Cade walked his gaze up the camouflage fatigue pants and lower-half of a dirty and tattered thermal top to where the rapidly widening hole was still calving debris. He saw the opposing faces of two ceiling joists through the shifting insulation. He also saw that the woman’s thin arms were hooked over the top of said joists. This revelation led him to conclude her hands were busy holding on for dear life. Too busy to effectively bring a weapon to bear and achieve any kind of accuracy.
“Pull,” Cade bellowed. “She can’t hold on for much longer.”
Though his glasses were fogged and he was beginning to look like a flocked Christmas tree, Duncan saw two things happening in his side vision. Taryn was glued to the hallway wall and advancing with her rifle aimed roughly a foot over his head. Which amounted to center mass on the writhing body in his grasp. And visible behind Taryn, Wilson was crouched at the top of the stairwell and training his M4 toward the landing below. Even in that brief snippet of time and seen through dirty lenses, Duncan could tell from the young man’s body language that his attention was undivided. Wilson was watching their six without having to be prompted.
“Quit fighting,” hollered Taryn. “I will put a bullet into your spine. See how running from rotters goes without use of your legs.”
At the same moment the word “spine” rolled off Taryn’s lips, the fight went out of the woman and her upper body slipped free of the hole. Since her legs were still being held by Cade and Duncan, her head and chest crashed hard into the floor. As the resounding thud filled the narrow hall, both Cade and Duncan went sprawling onto their butts and came to rest with their backs to the wall, Cade on one side, Duncan the other. Each man had retained his grip on one of the woman’s legs and instinctively hinged over sideways to get at her flailing arms.
Coming to rest with most of his weight and the slung M4 crushing down on the woman’s bony pelvis allowed Cade to let go of the woman’s leg and grab hold of her left wrist. He drew her near and planted his elbow down hard on where he guessed her carotid snaked past her collarbone.
Duncan was on the opposite side and face-to-face with the woman. From his vantage, he figured her to be in her thirties. Set above a hawkish nose, her jaundiced eyes met his.
“Quit yer bucking,” he said.
A light went on behind her eyes. “I saw the big black truck,” she spat. “You’re the ones who stole Mom’s supplies.”
Duncan said nothing. He didn’t have the energy to argue the case.
She cracked a mirth-filled smile. Her teeth were rotting, the stench carrying on her hot breath. On her plaque-whitened tongue was a red capsule. Her eyelids flickered and she closed her mouth. Lips pressed into a thin white line, she crunched down on the item Duncan had caught a fleeting glimpse of.
“We know where you live,” she said, eyes rolling back under heavy, dark lids.
Feeling the woman relax, Cade let up on the pressure he was putting on her neck and got up to his knees. Still holding a wrist with one hand and keeping her leg immobilized with his leg, he made a face and looked to Duncan. “You smell that?”
“What’d you fart?”
“Seriously?” Cade said, “It’s almonds. I smell almonds.”
“All I smell is this one’s ass-breath. Got some of those plastic handcuffs of yours handy?”
The woman’s eyes widened. She said, “Not my fault.”
Duncan looked at her over his glasses. “Who killed the old man?”
“Adrian did,” she answered, the words coming out a little garbled.
Taryn pressed the M4’s muzzle to the woman’s sweaty forehead. “Who’s Adrian?” she hissed.
Recoiling from the cool steel, she said, “Before the dead came, Adrian called the shots on the inside.” A tick later the woman’s eyelids fluttered and closed.
Cade shook her back to consciousness. “How’d you get outside?” he pressed.
Between labored breaths, she answered, “Once the food ran out Adrian cut a deal with the warden to go outside and forage for more. For everyone, she promised.”
Duncan asked, “Then what happened?”
“The head screw let his guard down.” She smiled again. “And then we killed them all.”
Knowing she was slipping away, Cade began firing questions at her rapid-fire. “Where is Adrian now? How many of you are there? What weapons do you have?”
The woman opened her eyes and tried focusing on him. When she finally attempted to speak, all that the effort produced was a thin rime of foam that coated her lower lip and then rolled down her chin.
Out of the corner of his eye, Duncan saw Wilson craning to see what was happening.
Blood trickled from a half-moon the rifle barrel had cut into the woman’s forehead. Taryn applied more pressure and said, “Tell us everything you know, bitch.”
“She’s swallowed poison,” said Cade, sweeping the barrel aside with his hand. He looked to Duncan. “Help me get her to her knees.”
While Duncan helped to haul the dead weight off the floor, Cade was fishing a pair of pre-fashioned flex cuffs from a pocket.
As Duncan let her down and kicked her feet apart, Cade was securing the woman’s arms behind her back. Then, after squaring up with her, he gripped her left shoulder with his left hand. With Duncan still steadying the woman, Cade made a fist with his right and twisted his upper torso clockwise away from her. Finally, without a word of warning, he uncoiled and let fly a roundhouse that landed just south of the woman’s sternum.
The whoosh of his fist cutting air was answered a beat later by a sharp grunt as every square inch of air was forcibly expelled from the woman’s lungs. The grunt morphed into a guttural groan accompanied by a spray of spittle and more frothed saliva.
“No dice,” said Duncan as he jammed the Saiga’s barrel into the woman’s mouth.
Taryn gasped. “I was just playing bad cop. I wasn’t going to shoot her point blank.”
Duncan held the shotgun steady with one hand while he jammed two fingers down the captive’s throat. He rooted them around in there for a few seconds, but failed to produce the desired effect.
“She’s dying,” Cade said soberly. He shook her by the shoulder hard enough to cause the stocking cap to slip off her head. Which in turn caused her greasy blonde hair and a few assorted items to spill out, among them a couple of cigarettes and a dirty hypodermic needle.
“I saw her bite down on some kind of pill,” conceded Duncan. “Looked like a Tylenol cold capsule.”
Cade stood up quickly, taking the limp form along for the ride. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and applied the Heimlich to no great effect. All he got from his efforts was a fresh whiff of the almond-tinged air leaking from her gaping mouth.
“I’m no Quincy, M.D.,” said Duncan, “but I’m pretty certain she’s dead.”
Cade lowered the body to the floor. Went to his haunches and checked for a pulse.
Duncan began wiping his glasses with a cloth. “Is she gone?” he asked matter-of-factly.
Firm set to his jaw, Cade regarded his friend. Through clenched teeth he said, “Helluva way to flush her out, Duncan. Kinda went off script, don’t you think?”
“Gotta admit it was pretty effective.”
Cade made no reply to that. Instead, he looked to Taryn. “See what’s going on out front.” Then he stared up into the gloom.
Remembering the Prairie Fire call he’d received what seemed like a lifetime ago from Cade, who had also gotten himself treed along with Hoss and Daymon in a farmhouse attic in Hanna, Utah, Duncan said, “You got it in you to go up there?”
Cade said, “I’m not Daymon.”
“Want me to get you that chair, then?”
Cade looked at the jagged hole. “I’ll go up through the hatch. If there’s someone else up there, that’ll leave one less direction for me to take fire from.”
Reporting from the other room, Taryn said, “The rotters are almost to the truck.”
Cade was already standing on
the chair and pushing up on the attic access panel with the M4’s barrel.
Poking his head into the front bedroom, Duncan said to Taryn, “We’ll cross that rotten bridge when we get to it. Keep your eyes peeled for breathers. I’m going back to spot for our attic rat.”
Taryn had shoved the corpse and rocking chair aside and was kneeling at the window with her rifle’s muzzle poking through the ripped plastic. “Copy that,” she answered back, her eye never leaving the 3x magnifier deployed atop the M4.
Slipping between rooms, Duncan paused long enough to instruct Wilson to go downstairs. As the redhead moved out, Duncan called after him. “If anyone shows their face, you be sure to shoot first and ask questions later.” When he turned around he dropped to one knee and fumbled inside the woman’s back pocket for the item he felt pressing his gut as he had held her down to the floorboards. Extracting it and seeing that it was exactly what he was expecting made his gut clench.
With equal measures of repulsion and giddy anticipation fighting for dominance in his head, robotically, he slipped the find into his inside jacket pocket.
Chapter 29
“There you go, Raven,” said Glenda. She wore a pained half-smile and was cradling the girl’s right hand in hers. The way the white gauze was wrapped over the knuckles and across the palm made the scene look like something out of a Rocky movie. “All better now. Just keep the dressing dry. Maybe stay inside the rest of the day and read a book or something.”
Max was sitting on the floor and looking inquisitively at the goings on.
Speaking to Max, Raven said, “Looks like Sasha’s your chief ball thrower from here on out.”
Max’s stub-tail began to thump against the wood floor.
Regarding Glenda, Raven said, “So no bike riding?”
“Nope.”
Looking on from the top bunk, Sasha said, “You’ve been known to crash that purple thing with two good hands.”
Raven made a face. “Not true,” she said. “If I remember right it was you who instigated that.”
Changing the subject, Sasha said, “Perfect time to practice your off-hand shooting. Then maybe you can call yourself Wyatt Junior.”
“I’ll never be as good a shooter as my dad. Besides, he says you can’t give yourself a nickname. It has to be besto—” Face screwing up in thought, she looked to the metal ceiling.
“Bestowed is the word I think you’re looking for,” proffered Glenda as she zipped closed the small emergency medical kit and placed it on a nearby shelf. “I call those senior moments. And speaking of your dad …” She reached back to the shelf and came away with a thick envelope from which she selected a thinner, sealed envelope. “He asked me to be the guardian of these while he’s gone. Your mother left behind some handwritten notes to be given to you as you get older. As you hit certain milestones, so to speak. Getting your monthly check is one of those milestones. And this is the note your mom wanted you to have in case she—” Glenda’s voice trailed off, leaving the painful words unspoken.
Raven took the envelope with trembling hands, then looked to Sasha for support.
Sasha’s mop of red hair bobbed as she nodded. “I got mine around your age. Maybe a little sooner. My mom was working a flight from Denver to Seattle and then Anchorage. All I had was Wilson.”
Raven and Glenda both grimaced.
“You’ll live,” Sasha added. “Maybe you’ll even turn a little bitchy like I do now and then.”
“Now and then?”
“OK. Most of the time,” Sasha conceded.
Raven tucked the sealed envelope into a pocket. “Won’t I need—”
Sasha took Raven’s uninjured hand and pressed a dainty packaged item and a neatly folded piece of paper into her palm.
“Those instructions there,” she said, lifting her brows. “The pictures speak louder than the words.”
Sasha slumped dramatically against the metal wall. Her head was bowed and shoulders rolled forward.
Raven rose from the bunk and placed a steadying hand on her friend. “What is it?” she asked.
Sasha said, “That injury of yours just got you out of dish duty. Probably for a couple of weeks, too.”
Glenda wagged her head side-to-side. “Nope,” she said. “Two days … max. Once the wounds on your knuckles begin to knit, I’ll put fresh butterfly stitches on and you’ll be good to go.”
Brows knitting together, Raven said, “But it’ll get wet. Won’t they fall off?”
“I know we don’t get bread from the store anymore,” said Glenda, a twinkle in her eye. “But we’ve got plenty of plastic bread bags. Previous owner of the RV squirreled them away everywhere. Some of us who remember hearing stories of the Great Depression make things stretch. Believe it or not, repurposing was cool before it was cool.”
“What good is a bread bag?”
Sasha was smiling now. She liked where this was going.
“You wrap your injured wing with the plastic and duct tape it in place,” said Glenda. “Then the dirty dishwater won’t be a problem.”
Feminine pad and instructions in hand, Raven stalked off to the Grayson quarters.
Thagon Home
Being careful to step only on the northsouth running joists, Cade made his way past a trio of plastic Rubbermaid bins sporting writing denoting their contents. Two bore the words X-Mas Ornaments and one was marked Halloween. That the Thagons took the time to decorate their alpaca ranch for that holiday blew him away.
Strands of gold and silver garland snaked from the open lid of one of the Christmas boxes. It was looped through the ceiling support above the box and wound around the beam all the way to the north-facing dormer where the top half of a faux Christmas tree had been propped up against the bare wallboards. Tinsel and ornaments adorned the perfectly symmetrical branches. Clearly the woman lying dead downstairs had had some time on her hands.
Beyond the boxes to Cade’s fore was the west-facing dormer he figured to be the watcher’s favored perch. With a commanding view of a substantial stretch of the north/south-running state route, it was exactly where he’d set up shop for an extended overwatch. And though he hadn’t been privy to the layout in the attic above the church rectory in Woodruff, he had a good idea that what he was looking at here was much of the same.
A milking stool sat before the dormer whose two-by-two window was split up into four panes with milled wood dulled gray with age. Three of the magazine-sized panes were clouded over with an accumulation of dust and cobwebs presumably decades in the making. A softball-sized porthole to the outside had been rubbed through the grime coating the upper left pane. The narrow sill below the window was home to hundreds of shiny black husks. A closer look revealed them to be mostly exoskeletons sprouting spiny legs all locked together in the customary dead-insect repose.
A square of plywood was nailed to the floor before the window. It was barely visible underneath the quilts and blankets and pillows piled up against the window. Written in black ink, the word ADRIAN decorated the unfinished wood header above the window. The letters were big and rounded and connected in spots. It looked almost like graffiti on a subway car, but not quite. And the longer Cade thought about it, the more it struck him as the style of writing a middle-school-aged girl would put on a Pee-Chee folder to proclaim allegiance to the crush of the week.
He peered through the portal and saw the Zs streaming past the Ford. One of the shamblers was caught on the open tailgate, its tattered shirt slowly ripping away as it continued to march in place. He watched the driver’s side mirror get folded forward as the telescoping stalk gave way to the half-dozen first turns filing through the yard-wide gap between fence and truck.
He looked around for a radio, but found only a couple of MREs and some plastic bottles full of clouded water likely collected from the stream cutting through the pasture. The MREs he’d take, the water could stay.
Before moving on, Cade went through the bedding. He found nothing of interest. However, moving the rat
’s nest and pillow off of the plywood exposed the framing below the window sill. And wedged between the vertical two-by-fours was an old-fashioned long-range CB radio. It was powered down and cool to the touch, which struck Cade as odd until he realized the watcher was just that and would be the one sending intel, not necessarily receiving it. Which made sense tactically considering batteries were quickly becoming worth their weight in gold. He powered it on and heard only the faraway white-noise hiss of an open and unused channel. There was no kind of chatter from the convoy he envisioned heading toward the rendezvous at the 39/16 junction. He hovered his thumb over the side-mounted Send key. Thought about depressing it and issuing a challenge to whomever was on the other end of channel 22. That notion quickly dissipated as he realized they’d lose the element of surprise by his doing so.
Chapter 30
Cade was just powering off the CB when he spotted the dog-eared corners of several sheets of paper. They were folded up on themselves and wedged into a crevice behind where the CB had been. He grabbed a corner and wiggled until the item was free of the hiding spot. One glance at the front page under the light coming in through the dormer windows told him what he had. And it was exactly the thing he was hoping to find.
Cade stuffed the item into an inside pocket and turned toward the hole punched through to the second-story.
Duncan called out, asking him if he’d found the radio.
“Affirmative,” said Cade, seeing only Duncan’s head (sans cowboy hat) jutting up through the attic hatch. In the dim light the flare off his friend’s aviator glasses completed the strange Max Headroom floating head effect. “Thing is, my gut tells me it’s not the one she just received the call on.”
Illuminated from below, Duncan’s ghostly-looking head bobbed ever so slightly.
Cade stared across the expanse, but said nothing. Figured he’d allow the man time to think.
Finally, after a long ten-count, Duncan said, “Why don’t ya come back this way and start moving north of where she went through the floor. First reaction when you lose your legs is to throw your arms forward. I’m an old drunk, I should know. Had my share of Pete Rose stumbles. Maybe Skinny Minnie here fumbled it over yonder somewhere when she broke through.”
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss Page 16