Heidi lurched on her long-travel suspension as the chute of Jersey barriers they had been following narrowed and the paved two-lane gave way to an unimproved dirt track. It was a newly graded access road put there to skirt the northside Red Zone.
The hula girl threatened to take her act elsewhere as the track curled around the west side of what was once a lush green oasis within the city. Unlike the No-Man’s-Land bordering the east wall, where the countermeasures consisted of mostly just tripwire-activated flares, the parkway’s rolling grounds was peppered with obstacles constructed from welded steel, hewn wood, and barbed wire.
What Raven was seeing reminded her of old pictures of D-Day her grandpa had once shown her. However, the dozens of bodies stuck in the wire and impaled on traps here were not wearing waterlogged uniforms and slack-jawed death masks. Instead, they were mostly naked and struggling mightily against the objects piercing their rotting flesh.
As the Bronco passed by, heads panned and dead eyes tracked it.
The unimproved road came to a sheep gate secured with a length of chain. It was rust-streaked and being pressed upon by a pair of badly decomposed zombies.
Raven lost the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to Duncan and had to dismount and open the gate and wait outside while Daymon pulled Heidi through.
The short run of dirt track on the back side of the gate fed to a boulevard shaded by trees and being encroached upon by overgrown lawns fronting two-story homes with darkened, grime-streaked windows.
The streets here were still garbage-strewn, and leaves and fallen branches had coalesced into little organic speed bumps Daymon showed zero care in avoiding.
“Why didn’t you tell us the place you got the paint is outside the wire?”
Deadpan, Daymon replied, “You didn’t ask.”
Raven flashed him the bird.
As Daymon laugh-snorted, Duncan said, “I saw that.”
“I don’t care,” Raven shot. Back to the drawing board was what she was thinking. That her plan just got altered was the real source of her anger. Daymon’s quip only added fuel to the fire.
Duncan said, “Why do you care so much about that park? They’re turning it into a monument, anyway. Let the graffiti cleanup be their problem.”
Why? Raven thought. She didn’t want to go into the thing about the initials on the bench matching her parents’ initials. They didn’t need to know how she had drawn strength from those symbols. Strength that she had needed at the time just to put one foot in front of the other. So instead of airing all that, she said, “You know those signs you see every so often on the road passing by the Eden compound? Those ‘Adopt-A-Highway’ signs?”
“Yep,” Duncan said, “I remember seeing them. Patriotic groups like the Freemasons and Veterans of Foreign Wars seem to be doing all the adoptin’.”
“Mothers Against Drunk Driving, too,” Raven noted. “Anyway, that’s what made me think of adopting the park. Just wanted to do something to keep my mind off all the waiting. All those days with no news one way or the other about whether I’d ever talk to my dad again.”
“Sometimes no news is good news,” Duncan proffered. “We didn’t hear from Lev and Jamie until just recently. And they’re doing just fine. Matter of fact, if things pan out, they’ll be here in a few weeks.”
Daymon said, “I thought Lev wanted to stay there.”
“He does,” Duncan said. “Problem is, he doesn’t know how to deliver a baby.”
Taking his eyes off the road, Daymon said, “Jamie’s pregnant?”
“Logan if it’s a boy. Brook if it’s a girl. Once the roads around Eden clear of snow, they’ll be Oscar Mike.”
Daymon ran his window down and braked. He craned around, examining the street signs and nearby homes.
Raven made a face. “I wasn’t worrying about them. Neither of them was in a coma.”
One hand pinching the bridge of his nose, Duncan said, “Point taken.”
“Quit with the jib-jab,” Daymon said. “We’re burning fuel.” He turned to regard Raven. “You want to do your thing now? Because if you still do, tools are on the floor behind my seat.”
Raven dropped her gaze to the floor. As she did, she heard coming in through the open windows the first telltale moans and rasps of dead things, no doubt coming to investigate.
Seeing the same street signs Daymon had noted, she gave the homes flanking the Bronco a quick visual recon.
“This will do.” As she rose up from picking the tools off the floor, in her left side vision, she detected movement outside.
Hefting the Saiga semi-auto shotgun off the floor by his boots, Duncan said, “Zs on our four o’clock. Whatever sneaky snake thing you got in mind, Bird, you better make it quick.”
“He’s right,” Daymon agreed. “We’re drawing a crowd.”
Elbowing his door, Duncan said, “I’ll take care of them.”
Daymon put a hand on the Saiga. “We’re still in the EZ. We have to do them quiet. We get caught discharging weapons out here, they’ll tear up our tickets.”
“The man has a point,” Raven said. No sooner had her words trailed off than the noisy pack of dead burst from between two squat bungalows off her right shoulder. The low ground-hugging shrubs and tall grass between the homes were whipped around as the head-lolling pack forged ahead on wobbly legs.
After a quick headcount, Daymon said, “Stay here, Old Man. I got this.” Looking to Raven, he added, “You go to work on your thing. Don’t mind me unless I call for help.”
She thought, That’ll be the day, and nodded in agreement.
Plucking Kindness and Mercy from the floor, Daymon met Raven’s gaze in the rearview. “I’ll need my bow as well.”
Chapter 40
Daymon had been out of the Bronco all of ninety seconds when he ran out of bolts and dropped the crossbow. He was standing in the center of the road, a dozen feet from his rig’s left front fender, and dragging his two machetes from their leather sheaths.
On the sloping lawn fronting the pair of bungalows between which Zs were still spilling lay the victims of his initial flurry of silent missiles.
There were nine total. Counting the three missed shots, he had averaged roughly one good hit every ten seconds. Not bad for a BLM firefighter from Utah.
Stumbling and falling over the splayed-out corpses, the next wave of dead things, maybe twenty strong, trundled down the lawn and poured across the sidewalk.
Clutching Mercy in his left hand, Kindness in the other, Daymon backed away from the Bronco on a diagonal tack that was meant to lure them away from the opposite corner where Raven was doing her thing.
One glance over his left shoulder told Daymon where he stood timewise.
Immediately after slinking out the door behind him, Raven had shimmied up the nearby sign pole. At the moment she had the uppermost sign removed and was furiously wrenching on the opposing sign. Figuring the girl required another minute, two at the most to finish her task, he led the Zs west, down the sidewalk, toward a bird-crap-spattered big Mercedes Benz sitting on four flat tires.
Long strides affording him a good lead on the pack of snarling dead, he leaped onto the hood, stepped over the glass moonroof, and took up station in the center of the car’s wide, curved roof.
About to engage in a deadly game of whack-a-mole, Daymon crouched down, kicked a leg out for stability, and eyed his pursuers.
“Step right up,” he crowed as a single right to left swipe of Kindness, tracking a flat plane head-high to the first two to arrive, sent both of their skull caps—wispy, bug-matted hair and all—spinning into the faces of the follow-ons.
It amused him that the dead didn’t blink. Not even in the face of airborne fluids and hurtling brain tissue. Shark-like stares fixed on him, locked on him, and devoured him as the dead kept on coming. And there were far more of them than he’d anticipated.
Creating a deadly wall of steel, the pair of razor-sharp blades flashed the air. Gnarled dead hands that breached t
he plane were instantly relieved of fingers. Living corpses within striking range lost their heads.
Daymon stole a glance at the Bronco. Saw Duncan sitting in the passenger seat, Saiga’s muzzle stabbing skyward out the open window, eyes locked on the row of homes on his side of the street.
Raven was no longer up the pole. She was now standing on the porch of a sky-blue Craftsman. From the looks of it, she was just commencing the last of her tasks.
There was a loud pop! and Daymon felt the roof buckle under his weight.
During the half-second he had spent looking up the street, the dead had amassed near the Mercedes’ front end. Adjusting his stance and taking a spot nearer to the sloping rear window, he drew a deep breath and went back to work with the aptly named blades.
Slashing with Kindness and chopping with Mercy, he pared the threat down by half. In a matter of seconds, the pile of twice-dead Zs had grown to the height of the car’s headlights. Tall enough for the dozen or so that still remained to use as a means to drape their bodies over the blood-slickened hood.
The screech of nails raking sheet metal raised the hairs on the back of Daymon’s neck. His breathing was becoming labored due to the high altitude. As a result, his biceps and triceps were afire. Each new swing of the machetes brought him closer to exhaustion. He was beginning to question his willingness to become the bait in this crazy side trip of Raven’s when a suppressed weapon’s hollow reports reached his ears.
The beginning of a grin was quickly erased by the snap-crackle of bullets slicing the air dangerously close to his position. This continued for a few seconds, with the intermittent sound of bodies falling, shell casings striking pavement, and his racing heart all combining to drown out the fading rasps of the creatures surrounding him.
When the shooting finally stopped, the drift of dead bodies in front of the sedan completely obscured its bumper, grille, headlights, and hood. A twenty-something male Z had taken a head shot while on the hood and had come to rest face down and spread-eagled. One arm was twisted grotesquely behind its neck. The other was riddled with old bite marks and hung limply over the fender facing the street. Slow runners of brackish, black blood leaking from the twice-dead corpse traced vertical lines on the exposed paint. Clumps of brain tissue and shards of hair-covered skull on the bullet-pocked windshield created a gruesome archipelago stretching from one window pillar to the other.
Looking left and right, Daymon saw more of the same: corpses two and three deep blocked all four doors. Heart still jackhammering, he said, “You could have shin-shot me.”
“Better than the alternative,” answered Raven as she stalked around the car, SBR in one hand, Geiger counter in the other.
Daymon leaped to the ground. After wiping the gore from Kindness and Mercy, he sheathed the pair and drew his dagger. “Any of them hot?”
Returning from her counterclockwise orbit of the car, Raven shook her head and switched off the device. “Nothing to worry about.” She changed mags and slung the SBR over one shoulder.
Seeing movement through a tangle of interlocking limbs, Raven knelt down beside a child-sized corpse that had become trapped underneath the weight of three others. Its one visible eye doing a crazy dance in the hollow socket was what she had seen.
Bracing the drift of corpses with a knee, Raven drew her Gerber. Hinging over sideways, she located the roving eye in the gloom. As she maneuvered the dagger through the warren of cold flesh, her stomach clenched, and an icy chill tickled her ribcage.
It’s the right thing to do she thought as she buried the tip of her blade into the roving eye and put all of her weight behind the killing thrust.
Finished stilling the handful of Zs that had eluded blade and bullet, she went to work sawing a heavily pierced ear from one waifish corpse. The thing was flat-chested and looked to have been dead since summer. Random tattoos running up and down both stick-thin arms were now just blobs of color in a pallid sea of wrinkled skin and no help in identifying its gender.
“You can’t do that,” Daymon said. “We’re in the Exclusion Zone and half of them have your bullets in them. Someone finds out this was our doing, we can all kiss our Golden Tickets goodbye.”
Raven said, “If we don’t take ‘em, someone else will.”
“If we take them,” Daymon pointed out, “we can’t deny it if they ask us. At least not with a straight face and a clear conscience.”
An old memory triggered, Raven heard her mom in her head. Do the right thing even when nobody is watching.
Shaking her head, she regarded Daymon, a sullen expression on her face. Through clenched teeth, she said, “You have a point.”
“Quit yer jawin’,” Duncan called. “We’ve got some more deaders on the way.” He was out of the Bronco now and hooking a thumb in the direction from which they’d just come.
Without exchanging another word, Raven and Daymon hustled back to the Bronco.
Holding his seatback forward for Raven, Duncan said, “Mighty fine shooting, Tex.”
As he fired the V8 and searched for first gear, Daymon said, “Ought to call her Wyatt Junior.”
“Not yet,” Duncan said as he climbed in and slammed the door shut. “She’s got a long way to go before she bests her dad with a rifle, let alone a pistola.”
Daymon drove a few blocks west, then turned left.
“Why are we heading back toward the wall?” Raven asked.
Finding another gear, Daymon said, “Not only is the house where I got the paint outside the wire—”
“—it’s in the Exclusion Zone,” Duncan finished. Looking to Raven, he went on, “When have you known our friend here to do things the easy way? Dropping a few dozen trees across I-89 instead of just blowing the bridge like I wanted to do. Then he went and moved into a new place outside the wire, drawing the attention of Adrian and her ilk. I could go on.”
Daymon said nothing. Just continued to drive until he reached a corner three blocks south of where he last turned.
Craning, Raven asked, “Which one is it?”
Slowing, Daymon said, “Next intersection, look to your left. It’ll be on the south side of the street, second house in from the corner. Look, but don’t be obvious about it.”
“Side-eye it,” instructed Duncan. “Do not turn your head in that direction.”
“Understood,” Raven said, making herself one with the backseat.
Though the Bronco was rolling achingly slow as it crossed the intersection, Raven didn’t get a great look at the house. From the two-second-long glance, she determined only its color, that it had only one level, and that there were no vehicles in the driveway or parked at the curb.
Daymon said, “You see it?”
Duncan said, “Yellow single-level bungalow, right?”
“I got it,” Raven said. “Yellow one-level. No cars on the street or in the driveway.”
Duncan said, “Don’t discount that garage.”
“Yeah,” Daymon said sarcastically, “that’s where I’d park my rig if I had the balls to squat in the EZ.”
Raven said, “Really, Daymon? Balls and squat in one sentence?”
Red began creeping up from the man’s collar.
Regarding Raven, Duncan said, “Seen enough?”
Angry at herself for not picking up more of the surroundings during the slow drive-by, Raven said, “Now on to the next stop. What’s it called?”
Duncan chuckled. “You forgot already?”
Raven said nothing.
“House on the hill. That’s your only clue.”
After giving it some thought, she said, “I’m stumped.”
Daymon said, “You won’t be for long.”
Chapter 41
The next stop whose name had eluded Raven was Ray’s Restaurant. A shingle under the sign read: Home of the Mile-High Stack.
A greasy spoon breakfast joint just outside the EZ, Ray’s was formerly a property owned by a West Coast restaurant chain known for its powder-blue metal roofs, quaint
white window trim, and wide-open floorplans.
Now the place looked nothing like those shiny beacons on the hill offering pancakes slathered with any topping one’s heart desired and crowned with a veritable Matterhorn of whipped cream.
Having endured the initial wild days of the flash zombie outbreak, had its windows boarded over as a result, and then sat through months of inclement weather with no upkeep, Ray’s looked more like a Detroit foreclosure than the family magnet it once was.
“Here it is,” Duncan said. “I’m told that this place holds the motherlode of ears.”
“I ate here once,” Daymon declared. “We were fighting a big fire on the backside of Garden of the Gods. After eating orange dust and cutting scrub for ten days straight, I needed something besides the MREs and pork and beans we were being served. Talked the crew into making the short drive down here during a mandatory twelve-hour stand-down. Best damn blueberry pancakes a brother has ever had.”
“Ray’s,” said Raven. “How’d I forget that? Ray and Helen were such nice people … at least once you got beyond Helen answering the door and saying, ‘Ray’s got a gun on you. What do you people want?’”
Starting a three-point-turn that would leave the Bronco facing back the way they’d come, Daymon asked, “What’s so special about this place?”
Eyes roaming the mostly empty parking lot adjacent to the restaurant, Duncan said, “Rumor has it that early on in the Omega outbreak, some people from the surrounding community used it as a depository for their Omega-infected relatives.”
As Daymon shifted into Reverse, he cast a skeptical look at Duncan.
Duncan said, “Look at it this way, ye of little faith. Hospitals those first days were full to capacity. With talk of a cure spreading faster than the outbreak, doesn’t a little roll of the dice make sense?”
Raven said, “It made sense until it didn’t.”
Daymon finished the turn and set the brake. Regarding Duncan, he said, “Since your source came through last time, I’m willing to hear you out. Tell us how you heard about this and, most importantly, how much the person you heard it from wants for sharing the info?”
Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse (Book 14): Home Page 21
