Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction Read Free Page A

paused. “If they come for us, we’ll take the cars to New Town. Meet us there.”
    Glancing longingly at the cow blood, I sighed and ducked back into the car to get the rest of my gear—pack, more ammo, baseball bat for a more silent melee option. Last, I switched my beloved aviators for the wrap-around shooting glasses, leaving the others on the dashboard. I was already sweating under my baseball cap as it was, and on second thought decided that I didn’t need full-face protection. I had no intention whatsoever to get close enough to any of the shamblers for them to bleed into my mouth.
    With our mission being a run-of-the-mill recon job, we left the cars behind, silence more important than comfort. Andrej took off across the field in the direction of the farm at a moderate pace, meaning that I would have to flat-out run to keep up. A year ago, the very idea of running three miles, playing hide and seek with the undead, and returning the long way around would have been out of the question—and not just because it included zombies. Now I didn’t exactly look forward to doing my daily workout session in the noon heat, dressed for a climate easily thirty degrees below what was beating down on us, but it wasn’t an automatic death sentence from cardiac arrest anymore.
    We made good ground, reaching the farm about thirty minutes later. From afar, it had looked abandoned, but the reek of shit and decay made it apparent that the ditches weren’t the only stretch of land that the zombies had claimed as their own. Using the scope of my sniper rifle, I scanned the buildings. There was movement—if not much—inside, making us abandon our plan to search the premises. Instead Andrej had us fan out to sneak around and check a few other hiding places—a small copse of trees to the south, a few more hollows, the large combine rusting away in the field. I got the trees, but didn’t need to go closer than half a mile to see that they were well-inhabited, too. Wherever there was shade to be found and some protection from the elements, shamblers seemed to be squatting. And if most of them had apparently been trudging toward the road, judging from the tracks in the dirt they had left, there were still plenty more around. More than there should have been in a stretch of land that had never had that many inhabitants when they’d still been alive.
    With results the same everywhere, we beat it to find a good position to surveil what was happening at the road. Andrej and Taylor ended up climbing an oak tree that was standing at the border between a pasture and a wheat field, the two zombies squatting there quickly and silently dispatched. I waited in the shade, alert but allowing myself to relax a little. The stench was bad here as well, impossible to keep out of my nose even when I pulled up the scarf that doubled as a face mask for that very purpose. It was usually as much of a dead giveaway—pun intended—as picked-clean remains out in the open, but because we’d had the windows closed up after the cows took off, we’d missed it. I filed that info away for later, too.
    About ten minutes later, Taylor dropped out of the tree, shaking his head at us when Martinez eyed him askance. “At least five hundred of them, maybe more. If we go any closer, we’ll just draw their attention.”
    Andrej followed, brushing oak leaves from his gear. “We go around east, then cut around them to the north and return to the cars from there. That should let us avoid those that ran after you when you fled.”
    I shared blankly back at him when he added the last, looking at me, but I didn’t respond. Making a run for it had been my only option, and I’d learned months ago that it never ended well if I tried to defend myself. Why I still couldn’t shut up when Nate was annoying me was a different thing entirely.
    It took us about an hour to return to the cars, but we barely met any resistance on the way back. We did find out where all the zombies