you are going to do next?”

I looked up at Wilkes’s voice coming from behind Nate. He took the seat next to Nate when Andrej moved over, nodding his greetings to us. Glancing at Nate, I expected him to reply, but he just looked back at me, a hint of challenge in his gaze, but muted enough that I could have ignored it had I wanted to.

“We haven’t decided yet,” I offered, omitting the fact that we hadn’t even talked about it.

Wilkes nodded, as if he understood that this decision required some time. “Any chance I can entice you to stay a little longer with us?”

Again I looked at Nate. He took that as incentive enough to reply. “As much as we all enjoy getting fed and having access to running water, our place is out there, not in here.”

Wilkes looked neither surprised nor annoyed by the rebuke. “I understand. I take it you have a plan? The people from your home in Wyoming have been asking about you already. I presume you will want to pay them a visit?”

It was a tempting idea, but also the most obvious choice for anyone who had even two brain cells to rub together. I didn’t need to tell Nate that, and the grim set of his shoulders let me know that a possible ambush wasn’t the only concern that might keep him away from the bunker. I hadn’t forgotten our conversation in the whorehouse jacuzzi. “We should probably coordinate with Dispatch,” he replied. “If anyone can give us a better idea of how things are out there, it’s probably them.”

I expected Wilkes to protest, but he took that with a stoic look on his face. “As much as I would like to think that we here have created a safe haven for everyone, more people are flocking there each day,” he agreed. “If strength in numbers is what you are looking for, Dispatch is likely where you should go.” Wilkes got up, pausing another moment to look at all of us. “Feel free to use our communication systems. Our tech staff has been working on assembling new radios that, as far as we know, cannot be tracked. We have several crates of them ready for shipping out, just no one willing to do any deliveries. If you decide to leave, you’d do us all a solid if you’d take them with you. As it is, more scavengers will trust you with that than us.”

“We will take that into consideration,” Nate said, a non-answer if there’d ever been one. Wilkes took his leave, several of our people looking after him. Not Nate—his eyes flickered to me and remained there. I stared right back, until I couldn’t take it any longer and raised my brows, silently asking for his opinion. Sooner or later we had to talk to each other again. Might as well be where I could hurl a cup of steaming coffee at him. “Any suggestions?” he asked, not the least bit cautious.

“Do you really want to head to Dispatch?” I asked, doubtful. “You already complained last time about the mass of people. That must be ten times worse now.”

He nodded, but didn’t looked deterred. “They will need us sooner or later. Until that happens, I’d rather stay in less populated areas. Less chance for anyone to sneak up on us.”

So much for our latent paranoia. “You think going to Wyoming means we’re setting ourselves up for an ambush?”

“Likely, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.” At my incredulous look, Nate grinned. “Two of us were enough to take down twenty of them. You know what damage ten of us can do.” That was true—but the fact that our numbers were dwindling rapidly wasn’t anything that instilled confidence in me.

“Should we talk to them first? Or just get in the cars and drive south? If we cross the Rockies up here and come from the west we’ll likely avoid any traps they can set up for us. It’s all open country and not much else out there if we’re careful.” I knew that I was stating the obvious, but I still wasn’t convinced that was a good idea.

Burns, sitting next to me, had been listening in silence so far, but now offered his own concerns. “I say we stay away from settlements. We don’t need ‘em, and all they’ve done is get us into greater shit than we’ve been in before. Why not go out there, find a neat place for the summer and spend the next months letting the sun shine on our lazy asses? A sortie a week is enough to keep ammo stocks high and us well fed. Let all that talk of civil unrest fizzle out. In the fall we find some neat cabin up in Canada, hit a few more larger towns to get enough gear to get ready for the winter, and then we wait until we thaw out again. Worked well last winter, and there’s no reason it won’t this year.”

Campbell, two seats down on my other side, agreed with him. “All the shit that’s happened to us was because we thought we had to go help people who don’t even want our help. We should have all bit it in Sioux Falls, but the worst that happened was that Bree cracked her ribs good. Hitting the cannibals and that damn factory wasn’t for our own good, but that’s where we lost our people. Sure, it’s neat to come here and get fed, but between us, we can easily build a water pump, irrigation system, and whatnots you need to have some creature comforts, too. No one thought to add anything to the bunker because we all knew that it was a temporary hideout for just one long-ass winter. I say we leave now and build our own compound. Next year, when we’ve tested and fortified it well, we can open it up for others. After this shit has died down.”

Agreeable murmurs rose from all around, although Pia didn’t look thrilled. I was tempted to tease her about whether she thought that farming was beneath her, but then it occurred to me that she might have another reason against permanent settlements. One upside to being nomads out there was that there were no dependents around that needed to be taken care of—like children. And my, didn’t that thought do its own to make me want to stay on the road forever.

Surprisingly, it was Martinez who spoke up as the voice of opposition. “I agree that we should lay low for a few months, but I don’t think that avoiding the settlements will do us any good except alienate them even more,” he said, looking around the table. “They are scared. They likely still don’t understand what is going on out there. If we don’t want them to become completely dependent on that government network they all think they need to belong to, we need to be out there and show them that they can depend on us. If we give up on civilization, we can’t complain that civilization is giving up on us.”

It would have been easy to disregard his arguments as idealistic, but he had a point. Nate seemed to agree with me on that, speaking up when no one else offered another opinion.

“Consensus seems to be that we take it easier for now. We can always decide later what we do, for winter or otherwise.” His gaze briefly skipped over to me. “We need to replenish our stocks and get some new gear. I’d also like to give Bree some time to get more familiar with her new abilities and limitations. I’m still not quite up to date on what happened since the factory, but I’m sure that there is someone around here who can fill me in on the details. If I’m not completely wrong, our folks in Wyoming won’t be too happy about a complete embargo. Any objections to me calling them and asking what is happening on their end? If they haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid yet, we could drop off one of the radios Wilkes was talking about. Depending on how the general state of the nation is, we could cross the Rockies and try our luck on the west coast.”

Pia looked less than ecstatic but inclined her head. “You mean you want to find out what the matter is with this town, New Angeles?”

Nate gave an ambivalent grunt. “The thought has crossed my mind. Having the Silo for a backup solution is good, but I would like to know more about this settlement—if it could become a second runner-up to withdraw to, if we need to. My first choice is still to just drop off the face of the earth. Objections?” No one voiced any, so Nate sealed that with a nod. “Anyone got any messages I should relay to our guys at the bunker? With luck we’ll see them in a week and you can chat in person, but we all know that Fortuna can be a fickle bitch sometimes.”

Some murmuring followed but no one seemed particularly chatty today. So Nate got up, presumably to go get that intel we needed. I hesitated, but then followed him.

Although it was still early in the morning, the command center was already buzzing with activity. Nate tracked down Petty Officer Stanton, who was very happy to give him a status report about the settlements, scavenger units, and trade routes that were still operational. I should probably have listened in, but I was soon getting bored. When I noticed Sunny sipping coffee at one of the consoles, I hesitated, but then excused myself and made my way over to him. He gave me a borderline hostile look but toned it down when all I was capable of was a flat stare back.

“You’ve come to your senses, I presume?” he asked, not as cautious as he probably should have been.

I had to remind myself again that I’d been just like him—detached, never seeing anything beyond the results. Maybe it was different with social studies, but scientists in general weren’t known for their empathy toward their test subjects.

“Ever ask yourself how the mice feel that you cut up to check whether a gene mutation you wanted to introduce has taken hold in their offspring? Well, I’m that mouse,” I said, hard pressed not to snap at him. From the way he blanched I could tell that he’d finally caught on to why exactly I’d stormed off yesterday, but before he could stutter something that was likely as offensive as it was inadequate, I shook my head and made an appeasing gesture. “Doesn’t matter now. Just tell me exactly how contagious I am, and what I have to pay attention to. Maybe next time… or maybe never. You have the results, and I trust you to deal with them accordingly.”
 

Sunny nodded, but still took his time to exhale slowly before he glanced at the papers lying to his left. He didn’t pick them up, or tried to shove them at me again, which I was grateful for.

“If you’re careful, it shouldn’t be a problem. There are viral particles in your saliva, urine, and fecal matter but most of them are inactive due to the enzymes working in the different environments. You maybe shouldn’t kiss anyone who can get infected, but I doubt that something like sharing a bottle of water or taking a bite from the same food would cause transmission.”

That wasn’t good enough for me. “‘Doubt’ isn’t exactly a seal of confidence.”

He shrugged. “I cannot tell you that it’s impossible, just highly improbable. You explained so yourself on your last stay here—all of you have come in contact with contaminated matter and none of you got infected unless it was a larger wound.” That was true. I couldn’t count the times I’d had zombie goo on my hands and had accidentally wiped my face, or had small scrapes or cuts somewhere that hadn’t even gotten infected—as in the leaking-pus-and-swelling kind of infected.

“So no making out with anyone not marked up, and maybe not sucking snake venom out of anyone’s leg,” I supposed. Sunny’s mouth opened, ready to offer a comment on the latter, I was sure, but he left it at a curt nod before he went on.

“Exactly. Now, your blood is another matter. Your virus titer is lower than what we’ve found in the samples you brought us, but it’s still high. We have no time-course studies of how the virus multiplies as no one thought of doing any as they got infected, but it should be above the threshold where direct exposure could lead to transmission. We haven’t tested it as mice can’t contract the virus and we don’t have any monkeys on hand—“

He shut up when I glared at him. “And I hope you wouldn’t if you had,” I ground out.

A muscle jumped in Sunny’s cheek, but he didn’t contradict me. “If we had any macaques we would have infected them with the original strain of the virus,” he supplied. “No animal we’ve tried contracts it. Not even pigs. Whoever engineered it made sure that it would only transmit between humans.”

The thing about pigs surprised me a little. Not that I was disappointed not to be attacked by zombie hogs out there, but particularly with influenza having been part of the original virus, transmission might have been possible.

“You tried? As in someone here?” I asked.

Sunny shook his head. “No. It was mentioned in the documentation that came with the serum trials, and one of the new labs did preliminary testing to confirm that nothing has changed about that since.”

That raised more than just one red flag with me. “What else did they test? Did they do human trials, too?” Sunny looked at me as if I’d gone insane, making me want to call him a hypocrite. “We found one zombie that had extensive needle marks. My guess was that he got infected and then someone took samples, but could have been the other way round.”

The alarm on his face eased some of my residual anxiety. I didn’t know him well enough to judge whether he’d try lying to me, but that genuine look of horror on his face was too real to be pretense.

“You don’t really think—“

“I don’t know what to think,” I admitted. “I just know what I saw. And what happened over the last weeks doesn’t exactly instill a lot of confidence in me where the good of humanity is concerned.”

He nodded, if grudgingly. “I guess I see where you’re coming from—“

A cold look from me was all it took for him to fall silent. “I don’t care if you understand my motives.” I had to take a few breaths to calm myself again, doing my best not to look at the stack of papers on his desk. “Thanks for screening me. And for not singling me out. I’ll do my very best to make sure that my viral load stays with me.”

Disappointment crossed his features but he actually extended his hand for me to shake. “My pleasure. Should you change your mind about the rest of the data, I’ll keep it right here at the Silo. We’ve only been working with off-line computers for analysis, and all samples are already destroyed so no one else has access to them anymore.” That gave me enough of a painful twinge deep inside that breathing got hard for a couple of seconds, but Sunny kept on talking, pretending not to have noticed. “The database is updated. You’re officially added to the serum roster, with the annotation that you were part of the vaccine trials. If anyone should ask why your serum protein profile was different in Aurora, we will tell them that the methodology over there was flawed. You shouldn’t let untrained personnel conduct important tests.”