Green Fields (Book 2): Outbreak by Adrienne Lecter Page B

Lexington, they didn’t look as if they’d spent days battling with the worst sickness of their lives. They also sported—without fail—bite marks or other wounds, making me guess that they’d been directly infected rather than succumbed to the virus otherwise. We already knew from Thompson that this was just as much of a possibility as getting it via contaminated food.  
    Mid-afternoon, we came across another road, only this time Nate didn’t head right back into the thick vegetation, but instead called for a halt in the middle of the street. I couldn’t help but glance back and forth, anxious to get into cover again.
    “Who thinks that making more mileage warrants possibly having to make a run for it later is the way to go? Raise your hands in favor of sticking to the road for a while.”
    The overwhelming majority was for it, even if it gave me the creeps, but I didn’t protest. And not having to watch my every step was a relief on its own.
    We really must have hit the thick of the woods here because I saw a couple of cows grazing across a meadow we passed, clearly undisturbed by our presence, and not eaten by zombies yet. We also didn’t encounter anyone in the next two hours on the road. Until we walked around a bend, and suddenly found the entire road in front of us blocked by a mob.
    So much for not running blindly through the woods today.
    Already tired and drained with only short breaks every few hours, I felt even worse as I tore through the underbrush behind Cho, hoping that he knew where he was going. There was a lot of noise around us—both what we caused and the howls that were chasing us—and with some bemusement I realized that I was more annoyed than frightened. At least until my mind had time to catch up with what was going on when one of the quick zombies brought down the guy running left to me, and reminded me all too well that this wasn’t just a walk in the park.
    I ran just a little faster after that.
    One thing that hour-long flight taught us, though—besides keeping more sentries out at all times and not to let our guard down—zombies weren’t doing well in unsteady terrain. Maybe that was the reason why they seemed to congregate on the streets; or they simply were smart enough not to go after anything that meant spending more energy than it was worth if you could just shamble along the roads. Either way, it dawned on me that once we made it out of the Appalachians and into the Midwest, we’d be screwed. But not now—we were moderately well off if we turned into forest dwellers.
    Just our luck that not thirty minutes later the forest started thinning and opened up onto I-70 beyond.
    Fuck, but I started to really hate Interstates.
    Worn out as we were, we’d been rather subdued in crashing through the underbrush, but as soon as Nate called us to a halt, quiet spread all around. First, there was the fact that there was a four-lane highway in front of us—with half a mile of open ground around it. Second, that meant zombies everywhere. And last—but definitely not least—the highway was chock-full of cars, providing yet more zombies and food for them aplenty. Even in the safety of the trees, I could see them pass by right now—and there were a lot more of them out there than what we’d seen on the roads in the valleys that lay behind us.
    I was just asking myself what drove them onto the highways in particular when I watched a couple of them pull something out of a car and onto the road, the ripping, wet noises loud enough to drift to us as the wind turned. All hushed conversation stopped as we watched a group of maybe ten zombies fall on the dead body, reducing it to a bloody heap of rags within minutes. They even cracked the long bones of the femurs to suck out the marrow. That the man must have been dead for days already, the corpse baking in the heat, didn’t seem to matter to them at all.
    At least that would take care of all the dead bodies—but it didn’t really feel