Allegiance

by Shawn Chesser

  Brushing the unsettling picture from his mind was as easy as shaking an Etch-a-Sketch. He’d cross that bridge when he got to it. Right here and now, he had a task to attend to and little time in which to complete it.

  He shook his head as he stepped over the rigor-frozen body. The sudden movement scattered the feeding flies in every direction, their shiny blue and black bodies glinting in the dim light. They buzzed him, making angry Kamikaze dives at his head, pulling up at the last moment before zipping back to their carrion meal. From whence they came, Cade mused.

  Before continuing on, he looked at Abe’s body one final time. Giving back to the food chain. He threw a shudder and wondered who the real winner in the room was. Living, these days, he thought grimly, seems to be nothing more than a holding pattern of misery to endure while awaiting the inevitable.

  The next aisle over contained the most important item on his list. For a brief moment he stood stock-still, second guessing himself, wondering if quitting the Unit for the second time in fifteen months was the right move. Leaving Nash high and dry—the one desk jockey who always had his back. Then Whipper’s parting barb resonated in his head: ‘You’re the fucking hypocrite.’ No, he thought, shaking his head. His family was the most important thing, and if he continued putting them second, then Whipper’s statement was the truth. Family was what had possessed him to go to these lengths to test himself, and his desire to return to his family would see him through.

  Pushing the mental flotsam and jetsam from the forefront of his mind, he switched back into mission mode. He grabbed the rectangular cardboard box which had been stored next to the fully assembled demonstration model. He scrutinized the shipping label. The color was correct. Check. Size and style, check, and check. Satisfied, he hefted the box which was about a foot deep and roughly the size of a larger model flat screen TV. He clamped the tactical light between his teeth, carted the ungainly rectangle through the aisles to the front door, and propped it across the threshold leaning against the splintered wood casing. At the very least the thirty pound container might slow down a walker trying to gain entry and make a meal of him.

  The next five minutes blurred by. He stopped at the lawn care aisle to liberate a four-foot length of neon orange garden hose. The Gerber’s honed edge made short work and he left the length of hose in the aisle to collect on his way out. He made a right turn, and ignoring the plastic snow discs and toboggans that would never see a ski hill, padded down the automotive aisle. Every type of lubricant, their colorful labels vying for attention, filled the shelves from floor level to a foot above his head. Where to start? he asked himself. Once again the flashlight went between his teeth. He opened the lawn debris bag wide and tumbled several quarts of motor oil—and with the last run of hundred degree days fresh on his mind—thought it prudent to include two large jugs of Prestone antifreeze. And then, as an afterthought, he pulled down four Fix-a-Flat canisters from the uppermost shelf.

  From the end cap he poached three spare gas cans to add to the ones he’d taken from the motor pool. In fact, most of the items needed for their cross country trek he could have demanded from Whipper, if push came to shove. But seeing as it already had, and he’d gone beyond just shoving the first sergeant, he decided to take what he needed from old Abe instead.

  Broken glass crackled and popped underfoot as he deposited the second lawn bag full of supplies next to the entry. He slid the bulky box aside and cracked the door a few inches, causing a new batch of broken glass to cascade from the doorframe. Instantly, hollow moans began echoing off of the makeshift plywood walls flanking the shallow entryway. Cade stuck his head around the jamb and stole a glance at the opening between his ride’s undercarriage and the sidewalk. His blood ran cold, then, in his head, he heard Desantos’s voice calmly say, ‘Make it home, Wyatt.’

  With the specter of being trapped inside with the proprietor’s rotting corpse, and who knows how many ambulatory ones on the outside, he kept his feet away from the clutching hands and heaved his ill-gotten supplies over his head and into the truck bed. The bulky box went in last, and though it took a little coaxing, he managed to catapult it up and over where it landed with a crunch atop everything else.

  He risked one last foray into Abe’s final resting place to take a white silk rose from a plastic vase near the register. He reentered the alcove with a renewed sense of optimism. Then he went to one knee, and with glass shards digging into his patella and at least ten hungry eyed Zs worming their way underneath the four-by-four’s protective off-roading skid plates, he aimed at the nearest creature but held his fire. A niggling sense of uncertainty gnawed at him because he was aware that there were a pair of gas tanks mounted somewhere underneath the truck body, but he had no idea where in relation to the wriggling corpses. The last thing he needed was for a bullet to ricochet, hit one of the oversize tanks and send the F-650 up in a blaze of glory, killing him along with it.

  But it was a chance he had to take. He went prone on his stomach with the suppressed Glock wavering four feet from the snarling faces. “Come and get me. Dinner time,” he called out, urging them forward, hoping to drop a few in the front that would slow down the ones behind so he could get inside the truck. Their hissing grew in volume, a cacophony of insistent cries and snapping teeth. Reacting to the sound of his voice, the creatures that were out of sight crushed in from the back—the whole scene reminded Cade of a Black Friday Walmart mob. He waited a few ticks until the monsters were wedged in one atop the other, smashed shoulder to shoulder, effectively blotting the daylight between the front and rear wheels. Keeping his aim level with the ground, he steadied his breathing and tried his best to ignore the pale hands grasping at the protruding suppressor. With thirty some odd gallons of gas suspended somewhere above the writhing creatures, he decided against the mandatory double-tap and instead walked the Glock methodically from right to left shooting a half dozen of them squarely in the face.

  “Look who gets to be a speed bump,” he said matter-of-factly. He sprang from the ground and entered the truck through the passenger door, being very careful to keep his lower extremities from the flailing hands. He scooted across the seat and placed the still smoking pistol in the open console next to him. It was hot inside the cab, smelled of leather and still had that plastic new car smell, though not enough to mask the undead stench. Something impacted the door near his thigh, then another resounded. Hollow thumps that told him they knew he was there, and though he really didn’t want to see how many of them were on the street side of the truck, he pressed his face against the glass and looked anyway. Not so bad, he thought to himself as he quickly counted a dozen or so zombies pressing against the Ford, milky eyes fixed on his window, nails scratching the sheet metal. Reflected in the side mirror, he could see the scrabbling legs of the persistent few still trying to burrow their way under.

  He closed his eyes and said a silent prayer, then fished the gilded basketball from his pocket and slipped the key into the ignition. He started the engine running, slammed it into drive, and stabbed the gas pedal. A shrill chirp sounded from the truck’s rear end and then the off-road tires clawed into the backs of the dead, churning tattered clothes and putrid flesh into the wheel wells. Cade heard a series of beeps emanate from the dash and noticed a little icon flashing on the instrument cluster as the traction control computer sensed the tires losing their grip in the gore and automatically locked the differential for him.

  As the tires grabbed, the brute force torque produced by the howling V-10 was transferred through the bodies and the Ford rocketed ahead. Cade bounced in his seat and the cargo in back slid across the bed and slammed into the tailgate with a resounding bang. He flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror. Thankfully, the box was still in the back but it had come dangerously close to tumbling out. So he stabbed the brakes and brought everything skittering back towards the cab, where it came to rest in a disorganized pile.

  Close call , he thought. To come all this way and then lose the most import
ant item on his list wouldn’t have made the trip a complete failure, but it would have been disheartening to say the least.

  Chapter 10

  Outbreak - Day 15

  Ovid, Colorado

  It could have gone either way. That much Elvis was certain of. One minute he was helping bag the bodies of folks he had just murdered, and the next he was laying in his bunk at Schriever waiting for one of two things to happen. Either he’d been fingered by one of the survivors and rough men with rifles were going to show up and escort him to a room where he would suffer through a very long interrogation session. Or his new friend Private Farnsworth was going to pull up at the agreed upon time, toot his horn like he had done three days running, and punish him with base gossip and inane conversation all the way to the job site.

  In the end the latter won out. But in a way, Elvis had expected the rough men to show up and he had even romanticized the notion that he would wrestle a gun from one of them and go out shooting.

  Now, two days removed from his terrorist act and after he’d had plenty of time to evaluate how he had prosecuted it, he would be the first to admit the whole affair had been thought out poorly, but not as poorly as the drive to the mass graves had ended for the Farns. Elvis had waited until they’d reached the job site and Farns had handed over the same .45 pistol from the glove box that Elvis had used to protect himself from the Zs three days running. Then after disabling the dozer, he had lured Farnsworth from his pickup truck with a ruse about needing help to get the machine started. Elvis executed the gullible private from a foot away as he was reconnecting the dozer’s coil wire. The big slug did a number on the blonde private’s head. In fact his face had been unrecognizable when Elvis buried the still cooling corpse under four feet of dirt. Then to cover up his tracks—literally—Elvis had left the fifty-ton D9 tractor parked directly over the evidence and then drove off in the dead man’s GMC pickup.

  He drove nonstop one hundred and fifty miles east from Schriever on the 70 in order to avoid the Castle Rock fallout, then he made his way due north following 385 for another one hundred and twenty-five miles along the Colorado/Kansas state line, bypassing the fortified city of Julesburg before stopping for the night in Ovid, Colorado, a stone’s throw from the Nebraska border.

  ***

  As Elvis sat in the folding chair in the uppermost story of the abandoned house he had been calling home for the last two days, he had a sudden urge to visit the town of his alma mater. He looked out the dormer window across the flat Nebraska landscape toward where he figured there had to be someone he knew. Then reality set in, and though he bled Husker football scarlet and cream he knew that if he went back to Lincoln with its quarter of a million people—most of them hungering for flesh—he would end up bleeding scarlet for real.

  Since arriving at Ovid, as well as the conclusion that the only thing he could do would be to come clean and reconcile the past, he had been dialing the same phone number twice daily—the only number that he knew might get him into contact with Ian Bishop.

  He thumbed on the Iridium satellite phone, keyed in eleven numbers from memory, and waited while it rang—after six, a man answered. Elvis was speechless; he hadn’t thought this one through very well either, so he just blurted out what he needed to say. “Ian, this is Elvis. You need to know something... The last time Robert Christian called me he ordered me to kill you.” He said it so fast he wasn’t certain Bishop caught it all, but he was relieved it was out in the open.

  There was a moment of silence on the line, then Bishop said, “I know. I bugged the house and his phone.”

  This revelation sent Elvis’s head spinning as he tried to recollect what it was exactly that he’d said to Robert Christian after the edict had been issued. Then he rolled with it. “I wasn’t going to do it. I promise,” he stammered, as visions of rusty nails being driven through his hands and feet made him shudder. “And just so you know, Robert Christian was kidnapped and taken to Schriever by a Delta team led by a man named Cade Grayson. That’s all I know... and now that Christian is gone, my loyalty lies with you.”

  “I know about it all,” replied Bishop calmly. “No blood, no foul.”

  Elvis took a second to process his part in things.

  “Still there?” asked Bishop.

  “Yes. I heard Jackson Hole fell to the monsters. Where are you now?”

  “You heard correctly,” Bishop intoned. “Do you have something you can write with?”

  “One second.” Elvis looked around the converted attic. There was a craft table by the far wall that looked like it had been used primarily for scrapbooking or some other meaningless retiree nonsense. He grabbed a pen from a plastic bin. “Go ahead,” he said. In silver glitter ink, Elvis wrote down the GPS coordinates as fast as Bishop rattled them off.

  “Got them?” the former Navy SEAL asked.

  “I got them,” he replied. “Should I dress for warm or cold weather?” Elvis asked, trying to be funny. He didn’t receive an answer as the line went dead. He powered the phone off to save the batteries, then looked at the paper scrap scribed with silver numbers, which, without a GPS receiver or an up-to-date Atlas or U.S. map—were totally worthless.

  Chapter 11

  Outbreak - Day 15

  Eden, Utah

  The two-man patrol took a circuitous route as they worked their way cautiously down the heavily wooded draw, losing ten feet of altitude every fifty yards or so.

  A dozen feet in front of his partner, the stocky point man moved silently heel-and-toeing it while pushing aside creepers and grabby brambles with the business end of his stubby black carbine. As the men padded downhill, any noise caused by their footfalls was quickly swallowed by the lush fragrant flora bracketing the barely discernible game trail. For two hours they had been fighting gravity and the humid summer air which was trapped under the dense canopy of pine and dogwoods. Periodically the point man would hold up a clenched fist, and the camo-clad man bringing up the rear would pirouette a slow one-eighty, eyes and rifle sweeping the forest to their six and then take a knee, ears pricked, listening for anyone stupid enough to be tailing them.

  After a few minutes, confident that they were alone, Lev motioned to the point man, and they were on the move again. Another twenty minutes and two more noise checks later, the men found themselves in a small area clear of undergrowth. The soft forest floor was cut through by a small creek running parallel to the trail that had just spit them out; the cool water jouncing over rocks smoothed by ten thousand seasons of spring runoff no doubt a destination for many of the areas’ four-legged creatures.

  Lev propped his rifle against the nearest dogwood, padded to the creek, splashed his face, and wet his collar. After retrieving his M4, the six foot one hundred and eighty pound veteran of the latest Iraq war took watch so his partner could take his turn.

  Holding back his thickly braided ponytail with one hand, Chief plunged his face into the frigid water. Eyes bugged and a grin creasing his ruddy, sunbaked face, the American Indian point man corralled his rifle and without saying a word continued on following the meandering cut in the land while keeping a rapid pace which contradicted his nearly sixty years of age.

  In the days since the occupants of the Eden compound had lost one of their own when the perimeter fencing along SR-39 had been cut by persons unknown and then breached by the dead, the more capable among the survivors had been continuously patrolling the heavily wooded acreage surrounding their bug out retreat.

  They had been following the creek for a considerable distance when Chief halted abruptly.

  “Rotters?” Lev asked. The military style comms gear which he had taken from a pair of dead soldiers a day earlier at an overrun National Guard roadblock east of the compound worked flawlessly, and his query sounded in Chief’s ear bud.

  Voice amplified and transmitted by the tiny disc-shaped mike pressed to his neck, Chief answered in a hushed tone, “I smell death... but I don’t hear any movement.”

  Lev p
ersisted, “It’s gotta be rotters.”

  Though they had seen the dead migrating in much larger numbers during the past week, Chief answered optimistically. “Since we’re still close to the game trail, it may be a dead animal.”

  “My money’s on rotters. We’ve gotta be close to the neighbor’s place,” Lev stated, using the term neighbor loosely. The house that Logan had described earlier, in which the Gudsons, a family of four lived, was more than six miles from the compound. Since the Gudsons’ turn-of-the-century farm house and Logan’s buried survival shelter were separated by thick woods, two barbed wire fences and a small cliff band of sandstone likely thrust up during an earthquake sometime in the distant past, merely popping by to borrow a cup of sugar was out of the question.

  As the two men neared the tree line which abutted the property on the far southwest corner of Logan Winters’s considerable plat of land, a fusillade of gunfire, distant and weak, like ladyfinger firecrackers, filtered up through the trees.

  Riding on a gust of heated air the pungent smell of death wafted up from below.

  “Rotters probably got them trapped,” Lev muttered.

  “We’ll know in a minute,” Chief said as he snugged the rifle to his shoulder and levered the safety to burst so that each pull of the trigger would send three tightly grouped 5.56x45 mm rounds down range.

  Through the thinning forest Chief noticed flashes of powder blue clapboard and black shingles, and then wavy glass panes in weathered framing to which flecks of white paint clung tenaciously.

  “I’m nearing the property line flanking the house... no rotters yet,” said Chief. “I’m pushing forward... going to end up near the front. You angle to the right and recon the back.”