Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed

by Chesser, Shawn

  “Where we gonna to start? Front or back?” Duncan asked, his hoarse voice and drawl making him sound as tired as he appeared.

  Great minds, thought Cade. He didn’t answer at once. He was busy trying to decide who looked worse, Duncan, or the dead thing lying face up in the snow a few paces away. Magnified by his spec’s thick lenses, Duncan’s red-rimmed eyes and the puffy bags under them made him look like a junkie who had been up and riding the dragon non-stop for days. Then it dawned on Cade that the older man wore the same look as every soldier he’d survived the Special Forces Qualification Course alongside of so long ago—dog tired and running on fumes.

  “Are you up to this?”

  “I was born ready,” Duncan said. He plucked his knife from the belt sheath and flicked it open. “I’ll start in the back. You start here. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  Cade donned a headlamp and adjusted the beam so it hit head-high to him wherever his eyes tracked. “Sounds like a plan,” he said, inadvertently blasting Duncan’s eyes with its hundred-and-thirty lumen beam.

  Mumbling something that began along the lines of with friends like you, Duncan stalked off south, wending between the tightly packed dead and stopping a dozen feet in. “I’m at an impasse. Let’s both start here. I’ll go right.”

  “Roger that,” Cade agreed, his Gerber already tainted with the first victim’s viscous black blood.

  ***

  Two hours after they started, Cade and Duncan were nearly three-quarters of the way through their grim task of thinning out the maxi-herd—a name Duncan coined, and every time he uttered it in a forced high falsetto made both he and Cade think of a Kotex commercial.

  Cade made his way to the middle of the two-lane. A hump of earth rose up more than head-high to him a dozen yards beyond the shoulder. It wasn’t a gradual rise, but more of a vertical wall shot through with various horizontal layers of sediment, mostly reds and oranges which, like the quarry to the east, indicated soil rich in iron. And like stubble after a hasty shave, lonely sage and scrub clung to its top.

  He treaded through a warren of twisted corpses and leaned with his back to the cut in the earth. He took a long pull from a bottled water and passed the remainder to Duncan, who was sitting in the snow, his breathing labored.

  Hand shaking with a perceptible palsy, Duncan accepted the bottle. He downed the water in one gulp and tossed the bottle aside. “Chief’s shedding a tear somewhere,” he joked.

  “I’m not following,” Cade conceded, cracking a second oft-refilled bottle open.

  Duncan chuckled. “Just referencing a commercial that was on television before you were a gleam in someone’s eye.”

  Cade shrugged and handed the water over. Then, again utilizing the skill recently taught to him by former SEAL and Special Agent to the President, Adam Cross, he stood atop a morbidly obese corpse and looked south down the length of the road. He did a quick calculation and decided two hundred was a fairly accurate headcount of the dead they had left to cull. “Almost done,” he said. “I’m going to move the plow up again. Watch yourself.”

  “Going to get me back on Daymon’s behalf?”

  “No,” replied Cade. “But you and Lev better give him a break. Why don’t you take your passive aggressive aggression out on Wilson?”

  “Called out by Cade.” Duncan rose, shakily. “I’ve been expecting this. And the answer is no. I’m working with Glenda on my character defects.”

  “I know, I know,” Cade said. “Progress, not perfection. You guys keep it up, though, that last strand is going to snap and we’ll lose him.”

  Awash in the headlights, his shadow a hundred feet long, Duncan said nothing.

  “Why I wanted to end the standoff peacefully,” Cade said. “We need all of the living we can get because there’s a war brewing, and I’m pretty certain we’ll be fighting more than just the dead.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “For one … I’ve been seeing lots of vapor trails. High up.”

  “You jumping on the chemtrail bandwagon?”

  “No. Hardly.” Cade shook his head. “However, Nash keeps calling. She’s called each of the sat-phones. Gotta be something to them.”

  Incredulous, Duncan said, “Phones … plural?”

  Cade nodded. “All three.”

  “That’s what you’re basing your assumption on?”

  “No. There’s more.” Cade relayed to Duncan everything the Navy SEAL Griffin had told him during the flight to Los Angeles aboard Jedi One. About how the Chinese and Russians were both trying to exploit the United States while she was on the ropes.

  “We’re fucked if the Bear and Dragon both fared better than us.”

  Again Cade nodded. “First things first. We’ve got these to go through. Then I’ll plow them off the road.”

  “Lookie who’s spouting the AA lingo now.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Of course you don’t, Cade. I wouldn’t expect you to. You, my friend, are what we like to call … a normie.”

  Cade said nothing to that. He was already on his way to the plow truck and wolfing down an energy bar.

  “You’ll never understand,” mumbled Duncan. He watched Cade hop into the truck and followed it with his gaze as it pulled forward three or four lengths.

  Cade poked his head out the window. “Good?”

  “Good!” Duncan flashed a thumbs up that cast a sword-sized shadow on the bodies in front of him. “Time to make the doughnuts,” he mumbled, parroting yet another pop culture reference from his era that’d probably be lost on the thirty-five-year-old.

  The diesel engine cut off and there was a little backfire, which was followed by that same crushing silence that reminded Duncan of the end of every one of his failed relationships. He was stewing in melancholy thoughts when he heard from somewhere south of him what sounded like the peep a baby chick makes. Just one. Could have been a figment of his imagination. He was about to delve back in with his blade when he heard it again. Definitely from somewhere deep in the pack, he thought. Making the drawstrings on his parka lash his face, a stiff wind gust whipped out of the east.

  Cade limped over and saw the older man standing there seemingly bewildered. “You OK?” he asked.

  Duncan shook his head. “Not if what I just heard is what I think it was.”

  Cade shot a look that said: Go on.

  “It didn’t sound like what you described earlier. Wasn’t a scream by any stretch. But it did remind me of someone choking back a scream.”

  Panning his head slowly left then back to the right, Cade listened hard. Nothing. There was only the steady three to five mile per hour wind out of the east that had just picked back up and was sending puffs of snow from the scrub lining the top of the knoll. “You’re hearing things now. Should I bust your balls … or believe you?”

  “I heard what I heard.”

  There was a lull in the wind and the sound was back, louder this time, and from more than one spot in the throng of dead yet to be culled.

  Cade shook his head. Effin Body Snatchers. With a granite set to his jaw, he said, “Let’s finish this.”

  ***

  Forty-five minutes later, with the big numerals on Cade’s Suunto reading a quarter of eleven and the newly risen moon casting a blue glow over the killing fields, he and Duncan took a short break from sending the dead to their final rest.

  Cade stood on the frost-heaved shoulder, rubbing his neck with one hand. Taken root in his lower back was a knot the size of a golf ball. His hips hurt from stepping over bodies while favoring his left ankle. Something to do with his pelvis in a constant state of misalignment, most likely. And though not as bad as when he had injured it in the chopper crash outside of Draper, his ankle was throbbing and the leather upper and laces of his boot were stretched to their limit.

  Sitting cross-legged on an oval of blacktop he had scraped free of snow, Duncan stared at a nearby corpse. The legs were twitching and the constant movement was s
lowly eroding the snow underneath it down to the blacktop. And even though the half-dozen creatures were now prone, they would occasionally emit a very eerie half-whistle, half-moan type of sound. Apart from this, all of them had one more thing in common that body-type, age, race, and sex had nothing to do with. All of the Zs laid out on the road in front of Cade and Duncan were fairly recent turns that had died fully clothed and with hats of one kind or another covering their heads.

  Two of the six were middle-aged. A man and a woman who, by Cade’s estimation, which he based on the light wear and tear on their expensive matching outerwear and boots, had been walking the earth in an undead state for less than a week. Though the two were found nowhere near each other in the throng, Cade and Duncan were of like mind that they had been husband and wife in life. Their thin sterling wedding bands looked to have been worked by the same artisan’s hand. Furthermore, cementing the shared hunch, the pair’s clothing, though different in style and color, bore the easily distinguishable Mountain Hardware logo.

  Another of the ‘whistlers,’ as Cade had taken to calling them, had died just a normal teenaged girl dressed in gothic attire: leather boots, ripped jeans, and a black leather jacket with spikes and anti-conformist logos plastered all over it. Pulled down real low, almost to her eyes, was a wool watch cap also in basic black. Save for a few facial piercings, the brunette wore no jewelry. Several fingers on one hand bore bite marks, while the rest had been cleanly stripped of flesh, leaving glistening white phalanges throwing the pale moonlight. Riding up the left side of the teen’s ravaged neck were angry raised welts, the dark purple ridges contrasting sharply with the pasty white dermis and yellowed trachea on display for all to see. Cade gathered that the injuries to her hands had been suffered while fighting off the hungry dead. The neck wound was a direct result of her losing that life-and-death battle, which he imagined had happened, judging by the lack of real decomposition, no less than three days ago.

  The other three whistlers lay sprawled out on their backs on the shoulder closest to Duncan. All were males in their twenties or early thirties and of Asian descent. The uniforms peeking out from under their cold weather gear sported a tan camouflage pattern nearly identical to the fatigues he was wearing now. The low-rise helmets still snugged tight to their heads were close in design to the Kevlar bump-style tactical helmet he favored. He walked his gaze lower and saw that, like the helmets and uniforms, the knee protection still strapped on the bodies were knockoffs of American designs.

  He unzipped one of the cadaver’s parkas and, in addition to finding a number of bite wounds suffered to its shoulder through the ripstop fabric, there was a black pistol and several magazines for a rifle riding in a chest rig slung over lightweight body armor—all glaringly similar to western products. Hell, he thought, the bastards copied our latest fifth-generation jets from plans stolen from various DoD contractors’ computer servers. Why not mine private sector databases for anything else they didn’t want to design themselves?

  He pulled the coat back and slipped a small black radio from an inside pocket. One quick glance and it went into his pocket. Then he yanked the coat off the Z’s shoulder and stared at the olive patch affixed to the uniform there. No surprise. The stylized sword complete with pommel and lightning bolt wrapping the blade, at a quick glance, could easily be confused with the SF patch worn by American Green Berets.

  Shaking his head, and not liking this new finding one bit, he regarded Duncan, who was staring at the Chinese soldier and slowly chewing a bite of energy bar. “Chinese Special Forces,” Cade said. “Probably part of a scout recon team.”

  “Where’s their weapons?”

  “Probably with their vehicles.”

  “Why’d they dismount?”

  “They were riding motorcycles.”

  “That’s stupid,” Duncan said, chuckling. He took another bite and stuffed the rest of the uneaten bar in a pocket.

  “Yes it was,” conceded Cade, thinking back to his own two-wheeled flight from Camp Williams and the subsequent collision with the young Z that earned him a dose of road rash and almost got him killed. “Yes … it … was.”

  Duncan grunted and shifted to his knees. “Give me a hand,” he said. “I’m stiffening up like a pecker in a Viagra factory.”

  Smiling at the joke, Cade put his hand on the older man’s shoulder. “Why don’t you take a load off,” he stated. “I’ll finish what we started here.”

  “I’m tired … not dead,” drawled Duncan.

  “I need you to try to get the kids on the horn,” Cade said. “Tell them to wrap it up and head on back to the house.”

  “What if they’re not finished?”

  “It’s a short distance to the boat launch from the house. Figure we can tackle whatever is left there tomorrow.” Cade cast his gaze on the six corpses, one of which was again making that hair-raising sound. He narrowed it down to the teenaged girl or the older man. He knelt beside the man and slid the Gerber into his eye socket all the way to the hilt, silencing the faint whistling. “Once we’re done in Eden,” he went on. “We can come back and mop up the leftovers.”

  Duncan swallowed. “Copy that, Boss.” He watched, emotionless, while the former Delta operator added five more souls to his black Gerber. Teenaged girl, older lady, and all three of what he guessed to be People’s Liberation Army SF scout soldiers who had been caught by the Zs with their pants around their proverbial ankles.

  As Cade cut across the road, his legs chopped through the headlight beams, creating a strange strobe light effect that made the handful of cadavers left standing look all the more like props straight out of a Halloween house of horrors. Duncan watched him go and dug out the two-way radio. He made the call and relayed the order in a manner so that it sounded more like a suggestion. Finished listening to Wilson yammer on about how many they’d culled and assuring the kid their work was far from done, he stowed the Motorola and, curiosity getting the best of him, stripped the coat from one of the Chinese soldiers.

  ***

  By the time Cade had finished putting down the last of the dead, he was feeling like Duncan looked. He threaded his way through the sea of bodies, avoiding the obvious collections of fluids that had pooled here and there on the road’s undulating surface.

  He found Duncan in the Land Cruiser. The engine was running, that much was clear. Wisps of exhaust curled up and were scattered with each new gust from the east. The driver’s side window pulsed down when he was even with the front bumper. He put a hand on the rig’s b-pillar, and when he leaned forward the heated air escaping the rig warmed his face.

  “You done?” asked Duncan.

  “For today.” He rubbed his shoulders one at a time. Then, working the kinks out of his neck, he said, “Strange house and hard floor be damned. I’m going to sleep like a rock tonight.”

  “Not after I show you this.” He took something from the passenger seat and passed it out the window.

  Cade removed his glove and took the item. Turned it over in his hand. It was a laminated sheet of paper roughly eight-by-ten and had a crease in the middle for ease of folding. Both sides were filled with symbols that looked like stick-houses to Cade. Opposite the strings of Chinese characters were English translations. The one that caught his eye first was front and center. It said: Surrender and you may live. Another disturbing phrase farther down the sheet, near the crease, read: Are you infected? Lastly, he read the words, We are here to help you, and lost it. “Bullshit,” he said. “They’re here to finish what they started.”

  “On a lighter note,” said Duncan, “the Kids put down most of their Zs. Some of them that were still inside their tents started making noises and moving.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Cade said. “Temps should drop back down again tonight. That’ll buy us some time tomorrow before they fully reanimate.” In his head he heard Glenda going on about the snow. It’s too early for this, she had said. Then her warning: Be careful out there. It might be shorts and tank to
p weather by tomorrow. Though he knew she was being a little facetious with the last part, she wasn’t joking about how the weather was prone to have wild fluctuations this early in the season. She was speaking from experience. But, she was only speculating. And that meant that Cade had a little wiggle room in the decision-making department.

  Interrupting Cade’s train of thought, Duncan said, “One more thing … while we’ve been out here, Urch and Oliver were clearing out the buildings downtown. They wanted me to tell you they’re going to get a jump on Eden just before first light. Apparently Oliver’s already gotten a headstart culling the rotters over there.”

  “Knowing Daymon, he’s got something percolating he’s not letting on about.”

  “Give the kid a break. Do those words sound familiar, Delta?”

  “Yes they do, Army.” Cade clapped Duncan’s shoulder. “Go ahead and turn in. I’m going to give the road a quick plowing. I’ll be back at the house in twenty minutes … tops.”

  Without a word, Duncan pulled the Land Cruiser around in a three-point turn. He stopped near the opposite shoulder and fixed his gaze on Cade. “Watch your six, friend.”

  Cade nodded and climbed into the Mack. As soon as the SUV began to slowly pull away, out came the Thuraya and he banged away at the keypad, composing a quick text message to Brook. Then, repeating a Duncanism, he said to himself, “Time to make the doughnuts,” and started the gory task of clearing the two-lane of the twice-dead corpses.

  Chapter 58

  When Cade turned the plow truck onto the street dominated by the towering Queen Annes, both of the SUVs were parked against the curb out front. There was no flicker of candles behind the panes of the French doors up above, and on the ground floor not so much as a stray bar of light escaped around the front door or the boarded windows. All in all, the house seemed just as dead as the hundreds of corpses he’d put down this day.