Raven had loosened her shoulder belt and was balanced on the edge of the seat again. Rising up for a better look, she said, “You did this?”
“Yep,” Cade said unapologetically. “With a little help from my friends.” He drove them the length of the straightaway, keeping the passenger tires tracking along the right fog line. A dozen feet from the black van, he slowed and parked broadside to the open rear doors. On the driver’s side was a pair of corpses. Both were obese by anyone’s standards. Only one had turned before death. Its belly was ripped open and maggot-filled, the fly larva causing the taut gray skin to undulate subtly.
The bodies stacked halfway to the ceiling obscured most of the detail from a distance. Up close, however, it was clear the van’s once vibrant shag carpet was soiled with dried blood and God only knew what other bodily fluids that had leaked from the corpses. A sheet of metal perforated with holes—some machined and perfectly round, dozens more jagged and created by bullets—separated the cargo area from the front seats. It was splashed with blood long ago dried to black. Like the apparatus on a set of monkey bars, chain, cable, and steel cuffs attached to the van’s roof cut up the gloom.
Crinkling her nose, Raven said, “What’s all that for?”
“Did Taryn or Wilson mention the booby traps the cannibals were leaving in some of the places they looted?”
A gust blew down the road at them, whipping the grass atop the berm to their left into a wild frenzy. Shell casings propelled by the sudden blast skittered along the blacktop.
Raven swallowed hard.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” he said. “They were transporting Zs in this.” He motioned to the left side of the van. “That one almost got me.”
Parroting Duncan, she said, “Almost only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes.”
Cade shook his head. Marveled at how the old guy was rubbing off on everyone. At how steady of a presence he had become—when he wasn’t drinking.
Though Raven knew the basics, she said, “What did they do with the Zs?”
Cade made a face. Said, “The bastards would clip their vocal cords and drill out their ear canals. Leave them in places where unsuspecting people would run into them. The traps they set were pretty elaborate.”
“Taryn said she didn’t hear the one that got ahold of her hair.”
“Which one?” Cade said in front of a soft chuckle. “She has a knack for letting them get a jump on her.”
“Wilson, too,” she answered, tucking her pigtails up inside her stocking cap. “Operation Arm Removal. Remember?”
Wearing a half smile, Cade shook his head. “I’ve only heard the story a dozen times.” As he was talking his eyes were roving Raven’s face. He noted her slightly upturned nose. The freckles on her cheeks, all but faded now along with her tan. Then he stared into those dark brown eyes. Brook’s eyes.
Raven snapped her fingers in front of her dad’s eyes. “Are you going to get whatever you came here for?”
“Right,” Cade said, blinking back to reality. His cheeks felt hot. No doubt they had gone red. Ears burning, he shouldered open his door and stepped to the road.
Raven watched her dad pause at the rear of the van and waver there for a second. Head moving slightly side to side, he reached into the van and grabbed an ankle. He pulled the first corpse hard and stepped to the side as it slithered from the van and banged the bumper on the way out before settling stiffly on the road. He removed bodies until he had cleared a path to the apparatus. After recoiling from what she guessed was a wall of stench, she saw him wipe the gore from his hands on a clean patch of shag carpet, then dip a hand into a cargo pocket of his camouflage fatigue pants and come out with a shiny multi-tool. After a short three-count during which he stared into the interior, he grabbed ahold of the handle on the bullet-riddled door, stepped up onto the bumper, and disappeared inside.
Raven rose up off her seat and checked the road fore and aft. Seeing they were still all alone, she opened the journal and thumbed past a small calendar going out three years, several pages filled with phone numbers and addresses all written in the same hand, and a couple of pages listing all of the recognized holidays.
The heading on the first page beyond the front matter read January 1, 2011. Raven skimmed the entry—a ramble of words scrawled in the same hand as the contacts. Apparently Rose and Bryan had attended a New Year’s Eve party at the headquarters of Raytheon, Bryan’s employer. Rose complained of a hangover and how the quadruplets just wouldn’t listen when she asked them to play quietly.
Quadruplets, thought Raven. “What happened to the fourth brother?” she said aloud. She lifted her gaze and saw movement inside the van. Judging by the dark camo pattern of the pants, it was her dad hard at work trying to remove some part of the interior. As his hips and upper body rotated back and forth, the van moved in concert, swaying on tired shocks. Eyes touring the mirrors, she found the road behind still clear all the way to the rise. Whipped up by the wind, the only thing moving was the mohawk of grass and ground-hugging vegetation atop the dirt berm to her left. Regarding the bend up ahead where the road swept gently left, she saw only the half-dozen festering corpses lined up on the right shoulder.
Satisfied they were alone, Raven buried her face in the journal. Thumbed all the way ahead to that last Saturday in July when, as Duncan was wont to say: The shit hit the fan. The Saturday her stay with Grams and Gramps in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was cut short by a worldwide viral outbreak whose scope and devastation she was yet to fully comprehend. Her jaw nearly hit her chest when she read the entry for that day.
Bryan called home from work this morning saying a friend of his high up in the DoD urged him to take that vacation to Yellowstone … yesterday!! Yesterday?? I didn’t quite understand what he was going on about. As I rounded up the boys … still in their swimsuits after swim lessons, and packed bags, Bryan burst into the house and went straight for the gun safe. We fought for a few minutes over this crazy spur of the moment vacation. Bryan had a wild look in his eyes as he insisted rather vehemently that we drive west. Drive!? AYFKM? Flying with four kindergarteners is bad enough. Driving with them beating the heck out of each other? Really? I demanded an explanation. I asked him if he’s on drugs? Yes, I was beside myself at that point. I even questioned if this was his mid-life crisis? Lord knows I’d been expecting it. But no matter what I said, he would not tell me what was going on. The whole time Brody and Brock are crying and Brandon and Bryce are having a food fight I am pacing the kitchen and damn near pulling my hair out trying to figure out what Bryan knows and won’t tell me. Grab the Nintendos for the boys is all he was saying. He said it over and over and over. Like a broken record. Uggghhh!! I need a drink.
I was taking things to the van and heard sirens. Lots of sirens! Sounded like they were down by the Charles. Is this a drill? I ask Bryan. He says it’s a bigger deal than that. More sirens! Lots of activity on the Mystic Bridge. Bryan said they’re probably closing the bridge but won’t tell me why he thinks that. Says he can’t say in front of the kids and insists we go without finishing our packing. Turns out he was right! I felt like a turd for the first two hundred miles watching people doing exactly what we were doing: running from the unknown. As I write this we are in a little motel with lumpy beds. Big frown! The heated pool is closed. Humongous frown!
The boys have nothing to do but rough house. A hundred channels plus HBO the sign said. Every effin channel has a frozen image from some governmental agency warning us to stay put and wait for further instructions. Brody and Brock are fighting over the remote as I write this. Great way to start a forced vacation. Only way this gets worse is if Bryan tells me we’re going back to Boston to get his Mom. That happens … I’ll know he’s on drugs!
My world is falling apart.
Calgon, please take me the eff away!
Raven closed the journal and looked up to see her dad hunched over and filling up the back of the van. Looped over one shoulder was a mess of what
looked to her like cables. In one hand was a long pole with a lasso on one end. In the other was an overstuffed gym bag that stretched his arm straight as if it weighed a ton. Black grips attached to the red handles of some kind of tool protruded from one end of the bag. As he hopped down from the van to the road, he suddenly pitched to his left and came away favoring his ankle.
Tucking the journal under one leg, Raven pulsed her window down and offered to help.
He waved her off, limped to the truck, heaved everything into the Ford’s bed, and then climbed into the cab.
“Your ankle again?” Raven asked.
“It’ll never be the same,” he answered. “I’ll be alright.” He regarded her for a beat. “Were you going to tell me about the crawler anytime soon?”
Wearing a startled look, Raven checked the mirrors. Lips pursed, she got her knees under her on the seat and surveyed the road all around the truck.
“I don’t see it,” she said.
“Because there isn’t one,” replied Cade. “But there could have been. Poked my head out and saw you with your head down. You have to—”
“Stay frosty, I know. I’m sorry, Dad. I was just reading the first passage in the woman’s journal.”
“Time and place for that. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” he said. “Do you understand what I mean by that?”
She nodded and apologized a second time.
“What did you learn from the journal entry?”
Raven read the passage aloud.
“They escaped the initial outbreak with all four boys,” he said. “Amazing they got all the way here from Cambridge in the first place. The Eastern seaboard was a mess from the get-go. Tens of millions of people packed in like sardines. Plus,”—he started the motor and selected Drive—“Boston is within spitting distance of Cambridge. Across the Charles River if my memory serves.”
“Did you and Mom ever go there. See where the Tea Party happened?”
Cade’s jaw took a hard set. He said, “Crack the journal and read while I drive.”
Raven nodded. “I have one question,” she said.
Wheeling the Ford past the van and into the left-hand sweeper, Cade said, “Shoot.”
“What’s Calgon? Some kind of pill for stress?”
Smiling, Cade said, “Something like that.”
Chapter 5
Duncan emerged from the heavily forested stretch of State Route 39 roughly two miles west of the compound and forty minutes after he’d entered its dreary embrace. Whereas it had been quiet as a tomb under the canopy, here out in the open he was experiencing sensory overload. A pair of crows in a distant conifer cawed at each other incessantly. Insects feeding on a twice-dead corpse droned on in the ditch. Its bloated abdomen had been sliced wide open. A failed crisscross attack from the looks of it. Glistening in the morning light, a jumble of unidentifiable organs lay scattered on the grass beside the corpse.
Duncan’s eyes tracked from the innards to where the shoulder asphalt began. There he noticed the start of a dark black blood trail stretching from the corpse to the opposite fog line. He wrote it off as the work of a scavenging animal having excised and then dragged away from the corpse a plump, decaying morsel.
Breathing heavy and still suffering mightily from the night of hard drinking, he slung the carbine and worked a water from his cargo pocket. As he stood there twisting the cap from a plastic bottle bereft of most of its rigidity, his own sour breath overpowered the carrion pong.
“Smells like you ate a bag full of assholes, Old Man.” As if in response to the self-admonition, the hangover-induced pounding in his head increased in pace and intensity. He closed his eyes and the cacophony rose to that of someone shaping metal against an anvil. He opened his eyes and spun a slow three-sixty. Seeing nothing capable of producing the racket, he closed them again and in his mind’s eye saw Daymon’s Winnebago. It was rocking to and fro and he saw himself sitting helpless in the folding chair watching the awning undulate snake-like while vertical creases appeared randomly in the RV’s thin outer skin. Though the banging in his head was real, the subconscious vision it conjured caused him to throw a visible shudder. Strange how the human mind works, he thought, opening his eyes and looking skyward to where he imagined Brook to be.
He took a handful of aspirin from a pocket. Without bothering to count them, he swallowed the whole lot dry. Certainly a dozen of the little bastards wouldn’t kill him. Pushing aside the thought of his liver going bad, he took a long pull off the water, the bottle crinkling loudly as its thin plastic walls collapsed.
“You’re falling apart, Old Man. Hearing things where there ain’t nothing. Having flashbacks when you’re supposed to be living in the present.” He stowed the bottle, then craned and looked over his left shoulder. He grimaced at the pain the move brought on, but still went ahead and glanced over the opposite shoulder. Absurd as the notion seemed the second it crossed his mind, he still needed to be certain he hadn’t been caught talking to himself. Because in his experience, only crazies and senile folks talked to themselves. What did that make a person hearing things that weren’t real? Equal parts of the two?
He dragged out his flask. Gave it a good swirl to get an idea of how much forgettin’ juice remained inside the slender metal vessel.
Three-quarters, give or take.
That’ll do for a start.
He spun the lid off with his thumb and took a long pull. Swirled the contents around again.
Down to half. Eight ounces or so.
Spotting a pair of rotters marching steadily against the wall of fallen trees a hundred yards from where he stood, he spun the lid on and returned the flask to his pocket.
As Duncan resumed his march toward the roadblock, the dead things facing it remained oblivious of his presence. They were fixated solely on a blue-crested bird picking its way through the arboreal tangle to their fore. Only explanation for them not following it was that they had become trapped on protruding branches he and Daymon had sharpened weeks ago. And though he felt empathy for the people the zombies used to be, he was saddened more by the sight of the once stately trees keeled over, most of their branches stripped by weather and time. He’d felt the same way in Nam. The Arc Light strikes conducted by high flying B-52s did a number on the verdant jungle. The trees and bamboo not turned into toothpicks from the seemingly non-stop barrage of thousand-pound bombs were laid out much like these firs. He recalled seeing scores of majestic hopea trees uprooted and flattened by the intense overpressure and shockwaves that came with the shrapnel. He’d stood in steaming bomb craters deep enough to hide a man standing upright. Saw whole colonies of primates unfortunate enough to have been caught up in the strikes. And walked among lifeless enemy bodies, their limbs torn and torsos crushed. The way the blasts caused their eyes to bulge from their skulls always fascinated him.
Six of one, half a dozen of another, was what he was thinking as he strode towards the undead duo. As he slipped the fixed blade from its sheath on his left hip, he couldn’t decide which task he dreaded more: getting close enough to these two rank corpses to put them down, or threading his way through wet undergrowth and climbing over fallen trees to reach the bridge at the far end of the roadblock.
Deciding both tasks sucked, the latter a little more on account of the numerous dead things likely awaiting him on the other side, he clucked his tongue to get the rotters’ attention. The female zombie nearest to him whipped its head to the right and leaned back as far as its entangled entrails would allow. Locking a lifeless gaze on the approaching meat, the first turn emitted a grating sound that stood Duncan’s neck hairs on end.
“What’s your hang up, sweetie?” He chuckled as the male rotter tore its eyes from the Steller’s Jay and thrust its arms in his direction, in the process entangling both bony hands in the lengthening rope of intestine keeping the female rotter at bay.
“Looks like you’re playin’ cat’s cradle with your girlfriend’s guts there, amigo. I bet she would no
t approve if she were still of the breathin’ variety.” Duncan was hit in the face by his own breath, which again reminded him of the previous night’s forgettin’ session. Taking a hold of the female’s greasy, shoulder-length hair, he pulled downward, a move that was met by very little muscular resistance and a mess of neck vertebrae popping. He held his left hand steady and brought the knife in his right hand down hard and fast. Hand-eye coordination a little compromised by the recent slug of Jack having rekindled the past night’s drunk, the blade didn’t enter dead center on the milky pupil as intended. Instead, the point penetrated at an angle and the serrated edge grated along the outside orbital bone until the zombie went limp and sagged forward, becoming suspended near upright, with the male’s hands and forearms still trapped in guts and bending at an unnatural angle.
“Look what Mister Jazz Hands got himself into.” Reacting to the quip, the thing craned toward Duncan and hissed. While its teeth clacked out an eerie cadence, its legs pistoned against the damp road and it strained mightily to get close enough to take a bite out of Duncan’s face.
Waving a hand in front of the rotter’s gaping mouth, Duncan said, “And I thought I had bad breath.”
In a burst of frantic motion, its wings but a blue blur, the jay took flight.
Duncan ducked as the bird buzzed the air overhead. He watched it wing away to the east, then grabbed hold of the male rotter’s hair and buried six inches of his blade into its eye socket. Granted sweet release, the zombie’s legs buckled and its arms slid free of the female’s slimy intestines.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 13): Gone Page 4
