For the first few seconds, as her hips were pushed hard into the thin mattress and the bones there made soft popping noises, Brook was swept away from all of the madness of the last few months, and she imagined she was in a high-end spa, enjoying a soothing soundtrack of new-age music accompanied by the sweet aroma of jasmine and sandalwood. Then, in her mind’s eye—not in a sexual way at all—she envisioned some guy named Sven’s muscled hands digging into corded tissue on the periphery of the shiny dinner-plate-sized mass.
She closed her eyes, enduring the initial discomfort until the nerve endings deep within the old wound woke up screaming bloody murder and sent a tsunami of pain signals flooding her brain. No stranger to this part of her rehab, with both hands she grabbed the horizontal bar by her head—the same bar she had zip-tied herself to that fateful day—and, grunting into her pillow, rode the initial wave out.
Thirty minutes of deep tissue work later, Glenda had transitioned from man’s touch mode and was delivering feathery caresses on pressure points where energy was supposed to transit the body. This went on for fifteen minutes, during which Brook drifted off into a near trance-like state.
The final fifteen minutes or so of the now bi-weekly hour-long session were dedicated to something Glenda called reiki that Brook had learned just the basics about from one of her coworkers back at the hospital in Portland. Never one to really deviate from conventional medicine, she initially had no idea if it was some kind of mumbo jumbo or an established and accepted alternate therapy. With nothing to lose and a long way to go to getting back to normal, she had kept her mind open and was the better for it. For this had become the part of Glenda’s efforts—totally devoid of touch or pressure or penetrating oils—that seemed most therapeutic.
Now, Brook’s eyes were open and she watched Glenda move her open hands over certain areas on her body, letting them hover there, her face a mask of concentration. Before the first session, the older woman had confided in Brook that she had been practicing reiki for a number of years and, though she was loath to admit it to her AA fellowship—which didn’t matter now because, sadly, she figured them to all be dead or undead—she believed it to have been a great help in her recovery from alcohol addiction.
“Almost finished,” said Glenda. “Once you’re one hundred per cent I want you to learn this so you can return the favor.”
Brook smiled. “I owe you so much, Glenda. Without your calming influence on this group, I think we would have disintegrated. Maybe even ended up all going our separate ways.”
“I was a soccer coach and den mother for the boys. Louie didn’t want any part of it.” Glenda smiled and sat back in the folding chair. “I guess it’s in my blood.”
Brook said nothing. She had pulled a tee on and rolled over onto her stomach.
Glenda covered her with a thin sheet. She looked at Max, who was curled up on the floor by the door, his bony ribs rising and falling, a steady rhythm to his breathing. “Get some rest,” she said. “When should I reel the girls in?”
“Give them a little more time,” mumbled Brook. “Half an hour or so.”
“Max?”
The dog perked up.
“He stays,” said Brook. “Thanks again for nursing a nurse.”
“Sleep tight,” Glenda said, unclipping the two-way radio from Brook’s pants that were balled up on the floor by the foot of the bed. Before she had risen and pocketed the Motorola and halved the distance to the door, Brook was making snorting noises. And by the time she had let herself out and was closing the steel door to the Grayson quarters behind her, the chainsaw-like rattle of Brook snoring was in full swing.
***
Sasha hadn’t been joking about visiting the graves of the fallen. Her reasoning for venturing up on the sloping hillside was to take a peek at the flowers Raven had recently adorned them with.
The two spent the better part of thirty minutes playing island hopper. Then, with the back side of the hidden gate in sight, abruptly and without warning, Sasha abandoned the game and cut another ninety-degree turn to her right and led Raven on a wild goose chase through the forest just inside the tree line.
Ten or fifteen minutes spent chasing the redhead around trees and through thick undergrowth had taken a toll on Raven. When she finally caught up to Sasha, she found the older girl sitting high up on the corner post where the fence stopped its parallel run with 89 and at a right angle snaked back into the forest in the compound’s general direction.
Translucent bars of sunlight filtered in from above. Save for Raven’s labored breathing, it was quiet here. There wasn’t even a bickering blackbird or chattering wren to be heard in this lonely corner of the property.
Hands planted on her knees, Raven gulped air until the throbbing in her head subsided enough so that she could stand up straight. But when she did so she was met with the much sharper pain of her still knitting ribs telling her to slow down and take it easy.
“Why did you run away like that?” she asked.
“Would you have followed me if I hadn’t?”
“Probably not.”
“Are you glad you did?”
“Yes,” Raven admitted, a toothy smile creasing her face. The exhilaration from being alone outside the wire … well, not technically outside the wire, but away from all of the adults—her parents especially—was a feeling unlike any she had ever experienced. The only thing she could remember that was even close to it was when she and Mom escaped the zombies overrunning Fort Bragg aboard the hulking twin-rotor helicopter. That wasn’t quite the same, she supposed. Sure, the danger had been real, but at Bragg there were five or six armed soldiers and another twenty women and children aboard the ‘bird’, as her dad liked to call helicopters, no matter the number of blades spinning over it.
Her nerves had been afire then, and she was feeling that same nervous energy crackling through her body now.
“C’mon,” said Sasha. “I saw something over here by the road I want to show you.” She reached down and offered her hand. Helped Raven up and over and then swung her own legs past the top post and lowered herself to the ground.
Once again, Sasha took the lead. Staying inside the tree line, they continued paralleling the 39, and after ten or so paces the redhead stopped and pointed through the thinning trees in the direction of the road.
By now, snow was falling off the trees like sailors jumping a sinking ship. Both girls donned their stocking caps as the fat white clumps splashed to the ground with audible wet plops.
Raven smelled the corpse before she saw it. Crinkling her nose against the sweet carrion stench, she parted a spray of ferns bigger than her and came face to butt with an adult zombie. It was stalled out, kind of like an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph, arms seemingly in motion, both bent at the elbow but hanging down at its sides. Its ashen white face was stuck in a permanent scowl, teeth bared and eyes ‘peeled wide’ as silly old Duncan would have said if he were here.
“Told you they aren’t moving yet,” said Sasha, sliding her knife from its sheath.
Yet, thought Raven. Made her think of Glenda constantly telling Duncan about the ‘yets’ he hadn’t quite gotten around to. She didn’t quite understand where the term came from, but this thing in front of her had moved recently. Behind each of its bare heels was a two-inch scuff in the snow. And as she exited the bushes first to get a closer look, she could have sworn its milky eyeballs moved ever so slightly.
“Kill it,” said Sasha, thrusting her knife in Raven’s direction, handle first as Wilson had taught her.
Raven said nothing. Eyes gone as wide as the smelly zombie’s, she regarded the offered blade and shook her head side-to-side, delivering a vehement ‘no way Jose’, charades style.
Arm at full extension and knife held rather delicately—kind of like a diaper containing an especially juicy load—Sasha’s body language said: I’m not doing it.
“We’ve been gone about an hour,” said Raven. “Let’s go back.”
Putting the kni
fe away, Sasha said, “I still want to see the graves. Real quick … then we’ll call your mom and tell her we’re coming back.”
“The clearing is that way,” Raven said, pointing to her left at the oval of light thirty feet down the road.
Once again, Sasha took off without stating her intention. This time she stalked off across the road at a diagonal in the direction of the clearing, parted more ferns and disappeared into the forested gloom.
Thankful Sasha didn’t haul into a sprint this time, Raven shot a final worried look at the putrefying corpse and followed her new friend dutifully and without question as she delved into the woods opposite of where they had just emerged.
Sasha had fought through the undergrowth like she had an idea of where she was going. When the two parted the final phalanx of drooping ferns and ground-hugging scrub, they were standing on a muddy, snow-dotted, single-lane road. Left for nature to reclaim long ago, the uneven track rose up slowly while simultaneously curving right-to-left, where it was eventually swallowed up by the trees lining it.
***
After a fifty- or sixty-yard uphill slog, where the road began to level out, Sasha came to a halt and pointed out a scrap of fabric someone had tied to a low branch of a juvenile tree growing up on their left.
Raven looked at it and shrugged as if to say: So?
“Do you know where we are?”
“Behind the place where Phillip got bit,” stated Raven, confidently.
“Nope.”
“Where then? Cut out the spy routine and tell me.” Raven’s cheeks were flushed, her breathing rapid. She didn’t know it yet, but she was one cryptic response away from experiencing her first ever full-blown anxiety attack.
“Jamie brought me up here not long after we all arrived from Colorado Springs. She said this is where her and Jordan got the jump on someone who was spying on them. Led to Duncan and Logan setting an ambush down there on the road. She said they took out a bunch of bandits some bad guy she called Chance brought back here from Huntsville.”
“I remember hearing about that,” said Raven. “Why didn’t we just cross the road down below and climb the hill directly?”
“The camera, duh.” Sasha slipped by the tree and her elbow brushed the fabric, sending it bobbing like a worm on the end of a fish hook. “If we’re not seen outside the wire … were we outside the wire?
Chewing on that nugget of teen wisdom, Raven followed after, dodging left and right to avoid clumps of snow suddenly letting loose as Sasha threaded her way forward.
The hide was half a dozen of Sasha’s long strides from the forest road. Raven reached it in ten of her own and a couple of seconds after losing sight of the bobbing yellow and white cap. When the packed dirt trail went soft underfoot, the instinct to see why drew her eyes toward the dry patch of ground opening up before her. However, when she looked back up to survey the graves through the portal in the foliage, there was a green-eyed man with a dark bushy beard towering over her. One of his large hands was already clamped over Sasha’s nose and mouth and he was holding her off the ground. The older girl’s cap was pulled down, partially covering her widened eyes. In the man’s other balled fist was a black pistol, its barrel pointing right at Raven. The sight of Sasha in peril and kicking at the man’s legs started Raven’s heart battering her ribcage and the old injury there aching. In the next beat, her first real anxiety attack was robbing her breath and choking off any chance of the developing scream ever escaping her throat. The rest was a blur as her knees buckled and stars popped and flashed in front of her eyes like a fireworks display. The last thing she remembered was the cool ground pressing her cheek and hearing the man telling someone out of sight in rapid-fire delivery about capturing two girls.
Chapter 64
The gunfire had lasted all of twenty seconds. There were three or four staccato ripples as the three survivors chose their targets and fired. Cade had watched it go down through the high power scope, wincing with every report, which in his mind equated to one wasted bullet. Kick ‘em when they’re down is how he had been trained to take the fight to the enemy. With the enemies of his old life, violence of action applied swiftly and without mercy had been what kept him tap dancing on the right side of the dirt. However, in this new world where there would be no factories churning out 5.56 or 9mm rounds by the millions, (at least not in the near future, by any stretch of the imagination) survival would depend on scrimping and stockpiling, using the ammo sparingly to train the kids or throwing lead downrange only when there was no other viable option. And with the arrival of the Chinese scouts on American soil, the latter, he feared, may happen sooner rather than later.
A dozen Zs coming to life and making that nerve-jangling noise all at once, while disconcerting as hell, by no means constituted a clear and present danger to the young trio. But he wasn’t there in the midst of the dead, so who was he to judge? He wasn’t their leader, that was established the day he hung his hat at the compound. He made a mental note to bring it up again at dinner when everyone could contribute to the conversation. A little reminder, he figured, would be better than an ass chewing. Live and learn—another motto Mike Desantos favored—would have to suffice.
Five short minutes after leaving the house on the hill and letting Lev off on the shoulder of Ogden Canyon Road, Cade found himself lugging the plow truck around in an ungainly three-point-turn. Bones snapped under the weight of the partially loaded truck, and flesh and internals were ground into a paste as he man-handled the front wheels over the soft shoulder to get them facing in the desired direction. Once the wicked blade was facing east, he reversed the rig a dozen yards until the feeder road to the boat launch/day use area was off his left shoulder. The 4Runner was just a handful of yards away, backed up the entry road a short distance, the sun glare winking off its windshield.
Cars, trucks, and SUVs took up every available slot on the blacktop sprawl. Surrounding the inert vehicles and cinderblock structure rising up in their midst were tents of every shape and color, a good number of them collapsed under the weight of the snow. Sprawled out in death poses, the now twice-dead putrefying cadavers crowded every available square inch of real estate.
Duncan lowered the Steiners and looked to Cade. “Lev made it to the others.” He set the binoculars aside and stretched his bowed legs in the footwell. “East to Eden, young man.”
“Eden is north of our twenty,” Cade replied, not bothering to look at the older man. “Or mightn’t you be talking about the Steinbeck novel East of Eden?”
“Never mind, Socrates,” grumbled Duncan. “Just get us there before the rest of the rotters come back to life. If I remember right, mister … we’ll cull them on the way back … there’s still a few hundred we left standing on the State Route between here and the compound.”
“Would have had to deal with them regardless,” Cade stated. He selected Drive, lowered the polished plow to within an inch of the steaming blacktop and, holding the wheel straight, started the multi-ton snowplow rolling.
The engine whined and Cade imagined the gray-black exhaust belching from the vertical stacks. As the rig picked up speed, a mixture of slush and body parts, frothy and reddish-black, shot from the blade in two different directions. In less time than it had taken him to turn the truck around, there was a straight path plowed through the dead and nothing but a steaming stretch of body-free blacktop laid out before them.
“What was that all about?” asked Duncan loud enough to be heard over the sharp jangling racket that was entering the cab.
Cade worked the controls, bringing the blade up a few inches. The metallic pinging ceased.
“Last thing I want is for us to have to come back to this side of the reservoir and help the Kids change a tire.”
“Ounce of prevention …” mumbled Duncan.
“Exactly.” Cade maneuvered the plow truck through the sweeping left-hander at just under the posted fifty, then swept his gaze northbound at Huntsville as the Ogden River, glittering silver
and gold, flashed under them. After the river crossing, with Dave’s BBQ and Rhonda’s Reservoir Requisites standing out like sore thumbs a few blocks west, 39 became Highway 166 where Cade wheeled the rumbling truck through yet another sweeping left-hand turn.
“I hope Oliver and Daymon made a big dent in the Eden dead,” Duncan said. “Because this fella’s knees are about shot.”
“My pack,” Cade said. “Side pocket right you’ll find 200 milligram Ibuprofen. Take what you need.”
They kept to a long and scenic straight stretch west with the Pineville Reservoir filling up the window on the left, and Duncan popping pills with a real good view of the snow-peppered foothills ringing Eden to the right. He was washing the half-dozen little pills down with a bottled water when 166 jogged back to the north and some unknown mountains, craggy and white, filled up the windshield. “Eden’s seen better days,” he noted as the fire-ravaged town became visible ahead.
“Misery loves company,” Cade said. “I saw the fire from the air. Eden was throwing off embers like crazy and ended up taking Huntsville down with it.”
“Glenda did say this was the hottest summer they had seen in a long time.”
“Global warming at work,” Cade said, knowing it would elicit a response from Duncan.
“Bullshit,” the older man bellowed. “Manufactured fear so that that loud-mouthed, private-jet-owning enviropuke could jam us up with more taxes and restrictions. Don’t get me started.”
“Looks like I just did. So, why don’t you tell me how you really feel,” Cade said, the beginnings of a laugh bouncing around in his ribcage.
“Look out,” wailed Duncan, as a pair of Zs rose up from the roadside a truck’s length ahead and loped a couple of paces toward the plow’s edge.
Cade jerked the wheel right. “Got ‘em.” The twin impacts sounded like gong strikes, deep and sonorous and lasting for a couple of seconds. The top of the blade vibrated briefly and then, like a big orange whale that had swallowed something disagreeable, the walking corpses were catapulted left and right, respectively.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 38