Allegiance (29 page)
Authors: Shawn Chesser
Outbreak - Day 16
Near Driggs, Idaho
The first thing Daymon
noticed when he snapped awake was the smile of an angel. He dug his fingertips
into his eyes and cleared out the sleep, leaned over and gave her a peck on the
cheek.
The second thing he
noticed was that the deep furrows on his chest had stopped throbbing to a
calypso beat. He pulled his shirt up, peeled away the bandage, and probed the
wounds with his finger. The redness had subsided a little, and the green
discharge seemed to have slowed but wasn’t altogether gone. He wasn’t home
free, that he knew, but the topical equine medication Charlie had risked his
life to get for him seemed to be working. And as a cherry on top of the sundae,
the melodramatic side in him marveled that he didn’t have the urge to whinny or
a sudden hankering for a handful of oats.
“How are you feeling?”
Heidi asked.
“Be better if we could
get on the road.”
“I mean your wounds.”
“Night and day,” he
said, covering up the white bandages with his tee shirt. “How are you this
morning?”
“Much better,” she said.
“Judging by the sound of
your voice I’d have to disagree.”
“Save your voice. It’s
still early... so why don’t you get a little more rest and I’ll go downstairs
and try and talk Charlie into leaving this dump
today
.”
Heidi smiled briefly and
then her hand went to her neck. He had seen her do this a hundred times over
the course of three days, and he wasn’t so sure that she was even aware that
she was doing it.
“How’s the neck?” he
asked. “Thumbs up, sideways, or down?”
She put a thumb
horizontal then rotated it a few degrees north. “Not as sore as it was
yesterday.”
Daymon gently put a
finger to her lips and shushed her. He gazed into her blue eyes and willed
himself not to look at the contrasting bruises encircling her throat.
“How does it
look
today?” she inquired while her hand continued the absentminded massage.
“Not
so
bad,”
Daymon lied.
Considering you were nearly dead a few nights ago
.
This time she remained
silent, saving her voice for later.
He kissed her forehead
and said, “Anything I can bring you when I come back upstairs... bottle of
water? Anything?”
She stopped worrying her
neck and put her head back down on the pillow. “No, but thanks hon. I’m good.”
She smiled and closed her eyes.
***
Downstairs, Daymon
cracked a water. He did a quick count of the remaining bottles.
Eight.
Yet
one more reason to blow this joint
, he thought to himself as he took a long
pull. Then, out of the corner of his eye he picked up movement down by the
road. He pressed his face to the window above the sink and looked down towards
the gate. Not liking what he saw, he walked his gaze down the feeder road to
the main highway. The situation at the intersection was no better.
“Charlie!” Daymon
bellowed. “Come here and see what followed you home yesterday.”
Launching out of a deep
sleep, Jenkins choked mid-snore and inadvertently kicked the La-Z-Boy’s foot
rest down. The violent action continued through the chair’s mechanism,
straightening the back up and nearly pitching him on his face.
“What the hell is it?”
he said, wiping a slug track of drool with the back of his hand.
“Come here and see for
yourself,” Daymon pressed.
Jenkins muttered as he
pulled his boots on. He lifted his pistol off of the coffee table, stuffed it
in its holster and hustled over to the kitchen.
“Hell did you have to
wake me for?” He looked at his watch. It read: 6:10 a.m.
“Because you are gonna
want to see this.”
Bellying up to the sink,
Jenkins accepted the offered water, cracked the seal and then his eyes followed
the length of Daymon’s outstretched arm, past his fingertip.
“
That
is what the cat drug home—”
The water bottle slid
from Jenkins’s grasp, hit the floor and rolled under the kitchen table where
its contents glugged out onto the floor. He stared at the amassed dead. He
didn’t need a pair of field glasses to see the situation was about to get
worse. “Fuck me running.”
“They’ll fuck us
shuffling and moaning if we give them a chance,” replied Daymon in a low voice.
“How many do you think
are down there?”
After a quick headcount
and another moment of contemplation, Daymon ventured an educated guess.
“Thirty... maybe forty,” he said in a near whisper.
“Shit,” Jenkins
whispered back. “What do you propose we do?”
“I know one thing we’re
not going to do. We’re not going to tell
Heidi
about them,” Daymon
hissed. “There is
no
sense in
freaking
her out any more than she
already is. I still can’t tell if she’s going to get over the shit that that
Robert Christian fucker put her through. She won’t open up to me... and
carrying that kind of baggage around will fuck a person up in the long run.”
Shaking his head,
Jenkins continued staring at the throng. “I’m no shrink. That stuff’s between
you and her,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s those things down there that have
got my panties in a wad. And to think there was only one of them down there
yesterday and it was only a flippin’ crawler.”
“You mean it had arms
and a head and that’s about it?”
“Yeah, creepy as hell.
Thing tried to eat my boots while I was locking up.”
“Thought you cut the
lock when we got here.”
“I did. I just
jerry-rigged the chain when I left. But when I came back I coiled it and
secured it with a carabiner... should keep ‘em out for the time being.”
“What’d you do to the
halfling?”
“Let it be.”
“You didn’t kill it?”
said Daymon incredulously.
“No... I didn’t have the
heart.”
“Better find your heart
now, Charlie,” said Daymon as he rifled through the drawers. His eyes widened
as he slid out a twelve-inch knife. It was slender and came to a very sharp
point, and had characters etched onto the blade that indicated it was probably
of Japanese origin. With a smile on his face he handed it over to the former
police chief.
“And what am I to do
with this?” asked Jenkins.
“Use your imagination,”
replied Daymon. “Come on. We’ve got our work
cut
out for us.”
The pun wasn’t lost on
Jenkins, who looked at the knife then stole one long look out the window. “Then
what?” he asked.
“We get the hell out of
Dodge before we get ourselves trapped. By the way, have you seen my machete?”
“It’s in the Tahoe,”
rasped Heidi, who was standing, hand on hip, in the hallway that ran between
the kitchen and living room. “I remember seeing it on the floor in the backseat
area.”
Caught off guard, both
men froze like statues. Then they mechanically turned to face her.
Daymon cleared his
dreads from his eyes and pinned them behind his ears. “
Stay
,” he said to
himself as if words alone could control the Rasta-inspired do. He swallowed
hard, not sure what to say, then he cut to the chase. “How much of our
conversation did you hear?” he asked sheepishly.
“Enough to know that I
don’t want to stay here, and more than enough to
piss
me off because you
two were talking behind my back,” she answered in a raspy-sounding voice that
was barely above a whisper.
“What’d you say, Heidi?”
Jenkins asked, wide-eyed as he skirted the kitchen table heading in her
direction.
Heidi repeated herself
slowly, enunciating every syllable while Daymon stared stone-faced.
Jenkins took a moment to
process what she had just said, and then grimaced because he knew she was
right.
“Well, first of all
Heidi, I owe you an apology for not only talking behind your back, but also for
not taking your opinions into consideration,” Jenkins proffered. “What—if
anything—can I do to make it up to you?”
“Drive us the eff out of
here,” she whispered. “
Now
.”
“Well it looks like it’s
two against one,” he muttered. Then he flicked his wrist and sent the keys to
the Tahoe sailing across the kitchen. Daymon snatched them mid-flight.
Reflexes of a cat
, Jenkins thought. “I’m going to check a couple
of the outbuildings, see if I might find a couple of gas cans and maybe cut us
a piece of hose. Why dontcha get your blade from the truck and I’ll meet you
out front.”
***
Five minutes later,
Jenkins returned to the Tahoe carrying two small plastic gas cans and a
good-sized length of hose.
Heidi was already in the
back seat, fully dressed and ready to go.
Jenkins hauled himself
into the driver seat, and looked over at Daymon who was cradling the machete in
his lap.
“Ready?” asked Daymon.
“I was born ready,”
Jenkins lied. Truth of the matter was, including the one he had stomped the day
prior, he had only killed a few of the creatures, and that had been at range
with a pistol or rifle—not one up close and personal with a blade. Shooting a
human to protect another life or himself—no problem. The NA guards at the Teton
Pass deserved to get headshot. But the dead were just poor souls in the wrong
place at the wrong time—not bad guys or criminals. He threw a shudder thinking
about what he was being asked to do. He started the Chevy, backed around, and
began the solemn trip to the gate.
Outbreak - Day 16
Schriever AFB
Colorado Springs,
Colorado
The first out of place
sound registered in Brook’s subconscious. A second later she hinged up from the
bed, planted her bare feet on the tiles and had her rifle in hand held at a low
ready.
But before her eyes
could adjust to the dark, a second sound—a joy-filled squeal—brought her to her
feet, and she placed the M4 back where it had been, propped against the wall,
muzzle aimed towards the rafters.
“Raven, sweetie. What’s
the
heck
is going on?” she called out.
“Quick Mom. Come here.”
Brook stretched as she
padded towards the front of the Grayson’s billet where the sounds of happiness
had originated. “Marco,” she said as she navigated the forest of bunks.
“Polo,” came Raven’s reply.
A smile blossomed on
Brook’s face when she saw what had gotten her twelve-year-old so excited. Near
the front door, shining in the warm morning light pouring in through the parted
curtains, was a girl’s mountain bike. Purple and white and chrome. Just the
thing Raven had been hinting about back in Portland before the madness known as
Omega had been released upon the unsuspecting citizens of the world.
“Just the right size,”
she said.
“Where did Dad get it?”
“You know your dad’s
can-do attitude. Even when there seems to be no way... he wills it to happen.
That thing is
nice
,” Brook said stretching the word ‘
nice
’ out
for a beat or two. “How many speeds ya think it has?”
“No idea Mom. Can I take
it out?” Raven said excitedly.
“Yes you may.”
With that, pig tails
bouncing, Raven was out the door. She mounted her birthday bike and slalomed
between the paths connecting the living quarters, the big tires leaving furrows
in the knee-high brown grass.
Brook laced on her boots
and was about to go outside and watch Raven be a kid when she noticed the white
silk rose sitting atop the stark white envelope on the table near the door.
Instantly her stomach
lurched. She knew exactly what it was and what it meant. And the thing that
scared her the most about its presence was that Cade hadn’t left a death note
since his final deployment to the
Stan—
slang for Afghanistan—more than
two years ago.
He hadn’t felt good
about his prospects of returning in one piece from that tour, and for good
reason. His unit had lost a handful of men in one chopper crash high in the
mountains, and he had seen things and had some particularly bad scrapes of his
own that he hadn’t been able to open up about even to her. His body still
harbored some shrapnel the doctors hadn’t been able to retrieve. The ugly pink
scars associated with the nasty sizzling chunks of lead were a visual testament
to the rigors of war.
The fact that he had a
bad enough feeling about this mission to leave the envelope scared the hell out
of her, and if anything happened to him she didn’t know if she would ever
forgive herself. So she said a prayer to God. Not a foxhole type of prayer, but
still it was one of desperation. The ill-advised type. The type where you
ask
for something rather than let His will be done. And as silly as it sounded to
her as it bounced around in her head, she still had no regrets for asking. She
only hoped that God had been listening and He used His direct line to Mister
Murphy.
