Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (33 page)

But her mom had always said:
Good things come to those
who wait.
And Mom had been right. The good thing finally did come to
her—his name was Logan. And then the animal named Carson had killed him.

She drifted into a fantasy in which she was the captor and
Carson the trussed captive. And she had the knife—a ten-inch single-tang item.
Razor sharp. Folded metal. Tempered. She was sharpening it, the steady clatter
of metal against metal comforting because she knew that to skin a man one
needed a finely honed tool. The first nick drew blood. The second pass curled,
scroll-like, an inches-long graft of dermis—along with it a number of veins and
capillaries. Blood was spritzing on her face. Aerated droplets at first. Then a
pulsing fan, hot and crimson.

But before she got to watch him die, her eyes fluttered open
and she was back to being trussed and utterly helpless.

Carson hovered over her, holding a cup in one hand and in
the other a half-dozen articles of ladies clothing. He said, “You were in deep
REM sleep. Your eyes were going like crazy behind the lids. Creepy as hell. Had
to splash you with water to wake you. Still thirsty?”

Wishing their roles really had been reversed, Jamie answered
groggily, “Yes ... and I’m starving.”

“Ever been to northern Africa?”

She shook her head side to side on a horizontal plane.

“You don’t know starving then.” Carson grinned and threw the
clothing on the foot of the bed. Produced the keys to the cuffs from a pocket
and started with her left foot. He paused and shot her an icy glare. He said
slowly and menacingly, “You try anything and I’ll strangle you to
unconsciousness, then fuck you ten ways from Sunday. Then I’ll throw more water
on your face and wake you up and
wash, rinse and repeat
until you beg me
to kill you. Then I’ll oblige you. But only after you beg.
Or
... ” He let
the word hang in the air.

Jamie, wide awake now, swallowed hard. She saw the boxy
pistol holstered on his hip. She saw the keys pinched between his fingers.

After a long dramatic pause, Carson went on, “
Or
you
can choose a nice outfit from that pile of girlie clothes there. I’ll get you a
washcloth so you can clean up a bit ... and then you doll yourself up a little
and we’ll go downstairs and you play nice and break bread with my friend. He’s
real nice. Tall. Dark. Some say handsome. I’m not one to judge.”

She made no reply. Just stared at him trying to determine if
she had enough fight in her to opt for the former. After a second spent
assessing her injuries and deciding that fighting the good fight would have to
wait, she nodded subtly.

“I’m no mind reader. Which will it be,” he said behind a
wolfish grin.

In her mind, she saw herself walking down the hall past the
door to the room where something evil had happened a short while ago. Then
taking the stairs down and turning a left, where her true fate would be
revealed when she emerged into presumably an open living room with every
available seat occupied by drooling men with bad intentions, all wearing the
same disconcerting look as Carson. She threw an involuntary shudder, composed
herself somewhat and lied through her teeth. “I’d love to meet him.”

Chapter 49

The small group of survivors covered thirty-seven miles of
State highway labeled
Indian Canyon Scenic Byway
between Helper and
Duchesne in just under an hour, stopping once to top off their tanks at a quiet
roadside turnout near the thirty-mile marker.

Circumventing the sage-covered natural basalt benches rising
south and west of Duchesne, the State highway jogged right and the city was
dead ahead. The two-truck convoy slowed, then, following the directions in
their navigation units, turned right and then swung the mandated left onto
Center Street North which cut the downtown core for a handful of blocks before
crossing over yet another Main Street—the third so far, if Cade’s memory
served.

He thought about reissuing his previous warnings to the kids
in the Raptor but quickly deemed it unnecessary considering what he was seeing.
Duchesne City,
Gateway to the Uintah Basin
as the sign on the roadside
had proclaimed, looked more post-nuclear-disaster downtown Chernobyl than a
gateway to anything. A majority of the storefronts were boarded up. Some bore
spray-painted apologies for closing during trying times. Most had short
missives scrawled in paint warning of dead barricaded inside. Scores more were
just the ventings of people pissed off at the bad cards the town had been
dealt. ‘
Why us God?’
could be seen on more than one vertical sheet of
plywood. There were also a couple of businesses papered with warnings stating:
‘Looters
will be shot on sight,’
which to Cade seemed highly likely considering the
proliferation of firearms in most of the western states and consequently a bit
odd considering all that he knew about human nature and how tight-knit most of
rural America had been before the shit hit the fan.

Out of the blue, Brook said, “Kind of strange how quiet it
is.”

Scanning the streets and rooftops a block in advance, Cade
replied, “Certainly beats the alternative.” He cast his gaze down a side street
and spotted a clutch of hollow-eyed first turns staggering towards him. And out
of the corner of his eye he saw their prey, a scrawny feral dog, bolt
whippet-like from beneath one parked car to the safety of the next. As the
scene slipped from view, Cade was struck by how quickly Duchesne had become a
ghost town at the hands of a little manmade virus.

After bisecting the idled city, Center Street curled left
and cut a serpentine path through a greenbelt paralleling the dogwood-lined
Strawberry River. The two-lane continued onward for six miles, passing by
turn-of-the-century homes with rocking-chair-porches and large working fields
before finally merging with Utah 35 at its easternmost terminus.

They drove on for an hour, the road numbers and distances
blending together until finally forty miles north and west of Duchesne, like
the fabled Bat Phone, Cade’s sixth sense started ringing off the hook. Easing
the Ford to the curb, he asked Brook to hand over the binoculars. With his
internal voice telling him he’d been here before and his gut screaming
turn around,
he pressed the Bushnell’s to his face and worked its center ring. The lush
green valley spread out before him sprang into sharp focus. He started panning
from right-to-left. Bordered by red earthen foothills, rectangular tracts of
land in various sizes meandered diagonally for a couple of miles before the low
mountains in the background closed in, creating a chokepoint in the distance
where the ribbon of gray disappeared into the low forest. Cade heard the hum of
tires on asphalt and then the rumble of the Raptor’s engine as it sidled to a
stop a foot to his left. Then the inevitable. The sound of a window whirring
down followed by a, “What’s up?”

Keeping his attention glued to the foreground, Cade
answered, “I just wanted to look before leaping. That’s all.” He let the field
glasses rest on their lanyard. With Brook watching him closely, he hit a couple
of buttons on the navigation unit and zoomed in until nearly the same scene to
the fore, only filmed by a satellite sometime in the past, was now displayed in
full on the LCD screen. The lay of the land was identical. The fields were
fallow, meaning that presumably the image had been captured in the fall or
early winter. And the way the image was filling the screen told him nothing he
didn’t already know from the thirty second recon. He felt Brook’s hand on his,
and then sensed Raven’s presence over his right shoulder. Brook manipulated the
controls and the image zoomed out, showing the last city they had passed
through and revealing the next one straddling the rural State Route. Then
Raven, possessing arguably the best eyesight in the family, read the next
town’s name out loud. “Hanna,” she called out. “Nice name for a town. Maybe we
can stop there and stretch our legs ... let Max do his business.”

Brook’s head panned left ever so slowly as if she didn’t
want to know what kind of effect, if any, the revelation had on Cade. When her
gaze finally met his, what she saw in his eyes put her at ease.

Though there was a cold ball forming in his gut, Cade remained
stoic. Pushing the welling anxiety back in its box, he shrugged his shoulders
nonchalantly and cast a sidelong glance at Brook. “There’s no future in
dwelling on the past.” Then glanced over his shoulder at Raven and added, “Just
because we haven’t encountered many Zs since the horde near Price doesn’t mean
Hanna will be quiet.”

“Can we stop if it is?” pressed Raven.

Massaging his temples, Cade replied, “I’ll take it under
advisement.”

Which to Raven was Dad code for ‘
no,
’ but stated in a
manner meant to give her a little bit of hope. So she pressed harder, “Please,
Dad. I think I need to go again.”

“Really?” he said nonplussed. “Can’t you go here?”

She said, “In the wide open, Dad? Out here in front of
everyone
?”

Then, remembering her accident near Green River, he changed
his tone and added, “Only if it’s safe.” He looked down at Wilson in the Raptor
and shrugged. Then went on and described to Wilson and Taryn as much as he
could remember about the little town.

With a range of emotions stemming from what he’d gone
through in the farmhouse attic with Daymon and the lawyer surging through his
body, Cade rattled the shifter into Drive and set a course towards what he
hoped might be a little closure.

Chapter 50

The little valley before the town of Hanna appeared to be
deserted. And like in the movie
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, after the
spaceship landed and the giant robot deployed, nothing down there moved for as
far as Cade could see. Then suddenly a light breeze picked up and rustled what
he guessed to be fields of alfalfa, creating a hypnotic waving motion that
reminded him at once of the picket of aspens quaking under a fierce rotor wash,
his fleeting final memory of Hanna as he escaped certain death and climbed
aboard the hovering Black Hawk.

Built up alongside the State Route were hardy country homes
sitting back on oversized plots of land. The yards were full of rusty farm
implements and here and there they passed a hand-painted sign staked in front
of a drive offering up for sale corded firewood or baled hay or freshly laid
eggs by the dozen. All the kinds of things that used to be make the world go
round for the folks in this neck of the woods. But unfortunately that world
stopped going around when Hanna’s self-sufficient economy fell to the dead
weeks ago. Of this Cade was certain. He didn’t need to see as proof the dead
feeding on a cow carcass or the multitude of homes with darkened windows and
empty clotheslines. For he had already seen dozens of the town’s undead
citizenry with his own eyes. Nearly half of the total population of one hundred
and seventy souls had converged around that farmhouse on the hill. And in the
end, after the helo had plucked him and Daymon off of the roof, Duncan claimed
to have seen many more streaming in from the very road spooling out behind the
Ford.

After the short climb up the far side of the valley, Cade
came to find that there really was no downtown Hanna. Two and a half weeks ago
he had entered from the north; at the time he had assumed the business district
lay to the south. But he had been mistaken. They passed by the shotgun-style
house where he’d found the Winnebago, keys and mushy brakes and all—the trio’s
would-be escape vehicle. A few more long country blocks down the road he saw
off to the right the driveway with the aspens partially shielding the two-story
farmhouse. He slowed the Ford to walking-speed and crept past the wall of
trees, details of the house becoming visible by degrees. First he saw the
mildew-streaked rear-end of the RV that was still wedged firmly under the left
corner of the wraparound porch, the improvised escape hatch he’d fashioned with
a number of rounds from his rifle still hinged up on the roof. He counted the
half a dozen Z corpses decomposing on the lawn and walk where he’d felled them
silently with the Gerber. Then he craned his head nearer to Brook and cast his
gaze at the roof, where on the south side he recognized the flap of roofing
material they were forced to saw through in order to effect their escape. A
chill traced his spine and his eyes narrowed when the whole picture came
together and he realized how close he had come to buying it right here.

Seeing Cade’s gaze lock on the house and a second later his
face harden and his brow furrow, Brook placed her palm against his cheek and
asked, “You going to be OK, Cade Grayson?” And though she only knew the basics
of how he got in and out of the house, upon seeing it up close she could tell
that he had purposefully left a few of the major details unsaid.

“Yeah. I’m just now processing all of it for the first time.
Seeing it from this perspective ... and after the fact, is a little strange.
That’s all.” Then to change the subject, he twisted around and removed one of
the buds from Raven’s ear and said loudly, “You think we should stop here so
Raven can pee?”

Brook winked at him. Said, “Yeah. And let Max out ... then
we can all stretch a little bit too.”

Back to eyeing the house, Cade said, “Done.” He pulled over
and stopped across the driveway. He looked past Brook and noticed a sliver of
Daymon’s BLM-green suburban sticking out from behind the house. In his mind he
saw the special-ops motorcycle that Beeson had given him before he left Camp
Williams so full of hope and fear, his only mission to find his family. It had
to be back there, he told himself. Probably still propped up next to the Chevy,
saddlebags full of gear, right where he had left it.