“I liked your face before this... when it was smooth. You know, like Uncle Mike’s—” she stopped mid-sentence. Made a face, clearly wishing she could take back the words.
The three of them said nothing for a couple of minutes.
Finally Cade broke the silence. “It’s OK, Raven. Even though we can’t talk to him, Uncle Mike is still with us. Right in here... in spirit,” he said, touching his chest over his heart.
“How do you know?” she asked, screwing up her face.
“I read about it in the old people hand book. You’ll have to trust me. Can you do that?”
“Yes Dad.”
He stood and stretched. “I’m going to go on a quick run before it’s full dark,” he said. “Want me to take the dog?”
“Not so fast, Captain Grayson. Wouldn’t want Max to get lost now, would we,” Brook said, adding air quotes with her fingers to the word ‘lost.’
“I love dogs,” Cade said, suppressing a grin.
“Sit down,” Brook commanded.
He dropped his tennis shoes and did as he was told, planting his butt on the rack.
“We need to have a family conversation, and honey, I have a confession to make,” she said softly. She paced the floor for a few seconds. Took a deep cleansing breath and went on. “I left the reservation while you were on your way to Jackson Hole. Went on a food run along with General Gaines, some of his 10th Special Forces guys, and a few of the civilians.”
Cade’s eyes narrowed. “I know,” he said matter-of-factly.
Brook stared into his brown eyes. “Who told you... I mean how did you find out?”
“Your boots gave you away.”
“My boots?” she asked as her gaze shifted unconsciously down the length of her body towards her feet.
“The mud caked on those things wasn’t from around here. Too many minerals. Smelled like manure. No kind of soil like that around here.”
Brook chuckled. “That was gated community dirt,” she said. “Rich folks dirt.”
“Like I said before. We live and die by the decisions we make, and we’re not going to live forever.”
“Dad...”
“I’m only speaking to the truth, Raven. Your mom and me are trying to prepare you for that day, and it starts right now. Keep it on your mind so that when it does happen you’ll know exactly what you need to do.”
“And then?” she asked softly, her head resting on the bunk’s vertical post.
“You survive,” Brook added. “You forget about us and you save yourself... that’s what it’s going to take for you to survive. You’ll have to detach—”
“Detach?”
“You know. Like I had to do in Myrtle Beach. Those things were no longer your Grandma and Grandpa... and I didn’t think of that thing crawling down the hall as my Mom when I pulled that trigger.” Brook paused to let it sink in. Watched Raven’s brow crinkle. Too much too soon, Brook thought to herself. Then she changed the subject. Went on to explain to Cade where she and Raven had been and what they had been doing. Over the course of an hour she told him about Wilson and Sasha and their entire story—from Denver on up to their unanticipated mess hall meeting after breakfast. She went over the horrors Taryn had endured inside of Grand Junction Regional until she was rescued by him and his Delta team. Finally she dropped the thumb drive bombshell in his lap.
Cade visibly tensed as he listened to the improbable news coming out of her mouth. He sat up and gently extricated himself from Brook’s embrace. Exhaled audibly and looked her in the eye for a beat. Shifted his gaze over to his daughter.
“It’s true,” Raven said rapid-fire. “I believe Taryn. She’s nice. Wilson... he’s kind of old and annoying—”
Brook whispered in Cade’s ear, “He’s twenty.”
Raven went on, “—and Sasha... she’s kind of full of herself, but I think sooner or later she’ll come around.”
“You’ve got ‘em all figured out,” Cade said, feigning surprise. “Except for the dog... If I were you I wouldn’t get too attached to anyone. Because we’re not going to be here much longer.”
Raven smiled.
“We’ll cover that in part two of our family meeting,” Brook said rather tentatively. Then she laid out her proposal. “We’ll all go to Eden. You, me, and Raven. Sasha. Wilson and Taryn, from the sounds of it, will pull their weight.”
“Don’t forget Max,” chimed Raven.
“And the dog,” Brook said, shooting a reassuring look at her daughter who was standing hands on hips and glowering her way.
There was silence as Cade just stared at Brook with a sour look on his face. He shifted his gaze to Raven, then the dog. He was outnumbered.
Brook and Raven stood before him. Smiling.
The whole thing had been a cleverly crafted and properly sprung ambush. Cade fought off the small curl of a smile working on the corners of his lips.
Brook continued. “If they go with us there will be someone close to Raven’s age. Plus,” she whispered into Cade’s ear. “Young people like Taryn and Wilson are going to be necessary to repopulate. To keep us going. Keep us fighting back against those things.”
Cade was speechless. The word incredulous crept into his mind. Rarely was he at a loss for words, so he merely stared with a firm set to his jaw.
“Bed time, Raven. I need to work on your father. Set Max up on one of the bottom bunks.”
Max heard his name and emerged from the shadows. Raven scratched behind his ears. Then she pecked Mom and Dad on the cheek. “Come on boy,” she said as she headed to the bathroom to get ready for bed.
***
One hour later
“So it’s settled then—you’ll at least show up at the briefing at zero-five-hundred? Give them your two cents’ worth?” Brook wrapped her toned arms around her man. Wrestled him flat to the bunk without receiving much of a fight in return.
“I’m not sold yet,” Cade replied. “Plus it depends on where they’re going.”
“Bullshit, Cade Grayson, you’re too much of a patriot to let the objective stop you from going. There’s so much riding on this. Like Nash said to me in not so many words, ‘Time is of the essence’—cliché’ but true.”
“I’ll go and sniff around. See what kind of mission they are planning.”
“Take these,” Brook said, holding out her right hand. It was balled up into a fist, her knuckles facing the ceiling. “You’ll need them.”
He held his hand out palm up.
She dropped two squares of desert tan fabric into his ready hand. Velcro on one side—captain’s bars stitched in black on a field of desert camo on the other. “Nash said for you to keep them whether you report to the briefing in the morning or not.” Brook grabbed Cade’s other arm, looked at the Suunto strapped to his wrist. She looked into the gloom towards Raven’s oasis. Cocked her head and listened for a beat. She heard nothing but rhythmic breathing. “Looks like we’ve got a window of opportunity,” Brook said in a soft sing song voice. “Don’t worry... I’ll leave you a couple of hours to decide on the mission.” She kissed him hard on the mouth. Felt him pressing against her, an urgency rippling through his muscles. They stopped simultaneously. Twisted around to face the back of their quarters. A few words of gibberish echoed from the dark. “Talking in her sleep,” Cade said as he rolled Brook from her side to her back.
They made love in the dark. Stopping only when both of them were winded and spent.
Brook dabbed the sheen from Cade’s cheeks and upper lip. Ran both hands through his damp hair. Then she abruptly kissed her man on the forehead, rolled away and was asleep in less than five.
That was it, he told himself. He had just witnessed Brook’s ritual. She had started to compartmentalize. To ready herself for another stretch of being alone while he was outside the wire. That simple act—rolling over and switching off like a circuit breaker being thrown—after they had just shared an hour of intimacy. An hour of true feelings exchanged without words. Her body languag
e told him it was OK for him to go. Told him she understood. Told him she had known what she was getting herself into thirteen years ago when they married. And it assured him that she hadn’t forgotten.
He lay there staring at the mattress above him. Contemplating the waffle pattern the springs cut into the dingy green fabric. Imagining what would have been if he had left Taryn to the mercy of the zombies at Grand Junction, just like he had left the survivors from the capsized barge at the Flaming Gorge dam. For if he hadn’t rescued her, he surely wouldn’t be wrestling with the decision to once again forsake his family and put his life on the line for the sake of the many.
He fell asleep with the unanswered questions ensconced in his mind and the fabric captain’s emblems clutched in his hand.
Chapter 37
Outbreak - Day 15
Near Winters’s Compound
“Goddamnit, what a pain in the ass,” Phillip muttered. The task he had started in the back of the Humvee had quickly grown old. His spindly legs didn’t altogether fit in the cramped back end, and he kept whacking his head on the pistol grips hanging from the big machine gun. So now he sat in the grass with a slowly diminishing pile of metal links, meticulously relinking them with loose fifty-caliber rounds. He’d lost count at two hundred but he still had one and a half ammo cans full of the inch-thick cartridges that were topped off with armor-piercing lead.
“Hey buddy,” Duncan called out from his blind side. Phillip’s head jerked up. He dropped a pair of the links he had been holding. “Shit,” he exclaimed. “What are you doing sneaking up on a fella like that?”
“Sorry... take this.” Duncan handed the lanky man a longneck Bud. “It’s warm—still wets the whistle though,” he drawled. “Pass me some of those... I’ll give you a hand.”
“Why do we need so much belted ammo?” Phillip inquired.
“You remember the machinegun fire we heard down by the roadblock—coming from inside the city?”
Phillip looked up from his task and nodded.
“AK-47... heard that kind of chatter gun poppin’ off in my direction more times than I care to remember. Mostly in Nam. Been on the wrong side of ‘em a couple times in the last couple of weeks though. But that’s not the point. If those hombres have Kalashnikovs, then no doubt they have bigger stuff. Hell, that Chance kid we let go had an AK-47. Leads me to believe our bad guys are calling Huntsville home, and like I already said... sooner or later we’ll be facing off against them. Rather do it on our terms out in the open. That Ma Deuce there... she packs a Helluva punch. Thing can swat a Huey outta the sky. Just makes sense to have her as an equalizer.”
“Good thinking, Sir. At least we got something out of our little excursion.” Phillip grabbed the last olive green ammo can. Looked inside and made a quick mental calculation. “There are about seventy rounds left. How many does Logan want me to leave him for his Barrett?”
“Better leave him fifty or so,” Duncan said. “I can’t wait to see Oops shoot that thing and get his skinny butt knocked to the dirt.”
Both men worked in silence for a few minutes. Duncan stopped to shoo away an armada of buzzing gnats. “Saved my ass back there at the roadblock,” he said out of nowhere. He looked over the top of his aviator glasses. “Thanks,” he added sincerely. “I figure I owe you one.”
Phillip took a long pull off of his Budweiser. “Wasn’t nothing. I just hope you get the chance to pay me back is all.”
“Alternative sucks.” Duncan smiled and let out a low chortle. The kind of sound someone makes after they’ve stared down death and survived.
“No disrespect Sir... I mean Duncan... you didn’t see those rotters flanking us today, did you?”
“’Fraid I didn’t,” Duncan answered demurely.
“Those thing’s prescription?” Phillip asked, tapping at his eye as if he were the one wearing the glasses.
“Yes Sir. I was supposed to go to the VA hospital up on the hill in Portland to get my eyes checked about a year ago. Kept putting it off until finally a week before the feces hit the oscillating thingy I finally made my appointment. The shit part of it is... my appointment was yesterday.” He upended his amber bottle and looked for its replacement.
“Newsflash Duncan. You ain’t getting new glasses, so I better stick close to you from here on out. Wouldn’t want you to get eaten.”
“Shiiiit,” Duncan drawled. “This old boy’s flesh is tougher than a deep fried chicken gizzard—good luck with that, rotters.”
Both men shared a few moments of morbid laughter.
“You know somethin, Phillip,” Duncan said as he regained his composure.
“Lay it on me,” Phillip replied.
“You’re an OK guy when you aren’t calling me Sir.”
Chapter 38
Outbreak - Day 16
Teton Pass
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Am I dead? Tran had asked himself after that first uneventful encounter with the pack of feeding zombies as he crossed Butte Road. And now, hours later, trapped on the straight stretch of Teton Pass Road, barbed wire flanking both sides, with nowhere to go and surrounded by zombies, he surrendered completely. He said a few silent, solemn words to his maker, collapsed to the smooth warm roadway, and waited for the inevitable clawing nails and gnashing teeth.
After a few moments had passed and his blood hadn’t been spilled, he willed his legs to support him. He stood on the centerline, hunched over, with a spasm hammering at his lower back. His eyes tracked the walking carrion as they took the path of least resistance. He was like a rock in a stream splitting the oblivious throng down the center. His mind had been playing tricks on him. For reasons unknown to him at the time, the zombies wanted nothing to do with him. He didn’t know why, nor did he care. With nothing but the dead and the steady slapping of his own bare feet for company, he left the crucified behind and tackled the curving mountain road with renewed vigor. He spent the next several hours trudging uphill among them, an achingly slow and silent procession, during which he began to question his humanity —for the second time since the big man named Liam threw him from the moving truck, he wondered whether he had turned, and was now one of them.
***
As Tran neared the sign proclaiming the elevation of the Teton Pass to be 8,431 feet above sea level, he couldn’t help but think someone’s altimeter had been malfunctioning the day they recorded the measurement, because to him, it seemed like he had been trudging Mount Everest all day, not this mere pimple on the earth. Without a watch to consult, he guessed he’d made a respectable mile an hour in forward travel—ten hours, he supposed, of putting one foot in front of the other while rubbing elbows with the dead. A feat to a tortoise maybe, but to a biped with a severely swollen ankle and a throbbing skull, surely it was some kind of world record.
As he pushed on, the foundation of hatred he had been trying to ignore strengthened with each tortured step. He tried to block out the fact that, for more years than he cared to admit, he had been head chef and sometime driver for a murderous madman. Instead, he tried to spin his situation into the realm of the positive. To reflect on his proper upbringing. To strengthen his belief that there was a certain order to the way the world worked and he had just been playing his role by working for the crazy billionaire. Truth be told, until the takeover of Jackson Hole, Robert Christian’s true nature had remained hidden. Sure, he could have run like all the others after the first group of resistors had been executed, but he hadn’t. There was no changing the past, and the harder he tried to distance his thoughts from the evil that had taken place in the valley, the more it became evident that by association he had played a small part in so many innocents’ misery. In fact, until this epiphany, he had been adrift in a river of denial, and in a way he wished the demons would have eaten him. Put him out of his misery. Made the looming decision moot and inconsequential. And as he tried to purge the two brothers’ scowling faces from his memory, he had a psychic shift. Suddenly an eye for an eye made perfec
t sense to him. He had missed what the one-eyed demon he had been forced to kill symbolized. Was she sent as some kind of message—a portent of things to come? Was he fated to survive and somehow stop the two men from further madness and mayhem?
With these questions preoccupying his thoughts, he failed to see the zombie directly in his path—until he collided face first into its sternum. The creature gazed down on him with cloudy indifferent eyes, then turned and shambled towards the looming cluster of burned-out vehicles. The largest among them looked to have been at one time some kind of school bus. It had been parked so that it partially blocked the road from the guardrail on his left to the far shoulder on the right, and it was going nowhere because it rested on blackened, bare rims which appeared to be fused to the road.
Tran stopped and leaned against a stalled-out SUV in order to watch the lone monster shuffle through the ten-foot gap that remained between the sloping shoulder and the hardscrabble mountainside. That the thing hadn’t eaten him came as no surprise. He limped around to the driver side of the green, two-door Scout. Hinged at the waist to look at his image in the side mirror. A monster peered back. Blood had dried black, leaving his already thin face resembling a grinning skull. A jagged fissure snaked through his hairline. It bulged with glistening, swollen flesh, and oozed a viscous yellowed fluid. In the failing light of dusk he could see a stark white strip of his skull underneath the festering mess. Not only did he look like one of them, the infected wound made him smell like one of them. The morbid-looking face reflected back at him was a hundred times worse than he had anticipated.
He backed away. I’m not one of them, he thought to himself. “I’m alive,” he whispered under his breath, the words doing little to convince him. He evaluated the situation, trying to decide on his next move. Looked at the truck—something about the black E spray painted on it seemed familiar. He’d seen other vehicles in town that sported the same markings. It gave him hope that there might be something inside that could be of use to him. The door was unlocked, and inexplicably a set of keys still dangled from the ignition.
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