Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (27 page)

The sun was high and the clouds were moving in quickly from
the southeast. A long white band of them growing pewter around the edges and
threatening rain looked to be on a collision course with Woodruff.
A bad day
about to get worse
, thought Brook. She opened the F-650’s door and tossed
her M4 on the seat. As she climbed into the cab, the other door hinged open and
Chief was joining her, his silhouette fully blocking out the light spill.

“We’re leaving a light crew behind, so I suggest we not rush
into Woodruff without giving it a once-over from a distance.”

“What Cade would have said for five hundred, Alex,” Brook
said. She turned the engine over and listened to the low burble for a second.

Chief propped his carbine on the seat barrel down next to
Brook’s M4 and snugged on his belt.

Finally Brook looked his way and said in a low voice, “This
isn’t my first rodeo.”

“What Cade would have said for six hundred,” Chief said. “I
wasn’t trying to sound patronizing. Just thinking aloud.”

“Copy that,” said Brook, then smiled. “Also what Cade would
have said.”

“The Kids are in,” said Chief, mercifully stopping the
running gag in its tracks. He picked up the radio and keyed the Talk button.
“You guys ready?” He heard a whistle and craned around and saw Max hop into the
bed of the idling Raptor.

“We are now,” Wilson said over the radio. “I’ll get both of
the gates.”

“What’s your gut saying to you about Glenda?”

“I think she’s on the level,” Chief said. “And that part
about her husband ... who would make something like that up?”

“Yeah,” conceded Brook. “Plus she knew about the dirtbags
who let the Zs into our fence a while back. And then she was able to describe
Bishop’s men and their helicopters to a T.” She went silent and watched in the
rearview while Taryn backed the mud-and blood-spattered Raptor around and then
smiled when the best driver in their small band gunned the off-road rig towards
the feeder road, sending up a rooster tail of dirt and rocks and uprooted
grass.

“Give them a second head start,” Chief said.

“Why?”

“What do you think we should do about Heidi?”

“I’ve already given that some thought. While I look for the
stuff I need for Raven, I want you to keep your eyes open for Celexa or Zoloft
or Citalopram ... all antidepressants. It’ll be a starting place, at least. Her
PTSD is going to take time to overcome.”

“Gives me something to do,” Chief said with a smile. “Now we
better catch the Kids.”

***

A freshly killed rotter was propped up against the inner
fence and Wilson was waiting to seal it up behind them all when Brook squeezed
the oversized Ford between the two posts. She slowed and opened her window and
said, “It was waiting for us here?”

Wilson nodded. “It was stuck in the fence. I walked the
perimeter fence in both directions last night and didn’t see any other
breaches. I’m pretty confident it’s just a straggler from the group we culled
yesterday.”

Brook made a face. She looked long and hard down the fence
line in both directions. Then she said, “We’ll call it in. Just in case,” and
wheeled the Ford ahead a few feet.

While Wilson closed the fence, Chief called Seth and told
him about the encounter. Seth came back on the radio and said that he’d seen
very little rotter activity on the State Route since morning.

Sure enough, when both trucks arrived at SR-39 the road was
free of rotters. Wilson had the gate yawning open for them in no time and both
trucks wheeled through and formed up on the road facing east. After playfully
flipping the nearby camera the middle finger, Wilson closed the gate and in
seconds he was back riding shotgun and the two Fords were rolling in the
direction of Woodruff, the F-650 in the lead.

***

Fifteen minutes had slipped into the past by the time the
red bluff, rising several hundred feet above the road and casting a shadow on
the nearby Ogden River, came into view. Brook looked up at the depressing
knuckle of earth as they blazed past and her heart hurt when she thought about
the pain, both physical and emotional, Jordan, Logan, and Gus had endured while
they were dying up there.

For the first time since turning on to the two-lane blacktop
she noticed how the weeks-long accumulation of pine needles covering it had
been recently disturbed. There were two wide tire marks, some distance apart,
tracking straight and true and equidistant from both shoulders. As she slowed
to negotiate the corner her eye was drawn to the horizon where, judging by the
smattering of oranges and russets and muted yellows showing on the trees
blanketing the rolling hills, autumn was right around the corner. In fact,
Brook thought, if she remembered correctly, the first day of fall was September
22nd.
Around the corner, indeed
.

Brook and Chief sat tight lipped as the miles ticked off.
Along the way the two-vehicle convoy passed a handful of walking dead, and
either blew by them at speed or slowed and bulled them aside where there was no
room to pass.

Knowing that 39 met up with State Route 16 at the end of a
short straightaway around the next bend, Brook halved her speed and flicked her
eyes to the rearview where she saw the Raptor’s black grill filling the mirror,
the word Ford spelled out in the cooling vents there.

The scene ahead was revealed in degrees as the F-650’s
massive snout cut the corner. Seeing a clutch of rotters near the overturned
bus dead ahead, Brook pulled to the right-side shoulder and jammed to a stop. A
tick later she saw a flash of white in her side vision as the Raptor pulled in
tight next to her door. The Raptor’s passenger side window whirred down and
Wilson looked a question at Brook.

She said nothing; pressed a pair of binoculars to her face
and glassed the intersection.

Peering through a pair of his own, Chief asked, “You see
that?”

Brook exhaled then put the binoculars on the center console.
Finally, she met Chief’s steady gaze and nodded, a pained look on her face.

Head hanging half out of his window, Wilson waved his arms
at Brook and said, “Well?”

Sasha’s voice filtered up from the back seat. She was going
on about stopping, whining and fretting about the Zs patrolling the road ahead
of them.

Brook craned and shot Sasha a look that momentarily silenced
the teen. Then she passed her Bushnells through the window to Wilson and said,
“Better look for yourself. And those are yours to keep.”

With the faraway murmurs of the dead competing gamely with
the sound of the two idling motors, Wilson glassed the scene for a full minute.
When he lowered the binoculars his mouth was hanging open and, as if what he
had just seen was but a heat mirage or a figment of his imagination and in no
way reality, he looked up and flashed Brook an incredulous look.

Suddenly Taryn picked the black and white vehicle out of the
clutter. Quietly, she said, “That’s Chief Jenkins’s cruiser ... isn’t it?”

Wilson sighed and slumped in his seat. “It’s the Tahoe all
right.”

Sasha asked, “Is he there?”

Wilson said, “Thankfully, I didn’t see him.”

“Maybe he’s just trapped inside,” said Sasha, wild-eyed, her
upper body hanging over the seatback. She looked left at Taryn. Let her gaze
linger. Then she panned her head to the right, locked eyes with Wilson, and
added breathlessly, “We have to help him.”

Taryn said, “We owe him as much. Ask Brook if we can check
it out.”

In a low voice, Wilson said, “There’s a lot of rotters
there.”

Taryn squared up in her seat and shot back, “He’d do it for
us.”

Wilson nodded and leaned as close as he could to Brook’s
window and ran the idea by her.

A ten-second huddle ensued between Brook and Chief.
Finished, she ran the window down and nodded in Wilson’s direction. Said,
“Better open the slider and let Max in with Sasha.” Then her window pulsed up
and the F-650 pulled ahead of the Raptor at little more than walking speed.

Sasha opened the sliding window and called Max inside.

Following Brook’s lead, Taryn slipped the transmission into
Drive,
caught up to the larger Ford, and tucked her ride in close to its bumper.

Inside the F-650 Chief recommended having the Kids stay at
the intersection while he and Brook motored down the State Highway to get a
closer look.

In response, Brook said, “I don’t think I want to know the
final outcome.”

He said, “All the more reason for the Kids to hang back.”

She responded at once, “Put a positive spin on it, though.
Say we need them to watch our backs.”

Which wasn’t altogether a lie.

While Brook swerved in order to bypass the first of the
rotters, Chief grabbed the radio and broke the news which, as expected, went
over inside the Raptor like a lead balloon.

Keying off the radio, Chief said to Brook, “That’s not going
to fly with them very much longer. One of these days ... real soon ... you’re
going to have to let them go. Let them sink or swim.”

“Not right now,” Brook said as she tapped the brakes and
squeezed the F-650 past the overturned school bus that had been there since
before the
incident
. With barely an inch to spare between the right side
mirror and bell housing protruding from the bus’s massive rear axle, the Ford
slipped past and Woodruff’s small town center, just a short distance ahead,
came into view. But she fought the urge to just motor on through and start the
search. Instead she turned right onto State Highway 16, the Ford tracking
straight for the grim task awaiting her. Thirty feet south of the school bus’s
crumpled front end, facing away from them and high centered on a mass of
writhing bodies, was Jenkins’s Tahoe. Standing near the driver’s side window
was a large male Z. And clutched in its clawlike hands was a smooth river rock
the size of a cantaloupe.

Brook pulled up twenty feet short and watched as the big
rotter bashed the rock repeatedly against the SUV’s B-pillar, to no great
effect.

“It’s using a tool,” Chief whispered, as if saying it any
louder would prompt the handful of Zs approaching the idling Ford to find a
like-sized rock and adopt the practice themselves.

Meanwhile, in the Raptor, which was parked diagonally on the
junction where 39 and 16 met, Wilson was watching the action through binoculars
and providing a play-by-play of what he was seeing.

Shaking her head, Taryn said in a skeptical tone, “A rock?”

“Yes ... a rock,” confirmed Wilson without looking away from
the surreal scene. “A pretty large one, too.”

“Why is it still attacking the truck if the window’s already
shattered?” Sasha asked.

Wilson said, “I have no idea. But it looks like Brook and
Chief are going to intervene.” He kept the binoculars glued on the F-650. He
saw Chief’s boots hit the roadway a second ahead of Brook’s and, when their
doors closed behind them near simultaneously, fifteen gaunt faces swung away
from whatever had their attention in the Tahoe. Quickly rising to a crescendo,
their plaintive murmurs became a strained chorus of throaty moans.

Arm hairs standing at attention, Brook picked her targets as
she stalked through the minefield of pulped body parts leading up to the inert
Tahoe. The oversized rotter wielding the rock went to his second death first. A
quick double tap from Brook’s M4 sent the rear half of its skull spinning away
in front of a rapidly expanding cloud of pink mist. Zs number two and three
each caught a pair of lethal 5.56 mm hardballs traveling at 3,100 feet per
second. The kinetic energy absorbed by the second and much smaller female Z was
sufficient to send it flying into the SUV’s rear hatch, its newly misshapen
head absorbing the full brunt of the impact. And as the sheet of glass imploded
with a bang that nearly drowned out Chief’s steady controlled fire, Brook’s
second volley smacked the next rotter in the mouth and right eye and exited out
back of its skull with another aerated spritz of gray matter and tooth and
finely flecked bone.

To clear his side of the Tahoe, Chief moved in a crouch,
firing continually, and by the time he reached the dented passenger door more
than his share of the rotters were sprawled on the roadway, rivers of their
bodily fluids trickling slowly toward the dusty shoulder.

Simultaneously, leaving a trail of bodies sprawled on the
centerline, Brook fought her way to the driver’s side door where from
underneath the listing vehicle pale hands reached out and groped her shins and
ankles. Ignoring the grabby Zs wedged under the rig, she went to her tiptoes,
looked through the bashed-in window and saw Jenkins. She lowered her weapon and
was hit by a wave of grief when she realized he was dead. That feeling lingered
for but a second and then strangely enough she felt gratitude for the simple
fact that he wasn’t coming back as one of them. He had spared himself from that
hell on earth. That was for sure. The flesh that was once his lips and cheeks
was specked black from the blowback of superheated gunpowder. The back of his
skull was sitting nearly intact, ring of graying hair and all, next to a gym
bag full of his clothes in the back seat. His blood and brains painted the
headliner crimson, and here and there dangling tendrils of semi-dried detritus
provided the flies a place to land and feed.

Looking in the passenger side, Chief saw that the
semiautomatic belonging to the dead former Jackson Hole Chief of Police was
still clutched in his lifeless right hand. And in the other was a cherished
picture of his wife and daughter, at Christmas time, wrapped up in his loving
embrace. Seeing it clearly for what it was, he called to Brook, “Charlie told
me he knew he was never going to find them.”

Brook bit her lip. Said, “He gave it a shot.”