Duncan knew from past experience where the feeder road ended. And he knew it was unmarked because the facility at its terminus was of no concern to the general public. He set out walking toward the trees, west by north across the lot. Trudged through an expanse of knee-high grass and continued on the diagonal tangent taking him to the point in the distance where the secondary road disappeared into the trees.
Before Duncan reached the trees, beer number five was in his gut, the can crushed under his heel, and the evidence stuffed into his jacket pocket. No sense in leaving a trail of crumbs for someone to follow, he mused, as he opened another beer, wholly intent on lightening his load while doing a little much needed forgettin’ on the way to his destination.
Two birds, one stone.
***
On the unmarked logging road, roughly two miles northeast of the Eden compound, Taryn and Wilson’s fight for survival was in full swing.
Taryn was standing as Brook had taught her: wide aggressive stance to absorb recoil, a slight bend to her knees in case she had to rapidly fall back or dive to evade incoming fire, shoulders generally squared to the target to allow a natural pocket in which to snug the M4’s buttstock.
She was firing and reloading with the snowmachine as a buffer between her and the dead streaming up the road. One male zombie was sprawled across the padded seat, twice-dead, its back bent at an unnatural angle in relation to its hips. A bullet fired from either her or Wilson’s M4 had caught it in the face, erasing its nose and right cheek, stopping it mid-stride, the vicious blow sending it windmilling away. To add insult to injury, a follow-on shot had opened up its guts, spilling a morass of putrid organs on the ground beside the Yamaha’s rear track. A second rotter on the ground by the first had caught a two-round tap from Taryn’s rifle. A face already beat upon by some kind of blunt weapon collapsed in on itself like an empty potato chip bag. Rear of its head opened up like an overripe melon, brain tissue dribbled to the forest floor from a flesh-ringed exit wound that may have once been an ear.
Advance stalled by another ferocious volley fired from Taryn’s first magazine, another pair of undead had come to rest tangled together in a verdant bed of ferns growing beside the road a few feet beyond the first two to fall to her accurate fire.
A dozen feet to Taryn’s left, standing roughly where one of the parallel tire ruts would be, stood Wilson. The floppy brim on his boonie hat partially obscured the sneer on his face as shell casings arced from his rifle.
“These are not stragglers,” he stated emphatically.
Slamming a fresh magazine into her rifle, Taryn answered, “We can’t hold them off here.” She was searching her memory for the exact verbiage Cade had taught them when Wilson voiced it, saying, “Break contact … we’ll regroup a few yards west and cull some more.”
“The uneven ground,” called Taryn, exasperation in her tone. “They’re weaving and bobbing.” She fired a dozen rounds, dropping only two of the ten or so rotters coming at her. Breathing hard, she backpedaled from the Yamaha. “Makes it near impossible to get a head shot.”
“Keep it up,” Wilson bellowed as he dropped a fast-moving fresh turn angling for Taryn.
Down on one knee in the center of the road and shooting head-high into the advancing column, Taryn called, “Can our stray bullets reach the compound?”
“Too far,” Wilson said, leapfrogging a fallen rotter. “Wrong direction, too.” Seeing Taryn raise her rifle and turn to run, he pumped a few rounds into her pursuers, scoring only a single headshot for his efforts.
Already a number of paces ahead of Wilson, Taryn slowed and said, “Aren’t we leading them toward the compound if we stick to the road?”
Wilson heard her but didn’t answer. A radio was pressed to his ear and he was focused on his footing as he broke through the gun smoke haze.
Taryn shouldered her rifle after he passed by her. She estimated the magazine was half empty. Maybe even down to ten rounds or so. Definitely a no-no in Cade’s book. Any chance he got he stressed the importance of practicing solid situational awareness—the amount of ammo in a mag at any given time being a major component to the edict. She steadied her breathing and settled the holographic sight on the closest zombie. Head high. The bridge of its nose, specifically. Less bone mass to contend with. Which lessened the chance of the speeding 5.56 hardball round to be deflected into the woods. Ineffective. Thus a waste of a hard to come by commodity.
The thing’s face imploded and she blinked as the contents of its brainpan tumbled out mostly intact. She had already shifted aim and was engaging the next zombie in line. Thanks to the flurry of suppressed gunshots, she was spared from hearing the wet thud the three-pound organ made when it struck the ground and broke apart.
Wilson waited for the tell-tale sound of Taryn’s bolt locking open to reach forward and grab her arm.
“This way,” he called, pulling her off the road and into the woods. Parting bushes with one hand, he rolled the M4 to his back with the other. Ducking under a low branch, the boonie hat was ripped from his head. But he didn’t lose his only good luck charm. Cutting a horizontal abrasion across his Adam’s apple, the hat’s long, leather chin strap arrested its fall and sent it spinning around to his chest, where it bounced and swung back and forth as he broke brush for Taryn.
Sticking close, they pushed deeper into the forest. Once the noise of branches breaking and guttural moans and raspy calls of the dead were almost out of earshot, Wilson stopped and plucked the radio from a pocket with trembling hands. His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath.
In the trees above some kind of bird squawked. A high-pitched sound that was promptly answered by a similar call from somewhere higher up in an adjacent tree.
Fielding a questioning look from Taryn, Wilson rolled the volume up and hailed the compound.
Tran came back at once. “What’s up?” he asked.
Wilson gave a quick rundown of their situation then asked if one or more of the group could meet them by the road with a machete or two and spare magazines for their M4s.
“If Seth wants to take over for me,” Tran answered, “I’ll head out as soon as possible. If not … you know how he’s been talking about pulling his weight around here. Especially after Daymon—”
Cutting him off, Wilson said, “I don’t care if SpongeBob and Patrick the frickin’ starfish meet us on 39 holding machineguns. Just make it happen.” Tran’s reply was a bit garbled, because Wilson was already putting the Motorola away. He figured it had begun with a query about the two fictional characters he’d just referenced. Tran knew a lot; however, he knew very little when it came to pop culture. The guy hadn’t even seen a Star Wars movie, for crying out loud.
“They’re coming,” Taryn said. Save for big red splotches on her cheeks, her face was ashen. Gulping air, she turned and looked the way they’d come. “Are you sure about this?”
“Got any better ideas?”
Taryn bit her lip and shook her head.
The noise of twigs and branches breaking was getting louder. As the reek of carrion became evident, the birds went deathly quiet.
“Let’s go,” she called.
Hat in hand, Wilson dragged a sleeve across his brow. Shaped by the boonie hat, his shock of red hair looked a bit like a pencil eraser.
A sight that would normally conjure a half smile or draw a quip from Taryn, did nothing. She took a few steps deeper into the woods and looked over her shoulder.
“They have to see us for this to work,” Wilson explained.
She shook her head slowly side to side. She hadn’t felt this exposed since the daring rescue by Cade on the tarmac at Grand Junction Regional, surrounded by dead things and with bullets flying.
Cupping his hands around his mouth, Wilson faced where he guessed the rotters would soon reappear. In a voice he didn’t know he possessed—a booming baritone rivaling James Earl Jones’—he bellowed, “Come and get it pusbags. Dinner is served.” Then, much higher in tone, added
some sound effects. “Ding, ding, ding …” Still imitating the dinner bell, he looked right just in time to see branches fold around Taryn as she stole away in the general direction of the nearby state route.
When the first slack face emerged from the woods a few feet to Wilson’s fore, he waited until the dead eyes acquired him, then set off after Taryn, his throat burning from a combination of the noxious odor preceding the dead and vocal cords getting a workout they hadn’t seen since the early days when screams came early and often at the sight of just one of these dead things.
Chapter 18
Cade covered the distance from the F-650 to the westernmost edge of the body shop’s car-choked lot in four long strides. Wedged in tight against a half-dozen similar vehicles in front of him was a four-door sedan. As he planted a Danner on its rust-pitted bumper and scrabbled onto its trunk, he was reminded of the Washington D.C. mission.
Hard as it was to believe, it’d been less than a week since he was with the Pale Riders and clomping across the sea of cars clogging the six-lane boulevard fronting the National Archives building. First time for everything had occurred to him at the time. Boot, roof, bonnet, was Axe’s unique way of describing the method they’d all employed to reach the target building unscathed. Trunk, roof, hood, was how Cade described it to Duncan as they sat in camp chairs in front of the dying fire talking about anything and everything but his experience inside the nearby Winnebago.
Stuffing the thoughts of that awful night back down where they belonged, he picked his way carefully from car to car. Along the way he came across Zs trapped between the cars. He batted their grabby hands away using the Glock’s stubby suppressor. Two-thirds of the way across the lot, a Z in a closed-up car made a play for him. The sound of teeth splintering against the partially open window was still with him as he reached the final car, ran up the Chevy Nova’s gently sloped trunk, and vaulted over its expansive rear window.
A hollow pop and sharp crack sounded back to back when his hundred and eighty pounds came down hard on the roof, causing it to buckle and the grimy windshield to spider in a hundred different directions.
He slid down the cratered windshield and sat on the hood, staying there only long enough to survey the damage.
From the ground to about the top of the Nova’s hood the rollup door was out of its tracks. If the car’s left front fender hadn’t hit the cement block wall, the point on the hood where Cade was sitting would be inside the garage. As it was, the angle the car had come to rest left only a triangular opening at ground level that looked barely big enough for him to squeeze his body through.
He banged on the metal door three times then waited ten seconds. Time crawled, but nothing rammed against the door from inside. However, he did hear what sounded to him like a barber running a straight razor back and forth along a leather strop. It lasted for a few seconds then was gone.
Satisfied an attack on the door from inside was not imminent, he slid off the hood and stood on a tiny triangle of cement bordered by the car at his back, the rollup door to his fore, and, bumping out a couple of feet on his right, the thirty-foot-tall cement block column rising up between the two rollup doors.
A quick peek around the column confirmed there was no getting to the rollup door through the vehicles stacked up against it.
There’s got to be a way in. Resigned to the fact the jagged hole by his feet was it, he fished out his tactical flashlight and thumbed it on. Flashlight clamped between his teeth, he went to his stomach, crawled forward, and stuck his head and arm through the opening. Playing the harsh white beam from left to right only revealed to him a tiny percentage of all that was in there. And while he wasn’t bothered by enclosed spaces, what little he did see led him to believe he was about to venture into a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare.
With the flashlight back in his mouth and the beam tracing crazy patterns on the ceiling, he wriggled the rest of the way into the garage bay flat on his back. Once the toes of his boots were clear of the bottom edge of the rollup door, he immediately transitioned to his stomach and drew the Glock from the thigh holster. Quickly rising to one knee, he snatched the tac-light from his mouth with his left hand, leveled the Glock’s suppressor across his left wrist, and swept the room visually for threats.
Unable to see much more from this elevation than he had from the worm’s eye view, he braced the hand with the flashlight on the car to his left and rose up off the cool cement floor. Caught in the light spill beyond the car was a windowless door. On the center of the door at eye level was a sign that read OFFICE - NO ADMITTANCE. Seemingly yanked from an episode of Hoarders, twin towers of newspapers and magazines stacked haphazardly to the header bracketed the office door. The shelves on the wall to the right of the office door held dozens of automotive repair manuals and parts catalogs.
Painting the rear wall and ceiling with the beam explained the reason for the garage’s unusually inky interior. The four rectangular windows running along the back wall were papered over on the inside. That the sheets of newsprint had yet to go yellow and turn brittle told him the papering job was recent and likely done to guard against the prying eyes of the dead. Overhead, the glass in the skylights was coated with leaves, their irregular edges overlapping to create a near impenetrable veil against the weak sun.
Lighting up the car to his left revealed it as some kind of American classic—an early model Buick Riviera according to the emblem on the trunk lid. It was white and low to the ground and wide at the hips. The rear sheet metal was formed into a V that started wide at the roof and culminated in a rounded hump where the trunk met the W-shaped bumper.
Someone had definitely planned on restoring the aerodynamic beauty—had being the operative word.
Sandwiched between the Riviera’s bumper and bowed-in rollup door was an impassible jumble of fenders and doors. Wedged in there with the loose parts was an old motorcycle. The wide sweeping handlebars and teardrop tank suggested to Cade it was a Norton Indian or early model Harley Davidson. The cracking paint and rusting chrome told him a restoration had also likely been in its future. Best laid plans. Then the world went to shit and survival trumped the long-term aspirations so prevalent to that old way of life. And just like the tiling job and honey-dos he was poised to tackle back in Portland the weekend Omega reared its ugly head, these projects had lost all relevance.
With every nook and cranny in the garage filled with one thing or another, the Buick’s roof had become a place to store yellowed cardboard boxes brimming with trim pieces and upholstery parts. A number of the boxes, their sides split open to reveal more chrome trim pieces and shiny emblems, had slid down the windshield and come to rest in a heap on the Buick’s massive hood.
Rising a few feet over the hood was an enormous upright tool box. Like the motorcycle and parts behind the Buick, the multi-shelved tool box was pinched between the Riviera’s front bumper and a waist-high workbench running the length of the garage’s entire back wall.
Cade illuminated the right-side bay. Saw more of the same. Nearly touching the rear wall, its black paint and matching convertible top wearing a thick coating of dust, was a two-door Chevrolet Impala. A second car with black badging identifying it as a Triumph TR-7 was perched precariously on a four-corner lift, its undercarriage visible and hovering just a handful of feet above the Impala’s vinyl top. The lift was leaning forward and listing in the direction of the left-side bay. Somehow the red sports car had ridden part way off the lift, ending up with its angular nose touching the back wall, its left front fender resting on one of the building’s two cement support columns, and both driver’s side tires hanging off the lift.
Scattered about the floor under the Triumph’s nose were dozens of paint cans and the lengths of fiberboard shelving on which they used to reside.
Taking up most of the dead space between the Riviera and pair of support columns was a tire balancing machine and a second piece of equipment fitted with wires and hoses. Opposite the equipment was the female
first turn responsible for the razor on leather rasp. Trapped between bays, it made lazy laps between the pillars while dragging in its wake a splinted and bandaged left leg.
As the tac-light beam spilled over into the far bay, there came the all too familiar nerve-jangling screech of fingernails on metal. A middle-aged male Z had somehow become trapped between the Impala and workbench. Now fully aware of its proximity to fresh meat, the thing thrashed around and continued to drag its fingernails across the Impala’s severely scored hood.
Amid the dry rasps and keen of nails on metal, Cade detected movement in the shadows on the floor between columns. Rats? Not likely considering the company he was already keeping. It was his experience that, big or small, animals wanted nothing to do with the undead.
Illuminating the floor revealed another Z. It was pinned face down and mostly hidden from view by the pair of toppled welding tanks lying across its upper back. Naked from the waist up, crisscross welts oozing pus and brackish blood covered its pale, hairless back. He saw that all of the muscle and flesh had been surgically excised from its legs. Neat rectangles a few inches deep were carved out of its neck on both sides. Whether the damage to its back was from branches in the wild or a sadist with a whip, he hadn’t a clue. The missing flesh pointed to Adrian and her gang, which lent credence to the whip and sadist theory.
As soon as the circle of light made its way to the oil-stained cement near the butchered rotter’s head, the thing arched its back, lolled its nearly detached head to the right, and stared side-eyed into the beam. Near simultaneously, the sound of its bare feet and hands slapping the floor echoed around the room. Down to the wanting look on its features, the thing appeared to be in the throes of the mother of all temper tantrums.
If the stakes behind his foray into the garage weren’t so high, Cade might have found a bit of humor in the sight.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 13): Gone Page 13