Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (36 page)

Eden Compound, Utah

The crown of Raven’s head barely reached the top of the
gnarled wooden post. She stood there, one hand gripping the top strand of wire,
head craned and looking through the trees towards the feeder road.

Sasha was already on the other side, having scaled the fence
without a word. Now the fourteen-year-old was staring a silent dare Raven’s way.

“You’re outside the wire.” Raven jiggled the post as if
checking its steadfastness. It did not move; however, her resolve wavered a
little.

“Technically, I’m inside the wire,” replied Sasha. She
removed her stocking cap, letting her hair erupt to its normal volume. It was
warming up, so the hat went in a pocket and she unzipped her jacket.

“What do you mean?” asked Raven, casting a furtive glance
over her shoulder and trying to pick out the all-seeing-eye perched on the post
somewhere through the trees to her right. Because if she could see the plastic
globe, then the camera inside the globe could also see her. Thankfully, it was
blocked entirely from view by the picket of juvenile trees lining the road just
inside the middle gate.

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Sasha. “The fence at the main
road
is
the wire. Then, if we cross the road and climb the fence on the
other side of the main road … we’re right back
inside
the wire.
Technically.”

Raven put her hands on her hips.
Define technically
, she
thought. Then right after that she heard in her head Sasha saying to Brook:
The
responsibility for whatever happens lies square on my shoulders.
That was
enough to erode her resolve, and as if someone outside of herself was
manipulating a string attached to her head, it bobbed up and down once, then before
she could stop herself, she was slipping between the stretched wires to Sasha’s
side.

“That’s my girl,” said Sasha, a devilish gleam in her eye.

It’s your butt, babysitter
, thought Raven as her
namesake started to caw somewhere nearby. Instinctively her hand went to the
knife on her hip. She rested her palm on its antler pommel. “What about the
rotters?” she asked, shifting her sixty-five-pound frame nervously
side-to-side.

“We don’t have anything to worry about. Besides, it’s still not
warm enough for them to move with any kind of speed.”

There was a brief silence as Raven shot her a look that
seemed to say
are you sure?

“Trust me,” said Sasha. “C’mon. What are you waiting for?
Let’s go.”

Raven said nothing. Her mind was going a mile a minute and
in her head was a little voice trying to talk her into climbing back through
the fence and letting Sasha go ahead by herself. But just as her muscles started
to act on the impulse, a pair of east-facing firs, having grown up so closely
together that a good deal of their branches had become interwoven, shed several
huge chunks of wet snow in one fell swoop.

The roar was tremendous, shattering the silence, and the
sight of the snow hammering the ground with immense force made any kind of walk,
whether towards the State Route or back to the compound, seem to Raven too
dangerous a thing to attempt alone. Again, as if something outside of herself
was in control, first her left foot moved forward and planted on the narrow
path, then the right grudgingly followed suit. Soon she was walking in Sasha’s
footsteps, all thought of consequence trumped by a heaping pile of age-old peer
pressure. A hundred paces from the inner fence, as the forest went from mainly
firs and opened up into a grove of birch and oaks, the latter whose orange and
red leaves were not completely shed, the two girls cut a ninety-degree turn to
their right. A minute later they were standing by the side of the feeder road,
out of sight of the middle gate camera, and, to pass the time—while also keeping
Raven’s mind off of the fact that they were both playing with fire—Sasha proposed
they play a game she called
Island Hoppers
.

“The snow is the water and the spots of gravel where it has
melted are the islands,” she explained. “The navigator goes
island hopping
until she gets stuck and cannot reach another island.”

“What happens then?” asked Raven, no longer giving much
thought to her mom or whether they were out of range of the camera or not.

“Easy,” said Sasha. “Then the next person is the navigator
until they get stuck.”

“How does someone win?”

“Whoever is navigating when we get to the graves is the
winner.”

“Graves?” said Raven. She stopped abruptly, swung her gaze
to Sasha and thrust her hands into her pockets.

Bear River North Gate

Dregan was in the lead driving the Tahoe. Lined up behind
him was the surplus Blazer once belonging to Mikhail and three Humvees, the
first two driven by men who were acquaintances and only along due to one
negotiated transaction or another. The Humvee bringing up the rear sprouted the
turret-mounted MK-19 grenade launcher and was driven by Dregan’s brother, Henry.

At exactly eleven-thirty the black and white former Jackson
Hole Police cruiser rolled to a stop near the rear gate, a twelve-foot-tall monstrosity
clad with rust-streaked corrugated metal and strung through every which way with
what had to be a mile-long strand of equally rusted barbed wire.

As heads panned up from what they were doing, the rain
resumed, pelting the windshield and putting new pockmarks in the diminishing
blanket of snow.

The pair of armed men guarding the gate—both having already been
promised certain things by Dregan to look the other way—nodded at him conspiratorially
then rolled the wheeled gate open and stepped aside.

After making eye contact with both men—one of whom was Eddie
Swain—and nodding subtly their way, Dregan started the Tahoe rolling slowly over
the threshold. A few dozen feet on the other side of the gate, just as the
single-lane road entered an orchard, he stopped and waited while the other
vehicles passed on through.

With the gnarled branches of the skeletal trees reaching for
the jouncing trucks from both sides, and clumps of snow heavy with rain pelting
the Tahoe’s roof, Dregan led the convoy north. They drove through the orchard
for half a mile until the road cut a sharp ninety-degree left, where it
followed the contour of the land on a gentle downslope west to an eventual
merger with the laser-straight stretch of State Route 16 off in the distance.

With the four-wheel-drive still engaged, Dregan drove
one-handed through the muddy snow for a spell while he fished Lena’s iPhone
from his jacket’s inner pocket. He reached to the dash and worked the phone
lengthwise into a device that looked to either have at one time held a book of
tickets or a wide pad of paper positioned nearby for taking notes on the fly.
Secured left-of-center on the dash, the apparatus’s rubberized arms held the
phone firmly in place, almost like it had been designed by Steve Jobs himself.
Nearing the bottom of the dip, where the road flattened out prior to the T-junction,
Dregan again took his eyes off the road to thumb the device on.

While he waited at the “T” for the four military vehicles to
close ranks, he tapped the Video icon and started Lena’s wedding montage
playing.

The tuned suspension complained as the slightly lowered SUV
turned onto the snow-covered two-lane heading northbound. Once forward momentum
was established, Dregan looked at the clock on the dash and learned it was a
quarter to noon. In his mind’s eye he saw Newman being escorted across the
rutted street from the makeshift jail to the bookstore-turned-courthouse. In a
way he envied the man. Whoever said revenge was a dish best served cold was
either fucked in the head or had never been in either of their shoes. Norman
got drunk and acted, and from that there was no escaping. There were far too
many witnesses. And Ford’s warm body to boot. The trial would be quick and the
vigilante would be swinging from the hanging tree by one o’clock.

Dregan thought about how it must have felt to gun Ford down
with the AK-47. After a second he decided, though very effective, it just wasn’t
quite as up close and personal as cleaving a sharpened length of steel into the
deserving dirtbag’s cranium and watching the light ebb from his eyes.

There was no doubt in Dregan’s mind. He had been there and
done that with his sword. It
was
satisfying, and that was how Lena’s
murderer needed to go out. Death by ancestral sword. Fitting and final.
Peaceful and accepting or kicking and screaming. Either way, he would have
closure and life could go on.

He pictured the bailiffs helping Newman through the double
doors. He saw the judge in his
chambers,
just a glorified storeroom
filled with dusty paperbacks. Right about now, he figured, Pomeroy would be
draining the liquid courage from his flask, stuffing random papers under his
arm, and standing in the gloom—all anticipatory moves preceding his title and name
being barked from beyond the door.

Realizing he had been daydreaming, Dregan cast a glance at
the drama playing out on the glossy screen. Pissed that he had missed out
seeing Lena on the proposal portion of the strung-together footage, he kept one
eye on the road and one on the screen as the bachelor party scene unfolded.
Mikhail was pacing back and forth in front of the groomsmen-to-be, his mouth
moving and gesticulating with his arms. He was drunk and his slurred words
barely rose above the hot air blasting from the Tahoe’s vents. Dregan did
nothing to remedy this. He knew what was being said. He had been there that
night and had bristled as the insecure young man pointed out everything that
was wrong with the men—his supposed friends—sitting in a line on the barstools.
A portent of what was to come; the bartender was in the background drying and
stacking glassware and watching the drunk groom surreptitiously via the
mirrored backbar.

There was a sharp jolt as the Tahoe ran over a prone form on
the road. He took his eyes from the phone and fixed them dead ahead where the
road would soon begin a long uphill climb.

At the top of the rise, the entire white landscape spread
out before him. To the left were low foothills, the spiny ridges reaching down
towards the road looking like bony fingers filling out a white glove. Straight
ahead, miles in the distance was Woodruff looking every bit as dead as it was.
To the right of Woodruff, foothills rose up, quickly culminating in the nine-thousand-foot-tall
snow-covered peaks of the Bear River Mountain Range. And closer in, on that
side, was the big red barn and two-story house with Helen and Ray snugged
warmly inside. He flicked his eyes right a few more degrees and walked his gaze
over the snowy field all the way to the snaking Bear River’s slow-moving
waters. There, somewhere between the house and river, was Cleo, the battery in
his two-way radio no doubt sapped dead by the cold, freezing his ass off and
earning every single thing Dregan had promised.

The radio in the console crackled to life. The voice that
came through the speaker was a smoker’s, gravelly and booming. “We were talking
back here and Peter wants to know if we’re picking up Cleo.”

Dregan’s knuckles suddenly went white as his grip on the steering
wheel tightened. A steady throb started at both temples as he pulled to the
shoulder and set the brake. On the iPhone’s screen, the action was just getting
to the part where the bartender shut the party down and singled Mikhail out by
calling him ‘Mister Rashovic.’ Feeling a flush of heat spread to his cheeks,
Dregan shut off the heater blower and let the embarrassing moment play through,
every word coming out of the tiny speaker suddenly loud and clear. He put his
thumb in front of Mikhail’s moving image so he didn’t have to see his face again.
With the other hand, he picked up the two-way, and just when Mikhail was meeting
the bartender toe-to-toe on the customer side of the bar and seconds from delivering
his trademark line, Dregan spared himself from hearing it again by stabbing his
thumb down on the iPhone’s power button.

He sat in silence for a few seconds while the Blazer and three
Humvees labored up the hill. As they pulled off the road behind the Tahoe, he
saw in the rearview another half-dozen trucks and SUVs materialize over a distant
rise. Mostly held together with rust and painted the same woodland camouflage
pattern as the Blazer, Dregan had gifted them to a Bear River resident named
Larry in exchange for a day’s worth of armed backup. He watched them for a
short while as they slowly closed the distance with the Humvees.

The sun high in the sky glinted off the passenger side
windows as the vehicles hit the straight. A tick later as they picked up speed,
Dregan saw the prearranged signal delivered when the lead vehicle flashed its high
beams three times.

“Peter wants to know ... ” Dregan said to himself, the sight
of the older military surplus vehicles suddenly making him wish he had eschewed
the Tahoe for the Blazer just so he could flick on the stereo and let the
flowing notes of Bach or Beethoven bring his stress level down. But he hadn’t
and, seeing as how there was no way to send Peter back through the gate without
racking up more favors than he wished to fulfill, Dregan had no choice but to
bring him along.

Clenching his teeth and in as calm a voice as he could
summon, he said, “I’ve got a call to place, Hank. Please send my blonde-haired blue-eyed
devil up front. Our plans have just changed.”

Cleo was in the throes of ecstasy … in his dream. If he had been
a bystander looking down on his own body stretched out on the old davenport, he
would have laughed out loud. Deep in an REM sleep cycle, his eyes were moving
rapidly under the lids. Judging by the disconcerting ripple his corneas made as
they swept back and forth, pushing against the thin skin there, one would think
that in his dream he was on the sidelines and watching an Olympic-caliber game
of Ping-Pong.

A thin strand of drool broke free from the corner of his
mouth and fell to the small puddle forming next to his head. His long johns
were tented in front and he was in the process of giving himself a thorough, albeit,
unconscious scratching down there.

Just when the thirty-something woman was about to apply
leather to his backside, Cleo felt something altogether different. Had she gone
rogue on him? Was that a stun gun crackling back there and about to deliver him
into oblivion? His mind reeled. A tick after the initial sensation hit him, his
eyes snapped open and he was wondering where in the hell he was.

He remembered a snifter being filled repeatedly. He’d lost
count after five, but was pretty sure he hadn’t been drugged. Two reasons: One,
his own personal rule: he didn’t drink with people he didn’t know and, more
importantly, trust. And two, that he was still alive meant he hadn’t been
traded away to someone intent on putting him into their stew. He knew enough to
stay away from Bear River’s seedy underbelly, where things of that nature,
though not common, had been known to happen.

The sensation was back. Something vibrating against his
backside. He was up in a flash as where he was and why he was here came rushing
back to him. Wearing only a dirty wife beater riding high over the red long
johns, he was up and stepping into his boots, the radio vibrating madly in his
hand.

“Lunch is served,” called Helen from the kitchen.

Cleo said nothing. If he didn’t answer this he was going to
end up as somebody’s
lunch
—living or possibly undead. He rushed out the
front door and was hit instantly by a sideways-driving drizzle. It was coming
in from the northeast and dripping off the porch overhang. And it was still
cold, even though the mercury in the old enamel thermometer tacked next to the
front door showed the temperature had inexplicably climbed into the low fifties
in less than twelve hours.

He thumbed the
Talk
key. “Cleo here,” he said,
wheezing a little.

“For Christ’s sake,” barked Dregan. “What took you so long
to answer? And why are you breathing like you just left the whorehouse?”

“Feet got tangled in my sleeping bag when I stood up, that’s
all,” he lied.

“You were
sleeping
on the job?”

The lies piled on. “No, Dregan,” he said. “I was staying
warm and couldn’t find the radio.”

“What did Ray and Helen do? Did they leave the house?”

Cleo paused for a second, radio clutched in his hand, mind
reeling. The further invested in the lies he became, the higher his anxiety
level climbed. At the moment he was embroiled in a massive Catch 22. On one
hand he wanted to fire up a cigarette. He wanted one so badly he could actually
taste the stale, month-old tobacco. However, at the moment, it seemed as if an
elephant had parked its substantial backside on his sternum. Breathing was a
chore. And the more he lied, the bigger the elephant got.

“Change your batteries,” Dregan bawled.

“I’m here,” stammered Cleo. “Ray and Helen were inside all
night.”
A half-truth.

“And nobody came by?”

“Nope,” Cleo said, casting a nervous glance at the door
behind him. He released the
Talk
key. A few seconds of dead air. Now
Dregan was leaving him hanging. He opened his mouth to ask whether he should get
his vehicle and drive to the 39 junction or if he should just walk down and
wait by the end of the Thagons’ drive. But he didn’t get the chance to. Instead,
wholly unexpectedly, Dregan let him off the hook. The big man said, “I have
enough men. You did a good job. Go on back and warm your old bones by a fire.”

“But if I don’t go … I don’t fulfill
my
part of the
deal,” Cleo protested.

“Don’t worry, old friend. I won’t dock you, I’ll add an
extra couple of tins of snuff. Consider it a tip.” There was a pause. Just a
handful of seconds. Dregan went on, “Go. I insist.”

The last transmission sent the elephant scurrying from
Cleo’s chest. In his mind, the hangover was gone and he was already at Smead’s
Tavern, hoisting one, and about to try and lure his favorite brunette back to
his place with a fifth of the vodka he had been promised. But he played it
cool. He said, “Are you sure you don’t need an extra gun? I’m a little stiff
and numb from a night out in the elements … I could still—”

Dregan cut him off. “I don’t have
room for you
anyway
. I just picked up another passenger.” His thumb was
still depressing the
Talk
key. Cleo heard a rattle and then a kid’s
voice followed at once by the solid
thunk
of a door closing. He took a
deep breath. Fumbled in a nonexistent pocket for a smoke. Realized he was outside,
damp and cold, and in his underwear.

“If you insist,” Cleo replied. There was another rattle and
then the creak of a screen door opening behind him. He craned over his shoulder
and quickly powered down the radio.

“What’s the word?” Ray asked. He was holding a red felt hat two-fisted
and wringing it like a hunk of saltwater taffy.

“I’ve been relieved.”

“Well then I’m relieved. Means neither one of us gets to
face Dregan. I was going to give him a piece of my mind for sending you to spy
on me.” He thought:
Shut up Ray. Switzerland.

Like an Etch A Sketch given a good hard shake, the look of
elation instantly drained from Cleo’s face. “You’re not going to—”

“Tell Dregan you spent the night under the enemy’s roof?” Ray
put the hat on his head and cracked a mirthless smile. “I won’t spill if you
don’t. Deal?”

Cleo’s face lit back up. He was flashing the rotting picket of
teeth again. “Deal,” he said. “Now
I
need a smoke.”

***

Dregan had just set the radio aside and the tail end of one
of his famous one-minute staring sessions was drawing near. Counting down from
sixty in his head had saved him from half a dozen murder charges over the
course of his lifetime. Murder wasn’t necessarily on the table here—a good old-fashioned
ass whipping was.

The boy tried to speak.

Dregan held a hand up to silence him. Took the brake off and
wheeled them north, the sweet taste of revenge oh so close to being realized instantly
edging out the anger he was feeling toward his boy.