With hot tears still rolling down her cheeks, she rose and walked slowly to the railing and gazed at the downtown core which amounted to nothing more than a handful of sign poles and a picket of soot-covered light standards rising above steadfast cement foundations also darkened by the incredible heat of the passing flames. Save for a few pleasure boats anchored in place and hiding who knew what behind darkened portholes, the reservoir, pristine and glasslike under the noon sun, was a scene deserving of a full-page spread in a travel magazine.
Admiring the tattered pink bathrobe concealing the layers of magazines she’d diligently duct taped to her arms and legs, Glenda shuffled the length of the porch, performed a wooden-looking pirouette at the far end and then limped back, careful to keep her hikers from squeaking on the wood decking underfoot. And as she transited the twenty feet in plain view of the dozen corpses patrolling the street below, a cursory glance from them was all the gimpy stroll garnered. Perfect, she thought. Time to the ice the cake.
***
This was the phase of the plan Glenda hadn’t given much thought to. So she stood in the middle of her kitchen, eyes moving over the counters until her gaze settled on the set of knives there.
Too messy.
She opened drawers and pawed through the specialty cooking gadgets that rarely saw the light of day. Hefted the metal mallet she’d used now and again to pound cheap cuts of meat palatable.
Too noisy.
She considered risking a trip to the garage but, fearing an outcome like her husband’s, quickly dismissed that idea.
Rifling through a little-used drawer she spotted two possibilities. But seeing as how she had no idea how deep inside the cranium the area of Louie’s brain the CDC scientist on television said she needed to destroy was located, she quickly ruled out the pewter-hued pick that worked so well at rending walnut meat from the shell. Ditto on the sharpened spike that hadn’t chipped ice since the Reagan era when she’d found a daily drink necessary to quell the notion that the cowboy President was trying his hardest to get every man, woman, and child in the United States incinerated in a nuclear exchange with the old U.S.S.R.
She slammed the drawer, muttered an expletive that would have made a merchant marine blush, and exited the kitchen. Passed through the little-used formal dining room and, after throwing the lock, slid the pocket door open with force sufficient to bang it into the back of its housing. A blast of stale air hit her in the face as she crossed the threshold. Then, making a beeline for the sewing table taking up space in the converted butler’s pantry, she looked at the carpet and realized that she was walking with her normal gait and another salty outburst left her lips. Followed instantly by: “Get with the program, Glenda,” bellowed loud enough to cause Louie’s reanimated corpse to answer back from upstairs with a goose-flesh-inducing moan. “Who asked ya?” she countered as her gaze fell on precisely what she’d come looking for.
Chapter 6
By the third lap Cade found his second wind. Legs pumping furiously, he followed in his own footsteps counterclockwise around the clearing, creating a nicely beaten-down path through the knee-high grass. Freed from the husk, seed filled the air forming a turbid comet-like tail in his wake.
Four more laps, he thought as he cut the corner behind the Kids, who had retired the half torso and were taking turns firing arrows into a four by eight foot rectangle of plywood. In a way he was pretty impressed because these daily practice sessions had started immediately after, and seemed a direct result of, unsolicited advice he’d offered up days ago. Instead of sitting around and rehashing days gone by, he remembered saying to Sasha, Wilson, and Taryn, who had been doing just that in-between the doled out daily chores, you oughta start honing new skills that will see you through the days yet to come. True, it was the same kind of woo woo shit Mike Desantos was apt to say to one of his Green Berets trainees on a rudderless tangent. And since Cade had learned most everything he knew about survival from Greg Beeson and then later from Desantos himself—the fact that he’d just spouted some woo woo shit didn’t surprise him one bit.
He saw Taryn take a deep breath and exhale as he passed silently a half-dozen yards behind her. Then he craned his head ever so slightly and saw her lean in and release the arrow and registered the direct bull’s eye in his side vision as he passed underneath the static Black Hawk’s drooping rotor blades.
The young people were turning the corner. That was for sure. Wilson, Taryn, and even Sasha had fired their weapons in self-defense and emerged unscathed. A little shaken, one and all, but safe all the same.
Brook, on the other hand, was slow in coming to grips with her part in countering the ambush set for them outside of Green River, Utah. That she’d killed at least three men in the process was hard for the nurse in her to accept. Her job had always been to nurture and care for other humans—Raven especially. And now that she was on the other side of the equation she had begun to question her own morality.
Cade deviated from the tamped-down trail and leaped powerfully, clearing the blanket and Brook, blowing a kiss in her direction before spinning around on his fully healed left ankle and powering off towards the far end of the clearing where the brown stripe of unimproved airstrip gave way to thick forest, the edges of the leaves on the deciduous trees already turning muted shades of yellow, orange, and red.
Scooping up the loose shells she’d dropped when Cade had startled her, and picturing the shit-eating grin no doubt spreading wide on his face, Brook, fueled by justifiable anger, hollered after him, “You little shit, Cade Grayson. I almost peed myself.” As she watched him near the end of the clearing without breaking stride, there was a whooshing to her right and Raven screamed along the trail on her metal steed, pigtails flowing freely behind her.
Barely a second later a furry brindle-colored missile, following the same tangent as Cade, cut the airspace above Brook and scattered the rest of the rounds destined for the half-filled magazine still clutched in her hand.
“Damn it Max! You too?” Momentarily exasperated, and slightly amused, Brook dropped the magazine and plopped onto her back on the blanket amongst the tinkling brass and stared up at the handful of fluffy white clouds scudding overhead.
Cruising by the motor pool, Cade eyed the dozen or so vehicles parked under the double canopy. Yin and Yang—the immense flat black F-650 and once shiny white Ford Raptor—sat quietly side by side, gassed up, grills facing the clearing and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Duncan’s repatriated Humvee sat nearby within a cluster of American and import trucks and SUVs, its turret-mounted .50 caliber Ma Deuce aimed menacingly across the clearing at the tunnel in the forest where the feeder road from nearby SR-39 emerged.
As Raven passed Cade on a parallel path of her own making she registered as a purple and chrome blur in his side vision. Her breathing, however, sounded distinctly and loudly over the swishing grass and clicking of the bike’s freewheel. It was the new normal. A soft wheezing that Brook had written off as late summer-early fall allergies, usually remedied by a half-dose of one of the adult strength Benadryls the late Logan had thoughtfully stockpiled. But this sounded different to him. A kind of snap and crackle. Kind of like Rice Krispies minus the pop.
He made a mental note to have Brook utilize the stethoscope—another prep of Logan’s—and listen to Bird’s chest.
The final four laps, roughly a mile and a half, Cade guessed, went by in a blur without so much as a twinge from the ankle he’d nearly broken in a helicopter crash a little less than a month ago. In a way he wished for a little residual pain. A sharp stab now and again. A dull ache, maybe. Hell, anything to serve as a subtle reminder of the friends who hadn’t survived the jarring impact with the Dakota soil and the subsequent race from the crash site, hundreds of walking dead closing in on all quarters.
Sweating profusely in the noon-time sun, Cade plopped down next to Brook. Chest heaving, he rolled over onto his side and stared up at her. He was going to mention Raven’s labored breathing when the
hairs on his arms stood to attention. He sat bolt upright and remained stock still as beaded sweat made the slow journey over his furrowed brow, meandered down the bridge of his nose and hung there, seemingly frozen.
Brook rolled her shoulders forward and mouthed, “What?” Simultaneously her nose crinkled and she reached for her carbine. In one fluid motion she slapped a magazine in the well and racked back the charging handle. Off went the safety as both her olfactory sense and Cade’s whispered words dumped a tsunami of adrenaline into her bloodstream.
Chapter 7
In normal times and under normal conditions a number ten knitting needle is good for little beyond its designed purpose. Outside of knitting colorful throws and scarfs and silly lopsided cubes only uglier than the pastel-hued Kleenex boxes they covered, scratching an itch deep inside a plaster cast was the only other use Glenda had found for one of the ten-inch anodized items.
But times had ceased being normal and conditions had deteriorated so fast and severely that she was no longer an atheist and now believed wholeheartedly that she was living in the oft talked about end times. So, needle in hand, she left the repurposed butler’s pantry, closing the pocket door behind her, softly, the action matching her mood. Resignation mounting, she went back into character, dragged her toes across the carpeted floor, and, contrary to how she’d been walking for close to sixty years, consciously distributed her weight as unevenly as possible and shambled to the base of the stairs, which, to avoid a fall and possibly a broken a hip, she scaled normally.
Resuming the uncomfortable routine, she hobbled down the upstairs hall, entered the master bedroom, and then stood beside the king bed, wavering silently, mouth agape.
Reacting to her presence, the trussed and decaying creature that used to be Louie turned its head slowly but remained placid, its dead eyes moving up and down, in sync with her swaying motion.
She smiled. Aced the test, Glenda.
The monster in her bed reacted instantly to the display of emotion by letting out a rasp and straining mightily against the makeshift four-point restraints. Eyes moistening, Glenda cast her gaze at the pantyhose tied to her undead husband’s stick-thin wrists and ankles. And once she determined they were holding fast and there was no danger of the blood-slickened bonds sliding off, she bent at the waist and whispered into the creature’s ear, which, after having been chewed off in the zombie attack, was little more than a shiny crescent-shaped scrap of cartilage abutting a pus-encrusted dime-sized orifice. “You were right, honey. There is a God.”
Glenda let her forearm hover an inch above undead Louie’s snapping teeth and tattered bits of flesh—all that remained of the once million dollar smile. “Honey,” she said. The creature went still and regarded her momentarily, as if a snippet of memory had been jogged. Then, with the awful sound of vertebra cracking and popping, it lunged and found purchase on Glenda’s terry cloth robe, clamping down firmly midway between her wrist and elbow.
Instead of recoiling, which Glenda’s inner voice screamed at her to do, she put one leg on the bed and her entire upper body on the zombie’s sternum. Hearing what she presumed was a rib or two breaking under the trifecta of gravity, her weight, and the latter two crushing against the corpse’s futile thrashing, she lodged her forearm in deeper and pressed its head hard into the pillow. “I’ll see you on the other side,” she said quietly as the number ten needle met a little resistance at first, then slid cleanly, behind a considerable amount of applied muscle, into one of her undead husband’s baby blues.
Newton’s Law made two things happen near simultaneously. First the eyeball imploded, releasing a copious amount of foul-smelling black fluid from within the thing’s cranium. Then, as the needle perforated the frontal lobe and continued on deeper and hit bone, all fight left the bucking corpse and Glenda rent her arm from its slackening maw. Finally, as if the act itself wasn’t morbid enough, seemingly in slow motion, the pasty eye socket filled to brimming and overflowed. Still clutching the needle, Glenda felt the cold blood wetting her clenched fist and watched it cascade down the corpse’s cheek and form an uneven black halo on the sheet around its head.
Slowly, with the finality of the act still settling in, Glenda slid from the cold corpse, released her grip on the needle, and wiped her bloodied hand on her robe.
Trembling slightly and dreading what was to come next, she whispered, “I’m sorry,” and trudged towards the vanity to fetch the scissors.
Chapter 8
Head moving on a swivel as Desantos had drilled into him years earlier, Cade rose to standing, turned a half circle and locked his gaze at the break in the trees just left of the gravel feeder road. Quietly and slowly he said, “We’ve got company.”
Nose crinkled against the sickly sweet stink of decaying meat, Brook replied, “I smell ‘em. And they’re real close.”
Grabbing Raven’s wrist before she could wheel away, Cade plucked her off her bike and handed her off to Brook. Turning back, he yelled across the clearing at the Kids. “Wilson, where’s Chief?”
Hollering back, Wilson answered, “Chief Jenkins just left for Salt Lake.”
“No,” Cade bellowed, shaking his head. “Chief.”
“Oh ... Chief. He and Lev are hunting ... left at dawn,” replied Wilson, dropping the crossbow in the grass.
Realizing that he and the Kids were the only ones available to counter however many Zs had breached the wire, Cade called for Wilson, Taryn and, rather reluctantly, Sasha to join him. At once a black pistol appeared in Wilson’s fist and the twenty-year-old former fast food manager was on the move with Sasha, his fourteen-year old sister, and Taryn, the raven haired nineteen-year-old survivor from Grand Junction, Colorado, following in his footsteps.
Silently, his cropped ears fixed facing upwind, Max threaded his way through the grass, passed between the trunks of two massive fir trees, and melted into the woods like a wolf on the hunt.
With a pained look settling on his face, Cade scooped up his carbine, which was on the sheet and next in line to be cleaned and oiled. He addressed Wilson, who had swiftly closed to within a dozen yards. “Duncan and Daymon ... where are they?”
Skidding to a halt and breathing hard, Wilson shook his head, saying, “They’re out working on the roadblock.”
Cade held Wilson’s gaze for a second, came to a decision, then looked to Taryn. “You two come with me.” He grabbed Brook’s elbow. Drew her near and whispered, “You have a radio?”
Brook nodded.
“Good,” Cade said. “Get inside with Rave and Sasha and keep them close by.” He stared at the redhead and said, “You good with that?”
Nodding, Sasha fingered her rifle nervously and then walked her gaze over the impenetrable gloom at the clearing’s edge.
Again Cade said, “Good.” Shifting his attention back to Brook, he added, “I’m taking these two with me. We’ll check the inner perimeter first.” He kissed Raven on the head, Brook on the mouth and, looking into his wife’s big brown eyes, said, “If we don’t return, I do not want you to come looking for us. Do not leave the compound unless your survival is at stake.”
Understanding the implication behind the statement yet remaining stoic in the face of the possibility of losing Cade to a little bite or another breather’s bullet, Brook corralled her carbine and herded the girls towards the compound entrance. She craned over her shoulder and saw Cade striding towards the tree line, clean-shaven and bare from the waist up, the INFIDEL tattoo between his shoulder blades rippling with menace. Then, catching her off guard, her man’s deep voice emanated from the two-way radio buried in her thigh pocket and she listened as he relayed his intentions to Seth and Heidi and anyone else who was listening.
Chapter 9
Heidi started when the two-way radio came to life with a shrill electronic warble. Fearing that her old friend Charlie Jenkins had run up against a horde of undead and was in trouble less than ten minutes into his journey to Salt Lake City, she snatched the chiming handset from th
e shelf just as another voice emanated from its small speaker. Instead of a plea for help coming from Jenkins, the words of one of the compound’s newest members, delivered crisply and in a businesslike manner, dropped a more ominous and danger filled sit-rep (situation report) onto her lap. Simultaneously the words Zombies inside the wire filled the air and resonated loudly in her mind. A nanosecond later the first tendrils of fear caressed her spine, cold and feathery. “Copy that,” she replied. “How many? And where?” Releasing the Talk button she stared ahead at the sat-phones plugged in and charging, their little lights pulsing independently of one another, like a trio of hearts beating to totally different rhythms.
On the other end, Cade said nothing.
Thumbing the Talk button again, she first asked if anyone else could hear her, then pressed Cade for more information. There was nothing but dead air for a few long seconds before she heard Lev’s voice, tinny and distant. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“We have zombies inside the wire.”
“Where?” asked Lev.
“No idea,” replied Heidi. “Cade just reported it and then went silent.”
Lev said, “Try him again.”
Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 4