Guessing where he thought the shorter of the two creature’s eye socket would be, he banged on the fence there with his free hand and held the dagger’s tip perpendicular to the inner netting. Seconds passed and then the fingers withdrew and disappeared and a tick later probed the fence a foot to the left. Meeting Cade’s expectation, the fence bowed in a couple of inches. Palm on the Gerber’s pommel, he leaned in and thrust the dagger through the barrier left-of-center of the steadily growing human-head-sized impression. There was a bit of resistance at first, but the attempt yielded nothing but a fresh inches-long-gash to go along with the roadmap of lesions and scratches already criss-crossing the Z’s alabaster face. Enticed by Cade’s presence, but confused by the gate, the two Zs wavered, their heads bobbing tantalizingly close yet still just outside of striking range. So Cade searched the ground nearby and found a wrist-thick foot-long piece of tree branch. He scooped it up, peered over his shoulder at Max, and waggled it over his head. After catching the shepherd’s multi-colored gaze, he threw the stick overhand to the right and watched it sail twenty feet or so and land on the spongy ground inside the fence with a hollow thud.
Stub tail a blur and eyes fixed on Cade, Max sat on his haunches waiting for permission.
“Get it boy.”
Instantly gravel shot from under Max’s paws as he gave chase.
The flexing at the gate stopped as the rotters, keying in to the out-of-sight sounds and sudden flurry of movement, released their grip. A tick later the wet slaps of rotted flesh on pavement started anew.
Gerber still clutched in his right fist, Cade followed Max. After traversing a dozen feet, he stopped near the gate’s edge where a gnarled wood post was buried in the ground and the barbed wire fence separating the roadside ditch from the dense tree line began its westward run. He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and bent his knees, going into a partial combat crouch while keeping his upper body coiled tight, like a spring under pressure.
Max paralleled the barbed wire fence, picked up the sun-weathered length of wood with his mouth, and began working it between his teeth, pulverizing it into a hundred little pieces in seconds.
With the usual eye-watering stench preceding them, the Zs staggered from behind the blind. Fixated solely on Max and unable to feel pain, they hit the fence at full speed and continued their hunt, with rusty barbs tearing chunks of flesh from their emaciated frames.
Cade waited behind the blind for the faster of the two to pass him by and then let out a soft whistle, causing the trailing creature to stutter step and turn clumsily to its right.
“Peek-a-boo,” Cade said, as the Gerber flashed black against a growing white background and penetrated the rotter’s right eye socket with a soft squish. Instantly, like a snipped marionette, the thirty-something female rotter folded to the ground where it settled face down, ass up—an unmoving heap of skin and bone. Resting there on the cold ground, with the knuckles of knobby vertebra and sharp pelvic bones straining against the pale bruised dermis, the thing could have easily passed for a concentration camp victim.
Before the first flesh eater had been stilled, Max had already destroyed the stick and was sizing up the remaining creature, teeth bared and hackles raised.
Still unaware of Cade’s presence, the second Z leaned hard into the chest-high strand of wire, bowing it inward half a foot, and gouging a foot-long, inch-wide chasm into its pale skin. Eyes fixed only on Max, and with its own teeth bared, a guttural, seemingly hate-filled sound escaped its maw.
“I got this,” muttered Cade, approaching the abomination from its blindside. Without pause, he reached across the wire and wrapped one gloved hand around the thing’s scrawny neck. Simultaneously he lifted and tightened his grip, closing off the hissing creature’s windpipe. With silence returned to the lonely stretch of road, and hatred burning hot behind his eyes, Cade thrust the dagger deeply into the patch of soft flesh an inch in front of the male cadaver’s right ear.
Like its off switch had been thrown, the Z went limp, its toes swaying an inch off the ground. Milky eyes rolled back, retreating into hollow sockets. And then, held aloft an arm’s length from Cade’s face, its jaw slackened, revealing a maggot-addled tongue and mouthful of crooked teeth still home to ribbons of flesh and sinew from its last kill.
Cade released his grip and let gravity take the dead weight. Then, cursing his decision to lay hands on the dead, and feeling a tinge of discomfort from the sight of the yellow pus sullying his glove’s padded leather palm, he added baby wipes and hand sanitizer to his mental grocery list.
“Come on boy,” he called to Max. “You get to watch my six.”
Seemingly aware of his appointed position, Max sat on his haunches, peering through the fence at the twice-dead humans. He panned left down the road then held steady for a moment, ears perked, nose sniffing at the cold air. Then the multi-colored shepherd swiveled his head right and fixed his gaze on the shadow-covered road to the west.
“I’ll be damned,” said Cade. “You’re hired.”
Max yawned and lay flat, his graying snout at rest on his outstretched forelegs. Then with his eyes, one brown, one blue, moving left and right, he issued a split-second throaty growl which Cade took as an affirmative.
Cade swung the gate away, then called Max and ushered him inside the truck. He hopped in after, fired up the big V10, wheeled the F-650 through the gate and onto the smooth two-lane where he left it facing east, and set the brake. Again he grabbed the suppressed Glock off the seat next to him and checked his surroundings for Zs. Better safe than sorry doesn’t count any longer. In the new reality brought on by the swift-moving Omega Virus, sorry meant dead, and Cade wasn’t about to chance the latter. He’d seen way too much of it recently. One instance in particular hitting more closely home than others.
Seeing nothing moving, east or west, he hopped out on the road and quickly closed and locked the gate behind the matte-black truck. With its low engine rumble fracturing the morning stillness and wisps of gray exhaust hanging above the road, he adjusted the foliage affixed to the camouflaged entry. Then, remembering his earlier conversation with Seth, not the part where he was begged to seek out a Hickory Farms and return with a holiday cheese log, but the request to clean the CCTV domes, he hurried past the gate and down the tree line. It took him a second or two of scrutinizing a trio of firs before he located the two half-domes ubiquitous in nearly every store and bank and eatery before the fall. The eye in the sky as it was not so affectionately called by some Vegas casino players. Only these cameras weren’t looking for card cheats. They were trained on both approaches to the entry. The east-facing camera viewed a short stretch of the road that was relatively straight and included a steady uphill grade and then nothing but low hills breaking up the distant horizon. The camera trained to the west had a little bit of a warped view of the entire curving length of 39 through the dip in the road on up to where it disappeared into a tunnel created by the encroaching woods.
Cade stood on a fence post, stretched out his full length, and ran a microfiber cloth over both onyx-colored domes, bringing a shine that lasted only a moment before the flakes started sticking again.
He hopped down, landing purposefully with most of his weight on his recently healed left ankle. He felt nothing abnormal. No flash of pain from compressing scar tissue. Not even the twinge of discomfort he’d experienced after fast roping from a hovering Osprey and sprinting over the sloped clearing upon returning from a recent snatch and grab mission to Southern California. So, he thought in Ranger parlance, the ankle is one hundred percent, good-to-go.
Retracing his steps, he stopped and dragged the Zs, one at a time, into the ditch, figuring he’d send Wilson to dispose of them later. Finished, he boarded the idling truck which had come into his possession in a crazy roundabout way shortly after the dead began to reanimate and walk the earth. After having been stolen from a mansion somewhere in Colorado, the oversized vehicle—which had obviously been custom-built for the lo
ng dead NBA basketball player whose underground multi-car garage it had been liberated from—was driven to Schriever Air Force base in Colorado Springs, a homicidal killer named Pug behind the wheel.
Nudging the details of the truck’s crazy odyssey from his mind, Cade inadvertently gazed uphill and caught sight of the disturbed ground. Though not entirely evident unless you knew precisely where to look, the replaced sod, newly green from recent rains yet still stunted from the shock of being peeled away from the dirt, marked the location of the graves containing the fallen.
Cade saw them in his mind’s eye, from left to right: a ski instructor and friend of Logan’s named Sampson. A man whom, embarrassingly, he didn’t remember ever meeting. Then there was the former Salt Lake Sheriff named Gus whom he had barely gotten to know before the event at the quarry stole him and Jordan and Duncan’s brother Logan from the earth. Capping the right side were the three recent additions, the grass atop them greener, the feeling of loss to Cade and the entire group still stinging like a freshly opened wound.
Shoving those thoughts down where they belonged, tucked away in the place where they would be less apt to resurface at an inopportune time and possibly divert his focus or cause him to forget something as small in detail yet still very important like cleaning the CCTV domes for Seth, he racked the transmission into Drive and accelerated east. Eyes forward, hands gripping the wheel tight, he kept his speed under thirty the entire length of Utah State Route 39, up the hill, then on down the slight dip and into the first turn, where the two-lane became crowded again on both sides by towering firs.
As the wipers beat out a cadence on the windshield, and the heater finally began to warm the truck’s frigid cab, Cade cast his gaze at the rearview mirror and watched for a second as the season’s first snowfall, disturbed by the rig’s passing, was sent into a frenzy, the big flakes jinking and swirling away hypnotically in a thousand different directions.
Once the right-hand curve straightened and the trees had fully closed in around the road, he stilled the wipers and, to beat back a forming band of condensation, set the heater blowing on the windshield. Having made hundreds of trips to Mount Hood’s ski areas — at first either with his dad or by himself, and then later with Brook and Raven—Cade was no stranger to driving in snow and ice. However, though the F-650 had four-wheel-drive and was shod with tires that looked capable of tackling all that Antarctica could throw at it, piloting a behemoth such as this was nothing to be taken for granted. The growling V10 possessed the kind of power he’d never been exposed to. On pavement the thing handled like a dream, eating up bumps and powering through herds of zombies without missing a beat. But the old adage—four-wheel-drive can’t help you stop—had been drilled into Cade’s memory by his father starting in his teens when the two of them would make the hundred-and-twenty-mile round trip from their home in Portland, Oregon to the Timberline Lodge ski area in the family’s venerable Jeep Grand Cherokee. So at the next snow-covered straightaway he came to, with his hands in the proper ten and two (also influenced by his father), he gripped the wheel even tighter and stood on the brakes. Instantly the foot pedal hammered back against his lug-soled boot as the four-wheel anti-lock brakes brought the beast’s forward momentum from thirty miles-per-hour to a complete juddering stop within an astounding three truck lengths.
Impressive came to mind as Cade looked back at the chevron patterns pressed by the tires into the dusting of freshly fallen snow. At first the two laser-straight tracks behind the rig took a slight jog right then, presumably, when the hammering had first hit his foot and technology took over, they righted and showed no further deviation.
Time to see what Black Beauty (as Raven had named her) can do accelerating from a standing stop. Still clutching the wheel in a way that would’ve made Dad proud, Cade released the brake and pinned the pedal to the floorboard. Instantly the truck was pulling strongly ahead, and in the next beat the white emptiness of the snow-dusted meadows on both sides of the road was blazing by in his peripheral. Attempting to break the rear end free from the road’s surface, he jinked the truck sharply left and then right to no adverse effect.
***
A handful of minutes after taking the rig through the impromptu Truck-Trend-Magazine-type of cold weather test, the stunted hill on which the abandoned quarry was located passed by on Cade’s left. Due to the inclement weather, the top third, which was notched flat where the sheds and massive garage resided, was hidden behind a gauze-like veil of clouds.
The feeder road, however, was not. The bushes flanking it were beaten back by multiple vehicles making dozens of trips to empty the compound of its worthwhile contents. The muddy road was now partially snow-covered and easy to follow with the eye. The white stripe clinging to the side hill rose and fell and then disappeared to the right before reemerging and then vanishing again into the clouds.
Leaving the quarry road behind, Cade hit the straightaway bordering the Ogden River and upped the speed. Moving at a forty-mile-per-hour clip, in under ten minutes the Ford ate up the distance from the quarry road to the juncture where State Route 39 bisected State Route 16.
He tapped the brakes well before the crossing and then a football field’s length short of the junction brought the Ford to a complete stop with the engine idling and heated air hissing through the vents. He trained the Steiner binoculars at the convergence of State Routes and glassed the area from right-to-left. He saw the jog in 16 where it went from a north/south run, took a right angle turn west and ran straight for a short distance before swinging back northbound again. A stone’s throw north of the jog in driving terms was the intersection and the wrecked yellow school bus where a Z had literally gotten the drop on Brook and rent a baseball-sized bite of flesh from her back. The rear end of the bus was facing him and the wheels jutted out horizontally to the left, leaving a scant few yards of road on which to squeeze by.
Both Chief Jenkins’ patrol Tahoe and a second vehicle that Cade expected to see here were gone. Instantly a tingle shot up his spine. He felt the combat juices begin to flow, sharpening his focus and slowing his heart rate.
Momentarily finding himself caught in a break between the slow-moving clouds, Cade lowered the field glasses and decided, despite this new development, to continue on into Woodruff and get this shopping spree over with.
Chapter 2
Cutting the air behind a big overhand swing, the razor-sharp blade created a faint whistle before embedding in the putrefying creature’s skull. The honed steel, pre-treated with a liberal amount of gun oil and now slickened by a viscous mixture of congealed blood and lumpy gray matter, retreated easily from the six-inch chasm and in the next beat was tracking on a horizontal plane, backhand, towards the monsters vectoring in from the man’s right. A deft back step and guttural grunt later, the former humans crumpled to the gore-slickened roadway like a couple of stunned boxers, their heads bouncing and spinning away, jaundiced eyes in the sockets still scanning the surroundings for fresh meat.
Overhead, a murder of crows, having been disturbed from their early morning feast, cussed and muttered, their shrill caws echoing off the cold metal skin of a nearby cluster of inert vehicles.
Hearing a dry rasp at his back, the man tore his eyes from the swirling black mass overhead and leveled his gaze at the sword clutched firmly in his two-handed grip. Reflected in the blade’s polished surface, he watched a half-dozen biters round the SUV he’d left parked near the shoulder several yards north of him. He stood stock-still and waited for the dead to come to him. Energy was his friend. Especially with the temperature sitting somewhere in the low thirties and food high in calories and protein a dwindling commodity. Wait, watch, and at the last second uncoil like a bear trap was an energy saving technique he’d adopted early on.
The zombies doddered across the recently crushed mess of rotting flesh and bone. Protruding from the putrid morass, wisps of hair still attached to half-moons of crushed and shattered skull waved in a wind gust stout enough to cut thr
ough his oiled leather duster. Still he didn’t move. With nothing to his fore, he watched them shamble closer, their stunted clumsy steps accentuated and clownlike as reflected back to him in the black blood dripping down the unwavering blade.
Once free from the obstacle course of human detritus, they picked up speed, moving in an almost lock-step fashion.
He remained still as their spindly arms elevated, straining for him.
Getting closer. Ten feet, he guessed, judging by the growing size of the leering faces mirrored back at him.
The raspy hisses rose over the wind and then morphed into hungry sounding guttural moans.
Five feet.
He imagined their crooked fingers kneading the air and the hairs on his neck sprang to attention. And though already chilled to the bone, gooseflesh rippled like an electric current up his ribcage.
Still he didn’t move. He felt alive now more than ever.
Three feet, now.
Excitement building, his body shivered against the stiffening wind. Finally, with the calls of the dead in his ear and his toned muscles under incredible tension, he spun counter-clockwise, straightened his arms and locked his elbows, bringing the nearly invisible blade—now horizontal and reflecting sky—around like a natural extension of his body. Breaking his wrists just before impact enabled the razor-sharp edge to cleave cleanly through two skulls and enter a third before coming to rest against the female cadaver’s ethmoid bone. She had been big in life, and her twice-dead weight nearly ripped the weapon from the man’s calloused hands as gravity instantly yanked all two-hundred-plus pounds of her vertically to the pavement.
Three things happened near simultaneously as the man backpedaled left, still in control of the wildly vibrating blade. First off, the initial victim of his roundhouse, suddenly minus the top third of its skull, staggered forward, the final impulses sent from the now-bisected brain urging pustule-covered arms to grasp the meat that was no longer occupying the last place registered in its dead gaze. A fraction of a second after the first to meet the blade—arms outstretched, crooked fingers still blindly probing thin air—crumpled to the pavement, the rotten interloper to its right, bald head cleaved clean through on a forty-five from ear to crown, tumbled sideways over the plus-sized corpse, the energy from it meeting the ground still rippling through its decay-ravaged blubber.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 2
