Allegiance

by Shawn Chesser

  Daymon thought about this for a second. “Great in theory, but there are a bunch of walkers heading towards this house,” he finally said.

  “Why dontcha go and take care of them?” replied Jenkins.

  “And leave Heidi?”

  “A second won’t kill her.”

  “I abandoned her once. I’m not going to leave her alone again,” said Daymon sharply.

  “Understood. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Jenkins replied. He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to keep the looming headache at bay, and after a tick he went on. “We’ll just have to take care of them before we leave in the morning. Shouldn’t be too bad.” He threw an involuntary shudder thinking about the creature he had just brained and put the boot to in the barn. The idea of putting down a slew of them set his stomach to churning. In the past he’d had no problem blowing away a bad guy—no regrets, no remorse. Those dirtbags never came back to haunt him in his sleep. But these regular folks... the multitudes who had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had gotten themselves bit and then turned—he was finding were the hardest to put down. Since day one of this horrible event, they had been the ones haunting him day and night.

  Throwing the radio in the console, Jenkins white-knuckled the wheel all the way to the house on the hill, utterly dreading the fact he was going to have to deal with the dead.

  Chapter 19

  Outbreak - Day 15

  Huntsville, Utah

  Duncan let the Land Cruiser coast most of the way down the hill, then braked a few feet shy of the supine bodies they’d spotted from the rise. He put the e-brake on, and out of habit started the flashers ticking. “Remember to keep your head movin’... ‘On a swivel,’ as a good friend of mine likes to say. And one more thing... those ‘rotters’ as you all like to call them... they don’t always let you know they’re comin’.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Phillip replied. He exited the truck, then looked left, then right, then back like he was in grade school and the crossing guard was AWOL.

  Duncan smiled—clearly his advice had sunk in. Remaining vigilant himself, he craned his head around the Humvee’s buried rear end. “Clear on this side,” he called out. Because he had seen walkers that had appeared to be truly dead rise and attack, he approached the nearest body with a great deal of caution.

  Mouth agape in a final silent scream, shadowed sockets where his eyes had been, the dead National Guardsman glared blindly at the morning sky. The cause of death was obvious: like a kindergartner’s unfinished connect-the-dots, purple entry wounds riddled his abdomen and left leg. Contrasting sharply against alabaster skin, coal-black tribal tattoos spiraled up both arms before finally coming together an inch above his sternum. On his left shoulder, encircling a soldier’s cross—an M4 rifle standing vertically with a pair of boots at the base and a helmet perched on the buttstock—were the words Fallujah, Never Forget, and a unit insignia he didn’t recognize. To Duncan, it was painfully obvious that the young soldier’s last seconds on earth had been spent suffering with immeasurable agony. He had seen dozens of men, the same age, and in similar poses—usually minus their manhood as well as their eyes—on the muddy and bloody battlefields of Vietnam. The fact that the Guardsman had escaped joining the ranks of the walking dead seemed to be the only bright spot to the man’s final day on earth.

  “Fucking savages that did this,” Phillip said, contempt dripping from the words.

  Duncan regarded the statement, nodded, but said nothing.

  “Hey Sir... over here,” Phillip called out. “We got some more dead soldiers in the ditch and a whole lot of head-shot rotters on the road.”

  Duncan looked both ways before crossing the two-lane blacktop—a habit not entirely necessary for survival in the zombie apocalypse. Then he skirted the front of the Humvee, giving it a wide berth, all the while looking underneath to ensure a grabber wasn’t lying in wait and ready to ruin his day—a habit he found very necessary for survival in the zombie apocalypse.

  Duncan stood alongside Phillip, who was kneeling and peering down into the roadside ditch where a dozen more guardsmen, their bird-pecked bodies frozen in various death poses, had been unceremoniously dumped.

  “Bunch a shit,” Phillip muttered sullenly as he stood up straight. “They were just doing their jobs.” He shook his head.

  A few silent seconds passed.

  Phillip sat on his haunches and poked a stick at one of the dead zombies that had been left where they fell by whoever had gunned them down. “What do you think went down here Sir?”

  Duncan envisioned his hands around Phillip’s scrawny neck. Squeezing the seeds from his Adam’s apple. He had heard one too many sirs uttered by his talkative road dawg. That’s it, he told himself as he revisited in his head the hours’ old exchange he’d had with his brother.

  “It’s not wise to go out there by yourself,” Logan had said, suggesting that Duncan take a handful of men with him.

  “I work best alone,” he had countered.

  Little brother finally relented, but did so with one condition attached: excluding Gus, Lev, or the Chief, big brother had to choose one of the men from the compound to ride shotgun, and for once, age hadn’t trumped persistence. The fact that he was a loner by nature and usually eschewed travelling companions—especially ones with a sidekick mentality—made Duncan wonder what the hell he had been thinking when he agreed to Logan’s one condition.

  “Sir...” Phillip said again.

  Cursing Logan under his breath, Duncan squared up to the walking stick bug. He looked down into the man’s closely-set eyes and said in his best John Wayne, “Phil, I don’t carry a rank any longer... and callin’ me sir just makes me feel old. I’m no math major, but I figure I’ve only got ten—maybe twelve years on ya—so I’m not your elder either.” He paused for effect, and stroked his silver mustache which was trying to grow into a goatee. “So how bout we stick with Duncan or Winters... you do that, and before you know it—you and me—hell... we’ll be thick as thieves.” And if you don’t, it’s the wood chipper for you.

  “Understood,” Phil said, breaking eye contact. At a loss, he pressed the binoculars to his eyes and slowly turned a full circle. “We’ve got six rotters coming from the west. Also there are a few of them in the field over there... couple hundred yards off.”

  “We’ve got time,” Duncan stated. He removed his Aviator’s glasses and wiggled the ear pieces, testing the tiny screws holding them together, then produced a handkerchief and polished each thick lens with meticulous precision before squaring them away on his face. “To answer your question, Phillip, these soldiers died more than a week ago. Probably closer to ten days, give or take.” He turned and walked along the edge of the ditch towards the Humvee. “Let’s take a closer look,” he added, covering his nose and mouth with the handkerchief.

  Trying to determine what had happened to the small patrol, Duncan eyed the desert-tan rig. Half in and half out of the ditch, with one knobby tire clawing the air and a wicked-looking gun barrel stabbing skyward, the metal beast looked like a stricken Cunard liner about to slip under the sea.

  He turned his scrutiny to the roadway and angrily kicked at a mound of shell casings. The four-inch long, finger-thick brass threw the sun and tinkled like chimes as they skittered and bounced along the flat surface. He guessed that these dead men had been deployed to this weather-beaten stretch of road to either set up a checkpoint or to block its passage altogether. Whichever the case, it appeared to have been hastily constructed. There were no Jersey barriers—those 42-inch high modular concrete slabs usually employed on freeways to re-route traffic. He also thought it odd that the troops hadn’t strung up concertina wire or employed sandbags. These two observations, when combined, led him to believe that this had been set up not only to allow people out of Huntsville, but more importantly to keep looters from going back into the city. To say the checkpoint and the troops manning it had been dangerously exposed—to the infecte
d but also to human threats—would be overstating the obvious.

  “Phil... Come here, I wanna bend your ear.”

  “Whatcha got, Duncan?”

  “See these shell casings?” He nudged a small pile with his boot.

  “Lots of ‘em,” Phil observed. “Different calibers, it appears.”

  Good job, Duncan thought. “Yep. We’ve got 9mm, 556 Nato, 7.62x39mm... Kalashnikovs.” He raised his brow an inch. His glasses hitched up too. “AK-47s probably. The bigger shells are from that mounted .50.” He gestured to the long-barreled gun atop the high centered Humvee. “I figure these dead boys—they probably knew the people gathered. Probably even knew the ones who did this... ate lunch with ‘em at the diner in town on occasion. Never forget, Phil... when push comes to shove, people change... allegiances shift.”

  “So the Guard let their guard down—”

  “And let the bad guys get too close before they engaged. Lethal mistake, because the .50—she ain’t designed for accurate close quarters combat,” Duncan said, finishing the younger man’s thought. They’d held their fire, probably as a result of compassionate human nature overriding self-preservation, he guessed. Hell, he would rather be eaten alive by army ants than be stuck in the same position. He couldn’t fathom having to follow orders that said he had to shoot his fellow countrymen—especially with the world going to shit around him—that would have been a hell of a moral dilemma. For anyone with a sense of fairness it’d be hard to wrap a mind around, let alone actually follow through. “They went through all of the ammo for the .50. Musta been a shit show.” This got Duncan to thinking. He picked up a handful of the metal clips that linked the .50 caliber bullets together. There were hundreds of them littering the floor and footwell in the open-backed vehicle—a by-product of the disintegrating ammo belts fed into the Ma Deuce by the gunner. These need to be repurposed, he said to himself.

  “Duncan... check this out.”

  “Whatcha got Phil?” he drawled.

  “A pile of bloody uniforms. This one belonged to Corporal Howard of the Utah National Guard... apparently he was O-negative,” he said with a frown as he displayed the punctured ACU blouse so that Duncan could see. “Says so right here.”

  “Unfortunately that info’s not gonna help him... wherever he is now.”

  “There are more uniforms than bodies. That makes no sense. Why would they take prisoners but leave their vehicle?”

  “Probably to use ‘em for slave labor. Make them do the things you don’t want to... clear a house of infected. Burn bodies. Cut firewood. You name it. Or worst of all... you infect them—and we’ve already seen it at the compound—then you got yourself fire-and-forget weapons. Rotters don’t need to be fed or watched too closely. Can’t think or reason... therefore they’re not scheming on how to escape,” Duncan proffered. Then he pointed at the grass near the far shoulder. “There were a couple more vehicles parked on the side... there. Probably Hummers judging by the tire impressions. And all of these cars stretching down the road, see how they’re loaded up with crap, camping gear and what not? Look closely, Phil. You’ve got mostly Utah plates, but damn near all of ‘em have either Salt Lake City or Ogden automotive dealerships advertised on their frames. The people who left these vehicles did not continue forward on foot, otherwise we’d have passed all kinds of discarded things they tired of carrying... so I’d be willing to bet someone forced them back into Huntsville.”

  “And?” Phillip said.

  “And most of them are probably rotters by now,” replied Duncan. “Roaming the interstate and the back roads. I think that goes a long ways toward explaining why we’re seeing so many undead visitors outside the compound.”

  Phillip turned his gaze towards the town and the glittering reservoir beyond. “So, the other day... why in God’s name did they cut the wire and let in the rotters and then not follow them in and attack us?”

  “Easier for them to loot what they need from unguarded soft targets in the area first. As I said before, they wanted to flush us out to the road... to get a ballpark idea of how many we were and whether or not we were armed. I god-damn guarantee you that they’re thinking twice about comin’ in... seein’ as how we chewed up the mess of rotters they sent in.”

  “So why didn’t they ambush us at the fence?” Phil queried.

  “For all they know we have a small army inside the forest. What would you think if a military type helicopter was flittin’ around the countryside that you previously thought you had all to yourself?”

  “Well, if I had anything to do with killing National Guard soldiers,” Phillip nodded to the eyeless cadaver to his right, “I’d be suffering from a very tight sphincter, and wishing I had eyes in the back of my head.”

  “So what choice do we have then?” Duncan asked.

  “I dunno.”

  Come on, thought Duncan. Use the brain God gave you, Phil.

  Fracturing the quiet, staccato bursts of gunfire rolled across the reservoir coming from the nearby town.

  “AK-47,” Duncan stated confidently.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Vietnam. Been on the wrong end of ‘em more than once. They have a slower cyclic rate than the M-16... they’ve got a distinctive chatter that I’ll never forget.” Then, playing into the whole democracy thing Logan insisted the group practice, he decided he’d delve further into Phil’s brain. “So what do you think we should do... do we sit in the compound and assume they aren’t going to return? Do we get into an arms race with an enemy we know nothing about? Or should we go and hunt them down?”

  As if saying, Beats the hell outta me, Phil shrugged his shoulders and waited for Duncan to enlighten him.

  Flunked the test, Phil, Duncan thought. Then he said, “They’ll come. When they need food, bullets, or women.” He kicked at the shell casings again and locked eyes with Phillip. “They’ll come. So we have to be ready for them.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No... not exactly. They’ve already declared war. We’d be stupid to fight this on their terms. We need to go and hit them where they sleep... get them on their heels and either run them out or kill ‘em all. And if it’s put up for a vote... mine goes for the latter.”

  Looking around nervously as if the bullets might start flying at any moment, Phil summoned up the courage to ask Duncan what he thought they should do right this moment. As if on cue, another hollow-sounding burst of gunfire rang out in the distance.

  “They’re coming this way,” Duncan said assuredly. “Quickly... we need to get this thing on the road.”

  ***

  After reeling off fifteen feet of cable from the Humvee’s winch, Duncan positioned the Land Cruiser pointing east—the direction of the compound—and hitched the spooled-out cable to the towing receiver underneath the Toyota’s rear bumper.

  “The rotters are getting close,” stated Phillip.

  Duncan stood on the Toy’s rear bumper and looked west down 39. A trickle of walking corpses approached, weaving in and out between the mass of stalls. Then he gazed east, the way they had come. More of the creatures, only these were separated from the road—kept at bay by a farmer’s fence.

  Phillip prairie-dogged up. Looked up and down the road. “Shouldn’t we be going?” he asked nervously.

  “Yes, but we’re taking the Hummer... if it’ll start.”

  Phillip cast a weary eye at the shambling dead. “What can I do?”

  “Get in the Toyota, put her in the lowest gear you can, and when you hear me holler, stomp on it.”

  “OK. But why do we need it? You said the gun was out of ammo.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Duncan replied as he mounted the listing Humvee. He applied the brake and turned the switch on the left of the dash towards the start position. Then held his breath. With a loud Braap the open-topped truck’s diesel engine turned over and thrummed to life. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed movement, and then two things happened at once: gunfire rang out—seven or
eight tightly spaced shots. Then the two first turns that had apparently emerged from between the vehicles and had been flanking from the left—out of his blind spot—fell to a heap five feet from him. He shifted his gaze to the front where he could see the upper half of Phil’s body protruding from the Toyota’s open moon roof; he flashed a thumbs up and then cursed himself for the lapse in security. More shots rang out before he could un-ass himself to assess the situation. Phil grinned, flashed a thumbs up back at him and yelled, “All clear,” before he and his AR-15 vanished back inside the Land Cruiser.

  “Now!” Duncan bellowed.

  The Toyota’s power plant whined and strained, trying to pull the nearly three ton rig from the ditch. Like an enormous Salad Shooter, the Hummer’s meaty tires chewed up grass and gravel, sending chunks of sod blasting the barbed wire fence to the rear. Slowly but surely, with the Land Cruiser tugging, the effort paid off as the 200 horsepower and 380 foot pounds of torque transferred from the Hummer’s 6.2 liter engine to the tires grappling with the road’s edge.

  Duncan was nearly launched from his seat when the front end came down with a resonant bang. As quickly as his old bones would allow, he leaped out, shotgun in hand, and following his own advice put his head on a swivel. Clear.

  He hastily rewound the cable into the front-mounted winch, then retook his seat in the Hummer. Being careful to avoid driving overtop the Guardsmen, he conducted a three-point turn and sped off to the east.

  With the white Toyota filling the rearview mirror and thankfully blotting out the macabre scene, he thought about the soldiers and lamented the fact they would never receive a proper burial. That they would molder in the elements until the birds and wild animals had picked their bones clean only made their fates harder for the old veteran to accept.

  Headed east on 33 with only the thrumming of the big tires for company, one of the motor mouth’s lines from Fargo popped into his head, bringing a smile to his face. ‘Would it kill you to say something?’