Pebbled glass and melting hail crunched under Duncan’s boots as he stepped to the road. He let his eyes roam the wrecked Cadillac straddling the sidewalk a yard from his open door. The black land yacht was a four-door model of indeterminable age. He flicked his gaze to the road and saw that both driver side tires were blown out. Figured it probably happened when it hopped the curb and made acquaintance with the nearby tree it was wedged up against. Good luck moving this tank, sprang to mind as the sun broke from the low clouds and made the window glass on the ground sparkle like a thousand diamonds. Peering inside the car, he saw the deflated airbag hanging limply over the horn ring. A long dead corpse sat behind the wheel, rotting away. Its hands were in its lap and, mouth wide as if belting a primal scream in death, its head was hinged at an impossible angle over the seatback. Blood, pooled and dried to dark crimson long ago, sullied the rain-sodden leather seats and once-beige carpet.
“What do you think?” Cade called through the open door.
Duncan looked up. “Didn’t end well for this one.”
“The car,” exclaimed Cade. “Think it’ll budge?”
Remember, glass half full, Duncan told himself. “I will make it happen,” is what he said as he looped around front of the idling Ford. Wasting no time, he unclipped the tow hook and, with Cade working the winch controls from inside, spooled out twenty feet of cable. He set the shotgun on the car’s wide trunk then went to his knees—a monumental feat for a man closer to sixty than fifty and with one arm working at half strength. He gripped the bumper and let himself down easy until he was laid out flat on his back parallel to the long length of chromed Detroit steel.
Out of sight somewhere Taryn and Wilson were encountering dead things. There were shouts of warning first. Then calm, cool conversation reached Duncan’s ears. The new glass half full mode of thinking had him imagining the pair drawing blades and then coordinating and carrying out a successful cull.
Hearing the sounds of battle subsiding, Duncan shimmied further underneath the car. Working by feel and suffering a couple of scraped knuckles, he finally got the hook and cable threaded around the axle and cinched tight. As a heavy silence descended on the rubble-strewn stretch of Main Street, he rolled out from under the car and reversed the complicated process he’d used to go prone.
Snatching the Saiga off the trunk, he turned and gave Cade a nod. Then, moving gingerly, he mounted the curb and took up station behind a listing telephone pole where he figured there was no chance of the car kneecapping him if it shifted unexpectedly once tension was applied to the cable.
Cade flashed a thumbs-up and reversed the Ford slowly until the cable was stretched tight.
Duncan looked north up Main Street. All clear. He gazed across the street. Saw that the Kids were nowhere to be seen. There were no screams which led him to presume they were searching the auto body place for keys. Cade gunning the F-650’s V-10 dragged his attention back to the task at hand. “Do it,” he mouthed and backpedaled a couple of more feet until his back was pressed against the two-story building rising up behind him.
Metal groaned as the Ford and Cadillac moved in unison—the former under power, the latter rather reluctantly.
The Caddie’s left side mirror sheared off and went spinning away through the broken glass. A half-beat later the car was free and turning on axis and coming off the curb. Duncan recoiled as the passenger side front fender scythed the air barely a foot in front of his legs. As the weathered radials scribed a black arc across the sidewalk to his fore and bounced off the curb, he flashed Cade a thumbs-up.
Inside the Ford, Cade grimaced as the car narrowly missed cutting his friend off at the knees. Seeing the car come to rest in the road parallel to the curb, he jockeyed the F-650 around so that the cable was slack and the oversized rig was positioned to finish the job. Dropping the transmission into Park, he returned the thumbs-up and then pointed to the car’s crumpled front end.
Taking the cue, Duncan stepped off the curb, grumbling and trying hard to not let on how his aches and pains were truly affecting him. He went through the motions of unhooking the tow cable and when he finally hinged up, holding the hook, Cade was standing there with his gloved hand extended.
“You’re moving like someone beat you,” observed Cade.
“That obvious?”
Cade nodded and took the cable. “I got this,” he insisted. “Heater’s blasting inside. Get in and do the driving.”
Head hanging subtly, Duncan made his way to the truck and clambered aboard. While Cade was hooking the cable to the Caddie’s front axle, Duncan was eyeballing the auto body shop. Nothing moved in the lot. Nothing moved beside the structure to the north. Studying the cinderblock wall facing the sidewalk, he saw that nothing moved behind the opaque windows there, either.
The Kids were nowhere to be seen and the radio remained silent.
Remember, old man, glass half full.
Reluctantly, Duncan took his eyes off the building long enough to check the mirrors. In the rearview, he saw a dozen man-sized forms. Judging by their stilted, head-lolling gait they were definitely of the undead variety. And though the mirrors made determining true distance difficult, he was confident they hadn’t yet made the 39/16 junction. Which was a good thing because neither had Lev and Jamie who were set to arrive any moment now.
A bang from the hood area caused Duncan to jump. He looked over the steering wheel and saw Cade, one hand flat on the hood, the other making the universal gesture (finger upthrust and cutting a circle in the air) that every person who had spent any time soldiering instantaneously took to mean: Let’s get this show on the road. Or, the saltier version which Duncan had had screamed at him more than once during boot camp decades ago: Unfuck yourself, Private Winters, and find another gear.
Which he did. Reverse gear in fact. And as agreed upon ahead of time, he backed the Ford south down Main until the cable was stretched tight against the Caddie’s driver side panels.
Seeing that Cade had learned from the recent near miss and was standing a few yards beyond the car’s front end, he tromped the gas and steered hard left.
Initially the engine protested and the rear tires spun on the damp pavement. Once the off-road rubber found purchase, the front of the Caddie jerked left and the car swung around, blocking both lanes, its flattened tires again leaving black marks on the road.
Seeing the cable go slack, Duncan eased off the gas and braked, stopping fully with the Ford’s back tires against the curb and its rear bumper crushing into the hedges bordering the auto body shop’s featureless facade.
Cade dragged a finger across his neck—kill the engine—then went about the task of unhooking the cable.
After shutting the truck down, Duncan elbowed the door and stepped to the road. Peering down Main, he saw that the dead were now past the junction and loping their way. Regarding Cade, he said, “We’ve got company.”
Finished freeing the hook from the Cadillac, Cade looked at his Suunto. “That’s OK. We’ve still got a few minutes until they’re an issue. Besides, Lev and Jamie should be here any minute. They’ll see them and do what needs to be done.”
After pulling his sleeve up and seeing only bare wrist, Duncan said, “Left my watch at the compound. How long until the rendezvous?”
“Thirty-two minutes.”
Climbing back into the truck, Duncan said, “We better get a move on, then.” He paused before starting the motor. “You still plan on adding the little rice burner to the mix?”
Cade nodded and started spooling the cable around his elbow and wrist. Then, as Duncan fired up the big truck, Cade unceremoniously tossed the wound-up cable and tow hook onto the Ford’s expansive hood.
Chapter 38
Across Main Street from Back In The Saddle, behind the body shop, Taryn and Wilson were hiding the twice-dead corpses behind a stack of balding radials that would never make it to the tire recycler or end up on a rope tied to an oak in somebody’s front yard. Finished with the grim task,
Taryn wiped her hands on her fatigues and set her sights on the dirty white pickup. She tried the handle and found it locked. Without pause, she put the butt of her carbine through the passenger-side wing window.
A few feet away Wilson was clambering up onto the side of the black wrecker. He was scaling the boom out back when Taryn called over to inform him that finding the keys to the truck wouldn’t be necessary to move it.
“Best news all day,” said Wilson as he stepped from the truck’s rear bumper and planted his feet on the oil-stained diamond plate decking. Didn’t want to go into that dark-ass building, anyway, is what he was thinking as he negotiated a tangle of chains and cables to get to the towing boom. Fighting gravity and his own questionable sense of balance, he inched up the boom on all fours, hand-over-hand, monkey-like, until he was within arms-reach of the cinderblock wall. Knees knocking, he rose and teetered there like a high wire act.
“You got this,” said Taryn.
Grimacing, Wilson pitched forward and arrested his fall by slapping both palms against the wall. Then, by stretching to full extension, he managed to get four fingers of one hand hooked over the top edge of the roof’s narrow parapet.
Stomach muscles burning, he looked down at Taryn. “Gonna catch me if I fall?”
She nodded.
“I’m not so sure about this Spider Man wall-crawling shit,” he conceded, going for the parapet with his other hand. Now gripping the parapet tenuously with both hands, he found himself in a position he imagined would look like a poorly executed pushup from the ground.
Inches from his face was a window inset with a single pane of wire-reinforced safety glass. In the split-second glance, he saw what looked to be the office and customer receiving area of the shop. Nothing to see here. Only your typical office accoutrements: threadbare furniture, a pair of desktop computers, dented metal filing cabinets, and a lone desk with an open phonebook-size catalog, its parchment-thin pages showing line drawings of parts necessary to save foreign and domestic iron from the car crusher.
Sensing hesitation, Taryn said, “Just do it, Wilson.”
He shot back, “This isn’t a Nike commercial,” and launched vertically off the boom. Success! He got enough elevation to hook his left arm over the edge. M4 banging against his tailbone, he dug deep and found the strength to pull his weight up to where he was able to get the other arm hooked over the parapet. The rest was easy. Feet scrabbling against the wall, he pushed up with his arms, twisted his torso, then crashed to the roof, ending up on his back and staring at the clouds scudding across the gray winter sky.
He lay there on the cool, wet roof and listened to Taryn softly calling his name from below.
After a long three-count, which he used to catch his breath, he sat up and leaned over the ledge. First thing that registered when he swung his gaze groundward was the worried look parked on Taryn’s face.
“I’m good,” he insisted, then forced a smile.
Speaking softly, she asked, “What do you see?”
He went to his knees and looked south. “We’ve got group of rotters near the junction.” He craned north and saw only Main Street spooling away. “North is clear,” he called down. Lastly, he rose and looked the length of the single-level section of the building he was on. Partially hidden by the distant parapet, on the street fronting the body shop, was the big black Ford. He couldn’t hear the usual engine rumble and exhaust note. Only the whoosh from a surprise gust of wind bringing with it the stench of death reached his ears. On the road down below Cade and Duncan were talking. They’d already moved the Cadillac to where it blocked most of the two-lane. Cade nodded then turned and walked past the Cadillac. Tow cable in hand, he knelt by a compact pushed up against the near curb and disappeared from sight.
Wilson turned back and filled Taryn in on what Cade and Duncan were up to. Then he blew her a kiss. “I’ll be alright up here,” he said confidently. Nodding toward Main Street, he added, “Hustle back to the others. They’re going to need your help.”
Still peering up, Taryn dropped her hands to her sides and mouthed, “I love you, Wilson.”
Before Wilson could reply to that, she was hustling through the cars in the shop’s back lot. “Be careful,” he whispered after her.
Wilson watched Taryn until she was out of sight. Then he turned his attention to finding a place to set up his overwatch position.
The wall to the garage on his right rose up another twenty feet. It would afford the best view, but was smooth and too tall for him to scale without a ladder. Only heating and ventilation equipment and a row of glass skylights shared space with him on the roof.
With no way to attain a higher vantage point, he opted for a spot beside the south-side parapet with a decent view of the intersection of Main and Center and propped his rifle against the garage wall to his right. Pressing his back to the cool cement block wall, he slid down to his butt and inadvertently sat in an inch-deep pool of standing water.
“Damn you, Murphy,” he cursed softly. “Damn you.”
From the driver’s seat in the Ford, Duncan watched Cade unhook the cable from the four-door Hyundai. This time he was ready for the bang when Cade again tossed the coiled wire and hook onto the hood. Following the clatter of metal on metal, Duncan heard a female voice off of his left shoulder call out to Cade and tracked the younger man with his gaze as he strode to the sidewalk where he held a brief conversation with Taryn.
Mission accomplished, thought Duncan upon seeing the young woman’s calm demeanor. Knowing that her presence on Main meant that Wilson was in position and not being eaten by the dead, he flicked his gaze to the body shop roof and was pleased that he couldn’t see hide nor hair of the youngster he knew was somewhere up there.
After Cade and Taryn held a brief conversation, Duncan watched the pair part ways. She disappeared through the tangle of cars in the body shop’s north-side lot while he looped around back of the F-650 and climbed inside.
Once Cade’s door sucked shut, Duncan asked, “Success?”
Cade nodded.
“What now? Do we deal with the rotters … or finish the job?”
“Let the Zs come,” answered Cade. “Less distance we have to drag them the better. Plus, that’ll cut down on the blood trails.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Drive around back of the shop.”
***
Thirty seconds after having observed the conversation on the sidewalk, Duncan had the F-650 nosed in next to the white Silverado pickup in the shop’s south lot. Behind the Chevy’s grimy driver side glass, he saw Taryn directing an expectant look his way.
In less than a minute, Cade had the cable secured to one of the Chevy’s frame-mounted tow hooks.
Once Cade was out from under the truck, Taryn was to throw the transmission into Neutral and disengage the parking brake.
Seeing Taryn flash a thumb his way, Duncan reversed the Ford out of the lot the way he’d driven in, taking the Chevy along for the ride just ahead of a jogging Cade who broke right and took a shortcut to Main Street through the shop’s south lot.
Peering over his sore shoulder, Duncan drove in reverse gear around the south end of the block to Center where he wheeled the rig east. At the intersection with Main, he slowed but kept moving east until Back In The Saddle Rehab’s south-facing wall loomed over both pickups.
Inside the Silverado, Taryn began to brake before its front end had cleared Main’s northbound lane. A beat later she stopped the rig completely, leaving a foot of the nose of the truck blocking the sidewalk and corner curb cut.
After hastily setting the brake, Taryn leaped to the sidewalk and sprinted to the Ford, where she slipped behind the wheel and settled into the still warm driver’s seat.
“See you in a bit,” Duncan said, closing her inside.
Cade climbed up on the running board. He could feel the thrumming of the engine through his boot soles as he waited for the window to pulse down. Once it seated into the channel, he said, “Keep your radio on.”
She nodded. Checked the safety, then passed her M4 butt first to him through the open window.
“No matter what happens to any of us—” he began.
“Stick to the plan,” she finished.
He nodded and jumped to the road. Then, drawing the Gerber, he did two things. First, he craned left and told Taryn to get going before the Zs could clog the nearby intersection. Then he passed the M4 and a pair of thirty-round magazines to Duncan. “Building should still be clear. Sure you won’t listen to reason?”
Duncan shook his head. “Whites of their eyes.”
Cade shrugged. “Go on up, then. I’ll meet you in two mikes.”
Without a word, Duncan slung the rifle, hefted his Saiga, and strode off toward the rear of the rehab place.
Cade waited in the middle of Center Street as Taryn wheeled the Ford past the throng of living dead and continued to watch her retreat south down Main. Once he saw the rig turn off 16 and disappear from sight behind the wrecked school bus, he drew the Zs’ attention back to him with a few choice catcalls. Then, with all eyes on him, he clapped his hands and chanted “Come and get it” until the whole rotten lot of them were locked on and coming at him like the meat-seeking-missiles they were.
With the entire baker’s dozen shambling across the intersection, Cade went light on the balls of his feet and extended the Gerber level with the street.
“For Brook,” he said through clenched teeth and lunged for the leader of the pack—a stick-thin and very road-weary twenty-something male. Clearly it had been dead for a long time. Maggots spilled from a gaping neck wound as the hissing beast met the knife thrust head on with a nonchalant vigor only the hungry dead could show against an armed man.
The honed steel clinked off orbital bone and the twice-dead corpse crashed over sideways, a hundred and fifty pounds of rotting flesh propelled fast to the road by its own hunger-driven momentum.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss Page 21