Frayed:
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
By
Shawn Chesser
KINDLE EDITION
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Frayed:
Surviving the Zombie
Apocalypse
Copyright 2015
Shawn Chesser
Kindle Edition
Kindle Edition, License
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go and buy your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.
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Acknowledgements
For Maureen, Raven, and Caden ... I couldn’t have done this without all of your support. Thanks to all of our military, LE and first responders for your service. To the people in the U.K. and elsewhere around the world who have been in touch, thanks for reading! Lieutenant Colonel Michael Offe, thanks for your service as well as your friendship. Shannon Walters, my top Eagle Eye, thank you! Larry Eckels, thank you for helping me with some of the military technical stuff. Any missing facts or errors are solely my fault. Beta readers, you rock, and you know who you are. Thanks George Romero for introducing me to zombies. Steve H., thanks for listening. All of my friends and fellows at S@N and Monday Old St. David’s, thanks as well. Lastly, thanks to Bill W. and Dr. Bob … you helped make this possible. I am going to sign up for another 24.
Special thanks to John O’Brien, Mark Tufo, Joe McKinney, Craig DiLouie, Armand Rosamilia, Heath Stallcup, James Cook, Saul Tanpepper, Eric A. Shelman, and David P. Forsyth. I truly appreciate your continued friendship and always invaluable advice. Thanks to Jason Swarr and Straight 8 Custom Photography for the awesome cover. Once again, extra special thanks to Monique Happy for her work editing “Frayed.” Mo, as always, although you have many pokers in the fireplace, you came through like a champ! Working with you has been a dream come true and nothing but a pleasure. If I have accidentally left anyone out ... I am truly sorry.
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Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services
www.moniquehappy.com
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Epilogue
Prologue
The man shifted his gaze from the thin band of blue sky up ahead to the rearview mirror, where he saw nothing but angry clouds and darkened countryside. Seemingly following him on the same northwesterly tack, the pewter smudge was depositing big heavy flakes on the rolling hills and abandoned farmhouses and rust-streaked silos whipping by on both sides of the winding State Route.
Thinking ahead, just after traces of the first snowfall of the season began to stick, the driver had stopped on a zombie-free stretch of road a few miles back and engaged the four-wheel-drive. Now, negotiating the snow-dusted rollercoaster-like two-lane cutting between Wyoming to the east and Utah to the west, all the driver had to concentrate on as he approached his destination were the clusters of walking dead making yet another slow motion sojourn north. As he halved his speed and zippered between the staggering human husks, he noticed that their movements seemed sluggish—more so than usual—their already diminished motor skills seeming to degrade before his eyes in pace with the rapidly dropping mercury.
As the rig passed within arm’s reach of another slow-moving group—where normally the younger and more agile specimens would at least crane and get an eye lock on him or, if the conditions were right, manage a clumsy swipe at the vehicle—there was a delayed response, their maws opening and arms extending only after the SUV was well past them.
“Well, well,” said the man, flicking his eyes to the rearview. “That is what I was hoping would happen. Levels the playing field, a little.” Despite the task at hand, a grin spread across his face and he rapped a ditty on the steering wheel. “Bite me biters … aren’t such the bad asses now are we?” Though he wanted to stop and take out thirty or forty of the things in one fell swoop, he didn’t want to expend the energy clearing their carcasses from the road would require. As he swept his gaze forward, he saw off in the distance the north-moving herd he’d first seen two hours prior and a number of miles south.
Spitting a string of expletives, the man slowed the vehicle and grabbed his binoculars from the seat next to him. Then, knee-steering, he risked a couple of glances at the shambling mass, only pressing the field glasses to his eyes for a couple of seconds at a time, which was all he needed to learn that the main body had just passed his turnoff, leaving only a loose knot of walking corpses and the few lone stragglers bringing up the rear for him to worry about.
Knowing the distant herd would soon crest the small hill and then be on the downslope and out of sight, he slowed his ride to a crawl, swung wide right, and hauled the wheel hand-over-hand. The sun-dappled horizon swung a one-eighty across the windshield’s wide curvature and the tires squelched on the far shoulder as he straightened the wheel and looped around the listless pack of dead he’d just bypassed. A hundred yards south around a bend in the road where he figured the vehicle’s silhouette would be masked from the dead, he eased off the gas and let the rig coast until its forward momentum bled off. Now, with two hundred yards or so and a grass-covered hillock between him and t
he biters, he jammed the SUV to a stop on the solid yellow centerline and put the automatic transmission in Park. For the sake of comfort, he took his boxy semi-auto pistol from its holster on his hip and placed it on top of the dusty dash within easy reach. Eyes threatening to close on him, he kicked his seat back, elbowed the door lock down, and flicked on the stereo to start the soothing sounds of Johann Sebastian Bach flowing from the speakers.
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The man’s respite was cut short just minutes into his powernap when the half-dozen dead not fooled by the coast maneuver caught up to the inert vehicle and began raking their nails against the sheet metal. Though the late German composer was being all but drowned out by the keen of bone against metal and hollow moans of the dead, the man tolerated the sneering creatures batting the window just inches from his face for ten long minutes.
Once the ten minutes had passed, for good measure the man stared at the second hand’s sweep and allowed five more minutes to crawl by. Finally, convinced most of the dead would be far enough away to the north so as not to key in on the growl of the diesel engine, he jacked his seat up and started the motor. Fighting the wheel and clunky gearbox, he conducted a three-point-turn and was rolling north at a fair clip.
Seconds later, he arrived at the crest of the hill where he had first spotted the herd which, in the thirty minutes since, had only shambled a half a mile beyond his turnoff and into a veil of falling snow. Closer in, however, was the smaller knot of biters that inexplicably were still within eyeshot of his turnoff, which was a narrow dirt road shooting uphill and to the right off the paved State Route.
Practicing what he preached to his kids—better safe than sorry—he gently pressed the pedal to start the SUV rolling forward over the hill’s crest. Once gravity grabbed the three-quarter tons of American iron, he jacked the transmission into neutral, manhandled the transfer case out of four-wheel-drive, and then killed the engine. Without the boost of power steering, keeping the SUV’s squared-off grill guard aimed at the throng of dead took considerable effort.
Halfway down the hill, the wind whistling through the half-dozen bullet holes in the driver’s side door alerted the dead to his approach and, sluggishly, as if in slow motion, they turned in unison and faced the noise.
A beat or two later, the sickening sounds of the coasting SUV plowing through the picket of corpses made its way through the rusted floor pan and again the soothing string work of another Bach masterpiece was drowned out. Before the remaining corpses could scrape themselves off of the roadway, the man had set the brake, grabbed his weapons, and was unfolding his massive frame from the high clearance vehicle.
Standing on the road in the midst of the crushed and mangled corpses, he slipped his Glock back into its holster. Then he donned his faded knee-length western-style duster, leaving it unbuttoned. Finally, he cracked his back and neck then slipped the corded nylon rope over his head and adjusted the scabbard it was attached to so that the pommel of his ancestral blade was within easy reach behind his head.
“Come to Daddy,” he growled, a wolfish grin spreading on his face as he began wading through the leaking corpses to get to the throng of dead vectoring toward him.
Chapter 1
Cade Grayson’s undead welcoming party on Utah State Route 39 consisted of two horribly decomposed first turns. In a can’t-see-the-forest-through-the-trees type of way, he would have missed them entirely had the colorful tatters of wind-whipped clothing clinging to their bodies not drawn his eye to them through the picket of lodgepole pines. And as he ground the big Ford pickup to a halt just inside the Eden compound’s foliage-covered front gate, it became clear that prior to hearing the vehicle’s approach, the Zs had been trudging along on an easterly heading. Which was a good thing. Because it meant that the wall of logs blocking the two-lane a few miles west of the compound was doing its job.
Dreamed up by another Eden survivor—former Bureau of Land Management firefighter Daymon Bush—the barricade provided a buffer between the compound and both the herds of dead finding their way along the State Route from the burned-out towns of Huntsville and Eden and the larger hordes of rotten corpses migrating from the more densely populated city of Ogden twenty miles further west of there.
So far the blockade had done exactly what Daymon had promised it would. However, much to the small band of survivors’ collective surprise, the feat of engineering brought about by a week’s worth of precision chainsaw work was inexplicably doing double duty. For no matter the size of the group of walking dead, upon hitting the wall of trees and finding no prey there, invariably, either jogged by some snippet of memory or driven by the primordial urge to hunt buried deep down in the reptilian part of their atrophied brains, they would about-face and shuffle back from whence they’d come. But, unfortunately, there was an exception to the rule. If the dead saw or heard anything—talking, engine noise, sometimes an animal or bird’s call—while near the roadblock, the urge to hunt in them would be triggered, resulting in a moaning assemblage of death. Which was a whole ‘nother can of worms which necessitated the tedious and dangerous task of a great deal of up close and personal killing followed by the back-breaking labor disposing of the putrefying bodies entailed.
Messy work that Cade wanted no part of, that was for sure. The latter more so than the former.
Keeping one eye on the dead through the trees, Cade killed the engine and set the brake. He fished the long-range 40-channel CB radio from a pocket and adjusted the volume up a couple of notches. He looked out the windshield at the snow falling faster now, keyed the Talk button and hailed Seth, who was manning the security desk inside the nearby subterranean compound. “I’m going east to the 16 junction and then north from there,” he stated, looking down at his Suunto and noting the time. “Figure I’ll be gone for a couple of hours at most.”
“Heading out solo,” Seth came back, wryly. “You got some kind of a death wish there, Grayson?”
“We’ve all got to die sometime,” Cade shot back. He reached over the center console and scratched Max, the brindle-colored Australian shepherd, behind the ears. “No need to worry, though. I’ve got my wingman, Max, by my side.”
Seth said, “That’s already been established in spades ... on both counts. Watch your back. There’s nobody at the overwatch to help you with the gate. And remember … there won’t be anyone there when you return either.”
“Roger that. I have eyes on two Zs. Are you seeing anything else on 39?”
The radio in Cade’s hand broke squelch, then Seth’s voice emanated from the tiny speaker. “I’ve got a bad case of CSS down here.”
Max yawned and swung his head in Cade’s direction, cropped stub of a tail beating a steady rhythm on the passenger seat.
Furrowing his brow, Cade thumbed Talk and asked, “C-S-S?”
“A bad case of can’t ... see ... shit.”
Cade shook his head. “Are we talking or texting?”
“A bit of both, old man. Can you wipe the camera domes for me before you leave the ... wire?” Still not used to using the military lexicon adopted by most since Duncan took control, and used more frequently since Cade’s arrival, Seth sometimes found himself struggling to recall the proper words, second-guessing himself, and often fearful that he was misusing them.
“Roger that.” Cade stuffed the radio inside his MultiCam parka and plucked his suppressed Glock 17 from the passenger seat. Acting on years of training, he ejected the magazine and pulled the slide back to verify that a 9mm round was in the pipe. Satisfied, he seated the full magazine in the well and, knowing that the dead and locked gate were tasks he’d have to tackle alone, shouldered the door open. With one leg in space and about to step down from the cab, the radio in his pocket emitted a low hiss. Cade froze, one foot on the running board and one hand holding the grab handle, as he listened to Seth ask him to keep an eye out for cheese.
“Any kind of cheese,” Seth went on. “Moldy sixty-day-old parmesan. Those little bastards hermetically sealed
in red wax. Hell, at this point I’m a beggar. I’d even settle for processed cheez-whiz-in-a-can.” The radio never left Cade’s pocket and soon Seth’s desperation-filled voice trailed off and there was a heavy silence in the cab. No moans. Damn.
With a firm set to his jaw, Cade lowered himself to the ground. He clucked his tongue ushering Max out, then, intent on making as much noise as possible, reached behind his head and flung the door shut. The resulting metallic clang resonated loudly for a beat, but without a wide-open expanse for the sound to expand and travel, it died off quickly.
Already alerted to the presence of fresh meat by the Ford’s rumbling engine and throaty exhaust, the eastbound Zs, now frozen in place and eyeing the forest, heard the door slam and immediately set off at a fast lope in the gate’s general direction. Their moans growing loud, the pair refined their search by homing in on the noise of wet gravel crunching underneath Cade’s boots—and with their own bare feet slapping a cadence on the cold asphalt, traversed the road on a collision course with the realistic-looking wall of foliage.
Before Cade had taken a dozen steps beyond the truck’s bumper, the Zs’ dry raspy calls had risen in volume. A beat or two later, the gate was rattling against its hinges and crooked and bloodied digits were probing the nylon netting holding the carefully arranged saplings and vegetation in place.
“Keep your pants on,” Cade barked. He stopped a yard back from the gate and paced left and then right to make sure two was the magic number.
And it was. So he holstered the Glock and withdrew his Gerber Mark II fighting knife from its scabbard on his right thigh. Carefully he probed the fence head-high with the honed black blade until he saw a flash of white through the warren of interwoven branches. He widened the opening a bit and saw a pair of cracked and shredded lips. They were drawn taut over a mouthful of yellowed teeth, all jagged shards parked in a jaw hinging slowly up and down. The little snippet he saw through the fence reminded him of an expectant grouper inspecting a pane of aquarium glass. The narrow face and bloated lips, even the swollen black hunk of flesh for a tongue looked as if it belonged in the mouth of a fish instead of this shell of a former human being.
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