Allegiance (33 page)

Gaines looked around the
cabin at the ashen faces of his men. Cade nodded in sympathy. He had been in a
similar situation with the survivors at the dam. Desantos had mentioned
something about old folks leaping off of a multi-story building in order to
escape the dead, and how the decision to mercy kill the lot of them had been
one of the hardest decisions he’d ever had to make.

Cade watched Gaines come
to some kind of decision. His features changed. Softened.

“Captain. I’m going to
have a pallet of .223 ammo and some cases of rations airlifted to you before
1200 hours.”

Cade looked at his
Suunto wristwatch and did the math.
A little over three hours.

“Copy that,” said the
captain. “I think we’ll be able to hold out. Thank you, General.”

“We take care of our
own, Captain. Now you take care of your men. Let me talk to the governor.”

“Boothe here.”

“Listen to that captain.
I’m going to have some supplies dropped... listen to that young man and work
with him. How many survivors do you have down there?” Gaines asked as he craned
his neck to see the ground from the orbiting ship.

“A couple of thousand.
But we’re having nightly outbreaks... lose a hundred a night.”

“I’m certain you’ll be
OK,” said Gaines. “Clamp it down and work together.” He clicked over and spoke
to Durant. “Get Whipper on the line and make it happen.”

“Copy that,” replied
Durant.

“Let’s go Ari. Can we
catch up with One-Two?”

“Done,” Ari said.

Cade leaned back once
again and listened to the hum of the engines.
Three hours
, he thought to
himself,
and we’ll all be in Canada.

Outbreak - Day 16

Near Victor, Idaho

Four miles and ten
minutes after the trio left the farmhouse in the rearview, the white colonial
with the gigantic red barn loomed on the horizon.

Jenkins inclined his
head towards the rolling green pastures and the buildings beyond. “Daymon, my
man. You can thank the fine folks of Three Rivers Equestrian for the salve on
your gut.”

“Doesn’t look like they
needed it anymore,” he said. “What’d they do? Take the horses with them?”

“No they didn’t,” said
Heidi slowly. She was in the back seat behind Jenkins. Her window was down and
the incoming wind was whipping her blonde hair back into her face. “The fucking
beasts got to them.”

Jenkins let out a
soul-shuddering moan that caused Daymon to jump from his seat. “What’s the
matter?” he asked.

“Gimme the binoculars,”
Jenkins demanded as he slipped the truck into park. “
Now
,” he barked
without removing his eyes from the blurry red mounds dotting the rolling green
expanse.

Calm down
, thought Daymon as he placed them into the
driver’s upturned palm.

Jenkins removed his
glasses, set them on the dash and reluctantly pressed the binoculars to his
face. “No, no, no. You dumbass, Charlie.”

“So what,” said Daymon.
“They’re fuckin’ horses.”

“Those aren’t just any
horses. Those are the ones I rescued,” Jenkins snapped. “Or what is left of
them. Some fucking rescuer... I saved them from a slow death locked up in their
stables. Let ‘em go into the pasture and then I left the gate wide open.”

“Don’t be so hard on
yourself, Charlie,” Heidi said. “You were jumped by a couple of those things.
Weren’t you?”

“That’s no excuse.”

“Let me see those,”
Daymon said.

Jenkins handed over the
binoculars and donned his eyeglasses.

After panning the
pasture, Daymon said, “Listen up, Charlie. I think I have an idea that might
help you feel better. We could drive up there and kill two birds with one
stone.”

Jenkins shot Daymon a
skeptical look. “What are you getting at?”

“I say we roll up there
and siphon the tanks of those two cars. Nose around the house for some food,
and then kill those rotten fuckers.” Daymon looked at Heidi, then shifted his
gaze to Jenkins and continued where he had left off. “Horse meat? Really?
Nobody eats effin horse meat.”

“Those bastards will eat
anything,” replied Jenkins as he urged the Tahoe forward.

***

Daymon was able to
siphon enough gas from the two compacts to top off the Tahoe’s tank. Then he
performed a quick calculation in his head and decided that one more refill
somewhere along the way would probably get them to the GPS coordinates Cade had
given him.

He stowed the hose and
can and retrieved the crossbow and one of the AR-15s from the truck. He slung
the rifle and started off towards the house on the knoll.

On the porch, Heidi was
holding an animated conversation with Jenkins. She had come a long way since he’d
first laid eyes on her at the Teton Pass, thought Daymon. But she certainly had
a long journey ahead of her. Scratch that, he thought.
We
have a long
journey ahead of
us,
and he gathered that he owed it all to Charlie.
Then out of the blue, a mischievous grin cracked his face.

He retraced his steps to
the truck and fetched the machete, then made his way back to the big white
colonial, climbed the stairs, and joined Heidi and Jenkins on the wide
wraparound porch.

“Been inside yet?” Daymon
inquired.

“It’s locked,” said
Heidi, referring to the wide oak door with the prominently displayed ‘
closed
’
sign.

“First things first,”
Daymon said as his smile returned.

Jenkins eyed the
weapons, then flicked his gaze to Daymon. “What’d you break those out for?”

Still grinning, Daymon
placed the machete on the railing nearest Jenkins, set the crossbow against the
wall next to the front door, and shrugged the carbine from his shoulder.

He received a perplexed
look from Heidi, and one of resignation from Jenkins.

“Choose your weapons,”
he said.

Saying nothing, the
former police chief took the machete, clomped along the wooden porch and down
the stairs while calling out a challenge to the feeding zombies. “Come and get
me. Fresh meat over here... no fillers.”

Daymon wrapped an arm
around Heidi and they watched the zombies, one by one, rise from the shredded
horse carcasses and stagger towards Jenkins. “Time for a shooting lesson,” he
said with an added wink.

“What do you recommend?”
she asked.

“Take the rifle. Low
recoil... point and shoot.” He showed her the basics. Then hefted the crossbow
and rested it over his shoulder.

By the time they reached
the bottom of the stairs, all of Jenkins’s hooting and hollering had drawn
quite a crowd. Half a dozen bloody-faced shamblers clutched the stark white
fence, leaving crimson smears everywhere their hands went.

“This one is first,”
Jenkins said, pointing the machete at the first turn with a sloppy mess of
tangled entrails swinging from its maw.

“That bushwhacker is
very
sharp. Be careful,” Daymon said.

Jenkins set his jaw and
raised the machete shoulder high.

“Time for some PETA
street justice,” Daymon said in a sing-song voice as he watched the machete
trace a flat arc towards the zombie’s temple. Although Jenkins hadn’t put
enough muscle behind the blow to cleave the thing’s skull in half, the finely
honed blade still sliced through the corpse’s right orbit bone and became
wedged in its ethmoid—the strip of bone separating the nasal cavity from the
gray matter. With its brain now destroyed, the monster’s jaw released, letting
the intestines plop to the grass.

“Hell yeah. Feeling
better?”

“I’ll let you know in a
minute,” Jenkins said. Then he walked down the fence line, leaving split skulls
and crumpled flesh eaters along the way.

“Save one for Heidi.”

“There’ll be more,”
Jenkins replied quietly as he buried the machete into the last creature’s
skull. “There always are.”

Mission accomplished
, thought Daymon.
Looks like the real Charlie
is back.

***

Twenty minutes later,
after the trio had gone through the two-story house room by room, they stood on
the porch with nothing to show in the way of food and water except for two cans
of something a vagrant wouldn’t eat and a glass jar of crap that a food drive
would probably reject.

“Dibs on the marinated
artichoke hearts,” Daymon said, tossing the jar from one hand to the other.
“That leaves sliced water chestnuts and”—he scrutinized the faded label of the
third can—“lutefisk... what the hell is lutefisk?”

“Cod, I think,” said
Heidi.

Jenkins hitched a thumb
in his belt. “Left in a hurry, didn’t they.”

“I think
bolted
is the word,” Daymon replied.

“My appetite is
returning and this stuff isn’t going to cut it. What are we going to eat?”
Heidi gazed at Daymon waiting for a response.

“The good news... we’ve
got a full tank. And we’ve got a few waters left.” Daymon paused a beat and
looked out over the pastures where what remained of the dead horses had already
drawn a ravenous murder of crows. And as they fed and cawed and carried on, he
added in a low reassuring voice, “Don’t worry hon, we’ll rustle up some food.
Promise.”

***

As Jenkins maneuvered
the Tahoe along 33, he remained silent, focused inward deep in thought. The
question that had been nagging him since leaving the Three Rivers Equestrian
Center was why the last ones out hadn’t seen fit to let the horses go free.
Then he reflected on the effect the monsters that used to be living, breathing
citizens had on him. Young or old, male or female, even though they were infected
by the Omega virus and were nothing but walking corpses, putting a bullet or a
blade in them didn’t sit well with him. And then the realization that his loved
ones were still out there somewhere—monsters wandering around in search of
human flesh—came to the fore and hit him like a mule kick. He said a silent
prayer that someone, some survivor like him or Daymon or Heidi would come into
contact with them and ease their pain. He didn’t care how, so long as their
suffering in this hell on earth ceased. Then he reflected back to the zombies
he had just dispatched. How every one of them had had rough, cracked, and
calloused hands, and wind-burned faces, indicative of a person who worked
outside for a living—on a horse farm perhaps. Then he remembered the scuffed
and worn cowboy boots one of them had been wearing and it clicked. Suddenly the
anger and white hot rage that had pushed him over the edge and had driven him
to hack the creatures to death morphed into a sense of serenity. His grip on
the wheel lessened and his jaw relaxed.
Yes
, he thought,
the folks at
Three Rivers were undoubtedly horse lovers just like him
. And, he guessed,
they probably couldn’t bring themselves to put down people they knew—who had
become infected—just to spare a few horses. He still had the horror of putting
his own wife down indelibly etched in his memory. The fact that even in his
frequent nightmares he could smell the coppery tang of her blood as he placed
her cold corpse in the bathtub made the idea of hating a person who had been
put in the same position seem utterly absurd to him.

“Jenkins, slow the eff
down!” Daymon bellowed.

Looking down at the
speedometer, Jenkins noticed the needle pulling back from sixty. That meant he
had to have been doing as least seventy while perseverating about his hand in
the death of a few animals. “You drive, then,” he said. He put the big disc
brakes to work and brought the Tahoe to a sudden stop on the shoulder. “I’m
fatigued as it is. Maybe even a little depressed... but I’m no shrink.”

“So you’re sleepy... and
she’s hungry. Then what dwarf am I?” Daymon said, trying to lighten the mood.

“Certainly not bashful,”
Heidi quipped.

Jenkins slipped the
truck into park, popped his seat belt, and traded places with Daymon.

Once they were moving
again Heidi spoke up from the rear seat. “You didn’t answer the question,
Charlie, which dwarf is Daymon?”

Not wanting to offer up
an answer that would be taken the wrong way, he glanced over his shoulder and
shot her a look that said,
Leave me the hell out of this
.

“Come on Charlie... play
along,” chided Heidi.

“Goddamnit, I just
killed six of those things. And the only difference between me and them is that
I
haven’t been bit
yet
. And the fact that I lost my cool and did
them in with a machete makes me feel like some kind of serial killer.” He
looked away at the barren countryside flashing by.

“Get used to it,
Charlie,” said Daymon as he steered around an overturned car. “They aren’t ever
going to stop coming.” And as if to confirm his statement, a pale arm reached out
from the crushed passenger compartment, groping for the passing SUV.

Daymon suddenly slowed
at the bottom of a long sweeping curve and pointed up the hill, where tendrils
of black smoke curled into the air. At the end of a short drive that teed off
of a narrow feeder road was a small plat of land, with a large oak standing
sentinel over a pale blue garage and some remains smoldering where he guessed a
house once stood. Milling about the property were more creatures than Daymon
cared to count; some were charred black, but most were just your garden variety
zombie—pale, shabbily clothed, and relentless. Suddenly, the gaunt faces turned
at once and locked their milky eyes on the white and black Tahoe. Then, as if a
switch was flipped, a ripple of movement coursed through the amassed dead and
the herd began to shamble towards 33.

“Shit... there’s gotta
be a hundred of ‘em,” exclaimed Daymon. “And that is the same yellow Hummer I
saw yesterday.”

“There’s not much left
of the house,” added Jenkins as he swapped his glasses for the binoculars.
“Just a few bricks that
used
to be a chimney.”

“I remember seeing that
ugly yellow truck parked at the
House
,” Heidi hissed.

“Yeah, I’ve seen it
before,” Jenkins admitted. “It belonged to that movie star prick who owned the
House.
He drove it around town whenever he decided to jet in from Hollywood and grace
the little people of Jackson with his presence. We used to joke about the
color... called it ‘
look at me yellow
.’”

“Fitting,” Daymon said.
“For a 5-foot-2 shrimp. Probably has blocks on the pedals so he can reach ‘em.”
He rolled up his window, trying to shut out the stench, and eased his foot from
the brake.

“I hope that whoever was
in there died a painful death... no, make that a thousand painful deaths,”
Heidi spat. “Just the thought that those animals who drugged me and did who
knows what while I was under might still be running around out here makes me
sick to my stomach.” She slumped into her seat, blinking away tears. Although
her memory of the events was like a patchwork quilt missing many pieces, the
slices of time that she couldn’t recall were filled in by her very vivid
imagination.