Allegiance

by Shawn Chesser

  Logan pulled a laminated overview of his property from a cargo pocket, unfolded it and marked the location of the trap on the map in black ink. He twirled his mustache and looked at his brother.

  “How many more you think?”

  Duncan looked up at the rapidly lightening sky. Made a show of checking his watch. “As many as we can finish before noon,” he replied. “Something tells me Chance and his kind

  are not early risers.”

  Chapter 44

  Outbreak - Day 16

  Near Driggs, Idaho

  The first thing Daymon noticed when he snapped awake was the smile of an angel. He dug his fingertips into his eyes and cleared out the sleep, leaned over and gave her a peck on the cheek.

  The second thing he noticed was that the deep furrows on his chest had stopped throbbing to a calypso beat. He pulled his shirt up, peeled away the bandage, and probed the wounds with his finger. The redness had subsided a little, and the green discharge seemed to have slowed but wasn’t altogether gone. He wasn’t home free, that he knew, but the topical equine medication Charlie had risked his life to get for him seemed to be working. And as a cherry on top of the sundae, the melodramatic side in him marveled that he didn’t have the urge to whinny or a sudden hankering for a handful of oats.

  “How are you feeling?” Heidi asked.

  “Be better if we could get on the road.”

  “I mean your wounds.”

  “Night and day,” he said, covering up the white bandages with his tee shirt. “How are you this morning?”

  “Much better,” she said.

  “Judging by the sound of your voice I’d have to disagree.”

  “I’m better,” she croaked.

  “Save your voice. It’s still early... so why don’t you get a little more rest and I’ll go downstairs and try and talk Charlie into leaving this dump today.”

  Heidi smiled briefly and then her hand went to her neck. He had seen her do this a hundred times over the course of three days, and he wasn’t so sure that she was even aware that she was doing it.

  “How’s the neck?” he asked. “Thumbs up, sideways, or down?”

  She put a thumb horizontal then rotated it a few degrees north. “Not as sore as it was yesterday.”

  Daymon gently put a finger to her lips and shushed her. He gazed into her blue eyes and willed himself not to look at the contrasting bruises encircling her throat.

  “How does it look today?” she inquired while her hand continued the absentminded massage.

  “Not so bad,” Daymon lied. Considering you were nearly dead a few nights ago.

  This time she remained silent, saving her voice for later.

  He kissed her forehead and said, “Anything I can bring you when I come back upstairs... bottle of water? Anything?”

  She stopped worrying her neck and put her head back down on the pillow. “No, but thanks hon. I’m good.” She smiled and closed her eyes.

  ***

  Downstairs, Daymon cracked a water. He did a quick count of the remaining bottles. Eight. Yet one more reason to blow this joint, he thought to himself as he took a long pull. Then, out of the corner of his eye he picked up movement down by the road. He pressed his face to the window above the sink and looked down towards the gate. Not liking what he saw, he walked his gaze down the feeder road to the main highway. The situation at the intersection was no better.

  “Charlie!” Daymon bellowed. “Come here and see what followed you home yesterday.”

  Launching out of a deep sleep, Jenkins choked mid-snore and inadvertently kicked the La-Z-Boy’s foot rest down. The violent action continued through the chair’s mechanism, straightening the back up and nearly pitching him on his face.

  “What the hell is it?” he said, wiping a slug track of drool with the back of his hand.

  “Come here and see for yourself,” Daymon pressed.

  Jenkins muttered as he pulled his boots on. He lifted his pistol off of the coffee table, stuffed it in its holster and hustled over to the kitchen.

  “Hell did you have to wake me for?” He looked at his watch. It read: 6:10 a.m.

  “Because you are gonna want to see this.”

  Bellying up to the sink, Jenkins accepted the offered water, cracked the seal and then his eyes followed the length of Daymon’s outstretched arm, past his fingertip.

  “That is what the cat drug home—”

  The water bottle slid from Jenkins’s grasp, hit the floor and rolled under the kitchen table where its contents glugged out onto the floor. He stared at the amassed dead. He didn’t need a pair of field glasses to see the situation was about to get worse. “Fuck me running.”

  “They’ll fuck us shuffling and moaning if we give them a chance,” replied Daymon in a low voice.

  “How many do you think are down there?”

  After a quick headcount and another moment of contemplation, Daymon ventured an educated guess. “Thirty... maybe forty,” he said in a near whisper.

  “Shit,” Jenkins whispered back. “What do you propose we do?”

  “I know one thing we’re not going to do. We’re not going to tell Heidi about them,” Daymon hissed. “There is no sense in freaking her out any more than she already is. I still can’t tell if she’s going to get over the shit that that Robert Christian fucker put her through. She won’t open up to me... and carrying that kind of baggage around will fuck a person up in the long run.”

  Shaking his head, Jenkins continued staring at the throng. “I’m no shrink. That stuff’s between you and her,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s those things down there that have got my panties in a wad. And to think there was only one of them down there yesterday and it was only a flippin’ crawler.”

  “You mean it had arms and a head and that’s about it?”

  “Yeah, creepy as hell. Thing tried to eat my boots while I was locking up.”

  “Thought you cut the lock when we got here.”

  “I did. I just jerry-rigged the chain when I left. But when I came back I coiled it and secured it with a carabiner... should keep ‘em out for the time being.”

  “What’d you do to the halfling?”

  “Let it be.”

  “You didn’t kill it?” said Daymon incredulously.

  “No... I didn’t have the heart.”

  “Better find your heart now, Charlie,” said Daymon as he rifled through the drawers. His eyes widened as he slid out a twelve-inch knife. It was slender and came to a very sharp point, and had characters etched onto the blade that indicated it was probably of Japanese origin. With a smile on his face he handed it over to the former police chief.

  “And what am I to do with this?” asked Jenkins.

  “Use your imagination,” replied Daymon. “Come on. We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  The pun wasn’t lost on Jenkins, who looked at the knife then stole one long look out the window. “Then what?” he asked.

  “We get the hell out of Dodge before we get ourselves trapped. By the way, have you seen my machete?”

  “It’s in the Tahoe,” rasped Heidi, who was standing, hand on hip, in the hallway that ran between the kitchen and living room. “I remember seeing it on the floor in the backseat area.”

  Caught off guard, both men froze like statues. Then they mechanically turned to face her.

  Daymon cleared his dreads from his eyes and pinned them behind his ears. “Stay,” he said to himself as if words alone could control the Rasta-inspired do. He swallowed hard, not sure what to say, then he cut to the chase. “How much of our conversation did you hear?” he asked sheepishly.

  “Enough to know that I don’t want to stay here, and more than enough to piss me off because you two were talking behind my back,” she answered in a raspy-sounding voice that was barely above a whisper.

  “What’d you say, Heidi?” Jenkins asked, wide-eyed as he skirted the kitchen table heading in her direction.

  Heidi repeated herself slowly, enunci
ating every syllable while Daymon stared stone-faced.

  Jenkins took a moment to process what she had just said, and then grimaced because he knew she was right.

  “Well, first of all Heidi, I owe you an apology for not only talking behind your back, but also for not taking your opinions into consideration,” Jenkins proffered. “What—if anything—can I do to make it up to you?”

  “Drive us the eff out of here,” she whispered. “Now.”

  “Well it looks like it’s two against one,” he muttered. Then he flicked his wrist and sent the keys to the Tahoe sailing across the kitchen. Daymon snatched them mid-flight.

  Reflexes of a cat, Jenkins thought. “I’m going to check a couple of the outbuildings, see if I might find a couple of gas cans and maybe cut us a piece of hose. Why dontcha get your blade from the truck and I’ll meet you out front.”

  ***

  Five minutes later, Jenkins returned to the Tahoe carrying two small plastic gas cans and a good-sized length of hose.

  Heidi was already in the back seat, fully dressed and ready to go.

  Jenkins hauled himself into the driver seat, and looked over at Daymon who was cradling the machete in his lap.

  “Ready?” asked Daymon.

  “I was born ready,” Jenkins lied. Truth of the matter was, including the one he had stomped the day prior, he had only killed a few of the creatures, and that had been at range with a pistol or rifle—not one up close and personal with a blade. Shooting a human to protect another life or himself—no problem. The NA guards at the Teton Pass deserved to get headshot. But the dead were just poor souls in the wrong place at the wrong time—not bad guys or criminals. He threw a shudder thinking about what he was being asked to do. He started the Chevy, backed around, and began the solemn trip to the gate.

  Chapter 45

  Outbreak - Day 16

  Schriever AFB

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  The first out of place sound registered in Brook’s subconscious. A second later she hinged up from the bed, planted her bare feet on the tiles and had her rifle in hand held at a low ready.

  But before her eyes could adjust to the dark, a second sound—a joy-filled squeal—brought her to her feet, and she placed the M4 back where it had been, propped against the wall, muzzle aimed towards the rafters.

  “Raven, sweetie. What’s the heck is going on?” she called out.

  “Quick Mom. Come here.”

  Brook stretched as she padded towards the front of the Grayson’s billet where the sounds of happiness had originated. “Marco,” she said as she navigated the forest of bunks.

  “Polo,” came Raven’s reply.

  A smile blossomed on Brook’s face when she saw what had gotten her twelve-year-old so excited. Near the front door, shining in the warm morning light pouring in through the parted curtains, was a girl’s mountain bike. Purple and white and chrome. Just the thing Raven had been hinting about back in Portland before the madness known as Omega had been released upon the unsuspecting citizens of the world.

  “Just the right size,” she said.

  “Where did Dad get it?”

  “You know your dad’s can-do attitude. Even when there seems to be no way... he wills it to happen. That thing is nice,” Brook said stretching the word ‘nice’ out for a beat or two. “How many speeds ya think it has?”

  “No idea Mom. Can I take it out?” Raven said excitedly.

  “Yes you may.”

  With that, pig tails bouncing, Raven was out the door. She mounted her birthday bike and slalomed between the paths connecting the living quarters, the big tires leaving furrows in the knee-high brown grass.

  Brook laced on her boots and was about to go outside and watch Raven be a kid when she noticed the white silk rose sitting atop the stark white envelope on the table near the door.

  Instantly her stomach lurched. She knew exactly what it was and what it meant. And the thing that scared her the most about its presence was that Cade hadn’t left a death note since his final deployment to the Stan—slang for Afghanistan—more than two years ago.

  He hadn’t felt good about his prospects of returning in one piece from that tour, and for good reason. His unit had lost a handful of men in one chopper crash high in the mountains, and he had seen things and had some particularly bad scrapes of his own that he hadn’t been able to open up about even to her. His body still harbored some shrapnel the doctors hadn’t been able to retrieve. The ugly pink scars associated with the nasty sizzling chunks of lead were a visual testament to the rigors of war.

  The fact that he had a bad enough feeling about this mission to leave the envelope scared the hell out of her, and if anything happened to him she didn’t know if she would ever forgive herself. So she said a prayer to God. Not a foxhole type of prayer, but still it was one of desperation. The ill-advised type. The type where you

  ask for something rather than let His will be done. And as silly as it sounded to her as it bounced around in her head, she still had no regrets for asking. She only hoped that God had been listening and He used His direct line to Mister Murphy.

  Chapter 46

  Outbreak - Day 16

  Logan Winters’s Compound

  Gus could just make out faint guttural growls, somewhere distant, riding the carrion-tinged breeze. He could see the creatures in his mind’s eye, somewhere off to the west, stumbling along the tree-flanked stripe of roadway he was standing on.

  Clearly the monsters had been drawn in by the noise the shovel produced each time it took a bite from the gravel-choked soil. That was a given he had already entered into the equation when he broke ground on the first hole. That he’d buried two cylinders before he had hungry visitors was a blessing. He figured he had a few more minutes before he’d have to make the decision as to whether he could handle the approaching rotters solo or if he would need to hail Duncan and Logan on the two-way and pull them in from their task.

  So, he kept his ears pricked and turned back to the digging. He placed the sharpened blade next to the last cut and leaped off the roadbed, landing both boots simultaneously on the curled metal flanking both sides of the shovel’s handle. Tempered steel on rock produced another harsh grating noise under the force of his two-hundred-pound frame as it cleaved cleanly through another foot of the densely packed shoulder. He tossed the ochre dirt over the barbed wire and made several similar cuts, widening the circle incrementally until it was the diameter of a manhole cover. Once he had dug out the hole to an eyeballed depth of eighteen inches, he placed the next to last cylinder on the bottom, and shoveled the dirt he had saved over the top and around the sides until it was no longer visible.

  The former Salt Lake sheriff wiped his brow with the top of his forearm, and took a belt from his canteen as he gazed east at the sky. Overtop the tree line, billowing thunderheads struck through with bars of sunlight lent the impression he was looking at a stained glass in some cathedral in a thousand-year-old European city. It moved him, stirring emotions that had been dormant for quite some time. So much so, that he had a hard time tearing his eyes away when the moaning sounds behind him grew louder.

  With the wind taken from his sails, he grudgingly turned westward where he could just make out a clutch of rotters trundling around the gentle curve in the road.

  With renewed effort he worked the shovel. Biceps and back muscles burning, he made short work of the final dig, and by the time he was tamping dirt over the last cylinder, the group of lurching monsters had halved the distance.

  A quick glance over his shoulder told him what he faced. Every one of the creatures were first turns—much slower than the newly turned—but every bit as deadly.

  He recalled with crystal clarity how a hastily-erected triage center outside of Salt Lake had been overrun by the dead. How, as he watched on in horror, the infected corpses in the makeshift morgue had reanimated by the dozens and had breached the flimsy rip-stop nylon tents with ease. They played no favorites, attacking the infi
rm and healthy alike.

  The heavily-armed soldiers seemed unable or more than likely unwilling to fire on their fellow citizens as the place fell to the blitzkrieg of tooth and nail in a matter of minutes.

  What a bloodbath that had been, he thought to himself. It had been his tipping point. The one event that opened his eyes to the possibility that order could never be restored. If the National Guard couldn’t stop the dead, he thought at the time, what the hell good is one sheriff going to do? And with that question and a fair amount of guilt hanging over his head, he hastily made his way to his good friend Logan’s compound.

  Gus propped the shovel against the barbed-wire fence and regarded the fresh scars in the dirt across the road. They stood out like two black eyes against the rest of the shoulder. He looked at the two on his side of the road, determining that all four of them would be visible to someone with half a watchful eye. But he had a hunch that as the day warmed up and the sun traced its normal east to west path directly over the road, the cover soil would dry out and become less conspicuous.

  Gus’s two-way radio crackled to life, bringing him back to the present. He stole another glance at the rotters as he fished the radio from his back pocket.

  “Gus here.”

  “How is it going up there?” Logan asked.

  Before Gus had a chance to answer, Jamie’s voice sprang from the speaker. “Gus... if you let the rotters get any closer I’m going to start putting them down for you. You got a death wish or something?”

  “No, Duncan says to leave them,” Logan replied, sounding confused. “I’m right here with him... he says the rotters will pose more of a problem for Chance and his gang when they show up.”

  “Wait one,” Gus said.

  He stowed the radio in a pocket and snatched the shovel, using the digging end to keep the nearest zombie beyond arm’s reach.