Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  A quarter mile down the road Duncan finally answered. “I’m sorry. I can’t remember, Lev.” He looked the question at Daymon and added, “What’s your best guess?”

  “I’m used to calling in airdrops from the bitch seat of a King Air.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Pinning his dreads behind his ears, Daymon said, “That was a long-winded way of saying I was intent on being your eyes in the air yesterday. A good spotter focuses on the ground only. And that’s what I was doing because I wanted to find Logan as bad as you.”

  Duncan remained silent—thinking hard—trying his best to pull up any small snippets from memory. All the while, off to his right, following the same twists and turns of 39 as the Cruiser, the Ogden River intermittently flashed silver through the trees. He glanced down and checked the odometer a couple more times along the way, and when three miles had spooled out behind the Toyota, thumbed his two-way and informed Phil that they were nearly out of radio range.

  After Phillip’s reply, Duncan pocketed the radio and scrutinized the passing landscape as the Cruiser bounced along. From light travel and the evening’s rains, the desolate two-lane was left covered with damp, fragrant pine needles. It wove through forested hills, rising and falling minimally, and then shot a straight line for a couple of miles before taking on a steeper pitch where the road snaked through, what appeared to Duncan, a series of staggered V-cuts that had been dynamited into the red earth decades ago to allow the road passage.

  Up on the hillsides, Duncan noticed that the patches of reddish rock where the elements had eroded the native grasses and topsoil were becoming more evident the farther they went from their valley. At last they rounded a slight bend in the road and a hundred feet ahead on the right Daymon spotted a reflective sign, the usual beehive cutout with black writing on white indicating they were still on Utah State Route 39.

  Duncan slowed the SUV to walking speed.

  Daymon read the first heading, “Woodruff, 11 miles.”

  The next line had a smaller beehive labeled SR-16 with Randolph, 22 miles and an arrow indicating the town lay to the left. And below that, using the same reflective letters and numbers, the third entry read SR-16, I-89 South, Bear River, Wyoming, 24 miles with an arrow indicating the town was to the right at the eventual T-junction.

  “Nothing about a quarry,” said Lev.

  Speaking in an awful faked Asian accent, Duncan replied, “Patience, grasshopper.”

  Two turns later those words rang prophetic when Daymon dipped his head, looking across Duncan and called out, “There. I recognize that finger of earth.”

  “From the ground?”

  “Yep. From the ground ... it all just came rushing back to me, Lev.”

  Smiling for real for the first time in a long while, Duncan’s eyes followed and he said, “I concur.”

  With his body pressed back in the seat, a result of Duncan’s sudden acceleration, Daymon clicked out of his belt and racked a round into the shotgun.

  “That certain?” said Lev.

  “Positive,” said Daymon. “Look ... right there. Looks like it’s just clinging to the bluff.”

  There was no need for him to point out the road. For as the SUV slowed it became obvious to everyone, snaking red at about a thirty-degree angle from the State Route before the first bend, a right-hand sweeper, disappeared from sight. Another thirty feet up the bluff the road reappeared, climbing right to left, a much steeper grade that in the short run, before the next hairpin, gained a good chunk of elevation.

  Lev said, “How do they get heavy mining equipment up a goat track like that?”

  “No need,” answered Duncan. “Cheaper to rent a heavy lift helo a couple of times than blow up the side hill in order to widen the road.”

  “And water?” asked Daymon as the SUV ground to a halt on the centerline.

  “There’s a creek behind the bluff. Heard it burbling faintly over the falling rain after I killed the helo’s turbine yesterday.” He stopped talking and turned left, pressing the pedal and wrestling the wheel in order to navigate the transition from pavement to the unimproved road inches thick with mud. Then, with the shiver-inducing noise of thorny branches scraping the rig’s sheet metal, added, “And this is the entry.”

  Master of the obvious, thought Daymon as he grasped the grab handle near his head.

  Duncan said, “The tire tracks I’m seeing were made by some kind of an SUV with a wide wheelbase.”

  “The Tahoe,” Lev said. A statement, not a question.

  Then Daymon made an observation, saying, “The grass in the center is crushed down. The rain alone didn’t do that.”

  “Jenkins’ cruiser sits lower than this land yacht. It’s tuned for speed and handling more so than off-roading. My guess is that the grass was beaten down by the skid plates and anti-sway bars underneath the thing.”

  On its own accord, as if in protest at being called a land yacht, the Land Cruiser jinked left towards the road’s edge and a thirty-foot drop off.

  “Whoa,” cried Daymon, still gripping the grab handle, his knuckles suddenly going stark white.

  Narrowly averting a deadly plunge, Duncan wrestled the rig back into the established ruts and stopped dead center on the incline. Looking for a way to select a lower gear, he scanned the dash and then the center console where, next to the shifter, he spied a chromed dial labeled CRAWL. Couldn’t hurt, he thought, rotating it to the midway point. Hearing a click, he released the brake and noticed an altogether different type of feedback through the controls. Once the SUV picked up some forward momentum there was zero slipping and sliding. And though the suspension was forgiving, and the sidewalls tall and the tire tread more suited for the city than a muddy goat track, the vehicle decried its luxury heritage and surged uphill.

  “Now we’re talking,” said Duncan, feeling the brakes apply on their own, the ABS thwarting a fishtail on the next corner. “Technology trumping tread pattern.”

  Five switchbacks and ten minutes later, Duncan could sense them nearing the top. On the last turn he spotted the reservoir in Huntsville, small and distant and sparkling diamond-like. Above and to the right was the stunted hilltop peppered with a myriad of small trees clinging steadfast in defiance of gravity.

  Knowing that he would soon be seeing the scene of Logan’s death under a whole different set of circumstances, while hopefully maintaining a calm and collected demeanor, he went silent, steeling himself against the inevitable flood of emotions.

  Chapter 24

  With a pair of curious first turns shambling in from the two-lane running parallel to Mesa View 4x4’s flower-lined drive, Wilson dragged the last of the rotten corpses out of the F-650’s path. He stepped back and wiped the gore from his gloves on the truck with Cade inside as it passed through the gate. A moment later, the Raptor rolled onto the drive and came to a stop, leaving barely a half-foot of clearance for the roller gate to skim by its rear bumper.

  It was Cade’s decision to leave the 4x4 shop as near to how they’d found it as possible, and Wilson had been appointed the facilitator for this plan. So, without complaint, he grabbed a handful of chain-link, leaned in, and ran the wheeled gate closed.

  Revving her engine like Danica Patrick on pole position, Taryn simultaneously eyed the approaching walkers and hollered out her window, urging Wilson to hurry up.

  Panting hard from the exertion, Wilson flung the passenger door open, took a firm hold of the grab bar, and hauled himself aboard. And while they waited for the lead vehicle to start rolling, he buckled in and quickly relayed all of the pertinent information and ground rules Cade had piled on him moments before. He powered up the two-way radio, maxed the volume, and stashed it in a cubby near his elbow. He wedged one of the Berettas under his left thigh, and the other, along with two of the four magazines Cade had given him, got stashed in the glove box. Seeing this, Taryn demanded to know how he got the guns.

  With a satisfied half-smile he replied, “Cade gave them to me
.”

  “Gave what to you?” inquired Sasha from the rear seat.

  In unison and in near perfect harmony, Taryn and Wilson replied, “Nothing, Sasha.” Such words might have placated anyone under seven, but Sasha had that doubled chronologically, so predictably she pushed the issue. And, as Wilson expected, his petulant sibling wedged her upper body between the front seats and into his personal space, demanding to know what was being ‘hidden’ from her.

  Suddenly the F-650 blocking their exit belched grey exhaust and spun its wide tires, tilling the flower beds and finishing the destruction the undead had started. As it surged forward, knocking the two Zs off of their feet, Sasha said sarcastically, “So that must be a semi-automatic nothing under your leg then, huh Wilson?”

  Wilson said nothing. He met Taryn’s gaze and delivered the universal signal for step on it by nodding in the direction of the rapidly accelerating Ford.

  Message received. Taryn pinned the pedal to the firewall, bringing four hundred of the Raptor’s available five-hundred-horsepower on line. The race-tuned pick-up shimmied in place for a half second as the torque spooled up and was transferred to the rear wheels. Then two new furrows were gouged into the beds as the truck rocketed ahead, going from zero to thirty in a dozen yards.

  Consequently, Sasha, victimized by both inertia and gravity, was thrown into the seatback with sufficient force to steal her wind.

  “Sorry, Sash,” Taryn said, a half beat before belting out a serious rebel yell.

  In the passenger seat, knuckles and face turning the same ghostly white, Wilson sat speechless and dangerously close to soiling his pants.

  Inside the F-650, Cade flicked his gaze to the rearview where he saw the baby Ford lurch up like a stallion and then slew sideways spitting dirt and Z body parts in its wake. Shaking his head, he whispered, “You better rein it in, Taryn.”

  At that same instant, great minds were running on the same track and Brook had twisted in her seat and stated the obvious: “That truck is way too much for her.”

  Returning his eyes to the fore, Cade arched a brow and quipped, “And how would you know ... have you been reading Road and Track magazine behind my back?” Not really expecting an answer to that, he muscled his own ride through a hard left turn that brought them back onto the tree-lined two-way heading back towards FOB Bastion.

  “Because I got a few new gray hairs riding in one just like it on the way to Bragg.”

  A few? thought Cade. In his experience, the wild ride that surviving another twenty-four of the apocalypse had become didn’t just manifest itself in the way of a few new gray hairs. In fact, nearly every person who was still living and older than thirty that he’d been around with any kind of consistency since Z-Day, himself included, had aged considerably. His normally coal-black goatee, for the first time in his life at just thirty-five years of age, was, to quote a Grateful Dead song, now showing more than a “touch of grey.” Crow’s feet were now a permanent addition to his face, and when he looked in the mirror the stranger looking back possessed heavy-lidded red-rimmed eyes that gazed back with a thousand-yard-stare inherited from too many sleepless days and nights spent ‘downrange’ rubbing elbows with the dead.

  “I found the truck and the keys for Uncle Carl,” bragged Raven, thankfully snapping Cade out of his funk. “It was the brightest shade of orange I’ve ever seen and parked inside the car place in Lumber Town. Inside ... pretty random, huh?”

  Correcting Raven, Brook said, “Lumberton. That’s where Raven saved our butts, Cade. Can’t think of when I’ve been prouder of our Bird than that moment.”

  “And that’s where Uncle Carl gave Mom the grays,” added Raven, satisfied she’d picked up on the correlation.

  Looking past Cade, eyes locked on the old Craftsman a block up, Brook said nothing.

  Cade was doing the same. He slowed to walking speed as the duplicate of their old home crawled by. He noticed that the Z that had been loitering on the porch earlier now was nowhere to be seen. More importantly, though he didn’t draw attention to it, the front door to the house was hanging open. With a palpable feeling of dread pressing him into his seat and his brain grappling with the complexities of the clear and present danger the new information represented, he pulled the rig hard to the curb and let the engine idle. Seconds later the Ford formed up on his side, the window powered down and Wilson looked a question at Cade.

  “Did you go over what I told you with Taryn?”

  “Sir ... yes, sir.”

  With the awful memory of the IED attack that had killed Leo and Sheila instantly, and then his neighbor Rawley being gunned down as a direct result when he doubled back to help, Cade decided to let Taryn hear the grim warning from his own mouth. He rattled the shifter to Park and slid from the truck. Putting his elbows on the window channel, he made direct eye contact.

  “Taryn, this is real important,” he said slowly. “If we come upon any trouble, Zs or human, we keep on driving unless the road is blocked. And if that’s the case ... ”

  Interrupting him, Taryn said rather confidently, “I stop and reverse out of the situation and then pull a bootlegger’s reverse so that your monster truck doesn’t get trapped. But don’t worry ... I don’t plan on tailgating you, so that’s not likely to happen.”

  Stunned at the fact that she even knew the name of the maneuver he’d been taught years ago during the defensive driving section of Delta’s OTC—Operators Training Course—he went silent and stared at her, trying to decide if she was parroting something she’d heard on an old Starsky and Hutch rerun or if she was actually being sincere. After a few seconds without the pendulum swinging either way towards any kind of a logical conclusion, he flat-out asked her.

  “And just how many bootlegger reverses have you successfully completed in your—” He paused mid-sentence, thinking back to his youth. He remembered getting his learner’s permit at sixteen and it was common knowledge that Taryn was nineteen going on twenty—so that meant she’d been driving three, maybe four years at the most. Unless she’d been brought up on a farm where special allowances are given to drive at fourteen, which Cade thought highly unlikely, because judging by the desert surrounding her hometown of Grand Junction the only thing anyone was pulling from the ground was dirt clods. After a couple of seconds, during which the two trucks engines idled and she maintained constant eye contact, he resumed his line of questioning. “So in four years behind the wheel, how much evasive driving have you actually done?”

  “None,” she said. “But I’ve raced open wheel cars on dirt tracks since I was seven and could reach the pedals.”

  Without wasting another word on the subject, Cade returned to the 650 and got back behind the wheel. He sat speechless for the second time since waking and, after the brief lull in both word and action, shifted into drive, and as soon as they were moving again filled a slightly amazed Brook in on the new revelation.

  As the larger truck pulled away and Taryn shifted the Raptor into drive, Wilson powered up his window, looked at her with his head at an angle, and said, “Really?”

  “Yeah ... really,” she replied, her eyes glued to the road. “Every word I said was the honest to God truth.”

  “Shut him up real good, too,” Wilson noted. “And as far as I’m concerned, my butt is glued to this seat for the rest of the trip.”

  “You are a badass,” said Sasha from her backseat domain. “But next time ... please warn me before you take off like that.”

  Chapter 25

  One heartbeat after leaving the final stretch of road with its deadly three-hundred-foot drop-off behind and entering what Duncan hoped was the final blind corner before reaching the quarry’s entry, several things happened simultaneously. He nosed the Land Cruiser out of the right-hand sweeper and his attention was immediately drawn to the airspace above the quarry where a good number of raptors rode the thermals in lazy counterclockwise circles. As he straightened the steering wheel, his gaze fell next on the twelve-foot-tall concertin
a-topped fence looming thirty feet away. And in nearly the same instant, he saw the dozen or so rotters standing on the road between the SUV and the quarry entrance.

  At first the dead remained rooted. Just staring and swaying—seemingly in some kind of state of hibernation—until the exact moment he crushed the brake pedal to the floor, bringing the nearly three-ton vehicle to a grinding halt. Then all hell broke loose. And in the microsecond between decision and action, as the dead surged forward in unison, a last furtive glance told Duncan that, prior to turning, this group had been mostly working-age folks with only a few falling outside of those demographics. That they were clothed in blue jeans and tee-shirts—sensible attire—not the kind of biker chic that the Huntsville crowd had seemed to favor, led him to believe that they had come from the east, drawn here by the recent activity.

  But from experience, he knew that the lives the walking dead left behind had no bearing on their intent now. They weren’t marauders from the west. Nor were they friendly survivors from points east. What they were right now was dead and hungry. Nothing more, nothing less. And he was sitting in a truck full of fresh meat only a few paces removed from them. So discarding his useless evaluation, he racked the transmission into reverse and tromped the pedal. In the next instant, as a few precious feet of separation was created, Daymon drew in a deep breath and Duncan heard Lev use God’s name in vain and bitch about them nearly becoming surrounded.

  Intuitively Duncan steered with one hand and craned around to look out the rear window. Then with the roar of the engine and a shrill whining from the overtaxed transmission leeching into the cabin, he ticked off two seconds in his head and again stood hard on the brakes. Lev uttered an unintelligible expletive and the distinctive click-clack of him drawing back the M4 charging handle reverberated from the back seat area. A half beat later, after the SUV had lurched to a complete stop, Duncan, with spittle flying off his lips, bellowed, “Out. Out. Out.”