The gunfire had ceased the moment Cade lost control of the truck. It was now replaced by doors slamming and voices calling out in Chinese from somewhere near the two-lane. What dialect of Chinese they were speaking, he hadn’t a clue.
He wiped at the blood on his face. Peered between the seats, looking for the Motorola. Saw that it was out of reach on the passenger floor. Nearing the dark edge of unconsciousness, he reached out to the passenger seat and came back with the Thuraya. He turned the sat-phone over in his blood-slickened hands until he found the SIM card port. He sighed and slumped in his seat upon learning a special tool was needed to access the card.
In his head, overriding the constant ringing caused by all the gunfire in the truck’s cab, he heard Desantos say, Improvise, Wyatt.
The sound of splashing water filtered in through the blown-out sliding window. Steam was drifting up through the seams where the hood met the fenders. Amazingly, the airbags hadn’t deployed. Maybe the NBA baller had them disengaged. Cade figured he’d never learn the answer to that.
Using all the strength at his disposal, Cade slammed the phone hard against the dash, causing it to break in two and the guts to be exposed. He located the SIM card just as the barrel of a gun was being thrust in through the passenger window.
Orders delivered in Chinese were being barked at him as he pried the card loose and palmed it. Still fighting the circle of darkness closing in, he transferred the card to his left hand and surreptitiously dropped it out his window.
Cade didn’t hear evidence the card made it into the pond water. There was no audible splash. No soldier letting on that he had witnessed the deed. All he heard was the ringing between his ears as the circle of darkness tightened before his eyes and the sensation of floating weightless enveloped him.
Chapter 43
Raven had led Peter through the thickening woods, moving fast and silent, carrying the positive knowledge that the distinctive sound of Black Beauty’s engine had indeed been retreating east prior to the sounds of the soldiers opening fire and then speeding off in hot pursuit.
By the time the noises and their echoes had dissipated, less than two minutes had passed and Peter was beginning to tire. “Can we stop now?” he asked.
It was very dark within the stand of old-growth firs. But not so dark that using the NVGs made sense. Raven steadied the constantly shifting goggles with one hand and slowed for a tick to answer. “Two more minutes,” she demanded. “By then we’ll have put close to half a mile between us and them.”
“What then?” he asked.
Batting a branch heavy with wispy lichen from her path, Raven said, “We find a place to hide and wait for my dad to radio us.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“What if a purple dinosaur jumps out of the woods in front of us?”
“Point taken,” said Peter between labored breaths.
“First person shooters didn’t prepare you for this, did they?”
“Can I have a gun?”
Raven didn’t respond to the plea. She was focused solely on their surroundings, head on a swivel. As they exited the stand of firs, facing a twenty-yard stretch of open field to get to an awaiting grove of aspen, she whispered, “Move fast, stay close, and keep a low profile.”
“The gun?”
She shot him a glare her mom would have been proud of. It silenced him instantly and brought him in close.
Without a word, Raven struck out west at a fast lope. During the short stint in the open, she spotted the two-lane. It was at roughly their eleven o’clock, maybe a quarter-mile off, and curled left to right in front of the single house she’d seen from the Ford. The house sat in the shadow of tall firs and was surrounded on three sides by at least two dozen broken-down vehicles and a broken-down-looking RV. She’d seen the rusting hulks from her seat in the truck on the way in and given them no mind. However, seeing them up close gave her an idea.
Just as Peter made it to the aspens, a fork of lightning lanced toward the ground far off to the south.
He counted, “One Mississippi … two Mississ—”
The bass-heavy clap of thunder rolled over the countryside off their left shoulder and seemed to dissipate as it hit the picket of trees sheltering them.
“That struck less than two miles out,” proffered Raven. “We should find shelter.”
Peter slowed, then stopped altogether. Placing his hands on his knees, he said, “The house? Maybe that old RV?”
Curling back around a tree, Raven stopped beside him. She was breathing about the same as always.
Back arching with each deep breath, Pater said, “How is it you’re not winded?”
“My dad is a slave driver. At least that’s what Mom used to say.” She paused. Stared off in the direction of the field and house beyond. “He’s been getting me ready for this.”
“You don’t think he’s coming back for us?”
Fixing him with a hard stare, she said, “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.”
Lightning struck again, somewhere out of sight. A beat later they felt the rumble of thunder in their chests.
“Is that a family motto?” asked Peter.
Raven chuckled and slowly shook her head. “Just one of my dad’s many sayings.”
Peter stood up straight. Eyes gleaming with newly formed tears, he said, “My dad was the same. He was a very smart man.”
Turning back toward the aspens, nose crinkled, Raven asked, “Do you smell that?”
Nodding, Peter said, “Roamers. We better go.”
“We can’t,” she said. “Those things will follow us to where I want to go. They’ll be a dead giveaway.”
“Bad pun,” Peter said.
If the observation registered, she didn’t let it show. “Stay here,” she ordered.
“Can I have the pistol?”
Back turned toward him, she took the pistol from the holster, dropped the magazine from the well, and jacked the live round from the chamber. Slipping the bullet and mag into a pocket, she passed the pistol back to him over her shoulder.
Grabbing the Glock, Peter turned it over and stared into the empty mag well.
“It’s not loaded.”
“You passed your first test,” she said. “This isn’t a game.” She raised her M4 a few degrees and faced Peter. “Stay down and keep your eyes open. I’ll be back in a bit.”
He said nothing. Just went to one knee, useless pistol in hand, and watched her go.
Ten paces into the aspen grove, Raven’s nose told her the dead thing, or things, were somewhere up ahead. Two more paces and she caught sight of a flash of color. Amongst the mostly white trees, finding a bearing toward the owner, or owners, was easy. However, instead of moving laterally and intercepting the interlopers face-to-face, she ranged left in a wide circle to come at them from behind.
Thirty seconds after leaving Peter alone, Raven was twenty yards northwest of him and coming up on the dead. There were three. On account on their varied sizes, she labeled them in her head: Small, Medium, and Large. All were adults. All were first turns and so badly decomposed, determining sex or age was impossible. But that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was disposing of them without having to use the suppressed weapon. Contrary to popular belief—as her dad would say—suppressed weapons aren’t silent, they’re only easier on the ears, and harder for the enemy to pinpoint in a firefight.
She came upon Small from its blind side. It was half a head taller than her and missing so much muscle mass that its arms and head bounced around as if connected to the torso with overused rubber bands. Achieving a killing blow with the Toothpick took two tries. On the first roundhouse strike, her blade carved a chunk of putrid flesh from the rotter’s neck.
For the fatal stroke, she rose up to her tiptoes at the moment she started the blade moving on a right to left arc toward the Z’s temple.
There was an audible crunch as the Toothpick pierced skull. Simultaneously, there was a soft squelch of it
s brain accepting the blade and all movement and sound ceased.
As the Z collapsed and the others became aware of her presence, she slipped deftly into the trees, continuing on the clockwise circle to further separate the remaining two Zs from each other.
Once Raven had achieved a lead on the Zs and Medium and Large were a good twelve feet apart, she stopped in her tracks and whipped around to face the latter of the two. As the big Z stumbled forward, arms reaching for her, she vacated the airspace with a quick hop to her left. Following through with her plan, she ducked the arms and stuck out her right foot, tripping the creature up. She waited for the hollow thud of it striking the ground, then put a knee in its back and jabbed the Toothpick into its right ear.
Sickened by the stink of the liquid weeping from the lethal puncture wound, she leaped up and continued in the same direction as before; a full-circle tack that would see her back to the edge of the clearing where Peter was waiting.
Before exiting the trees, Raven slipped behind a pair of conjoined aspens and called, “Marco.”
When Medium doddered past the aspens and swung its gaze toward the sound it associated with fresh meat, Raven had already flanked it on the left and was approaching from behind. “Dumbass,” she said, adding a swift kick to the back of one stick-thin leg and watching it lose its balance and sprawl forward.
The way Medium had landed, face planted in the dirt, arms in front and twisted across one another, made pouncing and pinning it in place unnecessary. It was having problems lifting its own diminished body weight off its trapped arms.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth, popped into Raven’s head. It was one of Duncan’s sayings she didn’t quite understand, but seemed appropriate for the moment. She had always associated it with wasted opportunity. And this was one opportunity she was not going to waste.
Work smarter, not harder.
Keeping her body low to the ground, she edged around so the Z’s head was between her boots and leaned out over its upper back. From this position, dispatching Medium was as simple as slipping the Toothpick into the tiny opening where its mostly hairless skull connected to its spine. Though she didn’t know the names of the bones that came together there, she knew the channel would allow access to the brain and stilling the thing forever required but a quick flick of the wrist. Which she did. Mission accomplished, she thought as the struggling ceased and another soul was released to go wherever it was supposed to.
Raven rejoined Peter two minutes after leaving him and just when another lightning bolt arced to the ground. Before she could think her way to One Mississippi, the clap of deafening thunder stole her breath.
Sizing Peter up and determining the only thing standing out sorely on him was his near white shock of hair, she removed the NVGs and stocking hat and commanded him to wear the latter.
“You got all of the roamers?” he asked, pulling the hat down low.
She nodded. “All three of them.” Pointing to his hair, she added, “Tuck it all under the cap. Then let’s go before a stray bolt finds us.”
As Peter worked his hair under the cap, he said, “Isn’t thunder and lightning mainly a spring and summer thing?”
Finished tightening the NVGs to the smallest setting, Raven swung the M4 around in front of her. Locking her gaze on the field and house before them, she said, “One of our people, Glenda, has been going on about the early snowstorm and that golf-ball-sized hail we had a while back. She’s lived here a long time and says these kind of weather fluctuations are a direct result of global warming.”
Peter scoffed at that. “I’m only thirteen and I still know the news people couldn’t predict the weather in Salt Lake ten days out. That’s why I don’t believe we’ll all be under water in a hundred years.”
“You’re just repeating what you hear people around you say, right?”
Peter said nothing.
“Well,” said Raven, “That’s how Duncan thinks, too. Doesn’t matter now. Doubt if there will be anyone left in a hundred years to find out.”
Near their position in the trees, a pair of dirt strips packed hard from the passage of tires cut through the field, passed close by a burn pile, and then curled around the east side of the house. Nearly a dozen cars dotted the field left of the worn tracks. There were no fences anywhere. Not even the short ones people around here liked to erect to keep the deer from eating their plants and flowers.
“What do you think?” Raven asked. “Fifteen yards or so to cover?”
“To the house?” he said. “No way. That’s a hundred feet, easy.”
“If they came looking—”
“When they come looking,” he interrupted.
She nodded. Eyes on the distant road, she said, “When they come. They’ll search the house for sure. Then the RV.”
A low rumble lasting a few seconds made her pause.
Looking skyward, he said, “You’re thinking of hiding in one of the cars?”
She said, “The trunk, if we can find one open.”
“That’s like begging to be electrocuted.”
“I’ve heard that rubber grounds electricity. They might be flat, but those tires on the cars are still rubber.”
“I think you’re mistaken,” said Peter. “I don’t like it.”
“It’s got to be safer than standing out here in the open.” A no-nonsense look on her face, she motioned for him to follow, then set off jogging toward the cars parked on the left periphery of the makeshift junkyard.
The trunks of the first two cars they came to were closed and locked. The third car in a jagged row of six was facing them. On all four doors, weeds and grass grew up nearly to the bottom of the windows. The hood was wide and long and shaped like a pair of opposing waves rearing up and touching in the middle. The chrome grille and bumpers matched the curvature of the front edge of the hood, At first glance it looked as if the car was frowning. A round, red enamel emblem bore the words HUDSON HORNET.
Looping around back, Raven said, “It’s open.” She ushered him in first.
Lightning lit up the clouds. Thunder followed. Next came the rain. Big fat drops slapped the flat metal surfaces with a slow steady cadence.
Peter showed a little reluctance, but clambered in at her insistence.
To the sound of approaching engines, Raven rolled over the knee-high bumper, lifted her boots over the bumper over riders, and pulled the trunk down on their heads, careful to leave it open a smidge. Inside it smelled of must and rust and death.
Peter did his best to keep from spooning Raven too hard. He sniffed the air once and said, “You smell like one of them.”
Craning her neck, she said, “It’s the hat you’re wearing. Same one the rotter was French kissing back at the boarded-up house.”
Peter threw a shiver. He couldn’t raise his arms above his head without disturbing the trunk, so the hat remained on his head and he breathed through his mouth.
Though Raven strained to hear over the rain pummeling the car, she couldn’t pick up anything else. No gravel popping under approaching tires. No exhaust notes. No slamming of vehicle doors.
Chapter 44
The ear-splitting explosions came back-to-back-to-back with no end in sight. In fact, there were so many detonations in so short a time, they eventually became one continuous rumble that went on for several seconds—or minutes, now that he thought about it. For some reason Duncan’s sense of time was skewed. It was as if his mind was a tapestry and someone had a hold of the edges and was pulling it this way and that, with no apparent rhyme or reason to the movements.
As he watched the barrage responsible for the cacophony from a vantage whose origin he couldn’t explain, he noted the individual shockwaves moving from the epicenter of each explosion. He caught himself marveling at the eruptions of flame roaring vertically through the voids created thanks to the immense overpressure. It all reminded him of watching a flower’s bloom in time-lapse photography. Only on a grander scale. And to his horror, the dozens of co
ncussions appeared to be on a collision course with him.
Duncan jerked awake with a start. He was still at Glenda’s house on the hill. Which came as a great relief. Because in his unconscious state he’d been back in the jungles of Vietnam, in the direct path of an Arc Light strike, with dozens of 1000-pound bombs walking their way toward him. It had been so vivid, he’d even detected the whistling of lethal lead shrapnel seeking his flesh. Felt the overpressure crushing down on him and causing his ears to ring.
It took him the better part of ten seconds to fully come to.
As the first half of those seconds slipped into the past, he became aware he was still reclining in the padded chair, on the outside deck, with his boot heels parked on the rail. At the end of those ten seconds, he was in a somewhat coherent state when distant lightning lit up the night sky and he caught sight of Glenda’s Dear John letter resting on his chest. It was soaked; the writing on the outside, once legible, now just a spider web of black ink running from the center. It also occurred to him as darkness crowded back in that he was as wet as the paper on his chest, and still all alone.
The drawn-out rumble of thunder helped him to understand why he’d just been in the path of a B-52 bombing run. But it sure didn’t explain his seeing his long dead friend Thigpen during the horror movie in his mind. Maybe the helicopter door gunner was expecting him soon, and this was his way of communicating the fact.
Pushing the thoughts aside, Duncan found the fifth bottle by feel. Gazing out at the darkened town and reservoir beyond, with not so much as a distinguishing silhouette to orient west from, he spun the cap off with a flick of his thumb and chucked it out over the rail.
“If I can’t see where I am,” he drawled, “I won’t know where I’m going.” He chuckled, then tilted the bottom of the bottle to the sky.
After pouring half of the remaining whiskey down his throat, he set the bottle on the floor by the chair legs, picked the .45 off his lap, and thumbed back the hammer.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 13): Gone Page 28