Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  Out of the blue, Brook said, “Kind of strange how quiet it is.”

  Scanning the streets and rooftops a block in advance, Cade replied, “Certainly beats the alternative.” He cast his gaze down a side street and spotted a clutch of hollow-eyed first turns staggering towards him. And out of the corner of his eye he saw their prey, a scrawny feral dog, bolt whippet-like from beneath one parked car to the safety of the next. As the scene slipped from view, Cade was struck by how quickly Duchesne had become a ghost town at the hands of a little manmade virus.

  After bisecting the idled city, Center Street curled left and cut a serpentine path through a greenbelt paralleling the dogwood-lined Strawberry River. The two-lane continued onward for six miles, passing by turn-of-the-century homes with rocking-chair-porches and large working fields before finally merging with Utah 35 at its easternmost terminus.

  They drove on for an hour, the road numbers and distances blending together until finally forty miles north and west of Duchesne, like the fabled Bat Phone, Cade’s sixth sense started ringing off the hook. Easing the Ford to the curb, he asked Brook to hand over the binoculars. With his internal voice telling him he’d been here before and his gut screaming turn around, he pressed the Bushnell’s to his face and worked its center ring. The lush green valley spread out before him sprang into sharp focus. He started panning from right-to-left. Bordered by red earthen foothills, rectangular tracts of land in various sizes meandered diagonally for a couple of miles before the low mountains in the background closed in, creating a chokepoint in the distance where the ribbon of gray disappeared into the low forest. Cade heard the hum of tires on asphalt and then the rumble of the Raptor’s engine as it sidled to a stop a foot to his left. Then the inevitable. The sound of a window whirring down followed by a, “What’s up?”

  Keeping his attention glued to the foreground, Cade answered, “I just wanted to look before leaping. That’s all.” He let the field glasses rest on their lanyard. With Brook watching him closely, he hit a couple of buttons on the navigation unit and zoomed in until nearly the same scene to the fore, only filmed by a satellite sometime in the past, was now displayed in full on the LCD screen. The lay of the land was identical. The fields were fallow, meaning that presumably the image had been captured in the fall or early winter. And the way the image was filling the screen told him nothing he didn’t already know from the thirty second recon. He felt Brook’s hand on his, and then sensed Raven’s presence over his right shoulder. Brook manipulated the controls and the image zoomed out, showing the last city they had passed through and revealing the next one straddling the rural State Route. Then Raven, possessing arguably the best eyesight in the family, read the next town’s name out loud. “Hanna,” she called out. “Nice name for a town. Maybe we can stop there and stretch our legs ... let Max do his business.”

  Brook’s head panned left ever so slowly as if she didn’t want to know what kind of effect, if any, the revelation had on Cade. When her gaze finally met his, what she saw in his eyes put her at ease.

  Though there was a cold ball forming in his gut, Cade remained stoic. Pushing the welling anxiety back in its box, he shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly and cast a sidelong glance at Brook. “There’s no future in dwelling on the past.” Then glanced over his shoulder at Raven and added, “Just because we haven’t encountered many Zs since the horde near Price doesn’t mean Hanna will be quiet.”

  “Can we stop if it is?” pressed Raven.

  Massaging his temples, Cade replied, “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  Which to Raven was Dad code for ‘no,’ but stated in a manner meant to give her a little bit of hope. So she pressed harder, “Please, Dad. I think I need to go again.”

  “Really?” he said nonplussed. “Can’t you go here?”

  She said, “In the wide open, Dad? Out here in front of everyone?”

  Then, remembering her accident near Green River, he changed his tone and added, “Only if it’s safe.” He looked down at Wilson in the Raptor and shrugged. Then went on and described to Wilson and Taryn as much as he could remember about the little town.

  With a range of emotions stemming from what he’d gone through in the farmhouse attic with Daymon and the lawyer surging through his body, Cade rattled the shifter into Drive and set a course towards what he hoped might be a little closure.

  Chapter 50

  The little valley before the town of Hanna appeared to be deserted. And like in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, after the spaceship landed and the giant robot deployed, nothing down there moved for as far as Cade could see. Then suddenly a light breeze picked up and rustled what he guessed to be fields of alfalfa, creating a hypnotic waving motion that reminded him at once of the picket of aspens quaking under a fierce rotor wash, his fleeting final memory of Hanna as he escaped certain death and climbed aboard the hovering Black Hawk.

  Built up alongside the State Route were hardy country homes sitting back on oversized plots of land. The yards were full of rusty farm implements and here and there they passed a hand-painted sign staked in front of a drive offering up for sale corded firewood or baled hay or freshly laid eggs by the dozen. All the kinds of things that used to be make the world go round for the folks in this neck of the woods. But unfortunately that world stopped going around when Hanna’s self-sufficient economy fell to the dead weeks ago. Of this Cade was certain. He didn’t need to see as proof the dead feeding on a cow carcass or the multitude of homes with darkened windows and empty clotheslines. For he had already seen dozens of the town’s undead citizenry with his own eyes. Nearly half of the total population of one hundred and seventy souls had converged around that farmhouse on the hill. And in the end, after the helo had plucked him and Daymon off of the roof, Duncan claimed to have seen many more streaming in from the very road spooling out behind the Ford.

  After the short climb up the far side of the valley, Cade came to find that there really was no downtown Hanna. Two and a half weeks ago he had entered from the north; at the time he had assumed the business district lay to the south. But he had been mistaken. They passed by the shotgun-style house where he’d found the Winnebago, keys and mushy brakes and all—the trio’s would-be escape vehicle. A few more long country blocks down the road he saw off to the right the driveway with the aspens partially shielding the two-story farmhouse. He slowed the Ford to walking-speed and crept past the wall of trees, details of the house becoming visible by degrees. First he saw the mildew-streaked rear-end of the RV that was still wedged firmly under the left corner of the wraparound porch, the improvised escape hatch he’d fashioned with a number of rounds from his rifle still hinged up on the roof. He counted the half a dozen Z corpses decomposing on the lawn and walk where he’d felled them silently with the Gerber. Then he craned his head nearer to Brook and cast his gaze at the roof, where on the south side he recognized the flap of roofing material they were forced to saw through in order to effect their escape. A chill traced his spine and his eyes narrowed when the whole picture came together and he realized how close he had come to buying it right here.

  Seeing Cade’s gaze lock on the house and a second later his face harden and his brow furrow, Brook placed her palm against his cheek and asked, “You going to be OK, Cade Grayson?” And though she only knew the basics of how he got in and out of the house, upon seeing it up close she could tell that he had purposefully left a few of the major details unsaid.

  “Yeah. I’m just now processing all of it for the first time. Seeing it from this perspective ... and after the fact, is a little strange. That’s all.” Then to change the subject, he twisted around and removed one of the buds from Raven’s ear and said loudly, “You think we should stop here so Raven can pee?”

  Brook winked at him. Said, “Yeah. And let Max out ... then we can all stretch a little bit too.”

  Back to eyeing the house, Cade said, “Done.” He pulled over and stopped across the driveway. He looked past Brook and noticed a sliv
er of Daymon’s BLM-green suburban sticking out from behind the house. In his mind he saw the special-ops motorcycle that Beeson had given him before he left Camp Williams so full of hope and fear, his only mission to find his family. It had to be back there, he told himself. Probably still propped up next to the Chevy, saddlebags full of gear, right where he had left it.

  And that thought led to an idea.

  Brook asked, “Who’s going to clear the area?”

  Cade smiled, “Great minds, honey. Great minds.” He popped a handful of ibuprofen sans water and grabbed the two-way, then cracked his door. A tick later the Raptor rolled by and, with the sound of gravel crunching under its tires, parked on the shoulder just past the driveway.

  Cade climbed out of Black Beauty and tested his weight on the ankle which seemed to be feeling better with each passing hour. Then he noticed the temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. It was almost tolerable now. About eighty, he guesstimated. He hiked his sleeves up and checked the time on his Suunto. Twenty-four hours to go. No sweat. Before going anywhere, he scanned the State road in both directions. There was nothing to see there so he walked across the road and listened hard. Other than the soft idles of the distant engines, there was nothing to hear. None of the telltale moaning or raspy hissing to indicate the dead were on to them. Like Duchesne, Hanna looked to be a ghost town. Hell, he thought. The whole world was becoming one big ghost town.

  Wilson and Taryn approached him, walking cautiously, heads on a swivel, eyeballing every blind corner. Brook had done well with the kids while he was out. He noticed that they both were carrying a bottled water and eating something from an olive drab wrapper, most likely straight out of an MRE.

  With gravel squelching underneath her boots, Brook rounded the front of the Ford and greeted Wilson and his ‘driver’ with a half-smile and a hug.

  “Gotta rub it in, huh? I’m never going to drive that thing.” Wilson looked at Taryn and gave her shoulder a playful nudge.

  She smiled but made no reply.

  “Someone’s got to keep up the pressure.” Brook’s lips became a thin white line and, still reeling internally from the Green River shootout, she lowered her voice and asked, “How are you two doing after the encounter back there?”

  Wilson said, “Which encounter? There were half a dozen, seemed like.”

  “The road above Green River.”

  Wilson looked away. Went silent for a moment, then said, “Like I told Sash and Tee. We did what we had to in order to survive. No telling whose bullets did them in. No sense worrying over it neither.”

  Eyes welling with tears, Taryn looked at Brook, then Wilson, and turned away.

  Changing the subject, Brook asked, “How’s the cheek?” But before Wilson could answer, the F6-50’s rear door swung open and Max bounded to the pavement and charged over to Cade where he sat at his feet, stubby tail thumping furiously.

  “Go ahead, boy,” said Cade.

  Wasting no time, Max shot off like a furry rocket in the direction of the aspens.

  Seeing Raven clamber from the truck, Cade motioned her over. He slipped his backup Glock from the shoulder holster, checked the chamber, and handed it to her butt first. “It’s loaded. Keep the muzzle pointed towards the ground until ... ” After taking the compact pistol from him, Raven finished his sentence. “Until I’m ready to use it. Keep my finger off the trigger—which happens to be where the safety is located—until I’m ready to engage the threat.”

  Cade arched a brow, looked at Brook and delivered a covert wink. Shifting his gaze back to Raven, he said, “Mom sure has you dialed in. How about we go and see what Max is up to?” He bent down to Raven’s height and whispered in her ear, “And while we’re at it, find us a real toilet.” He hauled the Glock 17 from its holster and with a quick twist attached the suppressor to its business end.

  Brook grabbed his attention. She asked, “Do you have a radio?”

  Cade patted a cargo pocket and said, “Roger that,” then put his arm around Raven’s shoulder and steered her towards the wrecked RV.

  Chapter 51

  Carson freed her legs first. She was certain, judging by the scratches on his face and the way he let his rough hands linger on her calves and ankles, that when the cuffs came off, deep down he wanted her to get out of line so he could follow through with his earlier threat.

  His upper body hovered near as he worked the key in the cuffs. He freed her left hand first. As her hand fell limply to the bed, Jamie flicked her gaze up to the side of his neck where she could see the subtle blue line of his carotid, or jugular, she wasn’t quite sure which, snaking its way vertically from collarbone to ear just underneath the skin. She parted her teeth and prayed for him to get complacent. To lean across her body in order to reach the other cuff and provide her the one opportunity she had been waiting for.

  But Carson was no dummy. He finished with her left and walked around the bed and repeated the process on her right. Then, without a word, and never once taking his eyes off of her, he made her pick a dress from the pile and then ushered her towards the adjoining bathroom.

  She saw him in the hall mirror, back to an interior wall, watching her undress. She peeled off her cotton fatigue pants and shrugged out of her blood-stained tee-shirt. Standing there in bra and panties, she could feel his eyes on her. Gathering up her courage, she looked at his reflection and saw that he was watching her intently. However, due to his body language and where he parked his eyes, she could tell that he wasn’t doing it just for jollies. He seemed to be focusing on her hands more than anything. Making sure she didn’t surreptitiously sneak a nail file, or a pair of nail clippers or anything else that she could use as a makeshift weapon. He was a professional. That much was clear. And if the man she was about to meet instilled enough fear or respect or perhaps a healthy dose of both in him to keep him on his toes, then she was pretty certain that for her to make it out of the house alive she would be needing much more than a random mani-pedi tool or sharp piece of kitchen cutlery. She sighed. Right about now her glass was half-empty, the waterline steadily receding.

  Meeting his eyes in the mirror, she asked, “How does this look?”

  He said nothing.

  “It’s kind of seventies chic, don’t you think? Your friend going to like it?”

  He made no reply. Arms crossed, he simply nodded towards the door.

  The number she’d chosen for the big date was low cut, contained less material than a Scottish kilt, and fell across her thighs even higher. Due to the sheer nature of the fabric, something manmade, rayon or nylon she guessed, the thing threatened to reveal her feminine grooming habits with even the slightest movement.

  A lifelong tomboy, jeans and tee-shirts were more in her wheelhouse than the form-fitting leggings and skorts favored by other girls. Including the one wedding she had endured as a bridesmaid, she could count on one hand the number of times she had ever donned a dress. Though she didn’t let it show, up to this point in her life she had never worn an article of clothing that caused her skin to crawl more so than this throwback to the disco era.

  Time to go ‘all in,’ she thought. Then, with Carson still watching, she reached back and unhooked her bra and shrugged it off and let it fall to the tile floor. She adjusted the top of the skanky burnt-orange dress so that a good amount of cleavage showed. Then she stepped out of her panties, kicked them away and looked in the mirror while thinking, What’s the point? At best, the no-frills cotton articles were only going to prolong the inevitable. At worst, one of them would provide the mystery man a perfect ligature.

  ***

  The tuxedo was on the back wall of the walk-in-closet, zippered inside a vinyl bag containing all of the necessary accoutrements: bow tie, cummerbund, dickey, and shoes. Like the jogging clothes, the formal wear was a couple sizes too small. He buttoned up the white shirt as far as possible, leaving the top two open and the seventeen-inch collar parted. From a jewelry box he took a pair of gold cufflinks and secured the
starched cuffs. Then he laid down flat on the bed and zipped and buttoned the high-water slacks.

  The necktie took him three tries to make presentable.

  Grimacing, he squeezed the patent leather shoes on and laced them loosely.

  He stepped across the master bedroom and stopped in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror and checked his work. Service dress white uniform this was not. Judging by the recent pictures of the lake home’s former owners, both well into their fifties, both packing around the extra weight accrued from half a lifetime of eating without thought of the consequences, and judging by the white ruffles and powder blue color, he guessed the era of the suit to be late seventies or early eighties. He did the math and realized that he had been a kid when the tailor made the tux for its former owner who at the time was likely in his twenties.

  With a bass heavy Bee Gees track looping through his head, he adjusted the tie, turned and walked stiffly towards the door. He closed the door behind and drifted down the hall, borrowed shoes squelching against the carpet. From behind the mystery door he could hear voices. Continuing on past Elvis’s room he heard a male voice filtering through the door. Then there was loud snoring followed by silence and a tick later the voice started back up. It was unintelligible but the inflection was unmistakable—urgent and demanding. Then the snoring kicked back in.

  Figuring Elvis was in the throes of one hell of a nightmare, Bishop ignored the commotion and continued on downstairs. He had been there. In fact, the undead visited him every night in the form of ultra-realistic nightmares that always started with him supine and holding a pistol with no ammunition. Then like Groundhog Day, minus Sonny and Cher’s opening track, the sneering faces of the dead descended on him, their cold hands clutching and tearing. Lastly, he would be out of body and watching as clawlike blood-stained hands rent steaming entrails from his abdomen. The recurring frequency and vividness of the images were taking a toll on him. Making him believe that somehow he was seeing his true fate played out every time he closed his eyes.