District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  “You’re not going in that way,” Daymon said. “Unless, that is, whoever put the board there decided to half-ass it.” He gently swept Tran and Lev aside with his long right arm and backed away from the garage door a half-dozen feet. Imitating a place kicker lining up a game-winning field goal, he squared up with the doggy door, took one and a half steps to his left, and then stuck his index finger toward the sky as if testing the wind direction.

  “Hut, hut … hike,” said Lev, playing along.

  Tran watched with a confused look on his face as Daymon performed a theatrical forward stutter step a tick before driving a powerful wide-arcing kick toward the door.

  There was an explosive bang as his boot struck the plywood shoring the dog door. Immediately following the loud report, there was a clatter of something skittering across the cement floor inside the garage.

  “Yep, they half-assed it,” Lev said. “Nice form, Daymon.”

  Daymon smiled and made a show of knocking the imaginary dust from his hands. Then he lifted the flap and nodded to Tran. “All yours, Fido.”

  ***

  By the time Daymon and Lev made their way around to the front door, Tran had been on the inside for less than thirty seconds. When the interior door sucked inward, which in turn caused the outer storm door to rattle in its frame, the newly minted cat burglar had been gone for two minutes, tops.

  After working the lock, Tran pushed the storm door out ahead of him and stepped aside to let Daymon and Lev pass.

  Squinting against the flat light spilling in through the north-facing floor-to-ceiling windows, Daymon padded a few paces beyond the foyer and looked around the empty great room.

  “Nothing dead in here?” he asked, his chest tight and mind threatening to take him back to Hannah.

  Tran shook his head. “There are no demons inside,” he stated confidently.

  Daymon said, “Well, well, maybe our luck is changing.”

  There was a lull in the wind and for few beats Lev’s woodpecker was back, the banging now crisp and clear and coming over the lake from somewhere west of the house.

  M4 held at low ready, Lev padded around Daymon and Tran and moved deeper into the unfurnished house. Upon hearing Daymon’s optimistic talk, he called over his shoulder, “My money is on Mr. Murphy making an appearance before nightfall.”

  “You and Cade and your damn Army superstitions,” Daymon said, his voice echoing off the bare walls and floors. “I prefer to call it bad luck. And if it wasn’t for that, I’d have no luck at all.”

  “We find Oliver alive,” replied Lev, “I’ll change my mind. Until then, color me pessimistic.”

  Daymon looked across the wide-open floor, past Lev and out the ground-level slider. The sky to the north was darker than ever and the lake’s surface was wind-churned and resembled the Pacific more so than the placid, brilliant blue lake he remembered. Down by the shore a lone, waterlogged-looking zombie was doddering toward the noisy machine.

  Lev nudged a box full of dishes with his boot. “Looks like the owners were either moving in or moving out before the event.”

  Head tilted slightly, Tran shot Lev a questioning glance.

  “The event,” Lev said. “The dead rising. People eating other people. Martial Law.”

  Tran nodded an acknowledgement and headed for the stairs leading up to the second level.

  As Tran disappeared from view, Daymon retraced his steps across the living room and slipped into the garage through the door off the foyer.

  Lev had been alone for but a handful of seconds and was roaming the kitchen when Daymon called for him.

  “Coming,” he said, crossing the room. Pausing before the threshold to the garage, he wasn’t at all surprised to see that it was half-full of boxes with the names of all the usual rooms in a house labeled on their sides in neat block letters. He descended the single stair and crabbed between the boxes until he came upon Daymon surrounded by shipping peanuts and elbows deep in a steamer-trunk-sized box marked Pacific City Beach House.

  “What’d you find, someone’s collection of priceless glass floats?”

  “Better than that,” Daymon replied, pulling a white cylindrical object from the box and inadvertently adding more of the green Styrofoam squiggly things to the growing pile on the floor.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a spotting scope. I’d guess its previous owners used it for eyeballing ships off whatever coast Pacific City is on.”

  “Or ogling bathing beauties from afar,” Lev proffered, flashing a sly grin.

  “Or,” Daymon said, excited at the prospect of not having to venture out into the passing squall, “covertly ogling the first two or three miles of shoreline in either direction.”

  “I doubt if it has the reach in this weather.”

  Tran showed up in the doorway. “There’s a perfect spot for it in the master suite upstairs. Let’s set it up.”

  “With unobstructed views to the west, north, and east?” asked Lev.

  Tran nodded.

  Relieving Daymon of one end of the three-foot-long scope, Lev said, “Good job, Tran. As a prize you get to grab the tripod and show us the way.”

  ***

  With the spotting scope set up behind a sliding glass door in the master bedroom that featured a stunning two-hundred-seventy-degree view of the lake, Daymon started his visual recon beginning with Rendezvous Beach. Obviously once home to hundreds—if not thousands—of people fleeing urban population centers during the first days of the outbreak, the sandy beach and treed campgrounds now held only the weather-beaten remnants of the greatest human diaspora known to modern man. Colorful tents and tarps, all flattened by the recent freak snowstorm, dotted nearly every square inch of the trio of strung-together campgrounds.

  Rising up from the sea of wind-whipped technicolor fabric were dozens of latrines, one for each group of tent sites, if he remembered correctly. And even more plentiful than the small, boxy johns were the trees planted among the sites to provide a modicum of privacy as well as much-needed shade during the hot summer months.

  Erected near the southeast end of Rendezvous Beach and hammering away seemingly non-stop were the machines responsible for the noise Lev had initially attributed to a woodpecker. They were blaze-red, industrial-sized, and powered by gasoline. Two emaciated men were feeding each machine thigh-sized rounds of freshly cut wood. And covering the ground around each machine where they had fallen after being split by the powerful ram-driven blade were dozens of pieces of wood sized perfectly to fit into a fireplace or woodstove.

  Daymon scrutinized the vehicles parked near the wood splitters. Two were ordinary pickups, both box beds containing enough split wood to have them sitting low on their springs. The third vehicle was a Ford Econoline van stretched out in back so that it could accommodate extra passengers. It was painted an industrial gray and bars covered the windows on the inside. He tried reading the writing on the van’s flank, but either his eyesight needed correcting or the viewing angle was too sharp—probably a combination of both, he decided.

  “What do you got?” Lev asked.

  “Two men and five women … no woodpeckers,” Daymon said, taking his eye off the rubber cup. “The men are working the splitters while the women stand around picking their asses. Take a look and tell me what your gut says.”

  Lev bent over the scope and peered into the protruding L-shaped eyepiece. After a long ten-count, during which he panned the scope from the people to the vehicles and then back, he hinged up straight. “You forgot the part about the women being armed. I think the dudes are their prisoners.”

  “Bingo,” Daymon said. “Figured I’d leave the shotguns and pistols for you to pick up on.”

  Tran took a quick peek. “They’re escaped convicts,” he said at once. “The writing on the van says Idaho Department of Corrections. And there are two demons coming their way from the lakeside road.”

  “Ding. Ding. Ding. We have a winner,” Daymon said. “Let’s see how they d
eal with the rotters.” He displaced Tran and watched the melee unfold. It took a few seconds for the taller of the female guards to get wind of the shamblers. Whether she really smelled them on the wind or heard their calls, over the distance it was impossible to tell.

  “Chalk one up for the guards,” Daymon said as he watched two of the women pick long-handled axes off the ground and begin to close with the approaching dead.

  The whole engagement consisted of a little backpedaling to get to a clear patch of ground, followed at once by precisely aimed and timed swings to the zombies’ heads. In fact, to Daymon, these women looked like hardened killers. They were obviously survivors to still be alive this far into the apocalypse, but their posture and demeanor told him they also gave zero fucks.

  As soon as the guards dropped their axes to the ground beside their latest kills, Daymon walked the scope up the lake’s southwestern shore and focused on a subdivision a mile or two south of Garden City. Even at this distance and with the gathering weather, the scope was powerful enough that he could see a half-dozen multi-pitched red-tiled roofs peeking through the surrounding treetops. And though the gauze-like curtain of rain just moving in hampered visibility, he could see that a number of concrete freeway noise barriers had been erected around the clutch of lakeside homes.

  As Daymon slowly surveyed the area, he learned that the wall was still under construction. Running for several hundred feet left to right on the subdivision’s east flank was a garden-variety fence constructed of a mishmash of pressure-treated cedar and chain link. Barbed wire had been strung haphazardly along the top. And clearly slated for future use, a number of cement panels lay stacked north of the unfinished compound. As he glassed the area left of the finished section of wall, he spotted a motor pool of sorts, the silhouettes of a dozen vehicles visible behind the chain-link fence.

  To the right of the fenced-in vehicles and facing away from the lake was what appeared to be the front entrance. The freshly paved road leading up to the compound was blocked by a wheeled gate nearly equal in height to the cement panels flanking it.

  “Copying Bear River, I see,” Daymon said, as his two-way radio emitted its familiar electronic warble.

  He fished the Motorola from a pocket. “Daymon,” he said, keeping his eye glued to the rubber eyepiece.

  “Were you going to check in today?” Duncan asked.

  “Yes, Old Man. I was just about to before I was so rudely interrupted.”

  “Bad news or good?” Duncan drawled.

  “We have eyes on target,” Daymon said, going on to detail the nearby log-splitting operation and how efficiently the locals had dealt with the pair of rotters. Then he went on to describe the distant lakeside compound. Finally, eye still glued to the spotting scope, he took a breath and added, “And I think I just picked up some movement inside their perimeter.”

  “Do you see Oliver?” Duncan asked, sounding tired.

  “Nope. Visibility sucks right now. But once this storm passes, I think, as you like to say, more will be revealed.”

  “Maybe I should be singing that old John Nash song,” Duncan said.

  “What song is that?” asked Daymon, shooting the radio an irritated look.

  “Never mind,” Duncan answered. “Before your time. Good work, by the way. I’m going to send this on to the Thagons and have them tell Dregan and Eden what we’re up against.”

  “Copy that,” said Daymon, a smile creasing his face as a thin, horizontal band of golden sunlight made a brief appearance below the scudding clouds.

  From somewhere around the corner, Tran was singing a song whose lyrics had to do with seeing clearly once the rain had gone.

  Shaking his head, Daymon tilted the scope down and trained it on the woodcutting operation. And just in time, too, because one of the guards was picking her way through the tents and dead bodies on her way to the van. Once there, she craned around its sloped front end and peered cautiously in the general direction of the main road.

  Thumbing the Motorola, Daymon said, “Old Man, the bad girls are closing up shop.”

  The guard spent a few more seconds crouched by the van looking and listening. Just when the rain from the passing storm band began to let up, she rose and walked back to the others while talking into a large walkie-talkie-looking-thing sporting a long, black whip antenna.

  Drawing in a deep breath, Daymon radioed back. “I think they might be onto us. One of the guards just eyeballed the road in your direction and called someone on a big ass walkie-talkie.”

  “Good eye,” Duncan replied. “Stay put and keep tabs on them. I’ll hail you when the cavalry arrives.”

  “Copy that,” Daymon answered, tossing the radio onto the carpeted floor.

  Chapter 64

  Ten minutes after leaving the airspace over Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, roughly twenty miles by crow to the southwest near Suitland, Maryland, Cade spotted the smoke plume rising vertically into the sky. Several hundred feet over the ambush site, the prevailing winds had dispersed the roiling column into a flat gray smudge stretching east to west for a mile or more.

  The closer they got to the killing field, the more Cade got a feeling that the PLA force dispatched to the middle of Maryland was either a diversion of some sort, or had been sent on some kind of sacrificial suicide mission. He watched the pair of Stealth Chinooks suddenly gain speed and bank toward the deck some eight hundred feet below the speeding Ghost Hawk.

  “Three minutes out,” Ari said over the comms. “Anybody bring marshmallows?”

  Having been asleep and snoring for the last fifteen minutes, Griff mumbled something unintelligible and shifted in his seat.

  Next to Griff, Cross rolled his eyes and shook his head.

  Chuckling, Skipper said, “I don’t think our customers are going to be able to get close enough to conduct a proper BDA, let alone make s’mores.”

  That got Cade’s blood boiling again. Damn if Skipper wasn’t right about this being a glorified battle damage assessment mission. Based on the footage they had watched, nothing could have survived the multiple strafing runs the Hogs had wrought on the enemy element. Even if the PLA Special Forces team had somehow survived riding a trio of motorcycles this far through Indian country, it was highly unlikely that they had escaped the hurt doled out by the Army National Guard aviators. And for that matter, they were just as unlikely to have survived the conflagration as were whatever data collection devices they had spirited from the NSA facility back at Fort Meade.

  Channeling the late Mike Desantos, Cade said, “Any way you stack it, this is a goat rope of the first order.”

  Opening one eye and acquiring Cade with it, Griff said, “Agreed. Those boys on the bikes are long gone by now.”

  Cross leaned forward against his safety harness and joined the conversation. “You all need to give President Clay, Colonel Shrill, and Major Nash a little more credit. They’re running the show. Therefore, only they’re privy to the big picture.”

  “Why should I capitulate on this one?” Cade asked, placing a hand over his boom mic. “We’re about to waste another Screamer and at least twenty minutes carving Maryland airspace while we wait for the Zs to clear out. Then we’re going to burn twenty more minutes picking through that road to Basra reenactment down there. And after adding that forty-plus minutes to the twenty-some-odd it took us to get here from Meade, we’re going to be hard-pressed to catch the PLA infiltrators and fulfill this mission.”

  “I heard all of that,” Ari said. “You know … the road to Basra was a hundred times worse of a weeny roast than this one. I’ve heard first-hand accounts from some of the Hog drivers who were there. And it only cost me a few beers and a couple of shots. By the way, Wyatt, in case you didn’t notice, I got us here in one piece.”

  “Just get us to the road so we can move on,” Cade shot back.

  “That’s not like you, Anvil Actual. Problems on the homefront?”

  Cade said nothing to that. No way Ari could know how close
to home the quip really hit.

  “Looks like we have two fellas aboard worthy of wearing the Doctor Silence mantle,” Ari pressed. Then, all business, he added, “One mike out. Deploy the port minigun, Skip. Then get the Screamers prepped. While Skipper’s busy with that task, I need the rest of your eyeballs on the deck looking for movement or signs of missile launch. We may still have some survivors armed with MANPADS down there.”

  Cade cast his gaze out the starboard-side window. The four-lane highway ran east to west, with the eastbound lanes clogged here and there with stalled-out vehicles and multi-car pileups. The westbound lanes ahead of the crippled and burning armor was crawling with zombies, but had far fewer static vehicles and pileups. However, behind the column was evidence that a Pied-Piper-like scenario had been playing itself out as the column had advanced: bodies lay in the road for as far as the eye could see. Closer in, the Zs that had been in tow had caught up with the unmoving vehicles and completely enveloped them.

  Without warning the doors concealing Skipper’s minigun parted horizontally. All at once the stench of carrion and smoke laden with the acrid smell of the smoldering vehicles invaded the cabin.

  After unlocking the mount for the minigun, Skipper hefted it up and snugged it into place atop the bottom half of the opening. With its six-barreled snout pointing groundward, he powered it on and tested the electric motor. “The thirty-four is hot,” he said, after seeing the barrel spinning without a hitch.

  Still sitting in the bitch seat, all Axe could do was hold on tight to his M4 and peer straight ahead between the pilots at the rapidly tilting horizon.

  “Going to the deck,” Ari called. “Countermeasures hot.”

  “Copy that,” answered Haynes. “Measures hot. I have eyes on the deck. We are clear to port.”

  Ari said nothing, busy maneuvering the helo behind the parade of zombies amassing around the east end of the column. “Screamers ready?” he asked, eyeing the much noisier Chinooks already hovering over Suitland Parkway a thousand yards west of the column’s inert, Humvee-looking lead vehicle.