by Mark Tufo
“Howdy, how’s it going, friend?” the man sitting in the truck asked, his voice accented with a Southern drawl.
One look and Cade knew that the older man could handle himself; he locked eyes and held Cade’s gaze, and he exuded an air of self-confidence, usually evident in law enforcement or military men.
“Well, considering that the dead are walking around and I’m not one of them, pretty damn good! And you?” Cade said.
“Pardon my poor manners, name’s Duncan Winters,” the man said, extending his hand.
Cade met him halfway and returned the man’s firm handshake.
“How did you end up travelling with the old man and the twins?”
“I was trying to get onto 84. I was aimin’ to head east to Utah and find my brother. Before I got onto the off-ramp I saw a group of unarmed people murdered in cold blood. One big sumbitch of a biker gutted a little girl while I watched,” Duncan said, his voice wavering.
“Was there a state cop present?”
“He was the first to die,” Duncan said.
“Did anyone resist?” Cade probed for more info.
“No, they were butchered before they could do a thing. Whole mess lasted less than it takes to watch a commercial on the TV. Those pukes make the Viet Cong look like pacifists.”
“Sounds like there was nothing you could have done to change the outcome by yourself,” Cade said, trying to assuage the guilt that he detected.
“I felt a feeling of helplessness descend on me. I watched that madman and his boys have their way with those people, and after they murdered all of the men, they took the rest of the women with them.”
Duncan stared into Cade’s eyes, his rage evident, and said with a hard edge to his words, “At any cost, I’d like to send those pieces of shit to hell.”
Cade had only two words to add, “I concur.”
“I’ve got kin near Salt Lake City that I’d like to check up on. I was headed that way when this madness started. Maybe we can help each other until we part ways? Anyway, what I’m getting at is I’d like to roll with you all.” Duncan waited patiently for an answer.
“There is something to be said for strength in numbers, but in all honesty my first priority is to get back East and find my wife and little girl. If we should run into the gang on the way, well, we will just have to cross that bridge when we get there.”
“Guess I will take that as an affirmative, sir. I’ll bring up the rear of the convoy and keep my eyes on our six.”
“Settled then, we’re oscar mike in five minutes,” Cade said to the fellow ex-soldier.
Cade walked the line of vehicles and touched bases with Harry and the twins, then pulled Rawley away from the latter. Addressing Rawley, he explained, “I still intend on finding my family, but I want to make sure those animals don’t kill any more people. So keep your eyes peeled; if we see them, we need to hit them hard and fast. No mercy.”
“I’m with you brother,” Rawley agreed.
The convoy entered I-84 and snaked east single file. The Columbia River flew by on their left. As the day wore on the stifling heat made travel miserable. The hot gusting east wind only added to their misery. They had to stop a handful of times to siphon gas and to allow for restroom breaks.
Some stretches of the road were fully blocked by cars and trucks that needed to be pushed out of the way. They learned to use utmost caution when approaching vehicles on foot. A good number of the infected had died and then reanimated in their cars, effectively trapping them inside, where they waited patiently and quietly for anything to get near enough to attack.
The group stopped near the Bridge of the Gods to search a large multivehicle pileup and obtain more gas. Leo and Harry had volunteered to be the “suckers” as they had jokingly started to call themselves. Leo had almost met the same fate as his brother; he was siphoning gas from a Toyota Prius when a partially paralyzed crawler silently pulled itself along the road towards him. The creature knocked over the empty plastic gas cans waiting to be filled. The cans tumbled and clattered on the blacktop. Luck was on Leo’s side, as the warning allowed enough time for him to crabwalk backwards on all fours and put some distance between himself and the ghoul. The young boy had probably been eight or nine when he died in the accident. The child zombie was naked save a pair of tattered Spiderman underwear and a shredded short sleeve shirt, reddish black with dried blood. The toothless face looked like it belonged to a meth addict; death had not been kind to him. The coarse rocky asphalt had been unforgiving as the ghoul strained to traverse it. Except for the head, the rest of his body looked like raw hamburger. Bite marks and missing flesh peppered its torso. The undead boy’s mouth opened and closed but no sound emitted. Without mercy or second thought Leo drew the compact Glock and said, “Better you than me fucker,” and put a bullet in the crawler’s brain. He found that he was growing very thick skin after all he had been through. Being callous towards the undead wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because empathy didn’t compliment survival. Leo followed the bloody slug track back to its source, it ended near a wrecked Camry. The crushed man and woman, who most likely used to be the boy’s parents, had been killed in the wreck and remained dead. In the back next to the booster seat was a Gameboy with a bag full of cartridges. I’ll take that, Leo thought as he scooped them up.
They drove for hours without incident until they were forced to stop near the Oregon-Idaho border. A large group of infected blocked the road and then promptly swarmed the stopped caravan. The convoy reversed and turned around to get some road between them and the infected. Cade, Rawley and Duncan armed themselves, dismounted and strode towards the undead.
More of the ghouls piled clumsily out of a Casino shuttle van. Most had been baby boomers in their fifties and sixties. Rawley watched Cade as he moved with the grace of a big cat on the hunt. His M4 shouldered, he walked towards the undead in a combat crouch and fired single shots methodically into the walkers’ heads. The steady rhythmic shooting, interspersed with the tinkling of the spent cartridges bouncing on the blacktop, shattered the quiet on the calm deserted highway. Seventeen undead had emerged from the Casino coach; they were covered with bite wounds and shredded flesh from the carnage they had endured while trapped inside. All of them now lay in a heap in front of Cade. Rawley, Leo and Duncan made quick work of the other walkers blocking the road.
Leo was especially proud to bag his first upright walker. The crawling boy hadn’t given him room for concern, but the taller undead man was a different story. Leo was very nervous. His hands shook, nearly causing him to miss the close range shot. The Glock 19 held seventeen rounds. It took him six shots to finally drop the ghoul with a bullet to the brain. The undead bus driver fell to the pavement, sticky black matter dribbling from the dime-sized entry wound on his forehead.
After nearly singlehandedly dispatching the creatures from the Coachman, Cade cautiously stepped inside the bus. He contemplated having one of the others drive it, but ruled it out because the gore splashed interior was a definite bio-hazard.
The survivors were fatigued and jittery from the constant adrenaline highs and lows and needed a break. After a brief period of uneasy rest, the decision was made to continue on. Everyone mounted up and the small convoy went off in search of an easily defensible place to stop for the night.
Just across the border in Idaho they passed over a flat cement bridge spanning the Snake River. Cade slowed the Sequoia, exited the interstate and parked at the rest stop. The other vehicles followed suit. Everyone got out, stretched their legs and made small talk.
Portland was more than four hundred miles and ten hours away. They had made pretty good time considering the world had been turned upside down.
Cade and Rawley were engaged in a strategy session when the screaming started from the direction of the restrooms. A group of undead had gotten trapped in the women’s side of the small structure. Shelly pushed the door open and inadvertently stumbled right into their midst. The doorway was narrow, an
d allowed only one of the twins to escape. Shelly was not so fortunate. Cold bloody fingers intertwined with her long blond hair, and another pair of hands clamped around her left arm. The combined weight of the two bodies pulled her down. She was pounced on by a Troop of undead Girl Scouts. One zombie tore Shelly’s hair from her head, effectively scalping her. She screamed until her voice box was torn from her neck. The remaining undead tumbled over the writhing pile on the ground and began pursuing Sheila.
Duncan proved himself adept with the stubby combat 12 gauge he kept displayed on the gun rack in his pickup. He only needed one shot each to drop the four bloated walking corpses.
“You fuckers…no…no…no!” each word from Rawley rose higher in octave while he ran to help the twins. He sprinted between Harry and the hysterical Sheila, SKS at the ready, and at point blank range shot both of the monsters that were eating Shelly.
Sheila shrieked her dead sister’s name repeatedly. With the grim knowledge that Shelly would soon reanimate, Cade gently escorted Sheila to the other end of the rest area, hoping to spare her any more trauma.
Rawley held vigil over Shelly’s corpse, praying to God that she wouldn’t reanimate. Coppery smelling blood flowed from her shredded neck across the white tile floor, finally ending its journey at the drain. In a matter of minutes the inevitable started to happen. First her hand twitched and then her head moved side to side. Her eyelids opened revealing milky orbs. Rawley put the rifle to his shoulder; the single shot rang out, echoing off of the bathroom walls. Save for the gusting desert wind, the rest stop went quiet.
Sheila wanted some time by herself, so Cade left her alone in his truck and sat on top of a picnic table deep in thought. He mourned the loss of Ike and Shelly. He reflected on how much he missed his family and said a silent prayer for them. Cade mulled over this latest encounter and subsequent loss and pondered how it would affect his travelling companions’ morale. Man, Rawley is going to need a shrink… if there are any still alive.
Cade was awed by the new guy’s prowess with the shotgun; he got up off of the bench and sought out Duncan so they could get better acquainted. Duncan reluctantly shared his story.
He became adept at shooting during his first tour in Nam. While many of his fellow soldiers slept the day away or partied between patrols outside of the wire, he spent his spare time shooting on the government’s dime. Eventually he befriended the Company armorer and soaked up all of the weapons knowledge he could.
When he was actually earning his paycheck, he flew slicks. That’s what the men in the 1st Air Calvary called the UH-1 Huey. It was the helicopter workhorse of the war and he flew them all over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. His Huey had ferried some of the last people out of Saigon after it fell in 1975, and then after landing on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier, to make room for other landing helos he helped the deck crewmen push his baby off into the roiling South China sea.
Cade reciprocated with his own story, but for now he left out all of the Delta Team black-ops stuff. He touched over his tours in both theaters in the sandbox as a Ranger with the 75th. It was the perfect time to bring up something that had been nagging him.
“I need to be frank with you Duncan. It was fully on me to check and clear the bathrooms. I didn’t even notice the extra vehicle. I let a kid down this morning, and it led to his death.”
“I’m an old man but this ain’t my first rodeo, son. Don’t beat yourself up. You’re used to being in the field with swinging dicks that know how to take care of themselves. This mother hen thing is gonna take some getting used to.”
“It still doesn’t make it any easier…” Cade said, his voice going quiet.
“Nothing worth doing is. I got your back, soldier. If it helps any, from now on we can both babysit.”
Cade thanked the fellow soldier and got up to go walk the perimeter of the rest stop. Duncan traipsed back to the rest of the survivors.
Rawley inspected the dead. Five of the six were young teen girls and the other was old enough to be their mom. How they all ended up in the bathroom together was a mystery until Leo made the observation that the door only opened one way, inward. Some of the girls had defensive wounds on their hands and some had been fed on before they reanimated. The den mother’s neck and blouse were caked with dried blood and it appeared she was the first to turn before attacking the others.
When Cade returned from his walk around the rest area he helped the others move the dead downwind from the vehicles. There was no way to bury Shelly; the ground was rock solid. They settled on a brief service before moving her near some colorful desert flowers growing on the periphery of the green-brown grass. Sheila cried through the kind words the others had to say. Rawley was visibly upset; he had taken a liking to Shelly the moment they first met.
They tried to keep themselves busy. It helped to keep their minds off of the fallen. The mood around the rest area was solemn and dark.
Harry extracted nearly a full tank of gas from the minivan while Leo broke the rear window. Leo’s nose was instantly assailed by the sickening sweet smell coming from the two dead lapdogs on the front seats.
Camping gear, Girl Scout books, uniforms and literature, plus a cooler full of warm water and spoiled food was arranged in an orderly fashion in the back of the stifling van. Leo and Harry pulled all of the gear out of the minivan and spread it out on the still warm asphalt. It looked like they were having a yard sale. They took the water purifier, binoculars, tent and six sleeping bags. They were sure to come in handy since it would be getting dark soon and the nights were very cold in the high desert.
Cade called the group over to one of the picnic benches in the middle of the grass.
“I think this would be a good place to stay the night. It’s off the road far enough, defensible, and the freeway is straight in both directions. We are in the open but at least we’ll hear and see any approaching vehicles before they’re upon us.”
“We could circle the vehicles like a wagon train and anyone wanting to sleep under the stars could sleep in the center. I will volunteer for guard duty,” Harry offered.
“Not a good idea Harry… we’re not camping, we’re trying to survive in a hostile environment. The vehicles would offer better shelter from the elements, animals and those things; but if you want to sleep under the stars, I’m not going to try stop you.”
Harry left the meeting in a huff. Constructive criticism it was not. He felt talked down to and belittled. Why did I even tag along with these ungrateful whelps anyway?
“Leo. You want to pull guard duty first?” Cade asked, trying to include him. He had been withdrawn and quiet since the death of his brother Ike, even more so now that they had lost Shelly.
“I will if I can borrow the smaller pistol.”
“You can have the Glock until we find a place to acquire some more weapons.”
Cade removed the gun and an extra magazine from the holster and handed them to the young man.
“Don’t forget, the safety is on the trigger, and always assume the gun is loaded.”
“I promise I’ll only shoot at those fuckin’ creatures.”
“Happy hunting,” Cade said, admiring Leo’s new found bravado.
Chapter 154
Day 2 - Whiteville, North Carolina
Carl quickly stole a glance over the three foot wall surrounding the rooftop. It was the stench his brain registered first. The smell of death clung to everything; it was something Carl knew he would never get used to. At least thirty of the undead were shuffling about the parking lot. Several had taken an interest in the truck. The bucket was at eye level, right in front of his face, but he didn’t dare do anything until he had a moment to collect his thoughts.
“Where did they all come from?” he asked Brook.
“Raven told me they came through the trees over there,” she responded, pointing at the thicket of dogwoods.
“I think they’re workers from that factory near the interstate,” Raven offered.
> The parking lot in front of the metal prefab building was full of cars. Quite a few of the walkers did have on work type clothes, coveralls, aprons, work boots and such. Most of them were slightly overweight men, and their movement was quite lethargic. Even though the walkers moved slower than a living person, you still had to be careful not to develop a false sense of security. The dead had the overwhelming strength in numbers, therefore a seemingly safe situation could turn deadly in a heartbeat.
Carl said, “Just great! This is the biggest gathering of these things I have seen in one place and they just haaadd to show up while we are cooling our heels on a Bi-Mart roof.”
Raven, always willing to point out the facts, added her two cents. “Don’t forget Uncle Carl, our only means of transportation happens to be sitting down there, fully surrounded by them.”
As they watched, twenty more undead filtered through the trees. “We need to make a run for it. I suspect that the swing shift must have just ended,” Carl said, failing in his attempt to be funny.
“There is a time and place...” Brook was abruptly cut off by a massive explosion at the Jackpot fuel mart.
The shockwave rolled over their heads, followed by intense heat and overpressure caused by the displaced air. It made their ears hurt, causing a prolonged ringing. The blast lasted only a few seconds. It felt like an invisible hand had slapped them completely flat on the rooftop. The surface felt cool on Brook’s stomach as the heat wave rolled over her back. She put her arm around Raven’s head and shoulders to shield her.
Most of their exposed arm hair had been singed; the awful smell still mingled with the zombies’ stench. Debris rained down around them, sounding and feeling like an intense hailstorm. A severed human arm, still wearing a bulky diver’s watch, landed with a thud near Carl’s head. He removed the indestructible Timex Ironman, murmuring, “You won’t need that anymore.” Finally a little truth in advertising, Carl thought.