Allegiance (17 page)

Outbreak - Day 15

Winters’s Compound

Eden, Utah

Duncan staggered to the
left, putting himself at the top of an imaginary L, and Phillip moved right in
a tight arc so he was at the toe.

The dead followed
dumbly, finding themselves bunched up at the heel of the invisible L, near
where the painted yellow dashes bisected the road.

A steady
Pop! Pop!
Pop!
erupted from Phillip’s smaller caliber AR, followed closely by three
rapid-fire booms from the combat shotgun. Sandwiched between the ear-splitting
blasts was a metallic
schnick-schnick
as Duncan racked each new round
into the chamber.

One left,
Duncan thought to himself. The Mossberg belched
fire one final time, then clattered to the ground at about the same instant the
Colt Model 1911, firmly clutched in Duncan’s right hand, cleared leather and
swept up and forward. He noted the sensation as the webbing between thumb and
forefinger depressed the automatic safety. He tracked his outstretched arm at
the closest threat. The first turn suffered from a bad maggot infestation. The
dermis covering its bare upper body rippled and undulated as the colony of fly
larvae fed on the deceased host. Duncan’s pistol boomed twice as he fought
against the substantial recoil to keep the muzzle down and on target. The
report from the discharged .45 caliber rounds drowned out all else and set his
ears to ringing. The middle-aged female rotter’s head exploded behind the iron
sights—whether from his pistol or Phillip’s rifle, it didn’t concern him—he
just shifted his aim and worked to empty the Colt into the dead, a few which
were still staggering his way when its slide locked open.

Without taking his eyes
from the stragglers, he dumped the spent mag, rammed a fresh one home, and let
the slide
snik
forward to chamber a new round. In the time it took him
to perform these nearly autonomous functions, Phillip’s AR had gone silent, and
all of the creatures were down.

A thick cordite haze tinted
the atmosphere a curious shade of gray around the battle space. The color
reminded Duncan of the smog-filled skies over Beijing, Mumbai, or Mexico City
before those mega metropolises fell to the dead and the multitudes of cars and
factories ceased spewing pollution forever.

Once the gunfire ceased,
Chance pulled the waterproof Birder’s notepad from his hip pocket. He had
stumbled upon it recently inside one of the rural homes that he and his brother
had been tearing apart in their quest for ammunition, food, booze, and most
importantly prescription medications. It was the solution to his most pressing
problem, and hopefully he would never have to revisit the thorough ass kicking
he had received from his dad upon turning over a soggy paper notepad complete
with running ink and unreadable words. He wiped the damp sheen from the first
plastic page, pulled the black grease pencil from the spiral loop, checked it
for a sharpened point, then proceeded to add his findings of the day to the
notes already jotted there. Right below the time when the lone vehicle left, he
wrote in big blocky numbers what time the men returned, described the Humvee
and the one-sided undead ass kicking he had just witnessed, and detailing, with
a series of arrows and numbers, the tactics the men had employed. And even
though he used to be a self-professed Military Channel junkie—before
all
of the stations went black—he didn’t know a pincer maneuver from a frontal
assault. Therefore, the poorly drawn diagram relayed less information than a
preschooler’s scribbling.

***

“Let’s get these things
off the road,” Phillip offered. He slung the AR-15 over his shoulder and
proceeded to make sure all fourteen of the rotters were down for good. He used
his Beretta only once, taking out a crawler, its spinal cord already severed by
one of their bullets. He bent down and hauled the dead thing off to the side,
being mindful of the leaking brains and their proximity to his boots.

Duncan hinged over and
retrieved his shotgun and the lone empty magazine for his .45. “Be careful,” he
said. “These things have been known to play a little game of possum on
occasion. You and I know they’re not the sharpest tools in the shed... and even
though they don’t make for good dinner conversation...” he winced at his choice
of words, then went on, “I’m afraid somewhere behind their dead eyes lurks a
certain bit of cunning... maybe even cooperation at times.”

Thanks for the
lecture, Dad
, Phillip thought to
himself, while at the same time wondering how difficult it had been for ‘Oops’
to grow up having a ball-busting big brother who was also old enough to be his
dad.

He grunted from exertion
and pushed the corpse’s bare spindly legs over its head, causing it to perform
an upside down and backwards somersault, the impact at the bottom of the ditch
leaving its limp arms folded across its chest. Jaw hinged open, skull, hair,
and most of the frontal lobe lost to a .45 slug, it looked as if it was about
to offer him a lecture of its own. “I don’t see it your way, Duncan,” he said,
tearing his gaze from the glaring eyes. “These things aren’t people anymore.”

“A small part of them
still
is,” Duncan countered. He made a face at the smell and put his back into his
work, dragging the one that had suffered decapitation by shotgun, not by the
hands, but by the heels so he wouldn’t have to look at his own handiwork.
Still, the headless corpse spilled a brackish blood trail over the road from
where it first fell to the ditch where it would finish decomposing.

Blood trails were
nothing new to Duncan. During the war in Vietnam, the Viet Cong always came
back for their dead. Sometimes the blood trail was as good as a body to the
lieutenant, which in turn was as good as ten bodies to his higher ups—who
coveted a high body count. Then that number was taken by the politicians, who
in turn picked another arbitrary number to get the figure they thought the
President wanted the public to hear. Just thinking about politicians made him
angry. They were one of the few denizens of the old world that he would never
miss. There were a few others on the list but none caused his blood to boil
quicker. No more two- and four-year election cycles. No more damning ads. Hell,
if he hadn’t seen so many good people die since Z day, the tradeoff would
almost be worthwhile.
At least the dead were predictable
, he mused.
They
tried to eat you, not screw you when you weren’t looking
. The visual
brought a rare morbid smile to his face. Yep... in Nam, winning had been
nothing but a numbers game—a fake war of attrition that had been destined to
fail. There were simply too many Chinese, Viet Cong, and North Vietnamese
throwing themselves into the fray to be stopped. Defeating the dead was going
to be a much harder slog, Duncan concluded. An ongoing war of attrition from
which mankind could never walk away from—and probably wouldn’t survive.

***

The two men worked in
silence, both eager to clear the road and return to the compound before more
walking dead arrived.

Once the road was
corpse-free, Duncan took a load off. He was still favoring his lower back, and
heaving the dead weight hadn’t helped matters any. What he really needed was to
lie down for a spell and take something to kill the pain and inflammation. His
only hope was that baby bro had something stronger than a Tylenol.

Casting a glance towards
Duncan, and noticing that the old man was in a considerable amount of pain,
Phillip took it upon himself and policed up the shotgun shells and all of the
brass he could find. “Why didn’t we just pass these things by and get on
through the gate?” Phillip asked. He paused for a second, expecting an answer.

“It’s not that simple.”

“But there were so few
of them... and as slow as they are... we would have had plenty of time to lock
up and put the camouflage back in place.”

“If we stop yakkin’ and
get off the road before more of them come around to see what all of the
commotion was about, then we’ll be OK. But if just one of them staggers around
that bend,” he stabbed a thumb westward, “and sees us go inside, it’ll hang
out, and sooner or later we’ll have a posse of undead waiting for us
next
time anyone exits here. This goes back to what I was saying about there being
something human left upstairs.” He tapped a finger to his head. “Some of ‘em
have long memories. I’ve been in places with better fencing than this. I
barely
made it out of that scrape alive... and that necessitated a Black Hawk. So
Phillip, my boy, in a nutshell that’s why I stopped short of the entrance. We
cleaned ‘em out... but we’re not home free. Let’s get off the road. Cause if we
let another bunch of rotters start hanging around here again we might as well
just put up a sign showing the bad guys exactly where the hidden entrance is.”

“Good call, Sir.”

Duncan grimaced but
didn’t let Phillip’s verbal slip alter his mood. Because no matter how annoying
the younger man could be, today, he’d come through when it mattered.
Hell
yes
, Duncan thought. He’d go to war with
Slim
any day.

***

With his bladder
compressed against the cool ground, Chance figured he could hold the piss
another five minutes, tops. Just enough time to let the two gunslingers slink
away, thinking their secret entrance hadn’t been compromised.
Jokes on you,
bastards. When we come rolling in there
, he thought,
you bunch of
dummies aren’t going to know what hit you
. Just the thought of a little
violence started a dull ache below, and adding the possibility of a female or
two as spoils of war really put some lead in his pencil. He grabbed his AK with
one hand and, grunting, pushed his considerable weight off the ground.

His plan had been to
take a piss in the woods and see if he might rub a quick one out. He never made
it to the woods. In fact, he was on all fours when he got the piss part of his
plan out of the way. The second he sensed the cool metal pinch his neck, warm
urine spread from his crotch, seeped down both pants legs and turned the denim
a darker shade of blue. His head slowly ratcheted up, dreads partially covering
thin slits for eyes. “Hell are you?” he demanded.

The rifle jabbing him in
the neck protruded from a bush. The bush remained silent, unmoving, deadly. His
eyes tracked along the barrel.
A large scope on top
.
Fingers inside
some sort of gloves.
He had been holding his breath. He exhaled sharply and
realized his erection was gone. Being on the wrong end of a gun could do that
to a guy. First time for everything, he figured.

“Who are you and what
the hell do you want?”

“
Shut up!
” said a
disembodied female voice from somewhere nearby just inside the tree line.

Then a burst of static,
followed by a soothing female voice, emanated from behind the rifle currently
crushing his jugular. “Old Man... come in. This is Jamie.”

Chance recoiled as a
second human-shaped bush emerged from the woods and waved one foliage-covered
arm at the men he had just been spying on.
Ghillie suits
, popped into
his mind.
Those aren’t bushes
, he thought to himself.
Just a couple
of bitches dressed like snipers
.

He
tried to rise. “You have no right—”

A boot caught him in the
ribs, blasting the wind from his lungs. “Lay back down,” the rifle-wielding
woman hissed.

Chance complied, then
cried out when a bony knee with a hundred pounds driving it speared the soft
spot between his ribs and spine. He wheezed and fought to clear his head, but
before he could regain his wind and fight back he felt his already fatigued
arms being wrenched behind his back, and then heard the unmistakable sound as
the zip tie cinched his wrists together. Soft hands brushed his face. A strand
of rough burlap covered his eyes, blocking out everything, and then those same
supple hands cinched the blindfold tighter than he had anticipated. He grunted,
waiting for the gag he knew was the next logical addition to the fucked-up mess
he had gotten himself into. It arrived a second later, and then to add insult
to injury the cool muzzle returned to his neck.

The walkie-talkie or
whatever it was spewed soft static, then a gravelly voice spoke out between
short blips of white noise. “This is Duncan. What’s going on up there?”

“Looks like we have
ourselves a secret admirer. Twelve’ o clock, past the fence up here on the
rise,” one of the female voices replied.

Once again the radio hissed
to life. “How long have you two been hiding up there?” Duncan inquired,
sweetening his drawl on account of the ladies.

Jamie removed her knee
from the jiggling rolls of fat, patted the man’s sticky back, and nodded at
bush number two. “We’ve been watching
him
for about ninety minutes. Took
us half that time to sneak up on him,” she replied over the two-way radio. “Not
to worry though. We had your back all the way, Sir.”

Duncan winced, shook his
head side to side, and with a devilish grin spoke into the radio. “We were up
to our asses in alligators down here. Least you coulda done was added a couple
of more rotter kills to your name.”