Oliver stared out over the shiny hood at the peaks where residual pockets of snow high up on their flanks reflected the low-hanging sun. “There’s no skiing up there,” he stated matter-of-factly.
“No shit.”
“What are you planning, then?”
Abruptly, Daymon pulled the Chevy to the right. He rattled the transmission into Park and dragged the keys from the ignition. Looking at Oliver, he said in a pleading voice, “Just humor me … please.”
Semiautomatic pistol in one hand, keys in the other, Daymon stepped to the road and closed the door at his back.
Oliver actuated the power door locks and then looked on as Daymon approached a weed-choked gate on the opposite side of the road. Interest mounting, Oliver craned and watched the lanky man crouch on the shoulder for a tick before rising and venturing into the knee-high grass growing up through the soft dirt fronting the gate. After a few seconds spent standing before the gate, Daymon pushed it inward and returned to the pickup with a substantial length of chain in hand.
Back behind the wheel and ignoring the quizzical look on Oliver’s face, Daymon pulled the pickup across the road and nosed it through the yawning gate.
Taking the chain with him, Daymon hustled back to the gate and secured it with the Schlage padlock—just as he’d left it weeks ago. After looking both directions up and down the road, he returned to the truck displaying the same sense of urgency as when he’d initially approached the gate.
Not a second had passed between the time Daymon’s door slammed shut and Oliver’s interrogation began. “What the hell are we doing here?”
“You’ll see,” Daymon answered cryptically as they barreled north on a smooth, paved road flanked by nicely manicured trees and once sculpted hedges clearly in need of a gardener’s attention.
Chapter 7
They followed the winding drive in silence until a lone zombie came into view on Oliver’s side of the truck. Upon hearing the engine noise, the male first turn instantly snapped its head in their direction and raised its pustule-riddled arms. Head bobbing and seemingly restrained by an invisible hand, the thing marched in place, its bare feet churning the muddy shoulder as it struggled mightily to set foot on the pavement.
“Was that here before?”
Daymon snorted. “He’s right where I left him. You could say he’s on a stake out.”
“You made him your fuckin’ pet?”
“Early warning system is more like it. The simple fact that he’s still standing likely means nobody’s driven this road since I did last.”
Oliver recoiled from his window as the wing mirror came into contact with the zombie’s left hand. The solid thud was still resonating through the door when the keen of fingernails raking sheet metal started up. Disgusted, he asked, “What’d you do, stake its foot to the ground?”
“Not quite,” Daymon answered with a soft chuckle. “I tethered the Z to a stake. Rope’s around his waist. Reaaaall tight. He isn’t going anywhere without help.”
Warily eyeing the rotting cadaver’s shrinking reflection in the side mirror, Oliver said, “You’re one sick individual.”
“Sick is in the mind of the beholder, my friend.”
After a short right-hand bend, a basketball standard and garishly painted basketball court came into view. As the sports court slid by on Daymon’s side, a three-story house filled up the entire windshield. It was all wood and stone and framed by the naked boughs of a picket of mature trees planted long ago. Where the drive spilled to a large circular parking pad, the Bear Mountain Range was visible rising up behind the house.
Oliver whistled. “Looks like this McMansion missed the left turn to Aspen.”
“Exactly,” Daymon said, smiling. “Reminds me of the houses back in Jackson Hole. And that pad there”—he wheeled the truck right and pointed left at a long rectangular area of poured concrete. It was newer, stark white, and stood out from the rest—“is where I found the Winnebago me and Heidi call home. Believe it or not, it was gassed up and ready to go.”
“Judging by that cow pasture gate at the road, you’d never know the drive would lead to a house of this caliber.”
“Or any house for that matter,” Daymon proffered. “And I want to keep it looking that way.” He steered the pickup in a big counterclockwise loop and parked it on the herringbone pavers underneath the covered entry adjacent to the front door. “Because one day when the effin dead actually start dying off this will be mine and Heidi’s retirement home.”
Oliver walked his gaze over the home. It was constructed of wood beams secured with rugged-looking rubbed-bronze iron bands. The roof and gutters were black steel and contrasted nicely with the pale gray stonework running up both sides of the huge wood and iron front door. Numerous gables jutted up through the multi-faceted roof. The windows on each floor were flanked by legitimate storm shutters. Constructed from what looked like louvered steel and mounted to the home on sturdy-looking hinges, the black slabs made the mini mansion look damn formidable from any angle.
After a pregnant pause, Oliver asked, “Whose place is it and where are they? I never heard any of the usual rumors that hit the wire when new money comes putting roots down around here. At least my mom didn’t mention it. Which is not like her at all.”
“There was nobody home when I was here last,” Daymon said. “Looks like it has been shut up since before the shit hit the fan. The junk mail in the recycling bin inside was postmarked well before summer.”
“Maybe this was their winter retreat.”
“Couldn’t think of a better place to store the RV. It’s a pretty easy drive to Yellowstone and Grand Teton from here. Both are very beautiful year round. Plus, there’s a trailer and four new snowmobiles in the garage.”
Oliver craned around. “Where is the garage?”
“That’s the best part of the place. It’s out back and full to the brim with toys. Hell, I felt bad leaving the spare 4Runner parked in there with all those big dollar rides.” Daymon killed the motor. Grabbing his AR from the backseat, he asked, “Coming or staying?”
Oliver hesitated.
“Because we’ve got to get back to the compound before hooking up with the others, It’ll just be a quick in and out. No sightseeing.”
“I’d just slow you down,” Oliver replied, looking over his shoulder. “What makes you sure there’s nobody already squatting inside?”
“I have a few tricks up my sleeve,” Daymon said. “Learned my lesson the hard way in Hannah waking up with a Glock stuck in my face.”
“Cade?”
Daymon nodded. “I was slippin’ … won’t happen again.”
Grinning, Oliver said, “And that’s why you tea-bagged him at Mom’s place.”
“Bingo,” Daymon said. “And that’s why we’re here. Be right back. Don’t forget to lock ‘er up.”
Oliver nodded. In fact, the door locks were thunking home before Daymon’s boot hit the front stairs. Oliver looked on from the truck as the former BLM firefighter ran his hand around the door jamb and fiddled with the lock and brass handle. After the cursory inspection, Daymon flashed a thumbs-up and set off for the corner of the house closest to the RV parking pad, black AR carbine held at a low ready.
And a poor tea-bagging at that, thought Oliver, walking his gaze in a full three-sixty around the truck. He didn’t even drop his trousers.
Two miles west of the McMansion, Lev and Jamie were already exiting Back In The Saddle Rehab emptyhanded. The pair of first turns that had been locked inside and wandering freely about the downstairs area were sprawled out on the cement ramp where Jamie had felled them. Just as she’d been conditioned to do since the dead things started walking, the old knock and listen had proven effective.
Once inside, however, everything of use in treating an injury or instrumental to someone on the road to recovery from one had been stripped from the place. Downstairs, papers with pictures of models performing therapeutic exercises littered the floor. They’d found
the floor-to-ceiling cabinets all thrown open, the plastic bins once containing the exercise handouts on the floor, some of them in shards as if they had been kicked and then stomped on. Staggered boot prints of varying sizes and with different tread patterns marked up the scattered papers with a reddish-brown mud.
Only office furniture, file cabinets, and the festering corpses of a young mother and her little one occupied the second floor.
In short, humans had picked the place as clean as the birds had the bones of the dozens of corpses sprawled in silent repose in the parking lot and sidewalk alongside the ransacked business.
From the rehab place’s elevated back entry, Jamie surveyed the gravel parking lot. “Well that was a bust,” she said, throwing the empty day pack over a shoulder.
Standing beside the F-650, Lev cocked his head and looked to his left. A tick later, engine sounds could be heard riding the wind somewhere well north of them.
“Whoever tore up the place,” he said, his attention still on the familiar engine growl approaching from the north, “there must have been a whole bunch of ‘em.”
“Half a dozen, at least,” Jamie said. “I counted that many unique shoe prints in there.” She nudged the corpse at her feet. “What’s really bugging me is how these two got shut inside after the breathers left.”
“Let’s hope they aren’t evolving,” Lev said, brow cocked. “They learn to turn handles and work keys in locks, we are toast.”
Jamie fixed Lev with a concerned look.
“Cade and Duncan believe they go through some of the motions they used to. Just not consciously. And that’s a theory I can get behind.”
Jamie shuddered at the thought of a pistol-wielding corpse. Or worse, a handful of them thwarting a door by a means other than brute force and entering the Eden compound employing stealth and cunning. “You’re right. We’d be done so quick if they did evolve.”
“I bet the owners of those boots left the door cracked when they left,” Lev theorized. “Then the two that were in there barged in and accidently bumped it closed behind them.”
Cocking her head toward the engine noise and recognizing it as the throaty growl of the Kids’ Raptor, Jamie asked, “You think maybe Dregan and the Bear River folks are responsible for this?”
Lev shook his head. “They agreed to leave the north to us. Besides, those tire tracks in the lot run deep and were definitely made by something much larger than anything of theirs we’ve seen so far. The wheelbase looks to be a good deal wider than a military Hummer.”
“Wider than the Graysons’ Ford, too,” she observed, glancing away from the chevron-patterned indentations and settling her gaze on the mud-spattered black pickup parked beside the tire tracks in question.
Lev’s face tightened. “Yep,” he said, exhaling. “Could be a threat to Eden if they get lucky and follow us home like Dregan did Cade.”
“Speaking in Cade’s defense,” Jamie said, “Dregan followed his tire tracks in the snow to Eden.”
“Whatever the case,” Lev said agreeably. “We still better keep our eyes peeled. And it would be wise for us to stop every once in a while, kill the engines, and listen. The motor stuffed under the hood of the thing that made these tracks is probably diesel and makes a hell of a racket. And that’ll carry real well considering this autumn quiet.”
After scanning the area one last time from the elevated perch for any rotters backing the F-650 into the lot may have attracted, the pair closed the door and made their way to the vehicle, heads on a swivel and weapons sweeping the lot.
Chapter 8
Head panning side-to-side, Daymon padded around the southwest corner of the multi-story home and struck off north in its shadow. All along the walk the bushes growing up beside the house brushed his right side as he made his way to the red paver drive he knew looped around back between the house and massive garage.
Thirty paces from the front of the house, he found himself facing a structure nearly half the size of the one at his back. Finished in the same stone and exposed timber style as the main residence, the garage rose up two stories and partially eclipsed the Bear Range to the east.
The roll-up doors all passed inspection, as did the dead-bolted door on the garage’s far northeast corner.
So far so good, he thought, turning his attention to the main home’s covered back porch and half-dozen stairs leading up to it.
The thick welcome mat on the decking in front of the sturdy wood door was just as he had left it: lined up perfectly with the marks he’d scribed with his knife on the deck next to each of its outside corners.
After banging on the door with a closed fist, Daymon waited the requisite half-minute listening for the telltale sounds of the dead: low-in-timbre moaning of the recently turned. Dry hisses of the first turned. Numb knees and shins inadvertently moving furniture around inside. Or, lastly, as Daymon ticked off the seconds in his head, cold dead flesh slamming headlong into the closed door he was about to enter.
Thankfully, none of the above happened. A minute removed from his last words with Oliver, Daymon was working the key in the lock and holding his breath. There was a soft click. Simultaneously, he pushed the door inward and took a wide step to his left, carbine trained on the ever-widening slice in which the home’s well-lit mudroom was presented.
He saw the washer and dryer first. Expensive items on pedestals with seemingly a thousand settings and something called “steam finishing.” There were a number of high-dollar jackets on pegs. Below the jackets were four different sets of new-looking boots still lined up smallest to largest just as he had arranged them.
Daymon closed the door at his back and ventured into the kitchen, stunted dreads bobbing with each footfall.
With its stainless steel Viking appliances, black granite counters, and bright white woodwork, the modern kitchen could have graced the pages of Architectural Digest. Maybe it had, Daymon mused as he made his way past the jumbo island to the formal dining room where a live-edge plank table in dark wood was arranged horizontally between the kitchen and wide-open family room.
After a quick glance to the grand staircase left of the front entry, Daymon padded across the room to the massive plate glass window looking out over the porch, red brick parking round and black pickup with Oliver still in the passenger seat, head on a swivel, the same as when Daymon had left him there.
***
After making a quick trip upstairs, Daymon returned the way he’d come and was outside the back door with a bulging gym bag in hand, carbine slung over his shoulder, and locking the door with his key.
Still on the porch, he stood still for a moment and looked over both shoulders. Nothing moved. The garage sat quiet, its windows darkened. The picket of trees encircling the rear of the property sighed and shimmied as a light east wind coursed through their upper boughs.
Satisfied he was still alone, he turned back to face his casa, squared the mat’s corners back up as he’d found them, and took the stairs down two at a time.
***
The quick in and out of Daymon’s future home coupled with the sprint back to the truck had burned all of two minutes. Thirty additional seconds went by as he slid behind the wheel, turned the engine over, and nosed the truck south down the winding drive.
In total three minutes were history and Oliver’s questions were filling the cab when the gate came into view.
After bringing the truck to a grinding halt a dozen feet from the gate, like a policeman directing traffic, Daymon silenced the yammering by holding his heavily calloused palm in front of Oliver’s pasty face.
“Give it a rest until I get us through the gate safely, will ya?”
Still feeling the last vestiges of the cold chill brought on by the keen of the staked-down Z’s fingernails raking the driver’s side door as they had wheeled past, Daymon shouldered open his door.
From his seat, Oliver shot a sour look at Daymon’s back as he stepped from the truck. Stewing internally from the perceived insult, he
watched the dreadlocked man crawl up onto the fence’s middle rung and give the road ten seconds of scrutiny in either direction before throwing the latch and swinging the gate open.
“Clear?” Oliver asked once Daymon was back behind the wheel and had closed the door.
“For now,” Daymon answered. “But there’s a rotter a few hundred feet down the road. Must have seen or heard us coming in. And the squeaky gate just got its undivided attention.” He rattled the transmission into Drive and wheeled them out onto the road and stopped the Chevy straddling the centerline, its chromed grill aimed at the ambling ghoul. “You want to earn your man card?”
Oliver remained tightlipped.
“C’mon … water your balls. Get out there and kill it face to face.”
Still Oliver sat in silence, staring at the approaching corpse.
“This ain’t no different than bombing down a double black for the first time, OG. Sure you’ve got the butterflies. We all still get them now and again. But once you get the tips over the precipice and commit … survival instinct takes over and edges the fear out. Same as doing a rotter up close and personal. You stab it in the brain. It falls. It’s all over. Plus, you’ll find there’s a certain sense of satisfaction you get from giving it sweet release.” He tucked his longest dreads behind his ears and fixed a no-nonsense stare on Oliver.
“Sure it’s different, Daymon. Way different. You fuck up on the ski hill and ski patrol’ll strap you in the basket and take you to the med hut. Best case scenario you’ve only sprained something and they give you a pain killer or two. Next thing you know you’re in the bar chasing them down with a shot of Rumple Minze.”
“Jägermeister …” Daymon interrupted. “Hell yes. Those were the days.”
Oliver made a face then went on, “Worst case scenario: a concussion and broken bones gets you aboard a life flight heading to Ogden or Salt Lake. If I freeze up out there and get bit my mom will kill me. Then, after she kills me, she will kill you. Probably with your own blade.”
District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 5