Nothing.
Not even a scrap of fabric from a ghillie suit, which was what Daymon had been wearing when Cade saw him last.
As they were making a final northbound pass on 100 Street, the satellite phone in the center console bleated its annoying electronic trill.
“You get it,” Cade said. He was busy scanning empty fields bearing for sale signs and straining to see inside the smattering of one- and two-story pre-war houses bordering them.
“It’s that woman, Nash,” Raven said, venom dripping from the words.
“She’s a Major,” Cade replied. “Gonna answer it?”
Raven’s expression said no. Her actions contradicted the narrowed eyes and set of her jaw.
She thumbed the talk key and then fiddled with the slim Thuraya until she found what she was looking for. All in all she had left Nash hanging for less than ten seconds when she finally said, “You’re on speaker. This is Raven Grayson. My dad is next to me. He’s busy driving.”
“So good to hear your voice, Raven.” If Nash had detected the animosity in Raven’s tone, she didn’t let on. “Your dad says you’re blossoming into a fine young lady.”
Raven brought the phone closer to her mouth and said, “The word blossoming has never passed my father’s lips.” She looked sidelong across the cab and saw that her dad was not smiling.
“Raven,” Cade said. And that’s all he needed to say. No matter what she was feeling at the time, that was no way to talk to an adult, and she knew better.
Raven faced him. In a low voice, she said, “Sorry, Dad.” After pausing and looking out the window as the F-650 swung left onto Woodruff’s northernmost street, she added, “My apologies, Major.”
“No offense taken,” replied Nash. “You’ve been under immense pressure. I get it. I really do.”
Nudging the subject in a different direction, Cade said, “What’s the news?”
“Still on speaker?”
“Affirmative.”
Nash said, “What I have to tell you is not PG-13.”
Still smarting from the blowback he had received as a result of his decision to have Glenda sedate Raven the night Brook died, he said, “Raven can listen in. I’m all about transparency from here on out.”
“Understood,” Nash replied. She described in great detail the interrogations applied to the prisoners taken in the raid on the Bear Lake airport compound. “They started out as garden-variety lowlifes. Lack of authority emboldened them. Hell, emboldened is an understatement. The quick evolution brought on by our current circumstances has twisted their idea of behavior that’s acceptable in normal society.”
“I was there. I saw what they’re capable of. And I made their leader pay for it,” Cade said. “Did they make contact with my friend?”
There was a long pause.
Glancing at the satellite phone, Cade said, “The one with the dreadlocks? Daymon Bush is his name.”
“Negative,” said Nash. She sounded tired. “And I can’t send any help from Bastion at the moment. Chinese PLA activity is ramping up. They’re like roaches. Stomp on one and three more appear. We’ve even caught a couple of them infiltrating Springs.”
“Can you divert a drone? Have it take one or two passes over Bear Lake? You’ll get intel on the hordes. We kill two birds with one stone.”
Voice full of surprise, Nash said, “Hordes? Plural?”
Cade told her all about the situation at Bear River and how in the early morning hours they’d spotted a second horde moving north. Then, as he wheeled a slow right turn at an intersection on the north edge of town where he could see down Main Street, he described the destruction laid to Woodruff in painstaking detail. After informing Nash he would likely have more intel on the state of things from Randolph on up north to Bear Lake once two of their own who were in the vicinity reported back with their findings, he dropped the bomb that at once rendered Nash speechless and caused Raven to lean forward and fix him with a probing stare.
Open fields blipped by outside the truck. By the time Nash recovered enough to say, “And when is this happening?” they had bypassed nearly a quarter-mile of barbed wire fencing uprooted from churned up fields bordering the two-lane.
“I want to make it happen before winter,” Cade replied.
Raven had rotated her upper body to face her dad. The probing stare had morphed into a look of bewilderment.
“I’ve got to go,” said Cade. “I’ll call when I know more.”
“I’ll do the same if we get anything actionable out of the prisoners,” Nash said.
Cade nodded to Raven. “You can end the call. Don’t want to burn up all our minutes.”
She ended the call. “Time and place, Dad. Remember?” She dumped the phone into the console and slammed it shut. “When were you going to tell me? Better yet … when were you going to ask for my opinion?”
“It just came to me a minute ago,” he admitted. “With the Chinese growing more emboldened and now two hordes roaming the area … just makes sense tactically.”
She said, “Colorado Springs?”
“I said we’ll be pulling up stakes and moving on before winter gets rolling. I didn’t specify Colorado Springs or Bastion.”
“Are we going home? To Portland?”
Cade shook his head. “Not yet, sweetie. Maybe one day we will. Or, perhaps, you will by yourself. Right now it’s too dangerous to go back.”
“My vote is for Springs,” she said. “That is, if I have a say in the matter.”
“First things first,” he said. “We need to check out the ice cream truck. See if Dregan made it out or not.”
Raven made a face as the caged animal in her chest stirred. She asked, “What about the zombies on 39? Aren’t we going back with the Screamer?”
Cade said, “No. I think they’re set pretty firmly on the hook. We’ve got about forty-five minutes to an hour until they get to the junction. If we aren’t there in time, they could turn and head north. If they do that, then Lev and Jamie will have to face them.”
Feeling the calm returning, she said, “Fingers crossed Lady Luck is looking out for us."
“Copy that,” Cade said as he jinked the wheel right to avoid driving over a six-inch-tall mound of organic sludge. From a distance it had looked like clay-rich soil that had sloughed off the side hill paralleling the road. Once he’d drawn to within two truck lengths, the scraps of clothing and human bones jutting skyward told him the true story.
“First time I’ve seen rotter paste,” said Raven, her right hand instinctively going for the grab bar by her head.
“Not for me,” Cade said. “The mega horde me and Desantos—”
“Nuked to kingdom come,” Raven said. “That’s what you did, right?”
“It was a group effort,” Cade conceded. Then, hoping to steer the conversation in a different direction, he asked Raven if she remembered much from her ballet lessons.
After shooting him a quizzical look, she said, “I was, like, eight or nine. I remember a little. First position is when your feet are like this.” She put her feet up on the dash in front of her seat and demonstrated.
Cade glanced sidelong at her boots. Shifting his attention back to the road, he said, “What’s the one where your toes are pointing away from one another and you bend your knees and almost break your back and get a double hernia as you lower yourself to the floor?”
Raven regarded him. On her face was a Who stole my dad and replaced him with a space alien? expression.
“I think you mean plié. If you bend down it’s a plié squat,” she answered. “What the heck does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”
Cade did a double-take and said, “Where’d you learn that … Duncan?”
“Grandma,” she said. “When we got to Myrtle Beach to visit them … before all of this happened, I asked her why she was picking us up by herself. And that’s when she looked at me and said, ‘Raven, dear, what the heck does that have to do with the price of tea
in China?’”
“Grandma was a bit of a feminist. She probably thought you were insinuating Grandpa should be driving. That to her came across as you insinuating a woman’s place is in the passenger seat. She didn’t mean it.”
“It’s a funny saying, though. Isn’t it?”
Not if you knew what I know about China, is what Cade was thinking. He said, “Your grandma and grandpa had more funny sayings than Duncan.” His mood turned sour at the thought of what had happened to Brook’s parents. Then he started to wonder where Glenda had gone off to. Which led to him worrying about the mess Old Man was in. The drinking roaring back. The talk of the good old days. All the maudlin behavior that started when he learned of Heidi’s killing and Daymon’s subsequent disappearance.
“Stay frosty,” Cade said. “We’re nearing the mile marker Lev mentioned.”
In a flash Raven scooped up her M4, sat upright in her seat, and started to scan the fields, head moving slowly left to right—on a swivel, was how her dad would describe it.
Eyes roaming a swath of field on his side, Cade dropped the F-650’s speed and slalomed the big rig right to avoid a long length of tangled wire still attached to a trio of weathered fence posts.
Two minutes after leaving Randolph in the rearview, Raven was again rising off her seat. Only this time words spoken by her dad weren’t the cause of her concern, it was the large, boxy vehicle resting on its side behind a two-foot-tall wall of mud in the distant field.
“I think I see the truck,” she said.
Cade lifted his foot from the accelerator and followed her gaze. “That’s got to be it,” he said. “Use the binoculars. See if you can pick up anything moving in or around the truck.”
He steered the truck to the right side of the road on a slight rise and stopped on the shoulder where Raven had a commanding view of the field and the Bear River Range backstopping it. A mass of trees began a few hundred yards behind the ice cream truck and rolled on to a thin line of ochre-colored hills far off in the distance.
Closer in, the fencing on both sides of the road was flattened or had been yanked from the ground altogether. The fields bordering the road had been trampled by the passage of thousands of feet. The first dozen yards or so of field were churned to mud. The next thirty or forty feet of field beyond the mud, the grass was trampled and pointing north.
Raven powered her window down. A blast of cool wind infiltrated the cab, bringing with it the heady scent of pine and earthen notes of freshly tilled soil. She braced on the windowsill and trained the Steiners on the distant vehicle. She remained stock still for a full minute before pulling her head back inside the truck.
Cade had been glassing the vehicle through the M4’s 3x optic. Putting the rifle down, he regarded his daughter.
He asked, “See anything?”
Biting her lip, Raven nodded. “Something is moving. Looks like on the driver’s side.”
“You sure? Because I didn’t see anything using the EOTech.” Gesturing for the Steiners, he said, “But that’s not saying much, considering the distance.”
Cade spent a few seconds glassing the vehicle and came away agreeing with Raven. “Could be a seatbelt blowing in the wind. Could be the belt on Dregan’s duster. Only way to give Peter some closure is to go and check it out. Buckle up,” he said. “We’re going to do a little off-roading.”
Complying with the order, Raven asked, “You sure we’re not going to get stuck?”
“In life, sweetie, nothing is guaranteed.”
“We can drive closer, park parallel to the truck, and leave Black Beauty on the road.” She picked up the binoculars and panned the field from the road all the way to the ice cream truck. Dropping the binoculars to her lap, she said, “Walking in wouldn’t take very long.”
Cade shook his head as he put the highly modified Ford into 4x4 Hi mode. “I don’t want to take the chance of us getting caught out there in the open. Kind of like oil and water … running and mud do not go together.”
Raven didn’t acknowledge her dad. She was busy surveying the two-lane behind the Ford. Swiveling back around, she stared out over the hood for a beat before finally saying, “There’s a mile or so of open road in both directions. Even if someone did come along while we’re out there, we would hear them well before we saw them. That’d give us enough time to run back to the truck, wouldn’t it?”
Steering off the blacktop, he said, “You must not have been listening to me. Have you ever tried running in ankle-deep mud?”
She shook her head.
“It’s nearly impossible … especially for someone with a bum ankle like mine.” He paused as the truck rolled into the soupy morass. Looking sidelong at her, he added, “Last chance to call it off.”
Without pause, Raven said, “We promised. And like you always say: A person is only as good as their word.”
“Final answer?”
Nodding at the vehicle at their twelve o’clock, she said, “It’s the right thing to do. Drive, Dad.”
That’s my girl.
Chapter 27
As per Taryn’s plan, when the dead finally began to spill from the overgrown fire lane and spread out on SR-39, all four of the Eden survivors were crouched down in deep grass behind the run of barbed wire fence on the opposite side of the two-lane. Tran’s position was directly across from the compound’s hidden entrance and the farthest from the fire lane. Sasha and Wilson were prostrate in the grass less than twenty feet from the dead things and enveloped by the stink of death hanging over the road. Thirty feet to Wilson’s right, nearly equidistant to Tran’s hiding place, Taryn was making herself small and hoping her woodland camouflage wasn’t standing out from the grass rising up all around her.
The ditch running the length of 39 separated the fence from the road’s gravel-strewn shoulder. It was deep and wide and held several inches of standing water. Hidden by the brackish water was a bed of boot-sucking mud—also inches deep. Behind the hunkered-down survivors was a wide open field of knee-high grass sloping gently uphill to a stand of firs. Near the tree line was the nondescript row of graves where several fallen members of the Eden group were buried.
Seeing the dead congregating on the road to his fore, Wilson brought the radio to his lips, thumbed the talk key, then whispered, “Now.”
Twenty yards east, Tran heard the order and showed himself to the dead. Shorter than the others, the grass rose to mid-thigh on him. In his hands was an uprooted sapling five feet in length and nearly as big around as his wrists. Both ends of his makeshift staff were stark white where he had whittled them to sharp points.
While calling out at the top of his voice, “I’m right here, demons! Are you hungry?” he jumped up and down and waved the staff back and forth over his head.
Attracted by Tran’s sudden appearance, a female first turn locked her hungry stare on the slight man and began a steady march east, bringing with her the entire group of rotters now spreading across both lanes and growing exponentially.
Relieved the Zs hadn’t struck off west when they first emerged onto the road, Wilson put a hand on Sasha’s shoulder and said, “You’re doing great. Just a little bit longer.” He could feel her shaking but couldn’t blame her. The rasps and moans of the dead had the hair on his arms standing on end. In just a couple of seconds the sound of feet scuffing the road rose to a din and the herd was on the move.
Through a part in the grass Wilson saw all ages represented in the mix of fresh kills and first turns trundling from the woods behind their leader. Wilson and Sasha kept quiet and remained out of sight until the head of the column reached Tran’s position. Then, whispering into the radio, Wilson said, “Your turn, Taryn.”
Also brandishing a long branch sharpened to a point with her Tanto blade, Taryn rose up from the grass, pumping the crude weapon up and down like a drill major and hurling insults at the Zs directly in front of her. This caught them by surprise, freezing a number of them in their tracks. The sudden halt by the Zs in the lead
slowed down the ones following, which started an undead pileup along 39’s eastbound lane.
Taking the bait, a male rotter, arms outstretched and a guttural moan rumbling deep in its chest, locked eyes with Taryn and staggered across the shoulder and into the ditch where it became mired in the diarrhea-like morass.
As soon as Wilson saw the conga line of dead on the road before him come to a lurching, slow-motion halt, he tapped Sasha on the shoulder and popped up from the crushed grass. Waving his sharpened length of wood overhead, he screamed at the dead and jumped up and down.
Feeling the silent signal, Sasha sprang up beside Wilson, reached out with her sharpened sapling and began beating it against the top strand of barbed wire.
Like lemmings near a cliff’s edge, three separate groups of dead marched off 39’s shoulder and into the ditch. Muddy water was kicked up and bodies were trampled as the mass of dead flesh scrambled to get to the meat. However, the first into the ditch weren’t necessarily the first out. A handful of dead among the second wave bridged the gap on the backs of the first in and started stomping postholes into the crumbling hillside.
Seeing Tran and Taryn engaging the dead and holding their own, Wilson stepped to the fence and buried one end of his staff in a rotter’s eye. He pulled the weapon free, aimed it at the sky, and ran behind Sasha. Coming to a sliding halt a couple of yards beyond his sister, he knelt before an undead boy busy worming his way underneath the fence and christened the other end of his staff with the snarling Z’s brackish blood.
In just a few seconds the dead already on the road were amassed in four loose knots separated by twenty or thirty feet. The group near the fire lane was still swelling with new arrivals. Crowded from behind, the first Zs to navigate the ditch and reach the length of fence where Sasha was scrambling brains were beginning to lose digits and chunks of putrid flesh to the taut barbed wire. Meanwhile, a dozen yards east, the two groups in the middle were coalescing into one and under attack on two flanks by Wilson and Taryn. The ditch to the pair’s fore was thick with Zs struggling to extricate themselves from the mud. A dozen yards east, Tran was felling Zs like dominos. His staff was a blur and blood and brain tissue traced gory arcs over the fence as he stabbed repeatedly into the milling throng.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 13): Gone Page 18