Free Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction by Adrienne Lecter Page A

had a certain feeling that his car would soon see some upgrades—provided we made it out of this. Probably not the worst of ideas.
    Wherever I tried to look, whatever I tried to focus on, my gaze kept snagging on the moving mass of bodies down there. I had no idea whatsoever how many there were. Two to three thousand, likely, but that seemed too small a number to describe what was going on there. And they didn’t just stand around like people in a concert hall, with the odd swaying and shuffling going on. They were moving, constantly pressing forward, then changing places when a weaker individual got shoved to the side by a stronger one. From a distance, they all looked the same, but if the stragglers of the horde had been any indication, they had one thing in common: they were all well-fed, which meant that we had to be on top of our game to stand a chance—and that wasn’t even counting what I knew must be hiding in that mass.
    “Recognize anyone down there?” I asked Bailey as he kept scanning the zombies through the scope of his sniper rifle. Like with our command group, there were three X-shaped marks across his neck underneath the black face mask he’d already pulled up that only left his eyes free. That was enough for me to catch the scorn on his face at my teasing, but he didn’t respond.
    Until we went up against them, we had no chance of telling the super-juiced zombies apart from the normal ones. The ones that, like Nate and the others, had gotten shot up with the serum that had turned them into what Burns jokingly referred to as super soldiers. Only that unlike our six, they’d caught the activated version of the virus when they’d consumed contaminated food—and the rest was history. Just thinking back to our little field trip into Sioux Falls made me shiver. I wondered if any of the knowledge we’d gleaned then would help us now. Against a pack with one or two of those, maybe. But this many? The sheer ration of us versus them was so skewered in their direction that even if they’d all been uncoordinated, starved, barely dangerous shamblers they could easily overwhelm us.
    It was then that something occurred to me. Looking toward the east, I guessed that we were only minutes from sunrise now, and except for the natural shadow our ridge threw down into the valley, it would soon be flooded with light.
    Making my way over to where the others were holding their meeting, I nudged Nate softly. “Do we have a time of attack yet?”
    He gave me one of those looks that wasn’t exactly hostile, but let me know plainly that he didn’t appreciate the interruption. If I’d wanted to join, I should have done so from the start. I knew that very well myself, but until now I hadn’t figured I could contribute anything.
    “Why?” Jason asked before Nate could send me off, fuming mad at whatever acerbic remark was about to offer.
    Looking at Jason and his man, I jerked my chin toward the settlement. “Because the zombies are nocturnal. They can function in daylight, but they hunt at night. Did you notice any different patterns in their behavior over the last twenty-four hours?”
    I felt a flicker of triumph when Jason’s eyes widened, and the other guy was quick to ask around their people. I beamed a smile at Nate, but he shut me up with that same look as before. My, someone was grumpy this fine morning.
    “Several of our men thought they were more sluggish during the day,” Charlie reported back a little later. “We didn’t really pay that much attention during the night, except to make sure that they didn’t see us up here. They haven’t torn down the palisades yet, so they can’t have been that active.”
    “Wrong,” Bailey reported from right behind us. “Just looking now, I’ve easily identified four to seven points where the wood is already weakening. Whatever we plan to do, we have to do it quickly, or else they’ll break through.”
    “Shit,” Jason replied for all of us, instinctively