Zed's World (Book 2): Roads Less Traveled

by Baker, Rich

  “Let’s go, Dad, we’re wasting time,” Keith says and starts for the front door.

  That sparks everyone into motion. Danielle and Marc follow Keith. Natalie and Andy start pulling canned foods from the cabinets. Annie stays to help them while Robert and Stephenie shoulder their bags and grab their rifles. Kyle grabs his .22 rifle from the gun safe in his closet, checks the safety, inserts a magazine, racks the slide, grabs his go-bag and heads back out to the kitchen. He grabs the manila folder and turns to Robert and Stephenie.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  Seventeen

  Nelson Farms, North of Longview, Colorado

  The first undead didn’t show up at the Nelsons’ farmhouse until well after sunrise. With no coroner or funeral home available to collect their dead, Virginia wants to get their people in the ground before they start to rot, though she doesn’t quite put it that way to the rest of the family. She worked on a farm long enough to know what happens to dead things in even the mild heat of late May.

  She recruits her son Tim and son-in-law, Steve, to help her clean the bodies and wrap them in linens, then in plastic. It’s emotional work; she works on Steve’s brother, so he doesn’t have to. Steve works on her husband, Dale, and third son, Roger, while Tim works on their foreman, Hector.

  DJ drives the big tractor with the front loader and backhoe attachments to the small family cemetery and trenches out four holes a couple of feet deep. He wants to get them buried deep enough no animals can get to them, but not so deep they can’t get them out in case they need to be examined later for evidence. Hector’s people might want his body too, and DJ doesn’t want to be digging six feet deep to extricate any of them.

  Steve and Tim load the cleaned, wrapped bodies on a cart, which they hook to one of the farm’s many Ranger APVs, and they head to the graves.

  DJ helps them place the bodies in the graves. They haven’t had time to build proper coffins, but DJ managed to get some planks from the barn that are about eighteen inches wide and six feet long. He places these on top of each of the bodies as further protection against wildlife and to make it easier to dig them up, if needed, and not tear the bodies apart with shovels.

  Vanessa, Roger’s wife, can’t stop crying. The Nelson children are more subdued. Tears streak their faces, but they don’t sob or weep openly. Their stoic father raised them to keep their composure.

  “This isn’t how I pictured laying any of you to rest,” Virginia says to the four dead men. “Not that I pictured having to do this at all, but hopefully you understand. We’re in a strange time now, with bad things happening all around, and we have to do something for you, so this is the service you get. It doesn’t mean that we don’t love and respect you, it just … it’s just the way it is. I love you all. May God keep you safe at his side until we see you again.”

  She turns to the others. “Anyone else want to say some words?” she asks.

  DJ clears his throat and removes his hat as he faces the open graves.

  “Life ain’t going to be the same without you here,” he says. “But if you guys are listening; we’re going to avenge you! You can take that to the bank!”

  “DJ!” Vanessa exclaims. “That’s not appropriate right now. My husband is dead because you had to go out there guns blazing, and the first thing you want to do is start digging more holes. Well, dig one for yourself!”

  She turns on her heel and storms away, a fresh round of sobbing pouring out of her.

  “I hope you’re happy, DJ,” Virginia says. “You have all the tact of a tornado.” She lets out a heavy sigh. “I guess we’re done here. Fill these holes in and put the backhoe away when you’re done. Then you’re going to apologize to Vanessa. You understand me?”

  DJ stands, seething, without saying anything.

  “Am I understood?” Virginia repeats.

  “Yes,” he says through gritted teeth.

  “Good,” she says and starts walking after Vanessa. The others all file after her. Tim stops next to DJ, his mouth opening slightly in anticipation of saying something.

  “Don’t, Tim,” DJ says. “Not now. Just go, please. You’ll just piss me off, and I don’t want to say or do something I’ll regret.”

  Tim closes his mouth, nods, and starts walking.

  You mean something ELSE you’ll regret, his inner voice says to him. As long as he can remember, he’s had a little Jiminy Cricket voice that carries on an inner monologue with him. As he so often does, he tells this inner voice to shut the hell up. He climbs into the backhoe and shuts the door. Before he turns it on, he notices the thick, black cloud of smoke coming from the southeast, from Longview. He scans the horizon from left to right, east to west. The air is thick, and the tendrils of smoke from several fires contribute to the overall haziness of the vista.

  No fire department, the voice says. That means there’s no police. No medical services. No government. No order. This got bad, fast.

  He nods in agreement and starts the diesel engine.

  As he turns the arm and manipulates the scoop to pull dirt back into the holes, he thinks briefly about his lone stint away from the farm, working for the richest man in Longview, Karl Platte. Karl owned most of the south end of town, has several streets in town named after him, and had his own landscaping company to tend the commercial properties he owned and leased to businesses.

  There was one man, Eugene, who drove all the equipment—front loaders, Bobcats, backhoes—you name it, he drove it. And he called them all the same thing: a machine. Eugene was driving a front loader one day and was called to the main office by Mr. Platte. Not wanting to stop the work and have a crew of high school kids and college dropouts standing idle, he called DJ over.

  “You’re the brightest kid in this crew,” he said. “And by that, I mean least likely to fuck up. Climb up here and I’ll show you how to run this machine.”

  He gave young DJ a ten-minute tutorial, which was all he needed for the basic tasks he would be doing. They had several truckloads of fill dirt brought in to make berm that would separate two of the buildings. A lot of that dirt had spilled into the parking lot, and they were instructed not to use the machinery to scoop it up to avoid damaging the pavement. So, DJ would be following the kids while they shoveled this wayward dirt into the front loader’s bucket. Once they’d filled it up, he’d take the dirt and dump it at the end of the berm.

  “Repeat as necessary,” Eugene said. “You do good while I’m gone, and I’ll teach you how to run the other machines. Running the machines is a good gig, kid. You get to sit in the comfort of the cab—some of them, like this one, have AC and a radio!—while these shmucks break their backs with a shovel and sweat themselves to death in the heat. Don’t fuck this up.”

  DJ did well, and over the rest of that summer, Eugene taught him how to operate all of the company’s heavy equipment.

  He’s the only one who ever thought you were worth anything, the voice says.

  Eugene died that year, at the ripe age of forty-nine. He was a four-pack-a-day smoker, drank most of a fifth of Jack each night, and ate a diet consisting mostly of steak, bacon, sausage, and butter. Everyone who knew him outside of work said it was amazing he made it to forty-nine. DJ cried more at his funeral than he did at his own grandfather’s.

  After that, DJ became THE guy running the machines for the company. He enjoyed it, but like all endeavors, he liked to do things his way, and he was fired after he got into an argument with Karl Platte himself, which ended with DJ punching him. Today he doesn’t even remember what he and Platte had disagreed about. After that, it was back to the farm, where he’s been ever since.

  He shakes the memories from his mind in time to see a trio of bloodied men coming toward the backhoe.

  Something’s not right, the voice says.

  “No shit,” DJ says out loud.

  Eighteen

  D-Day opens his door to find Carmen’s mother, Elizabeth, on the other side.

  “D-Day, thank God!” sh
e says. “People are freaking out. One of the people has been killed.”

  D-day is still shaking the cobwebs of sleep out of his mind. “What people? And what do you mean killed? In an accident, or was he murdered?”

  “She. And she’s from one of the floors below us, but she was found outside of the meeting area with a knife in her back.”

  “The rec room on twelve?” he asks, and Elizabeth nods. “Give me a minute,” he says, and goes to get his gear.

  D-Day puts on his tactical vest, checks that his guns are loaded, checks the spare magazines in the pockets of the vest, and says with a sigh, “All right, let’s go.”

  Elizabeth walks down the hall to the east stairwell and climbs from the tenth floor to the twelfth. A blanket covers a body by the community recreation room. Thirty people mill around, some upset, holding their hands over their mouths, their eyes watering. D-Day has seen the look from what they called FNGs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The glazed eyes and shocked faces of people who suffer from sleep deprivation and are scared from their first taste of battle isn’t easy to forget, and these folks have it in spades.

  Carmen sees D-Day approach before anyone else does and runs up to him.

  “D-Day, thank God Mom found you! We don’t know what to do here. These people need someone to calm them down,” she says in a hushed, hurried sentence.

  “Okay, got it. Tell me what happened,” he replies as they approach the sheet-covered body. Before Carmen can tell him anything, people start peppering him with questions.

  “Hey, what have you gotten us into?” demands a short, stocky man with blonde hair and a blonde mustache. “You had us all move higher in the building, and now people are getting killed! No one knew I was in my apartment—I would have been totally safe. Now we have a killer on the loose, and we’re all at risk!”

  A dark-haired woman jumps into the argument. “Yeah, you’ve had us moving bodies and breaking into apartments and have done nothing to ensure our safety. And it’s not like we can call the police, right? No one is going to come collect evidence or dust for prints! How do you plan on catching the killer?”

  Others in the crowd murmur their agreement with these two most vocal people, nodding heads and glaring at D-Day with their arms crossed and brows furrowed.

  “Okay, listen up!” D-Day snaps. “I don’t even know what happened yet. You all need to understand that we’re under siege here. We have no place to go, and in desperate times, people do desperate things. Do not lose your heads and do not do anything rash. Now, who found the body?”

  A middle-aged woman with short, curly black hair raises her hand. She reminds D-Day of Rhea Perlman. He points at her and says, “Come with me and tell me what happened. The rest of you,” he points and waves his hand across the group, “either go to your apartments or sit down in the rec room; I don’t care which. But don’t get in my way.”

  The dark-haired woman won’t let it go. “We have a right to know what’s happening and what you plan to do about it.”

  “What’s your name?” D-Day asks.

  “Melissa.”

  “Melissa, if this were a police investigation you would get nowhere near it; they wouldn’t let you. We’re in the middle of what could be the end of days here, and I don’t care what you want right now. Go home or go. Sit. Down. Now.” D-Day glowers at her and she backs down. A few of the people leave for the stairs to go to their apartments, but the rest stick around the big room in hopes of hearing what D-Day will do about the situation.

  D-Day turns to the woman who reminds him of Rhea Perlman. “What’s your name?”

  “Agnes. You can call me Aggie.”

  “Okay, Aggie,” he says. “Let’s go out into the hallway. Tell me what happened.”

  “Um, okay …” she starts. “Well, I had just brought two big bags of food up here from the third floor.” She nods at Carmen, then at the body wrapped under the sheet. “She and Cheryl were organizing the big stack that was already here. So I set the bags down and started unloading them. Carmen was saying how tired she was, so I said I’d stay and help organize, and she could get some sleep. She told us what apartment she’s in, just in case we need anything. So she introduced me to Cheryl, and then went to her place. Cheryl and I kept sorting through the canned food, putting the perishables in the fridge or the freezer. It was packed pretty full, you know, so since I’m just down the hall here on twelve, we decided to fill up my fridge and freezer, and if we filled that up, we’d fill up Cheryl’s down on nine.” She stops her recounting of events to take a breath.

  “So anyway, I took a few backpacks full of deli meat, cheese, and fruits and veggies down to my place. We had just about got everything sorted, and I had one more backpack full of stuff to put in my fridge. After the earlier trips, it was just about full, so I had to take a few minutes and reorganize some of the stuff. When I came back, she was … Cheryl was … there. Like that.” Aggie’s voice cracks as she points at the body. “She had a knife sticking out of her back, and there was blood all underneath her. I think I started screaming because soon a bunch of people were here, and someone went and got Carmen, and then they got you.”

  “How long were you gone?” D-Day asks.

  “Maybe ten minutes. I guess long enough for …” she trails off as she looks at the shrouded body on the floor. After an awkward moment, Carmen speaks.

  “We just didn’t know what to do. You’re the only authority figure here. They came to me because they think I’m tight with you, and I didn’t know what else to do. Everyone else is worried about themselves, and you’ve been looking out for all of us,” she says.

  D-Day looks at Carmen. He’s tired and knows she is too, but she looks good to him. He’s only known her for a short time, and everyone is assuming they’re “tight,” whatever she meant by that, and he doesn’t object to the notion. He shakes his head to clear the thoughts away and refocus on the situation at hand.

  “First things first; let me check out her body,” he says. “We’ll see what it tells us and then we’ll go from there.” D-Day sees Aggie turn even whiter than she already was. “You don’t have to be there for this part, Aggie,” he says. She nods and heads into the rec room.

  Carmen and D-Day approach the body. “You sure you want to help with this?” he asks her.

  She gulps audibly. “If you want me here, then I’m here.”

  “I could use a second set of eyes,” he says. “It’s not like I know what I’m looking for.”

  He reaches down and pulls back the sheet. D-Day recognizes the woman who came into the rec room with the bags of food from the third floor right as he left little more than an hour ago. There’s a pool of blood under her, soaking into the carpet. It doesn’t make sense to him that a knife in the back would produce so much blood.

  He rolls her away from him, exposing more of her face and neck. There are at least three punctures in her neck, and any of them could have pierced a major blood vessel and made the blood pool underneath her. D-Day takes a flashlight from his vest and shines it on the carpet leading away from Cheryl’s body, and he catches a stream of blood drops, including some on the wall nearby. One of the punctures must have hit an artery.

  “I’m no forensic scientist,” he says, “but whoever did this most likely got blood all over them.”

  “So as long as we catch them with bloody clothes then we’ve got our killer,” Carmen says. “Unless of course he changed his clothes like any person with half a brain would.”

  “What makes you say it’s a he?” D-Day asks.

  “I just assumed.”

  “Well, it so happens that women are more likely to kill by stabbing,” D-Day says. “Something about women like to be more up close and personal while men are more likely to shoot or strangle.”

  Carmen rolls her eyes. ‘Where’d you hear this? CSI?”

  D-Day looks at her, trying to remember the source of that information, but draws a blank. “Maybe,” he says.

  “Well, I’m sure CBS wou
ld never lead you astray. What else does TV have to say about this one?” The sarcasm is heavy in Carmen’s voice.

  “Never rule out the obvious,” he says, pointing at the knife. Carmen looks at it and sees that it’s not a knife at all. It looks like a letter opener, and it’s monogrammed.

  “Do you know anyone with the initials ‘MTU’?” she asks.

  “Yeah, there’s a lawyer, I saw his name on the building roster. Mike Upham. He caused some trouble earlier with your dad.”

  “Oh yeah, the guy who made a bunch of people move his stuff from the fifth floor to the ninth, right?”

  “That’s the one. I’ll double-check, but he’s the only one I can think of with a last name that starts with ‘U’,” D-Day says. He takes a folded set of papers from a pocket on his vest and flips through the pages, then folds them up again and puts them back in the pocket. “No other last names starting with U.”

  D-Day grabs the handle of the letter opener and pulls, meeting resistance for a moment, and then all at once the improvised weapon pulls free, almost sending him sprawling to the floor, but he catches his balance.

  “So what have you found? Do you know who did it?” Melissa has wandered back over near D-Day.

  D-Day turns toward her with the letter opener in his hand, blood dripping from it. She blanches at the sight of the blood. “Make yourself useful and help us roll her up in this blanket,” he says.

  Melissa tries to give D-Day a withering look, but it has no effect on him. She relents and walks over, helping roll the body to one side, spreading the blanket underneath it, and rolling the dead woman like a morbid burrito.

  “Ugh, I need Purell!” Melissa says.

  “There're a few bottles of it in there,” Carmen says and nods her head toward the cache of supplies in the rec room. She turns to D-Day as nosy Melissa walks away to get some hand sanitizer. “She’s a real pill.”