To Dregan, good OPSEC (operational security) meant following these necessary formalities. There was a saying an old veteran and mentor back home used to recite that best described who he was before, during, and after the Great Fall—as he and others in the community called the rapid worldwide spread of Omega and the even faster fall of law and order. There are three types of people in the world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. The sheep cower when confronted with danger, accepting their demise with a banal indifference. The wolves—murderers, rapists, thieves, and child molesters—are the predators who take advantage of the sheep. Then, young Dregan, there’s me and the men like me who are the sheepdogs, the man had said at the time. We were born with an innate ability to harness and channel aggression. We feel the need to protect the flock from predators, the wolves. You’ll know who you are early in life, Alexander. What he said next eventually started Dregan on a quest to prove him wrong. It isn’t necessarily imbued through training or experience. It’s a feeling ... Dregan remembered the man saying while tapping a finger firmly on his breastbone. And as he sat in the truck thousands of miles from where it took place, he remembered the moment as if it had happened yesterday. He recalled the fragrant flowers blooming next to the parade grounds. Heard the Hind helicopter beating the air far off in the distance.
Yes, though softened around the edges over the years, Dregan was still one of them. And this old sheepdog missed the man who had taught him so much. He wondered if Yuri had ridden out the Great Fall, thinking maybe the old warhorse, a foot shorter and twenty years older, had found an island off the Crimean Peninsula and was surviving just like him.
With the memory of his friend fading back into the ether, a burst of static followed by a voice requesting the password came from the radio’s speaker.
Dregan keyed the CB to talk. “Jack,” he said with a wan smile.
“Jill,” came the scratchy reply.
Jack and Jill, thought Dregan. Easy enough to remember, but not as clever as yesterday’s Bart and Lisa.
Dregan set the radio aside and drove down the slight decline, past a copse of stunted trees, and caught sight of the south gate, which was nothing more than a Jackson County school bus, all thirty feet of its passenger compartment filled to the windows with hardened concrete. Through the mesh screen covering the front passenger window he saw movement and then slowly the bus reversed to create an opening just wide enough for the Blazer to pass through.
Parked inside the entry, flanking the narrow road was a pair of desert-tan Humvees sprouting turret-mounted machine guns. A dozen men milled about, their reflections rippling in the Hummers’ green-tinted blast-resistant glass.
Dregan saw a knot of men clothed in civilian attire standing next to a copse of firs. Two of them were smoking and all were carrying carbines slung over their shoulders.
He pulled up close and rolled his window down. Looked to the rearview and watched the bus move back into position, sealing them all inside. Flicking his gaze back to the men, he put the truck into Park and fished out a cigarette of his own, the first of the day. He flicked a disposable Bic, lit the Camel and, barking out their first names, called three of the men over.
Chapter 20
The house Dregan had initially claimed for himself and his two sons was one of those you’d find built on an abbreviated lot in a growing city. In-fill was what he had heard them called. Two-and-a-half times taller than it was wide, and with a single-car garage taking up most of the downstairs footprint, the three-story place was perfect from a defensive standpoint.
The main living area, once accessed by a steep stairway rising from the cement pad fronting the garage, was home to an average-sized sofa and pair of overstuffed chairs. Next, divided by a wide granite bar, came the dining room and kitchen. And at the rear of the house on the left was a small bedroom and opposite it, a half-bath. A sliding patio door led out to a deck overlooking an overgrown backyard. Secured to the sturdy cedar railing with three-inch decking screws was an emergency fire ladder ready to be unrolled in a moment’s notice to effect a quick escape if need be.
Two more bedrooms were on the third floor: the master, with the balcony over the parking pad facing north, and the other, diametrically opposed at the rear of the house, facing south, its deck affording a sweeping vantage looking out over an orchard with a clear view of 16 snaking off into the distance.
Dregan parked in an alcove of sorts. Stacked haphazardly against the wood shake wall rising up in front of the rig were dozens of rust-streaked propane tanks commonly found under most outdoor barbecues. Rising to the top of the driver-side door were a pair of industrial-sized propane tanks, the kind normally exiled to the periphery of your local gas station and emblazoned with all kinds of OSHA-approved warning stickers. Partially strangled by creepers and host to a thin veneer of snow were the remains of the front stairway, brown pressure-treated treads and risers and stringers all cracked and twisted from being physically rent from the house by a vehicle with a tow chain.
He killed the engine and grabbed his belongings. Exited the Blazer and looped around front of the captured Jackson Hole patrol Tahoe. He slung his carbine and sword over his shoulders, letting them cross behind his back. Removed his gloves and stowed them in a pocket. Then, commencing his least favorite part of coming home, took ahold of a freezing cold rung and began to scale the telescoping ladder propped up where the stairs used to be attached.
He hauled his considerable bulk hand-over-hand to the front porch, making it there a little out of breath. He worked his keys in the trio of locks on the door and once inside could still see his breath coming in blossoming plumes. He rubbed his hands together and called out, “Gregory!”
Nothing.
“Peter!”
Still no response.
He closed the door and crossed the foyer to the base of the stairs. “Anyone home?”
A sleepy voice called down. “Yes, Dad. I went back to bed.”
“Is that all you do … sleep?”
“No. I play video games but it’s too cold to go outside and start the generator.”
“Get your lazy butt up, Peter,” bellowed Dregan. “It’s nearly noon.”
“Who cares. I don’t have to go to school. Or work. Sleeping passes the time.”
“Get down here. We need to talk.”
A bunch of grumbling and bellyaching filtered down the stairway. Then heavy footsteps crossed the floor followed closely by the hollow clunk of a toilet seat hitting the tank.
“Damn right it’s cold, boy,” Dregan said, crossing the room. He knelt on the tiles in front of the jury-rigged natural gas fireplace. There was a braided steel hose running from a tank outside through a hole in the wall and across the hearth, where it disappeared behind a steel grate. In the center of the hose Dregan had spliced a valve with a wheel. He palmed the wheel counterclockwise, starting a slow hiss of gas from behind the clouded glass. Acting quickly so the gas couldn’t build, he clicked the Piezo igniter, producing a whoosh and instant warmth that he felt on his face.
***
A handful of minutes later, the fake logs were glowing and Peter had come downstairs and was prone on the sofa, wrapped up in multiple blankets and peppering his dad with questions.
“We’ll have to see,” replied Dregan to Peter’s third inquiry as to how many people the other side had. At twelve, the boy tended to still see conflict as if it were a first-person-shooter game and not the life and death equation the apocalypse often presented.
“The only way I’ll know the answer to that question is if they pay a visit to the ranch before we move on them.”
“The old couple?”
“No Peter. We can’t rely on them. I dropped in on them this morning and they seemed a little standoffish—”
“What’s that mean?” asked Peter.
“They didn’t seem too friendly.”
“Oh.”
“You have to learn how to read people, Peter. You get that down … you’ve won the battle
before it begins.”
Sitting up, Peter asked, “They were mean?”
“No … they just weren’t as inviting as before. I felt like a stranger in their home.” Dregan stopped pacing and leveled a serious gaze at the boy. “For all I know they’re trading with the kids too. So I’ve hatched a plan to make sure I know if they venture back into our part of the valley by this time tomorrow.”
“What happens this time tomorrow?”
“I’m going hunting.”
“What about me?”
“I need you to stay here. If the judge comes sniffing around again you are not to talk to him. Think you can you do that this time?”
Peter nodded.
Dregan smiled. He could no longer see his breath and had removed his gloves. However, even with the radiant heat slowly warming the family room and working its way upstairs, the house remained cold and uninviting. Nothing like the home the dead ran him and his family out of, forcing them to leave behind everything including decades of fond memories.
He walked to the kitchen and looked out the window. Across the street, fronted by a ragged hedge, was the house Lena and Mikhail had recently taken as theirs. The grass not beaten down by the snow was drooping away from the hedge and crowding the narrow cement path leading to the front door. The curtains were pulled closed and the driveway was empty. Just looking at it infuriated Dregan and shot a cold chill through his body.
Turning back towards the warmth, he looked down at his watch and realized he was not going to make the agreed-upon meeting with Pomeroy at the makeshift courthouse.
Chapter 21
To a person, the Eden survivors thought Cade’s plan was doable until twenty minutes or so in, when all of the dragging and lifting and pushing it took to toss the corpses into the void began to take its toll on all of them.
“We need help,” Wilson said.
Daymon cleaved a rotter’s head from crown to brow, then paused and shot the redhead a cold stare. “You’re beginning to whine like your sister.”
Coming to Wilson’s aid, Taryn shot back. “That’s harsh. He’s pulling his weight.”
Saying nothing, Daymon took hold of a corpse that the cold had shut down mid-stride, jaw leading the way, in a pose suggestive of forward motion. Still making no comment, he hauled the stiffened body across the eastbound lane to the railing, where he released his arm from around its waist and left it like he’d found it—standing, skin as white as the snow its bare feet were planted in, and looking more like a store mannequin preparing to take a leap than something carrying a virus deadly to them all. He let his gaze linger on the male corpse for a second then looked down the length of the rail and addressed Wilson. “My moms told me it’s easier to get your work done when your gums aren’t flapping.”
Finding a strange sense of confidence after hearing his girl stand up for him, Wilson toppled a Z into the void, turned, and said, “My moms was fond of saying if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”
Taking a handful of the creature’s soiled blue jeans, and wrapping the fingers of his other hand in its oily hair, Daymon rose with a grunt, twisted at the waist, and heaved the shirtless creature over the edge. He watched it bounce and come to rest atop the pile then turned back to Wilson, lip curled into a sneer, and hissed, “You taking my effin inventory ... boy?”
After shifting his gaze from Daymon to Wilson and then quickly back to the dreadlocked man, Duncan dropped his corpse like a sack of potatoes. “Daymon ... you been readin’ my Big Book?”
Already kneeling next to another corpse, Daymon looked up, brow furrowed, and said, “Your what?”
“Never mind,” drawled Duncan. He held Daymon’s gaze for a beat then went on, “You already gave Lev a shot to the jaw. Now you and Mister needs-to-grow-a-pair here are jawbonin’. To me it sounds like something’s eating at you. Shall we talk about it?”
Daymon flashed Duncan the bird, then, for a beat, as snowflakes danced across the road on a gust, regarded the middle-aged female staring up at him. Looking like he had come to some kind of a decision, he finally grabbed a fistful of natty blonde hair and plunged a gloved thumb into the Z’s eye socket. Smiling, he worked it around like he was churning butter, then dragged the dead thing to the railing and, without pause, added it to the growing mound directly below the bridge.
“Guess that answers my question,” muttered Duncan, snatching a child-sized flesh-eater off the ground by its stick-thin arms and giving it a flying lesson.
“Halfway there,” bellowed Cade from across two lanes as he watched a limp body cartwheel down the cliff wall and smack the rocky creek bed below with tremendous force. “Keep it up. We’ll rest when we clear a path to the west end.”
***
Heeding the sage advice of Daymon and Wilson’s long dead mothers, the group put their heads down, their differences aside, and worked in silence. Thirty short minutes later, the narrow bridge was cleared of the dead and the group had gathered mid-span.
“Five hundred down, two hundred to go … is that about right Cade?” Duncan asked.
“I’d say you’re in the ballpark,” Cade replied. “You want to take charge of getting our wheels up and running?”
Duncan took a pull of water from a Nalgene bottle. “I’m on it,” he said, dabbing a sheen of sweat from his forehead with a faded handkerchief. He put the damp rag away, finished the water, then walked the length of the gore-spattered bridge to the overgrown spit of land hemmed in by a drop-off on the left and the tree blockade on the right. He knelt down and fumbled around in the snow until he found the flat rock Cade had hidden the keys under. He wiped the dirt off the two sets and thumbed the unlock button on the black fob.
Success.
The 4Runner’s lights flashed and he heard the soft double thunk of the door locks actuating. He opened the gore-streaked door, climbed behind the wheel and, half-expecting to find the battery dead since the vehicle had been sitting idle for weeks, was delighted to hear the seatbelt warning chime when he inserted the key in the ignition.
Two for two, he thought.
“Be gone, Mister Murphy,” he said, as he turned the key. At first, not sounding like success, there was a faint clicking that didn’t sound at all good; then, as if his plea had been heard and heeded, the V6 motor churned to life.
Leaving the engine running to work up the charge, he made his way to the Land Cruiser with the plastic doodad in hand that looked nothing like a key or a fob. He simultaneously waved the device by the door handle and depressed the button there. The sound of the locks popping was much quieter than the 4Runner. Oh the refinement an extra fifty grand could buy a fella in the old world.
Once he was sitting on the supple leather driver’s seat, he set the smart key in the console, pressed a foot on the brake, and depressed the Engine Start/Stop button. At once the dash lights dimmed and went dark entirely. That was it. No seatbelt chime. No starter ticking away futilely. Just silence interrupted now and again by the faraway sounds of the others dispensing of the dead.
Duncan pounded a palm on the wheel and without conscious thought snaked his hand into his inside coat pocket—an autonomous action learned from years of dealing with his problems the only way he knew how. Glenda called it coping by numbing out. And it caught him completely flat-footed.
He sat straight and took a deep breath. Thankfully, there had been nothing in the pocket. No smooth metal flask. No pint of Jack. Not even a dainty airline bottle crafted perfectly in scale to resemble the full-sized item.
He had been coping without that liquid crutch since the first time he sat down with Glenda in the clearing at the fire pit weeks ago and poured every drop of Jack he possessed into the ashes. In fact, he hadn’t had so much as a nip since Chief and Jenkins went into the ground and he’d even succeeded in white-knuckling it through Phillip’s ordeal. Fake it til you make it, Glenda had said at the time. And though he was the one who had been sent to the hide to check on Phillip and found him in a differen
t state altogether than he had expected—wandering around the clearing with half of his neck ripped away and all of his guts missing—he couldn’t do what needed to be done. At least not at that stage in his sobriety. So, all the while fighting the overwhelming urge to find a bottle and check out—he waited by the fence until Cade arrived and then, with a feeling of utter worthlessness hanging over him, watched the steely-eyed survivor stick a dagger in the snarling beast that used to be their friend.
He made it through the funeral, cursing Phillip for losing his life even while he sensed he was one drink away from losing his own.
So that night, with Jack Daniels and the ghosts of the recent dead sharing equal space in his head, he had dropped to his knees beside Glenda and repeated a prayer he thought hokey and old-fashioned at the time. Instantly the weight from living the way he had been for the last decade—a weight that had increased tenfold since the dead began to walk—was suddenly lifted.
Seeing this recent knee-jerk reaction for what it was—a learned response to stress he would probably never be rid of and thankfully didn’t ever again have to rely on—he bowed his head and closed his eyes and said in a low voice, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Feeling a thousand times better, Duncan opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on the far end of the bridge. There he saw Cade moving through the dead, stopping here and there to stab into them with his blade.
Nearby, Wilson was still swinging away at skulls with his bat, wasting way more energy than necessary, culling only one rotter to Cade’s half-dozen.
A couple hundred feet beyond the stretch of road Cade and Wilson were clearing, Taryn, Lev, and Jamie were dragging corpses already granted a second death off the road and into the woods.
Meanwhile Daymon had been working a knot of dead between the other two groups, swinging Kindness at the standing corpses and felling them like wheat to a combine.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Page 13
