Taking the nav unit’s advice, Elvis left 95 behind and motored due north with huge fenced-in tracts of freshly tilled flatland scrolling by on each side. He’d only made it three-fourths of a mile down the straightaway when he came upon a dozen vehicles blocking the road. And behind the vehicular wall were twice as many walking corpses, a good number of them pressing against the far fence line.
What to do, thought Elvis. He stopped the tow truck and looked the scene over for a good ten minutes. There was not one kernel of broken safety glass on his side of the block. He didn’t see so much as a smudge of rubber on the roadway to indicate that any of the associated vehicles had committed to any kind of hard braking prior to coming to rest in such a haphazard fashion. And as far as he could tell, the same could be said for the other side of the snarl. Suddenly he concluded that these vehicles had been placed here in order to force someone, such as himself, into taking the path of least resistance. To make turning around and going through Grangeville—where certainly something more dangerous than twenty-some-odd rotting pusbags—look like the lesser of two evils.
So he figured he had two options, and no matter which he ultimately chose he would need to be facing south in order to execute it. So he K-turned and parked facing south and sat in the cab with the window half-open and Jerry Garcia serenading him through the speakers. He pulled his hat down against the sun spilling in the window and balanced out the pros and cons in his head, unaware that his music had gotten the creatures agitated to the point where, clamoring for fresh meat, they crushed into one another in such a manner that two of them—a grade-school-aged male and a petite African American female—were inadvertently boosted up and over the trunk of an inert Chevy. Both monsters spilled to the road face first, arms and legs askew, and then somehow managed to get their sickly looking limbs to cooperate and dragged themselves to their feet. Mouths working and eyes locked on the fresh meat, they advanced on the truck from the driver’s side.
As the band harmonized about a long strange trip and Elvis’s thoughts drifted to a warm tropical beach, something cold brushed his Adams apple, causing him to start. In the next instant his hat slid from his head and seemed to levitate its way out the window.
It only took a millisecond longer for him to regain his composure and lean away from the window without losing a good chunk of flesh in the process. “Think you caught me sleeping, did you? Well I wasn’t, you motherfuckers,” he bellowed. “I was just resting my eyes.”
As he fumbled to get ahold of the .45, which lay on the seat next to him, the undead duo hissed and reached into the window, their hands leaving greasy slug tracks on everything they touched.
Enraged, Elvis screamed, “You’re gonna pay for that, bitches.” He jacked a round into the chamber and poked the muzzle through the open window. Instantly, the female grabbed ahold of both the gun and his hand and drew them towards its gaping maw. “It’s all yours.” His lips curled up and he pushed hard, wedging three inches of the barrel in deep and pulled the trigger—twice. Small bits of vertebrae and flesh and blood sprayed in a flat arc from the side of its neck as the thing crashed to the asphalt in a vertical heap, paralyzed from the neck down, spinal cord completely shredded.
He put the smoking .45 on the dash and reached one hand out the window and palmed the kid zombie on the forehead, a move he’d used effectively on his kid sister many times when they were growing up. Then with his free hand he extracted his boot knife and thumbed it open. Finally, with the little monster flailing and snapping away, behind a brutal thrust, Elvis buried the four-inch blade into little Johnny’s eye socket.
Pissed off at himself for letting the abominations catch him sleeping, he donned his Husker cap, kicked open the door, and stepped over the bodies, taking care to stay well clear of the female’s still-clicking teeth.
Seeing its eyes tracking him, he clucked his tongue and knelt down on a bloodless patch of highway and in a sing-song voice said, “Look what we went and got ourselves into.” Two quick thrusts of the blade into one of the roving eyes followed up by a thorough twist of the wrist scrambled its brains and stopped the incessant clicking.
Feeling nothing for who they might have been or who they loved nor who loved them, Elvis cleaned the blood and brains off on the kid’s Minecraft tee-shirt and clipped it back onto his belt. What a sorry sight, he thought. Gives new meaning to misspent youth.
Standing there on the lonely stretch of road with the noon sun beating down and the murmurings of the nearby dead competing with the idling engine, he came to a decision.
He leaned in and turned the volume to 8, which was more than loud enough to start the creatures slam-dancing into each other again. He stalked around to the passenger side and retrieved the AK-47 from the floor and racked a round into the chamber.
Bracing a thigh on the Chevy’s rear quarter-panel, Elvis opened fire point-blank on the moaning crowd. With the spent brass collecting around his boots and the front row of zombies falling fast, the second echelon unwittingly took advantage of the situation by crawling over the backs of the fallen. Listening to the awful sound of flesh and bone hitting pavement, Elvis back-pedaled several feet to a new position against the fence to his left and watched the zombies spilling over the Chevy’s smooth trunk. After collecting himself, he resumed firing until the magazine was empty, then switched to the .45 and finished off the remaining few with single bullets to the brain.
As the sound of the gunshots dissipated, Elvis made his way back to the truck and, using the lift apparatus, lowered the device to the road.
After an hour spent hooking and unhooking cars and trucks, he’d created a passage north. Ten minutes after that he had the device secured to the tow truck and was accelerating away from the roadblock with the lyrics sung by the Grateful Dead taking him back to early days of the outbreak. What a long strange trip, indeed.
Chapter 70
From the Morgan airport the Black Hawk hammered a straight line north through the morning sky, overflying Huntsville, where Cade noticed a few more Zs patrolling the streets than there had been earlier. He cast his gaze left at the Pineview reservoir which, contrary to the sad state of the sacked town below, glistened silver and calm, a sharp contrast to the black smudge on the horizon a number of miles to the northwest.
Seeing the haze in the distance, Duncan deviated a few degrees right and a minute later Eden was slipping by off the starboard side. Down below in an isolated sub-division abutting low hills on the town’s west side, a raging fire jumped from house to house, the trees, lawns and surrounding scrub tinder-dry from a long hot summer providing the perfect catalyst.
By Cade’s estimation, already twenty or thirty structures were involved and there appeared to be no end in sight. He asked the resident firefighter, “Think Eden will be gone when we come back this way?”
Looking up from the map spread across his lap, Daymon said, “Who’s gonna stop it? I just hope it doesn’t jump into the Cache. If it does, the compound could be at risk.”
“What do you think the odds are of that?”
“Pretty low,” said Daymon. “I’ve explored the canyon south and west of the compound pretty extensively. There’s a creek flows through and the woods down there aren’t dry like all of those dead lawns back there.”
After toying for a moment with the thought of calling the compound and putting them on alert, Cade finally decided not to because of the undue stress it would create.
***
The Black Hawk cruised along in radio silence for a good twenty minutes before Cade finally broke it. “Daymon ... any luck with the airports?” he asked.
“This is some small-assed print,” he said, flattening out a crease. “Plus everything is vibrating. I’m doing my best.”
Cade replied, “Keep looking. We’ve got time.”
Below them an unidentified road snaked south to north, interconnecting a number of smaller cities that Cade guessed were bedroom communities to the rapidly approaching sprawl. He looked at
Duncan and asked, “What city is that.”
“Logan,” said Daymon over the comms. “Couldn’t miss that one on the map.”
Inwardly Cade cringed, and out of respect said nothing.
Seemingly unaffected, Duncan drawled, “City of about fifty thousand. And no, my bro wasn’t conceived there nor does the city have anything to do with his name.”
The flood gates opened, Lev piped up, “Refresh my memory, Duncan. Why did your dad name him Logan?”
“After some stupid Sci-fi drivel about a bunch of folks who have gem stones in their palms.”
Looking up from the map, Daymon asked, “Surgically attached ... or are they just holding them?”
“I’ve no idea,” conceded Duncan. “But what I do know ... if the palm gem goes black on ya then it’s Reaper time.”
Cade said, “Now that Daymon went and opened Pandora’s Box, I’ve got to know, Duncan. Is this trip about revenge, or justice?”
Duncan remained quiet and dipped the helicopter towards the ground and turned a few degrees left. Then he regarded Cade and said, “Great big helpings of both.”
Sun flared off of Cade’s visor as he nodded in agreement.
“Holy shit,” exclaimed Lev. “Port side ten o’clock.”
“There has to be at least fifty thousand of them,” said Cade. “Haven’t seen numbers like that since Castle Rock.”
Daymon chuckled then said, “Which I bet is still glowing.”
Craning his head groundward, Cade began to feel a sense of vertigo course through his body. With the memory of the recent crash still at the forefront of his mind, he cinched his safety harness tight. Lot of good that did Tice, he thought, seeing the Spook’s crumpled body in his mind. Grimacing, he fished the sat phone from his pocket. It was still turned on and a tap on the number pad lit up the display. “Bingo,” he said. “Forget Boise. Inputting coordinates.” He leaned forward and tapped a long string of numbers into the flight computer. “Way point is set.” He cycled through the basic functions and shook his head. “But the maps for Idaho, Washington, and Oregon aren’t in here. I’m only seeing software updates that cover Nevada, Colorado, California, and New Mexico.”
“Roger that,” said Duncan. “I’ll fly by compass while you find it on the map. Hell, before computers and GPS, all we had was laminated squares of plastic.” After gently carving an arc in the airspace over infested downtown Logan, Duncan pointed the helo’s nose northwest and kept the altitude a steady eight-hundred feet.
“How do we know where we’re going then?” said Daymon.
Cade passed the phone back and said, “You tell me.”
A couple of minutes spent poring over the maps and Daymon came back on the comms and said, “These GPS coordinates are for the McCall Airport in Idaho. Looks to be two-fifty or three hundred miles northwest of us. But Cade”—Daymon handed the phone forward—“Tell me what this second message is all about.”
Rather cryptically, Cade replied, “‘Stand by, detailed images to follow.’ Speaks for itself ... don’t you think?”
Already thinking two steps ahead, Lev took his eyes off the horde below and leaned back, knowing that his skills would be coming in handy, sooner, rather than later.
Chapter 71
They’d been airborne in the DHS Black Hawk for close to two hours and were now following a diagonal flight path northwest towards the new GPS coordinates that Cade had inputted over the outskirts of Logan, Utah.
Millions of acres of Cache National Forest were behind them. They’d overflown dozens of small cities, all seemingly inhabited by nothing but walking dead. Then in the blink of an eye the scenery went from inhabited land crisscrossed by stripes of empty highway interconnecting farms and small communities to a vast volcanic plain spreading to the horizon.
Breaking over the comms, Lev said, “Craters of the Moon. Me and Oops camped there once.”
Cade replied, “Looks like the ‘Stan to me ... minus the folks wanting to blow us outta the sky and cut our heads off.”
Lev said, “You had to go there, didn’t you?”
“I never left there.”
Duncan added, “I haven’t had those kind of nightmares for quite a while. However, some of the sights and smells lately have taken me back to the Nam with my eyes wide open. And I can’t decide which one is worse —”
Lev said, “I have ‘em ... but thank God they slip away the second I wake up.”
“Lucky you,” said Duncan.
For a long minute nobody spoke as the Black Hawk engaged in a futile race with its own shadow. The black shape would morph, stretching and shrinking, an illusion created by the rifts and cracks in the ancient volcanic flows below.
After a short while, Daymon said, “I’m no expert. But that sure looks like the moon down there.”
Cade opened his mouth to reply but was silenced as the helo encountered a thermal and bucked like a bronco for a split second. Cinching his harness tighter, he felt a slight vibration against his thigh. At first he attributed it to the natural flight characteristics of a craft boldly defying physics. Helicopters were no stranger to shaking and groaning as they fought gravity and their natural inclination to drop from the sky. So Cade had learned long ago not to pay heed to all of the different sensations—such as the jostling created by the pocket of rising air—and instead take the cues pertaining to the Black Hawk’s airworthiness only from the pilots. But after experiencing the same sensation in the same place for the second time in as many minutes, he realized it for what it was. He extracted the sat-phone and saw on the screen that he’d missed two calls and there were two corresponding unread messages. He thumbed the four-digit code, unlocking the Thuraya.
With Duncan casting quick glances his way and the unforgiving landscape below slowly giving way to sage and grass, Cade read the two SMS messages. The first was several paragraphs—almost a book by modern texting standards—and greatly buoyed his hopes of them finding the needle in a haystack as vast as the state scrolling by under the helo. The second, much shorter correspondence, caused a pit in his stomach the likes of which he hadn’t experienced for quite some time.
Duncan cast a sidelong glance and asked, “Everything OK?”
Cade replied, “For now. Find a place to land and take us down.”
Duncan said incredulously, “Here?”
“Here and now.”
Daymon asked, “What’s up?”
Cade said nothing as Duncan slowed the craft and the ground steadily rose up to meet them.
Cade unbuckled and, with the sagebrush whipping madly in the cyclonic rotor wash, he opened his door and leaped from the bird the second its tires hit Terra Firma.
The side door slid open before Cade’s hand hit the handle. Then Lev appeared, the smaller Pelican case in hand. Cade received it without a word and loped south thirty yards. He set the box on the volcanic soil and turned a quick three-sixty. Nothing to see but sagebrush and grass and tan rock for miles around the emergency LZ. Farther off to the northwest, the Sawtooth Mountains rose up, their eastern-facing flanks and sharks-teeth-like crags catching the full force of the afternoon sun.
Consulting the compass feature on the Suunto, Cade found due south and scribed a line in the earth with his toe. He heard the whine of the turbines drop a few octaves to a low howl and then detected footsteps and Lev was at his side with a second, medium-sized Pelican hard case in hand.
In seconds they had both boxes open and, working silently, had extracted the larger pieces from their eggshell foam interiors. Working as a team, Lev assembled the desert tan-colored dish and positioned it facing the azimuth etched in the soil while Cade cracked open the armored Panasonic laptop and plugged it into a port on one side of the dish.
Powering on the computer, Cade said, “Thanks. You reading my mind?”
“Recognized the boxes. That’s all,” Lev said. “I went on a couple of joint ops with an SF team during my second deployment.”
Cade nodded. Then the computer got his
undivided attention. He tapped on the keys and waited. Then a few more keystrokes and a topographical map dominated the screen.
“We could use a printer,” said Lev.
Tapping his flight helmet, Cade said, “This is my printer.” Using the arrow keys, he scrolled the image up and down then panned it left and right. Lastly, he zoomed way in and sat in front of the static image, letting it burn into his memory. Eighteen minutes from setup to tear down and everything was stowed and everyone was aboard the Black Hawk. A minute later amidst a storm of sand and bouncing tumbleweeds, they were airborne and Cade was fielding the questions, reluctantly.
Chapter 72
The house Elvis settled on was five miles southeast of the final destination. Wary of being trapped again, he made certain there were no walking dead in the vicinity before turning off the highway and barreling up the paved drive.
Like the house in Ovid, this two-story clapboard affair was set back on a hillock with commanding views of the highway. The house was surrounded by a sturdy looking post and beam fence, while the drive leading toward the garage was bordered by both a chain-link fence and the dense strip of hedge that, over time, had completely engulfed it.
He parked the truck and killed the engine and, though the music coming from the speakers was barely above a whisper, turned off the stereo as well. Sitting in silence with the field glasses trained on the highway below, he witnessed hundreds of dead stagger by over the span of just forty-five minutes, the vast majority of them heading in the direction from which he’d just come.
Finally satisfied that he hadn’t been made by the dead, he grabbed his pistol and quietly exited the truck. He tucked the .45 in his waistband and scaled the wooden fence. The walk to the house was brick, the mortar between tinted green with a thin veneer of moss. There was a rise of six stairs leading to the back door. Gun drawn, Elvis took them two at a time and peered in the window. Nothing to see but a barren back room, one wall of shelving holding rows of glass jars containing home canned fruits and vegetables. The other, a hook full of coats and assorted brooms and mops and the like. The kitchen beyond seemed unused. There was nothing in the sink that he could see and the counters were devoid of small appliances. After rapping on the glass quietly, nothing dead arrived so he tried the knob. Locked.
Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 34