Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (32 page)

“That was close, Cade Grayson,” said Brook, stress evident
in her wavering voice.

“Hand grenades and horseshoes,” he replied, tires chirping
as the truck leapt backwards and, in keeping with Newton’s law, their heads
jerked forward. He drove fast and wobbly one-handed while looking over his
shoulder and, after about twenty yards, and with the Raptor closing fast, he
whipped the wheel left and hit the brakes, executing a bootlegger’s reverse
that Special Agent Adam Cross would have been proud of. And as the world spun a
one-eighty in front of Cade’s face, he saw from the corner of his eye, Taryn
behind the wheel of the white truck. That it wasn’t fully engulfed by the dead
as he had feared brought him a palpable sense of relief. Finally feeling the
inertia bleed off and the truck get light on the springs, he slammed the
shifter into Drive, released the brake and sped south towards the off-ramp and
a rendezvous with downtown Price, Utah.

Chapter 46

Though their small two-truck convoy had sped through the
previous town unscathed, Cade attributed it to how little commerce there was in
Wellington: a Gas-n-Sip, a crusty tavern with plate windows full of unlit neon,
and a couple of restaurants catering to various ethnicities was about it. But
Price, a college town with a population of eight thousand before Omega swept
through, was a different story entirely. The going was much slower—they trudged
along, barely able to make half the posted speed limit. The streets were
patrolled by roving groups of flesh eaters and littered with trash and bits and
pieces of putrefied corpses. Every business lining yet another street named
Main had been ransacked, most of the windows reduced to razor-edged shards that
littered the sidewalks.

A few blocks in, Cade was beginning to think that taking
their chances with the horde might have been the more sound decision. For on
two different occasions he was forced to use the F-650’s angular plate bumper
and tremendous amounts of horsepower and torque and fuel to bull through the
clusters of abandoned vehicles clogging the main drag.

Wilson’s voice came through the radio. “How much more of
this?”

Brook answered back, “A few more blocks and then one more
smaller town is all.” She shifted her gaze right down a side street and spied a
throng of Zs easily numbering over a hundred. She keyed the radio and went on,
“Company on the right ... do not stop.”

They slipped by the dead and a block later, near the edge of
the business district, Main Street jogged diagonally north by west and became a
razor-straight stretch of two-lane called Carbonville Road. After transiting
eight straight miles of two-lane unimpeded by dead or static vehicles, passing
by houses and fields and lastly a sprawling out-of-place country club complete
with a lush green golf course and driving range, they came upon a Y-juncture in
the road where Cade jammed the Ford to a stop.

A sign planted equidistant at the fork indicated that the
ramp to the left merged with Utah State Route 6. Below that useful piece of
information was an arrow pointing right towards the city of
Helper,
population 2000
.

Cade let the truck roll forward and merged left. A tick
later the voice in the box said:
Helper, one mile.

A name that meant nothing to Cade or Brook, but nonetheless,
upon hearing it pronounced in robotic syntax through the truck’s speakers, the
two-syllable word made Raven think of hamburger, and the two words, helper and
hamburger, when combined and transposed brought to mind the talking white glove
from the television commercials . Then, unable to resist the urge, she began to
sing the inane jingle in a high falsetto. And as Cade negotiated the onramp and
wheeled the Ford onto what he hoped would end up being a zombie-free stretch of
interstate bypassing Helper, the source of his daughter’s amusement, he
depressed the Motorola’s talk button and succeeded in infecting the heads of
the kids in the Raptor with the poorly sung but commonly known ditty.

The bypass was relatively free of vehicles and walking dead
and once Helper proper was behind them and the State Route had merged back onto
191, yet another country club with driving range and clubhouse all ringed by a
vast empty parking lot slid by on the left.
No better time than the
apocalypse to play a round
, thought Cade darkly. No groups wanting to play
through. No marshals tooling the fairways looking for rules to enforce. And
best of all, no one keeping count of his Mulligans. But sadly that fantasy
evaporated when he noticed, with no greenskeepers to combat the desert climate,
just how ratty and brown the fairways and greens of these links had become.
There wasn’t a single cart burdened by overstuffed bags and overweight golfers
traversing the course. There were no beer girls maneuvering their carts against
the grain in search of thirsty customers and the possibility of cash tips. Like
the world and most of her population, this golf course was history.

Glancing in the mirror, Cade saw that Raven had her head
buried in Taryn’s iPhone again and was busy scrolling through the music. He
looked over her head and saw the Raptor still keeping pace. Finally he let his
gaze skim over the navigation system, prompting him to say to Brook, “Looks
like the road splits up ahead.”

She zoomed in one stop and replied, “U.S. Route Six goes off
west to Salt Lake. This road we’re on curls to the right past those ...”

Casting a shadow over the juncture, a coal processing plant
loomed on the right. Two hundred yards beyond the towering machinery and idle
conveyor belts and rust-streaked hoppers and silos was an impressive mountain
of already processed coal. Seemingly sucking up every ray of sunshine, the
black pyramid-shaped mound made the two trucks look like toys in comparison.

To their left was a sobering and contrasting sight that
explained where the majority of Helpers’ population had ended up. Stacked seven
or eight deep and twenty across and stretching at least a block, the faces of
dead Americans staring out of the tangle of death spoke to the harsh measures
undertaken by the National Guard early on during the outbreak. The
bullet-riddled bodies of infected mothers and fathers and kids and
grandparents, all having been put down after the body bags had run out, had
suffered greatly from scavengers and exposure to the elements.

With Raven still distracted by the device and humming away
none the wiser, the F-650 and the Raptor crept by the drift of death, thumped
over a set of railroad tracks and came to a complete stop, side-by-side, at yet
another ‘Y’ in the road, where, erected in the shadow of the coal plant at the
point of divergence, yet another road sign presented them with two options.
After a short deliberation, eschewing the left fork that would take them
straight through the heart of Salt Lake City one hundred and seven miles
distant, Cade opted to suffer a few added miles and the associated time delay
and backtrack slightly on US-6 and then pass through Duchesne, a town the
navigation unit said was forty-six miles away north by east. After which they
would stay to UT-35 and chase the GPS coordinates through a handful of small
towns east of the Wasatch front to their ultimate destination a hundred and
thirty-seven miles north by west near Eden, Utah. There, at the end of the
proverbial rainbow, hopefully, they would find their pot of gold in the form of
a fortified compound and rendezvous with Duncan and Daymon before nightfall.

Chapter 47

Duncan left his new 4x4 parked near the compound’s entrance.
There was a resonant thunk when he let the tailgate hinge open and fall to the
stops. He scooped up an armful of the weapons they had taken from the quarry
and made his way to the hidden entrance.

After delivering a series of knocks in the agreed-upon
order, metal grated against metal as someone worked the inner locking
mechanism.
Thing needs another shot of WD-40
, Duncan thought as the door
hinged open and Heidi greeted him with a smile. Stepping up, arms outstretched,
she offered to lighten his load. “I got it,” he replied. “These are going into
the dry storage for now.” He stood in the gloom for a second and then went on,
“Any luck with the ham radio?”

She shook her head. “Nothing north. I tried all of the
frequencies your brother had written down. Then I freelanced a little. Talked
to a guy in Nevada. Big group of survivors from Salt Lake now calling some
Naval Air Base home. I guess there are a couple of hundred Marines there as
well. We could use something like that near here.”

Visibly bowing under the weight of the weapons, Duncan
nodded and moved sideways past her and through the narrow passage. He looked
over his shoulder and called, “I’ve got news too. We’ll have to catch up as a
group a little later. Thanks for lettin’ me in.”

“Me too,” said Daymon as he stepped over the threshold,
thick locks of braided hair swishing pendulum-like in front of his face. Also
weighted down by an armload of long guns, he paused in front of his lady and
leaned in, puckered lips parting the veil of dreads.

After pinning the unruly do behind his ears for him, she
kissed him, smiled and said, “You need a hat to control that nest, my little
Sherpa. Now carry on.”

With Daymon hot on his heels, Duncan navigated the labyrinth
and bent at the knees in front of the pantry/dry storage and placed his load on
the plywood floor. Then he relieved Daymon of the half-dozen rifles he was
carrying. “I’ll store these,” he said. “Why don’t you go and get another load.”

“Good call, Boss,” Daymon said. “I might be a minute though.
Gonna get a little more drive-by lip lock.”

Duncan made no reply.

“You OK?”

Again, Duncan said nothing.

Trying to lighten the mood, Daymon said, “What was I
thinking? This isn’t your first rodeo. Been there, done that, right? And I do
believe that you’ve got a Zippo older than me.”

Still, Duncan remained stoic, tight-lipped, as if he were
wrestling with some kind of monumental decision.

Sensing this, Daymon said, “Don’t renege on your promise.
Everyone needs to know what we’re gonna be facing down the road.”

Duncan nodded. Scooped a rifle off the floor and stepped
into the darkened room. There was a flare of light as he pulled the chain
dangling from the lone bulb. Squinting, he propped the rifle against a stack of
five-gallon buckets. He looked at the doorway and Daymon had already gone, his
footsteps faint. Receding. Then the echoes died away and Duncan found himself
alone—physically and spiritually.

The voice in his head piped up a millisecond later.
Deriding. Condescending. Telling him he was a failure. Telling him he’d killed
Logan through negligence and dereliction of brotherly duty. He listened hard.
Succumbed to the voice that seemingly had taken a contract out on his ass. The
voice that wanted him dead.

It was right where he’d stowed it the day before. Insurance.
His gateway to oblivion. His fingers curled around the slender familiar neck.
He hefted the sack with his right and pulled the smooth vessel free with his
left. Breaking the paper seal produced a brittle tearing sound, like a newly
struck match igniting.
Appropriate
, he thought.
‘Cause I’m about to
start a fire that all the water in the quarry couldn’t extinguish
.

The cap spun off smoothly. Hand shaking, he lifted the
square bottle to his lips. Going down, Old No. 7 never tasted better. “To you,
Oops,” he said between gulps. After one last long pull of the amber
liquid—during which he fulfilled his earlier promise to himself by producing a
long string of roiling bubbles— he reversed the ritualistic process, spun the
cap on slowly and secreted the bottle on a top shelf where it would be out of
sight yet easily accessible.

Chapter 48

No matter how Jamie positioned herself on the bed or which
particular wrist she chose to support her weight, she couldn’t quell the dull
ache deep down inside her rotator cuffs. And no matter how close she scooted to
the headboard, there was no stopping the constant throbbing in her deltoids.

Entirely by design, in order to strain her muscles and
stretch ligaments and hobble her, Carson had returned with two more pairs of
handcuffs and had left her spread-eagled, one on each ankle secured to the
footboard with lengths of nylon rope. Then he’d repositioned the handcuffs
attached to her wrists higher up on the headboard, leaving her very little room
for lateral movement. Finally, unable to sit on her butt and reclining flat an
impossibility, she realized that the pseudo-crucified position she was being
forced to endure was meant to hobble her not only physically but mentally as
well. To send a message. To say:
We own you
.
Get used to it.
And
it was working—on both accounts.

She craned her head and saw how the sunlight was now angling
in off the lake from the left and illuminating the wall to her right. It told
her that the sun was falling away past meridian and that west was to her left.
And if everything she had been taught about the directions on the compass still
held true, her feet were pointing north and the mouthwatering aroma hitting her
nose was wafting under the door from the south, presumably a kitchen somewhere
downstairs. And she also knew from past experience that where people cooked
they also stored knives and cleavers and meat-tenderizing mallets—all high on
her must-have-to-escape wish list.
Hell
, she thought.
A wine bottle
would do
. Going out swinging was also high on that list. The opportunity
presented to her in the helicopter had been fleeting. In hindsight she should
have done it there and then. Risked everything. Gone down with the ship, so to
speak.