“So we’ll all be safe from the zombies there?”
“Yes sweetie. And we will be with people whom we can trust.” Then, one at a time, he made sure each Glock pistol had a full mag and a round in the chamber. The 17—minus the suppressor—was holstered in the drop-down on his left thigh. The compact 19, however, went under his arm in the quick-draw rig. “Good to go,” he said aloud, out of habit more so than to reassure Raven.
“Yes we are,” she replied. She rose and crossed the room, Max by her side; as she opened the door she let out a little squeal. “Yeahhh ... Mom’s back.”
Marveling at the girl’s uncanny ability to hear what he could not, Cade grabbed his crutches, rose creakily, and followed her outside.
The Cushman ground to a halt just as he reached the bottom step. He hobbled over and, after Brook silenced the engine, said, “We’re ready when you are.” Behind him he could hear a ticking as Raven pushed her mountain bike from around the side of their billet. Then the swish of knobby tires through damp grass.
“Pinch me,” Brook said, beaming from ear to ear. “I can’t believe we’re actually leaving this fortress of boredom and deceit.”
Nodding his head in semi-agreement, Cade placed the lone backpack behind the passenger seat next to hers and loped around to the driver’s side. With most of his weight supported on his right foot, he slid his crutches into the back seat and sat with the walking boot sticking out slightly. “Hey hon,” he said, once he was situated.
Brook swiveled around to face him. “Yes,” she answered.
“You’re going to have to do the heavy lifting for a couple of days. Starting with the Bird’s bike.”
“And the rifles?” she asked as she placed the lightweight bike on the back where, on a normal golf cart, a couple of baskets would be corralling a pair of overstuffed bags full of golf clubs.
“Already in the truck.”
“The Whipper guy didn’t lay claim to it while you were gone ... did he?”
“No. He’s not so bad. He’s just wound pretty tight. Like we all are these days.” He went silent for a beat, then added, “We had a talk and we’re on the same page now.”
Wondering if she could coax the rest of that story from him one day, she secured the bike with a couple of lengths of paracord. She whistled and hollered, “Come on Max.”
Just as Raven was taking her seat next to Brook, the Australian Shepherd bounded from the grass, his coat covered with dew. After a couple of quick convulsions which sprayed everyone with a fine mist, he snaked under Raven’s legs and claimed a spot between mom and daughter.
“Home, James,” said Cade in his best British accent.
Pigtails flailing like medieval weapons, Raven whipped her head around and blurted, “Really?”
“No sweetie,” answered Brook as she started the Cushman. “Dad was using a figure of speech. I’ll explain it to you once we’re on the move. Reminds me,” she added, speaking over her shoulder. “Am I driving that monstrosity part of the way?”
“To start. We’ll take turns. Maybe the Wilson kid can take the wheel a little.”
“Over my dead body,” replied Brook, recalling the terror-filled moments during which their U-Haul convoy had gotten gridlocked in the gated community southwest of Colorado Springs.
The statement elicited an impromptu meeting of the eyes between father and daughter. Cade made a face and shrugged. To which Raven bugged out her eyes, then turned forward and sat rigid in her seat just as the cart started moving.
***
After transiting the base via the smooth asphalt drives past the community resource center, the medical clinic and the mess hall, Brook snugged the Cushman to the curb behind an identical model Cushman and silenced the engine. “You or me?”
“Me,” answered Raven, who was already half out of the vehicle.
Brook watched her bound up the steps and knock on the door—a furtive flurry of tiny knuckles playing out like bongos on the hollow-core door. After a few moments it opened a crack and Raven disappeared inside.
“Password please,” followed by a curt, “Enter,” was all Brook could think of as she watched the interaction play out. Then, like a limo driver delivering a diplomat to a high level meeting, she sat back and prepared for the long wait; her experience was that anyone under twenty seemed to think quick applied only to powdered flavorings for milk or the speed at which paint dries. She turned to face Cade and asked, “Since I’m doing the driving, is there anything I should know about this new truck?”
“It’s a beast ... that’s for sure. You know our Sequoia?”
“Hated driving that thing,” Brook answered without hesitation.
Fully expecting the sentiment he’d heard her utter a hundred times, he cracked a smile and said, “We can’t expect to run an undead gauntlet in a VW.”
“No ... really?” she said smartly.
“I know it’s bigger than my old truck, but I think you’ll warm to it.”
“I don’t have to like it to drive it,” was her answer to that. Then, parroting something Cade always preached, she said, “I’ll adapt.”
“You’ve done great so far,” he said, giving her shoulder a soft squeeze.
She looked at her watch. Seven minutes.
The door opened and Sasha emerged carrying a bulging, utilitarian-looking, tan canvas bag over her shoulder.
Max’s ears perked and he sat up as Raven emerged with a wooden baseball bat clutched in one hand and a tan leather handbag with some kind of logo dotting nearly every square inch in the other. Everything was placed in back of the other cart and Raven returned and took her place next to Max, who greeted her with a gentle butting of his head, a move that was reciprocated with a good scratching behind the ears.
“What’s keeping the other two?”
“Taryn is inside on her bed hiding under the covers,” answered Raven. “Wilson said she had cold feet. That mean she’s sick or something?”
“Something,” answered Cade. He’d been afraid something like this might crop up. Better to find the possible weak link here behind the wire than out there on the road. His first inclination when Brook proposed letting the kids come along was to scream Hell no, but he’d caved like he was prone to when Brook turned the screws or turned on the charm. Now he wished he’d listened to his gut instinct, which was usually always right.
But three against one was long odds so he said nothing more. Looked at his Suunto and did a quick calculation. If we get going soon, he thought, then we might make Mack—the small town straddling the border between Utah and Colorado—sometime around dusk. Just in time for a hot meal, and if the scuttlebutt he’d heard from some 4th ID soldiers who’d spent time there was correct—a hot shower just might be over the horizon.
The door creaked open and Wilson stepped into the flat light of morning. Mist swirling, he gently closed the door, head hanging low, eyes hidden by the brim of his boonie hat. Then he tossed his meager belongings into the back alongside Sasha’s and, without looking at Cade or anyone else, took the wheel and made a shooing motion, urging Brook to pull ahead.
The carts started in near unison.
Brook edged around and nosed in the direction of the humongous aircraft hangers piercing the fog in the distance.
“Taryn’s not coming?” Raven asked.
Once again Cade shrugged. He had no power over people—unless the circumstances required him to abduct or kill them. He tried to make eye contact with Wilson as they passed by the idling Cushman, but only registered the funereal-look parked on the redhead’s face.
Chapter 59
Quarry
After dragging the near-headless bodies out of sight, the three of them proceeded single file through the office and into the garage itself, leaving Jordan behind as lookout.
Once inside, another dichotomy presented itself. Although the exposed beams and rafters were obviously roughhewn old-growth and original to the building, Logan noticed that everything else was brand new and m
odern. There were work benches along two walls complete with peg boards and a plethora of tools, each outlined and hanging in their own assigned location. Sitting in the corner near the far overhead door were two enormous Honda generators—both shiny and red and still in their shipping packaging—crated in knotty yellow wood with Styrofoam showing at the corners. The floor they sat on had been painted a pale gray and was flecked with some kind of traction aid—which did wonders considering the slug tracks created by the female rotter as it had dragged its intestines everywhere. Aside from the slimy floor and streaks of body fluids and scraps of flesh and guts on the insides of the garage doors—every other surface in the place looked clean enough to eat from.
Gus, who trailed in last, flicked the wall-mounted switch—a move both rote and highly optimistic considering the electrical grid had been down since day two of the outbreak. However, he was rewarded for the effort as the overhead fluorescents flared to life, bathing them with a stark blue-white light. “Smart old guy ... installed himself a solar collection system on the roof,” he said, looking up at the ceiling which had to be at least thirty-five feet overhead. “And I’d bet the farm that he probably installed twelve to fourteen panels at a hundred plus watts each. Hell, a kilowatt will go a long ways if you only have the essential stuff drawing from it.”
Jamie looked at Gus. Made a face and said, “What were you doing, reading up on water filtration and solar arrays in between handing out speeding tickets and lounging around the donut shop?”
“Ha ha ... so easy to crack on a cop with the donut jokes. Pretty original, Jamie.” His smile faded and he added without one scintilla of remorse, “That’s exactly what I was doing, and that’s why I left my badge and cruiser on the freeway near Arsenal and decided to take Logan up on his offer. And I’m glad I did. Wouldn’t change a thing.”
“I’m glad you did too,” said Logan.
“Enough with the mushy stuff,” Gus said sharply. “I think we ought to dismantle this system and load it onto those trucks along with the generators and take it all back with us.”
The trucks Gus mentioned were nosed in to the back wall. Both were American-made rigs with dealer invoices glued to their passenger windows. The white Dodge was a factory-prepped extended cab 4x4 with a pair of whip antennas presumably for a citizens band radio. It was shod with dual rear wheels and oversized tires all tucked under widely-flared fender wells. The other, a black Chevy Silverado 4x4, was equipped similarly with a big Vortec engine sans the dual rear wheels.
Looking around the space, Jamie said, “So where’s the video feed from the front gate end up?”
“Good question,” answered Gus. “Surely they weren’t monitoring it on that old IBM in the office.”
Nosing around the far side of the hulking Chevy, Logan called out, “Over here.”
Jamie worked her way around, Gus in tow, and arrived just as Logan was kicking aside a charcoal-gray area rug that looked like it belonged in the high-traffic entry of an auto parts or hardware store.
Gus said, “Whatcha got?”
“I found a door,” he answered, pulling his shirt over his nose. “But there’s something dead down there. Your turn to do the opening, Gus.” He backed away.
Shouldering his AR, Gus approached the trap door which looked to be eight to ten feet long, and wide enough for two decent-sized men to stand atop shoulder-to-shoulder. He knelt and grasped the handle, pulled hard and swung it cleanly to the right and allowed it to rest against the workbench.
Simultaneously a cloud of flies, thicker than the first, enveloped his head while the air from below, thick with the stench of death, blasted him in the face. Throat constricting, he fell backwards and rolled onto his stomach. Instantly a torrent of vomit and bile sluiced from his mouth, running in rivulets over the edge of the shadowy opening and down the stairs which he’d caught a fleeting glimpse of before the unexpected two-pronged assault.
Grateful that a rotter hadn’t followed the swarm from below, and certain he’d be as good as dead if one had, he slid on his butt away from the stairs and pulled a flashlight from its carrier on his belt. Once a cop, always a cop, he thought, as he twisted the bezel and swung the beam over the stairs. Wood treads—not quite as high tech as the rest of the garage—disappeared into the ground. Suddenly on the verge of hurling again, Gus said, “Someone open up a door. Let some of this stink out.”
There was a clunk and then a discordant metallic rattle as Logan raised one of the garage doors upward in its tracks.
“Going in,” said Gus, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm. Feeling like a tunnel rat in Nam, he fully collapsed the stock on his AR, clamped the tactical light between his teeth, and moved down the steps one at a time, careful to tread on the sides only, heel first, slowly transferring the weight to his toes.
Nine steps later he was standing on the metal floor of a buried Conex container. He walked the flashlight’s beam left to right, illuminating the walls which were covered with small colorful murals, each with its own theme, painted by someone barely graduated from stick figures. Suddenly three light bulbs a yard above his head came on.
“How’s that,” Logan said, his voice thin and reedy in the stair’s confines.
“Bright,” answered Gus. He squeezed his eyes into slits until his pupils adjusted, and when he opened them fully he saw the source of the pong. Huddled in the far corner were two putrefying corpses, a boy and a girl.
The boy was tow-headed, thin in the face, and looked to have been about ten before death caught up to him. His hair was meticulously combed and he wore a pin-striped three-piece suit which was bulging at the seams from post mortem bloating. His shirt’s top button had popped, dropping his clip-on tie into the biohazard soup wetting the front of his jacket and slacks.
The second corpse looked a spitting image of the boy. Identical twins? Gus noted that her blond hair had been cropped short—harder for a rotter to get a hold of, he guessed. Both wore masks of contentment, like they’d gone to sleep on Christmas Eve with visions of sugarplums banging around in their heads and simply failed to wake up.
On the floor near the kids was a woman of about forty, her body curled in a fetal position atop a once-yellow sleeping bag that had done a wondrous job of soaking up copious amounts of her bodily fluids. The sight reminded him that on average the human body held ten pints of blood, all of which had run in a continuous rivulet from the woman’s slit right wrist, following the natural slope of the floor a number of feet before pooling and drying to black in the opposite corner of the container.
His gaze followed the nearly straight black line back to the sleeping bag. Then, full of sadness, his attention was drawn back to the woman. Nothing about her face was placid or calm or content. Her lips, thin bands of blue, were bared over a picket of crooked teeth. Her eyelids were frozen open but the windows to her soul were gone—having been usurped by a writhing plug of shiny maggots turned the color of ivory by the bulbs overhead.
He took a step closer, knelt down and took a pill bottle from under the sleeping bag near her head. He read the label. Percocet. Prescribed by Doctor Jeff Malone. Quantity: 40 tablets, 5 milligrams per. Enough to put the kids to sleep forever, he reasoned. But not enough for mom. So she resorted to slicing her wrists the correct way—vertically—thus taking the tendons out of the equation.
After covering the dead woman with the sleeping bag’s top flap, Gus searched around and found a fleece blanket in a stuff sack which he used to fully conceal the kids.
Using the AR’s flash suppressor he pushed open the next door, flicked the light switch and peered inside. Clear.
Following the same procedure he’d learned at the Academy and perfected from years serving the citizens of Salt Lake County, he searched the entire compound which was a warren of shipping containers, placed end to end like the Eden compound, but half the size. The technology, however, had not been skimped on. The security cameras at the front gate were indeed real, and broadcasting a steady image of th
e gate in one corner of a large flat-panel monitor.
Once he had checked the catacombs for more rotters, and after he’d taken a cursory inventory of the dead man’s preps, he called out for the others to join him.
Chapter 60
Quarry
But only Logan came down the stairs. “Big enough for the two of us?” he asked.
“Judge for yourself.”
“Wow, old man was keepin’ himself busy.”
“Where’s Jamie?”
“She’s doing the same thing you did.”
“Puking?”
“And crying.”
Gus made a face. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said. He pulled aside a number of hard plastic Pelican cases lining the wall opposite the glowing monitor, and with Logan helping, delved into them.
Inside the first box they found ammunition of various calibers as well as two sets of communication gear that rivaled the voice-activated units Lev and Chief had taken from the National Guard rotters. The next container held a half-dozen pairs of the earliest generation NVGs—not the best, but better than they already had, which was zip. The third case was filled to the top with medical supplies, arranged in neat little rows from meds on the left to bandages and sutures on the right.
Gus said, “Follow me,” and led Logan into another room where—Eureka!—ballistic vests in multiple sizes hung on wooden hangers. Extra sets of camouflage clothing in kids and adults sizes were piled high. And above them, a host of pistols were affixed to the wall in the same manner as the hand tools up top. Each weapon had its own outlined place with hooks holding them in place. Standing up on the adjacent wall were a couple of scoped bolt-action sniper rifles, a half-dozen modern automatic rifles prepped for close quarters battle, and a trio of riot shotguns.
Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 30