Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 by Adrienne Lecter Page B

not two states that went together well.
    After getting out and giving the area a generous sweep with his night vision scope, Nate grabbed a flashlight to check my arm. The scratches were deep and had bled somewhat during the first half hour, but now they were scabbed over and starting to heal. That was freaking me out as much as I was happy about it. Nate dabbed at the scabs to make sure that there wasn’t any dirt embedded in the wound—apparently residual bits of zombie were not good for keeping scars small—but eventually declared that he thought I didn’t need stitches. What he didn’t say was that, like me, he could only hope that I wasn’t hours away from dying again. Time would tell.
    I considered starting the car again after five minutes, but my leg wouldn’t quite cooperate. There was a house about half a mile off the road, barely more than a hovel. We’d slept in sheds that were larger. Nate watched me shift tenderly for about a minute before he told me to shoot at anything that wasn’t him, got his AK and sniper rifle ready, and left for the house. It took him forever to return, although the dashboard clock insisted that it had been less than twenty minutes. Nate’s pack, previously empty except for some spare ammo, was stuffed to the brim, and he’d even went as far as juggling a six-pack of water bottles with his rifle. He dropped the water in the leg room of his seat before he went rummaging through the pack in the back, dropping a shitload of medicine bottles into my lap. “Not sure what all that is,” he offered. “I took everything that I could find. Not that I’m positive that painkillers will still work for you, but it’s worth a try.”
    A lot of the loot was useless to me—blood thinners, statins; other prescription drugs that made me guess the inhabitants of the house had been elderly, or hadn’t exactly hit the genetic jackpot—but there was also a bottle of Ibuprofen and some Motrin. Nate made a joke about “vitamin M” that I didn’t get as I swallowed a handful of the Motrin pills, washing it down with what was left of our water. I didn’t ask, instead waited for the pain meds to kick in.
    They didn’t.
    Half an hour later I gave up and started the engine again, gritting my teeth until the worst of the pain had eased up in my leg. Nate looked ready to shoo me over into the passenger seat, but it was still pitch black out there, and we were too close to the streak to risk stopping yet. Besides, I had no idea where we were, and Nate could, at best, take a guess until we found some signs, so we just kept on going. I figured that the worst that could happen was us ending up in Canada. Maybe Canadian zombies were more friendly than ours?
    The sky started to lighten in the east by the time I had to stop again, this time to follow nature’s call. Getting out of the car was much easier than getting back in, and I debated taking Nate up on his offer to take over driving. As it was, it was still too dark for him to see, and I had a certain feeling that I wouldn’t be doing too well once the sun was over the horizon. So on we went, him checking more on me than our surroundings, and me in too much pain to concentrate on anything but keeping the car on the road. It helped a lot that backwater Minnesota was about as much of a wasteland as could be.
    “Take that right over there,” Nate said a while later. At my frown, he nodded toward the small access road branching off from the somewhat larger access road I’d been idling along. “Looks like it’s leading to a house. I say we stop there, at least for an hour or two. We need more water, and maybe we’re lucky and no one has raided it yet.”
    I was, quite frankly, too tired to protest, so I went right ahead. There was no house, but the road led right by a small creek that was just as well for refilling our bottles. I wondered if I should have asked Nate about washing up in the small stream, but the very idea of stepping into ice-cold