Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (33 page)

Approaching the turn-off to Trapper’s Loop Road, Cade’s
attention was drawn to the boat ramp and day use area up ahead and off to his
right. There were flashlight beams bouncing and swinging back and forth. Occasionally
a single shaft of light would illuminate one of the many nylon tents and make
it glow like a grounded Chinese funeral lantern. Unlike the cemetery where
everyone split up, the stabbing bars of white light were clustered together and
seemed to be moving left-to-right, near the shore, the beams flaring
brilliantly every time they hit the water’s surface. That the group was quite a
distance removed from the parking lot where they said they would leave the
4Runner suggested to Cade that Jamie, Taryn, Lev, and Wilson had wasted no time
getting underway and their late night culling session was moving ahead nicely.

He flicked his gaze to the tracked-up surface of 39, eased
off the pedal, and let the Mack’s transmission gearing down do the job of slowing
the lumbering vehicle. At the T-junction he made a wide arcing left turn, and
in the rearview saw the Land Cruiser’s headlights sweep through the snow
churned up by the eight massive tires on the double axle out back. Half a beat
later, the plow’s lights revealed a scene yanked right out of Cade’s worst
nightmare. Though he’d already seen the immobilized mass of Zs in their
entirety in full daylight, that was nothing like seeing them suddenly snap from
the dark like some kind of ambush rising straight out of hell.

The dead were stalled out heading south, so thankfully Cade
was spared falling under the hungry gaze of a thousand pairs of staring,
lifeless eyes. Throwing a hard shudder at the prospect of getting caught in
this kind of a jam with the mercury north of thirty-two, he pulled the plow truck
hard to the side of the road and shut the rig down. Leaving headlights burning,
he lowered himself to the ground and shut the door just as the Land Cruiser rolled
up and parked beside the plow truck.

Since the hostile takeover of Glenda’s house, the wind had
died to nothing. Still, as Cade stood on the lonely stretch of two-lane with
his breath coming out in ever lessening detail, he felt a subtle vibration
coming from the gathered dead. It wasn’t physical. It was almost the same
sensation he had gotten earlier when he was being watched. Only this was more ethereal,
like a premonition he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Still lit up by the quad shafts thrown out by the trucks,
the horde remained rooted. There was not so much as an eye twitch to confirm
they were actually still undead.

The Land Cruiser’s engine shut off and the driver’s door
slammed somewhere off Cade’s left shoulder. Still he continued to stare.
Where
to start? Front or back?

Duncan’s footfalls drew near. Gone was the initial crunch of
boot soles plunging through the frozen veneer. As was the soft squeak and
squelch of the powder-like snow under the mantle being compacted. Hearing this
dispelled Cade’s hunch that the lower elevation of the UDOT depot was
responsible for similar conditions there. Given that and the fact that the road
here was slowly rising from the level of the Pineville reservoir, there was
only one explanation for the changing conditions. The temperature was climbing.
He glanced at his Suunto and saw that the barometer rendered in the LCD display
was flatlined, meaning it was probably going to get warmer from here on out.

“Where we gonna to start? Front or back?” Duncan asked, his hoarse
voice and drawl making him sound as tired as he appeared.

Great minds, thought Cade. He didn’t answer at once. He was
busy trying to decide who looked worse, Duncan, or the dead thing lying face up
in the snow a few paces away. Magnified by his spec’s thick lenses, Duncan’s
red-rimmed eyes and the puffy bags under them made him look like a junkie who
had been up and riding the dragon non-stop for days. Then it dawned on Cade that
the older man wore the same look as every soldier he’d survived the Special
Forces Qualification Course alongside of so long ago—dog tired and running on
fumes.

“Are you up to this?”

“I was born ready,” Duncan said. He plucked his knife from
the belt sheath and flicked it open. “I’ll start in the back. You start here.
We’ll meet in the middle.”

Cade donned a headlamp and adjusted the beam so it hit
head-high to him wherever his eyes tracked. “Sounds like a plan,” he said, inadvertently
blasting Duncan’s eyes with its hundred-and-thirty lumen beam.

Mumbling something that began along the lines of
with
friends like you,
Duncan stalked off south, wending between the tightly
packed dead and stopping a dozen feet in. “I’m at an impasse. Let’s both start
here. I’ll go right.”

“Roger that,” Cade agreed, his Gerber already tainted with the
first victim’s viscous black blood.

***

Two hours after they started, Cade and Duncan were nearly
three-quarters of the way through their grim task of thinning out the
maxi-herd
—a
name Duncan coined, and every time he uttered it in a forced high falsetto made
both he and Cade think of a Kotex commercial.

Cade made his way to the middle of the two-lane. A hump of
earth rose up more than head-high to him a dozen yards beyond the shoulder. It
wasn’t a gradual rise, but more of a vertical wall shot through with various
horizontal layers of sediment, mostly reds and oranges which, like the quarry
to the east, indicated soil rich in iron. And like stubble after a hasty shave,
lonely sage and scrub clung to its top.

He treaded through a warren of twisted corpses and leaned
with his back to the cut in the earth. He took a long pull from a bottled water
and passed the remainder to Duncan, who was sitting in the snow, his breathing
labored.

Hand shaking with a perceptible palsy, Duncan accepted the
bottle. He downed the water in one gulp and tossed the bottle aside. “Chief’s
shedding a tear somewhere,” he joked.

“I’m not following,” Cade conceded, cracking a second oft-refilled
bottle open.

Duncan chuckled. “Just referencing a commercial that was on
television before you were a gleam in someone’s eye.”

Cade shrugged and handed the water over. Then, again utilizing
the skill recently taught to him by former SEAL and Special Agent to the
President, Adam Cross, he stood atop a morbidly obese corpse and looked south
down the length of the road. He did a quick calculation and decided two hundred
was a fairly accurate headcount of the dead they had left to cull. “Almost done,”
he said. “I’m going to move the plow up again. Watch yourself.”

“Going to get me back on Daymon’s behalf?”

“No,” replied Cade. “But you and Lev better give him a
break. Why don’t you take your passive aggressive aggression out on Wilson?”

“Called out by Cade.” Duncan rose, shakily. “I’ve been
expecting this. And the answer is no. I’m working with Glenda on my character
defects.”

“I know, I know,” Cade said. “Progress, not perfection. You
guys keep it up, though, that last strand is going to snap and we’ll lose him.”

Awash in the headlights, his shadow a hundred feet long,
Duncan said nothing.

“Why I wanted to end the standoff peacefully,” Cade said. “We
need all of the living we can get because there’s a war brewing, and I’m pretty
certain we’ll be fighting more than just the dead.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For one … I’ve been seeing lots of vapor trails. High up.”

“You jumping on the chemtrail bandwagon?”

“No. Hardly.” Cade shook his head. “However, Nash keeps
calling. She’s called each of the sat-phones. Gotta be something to them.”

Incredulous, Duncan said, “Phones … plural?”

Cade nodded. “All three.”

“That’s what you’re basing your assumption on?”

“No. There’s more.” Cade relayed to Duncan everything the
Navy SEAL Griffin had told him during the flight to Los Angeles aboard Jedi
One. About how the Chinese and Russians were both trying to exploit the United
States while she was on the ropes.

“We’re fucked if the Bear and Dragon both fared better than
us.”

Again Cade nodded. “First things first. We’ve got these to
go through. Then I’ll plow them off the road.”

“Lookie who’s spouting the AA lingo now.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Of course you don’t, Cade. I wouldn’t expect you to.
You
,
my friend, are what
we
like to call … a
normie
.”

Cade said nothing to that. He was already on his way to the
plow truck and wolfing down an energy bar.

“You’ll never understand,” mumbled Duncan. He watched Cade
hop into the truck and followed it with his gaze as it pulled forward three or
four lengths.

Cade poked his head out the window. “Good?”

“Good!” Duncan flashed a thumbs up that cast a sword-sized
shadow on the bodies in front of him. “Time to make the doughnuts,” he mumbled,
parroting yet another pop culture reference from his era that’d probably be
lost on the thirty-five-year-old.

The diesel engine cut off and there was a little backfire,
which was followed by that same crushing silence that reminded Duncan of the
end of every one of his failed relationships. He was stewing in melancholy
thoughts when he heard from somewhere south of him what sounded like the peep a
baby chick makes. Just one. Could have been a figment of his imagination. He
was about to delve back in with his blade when he heard it again.
Definitely
from somewhere deep in the pack
, he thought. Making the drawstrings on his
parka lash his face, a stiff wind gust whipped out of the east.

Cade limped over and saw the older man standing there
seemingly bewildered. “You OK?” he asked.

Duncan shook his head. “Not if what I just heard is what I
think it was.”

Cade shot a look that said:
Go on.

“It didn’t sound like what you described earlier. Wasn’t a
scream by any stretch. But it did remind me of someone choking back a scream.”

Panning his head slowly left then back to the right, Cade listened
hard.
Nothing.
There was only the steady three to five mile per hour
wind out of the east that had just picked back up and was sending puffs of snow
from the scrub lining the top of the knoll. “You’re hearing things now. Should
I bust your balls … or believe you?”

“I heard what I heard.”

There was a lull in the wind and the sound was back, louder
this time, and from more than one spot in the throng of dead yet to be culled.

Cade shook his head.
Effin Body Snatchers.
With a
granite set to his jaw, he said, “Let’s finish this.”

***

Forty-five minutes later, with the big numerals on Cade’s
Suunto reading a quarter of eleven and the newly risen moon casting a blue glow
over the killing fields, he and Duncan took a short break from sending the dead
to their final rest.

Cade stood on the frost-heaved shoulder, rubbing his neck
with one hand. Taken root in his lower back was a knot the size of a golf ball.
His hips hurt from stepping over bodies while favoring his left ankle.
Something to do with his pelvis in a constant state of misalignment, most
likely. And though not as bad as when he had injured it in the chopper crash
outside of Draper, his ankle was throbbing and the leather upper and laces of
his boot were stretched to their limit.

Sitting cross-legged on an oval of blacktop he had scraped
free of snow, Duncan stared at a nearby corpse. The legs were twitching and the
constant movement was slowly eroding the snow underneath it down to the
blacktop. And even though the half-dozen creatures were now prone, they would
occasionally emit a very eerie half-whistle, half-moan type of sound. Apart
from this, all of them had one more thing in common that body-type, age, race, and
sex had nothing to do with. All of the Zs laid out on the road in front of Cade
and Duncan were fairly recent turns that had died fully clothed and with hats
of one kind or another covering their heads.

Two of the six were middle-aged. A man and a woman who, by
Cade’s estimation, which he based on the light wear and tear on their expensive
matching outerwear and boots, had been walking the earth in an undead state for
less than a week. Though the two were found nowhere near each other in the
throng, Cade and Duncan were of like mind that they had been husband and wife
in life. Their thin sterling wedding bands looked to have been worked by the
same artisan’s hand. Furthermore, cementing the shared hunch, the pair’s
clothing, though different in style and color, bore the easily distinguishable
Mountain Hardware logo.

Another of the ‘whistlers,’ as Cade had taken to calling
them, had died just a normal teenaged girl dressed in gothic attire: leather
boots, ripped jeans, and a black leather jacket with spikes and anti-conformist
logos plastered all over it. Pulled down real low, almost to her eyes, was a
wool watch cap also in basic black. Save for a few facial piercings, the
brunette wore no jewelry. Several fingers on one hand bore bite marks, while
the rest had been cleanly stripped of flesh, leaving glistening white phalanges
throwing the pale moonlight. Riding up the left side of the teen’s ravaged neck
were angry raised welts, the dark purple ridges contrasting sharply with the pasty
white dermis and yellowed trachea on display for all to see. Cade gathered that
the injuries to her hands had been suffered while fighting off the hungry dead.
The neck wound was a direct result of her losing that life-and-death battle,
which he imagined had happened, judging by the lack of real decomposition, no
less than three days ago.

The other three whistlers lay sprawled out on their backs on
the shoulder closest to Duncan. All were males in their twenties or early
thirties and of Asian descent. The uniforms peeking out from under their cold
weather gear sported a tan camouflage pattern nearly identical to the fatigues
he was wearing now. The low-rise helmets still snugged tight to their heads were
close in design to the Kevlar bump-style tactical helmet he favored. He walked
his gaze lower and saw that, like the helmets and uniforms, the knee protection
still strapped on the bodies were knockoffs of American designs.