Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse (Book 14): Home

by Chesser, Shawn

  A block didn’t go by in which they didn’t see at least one home burned to the ground. Some homes with boarded-over windows looked as if they might still harbor the living. Like his Craftsman, many more showed signs of a life and death struggle: broken-out windows. Zombie corpses splayed out on rain-slickened driveways. Brass shell casings reflecting the failing light of day.

  Nothing Cade saw during their ten-block ride between Boise Street and Woodstock gave him hope that any of his former neighbors had escaped with their lives.

  More than once, as they got closer to Woodstock, with its many bars and storefronts, they were set upon by sizeable herds of first turns. To conserve ammunition, as well as lessen the possibility of alerting a Chicom patrol to their presence, Cade simply reversed course and led the team to a passable street.

  At the end of a short ride made long by the handful of detours, with the last light of day revealing a thoroughly looted Safeway and fire-ravaged Bi-Mart, Cade came to the conclusion that, at least where inner southeast Portland was concerned, T.S. Eliot had missed the mark. His old neighborhood did not go out with a whimper or a bang; rather, evidence told him it had died from a combination of the two.

  Maintaining radio silence, Cade rode out onto Woodstock—an east/west two-lane that once bustled with the cars of locals doing their weekly shopping, or college kids from Reed wheeling their way to Mickey Finn’s for a pint or to Otto’s Delicatessen for one of their world-famous sausages.

  All of that had changed. Woodstock was now lined with vehicles streaked green with algae. Some had become tombs for the living dead, the auto glass streaked inside with their own dried bodily fluids.

  Storefronts whose plate windows had survived the initial madness invariably teemed with emaciated walking corpses, their stark white palms and gaunt faces ghosting across sullied glass.

  Leaves and sticks clogged most of the storm drains. The result was twin rivers of turbid water flowing westward down Woodstock. Due to hours upon hours of non-stop rain, the water was inches deep near the curbs. So swollen were the mini-rivers that they nearly came together in the middle of the two-lane.

  Keeping to the yard-wide strip of visible blacktop in the center of Woodstock, Cade led the team west.

  Coming to a halt at the intersection with 39th, where Woodstock took a steep dive toward Reed College, Eastmoreland Golf Course and the once rough-and-tumble Westmoreland and Sellwood neighborhoods, Cade witnessed the dull blob of a sun slipping behind Portland’s tony West Hills.

  Coinciding with the sun’s rapid departure, the rain tapered to a slow drizzle. Then, as if a switch had been flicked, a shroud of darkness enveloped everything.

  With the darkness came a sharp drop in temperature that added exponentially to the sand-paper-like chafe wrought by drenched fatigues.

  Flipping down and powering on his NVGs, Cade rolled his front wheel over the hill’s apex, stepped onto the pedals, and positioned his butt behind and below his seat. It was the technique he used when tackling his favorite single-track trail along the Lewis River in nearby Washington state.

  What Cade hadn’t taken into consideration was how wet bicycle rims affected brake performance. While the drizzle did little to alter how the NVGs portrayed the environment as the team streaked down the hill in single file, it kept the rims wet, which in turn caused the rubber brake pads to screech like a dying mallard whenever brakes were applied.

  Cade became aware of this phenomenon seconds after they were all committed. Riding Ted’s Kona, Nat, the largest member of the team, had braked to keep from plowing into Cross from behind. The noise rose over everything. Caused every rider to search for the source.

  Yelling to be heard over the slipstream, Cade said, “It’s just the wet brakes. Use them sparingly.”

  But it was too late. The dead had heard the noise, too.

  Where Woodstock began to level out, maybe a quarter of a mile distant, Cade saw movement. At first, it was just one Z rising up from the bus shelter on the right. Then, one at a time, a dozen Zs hanging around the entrance to Reed College became acutely aware of the fresh meat bombing downhill in their direction.

  By the time Cade was nearing the intersection where the Reed feeder road branched off to the right, zombies were stepping off the curb. Behind him another set of brakes started wailing away.

  Griff’s? It made sense, seeing as how he’d gotten stuck riding a bike a little too small for him.

  Hands swiped at Cade. One caught him on the elbow, forcing him to make a high-speed course correction. As he did so the brief contact started the bike into a death-wobble he feared he wasn’t going to recover from.

  Simultaneously, Cade shifted more of his weight over the bars and tapped both brake levers. As his quick actions brought both tires back in line with his former trajectory, he shot a quick glance over his right shoulder.

  In that split-second full-color snapshot in time, he saw Nat, shoulders lowered and blazing by the same pack of Zs that had nearly been his downfall. Due to the extra weight—body mass and weaponry—the big Fijian had already overtaken Cross and was alongside Griff.

  Like an offensive lineman creating a seam for his back, Nat delivered a vicious hit on the Z nearest to him.

  Having already turned his eyes forward, Cade didn’t get to see the chain reaction the single glancing blow of Nat’s muscled shoulder had started.

  Cross inadvertently broke radio silence. “Hang on,” was his admonition to Nat. “Lean into it, big guy. Reel her in,” came next. Finally, the SEAL said, “Clear.”

  It was the one-word declaration that told Cade all he needed to know. He’d barked the word hundreds of times in dozens of different scenarios. And each time he had, it conveyed one singular message: Immediate threat eliminated. Carry on.

  So he did, without looking back.

  A quarter-mile further, Woodstock came to a T. Cade led the four-bike procession left, keeping to 28th Avenue, a winding two-lane bordered on the left by million-dollar homes and on the right by Eastmoreland Golf Course.

  An army of greenkeepers couldn’t bring the municipal course back from the dead. They’d need a John Deere combine to harvest the fairway grass. The greens were overgrown, too. Just swampy-looking patches of green as viewed in the color night vision. Had Cade been wearing old-model NVGs, he guessed the image transmitted to him would be eerily similar.

  After a long climb up Bybee Boulevard, the team wheeled into Westmoreland, a neighborhood close to downtown that still retained a small-town feel.

  As a result of the zombie apocalypse, Westmoreland was now more downtown Beirut than downtown Mayberry. The Starbucks on Milwaukee Avenue looked as if it had absorbed a direct hit from a Hellfire missile. The massive windows facing Bybee and Milwaukee were now just shards of green-tinted glass flowing across the sidewalk.

  Across the street from Starbucks, the wooden door to Kay’s Bar was propped open by a moldering corpse. While the team rolled on by, a pair of zombies doddered from the once-popular watering hole, further trampling the decaying doorstop.

  Old habits die hard.

  Sellwood was more of the same: a half-dozen restaurants faring no better than the Starbucks they’d just passed. County-owned window glass had apparently been an enemy of the people here, too. For every single window in Sellwood’s Multnomah County Library had either been bashed in completely or shattered to the point that only jagged shards held tenuous purchase in the frame.

  A closer look told Cade the place had been picked clean, its dozens of shelves as bare as those in the Woodstock Safeway. Someone’s appetite to read had been sated.

  Seated at a computer station in the library, its forehead pressed against a darkened monitor, a lone zombie stirred, then moaned as the bikes whizzed by.

  Leaving the business district behind, Cade led the team west, through a residential neighborhood consisting of mostly older homes. As in his neighborhood, the homes showed varying degrees of preparation as well as destruction. Being the epicenter
of infection, Portland was as ravaged a place as Cade had seen during his travels all across the devastated nation.

  Holding a fist in the air, Cade brought the team to a halt just outside the parking lot abutting the northeast corner of Sellwood Park. It was full of mostly civilian vehicles, with a few Homeland Security SUVs and military Humvees thrown in the mix.

  Wet down by the steady drizzle, dozens of tents making up a thrown-together FEMA facility sagged and swayed every time the east wind picked up.

  Twelve-foot-tall, razor-wire-topped hurricane fencing fully encircled the camp. There wasn’t a single inch of the entire run that didn’t have a zombie crushing into it. The undead trapped inside were a mix of civilians and soldiers, with a few still clad in biological containment suits. The fence quivered and groaned as the Zs craned and leered, trying to see in the dark the source of the mechanical sounds made by the bicycles.

  After a couple of minutes of hard listening, during which Cade heard only raindrops battering everything within earshot, the discordant jangling of the fence, and soft moans of the dead, he got on the net and reported their progress to the TOC at Peterson.

  Receiving the green light to proceed to the rendezvous, Cade called the team into a loose huddle. With the wind blowing at their backs, he detailed how he wanted to make first contact with the mysterious two Davids—their local FBI-connected assets.

  Chapter 71

  The rendezvous point was a city park on the east bank of the Willamette River. Nestled between the Sellwood Bridge to the south and Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge to the north, Sellwood Riverfront Park was once popular with bicyclists, joggers, and anglers.

  Nearly nine months of neglect had left the park largely indiscernible from the wildlands next to it.

  Slated for replacement before Omega changed everything, the two-lane Sellwood bridge connected the Sellwood neighborhood with John’s Landing—an up-and-coming neighborhood due south of Portland’s downtown core.

  Still astride his bike, its front tire pointed at the park’s only access road, Cade did a quick visual recon.

  To the left of the park, in the shadow of the Sellwood Bridge, was a gently sloping boat ramp. A mix of pickup trucks and SUVs, many with empty boat trailers still attached, had been abandoned on the ramp. Somehow a few Zs had found their way into the warren of vehicles and become trapped. Constantly on the move, they would go one way, bump into a trailer or vehicle, then reverse course.

  The park to the team’s fore was occupied by a hundred or so walking dead. Most were concentrated in one large group just inside the parking lot’s barricaded entrance. Solitary Zs could be seen patrolling the grassy expanse beyond the parking lot. More were mired in the marshy area at the refuge’s southern border.

  The floating dock the team needed to get to was a few hundred yards dead ahead. It was L-shaped, with the foot of the L attached to shore by a short ramp. The run of the dock paralleling the bank was roughly fifty feet long and unoccupied.

  While Cade didn’t like the fact that once inside the park they would be surrounded by Zs and left with only one egress point should things go sideways, it wasn’t his call to make. The location had been chosen by the assets on the ground and then approved by people way above his pay grade.

  Because Cade would never ask something of his men that he himself wouldn’t do—a leadership tenet learned from his late mentor, Mike Desantos—he declared he would be taking point.

  After stashing the bikes in the grass beside the road fronting the park, Cade stepped off the drive and struck a diagonal course through the park. His first goal: to find one of the cement paths in the jungle and be free of the soup of mud and standing rainwater sucking at their boots.

  Finally feeling his boot come into contact with something solid, Cade signaled to Cross, the next man in line, to halt and maintain noise discipline. He parted the grass with the M4’s suppressor and looked at the ground. Instead of seeing his toe up against a cement lip bordering one of the paths, a hairless skull stared up at him. The impact with his Danner had dislodged the jawbone and tilted the skull a full ninety degrees in relation to the rest of the decaying corpse.

  Dragging his gaze from the Joker-like grin, Cade did a quick headcount.

  Cross, Griff, and Nat.

  All present.

  Pointing the corpse out for Cross, Cade took a step to his right and resumed the same steady pace forward. He led the team another twenty feet into the park before sensing the ground under his boots go firm. No sooner had he paused to investigate what direction the footpath would take them than, over the steady patter of rain striking the grass all around, he heard something moving through the grass off to their right—the same direction the path wanted to take them.

  Panning his head toward the sound, Cade saw a Z—or rather, just the top half of a Z’s head. And it was coming straight at him.

  As the Z crashed through the tall grass to Cade’s fore, its dead eyes flicked left and right and back again, searching longingly for prey in the dark. The absence of splashing water and the accompanying sucking sounds told Cade the thing was likely sticking to the footpath he was on. Hell, he thought, they were known to follow roads and freeways. He’d seen them acting out other rudimentary actions. It was no secret the scientists thought the dead still retained snippets of memory from their past life experiences.

  Cade just hoped the rest of the roamers he’d seen from the road weren’t acting on the same embedded impulses. If so, the Gerber was going to be releasing a lot of souls in the near future.

  Standing statue-still, he drew his blade from its scabbard. Letting the M4 hang from its sling, he turned his body sideways and stepped off the path.

  As the Z parted the tangle of grass overgrowing the path, Cade saw that it had been a boy of no more than ten when it had succumbed to Omega. Cause of first death wasn’t immediately evident. However, the thing seemed to sense that prey was somewhere close by.

  Those eyes continued probing the dark all the way up until Cade whispered, “I see you.”

  The three words froze the Z in its tracks broadside to Cade. Instantly its eyes flicked left and its head followed.

  As the first guttural moan started to resonate deep in the undead boy’s chest, the razor-sharp tip on Cade’s Gerber was silencing it.

  Twisting the black blade as it entered the eye socket nearest him, Cade locked his wrist and accepted the weight of the corpse. With his free hand, he grabbed hold of the wet hair plastered to the Z’s skull. Steering the corpse with the hand still clutching the embedded dagger, Cade deposited it in the grass beside the path.

  Between Cade’s first encounter with the undead boy and the time the team reached the ramp connecting the dock to land, he’d put the black dagger to good use a dozen more times.

  While he had grown callous to taking the lives of the enemy, putting down fellow Americans never got any easier. They didn’t deserve the death sentence meted out by the Chinese due to their reckless handling of a superbug of their own creation. While Cade believed in God and that each human possessed a soul, the only tangible result derived from each thrust of the blade or press of the trigger was that each individual Z could no longer spread Omega.

  The team waited near the top of the ramp to the floating dock, muzzles aimed outward, covering all three directions from which enemy breathers or the walking dead might approach.

  Cade padded down the ramp, head constantly on the move and rifle at the ready.

  At the bottom of the ramp, he looked the length of the dock. If the two Davids were already here, he didn’t see them.

  Thinking they might still be en route, he cast his gaze out over the river.

  Raindrops striking the swift-moving water reminded him of incoming rounds. Affected by the river’s eddies, debris scudding along bobbed and spun in crazy circles.

  He had fond memories of picnicking here with Raven and Brook. Something about the river usually centered him. That was not the case tonight. Tonight the Willam
ette was angry and swollen and only served to make him long for that first dose of combat adrenaline.

  Good things really did come, he reminded himself, to those willing to wait. For the closure within reach tonight, closure he could almost taste, no amount of time was too long to wait.

  Speaking softly over the comms, Griff asked, “Where are these … Two Davids?”

  Fairly certain Griff was looking his way, Cade merely shrugged.

  As if on cue, coming right on the heels of Cade’s attempt at non-verbal communication, a split-second flash of light pierced the dark to his right. It had come from somewhere near the end of the dock and was in the IR spectrum—visible only to someone wearing NVGs. After a short two-second pause, the light began flashing out the complicated sequence Cade was expecting.

  Though he craned and took a few steps along the dock, all he could make out was a gloved hand holding a device he guessed to be an IR torch. From the new viewing angle it appeared the person signaling him was actually in the river. His best guess was that the person was wearing a wetsuit and likely holding on for dear life to the underside of the dock.

  Utilizing the IR designator riding atop the M4’s Picatinny rail, Cade responded with a predetermined signal of his own.

  Nearing the end of the dock, Cade learned the truth about the person who had signaled him. Instead of being in the water, the man was kneeling on the floor of a rigid-hulled inflatable boat and was currently tracking his approach with a suppressed Heckler and Koch MP5. Chambered in 9mm, the MP5 was a close-quarter battle weapon favored by SWAT and special operations units the world over.