Keeping his M4 trained on the center of the heavy wooden door, he gave it a good shove and stepped aside. Unlike the fix-it shop where Taryn had almost lost her life days ago, there were no tethered Zs waiting for him on the other side. Brushing past the winter coat and its grabby lifeless arm, he made his way silently over the threshold and closed the door at his back.
The temperature inside was no different than out. The sickly-sweet stench of death rode the drafts coming in through the breached windows. It was so thick here it seemed to Cade as if he was slowly being choked by tendrils of carrion-infused air.
Swinging the M4 to his right illuminated a staircase complete with wide wooden handrails. Sandwiched between an ornate bannister and a wall covered with floral print paper was a flight of stairs that climbed from right to left. The leaded window set above the base of the stairs was covered with newspaper, the words on the individual pages impossible to make out from afar. Moving closer he discovered that the yellowed pages had come from an Ogden Standard-Examiner dated the Monday after the dead rose. The subtext below the paper’s masthead read Serving Northern Utah Since 1888. Cade shook his head. A one-hundred-and-twenty-three-year run brought to a grinding halt by a man-made virus. The headline below the subtext screamed: Salt Lake City Teeming With Walking Dead. The declarations State of Emergency Bypassed - OMEGA VIRUS Forces President Odero To Suspend Habeas Corpus! - Martial Law Declared, were all below the fold in smaller font. Cade had seen these words flashed on the television and repeated on the crawl before leaving Portland that last Saturday in July. Never before had he seen them all confirmed on the front page of a widely distributed newspaper.
He moved the beam from the stairs and illuminated a squadron of newborn houseflies buzzing lazily around the dining room. The table was set for three: plates, service, and coffee cups. Salt and pepper shakers and ceramic urns presumably meant for cream and sugar sat equidistant between the plates. The plates looked to still have food on them. Intermittently, one or two of the flies would break formation and land on the morsels, loiter there briefly, then take flight again with their newfound bounty.
Deciding on a counterclockwise recon of the main floor, he swung his rifle back to his right and took a couple of paces toward the back of the house. The hall ahead of him was now more than just a black tunnel. It ran for twenty feet or so then spilled out into the kitchen. The walls on both sides shared the same vertical-striped paper he had spied from outside the sitting room window. Pictures featuring a middle-aged couple in happier times hung on the left wall. The right wall, cut off at an angle at the top to accommodate the open staircase, featured photos of alpacas—hairy creatures with long snouts and swooping necks. Hanging on wide straps of ribbon from the necks of the hooved beasts were shiny oval medallions—most of them gilded.
This set Cade at ease. Regular county-fair-attending country folk didn’t strike him as the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later kind of people. Then that supposition started a chill to creep his spine, for the ask-questions-first type of folks weren’t long for this cruel world.
At the hall’s terminus to his fore was the door to the sunroom. It was inset with a square window that was weatherproofed with the same blurry plastic as the outside windows. The door was cracked open a hair and sucked in and out intermittently much like the plastic sheeting on the sunroom had. This revelation erased the newfound calm brought on by the photos of the Thagons and their prized stock.
He heel and toed it down the hall, stopping before a door on his right he guessed hid an under-stair storage area. He tried the handle, finding the door unlocked. With no hesitation, he pulled it open and illuminated the interior with the tactical light. Finding nothing but cobwebs and dust and a large plastic bin with the words Board Games written on it in cursive, he closed the door and moved on to the kitchen.
Pausing before the door to the sunporch, he braced it with his toe to limit its swing, then poked the M4 through the three-inch gap. Seeing only a rusty propane tank and his and hers rubber galoshes on the floor, he closed and locked the door.
Awash in the high-lumen beam, he saw that the kitchen was as barren as the sunporch. Aside from the opened cans on the counter, the kitchen had been emptied of everything. The cupboard doors hung open. There were no cans or boxes, only imprints in the dust where they had been.
The floor was covered with shards of broken china. The light-blue pattern on the pieces matched the settings on the table.
As Cade shifted his attention from the mess on the floor to the sitting room beyond the kitchen, the tapping resumed. And it was coming from behind the door at his back.
After turning a slow one-eighty with most of his weight on the balls of his feet, he trained the M4 on the door and tried the brass handle.
Locked.
Tap, tap, tap.
Cade crouched to inspect the lock and saw the rounded end of a skeleton key protruding from the keyhole.
Tap, tap, tap.
He drew a deep breath and turned the key. A solid click greeted the effort.
Tap, tap, tap.
What he wouldn’t give right now for one of those camera on a stalk things Adam Cross carried with him on every mission.
Tap, tap, tap.
“Helen, Ray,” he called, rattling the door.
Tap, tap, tap.
Like fingers drumming a tabletop, thought Cade as he decided to investigate.
Standing opposite the door’s swing, he crouched down, turned the knob, and flung it open. Rifle snugged to his shoulder, he stepped clear of the door and brought the muzzle online. The moment the beam from his tactical light pierced the dark, three things were revealed, none of them good. The room was small and contained a shallow, blood-stained sink. A mirror hanging over the sink bounced the beam around, which let him see the freshly turned Z to his right. Thankfully it had been placed on the small porcelain toilet and tied down with a yellow nylon rope. Though the thing had blood-rimmed craters where its eyes should have been, and bloodied holes where ears used to hang, the wispy shock of silver hair and roadmap of wrinkles creasing its ashen face convinced Cade that he was looking down at Ray Thagon—one-half of the couple he was here to check in on. Though the fresh turn was unable to stand, it could reach the wall to its fore with those bloodied fingertips. And as Cade watched it squirm against its bonds, it paused long enough to lean forward and recreate the sound that had drawn him here in the first place.
Tap, tap, tap.
Like fingers drumming a table, indeed.
Even robbed of the sense of sight, somehow, the undead thing knew he was here. That much was clear. Because from that moment forward the scrabbling at the wall continued without pause until Cade moved closer and planted one of his Danners on the abomination’s wrists, effectively trapping both arms against its legs.
Drawing his Gerber from its scabbard, Cade said, “They made you face a Z or two before torturing you, I see.”
There wasn’t much fight left in old Ray’s bite-riddled body as Cade shifted his weight forward. Just some grabbing at the folds of his bloused pant leg with those gnarled and bloodied fingers.
“I’m sorry I have to do this, Ray,” he said, choosing an eye socket to receive the tapered point. “If Helen’s gone before you, you’ll get to see her soon.” Voice cracking a bit, he added, “And when you see Brook up there … let her know we miss her terribly.” Then, a hot tear streaking his cheek, he slowly introduced the combat dagger to the struggling creature’s brain. There was a little resistance, then a barely audible pop and the job was done.
“Senseless savagery,” muttered Cade as he withdrew the blade and swung his gaze to the mirror. What he saw there worried him: bushy beard, gaunt cheeks, dark bags under sunken eyes. All in all, it showed him the sum of several difficult days and sleepless nights spent trying hard to adjust to his new normal. Also reflected back at him was writing on the same wall old Ray had been scratching at. Though the writing was reading backward, the four letters ADRI still held
meaning to Cade.
He backed away and closed the door on the way out. He retraced his steps to the hallway, then took three deliberate strides through the kitchen, paying the broken china underfoot no mind. He didn’t bother to open the refrigerator. No need. There was no electricity. Hadn’t been any since late July. And he had a feeling this rural part of Utah would forever be off-grid.
After shoving the couch away from the doorway feeding into the oblong sitting room, he wove through the coffee-table-and-armchair maze, passed under the arched room divide and emerged at the far end of the dining room an arm’s reach from a buzzing cloud of flies.
Batting the pests away with his free hand, he trained the light on the table. On the plate nearest him was a pair of human eyeballs. Ray’s eyeballs. The pupils were fixed and dilated. The irises were but thin green bands flecked with gray.
“For fuck’s sake,” he muttered under his breath. With the lifeless eyes seemingly tracking him, he cut around the end of the table, keeping everything atop it illuminated.
The second plate was home to an inches-long slab of meat. As Cade neared the chair pushed against the table, the flies covering the plate took flight, revealing the fleshy lump for what it really was: a bloated and rotting human tongue. Minus the flies and center stage in the antiseptic glare thrown by the tactical light, the tongue was nearly as white as the plate it lay upon.
Cade grimaced as he realized that the bloody ears on the third plate, when paired with the body parts arranged on the other plates, made up a grisly trifecta.
See no evil.
Speak no evil.
Hear no evil.
He looked at his Suunto. Barely two minutes had elapsed since he left the others to wait for him on the porch.
A gust of wind buffeted the old house. In response, the creaking overhead began anew.
Leaving the others to wait on the porch for his all clear call, Cade bypassed the front door and scaled the stairs. Landing his footfalls to where he guessed the treads were nailed to the stringers—mainly to the sides near the kickboard—he made it to the midpoint landing without making a sound. Using the same technique, he turned the corner and started up the next run.
Stopping halfway up the run, he peered down the long hall. Muddy boot prints ran the length of the hardwoods. Viewed at eye-level, the jagged-edged chevrons left behind looked like mountain ranges on a topo map.
An open door on his right revealed a small bedroom. Facing each other farther down the hall were another pair of doors. At the end of the hall was a rectangular window. More of the Ogden Herald was plastered over the glass there. To Cade’s left was a partially open door. And through the six-inch gap came a cold draft carrying the stench of death. Following the caress of air on his cheek, the creaking started anew.
Wood on wood.
Then there was a hard to place rustling noise.
The curtains?
Or is something or someone moving around in there?
Keeping his rifle trained on the open doorway, Cade crept up the remaining stairs. Eyes roaming what little he could see of the room’s interior, he cut the corner by degrees until it was crystal-clear to him that what he had seen poking through the curtains when he was out front of the house was not a weapon. Far from it. In fact, the floor of the hall Cade was standing in could benefit from a few passes with the object in question.
Leaving the macabre sight behind, he hustled down the hall, methodically clearing the rest of the rooms along the way.
Chapter 25
Though the Z tied to the rocking chair was dressed in the type of sensible polyester clothes an old person might wear, one look at the clumps of dark hair clinging to its cream-colored skull confirmed it was not Helen. As Cade ranged around to face the writhing creature, it was obvious to him that the undead woman had taken her last breath well before reaching middle age. The bold, black tribal tattoos encircling her bare biceps screamed Nineties kid. After doing the math in his head, Cade figured her to have been just north of thirty when she left the realm of the living.
Both of the Z’s claw-like hands were gripping the chair’s armrests and secured in place with silver duct tape. An ordinary broom had been run through the zombie’s trunk from behind, the entirety of its worn bristles still sticking through the slat in back of the chair. The broom’s worn yellow handle had punctured the blouse-like top on the way through. The tip, wrapped with more silver tape, was nearly horizontal to the floor.
Cade pushed on the chair’s high back, causing it to lean forward on curved rockers. Which in turn caused the handle to stab through the curtains and the confined Z to whip its head around wildly.
Back to back, Cade did two things. First he fished out the Motorola and broadcast the all clear to the trio waiting on the porch. Then he said a silent prayer for the soul who used to inhabit the rotting shell in the chair and pushed his dagger through its temple.
He leaned in closer, parting the high collar with his blade. There was all kinds of damage to the Z’s throat and neck area. So much hacking had been done there that he could see the white glint of bone amid the shiny muscle and crusted blood. Definitely not the same kind of operation Duncan and the Kids had described having been performed on the Zs at the fix-it shop. And judging by the meat still left on all four of its extremities—this corpse had been treated nothing like the man crucified in the church.
Who would show this kind of disrespect to a female corpse? A man?
Cade shook his head. None of this made any sense. If only he could wake up in his bed in Portland with a nightmare-induced knot in his gut and the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun playing on the clock radio. Feel Brook nestled close. Hear Raven stir and then jump out of her bed and come running. What he wouldn’t give to have the sound of Duncan’s heavy footfalls in the hall at his back turn out to be his daughter’s bare feet slapping the wood floors back home and come to and find he was in the middle of one long nightmare brought on by bad Pad-Thai.
Duncan filed into the room ahead of Taryn. “Whatcha got?” he asked.
Like a game show contestant displaying a particularly nice prize, Cade stepped back and with a sweep of his arm gestured at Rocking Chair Girl.
“I have no idea,” he said as he crossed his arms over his chest, trapping the slung M4 in a tight embrace.
“Seen it before,” said Taryn. “Someone has done the back-room surgery thing to silence it. Looks like a rush job, though.” She regarded Cade. “What did you find downstairs?”
“It looked to me like maybe we spooked someone just sitting down to eat,” said Wilson. “Even though it was pretty dark down there, I could have sworn I saw food on the plates set around the table.”
“That wasn’t food,” said Cade glumly.
“What was it?” replied Wilson, the words coming out slowly.
“You don’t want to know.”
Taryn squared up with Cade. She asked, “What else is down there?”
Cade locked eyes with the young woman. “You don’t want to know,” he repeated, adding a slow side-to-side wag of his head for effect.
Undeterred by the swift change in the Delta operator’s body language, Taryn produced a headlamp from her pocket and snugged it on. Working the switch, she said, “I’m going down to see for myself.” Without pause, she brushed past Cade and issued Wilson a preemptive stare that could only be construed as a silent order for him to vacate the doorway.
Duncan watched her go then started to pace the floor. Boots clomping a rhythm on the bare wood, he said, “Someone put her here to deter breathers from snooping around.”
Wilson nodded at the broom-brandishing rotter. “Who’s that thing going to stop?”
“Someone very timid,” Cade said. “Someone unused to conflict.”
Creak.
Duncan stopped pacing and looked toward the ceiling.
Wilson went wide-eyed. He whispered, “Think that’s a watcher?”
Putting a finger vertical to his lips, Cade nodded. Then h
e pointed to the ceiling with the same finger.
Duncan looked a question at Cade.
Cade mimed for Duncan and Wilson to stay put, then mouthed, “We do nothing until Taryn returns.” He turned toward the doorway.
Duncan gripped Cade’s shoulder. He whispered, “Where are you going?”
“To see if I missed anything important.”
Chapter 26
Though the pair of hinges on the thin plywood door had been oiled recently, constant exposure to the elements ensured a nerve-jangling screech when Raven exited the makeshift outhouse. There was no moon cut into the door’s face to let in ambient light. There was no shingled roof rising over the four slab sides to make it appear to be anything but what it was. Instead, to keep the occupant dry as he or she did their business, a blue tarp had been stretched tightly over the top. Standing out against the thin, sun-bleached ripstop material were dozens of rusty staples dripping ochre tears down plywood walls already gray and warping from several years’ worth of changing seasons. At the bottom edge of the mud-spattered walls, as if recoiling from the morass accumulating there, the layered wood was beginning to separate and curl away from the soupy ground.
“Your turn,” Raven said to Sasha, holding the door open for her.
“You give it a shot of Lysol?” the redhead quipped.
Not quite getting the gist of the fourteen-year-old’s barb, Raven remained silent and closed the flimsy door after her.
Voice muffled, Sasha said, “At least you warmed the seat for me. Thanks for that.”
“You’re welcome,” Raven said as she sidled up to the scavenged washbasin hanging off the side of the outhouse. She swiped one finger across a withered sliver of soap and tipped some water from a plastic bottle to wet her hands.
A habit learned only recently, she checked her surroundings as she lathered up. Holding a silent vigil, Max sat on his haunches a few feet away. Behind the Shepherd, through the grove of trees and across the wide expanse of wind-whipped grass, Raven could see slices of the motor pool and most of the Black Hawk helicopter. The same wind moving the grass was making the tarp draping the helicopter pop and crack with regularity. Regarding Max again, she said, “That’s a good boy. Always watching our six.” She turned to pluck the plastic bottle from its perch on the shelf above the sink. In doing so, her gaze swept the shaving mirror hanging on a nail to the right of the shelf. And in that split-second glance she saw her own visage for the first time since putting her mother into the ground. The person looking back from the depths of the small oval drugstore-find looked nothing like the young girl in that last school photo her dad carried in his pocket at all times. Though distorted slightly by the viewing angle, she still noticed that her jaw was clenched, the muscles there small knots full of tension. Her eyes, brown and watery and identical to her mom’s, held no hint of happiness. And to complete the apocalypse-induced transformation, the pigtails she had worn in that school picture as well as every other snapped from kindergarten to fourth grade were gone. In their stead was an unruly shock of brown hair held in place by a navy-blue stocking cap, the front of which was snugged down to within a fraction of an inch from her furrowed brow.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss Page 14