Her one chance at even temporary safety was to get beneath one of the larger ledges and hope that it would be enough of an umbrella. The closest one sat twenty-three feet to her left and eight feet down. With no time to plan, she began shuffling along the rock layer, the heels of her Converse hanging far off the edge, her calves beginning to sing with pain.
As she went, zombies continued to come up to the edge of the ridge and either fall off on their own or get pushed from behind. There were so many now that they fell continuously and Sadie was forced to climb faster and faster, her feet breaking off parts of the ledge as she went.
Halfway to the overhang, the ledge gave way completely. Somehow she kept her wits about her and refused to panic. She slid down the jagged cliff, her feet pointed in opposite directions, her hands held out like claws. She slid seventeen feet before she hit another little ledge that stopped her.
More than anything she wanted to hug the wall and catch her breath, but there was no time. The zombies were still falling all around her. She made the mistake of looking up just as one toppled directly overhead. It bounced off rock after rock, hitting one just above her and cartwheeling right over her.
It was so close she could have kissed it. The near miss caused her heart to race and her muscles to spasm. Panic was close to setting in. Whimpering and dripping tears on the rock, she was somehow able to get her feet moving.
Only when she was “safe” beneath the overhang did she let herself cry. Safe really wasn’t a word that could describe her predicament; she was two hundred feet from safety, clinging to the side of a cliff and the rest of the climb wasn’t going to be exactly easy.
“But at least the zombies can’t get me,” she said, gingerly taking one hand from the wall and wiping away her tears. That bit of knowledge buoyed her and after a thirty second rest, she began to climb down again.
After so many near misses, going the rest of the way down seemed anticlimactic. Rocks continued to break under her weight and she slipped plenty of times as her hands grew tired and numb from the constant pressure, but she always managed to catch herself, and as long as she kept beneath the overhang, the falling zombies weren’t a problem.
By the time she finally reached the road, there were grotesque piles of corpses ranging along the face of the cliff. The piles undulated and squiggled in a manner that had Sadie turning away. Sucking her aching fingers, she walked to the middle of the road, looking as far down it as she could see.
The Dodge truck was nowhere in sight. “What the hell?” She spun, looking back the other way, but all she saw was the bend in the river two hundred yards away—no truck anywhere.
“If they are messing with me, I’ll…” Sadie didn’t know what she would do, mainly because she was suddenly too afraid to think straight. Captain Grey wasn’t one to play pranks while on a dangerous mission.
Her fear took charge and she ran the two hundred yards in twenty-three seconds. Not her best time, but not her worst, either. Gusting loudly, she pulled up to the mega-boulder that sat across the road and felt relief—they hadn’t been able to get by, of course.
“All that was for nothing then? I nearly died and we…” She stopped abruptly. They weren’t on the other side of the boulder, either. “Captain Grey?” she called as loud as she dared, going completely around the giant boulder. On the far side, she spotted the Dodge in the river and reached maximum confusion.
No one was in the truck. No one was up on the rocks on the other side of the river. No one was lurking in the bushes near the bend. She was alone except for a huge pile of zombies, most of which were dead. Still she slunk back into the shadows of the boulder waiting for something, anything to happen.
Nothing did. “What the hell?” she repeated after ten minutes went by and Grey and his team hadn’t returned. Their disappearance had a UFO quality about it that made hiding seem like the only smart thing to do. But she couldn’t hide all day.
Her one obvious clue sat in the river, its upgraded tires not quite covered by the rushing water. With one last look around, Sadie eased into the icy water. “Jeez! Oh, God! Shit, shit, shiiiit.” She cursed between teeth clenched so hard she thought she might crack a tooth.
The mountain rivers were always cold, but it was now November and the edge of the river had its first planes of ice beginning to extend outward. The cold stung, but didn’t turn her numb as fast as she wished. Her legs were still in agony by the time she reached the truck.
What she saw inside the bed caused her to forget about the pain. Almost all of their gear was missing. Gone was the food and the extra ammo and the jerrycans full of diesel. The only thing left were their backpacks and these had been rifled through and were scattered about in a most unmilitary fashion.
Slogging to the cab, she climbed up where it was warm and again messy…Sadie suddenly saw what else was missing: “My gun, oh, damn it!” All the guns were gone.
“Slavers,” she whispered. Glancing over at the boulder, she saw how the ambush played out: the slavers hiding, the soldiers probably more worried about her than keeping an eye on things. One or two get out to check to see if they can get past the boulder and then, out come the bad guys, shouting orders, guns aimed with dreadful accuracy.
Sadie sat back in the driver’s seat, her raw and aching fingers drumming on the steering wheel as she thought over her options. They were very few. Run back to Estes and tell Neil, which would give the slavers an eight to ten-hour head start. Or go after them herself.
How long was their lead? An hour? Could she make up an hour before sundown?
“Do I have to?” She leaned far over and opened the glove compartment. A map jumped out at her as if it was spring loaded. She began tracing the road system finding the scraggily little one they had been traveling on. She saw that it intersected Route 14 only a few miles ahead, where there was a tiny hamlet of a town labeled Poudre Park.
If the slavers rushed it, they could make it to Poudre Park by sunset and they likely wouldn’t press on from there, not at night. It was too dangerous to travel at night.
“Just not too dangerous for me,” Sadie whispered as she reached under the wheel, hoping, but not expecting to find the keys jingling in the ignition. Her fingers found them. “Interesting. You leave a perfectly good truck just sitting here with a quarter tank of gas in it? I don’t get it.”
She didn’t pause to try to figure out what that meant. She put the truck in 4-wheel low and coaxed it back to the road. And then she was off, speeding to catch the slavers before the night came. Driving at night frightened her. Not only would the zombies key right in on her lights and the sound of the engine, the slavers would too.
“It is what it is.” The only chance she had was to drive like a mad woman. “Or a professional.” Only she wasn’t a professional and the truck wasn’t a performance vehicle. Twice, she nearly careened back into the river and three times she scraped up against the side of a mountain, making an enormous screech that sent shivers down her back.
Still she barreled along, the diesel engine so loud that it rattled the last golden leaves off a stand of aspen. As she drove, she wondered what she would do when she found the slavers. She didn’t have a weapon or Jillybean’s smarts, or her penchant for destruction. “But I am pretty slick. It’ll be dark and they won’t know I’m coming.”
Her plan was founded on the hope that the slavers were the usual lazy sorts and that they would hole up in a house or business and trust that the lock on the front door would be enough to keep them safe. In her mind, they wouldn’t post guards and they wouldn’t bother unloading their trucks.
There would be plenty of guns and ammo sitting out, ripe for the taking. “And if I can get the drop on one of them that’ll be all she wrote.”
Sadie liked to focus on the positive even when it flew in the face of reality, mainly, because in her view, reality “sucks.”
Her reality was that the zombie menace kicked up the closer she got to Poudre Park. And worse, she lost her race w
ith the sun. The mountain canyons went from a dim dusk to a full-on dark in what felt like no time. And even worse than that, the Dodge ran out of diesel a mile and a half away from the town.
If she couldn’t find and overcome the slavers, there was a good chance that she would be walking back to Estes Park. It would be three days of starving, running endlessly from zombies, and praying fervently that a snow storm wouldn’t sweep down on her. Without shelter from the storm, she would freeze to death without question.
“But that’s not going to happen,” she whispered as she climbed out of the now silent truck, listening to the last echoes of the engine fading away. When the echoes had rolled down the canyon, never to return, Sadie was left with only the sound of the river, the rush of wind among the peaks above, and the moan of the zombies coming closer.
In the dark, zombies weren’t much of a threat to Sadie. There wasn’t a need for “zombie” make-up or clothes. She just had to act like a zombie to blend in.
“Uuuuhhh,” she moaned and began limping diagonally away from the truck. As usual, Sadie over-played her role as a zombie, which caused a few of the beasts to stray closer. Her heartbeat revved, and her feet wanted to kick it out of there, but she forced herself to ignore them and keep going.
A mile and a half wasn’t a long way, unless one was moving at the languid pace of the undead. Sadie had time to kill, however she wanted to get to Poudre Park as quickly as possible, and not just to find the slavers. With the sun set, the temperature dropped alarmingly.
Her toes were little frozen carrots in her canvas Converse sneakers, her chest rattled and shivered, protected only by a thin, black jacket, and her fingers were icicles—zombies did not put their hands in their pockets. Zombies rarely had pockets. More and more they wore rags or nothing.
There was nothing worse than the naked dead.
Slowly, without even knowing it, Sadie picked up the pace, while behind her, the dozens of zombies she had passed, trailed after her, drawn on for reasons that were as inexplicable as they were unfortunate. Sadie would have enough trouble dealing with the slavers without the zombies hanging around.
Deciding that she would have to chance breaking character, she waited until she got to the next bend in the road, and when she was out of sight of the zombies, she took off in a sprint. In the eleven seconds it took for the first of the zombies to reach the bend, Sadie was a hundred yards away and invisible in the gloom.
It felt good to run. It felt good to build up enough heat to cause a trickle of sweat to slip down the back of her shirt. But it would not be good to show up in Poudre Park winded and tired. She cut back to a slow jog, letting her senses speak to her.
The smell of smoke grew as she moved down the two-lane strip of black top. Undoubtedly it was the slavers thinking they were safe and sound. Sadie followed her nose, moving quieter now, keeping to the darker shadows.
She looked nothing like a zombie. She looked exactly like what she was: a girl sneaking up on a slaver camp. The smell of smoke brought her to the edge of town and led down a road that was little more than a long scratch of dirt that sat nestled in a gulch. With the walls of the gulch so sharp, there was little cover besides the sparse trees and the few ragged-out cars parked along the side of the road.
The smell grew stronger as she progressed until she finally saw the grey smoke puffing up out of a run-down little ranch. There were two black trucks parked out front, both with trailers hitched behind. One of the trailers was completely full with a bulging tarp strapped over it, while the other still had a little room, but not much.
So far, it had been a successful trip for the slavers, “But not anymore,” Sadie said under her breath as she eased forward. She went to the less full truck, guessing that the supplies that had been stolen last would be in it.
It was so dark beneath the tarp that nothing could be seen and she was forced to dig out her trusty lighter, though she paused before clicking it on. What if the light from it was seen? She eased up, looking over the trailer towards the ranch house. It was quiet and the curtains were drawn. Whoever was in there had gone to great effort to remain hidden.
And if I can’t see them, it follows that they can’t see me, Sadie thought using standard but faulty little kid logic. She ducked back down and clicked on her lighter. It was bright, startlingly bright it turned out.
Though she was expecting the little flame, the man sitting quietly in the bed of the second truck did not. To Sadie, it looked as though a bag of laundry burst into life as the man leapt up.
He was tall, made even taller by the height of the truck. He had on camouflage, but what Sadie had mistaken for laundry was a heavy green blanket. In his hand was an M4.
“We been expecting you, but boy-howdy you snuck up quiet.”
Sadie was caught and could do nothing except raise her hands.
Chapter 11
Jillybean
The slyness of the steps in the snow immediately shocked Jillybean into full consciousness. Ice cold logic suggested if the people outside were friendly, they would’ve knocked on the front door. That meant they were evil and, by the sounds of it, they were coming for her, looking to trap her.
There was still time to get away. If she hurried, she could run out the back door, but…but then where would she go? To the last house? To one of the pillaged houses she had passed on the way?
The snow was still falling as was the temperature. If she ran, she wouldn’t be able to take anything except her backpack, which held only a day’s worth of food and a single water bottle. If she ran, she would be back to where she started from: empty-handed and lost in the middle of Missouri.
And that’s if she could get away. A sprint outside wouldn’t guarantee freedom seeing as she would leave prints in the snow that anyone could follow. Then again, she couldn’t not leave, either. If she jumped into the open cupboard and closed it behind her, the people who were after her, and she could picture their dirty, hairy faces perfectly in her mind’s eye, would know she hadn’t left and all it would take was a thorough search in order to find her.
So, you have to leave and not leave? Ipes asked. How?
“Easy.” There was no time to explain. Sliding across the floor, she stuffed her pack and Ipes into the cupboard closest to the oven—it was always the “frying pan” cupboard and the last one searched—and then shut the door almost all the way. Then she rushed down the hall to the garage and waited with her ears cocked and her breath blowing out of her in plumes.
When the front door was smashed in, she made her move, stepping out into the snow, her old Keds leaving size 10 prints in the snow. Thirty feet to her left was the sliding glass kitchen door—a man was already slipping through the heavy curtain of blankets that she had hung over it in order to keep in the light from her fire.
Jillybean charged across the backyard towards him, slowing only when she came parallel to the sliding door. She had to pass by making as little noise as possible while stepping in fresh snow. Her feet crunched with every step as she made her way around the side of the house. Only then did she step into the footprints that were already there.
They had been made by a booted man with feet that were longer than her forearm. Purposely, she let her feet make marks in the first few prints—and then she turned around and made her way back the way she had come, careful only to step in the man’s footprints. She followed them to the kitchen where she paused just inside the blankets, listening to the sound of boots scuffing and thudding through the house.
“Little girl?” a man’s voice called out. The cold was suddenly forgotten and yet, she was frozen in place. How had he known she was a girl? Her pack was hidden and even if it hadn’t been, there wasn’t anything in it that suggested she was a girl. She didn’t even carry a hair brush.
“Where are you, little girl?” The steps moved away and the voice was slightly muffled. “Come out, come out where ever you are,” he sang. “Olley, Olley in come fr…”
A new voice hissed: “S
he went out through the garage!”
She couldn’t stay where she was even if it meant running into one of the men who were suddenly racing through the house. Jillybean dodged inside while at that instant one of the men stepped out into the snow from the garage. In one hand he carried a heavy, black pistol and in the other a flashlight. For the moment, the light was down on her tracks.
He didn’t see her or the flick of the blankets as she stepped through into the kitchen. The dark house seemed filled with noise: more boots stomping, a crash of furniture, a curse, and someone yelling: “You go out through the front, I’ll go through the kitchen.”
Jillybean didn’t have time to get into her cupboard. She ran on tip toes to the edge of the refrigerator and pressed up against it just as a great beast of a man stormed in from the dining room. In the dim light, she saw a quick flash of his eyes as he gave the room a glance.
Then he was through the blankets, tearing them down in his haste. From the side of the house she heard a man call out: “She went to the front! She went to the front!”
That was Jillybean’s cue to get out of sight. She ducked into the cupboard and shut the door completely. There was nothing she could do now except to hug Ipes to her and hope. The men ran around for a few minutes and then came back into the house, cursing.
“She didn’t disappear, Dave. Stop being a dick. Her tracks went right to the front. I saw them plain as day.”
“Maybe they were old tracks, like from earlier,” another suggested.
“No, they were fresh. You saw that one. It had those little waffle prints in it. No, she’s around here somewhere. I say we wait. She’ll have to come back or she’ll freeze.”
This was agreed to, and as the men waited, they poked around the house, paying particular attention to the kitchen. The fridge was opened, eliciting a volley of curses from all three. Next, the cupboards were opened one after another.
Jillybean could see the light from the flashlights through the door’s cracks. They were right on top of her and she was so afraid that she was close to peeing herself.
The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner Page 10