Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation by Adrienne Lecter

that would last them a week and a half if they rationed it, and they were on their way—heading west—before we’d finished our morning coffee. I didn’t know what to make of that, but in the end it was likely for the best.
    “Where to now?” I asked when we were ready to break camp, Nate and Andrej as usual studying the maps. One thing Nate had managed to liberate in Douglas was an entire stack of them, giving us detailed intel about the surrounding states—and in Martinez’s pack they had survived, unlike whatever Nate had had in his. I couldn’t not tease him about that.
    “How does South Dakota sound to you?” Nate asked, not even trying to hide a smile.
    I couldn’t help but frown. “Why is the first thing you do after we meet people who are as cautious as we are about the company they keep and the secrets they spill is to go hunt down the people they were trying to protect?”
    “Not planning on hunting anyone down,” Nate offered. “I was just thinking that if they’re dug in good in those caves, they are likely there to stay. People around these parts have never been shy to go hunting, and that they have jerky in abundance tells me that they haven’t changed their minds about that. We were talking about going to look for others elsewhere already, so why not start with a region where people sound like they already know what they are doing? Besides, the area east of the Badlands is where agricultural land really starts, so we have the best chances of finding the seeds that Sadie asked us to look out for. At the very least, we can clear a route for others, maybe establish a few trading posts along the route.”
    “You really put some thought into this,” I said, unable not to sound at least somewhat impressed. Nate gave me a harrowing glare back that I deserved.
    “Why does it surprise you that I’m not just eager to go poke some cave people with a stick?”
    “Because that’s exactly the thing that you’d do,” I replied, grinning at him as I turned toward my side of the car.
    “You’re just grumpy because you don’t get poked as much as you’d like,” he called after me, making Burns snicker on the other side of the camp. I didn’t even bother rolling my eyes.
    So off to South Dakota it was.

Chapter 7

    It took us the better part of two days to reach what used to be the grassland just beyond the Badlands National Park. Well, they were still grasslands, and we even saw a herd of bison in the distance, but as soon as we’d left the southern outskirts of the Black Hills, it was clear in what direction the zombies from Rapid City had gone. Avoiding the hills, they’d poured straight south across the prairie, leaving behind an easily visible trail of destruction and carcasses that had been cleaned to the bones. They hadn’t really bothered with roads, likely just running after anything moving that they’d glimpsed. The few cars that we saw were little more than scrap metal, unable to withstand the blind anger of the horde. Before Douglas, the sheer size of the trail that they’d left—months old that it likely was—would have made me guess that a city worth millions must have been to the north. Now, it just underlined that our estimates had been dead wrong.  
    I for one couldn’t be gone from the flat grasslands soon enough, yet Nate had me stop every few miles to check something on the side of the road, usually a carcass. I tried to distract myself with studying the rolling hills of fresh spring grass, flowers starting to bloom here and there, but my eyes kept snatching back to the carcasses.
    “Any idea how long since they went through here?” I asked, figuring that Nate would get that I was referring to the zombies.
    “A few months,” he offered. “Late fall to early winter. That would explain the excessive evidence of cannibalism.”
    That was something I just had to ask about. “How can you tell that they started to eat each other? Those bones could be from non-zombies,