Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (27 page)

As Cade cast another glance at the approaching Hummer, he
caught sight of Brook shakily swapping magazines. And seeing as how the last
thing he wanted was for her to have to add more human bodies to her gun, he
pinned the pedal to the floor, and amidst a cloud of tire smoke and with the
staccato pings of rocks and pebbles peppering the undercarriage, powered the
rear end around through the scrub and dirt beyond the shoulder. Once the Ford
had lurched out of the abrupt ninety-degree turn and bumped back up on asphalt
and was tracking west and picking up speed on the Interstate, he reached over
and palmed Brook’s thigh. Didn’t apply any pressure. Just let it rest there, a
silent sign of solidarity.

Chapter 37

There were a hundred other places on the abandoned mining
site where digging a grave would have been much easier, but after taking into
consideration the hell on Earth Jordan’s last moments must have been, Duncan
chose a spot near the edge of the quarry looking west over the valley, where
the odds of a sunset gracing her grave on a daily basis was a very real
possibility. “She deserves this,” he stated, taking the first swing. And while
he broke up the bulletproof ground with the pickaxe, Lev and Daymon shoveled
away the broken-up topsoil.

Half an hour after breaking ground, they had a human-sized
hole dug down to about mid-thigh on Duncan—a depth that they all agreed was
roughly three feet.

Not the textbook eight-by-four-by six
, thought
Duncan.
But deep enough to keep the critters away.

Lev and Daymon gently placed Jordan’s body into the grave,
then stood over her small shrouded form while Duncan dredged up a few words.
Nothing biblical. Not because he didn’t know any passages, far from it. He knew
plenty of them. However, he didn’t know the young lady well enough. The reason
he abstained. Instead, he spoke of how nice and kind she had been during the
short time he had known her. He finished with an Amen, out of habit mostly, and
had shoveled half a dozen scoops of dirt before realizing that Jordan was the
third person he’d interred since daybreak and suddenly felt weak in the knees.

Sensing Duncan’s discomfort, and seeing him seemingly
frozen, the shovel’s blade hovering empty above the grave, Lev gently took the
tool from his hands and helped him to the ground.

“Take a break,” said Daymon. “You’ve done more than your
share of shoveling today. Me and Lev got this.”

***

Fifteen minutes later the three fully loaded trucks were
parked bumper-to-bumper, five feet inside of the quarry entrance. Duncan climbed
gingerly from the newly liberated Dodge and, just in case another group of
semi-aware first turns had followed them up the feeder road, drew his .45 and
approached the gate slowly, cutting the corner a degree at a time.

Daymon called out from the driver’s seat of the patrol
Tahoe. “What do you see?”

“Clear,” answered Duncan, holstering his pistol. He strode
to the gate. Took the piece of broken lock from the links and unwrapped the
chain. Then, with Lev’s help, rolled the gate two-thirds of the way open.

A minute later the three trucks were through, the Chevy
bringing up the rear. This time Duncan stayed in the lead vehicle while Lev and
Daymon closed the gate behind them.

Nearly two hours under the hot sun had firmed up the road.
Though the ruts still grabbed their tires on the way down, threatening to send
an inattentive driver into space, the going down wasn’t nearly as treacherous
nor slow as the trip up. Ten minutes elapsed and they were sitting at the
bottom of the quarry road switching their vehicles out of four-wheel drive,
grateful for the smooth asphalt of State Route 39.

Duncan fished the Motorola from a pocket and powered it on.
Double-checked the channel and thumbed the call button. He said, “Left or
right?”

Hearing Duncan’s voice emanating from deep within a thigh
pocket, Daymon lifted his butt off the seat and reached deep, grasped the radio
and thumbed the button saying, “WWLD?”

“What?” answered Duncan.

From his slightly elevated spot at the rear of the column,
Daymon saw Duncan crane around and imagined the deadly dose of stink eye being
directed his way. Keying his radio, very slowly Daymon intoned, “What ... would
... Lev ... do?”

“He’s not in the loop anymore,” shot Duncan.

“Exactly. Don’t you think he deserves a say in the matter?”

“Nope,” said Duncan.

About to press the issue, Daymon decided to roll with it and
watched the white Dodge bounce up onto the two-lane and hesitate, rocking on
its springs, twin antennas moving counter to the body of the truck. Then he saw
a glint off the shiny new blackwalls and his query was answered as the off-road
tires cranked hard to the left.

Chapter 38

Conventional wisdom dictated that after having two vehicles
fail to stop at their checkpoint and several of their own gunned down in the
chase that ensued, whoever was driving the gray H2 would be calling for
reinforcements before commencing further pursuit. At least that’s what Cade was
preparing to counter as he zippered the big Ford between half a dozen cars and
trucks, all sitting firmly on shredded tires, a fate that Brook’s excellent
marksmanship had spared their vehicles.

After a chase lasting only a few seconds, during which the
pursuers got an up close eyeful of three of their own who had been breathing
just minutes prior and were now bloody corpses sprawled on the Interstate, the
Hummer slowed and whipped a quick U-turn and with a puff of black exhaust sped
east towards Green River.

Seeing this, Brook looked away from the side mirror, craned
towards Cade and said, “What the hell?”

“Stay frosty,” was his instant reply. “We’re not out of the
woods yet.” In his mind he saw the driver and passengers, who were already
jacked up on adrenaline, weighing the pros-and-cons of continuing the chase
alone. A kind of hasty cost-benefit-analysis in which their lives were the
cost. And presumably—the reason for their turning back—the people in the Hummer
saw little benefit in tangling with the two vehicles and getting gunned down
like their fellows.

Then the flip-side of the equation occurred to Cade, and he
pictured the bandits not so much giving up, but making a sound tactical
decision and opting to stack the deck in their favor
before
commencing
any kind of a dogged pursuit. In this scenario they would slide back into
town—on their mind how to add reinforcements
and
make up lost time and
distance. He guessed they would discard the slow Hummer in favor of faster,
more agile vehicles more suited to playing catch-up. Adding more bodies and
weapons was a given. The latter most likely being of the larger caliber variety.
The kind usually found abandoned at every overrun Guard checkpoint that had
sprung up on the outskirts of every medium-to-large city early on in the
apocalypse. And while these actions were undertaken, Cade knew that the story
of the interlopers who had killed three of their own for no good reason would
spread like wildfire over whatever means the denizens of Green River used to
communicate.

Lastly, the top-dog, or dogs—whoever was responsible for
meting out justice in Green River, perhaps the very people still with blood on
their hands from hacking away genitals and cutting off hands—would whip up a
frothy bloodlust among the citizenry and deputize some folks and then let loose
the hounds. A modern day lynch mob, revenge their sole motivation.

Cade shifted his gaze from the retreating SUV and regarded
the fast-approaching off-ramp, a fairly sharp right-hand bend that would shoot
them onto US-191 North and hopefully the planned rendezvous with the kids in
the Raptor. “Hang on,” he said, braking and downshifting to a gear more suited
to the rising road that lay beyond. He entered the right-hand sweeper with the
speedo wavering near seventy and felt the first tug of g-forces at work on his
body. The tires chirped, the body rolled harshly atop the raised suspension,
and he felt his butt sliding on the seat.

In the back seat Raven let out a squawk typical of her
namesake and then began chanting, “Oh my gosh,” over and over. There was a
skittering sound and a yelp as Max struggled to find purchase on the carpet.

Meanwhile, mid-way through the turn, in a cacophony of
sound, empty water bottles, MRE packaging, spent brass, the laminated map,
Brook’s M4 and a host of other unidentified items succumbed to gravity and
inertia and migrated left, the smaller items pooling against the doorframe’s
lower sill, the carbine coming to rest near Cade’s feet.

Fresh out of the turn, the truck amazingly still upright,
and with the floor flotsam and jetsam drifting slowly back to whence they’d
come, Cade said cryptically, “I have an idea.”

Chapter 39

Duncan smiled at Daymon’s weird sense of humor. “W-W-L-D?
What would Lev do, indeed.” He cranked the wheel left and spun the rear tires,
a juvenile move that pelted Lev’s brand new Chevy with mud and rocks and
ground-up scrub brush. The Dodge bumped onto the two-lane and there was a
frantic beeping inside as some central-processing-unit somewhere tried to calm
the crazy human’s driving habits. Outside there was a staccato chirping as the
rubber compound tried to grip the asphalt.

The driver’s side window went down with a mechanical
whirr
and Duncan poked his head into the slipstream. The air smelled of fragrant pine
with an underlying damp, mossy nose wafting up from the nearby river. He
watched the road closely. Not that the appropriately named pick-up couldn’t
handle butting heads with a few walking corpses, but because he desperately
wanted to find a few more first turns and hopefully disprove Lev’s whole
empirical-evidence-of-first-turns-becoming-self-aware bullshit. Not only to
show them that the rotters were just automatons hungry for flesh, and what they
had all witnessed at the gate to their compound had been nothing more than dumb
luck and a case of wandering, pustule-ridden hands. But also to prove to
himself that the rotters at the quarry gate hadn’t been waiting patiently in
ambush mode—a fear that had been scratching away at his gut since rounding that
blind corner and coming face-to-face with them.

So he drove east along SR-39, with the river a constant
companion off of his right shoulder for another couple of miles until the
landscape leveled off substantially and the river and two-lane State Route
parted ways. The former jagging south by east. The latter shooting ahead
straight as a plum line towards the T-junction with Utah State Route 16 near
Woodruff.

Three hundred yards from the T-junction, Duncan became aware
that the intersection was partially blocked by a yellow school bus that had
apparently failed to negotiate the corner and now lay on its side. He looked in
his rearview and tapped his brakes a couple of times to make sure he had Lev’s
attention and then pulled the Ram to the right. With two wheels still on the
road, the other two grinding into the red-dirt shoulder, the Ram came to a
complete stop two-hundred yards from the site of the single-vehicle accident.

Staring at the overturned bus, Duncan picked up movement in
his side vision as the black truck driven by Lev slid in close to his door and
came to an abrupt lurching halt. He also heard the electric motor go to work
and saw the window glass disappear into the channel. Then there was more
movement farther to the left as Daymon squeezed the Tahoe in tight beside Lev
in the Chevy, then more motor noise as his passenger window motored down,
creating a veritable wind tunnel through all three trucks.

Eyes still fixed ahead, Duncan said “See that?” There was
movement up ahead as the group of flesh eaters, having instantly taken note of
the three-truck caravan, started their slow stumbling march west—towards the
mechanical noises that screamed to them the arrival of fresh meat. As they
ambled down the two-lane another dozen pale forms filed in piecemeal fashion
from behind the bus.

“I see rotters,” replied Lev. “And lots of them.” Nervously
eyeing the rearview mirror, he slotted the transmission into reverse—just in
case.

Ducking, Daymon looked past Lev, made eye contact with
Duncan, and then called out, “You talking about what it says on the back of the
bus?”

“Yep,” said Duncan. He flipped up his visor. Squinted against
the sun and his own compromised eyesight and read the words slowly. “Says Etna
Elementary. Lincoln County, School District Number Two.”

Lev said, “That’s where the big boy and all his friends at
the quarry gate hailed from.”

Daymon added, “I remember sitting in this rig and talking to
the big dude ... Mr. Carter … right in front of that very school bus. Had it
parked across 89. Bunch of armed folks keeping watch. Hell, Tran nearly got us
killed making sudden movements they construed as hostile.”

Lev asked, “What happened?”

Daymon answered, “They looked inside the rig. Then asked
Charlie a bunch of questions. Finally said
‘shoo’
... told us that they
‘don’t
help outsiders’
and for us
‘not to come back looking for food or
medicine or help of any kind.’
It was kind of like that first scene from
Rambo
... either of you two remember that movie?”

Nodding yes, Duncan said, “Remember it. I lived it for a
while when I came back from Nam. Drinking and drifting. I was the original John
J ... ‘cept I didn’t kill any sheriffs in any sleepy Pacific Northwest towns.
Just ran off a lot of women folk. That’s all.”