Allegiance (34 page)

“You’re going to be just
fine,” Daymon said. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Promise.” He really
wanted to tell her about Cade and how the soldier had scooped up Robert
Christian, and that there was undoubtedly a gallows and a hangman’s noose in
the rapist’s immediate future. But if just the sight of a vehicle linked to her
ordeal was enough to bring everything to the surface, he reasoned, then letting
the fact be known that the main culprit was still alive and kicking was totally
out of the question.

They had only been
moving for a minute and had covered less than a mile when Daymon stopped the
rig abruptly on the centerline. “Lu Lu!” he cried. He’d thought he had been
seeing things the night before, and yet, as he looked off into the distance at
the green Scout with the unmistakable black E painted on her, he still couldn’t
believe his eyes.

“Who the hell is Lu Lu?”
inquired Jenkins.

“My International
Scout.”

“Sure as shit is Lu Lu,”
rasped Heidi, who had composed herself and had her upper body wedged between
the front seats again and the binoculars pressed to her face. “But there are a
couple of those walking corpses hanging around.”

Incredulous, Jenkins
asked, “How in the hell did your Scout get here? We’re what, ten... fifteen
miles from where you left it.”

“I don’t know, but I’m
sure as hell going to try and find out.”

Heidi shook her head.
“What are you going to do about those things?”

He put the truck in
neutral and allowed it to coast down the slight grade. Then, once gravity had
taken over and they were barreling silently towards Lu Lu and the zombies, he
held his right hand out, palm up, like a surgeon in the OR demanding a scalpel.
“Machete,” he said, without taking his eyes from the road.

Jenkins obliged, and
when the Tahoe had pulled parallel to the smaller Scout, Daymon secured the
brake, put it in park, and then hopped out.

From inside the truck
Heidi called out to Daymon. “Be careful,” she hollered. Then she curled up on
the bench seat, and covered her head with Jenkins’s uniform jacket. She
couldn’t stand to watch. Between the zombie bodies Daymon and Jenkins had piled
up at the farmhouse outside of Driggs and the head chopping spree at the horse
farm, she had seen enough splattered brains to last a lifetime.

The first turns
staggered from the road’s shoulder and approached the Tahoe on the passenger
side.

Daymon got as low to the
pavement as his lanky frame would allow, and when he rounded the front end of
the rig he was doing some kind of contorted duck walk, only the top of his
dreadlocks visible to Jenkins. Scudding along, seemingly floating over the
white hood, the tightly wound locks looked like some kind of mutant tribble
from Star Trek.

In the back seat, Heidi
jumped when the two creatures bashed into the sheet metal in an attempt to get
at Jenkins.

Hurry the hell up
, Jenkins thought to himself as the flesh eater
swiped its bloated tongue along the window inches from his face. Then, in his
side vision, the abomination’s head disappeared from the nose up. When he
turned his head to the right, he caught a glimpse of gray brain nestled in a
honeycomb of white as the creature’s chin bonked against the window channel on its
way to the ground.

Daymon watched the ghoul
collapse in a heap, and with the well-balanced machete in a loose, right-handed
grip backpedaled to create some distance between himself and the other
staggering mess. Minus one ear and missing a majority of its fingers, the
hissing cadaver—whether male or female he hadn’t a clue—looked like it had
fended off one hell of an attack before dying and joining the ranks of the
walking dead.

“Hey Stumpy. Over here,”
Daymon called out. Then, just as the zombie pivoted and set off headlong
towards the new meat, the Tahoe’s window lowered and Jenkins straight-armed his
pistol and shot it in the head from less than a yard away.

Daymon winced as what
seemed like ten pounds of gray matter exited opposite the bullet’s entry point
and splattered all over Lu Lu. God, how he’d missed his truck. He’d been so
overwhelmed with emotion when he had abandoned her that he hadn’t had a chance
to say a proper goodbye. Now that she was wearing half a walker’s brains, he
didn’t know if he even wanted to go near her.

“Thanks Chief,” he said
sarcastically. “Why did you have to go and do that for? I had it covered.”

“Wasn’t in the mood for
any more head splitting,” Jenkins replied as he slid out of the Tahoe.

The rear door creaked
open and Heidi stepped out timidly, tip toed over the bodily fluids and bolted
to Daymon’s side.

As Jenkins looked on,
Heidi gave Daymon more lovin’ in the span of a minute than he’d seen her give
the man in three days.

“Get a room,” Jenkins
said.

Daymon flipped him the
bird and the couple walked arm in arm towards the gore-splashed Scout.

“If only you could
speak, little lady,” Daymon said to Lu Lu as he used the machete’s rounded
blade to scrape detritus from around the door handle. Then, as he went to open
the door, the vehicle lurched once and then shimmied on its worn springs.

He looked over at
Jenkins and cast his gaze to Heidi. Both were nowhere close enough to the
vehicle to have touched it, let alone have caused the movement. And neither one
of them seemed to have noticed the tremor. Daymon wondered if he had imagined
the whole thing, then reminded himself that getting bit was usually the penalty
for displaying a cavalier attitude. So before he opened the door, he decided to
check the interior from the relative safety of the outside. He wiped a
four-inch square of road grime from the rear glass and peered in. All he saw
was his firefighting turnout gear. On them, the words
Property of JHFD
were stenciled in white, inch-high letters. Underneath the Nomex protective
clothing he could see his old, double-bladed axe poking out.

Next he walked around to
the passenger side and looked into the back seat area, where days ago three
Delta Force operators had been sardined hip to hip with all of their weapons
and gear and attitude. He didn’t expect to find anything, and was shocked to
discover what looked like a bruised and bloody corpse. Legs and arms drawn into
a fetal curl, the slight man looked to have been of Asian descent. And the
longer he stared at the man’s profile, the more he felt like he had seen the
man somewhere before.

“Jenkins, can you come
here for a second?”

“A second is about all
we have,” Jenkins answered. “We got an undead posse heading our way.”

“How far?”

Jenkins lowered the
binoculars. “’Bout a quarter mile,” he said. “Maybe a little less. Gives us
about three or four minutes, I gather.” He made his way around the front of the
Tahoe. “What do you got?”

“This guy look familiar
to you?”

Jenkins cocked his head
and furrowed his brow. “What do you mean,
guy
?”

“Just look in there,”
Daymon said, stepping back from window.

“Well I’ll be. Looks
like he ain’t going to be serving High Tea ever again,” Jenkins said. “You
haven’t seen him move?”

“No... I’m pretty sure
he’s dead.”

“Why
don’t you forget about him and forget about
Lu Lu...
and let’s
go.
”

“Lemme see those
binocs,” Daymon said.

Jenkins handed them
over.

“We’ve got time,” Daymon
stated. Then he whistled. “Jesus... would you look at the critter in front,
he’s huge.”

“I noticed him already.
That
was
Lucas Brother, one of Ian Bishop’s guys.”

“What did you just say?”
Heidi said sharply. She stormed over and snatched the field glasses from
Daymon’s hands. She adjusted them to fit her narrow feminine features and had a
look for herself. As soon as the charred zombie came into focus, a week’s worth
of horrible memories came flooding back. Without a doubt it
was
Lucas—matted and singed blond locks and all. The mere sight of him caused her
hands to shake uncontrollably.

While everyone’s
attention had been focused on the advancing throng, Lu Lu began to rock gently
on her shot springs and the driver door popped open.

Daymon pulled Heidi
behind him and looked to Jenkins, who had his pistol aimed over Lu Lu’s roof in
the general area where the thing was most likely to emerge.

“Save your ammo,” Daymon
barked as he stalked around the SUV, holding the machete loosely in his right
hand. “Don’t watch if you can’t hack it.” He chuckled at this. “Get it?
Hack
it.”

Jenkins stared daggers
at the dreadlocked former firefighter.
Smartass
, he thought. Then he
returned his gaze to the abomination scrabbling from the vehicle, then back to
Daymon who had the machete in the air, ready to bring it down for the coup de
gras.

Muscles tensed, Daymon
wondered how the hell a
zombie
had wormed its way from the back seats to
the front and
then
managed to work the goddamn door handle. Hell, if he
didn’t know any better he was probably looking at the zombie evolution taking
place right before his eyes. Then he about shit himself when the battered creature
turned and uttered the words: “Help me.”

Outbreak - Day 16

Draper, South Dakota

Jasper steered the dusty
old Chevy onto the shoulder. He didn’t know why. Habit, he guessed. He could
have stopped smack dab in the middle of the road without repercussions. Hell,
he coulda jammed the brakes on without looking; there was no chance of getting
rear-ended.

Truth was he hadn’t seen
a vehicle or a living soul traveling this lonely stretch of blacktop since July
turned into August—a full week into this madness. By that time he had already
put down his wife and his two kids. One of the wandering monsters had gotten to
them while he had been out disposing of the human shells that had been his
closest neighbors.

He had arrived back into
town to find Delores, his wife and best friend of a dozen years bleeding out on
the kitchen floor of their old house with the monster’s face still buried in
her guts. He decapitated the thing with one of Delores’s prized Henckels, the
ones they’d gotten as a wedding gift so many years prior. Two or three quick
sawing motions and the serrated knife relieved the undead stranger of its head.
After which Jasper buried the blade into his wife’s eye socket when she began
to reanimate.

In the backyard, in the
shade of the elm under which two cats and way too many goldfish were interred,
he found his oldest eating his youngest—Bobby with a mouth full of Jenny’s
entrails was a sight that would haunt him ‘til the day he died—and he nearly
did that day.

But in the end he
couldn’t bring himself to add another body to the gun that had put down his
only two children. He buried his family that day, but not under the elm. He
took the time and did it right. Three graves, each one of them three feet wide
by six feet long, and dug six feet deep into the earth. It took him all
day—backbreaking labor for certain—but his family deserved no less.

He sat in the truck with
the engine running, thinking about his family and what he could have done
different. Drawing a blank, he ran a hand through his chestnut-brown hair. It
was short from the razor cut he’d given himself prior to conducting the solemn
graveside service, and hadn’t grown out much since. His face had a week’s worth
of reddish stubble working hard to cover up two weeks’ worth of heartache and
stress. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow and glanced in the
rearview at the twisted limbs and contorted death masks worn by the dead—the
same folks who had been his good neighbors.

Still, the Mathersons
wouldn’t receive the same courtesy as his family. Their moldering bodies would
go on the growing pile in the cemetery with the rest of the
townspeople—seventy-something in total—who had succumbed to this thing the
people in Sioux Falls called Omega. The same desperate folks who had been so
thoughtful as to have delivered it here, to Draper, a hundred and eighty easy
miles due east, right down the I-90.

Omega
, thought Jasper.
Couldn’t have picked a more
appropriate name. No coming back from this one. No way. Not breathing and
possessing a pulse anyway.

He looked through the
back window at the white church steeple. Woulda been nice to have had a service
for the Mathersons but it was only him now. No priest. No pall bearers. No
choir. Just him and the birds.

He shifted his gaze to
Dale. The extra puckered eye on his forehead was not becoming of him. It sure
was amazing what a little deuce-deuce pistol could do to a zombie at point
blank range, and the lead, Jasper supposed, was probably still hanging out with
Dale’s scrambled brains somewhere inside of his blood-slickened dome.

He had stopped short of
the overflowing graveyard for a reason. Not because he wanted to gaze at his
dead cargo. It was the sight and sound of the strange-looking whirly birds
heading northeast towards the capitol that had drawn him to pull over. High in
the sky they droned along. One black and angular. The other seemingly built out
of spare parts. It had two forward facing propellers ten sizes too big. How the
thing landed without chewing up the runway was anyone’s guess.

He watched for a beat as
they cut through the azure sky, and then when his personal airshow had
concluded and they were out of view he jammed the truck into drive and headed
for the mound. As the truck jounced over the rounded shoulder and back onto the
smooth roadway, he put one hand on the shotgun on the seat next to him.
Just
in case
, he thought to himself. Just in case disposing of the dead proved
too hard to bear and he couldn’t see the task through to the end.

He already knew what the
muzzle of the little .22 pistol tasted like. Gun oil commingled with the
mineral tang of cordite. If he used the shotgun he’d decided he wouldn’t put
the thing in his mouth. He’d already run this scenario through his head a
hundred times. He’d park the Chevy next to the holes in the ground where
Delores, Jenny, and Bobby were slowly doing the ashes to ashes and dust to dust
part of the short service he’d performed for them. He’d stay inside the truck
with a photo of them on the dash. Under his chin is where he would place the
business end of the twelve gauge—then he’d pull the trigger. No way he’d
chicken out. Not with the shotgun.

Three more houses to
clear of the ones he knew were really dead. And nearly double that many that
still had living dead inside. Then he’d be going home to see them. Two days at
most, he hoped.

The organic hum
emanating from the feeding birds was reaching his ears over the V8’s soft
throaty rumble. And as he left the road and wheeled north to the graveyard, the
crows and ravens and buzzards took flight in a blast of black feather and
murderous cries. Bracketed by the mature dogwoods planted decades ago on the
west and east sides of the cemetery, the dark-feathered raptors all but blotted
out the sky, dipping and diving over the sea of grave markers and putrefying
flesh.

 Ignoring the aerial
display, Jasper reversed until the rear bumper met resistance with flesh and
bone. He hopped out, skirted the truck, and quickly dropped the tailgate with a
clang.
Oh to be young again
, he thought as he pulled on rigor-stiffened
limbs in order to move the Mathersons to their final resting place. The three
kids were the easiest of the six to remove, and Grandma Matherson might as well
have been a kid because her frail body matched the little ones’ weight. Dale and
his wife Loraine were another story altogether. Both loved their food
deep-fried and were easily north of two hundred and fifty pounds. Lugging their
dead weight out of the Chevy nearly broke the volunteer undertaker’s back.

He went around to the
cab and punched open the glove box, retrieved his tattered King James edition
and slammed the door. When he turned around, two of the walking corpses were
within spitting distance. He reopened the door, clambered across the bench seat
and clutched the scatter gun with one hand before popping out on the driver’s
side. The fact that the rotting pair had been able to sneak up on him was
supremely disconcerting.
Maybe the things are learning
, he thought as an
involuntary shudder wracked his body at the prospect.

He crunched a shell into
the chamber and let the dead trudge closer. Thankfully he didn’t recognize
either one of them.
Probably from one of the big cities
, thought Jasper.
Lately, most of them were
.

He didn’t relish the
idea of seeing another dead body with a face full of buck, but he was left with
no other alternative. He brought the muzzle up and pulled the trigger. The
discharge punched the stock into his shoulder but the damage to the shambling
creature was far worse—fatal, in fact.

The frail cadaver left
the ground and flew backwards through the air a half dozen feet and came back
down with a hollow thud. The gray matter that exited its skull travelled much
further and painted the dry earth in a wide arc.

Jasper followed the same
routine and pulped the other walker’s face with a well-aimed shot.

He shifted his gaze to
where the gravel road made a T with the blacktop to town and noticed a half
dozen more of the rotten beasts traipsing across the open flat land about a
half mile to the south.

Keeping one eye on the
walking dead, Jasper read a passage from Genesis 3:19 for the unfortunate
Matherson family.
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and
unto dust shalt thou return.”

He walked back to the
truck, being careful to avoid the dusty clumps of brain. He slid behind the
wheel and started the Chevy, cut a three-point turn and headed back towards
town. He glanced down at the Bible and then at the shotgun next to it.
My work
today is not finished
, he thought grimly.
Next stop, the Valdezes’ casa
de la muerte
.

Near
Victor, Idaho

Daymon’s jaw went slack
and he slowly lowered the blade but kept it pressed flat against his right leg.

“Come again?” he said,
craning to see into the creature’s eyes.

“Help me,” the thing
rasped.

“Oh, hell no,” Daymon
said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I’m hearing shit.” He looked over the top
of the Scout, drawing eye contact with Jenkins, then shifted his gaze to Heidi
and said, “One of you tell me I’m just hearing shit.”

As if in response to his
question, the group of walking corpses started in with their own chorus of
moans.

Jenkins crabbed around
the rear of Lu Lu with his pistol held in a two-handed grip, Heidi sticking to
him closely.

Turning its
blood-streaked face away from Daymon and towards Jenkins and Heidi, it uttered
the same two words: “Help me.”

“You heard it,” Daymon
spat as he backpedaled towards the Tahoe. “Help it. Put a bullet in its fuckin’
brain so we can get the hell out of here.”

Jenkins slowly lowered
his gun.

Noticing this, Heidi
stepped from behind Jenkins and angled for a better view. “That’s Tran.”

“I was thinking the same
thing,” Jenkins stated as he holstered his pistol. “Couldn’t see the
resemblance at first cause of the goose egg and all the dried blood.”

“He was the
only
one of them who was nice to me,” Heidi said. “Brought me wet wipes and warm
washcloths after...” Her eyes turned glassy and tears welled up. “And when I
came off the drugs he brought me food even though I said I didn’t want any.”

Jenkins stepped closer
to the man and called out his name. There was no response. Then he touched
Tran’s shoulder. It was warm.

Heidi had just turned to
get Tran a water from the Tahoe when a single shot rang out. She shrieked and
whipped her head around, glaring at Jenkins and thinking the worst.

But his pistol was in
its holster and he was hauling the bulky firefighting gear from the back of the
Scout.

More gunfire, controlled
and steady, sounded from the opposite side of the Tahoe.

Heidi crouched near the
cruiser’s rear tire and gazed down the road where one by one the undead herd
was being thinned out. Finally, when there was a lull in the shooting, she
hollered at Daymon. “This one’s alive,” she said, looking for some recognition.
What she saw instead was a look of confusion on her man’s face as he slapped
home a fresh magazine. Then from behind she heard Jenkins tell her to get to
the cruiser. She looked over and saw he was helping Tran to the vehicle.

Dressed in Daymon’s old
firefighting gear, the slight Asian man looked like a cross between one of the
infected and a sad-looking scarecrow.

“Saved the worst for
last,” Daymon said as he charged a fresh round into the AR-15.

Heidi put herself
between Tran and Daymon.

“No, not him,” said
Daymon.

Now Heidi wore the
confused look.

A wicked smile formed on
Daymon’s face. With his off hand he corralled his dreads behind his ears. “I
saved the Lucas bastard for
you
.”

She looked beyond the
rear of the Tahoe at the shambling giant. She regarded the pinkish half-moon
where the blackened dermis was missing from its neck and looked into its milky
eyes, then shook her head slowly. “No, let him rot.”

That’s my girl
, Daymon thought. He lowered the rifle and slid
behind the wheel.

Jenkins helped Tran into
the back seat and clambered over him to take a spot behind Daymon.

“Next stop, Eden,”
Daymon said. Then he leaned forward in order to see around Heidi and stole one
last look at Lu Lu.