A Pound of Flesh: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  “Joshua here.”

  “This is Bishop. When did the brothers go through the pass?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  Bishop felt his temples flush hot. “How many vehicles and personnel?”

  Joshua answered tentatively, “Just the brothers in the Escalade.”

  “And you thought that was normal? Did they say where they were going?” he said as he pushed through the set of French doors which fronted the top of the landing where the circular stairways from the foyer joined.

  “Ammo run or something like that,” Joshua answered cautiously.

  Standing on the outdoor veranda which stretched around in front of the master suite, Bishop gazed at the Tetons. “Joshua... you’re not as dumb as the others. Did you really ask or did you just let them pass without thinking?”

  “I didn’t ask. I assumed you knew... that they had already cleared it with you.”

  “What was the protocol?” Bishop asked, struggling to keep from saying something he might regret. Joshua wasn’t officer material as evidenced by this latest slip, but he was trustworthy. He had covered up all evidence from the massacre of the 4th Infantry Division soldiers without screwing that up. And sooner or later Bishop knew that he was really going to need former combat veterans like the swarthy New Englander. Probably much sooner, he surmised.

  After a few beats the pass sentry replied, “I am to call you immediately if anyone comes or goes through the pass.”

  “X gets a square—good answer sir. I’m relieving you of pass duty. I want you to leave a couple of the newer guys there,” said Bishop.

  “Copy that,” Joshua said forcefully, his mind turning over the unusual orders.

  As an afterthought Bishop added, “Pull the snipers. Tell them to take as much ammo as they can scrounge up and get to the bridge.”

  Wondering why Bishop would leave the Teton pass so poorly manned and against his better judgment Joshua asked, “Are we retreating?”

  “Keep your phone on,” the former SEAL said cryptically.

  Bishop thought back to his multiple deployments in the Sandbox. He had spent more time there with his SEAL team riding on the skids of a little bird killing insurgents and conducting midnight snatch and grabs than he had stateside with his wife and little boy.

  In a moment of weakness he thought about Samuel, his boy, now ten, who was with his mom back in Little Creek, Virginia. Much to her credit, Naomi had agreed to stay near Ian’s stateside post even after the divorce had been finalized. He had only had a chance to visit Samuel a handful of times in between deployments. Those meetings had been strange and surreal. His own son pushing him away was the precursor to his free-fall from the teams.

  Shoving those thoughts back into the black hole he called a heart, he pulled out his phone and dialed Robert Christian. Two rings later the President of New America—who was more so in title than in reality—picked up. “What do you want Bishop?” the slowly unraveling man slurred.

  “Where are you sir?” Bishop queried as he realized his continuing deference to the ambitious man had diminished to next to nothing.

  “The question, sir, is have you taken out my garbage yet?”

  “Negative.”

  “What are you waiting for boy?” Click. The phone went dead.

  Bishop lashed out, landing a solid kick on Christian’s teak chaise lounge and sending the broken piece of furniture pancaking flat to the veranda floor. Being called boy and the slap in the face the dead phone line represented pushed him over the edge. He could only hope to calm down enough during his little errand so he wouldn’t snap the old man’s neck at first sight.

  At that he thumbed the phone off and headed for the master suite; without knocking he barged in, setting his sights on the small shrouded form swallowed up by the California king.

  Heidi felt her body rising from the luxuriant bedding. This is it, she thought. I’m going home. Bruises covered her formerly alabaster skin from head to toe and her front teeth had been loose since she tried to eighty-six the crooked nosed smartass who had worn out his welcome at the Silver Dollar where she tended bar.

  She had been drugged and then sexually assaulted multiple times by the silver haired man and who knows who else. Each time the dosing of drugs was more powerful and the attacks more vicious. Those demeaning violations and the utter helplessness of her situation had had her wanting to die now for two days. That her soul was seemingly leaving her body filled her with a hopeful feeling. Maybe she would get to see all of the loved ones that she knew were dead, and Daymon, certainly he was gone. After hearing the stories coming from Salt Lake City and the towns along the Wasatch front, all hope for his survival had faded even before she had been put through this latest trial.

  She was ready.

  Take me home, she pleaded silently.

  What little wind remained in her lungs expelled as someone or something heaved her limp body into the air and brought her back down rather harshly on an unyielding surface.

  The drugs which the old man had been forcing her to eat were still affecting her to the point where her autonomous systems were on the verge of shutting down. She didn’t possess the strength to regain her lost breath let alone mount a struggle against the rough treatment at the hands of the stranger.

  Well if the Devil wants me that bad then he can have me, she thought before blacking out.

  Chapter 24

  Outbreak - Day 11

  Grand Junction, Colorado

  Onboard Jedi One-One

  The north end of Grand Junction blurred under the Ghost Hawk, and ahead loomed the Book Cliffs which rose in red-orange splendor two thousand feet above the Grand Valley floor.

  “Someone give the spook a bag,” Ari intoned as he pulled stick and skimmed the helo just feet from the nearly vertical cliff face.

  The G-forces pressed Cade firmly against the seat and bulkhead as he stared forward between the two pilots at nothing but blue sky. Then as the helo leveled off he finally cut in, “Great job team... Lopez, way to go, and Tice, thanks for getting our six with the mini. And Hicks... that has got to be some kind of a record... topping this thing off in under three minutes... makes those Indy pit boys playing with their little toy cars look slow.”

  “Don’t hold me to the same lofty standards if we are forced to come back this way,” said Hicks. “Our ride is going to be on fumes and filling her up is going to take at least ten mikes. And taking into account the number of Zs we left behind—shit could get hairy.”

  “Hey, Spooky might even have a chance to fire Betsy and get his mini-gun merit badge,” Lopez ribbed.

  “It took every ounce of restraint in my trigger finger not to save your butts back there,” Tice said with a wide grin. Then he added, “Just joking fellas. That melee couldn’t have been choreographed any better. With Wyatt and Low-Rider gunning away and Hicksy here with the Bowie knife moves... shit... Cirque De Soleil has nothing on you guys.”

  Even though the fact that he had saved the helicopter’s tail rotor assembly from chopping up a couple of stiffs didn’t get a mention in Tice’s glowing review, the always quiet Maddox let it slide. Though he was of the new generation in the teams, he was still old school, eschewing the war stories while letting his actions speak for themselves.

  “Cirque duh what,” Cade interjected.

  “Never mind,” Tice answered sheepishly.

  “Don’t worry ladies,” Ari said as he leveled the helo and sped over the ochre mesas, keeping the sun over his left shoulder. “By tomorrow, if his foraging parties hit paydirt, Whipper should have a fuel-laden Herc for this bird to drink from.”

  “You’re assuming, Ari, that Spooky here didn’t jinx us,” Lopez stated, poking a thumb towards Tice.

  “Durant set the waypoints,” Ari added, ignoring the quip. “We’re going north via the Flaming Gorge route... anyone been there?”

  Ari was greeted by a chorus of “Negative.”

  “It’s a ninety-mile long reservoir stoppe
d up by a pretty good sized dam.”

  Ari tapped the glass touchscreen to his right, bringing up a colorful high definition topo map of the ground they would be overflying. “I’m going to take us through the canyon, staying close to the reservoir. When the Flaming Gorge spits us out we will be very close to the insertion point handpicked by your captain.”

  Granted there were very few threats to the Ghost Hawk during the day now that the United States was in its final death throes, but dropping the Delta team off in broad daylight in the forest only a couple of miles from the bad guys was still going to prove risky.

  Ari had lobbied hard to execute the insertion at night when he, the aircrew, and the Stealth Hawk would be in their element.

  Cade pushed to leave as soon as possible. He made it no secret that he wanted to strike back swiftly and brutally at the people who had sent Mike’s killer.

  In the end, even though Ari was the one with thousands of hours on the stick and hundreds of insertions and exfils already under his belt—executed mostly in the dark—the choice hadn’t been his to make. Major Nash had made the final decision, which was no doubt influenced by the anxious Delta operator whose two cents often times held more purchasing power than most with the woman.

  Cade looked away from the window and let his gaze linger on the men going into Jackson Hole; he wondered to himself how many of them would be coming home alive.

  Chapter 25

  Outbreak - Day 11

  Jackson Hole, Wyoming

  The drive from downtown Jackson Hole to the Valley of the Crosses was much too short. The wide open field, lush and green, where Ian Bishop’s “examples” were crucified alive and then left alone to die in the worst manner imaginable came into view as the International Scout rounded the corner.

  Daymon got to the end of the line of crosses and pulled Lu Lu onto the shoulder. There he cursed God and pummeled the steering wheel until his palms ached and the inflamed gashes on his torso resumed their steady throbbing.

  Since his solemn drive into Jackson the previous day, three additional crosses had been erected, and three more of Jackson’s unbendable residents had joined the examples. Framed in the Scout’s flat windshield, two thirty-something males and a woman who looked to be of Heidi’s age hung limp, each crucified with three railroad spikes, one impaling each wrist with the third skewering the tops of their feet.

  The woman stood out in contrast to the men. Like royalty in an Edwardian painting, her skin had a muted pink hue suggesting she might not be dead. On the other hand, both men had been dead for some time, their pallid bodies hanging slack—unmoving. Daymon guessed the men had succumbed to shock, exposure, or a combination thereof. The ravenous blackbirds and crafty ravens wasted little time, beating the turkey vultures to the warm meat. The corpses were left with gaping black voids where their eyes should have been. Apparently the soft white morsels were the most coveted, Daymon noted, bile rising in his throat.

  Jackson Hole was the kind of town where nearly everyone that worked and lived there year round knew one another. During the summer, the apex of the fire season, Daymon lived for weeks at a time in the firehouse, rarely crossing the Teton Pass to go home. To his chagrin he found Jackson to be a very difficult place to remain anonymous, let alone retain a modicum of privacy, and given his exotic appearance—light mocha skin, green eyes, and dreadlocks—

  everyone knew Jackson’s BLM firefighter-in-residence. It was also common knowledge that he and Heidi were together.

  Daymon stared at the lipless grinning corpses. He was certain he had never seen either of the men before. The woman was a different story. His stomach clenched as he realized that although her face was swollen and bloody, she bore a striking resemblance to Heidi. There was only one way to be positive. His mind screamed jump over the fence and save her. His muscles wouldn’t respond. He stood rooted, paralyzed by fear, gut freezing, sphincter clinching fear. It was a sensation unlike anything he had ever experienced.

  Daymon placed his hands on his face and arched his back, letting out a guttural cry. As he did so his wounds reopened, adding an agonizing punctuation mark to his anguish. When he finished his outpouring of emotion, he gripped the gray weathered fencepost, using it to pull himself up. As he swiped the dreads from his face he sensed a glimmer of movement in his peripheral vision. He turned towards the woman he feared might be Heidi in time to see the fingers on her right hand waggle. It seemed like the kind of wave two girlfriends might exchange on a packed dance floor in a noisy nightclub where gestures ruled and words conveyed nothing.

  Was she trying to communicate?

  Daymon remained static, swaying on his feet, wracked by pain and stricken with remorse. Remorse from letting down his Moms. Remorse from not fully reconciling past transgressions with his dad before the monsters started to walk. Remorse from not having enough sack to scale the barbed wire fence, climb up the cross and then try to figure out how to pull her down. It wasn’t that he was still gun shy from tangling with the scalpel-sharp twelve footer that surrounded Schriever. His trepidation stemmed from not really wanting to know if it was Heidi hanging in front of him or if it was her badly beaten body double. Either way he was going to have to confront some hard truths. If it was her—how the hell was he supposed to save her? Hippocratic oath or not, there wasn’t a doctor in a hundred mile radius willing to risk the wrath of the NA storm troopers in order to help a defector. Assuming he got her help, how was he going to explain the obvious piercings to her wrists and feet? On the other hand, if it wasn’t Heidi, then he was right back to square one: his Moms and Pops and now Heidi would all be in the same back-of-the-milk-carton limbo. Not dead, and not alive, just perpetually missing.

  But first he had to be sure that she had moved and he wasn’t just seeing things. So statue like, he waited and watched.

  Before long the crows had each reclaimed a man, and after feasting on the gray matter that had been hidden behind the windows to the soul, they began earnestly ripping away the other fleshy bits while cawing back and forth, apparently very proud of their conquests.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” Daymon bellowed as he shouldered the crossbow and drew a bead on the nearest scavenger.

  The crows voiced their displeasure, and then in an explosion of black feathers reluctantly took flight.

  “Go find some road kill motherfuckers,” he muttered under his breath.

  As he turned his attention back to the woman, she lifted her head and moved it incrementally first left and then right. The gesture reminded Daymon of how survivors acted after being involved in a fatal car wreck. Trudging around the scene, heads wagging in disbelief—seemingly saying, Why the fuck me? Then her eyelids began to flutter and she looked directly at him.

  Daymon braced himself with one hand on the gnarled fence post as a wave of relief, which began deep in his gut, raced with dizzying speed to his head.

  Though the woman’s face bore an uncanny resemblance to Heidi, when she opened her slate gray eyes he realized he had been mistaken. Then, when she mouthed the words kill me, he released the deep breath he had been holding and steeled himself for what was to come. You pass up one mercy kill and guilt decides to rear its ugly head. Daymon mused grimly. Then, the next thing you know, you’re Jack-fucking-Kevorkian compelled to make things right. He lamented the fact that he hadn’t blown Hosford Preston away when he had had the chance. For if he had, then maybe, just maybe, the big lawyer would stay out of his nightmares. Furthermore, he hoped that by putting this young woman out of her misery he would right his wrong while at the same time possibly keep her from making nightly cameos alongside the pasty lawyer.

  He loaded the crossbow with a scalpel sharp arrow. There was no reason to finish the woman with a shot to the brain. She wasn’t a zombie. She hadn’t been bitten—or at least, not anywhere that he could see. He leveled the crossbow, making sure to avoid any eye contact with the poor woman, and then aimed at a spot just below her sternum. From where he was standing, and takin
g into account the elevation of the cross, he figured one perfectly placed shot should pierce her heart and end her suffering.

  The arrow left the bow with a snik and found its mark. The woman slumped. Daymon prayed she would find peace.

  He gazed at the seemingly unending row of crosses; no less than a hundred dotted the landscape. Far from the perfect symmetry of the head stones in Colleville-sur-Mer Cemetery in Normandy or the arrow straight rows of grave markers at Arlington National in Washington D.C., these crude wooden devices of torture were canted, each one leaning at a different angle, like drunken monuments to misery and suffering.

  The lanky firefighter left Lu Lu and marched back towards town following the long ribbon of blacktop, eyeing every cross along the way, all the while hoping and praying that he wouldn’t find Heidi nailed to one of them.

  By the time he returned to Lu Lu, two hours later, he had been forced to finish off two more examples, a teenaged boy and a twenty-something man; both had been beaten severely about the head and neck and he would take their faces to the grave with him. How they had survived the crucifixion process and then endured who knows how many days hanging in the Valley of the Crosses wearing only tattered shirts and shorts would never be answered. That they had somehow survived for so long, while exposed to the elements, only meant their suffering had been of epic proportions.

  He threw the bow on the passenger seat, slid in and started the engine. Happy he hadn’t found Heidi, yet angry at the monsters and the atrocities that they had committed, he spun the tires and wrenched the wheel over. Gravel pinged underneath Lu Lu as he conducted a hasty three point turn and then with a head full of morose thoughts, guided his ride back into town.

  Along the way he passed another vehicle, a green SUV. It slowed but didn’t stop.

  Daymon nodded at the driver and raised his hand in acknowledgement.

  ***

  Bishop slowed as the speeding SUV passed, and considered turning around and seeing what the dreadlocked man was up to. Then, upon seeing the E which marked it as an Essential’s vehicle, he dismissed the idea and continued ahead.