District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (4 page)

Busted.
Heidi sighed as she scooped up the phone Cade
had just replaced on the shelf. Handing it over her shoulder, she said, “Best
if you go into the call log and see for yourself.”

“You’re a quick study, Heidi.” Brook took the phone and
thumbed it on. “Plausible deniability. Straight out of Cade’s playbook.”

Heidi didn’t respond. The hole she’d dug herself was already
deep enough. And this little attempted cover-up had come just as she seemed to
be getting back on the intense woman’s good side. Returning her attention to
the monitor, she watched the trio of trucks motor away from the center gate. In
the ensuing seconds between the three-vehicle convoy slipping from view of the
mid-road camera and reappearing on the one trained on the run-up to the main
gate, out of the corner of her eye she saw Brook scroll to the call log. There
was a second of silence, then Brook was cursing under her breath.

As the convoy pulled close to the main gate, Heidi took her
eyes off the monitor and regarded Brook. “Everything good?”

Clearly in need of help staying on her feet, Brook put her
left hand on Heidi’s shoulder and leaned against the low desk to her right.

Heidi placed her hand atop Brook’s. “Still getting the dizzy
spells from the antiserum … or is this a result of Nash calling your man
again?” She continued to watch the monitor as her new fiancé hopped from the lead
vehicle and stalked to the gate, leaving the driver’s door wide open.

“A little of both,” Brook conceded. “More from the latter,
though. It’s not like Nash to deliver good news over the phone.”

Heidi said, “If it’s any consolation, my man is leaving the
wire, too.”

Brook turned her hand over. She clutched Heidi’s hand and
looked her in the eye. “Glad we’re in the same boat.” Forcing a half-smile, she
released her grip, turned, and set off for her quarters.

Heidi watched until Brook had disappeared around the corner.
Then, when she turned her previously divided attention back to the monitor, she
saw dead things congregating outside the gate in twos and threes. In the next
beat Daymon was luring the monsters away from the gate, the fence paralleling the
road the only thing keeping them at bay.

“Be careful,” she said aloud, watching Daymon cull the
monsters with swift chops to the head from his trusty green-handled machete.

Outside the door to the Grayson Quarters, Brook paused to
collect her thoughts. What was the worst news Nash could have added to the
already shitty prospect of having Cade go down range? Have him do so
undermanned and without proper air support and terrible rules of engagement? Oh
wait, she mused bitterly, that’s what he’d been doing those last couple of
months on the teams before opting to cycle out and come home to her for good.
And, unfortunately, some of that crap had resumed after he’d been drawn back
into Desantos’ and Nash’s orbit. Only this time, she couldn’t blame Cade coming
home in a body bag on the feckless actions of lawyered-up politicians trying to
run a hot war by proxy from walnut-paneled offices thousands of miles away. If
something should happen to Cade this time around, she would have nobody to
blame but herself. And that was acceptable. Because, Lord knows, the only child
was doing what he loved. Moreover, unlike that final year running ops with the
teams, he was doing it now for all the right reasons.

Cade’s voice carried through the door, reaching Brook’s ears
in the hall. “You going to come in, or just stand out there and block the light
under the door?”

“I’m coming in,” Brook called. “Are you decent?”

Still talking through the door, he responded, “Not for long,
if I have anything to say about it.”

Chuckling, Brook pushed the door open with her left hand. In
the light of the sixty-watt bulb she saw her husband. The gray woolen blanket
was covering him from his shins to his waist. His left leg was propped up on
the near end of the bunk. Brown liquid eyes tracked her as she closed the door.

“Which news do you want to hear first,” he asked. “The bad
or the good?”

“The bad,” Brook answered.

“Better sit.”

She moved to the bunk and sat next to him. “But I want to
hear the bad
after
I’ve had my way with you.”

Cade sat up and removed his shirt, exposing chiseled abs and
an apocalypse-honed upper body. Reclining, he watched his wife reciprocate,
grimacing as the cotton tee shirt cleared her high ponytail.

Right arm hung up in the sleeve, she said, “A little help
here?”

“First things first,” Cade said. Sitting up, he snagged the
string to the light and tugged. As the room was plunged into total darkness, he
wrapped Brook in a bear hug and dragged her into bed with him.

“Come on,” Daymon called from the fence. “I’m going to need
some help getting the bodies moved before more of the flesh-bags arrive.”

Wilson was already out of the Raptor and edging past
Daymon’s Chevy. He paused at the passenger door, looked in at Oliver and saw
fear in the man’s eyes. Disregarding it as a part of their new
normal
,
he shook his head subtly and pushed past the undergrowth crowding the road.

Lev jumped from the borrowed F-650 and turned back toward
the open door. “Stay, Max,” he said to the brindle Australian Shepherd that had
adopted Raven and Brook back at Schriever weeks ago. Since coming along with
the Graysons on their cross-country trek from Forward Operating Base Bastion on
the Colorado border to the Eden compound in rural Utah, the inquisitive canine
had taken to every member of the small band of survivors.

Regarding the veteran of the 2004 Iraq invasion with his
dual-colored eyes, Max yawned and stayed put, his stub tail thumping a steady
cadence on Jamie’s thigh.

“He’s no dummy, Lev,” Jamie said, scratching the dog behind
his cropped ears. “Close the door … it’s not summer.”

After complying fully without acknowledging the brunette’s quip,
Lev turned his back to the idling F-650 and scanned the road behind the super-sized
pickup.

Clear.

“
Checking your six
” is what Cade called the practice that
came naturally to Lev, a former 11 Bravo infantryman in the Big Green Machine,
as Duncan was fond of calling the United States Army—past and present. Easy to
remember, the lexicon well-known among combat veterans had become popular with
the younger Eden survivors. Which was a good thing for a generation brought up
with all manner of handheld electronic devices constantly vying for their
attention. And save for a couple of recent slip-ups, the handful of civilian
members in their rag tag little band seemed to be adopting the practice.

Head on a swivel
. No better way to stay alive, that was
for sure, Lev reflected. It was standard operating procedure that had seen him
come home from the sandbox in one piece, and, so far, a routine that had kept
him walking on the right side of the dirt even after a worldwide virus had
decimated humanity’s ranks.

Arriving at the gate last, Dregan’s man, a ruddy-faced fella
calling himself Cleo, exited the 4Runner given to him for the return trip to
Bear River. Without a word of complaint, he strode past the lined-up vehicles
to the state route and pitched in by helping Wilson and Daymon drag the leaking
bodies off the road. A half-dozen black trails leading from the front of the
open gate to the far ditch told him the men had been making quick work of the
grisly task.

Lev bent over and grabbed a female cadaver by the ankles,
the skin sloughing off in his hands as he pulled the body across the two-lane.
“Where the hell is Oliver?” he said to nobody in particular.

Hitching a thumb over his shoulder, Daymon said, “He pussed
out.”

After rolling the corpse of a young boy into the ditch with
a nudge of his combat boot, Wilson scanned the road in both directions. “Still
clear,” he observed. “Someone going to tell Oliver he needs to start pulling his
weight … or do I have to do it?”

Daymon encircled two thin wrists in one gloved hand and
trudged across the road, the dead Z’s skull producing a hollow keening as it
grated along the asphalt. Unceremoniously, as if he were bucking a bale of hay
into a truck, he heaved the shell of a former human atop the others. “Let it
go,” Daymon said. “I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“Straighten him out,” Wilson said, glancing toward the
vehicles clogging the feeder road. “Or I will.”

Lev paused, one hand gripping the wrist of another dead
thing, the other, out of habit, resting on the butt of the Beretta riding on
his hip. Eyebrows hitching in the middle, he regarded the redhead in the floppy
camouflage boonie hat. “I see that someone watered his balls this morning.”

“From this point on I’m not letting anything slide,” Wilson
shot. “Not Sasha’s bullshit. Not Oliver’s staying in the truck while we do the
dirty work.
Nothing.
Fuck sake, even Cleo is getting his hands dirty.”
Breathing hard, he leaned forward and began dragging a portly corpse toward the
ditch where the others were being deposited. Boots scraping the roadway, he
fumed inside. Inwardly, in a roundabout way, he was still blaming himself for
not keeping his sister in line. While he was away during the recent freak
snowstorm, the petulant fourteen-year-old’s actions had jeopardized the lives
of every person who called the compound home. Never again was he going to worry
about hurting anyone’s feelings. Pupa into a pissed-off butterfly, if you will.

Daymon walked over to the last of the twice-dead Zs. “Uh,
oh,” he said, ignoring the leaking body at his feet. “Looks like we missed
one.” In the ditch, partially obscured by the out of control weeds growing
there, was a near skeletal specimen. “First Turn” was what survivors had taken
to calling the ones that showed evidence of lots of wear and tear. “Crawler” was
what Daymon called the thing he was staring down on.

Meeting Daymon’s gaze, the thing hissed and raked its
fingernails across the toes of his boots. How the deflating tire sound made it
out of the hole passing for a throat escaped him. The noise, however, made the
hairs on his arms prick up.

“I’ll take care of it,” Wilson spat. “You take care of
Oliver
.”
The man’s name rolled off the redhead’s tongue dripping with venom.

Daymon shrugged and stepped aside. As he cleaned his
machete, aptly nicknamed
Kindness
, on the long grass, he watched Wilson
jam a folding knife to the hilt in the crawler’s eye socket. Then, after
slipping the machete into its scabbard, he rose and regarded Wilson with a hard
stare. “I’ll figure out what Oliver’s deal is,” he promised, then turned and
stalked off towards the awaiting Chevy, the specter of the looming
interrogation already troubling him.

Daymon waited until they were several miles east on State
Route 39 and nearing the quarry feeder road before broaching the subject of
Oliver’s strange new behavior. Slowing the Chevy a bit on a long straightaway, he
drew a deep breath and cast a sidelong glance at the man next to him.

Sensing the change in speed, Oliver shifted in his seat and
met Daymon’s chilly one-eyed glare. “What?” he asked, straining against the
shoulder belt as he squared up with the dreadlocked driver.

Not one to mince words, Daymon said, “What the
fuck
was that back there?”

“What was
what
?”

Facing forward now, Daymon sighed. “The inaction on your
part back there at the gate. You stayed in the truck like a little—.” Reining
in his rising anger, Daymon went silent, tightened his grip on the wheel and
steered the nearly new four-by-four pickup through a gentle left-hand sweeper.
Trees growing up from the sodden bank on the right side partially shielded the
turbid Ogden River from view. To their left, the small mountain the abandoned
rock quarry was perched upon rose several hundred feet from the road, partially
blocking the watery early morning sun.

“Bitch. That’s the word you swallowed, right? Newsflash,
Daymon. I’m guilty as charged.” His green eyes darkened. “Oliver frickin
Gladson is a goddamn fraud who is deathly afraid of living corpses. Have been
since the first time I left the Pacific Crest Trail to resupply and saw the dead
grocery clerk with his throat torn out walking the aisles and bloodying up his
store. So there. You have it straight out of the horse’s mouth. I’m a frickin
coward
.”

Daymon’s shoulders slumped subtly as the quarry entrance
blipped by on the left. Shortly after, on their right, the rectangular sign
announcing the feeder road to the long-abandoned Smith mining operation loomed.
It had been shot up from behind. Big holes blown right through it that left
twisted triangles of sharp metal jutting forward and the words on its face barely
recognizable. Daymon made a mental note to himself to ask the others in the
trailing vehicles if they remembered the sign being bullet-pocked.

Uncomfortable in the silence permeating the cab, Oliver
removed his black stocking cap and ran his hand through the unruly ring of
graying hair.

Finally, Daymon said, “What about the early legs of the Pacific
Crest Trail in California? With all of those people in Cali surely you had some
run-ins with the dead.”

“I didn’t see anything for days after the outbreak. I had no
radio. Wouldn’t have gotten good reception where I was anyway. So everything I
heard about the dead coming back to life came from trail angels and other through
hikers. Needless to say, I was skeptical. So I took it all with a grain of salt
and forged ahead.”

Seeing something lying across the road a good distance ahead—basically
just a horizontal shadow at this point—Daymon flicked his eyes to the mirror to
see what kind of following distance Taryn was observing.

As always, the former dirt track racer had her white pickup tucked
in tight to his bumper. In fact, she was so close—Nascar drafting close—that he
couldn’t see the prominent FORD logo on the matte-black grill. Worried that if
he stood on the brakes the white Raptor and its young occupants would become
the frosting center in a big metal Oreo consisting of the black Chevy up front,
and the massive F-650 behind, he tapped his brakes three times to back her off,
then slowed to the posted thirty-five. Keeping his eyes glued to the distant
roadway obstruction, he said, “All that distance you covered on the roads from
Oregon to Utah, how did you go about avoiding the dead?”

“I holed up during the day and travelled at night. Simple as
that.”

Daymon grunted.

“I had the night vision goggles I took off a dead Oregon National
Guardsman. Their roadblock near Mount Hood was a mess. The vehicles were all
shot to hell. The bodies, too. Ones that hadn’t reanimated and walked away were
nearly picked clean by the mountain birds. Hell, Daymon, the guy I took ‘em off
didn’t need ‘em anymore.”

“I’m not judging you on that,” Daymon replied.

Reining the pickup back to a walking speed, he leaned over
the wheel to scan both sides of the road for evidence of an ambush: a light
glinting from glass or metal. Fresh tire tracks on the shoulder. Out of place bodies.
Pools of spent brass or debris that looked as if it had been purposefully
placed on the road. Seeing nothing of the sort, he sped up a little and asked, “What
about the Ogden pass? And Huntsville? You put down dozens of rotters there.
That’s not the work of a coward.”

Oliver snugged his cap down over his ears. Then, in a flat monotone,
said, “Why couldn’t the snow have stuck around? I can handle those things if
they’re not moving. If those hungry, dead eyes aren’t flicking around … searching.
In Huntsville I was pretending to be Charlton Heston. You know … the Omega Man
… fucking with mannequins. That’s not courage, though. That’s just borderline
crazy.”

Daymon said nothing. He was focusing on the newly fallen tree.
It was resting on the right guardrail and stretched shoulder to shoulder across
the road. It was nothing like the monster old-growth numbers he had felled to
block 39 west of the compound. This alder was about as big around as a man’s
thigh, devoid of leaves, and had patches of white bark curling up. It looked diseased,
its affected roots likely compromised by the weight of the recent snow and
further weakened by the rains that followed.

Voice cracking, Oliver went on. “I was cleaning up
Huntsville for my mom. After finding my dad like I did, guts all ripped out; bite
marks and all … I figured she was dead for sure. Had become one of them
things.”

On the console between the two men, the two-way radio began
to vibrate.

Ignoring the buzzing, Daymon threw the truck into Park. “And
Duncan? Are you two cool yet?”

With no hesitation, Oliver spat, “Fuck Duncan. He’ll never
replace my dad.”

Daymon shot Oliver a sidelong glare as Wilson’s voice
emanated from the Motorola’s tiny speaker. He scooped up the handset and keyed
the Talk button. “Keep your pants on, kid,” he growled. “And yes … I did see
the shot-up sign back there.”

“I was wondering about that,” Wilson said. “I didn’t see any
signs of an ambush. You think this tree was cut down on purpose?”

“Roots are showing,” Daymon answered. “It was ready to go.
All it took was that heavy snow and then all that rain softening the soil. Good
thing it didn’t fall on the rig Cleo drove over. Would have been a fireball for
sure.”

Following a short burst of squelch, Jamie entered the conversation.
“Our six is clear,” she said. “We saw the sign, too. Lev seems to think the
holes in the sign are new. No signs of rust, he says.” There was a short pause.
In the background the F-650’s engine rumble could still be heard. “Lev wants to
know what you want to do with the tree? You going to take it out with the Stihl?
Or should we pull forward and use the winch to drag it off the guardrail?”

“The latter,” Daymon acknowledged. “Come around on my left.”
He released the Talk key and turned to Oliver. “Wilson used to be the skittish one
around the dead. A little razzing by his sister led to him trying to force the
issue on the way here from Colorado. Nearly got him killed. But it went a long
way toward loosening him up around the things.”

Oliver scanned the road on his right. He shifted his gaze to
the bushes crowding the road on the left. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he
conceded. “I’m scared as shit out here in the open … in broad daylight.”

“A little fear is necessary. Keeps us sharp,” Daymon said as
the F-650 pulled alongside, casting its shadow on the Chevy. “’Frosty’ is what
Captain America likes to call the razor’s edge he tries to ride. Heard him describe
it as the perfect blending of fear and confidence.”

“But he’s a trained soldier,” Oliver noted. “I’m nothing of
the sort.”

“That trained soldier had to get used to dealing with the living
dead just like me and Wilson and the others. Hell, your mom did it. Means you
can, too. So just
watch
. Sponge it up. And
learn
from your
mistakes.”

The sounds of multiple doors opening and closing entered the
cab through Oliver’s partially rolled-down window. He wiped away a stray tear
with the back of his hand.

“Baby steps, my man. Baby steps,” Daymon said, shouldering
open his door. “Be right back. Lock up if you feel the need.” Leaving the truck
idling, he closed the door and hustled to join Wilson and Jamie, who were
already stretching the winch toward the far shoulder where the tree’s top had
come to rest.