Read Online Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation by Adrienne Lecter - Free Book Online

to traverse I-25 and go looking for both signs of habitation and possible locations to find what we were looking for somewhere between Casper and Gillette. Depending on how bad—or not—the zombie problem was near the larger population centers, we might even try to hit them next, but I didn’t expect that this was a good option—at least not yet.
    Staying cautious as usual, we kept to the small roads, only skipping onto wider thoroughfares if we couldn’t avoid it. Remaining exposed to the elements for months now, most of the cars we passed were in rather desolate states of destruction. As we’d seen before, the zombies had been smart enough to escape their steel confines and ravage everything edible and easily accessible inside, adding to the damage, but also making sure that there weren’t any decomposed corpses in there anymore. No, those were all over the sides of the roads, scoured down to bare bones that scavengers had picked clean. We passed up the cars completely, only checking the odd truck to see if there was anything left in there, but we clearly weren’t the first ones who’d had that idea.  
    We spent the first night huddled together in an abandoned barn, happy to be out of the wind. None of the excitement about being finally free of the bunker and our rigid schedule had worn off yet, and I couldn’t help but feel just a little idealistic. Most of the people that Emma had started to organize into the watch detail had looked at us as if we were crazy, but I really didn’t mind being out in the open. The cars had done a great job protecting us, even before all the upgrades, so I felt pretty confident about weathering out almost anything fate could slap in our faces.  
    The next morning, we rolled out early, and reached our first prospective looting place about an hour later. We stopped on the last rise of the road, about a mile away from the town. Wright used to have a population of just under two thousand, and hopefully most of them were dead now. Permanently, not the temporary kind. I was well aware of just how morbid that sounded, but that was the new normal.
    “How are we going to do this?” I asked Nate, drumming my fingers against the steering wheel.
    “We could case the town. Approach slowly, find the best entry vector, clear possible exits first. Or…” He let that hang in their air between us, a hint of a smile making his eyes glint even through his wraparound sunglasses.
    “Or we could just drive in, drive over any shambler in sight and gun down the rest until they stop coming,” I replied, feeling a grin tug up the corners of my mouth.
    “And there you keep wondering why I’m putting up with you,” he snarked back.
    Chuffing, I glanced back at the town in front of us as I replied. “Not wondering. I’m sure that by now I’m the only woman left in the world who can even aspire to meet your standards.”
    Shaking his head as he chuckled, Nate disengaged the belt harness and slipped out, briefly talking to Burns and Andrej in the other two cars that we’d predestined as our advance. With five cars—two of them outfitted with larger cargo holds that made them potentially too valuable to destroy in a harebrained attack plan like this—it only made sense to work out a strategy—even if that strategy was barely more than a driving order so we wouldn’t end up careening into each other. That would just be stupid and inconvenient.
    Three minutes later, Nate was back in his seat, giving me the “go” with a nod. Exhaling slowly, I gripped the wheel harder, disengaged the handbrake, and gunned the engine. The car surged forward, howling with similar glee as I felt. I should probably not have been that excited about driving over zombies and potentially totaling our car and killing us in the process, but there were so few joys left in the world.
    Not bothering with sticking to the right lane as the road was clear and we didn’t exactly expect anyone to drive in the other direction, I