Cade flicked his eyes to the side mirror where he could see the two walking parallel to the dashed centerline which was just beginning to show through the melting hail. Staggering along the 16 a few hundred feet ahead of the kids were the Zs he’d just steered the Ford through. Fifteen or more, he guessed. Plenty enough to keep them busy. Happy to see the young couple placing a few feet of separation between themselves, Cade said, “I hope he is afraid. A good measure of fear never hurt anybody.”
“It wasn’t the lock up all motor function and cause you to shit your pants kind of fear I detected,” said Duncan, ahead of a chuckle. “But I could smell it coming through his pores.”
Cade thought: Sink or swim. The new mantra. If he went down to man or Z, he wanted Raven in the company of as many seasoned survivors as possible. The swimmers of this new world. With fond thoughts of Raven trying to surface from the dark place he stowed them while outside the wire, he fished his backup Glock and the Steiners from the center console. The former he placed on the dash. The latter he used to scan the tree line west of 16. Seeing nothing moving there, he swept the binoculars to the right a few degrees and glassed the foreground a short distance away. He panned right to the point where the intersecting State Route 39 entered the forest and snaked away to its eventual terminus at Daymon’s roadblock a couple of miles past the compound. He didn’t expect to see Bridgett on foot there, and she wasn’t. Her getting to the junction by now would be akin to someone finishing a half-marathon in record time. However, as low a probability as it seemed, he half-expected to see an abandoned vehicle that hadn’t been present when they passed earlier on their way to check in on the Thagons. But with no way to jump or push start one of the many vehicles still sitting idle at the lower mining concern or in the drives of the half-dozen unoccupied homes scattered along 39, the latter scenario was almost as farfetched as Bridgett having any kind of long distance runner’s pedigree.
Duncan asked, “What do you see?”
Cade lowered the binoculars. “Not a thing moving,” he said. “Road and tree line … both clear.”
“No rotters?”
Cade hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Just those.”
Shifting his gaze to the passenger side wing mirror, Duncan watched the action happening at their six while he worked at rubbing the knots from his tweaked shoulder. He winced as Taryn waded into the dead. Saw her stiff-arm the first emaciated specimen and quickly drop it with an upward arcing knife strike to the temple.
Opposite Taryn, the redhead was also meeting the monsters head on. He had the borrowed Glock in a two-fisted grip, its suppressor tracking from monster to monster and jumping slightly as spent brass arced away toward the roadside ditch. The young man looked at ease as he crab-walked through the throng wielding the weapon with a kind of efficiency Duncan had yet to see him exhibit. And contrary to the Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear warning etched onto the mirror below the reversed image, the puffs of hot gasses leaving the suppressor were hardly discernable.
Cade had dropped the binoculars to his lap and was watching in his mirror, too. “Must be the added weight of the suppressor,” he said. “Kid’s tracking smooth and keeping the sights on target.”
Duncan grunted. “He’s got it, all right. But he didn’t argue your ‘only good use for a sidearm in a gunfight is to get to your battle rifle’ gobbledygook.”
“No breathers in sight,” noted Cade as he hefted the Steiners and resumed his left to right visual recon, keying in mainly on the area surrounding the spot where four arterials came together in a sort of twisted X.
Just about where Woodruff started and State Route 16 became Main Street was the auto body shop Cade was already familiar with. He halted his sweep there for a closer look at the vehicles in the lot. Most were wedged in tight against the bowed-in roll-up doors. The few cars that had avoided the undead horde’s previous northbound surge would be of no use for what he had planned. West of the cinderblock building, where the uneven, frost-heaved expanse of blacktop curled around back, he spotted a black tow truck backed in close to the wall that piqued his interest. Though not sure of the make and model, he guessed it to be either a Ford F-350 Super Duty or Chevrolet’s equivalent. Emblazoned on the passenger door in gaudy-looking gold-leaf outlined with red striping were the words WOODRUFF AUTO BODY.
Cade supposed it would suffice for what he had planned.
Sitting nearby on four flat tires was another American-made pickup. Its glass was intact, but clouded over. The once-white factory paint was streaked vertically with dirt and moss. In the bed were a dozen tires all jammed in at crazy angles.
“Those will both do,” said Cade. He regarded Duncan and ran the hastily concocted plan by him.
“It could work,” Duncan agreed. “So long as they don’t see our tire tracks.”
“If they get that far then Murphy has already made an untimely appearance.”
“Then that means we don’t have to worry about dragging the rotters off the road,” Duncan stated, glancing over his shoulder at the young couple. “Looks like a dozen down. Only a couple left standing. They do good work.”
“We’ll see about that,” Cade said cryptically, a tick before a burst of white noise filled the cab. Going to his thigh pocket, he pulled out the radio he had taken off the attic watcher. It was powered on but not the source of the electronic squelch. He went to the other pocket and retrieved his Motorola—which by then was broadcasting Taryn’s voice. She sounded winded as she requested help to clear the dead off the road.
“No need,” answered Cade. “Come on back. We’re moving out.”
***
Wilson was at Cade’s window a minute later. He looked in and started working an invisible crank—universal semaphore for roll your window down. Which Cade did at once saying, “How many did you shoot?”
“I don’t know,” said Wilson. “Eight, maybe nine.”
“How many bullets did it take?”
“More than eight.”
“Wrack your brain then pick a number you can live with.”
Duncan flashed a questioning look at Cade. “Hell are you playing brain games for?”
Cade looked to Duncan and held up a hand.
Taryn opened the door behind Duncan and jumped in.
Cade swung his gaze back to Wilson. “How many?”
“Nine,” he replied, confidently.
“You sure?” Cade said, palm out. “Give it to me. We’ll see.”
Tentatively, Wilson handed the Glock butt first through the open window.
Without pause, Cade pointed the suppressor at the firewall between his feet and cycled the slide back and forth until the unspent bullets tumbled out and it locked open. He inventoried the rounds and leveled a gaze at Wilson.
Wilson’s Adam’s apple bobbed. Unconvincingly, he said, “Nine.” Then he asked, “Was it nine?”
“Twelve,” Cade said, brows knitting in the middle. “Keeping a good mental shot count might just save your butt one day.”
Sheepishly, Wilson said, “Copy that,” and climbed into the idling truck. Then, trying hard not to succumb to the urge to spew hot vomit onto the backseat carpet, he looked to Taryn and said, “I didn’t feel overwhelmed one bit back there. Did you?”
Seeing Wilson’s hand palsy as he reached to close his door, Taryn leaned across and lent him a hand. “You did fine, Wilson,” she said, wrapping her extended arm around his waist. “We did fine … didn’t we, gentlemen?”
Before doing anything, Cade found Taryn in the rearview. Shifting the Ford into Drive, he locked eyes with her and winked.
Chapter 36
Having covered less than a mile since the run-in with the pair of zombies, Iris came to a full stop on a short straightaway between opposing curves. She wavered there for a moment, listening hard. At first she had attributed the subtle hum off her right shoulder as belonging to the Ogden River which she knew snaked through the woods somewhere below the nearby embankment. Now she wasn’t s
o sure. It seemed to be getting louder and there was a throaty roar comingling with the rushing water sound. By the time something clicked in her pain-addled mind and she became keenly aware she was hearing tires hissing against the hail-covered state route—the white noise and exhaust note had grown exponentially and the low growl of an engine hard at work joined the chorus.
Panic rising like water in a flood-swollen creek, Iris ran through her options—none of them good.
First she looked to the scrub brush encroaching on the two-lane’s left shoulder. Too far. Then she stole a quick glance at the guardrail to her right. Too high. Besides, if she were to get over the thigh-high obstacle, the tumble to whatever lay below would probably kill her. She looked at the road by her feet. Barely visible through the sheen of hail was the solid yellow centerline. Not much room for error.
Though the last thing Iris wanted to do at this point was play dead in the middle of the road in the likely path of a rapidly approaching vehicle, she had no other option. That the vehicle was approaching from the west, where she knew the road was blocked by dozens of fallen trees, meant it couldn’t be carrying anyone friendly to her.
Seconds after first detecting the vehicle, she started to feel the vibration from the engine and rumble of the exhaust in her chest. In fact, the vehicle was closing with the nearby corner at such a high rate of speed that the thrum of its tires came across like an angry swarm of hornets about to alight on her back.
So she did that last thing on her mental list. She went limp mid-limp and let gravity take her to the hail-slicked roadway.
The spot where she came to rest—good leg locked straight, bad cocked at a crazy angle—was less than ideal from a survivability standpoint. But it was too late to do anything but tense every muscle in her body and hold her breath.
The vehicle was just rounding the corner as the repercussions from the voluntary freefall threw Iris’s mind into a desperate fight against the tractor-beam-like tug of unconsciousness.
Cursing herself for getting caught out in the open and ending up prone so dangerously close to the middle of the road, she closed her eyes and listened to the wicked thrumming of rubber on cement envelope the space all around her. Her eyes involuntarily snapped open the second the wall of air being pushed ahead of the speeding vehicle hit her body full on. Then she was shocked into a fit of screaming when the follow-on blast of icy slush thrown from the oversized tires slapped her in the face, stinging her cheek and ear and neck as if the imaginary hornets had been riding the slipstream.
Her screams morphed into an animalistic howl as she drew back her right hand and saw that the offending tires had turned it into a swirl of broken digits. The soft flesh on the sides of her shattered fingers had split lengthwise from knuckle to knuckle under the immense pressure exerted on them. An instant pulse of blood began to sluice from the gaping, mouth-like fissures and pool with the water on the road.
Iris rolled to her side and did two things simultaneously. She pressed her head hard against the road and arched her back. As she did she rolled her eyes up into her skull and caught a split-second glimpse of the retreating vehicle as it rounded the far corner and disappeared from sight.
She relaxed her body and began to chant the words dirty white pickup, two people. Wavering on the edge of consciousness, she grasped her pulped hand with the good and dragged it to her bosom. After a series of rapid breaths failed to chase the encroaching shroud of blackness from her peripheral vision, she closed her good fingers around the bad and squeezed with all her might.
An explosion of stars chased away the dark. Endorphins flooding her brain provided the clarity necessary to do what she had been meaning to before this series of unfortunate events had rendered her crippled and broken in the middle of the road in fuck-it-all Utah.
After fishing the two-way radio from a pocket and finding it unscathed from the fall and subsequent hit and run, she brought it to her mouth and thumbed the Talk button. Hand shaking like a drunk in dire need of a maintenance nip, she spoke into the radio. But instead of spewing the boilerplate identity and wait for a response, she repeated her mantra aloud, then resorted to begging for someone to respond. Even taking her dire circumstances into account, she hated how it all sounded. However, with winter nearly here and nightfall coming increasingly sooner, the specter of having to spend the night alone in the wild scared her more than any beating the display of weakness might bring.
Spent from the exertion of extracting the radio and then placing the thirty-second call, her lips parted into a half-smile and her eyes flickered. Then, as if an invisible hand was working the drawstrings of consciousness, darkness slowly encircled her field of vision until all that remained was a single pinpoint of light lingering behind high, watery clouds.
“That was damn close,” said Lev as he instinctively leaned forward and rolled the volume down, silencing the heavy metal track in the process.
While he was killing the tunes, Jamie was whipping around in her seat. She got her shoulders squared with the tailgate and craned just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the dead thing. And in that split-second snapshot in time, she saw that it was rising up, its body arching off the blacktop at an incredibly awkward angle. “He was playing possum,” she said as she turned back to face forward.
Skeletal trees and undergrowth beaten down by recent weather were whipping by on both sides. Far off, flanked by fast-moving clouds, the finger of rock rising over the quarry was just coming into view.
“I’ve heard Cade speak of seeing the Zs do some strange shit,” said Lev as he steered the Raptor out of a sweeping left-hand turn. “Working doorknobs. Pretending to drive. One even stalked him at the helicopter crash site in South Dakota. First time I can remember seeing it firsthand, though.”
“So I wasn’t seeing things?”
Lev shook his head. “Caught it flopping like a fish in my side mirror. That little bump we felt back there makes me think I ran over part of him.”
“Maybe you ought to slow down a bit. And try staying in your own lane. Do that and we won’t be changing a flat and exposing ourselves to whatever might be wandering the road.”
Lev said nothing. Instead, he let his foot do the talking and eased up on the gas, shaving at best two miles per hour off their forward speed. Shooting Jamie a smartass smirk, he reached for the volume control.
“Nuh uh,” said Jamie. “I’m done with Metallica. Whose is that, anyway?”
“Not Wilson’s,” he said with a grin. “I have a feeling he’s a Maroon Five or Dave Matthew’s Band kind of guy. Sensitive music for sensitive folks.”
With a tilt of her head, Jamie said, “Who, then?”
“Who has two arms full of dragon and skull tattoos?”
Jamie rolled her eyes and hit a button on the head unit to select the next disc. While it was going through some out of sight mechanical chore, she fixed Lev with a serious stare. “So Cade shares all that stuff with you?”
Lev nodded.
“He doesn’t say a word around me. Well, I take that back,” she conceded. “He does offer up a gun or knife tip now and then. Unsolicited, of course.”
“Of course,” Lev said, mimicking her. He playfully squeezed her leg. Which drew a pretend punch to the arm from her.
“Eyes on the road, Gropey Groperton. We’re coming up on the quarry roads. There’s usually some dead things hanging around just after the curves.”
Hands locked on the ten and two, Lev bled a little more speed. They were traveling east at just five over the posted limit when the Motorola on the seat between them came to life with a hiss of white noise followed at once by a disembodied voice.
“Cade here,” the voice said. “We’re waiting.”
Lev looked to Jamie. Said, “Ten mikes out.”
She relayed the message. Thought about mentioning the seemingly self-aware rotter, but released the Talk key instead.
A click of acknowledgement emanated from the radio’s speaker and that was it.
> The Raptor’s powerplant roared and there was a whoosh of exhaust as Lev matted the pedal. A tick later the bullet-riddled sign announcing the lower quarry flashed by. Because Lev had them going nearly double the speed limit in a short amount of time, they both failed to see the overgrown road servicing the upper quarry. Approaching the next curve, Jamie reached for the grab bar and said, “We’re going to die before we meet up with them.”
“We’re not going to make it in time to help set up if I don’t push it.”
Jamie said nothing as the truck listed hard to the right and the nose dipped on her side, Lev steering aggressively through the curve. On the next long straightaway, he opened it up and acquainted the speedometer needle with the north side of seventy miles per hour.
Chapter 37
Cade released the Talk key and pocketed the Motorola. While he had wrestled with the decision to tell Lev and Jamie that he had just heard over the watcher’s radio that the woman calling herself Bridgett had just spotted them and called it in, he ultimately decided nothing would be gained by sending them on a fool’s errand searching for her. It’d surely be the metaphorical needle in a haystack type of folly. Burning gas and time for what? To capture and then interrogate a woman who likely knew little more than the one he took the radio off of.
That time would be better spent setting the stage for his next act. Only this wasn’t a play. Big life and death stuff was about to happen in the general vicinity of Main and Center, and he wanted to get started on the preparations.
After killing the engine, he left the ignition locked in Accessory mode. Then he issued instructions to Taryn and Wilson and watched them pile out and scamper west across Main Street toward the auto body place. Pleased to see they were moving quickly, their rifles held at low-ready, he sat back against his seat and drew a deep breath.
Sitting in the truck parked a dozen feet north of Back In The Saddle Rehab, Cade rehashed his plan with Duncan. After a few moments of spirited back-and-forth conversation, tweaks were made and Duncan volunteered to do the “heavy lifting” and shoved open his door.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss Page 20