The slap of feet hitting pavement and hollow sucking sounds of the dead negotiating the pasture preceded the horde moving on Dregan from to the south. With their hungry calls starting to blend with those of the horde about to spill from the pasture and become one huge sonic tempest, Dregan pegged the volume to the Brady Mobile’s sound system and steered right onto SR-16 northbound.
Chapter 65
Eyes locked on the security pod’s metal ceiling, Seth said, “You don’t have any pants on.”
Displaying the sheathed Gerber in his hand, Cade said, “Had to cut them off before coming in.”
“Rotter guts?”
“Rotter and breather both,” replied Cade. “Mostly rotter, though. The pants and blouse were beyond saving. I’ll burn them tomorrow.”
Seth fiddled nervously with the satellite phone on the desk.
Risking life and limb, Duncan tugged on the cuff of Cade’s underwear. “Wardrobe malfunction notwithstanding,” he quipped, “we now know the answer to the all-important question: and boxers, it is. Hell, Cade, I had you pegged as a banana-hammock-wearing kind of guy.”
Even in the pale light thrown by the lone sixty-watt bulb hanging from the ribbed ceiling, Cade’s glare was unmistakable.
Stifling a laugh, Seth said, “I have something I need—”
Cade silenced him with a raised hand. “Lev is going to take over for you as soon as he finishes stowing the snowmobile Daymon gifted us.”
Duncan looked Cade up and down one last time. He said, “I’ll leave you two fellas alone. If I don’t have the boss look at this bad wing, she will not be a happy camper.”
Cade grabbed his friend’s uninjured shoulder. “Get a good night’s sleep,” he said. “We’ll brainstorm about this in the morning.”
“You sure about that?”
Cade nodded. “Thanks for pulling your weight out there.” Careful to not further aggravate the injury, he gave Duncan a weak one-armed man hug. Fully cognizant of his state of dress, he made sure to avoid any lower body contact.
Reciprocating, Duncan joked, “I’m feeling vulnerable all of a sudden.”
Pulling away, Cade thought he detected alcohol on the man’s breath, but gave him the benefit of the doubt. No sense opening another Pandora’s Box when there was already one open that needed immediate attention and definitive closure.
“Night, Delta.”
“Night, Old Man.”
Cade watched Duncan retrace his steps and take a right before the entry foyer. He heard a knock and a creak and voices spilling out into the passageway. Turning his attention to Seth, he said, “You were saying?”
“As you were parking topside I received a call on the long-range CB from Gregory at Bear River.”
“The horde is on the move?”
In a low voice, Seth said, “It’s breaking north as we speak.” He went quiet and twirled the sat-phone on the desktop.
“And?”
Seth looked up to meet Cade’s gaze. “It’s now a full-on mega-horde.”
Eyes narrowing, Cade said, “How many?”
Seth was stroking his beard now and staring at the monitor where in one panel dark forms were flitting by the stationary Humvee’s headlight beams. Returning his attention to Cade, he said, “Dregan told Gregory that once the two hordes merge there will be at least a hundred abreast.”
A door opened to Cade’s left and he heard Sasha and Raven chattering. He said, “How deep is the column?”
Seth said, “A mile or so. Damn, I hope to hell Gregory’s wrong with that assessment.”
While Seth was talking, Cade had grabbed a Sharpie and scribbled the channel the radio placed by Iris’s body was locked on. Finished, he did a double take. “A mile deep?” Still staring at Seth, he began employing a formula for determining crowd size taught to him by former Secret Service Special Agent to the President, Adam Cross. He shook his head after coming to a rough estimate of the mega horde’s size that, even if halved, would be impossible to get around once it ranged north of the 39/16 junction.
“Yep. A mile or so,” confirmed Seth, returning his attention to the monitor on which the individual rectangles were now all the same dark shade of gray. The only thing pointing to the fact that the cameras were still up and delivering a current image was the green letters and digits at the corner of each pane denoting the camera’s location and current time.
Cade heard the door to the Kids’ quarters close and silence returned. A tick later a whispered conversation was filtering down the passage. Ignoring the discernable snippets, he looked back to Seth and asked, “How does Dregan know this?”
“Because he’s the one leading the pusbags away from Bear River.” He paused again. “In an ice cream truck, I guess.” He went on to detail the rest of the plan relayed to him by Gregory.
As soon as Seth stopped talking, the door to the Kids’ quarters hinged open and quickly closed again. A beat later the sound of footsteps echoed in the corridor.
Cade clamped down on Seth’s shoulder and craned his head so they were nearly eye-to-eye. “Keep these cards close to your vest for now. Can you do that?”
Seth nodded affirmative at the very moment Raven rounded the corner holding her bandaged hand above her head and wearing a conspiratorial grin.
Releasing his grip on Seth, Cade scooped up the sat-phone and slipped it into his pack. Turning toward the foyer, he put on a happy face and locked eyes with Raven.
Smile leaving her face, Raven glanced down and said, “Dad, you have no pants on.”
He said, “Long story,” and bent and picked up the Pelican case. “I’ll give you the short version after I unload this gear.” He moved to the T and paused there. After Raven had passed and was preoccupied with opening the door to the Grayson quarters, Cade looked to Seth and pressed a finger to his lips.
Stub tail twitching spasmodically, Max was curled up and waiting for them when they entered the Grayson quarters. Cade closed and locked the door behind them. He set the Pelican case aside and propped his M4 against the head of the bed. After shrugging off his pack and plopping it on the floor, he gave Max a quick scratch behind the ears.
Catching sight of his daughter’s Brook-like posture—hands on hips, eyes boring into the back of his head—he rose and quickly slipped on a pair of Army-issue sweatpants taken from the foot of the bed.
Raven said, “Did you find Bridgett?”
“Her real name is Iris and she is dead,” he said, showing zero emotion. The bitch is feeding the birds, is what he was thinking. He went on to relay a sanitized version of the day’s events to her. He finished by mentioning the “heightened presence” of rotters walking the roads, stressing that though he had let her and Sasha venture outside the wire to deliver the supplies, she was not to leave the compound without an adult.
“Not even to go to the bathroom?”
Cade shook his head. “You have to go now? I’m going to take Max out and clean up a bit.”
Raven yawned, then shook her head. “I’m tired.”
He began, “Do you want one of your—”
“Mom’s melatonin pills?” she finished. “Sure. They make me dream a bunch. Good dreams, too.”
Cade grabbed two bottles from the table. Choosing the one labeled 5mg Quick Dissolving, he rattled one onto her palm.
“Water?”
He pulled a bottle from his pack and passed it over. Going back into the pack, he came out with the map and, while Raven was washing the pill down, stuck it into his waistband. He reached into the pack and pulled out his Glocks one at a time.
“Come on, Max.”
The dog sprang up and spun a circle.
Cade stooped over and gave Raven a hug. Kissing her atop her head, he said, “I love you, Bird.”
Regarding him with liquid, sleep-filled eyes, she reciprocated. “Love you more, Dad.”
Starting the Big Nutbrown Hare/Little Nutbrown Hare routine from a book he had read to her a hundred times when she was a toddler, he said, “
Guess how much I love you.”
She stretched her arms out to her sides and said, “This much?”
Cade shook his head. “More.” He touched the low ceiling. “I love you all the way up to here.”
After they one-upped each other a couple of times with Cade getting the last word by looking to the ceiling and saying, “I love you all the way to the moon and back again,” Raven retreated to her upper bunk and crawled under the covers.
Cade tucked the covers under Raven’s chin and kissed her on the cheek. Seeing her eyelids already beginning to flutter, he turned away and grabbed a threadbare towel and his M4. By the time he extinguished the light and was working the door handle, his girl was beginning to snore.
Chapter 66
Cade took Max outside to do his business then returned and left him guarding Raven in their quarters. Satisfied Raven was out for the count, he retraced his steps to the T where he caught sight of Lev sitting on a folding chair, upright and alert in front of the monitor. Seeing that there was a trio of radios spread out on the desk before the younger man set Cade at ease.
“Any movement?”
Looking away from the monitor, Lev said, “Nothing yet.”
“I don’t expect that to hold,” admitted Cade. “Wilson’s radio?”
“Just white noise.”
“At least the batteries are holding.”
Lev nodded. “Let’s hope Wilson put fresh Evereadys in the thing this morning.”
Ignoring the quip, Cade said, “Any more Adrian rantings come over the CB?”
Lev shook his head. “They’ve gone radio silent. Which makes sense. After all, they lost about three dozen of their Jay-Vee team in half a day.”
“What made you think the rendezvous team and quick reaction force—if you can call it that—were populated by their bench players?”
“Had to be,” stated Lev. “They had zero tactical sense. Even after we pulled the first ambush ... and the QRF saw its aftermath, their actions stayed the same. They gave chase and continued, for the most part, to drive bumper-to-bumper.”
“I concur,” said Cade. “Adrian seems to have a huge sway over them.”
“Like a cult type of sway?”
“Exactly. And that’s why I have no doubt she’s keeping her best and brightest close to home.”
Lev glanced at the monitor for a moment. When he returned his attention back to Cade, he asked, “Where is home?”
Cade unfolded the map and laid it flat on the desk over the radios.
After giving the area north of Bear Lake a once over, Lev put his finger on State Route 16 near Woodruff. He traced the squiggly line denoting the road south to Bear River, stopping a hair north of the dot denoting the tiny town’s location.
“I’ve already crunched the numbers,” said Cade. “I figure the horde is nearly to the Thagons’ house by now.”
Lev looked up from the map. “That means even the slowest among them will be pouring into Woodruff in half an hour.”
Cade nodded. “Unless Mother Nature comes through with an instant cold snap, I won’t be able to drive north.”
“Definitely not tonight,” agreed Lev. “But that’s a good thing, right?”
Cade shot him a look that said go on.
“If the horde is moving north, then Adrian’s people probably won’t be coming south any time soon. Maybe the horde will find them and eat them. Karma’s a bitch. Stranger shit has happened.”
Cade shook his head. “Too many variables. They know exactly where we stay. We have their stuff. If her group is what I think it is, then we’re dealing with a cancer here. Cut out some of the tumor—”
“The group south of Bear Lake and the two convoys,” stated Lev.
“Was a good start,” finished Cade. “However, if you don’t get rid of all the cancer it’s going to metastasize and then you’re fighting it on multiple fronts.”
After stabbing a finger at each of the half-dozen tiny red Xs scribed on the map between Bear River in the south and Bear Lake to the north, Lev said, “These would be their observation posts. They would have to be eliminated first.”
“That they are. And, yes, they pose a big problem. At least half of them do.” Cade tapped the X farthest south in the string. “Thagons’ home.” He dragged his finger north, passing one X east of the 39/16 junction, and stopped at the next X which was situated on Woodruff’s northern boundary.
“The church rectory?”
“Has to be,” Cade agreed. He moved his finger to the X on Bear Lake’s southwest shore.
“That’s the compound with the cul-de-sac,” said Lev. “No doubt about it.”
Cade nodded and took a black Sharpie from the cut-down Pringles canister. He popped off the cap and circled the three Xs he and Lev had just identified as known observation posts. “The two near this so-called Adrianville could be satellite colonies similar to the cul-de-sac outpost and contain like numbers of personnel, or, if I’m lucky, they’re just one-person affairs like the church and the Thagons’ place.”
Lev tapped his finger on the X east of the 39/16 junction. “And this?”
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that’s Hollah’s mansion.”
“You mean Daymon and Heidi’s new place?”
Before Cade could say that Daymon had already been informed of his findings on the map nor add that he had just tried hailing the man when he was outside with Max, Lev was snatching up the base station’s handheld microphone with one hand, and changing to a new channel with the other. Thumbing the call switch, he said, “Daymon? Heidi? This is Lev. Anyone copy?”
Cade stood still and silent for a long while as Lev tried multiple times to raise their friends. Finally, during a lull, he said, “I told Daymon earlier. If he was worried, he didn’t let on. He’s a big boy. You’ll just have to keep trying. If he doesn’t pick up tonight, you’ll probably get ahold of him at the agreed-upon time tomorrow.”
Lev tossed the microphone unceremoniously onto the desktop. “They still need to be warned about the mega-horde.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” said Cade. “The dead should stick to 16. They haven’t deviated yet.” He refolded the map and, ending up with a finished product far from what he began with, tucked the rumpled mess into his waistband. He grabbed a two-way radio from the shelf and powered it on.
Lev scooped a Motorola from the desk top. “Seth and Tran are patrolling the clearing,” he said. “I’ll let them know you’re going to be out and about, too.”
Already through the foyer and reaching for the handle on the door to outside, Cade held his radio aloft and said, “Copy that.”
SR 16 North of the Thagon Home
As promised, Dregan said some words for the dead when he motored by the Thagons’ place. As the Brady Mobile crested a hill a few hundred yards past the dirt road servicing the white house on the hill, he saw an orange-red glow a couple of miles distant north by east. It was exactly how Vegas appeared to him the first time he approached Sin City at night by car. Only then the glowing multicolored blob had been evident on the horizon for miles and miles and was caused by neon lights, not flame licking skyward. He stared at the distant inferno for a few seconds then shifted his gaze back to the road in order to negotiate an upcoming S-turn.
After steering the ice cream truck along the serpentine stretch of road, the headlight wash picked up reflectors in the distance. Figuring that what he was seeing was likely the side markers on one or more vehicles positioned across the road, he grabbed the spotlight off his lap and sped toward them.
***
Two minutes after spotting the reflectors in the road, Dregan had the Brady Mobile parked in the middle of 16 and was illuminating his surroundings with the handheld spotlight. Dead ahead, where the state route became Main Street as it shot through Woodruff, a pair of cars partially blocked the road. The foreign compact on the left was nearly half the size of the other—a decade-old Cadillac with broken-out windows and a corpse at the wheel. T
he gap separating the two cars looked to be a yard narrower than the ice cream truck.
Off to the left, barely a hundred feet behind the idling truck, State Route 39 snaked away west into the dark night. Running away to the east off of Dregan’s right shoulder was a two-lane street. The sign on the corner read Center. And resting on flattened tires, rendering the entire block-long run of two-lane unnavigable, was a long line of bullet-riddled pickup trucks and passenger cars. On the sidewalk adjacent to the vehicles were what looked to be nearly two dozen corpses. All had been stripped of their clothes and the majority of their flesh. The work was precise, done by someone with the tools and stomach for rendering a human corpse. Bone glistened white and pooled blood appearing as deep as a sea trench gleamed black even in the stark white cone thrown by the spotlight.
Throwing a shiver, Dregan swept the beam from the gruesome scene to the building with the Back In The Saddle Rehab shingle hanging out front. The wall facing him was bullet-pocked. Most of the windows held only shards of glass, if any glass at all. The front door was cracked down the center and hung open. The wide painted piece of doorjamb opposite the hinges was loose at the top and leaned across the doorway diagonally.
Dregan shifted in his seat, leaned out the window, and trained the spotlight beam on the distant S-turn the mega horde was just beginning to navigate. Taking into account the speed at which the front of the mass was moving, he figured he had five minutes at most before the leaders caught up to him.
Chapter 67
Eden Compound
Stepping into the night air started an eruption of gooseflesh on Cade’s exposed arms. Feeling the sensation working its way down his ribcage, he closed the compound door and, working with one hand, pulled the towel tight around his shoulders.
“Good job, Lev,” he said aloud to himself after seeing the pair of Ford pickups and military Humvee backed up to the forest’s edge nearby. Sure it would make finding the compound’s hidden entrance easier if someone were to come calling, but a fast egress and the ability to quickly bring the Ma Deuce to bear on bad guys using the feeder road trumped any disadvantage.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss Page 35