After inspecting the ground around the entry, Daymon unwrapped a chain and pulled the steel tube gate toward him.
Duncan recognized the style: four horizontal bars intersected by more of the same running diagonal between them. Sheep gate was what he’d heard them called. He looked beyond the road and saw brambles and what could be walnut trees. Nothing he saw suggested the tree-choked acreage ever supported sheep or livestock.
“You want us all to follow?”
“I was hoping you would,” Daymon answered, climbing into his pickup.
“These rigs might make it down the road,” Duncan noted. “But where’re we going to turn ‘em around?”
Daymon closed his door. “You’d be surprised. Just follow … it’ll be a quick in and out.” He pointed at Lev in the F-650 bringing up the rear. “Close and chain the gate after.”
“You sure about this?” Foley asked as Daymon pulled onto the feeder road.
“Positive.”
***
Three minutes after pulling off of the paved single-lane and onto the gravel feeder road, all four pickups were parked in the huge circular turnaround fronting the stone and timber home.
Duncan was first out. He paced to the bottom of the first run of stairs leading up to the multi-story mini-mansion and whistled. “Snowbasin, eat your heart out.” Finished ogling the structure, he turned and walked the twenty yards or so to the basketball court. He halted at center court and turned a full circle, eyeballing the pair of regulation standards sprouting from the smooth asphalt at either baseline.
Carrying a carbine one-handed and working his way toward the north side of the house, Daymon said, “Nice setup, huh?”
“Three-quarter court?”
Grinning, Daymon replied, “Full size … it’s longer than the RV they had parked next to it.”
Duncan nodded. “Who’s they?”
Daymon shrugged as if to say beats me.
“Wish I had a ball,” Wilson said.
Daymon stopped in his tracks and regarded the redhead, one brow arched. “You got game?”
“I was a high school starter. So, yeah … I’d say I have game.”
“We’ll have to find out some day.”
Still sitting in the F-650, Lev asked why they were here.
Daymon explained how he found the place and what he had planned for it.
“You two are going to be rural Utah’s Bill and Melinda Gates,” Duncan quipped. “If Dregan is the Natural Gas King of the area … what’s your title gonna be?”
“Claustrophobic in recovery. Sure you can relate,” said Daymon. “I’ll be right back.”
Suddenly gone serious, Duncan looked to Wilson and Taryn. “You two watch the road.”
Hustling to Daymon’s side, Foley announced he was coming along.
“Suit yourself,” Daymon said, picking up his pace.
Once the pair had rounded the corner and were walking in the shadow of the massive multi-car garage, Foley cleared his throat theatrically. He removed his worn ball cap and ran a hand through his thinning hair.
“You got something to say?”
“What was up with the chained-up Z beside the road?”
“He’s my watch rotter,” Daymon replied as he mounted the stairs to the side door.
“You chained him up there?”
“Yep,” Daymon said, running his hand around the doorjamb.
“That’s kind of a dick move.”
Daymon turned on the stair and peered down at Foley. Was the guy a mind reader or some shit?
“But it’s an effective dick move,” Daymon conceded. “What should I do? Put it out of its misery? It’s no longer human.”
“It was someone’s son or brother. Some little kid probably called him Daddy before all of this.”
Daymon nodded. Time to lead by example, he told himself. He inspected the Welcome mat then looked through the window and scrutinized the contents of the mud room.
“Well?”
“Oliver’s not here,” Daymon stated confidently. “And he hasn’t been here, either. The door mat is exactly as I left it.” Without meeting Foley’s gaze, he turned and tromped down the stairs, brushing past the shorter man.
Back at the circular drive, Daymon reported his findings to the others.
Duncan raised a hand and spun it clockwise, finger cutting the air. “North it is, then. Mount up troops.” He looked to Daymon. “Can I have a word with you, please?”
Sighing audibly and feeling like a kid being called out in front of the entire class, Daymon looked a question at his friend.
“The rotter by the road?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Daymon replied, hauling his door open. “I’ll take care of it.” He climbed behind the wheel and buckled in.
“Good on you,” Foley said, hauling his shoulder belt on. “Maybe Dregan knows where to get a dog.”
“Maybe,” Daymon replied. He waited for the others to mount up, then fired up his Chevy and dropped it into gear.
***
After driving in silence the short distance to where the Z was chained and staked down, Daymon stopped the Chevy and dismounted. Keeping to his word, he approached the snarling Z and, with one downward chop of his aptly named machete, freed one man’s soul and cleansed a small portion of his own karmic slate in the process.
Chapter 50
The group stumbled upon Sasha’s mountain bike thirteen miles north of Woodruff. After crisscrossing all twelve square blocks of Randolph and finding only walking corpses and houses, businesses, barns, and outbuildings with their doors either scribed with an X or hanging wide open on busted hinges, it was painfully obvious to them that whoever had picked Woodruff clean of supplies was also responsible for doing the same here. That there were a handful of virgin doors in the tiny town—probably booby trapped or hiding another Z, its flesh stripped to the bone—strengthened that first impression and made moving on with four empty truck beds and no trace of Oliver easier for all to bear.
Finding the bike had been a stroke of pure luck brought upon by three separate occurrences taking place seconds apart. First, the rain ceased and the clouds parted, allowing the sun to wash a narrow stretch of 16 that had been undergoing a minor repaving project before the world went to hell. Then, the convoy crested a rise in the road and came upon a pair of flesh eaters taking up more than their share of said stretch of torn-up state route, which forced Duncan to jerk the Dodge to the far right shoulder in order to keep from hitting the doddering duo. Lastly, two wheels riding the shoulder and kicking up gravel led to Duncan seeing a glint of sun off of chrome a hundred feet distant, which in turn led to him stopping in the general vicinity of his sighting and happening upon the girl’s 18-speed mountain bike at the bottom of the roadside ditch.
With Glenda’s tearful admonition for him to return with her boy echoing in his head, Duncan watched the other vehicles creep past the zombies and glide to a stop, all three trucks lined up bumper to bumper in the southbound lane.
Now, sitting in the idling Dodge with its door propped partway open and his muddy boots dangling a foot above the road, Duncan glanced over his shoulder at Tran. “Staying or coming?” he asked, hopping to the still damp blacktop.
Tran glanced in the wing mirror. Just above the words OBJECTS ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR he saw the zombies. Their heads lolled lazily and their eerie hissing carried on the wind as they trundled toward the stopped vehicles. “I’ll stay here and keep watch for you,” he said, eyes never leaving the macabre sight reflected in the mirror.
“Good man, Tran,” Duncan replied, grabbing his shotgun and Stetson. “Hit that horn if you see anything approaching from the north.”
Binoculars already in hand, Tran nodded, his brown eyes liquid and focused intently on the zombies.
Everyone but Taryn was on the road by now and advancing forward. “I’ll watch our six,” she called out, binoculars in hand and the upper half of her body already protruding through the truck’s open moon roof.
/> Duncan nodded then shifted his gaze to the bike. At once he noticed that its rear wheel was bowed in considerably. Tacoed, is what he had heard his little brother, Logan, call it when he’d done the same to his rim while biking in Moab years ago. The knobby tire was deflated and hung limply off the rim. He bent over and lifted the twisted heap from the knee-high grass. Half pushing, half dragging, he removed it from the ditch and held it upright on the blacktop, where he saw the frame was cracked near the seat post and most of the root-beer-brown paint had been abraded from the side that had been facing down.
The bike had taken a beating. That was for sure.
Duncan laid the bike down on the soft shoulder and strode to the Dodge’s front bumper, where he turned on a heel and began a slow, head-down walk to the parked vehicles. Sensing all eyes on him, he lifted his gaze from the road and regarded the others. “Maybe one of you could go search both ditches further up the road. Someone else needs to climb the fence and search the tall grass. Start on the side the bike ended up.”
“What are we looking for?” asked Wilson.
“A dead body,” answered Daymon, eyes already sweeping the road ahead. “Oliver’s … dead … body. I’ll take care of the rotters.”
“No. Allow me,” Foley insisted, brushing past the taller man. “About time I do a little more than set up solar panels and keep the communications shack running.”
Seeing Foley win the argument, Duncan cast scrutiny on the road to the south. Though he was no crash-scene detective, he saw the writing on the wall. The mangled bike. The twin stripes of rubber on the down side of the crest. Put together, these clues told him a speeding vehicle braked a little before hitting the bike from the rear. And from the position of the bend in the rim, he guessed the vehicle had been fitted with a grill guard or some kind of bumper overriders. After the second it took him to process all of this, he looked at Wilson and reluctantly answered his question.
“Daymon’s right. Oliver’s body is probably somewhere around here.” He sighed, his body seemingly deflating as he did so. “Look for a blood trail. Follow it and I guarantee you’re not going to find a pot of gold at the end.”
Lev and Wilson scaled the barbed wire fence bordering 16 to the east.
Head down and ignoring the death dance taking place between Foley and the pair of first turns a dozen yards off her right shoulder, Jamie walked the ditch north from where the bike had been resting, trampling the grass under her boots and warily eyeing the ground to her fore for anything moving—alive or dead.
“I found something,” Lev called. He was facing the group and holding aloft Daymon’s crossbow, which was nearly folded in half with feathery strands of fiberglass the only thing keeping one limb of the thing attached to the bent barrel.
“No body?” Duncan asked.
Wilson shook his head. “No blood either.”
On the opposite side of the fence, Jamie lifted her boot off the spongy, sucking ground and said, “I found his night vision goggles. They’re toast.”
“Take ‘em for parts,” Duncan ordered. “Everyone mount up. Oliver’s not here.”
Still holding out hope to find Oliver in one state or another—for some closure, if nothing else—Daymon said, “What makes you so sure?”
“I think someone saw him roll through Randolph.” Arm horizontal to the ground, Duncan swept it all the way around from the south, where the skid marks began just in front of the downslope, to the northbound lane behind his truck where Foley was dragging the last of the rotters from the road, the fresh blood trails glistening dark black against the nearly dry surface. “And then that someone got in their vehicle and chose this spot to run him down. The way 16 is hemmed in on both sides by fence for a mile or more prior to the repaving project, here makes it the perfect place to do so.”
Having just returned and caught the tail end of the conversation, Foley halted on the centerline and gazed down the road toward Randolph. “This close to town he wouldn’t have had much time to act. Especially in the dark. There would have been nowhere for him to escape to … even if he dismounted.”
“Means whoever did it knows this road pretty good,” Lev added, chucking the now useless crossbow to the ground where he’d found it. “Also means they probably didn’t want to kill him.”
“You all can interpret this any way you want,” Daymon said. “I’m afraid Oliver’s latest vision quest may be over before it really got going.”
“That’s harsh,” Foley said, disgust in his voice.
“He made his bed. I’m just calling it how I see it,” Daymon responded coldly.
Returning with the NVGs dangling from her hand by the strap, Jamie said, “I think they meant to hurt him just bad enough that it would be easy for them to take him alive. Which makes me think it was only one person. Maybe even the same person who was watching us back in Woodruff.”
“Whatever shape Oliver’s in,” Duncan drawled, “he’s either already a prisoner at Bear Lake, or whoever did this is taking him there now.”
“That’s enough,” Daymon said in a low voice. “I’m partly responsible for this … so I’m the one who should go after him.”
“Let’s think this through a minute,” Duncan said.
“No thinking necessary,” Daymon shot, casting a sidelong glance at the others. “I’m going with or without you all. Whoever’s going with me better say so now.”
Hands went up all around. Even Taryn leaned from the Raptor’s open window and cast her own vote to go.
Duncan looked over the rest of the group, meeting each person’s gaze for a beat until he arrived back to Daymon. “I’m in,” he said, resignation evident in his tone. “But we have to take it easy.”
“We have a saying in the Army,” Lev began. “Slow is smooth—”
“—and smooth is fast,” Duncan finished. “Mount up. Oliver’s life may be hanging in the balance.”
Chapter 51
After laying the Screamers out and swinging around wide of the target building, Ari nosed Jedi One-One north over multiple parking lots and auxiliary buildings to the wide expanse of fenced-in asphalt behind a shipping and receiving warehouse. Intent on giving the Screamers twenty or thirty minutes to draw the throng of Zs away from the building, he settled the bird next to the black Chinooks, shut her down, and joined the Rangers and air crew outside for a much-needed piss and stretch of the legs.
***
Twenty-three minutes after deploying the Screamers south and north of the black obelisk of a building, Ari held the Ghost Hawk in a hover twenty feet above a copse of cottonwoods bordering a traffic-snarled freeway off-ramp half a mile northeast of the Delta team’s insertion point. While Ari worked the controls to keep the bird steady, Haynes manipulated the nose-mounted FLIR pod, bracketing the nine-story glass and metal building and then piping the slightly wavering image onto the flat-panel display in the passenger cabin.
“Looks like they’ve taken the bait,” Cade said.
“They always do,” answered Cross. “I’ve seen the living show interest and come a looking, too.”
Cade took his eyes off the army-ant-like march of the dead taking place on the monitor. “Chinese?”
“Yep. Griff and I had been following a two-man team since they crossed over into Nevada from California. We hung back and tracked them by the dust they were kicking up. Finally they just up and stopped and set up shop right outside of Vegas. Stowed their motorcycles behind a roadside sign just like the ones the cops hide behind in the movies and pitched a tent in its shadow. So we dump our bikes and while I’m praying our dust trail dissipates before theirs, I see this sign that says Vegas 3 Miles and below that is that famous tag line.”
“What happens in Vegas—,” Cade began, nodding and smiling.
“—stays in Vegas,” Griff finished, flashing a half-smile of his own.
“Technically they weren’t in Vegas yet,” Cade noted.
“Technically, you’re correct,” Cross said. “But something did happ
en, all the same.”
Griff was full on grinning now. He said, “With the sun going down we decide that going into Vegas, what with all the dead still there, was out of the question. We’re almost out of MREs and water and wanting to exfil anyway when Cross sees one of them come out of the tent, edge around the sign, and cop a squat right out in the open.”
“And then one of you decided to throw a mini-Screamer his way,” Cade said, running the hilarious scenario over in his mind.
“That I did,” Cross said, the beginning of a smile revealing his unnaturally white teeth.
“Cali boy has a hell of an arm,” Griff said, nodding.
“And then one of you wankers shot the squatter just as he was pulling his drawers up to keep a screaming woman from seeing his manly bits,” Axe added, his curiosity now piqued.
“That was Griff’s job,” Cross said. “I shot the other PLA puke in the face when he poked it between the tent flaps.”
Ari interrupted. “And you two still owe Ripley some beers. I heard that cramming your motorcycles, the prisoner and their gear into her Osprey along with the injured heading to Bastion from the MWTC siege got her panties in a bunch.” Chuckling over the comms, Ari side-slipped the helo from cover and nosed her down, beginning the first leg of a long circuitous route that would eventually have them approaching the infil location from the southeast.
“I’d have helped her get them out,” Skipper intoned, a rare smile forming below his visor. “She’s pretty hot.”
Axe grinned at the comment.
Cross ignored it. In a serious tone, he said, “The takedown was well worth the intel we got from the Chinese captain whose name I couldn’t pronounce. Once they were translated, the documents he was carrying led to us learning about their ambitious extermination plan.”
“And how today’s target plays into it,” Ari said. “Two mikes, men. Looks like our undead friends have taken up the game of soccer.”
District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 28