On the way out with the newly filled bag, Cade spied a spare car battery still hooked to a deep cycle battery charger. After depositing the stretched and misshapen Hefty Sack near the door with the others, he returned for the battery and charger.
He stacked the final two items by the other stuff, padded to the picture window behind the sofa in the living room, parted the horizontal slats and peered out. Due to the blowing snow and the hulking F-650 in his line of sight, he couldn’t see anything beyond the end of the driveway.
He made a bigger portal in the blinds, pressed his face to the glass and looked left. He saw Jack still trapped under the car and still swiping at the snow with his gruesome bite-riddled arms. As if it sensed Cade’s scrutiny, the corpse suddenly ignored the falling flakes, lay back, stretched out on the snow as far as possible and fixed its glassed-over eyes on the house.
What a way to go, thought Cade. He pulled his head away and let the slats snap shut. Moved the clock aside and hustled the scavenged supplies out to the truck, heaving everything into the load bed. Then he whistled and opened the driver’s door. Once Max was inside the cab, Cade shut the door. With snow collecting in his beard and every exhaled breath creating big white plumes that slowly rose and roiled away, he stood there shivering and thinking. To anyone with a shred of imagination, concluding that he looked like a Viking or Mongol raider contemplating which city to sack next would not have been much of a stretch.
After a few seconds, apparently having made up his mind about something, he hurried back to the house. Crabbed past the broken door and stepped over the clock and twice-dead woman and went straight for the garage. Once inside, he reached over his head and pulled the pin that disengaged the drive chain from the overhead motor. With visions of the dead-filled parking garage in Los Angeles still fresh in his mind, he rattled the door up in its tracks and turned back to the pair of bicycles.
One at a time, beginning with the larger of the two, he wheeled the bikes to the Ford and heaved them both in back, where they settled with a whoosh of disgorged air atop the bed of plastic garbage bags.
With Max watching him from behind the steering wheel, and looking every bit like he was about to start the rig up and drive the thing, Cade went back inside the garage through the open overhead door. He entered the house again and made a bee-line to the vanity on the wall opposite the front door. He reached high and snatched the depression-era glass vase there, removed a bouquet of silk flowers from it, and without thought dropped it to the linoleum floor. Flowers in one hand, Glock in the other, he hurried back the way he’d come.
Outside, he closed the garage door and zippered between the sedan and the hybrid SUV. He stopped near the burn pile just out of arm’s reach from Jack.
Saying a silent prayer, Cade holstered the Glock and set the flowers on the car’s trunk. Then he drew the Gerber and gripped the creature’s left wrist with his free hand. With little effort on his part, he trapped the arm under his knee. Finally, after making the sign of the cross and reciting the Holy Trinity for the unfortunate man, in one fluid stroke—a move performed too many times to count and perfected in the months since the dead began to walk—he slid the blade into his left eye until he felt the high-carbon stainless-steel tip meet bone. At once the trapped Z went limp. Cade withdrew the black blade, dragged the dagger through the snow, and then finished cleaning it on the twice-dead Zs tee-shirt.
Again clutching the multi-colored bouquet of fake roses in one hand, and the Glock in the other, Cade made his way back to the Ford. He hopped inside and caught Max looking at him the way dogs are wont to do. Head cocked to one side as if saying, Are we done here yet, or what? To which Cade said, “Don’t get any ideas, Max.” He tossed the roses on the console. “Those aren’t for you. They’re for Raven.”
Realizing he was talking to the dog way too much, Cade dug the CB out from under the flowers and switched it on. He looked over at Max and said, “We better—” but cut himself short and instead pressed the key to talk and got Seth on the other end. He quickly filled him in on the news, good and bad, the former being that he had procured a fair amount of the items on the lists, and the latter being the scarcity of a certain brand of candy bar wrapped in brown and made by a certain company bearing the same name as the Greek God of War. After listening to Seth go on about how badly he needed chocolate, Cade needled him further. “Do you want some cheese with that whine?” he asked, already knowing the answer. That prompted another full minute of bellyaching out of Seth before Cade was able to get a word in edgewise and detail his next two planned stops.
Once Cade finished, Seth asked, “If anybody inquires, when should I say you’ll be back?”
Cade looked at his watch. “I can’t see being outside the wire past noon.”
“Roger that,” said Seth. “Call in when you get close.”
“Still having problems with icing on the camera domes?”
“Yep. Both of them on the State Route and the one on our feeder road are getting it good.”
Cade removed his camo ball cap and banged it against the floor mat to rid it of melting snow. “We’ll have to get Foley working on a fix for that.” He paused. “The ones trained on the clearing ... how are they?”
“Fine. They’re inside the tree line. In fact I’m watching a ferocious battle taking place up there.”
Cade snugged his hat on. “Come again?” he said.
“Daymon, Wilson, and Foley are going up against Duncan, Tran, Jamie, and Taryn.”
Watching the snow intensify outside the truck’s windows, Cade suddenly caught on. “Oh … a snowball fight. Who’s winning?”
“Believe it or not, the Old Man’s squad is taking it to Daymon’s crew. Don’t know how he does it, but Tran melts in and out of the tree line like a little ninja.”
“Jamie’s no slouch, herself.”
“Copy that,” Seth said. “Wouldn’t want her sneaking up on me”—he went silent for a long beat—“unless, of course, Lev was out of the picture.”
Detecting a trace of humor in Seth’s voice, Cade said, jokingly, “Easy, cowboy.”
Seth laughed. “You know I wouldn’t wish ill will on him.”
“Roger that,” Cade answered back. “I’ll see you in a few.” He consulted his Suunto and noted the time. Ten after ten. He put the truck into as tight a U-turn as the big 4x4 would make. Still, he had to reverse it half a truck length before transiting the drive to Center Street where he went left and, making new parallel tracks where the old ones had already filled in, finally wheeled west towards the rehab place.
***
Two minutes later, after using all of the shoulder to pass by the trio of near-frozen Zs, and with his silent wingman curled up into a ball on the passenger floor in front of the heat vent, Cade pulled to a smooth stop a block east of Main. Gripping the wheel with both hands at twelve o’clock, he leaned forward and rested his chin on his knuckles. He blinked his eyes in disbelief at what he was seeing. “They’re immobilized,” he said, taking his eyes from the herd and regarding Max. “This, my furry four-legged friend, is a game changer.”
***
A minute after seeing the phalanx of dead rooted in their tracks, some in mid-step, many more toppled over onto their faces or sides or backs, arms and legs twitching minutely but not fully responding to the neural commands issued, Cade was alone outside of the truck.
With Max nosing the passenger window and watching him, Cade stole one last look down the sidewalk at the dead, then mounted the back steps to the rehab place.
The rear door was ajar and a small snowdrift had accumulated just inside on the scuffed wood floor. Forgoing the normal routine, he entered silently with his Glock leveled, the black cylindrical suppressor leading the way. There was a rich odor of decay in the air that grew stronger as he crept down the short hallway.
From where the hall opened up to the front of the business, the floors were covered by the kind of blue tumbling mats usually found at a wrestling match or gymnastic
event. On the right wall were a series of doors, all hinged open. Drawers and plastic containers had been ripped from within, their contents—paper brochures detailing therapeutic exercises, resistance bands fashioned into different lengths, and rubber balls of all sizes and colors—littered the floor.
He bent to pick up an item and caught a flash of movement to his left. He turned and saw the reflection of a Z in the floor-to-ceiling mirror affixed to the south wall. In one fluid motion, he spun to his right and brought the Glock on target, its tritium sights lined up with an imaginary spot between the rotted thing’s roving eyes.
Having a hell of a time picking its way through the clutter near the back stairway, the Z emitted a screech that instantly sent the hair on the back of Cade’s neck to attention. “That’s not right,” he said aloud, hoping that all of the undead weren’t going to sound like this after the temperature buoyed back up. He didn’t remember Nash mentioning anything about the cold’s effect on the dead other than the fact that they didn’t ever completely die. However, he did know that early on, after the outbreak, Sylvester Fuentes froze some recently turned specimens solid. And when he had thawed them out, inexplicably, within a very short time they were ambulatory again. For all Cade knew, the notes detailing those first experiments had been in the computers and were lost in the fire set by Pug. Moreover, if the thumb-drive found by Taryn contained anything other than the doctor’s notes on the Omega antiserum, Nash had decided, for whatever reason, to keep that knowledge to herself.
Moving with a locked-knee type of shuffle, the high-pitched squawking still emanating from its constantly moving maw, the creature caught a 9mm round to each milky eye, fired by the man whose pistol prowess had earned him the nickname Wyatt early on in his Special Forces career. They don’t call it a silencer for nothing, he thought to himself as the screeching pusbag went silent and fell in a heap, partially blocking a gloomy stairwell leading up.
Finished ‘shopping’ in under a minute, cargo pockets bulging with liberated goods, Cade hurried back to his truck.
He popped the door and climbed in, saying, “Mission accomplished, Max.” He trapped the Glock under his thigh and transferred some of the liberated goods from his pockets to the deep center console.
Max growled as soon as the motor turned over. “Yeah ...” Cade said in response, “I don’t want to drive through them either. But it’s what we’re going to have to do in order to get back to 39. And Max, when we return to the compound”—the dog looked up from the floor, regarded him with multi-colored eyes, and yawned—“do not let on to the others that I talked to you so much.” Another yawn confirmed acknowledgement as the truck rolled slowly over a handful of withered and gunshot Z bodies and then bounced and lurched as Cade drove it off the curb.
As Cade angled the F-650 toward the column of dead, he detected no movement whatsoever. They were rooted in place like life-sized figures in a museum diorama. Or those terra cotta soldiers on display in the Forbidden City in China, the country responsible for this entire mess.
“Domino time,” said Cade, intending to put the wide steel bumper to use like a cowcatcher on a locomotive. He turned left onto Main and drove south, weaving slowly left and right, pleased when his spoken assumption came to fruition. The impacts with the Zs sounded through the sheet metal like hollow thuds, which were a far cry from the usual resonant slaps and screeching of fingernails digging into the paint. Instantly a chain reaction was started and, domino-like, the dead began toppling into each other, cascading away from the Ford like dual waves pushing out from the bow of a ship. Gunshot-like cracks of bones breaking under the tires competed with the same shrill noise the Z in the rehab place had made. Only here, in the midst of scores of immobilized flesh eaters, the noise soon rose to a deafening peal and suddenly Cade was driving through a scene from his childhood nightmares. In the next instant, with the windows vibrating slightly from the sonic onslaught, in his mind it was Oldies Night and he was at the Moreland Theater in Portland ensconced in the comfortable love seats in the back of the house. He wasn’t alone and there was this ethereal feeling of being wary and excited all at once. He was on the precipice of stealing a kiss from his first real girlfriend when that sound belted out of the speakers directly above them. He let go of Barbara’s hand then, took his arm from around her slender shoulders, and clamped his palms over his ears just like the people were doing on the movie screen. Who knew the body snatchers screamed when they were onto you? Until then, sitting through it in the theater, he’d had no idea. That God-awful noise ruined the moment and the screaming pod people returned in his sleep regularly in the form of nightmares that lasted nearly a year until another Oldies Night featured Alien and a whole new cast of baddies took their places.
The mental side trip lasted a millisecond and then, for the first time Cade could remember, he heard Max whine. Not one and done, but a long, drawn-out series of plaintive yelps ending in a final shuddering whimper. Concerned for the poor fella, he took his eyes from the road for a second and saw the shepherd burying his snout into the carpet and pawing at both ears.
“I’m with you buddy.” Feeling his chest rising and falling rapidly underneath his body armor, Cade swallowed hard and said, “Almost through them, boy.” Then he looked a few blocks over the heads of the slack-faced ghouls to the point where Main widened and intersected State Route 39. There he saw the rounded snout and road-grime-coated underside of the overturned yellow school bus standing out like a sore thumb against the snowy white background. On the upturned side was a thin layer of snow that from this distance looked like frosting atop a slab of lemon pound cake.
He tapped the brakes and walked his gaze over the rear of the blocks-long column of death and noticed that their eyes were not facing in the direction of the march. To a Z, all eyes were focused on the cab of the truck. The strange noises continued and the dead kept toppling.
Then it hit him like a mule kick right then and there that those eyes must have been shifting subtly, imperceptibly, from the moment the noisy Ford entered their midst a couple of hundred yards north and had been tracking the fresh meat—him—elevated and displayed behind glass like a rack of lamb at the butcher’s, all the way to this point.
An uneasy feeling washed over him and he threw an involuntary shudder as the realization that once the horde thawed out and reanimated, the ones leading the procession would invariably end up about facing and following the ones presently eyeballing him down 39 where eventually they’d pose one hell of a problem for the Eden compound. So possessing only enough ammunition to put down a tiny fraction of them, he did the next thing that came to mind. In hopes of concealing his egress from watchful eyes, he steered the rig at the nearest of the leering monsters and mowed down a dozen of them. He reversed and repeated the process a number of times until the rear echelon of the procession was bent and broken, their blood and fluids trickling onto the snow.
“That should keep them from following,” Cade said aloud, mainly for his own benefit. Then, as if he had just driven into the vacuum of outer space, the cacophony of the dead was gone, in place of it the V10 roar and metronomic swishing of the wipers.
Max sniffed the air and then, one paw at a time, crawled back onto the passenger seat.
Cade felt his breathing return to normal and the whoosh of blood rushing between his ears begin to ebb.
Finally, intent on making the junction before the few dead still left standing could track him with their eyes, he focused on the narrow band of white bracketed on the left by the bus’s protruding tires, drag chains, and snaking exhaust pipes and on the right by the soft shoulder he knew was there somewhere underneath the snow.
He took a breath, held it, and finessed the pedals, heel-and-toeing them to simultaneously cut speed and power drift through the turn in a vehicle designed for towing and hauling—not high-speed maneuvers on snow.
The result was acceptable—barely. The shoulder was under there, but both passenger side tires fell off it, sending the tr
uck into a hard list on that side and the road sign marking the 16/39 junction airborne, broken off like a matchstick and tumbling end-over-end.
In the next half-beat, three things happened near simultaneously.
First, Cade hauled the wheel hard right, stabbed the gas pedal, and the dull gray horizon shifted right-to-left in front of his eyes when the truck started into a slow speed sideways slide.
Then, rivaling the din the dead had been making, there was a metal-on-metal screech when the truck glanced off the bus and a fair amount of black paint and road grime was swapped between the two vehicles.
Finally, as he tromped the gas, the front wheels pulled straight and the school bus flashed by in his left side-vision, while the ground-hugging shrubs and Jersey barriers bordering 39 blazed by in his right.
Once clear of the choke point, Cade risked a quick glance over his right shoulder. Barely visible, even from his elevated vantage point, the prone dead looked small and inconsequential. Whether they had or had not seen the truck turn onto 39 was the sixty-four-thousand dollar question. Even if they had, thought Cade, he doubted the seemingly aware among them would remember enough to hunt him after the thaw. Which could be a day, a week, or longer. At any rate it amounted to an unknown window of time that the Almanac didn’t mention and led to another thought that really set the gears in his head to spinning.
Chapter 9
Less than a mile southeast of the 16/39 junction, Alexander Dregan was fighting off sleep, the battle made all the more difficult by the layer of snow shrouding the windows and the soothing melody filling the cab compliments of the Kenwood head unit and strategically placed woofers and tweeters. One thing the kid did right.
He rubbed his eyes then started the wipers moving. Not wanting to roll the window down and get a lap full of snow, he banged a fist against the driver’s side glass so he could see out, starting a mini-avalanche cascading off the outside surface. He leaned over and cleared the passenger window in the same manner.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 6
