Brook crinkled her nose at the result. Two of the four cans she had targeted were untouched. So in the interest of saving ammunition, she snugged the Glock into its holster. Once again forgetting her condition, she made a sweeping bowing movement to usher the girls forward, and suffered the consequences. Wanting nothing more than to numb the pain the easy way—with one of the opiates Cade brought back earlier—she instead bit her lip until the pain there took her mind off the sensation of what seemed to be a million pins and needles assaulting her back.
“Show me what you got, ladies.”
Chapter 40
The crumpled cereal bar was poised an inch from Gregory Dregan’s mouth and the previous bite was still mid-swallow when the first gunshot caught him completely by surprise. He swallowed, drew in a deep breath, and froze. At once a flurry of thoughts bombarded his brain: One shot. Most likely a small caliber pistol. And very, very close.
He rocketed off of his backpack which he’d been sitting on and cast his gaze upward, darting his eyes all around as if he could actually see the dissipating sound waves. When a second report didn’t immediately follow the first, he clean-jerked his pack off the snow, thrust his muscled arms through the straps, and snugged the waist belt tight. He grabbed his rifle and calmed his body. Stood still, listening hard against his own breathing and was rewarded a few seconds into the vigil when another boom sounded off in the distance. His nylon jacket rustled softly as he swiveled his upper body and faced the retreating sound. He stood statue-still and just a handful of seconds later there came two more identical reports spaced apart like the other.
He waited a few long seconds and, when no fifth shot came, hiked off in the general direction of the gunfire with no more of an idea where he needed to be than when he had folded and stowed the ruined map.
***
Gregory walked in silence for a couple of minutes with the fire lane meandering away from where he thought the shooting had taken place. Not wanting to go breaking brush through the heavy forest—a move that would undoubtedly give him away and provide an inviting target for the shooter if he or she were still nearby—he stayed the course.
After slogging another hundred yards or so through the snow with the weight of the pack cutting into his shoulders, a single shot rang out deep in the woods off to his left. He paused and a few beats later there came another shot. Then a few seconds after that he heard a third and fourth. Nine-millimeter, he told himself. Same as the others. The fifth report was unexpected and caused him to start. He had assumed the four-and-done pattern would hold true. But it hadn’t. And this changed everything. The shots continued coming. And they were methodical, like someone was taking aim, concentrating hard, presumably. No sane person would cruise about the countryside wasting good ammunition on the roamers when they were incapacitated and easy enough to kill with a blade. So he figured what he was hearing was one or more people engaged in a round of target practice.
Acting against the overwhelming urge to bolt in the other direction, instead he broke into a dead run towards the sound and began counting the shots. By the time his mental tally had hit fifteen and the shooting stopped, the fire lane was looping back around almost like it was encircling the shooters’ position.
With the sound of the final shot still crashing through the firs overhead, he came to a complete stop, bent over, and braced his hands on his knees. Save for the noise of him greedily gulping lungfuls of crisp mountain air, a heavy silence returned to the forest. There were no hardy mountain birds calling to each other in the canopy above. As the sweat beaded on his brow found the path of least resistance and started the slow slide down his angular nose, he became acutely aware of the pressure building steadily between his ears and the accompanying noise of his own heartbeat throbbing inside his skull.
He remained that way, stooped over, his back arched and straining against the weight of the pack until another round of gunfire commenced. Acting on the assumption that this volley would peak at fifteen, he took a final deep breath, hinged up, and took off running down the road. With the gunshot tally in his head standing at twelve and the steady popping still off of his left shoulder and coming every couple of seconds, the road seemed to end and he found himself staring at a thick phalanx of ferns and ground-hugging undergrowth.
As shot number thirteen rang out, Gregory shed his right glove and drew his pistol. He quickly pulled the slide back and saw a glint of brass in the chamber. Using shot number fourteen as cover, and feeling a little like Indiana Jones entering some jungle-choked ancient temple, he bulled his way through the head-high wall of foliage to his fore. Spitting snow and batting creeper tendrils from his face, he stepped over ferns the size of small trees and inexplicably found himself standing an arm’s reach from a single solitary upright rotter on the side of a two-lane road that had to be State Route 39.
Thoroughly disoriented, like a dog dizzy from chasing his tail, he looked left along the road and fixed his gaze on a spot where the forest canopy gave way and saw what looked like a wide-open meadow. The field of white was fenced near the road and rose gently up and away from the two-lane. Trying to get his bearings, he looked right down the natural tunnel created by the encroaching forest. The road there was straight and littered with fallen branches and needles and a light sprinkling of snow that had managed to infiltrate the thick canopy.
Though it had seemed much longer as Gregory stood there gaping at his surroundings and being gaped at by the thing in stasis, in reality he had only been in the open for a couple of seconds when the fifteenth and final shot sounded off in the distance. Not sure what to do, he ignored the creature and bolted across road to the other shoulder and froze in place, his breathing loud against the all-encompassing silence that followed. He stood unmoving for five long minutes and, when the shooting hadn’t resumed, found a path through the flora to the point where the abandoned fire lane picked back up. He shrugged off his pack and laid it flat on a dry patch of ground amidst a huddle of massive firs. There he sat for another fifteen minutes and when a boisterous conversation between a couple of crows started up down by where he thought the shooting had originated, he took his gloves off and fished the Utah road map from the side pocket.
With the birds bringing their war of words nearer, he unfolded the map very carefully to keep it from tearing completely along the already damp creases. Using the pack as a table of sorts, he folded the flimsy edges in and placed the map flat on the pack so that the town of Huntsville was on the lower left corner and Bear River was on the right. Then, seeing as how he still didn’t know which direction north was, he went about tracing the fire lane with his finger from its origination at the lower quarry and came to the same conclusion as before—the map was old and he was lost.
So he fished the CB radio from a pocket and powered it on.
***
Thirty argument-filled minutes later, with his dad on the other end juggling a radio of his own while consulting a more recent topographic map of the area, they concluded that sometime in the past another road that was not on either of their maps had been carved through the forest. And by comparing the stretch of 39 and retracing his steps on the fire lane in his head, Gregory realized that both the State Route and fire lane had dipped about a mile north before coming back on itself, nearly encircling a seemingly impenetrable tract of forest in the process.
Finally, after looking at the topo-map from every conceivable angle and estimating with a ruler and the mileage key just how far Gregory had come did his dad confirm that where the fire lane crossed 39 was a bit west of where he had spied the tracks and pair of black camera domes.
After once again arguing over compass points and then listening to his dad spew a litany of orders, Gregory turned the volume low on the long range CB and flipped it the bird.
***
As per Dad’s orders, Gregory continued following the fire lane. A dozen yards from where he paused last, it started a slow rise in elevation and began a big lazy right-to-left arc. He walked through the sno
w with the Odd Couple crows and their argument keeping pace. After figuring he had travelled a quarter mile or so, just as his dad had predicted, the fire lane leveled slightly, then turned very minimally to the left and began a gradual descent.
“Shit, Dad,” he said under his breath. “You were dead to rights about the road.”
He paced left for a few yards, scrutinizing the brambles and low-hanging ferns, searching for a way through. Finding nothing, he retraced his steps and repeated the process a few yards in the other direction.
It was a scrap of fabric, red and checked like a lumberjack’s flannel, that caught Gregory’s attention first. Trapped waist-high by the bramble’s sharp thorns, it seemed to be marking an opening just wide enough to fit a man, albeit one with much narrower shoulders than his.
He forced his way through, half-expecting to meet a hail of lead or at the least be looking down the barrel of a gun on the other side.
Though the briars grabbing at his jacket and pack slowed his progress, he didn’t have to wait long to find out his fate. When the brush gave way, he found himself in a sheltered little alcove surrounded on three sides by a smattering of old growth and juvenile firs and aspens. Much like the foliage concealing the fire lane both times it crossed 39, the undergrowth in front of the little hide consisted of ferns and some kind of wild shrubs that came up to his waist.
He looked out from the sheltered pocket abutting the meadow and saw the road below. It ran left to right, and though his dad insisted the vehicle responsible for the tracks had turned north off of 39, he still wasn’t entirely sold. The dense woods in which he was certain the gunfire had come from stretched out ahead of him beyond the gently curving stretch of 39. A triple strand of barbed wire bordered the road nearest him. Across the two-lane State Route an identical run of fencing stretched from left-to-right almost the entire run of road, but for some reason came to an abrupt end where the thick tree line took over.
Nothing moved in his field of view—living or undead. So he shed his pack and set it at his feet on the dry, packed earth. Laid his rifle atop the pack and his eye was drawn to a recurring pattern in the soil.
He went down on one knee and, like an umpire dusting off home plate, brushed aside the accumulation of dry needles and rotted leaves.
The pattern was left behind by someone wearing lug-soled boots. The marks were numerous and had mostly crumbled over time, the edges losing most of their definition.
For a moment Gregory contemplated digging out the CB and calling his dad and asking him to again describe the location where the tire tracks in the snow left the road. Instead, he took his binoculars from the pack, slipped the strap over his head, and stuck the rubber cups to his eyes. He walked the field glasses from left-to-right all the way to where the fence across the road ended, seeing nothing out of the ordinary until he got to the wall of foliage. For some reason he couldn’t point to, when viewed under high magnification, it just didn’t seem natural. Continuing on, seemingly hovering a dozen feet off the ground and reflecting a sliver of white that was the nearby State Route, he spotted the black plastic domes his dad had mentioned. Perched under a circular shroud affixed to a tall tree just inside the tree line, the shiny orbs looked like a pair of unblinking and all-seeing eyes.
Bingo.
Feeling a sense of accomplishment after overcoming the soggy map fiasco and more importantly, avoiding contact with his sister’s gun-wielding murderers, Gregory Dregan set the binoculars aside and started preparing his hide for the long night ahead.
Chapter 41
Cade had called for the huddle, and once everyone was standing in a ragged semi-circle, he began doling out jobs. When he had finished assigning responsibilities, and to his amazement no questions—inane or otherwise—were lobbed in his direction, he picked a path through the morass of fallen dead, careful not to step on a hand or trip on a splayed-out leg and further aggravate his tweaked ankle, and then climbed aboard the damaged plow truck.
With the watery sun starting its slow slide behind the distant Wasatch Mountains and dusk not far off, the group set to their tasks with a newfound urgency that only being outside the wire among thousands upon thousands of undead things could instill.
Taryn and Lev boarded their plow trucks, started the motors, then waited until Cade’s truck was rolling downhill towards the largest concentration of zombies before conducting three-point turns of their own and falling in behind.
In the cab of the lead truck, Cade thumbed his radio to life. “You two are going to have to do the majority of the work. I’ll follow behind to mop up the ones you miss.”
“With that busted up blade?” Taryn said.
“I plan on fixing it first,” Cade replied. “Out.” He put the radio aside and drove past the head of the stalled eastbound herd by three truck lengths. He wheeled left, looped around the handful of Zs that had been out ahead of the undead troop, and then nosed the truck forward until the pranged blade was parallel with the shoulder. Slowly he let the Mack roll forward, checking against the weight of the load with short stabs to the brake pedal until the top edge of the once-horizontal blade was scraping against the underside of a rocky shelf no doubt created when the highway was blasted from the side of the mountain decades ago.
In his wing mirror he saw the other two UDOT trucks finish wide turns and pull abreast of each other, their plows lowered and facing uphill.
Manipulating the controls, Cade kept the pressure building behind the blade despite the harsh whining coming from the hydraulics. The truck shuddered and crouched down up front as the air shocks compressed. He continued depressing the Raise Blade button until there was a drawn-out groaning of metal and the blade began to move in opposition to the static granite outcropping. As the pressure being exerted on both surfaces built further, the weaker of the two yielded first, with the blade bending from the near vertical “L” to something twisted up and resembling a cross between a flattened letter “V” and a fancy curly type of pasta of which Cade couldn’t remember the name.
Roughly half a mile uphill, Jamie and Wilson had lined the two SUVs up against the rock wall and left them parked there bumper to bumper.
Having taken the Stihl from the back of the Land Cruiser, Daymon had it running and was working its sharp chain back and forth against the creosote-stained six-by-six wooden beams supporting the banged-up guardrail. With the pair of muffs covering his ears dulling the keen of the saw, he also failed to hear the sound of metal scraping bare pavement and thus remained oblivious of the goings on at his back until movement in his side vision drew his attention. However, before he was able to react to the incomprehensible sight, two things happened at once. The chainsaw blade chewed through the last couple of inches of the third and final six-by-six support beam. And then, feeling the chainsaw’s bar break free, Daymon took his finger from the trigger, stilling the engine, and backpedaled just as gravity took hold of the twenty-four-foot run of newly severed guardrail. There was a groan of metal twisting under stress and then in a flash several hundred pounds of W-shaped steel and wood beam tore free and performed a lazy end over end tumble to the canyon floor below.
The dangerous part of his job done, Daymon shut off the chainsaw and set it down. With the steam produced by hot metal contacting snow swirling above the road, he removed his hearing protection and turned to see what the commotion behind him was.
“Holy hell,” he shouted, taking a quick step back as half a lane away from him a slow moving head-high mound of death came to an abrupt stop, with many of the corpses on top spilling off the pile and landing with dull thuds near his feet. At first glance, Daymon thought maybe a world-record-setting game of undead Twister had occurred at his back while he’d been working. Many of the rotters were folded over on themselves, some face up, their backs obviously broken like twigs under pressure from the plow. Pasty, road-rash-covered arms and legs, bent at strange angles in relation to their intended travel, protruded here and there from within. Scores of lifeless eyes star
ed back at him as moist gassy sounds emanated from deep inside the warren of decayed flesh.
He thought it comical at first what he must have looked like crouched there on his haunches, ear muffs on and sawing away obliviously, while a couple of hundred zombie corpses slowly tumbled his way. The humor in it evaporated the second he realized that if the pile hadn’t stopped where it did, he could have ended up down below amongst thousands more cadavers just like them.
Anger building, and not seeing Duncan walking his way from down the hill, Daymon stormed the plow, jumping on the running boards and trying to get at the driver.
Hands up, face wearing a look of incredulity, Lev cranked the window down, yelling for Daymon to relax. In fact ‘Stand down’ were the exact words and it took a couple of seconds for Daymon to come to the conclusion that Lev also found nothing funny in what had just happened.
Eyes wide, palms facing outward in a display of surrender, Lev said, “Duncan told me to put them right there. Said you were expecting them there.”
“Duncan is full of shit,” bellowed Daymon, loud enough to be heard above the racket coming from the two approaching plow trucks.
Duncan opened his mouth to shout out an amends for the miscalculation when the truck with Taryn behind the wheel turned directly in front of him and added another three dozen corpses to the growing mountain of arms and legs and staring death masks. He caught her eye and mouthed, “Back up.”
Taryn immediately punched the transmission into Reverse and, like any experienced driver, consulted her mirrors and checked over her shoulder before backing. And it was a good thing she did, because Cade was driving his truck behind hers with the plow up and seemingly on a collision course with the inverted “V” where the containers making up the blockade came together. At the last moment, hearing the Mack truck’s backup alert jangling across the entire highway, he swung the truck around Taryn’s and, with the drawn-out protest of the metal plow again changing shape, wedged all sixty tons of truck and gravel hard against the Conex containers.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 25