Steve-O unbelted and planted his elbows on the seatbacks. “Walking can be dangerous,” he said soberly. “Especially in cowboy boots.” He adjusted his Stetson. “But I like your idea, Lee Riker. I’m on board.”
“First things first,” Benny said. “We need to get where we were going and follow through with our promise to Rose.” He paused. “Last thing I want to do is piss her off and end up on the same no-nookie-gettin’ island as Lee.”
Shooting Benny a dose of stink eye, Riker tossed the Steiners onto his friend’s lap, achieving a direct hit to the family jewels. “Now you won’t have a choice,” he quipped. “Employ those bad boys. Keep a sharp eye out for deaders or breathers. But first, since we’ll be out of range soon”—he fished the two-way radio from a pocket—“better call Trinity and tell Tara and Rose that we’re taking the long way into town.”
Keeping to himself the anger management barb he was about to hurl at Lee, Benny took the radio from his friend and placed a quick check-in call.
Chapter 2
Tara swung the machete on a flat plane, right-to-left, dipping and twisting her hips at the exact moment the gleaming blade struck the wrist-thick sapling. A second swing was necessary to cleave through it completely. As she tossed the fledgling tree aside, her gaze fell on the three-inch nub protruding from the ground.
Being quite the Type-A personality, it had bugged her when Lee had insisted that a few inches of stubble left behind wasn’t going to be an issue in the grand scheme of things. When she had pressed him on it, he had parted the hardy underbrush and scraped the ground with the machete, revealing to her a small portion of the field of oversized pavers underneath the thick accumulation of decaying leaves and intertwined twigs.
It’s a landing pad, Lee had said. If you pull the trees out roots and all, it’ll disturb the pavers and leave us with a surface less even than the one we have now.
Tara admitted he had a point. Though she was a thirty-two-year-old grown ass woman, she still hated it when big brother was right. Lately, as hard as it was for her to admit, he had been right more often than not.
The circular plot of land she was clearing was roughly a quarter of a mile uphill from Trinity House. A worn path climbed from the door in the back wall to a break in the mature trees ringing the plot.
Long ago, likely in the eighties or early nineties, the plot had been clear ground. Taking into account how uneven the trees on the periphery had grown since, it was likely they had once seen constant pruning on the sides facing the clearing. In the years since, Mother Nature had come a long way toward reclaiming what had once been hers.
Tara and Rose had spent several hours over two days under hot sun clearing underbrush. Today, Tara was working solo. With Dozer lounging nearby, watching with canine indifference, she had chopped her way across a third of the clearing, leaving standing in her wake a half-dozen juvenile trees that would require an axe to fell.
On the far edge of the clearing, partly shrouded by early morning fog, were a number of trees Lee had marked with big white Xs. To bring those down, they would definitely need a chainsaw—a tool they didn’t have.
Running down a chainsaw was one of the many reasons Lee, Benny, and Steve-O had gone on their road trip south. Finding out if Rose’s friend, Crystal, was still alive was the prime objective. In Tara’s opinion—which she hadn’t had the heart to share with Rose—going out of their way to find Crystal was all risk and no reward. Tara hadn’t known Crystal before the woman brought danger to their doorstep; therefore she couldn’t empathize with her situation. She’d made her own bed, may as well sleep in it.
Tara paused to take a sip of water. As she ran the back of her hand over her sweaty forehead, she felt a subliminal tingling caress the nape of her neck. Last time she had experienced the sensation was at Shorty’s boat ramp. At the time she had been standing guard over the truck and had caught some teens watching her. That they had come with bad intentions was a certainty. Tara’s gut had been the judge of that. Showing them the business end of a stubby shotgun was all it took to set them on their way armed with the message that she was not to be fucked with.
As Tara looked about the clearing, eyes probing the depths of the shadowy tangle of flora surrounding her, Dozer raised his massive head and did the same. Nose twitching, he rose and took a few tentative steps toward the yet to be cleared portion of the plot.
The hackles along Dozer’s spine sprang to attention. Ears cocked forward, pink nose probing the air, he went statue still, all of his attention directed north, where something or someone was prowling the edge of the property still to be explored.
She capped the bottle and stuffed it in a side pocket of her cargo pants. She sheathed the machete and drew her compact Glock. With an extended magazine holding seventeen nine-millimeter rounds stuffed in the magwell, the playing field was now tilted in her favor.
“Dozer … leave it.” Last thing she needed was for the pitbull to go crashing off into the woods. As far as she knew, animals were immune to Romero. Still, she didn’t want to test the theory. Meeting Dozer’s gaze, she pointed at the ground by her boots. It was one of the handful of silent commands she had taught the dog over the course of a week and a half.
Still growling, Dozer sauntered over to the patch of ground beside Tara, sitting when she flashed him her clenched fist.
Tara rewarded the dog with a kibble, then took a pair of two-way radios from a pocket.
“Red or Green?” she asked herself. Teal for Trinity suddenly came to her. Teal was a shade of green. Teal begins with T. It was a word association technique she’d applied to help remind her which of the radios was on the same channel as Rose’s two-way.
Pressing the Talk button, Tara made herself a mental note to mark the radios with indelible ink once she returned to the house.
“Rose. You there?”
Nothing.
While Tara waited for a response, the other radio came alive. It was Benny relaying the change in plans.
Hearing the familiar voice, Dozer regarded the radio, then rose and spun a tight half-circle. Facing the trail leading back to Trinity House, the dog pressed his body flat to the ground and let out another low growl.
“Thanks for the heads up,” Tara said. “Tell my bro to be careful.” She paused. Rose’s radio silence on her mind, she went on, “You guys bring Steve-O back in one piece, you hear?”
After a short pause, Benny said, “Steve-O wants me to tell you he will make sure no sickos hurt me or Lee.”
Smiling at that, Tara said, “I bet you will, Steve-O. See you guys later.” She rolled the volume down and pocketed the red radio.
Pressing the teal radio to her lips, she hailed Rose. Still nothing. She tried three more times, the urgency in her voice rising exponentially with each new attempt.
Finally, after thirty long seconds, during which the only sound in the clearing was Dozer’s incessant growling, the radio came to life with a burst of squelch.
“I’m here,” Rose blurted. “Sorry, Tara. You sounded worried. I’m really sorry to have kept you hanging on like that.”
Thumbing the Talk button, Tara said, “Why in the hell weren’t you answering?”
“I didn’t have the radio on me,” Rose admitted. “I got to cleaning the fireplace in the great room. When I heard your call, I had to go and retrace my steps to find where I had left it.” She paused, drew a deep breath, then went on, saying: “I found something in the communal room that you’re going to want to see. Something I can’t do justice by just describing it over the radio.”
Tara shook her head. The ease at which Rose could bounce from something so serious to the mundane was astounding. Everyone was supposed to keep a radio on their person at all times. Just because someone was indoors and passing the time cleaning a room that had already been thoroughly scrubbed didn’t mean they were exempt from Lee’s most important house rule.
If Trinity House were to come under attack and everyone forced to flee, the radios would
be their only lifeline. Their only way to eventually link back up. And though Tara wanted to lay into Rose over the transgression—the third over the last two days—she let it slide. The something Rose had alluded to could also wait. At the moment nothing down at the house was more important than finding out what had Dozer so on edge.
Adding the task of making a lanyard for Rose’s radio to her lengthening mental to-do list, Tara said, “Dozer is going nuts. You see anything on the monitors?”
In addition to solar power, geothermal heating, and its own artesian-fed water supply, Trinity House had come equipped with a web of cameras that covered the sprawling estate’s entry, parking pad, interior courtyards, and its entire perimeter.
“I got nothing,” Rose answered. “No movement. No stinkers. Do you smell anything? Can you hear them breaking brush?”
Early on, the vast majority of the living dead Tara and the others encountered hadn’t given off much of an odor. Now, nearly three weeks after Romero had burned its way across the country, springing from mass casualty events in the big cities and spreading across the countryside like ripples on a pond, the appearance of bloated walking corpses was usually preceded by the sickly-sweet pong of their decaying flesh.
While the stench of carrion was a welcome early warning system, knowing the dead things were out there without actually being able to see them was, in a way, more disconcerting than the alternative.
Tara cocked an ear toward where Dozer was directing his attention. After a few seconds of hard listening and drawing in deep breaths through her nose, she said, “I didn’t hear a thing. Don’t smell ‘em, either.”
There was a long pause. When Rose finally came back on, she said, “What is it that your brother is always telling us to do?”
With no delay, Tara said, “Trust your gut.”
“What’s your gut telling you?”
“It’s saying blast the woods in the direction Dozer’s looking. But that would be stupid. You’re down there and my bro says rounds fired can travel a long way. They also drop a bit while they’re on the fly.”
“Why don’t you come in and have an early lunch? Call it brunch. You deserve a break. You’ve been going nonstop since me and Benny got here.”
“I can wait,” Tara said. We’re getting low on food, was what she was really thinking.
Though she couldn’t beat Steve-O up for it because he had meant well, the impromptu shopping trip to the overrun Smiths in Santa Fe had netted them more junk food than the kind high in nutritional value. Another thing high on her mental to-do list was to conduct a foraging mission to one of the homes down the valley. She figured if she could find one occupied—and they didn’t shoot prior to hearing her out—she might work a gold for food swap. She also held out hope that some of the homes were uninhabited. Several times over the past week she and Lee had walked the road to a nearby break in the trees and scanned the valley through binoculars. Not once had they detected signs of life at any of the half-dozen or so homes visible to them. No movement behind darkened windows. No telltale wisps of smoke coming from chimneys. No sounds other than the occasional muffled gunshot or engine noise lifting up from Santa Fe’s distant suburbs.
The first time they had walked beyond their vantage point, to the first fork in the road, Lee had arranged a line of dirt clods across the juncture in places where they would likely be crushed under the tires of passing vehicles.
Over the ensuing three days, during which there had been zero precipitation, Tara and Lee had returned twice daily to the fork in the road. When the third day came and went with Lee’s dirt clods having gone untouched, they concluded that the majority of the homes on the hillside below Trinity House were likely uninhabited.
While Tara had proffered that they were most likely vacation homes or investment properties being used as Airbnb rentals, Lee insisted that some of them had to be inhabited.
Only way to find out, Lee had said, was to go down and knock on some doors.
Before leaving on the current foray south, he had made her promise to not go it alone.
Voice a bit strained, Rose asked, “You still there, Tara?”
“Sorry,” Tara replied, “I was zoning. Lost in thought, that’s all.”
“You coming back soon?”
“No,” Tara answered. “I’m going to keep at it for a while longer. If I smell anything, I’ll wrap it up and come in for an early lunch. Or brunch.”
Sounding dejected, Rose said, “Whatever. It’s your gut. I’ll watch the monitors real close. Keep the volume up on your radio so you’ll hear me if I call.”
“Best if you keep the radio in your pocket,” Tara said primly. “I’ll check in with you in a bit.”
Before stowing the radio in the pocket with the other, Tara rolled the volume down to a level she hoped would let her hear the soft warble without giving her position away to the whole world. Without the constant noise pollution emitted by planes, trains, and automobiles, sound up here tended to travel great distances. Which was why Tara had added a pair of Motorola ear buds to the many other must-haves she’d snuck onto her bro’s shopping list. She wished she could see his expression when he unfolded the page and saw all of her additions to his list.
Smiling at the adverse reaction her scribbles were likely to bring, she grabbed hold of another sapling and swung the machete. Tossing the cutting aside, she recognized how much work still lay in front of her. It was at least a day’s worth. Two if Lee came back with an axe instead of a chainsaw.
How Lee had determined how much extra clearance Clark would need to land his helicopter on the pad was still a mystery. Hell, Lee had yet to tell her how he came to see this overgrown hole in the woods as anything but an ideal spot for nude sunbathing or to throw a late night stargazing party—the latter of which she had done, albeit solo, a couple of times now.
If the world ever got back to normal, first thing on her list was to have a contractor come out and give her a bid on putting in an infinity-edge pool. Lord knows there was room for one. Maybe even a sauna and hot tub.
She crossed her arms and scanned the perimeter one last time. Yeah, she thought, this would be the perfect place for a little oasis. Far enough removed from the house to ensure privacy, yet close enough to have a pool boy on standby to run down and fetch her a cold Corona.
Then, like a sneaker wave on a docile beach, reality came crashing back on her. Mood taking a sudden turn for the worse, she spit a few choice curse words and attacked the next sapling with newfound vigor.
Chapter 3
Front and center on the Shelby’s navigation pane was the thirteen-mile-long stretch of Veterans Memorial Highway they were currently barreling down. After curling around Santa Fe’s west side, the desolate four-lane eventually cut back on itself and crossed underneath I-25, which in turn fed southwest to Albuquerque, and north by east to Santa Fe.
For the first couple of miles or so, the opposing lanes were tied up completely by a series of horrendous wrecks. As they neared the beginning of a long stretch of divided four-lane, Riker was forced to slow the high-performance pickup to a crawl and bull through a sizeable herd of undead clustered around an especially nasty multi-car pileup.
Five miles from the first roadblock, Veteran’s Memorial bypassed the Santa Fe suburb of Agua Fria. Once home to nearly three thousand souls, the city looked like a ghost town, every stoplight dark and no vehicles cutting the streets.
The closer they got to their ultimate destination, the smoother travel became. Which seemed strange to Riker, because they were nearing the junction with US 84, maybe six or seven miles ahead.
The longer Riker had to dwell on what he was seeing, the more he came to believe that the people responsible for the first roadblock had likely set ones similar outside the cities fed by I-25. Adding fuel to his budding roadblock theory was that the only vehicles they saw moving the entire time they’d been driving Veteran’s Memorial came as they were closing on the I-25 overpass.
They heard th
e convoy of two dozen shiny Harley Davidson motorcycles well before they saw them. Scooting away from the cloverleaf feeding onto I-25, at nearly double the posted limit, the noisy train of chrome and painted metal, ridden by figures dressed in leathers and wearing helmets, blipped by in the blink of an eye.
Returning his eyes to the road ahead, Riker said, “What do you think, fellas? Weekend warriors or outlaw bikers?”
“Wall Street Angels,” Benny replied. “Their gear and bikes were way too put together for them to be one-percenters.”
“I’m with Benny,” Steve-O said. “Hell’s Angels have tiny helmets and beards and tattoos.”
“They also have those winged-skull patches on back of their jackets,” Benny added.
“I didn’t see any of that,” replied Riker as he craned to get a look at an upcoming overpass. On the navigation screen the span was labeled Interstate 25. It ran east to west over Veteran’s Memorial, with Santa Fe presenting as a wide-open sprawl way off in the bottom left corner of the display, and Albuquerque somewhere off screen to the right.
As the Shelby gobbled up the distance to the elevated highway, Riker saw zombies beginning to congregate at the low rail. Flashes of color among the multitude of vehicles stalled out up there suggested more were still to come out of the metaphorical woodwork. By the time the pickup had drawn to within a hundred feet or so of the shadow of the overpass, it was clear to Riker the twenty or more zombies drawn to the edge of the precipice by the thundering Harleys were now fixated solely on his shiny blue pickup.
Before the viewing angle was cut short by the front edge of the pickup’s roofline, everyone aboard was privy to the surreal sight of the first row of zombies pitching over the rail.
Realizing the deadly predicament unfolding before his eyes, Riker said, “Shit, shit, shit,” and stomped the pedal. Shouting to be heard over the supercharger whine, he implored his friends to brace for impact.
Riker's Apocalypse (Book 3): The Precipice Page 2
