District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (30 page)

The group stumbled upon Sasha’s mountain bike thirteen miles
north of Woodruff. After crisscrossing all twelve square blocks of Randolph and
finding only walking corpses and houses, businesses, barns, and outbuildings
with their doors either scribed with an X or hanging wide open on busted
hinges, it was painfully obvious to them that whoever had picked Woodruff clean
of supplies was also responsible for doing the same here. That there were a
handful of virgin doors in the tiny town—probably booby trapped or hiding
another Z, its flesh stripped to the bone—strengthened that first impression
and made moving on with four empty truck beds and no trace of Oliver easier for
all to bear.

Finding the bike had been a stroke of pure luck brought upon
by three separate occurrences taking place seconds apart. First, the rain
ceased and the clouds parted, allowing the sun to wash a narrow stretch of 16
that had been undergoing a minor repaving project before the world went to
hell. Then, the convoy crested a rise in the road and came upon a pair of flesh
eaters taking up more than their share of said stretch of torn-up state route,
which forced Duncan to jerk the Dodge to the far right shoulder in order to
keep from hitting the doddering duo. Lastly, two wheels riding the shoulder and
kicking up gravel led to Duncan seeing a glint of sun off of chrome a hundred
feet distant, which in turn led to him stopping in the general vicinity of his
sighting and happening upon the girl’s 18-speed mountain bike at the bottom of
the roadside ditch.

With Glenda’s tearful admonition for him to return with her
boy echoing in his head, Duncan watched the other vehicles creep past the
zombies and glide to a stop, all three trucks lined up bumper to bumper in the
southbound lane.

Now, sitting in the idling Dodge with its door propped
partway open and his muddy boots dangling a foot above the road, Duncan glanced
over his shoulder at Tran. “Staying or coming?” he asked, hopping to the still
damp blacktop.

Tran glanced in the wing mirror. Just above the words
OBJECTS ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR he saw the zombies. Their heads lolled
lazily and their eerie hissing carried on the wind as they trundled toward the
stopped vehicles. “I’ll stay here and keep watch for you,” he said, eyes never
leaving the macabre sight reflected in the mirror.

“Good man, Tran,” Duncan replied, grabbing his shotgun and
Stetson. “Hit that horn if you see anything approaching from the north.”

Binoculars already in hand, Tran nodded, his brown eyes
liquid and focused intently on the zombies.

Everyone but Taryn was on the road by now and advancing
forward. “I’ll watch our six,” she called out, binoculars in hand and the upper
half of her body already protruding through the truck’s open moon roof.

Duncan nodded then shifted his gaze to the bike. At once he
noticed that its rear wheel was bowed in considerably.
Tacoed
, is what
he had heard his little brother, Logan, call it when he’d done the same to his
rim while biking in Moab years ago. The knobby tire was deflated and hung
limply off the rim. He bent over and lifted the twisted heap from the knee-high
grass. Half pushing, half dragging, he removed it from the ditch and held it
upright on the blacktop, where he saw the frame was cracked near the seat post
and most of the root-beer-brown paint had been abraded from the side that had
been facing down.

The bike had taken a beating. That was for sure.

Duncan laid the bike down on the soft shoulder and strode to
the Dodge’s front bumper, where he turned on a heel and began a slow, head-down
walk to the parked vehicles. Sensing all eyes on him, he lifted his gaze from
the road and regarded the others. “Maybe one of you could go search both
ditches further up the road. Someone else needs to climb the fence and search
the tall grass. Start on the side the bike ended up.”

“What are we looking for?” asked Wilson.

“A dead body,” answered Daymon, eyes already sweeping the
road ahead. “Oliver’s … dead … body. I’ll take care of the rotters.”

“No. Allow me,” Foley insisted, brushing past the taller
man. “About time I do a little more than set up solar panels and keep the
communications shack running.”

Seeing Foley win the argument, Duncan cast scrutiny on the
road to the south. Though he was no crash-scene detective, he saw the writing
on the wall. The mangled bike. The twin stripes of rubber on the down side of
the crest. Put together, these clues told him a speeding vehicle braked a
little before hitting the bike from the rear. And from the position of the bend
in the rim, he guessed the vehicle had been fitted with a grill guard or some
kind of bumper overriders. After the second it took him to process all of this,
he looked at Wilson and reluctantly answered his question.

“Daymon’s right. Oliver’s body is probably somewhere around
here.” He sighed, his body seemingly deflating as he did so. “Look for a blood
trail. Follow it and I guarantee you’re not going to find a pot of gold at the
end.”

Lev and Wilson scaled the barbed wire fence bordering 16 to
the east.

Head down and ignoring the death dance taking place between
Foley and the pair of first turns a dozen yards off her right shoulder, Jamie
walked the ditch north from where the bike had been resting, trampling the
grass under her boots and warily eyeing the ground to her fore for anything
moving—alive or dead.

“I found something,” Lev called. He was facing the group and
holding aloft Daymon’s crossbow, which was nearly folded in half with feathery
strands of fiberglass the only thing keeping one limb of the thing attached to
the bent barrel.

“No body?” Duncan asked.

Wilson shook his head. “No blood either.”

On the opposite side of the fence, Jamie lifted her boot off
the spongy, sucking ground and said, “I found his night vision goggles. They’re
toast.”

“Take ‘em for parts,” Duncan ordered. “Everyone mount up.
Oliver’s not here.”

Still holding out hope to find Oliver in one state or
another—for some closure, if nothing else—Daymon said, “What makes you so
sure?”

“I think someone saw him roll through Randolph.” Arm
horizontal to the ground, Duncan swept it all the way around from the south,
where the skid marks began just in front of the downslope, to the northbound
lane behind his truck where Foley was dragging the last of the rotters from the
road, the fresh blood trails glistening dark black against the nearly dry
surface. “And then that someone got in their vehicle and chose this spot to run
him down. The way 16 is hemmed in on both sides by fence for a mile or more
prior to the repaving project, here makes it the perfect place to do so.”

Having just returned and caught the tail end of the
conversation, Foley halted on the centerline and gazed down the road toward
Randolph. “This close to town he wouldn’t have had much time to act. Especially
in the dark. There would have been nowhere for him to escape to … even if he
dismounted.”

“Means whoever did it knows this road pretty good,” Lev
added, chucking the now useless crossbow to the ground where he’d found it. “Also
means they probably didn’t want to kill him.”

“You all can interpret this any way you want,” Daymon said.
“I’m afraid Oliver’s latest vision quest may be over before it really got
going.”

“That’s harsh,” Foley said, disgust in his voice.

“He made his bed. I’m just calling it how I see it,” Daymon
responded coldly.

Returning with the NVGs dangling from her hand by the strap,
Jamie said, “I think they meant to hurt him just bad enough that it would be
easy for them to take him alive. Which makes me think it was only one person.
Maybe even the same person who was watching us back in Woodruff.”

“Whatever shape Oliver’s in,” Duncan drawled, “he’s either
already a prisoner at Bear Lake, or whoever did this is taking him there now.”

“That’s enough,” Daymon said in a low voice. “I’m partly
responsible for this … so I’m the one who should go after him.”

“Let’s think this through a minute,” Duncan said.

“No thinking necessary,” Daymon shot, casting a sidelong
glance at the others. “I’m going with or without you all. Whoever’s going with
me better say so now.”

Hands went up all around. Even Taryn leaned from the
Raptor’s open window and cast her own vote to go.

Duncan looked over the rest of the group, meeting each
person’s gaze for a beat until he arrived back to Daymon. “I’m in,” he said,
resignation evident in his tone. “But we have to take it easy.”

“We have a saying in the Army,” Lev began. “Slow is smooth—”

“—and smooth is fast,” Duncan finished. “Mount up. Oliver’s
life may be hanging in the balance.”

After laying the Screamers out and swinging around wide of
the target building, Ari nosed Jedi One-One north over multiple parking lots
and auxiliary buildings to the wide expanse of fenced-in asphalt behind a
shipping and receiving warehouse. Intent on giving the Screamers twenty or
thirty minutes to draw the throng of Zs away from the building, he settled the
bird next to the black Chinooks, shut her down, and joined the Rangers and air
crew outside for a much-needed piss and stretch of the legs.

***

Twenty-three minutes after deploying the Screamers south and
north of the black obelisk of a building, Ari held the Ghost Hawk in a hover
twenty feet above a copse of cottonwoods bordering a traffic-snarled freeway
off-ramp half a mile northeast of the Delta team’s insertion point. While Ari
worked the controls to keep the bird steady, Haynes manipulated the
nose-mounted FLIR pod, bracketing the nine-story glass and metal building and
then piping the slightly wavering image onto the flat-panel display in the
passenger cabin.

“Looks like they’ve taken the bait,” Cade said.

“They always do,” answered Cross. “I’ve seen the living show
interest and come a looking, too.”

Cade took his eyes off the army-ant-like march of the dead
taking place on the monitor. “Chinese?”

“Yep. Griff and I had been following a two-man team since
they crossed over into Nevada from California. We hung back and tracked them by
the dust they were kicking up. Finally they just up and stopped and set up shop
right outside of Vegas. Stowed their motorcycles behind a roadside sign just
like the ones the cops hide behind in the movies and pitched a tent in its
shadow. So we dump our bikes and while I’m praying our dust trail dissipates
before theirs, I see this sign that says Vegas 3 Miles and below that is that
famous tag line.”

“What happens in Vegas—,” Cade began, nodding and smiling.

“—stays in Vegas,” Griff finished, flashing a half-smile of
his own.

“Technically they weren’t in Vegas yet,” Cade noted.

“Technically, you’re correct,” Cross said. “But something
did
happen, all the same.”

Griff was full on grinning now. He said, “With the sun going
down we decide that going into Vegas, what with all the dead still there, was
out of the question. We’re almost out of MREs and water and wanting to exfil
anyway when Cross sees one of them come out of the tent, edge around the sign,
and cop a squat right out in the open.”

“And then one of you decided to throw a mini-Screamer his
way,” Cade said, running the hilarious scenario over in his mind.

“That I did,” Cross said, the beginning of a smile revealing
his unnaturally white teeth.

“Cali boy has a hell of an arm,” Griff said, nodding.

“And then one of you wankers shot the squatter
just
as he was pulling his drawers up to keep a screaming woman from seeing his
manly bits,” Axe added, his curiosity now piqued.

“That was Griff’s job,” Cross said. “I shot the other PLA
puke in the face when he poked it between the tent flaps.”

Ari interrupted. “And you two still owe Ripley some beers. I
heard that cramming your motorcycles, the prisoner and their gear into her
Osprey along with the injured heading to Bastion from the MWTC siege got her
panties in a bunch.” Chuckling over the comms, Ari side-slipped the helo from
cover and nosed her down, beginning the first leg of a long circuitous route
that would eventually have them approaching the infil location from the
southeast.

“I’d have helped her get them out,” Skipper intoned, a rare
smile forming below his visor. “She’s pretty hot.”

Axe grinned at the comment.

Cross ignored it. In a serious tone, he said, “The takedown
was well worth the intel we got from the Chinese captain whose name I couldn’t
pronounce. Once they were translated, the documents he was carrying led to us
learning about their ambitious extermination plan.”

“And how today’s target plays into it,” Ari said. “Two
mikes, men. Looks like our undead friends have taken up the game of soccer.”

“Football,” Axe corrected, yet again. “Who’s winning?”

“Manchester United, looks like. Their players are always pasty
and covered in crimson, right?”

“Bugger off,” Axe spat.

“Anvil Actual, are we a go?” Ari asked.

Cade leaned toward the display. Using crowd size estimation
techniques Cross had taught him some time ago, he pegged the number of Zs
leaving the grounds and lots around the target for the vast acres of empty
parking lots where the Screamers had been deployed at a thousand or more.
Thankfully, the number of Zs remaining around the target were beginning to lean
in their favor. However, as he looked closer at the clutter near the base of
the building, nearly lost in the debris and a little fuzzy due to distance and
the fact that they were moving, he noticed dozens of corpses loitering in and
around the ground-level front entry. And the longer he stared into the gloom
cast by the nine-story affair, the more concerned he became. For among the
shattered glass and uprooted shrubbery and hundreds of already twice-dead Zs
heaped in the building’s shadow, dozens of crawlers—partially incapacitated
creatures—dragged themselves along the ground.

“Ari, we’re going to need to loiter a bit before going in,”
Cade said over the comms. “Give the ones in the lobby a chance to vacate the
premises.”

“Copy that,” Ari said. “In the meantime, someone pass
another of those five-hour pick-me-ups forward.”

“Ask and ye shall receive,” Skipper said, handing another
pair of the small bottles forward. “If it’ll keep you awake and happy and this
bird in the air, I’ll keep them coming your way.”

“Copy that, Skipper. Much obliged,” replied Haynes, reaching
a long arm back to receive the bottled elixir.