Beyond Green Fields #2 - Regrets: A post-apocalyptic anthology Page 7

  It takes me forever to fall asleep, and I have nightmares from the moment I finally clock out to when I startle awake mid-afternoon. It’s stifling hot inside the barn, which may not have positively contributed to the entire situation, but the dreams? Those are a warning sign for me. I seldom have nightmares, and never about things I’ve done—those haunt me in my waking hours only. But on the few occasions when my mind goes on a bender like this, I know that I’m toeing the edge of the abyss—and that’s the kind of living nightmare you don’t get back from. At least my body has had a chance to recharge somewhat.

  The moment I drag my tired ass out of the car, Zilinsky is right there, and I can tell that she reads me as if I’d told her I’m about to lose it. It’s real concern that I see in her eyes. I’m used to her being all, “We got this, no questions asked.” Now, she looks ready to question me—which hasn’t happened in a while. It’s obvious that her mind has changed since last night—but why?

  But she doesn’t speak up, and we hit the road for another hundred miles before we have to stop again for yet another night where I don’t feel like sleeping at all. We’re cutting through northeastern Colorado and southern Wyoming because central Colorado is a nightmare. Coming directly south into Frenton is the only way in, as Jason has confirmed with us. Every extra mile drags on my nerves. Every time that we need to stop and either wait for shamblers to pass or get out and dispose of them is time wasted that I don’t feel I have.

  Seven days turn into eight when we have to go for a larger detour when we find not one but three bridges completely destroyed and the canyons they used to span way too steep to traverse by car. That adds hours and hours of driving.

  Finally we get into the ten-mile zone around the settlement and we take another break to go over the plan. Not that we have a plan as we don’t know if they will let us enter in the first place, and not shoot us once they realize who we are and why we’re there. I’m so caught up in my frustration that I almost don’t notice the light on the radio coming on, indicating that someone is hailing us—either Dispatch or the Silo because nobody else has the transponder intel for this radio—the third one that we’ve gone through to try to stay off anyone’s radar. I’m not expecting any calls from anyone, and this seems like an awful coincidence.

  Who knows? Maybe our reputation is bad enough that we scared someone into dishing the deets before we have to pound it out of them?

  I recognize Rita’s voice as soon as it comes on, my mood instantly souring. “What do you want, Connel?” I bark after identifying myself. It comes out like a tired whine, which makes me grit my teeth.

  “We got a really weird call just now,” she tells me. Her tone is off, making alarm bells go off in the back of my head.

  “Weird how?” If she doesn’t tell me right this second, I will turn the car around and drive straight through several nights so I can personally kick her ass.

  “Maybe it’s nothing. Or could be a completely false lead,” she hedges. “But we just got a call in from a woman who said her name was Anna Hawthorne, and she’s looking for her husband, Daniel. They were part of a trader caravan coming out of Colorado that got attacked...”

  I stop listening to her at the names, really. I’ll never know why I was too stupid in the past to set up any code names or phrases with her, but that’s exactly the kind of bullshit I know Bree would be going for if she tried to be stealthy—close yet obscure, with too many details.

  I know it’s not wishful thinking—but it might still be a trap.

  Fuck.

  I don’t know what to do so I listen to Rita finishing her string of information. I’m still trying to decide when she ends with, “What do you think? Might this be connected to her?”

  “Oh, it is her, no question,” I hear myself say. When did I start to be so distant? Focus, man!

  Rita is a little doubtful. “The names are a little similar but—”

  I cut her off before she can go any further, and possibly piss me off any more. “Anna is pretty much an abbreviation for her name. She’s been going by Bree the entire time since we’ve met, and I’m not sure anyone even still remembers that her full name is Brianna. The mention of the author of The Scarlet Letter is a nice touch.”

  Rita’s pause is a pregnant one. “So it’s not just a play on your name? You know… Nathaniel… Daniel… sounds close enough.”

  I drop pointing out that it’s the same as with her name, my exasperation rising. “The thing between us started out as an affair—on her part. Not sure anyone who hasn’t gotten her drunk or spent a week on the road with her would know. Trust me, it’s her. I know my wife well enough to know how her brain works.”

  “So what’s the issue?”

  Rita’s question takes me aback for a moment. “You tell me?”

  “There must be an issue,” she scoffs. “You haven’t even asked me yet where the call came from.”

  She’s not wrong there, but the reason is obvious—my mind’s not working properly at the moment, because it’s not like me to get lost in possibilities without first securing all the facts.

  “It might be a trap,” I admit, then ask, “And where did the fucking call come from? Did you talk to her?”

  “No, one of my techs was manning the center earlier, and he said the woman he talked to sounded strange. Crazy strange, not ‘gun-to-her-head’ strange—which, I guess, perfectly describes the woman who’d agree to marry you.” I don’t comment on her quip except for an exasperated sigh—that sounds more like a menacing growl—and Rita quickly goes on. “But that’s where the good news ends. The call came from Halsey, Nebraska. Miller, we have that settlement and a few others in the area on our deep blacklists. That’s an absolute no-go area for traders, and we’ve actively discouraged the few scavengers who thought about dropping by. If that’s really her, I have no idea how she ended up there, but it’s not somewhere I’d send anyone.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” It really doesn’t. I’ll go wherever I have to go to get to her. Does it add a new layer of grief to the already mounting heap of things I worry about? Sure does, but nothing I can do about it. “Give me the coordinates. We’ll be on the way as soon as I hang up here.”

  It’s her turn to be exasperated with me. “You can’t just blindly charge in there if you’re already convinced that it’s a trap.”

  “Not convinced, just justifiably paranoid,” I correct her, already thinking. “Ask her to complete the quote for verification—‘I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most…’” ’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ Until I met her, those words were utterly meaningless to me. Now they are making a habit of trying to kill me.

  Rita sounds impressed when she responds. “Okay, I’m starting to understand what the two of you have going on there with your literary references. Really, you read her Tennyson on her deathbed? That’s what this boils down to, right?”

  I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself. “What, surprised that other women have more discerning tastes than you?”

  A long pause follows—long enough for me to regret I said anything—and Rita’s tone has become markably cooler as she continues. “We blacklisted them for a reason—no scavengers allowed, so you better not look like any. You still have those Humvees? I can try selling them some bull about troops dropping off supplies and helping a few traders get back to safety. Can you make that work? Or is that below you?”

  “We can make that work.”

  “Good. Here are the coordinates. We have notes that there was some extended flooding to the west of the settlement so it’s best you approach from the south, then from the east on to their gate. Be careful when you get there.”

  She signs off before I can say anything else; not that I feel much like apologizing. Right now there’s only one thing on my mind: purpose. Bree is alive, and the fact that Dispatch is in the know should keep her safe. I can’t concentrate on the what-ifs and never-shoulds now as I vault out of
the car to let the others know.

  It’s like a breath of fresh air has swept through the entire group of us—until Zilinsky squashes my rising enthusiasm. “We have over five hundred miles to go and we need to be in fighting strength—that means we’re not driving through the night, and we make sure to be as prepared as possible. That means three more days on the road, and no going short on provisions.” I know that’s for my benefit—and the fact that my first impulse is to overrule her tells me that she’s very right to impose those rules, me included. But, fucking damnit! I hate the idea that it will be days until I see Bree again.

  But she’s alive—and that’s all I can focus on now.

  We make sure that no lookouts from the settlement that we almost went after are trying to turn the tables on us, but soon increase our speed to what works well for travel. I don’t mind the storm clouds overhead, but Zilinsky is right when she chases us off the road for an early night. I forego my now-chronic coffee habit, I eat as well as our provisions allow, I take first watch so I get as much uninterrupted sleep as possible—and then I’m ready to jump back into the car and drive all night and all through tomorrow, because if I can cut even a single minute from the time I don’t know what’s happening to my wife and can’t protect her, I will go insane!

  “You know that you won’t do either of you any favors if you get us all killed,” Burns remarks wryly from where he’s coming up behind me, meditatively chewing some jerky.

  “Why do you think I’m still standing here instead of driving recklessly to my certain death?”

  His usual grin is tainted by a certain edge, but nothing can bring him down. I wish I could conjure up the same kind of optimism. He stares off into the night next to me before he focuses on what little he must be able to make out of my face. “She’ll be okay. You know that, right? Whatever happened—we’ll get her through that. And then she’ll be okay.”

  “You’re a damn disgrace of a motivational speaker, you know that?”

  My jibe glances off him just like that. “I know you. And I know her. There’s nothing you can’t bring each other back from.” His grin broadens as he lets out a chuff. “Shit, your relationship is about as dysfunctional as it gets. If she survives that, I doubt anything can bring her down.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  I know he’s right—at least the part about bringing her back from whatever dark place she might be in right now, and I’m not talking physically. Bree has never been a bright, shining beacon of positivity—I don’t think I could have tolerated that for long enough to even fuck her in that back alley behind the coffee shop—but she has proven to have some remarkable resilience, at least toward me. I’m just afraid what seeing her in pieces will do to me. I know it’s selfish—and about the last thing I’d ever admit to her, because she would have a field day with me—but is it too much to ask of the universe that I get her back, whole and untarnished?

  Yes, I know that’s impossible. But one can still hope, right?

  If the futile treks back and forth across the country were bad, the route to Halsey is killing me—and not just because I feel like bashing my head in as we could have been so much closer if we hadn’t been chasing ghosts. But who could have expected that it would be her reaching out to us, not us stumbling over her mangled and beaten body? I have to admit, in hindsight, that sounds less stupid than I initially thought. But it poses another question—questions, really: Did she get away? Did they let her go? Is this still a trap, even with Rita confirming Bree got the phrase right, which doesn’t sound like anything she’d do if she was trying to warn me of anything? Maybe she doesn’t know it’s a trap? And who the fuck are we going up against?

  It’s the last question that gets under my skin, or as much as anything can penetrate considering that I’m constantly seething over any possible threat to her life, or health, or whatnot that may or may not have happened or is still happening. My mind is a paranoid mess of theories and contingency plans, exacerbated by the fact that I care less about all that than about making sure she’s okay.

  We’re going in blind, and that’s something that should set my teeth on edge—and it does, no question, but Bree as a whole is taking up more of my brain power than the circumstances she is in right now. I spend most of the day running through possible scenarios, but the main issue always remains the same: I know shit about what we’ll have to deal with. I don’t delude myself for a second to believe that it will be a milk run where we just have to get there, grab her, and drive off into the sunset. Another call to Dispatch doesn’t help, but when I get Frank, their stand-in radio tech, on the line he gives me one more tidbit: there have been sightings of military vehicles in that area. That makes me call the Silo again a few hours later, and Stanton confirms what I’ve been dreading: several times they have mentions of Humvees on the move in southern Nebraska. It’s not right where we will be going but close enough that it’s not hard to guess who might be responsible for guarding that settlement.

  We’re well into the next day when I see it, abandoned across the opposite lane of the road we’re following right now—the perfect decoy vehicle. I step on the brakes hard enough that Zilinsky curses next to me. The look she directs at me as I give the order to fan out while I case the car is puzzled. “What do you want with that old clunker?”

  I have a hard time curbing my sudden enthusiasm. “Don’t you see?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Rather than waste my breath convincing her otherwise, I get out, and after making sure that there is nothing coming out of the ditch at the side of the road, I peer into the car. One of the back windows is smashed and it looks like something has been living there for a while—a guess that gets confirmed when I pull open the door and get a nose-full of fecal matter, mixed with death and decay—but otherwise, the car looks decent enough.

  Martinez appears next to me, scrutinizing the car as much as me. “I understand that you’re under some immense stress right now, but I thought it would take longer for you to throw yourself into a psychotic break,” he remarks.

  I ignore him in favor of popping the hood. “Why don’t you do something useful and see if you can get this thing running?” I suggest. “I need a mechanic more than a shrink.”

  Martinez murmurs something under his breath that I don’t need to hear but gets to work. I attract a few more weird looks from the others, finally prompting me to point dramatically at the vehicle. “Don’t you get it? It’s a fucking mint-green car!” It also has four-wheel drive, which is a welcome upgrade from what I’ve found on my search.

  Again I’m met with blank expressions. It takes me a few seconds to rein in my exasperation. “Like Madeline’s car last year? That Bree couldn’t shut up over how impractical it was?” Clark was the only one brave enough to frown. “She’ll know it’s us when she sees this coming!”

  Romanoff is ever so slightly bemused. “She already knows we’re coming.”

  “But she doesn’t know that we have liberated the Humvees. What do you think her first reaction will be if she sees those draw up to the gate, huh?”

  More silence—until Burns lets out a bray. “Yeah, she’ll start bitching about the mint-green car all over again! And it’s exactly the weird shit she’d expect you to think of. Never would have come up with that.”

  I’m not sure if that’s a vote of confidence or a barely hidden jibe, but I don’t give a fuck about that now. Twenty minutes later, the car is as clean as it will get, the tank is filled up, the engine is chugging along quietly next to our other vehicles—except that one of the Humvees refuses to start. Martinez and Romanoff spend another ten minutes that now feel like a colossal waste of time trying to get it running but eventually call it dead for good. Apparently, when we gunned down the people operating it, we must have hit something vital that took a few more days to die. We only need the one, so we drive off, abandoning the broken-down vehicle right there in the middle of the road after syphoning the remaining gas int
o the other one. Since Zilinsky won’t leave me without a radio until she has to, Santos is driving the decoy car, violently complaining about the stench over the com. Too bad, really.

  We stop a few more times to pick up shit to stuff the decoy car with to make it look like it might belong to a trader. I also start assembling what will be my decoy getup for tomorrow. I hate having to consider this, but my main concern is to wear things I can, if necessary, bundle my wife up in. I also need a hat that can shade her eyes, sensitive to the light as they are, should they divest me of my shades. I end up with a bunch of shit that looks like I’ve stolen them from a B-movie western extra, but I can’t really walk in there in full gear.

  We’re sixty miles south of our destination when we hunker down for the night one last time. I try to get some sleep but it’s an impossible task, so I spend most of the hours until morning lying on my back, staring up into the starry night. There’s no comfort in asking myself if she’s looking up at the same stars right now. Fuck—if I’d taken off running at dinner, I could be with her by the time the sun comes up. I repeatedly ask myself if we are wasting time that she doesn’t have. I’m right back where I started when we realized that Bree was gone—and I’m just as ill-equipped as before to handle this.

  I also start plotting what I will do once I have her back—and not the kill-everyone-who-had-laid-a-hand-on-her part. I know a thing or two about how to deeply traumatize someone; the irony of me trying to come up with a plan how to de-traumatize my wife of all people now doesn’t escape me. She’s mentally strong, I know that—but they’ve had over a week to break her, and even though I’m sure she picked up a few clues along the way how to bend, that’s a lot of time for someone who knows what they are doing. I have to ask myself: did I go too light on her over the winter? I’ve had a fucking year to build up her spine—there was plenty of time to not just put her through her paces, but give her a lighter version of the treatment that ended up making me the man I am today. The answer is obvious: yes. I should have broken her spirit, torn her mind apart, and then rebuilt her as someone who has a chance to withstand torture and deal with pretty much anything people will throw at her.