Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (49 page)

Thinking back to the ‘90’s John Candy comedy
The Great
Outdoors
, Daymon so wanted to quote a line from the movie and start
chanting ‘
kick ass drag-boat’
over and over. But seeing as how that
might give them away to the dead, he kept it to himself.

Seeing Cade lower the field glasses, Lev said, “What next?”

“We cover each other and cross in the boats. The State Park
over there”—he pointed to the overgrown finger of land on the other side of the
narrow channel—“as best as I can tell from the imagery,
that
is the
western boundary of Bishop’s territory. And on the opposite side are some
houses and across the lake from them is where he is holed up. We’ll pick a
house adjacent and start observing.”

“And?” asked Daymon.

Though there was more he could add, Cade simply said, “And
we move on them when the opportunity presents itself.”

Shaking his head, Daymon put his bow aside and sat on the
curb. He removed his helmet and discarded the bloody knot of fabric he’d
stuffed inside. He tore another piece from his shirt and applied pressure to
his wound.

After checking his Suunto, Cade said, “We’re oscar mike in
five.”

Duncan cracked a water and sated his thirst in one long,
drawn-out gulp, all sixteen ounces, followed by a stifled belch.

Conversing quietly amongst themselves, Cade and Lev agreed
to split up. He would cover Lev and Duncan who would be crossing first in one
boat. Once on the other side, Lev and Duncan would extend the same courtesy and
provide security until they were all four on the peninsula.

“Looks good on paper,” conceded Cade.

“Remember ... Mister Murphy’s got scissors,” quipped Lev.

Shaking his head at the prospect of crossing open water in
daylight, Daymon positioned the makeshift bandage and cinched his helmet down
as best he could.

Five minutes later, two boats, one pink and the other black,
bobbed in the water next to the dock.

“Age before beauty,” said Lev.

Saying nothing, Duncan steadied himself by bracing the pair
of oars across the boat’s gunwales. Then, after pushing them off, Lev hopped in
and sat down quickly on the center thwart and rowed as fast as he could.

Cade glassed the far shore, looking for movement or a glint
of light off of glass. Seeing nothing, he lowered the binoculars and prepared
to board what he’d secretly dubbed, on account of its pink splendor, the Good
Ship Lollipop.

After navigating the still narrows, the two men clambered
ashore and Lev gave the signal.

Already in the boat and with the oars chocked in the
oarlocks when Cade jumped in, Daymon started rowing immediately. Taking fast
and deep cuts in the water while Cade trained his M4 on the receding shoreline,
Daymon put them on the white sandy shore of the peninsula in half the time it
had taken Lev.

After taking care to stow the boats in some low bushes a
dozen yards from shore, the ragtag team melted into the trees.

Chapter 77

With Cade walking point and practicing proper noise
discipline, the trek from the landing site to the State Park entrance burned an
additional sixty minutes of daylight.

Raising a clenched fist, the age-old silent signal meaning
stop
at once
, Cade halted and went to a knee beside the trunk of an old gnarled
pine. He craned his head over his shoulder, made eye contact with the
spread-out line, and whispered into the comms, “Vehicle approaching.”

Lev turned to their rear and took a knee, keeping the Glock
trained down the trail.

Duncan and Daymon both went to ground two yards behind Cade.
The former crouching next to a hearty pine and the latter on his butt,
cross-legged, with his crossbow parting a low-to-the-ground clump of ferns, its
deadly end aimed at the nearby strip of asphalt.

In the few seconds it took the team to react to the engine
noise it ceased getting louder and a couple of beats later, died off
altogether.

Surrounded by deepening shadows under the double canopy,
they remained frozen in place for what to Duncan, who was itching to make
someone pay for Logan’s death, seemed an eternity. He looked at his watch and
saw the minutes slowly crawl by. A full thirty minutes passed before he saw
movement ahead, but shortly into the thirty-minute wait the cravings had begun.
First just a thought. Then something washed over him and he wanted nothing more
than to open up a bottle of Jack Daniels and forget.

After staying still and silent and hearing nothing more for
a full thirty minutes, Cade rose from the needle-strewn floor. He motioned
silently for the others to follow and padded forward on the same course
paralleling the single-lane road from several feet inside the tree line.

Three hundred yards south, Cade repeated the same routine.
But this time, after taking a knee, he looked and listened for just a couple of
minutes and then called Lev up front.

From a dozen feet away Daymon watched as the two former
soldiers conversed. They must have turned off their comms because their mouths
were moving but he wasn’t hearing the words. However, he followed Cade’s arm
movements and tried to read his lips, picking up on only a smattering of
words—among them,
house
and
go
stood out prominently. Before they
had finished their exclusive tête-à-tête, Daymon saw their only two suppressed
weapons once again change hands.

As Lev crept past Duncan and Daymon, suppressed M4 in hand,
he whispered, “Cade’s going forward to recon some houses up ahead. He asked me
to tell you two to ‘
stay frosty
.’”

Watching Cade pulling items from his ruck, presumably in
preparation for his impromptu foray, Daymon muttered, “Never heard that one
before.”

Leaving his pack behind, Cade stuffed a flashlight and a
half dozen zip ties into a cargo pocket and crept towards the road, being
careful to maintain a low profile along the way.

He stopped and looked, first left and then right. Nothing to
see here but shafts of ambient light dappling the road with an eerie pattern
resembling clawlike hands ready to trip him up.

He padded south to a darker stretch of roadway with a good
deal of cover on the opposite side and sprinted across in a combat crouch,
Glock leading the way.

A couple of hundred yards east he could see a trio of houses
separated by great expanses of lawn and beautiful landscaping and surrounded by
wooden picket fencing. Beyond the houses he could see the lake and small
structures he guessed to be boat houses. Docks with personal watercraft tied to
them reached dozens of feet into the lake.

A trio of garages nearly the size of his home back in
Portland sat sentinel nearer the road, one belonging to each lakefront mansion.

Cade padded across a carpet of fallen needles, ducked
through a grouping of tired-looking rhododendron bushes and found himself
standing in front of the guest house of the middle mansion. Built in an A-frame
style with the double-car garage below and what looked to be guest quarters
above, the structure was much bigger than he’d originally thought.

Sitting in front of the right-side garage door, parked on
the cement pad, its hood still warm to the touch, was a boxy SUV, the tags on
the back proclaiming it to be a Jeep Commander.
New to me
, thought Cade.
The only rig he deemed appropriate to associate the venerable Jeep name with
usually had a soft top, a roll bar, and a vertical grill between closely spaced
headlights.

Nonetheless, the
Commander
would do.

Stopping at the bottom of a flight of stairs angling up to
the right of the structure, he listened hard but heard nothing. So he scaled
the steps, heel and toeing it to the top, silent as a ghost.

Chapter 78

McCall, Idaho

Forty minutes prior

Another monotonous day in the books
, thought Foley as
he nosed into the driveway, disappointed. There had been no mission with Carson
and his men. Therefore he had experienced none of the excitement and adrenaline
rushes that came along with going house-to-house and clearing out the dead. No,
this day had been more of the same: too many grueling hours standing under the
hot sun interspersed with mad minutes of gunfire and then the inevitable
back-breaking work of digging graves to bury the infected in.

He climbed the stairs, hopefully for the last time. Then he
initiated his ritual, also hopefully for the last time. The house was quiet.
The door was still locked. He turned the key in the lock and upon entering the
A-frame was hit square in the face with a blast of carrion-free super-heated
air. Thankfully everything was as he had left it. The downstairs and sliding
doors remained locked and the loft above was unoccupied.

He looked at the massive television with attached Blu-Ray
player and the shelves crammed full of movies and thought to himself,
fuck
Heat
. There was still more than enough of it trapped inside the house.
Besides, there were other more important things on his agenda tonight and
priming and starting a generator was not one of them.

Instead he pulled two warm bottles of Bud from a twelve-pack
on the island. Cracked one open, waited for the pungent nose to waft away, and
drank half of it in one long pull. After a long, drawn-out belch that echoed
around the room, he downed the rest—frothy backwash and all—then promptly
unlaced his boots and left them on the floor beside the island.

With a newfound pep in his step and the beginnings of a
slight buzz hitting him, he took the slick wooden stairs two at a time.

After spending a minute upstairs, Jimmy returned to the
kitchen carrying a black backpack stuffed full of all his worldly belongings: a
handful of pictures of his wife and daughter, extra ammunition for the pistol,
two changes of clothes, and a high powered headlamp that had already come in
handy for searching the deep dark recesses of unfamiliar abandoned homes where
things reeking of death hungrily laid in wait.

He was leaving on foot, that much he’d already decided. So
he opened some bottled waters and filled his hydration pack. Then he broke down
a couple of MREs and placed the individual items in the pack’s side pockets.
Lastly, he took his XD from its holster, removed the mag, and cleared the chamber.
He stripped the pistol into four separate pieces and cleaned each one. When he
was finished, he reassembled the parts, inserted the magazine, and placed the
handgun on the island.

He opened another beer and set the alarm on his wristwatch
for 3 a.m.
Full dark
. The time of night when alertness wanes and nearly
every sentry starts to bemoan his loss of sleep and pray for dawn to arrive.
And also a perfect time, Foley had decided, for him to make a run for it.

Two beers later he snatched up his pistol and scaled the
stairs. In less than a minute, the waning daylight gleaming faintly through the
adjacent bank of windows, he was sound asleep.

***

Foley’s eyes snapped open. In his nightmare, his daughter,
Samantha, had been chasing him again. It was always a slow motion, almost
comical, pursuit through his old home. Around the island first, her hands
outstretched and reaching. And then he fell. The visions were always the same
and played out exactly as they did in real life weeks ago. Only this time he
didn’t shoot her dead. In the dream he tripped on something and she was atop
him. Clawing and scratching until her bent fingers got tangled in his short
beard. He decided in his subconscious state this time to let her live. And it
was his undoing. Sam pulled closer, teeth clicking. Then, though he hadn’t gone
to get his gun from the safe yet, for some reason he could smell gunpowder. And
in the twisted reality of his dream that was now bordering on nightmare, the
stench was inexplicably on her breath. So he gave up. Accepted his fate,
willing to join his family at last. But once again the same subconscious that
had been terrifying him nightly since he’d pulled the trigger in real life
wouldn’t let him die in the ethereal one.

Coming to, he focused his sleepy eyes on the
silver-dollar-sized oval trained on him and came to the frightening realization
that it was real. And then it became evident the cordite stench clinging to the
matte black cylinder was also real, not Sam’s breath nor a part of his
nightmare. The slightly wavering oval was made of metal, quiet and deadly and
of this world. As was the man in black brandishing the pistol it was affixed
to. A tick after waking, Foley heard, “Planning on leaving soon?” He nodded,
then moved his head an inch left. Looked the length of the barrel and admitted,
“Yeah ... but it looks like I should have left earlier.”

Cocking his head, Cade said, “Let’s hear it.” He put the
lock gun that he’d used to gain the quiet entry back in his pocket and came out
with a pair of cuffs modeled from zip ties. Lastly, he set the cuffs on the
man’s chest and ordered him to put them on.

Reluctantly, Foley acquiesced. He clenched the rigid plastic
tip of the first tie in his mouth and pulled it tight. After doing the same
with the other, he looked up at his captor and arched a brow as if asking
silently,
Now what?

Cade checked the man’s work, then added a couple more clicks
for good measure. Satisfied, he took the man’s pistol from the small of his
back where he’d temporarily stowed it. Removed the magazine and checked the
pipe.
Clear.

Cade replaced the weapon in his belt and took a seat on a
chair kitty-corner from the cuffed man. “Let’s start with your name.”

After meeting Jimmy Foley, former IT professional and
outdoor enthusiast formally, Cade had him detail Bishop’s operation, beginning
with which house across the lake was his and how many others were present and
where they stayed. Cade committed these details to memory, then rifled through
Foley’s wallet. He looked at the Idaho license and asked, “Why this place?
Looks like you used to stay in southwest McCall.”