Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (40 page)

Bootsteps sounded and a sleepy voice said, “What’s going
on?”

“Come with me, Seth,” said Heidi, grabbing a coat off a hook
and tossing it to him. On the way through the foyer, she snatched up one of the
backup carbines and passed it back to him. Donning a coat of her own, she
caught his eye and began spilling the bad news.

Wasting no more time worrying about the hows and whys, Brook
snatched one of the satellite phones off the shelf and, ignoring the new
message there—
probably Nash again
— thumbed it on. She yanked the
charging cord off and hit the proper keys to raise Cade on it.

Leaning back in the chair and staring at the lined-up
vehicles on the monitor, their contours slightly distorted by distance, she
waited for the electronic handshake to happen. There was a series of clicks as
the signal cycled through a DoD satellite somewhere far above Earth and there
came a hollow and distant sounding ring. The electronic trill went on for three
agonizing cycles until a familiar voice answered.

***

With the distinct trilling of the Thuraya sat-phone filling
the cab, Cade brought the plow truck to a halt in the exact intersection and adjacent
to the car and road sign Oliver had shot up the previous night. As he fumbled
in his pocket to retrieve the noisily chirping handset, his gaze was drawn to
the houses on the hill where the reservoir and snow-capped Wasatch were
reflected in miniature in the west-facing windows. The feeling of being watched
he had experienced the day before was gone; however, a creeping feeling of doom
had taken root the second the phone began to vibrate and make that ominous
sound.

He thumbed the rubber
Talk
key. “Cade here,” he said
under Oliver’s watchful eye. He said nothing more. Just listened without
interjecting, his normally stoic expression going stony.

Oliver noticed the transformation and suddenly, like
something with leathery wings had taken flight in his stomach, he knew that a
good day had just been shot to hell.

“No,” Cade said slow and crisp, enunciating every syllable.
“Under no circumstances do you leave the compound on the feeder road. Gather
the girls and take the Ford and Humvee and punch a hole through the forest to
the old fire road.”

Oliver watched Cade’s brow knit and his grip on the wheel
tighten as a response was delivered from the other end.

“It’s your only chance to get away,” Cade answered,
exasperation showing. “Arm yourselves and go. Follow the road back to Woodruff.
I’ll meet you there and then we’ll find another place to call home.” He
listened for a handful of seconds then grunted and said, “Yes,” and ended the
call.

The Land Cruiser slid to a stop on the plow truck’s left
side.

Oliver sat up in the passenger seat rod-straight, eyes glued
to Cade, who was now staring at him directly.

“Coming or going?” Cade asked curtly. He flicked his eyes
away long enough to note the time on his big black watch.

“What?” said Oliver. “Going … where?”

There was a light tapping on the driver’s side window. Cade
rolled it down and found himself face-to-face with Daymon, who was standing on the
running board and gripping the vertical grab bar one-handed for balance.

Eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, Daymon asked, “What’s the
plan, Boss?”

Cade closed his eyes and let his head fall back into the
headrest. “Get Duncan for me,” he said slowly, the words enunciated perfectly.

One brow hitched, Daymon said, “O … K.” He turned his head.
Cupped his hands and bellowed, “Duncan … you’re needed in the boardroom!” He
turned back to see that Cade was talking into a two-way radio and heard him calling
the rest of the group back to the house.

Duncan was out of the SUV now and shooing Daymon off the
truck. He opened the Mack’s slab of a door and stared up at Cade. The look on
the younger man’s face struck him right away. Fact is, it puckered him up and
set his stomach roiling. He’d seen the steely gaze on many an occasion and it
usually preceded a shit ton of Zs and humans both meeting their makers. Already
knowing he was not going to like the answer, reluctantly he asked, “What’s up?”

Eden Compound

Eyeing her watch every minute or so, Brook gathered the
essentials: Weapons, magazines filled with 5.56 and 9mm, and both her and
Raven’s bug out bags containing food, medicine, and more loose ammo. Shouldering
the pack with considerable pain, she called out on the two-way to see if the
girls had been located yet.

Foley’s response hit her like a mule kick. She’d been
expecting to hear a resounding:
Yes
. Instead, she received a solemn:
No,
ma’am. There’s no sign of them … anywhere.

Still filling her cargo pockets with spare mags, she asked,
“Did you at least track them? Find any footsteps in the snow?”

“It’s mostly melted. What Glenda predicted happened. It’s
pushing sixty out here.”

Not liking any of these answers, Brook shook her head. “Are
there Zs on the wire?”

“Negative,” answered Foley. “I’m here with Glenda, Heidi,
and Tran. I’ve already moved Daymon’s RV and the Humvee started right up, first
try. What now?”

Finally a positive among all the negatives. Brook took a
deep breath and stole another peek at her watch. “Keep your eyes peeled for the
girls,” she said. “I’ll be out in ten.”

“Will do,” replied Foley. “Out.”

“Out,” Brook said, her gaze glued to the tall bearded man
whom she had no desire to tangle with. She watched him pacing back and forth
and talking into a two-way radio.

Hurry up Cade.

Cade filled Duncan in about the siege at the compound,
closed his door, then drove a couple of blocks east and let Oliver out at the
intersection near his house. Seconds later Cade had already looped back around
onto Main Street and was steering the truck left to get back to 39. He saw the sun
glare from the approaching 4Runner, but didn’t bother to stop. Duncan’s job was
to rendezvous with the Kids at the house, load up the smaller vehicles, and catch
up with him on down the road.

Ten minutes
, he thought to himself. He looked at his
watch.
Two down, eight to go. Not enough time. Not by a long shot.

He saw the National Guard roadblock and ditch full of
half-turtled cars and did two things at once. He uttered a little prayer for
his family and the others, asking for them to get to safety unscathed. He also tacked
on a little rider, asking God to allow the pranged plow up front to fit through
the narrow opening dead ahead.

As bent and battered as it had become from plowing the Zs
off Trapper’s Loop Road the night before, Cade wasn’t at all confident the dual
blade would clear the Jersey barriers at the blown Guard roadblock. He figured
the thing had to accept more adjustments—angle, camber, pitch all came to
mind—but he hadn’t taken the time earlier to acquaint himself with all of the
control’s intricacies, and had no time to do so now.

So he opted to raise the blade to the point where it looked
as if the barriers would pass underneath and hope for the best. He heard an odd
pneumatic whine overriding the hiss of the radials on the wet pavement. Next
came a painful groan of metal on metal when he actuated the
Up
lever.
The hydraulic whine rose in volume and there was a loud bang and the blade
started to rise ever so slowly. Once the blade stopped moving, he released the
lever, thinking to himself:
That’s as good as she’s going to get.

Closing rapidly with the narrow gap, and feeling the diesel
engine’s vibration through the firewall a foot from his throbbing ankle, he
suddenly reflected back to the hours following Jedi One-One going down in the
church graveyard outside of Draper, South Dakota. The similarities between that
awful day and the one this was shaping up to be were striking: Ballooned left
ankle … check! Unfamiliar and battered truck … check! Having to get to a
predetermined location traveling a Z-choked road and precious minutes in which to
make it happen … check!

Gripping the wheel two-handed, and entering the cattle chute
made up of stalled cars, burned bodies and unforgiving concrete Jersey barriers,
he put the pedal to the metal—or in this instance a high-wearing rubber floor
mat—and aimed the shiny chromed bulldog hood ornament at a point in the road
beyond it all.

There was a gunshot-like bang from the right and the plow
vibrated like a grain silo in a cat-5 twister. A little micro-car on the left
was peeled open like a sardine can from gas tank to the front door-pillar by
the left side of the blade. Then, concurrent with another pair of discordant
bangs, two noticeable bends suddenly appeared at the midpoint on each half of
the blade.

A tick later, save for the low engine growl, metallic
meshing of gears, and steady thudding of his heart, silence ensued until he
opened the gravel spreader out back to its most liberal setting and the deluge
of rocks began to pummel the pavement at his six.

Fields, fence, and the occasional ambulatory Z flashed by as
the rig picked up speed. Nearly emptied of gravel, it ate up the nearby grade,
crested the hill, and sped downhill with the blade vibrating wildly and pushing
a wind vortex ahead of it.

The road to the UDOT yard blipped by on the left. A half-beat
later, the Shell sign and burned-out husk of a gas station was in the rearview
mirror and fading into the background clutter.

He alternated between checking the wing mirror for the other
two vehicles and the road ahead for the larger groups of walking dead. He knew the
latter were somewhere up ahead. He only hoped they had not all resumed their
march east and amassed into one big rotting knot of death. Last thing he needed
was for the two herds they ignored earlier to have combined into a nearly
impassable roving horde. No, actually, as he thought hard on it, the last thing
he needed was for the reanimated throng to have made it all the way to Daymon’s
fallen tree roadblock and choke off all access to the bridge.

At just under sixty-miles-per-hour, the distance to the
bridge rapidly melted away. Cade checked his speed by a third on the corners
and pushed the rig hard on the straightaways. On one particularly long stretch,
he glimpsed a glint of sun in the vibrating side mirror. Slowing to the point
where the mirror stopped vibrating, he soon saw that the others were catching
up to him, the bulkier Land Cruiser in the lead and the 4Runner riding close in
its slipstream—Taryn at the wheel, no doubt. Damn, that girl could drive, he
thought, casting a glance at his Suunto. Five minutes until
surprise
time—whatever that meant—and the two-way radio, CB, and sat-phone still had not
made a sound. Whether that was good or bad, he didn’t have time to decide, for
when he looked up and slowed a little more for the next right-hander—the one
where he thought the minivan and its long dead human cargo lay—he saw a sea of jostling
bodies.

His own words came back to haunt:
There’s less than two hundred
here … we need to move on.

But there were more now. Crushed against each other, several
hundred deep, were the two groups of dead he’d feared would reanimate and eventually
converge.
Eff you Murphy … why here and now?
he mused, as the full scope
of the mess he was in came into view.

The blackened corpses from the two burned-out cities were
intermingled with the fresher corpses he presumed had at one time ventured east
from Ogden either in search of fertile hunting grounds or in hot pursuit of
prey. Didn’t matter now, because at the moment they were doing neither. Though
he didn’t want to stop, the threat of becoming mired like the minivan was real,
leaving him no other recourse. Quickly, he applied the brakes slowing the rig
right on the centerline. There was a hissing of air from the hard-working
brakes and the tires juddered and chirped—alerting the monsters to his presence.
He plucked the two-way off the seat just as Wilson’s voice emanated from the
speaker. “What are you stopping for? We’re just catching up with you,” said the
redhead.

Grimacing, Cade eyeballed the horde and saw that they were amassed
against a sizeable tree that had recently fallen across both lanes of 39. Beyond
both shoulders the guardrails were bowed down under its weight, and though the
dead were partially obscuring its trunk, he could see its massive and once far-reaching
root system reaching skyward. It hadn’t been brought down deliberately, that
much was clear. Probably had just succumbed to the heavy snow and high winds of
the previous day.

Worst timing ever.

Cade pressed the
Talk
button on the Motorola. “Lock
and load,” he said. “We have a few hundred bouncers guarding the door.” As an
afterthought, he added, “Have Daymon start prepping the chainsaw.”

He took another peek at his watch. The LCD numerals
indicated less than three minutes remained until the hostiles at the compound
were to send Brook and the others whatever
message
they had planned. He
shouldered open his door, planted his boot on the running board, and was hit by
a wave of pain. It shot up his leg and started a galaxy of sweat beading on his
brow. Grinding his teeth, he braced his M4 against the jam, engaged the EOTech
3X magnifier, and started punching holes in zombie skulls.

A split-second after he began firing, he heard between pulls
of the trigger the reassuring sound of approaching engines. And as he dropped a
spent magazine and grabbed a fresh one from his chest rig, the noise grew
louder. He jammed the mag into the well, released the bolt and shouldered the
rifle. In his left and right side vision, the two trucks pulled up, bookending
the idling plow truck.

Knowing the others needed no prodding, he continued picking
off the advancing wall of snarling flesh. As he dropped one after another, some
of the rounds passed through the Zs, causing sparks to fly off the minivan
trapped in their midst.

***

Inside the 4Runner, Wilson was thrown against his shoulder
belt as Taryn jammed on the brakes. “I knew this was going to happen,” he cried.
He tossed the radio aside and grabbed his rifle from between his legs. Drumming
up a little courage, he turned his gaze on Taryn and blurted out what he had
been thinking. “Stay here … watch the truck. Please …”

Unaware of the drama playing out inches to their fore, Lev
and Jamie were already piling out of the SUV.

“I can’t,” said Taryn, shaking her head. “The girls … Brook,
Glenda, Heidi, I care about them. I
have
to give a hundred and ten
percent on everything. If something were to happen to any of them and I didn’t
... I don’t know how I’d live with myself.”

Wilson leaned in and kissed her hard on the mouth. For the
first time—other than a couple of instances in the throes of ecstasy when he’s uttered
the words under his breath—he looked her square in the eyes and told her he
loved her.

“I know,” she mouthed. There was a short pause. “I love you
too, burger boy.”

A handful of seconds after the rear doors had slammed shut,
Taryn and Wilson were armed and joining the others near the plow truck’s right
front wheel.

***

 With the Land Cruiser parked and idling a yard off the plow
truck’s left side, Duncan actuated the tailgate lift and looked over at Daymon.
“Better be channeling some kind of lumberjack-superhero chainsaw work, bud.
Flannel Man activate.” He turned and stared hard at Oliver. “Time to bury the
hatchet, you and I. Go on out there and get yerself some more notches on that
fancy rifle of yours, O.G.”

Duncan reached back and grabbed the nearest rifle and a couple
of magazines. The sound of carbines hammering away at the dead filtered in as
doors opened and closed around him. He pocketed the mags and exited the
vehicle, rifle in hand and pulling back on the charging handle.

Warily eyeing the target-rich expanse of highway laid out
before the picket of idling trucks, he crabbed a few feet to his left, climbed
over the guardrail, and took a knee behind it. With a clutch of undergrowth
tickling his back, and the rifle steadied against the rust-streaked barrier, he
said a silent prayer and then opened fire.