Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (42 page)

Five miles west on State Route 39, Cade was not only coming
up against the growing number of reanimated walkers he had opted
not
to
put down on the way in, but he was also having to keep the rig’s speed down
because the blade up front was on its last legs. With each new jarring impact,
the twisted slab of metal slid lower to the road blurring by underneath it,
worrying Cade that it might shear off and flatten a couple of tires as a result.

Less than a mile from the fallen log blockade, Cade swerved
to avoid a group of first turns and clipped a number of them, starting a series
of irreversible chain reactions. The first application of cause and effect
slapped half a dozen Zs to the pavement, where they were promptly run over and
pulped underneath the trailing Land Cruiser’s undercarriage.

The second instance was more Newton’s Law of Motion than
anything when, as if made of tinfoil, the plow blade folded under the front
bumper and broke free of its mounts. Hell—after all of the battering it had endured
since the night before—Cade was amazed it had seen him this far.

The rising crescendo of metal on pavement ceased instantly
and the rig bucked like a spurred bronco as the massive plow became wedged in
its dual rear axles. Surprising Cade completely, the brakes locked up and the
Mack veered right and ran up onto the guardrail before coming to a complete and
jarring stop, high-sided, leaning hard to the left, and spewing steam from what
he guessed was a punctured radiator. The run from the crash site in Draper,
South Dakota was again on his mind as he watched the under-hood geyser
continue. He collected his radio, phone, and CB and filled his pockets with
them. He shrugged on his pack and grabbed the carbine. Then, with the failed
dismount from the night before fresh on his mind, he eschewed jumping down to
the shoulder from the high side of the cab and instead took the chance of
becoming a Darwin Award winner by throwing open the driver’s side door and sliding
from the seat to the wet pavement.

He rolled free from the open door of the dangerously listing
truck and was engaging the nearby Zs with his Glock when the already loaded-up
4Runner ground to a halt a yard away and its rear passenger-side door was flung
open.

A chorus of voices urging him inside rose over the silenced
reports from his Glock. So Cade rose from his kneeling position, doubled-tapped
a pair of rotters, and relinquished his pack and carbine to Wilson’s waiting
hands. Firing one-handed, he walked/half-limped backwards to the open rear
passenger door, where he quickly holstered his pistol and planted his butt on
the bench seat next to Jamie. Grimacing, he hauled his leg with the damaged
ankle over the door sill.

“That was close,” said Lev, as Cade closed the door and the
vehicle lurched forward over top of the fallen and leaking corpses.

Leaning forward to make eye contact, Cade said, “The rig had
to die sometime.”

“Duncan’s driving the Cruiser like a little old lady,”
exclaimed Taryn as a pair of Zs slapped at the 4Runner’s right side.

“Pass him when you can,” Cade said matter-of-factly. “Do it
on the right. Then drive like it’s your first race and your dad is watching you.”

Wilson poked his head around the edge of his seat. “You
planning on telling us how this is going to go down when we get there?”

“There is no
we
,” Cade said gruffly. “We get across
the roadblock and back to the truck and pile in. Then I’m going to have you
drive me to within limping distance of the compound and I’ll go it alone from
there.” He looked out the window at the carnage. Zombie bodies, twisted
grotesque forms, many of them burned horribly—lay on the road every couple of
feet or so. He swung his eyes all around, pausing briefly to scan the woods
flanking the road, and couldn’t believe the transformation. In less than
twenty-four hours, all of this had gone from a winter wonderland postcard scene
Bing Crosby would have crooned about back to a canyon of emerald green firs and
pines shot through with lonely stands of white-trunked alder and aspen. Shaking
his head, Cade consulted his Suunto and his fear was realized when he saw that
that the deadline dictated to Brook and the Eden group had come and gone and the
comms devices in his pockets remained quiet.

Eden Compound’s Hidden Gate

Standing in the F-650’s shadow, Brook noted the time on her
watch. Then, holding her carbine at the low-ready with a round chambered and
the selector set to
Fire
—locked and loaded, as Cade would say—she looped
around the front of the truck and covered the distance to the gate on the far
shoulder.

Head on a swivel—another practice Cade advocated as useful
to surviving contact with the enemy—she heel-and-toed it forward, stopping
every few feet to look and assess. Due to the height of the gate and the
encroaching canopy overhead, she couldn’t see the enemy’s vehicles from where
she was on the road.

When she finally reached the gate, she heard a low murmur of
conversation in the distance and, nearby, the sound of boots squelching on
gravel—quite possibly produced by the nervous foot-to-foot shifting of men
grown tired of waiting.

“Drop your weapon and step to your right so I can see you.”

The voice was gravelly and belonged to a smoker. It sounded
very much like the voice that had spoken to her over Raven’s radio. Close but
no cigar. In her mind’s eye, the voice of the person calling to her from the
direction of the vehicles matched perfectly with the man who had been issuing
ultimatums in writing on the legal pad.

Brook complied with only the latter part of the barked
order. She moved farther right where the fencing was chest-high on her and the thick
undergrowth and forest nearly pressed against her back.

The bearded man was standing a dozen feet away, dead center
on the road, with a line of vehicles and expectant faces trailing away behind
him. He was dressed in 1980’s-era camouflage fatigues in a woodland
pattern—browns and greens shot through with black. Over the surplus uniform and
hanging open was a knee-length Western-style duster. Once black and now faded
to dark gray, the coat’s fabric could be canvas or cotton for all Brook knew. The
man’s hair covered his ears and merged with a full beard, both of which, like
the duster, were once black and now graying considerably. His eyes were hidden
behind a pair of dark glasses and on his head was a black watch cap, also
surplus, she presumed.

The man had three weapons that Brook could clearly see. Held
comfortably in one hand was a carbine, tan and not much different from hers. In
a holster on the man’s hip was a black pistol, and strangely, protruding above
one shoulder was the intricately carved ivory pommel of some kind of two-handed
sword.

The man said nothing. He removed his dark glasses and fixed
his steely gaze on her.

Returning the hard look with one of her own, Brook saw the
man’s green eyes flick down to her weapon. So she took a step back from the
fence and regarded the line of vehicles, letting her gaze float from vehicle to
vehicle and face to face.

Feeling the bearded man’s eyes boring into her, she
scrutinized the vehicles and men one-by-one again, only in reverse order. The
first two vehicles—Jenkins’ Tahoe and the camouflage SUV she recognized as
having belonged to the kids—were of no concern to her. But the next four in
line did. They were sprouting enough manned firepower to shred the gun truck and
all of the other vehicles in her group’s motor pool. Seeing this made her contemplate
saving Seth and Foley’s lives by calling them off—an idea she shelved for the
time being.

The expressions on the faces of the people manning the
weapons and driving the vehicles weren’t quite what she had been expecting. To
a person—except for a young kid staring doe-eyed from the front passenger seat
of the Tahoe and a bearded man strongly resembling the leader—every one of them
wore the same bored visage she had seen draped on a person stuck in a menial
job and wanting badly to get out.

The blue-eyed boy beaming the bland look of someone waiting
out a TV commercial wasn’t a killer, of that she was sure. And the rest of the
posse—
if the shoe fits
, she thought—seemingly punching the time clock, weren’t
either. She heard Cade’s voice in her head saying:
Trust your gut
.

She kept her eyes trained on the dozen or so men and their
war machines. Sure, she figured, they would rise to the occasion if need be.
After all, they had already survived nearly a dozen weeks of hell on earth
since the dead rose. So, gritting her teeth, she locked eyes with the giant of
a man and approached the fence, M4 still at the low-ready and every muscle in
her body rippling under her clothing.

Gripping the fence with one hand, the rifle barrel
conveniently resting on the middle strand of wire, Brook ran her plan through
her mind one more time.

Fuck it
, she thought. Take the initiative, and try to
hit them flat-footed and backpedaling. Another one of Cade’s sayings from the
teams entered her head:
Speed, surprise, and violence of action.
She didn’t
know if this was the way to go about this one, but, damn it, she had gotten
them into this mess and she was determined to get them out.

The man opened his mouth to speak.

The
speed
part of Cade’s credo came into play as
Brook beat the man to the punch. “Who in the
fuck
do you think you are,
coming here and taking a couple of kids hostage and then throwing around
ultimatums based on presumptions I’m guessing you gleaned from watching CSI before
everything went to shit?”

Rendered momentarily speechless, even though his mouth was
clamped shut, inwardly Alexander gaped at the petite brunette woman who had
just emerged from the biggest truck he had ever seen. The black Ford made the Tahoe
and Blazer look like toys by comparison. How this woman managed to drive the
thing—let alone climb into it—spun through his mind. Clutched in her hands,
held southpaw and looking normal-sized given her stature, was a compact version
of the M4 carbine.

Where the woman was concerned, his presumptions had been way
off base. Fully expecting some kind of toothless, double-chinned, Bubba-looking
character in tobacco-stained coveralls to be driving the vehicle behind her, he
was thrown a completely unexpected curveball.

Like drawing a face card on a hard sixteen, he was sadly
disappointed this attractive woman had anything remotely to do with Lena’s
murder. A bust, in blackjack parlance.

“I don’t know this CSI you speak of. Your vehicle”—he nodded
toward her truck—“
that
vehicle, as described by eyewitnesses, was in the
area when my Lena and her new husband, Mikhail Rashovic, were killed in cold
blood.
I
”—he pounded his chest, strands of spittle flying from his
mouth—“I found her body. The smile had been blasted off of her face. Lena’s
lovely smile was just a bloody hole. No lips. No teeth. Your people erased her
face and her life on that road. All I have of her now is memories and a few
pictures and video clips stored on a pair of phones.”

“Listen—” Brook began.

“No …
you
listen to me,” bellowed the man. “Who
killed my
Lena
?” The tan carbine’s muzzle rose a few degrees and in
Brook’s side vision she saw the turret-mounted machine guns being trained solely
on her. On the bright side, she mused, at least death would be instantaneous
and final being shredded apart by those things. She let go of the fence and
gestured in the general direction of the graves up the hill. “They’re hard to
see … but, second grave from the right is where the man who shot Lena …
in
self-defense
… is buried. He died that day too.”

Shaking his head, the man said, “Lena was not a killer.”

“Once again with the assumptions,” Brook said. “Chief was
bit earlier in the day. My daughter was hurt as well. We were just trying to go
south on 16. Those two you’re speaking of stood between us and what we needed.
They were armed and assertive and they fired first. That’s the truth. And as we
all know … especially in the current climate, violence begets violence.”

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” said the man, his
stance shifting, the muzzle rising yet another degree or two. “Matthew 26:52, I
believe.”

Brook nodded.

“Still doesn’t bring Lena back.”

“Why didn’t you mention the boy in your makeshift Sharpie
Power Point presentation?”

“Lena was my everything.”

“You’re not at all curious how Mikhail died?”

Shaking his head, the man said, “No.” The carbine barrel
tracked upward. “Drop your rifle. You and your people ambushed and killed two
of ours. Someone has to pay.”

Brook glanced at her watch. Stalling, she said, “Fuck you. I
want proof of life. Show me the girls. In fact, let them go and you all live.
Go back to wherever you came from and tell your people this is still the United
States. We
will
travel anywhere in this state or any other with impunity.
Is that clear?”

“OK,” Dregan said. “Who killed Mikhail?”

Brook stared the man down for a full minute. As soon as she
heard the rising engine sounds at her back, she said slowly, “I did. But after
he shot at me first.” She raised her right hand slow and deliberate to her
cheek and traced with one finger the half-moon scar there. “I caught a piece of
lead from his first volley. In addition to this”—she jabbed the thin pink scar,
flashing a wicked half-smile as she did—“there are three dimples on my truck’s
bumper where the bullets that did this broke apart.”

Looking past Brook, at the feeder road, Dregan said,
“Whoever is coming, have them turn back or I’ll send grenades raining down on
them.”