Saying nothing, Daymon disappeared into the back seat all by himself.
Duncan looked a question at Cade. The same one he had offered on dozens of occasions since his brother was murdered, leaving him the sole Winters at what had at times informally been called the Winters’ compound. A reluctant why me look that meant a vote was in order.
Cade nodded. “So we vote.”
Duncan powered his window down. He nodded at Wilson and addressed Taryn, who was driving. “You guys need to vote on whether we cull these rotters here and now, or finish them on the way back. Cade’s of the opinion we need to push on.”
Taryn nodded. Duncan watched her twist around and talk to the back seat passengers, Lev and Jamie.
“Three of us want to push on to Huntsville now,” Wilson said. “Jamie”—he nodded toward the back seat—“wants us to put down as many as we can before the weather turns.”
“I kind of agree with the lady,” said Daymon. “Glenda did say the temps can make wild swings this time of year. I’ve seen a little of it in Idaho and Wyoming.”
Cade had been listening, but he was also walking his gaze over the herd of Zs spread out across the road thirty feet off the Land Cruiser’s bumper. “There’s less than two hundred here,” he said. “We need to move on.”
“Yep. I’m with Cade,” Duncan drawled.
Daymon said nothing.
“Five yay, two nay,” Cade said, stating the obvious. He shifted and met Daymon’s stare. “Don’t worry. You’ll be killing more of them with Kindness before the day is done.”
Duncan chuckled. “Poor Urch.” He mouthed, “Follow me,” to the Kids in the 4Runner and eased off the brake.
It was slow going, but by keeping to the shoulder in places—the path of least resistance—Cade and Daymon only had to dismount a couple of times to clear a swath of road through the dead wide enough for the bigger Land Cruiser to pass.
In the 4Runner, Wilson was leaning as far away from the passenger window as possible. Even though he knew the abominations gliding by just outside his window weren’t an immediate threat, it still seemed as if they were all being consumed alive by their vacant stares.
Every so often he would muster the courage and steal a quick peek and see what effect the elements, raging fire, and decomposition had on the human body. It quickly became clear to him that many of the monsters had caught bullets during the course of their travels, the damage presenting as mostly just pencil-sized entry wounds to the arms or torso. One in particular stood out from the others and would probably be visiting him in a nightmare later. Powder burns dappled the middle-aged rotter’s pallid skin from hip to neck. There were frozen streamers of dermis and scraps of flesh dangling in semi-permanent stasis from the periphery of a basketball-size hole in its gut. And further evidence of a run-in with a shotgun blast were the connect-the-dots patterns peppering the flesh around the empty chest cavity, where hundreds of shot pellets had entered and stayed just under the skin.
Finally having seen enough, Wilson tipped his head back and closed his eyes.
The group burned thirty minutes navigating through the herd and had just gotten going again when they came upon a scene that begged a dismount and further investigation.
Chapter 25
Dregan had cut to the chase. No pleasantries. No small talk. It was clear the two men didn’t see eye-to-eye and there was no reason for either of them to put up a front.
First Dregan voiced his displeasure for the judge’s unannounced visit and contact with his minor son, a move the judge explained away as a simple I-was-in-the-neighborhood type of thing. Then Dregan cut to the chase and told the judge that his visit with Ray and Helen had been to deliver propane, nothing more. After all, how was the judge to corroborate the story when he hadn’t set foot outside the wall since he’d arrived. This the judge didn’t protest. A kind of quid pro quo, since Dregan hadn’t pressed him further on the house call issue.
When they finally got around to the matter of Lena and Mikhail, all Dregan had to do to convince Pomeroy he was content to wait was lavish a little praise on the way justice had been handed out to the Ford kid. And as an exclamation point to the matter, Dregan blew a little more smoke up the man’s fat ass by adding how he believed—after all he had seen during the last hour—that the wheels of justice would soon catch up with Lena’s killers.
And finally, in response to the judge questioning him about how he was coping with his loss—a query Dregan believed to be from the mouth and not the heart—Dregan had said simply, “Time has a way of healing old wounds.”
In the end, Dregan had the judge’s promise to not visit without prior warning. And in return, telling a bald-faced lie, Dregan promised to not take the law into his own hands.
“We’re going to crawl back out of this,” Pomeroy had finally said after a pregnant pause. Bullshit, thought Dregan as he rose and shook the man’s clammy hand. And as he did, he thought to himself, Justice will be swift and final.
Suppressing a smile, Dregan left the musty room, closing the frosted glass door at his back. Letting the smile curl his lip, he slow-walked through the deserted bookstore where the cannibal rapist had just gotten all that he deserved.
Outside, he stood on the raised wooden sidewalk and marveled at how, under the gray light of afternoon, the snow-covered main drag lined with one and two-story buildings reminded him of the faded old photos of Deadwood or Tombstone or Silverado. Then it struck him how those towns had fallen, not to the rampant crime prevalent at that time in history, but to the advent of Mister Ford’s assembly-line-produced four-wheeled steed that in part had made the Iron Horse serving the frontier towns, of which Bear River was one, as obsolete as the venerable Colt Peacemaker.
He chuckled at the irony. Him standing here thinking about one Ford’s deeds when perhaps a direct descendant of ol’ Henry himself was about to get his privates gnawed off on account of his own misdeeds.
Suppressing a chuckle, Dregan stepped into the street at about the same time a red Jeep with more rust streaking its squared-off body than paint rounded the corner. Noticing the vehicle approaching off his left shoulder, he gave the driver a wave and stepped back onto the curb just as the rig crunched to a stop inches from his toes. The driver’s side window whirred down and instantly Dregan received a hot blast of fart-laden air to the face.
“Let me guess,” he said to the man driving the Jeep. “Breakfast was venison jerky and Smirnoff.”
The man’s lined face stretched tight and he smiled wide, revealing a mouthful of cracked stumps for teeth. “Just Smirnoff,” he replied.
Why did all the dentists have to get eaten? thought Dregan, wincing from the added stench of halitosis. “I’m glad you came, Cleo,” he said. “I need a favor from you.”
The man held Dregan’s gaze, took one hand from the steering wheel and rubbed his fingers together briskly, universal semaphore for: It’s going to cost you.
Dregan offered a conciliatory nod. “It’s just a little recon job,” he began. He laid it all on the table. The where’s, why’s and how’s. Once he got to the how he wanted the job done part, Cleo shook his head. He wasn’t having it. Dregan pushed the issue and Cleo said, “Keep me in propane for two winters.”
Figuring the man’s liver wouldn’t hold out that long, Dregan nodded. Didn’t matter if it did. He had squirreled away enough propane since the fall to keep all of Bear River going for two winters. And he also knew where more could be found.
Unfortunately, Cleo knew this too. “And a case of vodka and two cartons of cigarettes,” he added.
“Two cartons?” said Dregan, almost yelling.
“And vodka.” Again Cleo showed off his rounded teeth, sharing his bad breath in the process.
Exasperated, Dregan took off a glove and ran his fingers through his beard. The vodka was nothing. He had cases stashed in the garage. The cigarettes, however, were damn near worth their weight in gold. But then again, so was maintaining the element of surprise. And
the only way to ensure that was to know the comings and goings of everyone in the valley.
“You are raping me, Cleo. You know that, right?”
Another big smile as Cleo extracted a small notepad, the coiled wire pinched in places and the paper curled up. Still grinning ear-to-ear, with intelligent—though bloodshot—blue eyes sparkling, Cleo licked the tip of a pencil and wrote hard on the lined sheet until it was full of tiny scribbles looking more like something from a Pharaoh’s tomb than words taught in school. The smile disappeared and, after underlining the last sentence twice, pressing hard enough to break the pencil lead, he handed the contract along with a pen taken from his flannel pocket to Dregan.
“Sign it please,” he said, eyes narrowing to slits.
A vehicle slid by on the opposite side of the Jeep, heading in the general direction of the main gate.
Dregan glanced up at the truck carrying a foraging party of six in the back, then, looking like a man about to score drugs, he conducted a recon of his surroundings, two slo-mo jerky sweeps, one over each shoulder. Satisfied he wasn’t being watched, he read the words jotted on the pad. After spending an inordinate amount of time deciphering the barely understandable prose, he read the heavily underlined words again. “The fee is up to three cartons now?”
Cleo nodded. He loved having anybody by the short hairs—especially the former wannabe sheriff of Bear River.
Dregan signed on the line and fantasized about throttling the little fucker. Picking him up off the ground and holding him aloft until he shit himself and his legs twitched after receiving their last ever orders from his dying brain. But that would get him nowhere closer to his end goal. Telling himself this was just business and he’d make up the loss elsewhere, he drew in a deep breath.
“Two cartons and a roll of chewing tobacco,” he said over the exhale.
“OK,” Cleo conceded. “Camels and Copenhagen. And handwarmers … it’s going to be cold tonight.”
Dregan shook his head. “All of that and the vodka.”
“Stolichnaya,” added the man, straight-faced.
Dregan sighed and gazed up and down the street. Then he looked skyward as the snow started coming down in thick sheets full of big flakes. “You know, Cleo,” he said, flipping the collar up on his coat. “I’m just glad you didn’t ask me to give you a blowjob.”
The nubs for teeth reappeared and, after delivering a coquettish wink, the pencil reappeared in Cleo’s hand and he played at amending the contract.
Dregan put his hands up in mock surrender and backed away with the Jeep already moving forward and Cleo’s face sporting a wide grin. He kicked the pile of snow pushed up by the Jeep’s tires and watched the boxy rig circle back around and head off the way it had come. In the next instant, he started calculating how many favors were owed to him by others that he could call in at such short notice.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, crossed his mind as he stalked off for his vehicle.
Chapter 26
The dead baby girl was swaddled head-to-toe in a pink blanket and clutched tightly to the young mother’s bosom. A placid expression was frozen on the child’s delicate features, and if not for the presence of the blue jump rope knotted neatly around her impossibly thin neck, Cade would have thought death had come as a result of the firm one-armed embrace—not strangulation by ligature.
Sitting on the bench seat in back, shoulder-to-shoulder—small, medium, and large, like empty cups on display at a fast food joint—sat three other corpses, all grade-school-aged boys, separated by about a year or two chronologically and about half-a-head each in height. The boys were dressed in winter attire and wore blindfolds fashioned from an eco-friendly grocery bag—not quite fabric or plastic, but some kind of marriage of the two. Unlike the infant, each of the boys had one neat little entry wound about the diameter of a pencil eraser dead center on their foreheads.
Up front in the center console, partially concealed underneath cereal bar wrappers and balled-up tissues, was the weapon the woman, who Cade presumed to be the mom, had used to kill the boys: a chrome .22 or .32 caliber semi-auto pistol by the looks of the grip and mag well width.
Next to the pistol were a couple of well-worked-over pacifiers and a bottle half-full of a pinkish-looking liquid. And laying on its side by the baby bottle was what looked like some kind of over-the-counter kids’ cough-medicine. It was brilliant red and looked high in viscosity, like pancake syrup. Cade guessed Mom used the medicine and formula or some kind of canned milk to make the cocktail in the bottle. Though the defenseless little former bundle of joy would never see a first birthday, Cade felt better about the whole thing knowing the baby probably hadn’t suffered—much.
He craned and looked closer at the kids in back and saw very little blood; he guessed—based on the lack of visible bugs or maggots—they had suffered from perhaps a day’s decomposition.
The mom on the other hand, like the dead man on the road, had taken no chances. It was clear she had not wanted to come back and spend eternity thrashing around inside the van with her dead daughter in a baby carrier on her chest. The gun she’d used to relocate her brains from inside her skull to the windshield and headliner was a black 9mm semi-auto that was still clutched firmly in her dead hand. Closer inspection would divulge that it was poorly made and inexpensive, like the chromed number between the seats.
Cade worked the scenario through his head. Judging by the twenty or so Zs ground into the pavement underneath the van, the occupants had probably come upon the herd up the road and then, either acting out of fear or hubris, decided not to turn back toward Huntsville and instead took a chance at bulling their way through. And once the driver had committed and the low clearance minivan became inexorably stuck, he dismounted and shot a few and then tried rocking the vehicle off the writhing pile of death with the lady behind the wheel.
However it went down, the result was crystal clear. Trapped inside, the mother did what any parent facing that many flesh eaters would do. Maybe to make it easier on all parties involved, Cade thought, she had proposed a game that required the boys to wear blindfolds before ... at least that was how he hoped it had played out. But he’d never know, because, as the saying went, dead men—and women and their four kids—tell no tales.
The sound of a door opening and closing snapped him out of his funk. He looked towards the other Toyota parked a dozen feet behind the Land Cruiser and saw Taryn on the road and approaching the scene. He watched her step over the partially eaten corpse of the man whom he had already pegged as the dad. There was a bullet entry wound on the right temple and most of the left side of his face was bulged out and misshapen—like a grapefruit squeezed of all its pulpy goodness. Only there was nothing good about what Cade imagined lay under the snow, scattered on the roadway in a radius around the same side of the body the bullet had exited. Suddenly he was reminded of a bumper sticker popular with the pro-Second Amendment crowd before the fall—a group of like-minded folk whom he had proudly counted himself one of. You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands, was how it went, and that’s exactly what Taryn did. She planted her boot on the cadaver’s wrist and pried the desert-tan semi-auto free from the rigor-affected fingers. She patted down the body and came out with one empty magazine; the rest, Cade figured, were somewhere near the body, but covered with snow and brains. Pocketing the mag and what looked like a handful of cereal bars, the lithe brunette picked her way through half a dozen fallen rotters and approached the high side of the mound of unmoving Zs the family’s van was high-centered on.
For a second, Cade contemplated letting her see what was inside the death ride and then enlisting her help in searching the contents. Instead, as she was craning and skirting the vehicle’s driver’s side, like a cop stopping traffic, Cade held his gloved hand up palm out and turned her away with a slight nod to the 4Runner.
She froze in her tracks and shook her head. Matching his gaze, she blinked first and turned a one-eighty. She made it
one pace back toward the vehicles, then paused as if in thought and performed a pirouette, finishing a complete, albeit rather sloppy, three-sixty.
“When do I get to be part of the decision-making process?” she asked, standing her ground and glaring back at Cade.
“You just were,” hollered Duncan, who was in the nearby Land Cruiser with his window partway down and warming his hands in the air coming out the heater vents.
“Come on then,” Cade said. “If you can handle Cobain there ... I’m sure you can stomach”—he gestured at the van—“what’s inside there.”
Without warning, big flakes began falling all around them.
Cade looked to the sky, and far off to the southeast, in the band of blue left by the clouds that had already passed them by, saw a number of contrails. Though he’d seen them thousands of times in his life, from this distance there was no telling what made them, nor which way the jet aircraft that had were headed.
There was a squeak and then a rapid thwopping as Duncan toggled the wipers too high for the conditions. Cade swept his gaze to his right and watched as Taryn skirted the bent and broken appendages sticking out from under the minivan. She approached him and stood on her toes, with one hand gripping his shoulder for support.
In the background the wiper noise died down to a manageable thwop every three seconds or so.
The mom’s destroyed upper palate and shredded lips and cheeks were the first things Taryn saw as her eyes broke the plane of the bottom of the driver’s door glass. She flicked her eyes up and saw the clumps of brain and hair and bloody shards of white bone stuck fast to the once cream-colored headliner.
Taryn was feeling the first tingling in her salivary glands when her gaze swept the dead baby. Then, the knotted jump rope and what it represented registered in her brain. She didn’t even get a chance to look in the back seat before her jaw had locked up, and she lost her grip on Cade’s shoulder and pitched back off of the crushed bodies she had been standing on. In the next instant, her hands and knees went cold as she landed in the snow on all fours. A tick later, pound cake and applesauce mixed with the pint of water she’d just consumed painted the ground a foot from her face. It steamed coming out and melted the snow on contact, creating a color strikingly similar to the detritus dried onto the van’s headliner.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 15