A Pound of Flesh: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (22 page)

Even though the fact that he had saved the
helicopter’s tail rotor assembly from chopping up a couple of
stiffs didn’t get a mention in Tice’s glowing review, the always
quiet Maddox let it slide. Though he was of the new generation in
the teams, he was still old school, eschewing the war stories while
letting his actions speak for themselves.

“Cirque duh what,” Cade interjected.

“Never mind,” Tice answered sheepishly.

“Don’t worry ladies,” Ari said as he leveled
the helo and sped over the ochre mesas, keeping the sun over his
left shoulder. “By tomorrow, if his foraging parties hit paydirt,
Whipper should have a fuel-laden Herc for this bird to drink
from.”

“You’re assuming, Ari, that Spooky here
didn’t jinx us,” Lopez stated, poking a thumb towards Tice.

“Durant set the waypoints,” Ari added,
ignoring the quip. “We’re going north via the Flaming Gorge
route... anyone been there?”

Ari was greeted by a chorus of
“
Negative
.”

“It’s a ninety-mile long reservoir stopped up
by a pretty good sized dam.”

Ari tapped the glass touchscreen to his
right, bringing up a colorful high definition topo map of the
ground they would be overflying. “I’m going to take us through the
canyon, staying close to the reservoir. When the Flaming Gorge
spits us out we will be very close to the insertion point
handpicked by your captain.”

Granted there were very few threats to the
Ghost Hawk during the day now that the United States was in its
final death throes, but dropping the Delta team off in broad
daylight in the forest only a couple of miles from the bad guys was
still going to prove risky.

Ari had lobbied hard to execute the insertion
at night when he, the aircrew, and the Stealth Hawk would be in
their element.

Cade pushed to leave as soon as possible. He
made it no secret that he wanted to strike back swiftly and
brutally at the people who had sent Mike’s killer.

In the end, even though Ari was the one with
thousands of hours on the stick and hundreds of insertions and
exfils already under his belt—executed mostly in the dark—the
choice hadn’t been his to make. Major Nash had made the final
decision, which was no doubt influenced by the anxious Delta
operator whose two cents often times held more purchasing power
than most with the woman.

Cade looked away from the window and let his
gaze linger on the men going into Jackson Hole; he wondered to
himself how many of them would be coming home alive.

Chapter 25

Outbreak - Day 11

Jackson Hole, Wyoming

The drive from downtown Jackson Hole to the
Valley of the Crosses
was much too short. The wide open
field, lush and green, where Ian Bishop’s “
examples
” were
crucified alive and then left alone to die in the worst manner
imaginable came into view as the International Scout rounded the
corner.

Daymon got to the end of the line of crosses
and pulled Lu Lu onto the shoulder. There he cursed God and
pummeled the steering wheel until his palms ached and the inflamed
gashes on his torso resumed their steady throbbing.

Since his solemn drive into Jackson the
previous day, three additional crosses had been erected, and three
more of Jackson’s unbendable residents had joined the
examples
. Framed in the Scout’s flat windshield, two
thirty-something males and a woman who looked to be of Heidi’s age
hung limp, each crucified with three railroad spikes, one impaling
each wrist with the third skewering the tops of their feet.

The woman stood out in contrast to the men.
Like royalty in an Edwardian painting, her skin had a muted pink
hue suggesting she might not be dead. On the other hand, both men
had been dead for some time, their pallid bodies hanging
slack—unmoving. Daymon guessed the men had succumbed to shock,
exposure, or a combination thereof. The ravenous blackbirds and
crafty ravens wasted little time, beating the turkey vultures to
the warm meat. The corpses were left with gaping black voids where
their eyes should have been. Apparently the soft white morsels were
the most coveted, Daymon noted, bile rising in his throat.

Jackson Hole was the kind of town where
nearly everyone that worked and lived there year round knew one
another. During the summer, the apex of the fire season, Daymon
lived for weeks at a time in the firehouse, rarely crossing the
Teton Pass to go home. To his chagrin he found Jackson to be a very
difficult place to remain anonymous, let alone retain a modicum of
privacy, and given his exotic appearance—light mocha skin, green
eyes, and dreadlocks—

everyone knew Jackson’s BLM
firefighter-in-residence. It was also common knowledge that he and
Heidi were together.

Daymon stared at the lipless grinning
corpses. He was certain he had never seen either of the men before.
The woman was a different story. His stomach clenched as he
realized that although her face was swollen and bloody, she bore a
striking resemblance to Heidi. There was only one way to be
positive. His mind screamed
jump over the fence and save
her
. His muscles wouldn’t respond. He stood rooted, paralyzed
by fear, gut freezing, sphincter clinching fear. It was a sensation
unlike anything he had ever experienced.

Daymon placed his hands on his face and
arched his back, letting out a guttural cry. As he did so his
wounds reopened, adding an agonizing punctuation mark to his
anguish. When he finished his outpouring of emotion, he gripped the
gray weathered fencepost, using it to pull himself up. As he swiped
the dreads from his face he sensed a glimmer of movement in his
peripheral vision. He turned towards the woman he feared
might
be Heidi in time to see the fingers on her right hand
waggle. It seemed like the kind of wave two girlfriends might
exchange on a packed dance floor in a noisy nightclub where
gestures ruled and words conveyed nothing.

Was she trying to communicate?

Daymon remained static, swaying on his feet,
wracked by pain and stricken with remorse. Remorse from letting
down his Moms. Remorse from not fully reconciling past
transgressions with his dad before the monsters started to walk.
Remorse from not having enough sack to scale the barbed wire fence,
climb up the cross and then try to figure out how to pull
her
down. It wasn’t that he was still gun shy from tangling
with the scalpel-sharp twelve footer that surrounded Schriever. His
trepidation stemmed from not really wanting to know if it was Heidi
hanging in front of him or if it was her badly beaten body double.
Either way he was going to have to confront some hard truths. If it
was her—how the hell was he supposed to save her? Hippocratic oath
or not, there wasn’t a doctor in a hundred mile radius willing to
risk the wrath of the NA storm troopers in order to help a
defector. Assuming he got her help, how was he going to explain the
obvious piercings to her wrists and feet? On the other hand, if it
wasn’t Heidi, then he was right back to square one: his Moms and
Pops and now Heidi would all be in the same back-of-the-milk-carton
limbo. Not dead, and not alive, just perpetually missing.

But first he had to be sure that she had
moved and he wasn’t just seeing things. So statue like, he waited
and watched.

Before long the crows had each reclaimed a
man, and after feasting on the gray matter that had been hidden
behind the windows to the soul, they began earnestly ripping away
the other fleshy bits while cawing back and forth, apparently very
proud of their conquests.

“Get the fuck out of here!” Daymon bellowed
as he shouldered the crossbow and drew a bead on the nearest
scavenger.

The crows voiced their displeasure, and then
in an explosion of black feathers reluctantly took flight.

“Go find some road kill motherfuckers,” he
muttered under his breath.

As he turned his attention back to the woman,
she lifted her head and moved it incrementally first left and then
right. The gesture reminded Daymon of how survivors acted after
being involved in a fatal car wreck. Trudging around the scene,
heads wagging in disbelief—seemingly saying,
Why the fuck
me?
Then her eyelids began to flutter and she looked directly
at him.

Daymon braced himself with one hand on the
gnarled fence post as a wave of relief, which began deep in his
gut, raced with dizzying speed to his head.

Though the woman’s face bore an uncanny
resemblance to Heidi, when she opened her slate gray eyes he
realized he had been mistaken. Then, when she mouthed the words
kill me
, he released the deep breath he had been holding and
steeled himself for what was to come.
You pass up one mercy kill
and guilt decides to rear its ugly head.
Daymon mused grimly.
Then, the next thing you know, you’re Jack-fucking-Kevorkian
compelled to make things right.
He lamented the fact that he
hadn’t blown Hosford Preston away when he had had the chance. For
if he had, then maybe, just maybe, the big lawyer would stay out of
his nightmares. Furthermore, he hoped that by putting this young
woman out of
her
misery he would right his wrong while at
the same time possibly keep her from making nightly cameos
alongside the pasty lawyer.

He loaded the crossbow with a scalpel sharp
arrow. There was no reason to finish the woman with a shot to the
brain. She wasn’t a zombie. She hadn’t been bitten—or at least, not
anywhere that he could see. He leveled the crossbow, making sure to
avoid any eye contact with the poor woman, and then aimed at a spot
just below her sternum. From where he was standing, and taking into
account the elevation of the cross, he figured one perfectly placed
shot should pierce her heart and end her suffering.

The arrow left the bow with a
snik
and
found its mark. The woman slumped. Daymon prayed she would find
peace.

He gazed at the seemingly unending row of
crosses; no less than a hundred dotted the landscape. Far from the
perfect symmetry of the head stones in Colleville-sur-Mer Cemetery
in Normandy or the arrow straight rows of grave markers at
Arlington National in Washington D.C., these crude wooden devices
of torture were canted, each one leaning at a different angle, like
drunken monuments to misery and suffering.

The lanky firefighter left Lu Lu and marched
back towards town following the long ribbon of blacktop, eyeing
every cross along the way, all the while hoping and praying that he
wouldn’t find Heidi nailed to one of them.

By the time he returned to Lu Lu, two hours
later, he had been forced to finish off two more
examples,
a
teenaged boy and a twenty-something man; both had been beaten
severely about the head and neck and he would take their faces to
the grave with him. How they had survived the crucifixion process
and then endured who knows how many days hanging in the Valley of
the Crosses wearing only tattered shirts and shorts would never be
answered. That they had somehow survived for so long, while exposed
to the elements, only meant their suffering had been of epic
proportions.

He threw the bow on the passenger seat, slid
in and started the engine. Happy he hadn’t found Heidi, yet angry
at the monsters and the atrocities that they had committed, he spun
the tires and wrenched the wheel over. Gravel pinged underneath Lu
Lu as he conducted a hasty three point turn and then with a head
full of morose thoughts, guided his ride back into town.

Along the way he passed another vehicle, a
green SUV. It slowed but didn’t stop.

Daymon nodded at the driver and raised his
hand in acknowledgement.

***

Bishop slowed as the speeding SUV passed, and
considered turning around and seeing what the dreadlocked man was
up to. Then, upon seeing the E which marked it as an Essential’s
vehicle, he dismissed the idea and continued ahead.

A mile down the road he pulled over and
killed the engine. He went around back, opened the hatch and easily
removed the woman’s limp body and placed it on the roadside. After
closing the hatch he paused and considered the pale form at his
feet. He had to admit, except for the goose egg on her head and the
vivid purple bruising which encircled her neck, she was damn easy
on the eyes. Why Christian offed his conquests when he was finished
baffled the hell out of him. Under no circumstances would he kick
this one from his bed. Especially now—because the last time he
checked most of the females left were of the zombified variety.
Fuckin lunatic
, he thought,
what a waste
. But orders
were orders; still, Bishop didn’t feel like taking the time or
effort necessary to nail this woman to the cross. He picked her up
and heaved her small body into the knee high grass on the other
side of the barbed wire fence, then watched with grim satisfaction
as her body bounced and then rolled, finally stopping at the base
of the cross that was supposed to have been hers. He didn’t know if
she was dead, seemed so, but the truth was he didn’t give a shit.
If she wasn’t already dead, she soon would be. Bishop never
acknowledged his part in dealing with the
examples
as
anything but normal. They were no different in his mind than Iraqis
or Afghans, he was just following orders in a manner that suited
him—one that would ensure there would be a few less zombies
traipsing the earth.

Chapter 26

Outbreak - Day 11

Nineteen miles Southwest of Schriever AFB

Fountain Valley, Colorado

The gunner atop the lead Humvee called out
the walkers as he saw them. Mostly solo or clustered in small
groups of twos and threes, the pathetic creatures standing in the
road and those milling about the side streets posed no threat to
the convoy as it snaked along Squirrel Creek Road, heading for the
sleepy subdivisions and strip malls dominating the landscape
southwest of Schriever.