Grateful only for the bulging white clouds scudding through the summer sky and the brief shade-filled moments each one afforded, Chance squinted against the sun and took a long pull from the olive-drab surplus canteen. For reasons unknown, he fully expected the last few ounces of water to be cool and refreshing. But after sitting in the elements for hours, the super-heated liquid might just as well have been Earl Gray tea. Cursing under his breath, his thirst far from sated, he slammed the empty canteen against the ground. If only P.J. wasn’t Dad’s favorite, he thought, then I would be the one riding around in the air conditioned SUV doing the shooting and looting. That he had been sweltering in the same spot since dawn only added insult to his injured pride. It almost seemed like Dad was further punishing him for being a fat ass with a shoe size IQ. And now, well after noon, he was bored to death, drained of energy, and unable to keep his eyes peeled.
***
The low growl echoing up the valley interrupted his afternoon siesta. And like a triple shot espresso, the adrenaline surge that followed quickly brought him to his senses. Mouth spewing expletives, and thoroughly pissed at himself for nodding off, he brought the spotting scope to his eye.
Though still out of sight, he could hear vehicles approaching from the west. As the engine sounds drew nearer, he recognized one of them as belonging to the Toyota that had exited the woods hours earlier via the cleverly hidden access road. The second vehicle had him stumped, and though he thought of himself as a car guy, for some strange reason he couldn’t place the torque-heavy low-end growl and gearbox whine that he was hearing.
He shifted slightly to the left to make for a better viewing angle. Took his eye from the lens for a moment to make sure his AK-47 was within arms’ reach, then reacquired the vehicles just as they emerged from the tree-lined curve in the road.
He had been dead-on about the first vehicle. The Land Cruiser that had left earlier with two men inside now appeared to have only a driver behind the wheel. His heart twisted in his chest as the second vehicle emerged. “Chance, you dumbass...” he muttered. “You know what a Humvee sounds like.” Dad’s not going to like it when he hears about this, he thought. And considering the military vehicle had what he guessed was some kind of a large caliber machine gun mounted on top, Dad was really gonna be pissed off.
The two vehicles stopped unexpectedly a hundred feet short of where Chance believed the hidden gate was located. He watched the Humvee driver open his door and step onto the shimmering blacktop. Though he was terrible at guessing a person’s age—and equally as bad at remembering first names—Chance supposed the man had to be somewhere in his fifties.
While keeping the tree line at his back, the Humvee driver walked towards the zombies with a distinctive swagger—or limp—Chance couldn’t be certain. And to say the man seemed at ease against the lopsided odds he faced would have been an understatement. With the short-barreled shotgun resting on his shoulder, Chance thought the man looked like some kind of stagecoach driver or maybe even that guy Mad Max from those post-apocalyptic movies Mom wouldn’t allow him to watch as a kid. Yeah, Mad Max, the eighteen year old decided. Minus the spiked leather jacket and the ever-present mutt, that’s exactly whom the guy brought to mind.
After communicating something to the driver who was still sitting inside the Toyota, Mad Max sidestepped to his left, keeping the zombies off to the right.
Looking like workers on strike, albeit rotting and disheveled, the dozen or so zombies paced the road. It was the same staggering uncoordinated lot that had been patrolling the same quarter-mile stretch since the lone Toyota exited earlier in the day.
No sooner had the vehicles reappeared and Mad Max emerged from the Humvee, did the shambling dead begin to move in unison towards the meat. Chance’s eyes widened when he realized that even though he was a couple of degrees uphill, he would still be in the gunman’s line of fire. And if the man was shooting with shot shells then there was a slim chance he could catch a deadly dose of lead pellets. So with self-preservation at the forefront, he flattened his offensive lineman-sized frame and tried to be one with the earth.
But the ground was unyielding and Chance was not a gopher. Truth be told, he was closer to two hundred and fifty pounds. Fuck it, he thought. If a golden BB catches me right here, then so be it. He raised his head a few inches and trained the scope on the action, and as he watched the melee unfold three things happened simultaneously: Mad Max leveled his weapon at the advancing dead, a lick of red-orange flame vented from the shotgun muzzle, and the nearest rotter’s head erupted, sending a slow motion arc of liquefied gore airborne. Chance shuddered at the ghastly sight. He still hadn’t gotten used to the damage a firearm could inflict on the human body—living or dead—especially point blank and to the head. A fraction of a second later the booming report rolled uphill like a thunderclap, then quickly echoed to silence. Chance kept his eye pressed to the scope and watched, wholeheartedly rooting for the monsters to prevail. The fewer men with guns that he and the others would have to deal with when Dad finally sent them in, the better, he reasoned.
As he continued to observe, he found it amusing how the monsters jostled against one another to get to the shooter, who merely sidestepped and backpedaled while keeping a good amount of spacing between him and the hungry throng. Dude probably had some kind of military training, Chance concluded. “But why the hell aren’t they using the big machine gun?” he wondered out loud. After all, Dad had shown him firsthand what something similar could do, and he never ever wanted to be on the receiving end of one of those flesh shredders.
As he worked the scenario over in his mind, it suddenly dawned on him what the two were trying to accomplish. Mad Max was luring the monsters into position, and while they blindly followed, another man, who was very thin and looked to be middle-aged, had emerged from the Toyota and was silently flanking the zombies in order to put them in some kind of a crossfire. “Goddamnit,” Chance muttered. The more he saw of how these guys handled the rotters, the less he wanted to tangle with them.
A cold void formed in his gut as he contemplated what Dad had in store. He said a little foxhole prayer, easing away from the scope. He pushed his fledgling blonde dreadlocks from his face, then dabbed more sweat from his brow. He could feel his tee-shirt, wet with alcohol-infused sweat, sticking to the fat rolls on his back and sides. A gust of hot wind rife with carrion and exhaust fumes ruffled the brittle grass surrounding his hide. And then, when he finally put the scope back to his eye, Shotgun Guy’s back faced him squarely. For just a split second he entertained the idea of popping up and screaming “
Wolverines! ” and hosing them down with his AK. But that brilliantly crafted idea dissipated instantly when the thin man opened fire and had already dropped three more of the dead with accurate double-taps to the head before the shotgun rejoined the chorus.
Chapter 22
Outbreak - Day 15
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Tran came to, fearing that he had become a meal for the dead. He had no idea what time it was or how long he had been out. Tree branches rustled in the wind, and somewhere above him in the lush canopy a murder of crows engaged in a noisy debate. Despite the fact that he didn’t yet have a craving for human flesh—the pain flooding his body could mean only one thing—he had died and was reanimating as one of them. Then a chilling sound drew his attention, like the desperate spit of an angry tomcat cornered by a menacing Doberman. A dozen feet to his left and half that distance uphill, a first turn was emitting the noise while doing a sort of clumsy mechanical looking breast stroke—a pitiful thing to watch indeed. The pale, one-eyed demon would thud one arm forward, lancing the dirt with bony fingers, scrabble its knees like some kind of insect, and then slowly pull itself along, advancing only inches at a time. Clearly, gravity combined with the steep grade was giving it fits.
Suddenly it occurred to Tran that he must not be one of them. Because from what he had seen firsthand in the Elk Refuge—the dead didn’t eat the dead.
He spent a few agonizing minutes breathing deeply, trying to get oxygen-rich blood flowing to regain the equilibrium he’d need to confront the threat. Meanwhile, the simple act of tracking the thing with his eyes brought on agonizing pain—like someone jabbing an icepick repeatedly with metronomic precision into his brain. So intense was the pressure behind his eyes that he began seeing double—like looking through someone else’s prescription glasses. Concussion, he thought to himself. And as he lay there fighting to remain awake, the events leading up to this moment came rushing back to him with acute clarity. The mental movie picked up a millisecond after he had been shoved from the moving vehicle, when every nerve in his body instantly came alive—the adrenaline blasting through his body urging him to act on the fight or flight instinct—the life-saving mechanism that had been hardwired into humans since saber-toothed tigers were the alpha predator. In that do or die moment, he’d decided that flight was in his best interest. He remembered taking the full brunt of the fall on his shoulder, and then recalled seeing the big off-road tires whir by at the edge of his vision. And as he scrambled forward on his hands and knees, searching for a sliver of daylight amongst the sharp knees and shredded feet, he had yearned for nothing more than a shot at revenge against the two brothers who were sacrificing him to ensure their own survival.
The tomcat hiss resounded, dragging his attention to the present. Fully aware the one-eyed zombie was near, and with every intention of fleeing, he rolled over onto his chest and tried to stand. It started out well, but by the time he was on all fours, an all-encompassing tsunami of nausea slapped him back down. And like a kid determined to see the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, he fought to stay awake—to somehow stay in the light. The last thing he remembered before succumbing to the subdural hematoma pressing against his brain was the sickly sweet stench of death and the steady, seismic thumping of ol’ One Eye coming his way.
Chapter 23
Outbreak - Day 15
Winters’s Compound
Eden, Utah
Duncan staggered to the left, putting himself at the top of an imaginary L, and Phillip moved right in a tight arc so he was at the toe.
The dead followed dumbly, finding themselves bunched up at the heel of the invisible L, near where the painted yellow dashes bisected the road.
A steady Pop! Pop! Pop! erupted from Phillip’s smaller caliber AR, followed closely by three rapid-fire booms from the combat shotgun. Sandwiched between the ear-splitting blasts was a metallic schnick-schnick as Duncan racked each new round into the chamber.
One left, Duncan thought to himself. The Mossberg belched fire one final time, then clattered to the ground at about the same instant the Colt Model 1911, firmly clutched in Duncan’s right hand, cleared leather and swept up and forward. He noted the sensation as the webbing between thumb and forefinger depressed the automatic safety. He tracked his outstretched arm at the closest threat. The first turn suffered from a bad maggot infestation. The dermis covering its bare upper body rippled and undulated as the colony of fly larvae fed on the deceased host. Duncan’s pistol boomed twice as he fought against the substantial recoil to keep the muzzle down and on target. The report from the discharged .45 caliber rounds drowned out all else and set his ears to ringing. The middle-aged female rotter’s head exploded behind the iron sights—whether from his pistol or Phillip’s rifle, it didn’t concern him—he just shifted his aim and worked to empty the Colt into the dead, a few which were still staggering his way when its slide locked open.
Without taking his eyes from the stragglers, he dumped the spent mag, rammed a fresh one home, and let the slide snik forward to chamber a new round. In the time it took him to perform these nearly autonomous functions, Phillip’s AR had gone silent, and all of the creatures were down.
A thick cordite haze tinted the atmosphere a curious shade of gray around the battle space. The color reminded Duncan of the smog-filled skies over Beijing, Mumbai, or Mexico City before those mega metropolises fell to the dead and the multitudes of cars and factories ceased spewing pollution forever.
Once the gunfire ceased, Chance pulled the waterproof Birder’s notepad from his hip pocket. He had stumbled upon it recently inside one of the rural homes that he and his brother had been tearing apart in their quest for ammunition, food, booze, and most importantly prescription medications. It was the solution to his most pressing problem, and hopefully he would never have to revisit the thorough ass kicking he had received from his dad upon turning over a soggy paper notepad complete with running ink and unreadable words. He wiped the damp sheen from the first plastic page, pulled the black grease pencil from the spiral loop, checked it for a sharpened point, then proceeded to add his findings of the day to the notes already jotted there. Right below the time when the lone vehicle left, he wrote in big blocky numbers what time the men returned, described the Humvee and the one-sided undead ass kicking he had just witnessed, and detailing, with a series of arrows and numbers, the tactics the men had employed. And even though he used to be a self-professed Military Channel junkie—before all of the stations went black—he didn’t know a pincer maneuver from a frontal assault. Therefore, the poorly drawn diagram relayed less information than a preschooler’s scribbling.
***
“Let’s get these things off the road,” Phillip offered. He slung the AR-15 over his shoulder and proceeded to make sure all fourteen of the rotters were down for good. He used his Beretta only once, taking out a crawler, its spinal cord already severed by one of their bullets. He bent down and hauled the dead thing off to the side, being mindful of the leaking brains and their proximity to his boots.
Duncan hinged over and retrieved his shotgun and the lone empty magazine for his .45. “Be careful,” he said. “These things have been known to play a little game of possum on occasion. You and I know they’re not the sharpest tools in the shed... and even though they don’t make for good dinner conversation...” he winced at his choice of words, then went on, “I’m afraid somewhere behind their dead eyes lurks a certain bit of cunning... maybe even cooperation at times.”
Thanks for the lecture, Dad, Phillip thought to himself, while at the same time wondering how difficult it had been for ‘Oops’ to grow up having a ball-busting big brother who was also old enough to be his dad.
He grunted from exertion and pushed the corpse’s bare spindly legs over its head, causing it to perform an upside down and backwards somersault, the impact at the bottom of the ditch leaving its limp arms folded across its chest. Jaw hinged open, skull, hair, and most of the frontal lobe lost to a .45 slug, it looked as if it was about to offer him a lecture of its own. “I don’t see it your way, Duncan,” he said, tearing his gaze from the glaring eyes. “These things aren’t people anymore.”
“A small part of them still is,” Duncan countered. He made a face at the smell and put his back into his work, dragging the one that had suffered decapitation by shotgun, not by the hands, but by the heels so he wouldn’t have to look at his own handiwork. Still, the headless corpse spilled a brackish blood trail over the road from where it first fell to the ditch where it would finish decomposing.
Blood trails were nothing new to Duncan. During the war in Vietnam, the Viet Cong always came back for their dead. Sometimes the blood trail was as good as a body to the lieutenant, which in turn was as good as ten bodies to his higher ups—who coveted a high body count. Then that number was taken by the politicians, who in turn picked another arbitrary number to get the figure they thought the President wanted the public to hear. Just thinking about politicians made him angry. They were one of the few denizens of the old world that he would never miss. There were a few others on the list but none caused his blood to boil quicker. No more two- and four-year election cycles. No more damning ads. Hell, if he hadn’t seen so many good people die since Z day, the tradeoff would almost be worthwhile. At least the dead were predictable, he mused. They tried to eat you, not screw you when you weren’t looking. The vi
sual brought a rare morbid smile to his face. Yep... in Nam, winning had been nothing but a numbers game—a fake war of attrition that had been destined to fail. There were simply too many Chinese, Viet Cong, and North Vietnamese throwing themselves into the fray to be stopped. Defeating the dead was going to be a much harder slog, Duncan concluded. An ongoing war of attrition from which mankind could never walk away from—and probably wouldn’t survive.
***
The two men worked in silence, both eager to clear the road and return to the compound before more walking dead arrived.
Once the road was corpse-free, Duncan took a load off. He was still favoring his lower back, and heaving the dead weight hadn’t helped matters any. What he really needed was to lie down for a spell and take something to kill the pain and inflammation. His only hope was that baby bro had something stronger than a Tylenol.
Casting a glance towards Duncan, and noticing that the old man was in a considerable amount of pain, Phillip took it upon himself and policed up the shotgun shells and all of the brass he could find. “Why didn’t we just pass these things by and get on through the gate?” Phillip asked. He paused for a second, expecting an answer.
“It’s not that simple.”
“But there were so few of them... and as slow as they are... we would have had plenty of time to lock up and put the camouflage back in place.”
“If we stop yakkin’ and get off the road before more of them come around to see what all of the commotion was about, then we’ll be OK. But if just one of them staggers around that bend,” he stabbed a thumb westward, “and sees us go inside, it’ll hang out, and sooner or later we’ll have a posse of undead waiting for us next time anyone exits here. This goes back to what I was saying about there being something human left upstairs.” He tapped a finger to his head. “Some of ‘em have long memories. I’ve been in places with better fencing than this. I barely made it out of that scrape alive... and that necessitated a Black Hawk. So Phillip, my boy, in a nutshell that’s why I stopped short of the entrance. We cleaned ‘em out... but we’re not home free. Let’s get off the road. Cause if we let another bunch of rotters start hanging around here again we might as well just put up a sign showing the bad guys exactly where the hidden entrance is.”
Allegiance Page 15
