Dregan consulted both side mirrors, then flicked his eyes to the rearview. Nothing. It was still only him on the lonely road. Parked nearly equidistant between the old couple’s home and the hallowed ground he was intent on visiting. The only place where he could think clearly. Perhaps it was because when he was there he was away from the constant din of responsibility. The gravitational tugging at him by his boys for approval, answers, permission, and affection, the latter of which he didn’t know how to dole out—unless it was Lena who sought it.
But more likely the reason he felt whole where he had found Lena’s lifeless form was because he could in a way sense her spirit there. In fact, he’d made the pilgrimage there so many times over the past few weeks that his older son had on one occasion even gone so far as to question his sanity. Like a Muslim to Mecca—he was drawn. Maybe he was going crazy as the judge had also insinuated to him days ago. But wasn’t the whole world? After all, the dead were walking and wouldn’t stop. Their decay rate was agonizingly slow. Some of the survivors he’d been trading with in the outlying camps were even beginning to turn to cannibalism to survive. He had heard they were holding lotteries. A morbid and deadly version of shortest straw in which the loser wasn’t assigned some kind of unenviable task or forced to sleep on the couch or forgo riding shotgun for the day. The unlucky loser became dinner.
Savages, he thought, and threw a shudder at the prospect of eating another human. With a reflux of acid tickling his throat, he yanked his sleeve up and consulted his watch. Half past ten. Wanting to return to the walls before noon in order to confront the judge before the big man became too bogged down with hearing grievances and issuing rulings, he rattled the shifter into Drive and started out slow, the vehicle shuddering as the accumulated snow was packed down and forward momentum was established.
To the west, riding low over the foothills and presumably enveloping the Wasatch Mountains farther away still, the dark roiling clouds scudded along at a rapid clip. He came to a short straightaway, briefly shifted his gaze right and saw over the craggy red mountains a thin horizontal gash in the storm, brilliant blue sky showing through it. But behind the brief respite the break represented was another foreboding gray smudge.
Directly ahead, before the State Route became Main Street in the town of Woodruff, it made a sharp left and then a short distance later an equally sharp ninety-degree jog right. From here the road shot razor-straight north, the low buildings and canted telephone poles of Woodruff cluttering the horizon in the distance.
Closer in, Dregan saw the toppled bus. Snow covered the dozens of upward facing right-side windows and more was swirling in the air, cutting the visibility. He halved his speed as the hallowed ground drew nearer and suddenly the wind took a break and he caught his first glimpse of the biter herd he had succeeded in avoiding hours ago and many miles south.
Instantly his gut clenched and he jammed on the brakes, Pavlovian responses both. The SUV slewed sideways, coming to a stop roughly a quarter mile short of the road to Huntsville and Eden—both on his short list of towns ripe for foraging.
The knot in his stomach tightened and the usual butterfly flutter there brought on by the mere sight of this many monsters in one place commenced. He silenced the music so he could think. He drew a deep breath to calm his nerves then snatched the binoculars up and held it in as he glassed the column.
A few seconds passed and he exhaled slowly, causing the image to judder. “I’ll be,” he said aloud, liking what he was seeing. “The dirge has ceased and so has the dead.”
Interest suddenly piqued, he threw the volume back up and continued north with a million unanswered questions muddling his thoughts.
***
Tooling along 39 a couple miles west of Woodruff, Cade was glimpsing snippets of the retreating storm through the snow-dusted trees. Shifting his gaze from the road ahead to the rearview mirror, he saw the widening band of blue sky to the east and liked what it represented. Though he was no meteorologist, he figured, based mainly on all the time he’d spent in higher elevations on Mount Hood and other places around the world, the clear sky and low sun would drop the temperature into the lower twenties. Optimum conditions for what he planned to be doing the rest of the day.
But first, he had an unplanned side trip to make and then a promise he had to deliver on.
The quarry turnout was partially overgrown and easy to miss if one didn’t know where to look. Cade watched the digital mile counter tick over as he rounded yet another corner on the twisting serpent that was State Route 39. After a quick calculation in his head, he slowed the Ford to a crawl and stopped on the straight midpoint of a gradual S-turn. He leaned right of the steering wheel, over the center console into Max’s personal space, and craned his neck. The mist and low clouds present earlier had burned off, letting him see clearly the hillside rising up and away. Using the peak above and behind the quarry as a reference point, he moved his gaze down the rocky bluff and located the access road climbing steadily up, a hard-to-miss whip of white consisting of multiple switch-backs and a handful of steep straights.
He let the idling engine pull the truck and located the break in the brush just before the road dove into a shallow right-hand sweeper. Branches raked the Ford’s flank as Cade wheeled it off the State Route. Instantly, the four-wheel-drive proved its worth as the tires bit into the feeder road, churning up an icy mixture of mud and gravel that pinged and thunked off the undercarriage—all out-of-place noises that caused Max to rise up off the seat after each loud report.
In no time the grade lessened and the final turn before the gate was in sight. To the left, the road fell away sharply for hundreds of feet. To the right, a vertical wall of snow-mottled red soil passed close by the window, giving the sensation the Ford was static on an ice floe and an icebreaker’s rust-spotted bow was pushing slowly by.
Straight ahead, Cade spotted a lone Z, shoeless and shirtless and standing stock-still. Its atrophied arms were outstretched and both gnarled hands were clutching the wheeled gate. Twelve feet from the ground to the strands of rusty barbed wire strung atop it, the gate dwarfed the seemingly immobilized ghoul.
Leaving Max in charge, Cade stepped down from the truck and shut the door. The air was much colder here a couple of hundred feet from the road, and every inhaled breath was a reminder of that fact.
“Hey Z,” he said, feeling the burn in his lungs. He whistled and received no perceptible reaction to the stimuli. The Z didn’t flinch or waver or turn its head to get a fix on the source. It was as if it had somehow been granted final death while gripping the fence.
Holding the key to the new padlock in his gloved right hand, and training the Glock on the Z with the other, Cade approached the gate. Wary of the potholes no doubt containing Great-Lake-sized puddles underneath the clean blanket of white, he picked his way along the pronounced ridges. Better safe than sorry, he thought. No doubt the half-dozen pools of muddy standing water were now sheets of ice waiting to send him to his butt. Last thing he needed was to break his tailbone and miss out on the golden opportunity laid out at his feet.
When he finally arrived at the gate with his coccyx still in one piece, he saw that the Z still hadn’t budged. So he leveled the Glock and jabbed the suppressor against its bony shoulder blade. It swayed forward a few inches along with the slight give in the fence before returning to its initial stance.
“Thank you, Lord,” Cade said, dropping his pistol in its holster. He leaned against the fence and regarded the thing face-to-face. It was one of the first turns, that was for sure. The adverse effects of nearly three months spent outside in the elements was showing. Its gray skin was mottled and sloughing off in places, revealing the corded muscle and tendon just under the surface. The forty-something man had been short and lean in life. Five foot tall, maybe. One hundred pounds, max. In death, the nearly nude and graying being looked more circus oddity than walking dead. Cade imagined the Barker saying, Step right up and see the human skeleton.
; He leaned in even closer, face hovering just inches from the Z’s, and detected a slight twitch in its left eye. A few seconds passed and that bloodshot orb rotated his way, achingly slow. Then the scratchy moaning started. Low in timbre at first. Then it rose in pitch and volume, until the awful peal sounded identical to the calls of the dead making up the Main Street herd.
With visions of Body Snatchers returning to his head, Cade drew the Gerber. With no hesitation, he raked the dagger’s jagged saw-like edge across the Z’s neck just inches above its breastbone. Two sawing back-and-forth strokes and the Z was silenced—but not dead.
“Much better. Now let’s see what you can do.” He pried the cold undead hands from the fence and turned the stiffening corpse towards him. He saw a trio of purple-ringed dots below its solar plexus. A tight triangular grouping made by small caliber bullets, .22 rimfire, presumably. The skin around the entry wounds was dappled with tiny black dots. Powder burns. Whoever had fired the weapon that had left them there had done so at close range and likely hadn’t survived the encounter. Looking into its listless eyes, he said jokingly, “Shall we dance?” The thing remained silent, its cold-affected vocal cords now severed. And as Cade lowered it to a prone position on the frozen ground, its head hinged back like a Pez dispenser, revealing the damage the blade had inflicted while releasing a viscous dribble of nearly black blood onto the snow.
Cade grabbed a handful of wispy gray hair, twisted the head towards him, and stuck the Gerber in the waifish Z’s open maw. He rattled it around in there trying to get a response. Nothing. However, the dagger’s tip clinking against molars and canines did create a macabre symphony nearly as cringe-inducing as the thing’s utterances prior to having its throat cut.
“We’re done here,” Cade said. He cleaned his blade in the snow and slipped it into its scabbard. He knelt and grabbed the Z by its ankles. It was incredibly light, probably weighing closer to eighty pounds than one hundred. Then, retracing his own serpentine trail of footsteps in the snow—which had stopped falling for the time being—he dragged the corpse toward the ledge, its head, attached by only vertebra and a few strands of muscle, bouncing and twisting violently along the ground the entire way.
There was no countdown when he reached the edge with the undead corpse. No kind words for whoever it used to be. Just a grunt and burst of steam from Cade’s nose and mouth as he heaved the dead weight into the misty void. The sound of breaking twigs and dislodged rocks and pebbles cascading down the steep face reached his ears as he turned and walked purposefully towards the gate. Along the way, he imagined the thing cartwheeling all the way down, pasty appendages flailing, the nearly severed head flopping madly, speed increasing exponentially until finally the inevitable, and hopefully fatal, rapid deceleration against a very firm and unforgiving terra firma.
At the gate, Cade again drew the Glock and fished in his pocket for the shiny key to the new Schlage lock. With his black pistol trained on the blind spot to his right, he cut the angle and confirmed visually that the padlock Duncan had snapped shut last time they were here was still in the closed position and the thick chain was wrapped through the fencing, seemingly undisturbed.
Seeing nothing waiting for him on the other side—living or dead—he used the key in the lock. He pocketed the keys and lock, unwrapped the chain, and let it fall to the ground. With little effort, he got the wheeled gate moving and kept pushing until there was room for the truck to pass on through.
On the way back to the Ford, he paused and looked at the recently stripped electrical wires dangling near a mount where a shiny black CCTV dome used to reside. The mount was secured to the far right fence post and was partially protected from the elements by a small alcove etched into the side hill. Whether the depression was due to erosion or a byproduct of the blasting that had taken place in order to open up the road, he hadn’t a clue. What he did know, however, was whoever had removed the dome and then the camera had left behind the umbrella-shaped shroud installed directly above it.
It took a little finessing to get the Ford tucked in close to the soaring red wall. In the process, he scraped the right front fender against the waist-high rocky outcroppings protruding from the side hill.
Satisfied, and not the least bit concerned about the rig’s finish, he put it into Park and set the brake. Grabbed a multi-tool from the glove box and leaving Max inside and the truck idling, he hopped to the road.
He stepped onto the heavy-duty bumper and then crawled up onto the slick hood. Hand over hand, gripping the fence to keep from slipping, he made it to the corner post and went to work on the oval shroud with the Phillips drive. In a couple of minutes he had defeated the trio of fasteners and tossed the liberated part to the ground.
One down, three to go.
The shroud went behind the seat and Cade climbed in and began jockeying the rig around. Once through the gate, he hopped out, rolled it closed and locked himself in.
He clambered back behind the wheel, maneuvered the rig past the quarry’s still black waters, and parked it near the enormous rust-streaked building, complete with its destroyed office and attached multi-vehicle garage. The dozens of bullet holes punched into the steel siding were instantly evident, each one punctuated by its own vertical streak of rust. At first glance Cade got the impression that the building was weeping and, given the savagery that happened here just weeks ago, that impression came as no surprise.
He sat in the cab with the heater blasting and took the entire scene in. Straight ahead, sitting atop a series of carefully hidden underground chambers, the recently retrofitted steel building looked as much forgotten relic as the weathered mining equipment scattered about the property. In addition to the newly created bullet holes marring the building’s west facing façade, Cade recognized high up on the siding the circles of fresh paint that had been exposed when Foley or Seth—he wasn’t clear on whose undertaking it was—relieved the building of the west- and south-facing camera domes. He also noticed they had initially been mounted flush and tucked under the eaves, therefore there were no shrouds like the one up front to be had here.
Cade shook his head and pounded the steering wheel gently. “What now, Max?”
The shepherd yawned.
Not one to give up so easily, he shifted his gaze left. Settled it on the trio of swaybacked outbuildings sitting in a neat little row jutting off at a right angle from the left side of the main building. All of the windows were darkened with grime and, showing signs of forced entry, all three doors had been reduced to splintered boards hanging from rusted hinges.
Though Cade wasn’t here when the place had been stripped of its essential items, on a visit since, he had poked his head into each building and learned that they contained mostly specialized tools useful only to miners and roughnecks.
He looked a circle around the property searching for anything Foley might fashion into a shroud like the one he’d just liberated from the front gate.
Finishing the three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep, he returned his attention to the shed and saw them in an altogether different light. Saw them for what was useful on the outside.
Rust … nature’s camouflage, thought Cade as he shut the motor off. Armed with the Glock and multi-tool, he exited the truck and, with Max on his heels, went straight for the nearest of the three dilapidated sheds.
Chapter 10
With the motor off and Mozart silenced, Dregan spent ten minutes sitting in the truck watching the stalled horde through a pair of binoculars. During that time, with the snow still falling lightly and the delicate flakes alighting on the camouflage hood, he witnessed many of the dead making up the horde toppling over. At times only one stiff corpse would fall to the road with all of the grace of a knocked-out fighter. A handful of times he witnessed one of the biters lose out to gravity and fall into another, starting a domino-like chain reaction. In fact, he found it quite humorous seeing a daisy chain of rigor-affected corpses bang into one another and end up tangled on the road like some kind
of undead orgy gone awry. Whoops, he’d thought morbidly at the time. Looks like somebody forgot to holler their safe words.
***
Now, having deemed it safe enough to venture outside amongst the overwhelming numbers of dead, Dregan could see his breath inside the truck, and nearly two-thirds of the horde were horizontal on the road, arms and legs akimbo, not a sound coming from their rotten mouths.
He grabbed his sword and a suppressed AR-15 from behind the seat. The carbine he slung over his shoulder. Then the sword, which he intended to use on the assembled monsters, came out of the scabbard with a metallic snik.
Dregan closed up the SUV and marched solemnly down the State Route, keeping to the middle of the snow-covered road right where he imagined the yellow centerline to be. Twenty yards north of his parked Blazer he came upon the exact spot where he’d found Lena’s lifeless body. As it always did, his proximity to the scene of the crime brought back the mental image of her cratered face. The bullets, a trio of them he guessed, had done precisely what they were designed to—break apart on impact and tumble. The initial impacts shredded her angelic features. He figured the bullet that entered below the bridge of her nose had killed her instantly. The kinetic energy punched everything, nose and all, inside before the bullet broke into pieces and shredded her brain. The other bullets only added insult to the lethal injury created by the first. The skin and muscle and flesh that was her left cheek had been peeled back, one big bloody flap revealing shattered teeth, most of them blown into a thousand splinters scattered on the road and now buried somewhere here under the snow.
Dregan crossed himself and recited a prayer. With tears forming and a lump welling in his throat, he trudged ahead. He ignored the school bus. He walked right over the particular spot on the road at the junction with 39 where they’d found the Jackson Hole Police Department Tahoe parked on top of dozens of mashed corpses.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 7