Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed

by Chesser, Shawn

  Raven said nothing. She had turned away from the road and refocused all of her attention on Gregory, who at the moment was standing and holding the two-way Motorola he had taken away from Sasha. He thumbed the button and moved the radio to his mouth. Then, for a long moment, he stood rooted with his mouth open and no words spilling forth.

  Collecting his thoughts, is all Raven could come up with. So with him preoccupied, she went back to working the cord farther down her clasped hands. And though she couldn’t see the progress made, based on the lack of feeling in her fingertips, the knotted cord had to have worked down past the first knuckle on both thumbs.

  Eden Compound

  Precisely ten minutes after the Dregan guy had delivered his written ultimatum/warning, Brook felt a sharp jolt travel through the rolling chair. Then, as if she’d just been in a rear-end collision and had not seen it coming, whatever just exploded topside vibrated every bone in her body. More reflex than conscious thought, she grabbed onto the shelf in front of her as phones and walkie talkies were spilling off of it.

  Even as a pair of low rumbles and the distant fireworks-like crackle made its way through the foyer, behind Brook’s eyelids the capillaries flared red as a bolt of pain originating in her old wound shot through her entire body. Once the noise dissipated, a frantic voice came over the radio that had fallen onto the floor. “Fucking lobbing grenades at us,” Foley exclaimed.

  A dull throb still in her temples, Brook bent over gingerly, snatched up the radio, and cast her gaze to the monitor. “Are you all right?”

  There was a foreboding silence and then movement on the motor pool feed caught her eye as one-by-one she saw a line of heads gopher-up between the vehicles. There was Foley, with his balding head standing next to the much shorter and dark-haired Tran. Heidi was there as well, bracing herself against the black F-650, her contrasting blonde hairdo the dead giveaway. Next to her was Glenda. Though thinner than the rest, she still had a couple of inches on them all. Missing was Seth—and the girls.

  Finally Foley answered. “We’re all right. Seth ran off to see where the grenades fell.”

  Grenades? thought Brook. She said, “Where in the hell are the girls?”

  Another voice came over the radio. It was strained and a little raspy. A smoker’s voice? “I have your girls. Send out the killer and I’ll let them go. No negotiations. No brokering. A straight trade is what we want.”

  Like a line of sails being dropped on a tall-masted vessel, Brook saw the other survivors slump against the big Ford’s sheet metal flank.

  “Brook … you heard that, right?” Foley asked over the radio.

  Brook said nothing. The radio was compromised and she was kicking herself for not thinking of it ahead of time. Plus, the Thuraya sat-phone was to her ear and the clicks indicating the connection to Cade’s phone was being established had already begun.

  ***

  Six miles west of the Eden Compound, still slugging it out with the undead horde, at first Cade failed to hear the phone trilling away in his pocket. But by the third ring, as he was leaning into his M4 as it hammered away against his shoulder, he became aware of the phone’s vibration coursing up his right thigh.

  He looked left and saw Oliver with the scoped rifle and firing controlled single shots down range. Forty feet or so ahead of Glenda’s youngest son, the fruits of his labor lay tangled on the shoulder, piled three deep with a frothy soup of blood and snowmelt spreading around them. Passing his gaze left-to-right while he dug the vibrating phone from his pocket, Cade saw Daymon and Duncan standing shoulder-to-shoulder by the guardrail and reloading their carbines, thin licks of gun smoke curling from the hot muzzles.

  Next, his eyes fell on Jamie, who had advanced on the right. Her tomahawk appeared as a black blur at the end of big angry chopping motions as she cleaved through Z skulls, Ian Bishop’s visage no doubt transposed mentally on each and every one of them. Finally, as he blindly thumbed the Thuraya’s Talk button and brought the phone to his ear, he saw Taryn, Wilson, and Lev moving and firing, and dozens of spent shells arcing up from their bucking carbines spinning and tumbling end over end and glinting the sun along the way.

  With the stench of gunpowder and death assaulting his nostrils, Cade dropped the magazine from his M4 and listened to Brook’s voice mingling with the ringing in his ear. As the click of the fresh magazine seating home registered, the words They’re holding Raven hostage wormed their way into his ear.

  The female first turn bracketed in his sights earned a momentary reprieve as he drew his carbine back through the window and slumped heavily on the seat. Though he heard her loud and clear the first time, he still shot back, “Come again?”

  Brook repeated the ultimatum verbatim, then added, “I’m trading myself for both of them.”

  Cade wanted to scream, but held it in check. Instead, he said, “Have someone get to the road right now and get eyes on the convoy’s six. Make sure they can also provide cover for you at the gate if it comes to that.”

  “Seth’s already on the way.”

  “Good.” There was a long silence. Just the nascent background hiss of radio waves flying into space. “Stall them at every turn,” Cade finally added. “Take your time getting to the road. Once you’re there … get the girls if you can and send them back to the compound right away.”

  “I’ll have someone waiting for them.”

  “OK,” Cade said.

  “I’m going to have Foley bring the fifty cal into play if they don’t honor their end of the deal,” she said.

  “No,” Cade said. “That’ll just escalate things.” He looked over the hood and saw Daymon, chainsaw perched on his shoulder, crabbing over the fallen creatures. To the right the Kids were fanning out and putting their blades to great use, killing anything that still moved.

  “What do I do then?”

  “You are not to go with them, that’s for sure. Stall. Reason. Lie. Do everything in your power to buy me the twenty minutes I need to get there.”

  Voice wavering, she asked, “What then?”

  “I’ll tell them I killed the girl ... and the young man. And they can have me in your place.”

  Now there was a long silence on Brook’s end.

  “Promise me, Brooklyn Grayson,” Cade said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “And I won’t.”

  Before Cade could protest, there was a click and the connection was lost. He tried calling back, but after the requisite rings got only the strange robotic female voice telling him to leave a message after the tone. Intent on keeping all of this to himself for the time being, he thumbed the phone off, laid his rifle on the floor, and worked the control to lower the oddly misshapen plow blade to the road.

  Chapter 70

  Brook whistled and called for Max to come. A handful of seconds later there was a ticking of nails on plywood. Then, tail twitching and with a noticeable hitch in his normally peppy gait, the shepherd entered the light splash on the floor, sat on his haunches at her feet, and regarded her with an inquisitive gaze.

  “Come on, boy,” she said gathering up the two-way Motorola and Thuraya. Before heading to the exit, in case they all had to rabbit, she also grabbed the mate to the long-range multi-channel CB radio Cade had with him.

  She took one long last look at the place she had called home for quite some time now. In doing so, her gaze fell on the monitor and she saw a new scrawled message from the bearded man filling up the screen. Written in black on the legal pad in the same stilted hand were the words: YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO COMPLY BEFORE THE REDHEAD DIES.

  “Fuck you.” Brook set the stopwatch on her Timex scrolling forward, then, steeling herself against the pain to come, grabbed her carbine and Raven’s go bag. With the shooting pain ebbing, she paused in the foyer and went through the pockets of a jacket hanging there. The item she was looking for was tucked deeply into an inside pocket. Her fingers brushed the knurled grip and she brought the Beretta pistol out into the light. She checked the magaz
ine. Full. Braced the pistol between clenched knees and drew the slide back an inch. One in the pipe. Satisfied the weapon was as she had left it, she thumbed back the hammer and tucked it into her pants by the small of her back. One deep breath later, with Max at her heels, she was headed topside.

  All eyes were on her and Max as they crossed the clearing, both walking gingerly, and burning forty-five seconds of the allotted five minutes. She wasted another precious twenty seconds doling out tasks and issuing contingency plans in case things went sideways. After making doubly sure everyone was on the same page, she ushered the shepherd into the F-650 and, with her left hand, threw her carbine, pack, and Raven’s go bag onto the seat.

  With the numerals on her watch indicating Sasha had three minutes to live, Brook fired up the big V10, dropped the transmission into Drive, and sped off towards the feeder road with a pair of muddy rooster tails sprouting behind the fishtailing Ford. Entering the break in the forest with the truck nearly sideways, the last thing she saw when the gravel started its usual symphony of pings was Foley and Tran sprinting for the Humvee.

  State Route 39

  Daymon had the trunk cut away from the left guardrail fairly quickly. Once he had waded through the thick boughs, it took him three minutes from the chain’s first bite until the trunk was resting on the roadside. With the Stihl’s motor throbbing at idle, he extricated himself and trudged six or seven paces to his right, looking for a thin spot in the branches to get to the trunk.

  Seeing movement on the far side of the fallen tree, Cade shouldered his rifle and settled his crosshairs on the lone burnt corpse. He caressed the trigger and heard the brass banging around inside the UDOT truck even before the pink halo blossomed around the thing’s head. He shifted aim and walked his fire right-to-left, away from Daymon, the sizzling rounds passing harmlessly over the section of corpse-choked road that lay between the oblivious firefighter and the others, who were now gathered near the vehicles now parked bumper-to-bumper on the far left shoulder.

  While Daymon worked, Cade kept acquiring and engaging targets on the far side of the toppled tree. An elderly woman wearing a blood-streaked blouse and apron—a cartoonish-looking steaming berry pie and the words COME AND GET IT stitched across her bosom—was first. She fell behind the fallen tree as if yanked to hell by a demon. A tow-headed little boy was next, losing his face and top third of the mussed hairdo to a sizzling 5.56 round.

  Daymon was tearing into the trunk and a quarter of the way through when one unfortunate creature tangled with the whirring chainsaw. A spritz of flesh and brackish blood erupted a dozen feet into the air as the already one-armed first turn disemboweled itself on the howling Stihl.

  Cade flicked his eyes to the scene and noted the grim determination on his friend’s face as he went on about his task. Business as usual. He dropped three more dead approaching Daymon from the left and then his weapon was empty, the bolt locked open, a curl of cordite heavy smoke wafting to the headliner.

  After reloading, he stepped down from the cab and was looking at his watch just as the chainsaw won the battle with the trunk and the solid thunk of the twenty-foot-long piece of log striking the road reverberated through his boot soles. With Daymon making a quick pass of the saw over the upthrust branches to his fore, the grim fact registered in Cade’s mind that only one minute remained on the countdown.

  Wrapping one hand around the grab bar, he shot a thumbs up to Daymon and made a clearing motion with his arm while hollering for everyone to mount up.

  The next part of the plan had already been discussed, and though there was still a number of miles and a bridge crossing ahead of them, if it went off without a hitch Cade figured they just might make it to the compound in time to make a difference in the outcome.

  He climbed back into the truck and dropped it into its lowest gear. There was a grating of metal from up front as he applied a little throttle. Then, as the weight of the prone corpses built against the blade, it vibrated madly one time and bent to the point where it was nearly straight. Confident that the plow was not going to buckle and fail completely, Cade tightened his grip on the wheel and pinned the pedal to the floor.

  Like a cresting wave, the flaccid drift of death consisting of meat and bone and detritus curled up in front of the charging vehicle. Though the blade—no longer an inverted “V”—merely shoved the corpses forward, it still had the intended outcome as their combined weight hit the severed length of log and sent it rolling forward. The staccato crackle of the remaining branches shearing off went on until the trunk had completed one full revolution and began to roll freely.

  Cade eased off the gas and took his eyes from the road long enough to hit the button to disengage the low gearing. When he brought his gaze up, he saw the chunk of tree spin away like a Lincoln Log tossed aside by a petulant child. Next, with nothing pressing them against the blade, he watched the corpses spill off the blade to both sides of the truck in a mad final tumble of flailing arms and legs.

  Another glance at the Suunto told Cade the time was up and there was nothing he could do at that moment but trust Brook and trust God.

  State Route 39

  Near the Eden Compound

  Dregan checked the time. Four minutes down and seconds to go. The words in his head sounded like something a football announcer would say. Only there was nothing sporting about what he was being forced to do. Shaking his head, he reluctantly motioned his brother Henry from the Humvee.

  Muttering under his breath, Henry unfolded his large frame and stood on the steaming road. He took a long drag off his cigarette and placed the still-smoking butt on the vehicle’s flat hood for later. He walked across the road, transited the ditch without getting too muddy, and was bending down to slip through the fence when the low thrum of a strong-running engine met his ears. Hinging up, he looked to his brother and shrugged, arms out palms up, universal semaphore for what now?

  Suddenly at alert, every nerve ending in his body afire, Dregan backed away from the hidden gate. Hearing the engine noise as well as a strange recurring sound of metal striking metal, he put the radio to his lips and barked orders to his hired help. He ended the call after ordering Gregory to get the girls ready for the transfer if it were to transpire.

  Brook didn’t know what was worse … the continuous ear-splitting thunka-thunka-thunka of the entangled strand of barbed wire battering the passenger mirror, hood and fender—in that order, over and over again—or the deafening silence from the electronic devices jostling together in the center console. The noise would soon stop, that was for sure. The middle gate she had just destroyed with the F-650’s beefy front bumper could be fixed. The barbed wire could also be removed from where it had become embedded in the huge off-road tire. But if further instructions didn’t come through the radio’s speaker, what was she to do?

  The radio remained silent as the F-650 cut a wide swath down the feeder road. Soon a branch or something stole the piece of wire and length of fence post and the thunka-thunka-thunka ceased.

  Still, the radio didn’t emit so much as a burst of scratchy static.

  Though she prayed to hear the electronic trill she so despised, the Thuraya sat-phone remained silent. However, she did notice a message on the screen that she had been too preoccupied earlier to heed. On the final straightaway, while holding the wheel one-handed, she read the short message sent from Cade’s phone: Glenda’s son Oliver is alive. Shhhhh … he wants to surprise her. Back soon. Good news amongst all the bad, she supposed. “Well, well, won’t Glenda be happy.” Her face went slack as the back side of the hidden gate materialized out of the distance. She thought: Here I am possibly about to lose a child and the old broad wins the maternal lottery. She smiled at the lady’s good fortune. “What kind of name is Oliver?” she wondered aloud. With so much death and suffering befalling her circle in the last few weeks, suddenly she wanted nothing more than to meet the guy. Hear his story of hope. Who he was. What he was like. And how he’d survived all these months, alone
.

  But first she had some surviving of her own to see to.

  Gravel spattered the undercarriage like shotgun pellets as she jammed the Ford to a halt thirty feet from the gate and hard to the right side of the road. Up ahead in a break in the foliage she could see the light bar and needle antennas of the patrol Tahoe. And though it was painted woodland camouflage and blended in with the trees atop the rise, the roof of some other older model SUV was also visible. “Stay,” she said to Max. She grabbed her carbine, flicked the selector to Fire, and climbed down from the truck.

  ***

  Raven watched and listened intently as Gregory wrapped up the call and stowed his radio in a pocket. Strangely enough, she noted, even after the man stopped talking in his gruff smoker’s voice, the black birds hadn’t resumed their catty back and forth calls. Save for the occasional thump of snow hitting the forest floor, the woods surrounding them on three sides as well as the assemblage of men and machine on the road below was deathly quiet—and remained that way right up until the final seconds were about to tick off of the new five-minute deadline. Then, from somewhere across the road, deep in the thick forest, there was a muffled bang, almost like a minor fender bender had taken place. Immediately following the sudden noise was a ticking of metal striking metal, and then overriding that was a constant banging mixed in with a third vaguely familiar sound, mechanical in nature.

  The second Raven realized the familiar sound was the distinctive throaty exhaust note and deep V10 rumble of her dad’s truck emanating from somewhere along the feeder road, she sat up tall and craned at the road until her neck hurt. Having just overheard the man on the road telling Gregory via the radio to ready her and Sasha for release, her hopes were soaring. And now, hearing the engine noise below growing nearer, she was bubbling over with nervous energy and could barely sit still. Thus, when the engine finally shut off and the sound of a single door opening, then closing, reached her ears, she was on the verge of having her second anxiety attack of the day.