Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (37 page)

“Just noting it for future reference. That’s all.”

The number of stalls in the westbound lanes increased
exponentially the closer they got to Morgan. By the time the exit north was
visible, Cade was driving the Ford like a landlocked icebreaker. In the lowest
gear available, he traded paint and pushed a number of vehicles aside, clearing
a path for the trailing Raptor.

In the center console the radio sounded. “Are we there yet?”
asked Wilson, a smart-ass tone evident in his tone.

Thumbing Talk, Brook answered back, “Soon. Less than twenty
miles.”

“Copy that,” said Wilson. He left the channel open for a
second longer and Sasha’s whiny voice, tolerable only because it was in the
background, transmitted over the spectrum: “We’ve been on the road all day.”

“Less than an hour,” said Brook. She looked down into a
minivan full of death. The window was open and the monster in the driver’s seat
was reaching for the Ford’s front tire as the smaller vehicle was pushed aside.
Noticing the trio of car seats in the middle row, each one occupied by an
undead toddler thrashing madly against the nylon straps, Brook keyed the
two-way and commanded, “Do
not
look inside the van on your right.”

Cade flicked his eyes to the rearview and saw the Raptor
slow to a walking speed and all three heads inside turn in unison. Clearly an
act of conscientious objection. Human nature was to rubberneck at an accident,
so he wasn’t surprised when they did. “They’ve got to see it all, Brook. That
way when their lives or mine or yours or Raven’s are on the line, they’ll be
less likely to freeze up. I said it once and I’ll hammer it home every chance I
get. A split second pause is all it took for them to get to Desantos and
Hicks.”

Brook said nothing.

The off-ramp was thoroughly clogged, as was the road all the
way to the airport, so Cade shifted into four-wheel-drive and drove along the
shoulder, churning up sod and newly planted flowers, completely and irrevocably
destroying Morgan County’s stab at roadside beautification.

Once they were past the backed-up airport feeder roads, the
two-truck convoy bumped back onto the smooth blacktop and crossed Cottonwood
Creek on a utilitarian cement bridge before the two-lane made an abrupt turn
north.

As the airport slipped by on the right, Cade risked another
admonition from Brook by casting furtive glances out the window past her.

She said, “You’re all over the road, Cade. Pull over
or
let me drive.”

And he did. After passing a single-lane road servicing the
sprawling subdivision abutting the airport to the east, he brought the F-650 to
a halt on the centerline between two fenced-in swaths of grassland with no
walking dead in the immediate vicinity. He parked and engaged the brake and as
he did so, all he could think about was how low Wilson was going to feel after
seeing Brook loop around and get behind the wheel. He waited until she was out
the door and onto the roadway and then, lifting his feet over the console,
scooted across the seat. He glanced over his shoulder at the Raptor sliding to
a stop and picked up the Motorola, keyed the talk button and said, “Mandatory
driver swap.”

A second or two ticked by and Taryn’s voice filtered through
the speaker: “My butt,” she said.

The driver’s door hinged open and, with an audible grunt,
Brook hauled herself behind the wheel and started the process of jockeying the
seat around to accommodate her small stature.

Cade dropped the radio on the seat next to him and plucked
the binoculars from the passenger side footwell. He turned around and trained
them on the Raptor and saw Wilson, mouth moving, arms flailing animatedly,
presumably arguing for his turn at the helm. Panning right, he was amused to
see a look that Brook had often given him. Arms crossed and a rock solid set to
her jaw, Taryn ticked her head side-to-side, an obvious ‘negative’ in any
language.

Hiding a smile, Cade spun around and glassed the airport, of
which he could only see a thin sliver between the copse of trees at the end of
the facility’s single runway. The closely spaced aircraft hangars, presumably
once a darker shade of robin’s egg blue, were rust-streaked and weathered,
their south-facing elevations inset with massive garage-style rollup doors.
Sitting on strips of browned grass fronting the squat metal structures were a
number of brightly colored sailplanes and parked amidst the sleek gliders was a
civilian single-engine airplane, its FAA call sign, a combination of letters
and numbers, emblazoned in black on its tail and wings and fuselage. And from
recent experience Cade knew that where there were airplanes there were
below-ground fuel storage tanks and the mobile bowsers to service the aircraft.
He looked at the navigation display and made a mental note of the airport’s
location, then dropped the binoculars to his chest and said, “,Home James.”

Chapter 56

Twenty minutes and fourteen miles north of the Morgan
Airport, Trapper’s Loop Road came to a ‘T’ and ceased to exist. On the
navigation unit, a finger’s width beyond the merging yellow roads, shaped
vaguely like someone’s poor attempt at a snow angel, was a vast sea of blue
pixels labeled Pineview Reservoir.

Thirty yards before they reached the intersection, the
strange hybrid human/computer voice in the box instructed Brook to turn right.
Instead, awed by the low-hanging sun shimmering silver off the vast expanse of
glassy water straight ahead, she jammed to a stop on the gravel shoulder next
to a road sign, one arrow pointing left towards the city of
Ogden, pop.
84,721
just fifteen miles distant, the other indicating that
Huntsville,
pop. 776
was a mile to the right.

While Brook sat mesmerized by the picture postcard view, the
Raptor crunched noisily to a halt on the gravel on the opposite shoulder with
Taryn gesturing wildly at Cade to power his window down. A tick later, shaking
her head and pointing to the sign, Taryn said, “Please tell me we’re not
turning left.”

Cade said nothing. He pressed the binoculars to his face and
gazed out the passenger window over the other Ford’s hood at Huntsville, which
was built up on a finger of land encroached upon on three sides by water. He
adjusted the focus ring and discovered that the little burg at his two o’clock
appeared no different than the smaller population centers dotting the
Interstates and rural highways they’d already traveled between FOB Bastion in
Mack, Colorado and nearby Morgan, Utah.

The sixty-four-thousand dollar question nagging him was what
was keeping the eighty-five-thousand, presumably undead, citizens of Ogden at
bay. He shifted his gaze left and studied the ‘V’ in the nearby Wasatch
Mountain Range, where the stripe of road entered the forest and rolled up and
down and beyond before finally merging with the horizon and disappearing from
sight. In his head he imagined a National Guard unit, men and women, young and
old, called up hastily by the President’s declaration of martial law. They
would no doubt be confounded at first by orders telling them to shoot the
infected on sight. Fellow Americans. Perhaps even family. A feeling of helpless
reluctance creeping in—or not—they were still soldiers and would have followed
those orders. He let the scenario play out further in his head. He saw the
squad, consisting of ten to fifteen soldiers, already dog tired from two
sleepless days manning a roadblock somewhere west of Huntsville, get blindsided
by word that Salt Lake—most likely their city of origin—had fallen to the dead.
Then, like placing a tourniquet on a bleeding stump, the triage orders probably
came down from some FEMA or Department of Homeland Security bureaucrat flitting
around above it all, safe and sound in a Black Hawk. The order to procure a
sizable amount of demolitions—maybe from a mining supply outfit near town or
from a Guard armory—then, shaking their collective heads, the unit would
dutifully follow through on additional orders telling them to bury as much of
Highway 39 under as many tons of dynamited Wasatch granite as humanly possible.
At least that’s exactly how I would have done it
, thought Cade.
Stopped
the migrating Zs right in their rotten tracks.
But at this point it was
pure conjecture on his part. For all he knew the horde of flesh eaters eighty
thousand strong had already blown through the aptly named desolate cluster of
structures called Huntsville—hunted it clean—and then like ants on the march,
plodded on in search of the next unsuspecting town.

But speculation at this juncture—literally—was no better
than throwing darts in a dark room and expecting to hit the dartboard. So he
hitched a thumb to the right and said to Taryn, “Don’t worry. Passing through
Ogden is
not
in our plans. And it looks like this road will allow us to
circumvent Huntsville as well.” A look of relief supplanted the one of worry
crowding her tanned features. Seeing this and concluding that Ogden and Grand
Junction were roughly the same size, and that her airport ordeal was still
fresh in her mind, he leaned in and read the small text at the top of the
navigation screen. A beat later he poked his head back out the window, looked
down and, in order to put her at ease, said, “The compound is give-or-take
sixteen miles east of here. Piece of cake. We’ll be there in thirty minutes ...
tops.” As Taryn smiled, her tatted right arm passed through the light spilling
inside the Raptor’s cab and went to her face and, though she was a civilian,
flicked him a near-text-book salute.

And though he was no longer active duty, Cade reciprocated.
As Brook moved them out, going right at the junction, Cade swiveled around and
unplugged Raven from her device and relayed the same good news to her.

With a bit of fist bumping occurring in both vehicles, the
two-truck convoy proceeded east, Brook driving the F-650, and the Raptor, with
Wilson forever riding shotgun, bringing up the rear.

Like the blade on the Grim Reaper’s scythe, the narrow
two-lane dodged the city, arcing gently south before shooting laser-straight
north, all the while keeping to the eastern edge of the quiet town. Soon SR-39
struck off east through the wide open rural countryside. A couple of miles
outside of town, they came upon two dozen inert cars and SUVs, all pointed
east, presumably fleeing the
hard place
before coming up against the
rock
.
Cade brought the binoculars to bear and glassed the scene. He saw a great
number of corpses still occupying the vehicles in which they had died. The
lucky ones that had stayed dead appeared stiff and leathery from a combination
of rigor and heat. The unlucky few that had died and reanimated inside their
rides were blurry flashes of movement behind greasy cataracts obscuring the
auto glass. And lastly, no doubt alerted by the sound of approaching engines, a
pack of Zs suddenly showed themselves, rising up slowly one at a time, until at
least ten were visible near the front of the traffic jam.

Cade settled the field glasses on the pale abominations and
instantly his earlier hypothesis was blown into more pieces than he had assumed
blocked the Wasatch pass to the west.

Because the
rock
that had jammed up traffic consisted
of four evenly placed Jersey barriers. Ten feet from end to end, two feet wide
at the base, and standing thirty-two inches tall from the ground to the narrow
top where two eyehooks were embedded. Each of the four-thousand-pound poured
concrete barriers could deflect a bomb blast and required a front loader for
proper placement. Strangely, in addition to the wrist-sized holes punched into
some of the vehicles, the nearest pair of barricades were pitted and cracked in
places, almost like someone had willfully taken a jackhammer to them. Cade had
seen the same type of damage up close and in person in Afghanistan. Thirty plus
years of fighting one invader or another had left damn near every wall in that
Middle Eastern country bullet-pocked just like the Jersey barriers blocking
their advance.

Brook wheeled Black Beauty left and bumped down into the
sizable ditch paralleling the two-lane. Threatening to eject the cargo from the
bed, the Ford bucked and shimmied with the suspension groaning until the tires
bit and clawed their way up the other side. She muscled the wheel straight and
held it there, keeping the driver’s side wheels on one side of the gully and
the other two crunching through the gravel along the road’s left shoulder.
Then, with the nerve-jangling screech of rusty barbed wire raking the driver’s
side, and the mirrors and door handles and bumpers of the unmoving vehicles
hammering against the passenger side, she tromped the pedal and made her own
road.

Watching in the side mirror, Cade saw Taryn put the Raptor
through the same maneuver and soon the white pick-up had closed the distance
with the F-650’s rear bumper.

From his elevated seat in the truck, Cade saw a number of
weeks-old cadavers that the Zs had just been feeding on. And judging by the
desert tan scraps of camouflage fabric and that some of the corpses still had
helmets strapped to their flesh-stripped skulls, he concluded they had been
National Guardsmen who had been manning the road block. Just following orders
like he had done dutifully for more than a decade.
And for what?
Judging
by the damage to the barriers and the sun glinting from shell casings littering
the shoulder ahead, these soldiers were ambushed and murdered by their own
countrymen—living, breathing wastes of skin who needed to suffer tenfold the
pain they had inflicted on these patriots. Disgusted, he looked away from the
dead soldiers and watched the throng of dead zippering clumsily through the
traffic snarl. “Stop right here,” he said sharply. “After I get out, you and
Taryn are going to have to reverse out of here.” Then, his voice softening, he
apologized for being terse and craned around and said to Raven, “You need to be
Mom’s eyes and ears while I’m gone.”