“Seen enough?”
“Fuck you,” she said to Cade, dragging a hand across her mouth. “You could have warned me about the baby.”
“I could have also told you about the three boys, aged six to ... ten, I’d guess. They’re in the backseat blindfolded and sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, each with a bullet hole to the head most likely courtesy of Mom there.” He shrugged and stood in front of the lift gate, examining the stick figure family on the back window: Dad, Mom, three boys and the infant represented as if it was already a crawler—on all fours—which Cade doubted. It had probably just barely perfected rolling over and doing that seal thing Raven used to do—up on her hands, back arched, head on a swivel checking out her new world. Simultaneously as he searched the lift gate for a latch, he smiled at the memory and his eyes misted over. Dragging a sleeve across them, he added, “It’s a cruel world, Taryn.”
Wilson skidded in the snow, through the debris field from the man’s destroyed head, and went to his knees beside Taryn.
“I’m OK,” she hissed, not looking at him. “Let’s just take what we need and get going.”
“I’m looking for tire chains,” Cade said matter-of-factly.
Knowing her cars, Taryn said, “Don’t bother. That van has different series tires than the SUVs.”
“You’re the expert,” said Cade. He opened the hatch and stepped back while a mini-avalanche of loose sleeping bags, cans of food, bottled waters and various toys—mostly sports-themed—spilled from the back. After the items stopped pouring forth and settled in the snow, Cade stepped over a mini-basketball and waded through the colorful—though soiled—sleeping bags and started policing up the food, putting it all in the smallest of the bags, a Mutant Turtles-themed item rated for summer nights, not surviving winter temperatures.
Without needing a prompt, Wilson helped Taryn to her feet, had a couple of private words with her, then proceeded to rifle through the van, checking the side pockets, cup holders, and center console before finally striking pay dirt within the glove compartment. Coming out with a smile and several boxes of ammunition held aloft, he suddenly started feeling queasy himself. Something about finding fortune on account of a young family’s tragic end unsettled him more than the baby’s bugged-out lifeless eyes and Mom’s gray matter frozen to the inside of the passenger window.
Chapter 27
Four miles West of Bear River, Cleo nosed his late model Jeep Grand Cherokee between two trees and jockeyed it around until it was under cover and facing perpendicular to the road. Off to the left he could see his tire tracks but wasn’t too concerned; with the rate at which the snow was falling, any evidence of his passage would soon be erased.
The copse of trees he’d chosen would serve two purposes: keep the Jeep from being easily discovered and save him from having to dig the rig out in the morning should the steady snowfall continue.
He killed the motor and pocketed the keys. Took a small canister from the same pocket and, holding the hockey-puck-sized item in one hand, thumped the tin lid with a finger to pack the granular tobacco inside. He popped the lid and got a big whiff of the earthy-smelling tobacco then put a generous amount between his cheek and gums. He brushed the particles from his silver moustache that hadn’t quite made it into his mouth, and then stuffed the snuff can into his breast pocket. He figured the nicotine buzz of a fresh dip every couple of hours would help him stave off Mister Sandman.
His lengthening ghost of a shadow told him the sun was up there somewhere, but the diffuse light it was throwing lent little in the way of definition to the rolling countryside and even less to the Bear River mountains off in the distance.
Forgoing the fur-trimmed hood for now, Cleo zipped his white parka to his neck. He slipped a compact semi-auto pistol along with two spare magazines full of 9mm into a pocket. Next, he checked to see that his handheld CB radio was switched off and then put it and a sealed package of new batteries for it into the other pocket. No way he would hear it over his footsteps anyhow. Finally, he nudged the door open and stepped out casually onto the soft, needle-covered ground, dragging a desert-tan-colored carbine after. His eyes passed over the snowshoes resting on the back seat and, after half a second’s contemplation, decided bringing them would be a good idea. They went on the outside of his small rucksack, held in place by a couple of bungees. He shrugged the pack on, drew a deep cleansing breath, and grabbed his carbine from where he’d propped it against the Jeep.
He stepped from cover and continued north on foot through the pasture. To his left, he saw small, snow-covered hillocks rolling away to the west. Twin runners of fencing stood out against the snow. They stretched off to the north, bordering the State Route as it undulated away, twisting and turning like a big white snake.
Keeping Cleo company off of his right shoulder was a wide expanse of grazing land that eventually butted up against low foothills, normally scrub-covered red rock but now just a hazy white blur.
Fifty paces into his trek, he spat a big ugly black hole in the snow, then watched the warm tobacco-juice-laden saliva burn all the way through to the grass as he passed it by.
***
Ten minutes had passed since leaving the little oasis of trees behind, and off to the northwest Cleo could see the big metal dome on the silo and the steeply pitched roof of the red barn, the two big white X’s on the southwest-facing hayloft doors marking the spot.
Running right to left, almost as crooked as the road beyond was the Bear River, which he would be crossing rather reluctantly when the time came. As he trudged ahead, he worked up a good sweat. The high-end hiking boots he’d scored from an abandoned house in Bear River were treating his feet well. They were dry, blister-free, and his Plantar Fasciitis, usually aching to the point of being debilitating, was only a low-level current of pain arcing between the big toe, along the arch and into the soft flesh of his heel.
He continued north for another quarter-mile until he came to a low spot in the pasture and cut a sharp ninety-degree left turn. The tack he chose took him between two large mounds, usually bright green and host to cows favoring the high ground. Now they were white with snow and the cows, having fallen victim to the corpses roaming the countryside, were but rib bones and an occasional skull poking through the vast carpet of white.
As the land sloped away toward the narrow river—actually little more than a creek—he said a prayer of thanks for the weather presently keeping the dead at bay. Though the momentary respite would allow the residents of Bear River to shore up defenses and cull many of the dead things currently in a state of stasis, he held no reservations the world was out of the woods yet. In fact, if his last run to the towns on the periphery of Salt Lake City was any indication as to what the future held for him and the others, he wanted this snow to be the first of a new Ice Age. Dying cold and hungry, he mused, was far better than the alternative.
The image of the dead streaming out of the overhunted metropolitan areas in droves was forever etched in his memory. He’d even heard talk of a mega horde, in the hundreds of thousands, pushing across the Great Salt Lake and completely razing Wendover, a little gambling town on the Nevada side of the border with Utah.
Though he had his doubts, there were other rumblings that said the lights were working in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but that experiment was drawing the dead there from Pueblo and Denver like bugs to a zapper.
Lost in thought, Cleo nearly walked right into the slow-moving water. He stopped short of the bank and emitted a low whistle.
“Almost got wet there, Cleo.”
He picked up a rock and chucked it into the crystal clear water and counted slowly as it sank, stopping the count only when it finally settled on the bottom.
Two seconds. Over the cuff.
“Dammit!” He pulled a handful of plastic garbage sacks from the front pocket of his white ski pants. He placed one on the riverbank and sat on it. Then, using care not to puncture the thin black plastic, he double-wrapped his boots with the sacks, d
uct taping the tops just over his knees.
Good to go.
Grunting from exertion, he pushed off the ground and started fording the river.
Aside from a couple of slick rocks trying their best to pitch him into the drink, he arrived on the other side dry, wiggled his toes, and proclaimed his makeshift waders a success.
He sat down and ripped off the plastic sacks. Still sitting, he cast his gaze left and right and back, settling on a distant clump of brambles roughly twice as wide as it was tall. After tucking the sacks away in a pocket, he rose, covered the thirty yards up the gently sloping hill, and approached the tangle of vines from its west-facing side. He stepped into them with no hesitation and stomped a man-sized patch in the bare vines. Finished with that, he dropped his rifle and pack, and took a seat atop the latter.
“Home, sweet home,” he muttered as he dug out his binoculars.
From his vantage on the stunted hillock he could see the entire rear of the two-story farmhouse and a portion of the south-facing elevation, where a small porch had been tacked on opposite the side door going into the two-car garage. In addition to being able to see comings and goings from the rear of the old couple’s house, he had a view of 16, the front drive and level gravel parking area where an old truck sat, and the barn’s north-facing doors.
Cleo settled his gaze on the house. The four ground-level windows facing him were dark, as were the pair on the rear of the garage. Upstairs, more of the same: four windows with the curtains closed, not a sliver of light showing.
He lowered the field glasses and looked behind him, quickly determining the gnarled runners rose at least a foot over his head and would hide his silhouette from prying eyes as well as afford a modicum of cover from anything or anyone approaching from behind.
Satisfied with the hide, he started clearing the snow in a semicircle in front of where he would be camped out for the next dozen hours. After a few minutes’ labor he had exposed a refrigerator-door-sized rectangle of browned and matted grass and built ramparts on three sides with the snow he had displaced. The sides were roughly a foot in height, while the front he built up until it came up to his sternum when he was seated. Lastly, he pulled the plastic bags from his pocket and sat down on them.
Breathing hard from the exertion, and wanting nothing more than to light up a Camel, Cleo instead fished in a pocket for his snuff and freshened up the gobstopper-sized plug bulging his cheek.
All squared away, with a pair of hand warmers activated, one stuffed into each glove, he pulled the white blanket from his pack and draped it over his shoulders. Tucked the corners into the top of his parka and pulled the fur-trimmed hood up over his head.
Snug as a bug in a rug, and just catching a small buzz from the chewing tobacco, he put the binoculars to his eyes. There was movement now on the ground floor, and when he adjusted the focus ring, from nearly the length of a football field away he saw the woman of the house flitting back and forth in front of the ground floor windows.
Chapter 28
Big heavy flakes, suggestive of a slight bump up in temperature, were falling all around as the two-vehicle convoy hung a right off of Route 39. Making parallel tracks in the untouched field of white, the Toyotas cut a sweeping left-to-right arc in the parking lot and stopped side-by side in front of the partially burned-out Shell gas station.
On the passenger side of the 4Runner were nearly a dozen corpses. Partially obscured under six-inch drifts and with limbs poking through all akimbo, they reminded Wilson of National Geographic pictures he had seen of the bodies of abandoned climbers frozen in place on the inhospitable slopes of Mount Everest. He stepped out and closed his door, and as he did so he heard a chorus of thumps from all around as the other survivors dismounted, Taryn the first among them. Ignoring the bodies and oblivious to the metal rollup door to his right, which was bowing in and out minimally as if the garage itself were a living thing, he looped around front of the 4Runner and met the young brunette’s stare.
“Are you going to be able to shake that visual ... the baby and the boys, I mean?” He put his arm around her shoulder as they walked by the Land Cruiser’s warm grill.
“Yeah,” she said. “In a year or two ... maybe. If I’m one of the lucky ones who doesn’t get bit or blow my brains out first.”
The prospect of either happening to the woman he was growing to love instantly numbed Wilson to the core.
“How about you?” she asked. “You looked a little green around the gills when we pulled in.”
“Those rottercicles by the garage? Nope, they didn’t even register. The herd we drove through, though … that was disconcerting. However, nothing, and I mean nothing has come remotely close to trumping my first couple of kills ... yet.” And as he was saying it, in his mind’s eye he was seeing the snarling faces of the undead parents he was forced to brain with his Todd Helton. Running over the vivid memory, like a macabre soundtrack broadcast in full on Dolby, he heard their undead toddler repeatedly ramming the baby gate behind closed doors. That day back in Denver was as surreal as a memory now as it had been then in person. The sound of wood on bone echoing in the hall outside his apartment, however, would never leave him. Nor would the thunka, thunka, thunka and what it represented emanating from the next door apartment ever be forgotten.
Approaching from the couple’s blind side, Duncan said, “Sorry to spoil your Hallmark moment.”
“If you only knew,” Wilson replied.
Duncan grimaced. He said, “Taryn ... come on down,” trying his best to mimic that long dead game show announcer from The Price Is Right. Then he nodded at Wilson and shifted his gaze to Lev and Jamie, who were just exiting the 4Runner. “The rest of y’all stand guard out here while we search the garage.”
Wilson nodded and walked towards the road, head tilted, eyes scanning the yellow and red vacuum-formed sign. “Three oh three for Supreme. What I wouldn’t give to bitch about rising gas prices again ...” he said, his voice trailing off as he neared the skeletal carcasses of the burned-out gas pumps.
Meanwhile, Jamie and Lev had split up, each taking a corner of the station—Lev to the east, by the corpses and static hulks of burned-out cars, and Jamie to the west, amid a sea of vehicles all singed by the fire that had consumed the contents of the minimart, yet inexplicably spared the high ceilinged double-garage.
Watching the three move out in pretty much the directions he had hoped they would, and without needing any extra input from him or Duncan, suddenly elevated Wilson, and to a lesser extent Jamie—who could pretty much hold her own by now—a few notches upward on Cade’s there’s-hope-for-them-yet barometer. He waited until Wilson was kneeling on the cement island between pumps before motioning for Taryn, Duncan, and Daymon to follow. Once all four of them had ducked under the locked panic bars, Duncan having the most difficulty on account of the weather’s effect on his decrepit knees, they skirted the burned-out shelving and formed up at a door on their right, its sooty surface all marked up and sporting a road map’s worth of squiggles from the previous week’s torrential rainfall.
Duncan traced his finger over the remains of the warning Glenda had etched there weeks ago. “Supposed to have read something like danger, dead inside,” he pointed out. “At any rate, it don’t now. And I figure by now the critter she said she left trapped inside there has been reduced to nothing but a starer like all the others.”
“Definition of assume?” said Taryn, regarding the three men, one at a time.
Duncan smiled. He said, “Touché, young lady.”
Shrugging, Daymon put his palms up and looked a question her way. And your point is? is what it seemed to convey.
“Ass. You. Me. Assuming makes an ass out of you and me,” said Cade. He banged a fist on the metal-skinned door.
Nothing.
He turned the knob.
Unlocked.
Taryn worked her way next to Cade. She looked up at him, head tilted to one side. “Let me go first,” she said emphatically.
>
“Something to prove?”
“No, Daymon,” she answered, throwing him an over-the-shoulder glare. “You trying to get your ball-busting Merit Badge? Always talking shit.” She looked away, shaking her head.
“Stand down,” said Cade. He let his carbine hang on its center point sling and glared at Daymon. “First you and Lev. That dustup ended in fisticuffs”—Daymon tried to protest—“and now you and Taryn going at it.” Cade looked at Taryn and half-joking said, “My money is on her.”
Duncan said, “I want in on this action.”
“That was a joke,” Cade replied.
“Better work on your delivery then, Wyatt,” Duncan said, flashing the man a toothy grin.
Daymon glared at the three, who were seemingly standing together in opposition to him.
“However, my man,” Duncan added with an extra syrupy drawn-out drawl, “a hundred simoleons says she can take Urch. And a hundred more says Wilson can take him ... if she won’t.”
“We’re all under a ton of stress. Nerves are frayed … I get it,” Cade said. “But we need to work together if we’re going to make the most of this blessing the weather dropped in our laps.” He looked at them one at a time and got nods from two out of three. Daymon didn’t make eye contact. Shaking his head, he stalked off down the aisle toward the counter, kicking cans and piles of drifted snow as he went.
Also shaking his head, Cade turned the knob and pushed the door inward by a degree, listened hard and heard nothing. So he nudged the door inward another three inches, letting in a sliver of light that illuminated the nearly pitch-black interior. The first thought that entered Cade’s mind as Taryn edged past him and into the gloom was a positive one. Maybe her mounting displays of bravado weren’t a false façade as he kind of suspected. His next thought, however, as a pair of black hands grabbed the ponytail snaking from under her stocking cap and began dragging her inside was: Cade, you’ve just officially made an ass of yourself.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 16