Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  “You’re not even going to come over and pull the chair out for me?” Jamie called ahead, a mixture of incredulity and sarcasm in her voice.

  To keep her on the defensive, Bishop said nothing. Based on three things—the throw of her voice, a subtle rush of air on his right cheek, and lastly, her reflection relative to his—he put her three paces behind and a couple of degrees off his right shoulder. He also knew that Carson had a laser beam dancing between her shoulder blades and would put a .40 caliber hollow point through her the second she lunged for one of the knives in the block on the island to her left.

  Used to being the pursued, not the pursuer, he remained motionless and waited.

  He didn’t have to wait long. As she walked by he got a whiff of musk riding her wake, then she turned and stood, back to the glass, facing him.

  Anticipation rising, he walked his level gaze up her milky thighs and then to where the sheer micro-dress clung to her pubic bone and on up to her flat stomach. Trying to act the part of the gentleman, he skipped everything from there up and looked directly into her hazel eyes and was a little disappointed. He had grown fond of the girls in the sandbox. Their deep, almost impenetrable inky black eyes staring inquisitively, mysteriously, from behind a hijab. In fact, he had requested brown. And Carson had assured him that hers were brown. Maybe they changed with the light or her mood or the time of the month. But these were things he didn’t want to immediately concern himself with. And though she wasn’t anything close to being of Persian descent, his genes mixing with hers would serve to produce a capable heir. Of that he was certain.

  “Aren’t we going to sit?”

  “Allow me.” He turned and followed her to the table. Chair legs screeched on the tiles when he pulled her chair from the table. He drank in the sight from behind, taking in the nape of her neck and the small of her back and the subtle toned curve of her backside as he pushed her chair in. Then, with a discreet wave, he dismissed Carson, who was standing sentry at the end of the hall.

  “Where did you get the trained monkey?” she said, gesturing towards Carson.

  Full of piss and vinegar, thought Bishop. I like her. “I trained that monkey,” he said, picking up his glass of red. “A toast. And then we eat.”

  Smirking, Jamie hoisted her glass to his, anticipating a cheesy one-liner or, judging by his demeanor and bearing that screamed former military, perhaps a Sun-Tzu quote. Instead, he said, “The honor is all yours.”

  “Whatever I want?”

  He nodded.

  Cocking her head, she said, “Anything?”

  “Yes. Anything you want.”

  “To the Stockholm Syndrome, then. Cheers.”

  He glared.

  They tapped glasses, producing a soft resonant ping.

  “To Stockholm Syndrome.”

  She took a sip. Then, laying it on thick, said, “That’s what you were hoping for ... right?”

  Ignoring her question, he cut to the chase. “We’re going to have to procreate if we are ever going to dig ourselves out of this hole. A dozen years from now we can begin training our kids and then take back the cities and, if we’re lucky, we can reboot the United States. Minus the politicians and the Federal Reserve and all of the sheep I used to protect, of course.”

  He is military, she thought. Good to know. Then, cocking her head, she said, “So your plan is to create a utopia starting here ... wherever here is ... and make babies starting with me? Smacks of the Lebensborn program. Translated from German it means spring of life.”

  “The Aryan master race thing?” he said, shaking his head. “No. Far from it. Blonde hair and blue eyes ... not my thing.”

  “Well, whose thing is it then? I haven’t seen my friend Jordan since Carson split us apart.”

  “Just like the other two who were with you, Jordan didn’t make it. Carson said he was defending himself. She was more trouble than she was worth. This is a different world. I trust you understand.”

  Jamie took a bite of cold spaghetti. Resisted making a face as she swallowed. “OK. So if a master race isn’t your ultimate plan, what is?”

  Debating whether he should divulge anything else, he spun some noodles on his fork and jammed the golf-ball-sized bite into his maw. He chewed and swallowed hard and, giving in to his own hubris, said, “Starting tomorrow I am taking the fight to the enemy. We are going to use the almighty atom to disinfect every sizable city located at a crossroads in a five-hundred-mile radius from here.” He saw a look of incredulity light up her face.

  Jamie opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t immediately form the words.

  “Tell me this,” he went on. “Who picked out the dress?” He shoveled more food into his mouth.

  Still trying to wrap her mind around the possibility of being in the path of fallout from a nearby nuclear detonation—let alone at the epicenter of a number of them—she answered quietly, “Carson did.”

  Bishop took a drink of wine. He made a sour face and tossed his napkin atop his nearly empty plate. “And why no undergarments? Was that Carson’s doing?”

  The question struck her nearly as hard as the nugget of nuclear information. “It was my idea,” she answered.

  His features tightened, eyes going to slits. “What are you, some kind of whore?”

  “No. Far from it. They are the only pair of undergarments I own. I figured if I was going to be raped, made sense to leave them behind.”

  Practical, he thought.

  “Besides ... whoever this little number belonged to last wore it in the Carter administration. I doubt if there’s anything but granny panties and over the shoulder boulder holders in her undies drawer now.”

  And funny.

  She saw his face soften. Fish on. Then her eyes flicked to the veritable quiver of knives in the wooden block on the granite island to her left. She also noticed, next to the knives, a phone with a stubby antenna. It looked nearly identical to the ones she had seen plugged in and constantly charging in the security shed back at the compound. “What’s your name?” she said confidently behind a forced smile.

  “Bishop. And please, don’t judge me based on first impressions. Like I said ...”

  “These are different times. I get it.”

  He said, “Good. We’re on the same page.” He smiled. “To know me is to like me. Shall I call you Patty? Or do you have a real name?”

  “My name is Jamie.”

  He admired her beauty and liked that she seemed to possess a practical nature. That she was smart was icing on the genetic cake. But what he liked most of all was her honesty. Had she given him any other name than the one the Jordan girl had screamed while plummeting to her death, he would have snatched the .38 from under the table and immediately put a third eye in the center of her forehead. “Now eat,” he said. “You’re going to need the energy. Because you, my lady, are going places.” He smiled. Then added a mental asterisk to his statement.

  My bed, willingly.

  Or up on a cross, kicking and screaming.

  Chapter 55

  While Cade and Raven were away, Brook and the kids’ low-key conversation had somehow attracted more than a dozen dead. Returning just ahead of their arrival, father and daughter clambered aboard the F-650. A beat later the tinny calypso-like beat of palms contacting sheet metal started up. And in just a handful of seconds both trucks were surrounded and the two-way radio in Brook’s hand crackled to life. “Can we go now?” asked Wilson, his voice cracking slightly.

  Already one step ahead, and with the added sound of nails scrabbling and scratching the paint, Cade started Black Beauty rolling forward, its coffin-sized plate metal bumper acting like a cowcatcher and bulling a path through the entire undead delegation.

  After leaving the north side of Hanna behind with more questions than answers clouding his head, Cade nosed the Ford west by north. In map view, on the navigation screen, the graphically represented road resembled a kindergartner’s scribble. It bumped up and down for thirty-four miles all
the way to Francis, where it intersected Utah State Route 32, which then shot straight north to Oakley where the route took a serpentine course to Peoa and finally carved a graceful arc to the left as it bypassed the Rockport Reservoir.

  After the reservoir the voice in the box directed them to follow the I-80 four-lane left of a smaller reservoir until it finally merged with the run of road near Coalville that Cade had been dreading for hours. No matter how long he looked at the display—pulling it all the way out to see the big picture, or zooming it in so the unimproved forest roads and fire lanes were evident—he couldn’t find a route that would let them circumvent Interstate 84.

  In comparison to the desolate State Routes they’d been on most of the day, the fifteen mile stretch of I-80 was a traffic jam—albeit a passable one. Along the way, the F-650’s bumper proved its weight in gold, seeing them through several Z-populated snarls without warranting a dismount or having to utilize the winch. No shots were fired and when they arrived at the cloverleaf junction with Interstate 84, Cade couldn’t believe their good fortune. In sharp contrast to the eastbound lanes—where hundreds if not thousands of vehicles had been abandoned by people trying to escape the killing fields of Salt Lake City—the westbound lanes they were traveling had been cleared. In fact, it looked as if Salt Lake County DOT and the nearby ski destination of Park City had combined forces and employed their fleet of snowplows to create a viable thoroughfare. The inert vehicles they did encounter, however, were largely amassed on both shoulders, bumpers crushed in, deep V-shaped gashes creasing their sides and quarter panels.

  Popping one of her ear buds out, Raven asked, “What happened here?”

  Cade took his eyes from the road long enough to look the question to Brook. After a short pause, Brook said, “I’ve got no idea. But I’m grateful we’re not going the other way.” She looked at the river of dashed hopes and death flowing east. Every hundred yards or so, flashes of movement behind clouded side windows would draw her attention away from the army of Zs patrolling the warren of shiny chrome and metal.

  “How much further?” asked Raven.

  Cade flicked his gaze to the dash. He said, “The nav unit shows twelve miles until Morgan.”

  “Eyes on the road, Grayson,” Brook said sharply.

  Arms up in mock surrender, Cade said, “Alright Miss Bossy Pants.”

  Ignoring him, Brook zoomed the map out one step and said, “Exit 96 merges with Old Trapper’s Loop Road north ... looks like Huntsville is eleven point six miles from the exit. And the GPS coordinates are only a few miles east of Huntsville.”

  “And the compound. Yeahhh,” said Raven, clapping her hands and smiling wide.

  Max put his paws on the back seat and peered through the windshield, apparently searching for the cause of the girl’s outburst. Seeing this, Raven grabbed his ears gently and put her face near his and added, “You’re going to be running wild in no time, boy.”

  The proximity of Raven’s face and the pitch and tone of her voice proved too hard for Max to resist. He lunged up and planted a sloppy dog kiss on her face, tongue and all.

  There was an immediate and opposite reaction to the show of affection as Raven simultaneously drew back and wiped her face on her tee-shirt. A tick later her face was wet, the bottled water was half empty, her head was tilted back and she was gargling away the dog spit. She pulsed the window down and spat the water into the slipstream where it was carried aloft and then deposited on the Raptor’s hood and windshield.

  “Close the window ... you’re letting the stench in,” said Cade.

  “Max licked my mouth.”

  Swerving to miss a corpse splayed across his lane, Cade shot Brook a sly smile and said, “Wonder what Max was licking before that.”

  “Ewwww,” cried Raven.

  The smile disappearing from his face, Cade pointed to a splash of magenta bisected with a pair of parallel lines. “What’s that?”

  After zooming in on the item of interest, an icon representing a stylized passenger jet was evident. “Morgan County Airport,” said Brook.

  “How big is the city of Morgan?”

  “We’re about to find out.”

  ***

  Four miles from Morgan, their question was answered by a sign flashing by on their right.

  “Thirty-six hundred,” said Brook. “City center is off to the left. Our exit is on the right ... and so is the airport. What are you thinking?”

  “Just noting it for future reference. That’s all.”

  The number of stalls in the westbound lanes increased exponentially the closer they got to Morgan. By the time the exit north was visible, Cade was driving the Ford like a landlocked icebreaker. In the lowest gear available, he traded paint and pushed a number of vehicles aside, clearing a path for the trailing Raptor.

  In the center console the radio sounded. “Are we there yet?” asked Wilson, a smart-ass tone evident in his tone.

  Thumbing Talk, Brook answered back, “Soon. Less than twenty miles.”

  “Copy that,” said Wilson. He left the channel open for a second longer and Sasha’s whiny voice, tolerable only because it was in the background, transmitted over the spectrum: “We’ve been on the road all day.”

  “Less than an hour,” said Brook. She looked down into a minivan full of death. The window was open and the monster in the driver’s seat was reaching for the Ford’s front tire as the smaller vehicle was pushed aside. Noticing the trio of car seats in the middle row, each one occupied by an undead toddler thrashing madly against the nylon straps, Brook keyed the two-way and commanded, “Do not look inside the van on your right.”

  Cade flicked his eyes to the rearview and saw the Raptor slow to a walking speed and all three heads inside turn in unison. Clearly an act of conscientious objection. Human nature was to rubberneck at an accident, so he wasn’t surprised when they did. “They’ve got to see it all, Brook. That way when their lives or mine or yours or Raven’s are on the line, they’ll be less likely to freeze up. I said it once and I’ll hammer it home every chance I get. A split second pause is all it took for them to get to Desantos and Hicks.”

  Brook said nothing.

  The off-ramp was thoroughly clogged, as was the road all the way to the airport, so Cade shifted into four-wheel-drive and drove along the shoulder, churning up sod and newly planted flowers, completely and irrevocably destroying Morgan County’s stab at roadside beautification.

  Once they were past the backed-up airport feeder roads, the two-truck convoy bumped back onto the smooth blacktop and crossed Cottonwood Creek on a utilitarian cement bridge before the two-lane made an abrupt turn north.

  As the airport slipped by on the right, Cade risked another admonition from Brook by casting furtive glances out the window past her.

  She said, “You’re all over the road, Cade. Pull over or let me drive.”

  And he did. After passing a single-lane road servicing the sprawling subdivision abutting the airport to the east, he brought the F-650 to a halt on the centerline between two fenced-in swaths of grassland with no walking dead in the immediate vicinity. He parked and engaged the brake and as he did so, all he could think about was how low Wilson was going to feel after seeing Brook loop around and get behind the wheel. He waited until she was out the door and onto the roadway and then, lifting his feet over the console, scooted across the seat. He glanced over his shoulder at the Raptor sliding to a stop and picked up the Motorola, keyed the talk button and said, “Mandatory driver swap.”

  A second or two ticked by and Taryn’s voice filtered through the speaker: “My butt,” she said.

  The driver’s door hinged open and, with an audible grunt, Brook hauled herself behind the wheel and started the process of jockeying the seat around to accommodate her small stature.

  Cade dropped the radio on the seat next to him and plucked the binoculars from the passenger side footwell. He turned around and trained them on the Raptor and saw Wilson, mouth moving, arms flailing animatedly,
presumably arguing for his turn at the helm. Panning right, he was amused to see a look that Brook had often given him. Arms crossed and a rock solid set to her jaw, Taryn ticked her head side-to-side, an obvious ‘negative’ in any language.

  Hiding a smile, Cade spun around and glassed the airport, of which he could only see a thin sliver between the copse of trees at the end of the facility’s single runway. The closely spaced aircraft hangars, presumably once a darker shade of robin’s egg blue, were rust-streaked and weathered, their south-facing elevations inset with massive garage-style rollup doors. Sitting on strips of browned grass fronting the squat metal structures were a number of brightly colored sailplanes and parked amidst the sleek gliders was a civilian single-engine airplane, its FAA call sign, a combination of letters and numbers, emblazoned in black on its tail and wings and fuselage. And from recent experience Cade knew that where there were airplanes there were below-ground fuel storage tanks and the mobile bowsers to service the aircraft. He looked at the navigation display and made a mental note of the airport’s location, then dropped the binoculars to his chest and said, “,Home James.”

  Chapter 56

  Twenty minutes and fourteen miles north of the Morgan Airport, Trapper’s Loop Road came to a ‘T’ and ceased to exist. On the navigation unit, a finger’s width beyond the merging yellow roads, shaped vaguely like someone’s poor attempt at a snow angel, was a vast sea of blue pixels labeled Pineview Reservoir.