Aiming at the row of cans on the rail, he swept his arm real slowly toward the one right. “Don’t need you,” he said and blew the can to pieces.
With the ringing between his ears rising over everything, he flipped the make-believe coin in his head.
Tails it is.
The side of the coin he’d selected.
“Time to shuffle off this mortal coil, Old Man. Here I come, Mom … Dad, Logan.”
He pressed the muzzle to his temple. Let it linger there and burn his skin as blood seeping around the splinters ran down his face. He tasted its saltiness on his lips as he mouthed a simple and sorrowful “I’m sorry” for the people close to him he felt he’d let down. For all of the young soldiers bleeding out in his Huey over Vietnam that never went home. For the little girl gutted by the big biker at the I-84 roadblock in Oregon. For Leo and Rawley, whom he’d known fleetingly and had died horrible deaths on the road near Boise. For Oliver and all of those who died or suffered at the hands of a murdering cannibal because, he, Duncan Winters, had inadvertently let her live to see another day.
With the ghostly faces of dead acquaintances and loved ones long gone jittering through his mind like an old timey newsreel, he pulled the trigger.
While he’d expected to at least see a blinding light and hear an ear-splitting boom prior to his brains becoming a gory Rorschach test on the deck wall to his left, he instead heard a woman’s scream and the pistol was ripped out of his hand. And though his hearing was greatly affected from shooting empty cans, he knew the owner of the voice was close. Danger close. The hot breath on his neck told him so.
The scream morphed into a string of curse words, each one altered by a letter or two so that they’d get by a government censor—or pass scrutiny of a Higher Power.
Duncan heard only half of what was said. And of that half he recognized enough of the words to believe he knew the person who had just postponed his inevitable meeting with the Grim Reaper.
“Glenda? That you?” Though he didn’t know it, he was yelling. As he waited for an answer slow in coming, he turned his head in the direction of travel he thought his pistol had taken.
In the next beat he was blinded by three tiny, blue-white orbs. They were above his reach and sending separate beams lancing down to converge on his upturned face. His pupils shrank to pinpoints and he squinted and instinctively turned his head.
“Help me,” she said, her hands coming into the picture. He saw the silhouette of his .45. For some reason it was cradled between her hands, muzzle aimed at the night sky.
The light beam wavered and her hands started to shake. She was in great pain. That much was clear.
Drawing her hands close to his face, he saw that the pinky finger on her right hand was trapped under the hammer and sear. Suddenly it dawned on him she had chopped down on the pistol. Her intervention couldn’t have been timed better. The hammer was just coming down when the tip of her pinky got in its way, stopping the chambered .45 ACP round from discharging and saving his life.
Tails didn’t win today, he thought as he thumbed the hammer back and panned the muzzle away from them both. After de-cocking the Colt, he slipped it into its holster. Moving her hand into the light, he saw the damage to the pinky. It was somewhat flattened at the end, the nail there already showing the beginnings of a subungual hematoma.
She yanked her hand away. “I’m fine,” she snapped. “It’s just a blood blister. What the heck were you thinking, Duncan Winters? Why were you putting a gun to your head?”
“Because if I didn’t,” he conceded, “eventually I was going to read this Dear John letter you left me. Then I’d go out knowing way more than I need to. More than this old fella’s heart can handle.”
“You think that is a Dear John letter?” She spat the final three words as if they were poison. Tone softening, she added, “I may be from that generation, but that’s not me. Not my style. I confront my problems. Tell my truths in person and to the face.”
“Am I your problem?”
“Of course you are, Duncan Winters.” She held up the soggy square of paper. “This, sir, was my way of telling you something without making you waste your time trying to change my mind. If you would have gotten off your high horse long enough to get over yourself and read it”—She planted her hands on her hips—“You would have learned I was coming here to see if my oldest, Pete, finally made it here with his family. I lost Oliver over a week ago. Now Pete is all I have left.”
“Now that I know this isn’t one of those kinds of letters,” grumbled Duncan as he turned the harmless message over in his calloused hands, “it would appear to everyone present that you still have me.”
She lifted the bottle from the floor. “Not if you can’t put the plug in the jug and leave it there. Ever heard of Rule 62?”
He thought about it for a second, then shot a questioning look her way. “If I’ve ever heard of it, I’ve forgotten in my old age.”
“Stop taking yourself so damn seriously, Duncan. Stop using humor to hide your feelings. Stop using this”—she tossed the bottle over the railing—“to make everything you don’t want to face go away.”
He tried to speak.
She put a finger on his lips. “I’m not finished yet. But I can’t let you bleed out while you listen. And listen, you most certainly will. I’ll be right back. Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”
He said nothing. Watched the beam from her headlamp wash the bedroom walls as she pushed through the French doors and disappeared into the bedroom.
Glenda returned two minutes later carrying a few items in her hands. She snugged on a pair of rubber gloves, then illuminated his scalp with the headlamp beams. As she began to probe the wound with a pair of tweezers, a wind gust kicked off the reservoir. As a result, the rain came in at a shallow angle, stinging their exposed skin and prompting Glenda to insist they move inside.
Duncan rose and followed her inside and then closed the doors behind them. The quiet made him aware of the damage he’d done to his hearing. Though not as intense as the job Steppenwolf stage-right for two hours had done to him at Shreveport Auditorium in 1978, the ringing was going nowhere soon. He supposed it would be with him for a day or two. Even a week after Steppenwolf, the low-level buzzing was still there.
Glenda sat him down on a chair taken from her sewing table.
She said, “I’ve come to the conclusion, Peter is gone. Even did a quick 10th Step over it.” He looked at her queerly. Ignoring him, she went on, “Aside from you heathens, nobody has been here since I left for Woodruff weeks ago. The note I hid specifically for Peter to find was still in his old room downstairs. Now, with Oliver gone and Louie buried out back”—she went quiet for a beat and locked eyes with him—“all I have is you.”
He said, “And that ain’t saying much, these days. Lord knows I’ve tried to put it down.”
A thoughtful look on her face, she said, “You need to start living life on life’s terms. You’ve been good at it for short stretches. And during those runs you’ve put it down. But now it’s time to settle in for the long haul.” She paused, lifted her chin so the light painted the wall behind his head. Eyes boring into him, she added, “I’m with you for the long haul if you can follow those simple suggestions.”
“I can follow direction,” he said. “Feelings are a whole ‘nother animal. I’ve never been good about telling people the truth about how I feel. ‘OK’ has always sufficed for me.”
She shook her head, the movement causing the beams to walk back and forth across the wall. “You have got to open up. If you don’t … that stuff will eat you up from inside. Like hydrochloric acid.”
“Or that little bastard from Alien,” he quipped while pretending his hand was a monster clawing its way out of him through his ribcage.
“Get serious with someone, DW. Then you can get on with living.”
“Hell,” he replied, his eyes following her hands as she got ready to dig into his scalp again. “I�
��d rather do the worm buck naked across a floor full of rat traps than tell a woman my true feelings.”
Again the light followed the side-to-side motion of Glenda wagging her head.
Feeling uncomfortable awash in the spotlight thrown from her headlamp, he shifted in the chair and said, “I’m curious about a couple of things. Why didn’t you ride the bike? And those bloody clothes out back, where’d they come from? They weren’t here before.”
Answering the last question first, she said, “Like before, I smeared blood and guts on my clothes to blend in with the rotters.”
Duncan nodded. “The bike?”
She tugged at the wound.
He grimaced and gripped the chair arms.
She dropped a mangled piece of lead onto the table top. “I didn’t think I could reach the bike and mount it or push it away without drawing deadly attention to myself. There were just too many deaders packing the bridge to even try it.”
He went cross-eyed as he watched her plucking wood splinters from his forehead. “I concur on that part,” he said. “I came across the biters down the road a spell from the bridge. Did you see any men on motorcycles?”
She shook her head. “Nope. Didn’t hear any, either. Probably because I was up at the ski lodge most of today. Figured I might find my boy up there. Maybe staying in a nice room with his family. It was a longshot. Did it out of desperation. Yep … denial runs deep in Glenda. However, I did see what looked like a family taking bedding and the like out of some ground-floor rooms.”
He mentioned the truck and dead bodies. “I saw the bedding. Left it there.” Pointing to the bag on the floor, he asked, “What’s in there?”
“Long range radios. There’s wall chargers as well as the automotive lighter plug-in type for them. I stumbled upon them in the guest services office. Believe it or not, they were still in the box and sitting atop the ski patrol’s filing cabinet.”
“Break them out. We’ll call the compound.” He looked up at her. “I’ll come clean to them all. Tell ‘em everything I’ve done.”
She dabbed at the wounds with a towel. “They don’t have a charge. Besides, it would probably be better to wait until you get there to tell Cade and the others what you’ve been up to and the reason you left. You do it in person, face to face, there’s no wiggle room. You do that, you’re practicing rigorous honesty.”
“I suppose that’s a reasonable request I cannot refuse.”
“That’s the Duncan Winters we all know and love.” She smiled and finished bandaging the wounds that warranted it.
“My gunplay is probably going to draw a crowd.” He rose with the bag of radios in hand. “We better get a move on.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll take the keys and go start one charging. By the way … where did you find the purple Dodge?”
Sounding real tired, he said, “It’s a long story.”
“I suppose in the telling of said story I’ll also learn how you nearly got scalped.”
“That’s an affirmative.” He handed her the keys, paused, then unholstered his pistol. “You better take this, too.”
“You’re past that … aren’t you?”
He smiled, the pain brought on from doing so causing him to wince. “It’s to use on any rotters you may come across.”
She took the pistol. “Okay … if it’ll make you happy.”
“That it will.”
A couple of minutes after leaving, Glenda returned, spun a chair around, and sat with her face a foot from Duncan’s. “Spill,” she said. And he did, beginning the story at Daymon’s roadblock, intent on sparing her none of the grisly details.
Chapter 45
The Hudson Hornet’s trunk lid had settled down on Raven and Peter just as the pickup full of soldiers passed by the end of the drive. Raven knew this only because she’d quickly pressed her face to the inside of the trunk and peered through a quarter-size hole she presumed used to house the trunk lock. At any rate, due to the angle of the car in relation to the house and two-lane beyond, she saw most of the road running left to right in front of the house as well as the solitary dwelling’s entire east elevation. All of which meant she would be privy to anyone coming or going through either door, front or back.
She’d chosen to get in the trunk after Peter and settle in facing the rear of the car for two reasons. First, she’d wanted to be able to keep watch through the makeshift peephole. Second, facing the rear of the car, where anyone opening the trunk would be fully exposed, gave her an enormous tactical advantage. In the event the soldiers decided to wade into the sea of cars and open the Hornet’s trunk lid—BANG, you’re dead.
At least that’s how she imagined it going down.
Raven divulging to Peter her reason for choosing the car trunk over the house had brought an unwanted barrage of questions her way.
“How are you going to take out more than one soldier before we’re both shot dead?” he’d asked. “This isn’t Modern Warfare.”
Touché, she’d thought at the time. “You have a better idea?” was how she’d replied to the stinging barb. It was at that very moment when she came to realize how much she really didn’t know about surviving outside the wire. There were so many variables. It was also when she realized just how much she missed her mom and, now, though he’d been gone less than an hour, her only surviving parent.
While Raven silently cursed Murphy for the soldiers’ initial arrival, Peter had asked, “What if some roamers saw us climb inside here and surround us?”
She had repeated her dad’s nugget of wisdom. “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” Then, after a perfectly timed comedic pause, she’d added, “Or I’ll trip you so they have something to eat while I get away. I won’t have much of a head start, though.”
“Why is that?” he’d asked.
“Because there’s not much meat on your bones,” had been her instantaneous response. The second the quip left her mouth, she’d wished she could take it back. After all, the Zs had fed on the kid’s father. Figuring, What he doesn’t know, won’t hurt him, she had wisely kept that detail to herself. The fact she had put the bullet in the elder Dregan’s head would also forever remain her own dark secret.
“Not funny,” had been Peter’s curt reply.
As Raven chided herself for again resorting to humor to ease her own anxiety, she could almost hear the gears turning inside Peter’s head. Despite their close proximity, it seemed as if a mile-wide gulf had just opened between them. She had a hunch he wanted to ask those very questions concerning the hows and whys of his father’s demise, but was afraid to.
As it grew hot inside the trunk from their combined body heat, they both began to sweat. To add insult to injury, Peter took to repeating the same two words every couple of minutes until the soldiers returned in their truck nearly half an hour after they’d motored west.
Raven and Peter were both holding their breath in the dark, tomb-like trunk when the approaching engine noise and hollow pops of tires on gravel overrode the patter of raindrops on the Hornet’s thin sheet metal.
They had remained hidden as the soldiers ransacked the house and RV. Then, Raven had watched wide-eyed through her peephole as a pair of stony-faced Asian soldiers moved from car to car, searching trunks and interiors, beginning with a big rusting Cadillac near the back of the house. After thirty minutes or so, with the pair of soldiers yet to search any of the cars near where the Hornet languished, a small man who seemed to be in charge bellowed something in a foreign language. Seeming eager to leave, the subordinate soldiers piled into the pickup, which promptly started up and drove away east, toward the darkening sky.
The moment the truck was out of earshot, Raven and Peter had scrambled from the trunk and sprinted for the perceived safety of the aspen grove.
During their first hour on the move, the kids had remained inside the tree line. However, the closer they got to Woodruff, the more zombies they began to encounter within the rapidly thinning forest. Aside
from the herd hunting the elk in the woods near the quarry, this kind of behavior was new to Raven.
After coming close to being surrounded by a number of rotters hanging out behind a partially burned Itasca travel trailer hidden just inside the tree line, Raven had led them from the woods to the road, where they endured a ten-minute barrage of stinging rain being driven hard in front of a prevailing west wind.
Over the course of the second hour, the pair had covered the three miles to the outskirts of Woodruff, walking single file down the center of the road. Along the way, attracted by the sound of their boots striking blacktop, slowly but surely the kids had attracted an entourage of undead.
Now, two hours after slipping from the trunk and melting into the aspens, Raven and Peter stood amid jumbled squares of city sidewalk, underneath a massive oak tree looming tall over a sign that read: Entering Woodruff - Pop. 180. The night was moonless. High cloud cover completely blotted out the stars and planets normally dominant overhead. To the naked eye, everything spread out before Peter was black and indistinguishable.
Viewed through the four-tube NVGs, everything spread out before Raven from where she stood to the debris-strewn intersection of Center and Main was rendered in tones of white, gray, and black.
As she looked over her shoulder to relay to Peter what she was seeing, she spotted the undead posse that had been hunting them for the better part of the last hour. They were still a couple of minutes back, maybe five long country blocks. And though she was certain the two-dozen-strong clutch of recently turned zombies couldn’t see a thing in the dark, judging by the way they panned their heads back and forth, eyes roving wildly in their skulls, it was obvious they were still hunting her and Peter by sound.
Raven watched Peter react to the distant moans. Saw his face go slack and his body snap rigid. If this was what abject terror did to a person, she knew what she had looked like that day when she saw her undead grandfather after he’d been feeding on Nana.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 13): Gone Page 29