“We didn’t just come in one vehicle.”
“Why did you burn down the farmhouse?” Natasha asked. She was still staring at him, trying to read him, maybe catch him in a lie. Sunlight streamed through the windows to their right and splashed across her hardened face.
“After they attacked us, we thought there were some left in the basement in the morning,” Will said. “We couldn’t stay there anymore, so we burned the house down in hopes of getting some of them, too.”
It wasn’t a total lie. All of it was true, except for the part where he inserted himself into Lance’s role.
“You’re talking about them, them,” Leo said. “The creatures.”
Will nodded.
“Did you get them?” the older man asked. He sounded almost hopeful. “Did it work?”
“I don’t know,” Will said. “We never opened the basement door to check.”
Eureka, he thought when he saw Natasha casually slide her finger out of the trigger guard of her M4. She probably didn’t even know she had done it — an unconscious act that told him she had stopped seeing him as the immediate danger he once was.
Or, at least, he hoped he was reading her reaction correctly. He had to remind himself that he was treading on very dangerous ground here. One wrong lie, one creative story that couldn’t be collaborated by evidence or what they already knew, and he’d never make it to Song Island.
Like walking a tightrope fifty stories up…while getting shot at.
Will sat back against the dirty wall, took out the bottle of meds, and downed two more, leaving just three lonely white pills at the bottom. He had been surviving on mostly adrenaline and sweat these last few days that the old wounds throughout his body had begun to fade into the background. He just had to worry about the ones still held together by stitches, especially the one in his side. That, more than anything, was his primary concern.
“What’s that?” Natasha asked.
“Painkillers,” Will said.
“You hurt?”
“You’re not?”
She almost smiled. Almost.
“Who isn’t, these days,” he said.
“Dead people,” she said.
Leo chuckled. “Hallelujah.”
The older man was sitting to Will’s left and rummaging through a school backpack. Will had been hoping one of them had picked up his tactical pack, along with all the silver ammo inside, but it was gone. Either Mason had thrown it into his own inventory, or it was lost somewhere in all the rubble back in the Palermo.
There were also no signs of his M4A1, which really hurt. From Afghanistan to Harris County to the end of the world, only to lose it at a lousy gas station in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t ask them about it, either, because that would mean he was a guy who knew guns, and the Will he was trying to sell right now was a civvy through and through.
“Here,” Leo said, and tossed him another refilled bottle of water along with a vacuum-sealed bag with strips of jerky inside. “Eat up; it might be a long wait.”
“Thanks,” Will said. He pried the bag open and devoured the jerky. It tasted like deer meat. “You made this?”
“None of that store-bought junk. I’ve been hunting since I was twelve and learned to make my own jerky when I was thirteen.”
“Where did you even find deer?”
“They’re around, if you look hard enough. Not easy by any means, but there are a few still running around out there in the woods. Of course, turns out surviving the bloodsuckers is easier than dodging me.”
“He’s really proud of his jerky,” Natasha said. She unzipped her own pack and took out a similar bag, then produced another long strip of jerky. “He should be. It’s better than the crap we hoarded after everything fell apart.”
“And that’s the closest you’ll come to getting a compliment out of Nat, kid,” Leo said.
Will smiled, then, “How long are you guys going to stay here?”
Leo and Natasha exchanged a brief look.
They have no idea. They’re just making it up as they go. Swell.
“Maybe an hour,” Leo said with a shrug. “If they send more over, we’ll deal with them the same way we dealt with the others. Too bad we already used up the frag grenade.”
“Whose bright idea was that?”
Leo grinned at him. “One guess.”
Natasha. Of course.
“I expected the damn gas station to go up like a Roman candle,” Leo said. “I guess it’s a good thing for you that Nat doesn’t throw like a girl. You should have seen that fastball vanish into the Palermo. Boom. If it had landed over the storage tanks under the pumps, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
“No kidding. Where’d you get your hands on something like that?”
“From the same meatheads we took the truck from. The stuff these guys are carrying around, all those M4s and MGs. They must have hit a fort or something. Who knows what else they have stashed around the state.”
Will glanced down at his watch again.
“You in a hurry?” Natasha asked. The edge had crept back into her voice.
“Yes,” Will said, meeting her suspicious gaze.
Sell it. She expects you to run from her glare. So don’t.
“My friends got away, and I need to find them again,” Will said. “We came here together, survived all this as a group. You guys seem okay, don’t get me wrong, but these are my people. I need to catch up to them.”
He must have sold it well enough, because Natasha nodded. “They went up the interstate. West.”
So they really had been close enough to witness the ambush. Where the hell had they been hiding during the whole thing? The sunburned grass in the fields around them wasn’t exactly a sniper’s dream. There were thicker woods further up the highway, but there wasn’t much of that over here, where the businesses were concentrated.
“Where they headed, anyway?” Leo asked.
And there it is.
“Have you ever heard of Song Island?” Will asked.
They waited another thirty minutes.
Then thirty minutes became an hour.
And no one showed up.
Meanwhile, the carrion birds had begun circling over the corpses left behind in the streets and parking lots of both the Palermo and the Chevron.
Ray, one of the two guys in the Valero across the street from them, jogged over, his lanky six-three frame like a scarecrow against the heavy afternoon sun. “We’re leaving,” he said as soon as he was inside the Domino’s. “They’re not coming.”
Then he left and ran up the street, toward the parked technical.
Leo stood up, brushing dust off his pants. “Come on,” he said to Will, “let’s see if you can convince the others about this Song Island. If we’re going, it’s gotta be as a group, or not at all.”
Will pulled himself up from the floor. He was glad to finally be up again. His side stung a bit, but stinging was better than bleeding, and a quick check told him he was still fine. For now, anyway.
“I can be pretty convincing,” Will said.
“You better hope so,” Natasha said.
There may or may not have been a warning in her voice, and before he could gauge which one was more likely, she had pushed open the doors and stepped out into the street, leaving him behind with Leo.
“What’s her deal?” Will asked.
“What do you mean?” Leo said.
“Back there, at the station. She shot that kid in cold blood.”
Leo frowned, which didn’t do anything for his already heavily lined face. “She lost her daughter two nights ago. The kid was waiting for her in the VFW hall in Dunbar when the soldiers attacked, and… Well, it didn’t end happily for her. For any of us. I guess that explains why we’re all out here trying to kill as many of the bastards as possible.”