Soldier On: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (2 page)

After inspecting the bodies to ensure all were dead, Cade picked up the bike and looked it over. There were a few scratches and one of the saddle bags was cracked, but nothing serious. The Kawasaki started on the first try.

With quite a few hours of daylight left, and a lot of ground to cover, Cade had to get moving.

***

Cade used the time on the road to think through the events of the last few days. He made the decision to leave Portland, Oregon when the outbreak first started. He needed to go back east and find his wife and daughter.

From day one he had been thrust into the unwanted role of protector, mentor and savior. Two neighbor boys had lost their parents to the Omega virus, as the media had taken to calling it, and since there was no one else to care for the two young brothers, Cade reluctantly took them in.

Soon, he and a band of survivors were travelling together in a mini convoy. After hundreds of miles and numerous brushes with death he remained unscathed.

It nearly brought the tired warrior to tears every time he thought about the smart aleck Ike whose personality was extremely large for a boy his size. Ike's teenaged brother Leo, always the protector couldn’t keep Ike safe in the end.

The twins, Sheila and Shelly, in their early twenties, each met their own horrible death.

Rawley, the rowdy neighbor, talented musician and crack shot with a rifle also met his maker violently.

Five vibrant souls lost and Cade felt like he was the common denominator. He had been beating himself up over the chain of events and cast himself as a pseudo grim reaper, in a way responsible for their deaths.

He made up his mind while en route to the Special Forces garrison outside of Draper, Utah. The second the Black Hawk landed Cade began to plot his solo journey. He firmly believed he would be better off distancing himself from anyone and anything that could divert him from his personal mission. Locating his wife Brook and young daughter Raven was his main reason for living.

Cade stopped reflecting on the past and focused on the present. It was time to find a place to stop for the night. After the near fatal brush with the group of walkers, driving on the narrow road, with only the meager illumination cast by the bikes headlight was out of the question.

In the midst of a short straightaway, he stopped in the center of the road, and let the Kawasaki idle.

To get to the pocket where he put the topo map, first he had to brush off the armor of road grime that had worked its way onto every square inch of his body. Neatly folded, in the side cargo pocket of his ACUs was the Bureau of Land Management map that Major Beeson had provided. According to the map there was a junction five miles ahead and the River Bend campground was only a mile further off to the right. If it was free of undead, Cade decided, it would be a safe and secluded place for him to get some much needed sleep.

He was busy refolding the map when he detected a rhythmic scraping reverberating up the draw, the noise seemed to be coming from downhill in the same direction he was headed.

Spontaneously Cade turned the motorcycle perpendicular to the road, gunned the engine, and roared uphill through the underbrush and scrub oak, the bikes knobby rear tire spewing dirt and rocks into the air. Cade had no idea what or whom approached, but on the road and exposed was the last place he wanted to be. After charging twenty yards up the incline he killed the engine and dumped the bike on its side.

With the engine noise silenced, the scrabbling, scratching cadence grew louder. His gut feeling led him to believe that many more zombies were marching on a collision course towards him. Cade quickly retrieved his M4 carbine, attached the suppressor; tromped uphill a few more yards and dove behind the nearest cover. A semi-hollow fallen tree served to conceal his prone body. Cade braced the carbine over the rotting deadfall, removed the black protective end caps from the optics and appraised his situation. The image framed by the scope made him shudder involuntarily. A mob of undead, numbering somewhere in the hundreds, noisily approached, their shuffling gait propelled the fine talc-like dirt airborne. The ochre cloud of dust rose to the treetops, obscuring the rear of the long shambling column.

Cade harbored no reservations that the ongoing commotion at the military base was pulling them in from the city and he feared for his buddy Duncan and his mentor Major Beeson. There wasn’t enough ammunition in Camp Williams to fend off the undead tsunami soon to be at their doorstep. Knowing that fault lay solely on Beeson's shoulders troubled Cade the most. In the days following the outbreak, his decision to illuminate the base at night had the adverse effect of drawing more walkers.

During his time deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan Cade had spent countless hours observing targets and gathering intelligence, he was no stranger to laying low and staying quiet. He stopped estimating how many undead were marching past his position after the count exceeded more than five hundred.

The monsters were shambling towards the base in silence, there wasn’t any of the moaning, and hissing or grunting Cade had gotten used to.

With nothing to do but wait, stay quiet and still, Cade thought of his wife Brook and 11 year old daughter Raven. The last time he hugged them outside of the airport in Portland was still fresh in his mind. The last words Raven said to him, with an air of confidence rarely exhibited, “
Nothing shall befall my mom when I am on the job
,” played over and over, a continuous loop in his mind. The last time he heard Brook’s frantic voice on the other end of the phone, sounding alone and scared, also gnawed at him.

His thoughts turned to his neighbors back in Portland, and how he had been forced to kill Ted and Lisa after they were infected. The faces of Rawley, Leo and the twins Sheila and Shelly-all murdered by the red head outlaw biker invaded his head as he pressed his face into the dirt, willing himself to blend into his surroundings. What an introduction to the new world.

A sudden commotion brought Cade back to the present, three of the monsters were scrambling and clawing up the incline towards him. His finger tensed on the trigger as he watched the trio of flesh-eaters stumble over the motorcycle. One of the zombies began to frantically dig in the dirt while the other ghouls dumbly looked on. A flash of chestnut fur shot from the ground and raced between the kneeling creatures legs. Abruptly the zombies about faced and tumbled down the hill after the speedy rodent. A humorous thought crossed Cade’s mind,
chipmunk 1, zombies 0
.  He smiled inwardly.

It took forty-five minutes for the walkers to trudge by his hide. When the road was finally clear of zombies, Cade assembled the satellite phone. He felt it his duty to warn Major Beeson of the approaching zombies and their approximate number.

The canopy of trees or some other atmospheric anomaly prevented the phone from working properly. Finding a better position to access an overhead satellite would require a long hump uphill, breaking through thick underbrush. Cade made the decision to use what little light he had left to distance himself from the dead. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and picked his way down the hill to the dirt bike.

Apprehension set in as Cade was about to start the motorcycle. It was hard for him not to imagine another army of dead waiting, out of sight, right around the corner. With his mind fully in check, he started the engine and pointed the front wheel towards his destination. Cade calculated that if he pushed the bike and rode hard, he might make it to the
River Bend
campground before sundown.

Outbreak Day 5

Shriever AFB

Colorado Springs, Colorado

“Bring more ammo!” Brook screamed, without looking away from the stumbling ghoul bracketed in the scopes crosshairs. She smoothly pulled the trigger, the rifle bucked and the top third of the zombies head evaporated in a luminous green cloud of bone and brain matter. The advancing corpse was cold; the superheated bullet warmed the detritus making it resemble a gory aurora borealis through the thermal scope.

A sidelong glance confirmed her worst fear. The gunfire from within the base was nothing but a siren song for the dead. Although it appeared the entire population of Colorado Springs was at the gate; the truth was the men and women of the United States military were presently taking the war to the enemy in and around the city.

***

Parker Bluff, Subdivision. Colorado Springs.

Lawson tested the door knob, sure enough it was locked. He looked at his superior. Captain Ronnie Gaines was in his mid forties and stood head and shoulders above most of the men he commanded. He was of African American descent and dark as night. His clean shaven pate and muscular build made him the center of attention wherever he went. Good attention or bad he always took it in stride. One smile could charm the ladies or disarm the men; he was an equal opportunity killer.

Gaines was a member of the 10th Special Forces Group out of nearby Fort Carson and he was a decorated combat veteran of both wars in the Middle East and Operation Desert Storm.

The locked doors usually hid bad things behind them. The question was how many bad things?

Lawson rapped sharply. The other four men stayed abreast of the door, two per side, and waited the customary thirty seconds.

“No one home,” Lawson said-a little too early as something heavy impacted the door from within. The moaning soon commenced; it was nearly always the same, a low pitched plaintive sound that caused grown men to get the chills. So much for hoping the house was empty.

They always followed the same protocol. The entry man would pop the door with the twelve pound Thundersledge and then stand back. Rarely did it take much more than the hammer. Occasionally one of the operators would be forced to blow the lock with a shotgun.

Lawson was six foot tall, although he was thin; his body was ripped with corded muscles. His pale complexion and wiry frame earned him the nickname Icky from his peers. It was short for Ichabod, as in Ichabod Crane the timid character from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Ick was calm on the exterior; in battle he was anything but timid.

“Pop the door, Ick.”

The sledge traced a well practiced tight arc, a perfect one timer. The door buckled as the hammer forced the trim on the inside to pop off, rendering the deadbolt useless. What followed was a little humorous, but deadly serious. A hefty female zombie who had been the source of the moaning became wedged between the ruined door and the jamb.

The trapped undead woman had been cooking in the one story ranch house for days. She was morbidly obese, pasty white and bloated like a beached whale carcass. The last shirt that she put on while still alive was stained with days old dried blood and other not so dry bodily fluids. She had probably been some soldier or airman’s wife enjoying her weekend when the Omega virus stormed across the nation.

Gaines bellowed, “Clear.”

Icky stepped aside to allow the other two operators a clear field of fire. The three round burst from Gaines silenced SCAR assault rifle pulped the walkers face. Her body performed a clumsy pirouette and crashed across the entryway to the house.

Sergeant Dale Williams stood back from the door, silenced SCAR at the ready waiting for more zombies to appear. After a few seconds Captain Gaines stepped over the corpse and began clearing the interior of the house.

“Clear,” was repeated after each room was checked for threats and deemed to be empty. With practiced precision the four man team swarmed the house from top to bottom.

“What does this remind you of gentlemen?” Gaines said, subtly reminding his men to stay frosty.

“
Fallujah, sir
.”

“Ding. X gets a square. Good job Ick.”

Williams dragged the corpse down the stairs and deposited it on the brown lawn.

Gaines pulled the door shut and marked it with a big chalk X and the numeral one. He had taken this right out of the hurricane Katrina playbook. The X meant the house was clear and the circled out one denoted the now deceased occupant.

Scenes like this played out all across the city as the Special Forces soldiers from Fort Carson prepared Colorado Springs to become the new capital of the United States.

Outbreak Day 4

River Bend Campground

Wasatch mountains, Utah

The cutoff road was right where the map indicated it would be. Cade followed it to the right and continued on further until he saw the small sign that read,
River Bend Campground
.

The symbols on the map denoted that the place would be unimproved-and it was. There were only eight sites and all but one was empty.

A white Jeep CJ was backed in next to one of the sites. The odor of carrion was evident; except for the flies he detected no movement. A red, three person North Face tent was erected directly behind the Jeep.

The Special Ops motorcycle was very quiet, although the exhaust was baffled; it still made enough noise to flush two very large ravens from the tent. They cursed the intruder with their caws and flew into the tallest tree where they continued to let their displeasure be known.

Cade silenced the bike’s engine, dismounted and drew his Glock 17 from the holster strapped to his thigh.