Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  In answer to that, Cade cocked his head and stared into the older man’s eyes. Seeing no signs of deception or malice in them, he pulled his Gerber and sliced through the man’s cuffs.

  “Two coming in,” announced Lev over the comms.

  “Copy that,” replied Cade as a soft knock echoed in the hall. As a precaution, he watched Foley rub his wrists as Duncan disappeared down the hall to get the door. Then there was a sharp snick of a lock being thrown and a subtle creak and the noise of clomping boots and labored breathing invaded the guesthouse.

  Stopping and turning where the hall spilled into the great room, Duncan furrowed his brow and asked, “Done?”

  Face white, like he’d seen a ghost, Daymon held his blood-stained hands up, palms forward, and whispered, “Done.”

  From across the lake came the steady popping of small arms as a firefight raged between troops on the ground and the occupants of the house flanking Bishop’s. Tongues of orange leapt from windows on the second story. In the next second, silencing the opposition, red tracers, seemingly connected like links in a chain, poured from the sky somewhere above and behind the house full of holdouts.

  “They’re not going quietly, are they?” observed Cade.

  Shooting a rueful look Cade’s way, Duncan asked, “Your boys are really taking it to them. When do we get some?”

  After switching frequencies and holding a separate private conversation with someone over the comms, Cade looked at the men assembled around him, met each expectant stare and said, “Police up your gear and lock and load ... we’re oscar mike in five.”

  Chapter 85

  The second Bishop stood and reached across the table for her, Jamie knew her worst fears were coming true. She’d seen it in his eyes. The sparkle of hope that had lit up the room the night before and had been there to a certain extent when he’d met her at the door upstairs was gone. A look of menace crossed his face as he said: I’ve survived dozens of encounters with liars better than you. I’ve been taught how to win hearts and minds and it’s become evident with you I’ll do neither. And when he looked down the hall over her right shoulder, she instantly knew why he had sent Carson upstairs. And that there were a pair of handcuffs in her immediate future followed shortly by a lifetime’s worth of agony and degradation and torture, both physical and mental.

  Several things happened at once. Her epiphany, given away by the look on her face, was followed by a devious grin spreading on Bishop’s shadowed features. Then she instinctively pushed away from the table and tried to stand. But by the time those impulses crossed synapses on their way to make it so, she was wearing most of the former Navy SEAL’s right shoulder and clavicle in the form of blood and flesh and flecked bone.

  Blinking against the onslaught, she cried out as tiny razorblade-sharp bone splinters bombarded her face and eyes. Then simultaneously two things happened. Stifling her scream, a sizeable hunk of shredded pectoral muscle, firm and warm, entered her mouth and lodged in her windpipe. And the cause of all the damage crackled the air by her ear and impacted the heavy-gauge stainless skin of the Wolf refrigerator with a solid sounding slap.

  As she instinctively gagged and spit the plug of flesh from her mouth, she noticed the glass spilling like a wave from the destroyed slider. Then, like a slow-motion scene from a Matrix flick, food and china and silverware bunched together at the low end and crashed to the floor as the table, looking like a sinking ship, reared up and followed her captor over backwards, a look of utter surprise painting his face.

  Fight or flight. The question didn’t register in her brain as an audible cue. Nor did she realize she had made a decision until a second after the endorphins flooded her brain and she acted.

  Hearing Carson cursing upstairs and then his footsteps pounding out a hollow cadence above and behind her, she shifted her gaze left to the block of knives on the island. Midway through the sweep, her eyes had fallen on something interesting on the underside of the upended table. Her subconscious mind instantly knew what it was, but not until she stared at the black lump for a second did she realize her incredibly good fortune.

  Elvis

  Waiting for a break in the river of dead, Elvis sat in the truck, thinking. After a couple of minutes wrestling with more questions than he had answers for, his patience wore thin and he started the big engine. Lights off, he nosed the rig down the drive and turned right at the ‘T,’ charging hard against the trudging tide of decaying flesh. The effect his presence had on the creatures was comical as he zippered through the flow of flesh eaters, causing a bullwhip-like chain reaction when they clumsily about-faced and gave chase, all shoulders and elbows and hips battling for a clear lane on the blacktop.

  The reversal of flow intensified and as he sped away, in his rearview, Elvis saw what looked like an undead orgy taking place in the center of the road.

  After driving two straight miles nudging dead from the tow truck’s path with the bumper guard most of the way, he came to another ‘T’ and the sultry voice in the box told him he had arrived at his final destination.

  “What the fuck,” he said aloud, banging the wheel while the dead slapped the flanks of the truck. Panic welling within him, he wildly scanned the horizon while weighing his options. Blackout restrictions or no, he figured he would see at least the silhouette of a military base, however distant. A guard tower maybe, standing out boxy against the blue-black night sky. A fence with coils of concertina perched strategically atop. But he saw nothing. No base. No soldiers in the distance having a smoke. No vehicles in the foreground where he assumed a base would be. And worst of all, starting the slow creep of chill into his stomach, he saw nothing to indicate there had been, save for the traipsing dead, any activity whatsoever near here for quite some time.

  For just a tick he entertained flashing his headlights as he had upon arriving at the lake two nights prior. But knowing he wasn’t a tactician, nor would it serve him to pretend he was, he quickly discarded the foolish notion.

  Instead he turned right and drove madly for a quarter-mile until he came upon a county road blocked by a swinging gate intended to keep out vehicles, mainly. The gate had a sign bolted to it warning that trespassers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Throw the book at me, thought Elvis with a morbid grin.

  Beyond the gate was a winding gravel road that meandered up to a squat, earth-tone-painted cinderblock building he guessed was home to water pumps or controls of some sort. And best of all, the windowless structure was on a slight rise and surrounded by a cyclone fence, which in his opinion presented him the perfect location to arm and abandon the device.

  He shifted into low gear and used the truck’s bumper and a ton of torque to breach the gate. It popped noisily and rocketed inward as Elvis sped through. He followed the gravel road to the building and stopped short of the entry. After a quick K-turn he nudged the gate open with the wrecker’s rear bumper.

  Leaving the engine running and the front end blocking the newly forced opening, Elvis leaped out, stuffed the .45 in his belt, and went to work.

  Jamie

  The second that she knew what she was looking at, fight won out over flight and she ripped the stubby looking gun, tape and all, from the table’s exposed underside. Without giving thought as to why it was there in the first place, she thumbed the hammer back and aimed the revolver at the air above the table’s edge where she suspected Bishop would eventually surface. In the interim, she reached her left hand out and snatched up a medium-sized knife from the block. Not too big to swipe with, she reasoned. And long enough to hit a vital organ. It would do the trick, she decided.

  The air in the great room had taken on the all-too-familiar smell of spilt blood. Breathing through her nose, Jamie listened hard and detected movement on the stairs. She knelt down, the island pressing her back and Bishop struggling to pull himself up with his one good arm to her fore.

  Outside there was a loud explosion. Very near, she surmised. Then, coinciding with a few long, dra
wn-out chainsaw-like sounds, the horizontally mounted windows on each side of the house lit up red and orange like eyes on a Jack-o’-Lantern.

  Carson’s voice: “Bishop?”

  With one elbow hooked over the table edge, Bishop’s head slowly broke the plane. Instantly the image reminded Jamie of the old Navy recruitment commercial in which a team of SEALs emerge from black waters, deadly and wraith-like. This was nothing of the sort. Bishop looked pathetic. His face was drained of color and his mouth moved fish-like, fighting to draw a breath.

  In her side-vision Jamie saw the toe of a tan boot followed by a shin and knee and finally a man’s thigh, all muscled and flexing under the desert tan camouflage fabric.

  “Bishop?” said the owner of the leg, only this time with an, Oh fuck what happened to you kind of delivery. Not agitated sounding, but drawn out and filled with compassion.

  Knee, thigh, or head?

  Jamie chose thigh but her aim was off. Instinctively she crunched her eyes shut as the report, sandwiched between the table and island, roared back and forth, seemingly using her ear canal as a pass through.

  Semi-deafened, Jamie squeezed the trigger two more times as Carson fell sideways. The first shot she would find out momentarily passed through his scrotum mid-stride. The second she witnessed (between blinks) punch through the soft meat of his hamstring, instantly turning the pants leg crimson and bringing forth a shrill, gut-wrenching scream.

  Both hands allocated to holding together his nutsack, Carson let his semi-automatic fall to the floor where he joined it a beat later with a third catastrophic bullet wound to the left hip.

  Willing herself to move, Jamie scooted along the blood-slickened floor and snatched away the boxy pistol. She rose on shaky legs and crabbed around both men, tiptoeing through splintered china and around the upended table.

  Standing hands on hips with shouts and gunfire rising to a crescendo outside, she smiled big at the fallen men. For an instant she contemplated crowing about how Karma’s a bitch or spouting something witty like you reap what you sow. But she didn’t. Trembling with rage and aware of how Bishop, on orders from Robert Christian, had left Heidi for dead in Jackson Hole, she went to work with the knife.

  “This is too good for you, Bishop.”

  “You don’t have the balls to kill a man,” he managed to say through a mouthful of crimson froth.

  Even over the ringing in her ears, Jamie heard the backdoor come off its hinges. Undeterred, she hissed, “I just grew some, asshole.” Fighting off the dying man’s one good arm, starting with Logan and finishing with Jordan, she drew the keen-edged kitchen knife from one ear to the other, slowly whispering the names of the three who had fallen beside her at the quarry.

  “Drop it,” called a stocky Hispanic man clad head to toe in camouflage and Velcro and body armor. He trained a stubby machine gun on her and repeated the order, louder and more forcefully. Then, still glaring at her, he talked to someone out of sight over his high tech communications gear.

  After seeing the American flag on the man’s uniform, Jamie dropped the knife and inched away from Bishop’s pale corpse. Immediately a second man dressed all in black with a weapon to match helped her to her feet. He turned her head and checked her for injuries. A second later he nodded to the Hispanic soldier and whispered near her ear, “You’re going to be OK.”

  Shaking slightly, Jamie shot a long nod at Carson and asked the soldier in black matter-of-factly, “Is he going to die?”

  Having just zip-tied the blonde mercenary’s hands behind his back, the Hispanic soldier rolled him over. He stuck a gloved finger into the hole in the crotch of Carson’s blood-soaked pants. Grimacing, he examined the other more visible gunshot wounds and finally said, “He’s got a few minutes. Ten max.”

  Chapter 86

  Across the lake, Cade took two strips of what looked like reflective tape from his pack. He peeled the backing to expose the adhesive and stuck one strip to Foley’s chest over his heart and then another on his back. Lev and Duncan said nothing. Both peeled the backing and stuck a strip to their BDUs over their hearts.

  Daymon snugged on his helmet and shot Cade a quizzical look.

  Flipping his NVG’s over his eyes, Cade answered, “Infrared reflective GloTape. It’s already on our helmets ... the rest is for good measure. We wouldn’t want our friend Foley to be mistaken for a bad guy and take a bullet and buy the farm before we get a chance to interrogate him.”

  Foley felt his stomach flop as he was herded out of the house with the sharp barrel of a gun against his spine.

  Between the recent sunset and the moon’s inevitable rise, without any ambient light from street lights of nearby McCall, the night sky had gone inky black. Listening to the distant sounds of battle—and kind of disappointed he was missing out—Cade flipped down his late-gen night vision goggles and descended the stairs as quickly as his ankle would allow. Once at the bottom and standing on the cement parking pad, he pulled two identical items from a pocket. About the size and weight of a double pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, the devices, made from high impact plastic, had a flat bottom and an elongated clear plastic dome on top.

  After flicking a switch and peeling a strip of backing paper from each one, Cade stretched tall and placed one atop the Jeep, centered on the roof sheet metal just aft of the windshield. As he placed the second device on the roof near the rear hatch, Duncan hopped in the passenger seat and Lev and Daymon bookended Foley in the backseat.

  As expected, rendered in bright yellowish-green as seen through Cade’s goggles, there was a flare of stark-white light from the overhead dome when the doors hinged open. Working quickly to extinguish the light, Cade got behind the wheel and used his Gerber to pry the plastic lens away and then dug out the tiny bulb with its sharp point.

  Reacting instantly, the goggles adjusted and the brilliant corona subsided; he could see the dash and controls presented in a dozen varying shades of green. So far so good. In his ear bud he could hear brief snippets of conversation, the practiced commands and calls of a well-honed team presumably clearing one of the houses across the lake.

  He started the truck up and asked Foley: “Is anyone we encounter going to recognize this rig?” A nod from the bald man registered in the rearview as Cade J-turned out of the driveway and shifted into Drive. In less than a minute, driving south, lights out, they were approaching the T-junction. Sweeping his gaze right, Cade noticed the gate some distance away. He also saw the logjam of death pressing up against it. Bright eyes in hollowed sockets, all the more evil-looking through the NVG’s optics, swept left in unison as the monsters detected the exhaust note of the approaching vehicle.

  “That’s some Boris Karloff shit right there,” stated Daymon. “All green and glassy-eyed.”

  Without prompting, Foley proffered, “Turn left here.”

  “Think the gate’s going to hold?” asked Duncan as Cade took the left at speed.

  Foley said, “Not for long. We have standing orders from Bishop to cull them on sight.”

  “Not everyone follows orders,” muttered Daymon.

  Remembering the vision of the two men Bishop had gunned down earlier and hearing their cries in his head as they died, Foley said, “Anyone caught not following orders were made examples of ... either crucified or shot on sight by Bishop or Carson.”

  “Carson?” asked Cade.

  “He likes to say he’s into ‘procurement’ ... supplies and women. Especially women.”

  “I hope your D-boys roll him up,” said Duncan.

  “Me too,” Cade agreed, meeting the older man’s gaze.

  The Jeep cut through the darkness under a thick canopy of trees. On their left vacant houses flashed by, the lake beyond appearing as green slivers of light between them.

  They encountered no resistance travelling the curving arc of road between the roadblock near the peninsula and the first few houses making up the lake front compound where fires were raging and a mopping-up operation was underway.r />
  Then a hundred yards from the action and two houses removed from the target house they encountered the security perimeter, where a trio of Army Rangers wielding M-203 grenade-launcher-equipped automatic weapons lit them up with what seemed like a million candlepower light.

  Shielding his eyes in front of the goggles with one hand and holding the wheel tight with the other, Cade braked hard, bringing the Jeep to a crunching halt a dozen feet short of colliding with both bullets and vehicles.

  “Hands out where we can see them,” shouted one of the soldiers whom Cade could not see.

  Cade flipped up the goggles and then with both gloved hands poking into the night air and a light like a locomotive’s blinding him, suddenly sensed a presence on his left. Then he heard: “Name?”

  “Cade Grayson ... United States Army, Retired.”

  “Wyatt?”

  “Affirmative.”

  The soldier pressed, “Ground call sign?”

  “Anvil.”

  Though Cade couldn’t see it, the Ranger nodded. Then he said, “And the civilians?”

  “They’re capable.”