Bishop tightened the laces on his running shoes. Motioned for the hewn timber gate to be opened and padded on down the road.
***
An hour later, give or take, Bishop was back. Pulse pounding, he stood hands on hips and breathed in through his mouth. The smell of death was heavy. Pervasive. It was one of the things he hated most about the dead. You could outrun them. As he had just proven on his jaunt outside the compound. But you couldn’t elude their stench. It permeated his clothes and hair and, though it was probably just his mind fucking with him, he could almost taste it in his mouth.
Salivary glands pumping abnormally, he spat on the grass outside the gate. Still catching his breath, he looked over at the bodies of the two men he’d gunned down earlier. A murder of crows surrounded the prone forms, strutting around, their beady eyes throwing sideways looks as if aware there were more from where these two came from. One had taken station on Tweedle Dee’s forehead and was laboriously working its head inside one empty eye socket. Red rivulets ran down the corpse’s pallid cheek from where the raptor’s claws had sunken in. It came up with a morsel, glistening wet and trailing some kind of membrane, then raised its head towards the blue sky and swallowed the treat whole and cawed mightily. Triumphantly. And though the cadavers were not yet contributing to one of the banes of Bishop’s existence, in this hot sun, he knew they soon would be. “The birds have had enough,” he said to the bald conscript who was opening the gate for him. Hitched a thumb over his shoulder and added for everyone present to hear, “Wait for my rotting entourage to catch up and when you’re finished culling them I want those two fools buried in the same pit.”
Moving the conscript aside with a sweeping motion, an oversized Spartan mercenary nodded at Bishop and stepped aside, allowing him passage.
Bishop said nothing. He used the walk to the lake house to cool down. Stopping to stretch along the way, he regarded the newly cut landing zone and the fuel-laden helicopters sitting there quiet and dark. There would be no repeat of Jackson Hole. His plan for Elvis was going to see to that. However, he thought. Having the helos and pilots nearby as insurance offers me a sense of security I haven’t known since before the dead began to walk. Suddenly from the vicinity of the gate there came a fusillade of gunfire. It lasted three or four seconds and then trailed off. He went to work stretching the other leg. Working the lactic acid from his hamstring with a steady kneading, he listened to the satisfying sound of single and sporadically spaced kill shots. The hollow pops—that to him signified but a single grain of sand in the dune of dead he’d need to cull in order to be satisfied with his new sanctuary—crashed off the houses and trees across the lake and came echoing back and dissipated to nothing.
All was quiet as he mounted the stairs and entered the house through the back door. He stopped and listened hard. Nothing stirred. He walked the length of the hall past the powder room and was hit face first with a very satisfying aroma. Sage and basil and garlic instantly came to mind. Ten more paces and he was in the kitchen and saw the source. To his left, sitting atop the gas stove, was a jumbo steel stockpot and another pot a quarter its size. Steam was pouring from the large pot and he could hear the water inside roiling and making it shimmy slightly. The aroma he’d hit upon when entering the house was emanating from the other smaller pot. And sitting in a chair in the living room, that with the kitchen and dining area made up an open plan great room, was his number two, a veteran of the Iraq war who simply went by Carson. First name or last, only he and Bishop knew. And he was wearing a shit-eating grin that made the quartet of red welts marring his face fold in on themselves to resemble a vertically arranged W.
“You like?” asked Carson with a sweeping gesture.
“The view’s great,” he answered, looking towards the sliding glass and shimmering lake beyond.
“No ... the spread, Ian.”
Looking left, Bishop noticed the wood slab dining table had been set for two. There were two napkins folded fancy. Two plates with gold trim guarded on both sides by an array of silverware, two of everything it seemed. There was even a pair of distinct glasses, one for wine, and one, presumably, for water. Peeling off his sweat-soaked tee, Bishop said, “Are you coming out of the closet on me or something? We having a date here?” He held a straight face for a second and then burst out laughing.
Failing to constrain himself, Carson also broke out in laughter, and then after a minute or so wiped a tear from his eye and said, “Get washed up. I have another surprise for you.”
“I love surprises,” said Bishop with a knowing look. He shifted his gaze to the lake. “Elvis?”
“Sleeping by now,” replied Carson.
“Did he follow through?”
Carson smiled. “And then some. Must have found a second gear. He sent the girls out about ten minutes ago. I took them over to the boys.”
Wearing a concerned look, Bishop glanced over his shoulder. “Are the girls broken?”
Carson shut down the stove. “They’re a little bent. But nothing serious.”
“Elvis is a go for tomorrow?”
“For sure,” replied Carson. “For sure.”
“Mmmm, spaghetti,” said Bishop in passing. He traced his steps back. Turned a right before the back door and climbed the seventeen stairs to the second floor. He passed the first door on the right and heard Elvis snoring, deep and resonant. He got a whiff of a musky scent. A byproduct of the King’s sexcapades, no doubt. Far better than carrion, he thought. The second bedroom was next and he noticed the door now had a padlock on the outside. A big Schlage item, the screws concealed by the hardware. Still, he imagined Carson had sunk the wood screws deep into the frame. Unless Lara Croft was behind the door, nobody was getting out of there. And since he didn’t have a key, he wasn’t getting in. Dad must not want me to peek at the present before Christmas, he mused. Pushing aside the forming mental image of the woman behind the door, he walked the length of the carpeted hall to the master bedroom and the cold shower awaiting.
Chapter 44
The overhead skylight and sliding glass door let in copious amounts of sunlight, the majority of which was reflecting off the lake and danced hypnotically, wave-like on the angular vaulted ceiling. As a direct result, the temperature in the room had risen beyond hot. Sweltering was the first word that came to Jamie’s mind. Her sweat-soaked clothes clung to her body but had no kind of cooling effect. She knew she looked as bad as she felt. Passing through the back door, she had gotten a glimpse at her own reflection in the glass. Looking like a black swimmer’s cap, her hair was plastered to her head and had dried that way after the hood had been removed—for good, she hoped. Put her in a flapper’s dress and show her to the speakeasy and she’d blend right in, she’d thought at the time. Hell, throw in some bathtub gin as well because when she tried to swallow, her saliva was thick and viscous and a white crust had formed at the corners of her mouth. She couldn’t remember ever wanting a drink of anything wet more than she lusted for one now.
In addition to the locked door leading out to the hall, there was another (also locked) leading off to the right into a Jack and Jill bathroom. This she knew because periodically she would hear the toilet water run for a few seconds and then stop, presumably a valve in the tank replacing water lost through a leaky seal somewhere. Liquid. So near yet so far. In fact it might as well have been a waterfall. And every time she heard it, her Pavlovian response was triggered, causing her to struggle against her bonds, adding new welts to the collection of old on her wrists.
The handcuffs that had replaced the zip ties were no-nonsense items. Smith and Wesson was stamped in the tempered American steel as was their place of origin—Springfield, Massachusetts.
Flat on her back with her arms cuffed high to the queen-sized headboard, she had been forced to listen to both the running water and, louder still, the grunts and groans and whimpers of a rape in progress filtering under the door from a room beyond. And sickening as the animalistic sounds and desperate fem
ale voices made her feel, they needed to be exploited. So with the noise from the ongoing attack rising to a crescendo, Jamie yanked with all of her might, trying to break a weld or compromise the curled ironwork.
Nothing.
Twenty grueling minutes passed as she fought her bonds while the assault next door continued. Finally, with the awful noises diminishing, she brought her knees to her chest, and in a last ditch effort, placed the balls of her feet against the curved horizontal top bar and extended her legs. Nothing budged except for the mattress and box springs under her. Crestfallen, she spat a few choice expletives and gave up fighting her predicament physically. Since the moment Logan and Gus had crumpled to the ground near her feet, everything seemed to be working against her.
But she was still alive.
Then her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything substantial in two days. A bad thing. Weak malnourished people had no chance of escape. So she closed her eyes and, to conserve energy, focused on her breathing and visualized what she would do when the cuffs were removed. The war gaming and plotting and scheming didn’t last long because five minutes into it she came to the conclusion that whatever she tried would probably do nothing more than sign her death warrant.
Two minutes after that epiphany she gave up mentally.
Sixty seconds later she was asleep and the footsteps outside the door went unnoticed.
Chapter 45
Twenty-two miles from the I-70 junction where State Route 191 passed over a tributary of the Green River, the landscape turned from dull brown to lush green and then almost instantly reverted back to the same ever-present depressing muted earth tones.
A stone’s throw north of the crossing they came upon what Cade had guessed was once a bustling stop on the mostly desolate road, where, looking like nuked playground equipment, the shells of a dozen long-haul trucks sat atop acres of scorched concrete. The initial explosion, no doubt fed by the contents of huge underground tanks, had been of cataclysmic proportions. Pieces of the main building, where presumably a driver could find all manner of goods and services and other off the books experiences, had been blown to all points of the compass. Aluminum panels had reached the main road a hundred yards off. A carpet of glass pebbles encircling the shell of a building sparkled in the afternoon glare. After the explosion, the several-thousand-foot structure had burned to the ground completely, the only remaining distinguishable items: a pair of centrally located cube-shaped walk-in coolers. As a result of the blast, a number of the trailers had been knocked over and, along with whatever cargo they’d been hauling, had burned hot, leaving pools of molten metal, now hardened, glimmering in the sun. And to add insult to injury, like clumsy security personnel, a number of crispy Zs loitered near the sooty metal skeletons.
Clearly, the Double J truck stop had seen better days.
***
Two hours and fifty miles removed from the high desert killing fields, thankfully with all parties—especially Mom—none the wiser, Raven had recovered from her unavoidable accident, and was chattering on excitedly about anything and everything. After having everyone declare allegiance to their favorite pop stars—Cade’s of which drew the most laughs—Raven went silent, seemingly content to just stare out the window.
Suppressing a grin, Brook looked at Cade, and said, “Michael Jackson ... really?” To which Raven, out of the blue and on a totally different conversational tangent said, “I think we need to name this truck.” She cracked a water bottle and poured a slow steady stream onto Max’s lapping tongue.
Grateful the topic had swung in a different direction, Cade humored her. “You called our Sequoia the Big Silver Beast, right?”
From the back seat Raven said, “Yes I did.”
“How are you going to top that. Big Black Beast just doesn’t have the same ring to it.”
Brook chimed in. “That is not going to fly.”
“How about Black Beauty?” proffered Raven.
“Taken,” said Brook and Cade in unison.
“I don’t care. Walt Disney is dead ... I’m using it.”
Cade and Brook exchanged looks learned in the trenches called parenting and understood only by them.
“Done,” conceded Cade. He looked over his shoulder and met Raven’s gaze. “B.B. for short ... OK?”
Before Raven could answer, Brook blurted, “Cade, look.”
Hearing this, he shifted his gaze forward and immediately saw what Brook was seeing. A little more than a mile distant, the rolling landscape started to resemble the approach to the last river crossing, the scrub sharing space with green grasses and low-growing bushes. And a few hundred yards beyond the wanna-be-oasis, he recognized sun glinting from the windows of a myriad of structures and unmoving vehicles. With the two previous firefights fresh on his mind, he eased up on the throttle and tapped the brakes, quickly halving his speed from forty miles per hour down to twenty. Keeping his eyes forward and slowing more, Cade said, “Check the navigation system.”
After turning the navigation system on, Brook checked her M4 for the third time in an hour and finished her ritual by patting the extra magazines bulging her cargo pockets. Thirty seconds later, the device in the dash had shaken hands with whatever GPS satellite was providing it the info and had refreshed to show the squiggle representing S.R. 191 as well as a trio of town names stacked diagonally, ascending stair-like right to left—Wellington at the bottom, Price dead center, and then, at the top left corner of the screen, the smaller of the three, a town called Helper. All total, judging by the speed the pixelated blip representing the F-650 was moving along the State Route, Cade guessed that no more than twenty miles separated the largest concentration of lost civilization he’d seen up close in a long while.
Simultaneously, awakened from her slumber, the computerized female voice said, “Wellington, one mile,” and on the right a sign demarking the city limits and bearing the same name with the population noted below in reflective numbers slid by.
Brook whispered, “Sixteen hundred and seventy-six souls.”
“And hopefully they’re all dead and have shuffled off into the sunset by now.”
Grabbing the binoculars off the floor, Brook said, “Not likely. Stop here and I’ll take a look.”
He pulled hard to the shoulder, leaving the rig angled a few degrees left with its front tires straddling the centerline. After watching Taryn bring the Raptor to a halt a couple of truck lengths behind, Cade flicked his eyes from the rearview and asked, “What do you see?”
“Just some Zs. Nothing else.”
“Nothing moving?”
“Nope. Just broken-down cars. This road runs through the middle of them all.”
Cade flipped a coin in his head. Not the ideal way to make a decision considering Green River. But those folks had come from Salt Lake and Grand Junction. And it seemed to him that the ones who got out of the cities usually did so by any means necessary. Consequently, most of the survivors they’d encountered up until now came with bags packed full of bad intentions. But with Wellington, his gut was telling him something different. Using the two-way, he told Wilson that Main Street looked navigable, but the same rules that had gotten them through their previous scrapes still applied. Then he finished with a pop quiz and asked them what the most important rule of the road was.
Inside the Raptor, Sasha’s mouth moved but nothing useful emerged.
Wilson looked at Taryn and shook his head. Mouthed, “We’re not stupid.” He keyed the radio and answered deadpan, “Don’t stop for anything.”
“Correct,” said Cade, accelerating the Black Beauty briskly towards Wellington.
***
There was no ambush waiting for them in Wellington. Twenty blocks worth of seemingly deserted downtown were sandwiched between open fields, a smattering of quiet darkened houses, and vast tracts of land with nothing more than dirt clods and tumbleweeds to look at. They nearly doubled the posted limit blowing through every intersection—stop sign, or no—in t
he downtown core.
Consulting the navigation unit, Brook said, “We’re in luck. We’ve got two choices ... stay on this and run the gauntlet through the next two towns. Or go left and take something called the Six Bypass and skirt them altogether.”
“No brainer,” said Cade. “Say when.”
“Coming up,” said Brook. “Six shoots off to the left. Looks like an overpass will take us over some train tracks—” She looked up from the GPS display and suddenly went quiet.
Muscles tensed, Cade jammed on the brakes.
The F-650’s tires juddered and bounced on the blacktop momentarily and then the springs and shocks compressed under the rig’s mass and a full one-thirty-second of an inch worth of rubber was laid down in the form of four smoking hundred-foot-long black streaks.
Worried that they were about to receive a vicious rear-ending, the lesser of the two evils considering that less than two hundred yards ahead, fully blocking the bypass and moving in their direction, was a full blown horde, Cade tightened his grip on the wheel and said, “Brace yourselves.”
But Taryn had been alert. Looking several car lengths ahead as her father had taught her. Hands at the proper ten-and-two. Ready to heel-and-toe the pedals. And she did exactly that. However, she didn’t lock them up. Instead, exhibiting an awesome display of controlled driving, she slewed her ride around the black rig even before it had ceased all forward movement. Finessing the pedals, she braked hard and hauled the wheel right, leaving four smoking black marks on the roadway before stopping broadside to the moving mass of death. Then, reacting with a sense of urgency only a phalanx of gnashing teeth and swiping nails could impart, she pinned the accelerator to the floor, held the wheel locked over and powered the Raptor’s tail end around and into the front row, starting a domino-like chain reaction that sent dozens of them pin balling off of each other before succumbing to the inevitable and falling hard and vertically to the hot roadway. As the oversized bumper and boxy rear panels scythed through the second echelon of flesh eaters, the rear tires found purchase and Taryn wheeled their gore-spattered ride away from the moving wall of decaying flesh.
Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 23
