Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss

by Chesser, Shawn

  Cade said nothing. Time for talking would come later. Instead, he looped around the leaking bodies lined up perpendicular to the barn wall. He stepped over dead things wearing twisted death masks and edged past the others on his way to the F-650. Stopping by the driver’s side front fender, he craned around the bent-forward driver-side mirror and was rewarded with an unobstructed view down the length of the drive.

  Chapter 32

  “We still clear?” asked Duncan. Even with the wind beginning to subside, he was forced to cup his hands around his mouth and yell to be heard.

  Cade tore his eyes from the lolling heads of the dead things traipsing north on the distant state route. “We dodged a bullet,” he called back. “Squall came at just the right time. Helped drown out their moans.” He racked a fresh round into the Glock and started off toward the barn doors.

  “The gunfire, too,” Duncan answered, his brow crinkling. “That was some fast thinking.”

  “Damn fast shooting, too.” added Taryn.

  “You never let us have any fun,” chimed Wilson as he looked to Taryn for support.

  Stopping a few feet from the permanently stilled flesh-eaters, Cade looked to Wilson, saying, “Killing should never be fun. If it ever crosses the line from a dark deed necessary to survival and becomes something you actually look forward to … then you’re treading dangerously in the territory sociopaths live in.”

  “Yeah. Like Adrian,” said Wilson. “I was just busting balls.” Embarrassed, he looked away.

  “Saw a friend in ‘Nam lose his way,” said Duncan. “Disappeared into the jungle one day never to be heard from again.”

  Cade said, “Smacks of Apocalypse Now. His name Kurtz?”

  “If I was the eyerollin’ type,” drawled Duncan. “I’d be rollin’ them somethin’ fierce about now.”

  Taryn and Wilson exchanged bewildered looks.

  Cade knocked lightly on the barn and scrutinized its looming face.

  Both doors were nearly as wide as they were tall and decorated with big white Xs fashioned from one by six planks. Victim of harsh winters and the relentless high-altitude summer sun, the paint was faded and cracked, the fissures curling up at the edges. In places, blood and flecked bone and clumps of hair still rooted in festering flesh clung to the weathered boards.

  Cocking an ear to the door, Cade said, “Hear that?”

  One brow raised, Duncan nodded. “Sounds a lot like a kitten’s mewing.”

  Wilson turned away from the barn. “So how come we didn’t hear it when we were hiding behind the truck earlier?”

  “Because we were all fixated on that gun-barrel-turned-broomstick that kept poking through the curtains,” answered Duncan. “I sure as hell thought maybe Ray or Helen had snapped and was up there drawing a bead on us.”

  Taryn said, “You think Helen is in the barn?”

  “She’s still not accounted for,” answered Cade.

  Looking at Cade, Taryn said, “Whose tongue was that in the house? Ray still had his. Not much else, though.”

  “Let’s find out.” Cade asked Duncan to watch their six for rotters. Then he made a fist and pounded three times on the left-side door. Not too hard. Hard enough, however, to silence the mewing and start a shower of fine dust to fall from the top of the door.

  Hoping to draw anything dead and ambulatory to the doors, he tried again. Same method. Same number of strikes.

  As soon as the reverberation from the solid blows subsided, the mewing returned, still distant and muted.

  Leading by example, Cade holstered the Glock then bent over and grabbed the wrists of one of the Zs. He dragged the body a dozen feet from the barn and let the limp arms thump to the ground.

  ***

  Five minutes after Cade started the process, with help from Wilson and Taryn, they had the doors clear and the dead bodies stacked waist-high a dozen feet downwind from them.

  Standing before the barn, Cade looked to Wilson. “You did good with that big Z. You want honors here?”

  Playing it cool—but still feeling the feathery bat wings of dread caressing his stomach—Wilson shrugged and said, “If you insist.” From a jacket pocket, he fished the tiny Maglite he’d employed while standing watch on the stairs in the house. Flashlight clamped between his teeth, he unwound the chain slowly and parted the doors, leaving just enough of a gap between them to shine the narrow beam through.

  M4 held at a low ready, Cade said, “What do you see?”

  “Nothing I can attribute that creepy ass noise to.”

  Duncan said, “No dead things in traction waiting to be sprung on us?”

  Wilson said, “Not that I can see.”

  The wind had gone calm again. Just intermittent little gusts that ruffled the partially drawn curtains in the farmhouse’s upstairs windows.

  Taryn offered to run point as she’d heard the men with military training call the guinea-pig-like role of being the first person walking in a patrol line or entering a structure needing to be cleared. Last time she had taken this kind of initiative she still had waist-length hair and Oliver, Foley, and Brook were still alive. Nothing for the rotters to sink their grimy claws into now, she mused. Nothing much for Wilson to grab hold of either, she quickly lamented.

  Cade backed off the door a couple of steps. Looked to Duncan for input.

  “Knock yourself out,” was Duncan’s reply.

  After handing Taryn his suppressed Glock, Cade snugged the M4 tight to his shoulder and trained the muzzle where the doors would soon part.

  Patting Wilson on the shoulder, Duncan said, “Haul them open, killer.”

  Wilson made no reply. He wrapped both hands into the opposing handles, leaned away from the doors, and tried pulling them apart.

  The left door moved a few inches in its track, but quickly seized up behind a noise sounding like a carpenter’s planer being dragged across wood.

  Borrowed pistol held in a two-handed grip, Taryn stepped forward, ready to enter as soon as Cade said to. Time to get back in the saddle and ride, girl, she thought to herself as a low amp current of fear started her heart to hammer. Last thing she wanted was to be stuck doing the kind of monotonous jobs always foisted upon Tran, Seth, and the late James Foley.

  “A little help?” Wilson said to no one in particular.

  Slinging the Saiga, Duncan stepped forward and took hold of the right door handle.

  Wilson grabbed the left handle with both hands. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Go,” Duncan said.

  The right door moved first, sliding a few inches and restarting the noise of something overhead grating against wood. Once the doors were open evenly, the previous noise was replaced by the squeal of metal on metal and the tension on the doors disappeared entirely.

  What happened next caught each of them by surprise.

  Missing the movement above the door due to the bill of his cap, Cade was aware of the falling body only when it was arrested a yard from his face and barely a foot off the ground.

  Catching a glancing blow on her shoulder from above, Taryn yelped and was sent sprawling to her left. As a result of the pain lancing from her shoulder to her wrist, her hand involuntarily opened and the Glock was separated from her grasp.

  Duncan was still gripping the handle when an object ejected from the hayloft door above caught him squarely on the top of his head, knocking the Stetson one direction and his senses the other.

  Spared injury, but shocked all the same by the sudden appearance of a ghastly figure complete with bruised and bloated facial features, Wilson let go of his hold on the handle and was carried onto his back by his own spooled-up momentum.

  In the next instant, Cade was flicking his rifle to Safe and rushing to check on Duncan, who was on his back and twitching like a fish on land. Feeling a pulse and seeing his friend’s chest rising and falling underneath the thick jacket, Cade turned his attention to the person hanging from their neck by a taut rope. Though at first blush the body that had been ejected thro
ugh the sliding hayloft door a dozen feet above him along with a basic wooden chair looked a lot like one of the undead, from where he was kneeling he could see that its bare, varicose-veined legs still possessed a slight pink hue. Even as he was wrapping his arms around the hips and lifting up to relieve the noose of tension, he was calling for Wilson to use his Gerber to cut the rope.

  As Cade waited for the redhead to act on the command, he walked his eyes up the body in his grasp and came to realize it was a woman. And she was elderly. And her skin was still warm against his cheek. Which meant she was alive, or had been a few seconds ago before Duncan and Wilson’s simple act of forcing open the lower doors had somehow started the upper door moving in its tracks. Which in turn, he guessed, had sent her and the chair that had clocked Duncan careening into space.

  Wilson righted the chair and placed it beside Cade. After slipping the Gerber from the sheath, he jumped up on the chair and began sawing at the rope with the dagger’s serrated edge. As he worked, he was casting furtive glances at Taryn who was by every definition of the boxing term—down for the count.

  Cade felt a slight jerk and then he was supporting the woman’s entire body weight. Which felt double of what he guessed it to be because there seemed to be no life left in her. “Check on Taryn,” he called to Wilson as he let the body to the ground and laid it out flat, cradling the misshapen head gently in one hand as he did so.

  Examining the woman’s face, it became clear to Cade that she was dead or very close to it. Her eyes—at least they were still in their sockets—were bugged out and the pupils fixed. She was making no sound and the color was draining from her cheeks.

  Sounding hopeful, Wilson said, “She’s just shaken up.”

  Out of his right eye, Cade saw Duncan beginning to stir. Without looking over his shoulder, he barked at Wilson, “Get over here then. I need your help.”

  One atop the other and fingers interlocking, Cade placed his hands on the woman’s narrow ribcage and began chest compressions.

  Skidding to a stop, Wilson went to his knees. First he looked at Cade, then the woman, then swung his gaze back to Cade. “What do I do?”

  Matching chest compressions to the one-hundred-beat-per-minute tempo of the Bee Gees ditty looping through his head, Cade said, “Tilt her head back and make sure she hasn’t swallowed her tongue.”

  Wilson did the first part and was sticking his fingers in the woman’s open maw when he recoiled and said, “We have a problem.”

  Coming to realize whose tongue was inside on the plate, Cade said, “Start breathing for her then.”

  The anticipated complaints didn’t come. Instead, Wilson hunched over and drew in a lungful of air. With no hesitation he planted his mouth on the woman’s blood-rimed lips and transferred the trapped breath. He continued the process while Cade hammered away right next to him.

  Though Cade’s knuckles were beginning to ache and his shoulder and forearm muscles were burning from the roughly two-hundred chest compressions he’d already administered, he kept Stayin’ Alive playing on repeat in his mind.

  The two men kept this up for what seemed like an eternity. When they finally stopped, Cade declaring her dead after failing to find a pulse, only five minutes had elapsed since her sudden and wholly unexpected gravity-aided entrance.

  From his perch on the nearby chair, Duncan said, “Dollars to doughnuts her neck is broken. Fall probably did a number on her brain stem, too.” His hand subconsciously went to the tennis-ball-sized goose egg growing on his head. “No coming back from that.”

  Cade spun around and went from a kneeling position to sitting cross-legged. “That’s what I figured,” he said, shifting his gaze to the hayloft door. There was a taut length of white rope cutting the space horizontally. A new item, judging by how clean it appeared.

  Taryn was on her feet now. She braced herself by taking hold of the chair back. “Another trap set by Adrian’s people,” she said, grimacing.

  Looking side-eyed at her, Duncan said, “That was no trap. It was a message.”

  Voicing what Cade had already noted, Taryn said, “That tongue in there is hers. She wouldn’t talk. And that’s why she lost it.”

  “Brook said Helen was one tough cookie.” Silently scolding himself for another slip of the tongue, Duncan grimaced and looked away.

  “Brook had a lot of good things to say about this couple,” Cade said in a near whisper. “Her note to me was almost two pages. That forced dinner she had with them left a great impression.” He clenched his jaw and clasped his hands behind his head. Looking to the north, he added, “They didn’t deserve this.”

  Wilson was standing in the gaping opening and staring into the barn.

  Voice taking on an ominous tone, he said, “There’s more.”

  Chapter 33

  They all filed into the barn behind Wilson. And just in the nick of time, too. Because the sky decided to open up and pea-sized hailstones thudded the ground and raked the fallen corpses with machinegun-like efficiency.

  Even as Helen’s thin cotton night clothes jumped and rippled from the sudden bombardment, her open mouth was filling with the frozen precipitation.

  A few yards beyond the prostrate bodies, the F-650 was also taking a heaven-sent beating. With each crystalline explosion created by hail striking its windshield and sheet metal there came a furious, gunshot-like report.

  The damp air inside the barn was heavy with the sweet stink of carrion and rotting hay. And as the cacophony from the fusillade hitting just outside the doors rose to a crescendo, to Cade, the hail banging and booming off the tin roof overhead began to sound like a hundred blacksmiths hard at work straightening metal. Or, on second thought, bullet-proof South Dakota soil reducing a stealthy black helicopter to a mess of twisted metal and shredded carbon fiber. Pushing that hellish memory from his mind, he activated the tactical light on his M4. Swept the muzzle over the walls and saw miscellaneous pieces of tack hanging here and there. Gardening tools were propped in a nearby corner. Adorning the walls was an assortment of porcelain-coated signage harkening back to the time before lighted reader boards and neon migrated from the big cities. The products advertised on the differently shaped and brightly colored signs ranged from Mobil Oil to Yankee Girl Tobacco to John Deere tractors, the latter of which was represented in the barn by the real thing. Covered with a thin coating of dust, the hulking green piece of machinery essential to most every rural enterprise sat silently in a far corner under a translucent canopy of wispy cobwebs.

  After finishing the clockwise visual recon by shooting the others a nothing to see here expression, Cade studied the ladder running up a nearby support beam. Letting his eyes travel its length, he saw that it led to a three-by-three trapdoor installed between one pair of the dozen or so rough-hewn four-by-six timbers running horizontal to the barn’s front doors. The trapdoor was open. By the light infiltrating the parted loft doors he could just make out the rafters and dull underside of the tin roof above. Without a word, he let his rifle hang by its sling and began to scale the ladder.

  Without missing a beat, Wilson blurted, “I’m coming, too,” and hustled up after.

  The closer Cade came to the top rung the more the odor of death was affecting him. By the time he stopped short of the opening to look and listen, his eyes were beginning to water and he had to breathe through his mouth to keep from gagging. A long ten-count with Wilson waiting impatiently a rung below his Danners told Cade all he needed to know. Save for the steady drum of hail from the passing storm, he heard nothing to make him think anything living or dead awaited him. Holding in a breath, he swept the M4 up, poked it through the opening one-handed, and climbed another couple of rungs. Head and shoulders inside the loft, he thumbed the tactical light on and panned the sterile white cone in a smooth right to left arc. Seeing the beam refract off of something liquid and shiny at the end of the sweep, he let it linger for a tick then quickly jerked it away and began to dry heave.

  Down in the barn Tary
n had already turned toward the once-gray field of gravel fronting the parted doors. Outside the hail was still hammering everything in sight. In less than a minute, the landscape for as far as she could see had gone from mostly earth tones dashed with the warm colors of autumn to a blanket of white shot through with shades of gray.

  The upturned faces of the rotters drew her attention back to the foreground. Sunken eye sockets white with hail lent the impression a half-dozen Orphan Annie’s were staring blankly back at her. Mouths left yawning by a sudden second-death also brimmed with hail, the excess sloughing off and piling neatly on the ground around their heads. Unmoved by the surreal sight, she glanced up at Wilson on the ladder and indicated that she was content to hang with Duncan and help keep an eye on the driveway.

  Wiping an errant rope of drool on his sleeve, Cade leveled his gaze to the wall a half-dozen yards to his left. There, partially obscured by shadow from the overhead beams, were two people. Even in the dim light he could see that they both had been crucified in a spread-eagle position. The rusty heads of what looked to be railroad dog-spikes protruded several inches from their palms. Down below, the same style spikes had been driven through their ankles until the flat, bent heads had come to rest against the pale flesh there. Both of their heads were touching the steeply pitched roof near where the rafters met the wall. The inky dark permeating the angled recess made it impossible to see their faces, which in turn left Cade in the dark as to their gender.

  From ankle to groin and wrist to breast the corpses had been skinned and stripped of flesh. Ribcages devoid of all internals gaped down on him. All that was left between their legs were gaping holes with pelvic bone and unidentifiable reproductive organs on full display. Though Cade had never seen this level of wholesale savagery in person, he’d heard fellow soldiers describe the torture houses they’d come across in Fallujah, Iraq, where drills and flame and all manner of blades had been employed on Iraqis friendly to the American-led invasion.