Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  A ton of information was conveyed between the two men with very few words, and Jamie was dying to know if turning left was the correct decision. And then, answering her unasked question, the men climbed back in, slammed their doors in unison, and Logan cranked the wheel to the left and sped up the unimproved road.

  “Well?” said Jamie.

  “Well, what?” said Logan.

  “What did all that detective work tell you?”

  “Left is as good as right,” answered Logan as the SUV dipped into a deep pothole jostling everyone like ragdolls.

  “We found some tire tracks. No telling how old they are because of the rain,” said Gus. “So we decided it would be best to check it out since we’re here, and if this isn’t the right place we check it off the list and move on.”

  “And we spare ourselves a twenty-mile backtrack if Sacajawea is right,” added Logan.

  With no guardrail between the Tahoe and a deadly drop off, the narrow road twisted back and forth on itself and gained several hundred feet in elevation before leveling off at the gated entrance to what appeared to be a long dormant mining operation complete with an old, water-filled quarry, the rising sun glinting from its surface.

  Logan pulled up close to the gate, which was adorned with a host of colorful OSHA safety signs. One, red and black, read Hardhat Area. Another depicted an exploding stick—complete with lit fuse—that could only be construed as Danger - Dynamite! Under the picture, for the low IQ crowd, were easy to read bold letters stating that blasting took place on the premises. Topped with razor wire and at least twelve-feet-tall by his estimation, the fence looked pretty formidable—but Logan had an ace up his sleeve. Craning his head to see the top of the fence, he said, “See that?” to no one in particular.

  “See what?” said Gus as he chambered a round into the Les Baer AR-15 sitting between his legs, barrel pointing downward towards the SUV’s floorboard.

  “Up there.”

  Jamie clucked her tongue and said, “Those are the same black domes on the ceiling in Wal-Mart and Target. Security cameras. See them Jordan? There’s one on each corner.”

  “Oh ...”

  “And this ain’t the movies,” Gus interjected. “Those things aren’t going to pan our way and let us know we’re being watched. They’ve got a wide field of view so they don’t have to.”

  Jamie made a face. Looked out her side window. “Are we—” her brow furrowed as she looked up “—being watched?”

  “One way to find out.” Logan jumped up and down waving and smiling at the camera.

  They waited a few minutes, and when there was no response Logan asked Gus to cover him. He hustled around back, popped the hatch, and came out with his ace. And by the time he looped back around—massive red bolt cutters in hand—Gus was out and had his carbine trained downrange, aiming at dead space beyond the chain-link fence.

  “I’ll watch our six,” Jamie said, stepping onto the ochre roadbed. “Jordan ... you stay in the truck and keep your eyes peeled.”

  Jordan made no reply. She was watching Logan, who was leaning forward, elbow splayed out, working the tool with all his might. She didn’t see the lock fall away but knew it must have, because Logan motioned Gus over and the two of them rolled the fence in opposite directions, creating an SUV-sized gap. A tick later there was a pneumatic squelch from the gas struts as the hatch was closed, followed by a heavy clunk as the latch dogged shut. Simultaneously, Logan and Jamie slid into the front seats, and then Gus was crowding in on her from the right. The doors slammed shut—three consecutive solid thumps—and just like that they were rolling through the breach.

  “Moment of truth,” said Logan as the Tahoe squeezed through the gap with only inches to spare on each side. Wincing at the idea of a flurry of bullets coming their way, versus a lone chunk of lead with just his name on it, he goosed the engine and caught flashes of silver from the wind-rippled body of standing water rolling by on the left.

  “There’s your water source,” said Gus. “You could probably roll a 747 Jumbo Jet in there and it’d sink from sight.”

  “A mining op this size has gotta have the pumps to draw the water out,” said Logan.

  Jamie cut in. “What about filtration?”

  “Before the shit hit the fan, there were tons of sites on the web where you could download plans on how to build large scale water collection and filtration systems,” answered Gus. “Couple of plastic barrels and charcoal are about all a person would need. So easy even a caveman could do it.” He smiled but the quip was lost on everyone but him. “You know that Government Insurance commercial ... with the Neanderthal?”

  Crickets.

  A frown furrowing his brow, Logan set the brake and slid from the truck. He hustled around and shut the gate, looped the chain through twice and returned to the Tahoe. Once they were moving again, Logan had to wheel around a series of water-filled potholes, all of which were large enough to swallow up one of the Tahoe’s tires. He walked his gaze over a trio of swaybacked buildings. Behind the windowless, corrugated steel and wood structures, the red earth rose gradually, and then after a dozen or so yards shot up vertically at a ninety-degree angle for thirty or forty feet before rounding off at the hill’s apex, where a tiny copse of gnarled junipers grew skyward.

  To the right of the tired-looking sheds, backing up to a chain-link fence similar in construction and height to the front gate, stood a monstrous garage that looked to have enough square footage to accommodate a pair of full-sized fire trucks—or an Abrams battle tank or two. Wouldn’t that be awesome, Logan mused. Clank into Huntsville, bring the Howitzer-sized barrel to bear, and settle things once and for all. He noted how weathered the facade was. The gray paint was chipped and flaking off, and what remained was tarnished by vertical fingers of rust, starting where the fasteners held the steel sheets together, and ending at the frost-heaved cement apron encircling the building. Two windows, grimy and yellowed with age, wrapped around the left corner. To the right of the windows, rising above the low cement stairs, was a banded metal door painted a pale shade of institutional green. Windowless, and secured with two serious-looking deadbolts and a padlocked latch thrown in for good measure, the entry looked more suitable for a correctional facility than protecting a mining operation’s interests.

  Offering another positive clue that the property had not been forgotten entirely were the two rollup doors, both about thirty feet square, stark white, obviously newer than the rest of the building.

  “What’s behind door number one, Vanna?” said Gus, poking his head between the headrests.

  Making a face, Jordan looked at him and asked, “Who’s Vanna?”

  Suppressing a chuckle, Gus said, “Google her.”

  Twisting in her seat, Jamie shot the man a sour look.

  “What? I’m just pulling her leg.”

  “Things are never going to be the same for her. Hell, for all of us for that matter, Gus. And we don’t need you reminding us of it every two minutes.”

  Putting his arms up in mock surrender, Gus retreated into the back seat.

  Trying to ignore the inane banter, Logan wrestled the steering wheel left and right, navigating the minefield of water-filled depressions. Head on a swivel and eyes moving, he pulled broadside to the double doors leaving thirty feet of separation and the Tahoe’s push bar pointing towards the dilapidated outbuildings.

  He took a peek in the rearview and spotted the motor pool. Languishing in a patch of briars, off to the side of the front gate, were a number of heavy earthmoving vehicles, colorfully-hued and rust-mottled. A couple of half-ton pickups, once Ram Tough, Logan guessed, were all but consumed by brambles, only the sheet metal of their sunbaked roofs peeking through.

  Perfect cover, he thought. And as the seconds ticked by and the pieces of the puzzle fit together it was seeming more and more likely to him that this was the place they were looking for.

  Chapter 55

  Eden Compound

  After a thirty-m
inute hike, a good deal of that time spent locating and avoiding Duncan’s many pitfalls, Daymon was standing inside the tree line overlooking the gently sweeping curve of State Route 39 that had earlier been the site of so much death and destruction. He swept his gaze along its entire length looking for rotters. Nothing. He looked at the blacktop, noting the spilt blood which had dried to black; rambling Rorschach patterns marking where Duncan’s antagonists had fallen and died. Equidistant from either side of the road at the apex of the curve were four oily black splotches where a vehicle had burned, its tires melting to pools; the skeletal remains now sat partially blocking the road a few hundred yards to the west—a warning to anyone else who dared bring their bad intentions on a road trip from Huntsville.

  On both shoulders bracketing the charred asphalt, still evident and partially filled with brown water from the previous night’s rains, were the four manhole-sized craters produced when the buried propane canisters marking the beginning of the end for the marauders had been detonated. And across the two-lane, beyond a barbed wire fence on the upslope of a small grass-covered hillock, he could see the freshly tilled dirt concealing the corpses of the dozen or so dumbasses who had pushed their luck one bad deed too far. Nearby, above ground, was where the group had set fire to a couple of dozen rotters. He could see blackened skulls, their shadowy eye sockets staring blankly, sitting atop a wide debris field of knobby vertebrae and razor-edged rib bones.

  The whole morbid scene took him back to a turn of events that had taken place shortly after he was forced to give up the search for his “Moms” on the outskirts of South Salt Lake on the same day he’d first met up with Cade Grayson.

  Nearly surrounded by the dead, and in danger of high-centering the old mint-green BLM Suburban atop a mound of the writhing creatures, he’d quickly jammed the transmission into reverse and blindly accelerated away before pulling the oversized rig into a violent ‘J’ turn.

  But the evasive action had had an unintended consequence. By the time his front end had turned a full one-eighty, leaving the zombies in the rearview, an oncoming vehicle had been forced to swerve in order to avoid the collision with his much bigger rig.

  The last thing he recalled, etched indelibly in his memory vivid with detail, was the minivan full of kids flipping onto its roof and skittering by, trailing sparks and kernels of shattered automotive glass. Then the immediate fireball, its heat warming the side of his face, followed a nanosecond later by an oxygen-robbing whoosh that seemed to tug at the Suburban. Finally, in super slow motion, always playing out in his side vision, were the backlit silhouettes of tiny arms, desperately fighting gravity and flailing and pounding against the spiderwebbed windows. And always present in his nightmares, right before he awoke sweating and breathing hard, were the innocent faces craning his way, flaming gas running like magma, melting hair and flesh away.

  Thankfully the Motorola sounded in his pocket, a piercing electronic warble lasting long enough to drag him away from the awful scene playing in his head. “I can see you,” said a male voice he didn’t immediately recognize. “You’re pretty good; I almost missed you.”

  With a mounting suspicion that Duncan’s hearing was as bad as his vision and somewhat concerned the loud noise would draw rotters his way, he grabbed the radio’s stunted antenna and pulled the trilling thing from his pocket. He quickly backed off the volume and thumbed the call button. “Where are you? And more importantly, who are you and why the games?”

  “It’s me, Lev. Up in the tree line. Your ten o’clock.”

  Daymon walked his gaze up the hillside, then panned his head left by a few degrees. In a grove of mature pines that had overgrown a good portion of the hilltop was a small sapling quivering to and fro, an exaggerated little dance. Then, dressed head-to-toe in some kind of camouflage netting, Lev stepped into the sunlight. Braced against his hip, throwing a long shadow across the grass, was some kind of scoped rifle. “I see you now,” said Daymon.

  “Where you headed?” asked Lev.

  “Clearing my head, that’s all.”

  The radio hissed again and Lev said, “Be careful of—”

  “The Punji pits,” said Daymon, beating him to the punch. “I know all about ‘em. Logan drew me up a map.”

  “Call if you need anything. These things have about a three-mile range,” said Lev. “I recommend you err on the side of caution and don’t stray too far.”

  “Sheep and cattle stray,” said Daymon sharply. “But thanks for looking out for me.” Again.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Daymon said nothing. He wanted the chit-chat to end so he could get going and spend a couple of hours exploring the expanse of property that he’d been told fell off into a thickly-wooded valley heavy with game trails and split in two by a small creek. Who knows, he thought to himself as he strode off towards the west, maybe I’ll cross paths with a deer or wild boar along the way—either one would be better than the goulash Logan calls food.

  He set out on the gentle downslope following the fence line. He’d gone about thirty yards when something out of the ordinary grabbed his attention. Thinking he’d heard some kind of engine noise far off in the distance he froze mid-stride, slowed his breathing, and listened hard. Nothing. Then, a tick later, the dissonant buzzing, mechanical in nature, once again reached his ears. It droned on for a split second and then was gone. He stood stock still for couple of minutes without picking up the sound again. He thumbed the radio. “Lev ... you there?”

  “Good copy. Lev here.”

  Cops and former soldiers, Daymon thought to himself. Always communicating in the same clipped syntax—robot-like and impersonal. He asked, “Did you hear some kind of engine?”

  “Negative,” said Lev, robot-like and impersonal. “Maybe it was the rotters moaning. Got a few approaching from your right. Saw you freeze ... thought you saw them. Didn’t think you needed warning.”

  Daymon walked his gaze the length of the road. At the point in the distance where the blacktop disappeared into the canyon of trees, a number of pale forms were emerging from the shadows. He watched as they trudged silently uphill, past the immolated, now see-through, SUV. “Nope,” he replied. “It wasn’t them. I can’t even hear their feet slapping the road from where I’m at.”

  “They’re not moaning because they don’t see you ... yet. What is it you think you heard?”

  “I think it was a helicopter. Way off— distant. North and west of us.”

  “Military or civilian?” asked Lev.

  Contemplating the question, Daymon shifted his gaze to the sky. Then he scrutinized the approaching zombies and determined from more than a hundred yards, based on their gait and decomposition, that they were all first turns, and were thus incapable of producing the sound that he had heard.

  There was a brief burst of static and Lev said, “Well ... what was it?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” answered Daymon truthfully. “Maybe it was all a figment of my imagination.”

  The radio crackled again. “Maybe it’s your Delta Force buddy trying to find the compound.”

  “He would have called first. He’s a soldier just like you. Ducks in a row and all that jazz.”

  “Roger that. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. And Daymon—”

  “Yes.”

  “The rotters will move on as long you don’t let them get eyes on you.”

  “Where are they coming from?”

  “Nowhere really. They seem to just walk the road back and forth between Huntsville and Woodruff. Any of them that happen to be in the area when we come and go are drawn in by our engine noise. Engine noise travels a long way out here. Especially when it’s the only man-made sound for miles. The dead have great hearing ... they triangulate in on sounds real well. Especially anything they associate with food ... which is just about everything.”

  I’m no dummy. But thanks anyway for the zombie primer, is what Daymon thought. “I’ll be quiet,” is what he said. He silenced the radio and melt
ed back into the forest.

  Chapter 56

  Quarry

  Leaving the engine idle, Logan slid from behind the wheel and met the others in front of the SUV’s warm hood. “I’ve got a gut feeling this is the place we’re looking for,” he said. “Gus—you and Jamie check out the three buildings over there. I’m going to walk around the garage and see if I can find a window and take a peek inside. Keep your radios turned down low and call only if you need to.”

  “I don’t have a radio. I thought you were grabbing them,” said Jamie with a tilt of her head.

  Feeling a little sheepish, Logan cast his gaze to Gus.

  Shrugging his shoulders, Gus added, “I got asked to help move the helicopter. Figured since you were in the security container last ...”

  “Forget the radios,” said Logan. “We’ll fan out and take a quick look.”

  Gus nodded.

  “Lock and load,” said Logan, shoving the now worthless lone radio into his pocket.

  “What about me?” asked Jordan, subconsciously kneading the seatback.

  “You’ve got the most important job,” Logan said quietly. “I want you to get behind the wheel and lock your door. Then watch our backs while we check things out. While we’re inside, if you see anyone or anything—living or dead—I want you to sound the siren. Can you handle that?”

  She regarded him for a second. Her eyes narrowed, like she was deciding if this was a request or if she had just been issued an order. Finally, after a couple more seconds’ contemplation, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “No problem.”

  To Logan it was fairly obvious the young lady was still trying to find her role within the group. And he took the hesitation for what it was, a manifestation of her deep-seated distrust of the male species. Given all she’d gone through as a captive of the hillbilly rapists, he couldn’t blame her in the least. He killed the engine, slid from the truck, carbine in hand, and watched her loop around the hood with a newfound pep in her step. Obviously happy to finally contribute, Jordan flashed the group a smile and placed her rifle in the passenger seat before climbing behind the wheel.