Turning off of Kiowa, Raven followed North Sierra Madre Street a block south.
At the next intersection, with Antlers Park, Cascade Street, and the railroad tracks all in sight, she coasted the bike to a complete stop and dismounted.
Gaze roaming the darkened storefronts and buildings all around her, Raven stashed the bike in an alley behind a long-shuttered Caribbean-themed grill.
After a minute or so spent contemplating angles and distances to the two north/south arterials most popular with the city’s growing population, Raven tried the doors to the restaurant—front and back—and found them locked. She didn’t want to attract attention with a gunshot or the sound of breaking glass, so she walked her bike across the street to check out Pikes Peak Community College.
Though the modern building had many windows overlooking Antlers Park, it would do her no good because chains were wrapped through all the door handles.
Moving on, she discovered, kitty-corner from the restaurant, a small one-level building that looked to have once been a gas station. Depot Square Railroad was etched on the glass door. A pair of Dodge Ram pickups parked on a cement apron fronting the building bore the same name on their doors.
Though she wanted to do her surveilling from inside, she parked her bike and crouched down between the pickups where she could see the train tracks fifty yards west of her, all of Antlers Park to the south, and the intersection of Pikes Peak and Cascade a block to the east.
Remembering that the newer models of NVGs were prone to sucking the life out of batteries faster than previous generations, she resorted to watching the three avenues of approach without them.
Sound carried in a city with very few people. Especially one in which civilian motorized vehicles were banned from the roads from dusk to dawn.
Crickets struck up a symphony once Raven settled in. Now and again the low engine growl from a CSPD patrol Explorer making its rounds would echo down the side streets. Far off, outside the walls (or so she hoped) competing packs of coyotes could be heard calling back and forth.
More than an hour passed before her radio finally emitted a low burst of static. It was Daymon. He said, “Our trio of tattooers stopped off at a boarded-up hardware store a few blocks from the shop. I’m real close to the entrance and didn’t want to draw attention to myself by calling you. The girl just left. She’s out of earshot now. Went west for a couple of blocks before turning north. I would imagine she’s now heading in your direction.”
Raven pressed the Talk button. “What about Pirate and Snake?”
There was a long pause. Then, whispering, Daymon said, “They’re coming out now. Looks like the tattoo bros found themselves new backpacks. And boy, do they look like they’re carrying some weight inside them.”
“Are they still coming on their bikes?”
“Yep,” he answered. “All three are riding. You better get ready. I have a feeling they’re going to regroup. Watch for them crossing Pikes Peak sometime in the next few minutes.”
Raven said nothing. Instead, as her dad had taught her, she broke squelch one time to indicate she understood, rolled the volume way down, and powered on the NVGs.
***
Five minutes after stowing the radio in a pocket, Raven was dividing her attention between the three approaches. Everything she looked at was presented to her in shades of gray, black, and white. It was as if the world had been washed of all three primary colors. Still, she could make out even the tiniest of details, down to the names of the streets on the distant signs where Pikes Peak and Cascade intersected, the individual railroad ties supporting the tracks west of her, and even the terrified expressions on the faces of the statues making up the monument to the Pueblo survivors.
With Antlers Park fully ringed by Jersey barriers, and the stage erected for the President’s ceremony taking up the majority of its western edge, navigating its bisecting pathways by bike wasn’t particularly easy. Making a calculated decision based upon that presumption, Raven spent less time staring south, into the park, than she did at the other two directions of approach.
Swinging her gaze toward Cascade Avenue, she spied a pair of bicycles zipping right-to-left across her field of view. The riders were about the same size as Pirate and Snake, but the thing she was looking for was missing.
Quickly dismissing the riders, she panned right, pausing on the park to watch two people walking toward her on one of the paths. She watched them stop next to the monument and embrace. A tick later they were jamming their tongues down each other’s throats. It was as if she was watching two ghosts. Though she was no expert—hadn’t even had her first real kiss, actually—they didn’t seem to know where to put their hands, nor how to coordinate the tilt of their heads to get their teeth aligned. She surmised they were new members to the lip-lock-club. Their stilted, clumsy movements reminded her of a baby foal trying to stand.
Moving on, she watched the tracks for a ten-count. Seeing nothing coming there, she walked her gaze in the other direction.
In the park, the couple was now sitting on her bench and still going at it hot and heavy. She threw a leg over his and ran her hands through his long, straight hair. She mashed her mouth on his, the angle of attack constantly changing.
Raven noted how the girl’s hair was pulled back and tied, leaving a fuzzy ball about the size of a grapefruit out back. The way it bounced to and fro was familiar.
At once, like a lightbulb flicking on, Raven realized she was spying on Sasha and Peter—now sans the third and fourth wheels.
So much for walking Max! she thought, as the kissing moved on to second base.
Stuff is getting real!
Feeling an emotion equal parts revulsion and embarrassment, Raven instinctively closed her eyes and looked away to her right.
Skin crawling, she shook her head once, real slow and deliberate. Drawing in a breath, she lifted her gaze and focused on the train tracks. There, in the middle distance, she saw what she had been waiting for: three white dots. They were maybe a yard or so off the ground and coming at her on a diagonal. Brighter than anything surrounding them, they blinked steadily, like the beating of a heart at rest. As they grew nearer, they bounced up and down and jinked left and right. Just subtle movements that gave the impression they were crossing paths with each other.
Thirty seconds after picking up the distant strobes, they were crossing behind the converted gas station. Rising from her position between the pickups, Raven focused on a spot in space, just to the right of the building, where the riders were bound to come back into view.
Since the infrared strobes Daymon had planted on the three bicycles were visible from a great distance with the NVGs, she figured she could afford to give them a nice head start.
After waiting a long fifteen-count, she straddled the Schwinn and pedaled westbound. She rounded the rear of the Depot Square Railroad building and immediately saw the IR strobes. They were far off and didn’t appear to be slowing.
She gave chase, pedaling her heart out, the backpack and slung SBR pummeling her back. She turned left, coasted west another block, then stopped on the corner, where she was flanked by a U.S. Postal Service mailbox and a low-slung car resting on four flat tires.
Looking north, she picked the strobes back up. They were still moving but seemed to be slowing.
The coyote calls could be hard over the noise of the bikes bouncing along uneven ground paralleling the railroad tracks.
After catching her breath, Raven began pedaling north, only to have to stop and dismount a block later because the riders she was following did the same.
Raven watched the trio from behind a plastic garbage can on wheels. They crossed the tracks and stopped beside the western wall. It was an old segment of cement barriers constructed before Z-Day. It was inundated by ivy and bordered by a narrow gravel lot.
As Raven looked on, Pirate peeled a section of the ivy veil aside and hid his bike behind it. From the ground behind the ivy, he dragged a ladder into the open
. It was different from the one her dad had kept in their garage back in Portland. This one was segmented and folded in on itself.
While Snake and Pixie stashed their bikes, Pirate straightened the ladder and locked the individual segments into place. After leaning the ladder against the wall and issuing instructions to the others, he climbed up ahead of them. With the pack weighing the man down, every step looked to be a chore. Once on the top, he shrugged off the pack and let it fall to the ground on the opposite side of the wall.
Pixie stashed her bike and waited while Pirate scanned the freeway left to right through a pair of binoculars. Seeing Pirate flash a thumbs up, Pixie grabbed ahold of the ladder and started climbing.
Still straddling the wall, Pirate grabbed Pixie’s hand and helped her up. Once she was steadied atop the wall, he helped her roll over so she was balancing on her chest. With both of her legs now on the opposite side of the wall and jutting into space, he stretched out atop the wall, hooked his knees on either side, then helped the waifish Asian down to the ground on the other side.
Snake didn’t need any help. Once Pirate was over and gone from view, he climbed the ladder all by himself, monkeyed both legs over the top, and planted his butt in the middle of the wide swath of crushed-down ivy.
After hauling the ladder up and positioning it on the other side, Snake disappeared from view, whistling a movie theme song Raven knew she had heard more than once but couldn’t quite place.
What amazed Raven was that he did it all while loaded down with the backpack. Pretty impressive for a guy not much bigger than she.
While Raven waited for her quarry to get a head start, raindrops began to strike the ground all around her. Soon the small drops doubled in size and were creating a sonorous cadence as they struck the garbage can’s flat lid.
She endured thirty seconds out in the open, with a torrent of water inundating her collar, and, gnawing at her the entire time, the real possibility the trio might be out of sight if she waited too long.
Multitasking, she hailed Daymon, telling him all that had transpired, and assuring him she could not wait the ten minutes it would take for him to get to her.
“Be careful,” was all Daymon could say at that point. As he signed off, he issued a stern admonishment: “Don’t do anything your crazy Uncle Daymon would do.”
Just as the squall moved off to the east, with Daymon’s cryptic advice still nagging her, Raven left her bike propped against the can and set off running for the wall.
Chapter 58
By the time Raven reached the wall, barely a minute had passed since the people she’d been following had slipped from her view.
Standing in the exact spot the trio had just vacated, she looked up at the cement freeway barrier. It towered over her by fifteen feet or so and was completely overtaken by the ivy.
She swung her rifle around to her back and grabbed a handful of ivy. She tugged hard. It stretched a bit and came away from the wall. She leaned back, testing the runners with her entire weight. There was a tearing sound and most of the runners in her two-fisted grip tore away from the wall.
Suddenly she was a prime example of Newton’s Law, backpedaling and windmilling both arms. The weight of the rifle and pack on her back only added to the forces trying to send her sprawling. However, thanks to good reflexes and a superb sense of balance, she remained on her feet.
Glaring at the wall while cursing under her breath, she came to the sobering conclusion that she was going to need a ladder. As she scanned the nearby businesses, thinking hard about where she might find one, she heard in her head: Improvise, adapt, and overcome. It was a mantra made popular by the United States Marines. And though her dad was in an entirely different part of the country, she had heard the words uttered in his voice.
The saying was usually used as a prompt to get her to think outside the box—and that’s exactly what she did.
Acting on the four-word nugget of wisdom, she crossed the street and retrieved her bike.
Making a second trip across the street, she emptied the rolling garbage can.
With the rain still coming down hard all around, she wheeled the can ahead of her, bumped it over the sidewalk, crossed the gravel, and then pushed it hard against the wall. Next, she yanked all three mountain bikes from behind the ivy, retrieved the tiny IR strobes, and shoved them deep in a pocket.
Though the beach cruiser just about matched her bodyweight, she managed to get it up and laid flat on the rolling bin’s wide lid. Getting Pixie and Snake’s high-dollar light-weight bikes atop the Schwinn and interlocking their pedals and bars to create a stable base was a cake walk compared to lifting the ungainly steel-framed beach cruiser.
So far, Raven figured that for all her improvising, she had gotten less than eight feet closer to the top of the wall. Even if she stood on the stacked bikes, went to her tippy toes and reached for the sky, she guessed she’d still be a foot shy of reaching the top.
Dipping back into the well of improvisation, she manhandled Pirate’s bike so that it was popping a wheelie with its rear tire on the ground and the front elevated and resting on the ivy. Though the mountain bike weighed only half as much as the Schwinn, it was not going to be easy to keep in this position and get it to where it needed to go.
She stood, bike braced on the wall, sweat from the earlier exertion mixing with rain and running down her face. It stung her eyes and tasted salty on her tongue.
Think, think, think.
Looking the length of the street, she spotted another rolling bin. It was parked on the curb near a Chinese restaurant and full to overflowing.
Leaving Pirate’s bike propped against the wall, she hustled down the street to retrieve the bin.
The bin was full of rotting food whose stench would give a bloated recent-turn a run for its money.
She pressed her shoulder to the bin near the handle and lowered her hips. Using all the strength in her legs, she stood up from the crouch, knocking the can on its side. She grabbed the top of a tied bag and pulled. The bag tore, leaving her holding a slimy scrap of knotted plastic.
She took hold of one wheel and tugged on it. Nothing happened. Combined, the can and its contents were too heavy for her to budge. So she went to her knees and started digging the mess out with her hands. Chicken bones embedded in a gray sludge jabbed at her fingers but failed to penetrate her damp gloves.
She got the bin emptied to the point where she was able to upend it and pour most of the sludge out into the street. Gagging and on the verge of throwing up, she returned with the rancid-smelling bin, parking it next to the other.
Clambering atop the second bin, she hauled Pirate’s bike up and trapped it vertically against the wall. Pressing one shoulder against the wall to give her a little added stability, she lifted the bike’s knobby rear tire over the stacked bikes. To stabilize what was to be her makeshift ladder, she turned the bike flat against the wall, drove its rear tire into the frames of the other bikes, and then buried the handlebars deep into the ivy.
Beaded sweat stinging her eyes, she jiggled Pirate’s bike a couple of times. Finding it stuck fast, the tip of the front tire a foot or two from the top of the wall, she placed one foot on the seat post.
Everything under her suddenly went wobbly.
She froze, every muscle in her body tensed and humming with nervous electricity.
Once the bike stopped moving, she drew in a deep breath and planted her opposite foot on its horizontal head tube.
Success.
The bike and everything holding it in place stayed still. Not statue-still, but it was good enough.
Trying to replicate the previous step, Raven grabbed a fistful of ivy, prayed to God it would hold at least a portion of her weight, then pushed off again.
As the toe of her boot found purchase on the bike’s front forks, the bin underneath the bikes started a slow roll away from the wall. Thankfully, after moving a hand’s width from the wall, the gravel made a popping noise and all movement
ceased.
Perched precariously more than a dozen feet off the ground and really pissed at herself for not chocking the wheels with something, she froze and drew in a deep breath.
Feeling a bit like one of those crazy free-climbers scaling El Capitan with just shoes and a bag of chalk—albeit facing just a sprain or broken bone versus a seconds-long freefall to a grisly splat—she reached slowly over her head and threaded her fingers gingerly into the ivy.
After a couple more calming breaths, Raven said, “Eff you, Murphy.” Simultaneously, she let go of the ivy, shot both legs straight, and thrust her hands toward the sky.
While the poorly orchestrated move propelled her vertically off of Pirate’s bike, the equal and opposite reaction started the bikes and garbage can sliding slowly to her right.
Body in midair, legs and arms at full extension, everything that had been supporting Raven was rocketing toward the ground.
As the discordant jangle of bicycle chains and crash of metal frames colliding rose up around her, Raven managed to grab the top of the wall with both hands. Body stretched out fully, her gear adding to the immense strain being put on her fingers and wrists, she began to kick her legs. To get her entire body moving pendulum-like along the wall, the kicks had to be timed just right.
After the third left-to-right pass, toes carving shallow furrows in the ivy, she finally managed to get one leg hooked over the wall. From there it took every ounce of her upper body strength to get to where she was straddling the wall like the others had.
Now, balanced just so, with her fingers and arms feeling like overstretched rubber bands, she deployed the NVGs and powered them on.
As the goggle’s white-phosphor display lit up, she learned she had a commanding view of roughly half a mile of I-25 in either direction. Beyond the freeway was No-Man’s-Land. She saw lots of movement. A flash of a face showing itself behind a window. Pale forms flitting across a desolate street littered with husks of burned-out cars.
She also learned, save for a dozen or so dead things plodding down the freeway away from her, that she was all alone. The trio was nowhere to be seen. Which suggested to her that they rode away on bikes they had waiting for them on the ground below her.
Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse (Book 14): Home Page 30
