Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (31 page)

Failing to constrain himself, Carson also broke out in
laughter, and then after a minute or so wiped a tear from his eye and said,
“Get washed up. I have another surprise for you.”

“I love surprises,” said Bishop with a knowing look. He
shifted his gaze to the lake. “Elvis?”

“Sleeping by now,” replied Carson.

“Did he follow through?”

Carson smiled. “And then some. Must have found a second
gear. He sent the girls out about ten minutes ago. I took them over to the
boys.”

Wearing a concerned look, Bishop glanced over his shoulder.
“Are the girls broken?”

Carson shut down the stove. “They’re a little bent. But
nothing serious.”

“Elvis is a go for tomorrow?”

“For sure,” replied Carson. “For sure.”

“Mmmm, spaghetti,” said Bishop in passing. He traced his
steps back. Turned a right before the back door and climbed the seventeen
stairs to the second floor. He passed the first door on the right and heard
Elvis snoring, deep and resonant. He got a whiff of a musky scent. A byproduct
of the King’s sexcapades, no doubt.
Far better than carrion
, he thought.
The second bedroom was next and he noticed the door now had a padlock on the
outside. A big Schlage item, the screws concealed by the hardware. Still, he
imagined Carson had sunk the wood screws deep into the frame. Unless Lara Croft
was behind the door, nobody was getting out of there. And since he didn’t have
a key, he wasn’t getting in.
Dad must not want me to peek at the present
before Christmas
, he mused. Pushing aside the forming mental image of the
woman behind the door, he walked the length of the carpeted hall to the master
bedroom and the cold shower awaiting.

Chapter 44

The overhead skylight and sliding glass door let in copious
amounts of sunlight, the majority of which was reflecting off the lake and
danced hypnotically, wave-like on the angular vaulted ceiling. As a direct
result, the temperature in the room had risen beyond hot. Sweltering was the
first word that came to Jamie’s mind. Her sweat-soaked clothes clung to her
body but had no kind of cooling effect. She knew she looked as bad as she felt.
Passing through the back door, she had gotten a glimpse at her own reflection
in the glass. Looking like a black swimmer’s cap, her hair was plastered to her
head and had dried that way after the hood had been removed—for good, she
hoped. Put her in a flapper’s dress and show her to the speakeasy and she’d
blend right in, she’d thought at the time. Hell, throw in some bathtub gin as well
because when she tried to swallow, her saliva was thick and viscous and a white
crust had formed at the corners of her mouth. She couldn’t remember ever
wanting a drink of anything wet more than she lusted for one now.

In addition to the locked door leading out to the hall,
there was another (also locked) leading off to the right into a Jack and Jill
bathroom. This she knew because periodically she would hear the toilet water
run for a few seconds and then stop, presumably a valve in the tank replacing water
lost through a leaky seal somewhere. Liquid. So near yet so far. In fact it
might as well have been a waterfall. And every time she heard it, her Pavlovian
response was triggered, causing her to struggle against her bonds, adding new
welts to the collection of old on her wrists.

The handcuffs that had replaced the zip ties were
no-nonsense items. Smith and Wesson was stamped in the tempered American steel
as was their place of origin—Springfield, Massachusetts.

Flat on her back with her arms cuffed high to the
queen-sized headboard, she had been forced to listen to both the running water
and, louder still, the grunts and groans and whimpers of a rape in progress
filtering under the door from a room beyond. And sickening as the animalistic
sounds and desperate female voices made her feel, they needed to be exploited.
So with the noise from the ongoing attack rising to a crescendo, Jamie yanked
with all of her might, trying to break a weld or compromise the curled
ironwork.

Nothing.

Twenty grueling minutes passed as she fought her bonds while
the assault next door continued. Finally, with the awful noises diminishing,
she brought her knees to her chest, and in a last ditch effort, placed the
balls of her feet against the curved horizontal top bar and extended her legs.
Nothing budged except for the mattress and box springs under her. Crestfallen,
she spat a few choice expletives and gave up fighting her predicament
physically. Since the moment Logan and Gus had crumpled to the ground near her
feet, everything seemed to be working against her.

But she was still alive.

Then her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t
eaten anything substantial in two days. A bad thing. Weak malnourished people
had no chance of escape. So she closed her eyes and, to conserve energy,
focused on her breathing and visualized what she would do when the cuffs were
removed. The war gaming and plotting and scheming didn’t last long because five
minutes into it she came to the conclusion that whatever she tried would
probably do nothing more than sign her death warrant.

Two minutes after that epiphany she gave up mentally.

Sixty seconds later she was asleep and the footsteps outside
the door went unnoticed.

Chapter 45

Twenty-two miles from the I-70 junction where State Route
191 passed over a tributary of the Green River, the landscape turned from dull
brown to lush green and then almost instantly reverted back to the same
ever-present depressing muted earth tones.

A stone’s throw north of the crossing they came upon what
Cade had guessed was once a bustling stop on the mostly desolate road, where,
looking like nuked playground equipment, the shells of a dozen long-haul trucks
sat atop acres of scorched concrete. The initial explosion, no doubt fed by the
contents of huge underground tanks, had been of cataclysmic proportions. Pieces
of the main building, where presumably a driver could find all manner of goods
and services and other
off the books
experiences, had been blown to all
points of the compass. Aluminum panels had reached the main road a hundred
yards off. A carpet of glass pebbles encircling the shell of a building
sparkled in the afternoon glare. After the explosion, the several-thousand-foot
structure had burned to the ground completely, the only remaining distinguishable
items: a pair of centrally located cube-shaped walk-in coolers. As a result of
the blast, a number of the trailers had been knocked over and, along with
whatever cargo they’d been hauling, had burned hot, leaving pools of molten
metal, now hardened, glimmering in the sun. And to add insult to injury, like
clumsy security personnel, a number of crispy Zs loitered near the sooty metal
skeletons.

Clearly, the Double J truck stop had seen better days.

***

Two hours and fifty miles removed from the high desert
killing fields, thankfully with all parties—especially Mom—none the wiser,
Raven had recovered from her unavoidable
accident,
and was chattering on
excitedly about anything and everything. After having everyone declare
allegiance to their favorite pop stars—Cade’s of which drew the most
laughs—Raven went silent, seemingly content to just stare out the window.

Suppressing a grin, Brook looked at Cade, and said, “Michael
Jackson ...
really?
” To which Raven, out of the blue and on a totally
different conversational tangent said, “I think we need to name this truck.”
She cracked a water bottle and poured a slow steady stream onto Max’s lapping
tongue.

Grateful the topic had swung in a different direction, Cade
humored her. “You called our Sequoia
the Big Silver Beast
, right?”

From the back seat Raven said, “Yes I did.”

“How are you going to top that.
Big Black Beast
just
doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

Brook chimed in. “
That
is not going to fly.”

“How about Black Beauty?” proffered Raven.

“Taken,” said Brook and Cade in unison.

“I don’t care. Walt Disney is dead ... I’m using it.”

Cade and Brook exchanged looks learned in the trenches
called parenting and understood only by them.

“Done,” conceded Cade. He looked over his shoulder and met
Raven’s gaze. “B.B. for short ... OK?”

Before Raven could answer, Brook blurted, “Cade, look.”

Hearing this, he shifted his gaze forward and immediately
saw what Brook was seeing. A little more than a mile distant, the rolling
landscape started to resemble the approach to the last river crossing, the
scrub sharing space with green grasses and low-growing bushes. And a few
hundred yards beyond the wanna-be-oasis, he recognized sun glinting from the
windows of a myriad of structures and unmoving vehicles. With the two previous
firefights fresh on his mind, he eased up on the throttle and tapped the
brakes, quickly halving his speed from forty miles per hour down to twenty.
Keeping his eyes forward and slowing more, Cade said, “Check the navigation
system.”

After turning the navigation system on, Brook checked her M4
for the third time in an hour and finished her ritual by patting the extra
magazines bulging her cargo pockets. Thirty seconds later, the device in the
dash had shaken hands with whatever GPS satellite was providing it the info and
had refreshed to show the squiggle representing S.R. 191 as well as a trio of
town names stacked diagonally, ascending stair-like right to left—Wellington at
the bottom, Price dead center, and then, at the top left corner of the screen,
the smaller of the three, a town called Helper. All total, judging by the speed
the pixelated blip representing the F-650 was moving along the State Route,
Cade guessed that no more than twenty miles separated the largest concentration
of lost civilization he’d seen up close in a long while.

Simultaneously, awakened from her slumber, the computerized
female voice said, “
Wellington, one mile
,” and on the right a sign
demarking the city limits and bearing the same name with the population noted
below in reflective numbers slid by.

Brook whispered, “Sixteen hundred and seventy-six souls.”

“And hopefully they’re all dead and have shuffled off into
the sunset by now.”

Grabbing the binoculars off the floor, Brook said, “Not
likely. Stop here and I’ll take a look.”

He pulled hard to the shoulder, leaving the rig angled a few
degrees left with its front tires straddling the centerline. After watching
Taryn bring the Raptor to a halt a couple of truck lengths behind, Cade flicked
his eyes from the rearview and asked, “What do you see?”

“Just some Zs. Nothing else.”

“Nothing moving?”

“Nope. Just broken-down cars. This road runs through the
middle of them all.”

Cade flipped a coin in his head. Not the ideal way to make a
decision considering Green River. But those folks had come from Salt Lake and
Grand Junction. And it seemed to him that the ones who got out of the cities
usually did so by any means necessary. Consequently, most of the survivors
they’d encountered up until now came with bags packed full of bad intentions.
But with Wellington, his gut was telling him something different. Using the
two-way, he told Wilson that Main Street looked navigable, but the same rules
that had gotten them through their previous scrapes still applied. Then he
finished with a pop quiz and asked them what the most important rule of the
road was.

Inside the Raptor, Sasha’s mouth moved but nothing useful
emerged.

Wilson looked at Taryn and shook his head. Mouthed, “We’re
not stupid.” He keyed the radio and answered deadpan, “Don’t stop for anything.”

“Correct,” said Cade, accelerating the Black Beauty briskly
towards Wellington.

***

There was no ambush waiting for them in Wellington. Twenty
blocks worth of seemingly deserted downtown were sandwiched between open
fields, a smattering of quiet darkened houses, and vast tracts of land with
nothing more than dirt clods and tumbleweeds to look at. They nearly doubled
the posted limit blowing through every intersection—stop sign, or no—in the
downtown core.

Consulting the navigation unit, Brook said, “We’re in luck.
We’ve got two choices ... stay on this and run the gauntlet through the next
two towns. Or go left and take something called the Six Bypass and skirt them
altogether.”

“No brainer,” said Cade. “Say when.”

“Coming up,” said Brook. “Six shoots off to the left. Looks
like an overpass will take us over some train tracks—” She looked up from the
GPS display and suddenly went quiet.

Muscles tensed, Cade jammed on the brakes.

The F-650’s tires juddered and bounced on the blacktop
momentarily and then the springs and shocks compressed under the rig’s mass and
a full one-thirty-second of an inch worth of rubber was laid down in the form
of four smoking hundred-foot-long black streaks.

Worried that they were about to receive a vicious
rear-ending, the lesser of the two evils considering that less than two hundred
yards ahead, fully blocking the bypass and moving in their direction, was a
full blown horde, Cade tightened his grip on the wheel and said, “Brace
yourselves.”

But Taryn had been alert. Looking several car lengths ahead
as her father had taught her. Hands at the proper ten-and-two. Ready to
heel-and-toe the pedals. And she did exactly that. However, she didn’t lock
them up. Instead, exhibiting an awesome display of controlled driving, she slewed
her ride around the black rig even before it had ceased all forward movement.
Finessing the pedals, she braked hard and hauled the wheel right, leaving four
smoking black marks on the roadway before stopping broadside to the moving mass
of death. Then, reacting with a sense of urgency only a phalanx of gnashing
teeth and swiping nails could impart, she pinned the accelerator to the floor,
held the wheel locked over and powered the Raptor’s tail end around and into
the front row, starting a domino-like chain reaction that sent dozens of them
pin balling off of each other before succumbing to the inevitable and falling
hard and vertically to the hot roadway. As the oversized bumper and boxy rear
panels scythed through the second echelon of flesh eaters, the rear tires found
purchase and Taryn wheeled their gore-spattered ride away from the moving wall
of decaying flesh.