The air was heavy with the odor of death. Like he had walked into a stagnant pocket of carrion-rich air. Only he couldn’t see the source. The fence stretching away left and right was clear. No wavering rotters grasping the links with gnarled fingers. A quick glance at the ditch and tree line on either side of the road didn’t identify the source. So he turned his attention to his destination.
Save for the lack of snow, everything about the Utah Department of Transportation facility was as he remembered it.
Situated diagonally from the entrance on the far right corner of the neatly graded plot of land were two outbuildings the size of double-car garages. Fronting the two outbuildings was a thirty-foot-tall structure with a shallow pitched roof that was open to the air on all four sides. Sheltered from the elements was an immense poured-concrete pad. The pad still bore a thin layer of gravel and tire marks from the loader Daymon used to fill the spreaders on the plow trucks the group liberated from here. A pair of the trucks now sat on shot-out tires in the Ogden Canyon pass, shoring up the cargo containers placed there to hold back the hordes migrating east from Ogden and points beyond. So far the block seemed to be holding. The dead were only showing up at Daymon’s tree roadblock by the dozens, not hundreds.
The sturdy twelve-foot-tall hurricane fence had cost taxpayers a pretty penny. Signs warning that the premises were monitored 24/7 by closed circuit television cameras were attached to the fence chest-high about every thirty feet. And displayed prominently on the front gate was another sign featuring a crude caricature of a dog. Underneath the cartoon-like dog, in big red font, were the words GUARD DOG ON DUTY.
Duncan chuckled. “More like Benji on duty,” he muttered as he stood looking at the sign. Because of the warning, or the rabid dog caricature, last time Duncan stood here, Daymon had been the most apprehensive of the group. No way in hell, were his exact words as he balked at cutting the lock and going in first.
Duncan studied the ground by his boots. Saw chevrons pressed into the gravel. The tire tracks continued on under the gate and faded a dozen yards inside the facility where the gravel looked to be a bit deeper. While the tires responsible for the patterns were wide enough to have been made by one of the UDOT trucks, the narrower wheelbase suggested they were left here by another type of vehicle. Or perhaps many similar vehicles traveling single file.
The gate rolled on a pair of steel wheels shod with rubber. A heavy-duty chain was looped twice around the gate’s vertical pole, both ends left to dangle outside the fence.
Duncan threaded the chain ends back through the fence then let gravity take the entire length to the ground. The noise it made falling at his feet echoed across the facility. He took hold of the fence two-handed, leaned to his right, and rolled the door open just wide enough to admit his beer-bloated carcass.
As he closed himself in and looped the chain as he’d found it, his mind went back to the topic of conversation the last time he’d crossed this threshold. Daymon had been needling him about quitting drinking. Haranguing him about Glenda’s part in the whole affair.
It’s none of your dang business, he’d told the younger man. Then he’d admitted to Daymon that he had in fact been sober since hearing Glenda’s story.
As Duncan trudged toward the prefab buildings, he remembered Daymon calling him a “liar” and busting balls for drinking while the rest of the group were busy clearing the undead from the bridge fronting the downed tree roadblock. That had been a watershed moment of sorts. He even went so far as to evoke God as his witness and swear to anyone within earshot that he was sober. Affirmed then and there how he had poured out all of his Jack Daniels.
God damn if he wasn’t so far removed from that day now. Then, suddenly, as if he was one of Pavlov’s damn dogs, the mere thought of his favorite whiskey induced an actual physical response from his salivary glands.
Duncan was still on the move and equidistant to the entry and prefab building when he heard the distinct sound of someone, or, more likely than not, something—a zombie, or ten—rattling the chain-link fencing somewhere off to his right. He stopped walking and made a visual sweep of the facility.
The rectangular area inside the fence was roughly the size of two football fields laid end-to-end. His ultimate destination, the boxy building to his left, was about half as big as a single mobile home. The door was closed. Horizontal blinds behind the windows flanking the door were drawn tight.
He returned his gaze north. To a long row of heavy machinery. There were snowplows and graders parked side by side. A pair of bucket trucks with wood chippers hooked to them were parked nose to tail along the north fence. The discordant metallic rattle was coming from behind a row of trucks hitched to flatbed trailers carrying huge spools of wire, line-painting equipment, and steamrollers of different sizes. Every piece of equipment on the lot was painted the same safety-orange and was dirt-streaked from sitting in the elements unused since that Saturday in July when road improvements and public works projects took a permanent back seat to surviving the dead.
He looked sidelong at the trailer as he drained the last of his current PBR into his open mouth. Then the chain-link jangled again, far away to the north. Whatever is making the noise is outside the wire and can wait, was his thinking as he diverted to the trailer.
Stopping at the base of the short stack of steps, he chucked the can amongst the weeds growing by the foundation and let the M4 fall off his shoulder and into his waiting hands.
He listened hard but heard nothing. No voices drifted from within the structure. Most importantly, when he banged on the door a tick later, he didn’t get the same result from within as he had from the Winnebago a few nights ago.
He gave it a few more seconds before trying the knob.
Unlocked.
He pushed the door inward with a nudge from the suppressor. His finger slid into the trigger guard and he tracked left to right, following the door sweep with the M4’s business end.
The interior was revealed in small segments. To the left were a trio of chairs pushed up to a small table. Atop the table was an old television. Next was a garbage can overflowing with beer cans.
“My kind of folks,” he joked.
Mounted to the wall above the garbage can was a whiteboard. Once filled with maintenance chores, it was now covered with squiggles and geometric shapes. There were mythical creatures and monsters that looked to have leaped straight off the pages of a Tolkien novel. There was no rhyme or reason to the placement. No kind of symmetry or balance. And it was all done in red, yellow, and black.
“Guess the county didn’t spring for the rainbow pack of dry erase pens.” Duncan chuckled. The graffiti reminded him of a Beatles album jacket. The one with the yellow submarine bobbing in a sea resembling a beatnik’s worst acid trip.
Pressed up to the wall facing him was a low-slung love seat wrapped in tan fabric. On the far right, at the end of the building, was a trio of sleeping bags. All were Dijon-mustard-yellow and spread out on the floor. The narrow ends where a person’s feet should go were all aimed at Duncan. A trio of pillows were propped against the wall before each bag.
“Somebody has been lying in my bed,” Duncan said in his best big-bad-bear voice.
He looked behind the door. No backpacks or cooking gear. And no food. Which led him to conclude that whoever had been squatting here was long gone now. He figured they’d been eaten by the dead or killed by a desperate breather. At any rate, the place was his for the plucking.
And pluck he did. He took a handful of keys off the pegboard on the wall behind the door.
The little niggling voice was back and whispering a reminder about the beers still secreted in his coat pockets.
He started the door closing and the love seat drew his attention. Just five minutes, he told himself. Put your feet up. Hell, Old Man, you walked a mile. You deserve to take a load off. Have a beer. Or three.
He threw the lock and propped the M4 beside the jamb. Plucking another beer from his coat, he sat
down hard on the love seat. As he popped the top, his eyes roamed the wood paneling. There was a calendar on the wall beside the window left of the door. It was a freebie plastered with photos of heavy equipment and still turned to July 2011.
Which told him the first people who stayed here hadn’t lasted very long before abandoning the place. It also indicated that whoever was here last, likely the owners of the sleeping bags, didn’t give a rat’s ass what day it was. Maybe they were taking it one day at a time like Glenda urged him to before he went and screwed it all up.
Duncan stuck a hand into his pocket. He ran his fingers over the smooth surface of the Dear John letter.
A sour look settling on his face, he destroyed the beer in one long drink and hurled the empty at the calendar. He closed his eyes and listened to the noise it made as it caromed off the floor and came to rest somewhere off to his right. With one hand clutching the note in his pocket, the other wrapped around one of the remaining beers in another pocket, he transitioned from just forgettin’ to the warm embrace of sweet oblivion.
Chapter 23
The driver steered the jacked-up 4x4 left off of 39 and coasted to a full stop a hundred feet west of the burned-out Shell station. Leaving the V8 idling, he looked past the twenty-year-old blonde to his right and addressed the scruffy-looking teenager riding shotgun. “Good eye, Nate Dog. You got 20/20 vision or some shit?”
The passenger shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Far as I know,” he said, tugging nervously on the wispy beginnings of a mustache. “Haven’t had ‘em checked since I was twelve. Been about six years, I guess.” He regarded the young woman to his left. “How often did you go to the ornithologist?”
“Ophthalmologist,” she said, snapping her gum. “Ornithologist is a faggot who studies birds.”
The driver shot her a sidelong glance. Speaking slowly, he said, “Homosexual. A fag is a cigarette. Speaking of …” He reached across the seat, brushing the young woman’s breasts in the process. He smiled and wiggled his fingers before Nate’s face.
Gimme.
Without protest, Nate relinquished his last cigarette. He made a show of crumpling the empty box before chucking it into the back seat.
The young woman looked to the driver first. She let her gaze linger for a second then regarded Nate with a coquettish smile.
“If I would have asked you for a cigarette, too, who would you have given it to … me or Otto?”
“I’m pleading the fifth,” Nate replied.
Otto laughed at that. It was the kind of drawn-out bray that usually preceded him committing violence. He said, “You and Holly drank the fifth, dumbass.” In a sing-song voice he added, “And you didn’t save any for good ol’ Otto.”
With the tension she’d just created taking on a palpable air, Holly excused herself to go take a pee.
Nate scanned the lot on his side before elbowing his door open.
“If you want some privacy, you better make it quick,” Otto called as he watched her shimmy her way onto Nate’s lap.
Flashing the same smile at Otto she’d just covertly hit Nate with, she ground her ass against the younger man’s crotch and then hopped down from the truck, along the way raking her nails across the front of Nate’s stiff new Levi’s.
The second the door thudded shut, Nate faced Otto. Again worrying his sparse facial hair, he said, “She’s been asking questions.”
Otto took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled through his nose. Wisps of smoke curled through his beard and around his head. With the tendrils drifting lazily toward the open door, he said, “What’s she saying?”
“She saw the bump on Tyrone’s head.”
“Who gives a fuck,” Otto spat. “Just tell her the same story I told her.”
Nate looked questioningly across the cab.
“The dumbfuck was drunk and high. He probably fell against one of the rocks in the fire pit. That’ll make a motherfucker dizzy as fuck. Then he wandered off in a daze and next thing you know … voilà, he’s getting ate by a Mortimer.“
“She doesn’t buy it.” Nate checked over his right shoulder. Saw that Holly was almost to the SUV. Turning back, he leaned in close, saying, “She told me your tattoos are prison tats. She saw the SS thing and the WP and the swastikas the first night you—”
“I didn’t rape her. She wanted it. She even said so in front of you and Kerry.”
“The black eye?”
Otto laughed. “She fell against a rock by the fire pit.” Then he got real serious and fixed Nate with a menacing glare. “That fucker Tyrone and her met after the shit hit the fan. They were not an item. That was a union of convenience. Just so happens that the Otto Train is more convenient. She gets to live with us. Besides, Tyrone’s nonstop beatboxing and rapping was going to get us all killed.”
After a long moment of strained silence, in a conspiratorial tone, Nate said, “Can I have her first tonight?”
Otto nodded. “But you have to ask her in front of me. And at the end of your query, I want you to add pretty please with cream and sugar on it.”
Nate peered out his window and watched Holly drop her jeans and pink thong and squat beside the banged-up white SUV. As if a formed thought was about to spill forth, his lips parted.
“You were about to agree, weren’t you?”
Nate’s jaw took on a hard set. He continued to watch Holly but said nothing.
“Don’t you ever fucking beg for pussy,” bellowed Otto. “Do not stoop that low. You fucking embarrass me sometimes, Nate Dog. And just for that personal display of your own lack of self-respect, I’m going to have to reverse the Fifth Circuit Court of Otto’s decision and say negatory to your request. Now gun up and get out. Grab the can and hose while you’re out there.”
Halfway out the door, Nate turned back to face Otto. “We already have all the gas we’re going to need.”
Otto gestured at the Toyota with his cigarette. Glaring at Nate, he said, “But we don’t have that gas.” He held the stony expression even as he took a long dramatic drag off the Kent and stubbed the butt out in the ashtray.
After blowing the stale-smelling smoke into the younger man’s face, Otto snatched up his rifle and piled out of the truck.
The trio stood shoulder to shoulder next to the battered Land Cruiser, the roof over the filling islands casting a shadow over them all. By chance they had lined up by size, with Nate at five-foot-five and the smallest of the three, on their left flank.
At six-foot-three, shoring up the right, Otto towered over Holly, who fell somewhere in stature between the two men.
Strangely enough, the arrangement also mirrored their ages, from youngest to oldest. Nate had hit voting age the weekend the calamity happened. Before the dead began to walk, Holly had been anticipating her first legal drink on Thanksgiving Day. And though Otto claimed to be thirty-one to anyone who asked, his ruddy complexion and receding hairline was that of someone knocking hard on the door to forty.
Nate slung his AK-47 over a shoulder and stepped to the dented door. He cupped his hands on the glass and looked inside. “Dumbass left behind the better part of a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a roll of toilet paper. It’s two-ply, too.” He did a little hip thrust followed by some kind of leg kick to show his delight at their good fortune. Whether it was the beer or asswipe that precipitated it, he didn’t let on.
Holly smiled at the Michael-Jackson-esque dance move. “A little late for the latter,” she said. “I already let the gy-gy drip dry.”
Nate tried the driver’s side door handle. “Figures … it’s locked.”
“Not for long,” Otto said as he delivered a solid shot to the glass with his AR-15’s collapsed buttstock.
Both Holly and Nate flinched and their hands went up to ward off the ensuing shower of pebble-sized pieces of lightly tinted glass.
Brushing remnants of the window from her shoulder-length hair, Holly said, “Could have warned us first, Otto.”
Nate spit out a tiny shard of glass but
added nothing to Holly’s stern admonishment.
“Fore,” Otto bawled, ahead of another fit of laughter. “At least the glass didn’t blacken your other eye.”
Holly stuck out her lower lip and jammed her hands into her coat pockets.
After reaching under the dash and popping the fuel flap, Nate walked around to the right quarter and set up his siphoning operation.
Otto snatched up the PBR suitcase. He ripped into the box and laid the beers out on the hood. “Ten left,” he said. “That means five for me. You two can fight over the rest.”
Cheeks sunken and with the length of hose snaking from his mouth, Nate rose up and shot a glare through the glass. If Otto saw, he didn’t let on.
“Not cool,” Holly said as she grabbed three off the hood and promptly opened the top on one. “Why do you get the lion’s share?”
“Consider it Dad tax,” said Otto as he returned his beers to the box.
Nate rounded the back of the SUV, shaking his head.
Otto opened a second beer. Regarding Nate, he asked, “Tank empty?”
Nodding, Nate said, “Gas station is a hell of a funny place to go dry.”
“Ironic,” Holly corrected.
Otto looked west toward Huntsville. “Sure is,” he said agreeably. “On both accounts.” He grabbed a beer off the hood, then paused and looked queerly at Nate.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Otto placed a palm on the Land Cruiser’s hood. “The beer is warm and this dented-ass hood is cold. Means this thing’s been parked here for a while.”
“Who cares?” said Holly, finishing with her first beer. She did a little dance, complete with a few provocative gyrations and toe touches. “We got their beer. Let’s get our haul home and parrrr-tee.”
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 13): Gone Page 16