“I hadn’t heard, as a matter of fact.” I couldn’t tell if she was lying or not. “But my duty is here and if the US government wants to retake New England in the next century, they’ll be smart enough to leave me here. You said Allen is dead. How do you know?”
“We shot him in both legs and left him on the south side of the island. He’s probably a zombie by now.”
Her face was unreadable in the darkness, which by now was total, the guards having switched off their flashlights and gone back to patrolling the deck, excepting one young trooper who stood at the Sergeant Major’s left shoulder. Her bodyguard, I assumed.
“Good.” She managed a world of satisfaction in that one word.
I relaxed. Whatever the whole story about her presence here, she wasn’t connected to Allen and my wounded were getting treatment. She glanced over her shoulder. “Your ride is early.”
Sure enough, another wagon pulled by those giant horses had appeared. One by one my team climbed down and pulled themselves into it. Padded with straw, it wasn’t too bad even with the jolting. I pulled myself up towards the front, hooking one elbow over the front of the wagon, at her left side. The Sergeant Major drove, clucking gently at the team and occasionally slapping the reins against their backs. The rest of the guards we left behind, and I looked back to see them spreading along the wall to their original positions. Next to the Sergeant Major sat the young trooper. We jolted along the remains of a paved road for perhaps an hour, gradually turning away from the edge of the wall. “What is that?” I asked over the clopping hooves.
“A twenty-foot sea wall.” She replied over her shoulder. “In the days after New York City fell, people in the biggest towns in Vermont took the hint and started leaving in droves. Even though the locals knew we were here, most fled east and north. Only a couple hundred made their way to us, and most of them stayed in Grand Isle. There was a window of about four weeks between the zombie plague spreading north and their arrival in Burlington. We took advantage of that and looted every construction site we could find. Most looters were taking things they could cart away in sedans and SUVs. Since we are mostly farmers, we went in there with trucks and trailers. It took over two years, long after we had to start defending ourselves from the Undead, to steal enough cement blocks to circle the island, but now the wall is complete. We also excavated thirty-foot deep trenches into the lake bed. No one can reach us from the lake, unless they’ve got a Naval fleet.” This struck her companion as funny, somehow, and he laughed. I had to give her credit: it was no small feat to circle an island, however small, with that kind of defense. If nothing else, she could organize a work force.
“You know the Zs don’t like water. Was it worth the effort?”
She nodded. “There are worse things than Zombies in the world, as I’m sure you know, Sergeant.”
Eventually she pulled into a long driveway that snaked this way and that through a line of trees, dead-ending in a stable yard. There was a huge, three-story barn on one side, some sort of walled-off enclosure directly in front of the drive, and a third, smaller structure to the left. When I jumped off the back of the cart, I landed on cement. A glance at the constellations told me it was well on towards dawn, and in the growing light I could see the dark circles and haggard expressions of my team. None of us had slept in better than thirty-six hours, and it was starting to catch up with us.
Several young guys had come out from the barn and unhitched the team, leading them away. The Sergeant Major and her companion slung our packs over their shoulders. “This way,” she said. We followed her up.
It might have started life as a barn, and the horses might bed below us, but the top half of the structure had, at some point, been turned into living space. In a world where people lived badly and a bath was usually a dream, I could only be amazed that she had managed to maintain this place. It was clean — not just the half-assed clean you get by removing muddy boots at the door and maybe sweeping around with a broom made of twigs — but clean. I hadn’t seen anything like it outside Seattle. There was even a TV on the wall and a pool table near a tall bank of real windows on the opposite side of the room. I looked around. The space beneath stairs leading to the third floor was filled with books, facing a small kitchen that had, from the sound of it, a working refrigerator. She looked at my astonished face with amusement, and I hastily shut my trap. The others were just standing there, heads hanging, so dog-tired they couldn’t even drum up the enthusiasm to look around for themselves.
“You can sleep here tonight,” she said. “There are enough beds upstairs for you all. Do me a favor and strip out of your clothes, and we’ll have them clean in the morning.”
I just blinked at her, stupidly. The combination of a week’s poor sleep, high-alert while teasing out Westbrook’s squad, then a two-hour adrenaline rush escaping a pack of zombies had all cost me. Seeing this place was my limit. It was all I could do to stand upright with my eyes open. Processing information was out the fucking window. For a half second, I thought maybe I was really dead and this was just one messed-up stop in purgatory. By the time I understood what she was saying, she was already headed down and the others were stumbling their way upstairs. It was Brit’s hand in mine, pulling me towards the stairs, that got me moving at all.
Twenty minutes later, I tossed our combined uniforms into the hallway, truly glad the reeking mess wasn’t in the same room as me, and passed out next to Brit where she lay, dead to the world, on the double bed upstairs. If they were going to kill us in the morning, I didn’t give a shit about it tonight.
Chapter 20
Around four am, Red shook me awake for my watch. I got up groggily, and he slipped down the hallway into Harts room. Good for him, I thought. Good for them both. The hour of my watch passed slowly, and I was close to nodding off again when Brit stumbled out to relieve me. Even though we seemed safe, we could never let our guard down. I had spent that hour pacing the hallway, worrying about Doc and Ziv. Hopefully they were being treated well, but I wasn’t going to go stumbling around an armed camp at zero dark thirty to find them. I fell back asleep almost instantly, once I was sure Brit was awake and ready for watch.
I actually woke up to the sound of Brit’s “Holy shit, would you look at that!” as she stood naked at the window, nose mashed against the glass, looking down.
I scrubbed sleep from my eyes and caught sight of her. “You’re probably giving those farm hands a cheap thrill standing there like that.”
She either didn’t hear me or, more likely, didn’t care. We might love each other and all that sappy-happy crap, but she still enjoyed giving total strangers awkward hard-ons. “Get over here and check this out.” Less of a hedonist than her, I wrapped the sheet around myself before stepping up beside her. I glanced down and immediately saw what had caught her interest.
At three am, the place had seemed like a farm. At a quarter past eleven in the morning, I could see that it was. The walled enclosure I had spotted earlier was at least an acre in size and filled with raised beds of vegetables. This late in the season, it was a riot of green. Between the garden and the barn, outside the wall and almost directly beneath us, I could see the curve of greenhouse glass beneath a deck off the second story. A walk to the window against the east wall showed me the smaller barn and beyond it, at least twenty acres of pasture in which a herd of beef cattle were grazing, four or five of those giant horses mixed in with them. The thought of a steak filled my mouth with saliva. A couple of cows, a different breed to the cattle, were grazing in a separate pasture but mooing at the huge bull bellowing at them from the other side of the electrified fence. Brit was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet like a three year-old, although the effect was quite different in the nude. “Look at that orchard!” she squealed, pointing out her window. Sure enough, long rows of fruit trees stretched out past the garden.