Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  When Cade figured that the Suburban had closed to within the M4’s acceptable range, he shot Brook a glance and said, “In three, two, one ... ”

  Body coiled, face a mask of concentration, Brook snugged the carbine tight and said a silent prayer.

  After abruptly slowing the F-650 to thirty miles per hour, Cade then locked up the brakes, hard, slewed the wheel right and yelled, “Light ‘em up!”

  Carbine leading the way, Brook leaned out the window and brought the Eotech on line as the big Ford shimmied, the smell of burnt rubber hit her nose and the world spun by her face. She kept the sight’s red holographic pip centered on the approaching vehicle’s windshield and caressed the trigger even as the F-650 beneath her continued shifting on axis, fully engaged in a juddering power slide. “One, two, three, four,” she counted under her breath with each pull of the trigger and when she hit five the SUV’s windshield spider-webbed and a tick later imploded behind the intense overpressure. As she watched the crumpled sheet of mostly intact safety glass lose all tensile strength and fold in on the driver and passenger, her head was jerked sideways as the truck under her came to a full and screeching halt perpendicular to the outside shoulder.

  Suddenly hit with a face full of opaque glass and unable to see the road ahead, the man driving the Suburban apparently panicked and locked up his brakes.

  Brook saw the blue-black smoke coming off the tires first and then noticed the ungainly SUV begin to fishtail. Then, seemingly in slow motion and suffering from an extreme amount of body roll, the SUV’s rear end broke free and swerved hard to the right. Until the driver, presumably still batting the glass from his face, felt the change of inertia and overcorrected horribly by hauling the wheel in the same direction as the slide but with more vigor than necessary.

  Still engaging the moving target, Brook shifted her aim right and emptied the magazine into the windshield and passenger side door. Everything around her seemed to slow to a crawl. She smelled the sharp tang of cordite. Then registered the passenger grimace and throw his hands up and then crumple over in obvious pain. She heard shell casings pinging off the door pillar to her right and felt the hot brass hitting her shoulder but didn’t count how many rounds she had pumped into the out-of-control SUV, nor did she remember hearing the metallic snik of the bolt locking open on the empty chamber. However, the Suburban going up onto two wheels and then rolling over and over while ejecting the broken and bloody bodies of the two men amid a roiling carpet of broken glass and spilt fluids would be forever etched in her memory.

  Cade looked ahead and saw the Raptor speeding off into the distance, growing smaller. Don’t stop for anything.

  He shifted his gaze right. Saw that Brook was fixated on the smoking wreckage. Her eyes were narrow slits. Her jaw was set, the muscles knotted under tanned skin. The empty M4 was still snugged tight and trained on the bullet-riddled corpses.

  “Good shooting,” he said. He reached over and gently helped her pull the rifle back inside the truck. Immediately she loosed her grip and her hands began trembling. “I just killed three people,” she whispered.

  “Their fault, not yours,” said Cade, a grimace twisting his face. “And if they had anything whatsoever to do with stuffing amputated genitals into another human being’s mouth—regardless of the perceived crime—they got exactly what they deserved.”

  “Is it over?” Raven asked meekly, still out of sight.

  Exhaling hard, Cade wondered if Raven comprehended the word genitals. Then said to her over his shoulder, “Not yet. Keep down.” He spun the steering wheel around to the left until it hit the stops and locked and the power steering apparatus squealed in protest. He looked past Brook and far off in the distance noticed two things. The fella with the motorcycle was struggling to get it started. Rising up off the bike’s saddle, one leg extended and then coming down hard on the kickstarter. That went on for a second with no positive result. Then Cade saw the gray Hummer pull alongside the finicky Harley and pick up the rider. Knowing full well that the F-650 could easily outrun the Hummer, and confident after the recent shooting display that they could outgun the occupants if need be, he snatched up the two-way, and though it didn’t need repeating, hit the talk button and told Taryn to take the next exit north and keep moving—no matter what. He released the talk button and Wilson came back with a strained sounding, “Copy that.”

  As Cade cast another glance at the approaching Hummer, he caught sight of Brook shakily swapping magazines. And seeing as how the last thing he wanted was for her to have to add more human bodies to her gun, he pinned the pedal to the floor, and amidst a cloud of tire smoke and with the staccato pings of rocks and pebbles peppering the undercarriage, powered the rear end around through the scrub and dirt beyond the shoulder. Once the Ford had lurched out of the abrupt ninety-degree turn and bumped back up on asphalt and was tracking west and picking up speed on the Interstate, he reached over and palmed Brook’s thigh. Didn’t apply any pressure. Just let it rest there, a silent sign of solidarity.

  Chapter 37

  There were a hundred other places on the abandoned mining site where digging a grave would have been much easier, but after taking into consideration the hell on Earth Jordan’s last moments must have been, Duncan chose a spot near the edge of the quarry looking west over the valley, where the odds of a sunset gracing her grave on a daily basis was a very real possibility. “She deserves this,” he stated, taking the first swing. And while he broke up the bulletproof ground with the pickaxe, Lev and Daymon shoveled away the broken-up topsoil.

  Half an hour after breaking ground, they had a human-sized hole dug down to about mid-thigh on Duncan—a depth that they all agreed was roughly three feet.

  Not the textbook eight-by-four-by six, thought Duncan. But deep enough to keep the critters away.

  Lev and Daymon gently placed Jordan’s body into the grave, then stood over her small shrouded form while Duncan dredged up a few words. Nothing biblical. Not because he didn’t know any passages, far from it. He knew plenty of them. However, he didn’t know the young lady well enough. The reason he abstained. Instead, he spoke of how nice and kind she had been during the short time he had known her. He finished with an Amen, out of habit mostly, and had shoveled half a dozen scoops of dirt before realizing that Jordan was the third person he’d interred since daybreak and suddenly felt weak in the knees.

  Sensing Duncan’s discomfort, and seeing him seemingly frozen, the shovel’s blade hovering empty above the grave, Lev gently took the tool from his hands and helped him to the ground.

  “Take a break,” said Daymon. “You’ve done more than your share of shoveling today. Me and Lev got this.”

  ***

  Fifteen minutes later the three fully loaded trucks were parked bumper-to-bumper, five feet inside of the quarry entrance. Duncan climbed gingerly from the newly liberated Dodge and, just in case another group of semi-aware first turns had followed them up the feeder road, drew his .45 and approached the gate slowly, cutting the corner a degree at a time.

  Daymon called out from the driver’s seat of the patrol Tahoe. “What do you see?”

  “Clear,” answered Duncan, holstering his pistol. He strode to the gate. Took the piece of broken lock from the links and unwrapped the chain. Then, with Lev’s help, rolled the gate two-thirds of the way open.

  A minute later the three trucks were through, the Chevy bringing up the rear. This time Duncan stayed in the lead vehicle while Lev and Daymon closed the gate behind them.

  Nearly two hours under the hot sun had firmed up the road. Though the ruts still grabbed their tires on the way down, threatening to send an inattentive driver into space, the going down wasn’t nearly as treacherous nor slow as the trip up. Ten minutes elapsed and they were sitting at the bottom of the quarry road switching their vehicles out of four-wheel drive, grateful for the smooth asphalt of State Route 39.

  Duncan fished the Motorola from a pocket and powered it on. Double-checked the channel and thu
mbed the call button. He said, “Left or right?”

  Hearing Duncan’s voice emanating from deep within a thigh pocket, Daymon lifted his butt off the seat and reached deep, grasped the radio and thumbed the button saying, “WWLD?”

  “What?” answered Duncan.

  From his slightly elevated spot at the rear of the column, Daymon saw Duncan crane around and imagined the deadly dose of stink eye being directed his way. Keying his radio, very slowly Daymon intoned, “What ... would ... Lev ... do?”

  “He’s not in the loop anymore,” shot Duncan.

  “Exactly. Don’t you think he deserves a say in the matter?”

  “Nope,” said Duncan.

  About to press the issue, Daymon decided to roll with it and watched the white Dodge bounce up onto the two-lane and hesitate, rocking on its springs, twin antennas moving counter to the body of the truck. Then he saw a glint off the shiny new blackwalls and his query was answered as the off-road tires cranked hard to the left.

  Chapter 38

  Conventional wisdom dictated that after having two vehicles fail to stop at their checkpoint and several of their own gunned down in the chase that ensued, whoever was driving the gray H2 would be calling for reinforcements before commencing further pursuit. At least that’s what Cade was preparing to counter as he zippered the big Ford between half a dozen cars and trucks, all sitting firmly on shredded tires, a fate that Brook’s excellent marksmanship had spared their vehicles.

  After a chase lasting only a few seconds, during which the pursuers got an up close eyeful of three of their own who had been breathing just minutes prior and were now bloody corpses sprawled on the Interstate, the Hummer slowed and whipped a quick U-turn and with a puff of black exhaust sped east towards Green River.

  Seeing this, Brook looked away from the side mirror, craned towards Cade and said, “What the hell?”

  “Stay frosty,” was his instant reply. “We’re not out of the woods yet.” In his mind he saw the driver and passengers, who were already jacked up on adrenaline, weighing the pros-and-cons of continuing the chase alone. A kind of hasty cost-benefit-analysis in which their lives were the cost. And presumably—the reason for their turning back—the people in the Hummer saw little benefit in tangling with the two vehicles and getting gunned down like their fellows.

  Then the flip-side of the equation occurred to Cade, and he pictured the bandits not so much giving up, but making a sound tactical decision and opting to stack the deck in their favor before commencing any kind of a dogged pursuit. In this scenario they would slide back into town—on their mind how to add reinforcements and make up lost time and distance. He guessed they would discard the slow Hummer in favor of faster, more agile vehicles more suited to playing catch-up. Adding more bodies and weapons was a given. The latter most likely being of the larger caliber variety. The kind usually found abandoned at every overrun Guard checkpoint that had sprung up on the outskirts of every medium-to-large city early on in the apocalypse. And while these actions were undertaken, Cade knew that the story of the interlopers who had killed three of their own for no good reason would spread like wildfire over whatever means the denizens of Green River used to communicate.

  Lastly, the top-dog, or dogs—whoever was responsible for meting out justice in Green River, perhaps the very people still with blood on their hands from hacking away genitals and cutting off hands—would whip up a frothy bloodlust among the citizenry and deputize some folks and then let loose the hounds. A modern day lynch mob, revenge their sole motivation.

  Cade shifted his gaze from the retreating SUV and regarded the fast-approaching off-ramp, a fairly sharp right-hand bend that would shoot them onto US-191 North and hopefully the planned rendezvous with the kids in the Raptor. “Hang on,” he said, braking and downshifting to a gear more suited to the rising road that lay beyond. He entered the right-hand sweeper with the speedo wavering near seventy and felt the first tug of g-forces at work on his body. The tires chirped, the body rolled harshly atop the raised suspension, and he felt his butt sliding on the seat.

  In the back seat Raven let out a squawk typical of her namesake and then began chanting, “Oh my gosh,” over and over. There was a skittering sound and a yelp as Max struggled to find purchase on the carpet.

  Meanwhile, mid-way through the turn, in a cacophony of sound, empty water bottles, MRE packaging, spent brass, the laminated map, Brook’s M4 and a host of other unidentified items succumbed to gravity and inertia and migrated left, the smaller items pooling against the doorframe’s lower sill, the carbine coming to rest near Cade’s feet.

  Fresh out of the turn, the truck amazingly still upright, and with the floor flotsam and jetsam drifting slowly back to whence they’d come, Cade said cryptically, “I have an idea.”

  Chapter 39

  Duncan smiled at Daymon’s weird sense of humor. “W-W-L-D? What would Lev do, indeed.” He cranked the wheel left and spun the rear tires, a juvenile move that pelted Lev’s brand new Chevy with mud and rocks and ground-up scrub brush. The Dodge bumped onto the two-lane and there was a frantic beeping inside as some central-processing-unit somewhere tried to calm the crazy human’s driving habits. Outside there was a staccato chirping as the rubber compound tried to grip the asphalt.

  The driver’s side window went down with a mechanical whirr and Duncan poked his head into the slipstream. The air smelled of fragrant pine with an underlying damp, mossy nose wafting up from the nearby river. He watched the road closely. Not that the appropriately named pick-up couldn’t handle butting heads with a few walking corpses, but because he desperately wanted to find a few more first turns and hopefully disprove Lev’s whole empirical-evidence-of-first-turns-becoming-self-aware bullshit. Not only to show them that the rotters were just automatons hungry for flesh, and what they had all witnessed at the gate to their compound had been nothing more than dumb luck and a case of wandering, pustule-ridden hands. But also to prove to himself that the rotters at the quarry gate hadn’t been waiting patiently in ambush mode—a fear that had been scratching away at his gut since rounding that blind corner and coming face-to-face with them.

  So he drove east along SR-39, with the river a constant companion off of his right shoulder for another couple of miles until the landscape leveled off substantially and the river and two-lane State Route parted ways. The former jagging south by east. The latter shooting ahead straight as a plum line towards the T-junction with Utah State Route 16 near Woodruff.

  Three hundred yards from the T-junction, Duncan became aware that the intersection was partially blocked by a yellow school bus that had apparently failed to negotiate the corner and now lay on its side. He looked in his rearview and tapped his brakes a couple of times to make sure he had Lev’s attention and then pulled the Ram to the right. With two wheels still on the road, the other two grinding into the red-dirt shoulder, the Ram came to a complete stop two-hundred yards from the site of the single-vehicle accident.

  Staring at the overturned bus, Duncan picked up movement in his side vision as the black truck driven by Lev slid in close to his door and came to an abrupt lurching halt. He also heard the electric motor go to work and saw the window glass disappear into the channel. Then there was more movement farther to the left as Daymon squeezed the Tahoe in tight beside Lev in the Chevy, then more motor noise as his passenger window motored down, creating a veritable wind tunnel through all three trucks.

  Eyes still fixed ahead, Duncan said “See that?” There was movement up ahead as the group of flesh eaters, having instantly taken note of the three-truck caravan, started their slow stumbling march west—towards the mechanical noises that screamed to them the arrival of fresh meat. As they ambled down the two-lane another dozen pale forms filed in piecemeal fashion from behind the bus.

  “I see rotters,” replied Lev. “And lots of them.” Nervously eyeing the rearview mirror, he slotted the transmission into reverse—just in case.

  Ducking, Daymon looked past Lev, made eye cont
act with Duncan, and then called out, “You talking about what it says on the back of the bus?”

  “Yep,” said Duncan. He flipped up his visor. Squinted against the sun and his own compromised eyesight and read the words slowly. “Says Etna Elementary. Lincoln County, School District Number Two.”

  Lev said, “That’s where the big boy and all his friends at the quarry gate hailed from.”

  Daymon added, “I remember sitting in this rig and talking to the big dude ... Mr. Carter … right in front of that very school bus. Had it parked across 89. Bunch of armed folks keeping watch. Hell, Tran nearly got us killed making sudden movements they construed as hostile.”

  Lev asked, “What happened?”

  Daymon answered, “They looked inside the rig. Then asked Charlie a bunch of questions. Finally said ‘shoo’ ... told us that they ‘don’t help outsiders’ and for us ‘not to come back looking for food or medicine or help of any kind.’ It was kind of like that first scene from Rambo ... either of you two remember that movie?”

  Nodding yes, Duncan said, “Remember it. I lived it for a while when I came back from Nam. Drinking and drifting. I was the original John J ... ‘cept I didn’t kill any sheriffs in any sleepy Pacific Northwest towns. Just ran off a lot of women folk. That’s all.”

  “Well it was like that. Bob’s Big Boy had one of his men escort us across town to a second roadblock.” Out of habit born in the apocalypse, Daymon checked all three of his mirrors. Nothing to see. “We weren’t welcome. Bottom line.”

  “You think they were flushed out? Had to make a run for it ... leave the safety and security of their town?”