Born out of times of stress, he’d suffered before from similar nightmares. Only in those it hadn’t been the hands of the dead literally ripping out his guts. It had been a figurative disembowelment during which his entire SEAL team was decimated by the Taliban because they had been forced to follow ridiculous rules of engagement foisted upon them by politicians who only set foot on the Godforsaken soil for a photo-op to add a sort of unearned street-cred to their own personal dossiers. But everything happened for a reason. Cause and effect. And his constant bending of those inane rules of engagement, the worst being don’t shoot until you’re fired upon, was seen as insubordination in some circles and eventually led to his ouster from the teams. A life event that left him rudderless and open to accepting Robert Christian’s financial aid.
While the recent nightmares had yet to come true, he feared that the former had. He hadn’t heard from his brothers who were still on active duty since before the outbreak. He feared that the same ROE-instituting politicians who were responsible for keeping the population in the dark and holding back the full might of the military early on in the outbreak had in effect once again tied their hands and then thrown them to the wolves. Lambs to the slaughter.
Sure, the odds against success were stacked mightily on the side of failure. Enough to make an ordinary man give up and ‘ring the bell.’ But there wasn’t a quitter’s bone in Ian Bishop’s body ... he never would have completed BUDs in Coronado a decade ago if there had been. So for now he was content to wear down the dead through attrition. Elvis’s mission tomorrow would be the first blow towards ridding the United States of the only thing he feared. And if he used the rest of the devices to their full potential—placing them near the highest concentrations of the dead—the odds would begin shifting fast in his favor. He didn’t care to save mankind or get back at the politicians and cry baby PC crowd who’d tried to micro manage his job over there. Nope, he just wanted to take out as many of the walking flesh bags as possible. And if he couldn’t do it in his lifetime, then he wanted to make sure and leave an heir behind who could finish the job he’d started.
Leaving the seat with a view for his date, he pulled out the chair opposite and sat with his back to the lake. He poured the 1997 Silver Oak Cabernet that Carson had selected from the cellar. Noting the shiny label, he understood why his number two man had chosen it. The selection had nothing to do with vintage, or terroir or varietal. Simply put, the silver leaf embossed label screamed pick me. Being a beer man himself, Bishop was the farthest thing from a sommelier. He corralled the pair of crystal Boudreaux glasses Carson had also set out on the table and filled both of them to near overflowing, then carefully moved hers back to its proper place.
Satisfied with the arrangement and feeling and looking—on account of the dated attire—like a kid on a prom date, he put his hands on his lap near where he had duct taped a compact .38 caliber snub-nose pistol to the underside of the table and eyed the two rapidly cooling plates of meatless spaghetti.
Chapter 52
After checking underneath the Winnebago and finding nothing dangerous, Cade put an ear to the detritus-smeared aluminum skin just behind the driver’s seat. Nothing stirring. He looked at Raven who was still holding her weapon correctly, finger braced on the trigger guard. He mouthed, “Ready?” After receiving a nod to the affirmative he made a fist and thumped on the side of the RV. Three sonorous blows. They waited a second and, upon hearing no response from within, crept past and moved along the left side of the farmhouse.
Holding his free hand up, fingers splayed, Cade met Raven’s eyes and made a fist. Seeing his diminutive twelve-year-old respond instantly and freeze in place, eyes searching for the perceived threat, made Cade want to run back out front and give Brook a high-five and a big wet sloppy kiss. But school was still in session. He pointed to his eyes, two fingers in a ‘V.’ He then motioned with the same two fingers toward the far side of the inert Suburban where a pair of recent turns, low guttural moans emanating from their constantly working maws, marched in place, fighting a losing battle against a tangle of waist-high shrubs.
Raven’s gaze followed her dad’s gesture. She nodded subtly and remained motionless, waiting for instruction which came quickly in the form of one vertical finger pressed against his lips. She watched him creep nearer, knees bent, weapon outstretched. Her eyes went to the Zs. She saw them craning and leaning and stretching against the thick bushes, trying to see where the mechanical engine sounds were coming from. Then the dagger was in her dad’s hand and he covered the final three feet at a trot.
Raven didn’t look away. She forced herself to watch. Thankfully it was over swiftly and silently. Not a shot fired. Two short efficient jabs, the point of the knife piercing each creature through the eye socket, only a half second between each one’s final death.
They filed by the rotten corpses, both of them hinged over the hedge as if in supplication—perhaps praying to remain dead.
A jumble of Daymon’s firefighting gear was in the rear of the Suburban. On the front seat was a letter, previously folded three ways. Cade reached in the open window and snatched it by one curled-up corner. Saw that it was addressed to Heidi and, ignoring its content, promptly folded it and stuffed it into a cargo pocket for safekeeping. And hopefully future delivery.
He spun a slow one-eighty. Looked over Raven’s head to check their rear.
Nothing.
He spun back around, slowly, eyes probing all points of the compass, listening hard. The truck’s engines had been silenced. There were no discernable moans or rasps of the dead. No screams of the living. Nothing to hear but the aspen’s soft rattle. Things were good.
Raven caught her dad’s eye and pointed towards the desert tan dirt bike. Then a flash of recognition. The sum of two plus two fell into place and her brown eyes got wide as a knowing look fell upon her tanned face.
Cade saw that nothing was amiss. The saddle bags, though scarred from when he dropped the bike outside of Camp Williams, appeared to be sealed, protecting their contents from the elements. The bike represented one of the vague facts about his flight from Portland he’d previously disseminated to Raven. Unsubstantial, in and of itself. Nothing pointing to what went on inside the charnel house looming over them.
The bike could wait.
Raven’s full bladder could not. That much had already been proven. And he had seen to it that the unfortunate result had been handled tactfully and with the utmost respect.
The back stairs led to a small porch. There was no hand rail so Cade motioned silently and had Raven wait on the first tread. Stepping only on the nail heads indicating where the under support and treads met, he scaled the seven stairs without making a sound. Bloody hand prints marred the shingles and wood casing to eye-level all around the back entry. There was more of the same and the door hung ajar and was creased vertically in the center, the victim of constant and certain pressure inflicted upon it by a couple of tons of determined dead weight.
Cade could see through the back window the damage the throng of Zs had inflicted on the kitchen table and chairs. Every piece was upended, their chromed legs bent and twisted at odd angles. More hand prints walked up and down the walls between the kitchen and long hallway leading to the destroyed front door. On the linoleum floor, two badly decomposed corpses lay among shards of broken china, their limbs intertwined, each harboring one of Daymon’s arrows in an eye socket.
Repeating the dinner bell tactic he had used at the RV, Cade pounded on the windowless door. He waited and listened for a moment and heard only the sound of branches rubbing together coming through the open front door. The sound seemed to be bouncing around the expansive foyer before transiting the enclosed confines of the lengthy hall. Though the stench of decay was heavy in the house, nothing told him to turn back. His sixth sense was eerily quiet. So he brought Raven forward.
She nodded and scaled the stairs, then looked around the kitchen, mouth ajar, first taking in the destruction and then acknowl
edging the corpses. Finally, curiosity having gotten the better of her, she whispered, “What happened in here?”
“It’s a long story,” said Cade quietly. As she watched he went about the kitchen searching all of the drawers. He removed a couple of items from a far drawer and stuffed them in a pocket.
“What do you need those for?” she asked.
“For a friend,” he answered. “Now follow me.” He stepped over the fallen Zs, walked half a dozen feet down the hall and found a narrow door with a hole for a skeleton key. Sensitivities being a little different around the turn of the last century, residents had no problem with a toilet being so close to the kitchen. Plus, routing the plumbing with only one wall between the two was a win-win for architects and tradesmen alike.
He pushed the heavy door in with his right hand and side-stepped to his left, the hefty silencer keeping track with his gaze. “Clear,” he stated. “Come on over, Bird. It’s all yours.”
With his back pressed to the wall across from the small first floor powder room, he peered up and marveled at the jumble of bedroom furniture and corpses clogging the stairway leading to the second floor. There were pale arms bent at strange angles reaching through the mess, some still twitching. The claw foot tub that he and the lawyer had worked so hard to uproot lay on its side where it had landed and crushed a pair of unfortunate flesh eaters.
As he waited for Raven to finish her business, the sound he had heard from the kitchen a moment prior was repeated. Only when he looked left through the empty windows framing the battered front door he saw the aspens were unmoving, their brittle leaves deathly quiet. He noticed Brook and Taryn standing near the Raptor engaged in conversation but couldn’t hear a word across the distance.
A tick later the bathroom door creaked and swung inward and Raven rejoined him in the hall wearing a sour look on her face. She said, “No toilet paper,” then put her hands on display and added, “Or water.”
Cade said, “Sorry, sweetie. Beats squatting in the bushes or peeing yourself again.” Regretting his choice of words, he passed the Glock back and with a nod towards the kitchen added, “Keep it pointed that way. I’ll be right back.”
With the business end of his suppressed Glock leading the way, Cade stepped over a handful of bullet-riddled corpses and then cut the corner around the baluster, keeping the front entry to his back. He swept his gaze right to the formal dining room where golden dust motes skipped between splashes of light. Speaking to the numbers of dead that had cornered them upstairs, the walnut table fit for eight had been shoved up against the far wall and around its periphery a mosaic of bloody footprints marked up every inch of a finely woven Persian rug. It was a miracle, he thought to himself, that the house hadn’t literally come apart at the seams.
Then the subtle sound again. Almost like a barber running a straight razor slowly over a strap—back and forth and back and forth. Intrigued, Cade took two steps to his left, looked up, and saw a bloated gray face staring back at him from atop the mass of shattered joinery, and when eye contact was established its maw opened and once again the brittle rasp echoed about the open foyer.
He called down the hall. “Don’t worry, it can’t get us.” Raven’s reply caught him flat footed. Voice devoid of all emotion, she said, “Leave it then.”
A breath caught in Cade’s throat. He supposed he was expecting a little more empathy. But then again, she didn’t know that the creature impaled on the picket of splintered balusters between floors used to be the man that he and Daymon had endured way too many grueling hours trapped upstairs in the hot attic with.
His name had been Hosford Preston the something or other. But Cade couldn’t recall if he had actually declared a title other than attorney of law. And though Cade was no detective, how Hoss had come to be perforated diagonally through the abdomen by three wrist-thick wooden spindles was evident by the gaping hole in the ceiling directly overhead.
Stripped clean from the waist down, undead Hoss’s lower body was harder to look at than his face. All that remained was a leather belt and shreds of fabric no longer resembling dress pants. There was a gaping cavity where his manhood had been, and from there on down, looking like a school of piranhas had gotten to them, all that was left of his tree-trunk-like legs was bare bone. One foot had gone missing, a rounded nub of bone and strips of opaque tendon where it used to be. Inexplicably, the other foot remained attached and still shod in a tightly laced leather wingtip.
Baffled by the fact that the lawyer’s meaty head wasn’t already home to a half dozen 9mm Parabellums, Cade aimed his Glock up the stairs and, before the thing could emit another hair-raising rasp, finished Daymon’s job for him.
With the two spent casings still pinging across the foyer floor, he hustled down the hall, gathered Raven in one arm and ushered her from the charnel house the same way they had entered.
Now standing on the back porch, Raven screwed her face up and asked, “Who was it?”
“Who is not important,” replied Cade. “The it part is what we need to remember. If me or Mom become an it you must not hesitate. Two to the head ... hear me? I just had to finish a job in there someone else couldn’t.”
“You did know it then.”
Thinking through his answer, Cade led them down the stairs and to the motorcycle. He opened the saddle bag nearest him and looked up at Raven and said, “I knew it briefly.” Which was as nice a way as he could think of putting it. He grabbed the single pair of goggle-like NVGs—night vision gear—and the bulging Ziploc filled with the spare batteries that went with them. He also scooped up the loose ammunition—5.56 for the Colt and 9mm for his Glock—as well as the spare magazines the armorer at Beeson’s fallen command had been so kind in providing.
“If it happens,” Raven said solemnly, “I think I can do it.” She looked at the ground. Kicked at a pine cone, then looked him in the face. “If I really have to.”
Handing a box of shells to her, Cade said, “I know you will.” And he believed it. Had to. Because hope was all he had. All any of them really had. And the alternative—him or Brook turning and taking her with them—was unacceptable. There was no failsafe. So faith was going to have to do. He scooped up his Glock, rose from kneeling, and with one arm embracing his only child left the dirt-bike and Suburban and bad memories behind him.
Ignoring the pair of leaking corpses and following the sound of quiet conversation, they walked the drive and rejoined the others.
Chapter 53
Propping a pair of Daniel Defense M4 carbines against the door frame, Daymon said to Duncan, “That’s the last of ‘em.”
Daymon turned to leave, then paused mid-stride and asked Duncan if he wanted to come along and hunt some game for dinner.
“I’ll take a rain check,” he replied. “I need some space and a little time to do some thinking ... so I can try and process all of this mess.”
You mean you need to do a little more forgetting, thought Daymon darkly, as he picked up the smell of charcoal-filtered whisky coming off the older man’s breath. But he didn’t feel like arguing the point. There was still a lot of time before tomorrow for sobering up. And besides, what harm could he do to himself or others as long as he was only boozing it up inside the wire? So he let it go.
Duncan, hands shaking perceptibly, asked, “Anything else need to be stowed away?”
“Negative,” replied Daymon. “Have you heard from the Sarge yet?”
“Haven’t given it much thought,” said Duncan truthfully. “He’s got until tomorrow. He either shows up or he doesn’t. Either way I’m going north.”
“Where are you going to go?”
Duncan shrugged.
“I tried coaxing more details out of Tran this morning.”
Duncan arched a brow.
Shaking his head from side-to-side, Daymon said, “No help.”
“Heidi get anyone on the horn?”
Again, Daymon shook his head.
A string of expletives and another blast
of alcohol-laced breath burst from Duncan’s mouth. Then he reared back and put the boot to a plastic bucket filled with five gallons of rice, sending the lid and at least two gallons worth of the dietary staple airborne.
Daymon watched thousands of white grains erupt and then rain down on the plywood floor, little dainty patters filling the cramped room. Once silence had returned, he said, “Tell me how you really feel.”
Cupping his face with both hands, Duncan said, “Helpless. Fucking helpless.”
“Well I know one thing ... you surely are not gonna find your answer to that kind of problem at the bottom of a bottle.”
Duncan glared at the floor. Then, without meeting Daymon’s gaze, he turned away and said, “So you said earlier in not so many words. But I figure maybe this one will be the exception to the norm.” He reached over his head and snatched the half-empty bottle of Jack down and quipped, “I’ll let you know if I find empirical evidence.”
“Smart ass,” muttered Daymon.
Duncan spun the cap off the bottle.
“Don’t forget your last promise,” Daymon called over his shoulder. “’Cause Lucy ... you got some esplainin' to do to the group.” Then, obviously disappointed, he shook his dreads and stalked off, leaving the hard-headed aviator to clean up his own mess.
Chapter 54
As Bishop stood still, staring out at the lake’s shimmering waters, light footsteps on the stairs and then the slap of bare feet against the travertine tiles behind him signaled a start to the evening’s festivities. His eyes narrowed as he imagined her brown hair flowing as she walked. He closed them and focused on the wide smile sure to spread on her face when she noticed the lengths that Carson had gone to make her feel comfortable. But since his back was to her approach and the fleeting snippets of her reflection in the sliding glass door told him little, he opted to remain still and let their introduction unfold naturally.
Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 26
