Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 13): Gone

by Chesser, Shawn

  Motioning toward the glove box, he said. “Should be a pair of golf-ball-looking things in there.”

  Raven’s head swiveled right. Gaze fixated solely on the blood-streaked faces rising up from her kill, she reached blindly inside the glove box.

  Cade said, “They’re bright orange. Real hard to miss … so long as you’re actually using your eyes.”

  Reluctantly, Raven peered inside the glove box. “Got one,” she said, holding it at eye level in the cab.

  “Look for a small panel. Pop it open and you’ll see a button. Do not push it yet.”

  “What is this thing and why are you having me mess with it?” She drew in a deep breath and exhaled.

  “Good job,” he said. “Calmer heads prevail. Don’t forget that.”

  “But I don’t know what I’m doing with this—”

  “It’s called a Screamer. It’s a diversionary device. And it works as advertised.”

  Raven took her eyes from the Screamer and looked over her shoulder. Seeing the dead now crowding the road across both lanes and totally shielding the fallen elk from view caused her to gasp. She asked, “Is that considered a mega-horde?”

  “Negative,” he said. “It takes tens of thousands of dead to be considered mega. This is just a large herd.”

  “You’re having me do this because my fingers are smaller,” she stated.

  Cade lifted off the seat, craned around, and opened the slider inset into the rear window.

  “Am I right?”

  “Affirmative.” He started the Ford and threw the transmission into gear.

  At once a first turn rose up. Both hands clutched an end of a thick length of intestine trapped between its steadily grinding teeth. In a way it reminded Cade of a bovine in a field blissfully working a mouthful of cud.

  Goosing the big V10 made several dozen more faces turn in unison. A beat later several dozen sets of dead eyes were locked on the idling truck.

  “Got their undivided attention,” Cade said. “Push the button and hold it down.” He cut the wheel hard right and matted the pedal. Tires chirped and the truck’s rear end straightened out parallel to the centerline.

  “Won’t they stay in one place if I throw it out of the truck?”

  Cade nodded. “When I tell you to, lob it through the back window so that it lands among the gear in the bed.”

  Both brows rising, she said, “Then they’ll follow us. Mom did something like this. Only Carl was the bait.”

  “I remember the story. She was driving the bucket truck. Your uncle was suspended in the bucket just out of reach of the dead.”

  “Yep,” she said, a frown forming from the memory.

  The first of the Zs were barely a hundred feet off the Ford’s grille. “Throw it now and hang on,” he said. “The ride is about to get bumpy.”

  “Dad.”

  “What?”

  The V10 was purring now as the speedometer needle passed thirty.

  “I dropped the Screamer in the back seat.”

  “Unbuckle and get it. It must be in the bed if you ever want to hear Lady Ga Ga again.”

  I’m over her, thought Raven even as she was clicking out and monkeying over the seatback.

  “Five seconds to get it into the bed,” Cade said through gritted teeth. Three until impact, is what he kept to himself. No sense adding undue pressure on his daughter.

  “Got it,” she crowed.

  Flicking his eyes to the rearview, Cade saw the back of her hand as she lobbed the Screamer through the window. He didn’t see her close the slider because he was already looking forward and bracing for the impending collision. “Stay down,” is all he had time to blurt before the front row of Zs folded under the F-650’s steel bumper like sawgrass in a hurricane.

  There was a series of thuds as the truck reared up and the narrow strip of sky peeking between the treetops momentarily filled up the windshield. The multi-ton truck leveled out almost immediately. Then there was a grating noise of something raking the undercarriage as it jounced over the sea of organic matter.

  What was that sound? Cade asked himself. Zs having their bones snapped by the weight of the truck? Were they raking the undercarriage with their fingernails as the rig passed over them? Or was he hearing an impressive rack of antlers splintering and shearing off after losing a split-second encounter with the Ford’s frame?

  Cade hadn’t a clue either way. However, knowing that brake lines and electrical wires used the frame as a conduit, he truly hoped for any explanation save for the latter.

  Without warning, the Screamer in the load-bed came alive, its life-like female wail drowning out everything as the truck settled into the clutch of dead.

  “Almost through,” Cade bellowed. On both his left and right, pale palms slapping the window glass registered in his side vision like explosions of old time flashbulbs. Along with the sharp reports from the multiple impacts rattling the windows in their channels, the dry rasps of first turns and hollow moans of the recently changed rose all around them. Then there was the noxious stink of death and decay. It was super concentrated and infiltrating through the heater vents.

  Cade breathed through his mouth as the bumper met the dead waist-high, pummeling and casting them aside like so many mannequins. Then a buzzer sounded and his eyes were drawn to an icon flashing yellow on the dashboard. Traction control warning? If so, a little late, he mused as the massive off-road tires spun and the wet pops of skulls imploding rose above the din to give the Screamer a run for its money.

  “I hate that sound,” Raven called from the back seat.

  “You’ll never get used to it,” Cade answered as the truck bucked and shimmied and came down off the drift of mangled corpses, the tires chirping as they made contact with the road. With a flick of the wrist, Cade jinked the truck left to avoid a pair of recent turns. Working to keep the back end from breaking free, he hauled the steering wheel in the other direction, only to narrowly avoid plowing into a knot of dead twenty strong just trooping out of the woods.

  “I may have spoken too soon about the number of Zs we’re dealing with,” Cade admitted. “The elk have gathered quite a following.”

  Now in the clear of the main body, Cade motored forward another fifty yards or so, then stopped with the tires straddling the dashed yellow line.

  Voice muffled, Raven asked, “Why are you stopping?”

  “We don’t want to get too far ahead of them. As long as they can see us, and the Screamer is doing its thing, they’ll follow us lockstep to wherever we want to take them. To the ends of the Earth if need be.”

  Without warning the Screamer went silent.

  With the horde downwind and the engine idling, the silence inside the cab was deafening.

  Raven slowly turned to face her dad. “What happened?” she asked, terror creeping into her voice.

  “The scream track plays for the better part of a minute, then has to reset,” Cade said. “Don’t worry. It’ll start back up in a few seconds.” He regarded his wing mirror. Saw the dead trudging in their direction. At the front of the rotten procession were the fresh turns he had nearly mowed down.

  “Do you plan on letting them surround us before moving on?”

  Still peering into the mirror, he shook his head and said, “No.” Swinging his gaze to Raven, he added, “As soon as the Screamer fires off again, I’ll get us back into Pied Piper mode.” The idea of the V10 powering the truck for the duration of their slow roll to Woodruff got him thinking about gasoline consumption. And though he knew the large volume tank was near half full when they left the Eden compound, he still was compelled to consult the gauge cluster, where he learned his guestimate of half a tank was spot on. There was also a yellow icon different than the one that had lit up before. It resembled a half full tire and glowed yellow.

  As Cade was about to ask Raven to go back into the glove box and haul out the owner’s manual—just as the encounter with the undead herd had begun—she said “Dad” to get his attention
. Then, pointing at her ear, she added, “Do you hear that hissing? I think a tire is going flat.”

  Before Cade could answer, the Screamer went live again, belting out its super realistic recording of some anonymous woman suffering a horrific death. Coming to realize what the idiot light in the instrument cluster was telling him, he said, “I’ll take your word for it, sweetie,” and let his foot off the brake.

  Chapter 9

  When Duncan first spotted what he guessed to be the tail end of the mini-herd of rotters from the bridge, he was adding items necessary to continue his search for Glenda to the growing list in his head. With the Land Cruiser’s gas needle hovering just above the 1/4 mark, fuel for the thirsty rig was on the verge of knocking Jack Daniels from the top spot.

  A half-mile west of Daymon’s roadblock and coming up on a right-hand curve, he had detected movement in the shadow of a distant roadside picket of trees. Still a couple of hundred feet from the curve, he lifted his foot off the pedal and let the SUV slow on its own. As the distance to the shadows spilling across the two-lane halved, the object in motion took shape. Definitely a bipedal form, its outline still a little fuzzy. However, judging by its stilted movement, this was not Glenda.

  Figuring this lone rotter was the rear of the troop he hoped by now was stretched thin along 39, Duncan steered straight for it.

  The exhaust note and hiss of tires on blacktop made the rotter stop in place. Like an owl scanning for prey, it panned its head slowly to the right. It had just acquired the Land Cruiser visually and its mouth hung open as Duncan ground the Toyota to a halt broadside to it. As the noise of the window powering down broke the still, the undead female emitted a weak rasp. Pale arms lifted horizontal to the road as the rotter doddered a half-circle across the eastbound lane and set a course for the idling vehicle.

  Duncan eyed the emaciated corpse from a dozen feet.

  No backpack. No pockets. Only a filthy tattered sundress clinging to a mess of bones wrapped in taut skin crisscrossed with a road map’s worth of lacerations, most old and home to fly larva, some new and weeping brackish, black blood.

  He stared into its dead eyes as it drew near. They were mostly black with flecks of brown around the edges. The whites were jaundiced and shot through with capillaries gone an angry red.

  Strands of raven black hair home to twigs and leaves and who knows what else hung limply on bare shoulders.

  Duncan inhaled sharply. He said, “Damn, young lady, you look a little like Brooklyn Grayson on her last good night on Earth.” He felt a lump form in his throat. Probably the booze weakening the decades-old wall keeping his emotions at bay. What he really needed was something to numb the feelings. And he sure wasn’t going to find it here.

  Out came the knife.

  He pulsed the window two-thirds of the way up, leaving an opening just wide enough for Brook’s doppelganger to worm that once beautiful mug inside. When the thing reached the Toyota, it grabbed for his face with both hands.

  Drawing away from the opening, Duncan held the dagger horizontally and face-high to him. He couldn’t help but notice his hand shaking. He watched the tip of the blade trace little arcs in space on its own accord.

  It wasn’t a byproduct of fear. That much was clear. He hadn’t experienced the adrenaline dump associated with the classic fight-or-flight impulses that usually sent him on an instant high, only to come crashing down once the action had waned.

  The Brook lookalike hooked its twisted fingers over the window’s edge, went up on its tiptoes, and mashed its face chin-to-brow into the opening.

  “You want to be one of the grateful dead?”

  Amidst the clacking of teeth against glass, the waxen-skinned woman hissed.

  “You do, huh?” Duncan cackled. “It’s not what you think it is. I’m not talking about that band out of Haight and Ashbury. No ma’am. No trains and no cocaine. It’s all about quid-pro-quo. I help you, and you help me.”

  Another hiss. Louder and more pronounced.

  Hands complete with filthy, chipped nails raked the air inches from Duncan’s face. Then the creature’s arms retreated and the pallid face was back and filling up his entire left-side vision.

  Ignoring the change in scenery, Duncan glanced in the rearview mirror.

  Clear.

  “OK, missy—listen up.” He cleared his throat.

  Tracers erupted before Duncan’s eyes, the Black Velvet hitting him hard now. Damn if this thing wasn’t progressive in nature just as Glenda had warned. Reading about it in the blue book wasn’t enough. He’d asked her one time when they were sitting outside by the RV with a fire warming their faces and the night air cold at their backs. Without hesitating she broke it down for him. Picture your addiction to alcohol as a monster out in the clearing, she had said, a touch of manufactured menace in her voice. It’s over there in the dark on the dirt airstrip doing pushups. It’s getting stronger and waiting for you to fall off the wagon.

  And was it ever waiting for Duncan that night when Cade stepped from the RV, jaw set firm, eyes moist. Duncan had seen that expression more times than he could count since this zombie apocalypse started. And he was not immune. He’d lost his share of loved ones to Omega.

  A flurry of movement snapped Duncan back to the present. Those pale hands were again batting the airspace before his face. One finger caught the Stetson’s brim, knocking it off his head and onto the passenger seat.

  “Hold your pants,” he bellowed. “Can’t a fella daydream?”

  The fingers raked at his wispy gray hair as he straightened his glasses on his face.

  In retaliation to the encroachment on his personal space, he motored the seatback to about sixty degrees, so he was just out of reach of those probing fingers.

  “Where was I?” he went on. “Oh yeah, grateful dead. In many cultures’ folklore, when a deceased person isn’t given the proper burial they’d arranged with the undertaker, they get pretty ticked off. So ticked off that they wander the back roads looking for a traveler to make it right. So this traveler … who just so happens to be me … he buries this walking corpse, who, you guessed it, just so happens to be you. Now that the wandering dead woman gets her wish fulfilled and she’s buried as arranged and finally resting in peace, she’s grateful. Get it? Grateful dead. Not only is her spirit happy now, it’s so effin happy, ecstatic actually, that it bestows benefits on the person who freed it. You following?”

  As if the story had triggered something—perhaps a memory buried deep in the undead woman’s brain—she canted her head a few degrees and went still for a beat.

  Perfect opening.

  Though his vision had gone a little blurry around the edges, the knife strike was perfect. It went straight into the eye socket at an upward angle, scrambling brain tissue and releasing a drizzle of yellow pus to sluice over the destroyed eyeball. A perfect “one timer” was what Cade would have called it. And that’s exactly how the young Delta operator had described the kill stroke that released Brook’s spirit from the infected shell banging around inside the RV that fateful night.

  ***

  Duncan carried the corpse to the side of the road where the guardrail ended. She’d been taller than Brook by a few inches. He figured she was five-foot-six and 120 pounds when she was living. Beautiful, too. A dancer’s body. He had to avert his eyes when the sundress tore at the sternum and her breasts spilled out.

  Now the rotter was prostrate on the shoulder and lined up perfectly with the white fog line. Duncan was no ogre. He covered her up and tugged the hem of her dress down over her nether regions.

  When he had initially scooped the body off the ground, it became evident to him how she came to be infected. Up and down both sides of her spine were deep vertical furrows made by fingernails. A two-handed blind-side attack. The bite that did her in was on her right shoulder blade. Deep and ridged around the edges like a crater on the moon, the bite had erased most of the fancy angel tattooed in black across her right shoulder blade.

 
He found a suitable spot to bury her between clumps of ferns beyond the shallow ditch and started digging. The soft soil yielded readily to the tire iron taken from the Toyota.

  “Don’t think I’m crazy enough to believe that story I told you,” he said, spearing into the dirt with the tool’s sharp end. “I just needed someone who would listen to me.” He regarded her bare feet, then walked his eyes to her face and met her dead, one-eyed gaze. “Want to know a secret? I’m a closet Grateful Dead fan. Where I grew up, admitting that would get your ass kicked. Texas was no place for a beatnik. Hell, I joined the Army to prove to my father I wasn’t one of them. Still, I saw them a few times when I was home on leave. Drove to Frisco one time …”

  A bird alit in a nearby tree and promptly began pounding on the trunk. Rapid-fire, hollow reports that echoed across the road.

  “You know the Dobson cover they did in 77 … Morning Dew?” He paused but kept digging. “That was about the end of the world. The apocalypse. But not due to a little virus like the one that killed you. Killed Brook. And Oliver. And my best friend, Charlie Hammond. Nope, sister, this was about the threat of the day: global thermonuclear war. And it was going to toast us all. Had teachers making kids cower under desks. As if that would have saved them from fryin’.”

  Back aching, Duncan rose and surveyed his work. Not bad. The grave was a foot deep and five long. He’d have to lay her on her side, but it’d do. Plus, he’d burned some time and got to take a guilt trip down memory lane.

  He rolled the corpse into the grave. Began kicking the dirt in with it, starting at the foot and working his way up to her partially upturned face.

  “Why am I still here and they’re not?”

  He stared the corpse in the face.

  “Want to know a secret about Cade? It’s something he told me after he put Brook down. A regret he’s carrying even as I yammer at you.”

  A blackbird cawed somewhere in the forest.

  Duncan brushed the dirt off his pants at the knees. He clapped his hands together and stomped his boots on the ditch’s gravel edge.