ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story)

by Chesser, Shawn

  The truck’s warm flat roof was a perfect platform to plant his elbows on. Much better than the narrow window ledge in 304.

  First he scanned the road with his naked eye. Close in, about a hundred yards away in the three desolate westbound lanes, two bikers had stopped their Harleys in the breakdown area and appeared to be working on one of them. They don’t call them hardly ever-runs for nothing, thought Duncan as he swept his gaze forward and found that making out the details at the far end where the roadblock had been erected was impossible without the binoculars. So he raised them to his eyes and picked up the trooper, who was now being crowded around by citizens and bikers alike. It looked like the scene in Frankenstein when the villagers were trying to get at the man-made monster, only the people surrounding the trooper held no pitchforks or torches. They were American citizens with inalienable rights—freedom tantamount among them. And dollars to donuts, if he was close enough to hear what was being said, the civilians would be arguing about civil liberties, the Bill of Rights, and a myriad of other First World problems keeping them from continuing on eastward.

  And the trooper would no doubt be imploring them to be calm. Telling them he was only following orders. Then, as a last resort, threatening arrest if the crowd didn’t stand down and back off. A threat he was in no position to carry out unless backup arrived very soon. In short: panic had the upper hand. The introduction of the outlaw bikers into the mix only made matters worse.

  Then the true nature of the situation hit Duncan like a mule kick when, for the third time today, he saw the pink mist and the trooper dropped from sight like a trapdoor had been opened underneath him. One second he was there, the next he was gone. Where his head had been a pink halo was now blooming and drifting, seemingly in slow motion, over the people crowded around the dead lawman’s squad car. The Smokey the Bear hat had been blasted off the trooper’s exploding head. Caught by the east wind, it was now flying end-over-end above the heads of the shocked civilians being pressed in by a dozen or so bikers who were all suddenly reacting gleefully to the trooper’s execution.

  Through no volition of his own, Duncan tracked the mist left to right and watched it paint the squat police car with a glistening sheen of detritus.

  The booming report had rattled the Dodge’s rear window glass, causing Duncan to duck instinctively. Left ear ringing subtly from the unexpected discharge, he crouched lower, and pressed his right shoulder tight to the sliding rear window.

  Bringing the field glasses to bear on the nearest pair of bikers, Duncan saw the shooter—full black beard all tangled and windblown—set aside an impossibly large sniper rifle and high five the second outlaw biker. When they did so, Duncan got a good look at the patching on the back of their leathers. Same as before. On the top across the shoulders was the scroll reading Nomad Jesters. In the center was the sneering, Kalashnikov-wielding jester caricature. And below the big red and black jester head, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho was spelled out in white, swastikas bookending the bottom patch.

  Right then it was clear to Duncan there was nothing wrong with the pair of Harleys. The dismounted bikers had been readying the rifle, which they were now wasting no time putting away in a soft case of some sort. Still laughing, they lashed the long gun to one of the bikes, kick-started their steeds, and rode along the shoulder all the way to the scene of the crime, where the carnage resumed at once.

  Stomach twisting in knots, Duncan continued to watch through the binoculars as an impossibly large redheaded biker smacked around one of the male civilians. Other bikers soon joined in, stomping the men and rounding up the women and kids. Finally, as if things couldn’t get any worse, the big redhead snatched a young girl from whom Duncan presumed to be her mother, held the writhing youngster aloft in front of his disciples, and drew a long knife against her bare midsection.

  The last image indelibly imprinted on Duncan’s memory before he sank to his butt in the pick-up bed was a fan of crimson spraying horizontal to the road and a jumble of shiny guts tumbling in slow motion to the heated blacktop.

  Imagining himself putting his shotgun up the biker’s keister and pulling the trigger, Duncan collected the weapon and binoculars and crawled over the side of the truck to the blacktop. But first things first: he needed to get out in front of the wastes of skin bikers and start forgetting the evil acts that he’d been utterly helpless to prevent. Wanting nothing more than to crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels and speed up the process of forgetting, he instead fished a bottle of water from his bag and cracked the seal.

  Naïve, indeed.

  Chapter 42

  Duncan was missing Charlie’s humor the moment the hiss of the wheels resumed inside the old Dodge. Eyes misting over for the little girl, the other civilians, and now, once more, his friend, he enacted Plan C.

  The drive east through downtown Troutdale—all three blocks of it—were uneventful. The power was out here, but the streets were lined with cars and trucks and the lone bar was hopping. In fact, it looked to be filled to capacity, with folks spilling out onto the sidewalk, drinking and smoking. With the infection spreading outward from Portland twenty miles west of them, they were dancing on the deck of the Titanic and didn’t seem to care.

  Duncan’s gaze was drawn from the revelers outside to the plate glass windows and the darkened neon signs promising cold Budweiser and Miller High Life. The niggling internal voice was back and telling him how nice it would be stop and tip a few. Go ahead, it chided. You’re a big boy. You deserve it. Park this rig and bull your way to the bar and talk the bartender into extending you a tab on credit.

  Once again, like some demonically possessed Plymouth Fury, the truck began to slow. But family was more important. And the only family Duncan had left was roughly eight hundred miles away by crow, and seeing as how the helicopter procurement mission had failed horribly, as had the second option of taking I-84 east, stopping and getting drunk would be the nail in his coffin. So he dragged his eyes from the mingling going on, from the signs and the frothy emotional appeal they produced, and drove on through the blink-and-you-miss-it town.

  ***

  Troutdale’s short main drag went from a straight west to east affair and dove into a series of gradual turns. Along the way he passed houses new and old before the winding road spilled the Dodge onto a narrow iron and cement bridge spanning the glittering Sandy River. Rusty and flecked with curls of hunter green paint, the dilapidated thing looked as if it wouldn’t support a moped let alone the three-ton truck underneath his butt.

  To Duncan’s surprise, there was no groaning of metal or hundred-year-old rivets popping from the supports as he wheeled the wide-fendered Dodge across the bridge. And when he turned right onto southbound Historic Columbia River Highway he was also surprised to see a couple of trucks parked on the frost-heaved spit of blacktop making up the parking lot set aside for people recreating on the Sandy.

  He was truly blown away when through the trees he saw two men in hip waders and tan vests rhythmically casting flies into the river’s gently moving current.

  Cast.

  Jerk.

  Reel it all in.

  They went on like that—rinse and repeat—until they were lost from view in the passenger-wing mirror.

  ***

  Charlie’s company was sorely missed as the Dodge tackled a steep and narrow two-lane running east away from the river’s banks, bringing on memories from earlier. Them avoiding the bikers and guardsmen. Sitting atop Mount Scott and watching the rising sun.

  As the shaded gray stripe snaked left and right up the hill with the truck’s engine laboring, a couple of wisecracks out of his friend would have been nice to pass the time. The thought of Charlie saying: What, did ya forget to feed the hamsters?” or “Hey Flintstone, want me to kick a hole in the floorboards and help with the hill?” brought a much-needed smile to Duncan’s face.

  At the top of the two-mile-climb the road went laser-straight and the dotted yellow became a double solid. Here farmhouses and pas
tures dominated the scenery. A swaybacked barn, its once red paint weathered and peeling, flicked by on the left. Rusty farm implements dotted the fields. There were no dead things in sight.

  After a couple of miles the road narrowed and took a sweeping left before going straight again and shooting north past a country store with a gravel parking lot full of cars and trucks. And though the students were on summer break, the lot fronting Corbett Grade School was a hive of activity. There was a black and white police cruiser as well as a dozen or so other vehicles nosed in by the brick structure. Beside the school were a pair of yellow Corbett District school busses piled high with camping gear. Parents were preparing to send their Cub Scouts on a camping trip, Duncan presumed. At face value, a good idea. Get them out in the woods and away from the crazies carrying the infection.

  Though he was far from a social scientist, he knew a little about normalcy bias. Saw it in Vietnam. The REMFs (Rear Echelon Motherfuckers), most of them, anyway, acted as if a bloody war wasn’t being waged just beyond their doorstep. The old “pretend it’s not happening and it might go away” type of wishful thinking had been at work there until the Tet Offensive. And now, based on the general lack of truthfulness coming from the President early on, Duncan feared most of the population of Portland proper—all six hundred thousand of them—were planning on staying put. Riding it out, so to speak. Which would lead to exponential rates of infection and eventually a frenzied diaspora of the living bringing the infected along with them.

  The normalcy bias that had gotten a lot of people killed in Saigon in 1968 was about to be the downfall of Corbett and all of the tiny towns like it in close proximity to highly populated areas.

  Passing the post office, he noted that Old Glory was at half-staff, the east wind making her pop and crack loud enough to be heard over the hiss of the truck’s off-road tires. Forgetting Charlie was no longer with him, he started to sing the National Anthem. He was already at “can you see” when he looked to his right and it hit home that his friend was really gone. Their strength in numbers, which was Charlie’s stated rationale for coming along, had indeed been cut in half by a freak accident. With hot tears rolling down his cheeks, and the image of the flag retreating in the rearview, Duncan decided what his friend had done to himself to avoid becoming a monster without a pulse would never be revisited. No reason to remember the man with anything but the easy smile on his face. That final image—the powder burns, bulged blue eyes and elongated skull—was filed away, hopefully forever.

  The sight of the flag not only brought on the melancholy mood, it also gave birth to hope. For if the citizens of Corbett knew enough to lower Old Glory out of respect for the truly dead, then there was no reason to doubt that they were aware of what had taken place at Pioneer Courthouse Square, and that knowledge alone, at the very least, gave them a fighting chance to survive the coming onslaught.

  A few blocks north of the solemn reminder of the outbreak was an ODOT sign that read: Crown Point 3, Multnomah Falls 11.

  Apparently ODOT suffered from no kind of sign post shortage, because half a mile past the previous, another sign caught Duncan’s eye. It read: Narrow Winding Road Next 14 Miles and below that Vista House and Multnomah Falls Next Left.

  Now we’re cooking with gas.

  That the Dodge had barely made it down half a dozen of Ladd’s Edition’s skinny little streets without losing a couple of inches off each fender made Duncan question whether the old girl was gonna make it down fourteen miles worth of that kind of civil engineering.

  ***

  The first mile wasn’t an issue. Duncan and his Dodge were all alone on the narrow winding road, so he just took his half out of the middle.

  Soon he came to a fork in the road where he had to make a decision. To the left was the Vista House—a stone and glass homage to days gone by with a million-dollar-view up and down the Columbia River Gorge. In the parking lot were a pair of cars and a trio of people leaning against them and talking amongst themselves.

  To the right, the scenic highway continued winding away to the east—narrow, shaded, and looking as lonely as he felt sitting in the cab by himself.

  Strength in numbers.

  Indecision gripping him, Duncan plucked the binoculars off the seat and focused on the dome-shaped Vista House. He walked the field glasses over the vehicles. One was a yellow classic car. A Camaro or Chevelle of the Sixties’ vintage. The other was a red convertible. Cute with a white top and made in Germany by VW. Next, he panned lower and scrutinized the people. The taller of the three was an older man dressed in polyester and wearing a powder blue fisherman’s hat. Dark sunglasses shielded his eyes; still, Duncan categorized him as the furthest thing from a threat. The other two were young females, blonde, tanned, and very beautiful. Their similar dress, body dimensions and mannerisms led Duncan to believe they were twins. Spying on them from afar made him feel voyeuristic and a little dirty.

  He had a decision to make and Charlie was not here to offer his opinion. So Duncan did what he always did in situations like these: he took a quarter from the ashtray and assigned heads to taking the left fork and perhaps another chance at fulfilling Charlie’s strength in numbers strategy. If tails should come up, he would take it as a sign he was meant to make a solitary journey to find his brother.

  Here goes nothing.

  Duncan thumbed the quarter into the air. It spun end over end, catching the sun’s rays on the way up. He nearly lost it at the apex, but ended up snaring it and quickly closed his palm around its flat cool surface.

  Anticipation building, he said a little prayer and then slowly opened his hand.

  Tails.

  Damn.

  In his head he again heard the admonition “strength in numbers,” only this time it was spoken in his East Texas drawl.

  He dropped the quarter back where it had come from and released his foot from the brake, letting gravity take the truck. At the bottom of the hill, as had already happened more than once, someone else took the wheel and the old Dodge swung wide left.

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  ###

  To be continued in Trudge: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

  Thanks for reading Drawl! Reviews help. Please consider leaving yours at the place of purchase. Cade rejoins his former Delta team on a new mission in District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, the forthcoming novel in my bestselling series. Available Summer of 2016 everywhere ebooks are sold. Please feel free to Friend Shawn Chesser on Facebook. To receive the latest information on upcoming releases first, please join my mailing list at ShawnChesser.com.