Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed

by Chesser, Shawn

  “You sure that’s necessary, Boss?” Daymon asked, making a face. “They’re four by fours.”

  “Just hoping to head ‘ol Murphy off at the pass, that’s all.”

  “Pardon the pun, right?” Daymon tugged his knit cap tight over his mini-dreads and then pulled Kindness from her sheath. He looked at Cade with a smile and a rare twinkle in his eye. “Thought you’d never ask.” He turned and strode toward the small herd and, as he passed through the low-hanging exhaust, his black boots set the vapor swirling, giving the impression that he was walking on clouds.

  Cade watched him go for a second then flicked his gaze to the others. They were arming themselves and chatting like they were getting ready for a night out—not fixing to take down a hundred former human beings: men, women, and children all represented within the eastbound procession. He called Wilson over and relieved him of the baseball bat. Then he drew the Gerber and held it out, pommel first. “Use this,” he said, more order than request. “You’ll find it’s much more efficient.”

  Without a word, Wilson took the offering and started out after the others, who were already following closely in Daymon’s footsteps.

  Cade leaned the bat against the 4Runner. Then, favoring his tweaked left ankle, he walked to the Land Cruiser, where Duncan was bent over and rummaging through the gear in back.

  Hearing the squeak of Cade’s soles on the settled snow, Duncan poked his head around the rear of the SUV. “You prick,” he said. “Volunteerin’ me instead of Carrot Top to get down on the cold ground and monkey with these things?” He tossed the two plastic boxes unceremoniously to the road, breaking one wide open in the process. Grimacing, he hoisted a tangled tire chain from the box and held it up in front of his face like a metal veil. “Hell, I’d just as soon try to shove a hot buttered noodle up a cat’s ass than shred my fingers putting these on.”

  “Gimme one of them,” Cade said. “I wanted the Kid to get back to being used to seeing blood on his blade.” He took the chain from Duncan and gestured at the dead crowding the road up ahead. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s bound to be thousands of them at the pass and in and around Huntsville and Eden.”

  “And?” Duncan drawled. “You obviously wanted some alone time with me, too. So spit it out.”

  Cade looked over his shoulder and saw the five survivors tearing into the immobilized herd. On the periphery, where he had asked that the corpses be deposited for ease of removal later, Wilson was jabbing the black dagger head-high then immediately dragging each kill to the shoulder where a small pile of them was building. Daymon and Jamie were out ahead of everyone. He had taken his hat off and his stunted dreads were bobbing with each methodical swipe of the machete. On the far side of Daymon, where Cade imagined the dashed yellow centerline to be, Jamie was bringing her tomahawk down in short efficient strokes, dropping the dead into vertical heaps on the road where they once stood.

  All the while the unlikely duo were at work with their blades, Lev and Taryn were following in their footsteps and dragging the leaking sacks of pallid skin from their metal-flashing wake.

  Cade regarded Duncan with a hard stare. All business-like, his hand touching the Glock strapped to his leg, he said, “What do you think about us staying the night in Huntsville when we’re done in Ogden Canyon?”

  Duncan’s brow shot up. He hadn’t been expecting this. Especially after the one-two punch the younger man’s family took last time he was away for an extended period of time. “Sure … but what’s Brooke gonna say?”

  “I won’t be asking her. This is for the good of the group and needs to be done. It’s the first real advantage we have had ... hell, all of mankind has had over the dead without having to resort to the use of tactical nukes. I just hope the President and her people in Springs don’t have so many irons in the fire that they throw away this first real opportunity to make a huge dent in their numbers.”

  With a look of confusion on his face, Duncan removed his glasses and a square of fabric from a pocket. “So what are you asking me for?”

  “Because of where we’ll be staying.”

  Not following, Duncan regarded the nonstop movement down the road.

  Cade followed Duncan’s gaze and, after they both watched the macabre happenings there for a couple of beats, he noticed the older man’s shoulders droop.

  Wearing a look of concern, Duncan turned to Cade. “You mean you want me to stay the night in Glenda’s home.”

  Cade nodded. “If she’s alright with it. You can call the compound and ask her first.”

  “Well, well. I’ll get to meet Louie after all,” Duncan said, the look of concern morphing to one of astonishment. He shook his head, cast his eyes down. “I don’t think the old boy is going to have much to say about his wife’s new man.”

  “I’m not following,” Cade said.

  “You’ll see,” Duncan replied, forcing a smile. “Let’s get these chains on.” As he bent down to grab the box of chains, the smile faded and, triggered by the fear that he might find out things about Glenda she had not yet divulged to him, that old familiar craving was back.

  Chapter 38

  A short while after adding a number of fresh lesions to his knuckles, Duncan was sitting in the passenger seat and pounding his fist on the dash in perfect time with the chains thrumming against the freshly plowed road.

  “What’s eating you?” asked Daymon, taking his eyes off the road for a long two-count.

  Seemingly hypnotized by the shiny wood veneer fronting the glove compartment, Duncan stared and drummed, but made no reply.

  Nonplussed by the lack of response, Daymon shook his head and shifted his gaze forward just as the 4Runner two car lengths ahead rolled over an adult-sized corpse, splitting it in half at the hips and sending the two pieces spinning off in entirely different directions. He muttered an expletive as the legs and pelvis went into a lazy flat spin across the snow and became hopelessly tangled up against the right-side guardrail. Then, in the blink of an eye, he was channeling a sailor and his muttered curse words were a full on verbal assault on his own bad luck. And though his reflexes were superb, due to the effect the chains had on both the steering and acceleration, when he tried to wheel around the three-foot-long chunk of legless upper torso, the maneuver was not entirely successful. Like hitting a speed bump at thirty-five miles per hour, the luxury sport-utility rose up on the left side, but only shortly, because the speed bump was a skull and, bone not having the same properties as cured asphalt, it imploded, sending a hollow sounding pop coursing up through the floorboards. In reaction to the sudden change in angle, in unison, both men listed left and then jerked back to the right as the rig settled back to earth and the metronomic cadence that had been vibrating the chassis and their teeth returned, as loud and annoying as ever.

  Still grimacing from the imagined visual produced by the awful noise, Duncan answered the question. “What’s eating me?” he said, voice rising an octave. “A whole bunch of little problems, that’s what. And all of ‘em put together is like a whole school of piranhas tearing me apart bit by bit.”

  “I feel ya,” Daymon said just as one of the plow trucks delivered a metal hockey check that sent a dozen corpses careening against the canyon wall. “I’m dreading the moment my girl runs out of her pills. Ever since the shit happened in Robert Christian’s mansion she’s been a special flavor of crazy.” He paused for a tick and then went on, “And when they do run out it is going to be ultimatum time for good ‘ol Daymon.”

  “What do you mean?” Without conscious thought, Duncan popped open the glove compartment.

  Daymon shot him a glare. “Why you goin’ in there?” he asked.

  “Habit,” replied Duncan. “An old one that’s dying hard.”

  Up ahead, the road took a sharp dip where it looked as if an unchecked stream had spilled down the opposite hillside and eroded the roadbed underneath. The four vehicles ahead of them slowed, entered the dip and then rounded the following right-han
d sweeper, picking up speed along the way. As Daymon braked to navigate the beginnings of a major washout, his eyes were drawn down below to his left, where visible in places through the snow cover was a mosaic of color. After staring for a second, he realized what he was seeing was the clothing of the dead that had fallen or been pushed from the road. And as he steered nearer to the guardrail and got a closer look at the canyon bottom, from his elevated position he saw arms reaching up, the fingers frozen claw-like and seemingly taking desperate swipes at the sky.

  “Gotta be a couple thousand of ‘em down there,” Duncan said.

  Still gawking at the macabre sight, Daymon replied, “Double or triple that number ... at least.”

  Duncan rapped his shredded knuckles on the glove box door. “Better keep your eyes on the road,” he said as brake lights flared red up ahead and the lead truck with Cade at the wheel swung a sudden right-to-left arc over three lanes.

  Heeding Duncan’s warning, Daymon slowed, and once the taller plow trucks pulled around the bend, got his first good look at the Ogden Canyon roadblock that up until now he had only seen from the air. To the right of the road rose a nearly vertical cliff face with scrub and gnarled trees clinging to it tenaciously. Opposite the steep face, beyond the guardrail, the canyon dropped off sharply an indeterminate number of feet to the logjam of dead bodies that a second ago had been the object of his fixation. And looming a dozen feet over Cade’s now inert and inexplicably high-sided plow truck was a wall of rust-colored shipping containers. Best he could tell, they were still mostly blocking off the body-strewn four-lane.

  Four abreast, three deep, and stacked two high, the containers looked to have originally been assembled in an inverted ‘V.’ The twelve on the side with the drop off had been pushed inward, presumably by the surging dead, and now sat nearly parallel with the guardrail. From Daymon’s viewing angle, the breach there looked to be three feet wide and at the most ten feet deep. And, like cattle in a chute, dozens of unmoving corpses were stuck fast in it. Most were upright and had succumbed to the effects of the cold mid-stride. A handful of them teetered precariously over the guardrail, spared a trip to the bottom of the canyon due to Old Man Winter’s sudden intervention.

  Daymon steered the Land Cruiser around the 4Runner, leaned forward and looked across Duncan and saw that both Jamie and Wilson were staring slack-jawed at the scene they had all just happened upon. A little overwhelmed by the scope of things and just how close the truck Cade was driving had come to driving off the cliff face, he swallowed hard and said to Duncan in a low voice, “We’ve got our effin work cut out for us.”

  Always the optimist, Duncan replied dryly, “And two hours of light left in which to git-er-done.”

  Noting the sarcasm in the older man’s voice, Daymon nodded and said agreeably, “We are fucked.” He applied the brakes and, once the monotonous thrumming of the chains quieted, added, “And I have a sinking feeling we’re all gonna be staying the night in Huntsville.”

  “I think you’re onto something,” replied Duncan, cryptically.

  Daymon pulled the rig hard to the right and parked it with the passenger side tires on the soft shoulder. He pressed the Engine Stop/Start button, quieting the motor.

  “Why don’t you hail Sarge and see what he was thinking going balls-to-the-wall toward the drop off.”

  “No blood no foul,” Duncan replied. “Besides … he’s the only one among us who’s not acting like his panties are bunchin up. No sense in driving him there.”

  Daymon made no reply. He was looking at the listing plow truck with its horribly pranged blade up front and recalling Cade’s prophetic words: Just trying to head ‘ol Murphy off at the pass. “Mission accomplished,” he muttered.

  “What?” said Duncan, his fingers curling around the grab-bar near his head.

  “Never mind,” Daymon replied.

  The doors on the Land Cruiser opened simultaneously and both men exited, Duncan wincing at the annoying metal-to-metal groan his produced. Eyes downcast, he made his way out of the deep snow-choked ditch and, sneering with disgust, kicked aside a severed leg blocking his path. Slipping, sliding, and cursing under his breath while using the vehicle for stability, he shuffled to the front of the SUV, stepped over the crushed cadaver the leg had apparently come off and, finally standing on flat ground, shook a fist at Daymon.

  Without a trace of sincerity in the delivery, Daymon smiled, looked over the hood at Duncan standing ankles deep in gore, and said, “Sorry … I had no idea the ditch was there.”

  ***

  Sitting in the listing truck, left cheek mashed against the side glass, Cade relived his near-death-experience. First he had felt the building mass of corpses working against the engine. Then he had eyed the looming wall of metal and tried to time his left turn so that the blade up front would clear as many of the Zs away from its base as possible. Finally, as he gave the truck more gas and straightened the wheel, two things happened simultaneously. First, the extra added weight bogged the truck down and there was the groan of rending metal. Then, as a gunshot-like bang of the plow trying to tear free from its mount rang out, all resistance of the bodies grinding against pavement gave way, the truck suddenly lurched forward and he felt a sudden weightlessness.

  Ass off the seat and wrestling with the wheel and brake to get the combined tonnage of truck and load stopped, time slowed for Cade. A heartbeat away from impacting the guardrail and a fatal plummet over the ledge, he recalled grabbing the door handle and preparing to bail out. In the next half-beat, fingers touching the cool metal, inexplicably the sluggish handling truck hauled over to the left and ground to a complete stop, its once-straight plow blade bent into an “L” and periscoping over the hood.

  Flashing back to the present, Cade took a deep breath and pried his fingers free of the door handle. He said a prayer, thanking his God as he looked past the sloped hood and saw the accumulation of bodies below. He regarded the blade and came to the conclusion that because of the way it was bent completely to vertical and rocking back and forth gently—thanks to his numbskull miscalculation at the first roadblock, and this new failure to foresee certain handling characteristics—it was now rendered all but worthless. So he set the brake and stilled the engine. Time to make lemonade out of lemons.

  He hailed Taryn and Lev on the radio and asked one of them to pull close to the rock spreader attached to his truck. He climbed over the transmission tunnel and flung the passenger door open. Half-expecting gravity to send the fifty-some-odd pounds of metal, vinyl, and glass right back into his face, he immediately leaned back into the cab. But instead of the undesirable result, the door hit the break point and hinged wide open with the mirror hitting sheet metal and finally arresting it. After looking over the sill and judging the drop as doable—even with his tweaked ankle—Cade lowered himself slowly, facing the detritus-smeared undercarriage, until he felt his boots come into contact with the unusually spongy roadway. With the stench of decay assailing his nose, and fully aware of the dangers the splintered bone and body fluids presented, he limped through the minefield of body parts and around back of the truck where he was met by Lev.

  Holding a nylon tow strap he’d scrounged from under the seat of his UDOT truck, Lev asked, “Where do you want it?”

  A little embarrassed by the predicament he had gotten himself into, Cade said nothing. The only child in him coming out, he took the orange strap from Lev, duck-walked under the truck’s passenger side and hooked it to the frame. When he turned back, Lev had the other end attached to his truck’s bumper and was behind the wheel, hat off, and staring ahead with a stony set to his jaw.

  Cade straightened the strap and backpedaled well away from the rig’s exposed undercarriage. Flashing a thumbs up to Lev, he bellowed, “Go!”

  There was a puff of black smoke and the Mack’s big diesel howled. The strap produced an inharmonious twang as it snapped taut. Then, slowly but surely, Cade’s mistake rolled off the crushed corpses, banged back onto all t
en tires, and lolled side-to-side like a dinghy in a swell for a quick second until the load in back leveled and all movement ceased.

  Grimacing, Cade looked at his mess. For one, he had drastically overestimated the amount of bodies the plow could handle. He studied the distance from the wall of cadavers and the guardrail dwarfed by it. Couldn’t have been more than six feet from going over. Shaking his head, he shifted his gaze to the scraped and dinged white metal rail and the vertically ribbed wall of the nearest container and saw through the gap there what had to be thousands of Zs packed in tight.

  Out of his truck and working to get the strap untied, Lev paused and said, “That was close.”

  Cade made no reply. Just stared at what almost was and what they were going to have to face if his plan here failed.

  Having just walked up, Duncan said, “Lev … I think if our boy Crash here woulda somehow jammed just one more carcass under his truck, we’d be looking over that rail and saying sayonara to him.”

  Lev started to say something until he saw how shaken Cade appeared.

  So Duncan did it for him. “Were you trying to commit vehicular hari-kari there, Cade?”

  Cade was about to make a reply he would have probably regretted when Lev reentered the conversation. “What do you figure, a couple hundred new ones were showing up here daily until the weather stopped ‘em?”

  “At least,” replied Cade, his glare softening as he looked away from Duncan and met Lev’s gaze. “Good thing for us is it seems just as many end up below as actually squeeze through the gap.”

  “Quit yer jawin’ about couldas and wouldas,” Duncan said. “This would have all been avoided if someone”—he looked directly at Cade—“had let me dynamite this pass closed for good.”

  “But I didn’t,” Cade said. He locked eyes with Duncan. “And I told you my reasoning behind it. And you agreed.”

  “I was drunk.”

  “When weren’t you?” Cade said.