Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (46 page)

“Isn’t that where the rotters almost got you?”

“Yeah. Phil saved my ass. I was winching the Humvee out of
the ditch ... they didn’t need it anymore.”

“They’re in a better place.”

“I guess so,” Duncan replied solemnly. “Just wish we could
have taken the time to bury them proper.” Suddenly the realization that he
would be doing just that for his brother before long sent a cold chill up his
spine. He shivered as his mind reeled and he reminisced over Logan. Saw in his
mind’s eye snippets of him as a baby, then a boy and finally as a young man
with his curled mustache and black bowler hat. The scenes flashed by, morphed
together like a photo montage at a wake, and then ended with an overhead view showing
him rolling Logan’s corpse into a shallow grave and then flinging the first
shovelful of black soil over his slack, pallid features.

“Think we could hover here for a minute so I can take a look
at the city with my binocs?”

“Better yet,” said Duncan, working his thumb over a couple
of switches on the contoured flight stick. He turned a knob bringing an
image—like a fast-moving waterfall rendered in whites and blacks—into focus on
the recessed, ten-inch screen mounted nearer to the left seat than the right.
“That’s the feed from the FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared Radar) pod. That round
gimbal-mounted doo-dad under the chin? The DHS used it to patrol the border
looking for little ninety-eight-point-six-degree hot-spots scurrying along the
cold desert floor.”

“How’s it work?”

“I didn’t pay too much attention to that part of the manual.
I focused on the nuts and bolts of how to keep this thing in the air.”

“Thought you said it’s like riding a bike.”

“This ship is like the Space Shuttle in complexity compared
to my old Huey,” said Duncan as the image on the screen moved in response to
his manipulating the switches. Then by trial and error he managed to get it to
zoom in and pan left.

“Wow,” exclaimed Daymon. “Makes the city look like it’s
built outta black Legos.”

“Those are the cool spots. Keep your eyes peeled for bright
white spots. Especially real bright ones that are moving.”

Daymon craned his head closer to the display.

“See anything?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll take us closer.”

“You’re not worried about us getting shot out of the sky?”

“Odds are against it. Besides, if you haven’t seen anything
yet then there probably ain’t nobody home.”

Pushing the stick forward and adjusting the FLIR pod with a
nudge of the thumb, Duncan threw caution to the wind swung wide out over the
reservoir’s calm waters and approached the city from the north.

***

Up close, Huntsville was as dead as it appeared through the
FLIR feed; except for a couple of dozen walking dead, nothing moved.

“Those rotters look fresh,” said Daymon, binoculars pressed
to his face as he watched a pair of zombies rending hunks of bloody flesh and
entrails from a recent kill.

“I’ve seen nothing but first turns the last couple of
weeks.”

Still framed in the binoculars, the creature facing Daymon
jammed a length of shiny intestine into its maw and, like a kid slurping
spaghetti, ground away on the slippery white morsel, the contents of the
victim’s last meal dribbling from its working mouth. “Oh fuck,” said Daymon,
putting the field glasses in his lap. “Good thing I didn’t eat this morning.”

“Look at this,” said Duncan. He had the FLIR pod trained on
something in the distance. He zoomed in and spent a moment fiddling with the
controls before finally figuring out how to switch from the infrared feed. The
image on the monitor switched from blacks and whites to color. Licks of black
smoke rose from the remains of a very large house that had been built high on
the hill with a commanding view of both the downtown area and the surrounding
reservoir . From the looks of the concrete footprint, the herringbone-patterned
brick circular drive, and the beautiful landscaping, Duncan guessed the place
must have belonged to someone very important. A number of luxury SUVs were
parked in front, and out back a swimming pool shimmered turquoise in the sun.
“I’m going to take us downtown,” Duncan stated as he skimmed the Black Hawk
over a block of commercial buildings housing a diner, a drugstore, and what
looked to be Huntsville’s only U.S. Post Office—Old Glory still snapping
smartly in the breeze.

After skirting the city along the water’s edge, making a
thorough recon to the south and finding mostly residential and not one living
soul, Duncan spat a string of epithets into the comms. His drawl thick, veins
bulging in his neck, he said, “We’re going to check the McMansion and then I’m
going to bury my brother.”

Remaining silent, Daymon twisted around and retrieved the
shotgun from the floor behind his seat.
Come on Cade
, he thought,
please
look at your effin phone.

Somewhere in Montana

Elvis had been following the yellow squiggle in the plastic
box. Turn left. Turn right. Continue to blah, blah, blah and blah, blah—doing
exactly what the lady said to do.

Hell
, he thought,
with a name like Tom Tom she
sure sounded pretty sultry
. He envisioned one of those brunette beauties
from the forties or fifties in a low-cut top and hip-hugging shorts over
fishnet stockings, all dolled up with lips pouting and red.

Mountains looming north by west killed his fantasy. He
slowed, pulled over, and looked closely at Tom Tom’s five-inch screen.

Then a song popped in his head. Something about coming
around a mountain and she’ll be there. God, how he hoped wherever Bishop was
there were also a few ladies who sounded half as hot as the woman in the box.

With the trucker-on-meth mantra blipping through his head,
he hopped out. Retrieved the final two full gas cans and emptied every last
siphoned drop into the tow truck’s extended range tank. Swept his eyes around
and then tossed the empties behind the cab.

He climbed aboard and set the truck to rolling. Goosed the
big engine and turned on the stereo.
Nothing
. Just white noise. So he
hummed a few bars of an old Grateful Dead ditty.

Truckin’ indeed.

Like a trucker on meth.

Southwest of Colorado Springs, Colorado

While the Chinook hammered a nearly-straight line westward
through the cobalt sky, Ari took the airline pilot shtick to the next level by
pointing out the Garden of the Gods off to the starboard side. The
reddish-orange rock formations, a byproduct of geological upheaval when the
Rockies were formed, dominated five square miles on the western edge of
Colorado Springs.

The new White House buried deep inside the NORAD Cheyenne
Mountain Complex received a spirited introduction from Ari as the 9,656-foot-tall
rocky crag scudded by on the port side.

While Ari provided the distraction no doubt designed to keep
the younger passengers from keying in on the ongoing battle against the
remnants of the Pueblo horde south of downtown Springs, Cade’s full attention
was on the dark smudge to the north, where the nuclear-scorched earth near
Castle Rock and the hazy horizon met. That was in effect for him hallowed
ground; the very place where his best friend, Mike Desantos, got bit and in
effect lost his life. As the helo droned on, he kept a laser-like focus on the
twin craters until they were no longer visible through the Chinook’s tiny
bubble window.

***

After having successfully tuned out Ari’s voice for quite
some time, Cade decided to be productive and power up the replacement sat-phone
Nash had given him and see what kind of coverage it was drawing. He deployed
the stubby antenna and thumbed the power button. After a long second, while the
unit shook hands with whatever satellites remained aloft, the keypad flashed
red and some kind of logo, colorful but vague, appeared on the tiny screen. He
glanced at Brook, who appeared to be asleep, and when he returned his gaze to
the Thuraya, the logo was gone and in its place were two identical ten-digit
phone numbers—two missed calls that had come in back-to-back—both of
approximately the same duration. But most importantly, the phone had recognized
the number as the one Cade had assigned to the first slot in the contact list.
And that could mean only one thing, Cade concluded—shortly after takeoff,
Daymon had called him twice with the sat-phone Tice had given him in Jackson
Hole.

Cade retrieved the earpiece that came with the new phone,
removed the rubber dustcover from the headphone port, and plugged the jack in.
He navigated the menu and selected the first missed call. After listening to
the message twice, he scrolled to the second missed call and repeated the
process.

Since the moment Cade withdrew the candy-bar-sized sat-phone
from his pocket, Brook had been watching covertly from her side vision. And as
she looked on, the expressions that crossed his features as he powered on the
device and plugged in the ear bud said more than words alone. So she remained
still and continued to watch his body language, which seemed to be changing by
the second. His thumbs walked over the keypad and his shoulders seemed to inch
closer to his ears. He clenched his teeth, and though he was wearing a flight
helmet and had grown a partial beard, black and flecked with gray, underneath
it all she imagined the muscles where his jaw hinged bulging to the size of
golf balls.

Then the phone’s keypad went dark; he glanced up and she was
burned. Caught in the act, she mouthed, “Who was that?”

“Daymon,” he mouthed back.

“Who?”

Providing a poor representation of dreadlocks, he waggled
his fingers over his head.

She made a face, nodded, and closed her eyes.

“No more spying on me,” he said behind a sly grin. Then,
eyes bugged, he stared at her until her resolve cracked and she smiled, opened
her eyes, and mouthed, “I love you.”

Huntsville, Utah

Hovering thirty feet above a copse of pines, and roughly a
quarter-mile away from the mansion, Duncan put the FLIR pod through the
motions. With the device set to pick up heat signatures he zoomed way in and
slowly walked the optics right to left.

Nothing
.

Next he chose the setting that allowed them to see the image
being picked up on the cockpit display in full color. “Where the hell are
they?” Duncan drawled. “A good day spent killing and kidnapping, you’d think
it’s just about Miller time. Wish this thing had a rocket pod or two ... couple
of Hydras into the middle of town might flush them out.”

“I think there ain’t nobody home,” Daymon said. “Just
walking rotters and twice-dead corpses. Can you zoom in on that garage?”

“You see something out there I don’t?”

“Think about it, Duncan. You almost got bit because you
didn’t see a rotter ten feet from ya. The remains of the mansion is what ...
couple of football fields away? The garage is another hundred feet.”

“Quit bashing me and tell me what the hell you see and which
side of the garage, the left or the right?”

“Left side,” said Daymon. “A row of corpses. Lined up and
stripped naked just like the soldiers at the roadblock.”

With a little manipulation of the controls, the image on the
screen grew in size and clarity. Duncan held the hover and craned his neck to
see more of the display.

“They’ve all been shot. What’d you call it ... center mass?”

“That’s how every soldier learns to engage the enemy in basic
training,” said Duncan, nodding an affirmative. “And that’s exactly how those
fucks popped Logan ... two to the chest.” He grimaced as he heard his brother’s
last words echoing in his head:
Rotters don’t shoot back
.

“Taking that into consideration, what does that tell us?”

“Boy should’ve been wearing a vest,” whispered Duncan, a hot
tear tracing the contours of his cheek.

***

After a slow fly by, during which no words were exchanged,
Duncan set the Black Hawk down on the gently-sloped lawn in front of the still
smoldering mansion. Newer grass clippings took to the air, creating a thin hazy
veil that quickly dissipated after he set the power to idle.

With the hypnotic blur of the rotor disc overhead
dissipating and the turbine noise a steady tolerable din, Daymon removed his
helmet and shook out his dreads. Then he called out over the steady
thwop
of the rotor blades, “Why don’t you stay here this time and let me do the
lookin’ around.”

Ignoring what seemed to him more of an order than a question
or statement, Duncan went about flipping switches that quickly silenced the
turbines. He removed his helmet and hung his head for a moment, stroking his
silver mustache. Then, after having come to some kind of conclusion, he reached
around and grabbed his stubby shotgun from the back, swiveled around and shot
Daymon a hard look. Held it for a couple of seconds like some kind of Mexican
standoff and then, without a word, toed open the door and slid out of the helo
onto the neatly manicured lawn.

Huntsville, Utah

Without a shared word between them, Duncan and Daymon
performed a thorough recon of the property. They walked slowly
counter-clockwise from the static Black Hawk to the Olympic-sized swimming
pool, stopping regularly so that Duncan could inspect the lush lawn.

Finally, breaking the heavy silence, Daymon asked, “What’s
with the lawn inspection?”

Without making eye contact, Duncan swept his arm on a flat
plane indicating the expanse of lawn north of the razed structure and said,
“Same thing happened at the quarry happened here. Helicopters put down right
here.” He pivoted and pointed at the Black Hawk. “And there also.”