Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [19]
She turned back over and willed herself to go to sleep. She could tell from the blackness on the other side of the tent walls that it was still dark outside. Getting so much sleep was pampering herself, but she didn’t feel guilty. Her dreams had been disturbed by images of the dead people at Deener’s Corner. They weren’t any worse than a lot of dreams she’d had before but more fresh. The mutie-coyote things had been in there as well.
After a few minutes, Hella discovered that her bladder had awakened her because she couldn’t get comfortable. She hated to get up in the middle of the night for that, but she knew she wouldn’t get to sleep any more if she didn’t. Reluctantly she grabbed her pack, pushed herself out of her bedroll, unsealed the electrostatic door, and stepped out.
The camp lay quiet around her. Riley had guards posted at all four points of the compass around the camp. Hella picked them out easily and knew that anyone with any kind of wilderness experience would be able to do the same. It didn’t make her feel protected, but at least the hardshells would make them difficult to kill. That would provide her and Stampede a warning.
“Red?” Stampede’s voice sounded over the comm link.
“Nature break. Go back to sleep.” Hella sealed the tent flap behind herself and headed for the south end of camp. Riley’s men had dug a latrine there. Normally on an expedition, she and Stampede didn’t bother with niceties like that. Travel wasn’t about comfort; it was about getting from Point A to Point B.
One of the guards inside the camp stared at her. His direct gaze reminded her that Dr. Pardot had surrounded himself with men who were afraid of him, but they weren’t necessarily good men. Stampede had pointed that out as well, and maybe that was why he was so watchful of Riley.
After putting herself back together, Hella gazed up at the sky. Clouds still blocked out the stars, and the promise of more rain left her feeling dismayed. She was tired of the precipitation, but at least it wasn’t toxic. Sometimes acid rain drifted up from Texas and burned holes into the forest. That was what gave the Redblight its name. Occasionally unprepared expeditions were caught unprotected and ended up dying before they could get to shelter.
That was a hard way to go. Hella had seen the bodies. Even fresh dead, the flesh had sloughed away from the bone.
A shadow drifted through the forest a few meters away. Out of habit, Hella froze. Movement drew the eye in darkness. Until she took a step or shifted a hand, she knew she had a good chance of remaining invisible.
Using her peripheral vision, Hella spotted Colleen Trammell walking through the forest. The woman moved slowly, almost gliding across the wet ground. She was dressed in sleeping pants and a sleeveless shirt that left her cleavage exposed. It wasn’t the kind of outfit Hella thought a woman such as Colleen would wear around a camp full of men even if some members of the security team were women.
Also, Colleen didn’t move right.
At first Hella thought the woman was drugged. Hella almost immediately discarded that notion, though, because she’d never smelled any kind of swampweed or dream ’shrooms on the woman. Nor had she noticed any usage of orchid beetle or night leech, both of which secreted toxins that released opiates in the bloodstream.
Of course, there was the possibility that Colleen had brought something with her from New Mexico that Hella had never encountered. There were always new things in the world. She’d known that even before Stampede had given her an earful about that.
Curious, Hella trailed the woman through the forest. Even though morning was still hours away, fog rose from the ground and softened the edges of everything. The world was mostly grays and blacks, and Colleen Trammel was just a pale shadow