“I hate to change the subject,” she said, reaching across the desk and breaking herself off a substantial hunk of the MRE pound cake Tran had been eating. “But I’m gonna.” She popped the purloined hunk of dessert into her mouth whole and chewed noisily.
Without looking away from the monitor, Tran urged her to speak her mind.
“You know, I’m tired of being a watcher. Just sitting on my ass and letting you all go merrily about your daily business is so boring. I’m a doer by nature, Tran my man.”
Holding up a hand, Tran said, “Duncan and Daymon are allowed to call me that. Not you.”
She went on, “Anyway, I just want to help. I know I asked you to go to bat for me yesterday …”
Tran glanced at her for a brief second. “I may have.”
“If you didn’t, I’m going to jump the chain of command and ask the boss man myself.”
Tran said nothing. On the screen before him, Glenda, Jamie, Sasha, and Raven were slowly working their way across the clearing. That they were arranged tallest to shortest wasn’t lost on him. He couldn’t blame the youngest—and shortest—of the group for wanting to be on the periphery; it was where he preferred to find himself—always had.
“Well, did you or did you not talk to your friend … the one who’s running the show here?” Bridgett swiped some more of the pound cake, adding it to the mouthful she was still working on.
Tran nodded and swung his gaze around to her.
Sending tiny pieces of cake raining down on the table, Bridgett blurted, “What the eff did he say?”
“I’ve been cleared to start training you.” He rolled the chair back a foot and rose. “Sit here. Watch the monitors. You see anything on the road here, here … or here”—he pointed to the three corresponding rectangles on the grid—“you pick up the two-way and let me know.”
Taken aback by the sudden capitulation, she rose from the folding chair. “Where are you going?” she asked, settling her butt on the plush rolling chair.
“To relieve myself,” he said, scooping up his Beretta and pocketing a Motorola. “Be right back.”
“Happy squirtin’,” she said to his back as he walked through the blackout curtain. “Want me to lock the door behind you?”
Tran paused in the foyer, hand on the door. “Of course,” he said, the beginning of a smirk forming. “It’s our new standard operating procedure. And you better keep out of dry storage. We’re nearly out of pound cake.”
In no time, Bridgett was at the door, wearing a guilty look. She pantomimed crossing her heart and said, “Hope to die. No more pound cake for this girl.”
Hook, line, and sinker, thought Tran as the metallic rasp and snik of the lock being engaged reached his ears. Time to bring the others up to speed.
Chapter 6
In the F-650, Cade was keeping the speedometer needle hovering near the posted forty miles per hour. From the compound entrance to the partially overgrown feeder road leading to the upper quarry, not a word had passed between he and Duncan. Periodic glances in the rearview, however, told him that in the backseat Taryn and Wilson were having an entire conversation delivered via looks and hand gestures.
“Playing charades back there?” Cade finally asked, only to be met with a pair of guilt-ridden expressions. Taryn shook her head side-to-side. Wilson broke eye contact first. He removed his hat, placed it in his lap, and lowered his gaze.
“Let’s address the thousand-pound elephant riding with us,” said Cade, sweeping his gaze from the rearview mirror and settling it on Duncan.
“I weigh two … two-twenty max, now,” Duncan said. “All this running around and avoiding dead things is getting me back into fighting shape.”
“Jenny Craig has nothing on the MRE weight-loss plan,” quipped Wilson.
“Cut the shit,” said Cade, slapping a palm on the wheel. “You all have been walking on eggshells around me since—”
“Since you had to put down your wife of thirteen years,” interrupted Duncan. “You expect us to act as if nothing happened? She was a strong, capable woman we all grew to know and like. Hell, I loved her like a daughter. You’re a pretty withdrawn individual, Cade. Out of all the men I’ve known over the years, yours was the toughest nut to crack. Sometimes I feel like I’m prying at a damn Brazil nut with a cooked spaghetti noodle.”
Taryn and Wilson no longer wore looks of embarrassment. They were now watching wide-eyed and hanging on every word in the so-far one-sided conversation.
Cade didn’t acknowledge Duncan’s use of humor. Deep down he didn’t begrudge the man for it, either.
“To be honest,” Duncan added, “though we’ve been through a lot of crap together, up until I flew you into Idaho on your warpath to kill Bishop you had a barrier the size of the Great Wall of China thrown up between you and me.”
Cade grimaced. “That obvious?”
Duncan nodded. “Oh, it’s been coming down brick by brick since then. Really started to crumble when we fixed the roadblock at the Ogden pass and solved that problem. Hell, we were thinking alike as if we were a couple of Siamese twins when we took down Oliver at Glenda’s place in Huntsville.”
“Conjoined,” corrected Wilson.
Though Duncan wanted to bonk the younger man over the head for continuing on with the political correctness bullshit, he instead swiveled around and shot the redhead a look that said butt out.
“And?” said Cade.
“And,” continued Duncan, “ever since you set Brook free you’ve been stacking those terra cotta bricks back up. You keep on keeping to yourself like you’ve been … it’s going to start rubbing off on Raven.”
“I’m trying to prepare her for—” Cade began.
“For when you buy the farm,” Duncan finished. “I get it. But I also have a feeling you’ve got an army of Guardian Angels watching over you. Mark my words”—he began to nod slowly—“you’re going to be giving away Raven’s hand in marriage one day. Have that first dance with her and all that jazz.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Cade growled, his jagged knuckles gone white and looking like barnacles affixed to the wheel.
“Let us help you, Cade. Let us in. You need to learn how to communicate,” said Duncan, the last word drawn out for an extra beat. “That thing you and Tran have going with Bridgett is brilliant. Almost as good as when me and Logan ran that good cop/bad cop routine on the Chance kid.” He cackled and doubled over. “Priceless.”
Grimacing, Cade said, “Tran told you?”
Duncan nodded. “He told me last night. Tran The Man and me are pretty tight. All it took was for someone to show a little trust in him. Newsflash … that boy is no longer working on his Pacifist merit badge.”
“Doesn’t matter who he tells,” said Cade, a rare half-smile curling his lip. “I told him we’re trying to catch our food thief. He was more than happy to help.”
“If you’re not trying to catch Bridgett stealing food …” Duncan looked out the window at the trees blipping by and caught a glimpse of the turbid Ogden River roiling along as it would for time immemorial. After a long moment spent in silent thought, he asked, “What the hell are you fishing for then?”
“Someone messed with Brook’s sat phone two days ago. I found it unplugged and nearly out of battery.”
“Sure you didn’t just forget to plug it in?” Duncan asked.
Cade shook his head. “I was moving on autopilot that night. But I’m certain I powered it down and plugged it in before putting it up on that shelf.”
Duncan exhaled sharply. “All this went down the very same day we let Bridgett out of quarantine.” He knuckled the brim of his Stetson up an inch. Fixing a concerned look on Cade, he said, “I’m guessing no calls were placed on it?”
Cade glanced over. “Thankfully, no,” he said. “It was locked. To set the trap I disabled the lock code on one of the other Thuraya last night.”
“She has been acting kind of weird,” Taryn proffered. “And now it makes
sense you borrowing my iPhone. I thought that was unlike you when you asked. Raven has borrowed it more times than I can count. First time for you. Or anyone else for that matter.”
Wilson parked his elbows on the seatback near Duncan’s head. “Now that I think about it,” he said in a low voice, “if that woman’s not in her quarters or on the crapper, she’s in the security container hovering over whoever’s watching the camera feeds.”
“We’ll know soon enough via operation ‘pound cake’ if she’s up to no good or just trying to stuff her gullet,” said Duncan.
“If it turns out to be the former,” Cade said, slowing to avoid a lone walker tottering out from the shoulder, “we’ll get everyone together and quickly decide on an appropriate course of action.”
While humming the first few bars of a once popular tune, Duncan sang, “Breaking rocks in the hot sun—”
“—I fought the law, and the law won,” Cade finished. “How appropriate.” His face broke into a rare smile that stayed put as he focused his attention on following the chevron-patterned tire tracks imprinted into the slowly disappearing sheen of white blanketing 39. Just as the lower quarry road and bullet-riddled sign announcing its presence blipped by and he was steering the rig into a sweeping left-hand turn, he spotted a host of splayed-out corpses blocking his lane. After braking hard and slewing the truck to the left to avoid running over the prostrate bodies—an unexpected action that elicited gasps from the backseat and sent Duncan scrabbling to get his hand to the grab bar near his head—he let his gaze wander the scene.
Judging by the tire tracks leading up to the grisly sight, whoever was driving the vehicle responsible had deviated only slightly, the calmly conducted maneuver causing the fading tracks to tick left, not unlike the blip scribed on a seismograph by a small, yet wholly unexpected earthquake. Clearly one of the rotters was down for good. Spread-eagled and unmoving on the centerline, its head surrounded by a spreading crimson miasma, the cause of death looked to have been a meeting of its mind with a speeding vehicle’s high-rising grill. Clumped gray meninges and hair-covered skull spattered the road in a growing arc of gore from where its head had started the journey to where it had finally come to rest atop a pillow of plowed-up hail.
Flesh and bone being no match for rigid skid plates and knobby off-road tires, the other two had been reduced to crawlers after what Cade guessed had been a thorough tumble beneath the Tundra’s undercarriage.
“I need to get something off my chest,” Duncan said, bouncing in his seat as the F-650 rolled over one of the creature’s outstretched arms.
Cade looked to his right and caught his friend worrying his new shotgun’s nylon sling. “You drinking again?” he asked, concern evident in his voice.
“No,” blurted Duncan. He removed his hat and ran an unsteady hand through his thinning, gray hair. “I wasn’t compromised when I decided to take in the pound puppy. After I damn near plowed into her car … which was surrounded by rotters by the way, I just flipped a coin in my head.” He went silent again.
“And?” asked Cade, eyes locked on the winding road ahead.
Before answering, Duncan thought back to that late July day when this madness started. That day, sitting in his old Dodge with a clear view of the Columbia River and the glittering Vista House, he’d done the same thing. Only that time he had chosen to act against the results of his mental coin toss. And as a result, instead of continuing on to Utah alone, he had driven down to the stone and glass landmark perched above Interstate 84 and introduced himself to old Harry and the blonde twins (their names still escaped him)—which led to him joining up with the man to his left and eventually meeting the Kids in the backseat. What a trickster Fate was. If only he’d gone against the mental toss on the return trip from Bear Lake.
Taryn reached over the seat and gave Duncan’s shoulder a soft squeeze. Rubbing his back in a platonic way, she asked, “You OK?”
“It was Bridgett’s lucky day,” was Duncan’s response.
Free of the debris field, Cade mashed the pedal, hoping to get to the 39/16 junction before the sun threatening to break the clouds had a chance to fully emerge. Glancing sidelong at Duncan, he asked, “Why’d you feel the need to give her a chance?”
“Because I had two dead bodies in the back of the rig I was driving … Oliver and Foley,” answered Duncan. “Couldn’t see leaving a fellow breather to the mercy of those rotten things.”
“There is no longer a high road,” said Cade. He went on to tell the others what he’d done to the Chinese soldier who had not so eloquently told him and his team to go fuck their mothers. Described the gurgling noise escaping his throat as the Gerber ground through and finally rasped sharply against vertebra. “I didn’t want to stop there. If I’d been alone, nothing would have kept me from removing that fucker’s head clean from his body and hurling it into the trees. Not a thing.”
“Everyone is an enemy,” said Wilson. “Is that what you’re getting at?”
Cade said nothing. It was way more complicated than that. Opening the stage for an argument on humanities was the last thing on his mind.
Duncan glimpsed a flash of color around the next turn. “Slow down,” he implored. “We’re coming up on where we left Bridgett’s car.”
Sure enough, the overloaded compact was revealed in tiny slices as the F-650 cut the corner at a crawl. The driver’s side door was still yawning open and a pair of Zs stood wavering just a couple of yards from the inert vehicle.
When Duncan powered his window down, the competing growl of the engine and hollow roar of the nearby river came rushing in.
“The tire tracks continue on around the car,” Taryn noted. “Why not stop to check it for supplies?”
Duncan craned over his right shoulder to get a clear look as the car and its undead protectors slid by. “I’d bet they did on the way in. Frick and Frack there are just enamored with the river.”
Wilson said, “Think they’re acting on past memories?”
As Cade steered the big Ford out of the turn, he intoned, “I’ve given up trying to figure out what makes them tick.”
Chapter 7
At the junction with State Route 16, where 39 jogged left and became a narrow two-lane running east toward the Bear River Range, the trail the Eden group was following did indeed go hot on them. All that remained of the once-distinct chevron patterns created by the Tundra as it wheeled east were tiny rectangles of compressed hail.
Tendrils of steam rose from the glistening blacktop all around as a long east to west seam opened up in the gray cloud cover. Then, like some kind of biblical painting, bars of golden light arced down from the heavens, painting a broad swath of the countryside before them in muted shades of yellow and orange.
Cade looked to his right and studied the stretch of 16 that fed south to Bear River. There were no tire tracks or remnants of compacted hail that he could see. He looked northbound along the two-lane from the intersection through the gentle jog it took to the east.
Nothing.
Voice full of confidence, Duncan said, “They turned left.”
Squinting against the glare, Cade said, “And you know this, how?”
“Transition lenses, my good man.” Duncan pointed north. “I can see traces of the tracks in the runoff. They’re real faint. Almost look like a pair of slug tracks at this point.”
Cade flipped down his visor. Then, looking at Duncan, he gestured to the glove box. “Grab my Oakleys for me, please.”
After handing over the black wraparound sunglasses, Duncan said, “You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you,” responded Cade. “But I gotta see to drive.” He donned the glasses and wheeled left.
The state route heading north became Main Street as it cut through what passed for downtown Woodruff. Back In The Saddle Rehab was coming up on the right. Across the street from the ransacked two-story business was an auto body shop. Deposited on the sidewalk and frost-heaved parking pad by the force of the migrati
ng horde was a colorful jumble of inert cars. They were dented and dinged and had come to rest at odd angles, some of them wedged tight against the bowed-in rollup doors. Just past Back In The Saddle’s elevated front porch, half-straddling the sidewalk where the horde had shoved it, was an equally abused Cadillac. Missing most of its window glass, the American icon sat forlornly in the shadow of a two-story building whose upper windows were skewered through by the top crossbars of a crazily listing power pole.
Adjacent to where Center Street jogged off to the right, Cade slowed the Ford to walking speed and looked a question at Duncan.
“In the shadows,” said Duncan, pointing. “See them?”
Cade perched his sunglasses on the tip of his nose and pressed his chin to his chest to see over them. A few feet beyond the Cadillac’s stretched-out front end, where Main Street was cloaked in shadow, he saw that the tracks did indeed pick back up again. He lifted his foot off the brake and drove past the Cadillac, over the glass pebbles from the destroyed windows, and continued the slow roll under an entire block’s worth of utility lines stretched to their limits by the canted power poles.
Cade said, “I lost them again at the next intersection.”
Duncan said, “There’s still a trace in the shadow of the tree up ahead. Keep going straight.”
As Cade accelerated down Main, the Ford’s passing totally obliterated any trace of the melting chevrons. Once they reached the intersection Duncan had pointed to, there was no more cover and the road was but wet pavement. Here the two-lane shot off in three different directions. North, beyond the intersection, Main Street ended and State Route 16 resumed its laser-straight charge out of town. To the left were three squat homes with big front yards and long driveways. Rolling cans bulging with garbage never to be hauled away crowded the undulating sidewalk. At all four corners storm drains choked with months’ worth of debris were underwater, the rapidly melted hail still feeding the burgeoning pools.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 12): Abyss Page 4
