Hands still dripping water, she forgot all about drying them and lashed out at the stranger staring back at her. Thrown on a shallow upward trajectory, her right cross shattered the glass and sent the mirror spinning around the nail like an out of control Tilt-A-Whirl.
The instantaneous spritz of blood left the wall and triangles of broken mirror speckled with a constellation’s worth of crimson dots. Raven yelped and kicked the base of the outhouse, causing Sasha to shriek and issue forth a spate of salty language.
Welling with emotion brought on by the sudden reminder of her recent monumental loss, Raven clenched her left hand into a fist and initiated an opposing blow meant to erase every last sliver of mirror in the mangled chromed frame.
But that blow never landed. Just as the fast-twitch muscle fibers began to unload their pent-up energy, the swing initiated with a twist of her hips was redirected down and she found herself wrapped up in a vice-like embrace. Arms pinned firmly to her sides, she struggled and craned to see her attacker.
That Max wasn’t coming to her aid hit her blindside. Wind rustled the firs all around, sending a barrage of trapped rainwater hurtling toward the ground. In an instant, the gentle patters became a full-blown assault on the tarp.
Tuning out everything—Sasha’s renewed queries from behind the outhouse wall. The creaking of the trees overhead. The water sluicing down the wall to her fore—Raven lifted her boot off the ground and searched for some toes to land the heel on.
“Don’t,” ordered a disembodied female voice.
Raven heard the word, but its meaning and context didn’t register. The primal part of her brain responsible for fight-or-flight instincts had already kicked into high gear—instantaneously producing endorphins, dopamine, and a handful of other chemicals and funneling them directly into her bloodstream. A millisecond after the stranger had made herself known, the only thing driving Raven was an inborn desire to survive the unexpected encounter.
Without further thought, she arched her back and stomped down, missing the intended target completely. In the next beat, the stranger was spinning her around forcibly and a face she recognized was inches from her own.
“What’s gotten into you?” hissed Jamie, clamping down hard on Raven’s wrist and drawing the dainty hand near in order to inspect the self-inflicted damage.
“I thought you were her,” gasped Raven.
“What the eff is going on out there?” asked Sasha, her voice several octaves higher than normal.
Speaking loud enough to be heard over the wind and through the quarter-inch plywood, Jamie said, “It’s just me. I surprised Raven, that’s all.”
Still watching with the kind of indifference only a dog could convey, Max yawned and flopped down onto a bed of semi-dry pine needles.
“I’m not her. And I forgive you for trying to stomp my toes flat,” Jamie said as she raised Raven’s right hand so the girl could get an eyeful of her own bloody knuckles. “But I do want to know what this is all about?”
Eyes downcast, Raven said softly, “I saw my mom in the mirror.”
Jamie released her hand. “You’re mad at her?” she said. “For leaving you and Cade all alone?”
“No,” Raven replied softly. She looked up and met Jamie’s gaze. “I’m mad at myself for seeing what was happening to her and not making a big deal out of it. She wasn’t getting better after she got the shot of antiserum. She was slowly getting worse. Withering away in front of my eyes. I noticed it every time she had me give her a back massage.” She swiped a forming tear, leaving a streak of crimson from cheekbone to chin. “Bottom line … I should have said something about it to my dad or Glenda.”
“It’s not your fault,” Jamie said, getting her face level with the girl’s. “You’re by no means a medical professional. And neither one of them, Cade or Glenda … hell, none of us for that matter could have stopped what Omega started.”
“Not even God?”
Now Jamie was getting misty-eyed. “Nope. Not even the Big Man upstairs,” she conceded.
The door creaked again as Sasha stepped from the outhouse. Still cinching her belt, she said, “Don’t worry, Raven. I sprayed enough Lysol for the two of us.”
Jamie forced a smile. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she said, “You’re both too young to have shits with stink worth worrying about.”
Raven’s eyes lit up. “Oooh,” she exclaimed, and left it at that.
As she wet her hands with water from the bottle, Sasha looked at the others’ reflections in the remnants of the mirror and said, “You’ve been following us all morning, Jamie. What gives?”
Clamping her bloody hand under her armpit, Raven answered for Jamie. “Probably following my dad’s orders.”
Jamie nodded.
“What happened to this?”
Grimacing, Raven produced her right hand.
Sasha’s brow inched up, but, strangely, she held her tongue.
“C’mon,” said Jamie. “Let’s go see Glenda and get you patched up.”
“Wait,” blurted Raven, grabbing a fistful of Jamie’s jacket sleeve.
Seeing the confused look settling on the young girl’s face, Jamie said in her most big-sisterly tone, “What is it, honey?”
“I’m bleeding somewhere else.”
As if she’d been kicked in the gut, Jamie exhaled sharply.
Raven’s eyebrows pulled together and tears welled in the corners of her eyes.
In spite of everything, Jamie had to smile. “It’s going to be all right, sweetie.” She wrapped her arm around Raven’s slight frame and pulled her along toward the compound entrance.
Chapter 27
Iris guessed she’d made another half-mile of forward progress since donning Flippety-Flop’s shirt. Two times since that awful decision she had heard the telltale rasps of the purged on the march. And both times she had wisely gone to ground in the roadside ditch and remained there until the shuffling processions passed her by. Two first risers were about all she was confident enough at this stage of her career as a Doer to take on solo. Roaming bands of purged the size of which she had just avoided were way out of her league considering she had yet to receive any formal firearm or edged-weapons training.
Then there was the dead weight of her leg. Still numb from the knee down, it was getting harder and harder to swing around and plant so she could affect the next step with her good leg. Up to this point, the times she’d spilled over onto her face numbered in the teens. And as a result of her many skirmishes with gravity, her palms and elbows and knees resembled ground chuck and were bleeding profusely.
Then it happened again. On her feet and plodding ahead one second, crashing helplessly to the unforgiving asphalt the next. Only in this instance her reaction time was a half-tick too slow. Her hands were still near her sides when the road dealt her a near knockout blow that sent her bottom teeth clean through her lower lip, adding a flap of shredded flesh to the growing list of bleeding body parts.
Lying there on the road in the middle of Utah, she felt the last vestiges of resolve wriggling free of her pain-clouded mind. With a shroud of darkness threatening to close around her and send the stars dancing before her eyes on their way, Iris dug down deep, both figuratively and literally, and managed to pluck the radio from her pocket. It was all she could do to roll the volume up and thumb the Talk button. After a short rest, during which she drew a few deep breaths, she inched the hand grasping the radio across her chest, placed the plastic speaker grill near her mouth, and uttered a horribly garbled plea for help.
At that moment, in the Thagons’ farmhouse eighteen miles by crow, Taryn was backing away from the cramped powder room with one hand covering her mouth and nose. The sight of the kind old man sitting on the toilet, horribly disfigured by the combination of torture and Omega’s effects, had started the first tell-tale trickle of bitter saliva leaking from the glands in back of her throat. She stumbled down the hall and grabbed a chair at the dining table for support. Standing there wea
k in the knees, she took a few deep breaths to quell the initial gag response, then took a seat at the head of the table.
She sat there for a second, eyes closed and trying to conjure up an image of Ray. Anything to displace the one currently burned into her mind and psyche.
As Taryn opened her eyes and inclined her head, the narrow cone of light from her headlamp painted a pair of walnut-sized orbs sitting on the plate at the far end of the table. Swinging her gaze left illuminated the tongue and scattered the few remaining flies feeding on it. Still unsure of what she had just seen, she looked down at the plate on the table in front of her.
Immediately recognizable from her viewing angle were a pair of ears. Not dainty things you’d see on a pop singer or cute little baby. These ears were stretched by what had to be several decades spent under gravity’s unrelenting pull. Stiff gray hairs stabbed up through canals crusted with blood dried to reddish-black.
The scream formed deep in Taryn’s lungs was usurped by the chain reaction started earlier in the bathroom. Her body shuddered and the headlamp bobbed. Shadows danced about the room as she heaved her meager breakfast onto the horrors plated so carefully on the fine china before her.
And at the same moment Taryn was pushing away from the table downstairs—equal parts disgust and fury building within her like some kind of unstoppable fission reaction—Cade was finishing his second, more thorough recon of the rooms upstairs.
Ignoring the retching noises echoing in the stairwell, he returned to the room where Duncan and Wilson were waiting and motioned for them to follow.
Cade led the silent procession across the hall to the room he had cleared just prior to summoning them all upstairs from the front porch.
At first glance there seemed to be nothing to the room. Opposite the door, abutting the wall below a window covered with blackout curtains, was a low desk. Filling up the desk’s knee-hole was a simple, low-backed wooden chair. Atop the desk was an old sewing machine. On the floor in the center of the room was a wooden ammunition box, its lid hinged open and revealing that it was empty. Stenciled on the sides of the box in black were words describing its contents as 5.56 ball ammunition—definitely U.S. issue, Cade had concluded at first glance.
Discarded in the single closet located on the far wall left of the entry were a half-dozen ripped-open MRE packages and an equal number of cellophane sleeves—the type which new Army M4 rifles leave the factory sealed in. And positioned against the wall just inside the door to the left was a chair matching the one at Helen’s sewing station.
Cade crossed the room and parted the curtains covering both east-facing windows. He turned and pointed to the attic access panel inset into the ceiling directly above the chair that had been left pushed against the wall. In the light of day, the panel was impossible to miss. Around the panel’s edges were faint, finger-print-sized smudges. And on the cream-colored wall below the panel, one well-defined handprint seemed to be waving at them all.
“Well lookie here,” declared Duncan over the sound of boots scuffing the stairs outside the door. “I do believe we have someone treed.”
Taryn entered the room, still dragging her sleeve across her lips. She stalked to the windowsill adjacent to the desk and took a seat on the narrow ledge. The sunlight streaming in cast her shadow over the debris strewn about the scuffed and gouged wood floor. Glaring at Cade, she said, “Treed?”
“Kind of like how your old boss had you trapped in his office at the airport,” he explained.
“Treed means you’re trapped and you know it,” Wilson added.
Hefting the Saiga, Duncan stabbed its gaping barrel skyward. “And that, my friends, adds a degree of difficulty to our next move.”
Chapter 28
When Duncan mentioned her old boss Richard Less, aka Dickless, Taryn had gone silent and glanced out the window at the pasture and fast-flowing stream beyond. A tick later she visibly started and flicked her gaze to the ceiling. “Anyone else hear that?”
In unison, like hounds on the scent of a coon, Duncan, Cade, and Wilson went stock-still and looked up at the ceiling.
Seconds crawled into the past. Half a minute later the nearly imperceptible sounds were repeated.
Directing his whispered question at Taryn, Cade said, “What’d you hear the first time?”
Voice barely a whisper, she said, “Same thing. Static.”
He mouthed, “Then?”
Taryn made a face. She whispered, “A woman’s voice, for sure. She said ‘Help’ … I think.” She screwed her face up again and thought for a second. “And I could have sworn I heard ‘State Route thirty-nine,’ too.”
Cade nodded in agreement. Still whispering he said, “Time to flush them out.” He looked to Duncan. “Any ideas?”
Duncan patted his shotgun.
Cade shook his head. “Verbal encouragement, first.”
Wilson said, “Have Taryn do it.”
Taryn shifted her glare from Cade to Wilson. “You bastards picking on the fairer sex now?” She swung her gaze back. “First he lets me go downstairs without warning me about—”
“What?” asked Wilson. “What’s down there?”
“There was no stopping you,” said Cade. “And being put on the spot like that, I didn’t have the words to describe what they did to Ray. That was Ray … wasn’t it?”
Taryn nodded.
“What did they do to him?” asked Wilson, his voice taking on an annoying, pleading tone.
“No time to explain,” said Taryn. She looked to Cade then flicked her eyes back to the ceiling.
M4 trained on the ceiling left of the access hatch, Cade backed to the wall and motioned for the others to follow his lead.
Seeing this, Taryn hesitated for a second. Which was enough of a window for Cade to whisper instructions to her.
Taryn nodded in understanding. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and bellowed, “We know you’re up there!” Then, lying, she added, “And we don’t mean you any harm.” Fact was, she wanted to jam her Beretta into the mouth of the person responsible for killing Ray and personally pull the trigger. Watch the person’s eyes bug out. Hell, maybe even shoot them out one at a time to get even for the see no evil treatment that’d been inflicted on the corpse downstairs. Whether the damage had been done post-mortem or not, she didn’t give a shit.
But there was no response. No utterance of surrender. No shuffling of feet of someone preparing to flee the punishment they most definitely had earned. Not even another static-filled peep came from what they’d all agreed had probably been a radio of some kind receiving a transmission at the worst moment possible.
On the bright side, she thought as she drew in a breath sufficient to deliver loudly enough her next sugar-coated overture, the call going unanswered likely meant the attic dweller was just hoping they’d go away without incident.
“Come down now—” Taryn began.
“Or we will shoot holes in the ceiling until you do,” finished Duncan, adding an exclamation point to the threat by cycling a round through the Saiga.
The verbal threat worked wonders. Or was it the schlak-schlak sound of him expelling an unfired shell through the breach? He didn’t ponder the thought for long, because a half-beat after the hollow-sounding footfalls began retreating to the north side of the attic, he poked his head into the hall and said, “Wait for it.”
Following Duncan’s lead, Cade craned around the door frame just in time to hear a panicked string of curse words and see a slender leg come plunging through the ceiling ahead of a puff of plaster dust and falling debris. Shades of the Hanna farmhouse, he thought. Only this leg had a feminine quality. Even clad in pants made from a strange tan and black camouflage pattern, there were definite womanly curves to it.
Exhibiting a burst of speed belying his age, Duncan bolted down the hall. Three strides removed from the sewing room door, he was wrapping the leg up in his arms and twisting the foot counter to where the ankle bones wanted it to rotate.
> There was a yelp of pain and more plaster rained down.
“Shoot the knee,” feigned Duncan, even as he applied more pressure to the ankle laterally and added his own bodyweight to gravity’s natural pull. In response to his efforts, there was another explosion of plaster and the leg’s owner let out another shrill yelp. With lumpy insulation raining down on his head, Duncan barely avoided a mouthful of boot as the person’s other leg plunged through the ceiling and scythed the air an inch in front of his face.
Just a couple of steps behind Duncan, Cade saw the shower of white powder and let his rifle hang on its sling. Already on the move and witnessing the second leg blast through, he lunged forward like a receiver going for an errant pass and ended up arresting the pistoning leg just as the knee began hammering against his friend’s temple.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss Page 15