Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss

by Chesser, Shawn

  “Screw all of that,” shouted one of the women, tears carving white channels down her dirt-smudged cheeks. “What about our dead?”

  “The dead are the lucky ones,” answered Dregan. He glanced anxiously at the lurching creatures beginning to amass at the mouth of the feeder road. “The dead have to remain outside with the trucks. You’ll get your weapons back after we get to know you all a little better.”

  “Teresa, Ned, and Cloe are going to turn,” said the woman with the grime-streaked face. “What about them?”

  Dregan said nothing. He turned and ordered Hunt to police up the weapons. Letting his rifle dangle from its sling, he pulled a long buck knife from its leather holster. Under the watchful gaze of the outsiders, he strode to the lead truck and leaned over the bed. Two of the three corpses were beginning to stir: a boy of about ten and a tween girl. The eyes darted under heavy lids and their stick-thin bite-riddled arms twitched minutely. Without letting on that the transformation had already begun, Dregan uttered a short prayer and then performed the necessary task the loved ones for obvious reasons had not.

  Face devoid of emotion, he turned and spread his arms wide as if he were giving the little band of survivors a much-needed group hug. Then, like a sheepdog working a flock, he made shooing motions with his arms and herded them all toward the gate.

  As Deputy MacLeod crabbed past the mangled grill and bumper, the school bus’s diesel engine came to life. By the time the group was through, Deputy Hunt was doing the herding.

  Dregan stopped and stole one last glance at the pickups and was reminded of his family’s escape from Salt Lake. Pressing his palms to his eyes to staunch the forming tears, he stood there for a moment bracketed by the group’s vehicles and the idling bus. Coming to some kind of conclusion, he fished his radio out and strode through the gate, already barking out orders at the driver to close it up and issuing others instructing his deputies to begin shoring it up against the dead now streaming unimpeded up the feeder road.

  Once inside the wire—a universal term soldiers called the inner sanctum of a base of just about any size so long as there were fortifications sufficient to keep the enemy outside—Dregan hailed Gregory and Cleo and ordered them to meet him in Judge Pomeroy’s chambers.

  Chapter 13

  Iris came to hearing the name she hated being called being repeated over and over. Now and again one of the searchers—the long-haired guy named Seth, judging by the slightly nasal quality to the braying voice—would bellow “Bridgett!” and make an appeal for her to show herself. The plea would always arrive ahead of the promise that she would not be punished for stealing food.

  “We just want to talk to you,” called a second male voice she couldn’t match to a face. “That’s all … just talk.”

  The pain in her leg stifled the rising chuckle brought on by the absurdity that anyone would believe some bullcrap like that. Maybe in the movies or on television, she mused. This Doer ain’t biting. Hell no!

  She dragged her sleeve across her forehead, wiping away the sweat beading there. Then she leaned over and gently removed a few handfuls of decaying leaves from around her knee, grimacing as each movement sent new tremors of pain surging through her body.

  Iris paused for a moment then continued clearing the leaves and found that the next layer was mostly wet clods of dirt shot through with reddish-brown clay. Adding to the mud already caked to her palms and trapped underneath her nails, she plucked out most of the debris filling in around her trapped leg. After succeeding in getting through the secondary layer without passing out, she learned that the hole was not home to a bear trap as she had suspected, but was instead bristling with a half-dozen sharply pointed sticks, each one protruding from the walls and floor at a different angle. She also saw that not only was her calf pierced through by at least two of the sticks, but her shoe was shot through with one as well.

  After digging furiously for a couple of minutes at the wall on the right side of her leg, the blunt ends of the sticks began to release from the mud holding them.

  Thank God for the recent rains, she thought, as the stake piercing through her jeans and into her calf from the left side began to break free from the wall. With the sweet endorphins flooding her system and dulling the pain, she had no way to gauge the damage done until she freed herself from the grips of the diabolical trap.

  “Why did you Eden fuckers allow me inside your precious compound?” she hissed through clenched teeth, ahead of a soft, sad chuckle. Who had been fooling whom? Though she had convinced their older leader to save her from the purged and take her in, she never felt welcomed by the younger man. The one with the permanent hard-set jaw and calculating gaze they called Cade. He was a Doer in a Watcher’s body. And she had a strong suspicion that he was the group’s de facto leader the moment she saw him interact with the others.

  “Fuck me,” she said softly. “I’ve been played.”

  Her first thought upon having this epiphany was: This isn’t happening. Then she asked herself: are you really going to give up after completing the tasks you were given? Hell, Iris, you convinced the women sitting by the RV that you were going to the latrines, then doubled back out of the camera’s reach with all of them none the wiser.

  She put a hand over her mouth to hold the laughter in. Back in a minute, she remembered telling them, all the while stifling the urge to laugh and call them both cunt whores to their faces. Then inform them of what they really were: purged waiting to happen. Then drive the dagger deeper by laughing in their hope-filled faces and mock the death of the man they called Oliver who did get purged that night she successfully completed her first official mission as a Doer.

  After so many successes was the Doer about to be undone by a bunch of sharp sticks?

  “Fuck no,” she muttered. “I’m a Doer now.”

  ***

  Two minutes after having her great epiphany, Iris freed her leg and lay flat on her back and stared straight up through the gnarled boughs and branches. Afraid to assess the damage, but mostly afraid of what it might mean for her future as a Doer, she stayed prone for a long time, watching dark clouds scud by and listening hard to detect the search party.

  Nothing.

  Five long minutes and she had heard nobody braying her pseudonym.

  Unable to further ignore the throb in her leg reminding her that she was going nowhere without tending to it, she arched her back and regarded the fence she had scaled prior to stepping in the shit that got her here. It was basically three strands of heavy gauge wire strung between steel T-posts commonly found at most builder supply stores. Incidentally, she concluded it was of the same construct as the fence and swinging gate under constant surveillance of one of the half-dozen video cameras supplying a steady stream of moving images to the monitor in the underground compound. The realization of which brought on epiphany number two.

  You are a Doer now, Iris. Suck it up.

  And she did suck it up—literally—in the form of a lungful of cool, damp air. Which she held in to counter the solar flare of white hot pain that came when she sat up and gazed down the length of her leg. The denim from her knee down wore a morass of blood and mud. There were numerous quarter-sized tears in the fabric. And like the tail on one of those dinosaurs whose name she couldn’t pronounce—ankylo-something or other—one branch had pierced her Achilles tendon while two more, as thick as her thumb and twice the length, protruded from each side of her calf. Jiggling one of the sticks in her calf told her that they were two separate pieces. A good thing, she figured. The through-and-through, however, she feared was going to be a bitch to remove. Lastly, she inspected her shoe. Somehow the upthrust stakes had missed her foot entirely, the only damage occurring when one had skewered the sole and exited above the inside arch.

  Dodged that bullet, she thought even as she steeled herself to remove the ones she hadn’t. The two in her upper calf slid out with little trouble, but lots of added pain. Panting hard from exertion, and with a remembered vision of
some movie star performing battlefield surgery on himself in a setting eerily similar to this, she took hold of one end of the stake wedged between her Achilles tendon and whatever bone it was attached to. Hell, she wasn’t a nurse. There had been two in the compound. The older one, Glenda, was a self-righteous, tee-totaling bitch. Always so fucking positive. What she needed was to be locked up for a few months. That’d show her what powerlessness really was. Doubtful if her higher power would see fit to stick around in the hole with her. Because, from experience, Iris knew that the only company one had while in solitary was of the Me, Myself, and I variety. One week-long stint last spring had been enough to nearly drive her mad. Thank God the purge happened when it did, ensuring she would never again be locked up with only herself as company.

  Anger coursing through her, she yanked the stake free without thought of the ramifications. There was a nuclear explosion of pain behind her eyes. Then she rolled her head to the right and vomited up pound cake peppered with undigested nuggets of venison from the stew she’d recently inhaled.

  A byproduct of the lightning bolt of pain was an inadvertent scream which she quickly stifled with her dirty tartan sleeve.

  Leaving the splinter- and dirt-filled wounds in her calf to be dealt with later, Iris tugged up on her pants leg, releasing a torrent of blood that spilled over her shoe and onto the carpet of decaying leaves.

  Pulling her sock down, she inspected the wound to her Achilles. There were two holes, one on each side, and they were pulsing with blood. To staunch the flow, she tore off one of her tartan sleeves at the elbow and wrapped it twice around her ankle, tying it off with as tight of a knot she could produce. In seconds the ligature staunched the flow of blood. Next, she undid the button on the other sleeve, pulled it over her hand, and dabbed at the other wounds with it. Determining she wouldn’t be bleeding to death anytime soon, she looked up and cast another furtive glance at the fence. Nothing moved in the general direction of the compound. She drew a breath, cocked her head like a dog, and again listened hard. Nothing. There were no harried voices of people hunting for the source of the stunted scream. Save for the steady patter of drips landing on the forest floor and distant cries of a pair of bickering ravens, all was quiet.

  Countering the pain with thoughts of sweet revenge, she rose from the ground and stared at the bloody sticks and collapsing pit, taking one of the former and stuffing it into a back pocket. Face twisted into a hate-filled mask, she said, “Cade and Duncan, this is all your doing.” Then, biting her lip to distract from the dull throb radiating upward from her heel, she took a tentative step, placing the majority of her weight on her injured leg. When she didn’t immediately end up on the ground in a worthless heap, she smiled and hissed, “Better watch your asses, Doer one and Doer two. Because Iris is coming back with reinforcements.”

  Chapter 14

  Casa De Daymon

  Daymon led the callers inside, closing the door after Taryn. “I like the new do,” he said. “Are you happy you hacked it off?”

  “I’m not,” Wilson interjected before Taryn could answer.

  Stepping out of the way of the door’s wide swing, Taryn said matter-of-factly, “It needed doing.”

  While Daymon was throwing the dual deadbolts, Taryn punched Wilson in the shoulder and shot him a look that said: I’ll talk for myself, thank you very much.

  Casting his gaze counterclockwise around the grand foyer, Duncan noted the lavish finishes as well as the framed photographs and high-end art dotting the walls. Tiled with sand-colored tumbled travertine, the nearby stairway curled up and away to his right. Left of the entry near the base of the stairs was some kind of sitting room. Through a set of open pocket-doors he saw Shaker-style oak furniture with cushions wrapped in saddle-brown leather. A soot-stained fireplace clad with smooth, gray river rock and capped off with a live-edge wood mantel dominated one interior wall. Affixed to velvet-wrapped mounts, a dozen different animal heads stared down from the walls, their beady glass eyes seemingly passing judgment on the displayed opulence. Two types of deer framed the ugly mug of a razor-tusked boar: a common whitetail (ears perked forever), and some species of prong-horned African deer. Positioned high up on the far wall, complete with upthrust horns and dangling shaggy black beard, was the enormous head of an American Bison.

  Whoever owned this place had been a busy little beaver, Duncan reflected as he glanced at the ceiling directly overhead. Suspended there by a long chain anchored in the center of a carved wood medallion was a massive crystal chandelier complete with hundreds of multi-faceted prisms all cut into delicate-looking tear drops. He imagined when the switch on the wall was thrown a mosaic of light would speckle the battleship-gray walls and splash a stepping-stone-like pattern across the highly polished walnut floors.

  Instead of turning and addressing the rest of his guests after locking the door, Daymon reached out to a keypad on the wall nearby and punched in some numbers.

  Seeing a light on the panel flash red and then go to solid green, Duncan whistled. “You wired this place for solar already?”

  “Not my doing,” Daymon answered, a sly grin forming. “The owner had the solar panels installed behind chest-high parapets.”

  Duncan raised a brow and worried one side of his mustache. “That’s why I didn’t see them the first time you brought us here.”

  Content to just soak up the intel, Cade kept his mouth shut and ears open and looked down the hall toward the back of the house where, judging by the sounds of slicing and dicing going on, Heidi was in full command of her new kitchen.

  Leaning against the wall supporting the staircase, Wilson asked, “Wouldn’t the panels be visible from the ground farther out? Reflect the sun? That’d be a dead giveaway, wouldn’t it?”

  Daymon shook his head. “I can walk to the trees and still not see them. Because they’re south-facing and installed at a shallow angle, if you’re looking at the house beyond the trees you’d be hard pressed to see them through the trees.”

  Duncan poked his head into the sitting room. Seeing the booze-filled decanters on the bird’s eye maple coffee table, in his best Robin Leach, he said, “Lifestyles of the rich and famous. Caviar dreams and champagne wishes.”

  Having just returned from the short side trip to the end of the hall, stopping now and then to analyze the people and locations on display in the nicely framed photos hung here and there on both sides, Cade found himself casting extra scrutiny on one particular photo of a smiling family of four obviously taken during better times. The example of days gone by was wrapped in a gilded frame and occupied a place of prominence where anyone heading down the hall would see it first.

  Seeing the Delta operator examining the photo, Daymon said, “I’ve been wondering where they are now, too.”

  The exchange got Duncan thinking about the old television programs of the same name. Lord knew he’d been guilty of wondering what had become of certain people. Though he loathed the boob tube before the dead began to walk, strangely, it was mostly celebrities’ whereabouts that piqued his interest. That loudmouthed coffee-swilling guy on MSNBC who kind of rode both side of the tracks. Where was he? Did he become rotter bait? Or the salt-and-pepper-haired late-night opinion fixture on FOX. Was he still throwing his NERF football somewhere? Or was he forever ambling around Manhattan in a tattered three-piece-suit and leather loafers in dire need of a resole job? Duncan knew going down this rabbit hole always took him full circle to the small number of people he’d called friends before the shit hit the fan. Sadly, Aunt Matilda and Charlie Hammond both went to meet their maker within a day of each other at the very onset of all this madness. “Who’s ‘they?’” he asked, more to staunch the thoughts of loved ones lost than because he actually gave a rip about the class of people who lived in places like this.

  “A very wealthy family from Salt Lake. First couple of trips through the house I glanced at the pictures but didn’t make the connection. After going through a filing cabinet in the upstairs office I ca
me to learn that this house belongs”—he paused and grimaced—“belonged to the Hollah family.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Manny Hollah?” Daymon pressed. “You know … the dude with the gold chains who owned a dozen dealerships along the Wasatch front. He sure looks a lot older in the pictures scattered about the house than he did in those goofy commercials.” He tried to imitate the catchy jingle, butchering it badly. Then he spouted one of Manny’s many tag lines: “Give Manny a hollah if you wanna save some dollahs?”

  Blank stares from the others.

  “We finance anyone the law allows?”

  Nothing.

  “If you don’t come see me today, I can’t save you any money.”

  Crickets.

  “I’ve a feeling none of us got those commercials where we lived,” said Duncan. He walked over to one of the pictures and peered at it over his glasses. “If ol’ Manny Moolah had any sense, he and the woman and kids in the pictures are holed up in a mansion just like this on the west slope of the Wasatch. Trying to get through Salt Lake and past the National Guard’s roadblocks would have been a fool’s errand. Hell, Logan squirted north from Salt Lake early on. The stories he told me—”

  Daymon was nodding when he interrupted. “South Salt Lake was a shit show,” he said, his voice low and wavering slightly. “I tried to get to my Moms’ house and had to turn back. That’s why I doubt Manny even contemplated trying the long end-around to get to this joint.”

  “If he did … he probably died trying,” proffered Wilson, his own harrowing flight from Denver to Springs still fresh in his mind as if it had happened yesterday.

  Cade stepped from the shadowy hall and regarded the group. “Poked my head in the kitchen,” he said. “Heidi’s making Spam and hash browns for us.” He settled his gaze on Daymon. “Why don’t you give us the nickel tour while she’s putting on the finishing touches?”