In Harm's Way (2 page)

***

An hour before dark, Daymon had taken a long meandering walk around the north and west sides of the base searching for the right spot to scale the fence. The first thing he noticed was that there were very few walkers near the perimeter. The snipers had been engaging the flesh eaters with surgical precision since they began arriving outside the perimeter a week ago. The massive mounds of dead still awaiting burial stood testament to the shooters’ lethality. He returned to his billet two hours later, confident he could escape the base; whether he would find what he was looking for once outside the wire was another story.

***

Schriever Security Pod

The airman tasked with monitoring the northeast perimeter cameras during the early morning hours was distracted, to say the least. He was trying to listen in on the action in downtown Springs in one ear and watch the multi-camera feeds on the monitor at the same time. The rooftop snipers were constantly calling for ammunition and relaying body counts. The drama being played out over the radio was enough of a diversion to make the airman miss the melee taking place in the lower corner of the flat panel monitor. The ethereal shadow lunged and hacked at the group of zombies until they were a dark unmoving pile of bodies at the bottom of the screen. He also missed the dark shape leg sweep the last standing zombie and deliver a final fatal blow, pinning the thing’s head to the ground.

By the time the sleep-deprived sentry turned his attention to the eight separate camera feeds on the divided LCD screen, Daymon had already melted away into the darkness.

***

Outside the wire

Daymon pulled consistent five minute miles when he ran cross-country for the Teton High Redskins. That was over a decade ago, and in track shoes, not leather boots. The steady breeze caressing his back was calming and helped push him along, more mentally than physically. Late afternoon thunderstorms the day before had softened the ground, lessening the strain on his knees. Large mountain ranges like the Rockies had more of an effect on the weather than most people realized. Nearly every day like clockwork, the angry dark clouds would pull in from the west, form up like soldiers awaiting marching orders, spill over the craggy peaks and violently roll across the high desert. The summer weather was the same back home: both the Wasatch front in Utah, where his mom used to live, and the Tetons in Wyoming, where he spent most of his childhood. After high school Daymon followed his parents to the Salt Lake suburb of South Jordan, where he rented a studio apartment and worked loss prevention at a number of different electronics stores. He quickly found that the work was neither challenging nor rewarding. The city was too vanilla for his liking, and as much as it pained him he decided to move back to Driggs, the poor man’s Jackson Hole, and get a job with the BLM fighting forest fires. Before long the lanky young man worked his way out of the heavy fire crews and up the government pay grade, eventually finding his true calling--jumping out of perfectly good airplanes into dangerous situations.

Before the outbreak Daymon was enjoying a one week stand down; late July had seen fewer forest fires than usual so he risked a quick trip to South Jordan to see his “Moms” as he liked to call her. He had left the fire station in Jackson Hole early Saturday morning and was on his way to Salt Lake when he heard the first Department of Homeland Security alert announced on the radio. He vividly remembered the first tingles of caution he sensed when he couldn’t get a call through to Chief Kyle at the station. His cell phone wasn’t one of the new “smart” models--those kind usually didn’t last long when he was jumping out of airplanes or hacking through heavy brush and setting backfires. Cursing his bad luck, he tossed the chunky Ericsson phone into the glove box of the Suburban, chalking the lack of reception up to a cellular dead spot. He only made it as far north as Provo, Utah before he was repulsed by the living dead
.
Grudgingly he made the difficult decision to head back to Jackson Hole, leaving his Mom’s whereabouts seemingly forever unknown. It was during the return trip, in the little town of Hannah, Utah, where he met Cade Grayson and they embarked together on the dangerous trek that eventually delivered them to Schriever Air Force Base on the outskirts of Colorado Springs.

***

Two miles outside of the wire

Daymon had spotted the Rocky Mountain Outdoor Store near a boarded up strip mall the night before while riding shotgun in the Wells Fargo armored car. It looked, from a distance, like the entire block and parking lot had been surrounded with chain link fencing. Even though it had been dark and the vehicle he was riding in had been moving at a decent clip, it appeared as if the stores had been spared from looting. The close proximity to Schriever, with its large military presence, was probably its saving grace.

Daymon stopped to surveil his surroundings, getting his bearings while he racked his brain, striving to remember where he had seen the cluster of stores.

After a moment’s rest he decided to keep looking and resumed running, picking up the same fast pace. The early morning high desert air had a crisp edge to it, allowing him to see his breath with each hard earned exhale. Daymon was just hitting his stride, long legs propelling him smoothly forward, when the ground under his boots suddenly disappeared. The instantaneous sensation of weightlessness compelled his stomach to take temporary residence in his throat as he plunged into the abyss. The impact that followed was as startling as the realization that the ground had seemingly been yanked out from under him. He sensed something sharp poking his knee through his thick dungarees and his right hand rested on a cold smooth surface with a small amount of give. The makeshift weapon in his other hand had become embedded in something solid.

As Daymon’s eyes adjusted to the new environs a pallid face, inches from his, came into sharp focus. The zombie’s death mask, stretched tight across its skull, thin waxy lips riding over a picket of ivory incisors, stared blankly back at him. Thankfully, worms squirmed from a gaping, fist-sized cavity in the thing’s temple, confirming that it was
really
dead.

Daymon recoiled and removed the tent stake from the thing’s shoulder. As he shifted his weight to avoid the inadvertent kiss of death, his hand plunged into something sticky, releasing a burst of noxious gasses. Elbow deep in entrails, he detected a shifting within the sea of carrion. Frantically he scrabbled to his knees, pulling his right arm from the gore. Mercifully it was dark and the true horror of his predicament wasn’t fully revealed. Once again he sensed something moving underneath him, whether it was a bunch of zombies or just the result of his added weight was moot, he wanted out.

The Gods taunted him as the moon briefly appeared, shining golden light down the middle of the mass grave that he had unwittingly tumbled into. Hundreds of dead bodies surrounded him, and like the faces in a madman’s nightmare, they silently snarled and laughed at his misfortune. Daymon found out the hard way that it was impossible to retch and breathe through his mouth at the same time. Acid-laced bile backed up and sluiced from his mouth and nostrils. Each heave of his body was answered by more subtle movements from just under the surface layer of decaying corpses.

Daymon shakily arose while nervously eyeing the area near his feet. A shiver coursed up his spine and the small hairs on his neck stood at attention when the muffled wanting moans began to resonate from deep inside the grave. Daymon slipped and slogged through the pit of corpses and once he finally made it to the edge, like he had done hundreds of times while skiing in the backcountry, he kicked postholes into the mud wall and slowly made his way up the slippery seventy-five degree incline.

Daymon sat on the edge of the muddy wound that had been gouged into the earth and contemplated his latest brush with death. He knew it was going to happen sooner or later... death was inevitable. The Grim Reaper was going to have to wait though, because Daymon still had a few hundred things left to do on his bucket list. Snapping back to the present, his eyes were drawn to the distant sky show. The sweeping spotlights in downtown Springs, twenty miles to the west, were dwarfed by the backdrop of Pikes Peak and the southern Rockies. The mountains rose to 14,000 feet, jutting like sharks teeth into the inky night sky.
Good idea
, he thought. Even though the noisy transport planes bringing the soldiers back from places around the globe had stopped arriving hourly, the hungry dead kept showing up outside the wire. Utilizing the intense spotlights to draw the monsters away from the base and back into the metro area was ingenious. But just how long it was going to take to kill all of the zombies once they amassed was the sixty-four thousand dollar question.

***

With the ordeal of the pit fresh in his mind, Daymon loped at a slow trot northwest while keeping a wary eye on the ground. He jaywalked diagonally across the street towards a darkened Texaco gas station and happened upon two zombies trapped inside a 1970s Cadillac Eldorado. The car was adorned with the full luxury package, including the faux gold plated spare tire kit on the trunk; it had been a regal car when it was shiny and new, but now the once white interior was streaked with dried blood and a milky film of unidentifiable fluids fouled the insides of the glass. The creatures hadn’t seen him yet and he didn’t want to give them a reason to moan, so he kept out of sight and quietly snuck around the rear of the gold Caddie.
No way
, he thought to himself when he spied the red and blue Grateful Dead sticker proudly displayed on the car’s rear bumper. Don Henley would have been proud, he mused, as the Eagles’ lyrics began to resonate in his head.

He moved on with his attention divided between avoiding the zombies in the car and watching the ground in front of him, and nearly ran headlong into a lone walker emerging from behind one of the gas pumps.

Daymon had little warning and was forced to leap over the snarling ghoul. The move brought back memories of his track and field days at Teton High. He stopped abruptly, turned and sized up the pint-sized flesh eater. Somewhere along the line the zombie had lost its foot and most of the fingers on both hands. Daymon had noticed that nearly all of the creatures had similar defensive wounds, suffered when they were still human, trying unsuccessfully to survive the brutally vicious attacks the packs of hungry dead were capable of.

The limping ghoul scraped forward dragging its mangled stump, nubs for hands reaching for him. Daymon thought the thing would be a good candidate for an eye patch considering that the raw protruding leg bone resembled a peg leg and the guttural moaning sounded a little pirate like.
What a way to end up
, he thought to himself.

Calmly, the lanky dreadlocked man stood his ground. Like a bullfighter without a cape, he swiftly sidestepped the gimpy zombie and followed through with a vicious downward blow to the top of the skull. The twice dead corpse slid freely from the blood slickened shank and collided with the ground.

Daymon wiped his only
weapon
off on the zombie’s tee shirt and continued on his way. He was only three blocks removed from the encounter at the Texaco when he found what he was looking for. The enormous darkened sign loomed above him. It appeared to Daymon that
C.K.’s Rocky Mountain Outdoor and More
was closed for business... indefinitely. The words on the reader board silently urged everyone passing to
Gear up for bear season!
And the promise of a
Military Discount
adorned the bottom of the sign, likely put there to deter base personnel from venturing into the big city for their sporting goods needs. 

The temporary fencing here was nearly as tall as the one ringing the air force base; uneven and sagging in spots, it looked like it had been hastily erected. Still smarting from his last encounter with a security fence, he walked the perimeter looking for an easier way in than over the top.

Daymon noticed several smaller businesses standing adjacent to the outdoor store. A cellular store, flanked by a sushi restaurant and a UPS mailing center; all were boarded up and dark. It was your garden variety retail cluster, minus the ubiquitous Subway or Baja Fresh fast food store. He had no idea why they took the time to board up the sushi restaurant. Fifteen minutes with no power and all you have is bait anyway. He couldn’t even fathom what it smelled like inside after a
week
without refrigeration, and he shuddered at the thought. As for protecting the Verizon shop from looters--that was wishful thinking at best. Thanks to the zombie apocalypse all of those fancy phones were now just useless paperweights.
Welcome to the Dark Ages
, he thought.

As Daymon walked the fence on the far side of the sporting goods store, he found the chink in the armor he had been searching for. With a little jostling he successfully moved the two cinderblock bases apart enough to allow his narrow frame access to the empty parking lot. A stiff wind kicked up, delivering the stench of rotten flesh to his nose. After surveying the surroundings for the source and finding the lot free of undead, he came to the awful realization that the odor was from the bodily fluids soaked into his sleeves and pants legs. His first order of business, he thought, was to find a real weapon and then a set of clean clothes.

After locating the front doors of the outdoor store, Daymon quickly traversed the large parking lot with the
Mission Impossible
theme playing on a loop in his head.
Shit
, he thought, as he spied the heavy duty chain coiled around the handles like a steel anaconda. One glance told him the lock wouldn’t yield so he chose the path of least resistance, and prying around the edges with the tent stake, removed the quarter inch plywood covering the glass. Daymon’s first kick, aimed just below the door handle, buckled the entire window inward. The subsequent blow from his size eleven boot shattered the spider-webbed pane spraying hundreds of pea-size glass nuggets inside the store. He ducked his head under the bar, contorted the rest of his body to follow, and slowly crossed the debris field, trying to heel and toe it as quietly as possible, although doing so while retaining a modicum of stealth proved to be futile. The glass shards crunching under his boots sounded like small caliber gunshots echoing about the cavernous store.