Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  Thirty yards before they reached the intersection, the strange hybrid human/computer voice in the box instructed Brook to turn right. Instead, awed by the low-hanging sun shimmering silver off the vast expanse of glassy water straight ahead, she jammed to a stop on the gravel shoulder next to a road sign, one arrow pointing left towards the city of Ogden, pop. 84,721 just fifteen miles distant, the other indicating that Huntsville, pop. 776 was a mile to the right.

  While Brook sat mesmerized by the picture postcard view, the Raptor crunched noisily to a halt on the gravel on the opposite shoulder with Taryn gesturing wildly at Cade to power his window down. A tick later, shaking her head and pointing to the sign, Taryn said, “Please tell me we’re not turning left.”

  Cade said nothing. He pressed the binoculars to his face and gazed out the passenger window over the other Ford’s hood at Huntsville, which was built up on a finger of land encroached upon on three sides by water. He adjusted the focus ring and discovered that the little burg at his two o’clock appeared no different than the smaller population centers dotting the Interstates and rural highways they’d already traveled between FOB Bastion in Mack, Colorado and nearby Morgan, Utah.

  The sixty-four-thousand dollar question nagging him was what was keeping the eighty-five-thousand, presumably undead, citizens of Ogden at bay. He shifted his gaze left and studied the ‘V’ in the nearby Wasatch Mountain Range, where the stripe of road entered the forest and rolled up and down and beyond before finally merging with the horizon and disappearing from sight. In his head he imagined a National Guard unit, men and women, young and old, called up hastily by the President’s declaration of martial law. They would no doubt be confounded at first by orders telling them to shoot the infected on sight. Fellow Americans. Perhaps even family. A feeling of helpless reluctance creeping in—or not—they were still soldiers and would have followed those orders. He let the scenario play out further in his head. He saw the squad, consisting of ten to fifteen soldiers, already dog tired from two sleepless days manning a roadblock somewhere west of Huntsville, get blindsided by word that Salt Lake—most likely their city of origin—had fallen to the dead. Then, like placing a tourniquet on a bleeding stump, the triage orders probably came down from some FEMA or Department of Homeland Security bureaucrat flitting around above it all, safe and sound in a Black Hawk. The order to procure a sizable amount of demolitions—maybe from a mining supply outfit near town or from a Guard armory—then, shaking their collective heads, the unit would dutifully follow through on additional orders telling them to bury as much of Highway 39 under as many tons of dynamited Wasatch granite as humanly possible. At least that’s exactly how I would have done it, thought Cade. Stopped the migrating Zs right in their rotten tracks. But at this point it was pure conjecture on his part. For all he knew the horde of flesh eaters eighty thousand strong had already blown through the aptly named desolate cluster of structures called Huntsville—hunted it clean—and then like ants on the march, plodded on in search of the next unsuspecting town.

  But speculation at this juncture—literally—was no better than throwing darts in a dark room and expecting to hit the dartboard. So he hitched a thumb to the right and said to Taryn, “Don’t worry. Passing through Ogden is not in our plans. And it looks like this road will allow us to circumvent Huntsville as well.” A look of relief supplanted the one of worry crowding her tanned features. Seeing this and concluding that Ogden and Grand Junction were roughly the same size, and that her airport ordeal was still fresh in her mind, he leaned in and read the small text at the top of the navigation screen. A beat later he poked his head back out the window, looked down and, in order to put her at ease, said, “The compound is give-or-take sixteen miles east of here. Piece of cake. We’ll be there in thirty minutes ... tops.” As Taryn smiled, her tatted right arm passed through the light spilling inside the Raptor’s cab and went to her face and, though she was a civilian, flicked him a near-text-book salute.

  And though he was no longer active duty, Cade reciprocated. As Brook moved them out, going right at the junction, Cade swiveled around and unplugged Raven from her device and relayed the same good news to her.

  With a bit of fist bumping occurring in both vehicles, the two-truck convoy proceeded east, Brook driving the F-650, and the Raptor, with Wilson forever riding shotgun, bringing up the rear.

  Like the blade on the Grim Reaper’s scythe, the narrow two-lane dodged the city, arcing gently south before shooting laser-straight north, all the while keeping to the eastern edge of the quiet town. Soon SR-39 struck off east through the wide open rural countryside. A couple of miles outside of town, they came upon two dozen inert cars and SUVs, all pointed east, presumably fleeing the hard place before coming up against the rock. Cade brought the binoculars to bear and glassed the scene. He saw a great number of corpses still occupying the vehicles in which they had died. The lucky ones that had stayed dead appeared stiff and leathery from a combination of rigor and heat. The unlucky few that had died and reanimated inside their rides were blurry flashes of movement behind greasy cataracts obscuring the auto glass. And lastly, no doubt alerted by the sound of approaching engines, a pack of Zs suddenly showed themselves, rising up slowly one at a time, until at least ten were visible near the front of the traffic jam.

  Cade settled the field glasses on the pale abominations and instantly his earlier hypothesis was blown into more pieces than he had assumed blocked the Wasatch pass to the west.

  Because the rock that had jammed up traffic consisted of four evenly placed Jersey barriers. Ten feet from end to end, two feet wide at the base, and standing thirty-two inches tall from the ground to the narrow top where two eyehooks were embedded. Each of the four-thousand-pound poured concrete barriers could deflect a bomb blast and required a front loader for proper placement. Strangely, in addition to the wrist-sized holes punched into some of the vehicles, the nearest pair of barricades were pitted and cracked in places, almost like someone had willfully taken a jackhammer to them. Cade had seen the same type of damage up close and in person in Afghanistan. Thirty plus years of fighting one invader or another had left damn near every wall in that Middle Eastern country bullet-pocked just like the Jersey barriers blocking their advance.

  Brook wheeled Black Beauty left and bumped down into the sizable ditch paralleling the two-lane. Threatening to eject the cargo from the bed, the Ford bucked and shimmied with the suspension groaning until the tires bit and clawed their way up the other side. She muscled the wheel straight and held it there, keeping the driver’s side wheels on one side of the gully and the other two crunching through the gravel along the road’s left shoulder. Then, with the nerve-jangling screech of rusty barbed wire raking the driver’s side, and the mirrors and door handles and bumpers of the unmoving vehicles hammering against the passenger side, she tromped the pedal and made her own road.

  Watching in the side mirror, Cade saw Taryn put the Raptor through the same maneuver and soon the white pick-up had closed the distance with the F-650’s rear bumper.

  From his elevated seat in the truck, Cade saw a number of weeks-old cadavers that the Zs had just been feeding on. And judging by the desert tan scraps of camouflage fabric and that some of the corpses still had helmets strapped to their flesh-stripped skulls, he concluded they had been National Guardsmen who had been manning the road block. Just following orders like he had done dutifully for more than a decade. And for what? Judging by the damage to the barriers and the sun glinting from shell casings littering the shoulder ahead, these soldiers were ambushed and murdered by their own countrymen—living, breathing wastes of skin who needed to suffer tenfold the pain they had inflicted on these patriots. Disgusted, he looked away from the dead soldiers and watched the throng of dead zippering clumsily through the traffic snarl. “Stop right here,” he said sharply. “After I get out, you and Taryn are going to have to reverse out of here.” Then, his voice softening, he apologized for being terse and craned around and said to Raven, “Y
ou need to be Mom’s eyes and ears while I’m gone.”

  He drew the Glock 17 as the Ford lurched to a halt and, out of habit, ejected the magazine. Full. He slapped it back into the magwell and then racked the slide back a third of a pull. One in the pipe. Lastly, he screwed the suppressor on and nudged the door open with his good foot.

  “You sure this is necessary?” asked Brook.

  “Very,” he replied icily. He stepped out and down and walked a few paces toward the Raptor and broke the bad news to Taryn and then motioned for Wilson to join him on the roadway.

  Wilson hopped out and crushed his boonie hat down low on his head. Beretta in his right hand, he slammed the door behind him. Wasting no time, Taryn gunned the engine and sped off in reverse, spitting a hail of gravel and moist soil at their boots.

  Startled by the howling exhaust note, a flock of emboldened crows took flight in an explosive flurry of black feather and attitude. Cawing and cussing, they took station overhead, cruising languid ovals as Brook, driving by feel and sound, retraced her hard-earned forward progress in reverse.

  With the noise of scraping metal and breaking glass signaling the forced retreat, Cade and Wilson pushed forward on foot, approaching the dead from an oblique angle off to their right.

  Leaving the thoroughly scoured carcasses to the birds, the Zs angled doggedly towards what the instincts buried deeply in the reptilian part of their atrophied brains told them was a meal of fresh meat.

  Motioning for Wilson to stop, Cade said, “There was a reason the Guardsmen picked this spot to set up their roadblock. See the rocks and the steep grade on both sides of the road? Makes it pretty much impassible from this point east”—he pointed to the terrain on both sides and then to the incline beyond the Jersey barriers as he spoke—“And that means doubling back—which could take hours—and that’s assuming there is a way around Huntsville.” He paused while Wilson took it all in. “But to avoid all of that, we’re going to clear a path with the winch. All of the noise is probably going to draw a lot more Zs our way. So for now, your job is to stay frosty and watch our backs.” He gestured at the Zs with the silencer affixed to his Glock and stuck a vertical finger to his lips.

  Wilson nodded and checked their six position. He scanned the horizon. Nothing to see. Then shifted his gaze towards the Raptor and glimpsed Taryn’s form hunched over the wheel, tatted arms wrapping it in a death grip. Then the rear passenger window slid silently into the channel and Sasha poked her head out and shot him a harried look. He flashed a tentative thumbs up to her before returning his attention to the advancing cadavers.

  Using the contour of the back window for support, Cade stretched his arms across the red and blue Union Jack painted atop the tiny white Mini Cooper and, feeling the heat of the sun-baked glass warming his chest and stomach through his tee-shirt, sighted down the Glock and waited. A tick later, the first of the Z procession, a shabby looking thirty-something male, squeezed its rotten torso between the closely spaced fenders of two nearby sedans.

  After letting the hissing monster lead the others a dozen lurching steps into the metal and glass chute, Cade settled the Glock’s tritium sights on its forehead, just below its greasy looking widow’s peak, and squeezed off two quick shots. Simultaneously the silenced weapon bucked slightly in his gloved hands and the two sizzling 9mm Parabellums plowed a jagged V-shaped chasm through bone and brain. A half beat later, its bare feet left earth as the headshot body contorted into a U-shape and followed the spritz of bone and hair and gray matter airborne. With the sound of the twice dead corpse pin balling off of sheet metal, Cade shifted aim and engaged the next two behind it—a long dead female and a recently turned male teenager—with a rapid-fire pair of double-taps. The female walker received the initial 9mm round to the right temple and, as the 115-grain hunk of lead bored through bone and tumbled end-over-end, cutting a path through putrid gray matter, the second bullet entered obliquely, sending the rear half of its skull, dirty blond ponytail and all, spinning off and away like a bloody hunk of peeled orange rind. Brains dribbled from the gaping head wound as the female Z collapsed vertically to a kneeling position, wedged between the two inert vehicles, and then slowly, like a felled tree, hinged forward atop Cade’s first victim.

  Hands kneading the steering wheel, Brook watched the one-sided melee unfold from her high perch in the F-650. Had there been more than a dozen undead she might have climbed down and joined in. But, as always, it appeared that Cade alone had everything under control, and after the first three Zs were down and effectively blocking all passage between the two cars, he did exactly what Brook thought he might. He pushed off of the small car, and with Wilson clinging like a shadow, flanked the remaining undead. She saw him stop and square up against the line of creatures. Then, arms outstretched and sweeping left to right, he ticked degrees off an arc like a slow-moving sprinkler head, the silencer twitching once at each barely perceptible pause. The instantaneous and deadly result: a daisy chain of airborne pink mist as each of the hurtling bullets found their mark from near point-blank range.

  All total, from the time Cade told Brook to stop and extricate the truck until his last shell casing had finished spinning and pinging across the pavement, a little less than two minutes had elapsed and all of the Zs were wedged chest to back, their still vertical forms leaking brackish liquids onto the blacktop. Loosening her grip on the wheel, Brook exhaled and watched Cade swap out magazines. A second later her man was stuffing the empty into a pocket and he and Wilson were on the move, crabbing past bumpers and grills, stopping now and again to look underneath the higher clearance vehicles for anything lying in wait.

  The closer they got to the roadblock, the more evidence Cade was able to pick up on. Scattered everywhere were shell casings in multiple calibers. The gravel shoulder adjacent to the fallen Guardsmen had been chewed up by something. Two furrows, eighteen-inches wide and darker than the surrounding soil, had been gouged several inches deep into the sloped edge of the roadside ditch. There was also a pair of faint black smudges in the right-hand lane. They continued across the yellow centerline. To Cade, up close, they resembled interconnected chevrons—elongated horizontally. As he eyeballed the scene, he tried to picture a Humvee in his head. To gauge its wheelbase. Coming up empty, he resorted to pacing off the furrows. Then he did the same with the skid marks on the blacktop and found that, give-or-take an inch or two, both were identical. Lastly, he paced off the width between front wheels on the nearest passenger car and discovered a two-foot deficiency on its part.

  “What do you make of it?” asked Wilson, who was leaning against an old GM station wagon with a bullet-riddled cadaver slumped over the steering wheel.

  “Those Guard soldiers manning this roadblock were ambushed and died right here.” After a long pause, Cade pointed out the Jersey barrier closest to the right shoulder. Judging by marks scribed into the road near its base, it had been pushed back a few degrees. There were more tire marks on the shoulder, and black rubber streaks like the ones on the road marred the base of the barrier. “And whoever did this to them stole their vehicles and went east. But worst of all ... they now possess whatever heavy armament was attached to those vehicles.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that from here on out, until we get to the compound, we’ve got to be on high alert.” Cade bent down and retrieved a massive four-inch-long brass shell casing from underneath the rust-marred front bumper of the tired-looking station wagon. It looked like it could almost double as a flower vase. He held it up in front of Wilson’s face and said ominously, “Because if we run into the Ma Deuce that spit these out ... we better kiss all of our asses goodbye.”

  “What’s a Ma Deuce?”

  “A fifty-caliber heavy machine gun ... bad news to vehicles and personnel alike. It’d punch a hole clean through both of our rigs and keep going for a mile after. I figure it was probably turret-mounted on the Humvee the bandits towed from the ditch.”

  Toeing through
a pile of smaller shell casings, Wilson asked, “How are we getting through this ... all of these cars and cement barricades?”

  “Follow me. I have an idea.” Favoring his left ankle, he slowly walked back and relayed to Brook what he had in mind. He disengaged the winch and, with the curved steel hook in hand, looped the 3/8-inch cable over his shoulder, leaned in and trudged forward, spooling forty feet of it out behind him. He rounded the first vehicle in the left lane and called back and had Wilson feed him an additional twenty feet.

  The heavy-duty eyehooks embedded in the top of the Jersey barrier were there to make them easy for a front loader to quickly lift and position them wherever they were needed. But Cade had a different use in mind for them. He wound the cable around two of the barriers and then clicked the metal hook into the right eyehook of the barrier farthest from the Ford. Then he pulled the cable taut and let the leftover cable snake into the ditch. After having Wilson engage the winch and draw up most of the slack, Cade caught Brook’s eye and pointed with two fingers in the direction of Huntsville and ducked in between the first two cars.

  Message received, Brook engaged the four-wheel-drive and jammed the transmission into reverse. There was a roar as the engine’s rpms rocketed upwards. Then the big Ford’s rear end settled under load, the two massive tires on the passenger side found purchase on the roadway and the two opposite bit deeply into the gravel shoulder.

  Simultaneously there was a resonant twang as the cable stretched tight, a chirping of tires trying to hold steady, and a grating of stone against stone that Cade could feel through his boot soles. A beat later, as the barriers gave in to applied horsepower and several tons of rolling 4X4, there was a sound like a bowling ball finding the gutter, only a hundred times more explosive as the barriers slapped together. Then, just as Cade had envisioned, both slab-sided hunks of white concrete did a slow motion barrel roll into the ditch.