Carlie Simmons (Book 3): The Way Back

THE WAY BACK

BY JT SAWYER

Copyright

Copyright
2015 by JT Sawyer

No
part of this book may be transmitted in any form whether electronic, recording,
mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without written permission of the
publisher.

This
is a work of fiction and the characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, businesses,
incidents, or events is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Chapter 1

Somewhere in the Caribbean

The gaunt creature in a torn, blood-soaked
tank top hobbled towards Carlie who was kneeling behind the trunk of a massive
palm tree thirty feet away. The zombie tilted its wrinkled head, its face
resembling a shriveled orange peel. It looked skyward as if studying the longitudinal
rays of sunlight piercing the thick jade canopy. The salty ocean breeze floated
through the trees and a heavy coat of sweat glistened along Carlie’s arms as
she slowly pulled back the plant-fiber bowstring with her tanned fingers. She steadied
the primitive arrow shaft in line with the desiccated creature’s chest. As the
beast turned its milky-white eyes towards her movement, she loosed the
improvised arrow and watched as it buried itself into the creature’s right
pectoral. The zombie recoiled, tripping over a fallen log and tumbling backwards
into a patch of knee-high grass. Carlie sprinted forward and closed the
distance while gripping the wooden bow in her right hand. Approaching the
fallen figure, she removed her weathered machete and delivered an angular
strike across the forehead, severing the cranium. The creature stopped
wriggling as Carlie resheathed her machete and placed her free hand on the
arrow to yank it out. She stared down at the mottled corpse, noting how parts
of the hands and legs looked shriveled.

Shane moved up behind her and was scanning
the surrounding treeline for any movement while he kept his own bow ready. Carlie
removed the soiled arrow shaft and she could hear Amy and Jared finishing off
another creature to her right. She saw them flailing their handcarved clubs at
its bald dome, followed by the sight of the portly beast tumbling to the ground
with its head resembling a deflated football.

Matias and Pavel, who were covering the
rear, emerged from the dense foliage and moved up behind Carlie. She flung back
her shaggy blonde hair to reveal a weathered face and sunken cheeks. Like the
others, she was clad in tattered clothing that was streaked with grime and
blood spatter. Their hands were cracked from too much time in the sun and their
fingernails looked like flaked drywall from the constant ravages of manual
labor in the elements.

Carlie hardly resembled the athletic woman
she had been five weeks earlier when they had narrowly escaped the doomed
USS
Farragut
on their liferaft. With no hope of rescue in sight as the days
turned into weeks on their small island, she knew that their fate rested solely
in their own hands. After the first island’s resources had proven too meager to
sustain them, they used a crude dugout canoe they had discovered at an old
fishing shack to navigate along the chain of lesser islands dotting the ocean
to the northeast. Each stop had proven too small, too hostile with zombies, or
had too few animals for hunting. Since arriving at this new landmass earlier in
the morning, they had dodged numerous groups of undead in their quest to hunt
the small rodents whose tracks dotted the beaches.

Thanks to Shane and Matias’ skills in
jungle survival, the group had learned to fashion bows, arrows, shelters, plant
cordage, snares, fish baskets, and all that goes with becoming proficient in
the never-ending quest for food. The precarious nature of living off the land
had taken its toll on each person as their waistlines shrunk with each passing
week and their energy levels fluctuated like the rush of tides along their many
beachside encampments.

As the others regrouped around Carlie, she
looked at each person to check on their physical and mental wellbeing. Shane
had a thick charcoal-colored beard and slicked-back hair. She knew he was tired
but he never complained and was always willing to push the extra mile overland
in search of food. Amy still had a youthful appearance to her eyes despite her exposed
cheekbones and unkempt hair that was matted in sections. Matias, although
twenty pounds leaner, looked right at home in the jungle. His Panamanian
heritage and knowledge of local flora and fauna, coupled with Shane’s former
jungle training, had been their salvation during these many weeks of wresting a
living from the unforgiving terrain. Pavel, the meek Russian scientist, was
suffering the most. His scraggly silver beard revealed his age and he tired out
the fastest, causing the group to constantly adjust their pace so they didn’t
become separated in the thick jungle. Lastly, there was Jared, whose chestnut-colored
beard stood out below his striking cobalt eyes. His sarcastic humor had only
increased but Jared had turned into a proficient hunter under Matias’ tutelage
while still managing to look like he took a shower every day. In the ensuing five
weeks since they had been stranded after departing the
USS Farragut
,
they had been forced to become a ruthless band of survivors. Whatever
differences they’d had before had been swept aside in their daily struggle for sustenance
and they had become a well-oiled hunting tribe. Early on, they had faced the
grim reality that there wouldn’t be a rescue party landing on the beach to
whisk them back to safety. With each passing day, their resolve to extricate
themselves by any means possible from their tropical prison increased in
proportion to their shrinking bodyweight.

“That should be the last of these drooling
freaks,” said Carlie. “That makes six for the afternoon and tallies up with the
tracks we observed earlier.”

“Yeah, but this is a bigger island so I’m
guessing there are gonna be more as we venture further,” said Jared.

“We only need our immediate camp area
secure—this will do for now. Besides, I’m always for avoiding contact with the
enemy when possible,” said Carlie.

She looked around at the dense foliage and
strained for any movement in the trees. “Let’s make camp in that thicket near
the beach,” she said, pointing to a low grove of bamboo at the edge of the
forest to her left. “That’ll provide us with security on three sides and cloak
our campfire. Amy and I will head back to the canoe and grab the remaining
gear. Why don’t the rest of you gather bedding material and firewood and then
we’ll all meet back at our new abode in an hour.”

As the two women headed down an old deer
trail, the four men began slicing down palm leaf sections and hauling them over
to the bamboo grove.

A few minutes later, Carlie and Amy came
upon the beach where their tattered canoe was hidden in the scrub. The vessel
was eighteen feet long with a side rail for stability. It just barely fit all
of them and their meager supplies but had become a trusted friend like most of
their critical gear that enabled them to live under such trying conditions.

“This dingy vessel has managed to get us
to six islands, but I keep wondering how many more miles it has left in it,”
said Amy, tapping her tan foot against a football-sized ding in the side panel
of the canoe.

“You talking about the canoe or your body?”
Carlie said.

“Well, this finger of land here looks to
be the largest island we’ve come across so far. Hopefully, it will provide us
with more food and resources than the others, especially since the cooler
winter months are only about six weeks off.”

As Carlie leaned forward to grab a pack
out of the canoe, she winced and hopped backwards on one leg as a slender
splinter drove itself into her heel. “Dammit, I really miss having boots. Hell,
I’d even take a pair of flip-flops,” she said, sitting down and crossing her
right foot over her other knee.

“Yeah, it seems like none of our stuff
lasted long in this humidity and constant immersion in the water, especially
since we all had desert gear to begin with.”

“Ah, what I wouldn’t give for a container
of Nivea right now,” Amy said, staring down at the fissures in her hands.

“Or a bottle of shampoo.”

“And a real hair brush instead of a bundle
of stiff twigs…and add in a massage.”

“Hell, I’d take a clean pair of jeans and
a t-shirt before that.”

“I sure don’t miss having to put on makeup.”

“Yeah, I never bothered to begin with,
other than some eye-shadow once in a while. In my world, the other agents were
married to their careers and only viewed dating as a means of letting off some
steam in between assignments. Most of the time, I never gave a damn about
whether the guys thought I was appealing.”

“From what you’ve described it sounds like
you were also married to your career.”

Carlie looked up at a row of waves
pummeling the beach. “Yeah, well, look where that got me.” She returned to
studiously prying the sliver out of her left sole and then flicked the tiny
piece of palm wood into the sand. The sun-dried cracks in her face hurt every
time she squinted and her entire body ached as if every day was another round
of being in nature’s boxing ring. Carlie stared down at her skinny calves which
resembled slender fence posts. The red sores peppering her legs from the
endless assault of sand fleas made her want to scratch off her skin. Her eyes
were heavy and she just wanted to sleep in a real bed out of the wind and sun.
The constant pangs of hunger and accompanying sounds of her stomach growling had
become a familiar part of her daily routine but it was still hard to push away
the constant craving for food when every cell in her body screamed out for
nourishment.

Carlie knew they were all operating on
borrowed time against the ever-present threat of running headfirst into Murphy’s
Law, whose likelihood only increased as they grew weaker. She thrust a stick
into the sand between her legs and swirled it around.
Will we ever make it
back to the States and get to the lab in Alaska so Pavel can begin work on an
antidote? God, that seems like it’s in another galaxy. Maybe General Adams back
at White Sands cracked the encryption on the CIA laptop that we got a hold of
in New Orleans. That might contain the critical intel to locate a vaccine. And
what of my brother in San Diego
—
is he even alive?
She continued pirouetting
the stick, creating a figure-eight and then blotting it out with her foot only
to start anew.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” said Amy, who
was walking towards the treeline. “Nature calls.”

Carlie stood up and flung the stick into
the tide then walked over to the shoreline to wash off her foot. After
retreating back from the water, she glanced down to her right and noticed a
single row of boot prints that snaked along the shoreline. The stride was too
uniform to be a zombie and the gait pattern didn’t match up with her mental
files of anyone in the group.
The only two people with footwear left are
Shane and Pavel. Who the hell do these tracks belong to?
She studied the
stride, noticing that the heel-to-heel distance resembled the typical walking
gait of an adult male. On the left side of the tracks was a round indentation
which she surmised was from a walking stick. As Carlie stood to scan the track
pattern ahead, her sleuthing was halted by the shrill voice of Amy screaming
from the jungle behind her.

Carlie bolted back to the canoe and grabbed
her bow from the ground then sprinted into the jungle. As her pace increased,
she heard Amy yelping in pain followed by the sickeningly familiar sound of a
machete cleaving through bone. Carlie leapt over a fallen moss-encrusted log
and ran ahead, forging her own trail through the cumbersome foliage. She could
see Amy removing her blade from the head of a ridiculously obese zombie clad in
an orange shirt. As Carlie rushed up, she could see Amy bleeding profusely from
her outer left thigh as a jagged piece of bamboo stuck out. Amy fell back into
her arms before going unconscious and dropping the blood-soaked machete near
her feet.

Carlie looked down at the creature whose prune-like
skin resembled someone who had been soaking too long in a hot tub. Its soiled
shirt bore an image of a skeleton smoking a cigar with a crown of red roses
around its forehead. She frowned at the surreal image before lowering Amy onto
a shaded patch of ground.