Remarkably, motoring along at barely walking speed, the Ford entered the moving roadblock and parted the undead mass evenly down the middle. The target Z was swallowed up under the truck much like its guts had been before it joined the ranks of the undead. Then the chain reaction created by the truck’s wide bumper started the Zs spilling to the ground, many ending up at the bottom of the roadside ditches, hands clawing for the rig as it passed them by.
The cabin went strangely quiet and nobody spoke as Cade negotiated the numerous dips and rises the road took before straightening out a few miles south of Woodruff. Once the fence and top half of the Thagons’ farmhouse and barn came into view, everyone save for Cade seemed to perk up a bit.
Though Wilson was full from Heidi’s cooking, he couldn’t help but think about Helen’s, which in every way was far superior.
Taryn said, “First left at the break in the fence.”
Cade nodded and braked.
The white fence bordering the grazing pasture to his left followed the contour of the land, which took on a slight rainbow-like arc from the road to the flat where the house and barn were perched. The paint was faded and scaling off. Suggesting the zombie horde had come into contact with it sometime in the past, some of the posts were leaning away from the road. Once the Ford ground to a halt, Cade looked to Duncan. “Check and see if we have any movement up there.”
Duncan lifted the binoculars off his lap and trained them on the property. After a few seconds spent panning them back and forth, he said, “Upstairs window is open. I can see the curtains moving a bit. Other than that, nothing is stirring. Nothing living. Not even a mouse.”
“How about vehicles?” Cade asked. “I remember Brook mentioning that Ray drove a pickup like the one her folks had when she was a girl. A baby blue Chevy, I believe.”
“One detail I left out of the Bear Lake excursion,” Duncan replied with a wag of his head. “Dregan gifted Charlie Jenkins’ Jackson P.D. Tahoe to old Ray. As we speak, that decrepit blue rig you’re talking about is dripping oil on a driveway up north. If anyone is home, either they parked the Tahoe out of sight behind the house, or it’s stashed inside the barn.”
Cade scanned the road ahead with the binoculars. Handing them back to Duncan, he consulted the mirrors. Nothing was moving on the road for as far as he could see. Which was good, because it lessened the chance of their presence leading to the zombies taking notice of the house on the hill.
Cognizant of the fact the rotten meat missile they had just parted on the state route had already about-faced and begun their indefatigable search for the truck he was presently sitting in, Wilson said, “Are you sure these folks need checking on? After all … they’re notorious for not monitoring their radio.”
“Or turning one on in the first place,” added Taryn. She leaned forward and told Cade and Duncan about finding the blood trail leading to the Thagons’ door. That had been the same day Oliver disappeared. That had also been the day she found herself staring down the barrel of Helen’s rifle. Though the blood on the farmhouse stoop turned out to have been from a rabbit Ray had butchered, the side trip had proved to her the old folks could handle themselves. And with the rotter mega-horde currently just a few short miles south at Bear River, popping in to check on the geriatric dynamic duo was nowhere near the top of her “to-do” list.
Duncan craned around and shot a sour look at the backseat passengers. It said: Give the man some slack, he just lost his wife.
“Has to be done,” Cade said gruffly. “Stay in or get out. Your choice.”
Wilson shot a furtive glance at the road behind the truck. “Getting out,” he said.
Taryn agreed, but added, “Let’s make it effin quick. I don’t want to have to wait the horde out in the barn again.”
“You and me both,” Cade said soberly. He took his foot from the brake and let gravity pull on the truck down the hill. At the bottom of the decline where the dingy white fence parted, he committed to the turn and fed the engine some gas. The transition from asphalt to the feeder road was like driving over a cattle crossing guard. The entire truck shimmied as the tires tackled the washboard ruts left by two weeks’ worth of inclement weather. After slewing right, then left, all the while threatening to spill the tethered Arctic Cat from the bed, the F-650’s tires bit into the mud and forward momentum was established.
Piles of gravel lining both sides of the narrow road suggested to Cade that Ray had had it graded regularly and likely topped with fresh rock afterward to prevent against seasonal runoff. Regular having gone out the window three months ago, it didn’t surprise him that Ray had let the road go.
Taryn noticed Cade’s head panning the road and detected a definite change in his body language. He was going frosty, as she’d heard Brook describe the zone he went into when facing certain situations. “The Thagons will recognize this vehicle,” she said, trying to put him at ease. “Besides, they don’t shoot first.”
“One of them usually gets the drop on you, though,” said Wilson. “Lord knows I’ve stared down the barrel of Ray’s rifle before.”
“Ray’s a hell of a shot, too,” added Duncan as he tightened his grip on the grab bar by his head.
“Better slow down,” said Taryn, thrusting her arm between Cade and Duncan and pointing to the looming curve in the drive. “Beyond the rusty combine there the road is washed out pretty bad.”
Duncan said, “This isn’t bad?”
She said, “Compared to what’s ahead? No. There’s a drop of at least eight inches and the wash broadens out to where it’s between fifteen and twenty feet across. The Raptor ate it up. With the snowmobile back there … this rig, not so much.”
“Ray said they’d get the tractor out and fill it in come spring time.”
Duncan looked at Wilson over his shoulder. “When did the old boy tell you that?”
“After he took the shotgun from my neck,” he answered. “We’re best buds now.”
Knuckles going white as the Ford dipped into a particularly deep rut, Duncan said, “I think we should stop here and go the rest of the way on foot.”
Cade made no reply as he brought the pickup to a lurching halt a foot from the heavily eroded roadway. Still mute, he rolled the shifter into Park and set the brake. He popped out of his seatbelt, sending it sailing home. As his hand went for the keys, his eyes roamed the two-story house looming over the gravel parking area fronting the wraparound covered porch. Like the fence, the paint on the house was scaling off. Large sheets hung off the clapboard siding here and there. After stilling the engine, Cade dumped the keys into a cargo pocket and his hand went for the M4 pressing against his left leg. It was within easy reach, angled down out of sight with the telescoping stock collapsed and the suppressor kissing the firewall.
Clicking out of his seatbelt, Duncan whispered, “I’d take that as a yes.”
Still, Cade remained quiet. The way his eyes never left the farmhouse told Duncan the Delta operator sensed something was amiss.
Duncan slumped low in his seat and cast his gaze on the house. “Whatcha got?”
Cade said, “At first I thought the window was left open. It’s not. It’s been shot out. See the bullet pocks on the walls? There’s also broken glass on the porch roof.”
Hefting the Saiga and clicking his door partway open, Duncan said, “No, I don’t see those details … but I’ll surely take your word for it. What’s the move?”
Chapter 21
The first detail Dregan noticed when he pushed the door open to the bedroom his son had claimed weeks ago were the curtains covering the far window. They were shut, as they should be. However, he noticed a thin strip of light infiltrating where the drapes had been left open. Colorful tanker trains with eerie plastic smiles chugged here and there on the curtains. Peter had the toy versions of the trains when he was still dawdling around their house on the cul-de-sac in Salt Lake City. Always fascinated with anything mechanical—especially the jet airplanes whose flight paths took them
directly over the subdivision several times daily—Peter had worn deep grooves into the wooden tracks playing choo-choo with Thomas and Percy and Henry.
Now, edging into his teens, Peter was into any movie that he could get to play on his scrounged laptop computer. He’d stay glued to the thing until the battery went dead and then bring it back to life with a portable solar charger Dregan found while out foraging. Wash, rinse, repeat, thought Dregan as a mother of a cough slowly worked its way up from the far recesses of his failing lungs.
“Peter,” he said, gently nudging with the toe of his boot the blanket-swaddled form stretched out lengthwise on the floor. “You need to make sure the curtains are all the way closed before night.”
A grunt was all he got from the boy.
“Did you finish your movie?” he asked.
Voice muffled by the comforter, Peter said, “Battery died before the killer shark did.”
Dregan yanked a corner of the bed cover, exposing a shock of blond hair which he promptly tousled with his mitt-sized right hand. Meeting the boy’s ice-blue eyes, he nodded toward the shelf full of toy trains and said, “Why don’t you play with Thomas and Friends then?” What started as a belly laugh dislodged the cough Dregan had been fighting hard to suppress. His body was wracked by an unstoppable coughing fit, the laugh all but drowned out by a rising tide of bloody mucous.
On the receiving end of a glare from his son that said: Are you kidding? Dregan fished out a square of fabric torn from an old tee shirt and turned it a dark shade of crimson by spitting the contents of his mouth into it.
Face nearly the color of his hanky, Dregan wiped his mouth and tucked the soiled fabric into his jacket pocket.
“Done smoking?”
Dregan’s body seemed to deflate as Peter’s words registered.
“Cause it’s not doing you any good.”
“I know, boy. It’s been three days since I finished my last pack. Now that Greg seems to be recovering from the bite, I’m not as stressed. Don’t feel as if I need one every waking moment.”
Peter sat up and cast a furtive glance at the window. “You must not have looked out there lately.”
“Correct,” he said. “Not since we lost the woodcutters trying to make it to the gate. Has anything changed?”
Peter looked at his dad with those eyes. They were watery and glittered like twin sapphires. In a low voice, he said, “Only thing between our stretch of the wall and the roamers in the field is the graveyard fence.”
Dregan shuffled past the beanbag chair and parted the Thomas curtains a couple of inches. Peering out with one eye he saw that Peter was right: The dead were now amassed six deep around the newly erected fencing. A dozen yards behind the monsters was the doomed woodcutting crew’s pickup. It carried most of a full load of split logs and sat low on its springs. So low that the long grass nearly brushed the handles on the open passenger side door. In his mind’s eye, he saw the old step side come in from the south and pass the feeder road at a high rate of speed, taking out dozens of walking dead in the process. As the corpses went tumbling to all points of the compass, the blood-red pickup abruptly faltered and fishtailed wildly. He recalled shaking his head and saying “No” as the pickup’s rear end broke hard to the left, then swung back to the right. He cursed and punched the wall as the driver lost all control with the vehicle’s grill nearly square with the sloped embankment directly across the field from Peter’s window.
Still etched into his memory were the driver’s and passenger’s faces—the color of driven snow—as the pickup left the road, bounced through the ditch, and continued on for another fifty yards, dragging fence posts with barbed wire still attached. The truck had churned muddy furrows into the field before finally coming to a violent, juddering halt a stone’s throw from where Dregan was standing now.
As a result of the sudden stop, the load had shifted and cut firewood rocketed through the rear window, gravely injuring both the driver and passenger. Before Dregan could order up a rescue team, the first of hundreds of undead that had followed the stricken truck in from the road reached the crash site and began to worm in through the broken rear window.
An hour removed, the screams of the dying men still echoed in Dregan’s head. What was left of the passenger still lay on the circle of crushed grass where the dead had dragged his kicking and flailing body before stripping it clean of its flesh and organs. The driver, however, was still in the truck. Having been killed mercifully by a headshot delivered by one of the snipers positioned in the tower north of Dregan’s home, the corpse’s pale hands still clutched the wheel even as the monster sprawled across the bench seat continued to feed.
Rattling the elder Dregan from his vivid walk down memory lane, Peter asked, “What are you going to do about them?”
Still holding the curtains apart, he said, “I’m working on a plan, Peter.”
“What kind of plan?”
Dregan heard the question, yet couldn’t take his eyes from the perimeter wall. He was focused on the spot where the continuous run abruptly doglegged around a large bog where sinking the multi-ton panels into the ground hadn’t been an option. It was at that point where the dead were beginning to pack in the tightest—dozens deep by his estimation. Hundreds of bodies were pressing against each other, their combined weight being focused at the point where the south-running length made a near ninety-degree turn to the west. Hundreds more were mired in the bog and fighting mightily to free themselves from the sucking ground. Dozens more of the abominations were trapped on the outer periphery of the bog and had already been trampled by their own kind. Stark white legs and arms jutting from the bottom of the pile continued to kick and claw the air, the crushing weight of their undead brethren inconsequential against their unrelenting desire to reach the nearby prey and feed.
A long hard look at the jog in the panels told him a few were beginning to bow inward. If something wasn’t done before nightfall, he feared that the dead would be flooding through a breach before he could put into motion the plan stewing on the back burner of his mind.
Peter joined his dad by the window, peeled the curtain back further and repeated his question. “I don’t think you heard me, Dad. What kind of plan?”
“It depends upon whether your brother gets back to me with good news or not. I’ll let you know when I know. I promise you that.” He took his son’s head in both calloused hands, bent down, and kissed him on the cheek. “I love you, boy. Now put on your boots and grab a jacket … today is take-your-son-to-work day.”
Peter stole one last glance outside. His eyes fell on the roamer tangled in a length of barbed wire attached to a three-foot-long fence post. It was still trudging across the bog. However, since he’d seen it last, it had somehow gutted itself, the rope of slimy gray entrails now one with the splintered wood and tarnished wire.
After saying a silent prayer for the soul of the man whose husk remained behind on Earth, Peter smoothed the curtains to the wall and arranged them so the two halves overlapped each other in the center of the window. Greatly troubled by the sheer number of soulless human shells still shuffling north on the state route, he turned to retrieve his shoes from the floor and spotted his dad stooped over and leaning against the doorjamb. Underneath the stretched fabric of his long black duster, his broad back heaved as a fresh bout of coughing wracked his body. In that moment, the towering figure he had always thought of as invincible seemed defeated.
Holding a hand up to silence the forthcoming query, Dregan buried his face in the crook of his arm and hacked uncontrollably. The fit was the worst to date. It lasted a couple of minutes, a softball-sized black stain on his jacket sleeve the end result.
“Let’s go,” he wheezed, and then led Peter out of the room.
Chapter 22
Thagon Homestead
Sixth sense jangling crazily, Cade grabbed the binoculars off the seat, shouldered open his door, and stepped from the truck. Cover is your friend sounded in his head as he slowly backed
away from his open door and hauled open the rear passenger door. Danners ankle-deep in muddy water, he ushered Wilson and Taryn from the cab, she toting an AR, the gangly redhead pressing his black Beretta to his leg. Stopping the latter by placing a hand on his shoulder, Cade leaned in close and told Taryn to take cover by the tailgate.
“What?” Wilson asked, sounding irritated, his eyes flicking to Cade’s hand.
“Only good use for that pistol if we get into a gunfight is to use it to fight your way to your rifle.” He reached across the seat and dragged out an M4. “So holster the Beretta and take this.”
Heeding the unsolicited advice without a word to the contrary, Wilson aimed the rifle at the ground by his feet and backed up slowly to where the others were huddled.
Crouched next to the F-650’s rear tire with two open doors between him and any possible incoming rounds, Cade raised the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the upper story. With two far-from-clean panes of auto glass in the way, the image was a little blurry.
Head craning around the rear bumper, Duncan said, “Whatcha got?”
“The upper window on the left has been shot through … half a dozen times,” Cade replied. He walked the field glasses to the right. “Same with the other window up top. Looks like the lower pane is gone completely.” He rose and steadied the Steiners on the truck bed rail to get an unimpeded second look.
“And …?” asked Duncan.
“The lower half of the right window isn’t shot out … it’s open,” Cade answered.
Just then the curtain in the window in question was ruffled by the wind, revealing a black cylindrical item. It was angled down and moving toward the windowsill.
“Gun,” whispered Cade, causing everyone to duck. He dipped down behind the bed and passed off the Steiners to a waiting hand. Then he deployed the 3x magnifier to augment the EOTech holographic sight atop the M4’s top rail and snicked the selector to Fire. At the back end of a long two seconds, he shouldered his rifle in one fluid motion and brought its stubby suppressor to bear on the upper story.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss Page 12