***
Less than a mile north and barely two minutes removed from the encounter with the undead herd, Cade entered the Joshua tree-lined subdivision and pulled parallel to the curb in front of a two-story Craftsman nearly identical to his childhood home back in Portland.
Nostalgia flooded his brain as he took in the sight for sore eyes. Then he shifted his attention to the late-model mid-sized SUV he’d spotted during the ride along with Beeson. It was parked on the long driveway against the left side of the house and the real reason he’d undertaken the self-centered excursion from FOB Bastion in the first place.
Disregarding the forward shambling mob in his rearview, he turned the wheel hard right and gunned the Ford over the curb. There was a harsh squelch as the knobby tires gnashed through the crushed rock parking strip and a shudder as he pulled a hard one-eighty and ground the rig to a halt atop the front yard consisting mostly of prairie grasses and ground-hugging cacti. Rattling the shifter into Park, he pulsed his window down and regarded the sight that instantly took him back to Portland. As he relived that Z-Day siege he could literally smell the stink of the dead as they surged through his front plate window and rode the splintered glass into his family room. Sitting there with the engine idling, he shuddered as Ike and Leo’s screams rolled across the porch. Then he saw his neighbor Rawley taking the fight to the creatures from his front stoop. The rifle fire clear as day as it rolled across the street. There were long drawn out bursts and the dead falling and clunking down both flights of steps.
He took a deep breath of hot dry air. Feeling his heart rate ebb, he removed his hat and swiped the newly forming sweat from his brow. For a moment there, he thought, the whole thing seemed so real. Only the drapes in this Craftsman were open and he could see nothing moving in the gloom behind the still-intact double-paned windows. There were no screams or rifle fire. All in all, inside and out, the mocha-brown-and-gray-trimmed house was deathly quiet. And with no breeze to speak of, the stunted bushes bordering the side fence and mature trees opposite them were statue-still, making the whole scene—minus the putrefying monster banging around trapped inside the adjacent fenced-in yard and the approaching group of Zs still a dozen blocks distant—seem like something Norman Rockwell could have imagined.
Killing the engine, he wondered briefly if the vivid flashbacks he’d just experienced were what the doctors at Schriever had taken to calling Post-Apocalyptic Traumatic Stress Disorder. Maybe, he reasoned. But PATSD didn’t roll off the tongue the same. So he decided to chalk it up to PTSD, call it a day, and be done with it. Son, nobody likes a whiner, his dad had often said.
And Dad was right. Decision made and behind him. Time to forget the past and do what he had come here for in the first place. He looked at the front door, which, like the one in Portland, was a sturdy design constructed of wide oak planks running vertically and outfitted with an antiqued brass pull and matching hinges. But sadly, destroying the illusion of home, this front door had been defaced, spray-painted dead center with a three-foot-tall white letter ‘X.’ Noted in the top quadrant of the ‘X’ in like color was the date the home had been searched. Cade did the math in his head and determined that nine days had passed since, presumably, anyone had entered the dwelling. Reading counterclockwise, he saw the words 2nd ID in the left panel. Pretty self-explanatory. The Second Infantry Division, perhaps even the soldiers at FOB Bastion’s gate, had searched the dwelling. Between the lower legs of the ‘X,’ scrawled hurriedly very small, was O-3-Zs. He thought back to his search and rescue training from years ago. The O meant the Second ID had found zero survivors inside. The 3 indicated the number of cadavers they had found inside. And finally, the Z made plural told him in code that the three cadavers inside had been ambulatory. No living, three dead, all of them Zs. Lastly, the fourth quadrant was empty, which when he’d been trained many years ago meant that there were no dead present—or hopefully in this case—no undead present. But that was then, old training methods for sure. And this was now, when one bite spelled doom. So making no assumptions, nor taking unnecessary chances based on a bunch of spray-painted hieroglyphics, Cade decided that though time and shambling Zs waited for no one, discretion was the better part of valor. Then he heard Desantos’s voice in his head: Take it slow, Wyatt. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
So he did. After burning another precious minute scrutinizing the house and surrounding area, still nothing moving but the lone Z, he nudged the door open, then propped his crutches against the hinge and climbed out. Shouldering the door closed, he shifted his gaze south down U-13, quickly decided he would have five minutes or fewer inside, then armed the lock and dumped the keys into a cargo pocket.
After one last long look at the upper-story windows and a glance at the flesh eater pressing its abdomen against the pointed slats atop the neighboring fence, he nestled the crutches under his pits and clunked his way up the cement path. He carefully negotiated the half-dozen steps and stopped on the elevated front porch under an ornate oil-rubbed bronze light, the graffiti-marred front door daring him to enter.
He tested the knob and found it unlocked and figured that the soldiers of the Second ID had either A: forgotten to lock up after clearing the house; or B: the most likely scenario, had assumed that a closed door was sufficient to keep out the dead.
So he pushed the door open, stood stock still and peered into the shadow-filled foyer listening hard for any kind of movement. Nothing. The place seemed clear, and after an additional second’s hesitation he stepped inside and back in time.
Chapter 5
Duncan came to with a crushing headache and excruciating pain stabbing his right side where the leather-wrapped armrest did the job the unused seatbelt hanging near his throbbing head had not. Stars and tracers danced before his eyes—not safety-orange arrows fired from a crossbow or .50 caliber marking rounds conjured up by his imagination—but honest-to-God, head-trauma-induced, streaks and blobs of colorful light. That his head hadn’t gone through the glass as a result of Daymon’s Fast and Furious-inspired sideways drift and ensuing rapid deceleration and collision with the pair of sturdy fence posts was either a testament to long-dead engineers in Japan or some kind of miracle he didn’t deserve. Would have better served Logan, crossed his mind as the ethereal sky show faded and new stimuli flooded his senses.
The driving rain lessened to a sporadic patter pelting the smoked-glass moon roof as the rasps of the dead intensified. Hearing this, Duncan shook his head to blink the fog away and suddenly a blast of damp carrion-tinged air entered through the open driver’s door. Looking left, he half-expected to see Daymon’s body sprawled on the ground either mortally injured from the impact or being eaten by the dead.
Instead, without warning, the driver’s door slammed shut with a hollow thunk and he saw Daymon crabbing sideways away from the static SUV, a two-way radio pressed to his lips, and the stubby shotgun, held one-handed, aimed head high at a crowd of advancing rotters.
Reacting to the gooseflesh-producing sound of nails rasping the window near his ear, Duncan swept his gaze right and was greeted with a multitude of snarling zombies, their teeth bared and only three millimeters of automotive glass keeping them at bay. The Lord helps those who help themselves, crossed his mind as he fought the numbness in his right arm and fumbled the Colt from its holster. Finally, struggling against the rig’s downhill list, with his arm throbbing mightily, he wormed across the rain-slickened center console, opened the door, and slithered otter-like head first out of the vehicle. The second his chest hit the soggy ground three closely spaced gunshots set his ears to ringing. Lying in the mud, he looked left and saw that Daymon was crouched near the Toyota’s rear bumper, the shotgun trained cross-hill away from the wrecked Toyota. In the next instant the shotgun belched flame and another thunderous boom pierced the air, crashing overhead. Watching the targeted rotter’s head dissolve, Duncan sighted over the .45 but held fire for fear of accidentally hitting Daymon. So, after casting a quick look at the
SUV, and verifying that it had indeed come to rest completely blocking the breach in the fence entirely, he moved a few feet uphill and, with his friend now out of harm’s way, engaged the remaining creatures from an oblique angle.
When Duncan caressed the trigger, two things happened simultaneously. In his side vision he saw Daymon tossing the shotgun to the ground. Empty, he presumed. Then, almost drowned out by a deep rumble of distant thunder, a tremendous volume of gunfire sounded from below and to his right. He didn’t bother looking. There was no reason. Two plus two, put together in his mind, told him that whoever Daymon had hailed a moment earlier over the Motorola had just joined the party. Then as the first bullet left the .45’s muzzle, he realized that the newly turned zombie bracketed in his iron sights looked vaguely familiar. Like the Chance kid he’d killed the day before, minus the greasy blond dreadlocks and thirty or forty pounds around the middle. The pale-faced monster snarled and bared its teeth and, with its last labored step, some kind of fluid, dark and thick like molasses, pulsed from the horrific wound on the right side of its neck. Then the .45 boomed again and jerked in Duncan’s fist and the top third of the Chance look-a-like’s head dissolved into a viscous spray of brain and bone that mingled with the misting rain and landed with a patter, a gory strip of detritus a couple of yards long and several inches wide.
At once the gunfire below trickled off to nothing and the rain began letting up.
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” bellowed Duncan, turning his attention towards Daymon who was now wielding the machete and had just dropped the last standing zombie with a quick downward chop, sinking the sixteen-inch blade a fist’s width into the monster’s cranium. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Duncan recalled the vision he’d had of Daymon dispatching the dead on the road while he held the DHS helicopter in a hover. “Just like I remembered,” he added. “Only up close and personal your handy-work is much more impressive.”
“Thanks ... I think,” said Daymon, slightly confused by the offhand comment.
With the surge of adrenaline ebbing quickly from his system, Duncan moved on shaky legs to the SUV and took a seat behind the wheel. From there he watched Daymon hinge at the waist to clean his blade off in the drooping grass. Then he saw more tracers as he regarded the pistol in his hand. Confused as to how it had come into his possession, he turned it over, looked at the small print stamped on the slide, and then snugged it back in its holster. Suddenly his head took a lap around his body and he saw blurred figures on the road clearing bodies away, the widening blood trails reminding him of Vietnam. Then he looked in the side mirror at where Daymon had been but he was no longer there. Seemingly, in the blink of an eye, the dreadlocked man had sheathed his machete, retrieved the crossbow from twenty feet uphill where he’d tossed it mid-fight, and then covered twice that distance towards the SUV and was standing a foot from him.
Handing Duncan the combat shotgun, Daymon noticed the look of bewilderment on the older man’s ashen face. “You OK?” he asked.
Like a white light moment, Duncan had an epiphany right then and there. And as sickening as it was for him to acknowledge, considering his checkered past, he accepted as fact that he’d just lost time slipping in and out of an alcohol-induced blackout. Managing a nod he muttered, “Here we go again.”
Ignoring the comment, Daymon gestured at the shrouded bodies near where the Land Cruiser’s high-speed downhill journey had begun and said, barely loud enough to be heard over the falling rain, “Get the others and let’s finish what you came up here to do.”
Chapter 6
Cade crossed the threshold slowly as if going inside might open up old wounds. But it had no such effect. Instead he felt cheated. The entire layout was different. The mahogany stairs were not where they were supposed to be. The living room was misplaced as well. The house, he concluded, was a metaphor for how he was feeling just three short weeks into the life-changing event that the Omega virus had wrought on his family and the world.
When he looked in the mirror he recognized the face staring back. However, when he went introspective—like the Craftsman’s flipped floor plan—everything inside him, memories, emotions, loyalties, and values, had been rearranged, changing their order of importance. So drastic the change had been that now every decision he made was predicated on a new set of rules. Guided by a constantly spinning moral compass. White lies were acceptable and had become a type of family lubricant. Real lies. Big, lifesaving lies, on occasion, had become necessary. He didn’t like the direction he was headed but could do little to stop it. “You’re not a Boy Scout anymore,” he told himself as he elbowed the door closed and threw the lock, just in case.
He stood in the foyer and took in a deep lungful of stagnant air and instantly hit on a barely perceptible whiff of carrion emanating from somewhere inside the dwelling. In for a penny, in for a pound crossed his mind as he propped the crutches against the ornate bannister attached to the stairs doglegging upward to his right.
Silently, the Glock 17 cleared the drop-leg holster and then not-so-silently he hobbled towards the source of the stench, the moving parts of his plastic boot betraying his presence with every stride forward.
Along the way he saw at eye level bloody handprints, smeared and dried to black. The floors were tracked here and there with small footprints, the fluids dried glossy and flaking. After clomping across the bare hardwoods and passing under an arch dividing the living room and formal dining room, he felt the soft give of the oriental rug underfoot. He paused again to listen and was greeted with a silence with a physicality all its own. So he pushed deeper into the lower floor, the rug quieting his approach through the formal dining room as he skirted the walnut table and chairs dutifully taking up most of the space. Pausing a yard from the narrow doorway he guessed led to the kitchen, he steadied his body on a walnut built-in housing a host of very expensive-looking gold-rimmed china, looked left and saw a door with half a dozen panes of glass. Leaded and cut in diamond shapes and sandwiched between white woodwork, the entry presented a nice first impression for anyone entering from the driveway. And positioned in a breakfast nook to the right of the doorway was an informal oak picnic-style table, complete with a long bench pushed against the outside edge. Four sets of service had been laid out alongside ceramic plates featuring a desert motif of vivid reds and yellows. Three of the plates still contained half-eaten breakfast items, dried hard and shiny, no doubt a result of prolonged exposure to the sunlight filtering in from the west-facing wall of windows behind the table.
Knowing what the empty plate likely meant, Cade swept the pistol right, cautiously craned his head, and found himself peering down the length of a galley-style kitchen.
At the end were more ornate windows, sunlight beaming in. Next to the windows was an old enamel refrigerator, ivory in color, a throwback to a different era. The door leading out to the backyard opened just to the left of it. And on the floor surrounding the Art Deco-inspired item’s open door was a half-moon-shaped pool of something rotten, yellowish-colored, and sprouting a thick carpet of black mold. Whatever the sludge had been, it was now assaulting his gag reflex, making his salivary glands come alive.
Trying to breathe through his mouth, he averted his eyes, steered clear of the mess and began searching for what had drawn him to the house in the first place.
Starting with the drawer farthest from the triangle—the recommended placement of the most important kitchen items—which in this instance consisted of the gas range on the right wall, a double-wide kitchen sink opposite it, and the putrid mess of a fridge at the tip, he began his search.
In his experience, every house had a junk drawer. And this one, which was exactly where he’d expected it to be, had a smell all its own. In addition to all of the usual stuff: small tools, old-fashioned screw-in fuses, batteries, pencils, and a myriad of other items all without a dedicated place of their own, there were a dozen patchouli-scented tea light candles mixed in. He hated the putrid earthy odor almost more than the st
ench of carrion. In fact, it was giving the fridge a run for its money in the offensive odor category.
After picking the candles out and tossing them into the moldy sludge, he searched the rest of the junk drawer without finding what he was looking for. So he moved on and rifled through the other drawers and again came up empty. As a last resort, he opened all of the cupboards one by one, and when he finally reached the one near the far door he found a number of eyehooks screwed into the wood, not one of them with a car key dangling from it.
“Dammit,” he muttered, slamming the cupboard door. He walked back past the unfinished morning meal and scrutinized the Lincoln SUV through the side door, trying to determine if it could be hotwired. Noticing the keyless entry and guessing that the high-dollar vehicle also came standard with one of those computer-chip-embedded keys, he spit a string of epithets cursing Mister Murphy.
Crestfallen from not finding the keys to the Navigator as he had hoped, and definitely not wanting to go back to Beeson and asking for another handout, he padded through the dining room, creaked across the hardwoods, and retrieved the crutches. Before leaving the familiar-feeling house, he paused in the foyer and closed his eyes and imagined the floor plan flipped and the world righted. Thought of how nice it would be for him and Brook and Raven to be back in Portland, picking up right where they had left off. For a brief moment he experienced a respite from reality until from somewhere outside the dead and their incessant moaning had to go and ruin it.
He looked through the window inset into the door. All clear. So he opened the door slowly, stepped out onto the porch, and left it closed but unlocked just as he had found it.
Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 3
