Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (16 page)

Once Cade had finished his impromptu dissection, he made a
face and said, “This thing’s skin is acting like natural insulation. And to
answer Taryn’s question—” he looked at Duncan, then Taryn, “—it
was
lying in wait for us, no doubt about it. These things are still learning. The
longer they stay alive ... dead, whatever. The more of this kind of behavior I
think we’re likely to see.”

“We better get busy culling them then,” Daymon said, the
bars of light slipping around his frame, rippling in the turbid air as he shifted
in the doorway. “Kindness wants to eat.”

Taryn was up on her feet now and switched on a flashlight of
her own. She paced the perimeter of the garage, walking the beam over the
products—air cleaners, oil filters, serpentine belts and all other manner of
car parts—stored there, only pausing when she got to the partially disassembled
early model pickup. “Nice Fat Fender Ford,” she said to no one in particular.
“Dad would have loved it.”

Cade stowed the dinky mag-lite in a pocket. Then he took his
carbine in hand and thumbed the button on the foregrip, bringing the tactical
light online. He struck out on his own, illuminating the floor and walls and
shelves with the cone of white light.

***

Duncan chatted with Daymon, offering up a half-hearted
apology for busting his chops and promising he’d probably do it later but if
not then certainly tomorrow.

A couple of minutes after disappearing into the gloom, Cade
and Taryn had both completed a clockwise sweep of the garage, her returning
loaded down with two plastic boxes containing tire chains, one pinned tightly
under each arm, and him with pockets bulging with the type of spray cans
usually containing auto lubricants of some kind.

“Mount up,” Cade said, unslinging his rifle. He watched
Duncan and Daymon turn back into the store and crunch through the snowy aisles.
Once they were out of earshot, he turned and stood in the doorway, barring
Taryn from leaving the garage.

She regarded him and spoke first. “I’m well aware of how
stupid that was.”

Cade said, “It’s OK to have a little fear. In fact, it’s
healthy. Keeps us on our toes. That was partially my fault. This is all new to
me. These things don’t act like any enemy I’ve ever seen ... and that they’re
constantly pulling new tricks out of their asses doesn’t help.”

She said nothing. Then, as if the realization of how close
she’d come to being bit dawned on her, she began to shake.

“It was a close call … sure. But look on the bright side,
we’re both still breathing.” He reached for the door jamb and came back with her
carbine. “Chalk it up as a freebie. A hard-earned learning experience.” He
handed her the rifle and stepped aside.

Taryn ducked by and said, “I’m done assuming. I’ll take the
blame there. I let Daymon get under my skin and as a result I made an ass out
of myself.” She sighed and shook her head. Fixed her eyes on his. “And for that
I am truly sorry.”

“I forgot about it as soon as the dust settled and I saw we
wouldn’t be burying you. We don’t have any antiserum with us. And I don’t know
when or if we will get anymore. So you’ve got to—”

“Stay frosty,” she said, cutting him off. “And I’ll try and
give Daymon a little slack. All of Heidi’s ups and downs are probably taking a
toll on him.”

Cade had no reply for that. He was no shrink. He figured
he’d leave all of that stuff to sort itself out. God knew there’d be plenty of
time for it once the snow stuck around for the long haul. “Let’s go,” he
finally said, fearing this snow event to be fleeting and that the dead would be
walking again, sooner rather than later. “Time is of the essence.” He followed
Taryn through the door, both of them ducking under the panic bar. Once outside
with snowflakes darting around his head, he looked to the others. “Mount up.
According to Glenda our next stop is about a half a mile down 39 and then
another half a mile north down a side road. Keep your eyes peeled for it.”

Though it was a tolerable fifty-five degrees in the
Graysons’ quarters, beads of sweat had formed on Brook’s forehead. She was
sitting hunched over in a folding chair and clutching a rectangular olive drab
ammunition canister in her right hand. The metal canister was partially filled
with dirt and the metal handles had been wrapped with a few lengths of silver
duct tape. She was in the middle of the second of three sets of fifteen and
feeling a burn near her trapezius and deltoids, not so much from the muscles
being overexerted, but from the thick slab of still-mending scar tissue being
stretched to its limit.

She counted: “Twelve, thirteen, fourteen,” grunting between
each repetition. At
fifteen
she let the ammo can down easy and sat up
straight in the chair, the beads now sheeting down her face as she breathed in
deep and listened to the soft sounds of whatever DVD Raven and Sasha were
watching now.

Taking up the stress ball Cade had brought back from the
rehab place, she worked it hard, squeezing the life from it until the fingers
of her right hand ached and then kept going. Like the ammo can exercise, she
did three sets of fifteen with the ball, afterward feeling as if she had milked
a herd of cows with it.

“Raven,” she called.

One of the girls silenced the laptop.

“Yes Momma?”

“Can you get me a water, sweetie? And when you come back I’m
going to need you to stretch me out.”

“Yes Momma,” she said again.

A moment later Raven emerged from the gloomy rear section of
the container with a canteen in one hand and a cotton towel in the other. She
handed her mom the canteen and folded the towel in on itself until she had a
tight square of fabric.

Before twisting the cap on the canteen, Brook pressed its
flat side to her forehead, then cheeks, and finally rested it on the base of
her neck for a moment. “Only good thing about this weather,” she finally said.

“Cold water,” Raven answered back. Then, like the world’s
smallest corner person tending to a tuckered-out boxer, she put the towel to
use, dabbing the sweat from her mom’s face with delicate stabbing motions,
starting with the underside of her chin and working up to the constellation of
scars on her cheek. Finished with that, she squeezed a pearl-sized bead of the
vitamin oil onto the damp washcloth-sized towel and began working it into the
pink and purple scar on her mom’s back, wincing each time she encountered one
of the deep indentions caused by the crawler’s incisors.

“Can I get you anything?” asked Sasha. She was standing
partly in shadow and gripping the bunk bed post like a subway rider expecting
the train car to suddenly take a wild lurch.

“Just keeping Raven occupied helps me more than you know,”
answered Brook. “Wish money still had a meaning. I’d pay you handsomely by the
hour.”

Though it wasn’t evident to Brook or Raven, a wide smile
spread on the redhead’s face and stayed there.

“I figure you girls can help Tran cook dinner again. If
you’re both up to it.” In her side vision Brook saw Raven nod enthusiastically.
“That will also get you two out of dish detail. What do you think, Sash?”

“Whatever you say, Mom—” Sasha caught herself the second the
word she hadn’t uttered in a long time rolled off her tongue. She went silent
and sat down hard on the bunk, her expression gone tight and cloaked in shadow.

“It’s alright, sweetie. You can call me that if you want.
Might as well ... these last few weeks you and Raven have become so close an
outsider would peg you two as sisters.”

“Right, Mom,” Raven said. “Me with my brown hair and eyes
and perpetual suntan and her with red hair, greenish eyes, and totally opposite
skin tone. I don’t see it. Not by a long stretch.”

“I agree with Raven,” said Sasha. She rose from the bed and
stepped around the end of the bunk and into the cone of light thrown from the
hanging sixty-watt bulb. She fixed her gaze with Brook’s. Had trouble holding
it because Raven was now vigorously rubbing the muscles running vertically up
the woman’s right side. “You’re just trying to make me not feel embarrassed,
Mrs. Grayson. My mom is still out there ... somewhere.”

“I’m sure she is,” Brook said, nodding. “I won’t be mad if
it slips again. In fact I’d be honored. I’m sure your mom is a very tough
lady.”

Was
, thought Raven. She capped the bottle and set it
on the floor by her feet. “I’ll share my mom with you until yours comes back,”
she said.

Sasha said nothing. Her chin dropped to her chest and tears
rolled off her downcast face. They made little ticking patters striking the
floor near her feet, and soon the silhouette cast there by her full head of
hair was dotted with fallen tears.

***

Southeast of the Eden Compound, Helen was standing in front
of her kitchen sink, looking absently out the window there, slowly scrubbing
Ray’s lunch plate with a Brillo pad. And as she made lazy counter-clockwise
passes over the stuck-on bits of hash he had failed to lick clean, something
just above her line of sight dead center in the backfield caught her attention.
She froze instantly, every muscle seizing involuntarily and, without peering
down, dipped the plate in the numbingly cold rinse water and snatched up a
dishtowel. Still fixated on the unmoving lump sitting just at the edge of her
vision, she dried the plate and put it aside then wiped the watery suds off the
backs of her hands.

“Ray,” she called, the word, uttered like a halfhearted
stage call, carrying no weight. Keeping her eyes locked on the gray smudge a
few degrees above the window’s mid-point where the narrow excuse for a river
made a westerly bend, she called his name again.

“Yes, dear?” he called back.

“I think there’s something out in the field.”

“A deader?”

From the dining room came the screech of a chair’s legs
giving way, wood scraping wood. It was followed by a half-dozen plodding steps
and Ray’s harried breathing.

Helen looked over her shoulder just as her husband filled up
the doorway. He looked tired to her. Stooped, more so than usual.

“I don’t know what I saw,” she conceded. Then, something she
should have done before calling Ray—which was usually her first inclination
because she gathered it went a long way towards making him feel useful—she
plucked her glasses from the sill, looped the diamond-cut leash over her head,
and perched them properly on her nose. “Come on over and see what you think?”

And he did. He shuffled around the chair pushed in against
the small bistro table left of the doorway and came up behind her. Placing a
hand lovingly on her shoulder, he asked her to point to what she had seen.

With his naked eye, he followed the length of her arm to the
tip of her finger and beyond. He took a deep breath and chuckled. “Oh, Helen.
That’s that old bramble mound I was going to hit with Ortho and it kept
slipping my mind. And then the
thing
happened.”

“That’s what you’ve been saying about the rock
underneath
those brambles five years running now. When these dead things finally die off
you better get the Deere running and pull it out once and for all.”

Not having the heart to tell her those things were likely to
be around and walking when both of their hearts gave up the ghost, he merely
mumbled something agreeable and made his way back to the dining room and the
task at hand.

Helen said nothing. She pulled her plate from the cold soapy
water, gave it a wipe, and put it in the frigid rinse.

“Ray.”

From the dining room, softer this time, because there was no
weight on it, there came another scraping noise, still wood on wood, and then,
“Yes, Helen?”

Wishing she had broken down and bought that snazzy
combination shelf organizer/lazy Susan from the city slicker on QVC, she
continued moving cans around in the cupboard and let out a sigh.

“What strikes your fancy for dinner ... Vienna sausages and
sauerkraut or ... Vienna sausages and sauerkraut?”

“Sounds like we had one too many
last suppers
, eh
Helen,” he called from the other room.

“Yep. Made the last canned ham for Alexander and his boys
two Sundays ago. We still have a year’s worth of those MRE things upstairs,
though.”

Concluding Helen was bored out of her wits—hence the
planning for dinner so soon after lunch—Ray said, “Why don’t you bring some
downstairs then. I don’t think there’s any chance of us getting in trouble for
purloining them at this juncture.”

“
Juncture,
” she said. Just the one word delivered all
nasally, as Ray oftentimes finished a sentence, caused her to snort. “Say that
again, Ray. Sounded like a former Republican president from Texas.” She wracked
her brain trying to remember whom.

“Say what?”

“
Juncture
, Ray.
Juncture
.” Just thinking about
the old world seemed so absurd to her, seeing as how the first snow of the
season was on the ground, the pantry was near empty and the front pasture was
dotted with alpaca carcasses. She laughed like she was going crazy. A
high-pitched warbling.

“I don’t know, Helen. Why don’t you go up and see?” he
called again, not really hearing the question, but appeasing her with an answer
anyhow.

Why don’t I?
she thought, casting another glance
toward the brambles.

***

Three hundred yards due east from the farmhouse, Cleo
shifted his weight from his left butt cheek to the right. There was no feeling
in either now and he couldn’t decide whether a minor case of frostbite was
setting in or they were numb from lack of blood flow. After a few seconds spent
in the new position, it became abundantly clear that the latter was the case
when it started feeling like an army of sprites armed with pins and needles
were attacking the area in question.

Adding to the sharp stabs and nettle-like tingling, the
mother of all headaches was settling behind his eyes. Nicotine withdrawals, he
thought. By now he’d be three-quarters of the way through his first pack of the
day and it wasn’t even mid-afternoon yet.

He shook his head, spit the spent plug of tobacco into the
snow, and loaded a fresh dip. From another pocket, he took out the long-range
CB radio and upped the volume a couple of notches.

As he took a scrap of paper from a pocket and double-checked
the channel on the CB, a wave of nicotine hit his brain, producing a sudden
pain negating euphoria.

He thumbed the Talk key. “Are you in place yet, Gregory?” He
took his thumb off and for a long moment there was only a soft hissing coming
from the speaker. He tried again. “Gregory?”