She walked around the driver’s side and was looking up him just as the blade locked into position. He opened his window and thanked her.
“It was on the floor board when I got in the truck. Figured I’d put it to use,” she said. “And hell, Cade. You said you’d get us through the block. And you sure did. Pretty impressive.”
“Physics,” he said, as the other vehicles formed up in a line stretching back. “Honestly ... I thought this thing would squeak through without making contact.”
She smiled. “Nobody’s perfect, Mister Grayson. Are you going to see if the blade is going to stay put before we get going?”
“No need,” he said. “It’s down now ... thanks to you. It’s going to stay there until it won’t. And it’s Cade ... or Grayson. No Mister. And I’ve never answered to sir, never will.”
She nodded and looked to her left at the static herd of dead, some standing, most not. “Are we going to take care of these now or later?”
He looked at his Suunto. Saw that it was nearing four o’clock and realized time was slipping away fast. He shook his head. “We’ve got a lot to do still. Mount up or we’ll be driving home in the dark.”
Just as Taryn nodded and turned toward her truck, Cade’s radio blurted to life. He regarded the side mirror and saw the Land Cruiser coming to a halt at the back of the procession. In the next beat Duncan said, “We better stop and bury those soldiers back there.”
“No time,” Cade said. Full of remorse for having left them languishing in the elements the first time, and cursing under his breath at being forced to leave them now, he dumped the radio on the seat, released his foot from the brake, and pinned the pedal to the floor.
Chapter 35
Dregan’s chest heaved as his body was wracked by a big, booming cough. He spit a thick rope of phlegm on the bark dust at his feet and stood up straight, trying to get his breath. Though he was telling his boys and anyone else who showed concern for him that the changing of the seasons and the fluctuations in weather that came with them was the reason for his worsening condition, deep down under the outer layers of voiced denial, he knew something was eating away at him from within.
He coughed once more, spat on the ground, and then removed the stake holding down the corner of the blue tarp. He walked counter-clockwise around the boxy shape and pulled up three more stakes, watching the edges of the tarp fluttering in the breeze coming up from the east. Mesmerized by the gentle movement, he held one corner and watched the thin tarp ripple for a few short seconds. Once the wind picked up, he pulled sharply on his corner and, like a magician performing the age-old tablecloth routine, jerked the waterproof covering clean off the squat desert-tan Humvee. After catching briefly on the matte-black barrel protruding from the top-mounted turret, the tarp fell quietly in a bunch on the ground.
Just as he’d been doing bi-weekly since late August when he, his brother, Gregory and Mikhail returned from the outskirts of Salt Lake City with this Humvee and three similar vehicles, he climbed aboard and started the diesel engine. He let it idle for a long while, and once the blue-gray smoke began to build under the boughs near his head, he silenced the engine and tapped out a random rhythm on the wheel.
“What are you doing, Dad?” asked Peter. He was standing in the snow equidistant from their house and picket of fir trees under which the vehicles were parked. He was wearing fur-lined Sorel winter boots with the sales tags still attached. His winter jacket and quilted heavy-duty pants were camouflaged in a typical tree pattern favored by hunters. On his head was a hat emblazoned with the words Call of Duty Modern Warfare and the silhouette of a soldier clutching a rifle.
“How long have you been there, Peter?” called Dregan. He hawked again and motioned the boy forward.
Peter replied, “The whole time the motor was running.” He took his hat off and as he crunched across the snow, tucked his long blonde locks behind his ears and readjusted the clasp on back of the hat.
“Time for a haircut, boy. Maybe for your birthday I’ll take you in to see Doc. Get your teeth checked and ears lowered all in one sitting.”
Peter said nothing. Self-conscious of it, he hid his hair under his hat and snugged it down tight over ears that were already going red from the chill.
“You forgot about your birthday?” Dregan said, incredulous. “You’ve been crowing about the big one-three for most of the year.”
Peter opened the heavy door—up-armored is what he’d heard his older brother Gregory call it—and climbed up into the passenger seat. He looked up at his dad, his azure eyes watery from the fluctuation in temperature between inside and out.
“Too much bad stuff happening,” Peter said. “Yes … I forgot.” He smiled, showing off his straight teeth. “But I won’t forget Halloween, though.”
Dregan tousled his head, setting the cap askew. “You already got your mom’s short gene. Candy will just stunt your growth ... and ruin your teeth. She was always proud of how straight they came in, you know. Figured you were going to save us money on braces on account of it.”
Peter made a face and looked away. “We were going to go to Disneyland if I didn’t need them, remember?”
“How could I forget? And Peter—”
“Yes,” the boy said, sweeping his gaze back.
“It’s okay to forget your birthday.” He went quiet for a tick. Covertly wiped a stray tear on his flannel sleeve then fixed his blue eyes on the boy. Slowly he said, “Don’t you ever forget your mom.”
Consciously changing the subject, Peter looked over his shoulder. He hooked a thumb at the weapon in the turret. “What’s that?” he asked.
“That, my boy, is a Mark 19 grenade launcher.”
“Do you have any bullets for it?”
“They’re not bullets like our guns take. It shoots forty-millimeter grenades,” Dregan absently corrected his son. He reached his long arm around between the seats and over the transmission hump. He removed the rectangular lid from a metal canister and walked his eyes across the ammunition lined up in the bottom. He counted the linked projectiles for the weapon. They were gun-metal gray with yellow/gold tips and about the size of a can of soda.
“We have eight rounds left,” Dregan said.
“Is that enough to kill the people who murdered Lena?”
“Perhaps,” Dregan said, the granite set to his jaw suddenly returning.
“And the other three ... are there guns on them too?”
“You know there are, boy. Don’t play dumb with me.” His demeanor softened and he said softly, “I’ve seen you under there and the tarps tenting up. Wasn’t Casper the Friendly Ghost playing soldier, was it?”
“Uh, uh,” Peter said, looking away.
“It’s okay. I woulda done the same at your age. I did, actually.”
Peter swept his gaze to his dad. “Can you tell me about your time in the Army?”
For the umpteenth time, Dregan shook his head. And for the umpteenth time he said, “Not today.”
Peter frowned.
“Go … now. Get back inside the house,” Dregan said with a shooing motion. “And close the door quick so the heat stays in.”
“Are you coming, Papa?”
“After I start these other vehicles. Now go.”
Dregan watched his youngest tear across the snow-covered lawn. The boy scaled the ladder like a spider monkey and went inside without looking back.
***
Forty minutes after the conversation that had left him choked up and thinking about his dead wife, Dregan was finished prepping the vehicles for war. The first round of eight was fed into the MK-19, the other seven resting in the attached ammo box. The other three Humvees were also armed, fueled up, and had started as easily as the first.
Heart heavy from thinking of his wife and daughter, Dregan staked down the last of the tarpaulins. He stood and breathed in deep, felt the cold stabbing his chest. And as he exhaled, the air around his head clouded from his breath and another coughing fit wracked
his body.
The horizontal blinds in the upper-story window were parted, but Dregan had no idea he was being watched as he set off for the house. Halfway there, he convulsed again and spat over his shoulder, painting the snow with a smattering of bright crimson.
In the house, Peter drew his hand back from the horizontal blinds and let the dusty slats snap together. He lay down on his bed and said a small prayer to God, asking for his help so his dad would get better. He heard the rattle-clank of footfalls on the ladder treads then the door opening and closing downstairs.
“Come on down, Peter. Time to go and get your birthday haircut.”
***
Leaving the Blazer in the carport, Dregan drove the Jackson Hole PD Tahoe into town. He decided that by flaunting the vehicle directly connected to the crime scene, he would send a silent message to anyone who might have gotten wind of his plan that snitching was not an option. Conversely, showing up on Main in the liberated vehicle would send the not-so-silent message to the men Gregory had lined up for him that the mission for tomorrow was still on.
He drove the half-mile to town, slow and deliberate. Along the way, he stopped at two different homes. At the first, when a young man came out onto the porch, he made eye contact and delivered a nod and hand signal. The second was different. He stopped the Tahoe in the drive behind a Humvee painted in woodland camouflage and when his brother Henry looked up from whatever maintenance he’d been embroiled in, eye contact was made and Dregan backed out of the snowy drive. With the details having already been agreed upon, nothing beyond that was needed.
Catching on after the second seemingly non-exchange of information, Peter looked at his dad, saying, “The hand signal to the first guy. Means we’re leaving at noon ... when court is in session, right?”
“Very good, boy. I’m glad you picked up on that. But it’s me and your uncle and the men me and your brother lined up who are going. You need to stay and guard our home. If the judge comes snooping around again, you tell him we went out to cull the roamers.”
“They’re not roaming anymore.”
“Exactly. That’s why the judge will buy the story if you have to lie to him.”
Peter was thinking of a way to sway his dad to let him come along when a mud-splattered pick-up sped by on the right then reentered their lane, cutting them off.
“That’s Mister Newman.”
“Probably tied one on. I would if I were in his shoes.”
“You told me Ford’s going to get his.”
“The judge’s verdict only stopped Newman from killing Ford. No satisfaction in letting others avenge your kin. That’s why I need to get to Lena’s killers before the judge and court gets involved.”
“We,” corrected Peter.
Newton’s truck swerved in the snow then jumped a curb directly across the street from the bookstore-cum-courthouse. It was at that moment when Dregan realized what was about to happen and could not help but watch. Part of him wanted to stop Newman, if only to keep the jailers from being injured or killed. But the other part of him—the majority—decided that Ford had already cast his own fate and then concluded that Pomeroy’s men didn’t deserve to be saved.
Like a slow-moving train wreck, the old truck sheared off one of the porch stanchions and the makeshift jail’s porch roof came hinging down atop the full-size GMC, effectively blocking anyone inside from exiting through the double doors.
How I would have done it, thought Dregan as he pulled hard to the curb, telling Peter to get his head down. In his mind, he saw Ford in the cell and Pomeroy’s men watching him. The initial noise would draw the jailers to the blocked front doors. In the ensuing confusion Ford would be all alone in the back room, unknowingly awaiting the reaper.
Dregan silently rooted for Newman as all five-foot-six of him, brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle, leaped from the wrecked truck like a man on a mission. With short precise strides, the wiry man, dressed only in a rumpled tee-shirt and jeans despite the cold, peeled around the corner just as there was movement behind the jail’s clouded front windows. A tick later Dregan heard a pair of gunshots. There goes the door lock, he thought. And here comes act three.
No sooner had Dregan thought it than there was a long, drawn-out fusillade of gunfire. But only the ragged chatter of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s lethal invention. There was no return fire. Not even a few sharp pops of a semi-auto pistol neutralizing the threat. There was only a brooding silence. Like time had ceased rolling forward and the world decided to take a break from spinning. Then there was the opposite. A flurry of activity behind the wavy glass. Then raised voices full of emotion and people were spilling from the buildings on either side of the darkened courthouse.
As the men and women who had no doubt been enjoying time off in the saloon ran behind the Tahoe, not one of them paying him any attention, Dregan, still holding Peter’s head below the dash, let the idling engine pull the rig forward and, steering one-handed, turned left at the crossing street. Goosing the accelerator, he let Peter sit up and turned another left.
Behind the jail, Newman was sitting in the snow, the shattered wooden back door hinged open, fingers interlocked and his hands atop his head. On the sidewalk a yard away, where presumably Newman had dragged him, Ford was on his back, arms and legs spread wide like he had died right there making a snow angel. Runnels of blood were seeping out from the cannibal’s pulped midsection, and around his misshapen head was a rapidly growing crimson halo.
Peter sat up in his seat and looked at the carnage. Though based on his dad’s mood, he should have been elated by the sight, instead, he was feeling equal parts disgust and something he couldn’t put a finger on. Torn, is what he’d heard adults call the inability to decide how they felt about a certain thing. Only this wasn’t deciding what coat to wear or whether he wanted white meat or dark at Thanksgiving dinner. A man had died. Or was dying as he looked on. And to Peter it was all so surreal. Up until now Dad had sheltered him from the dirty work, as he called it. Skinning a deer. Cutting a rooster’s head off. Or killing a man. To Alexander Dregan it was all the same—dirty work.
Right here and now, the deep red liquid pulsing from the multiple holes punched into Ford’s chest and guts looked like the black cherry flavoring the concessions people spritzed onto his snow cone after a Little League game. And the way it steamed as it cooled and bloomed slowly in the snow around the prostrate body only served to reinforce Peter’s initial impression.
Dregan clucked his tongue. “That’s what happens when you cross the line, boy. And don’t you forget it.”
One of the men Dregan had motioned to a few blocks back sidled up to the idling Tahoe. The man pulled his hood back, revealing his slender face and high forehead. He looked over each shoulder and then fixed his stony gaze on the Tahoe.
Peter looked into those eyes, shuddered, and glanced away.
Dregan pulsed down his window. The man, blonde and blue eyed like the boy, said, “You better go or you’re going to be called as a witness.”
“Nobody saw me,” Dregan lied. “We lucked out. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day at the courthouse. And at noon when Newman goes to trial and Pomeroy is feeling useful, we’ll be at the gate.”
“A fifth of hard liquor per,” said the man, glancing at the commotion.
“Each vehicle?” Dregan did the math. Almost a full case.
The man raised a brow.
Dregan nodded and pulsed up the window.
The man smiled and backed away from the Tahoe, watching as it cut a U-turn and sped away, slipping at first and then tracking straight before finally turning right and disappearing from sight a block distant.
The blonde man zipped his jacket up around his scraggly beard and watched and listened as the jailers—a big African American man and a smaller Caucasian fella—filtered among the dozen townspeople congregating around the condemned man’s body. Not wanting to get swept up in the questioning, Eddy Swain tucked his stubby carbine under his arm and strolled slowly
towards his Subaru. He got behind the wheel, dropped the all-wheel-drive WRX into gear, and drove away slowly following in the Tahoe’s tracks.
Chapter 36
No shots were fired their way as the small convoy left the roadblock behind. They passed the trio of roads leading north off of 39 into town, wheeled south for a spell, then looped around and paralleled the reservoir heading west—still no bullets cleaved the air or spiderwebbed any windows.
All parties were breathing easy when Cade pulled over on the Ogden Canyon Highway a short drive west of where Trapper’s Loop Road peeled off towards Morgan and the County airport of the same name, twenty-three miles through the rolling countryside due south.
While Duncan and Wilson wrapped all eight of the SUV’s tires with the pain-in-the-ass cable chains and topped off the gas tanks, Cade, Daymon, Jamie, Lev, and Taryn waded into a throng of roughly two hundred eastbound Zs. Stretching about a hundred yards west, the shamblers were mostly frozen in their tracks upright, and by the time Duncan bellowed, declaring the vehicles “Good to go,” the small group wielding a dagger, machete, tomahawk, and pair of folding knives respectively had felled two-thirds of the dead and left them scattered and leaking onto the road from one shoulder to the other.
Walking between Lev and Cade, Daymon wiped blood from Kindness with a scrap of cotton tee-shirt taken off a fallen corpse. He sheathed the machete and hurled the soiled fabric to the ground. “Too bad we couldn’t finish the job.”
“Get used to it,” said Cade. “This is nothing. I spotted a real big herd back a ways. They were a couple of hundred yards south on Trapper Road. Easy to miss if you weren’t looking left.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Lev. “I did the math and it isn’t encouraging. Before the shit hit the fan there were fifty thousand people residing in Ogden. Even if only twenty percent of them found their way through the canyon and were standing in a neat little line, we would need a bunch of snow days and every warm body from the compound in order to cull them all and dispose of the bodies.”
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 21