Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (22 page)

The sign wasn’t lost on Brook. Nor was the part about
bandits or the stylized skull-and-crossbones.
Green Acres, my ass
, she
thought. Without a word, she retrieved her M4 from the footwell, pulled the
charging handle towards her, chambering a round, and then tilted the weapon on
its side and looked and made sure the safety was set. Then, with a firm set to
her jaw, she looked sidelong and caught Cade’s eye and nodded subtly.

Inside the Raptor, two truck-lengths behind and slightly
right of the F-650, Wilson, who was growing weary of riding shotgun, also read
the sign, and at once felt the first feathery tingle of fear creep into his
gut.

“Did you see that?” asked Taryn, eyes never leaving the
road.

“How could I miss it?” said Wilson. “Whoever wrote it used
effin silver paint. Pretty eye-catching in the desert.”

Sasha popped up between the seats and asked, “What did I
miss?”

In unison, but not very convincingly, both Taryn and Wilson
said, “Nothing.”

Quarry

The sight greeting Duncan when he rounded the back side of
the briar patch finished the process being near the site of Logan’s murder had
started. The flock of juvenile buzzards took flight first. Then the source of
the buzzing, disturbed by the frantic flapping of feathered wings, took flight,
changed direction and flew en masse around his head and into his open mouth.

Falling to his knees, he projectile-vomited the contents of
his stomach onto the damp gravel. Yellowed bile made all the more bitter from a
night of hard drinking burned as it sluiced over his teeth and shot from his
nose. Thick with squirming flies that had failed to escape his mouth, the
initial torrent pooled right where he had planted his hands. On all fours, back
arching and falling, he emptied everything that was in his stomach—and then
some. And when he was finished and had dragged his forearm across his lips, she
was still there. In the same contorted pose that was instantly burned into his
memory from only a split second’s glance. Arms and legs twisted at unnatural
angles. The sight of her, staring Little Orphan Annie-like, black jagged
openings in the hollow sockets where working muscle and soft tissue used to
reside, sent a chill up his spine. Her tongue was purple and flayed and rested
on her chin, having no doubt been tugged from her throat by the carrion
feeders.

He collapsed to his stomach and rolled over onto his back
and, while watching the voracious raptors wing across the azure sky, began
calling for Lev and Daymon—in a normal voice at first—then, when the shock
began to dull and he’d regained a modicum of breath—at the top of his lungs.

“Get the fuck over here, now!” He crossed his arms over his
eyes and added, “You’re gonna need to bring some sheets!”

Chapter 31

Thirty minutes after hearing Bishop deliver his cryptic
promise, Elvis had finished with bulldozing the makeshift landing spot and then
jumped right into his next assigned task.

An hour and a half into his newest chore, the head-heavy
splitting maul was beginning to feel like a natural extension of his body.
However, swinging the eight-pound tool with the same repetitive motion to
bone-jarring completion was taking its toll. Already destroyed by fifteen hours
of straight driving, made worse by a measly four hours of sleep over two days,
he knew from past experience—and an ever increasing flurry of twinges—that his
lower back was about to go out on him.

So he thunked the axe into the manhole-sized round of wood
and left it there, its yellow fiberglass handle sticking into the air. Then,
looking towards the trailer Bishop had entered two hours prior, he cracked the
seal on a fresh bottle of water, took a couple of long pulls, let the hot
liquid reconstitute his tongue, and set it aside. With muscles aching like he’d
just spent a day on a Georgia chain gang, he sat on a round, removed his
Huskers ball cap and wiped the beaded sweat from his forehead. Once again he
regarded the eighteen-wheeler. He drained the water and tossed the bottle on
the brittle brown grass.
Means to an end
, he told himself as he worked
up the courage to go and see for himself what the former Navy SEAL was up to.

After crossing the road running between the lakeside homes
and the newly cleared expanse awaiting Carson’s fleet of helicopters, Elvis saw
Bishop leap from the back of the trailer. Mind racing to come up with one good
reason—besides the truth of course—to explain why he was taking a break before
he’d finished splitting the wood, Elvis stopped dead in his tracks. Pulse
rising a few extra beats per minute, he watched Bishop wipe his face with the
bottom of his sweat-stained wife beater then drop the tank covering his toned
six-pack abs.

Busted
, thought Elvis just as Bishop looked up.

“Perfect timing,” called Bishop. “I was just coming to get
you. I’ve got something that needs moving. And like the saying goes, it’s more
awkward than heavy.”

Slowly releasing the breath he had been holding, Elvis
grunted then said, “No problem.” Massaging his lower back while envisioning it
going out and causing him to drop whatever he had been conscripted to move onto
Bishop’s toes brought forth the specter of the wrath a fuckup of that magnitude
would likely incur. Last thing he needed was to literally ‘drop the ball’ this
late in the game—just about the time that he thought he had proven himself,
thus avoiding a bullet to the back of the head for his past transgressions. He
had failed at Schriever. That President Clay was still alive and very few
soldiers had perished in the zombie outbreak he had orchestrated was common
knowledge. Furthermore, he should have known, with his luck as of late, that
Bishop would eventually learn of Robert Christian’s order to assassinate him.
Stating that he had only said yes under duress had apparently been enough to
get him a shot at redemption. So here he was. Toiling away to earn the right to
keep on breathing. Then, with Bishop’s smile fading, Elvis heard his mother’s
voice in his head.
Work hard and everything else falls into place
. And
then his father chimed in from the grave.
Carpe diem.

Seize the day indeed
, he thought. He nodded at Bishop
and swallowed hard, trying to mask the growing pain. Then the fit and tanned
stone cold killer said, “I think you’re going to appreciate what I’ve been
working on.” He about-faced and retraced his steps between the two vehicles. A
tick later one of the trailer’s rear doors hinged all the way open, barely
missing the wrecker’s boom, and banged against the slab-sided trailer. “Spoils
of war,” bellowed Bishop, gesturing to the cargo. “Come and see.”

Sparing his back from the sideways shuffle between the two
trucks, Elvis took the long way around. He skirted the apparatus hanging off of
the tow truck’s boom and caught his first glimpse of the object of Bishop’s
swelling pride. Sitting there on the wood-plank floor, about chest-high to both
of them, were two neat rows of footlocker-sized cases, six on the left side,
and five on the right. Each box was made of some kind of brushed metal and had
multiple latches on the lid. They were positioned lengthwise in the trailer and
secured to the floor three feet apart at all corners with thick canvas shipping
straps that Elvis guessed would be sufficient to keep a baby grand from sliding
around. Box number twelve, however, was sitting horizontally near the rear edge
of the trailer, its lid hinged open.

“I’ve got a present for you,” said Bishop. He closed the lid
and grabbed a handle before Elvis had gotten a good look inside. “Give me a
hand. But a word of caution ... the modifications I’ve made require that we
handle it with care.” He smiled again. “That, and the fact that there’s enough
boom
here to boil all of the water from the lake.”

Elvis smiled as he looked into the gloom at the other eleven
boxes and wondered what
twelve
boiling lakes would look like.

“OK. Lift,” said Bishop.

Surprisingly the case and its contents were much heavier
than Elvis had guessed. He figured his half of the box would be about fifty
pounds or so. He was mistaken. The device, when combined with the weight of the
lead-lined box it was nestled in, weighed closer to three hundred pounds.
Elvis’s back, however, seemed to think the box weighed that of a small
automobile. Setting the box to the ground brought on a twinge, making the
muscles rapidly contract and expand uncontrollably. A sharp stab of pain came
next, shooting instantly at light speed from his lower lumbar region to his
brain and nearly causing him to lose his grip.

But he clenched his teeth and sucked it up and, with Bishop
manhandling most of the burden, together they wrestled the box from the trailer
and placed it gently on the ground. Then, for the second time in as many
minutes, Elvis released a captive breath and collapsed against the wrecker’s
quarter panel, his face a mask of pain.

“You going to be OK? asked Bishop.

Elvis said “Yes,” but his body language conveyed the
opposite. He leaned against the trailer, grimacing.

Pussy
, thought Bishop as he popped open the box lid,
fully exposing the hidden innards. Sitting lengthwise, held down by a pair of
sturdy-looking metal bands, was a two-and-a-half-foot-long cylinder, ten inches
in diameter, roughly as big around as a basketball. It was polished to a high
gloss, smooth to the touch, and looked to be milled from some kind of space-age
metal—probably titanium, guessed Elvis. And true to the movies, the cylinder
had been labeled with the instantly recognizable trefoil symbol consisting of
three magenta blades around a like-colored center radius, all overlaid atop a
yellow background— an instantly recognizable visual warning pointing to its radiological
nature. Coils of wires in varying colors snaked from some kind of sealed-cell
battery pack to what appeared to be an Apple iPad, its display currently dark.
And pointing to the work Bishop had put into prepping the thing, pieces of wire
in varying lengths, some stripped of their colorful coating, most not, littered
the ground around the open box.

Bishop lounged on the tow truck’s bumper calmly explaining
the inner workings in painstaking detail, leaving out only the
how to
part of arming the thing.

Elvis listened and nodded and felt the first tingle of
adrenaline when the fact that he was being primed on the particulars of the
jerry-rigged device became abundantly clear, starting him to fantasize about
the havoc something like this could wreak on his enemy. Then the beginnings of
a smile curled the corner of his lip, and Bishop’s voice went all Charlie
Brown’s teacher as suddenly the possibility of righting his Schriever wrong
with a much higher body count was within his grasp.

Suppressing the urge to blurt out the words,
I’ll do it
,
Elvis returned his attention to Bishop’s technical-jargon-filled spiel.

A handful of minutes later when Bishop was finished talking
about yields and overpressure and blast radius’s, Elvis was invited to have a
couple of beers on the porch of the big lakefront house.

With the sound of approaching helicopters reaching his ears,
Elvis, praying his back would hold out a little while longer, helped Bishop
lift and arrange the radiation safe box onto the tow truck using its hydraulic
lift apparatus. Once it was on the deck, they secured it with the unused straps
from the semi-trailer. Then, walking with a definite hitch in his step, he
followed the super-fit former operator toward the house, behind which sat a
quarter-cord of wood still in need of splitting.

Looking disdainfully at the dozen rounds of pine, Elvis
gripped the rail firmly and scaled the stairs one cautious step at a time.
Greeting him at the top stair with a sweating bottle of Corona, Bishop said,
“Here. You earned it. And there’s more where these came from.”

As they walked the length of the rocking chair porch towards
the front corner of the house, Elvis called ahead, “One will probably do. I’m
not much of a drinker.”

“More for me,” said Bishop as he positioned a couple of
wicker chairs with floral print cushions next to a weathered teak table. Chair
legs scraping the pressure-treated wood, he arranged one for Elvis, and added
with a nod, “You look pretty beat up. Better take a load off.”

His back throbbing with pain, Elvis stayed standing for a
moment.

Bishop sat down and studied the former-college football
player as he tried to ease his six-foot-three-inch frame into a seated position
without throwing a disc.

Seeing this, Bishop’s face suddenly hardened. And like a drill
instructor addressing a recruit, he growled, “For this mission to succeed
tomorrow we’re going to need a
youthful
Elvis to suit up and show up.”

“Couple of aspirins and some shut eye and I’ll be good to go
by morning,” replied Elvis. Then, bracing his back with one hand, the other
gripped white-knuckle-tight on the low-slung chair, he lowered his butt slowly
onto the cushion.

Bishop sipped his beer. Gestured with the bottle and said,
“You’re moving like the old jumpsuit-wearing Viva Las Vegas Elvis.”

Though he wanted to explode, Elvis remained tight-lipped and
ground his teeth.

After laughing at his own joke, Bishop added, “You sure
we’re not going to find you dead on the toilet, ass up and face down?”

“Hell, I don’t think I’m ever going to get out of this
chair,” answered Elvis with a forced grin. “So I suppose I’ll have to die out
here underneath the stars.”

Bishop said nothing. Wasn’t his joke. He looked west across
the lake where the sound of rotors thrashing the warm air carried over the
still water. A beat later, moving left to right, four matte-black helicopters
appeared on the horizon. Then, sun glinting from their canopies, two egg-shaped
Little Bird attack helicopters, one lagging a little behind the first, left the
treetops behind and descended until their skids cut the air barely a dozen feet
above the lake’s placid surface. And following closely—almost literally—in the
smaller craft’s wake, two Black Hawk transport helicopters dipped down over the
trees and transited the lake, their wheels also skimming a dozen feet over the
now choppy water.