Now on the second pair of identical skis, and tacking a second high speed run onto them, he could literally feel the base layer being abraded away, and started catching chemical-laced whiffs off the melting P-Tex. So to ensure he didn’t have to walk the rest of the way down, he tucked again and rode the second half of the hill without getting air while staying away from the ever-growing patches where the rocks and dirt and grass was showing through.
With no idea if Oliver was behind him or not, Daymon hit the end of the marked trail and, just like the old days, rode his momentum all the way into the parking lot and came to a grinding halt beside the looming orange plow truck where he received a well-earned double dose of stink eye from Cade and Duncan.
Duncan was standing near the gore-encrusted plow blade, arms crossed and looking like he had something to say.
Daymon tossed his poles down, clicked out of the thrashed skis, and kicked them aside. Sweating profusely, he unzipped the jacket to his waist. Feeling eyes boring into him, he ignored Cade, who was looking down on him from behind the big rig’s steering wheel, and instead took the path of least resistance. He looked over to Duncan, who was standing by the driver’s side door, and knitted a brow. “What?” he said rather sheepishly.
Before Duncan could unload one barrel, let alone both on the dreadlocked man, there was a harsh grating racket and Oliver skied onto the parking lot with sparks flying off his edges. Following Daymon’s line, he made it to within a dozen feet of the UDOT truck where his momentum bled off and he stepped out of the still smoking skis.
“What in the hell,” exclaimed Duncan, “do we have here?” He gave the two a quick once over then answered his own question. “Let’s see, there’s a black guy with dreadlocks and a white guy wearing a hat sprouting fake dreadlocks”—Oliver flashed a lopsided smile at that and peeled off the novelty ski cap—“and if I didn’t know any better I would have thought I was looking at two-thirds of the Jamaican bobsled team. Only you two are dressed nowhere like that class act. Wearing all that neon makes you look like a couple of Technicolor dildos who’ve lost their way and ended up on the mountain.” He pointed in the general direction of Eden. “The porno convention is down there. You dolts must have taken a wrong turn in that four-by-wanna-be Cadillac.”
Skis, poles, and gloves shed, Oliver, still clad in a neon green ski ensemble and clunky boots, approached cautiously.
Daymon said nothing but looked to Oliver, a stupid pot-affected grin spreading across his face.
“Why yes, yes we did,” said Oliver, sounding rather disingenuous.
Finally, somewhat composed, Daymon peeled off his goggles. “How’d you find us?” he asked.
Duncan shifted his weight and leaned against the truck. “The first dead giveaway was the SUV-sized hole in the front of the ski shop at the base of the hill.”
“The accordion security gate was closed and locked,” Daymon protested. “The Kids have the bolt cutters so we had to improvise.”
Duncan said, “Cade here put two and two together and we followed the Powder Mountain Ski Resort signs. Hell, they’ve got one every hundred feet leading up to here like breadcrumbs. Must have had a hell of an advertising budget.”
“Nope … just steep lift ticket prices,” Oliver proffered, stoned eyes glittering. “And the Salt Lake and Ogden douchebags don’t even blink at paying them.”
“Didn’t,” added Daymon. “Past tense. They’re all gone now.”
Duncan changed the subject. “We drove through what’s left of Eden. Good job coming in. What’d it take you, all of an hour to put them down?”
“Thirty minutes,” said Oliver, his grin fading. “I already started in on them yesterday.”
Arm and head hanging out the plow truck window, Cade asked, “And the North Ogden Pass … is it still blocked?”
“Real good,” Oliver said. “I got a car running a while back, waited until full dark and drove up to get a look at it from this side. Even glowing green you could tell whoever threw it up meant business. In addition to the shipping containers—kind of what Daymon said you all did up at the south pass—these folks left the trucks they used to haul the containers up there nosed in against the barricade. Tires weren’t flattened, though.” He looked up at Cade. “That was genius.”
“Well, hell,” drawled Duncan. “Why didn’t you boys answer the radio then?”
Like a mountain lion waiting to pounce, Oliver began, “Just cause you’re doinking my mom—”
Cutting him off at the pass, Duncan said, “Whoever told you that is full of shit.”
“Daymon told me all about you two,” Oliver said, fingers on both hands curling into fists. “Don’t think you’re going to slide in and try and fulfill some father-figure fantasy of yours using me as a stand in for little boy lost”—as the man talked, Duncan’s shoulders slumped and he began to worry his silver goatee—“in case it slipped your mind already … I just buried my dad behind that house.”
Daymon looked away as Duncan pushed off the truck and took a step toward Oliver. “You don’t have a thing to worry about, Oliver. I am the farthest thing from Louie you will ever encounter. Drunken degenerate gamblers just do not make good father material. That’s why I never had any kids of my own … that I know of, anyway.” He chuckled at his own funny. Then the chuckle became the full-blown crazy man cackle he was known to belt out now and again, which drove Oliver back to the Land Cruiser where he promptly lit up a joint and started changing from the ski gear back into his makeshift armor and hiking boots.
“Let’s go, mon,” Daymon said in a passable Jamaican accent. “Best be getting before all of deese dead be wakin up.” He clapped Duncan on the shoulder, whispered in his ear, “You can be my daddy anytime.” Now Daymon’s pot-fueled crazy man laugh was on display.
“You gonna be alright to drive?” Duncan asked.
“Yes, Daddy …” Daymon said as he turned and clomped off towards the Land Cruiser, shedding the Day-Glo ski garb as he went.
Chapter 67
Gregory had relocated the girls to a patch of damp ground opposite the log where he could see them as he took down his tent. To Raven, the thing looked like something one would get in the Kid’s section at Ikea. God, how she missed going there and getting all of those little containers and stationaries that she used to keep her desk back home so organized. She hated it when thoughts of the way things used to be crept in out of the blue on account of some stupid unrelated observation. Worst of all was the day she came to the realization that she would never again hear the familiar tune of the ice cream truck. Nor would she ever again have to battle the Pavlovian response it triggered in her. Ice cream, she thought. What she wouldn’t give for one scoop of salted caramel in a waffle cone.
Gregory had just cinched up the stuff sack and was on one knee and turning at the waist with it in his hands when he froze. Went completely still and cast a sidelong glance at the girls. “You hear that?” he asked.
Raven snapped out of her daydream and shook her head. She looked to Sasha, who also indicated ‘no’ with a quick roll of the eyes.
The only thing Raven had noticed when she gave it a second thought was that the pair of black birds—mountain birds, to Mom or Dad—that had been calling back-and-forth from somewhere behind her, in the general direction of the fire lane, had recently gone silent.
Then there was a crash from the woods as, presumably, another tree or two shed their early season coat of snow. The sound hadn’t yet faded when from the opposite direction, downhill and across the clearing, the growl of engines in low-gear tackling an incline floated up to the hide.
Sasha could not resist. “I heard that,” she said. “I bet it’s Cade and the others coming back from wherever they went … and when they find out we’re gone they are going to hunt us down and kill you.”
Wincing, Raven blurted, “They came back hours ago, Sasha. Remember?”
Smiling inwardly at this un-coerced tidbit of information, Gregory put a vertical finger
to his lips and shushed the girls.
Hating nothing more than being shushed, Sasha stared daggers at the back of the man’s head, and though there was nothing to work the cord against but dirt and pine needles, she continued trying to loosen it by forcing her wrists apart against the slight give.
Expecting nothing less than to hear a bugle call hailing the Calvary’s arrival, Raven went to her knees as the motor sounds reached a crescendo. She smiled and glanced at Sasha when the black and white Tahoe she associated with Jackson Hole Police Chief Charlie Jenkins swung into view. Then her brow furrowed when she saw that it was followed closely by a number of other vehicles, including a trio of Humvees similar to the one parked in the motor pool near the compound.
Being a full head taller than Raven gave Sasha a better vantage of the road below. She looked for a second and regarded Raven. “That’s not them,” she whispered.
Raven knew this a half-beat before it was voiced. The vehicles were coming from the direction of the quarry, not the roadblock. Her heart was already sinking when Gregory raised the black radio to his lips. Then he spoke the words: I see you. I’m at your ten o’clock inside the tree line, and like it had never left in the first place, the finger of dread was back and a knot was forming in the pit of her stomach.
“Anything more from the girls?” a disembodied voice answered back.
Gregory nodded and a knowing smile rippled the whiskers ringing his mouth. “I have it on good word that whoever has set up camp down that road is sitting a little, or maybe even a lot undermanned right now.”
Raven was watching her captor and started feeling the cord begin to flex against the constant pressure she was putting on it. Finally sensing that the thumb on her right hand was close to slipping free, she halted her effort long enough to shoot a glare at Sasha. “Keep your trap shut,” she mouthed, then resumed her silent struggle.
Coming to see what her slip of the tongue might have ultimately cost them all, Sasha blinked against the tears forming in her eyes and hung her head between her knees.
Wondering where she had picked up ‘shut your trap’ from—a Duncanism she supposed—Raven took advantage of Gregory’s preoccupation with the new arrivals, got up onto her knees, and craned her head towards the road. Now head-high with Sasha, who was staring intently at the road, Raven saw the Tahoe’s door open and a man just as tall as her captor—if not taller—unfold from the vehicle. Walking a little stooped over, he looped around the SUV and approached the front gate, where he stopped a few feet from the black camera domes. Then, as if the man already knew about them, he held up one of those large yellow pads of legal paper—whatever that was—and started stabbing his finger at it.
As the man continued pointing and flipping pages, a sound, kind of like the lift mechanism at work on a garbage truck, came from the second vehicle in line as the round part on top started swiveling slowly to the right. There was a younger man with a red beard standing straight up in it and holding onto something that looked like a smaller version of one of those cannons sticking from the side of a pirate ship. As the faint garbage-truck-sound ceased Raven saw that the cannon barrel was trained away from the road and in the direction of the compound where her mom and the others were. In the next instant, just as she and Sasha both figured out what that likely meant, Red Beard tilted the black barrel up and the big man with the pad backed away from the gate and went to one knee behind the Humvee.
Eden Compound
Brook selected the book she was reading at random from the pillowcase full of them Cade had brought home the day before. Letting the hand of fate do the choosing, she just reached right in and grabbed one.
The title had revealed little, and since she was the type of person who usually skipped reading the back blurb—especially when sci-fi and dystopian books were concerned, as she always got those two mixed up anyway—she cracked the cover and was hooked from the first page.
Having lost all track of time, she was at a part in the book where the protagonist and his young son were hiding under the floorboards of an old farmhouse, in the dark, and thinking they were alone. Then, just a few paragraphs in, she came to learn that the pair she had been rooting so hard for to survive had stumbled onto a cellar that was a larder of sorts, and the provisions were humans and still alive—albeit missing parts of limbs, the choicest cuts, perhaps.
Though she had yet to come across evidence of, nor hear about, the living eating the living, yet, the winter-like setting and all of the running and hiding from bad guys the two protagonists in the book were facing was starting to hit a little too close to home for her.
Suddenly hungry, she threw a shiver and looked at her watch. Saw that it was quarter past noon and immediately began to wonder why the girls weren’t already pestering her for lunch, or, at the very least, sniffing around for some MRE pound cake, which seemed to be a big hit among the younger survivors.
She stepped into her boots and laced them tight. Grabbed her carbine and looked around for her gun belt before realizing she had been wearing it throughout her treatment, the brief nap, and all hundred some odd pages of one hell of a spooky read.
Heidi was watching the monitors when Brook stepped into the security container. The young blonde looked up at the sound of boots on plywood and smiled, which to Brook was a good thing that meant her medication dosage was working. Had she stayed glued to the monitor for a little too long and then presented her old flat affect, there would have been cause to worry.
Brook unfolded a metal chair and sat backwards on it. “How are things?” she asked, cheerily.
“It has been eerily quiet.”
“Better than the alternative.”
“Truer words have never been spoken.” Heidi rolled her shoulders, her back popping as a result. “Are you taking over?” she asked.
Brook took a second to answer. She was looking past Heidi, at the monitor. On the partition showing the entrance from 39, save for rivulets of snowmelt coursing off the steaming two-lane, nothing moved up there. On another panel, she saw that the middle gate was closed and only dual strips of white remained on the road’s shoulders where the undergrowth had shielded the snow from the effects of the high noon sun. Her eyes flicked over the other incoming feeds. The clearing was once again a sea of grass, now broken and bent over to reveal the muddy landing strip running down its center. On the far side of the clearing, the vehicles sat silent, sun glare lancing off all of their angled glass and chrome surfaces. And lastly, she saw that the camera trained on the compound’s hidden entrance showed only the camouflage panel surrounded by a grove of small- to medium-sized trees that cast shadows in all different directions, rendering it hard to see even if one knew where to look.
“Everything looks great topside,” replied Brook. “Want to trade me chairs? I think I’ve dropped a few pounds since the …” She still couldn’t bring herself to verbalize what had happened to her. The weight of embarrassment she still shouldered and carried around as a result of losing Chief and nearly her own life had almost sent her running the couple of times she’d actually opened up and talked about that day in September to anyone who hadn’t been there. “Any way … my butt’s so bony I bet it looks like two razorblades wrapped with parchment paper. I’ve got my pants cinched all the way down and still they want to fall off me.”
“Better than the alternative,” replied Heidi, for the second time in as many minutes. “Those pills you gave me have got me eating like a horse. I think I may have taken on the weight you lost.” She removed the headphones and powered off the shortwave set. Absentmindedly she ran a hand through her spiked blonde hair as she relinquished the ‘comfortable chair,’ which in her opinion was little more than a folding chair on rollers with a stadium seat jammed under cheap fabric—forty dollars, tops, at the Office Depot.
“Thank you,” Brook said, sliding over and taking the seat. “Sorry I’m late.” She grabbed a two-way from the shelf, and once she saw it was tuned to the proper channel and sub-channel, keye
d the side button. “Sasha … Raven. Pick up. It’s lunch time.” She released the key to a little bit of squelch—par for the course considering the thin layer of dirt covering the roof. “Raven. Sasha.” Nothing. Just static.
“Maybe they’re out of range.”
“Shouldn’t be. I explicitly told them to remain inside the inner perimeter.”
“Batteries?”
“Could be,” said Brook agreeably. She made a face and was about to hail Foley and Tran, whose radios were tuned to the same frequency, when someone broke squelch and then Foley’s voice emanated from the speaker. “Did you find them yet?”
“No. They aren’t answering.”
“I’m over here by the solar array. Me and Tran are gonna drop everything and go looking for them.”
“He’s not going to be happy … but I’m going to wake Seth and send him and Glenda out to help you.”
“Copy that,” Foley said.
“I’ll get a coat and head on out,” Heidi said through pursed lips, her smile long gone.
Brook made no reply because movement on the monitor to her left caught her attention. In her side vision flashes of yellow and black registered, making her think at first that a fat bumblebee had taken interest in its own reflection in the camera’s dome. But once she focused on the panel where the movement was, two things dawned on her. One, the camera recording the movement was the one watching the east approach on 39. And two, the movement was no bumblebee ogling itself, that was for sure. Filling up almost the entire partition on the flat screen was a yellow sheet of lined paper filled with bold, black, handwriting. The letters were all capitalized, punctuation was nonexistent, and the grammar was horrible.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 40