Read Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation for Free Online

provisions, and when they went hunting for something else, they all ate contaminated stuff. Else, I doubt there would have been so many children among them.”
    Sadie looked horrified for a moment, but shook it off way too easily.
    “Shit.”
    I nodded, just as her mother provided an acerbic, “Language!”
    Sadie made a face but didn’t correct herself. Ah, the joys of having a teenage daughter. As usual, that thought gave me a brief pang deep inside, but I’d learned to ignore that.
    Nate picked up where I’d left off. “They must have been pretty desperate, because otherwise they had good gear. So my guess is that they were dug in somewhere in the mountains; either Yellowstone or somewhere just beyond the border to Montana or Idaho. Even with the roads still backed up, they could have made it. They’re damn resilient fuckers.”
    Emma looked ready to snark at Nate next, but held herself back; less so because he was a grown man and thus not really under her maternal jurisdiction, but because provoking him like that would just lead to more swearing, as she’d found out in the past. I wasn’t the only female around he loved to drive insane.
    Sadie frowned at the news, but not because she seemed to want to debate the validity of it. “Do you think that there will be more of them coming?”
    Nate shrugged, but considering how relaxed he looked as he continued spooning stew into his mouth, he couldn’t have been that concerned. “I’d guess most of them would be smart enough not to climb through the mountains if they’d be much faster in the plains, where there’s more to hunt, too. That’s why I think they were already in the mountains, and it was just our luck that they came by here rather than elsewhere.”
    “Yeah, or they smelled the unmistakable stench of urine from our perimeter markers and just had to follow the enticing notes of it,” I pointed out. Emma and I shared a suffering look while Sadie was grinning. Nate just gave a sigh that was a clear “not this again,” and for once, I left it at that. See, I could be pretty reasonable. Although I doubted that would hold up for long, as going looting would mean spending hours upon hours locked in the car together, and that usually wasn’t a guarantee for calm and quiet. Then again, the big issues of the last months—except our dwindling food stores, of course—had been several broken legs and arms, dislocated joints, and two rather nasty rounds of the common cold.  
    “Didn’t work with the others that came before them,” Nate replied, as if anyone even expected an answer. Eyeing him askance now drew a shrug from him. “You as a scientist in particular should be familiar with the drive to explore new theories.”
    “So zombies are not lured in by the stench of urine. What a paradigm-shifting change. The world thanks you for your scientific contribution,” I said.
    “Now you might be grumpy, but we did find out a few things,” he offered. “They like pepper spray, so macing them—not a good idea. They eat fecal matter if they are really starved, but they ignore leftover bones. Food, not so much. I expect we’ll find a lot less rotten produce this spring after they’ve been scouring the land for the entire winter.”
    Information that might be vital—at least that bit with the pepper spray—but the very idea that we’d probably have to compete with the undead for any food that we planted wasn’t something I liked to consider.
    “Does this mean that farming’s not really a good idea?” Sadie asked, already sounding disappointed.
    Nate shook his head. “No, I think it’s the best and only chance we have at long term survival. But we might do without a compost heap close to the fields, or find some other kind of deterrent. Chain-link fence comes to mind. Or just dig ditches all around. I don’t think that you’ll get overrun here. There’ll always be the odd pack moving through, but we’ll probably clean them up for good around