Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (5 page)

For Glenda, making the initial incision went much better
than performing the coup de grace. In fact, Louie’s eye had proven harder to
puncture than the skin above his navel and, hard as it was for Glenda to fathom,
due to gravity and three weeks in a supine position there was very little
blood. Just like she’d done hundreds of times when wrapping presents for her
kids and grandkids, she opened the scissors a few degrees and inserted the lower
blade just under the pallid dermis and let the upper blade remain outside the
body. With a little forward pressure the sharp edge rode just underneath the
skin and, like cutting a sheet of wrapping paper, she opened Louie up from
navel to sternum. The sucking sound she was expecting didn’t happen. There was
little of what decades of watching horror flicks had conditioned her to expect.
A writhing mass of milky guts didn’t burst forth, showering her with bile. The
full scope of what she was trying to do didn’t hit her fully until she snipped
through the atrophied muscles and sinew and got her first glimpse of her
beloved’s inert internal organs.

Grimacing from the stench that even three weeks cooped up
with the living corpse had failed to prepare her for, she reached a gloved hand
inside the puckered opening, rooted in the cavity, and came out with a slimy
rope of intestine. Not stopping there, she punctured the thin membrane and
slathered a handful of its rotten contents over the entire front of her
bathrobe. On the verge of retching, she cut free a three-foot length with the
scissors and whipped it over each shoulder a couple of times, adding a matching
coating of blackish sludge to the back of her robe. And as she did so she
imagined that to a casual observer, her actions could have easily been mistaken
for self-flagellation.

“I’m sorry, Louie,” she said during a silent lull between wet
slaps. “It’s the only way.” She looked away from his unmoving corpse and
settled her gaze on the cherry wood bureau. There on its flat top, stuck fast
in colorful pools of hardened candle wax, was her entire perfume bottle collection.
Mixed in among the candle nubs and onion-dome-like bottles were at least a
dozen photographs of the couple, both alive, enjoying happier times.

On the wall next to the bureau was an old full length
dressing mirror in a dark wood frame. The thin film of polished metal was cracking
and fading around the edges, but Glenda still got a good look at her own self
staring back—and it hardly resembled the Glenda of forty days ago. After the
initial sudden start, she dropped the intestine to the floor and walked slowly towards
the mirror, eyes locked with those staring back. She cast her eyes down and
spun a slow circle, taking in the awful sight of the detritus splashed
bathrobe.
Perfect.

Five minutes after entering the trees Cade located the
source of the stench. Using pre-arranged hand signals he motioned Wilson and
Taryn over. Then, with knife-edged branches dragging against his exposed skin,
he led them through the undergrowth and just as they stepped into a clearing
where two beaten game trails converged, there came a distinct and instantly
recognizable noise, like brittle leaves skittering across concrete.

“Zs,” mouthed Cade, nodding in the direction of the sound.
Having them follow he stepped quietly from the bushes and padded down the foot-wide
strip of beaten earth. When he stopped and Wilson and Taryn formed up, the latter
mouthed, “How many?”

Quietly, Cade said, “Seven.”.

Taryn pressed close and in a stage whisper asked, “So how’d
they get over the fence?”

“On the backs of the others, I’d be willing to bet,” answered
Cade before dragging a finger across his neck, universal semaphore implying he
was done with the Q and A session. In the next instant a low rumbling guttural
sound came from the direction of the rasps, rising above them for a second
before dissipating and then starting anew. Cade stopped abruptly and pressed
tight against a towering fir, using the substantial girth of its trunk for
cover.

Doing the same behind a pair of smaller trunked deciduous
trees, nearly skeletal, their ochre and yellow insect-ravaged leaves thick
underfoot, Taryn and Wilson simultaneously brought their Beretta pistols to
bear on the interlopers.

The source of the out-of-place noise, just short of the
interwoven barbed wire barrier, teeth bared and hackles up, Max stood his ground,
warily eyeing the wavering corpses.

Crouched down and reaching between the tightly strung barbed
wire, an obvious first turn, its skin pale and taut over an emaciated frame,
pawed at the growling animal.

“Good boy, Max,” said Cade, imparting an unnatural, almost
cheery tone to his voice that conflicted with the strange sight.

Looking on, Taryn couldn’t help but smile. It was as if Max
had led them all to a pond full of mallards, not a clutch of festering zombies,
half of them impaled on the randomly placed sharpened stakes that, at Daymon’s
insistence, had been added to the newly erected fence.

In unison the creature’s vacuous eyes swung up from Max who
must have just beaten Cade and the Kids there. Then the seven pair of jaundiced
orbs fixated unblinkingly on Cade as he stepped from cover. Throwing a shudder,
the usually unflappable former Delta operator noted the laser-like intensity in
them and how, seemingly in the reptile part of their brain, he was already in
their clutches, the marrow being sucked slowly from his bones. He set the M4 aside
and drew his black Gerber from its sheath. In his side vision he saw Taryn and
Wilson holstering their pistols.

In the next moment Wilson produced a six-inch Kershaw lock
blade and fanned out left, while Taryn, who’d acted a little bit quicker,
approached the jostling Zs dead on, Cold Steel blade held on a flat plane,
outstretched at eye level with what, at this stage in the zombie apocalypse,
she considered a rare find. Because, like her, thought Taryn, to have lasted
this long, the newly turned female must have been a gritty survivor in her past
life. Late teens or early twenties, she guessed, before taking into account the
nearly dozen piercings ringing both ears plus the thousands of dollars and
hundreds of hours of elaborate ink work which—though Taryn was loathe to admit—easily
trumped hers in quality and surface coverage. A tick later, after processing
all of the clues in front of her, Taryn concluded that the floral sleeve
tattoos, fully colored and vibrant on the alabaster skin, was way too much
chair time for someone just north of eighteen to have endured.

Crawling green stems adorned with like-colored thorns and lipstick
red pedals rippled atop the dead woman’s pallid arms, which were thrust through
the fence in a feeble attempt to get ahold of Taryn’s tight fitting camo top.
Just out of range of the Z’s kneading fingers, Taryn watched its eyes follow
the squared-off tip of her black tanto-shaped blade, then, rather comically,
cross just before she rammed it home. As the thing’s arms went limp Taryn
pushed off of her back foot with enough force to send the tatted Z toppling
backwards. And as it hinged over there was a ripping sound and Taryn saw, stuck
fast to the rusty barbs, the white roundel and black fabric scraps of a vintage
Ramones tee shirt.

The rasps suddenly increased and Wilson returned his
attention from Taryn’s first kill to the pair in front of him. Cadaver number
one was draped over the fence—pushed there by the other or acting on its own
accord, Wilson didn’t care to know. He wanted the things dead and gone and the
only way that was going to happen was up close and personal. Shirt hiked up and
covering his nose, he made it to the fence at about the same instant rotter
number two was ramping up the first one’s back.

Like a fish breaking the surface the rotter powered over the
other, twisted its upper torso and hinged sideways onto the uppermost barbed
wire strand, the added weight stretching it downward. After a clumsy pirouette
that seemed to play out in slow motion the male cadaver pitched forward and
struck the ground face first with a hollow thud. Needles bounced and leaves
were disturbed by the impact, but Wilson ignored the writhing wreck and, like
some kind of fencing move he’d seen on the Summer Olympics, lunged forward, burying
the shiny blade to the handle in the first rotter’s bald pate. He heard the
grate of honed steel against bone then a wet squelch as the corpse went slack
against the wire.

Similar sounds were coming from Wilson’s right flank but he had
no time to check Taryn’s progress, and knowing that Captain America was on her
right and had probably already filleted his fair share of zombies without
breaking a sweat, there was no need.

So he yanked his Kershaw free and, sidestepping the
resulting blood spurt and patter of wet gray matter, hauled back and sent one
of his steel-toed boots hurtling forward in a shallow arc on a collision course
with the prone Z’s exposed temple. A split second before impact a thought
crossed his mind. Either he was about to land a bone crunching death blow or he
would miss entirely and look like Charlie Brown duped yet again by his nemesis.

Thankfully, but with unintended consequence, the former came
to fruition. Upon impact a live wire shiver coursed up Wilson’s tibia and
fibula, shot through his femur—the biggest bone in the human body—and like they
were components of a desk top kinetic sculpture, set his testicles crashing
violently against each other. The resulting nausea doubled him over and, as he watched
the semi-aware rotter go limp and crash to the forest floor, horizontal, its
skull a miasma of tattered flesh and crushed bone, he caught sight of his lover
making quick economical thrusts with her black blade.

***

Max’s barking caught Brook’s attention and by the time she
had crossed the clearing he was waiting for her, stubby tail twitching, a
knowing tilt to his head. After yawning widely the multicolored Shepherd spun
a one-eighty and padded into the forest, undoubtedly taking her to Cade.

***

A short while later, after performing some bushwhacking of
her own, she heard the distinct sound of a first turn carrying over the top of
muffled voices. She snugged her carbine to her shoulder, slowed her pace, and
made every effort to slip through the brush ninja-quiet. She’d only traveled a
few more paces towards the commotion when the voices became recognizable. And a
few short steps after that the beaten game trail spilled into the tiny clearing
near the inner perimeter fence, where she saw Cade, Taryn, and Wilson milling
about a scene of utter carnage.

She greeted the trio and surveyed the aftermath. To her left
was a middle-aged male rotter that had inexplicably gotten over the fence and
now lay face down, its skull wildly misshapen and leaking black blood and
viscous spinal fluid. Hanging on the fence nearby was another male first turn,
scrambled brains oozed from a small slit in the center of its bald head. Blood
had pooled shiny and black on the leaves near its feet and, adding to the
spreading puddle, slender, saliva-like strands dripped from its open maw. On
the opposite side of the loosely strung wire fence were five more corpses.
Three lay on the ground, arms and legs askew, each with a gaping hole where an
eye had been. Pathetically, the other two Zs which were the source of the dry
rasps were stuck fast on sharpened stakes jutting from the ground. They hissed
and reached for Max as they marched in place, their bare feet digging shallow furrows
into the dirt.

Looking at Cade who was sitting a dozen feet away, back
propped against a tree, Brook said, “You going to finish the job?”

“Let’s wait a minute and see if they have any undead friends
roving around between the wire. Then we’ll cross over and take care of these
two and see how they got here.”

Rocking her head side-to-side as if to say
Six of one,
half a dozen of another
, Brook made her way past Taryn and Wilson who, so
engrossed in each other, had barely noticed her arrival. She sat down hard on
the ground next to Cade and nodded at the pair of wire-scaling Zs. “Those two
your doing?” she asked.

“No. They’re Wilson’s kills,” said Cade. He finished
cleaning his blade and slid it in its sheath. Then, squinting against a bar of
light infiltrating the forest canopy, he looked up at Brook and added softly,
“I put down the naked woman there.” He paused for a second, felt Brook’s eyes
boring into him, and also claimed as his the undead little girl crumpled in the
dirt near the naked corpse. He threw a shiver at the sight of her. The one-eyed
stare, alabaster skin and dainty hands and feet made her look more like one of
Raven’s old American Girl dolls than a twice-dead toddler.

Looking at Wilson but nodding towards the other corpses,
Brook said, “See how Cade did his? Nice and clean. That’s what you’ve got to
work on next. Because now we’re going to have to bury the gore and churn the
blood into the dirt since it’s inside the wire.”

Coming to the redhead’s defense, Cade said, “He did fine,
Brook. And so did Taryn. She dropped hers before I finished with the mom
there.”

Brook said nothing.

Taking that as his cue, Cade said, “I think that’s all of
them. Come on, Wilson ... let’s get these ones disposed of.” Pushing off the
tree, Cade rose to standing and checked his pants and boots. Then he examined
his arms and chest for blood or minuscule scraps of detritus that might have gone
airborne and landed on him. After running his fingers through his hair he asked
Brook to inspect his back.

Taking swipes at the wood chips and moss accumulated between
his shoulder blades, Brook went to her tip toes and whispered in his ear, “Just
a little bark. That’s all. You’re good as new ...
Infidel
.” Then, oblivious
to the group of young people now gawking at them, Brook grabbed one of Cade’s
muscled shoulders, spun him around to face her and went up on her tiptoes. The
kiss, taking him by surprise, was one for the books.
Greta Garbo, eat your
heart out
, she thought, her tongue probing his mouth, both hands cupping
his face. But, sadly, it was over before it got real good. She pulled away and
delivered the look that he knew all too well. Those smoldering brown eyes had
just issued him a rain check to be redeemed later for a private rendezvous. And
since the new world hadn’t changed Brook’s libido one bit, Cade was confident that
he’d be cashing in his chit before the day was done. Finally, with more than a
little color spreading to his cheeks, he looked over at Taryn and Wilson and
said, “Move along here. Nothing to see.”

***

Back at the compound, inside the security container, Heidi
was losing her battle against a rising tide of guilt. Though she’d grown fairly
thick skin as a result of her longtime bartending job, after the outbreak the
things she’d endured at Robert Christian’s mansion in Jackson Hole had broken
her down completely and changed her perception of people in general. Now, reluctant
to open up to anyone but Daymon and bound by an unrealistic fear of the
outside, she eschewed any prolonged human interaction and had come to embrace
fully the subterranean safety of the compound. And as a result, due to the lack
of daylight and whatever vitamin it normally provided, she was moody and quick
to anger. And that anger, recently unleashed by the perceived snub brought on
by Cade’s no-nonsense attitude over the radio, had hijacked all rational
thought for a short while and was now just beginning to ebb. Unable or
unwilling to admit she had been wrong in ignoring the incoming call, she
thought up a creative way of absolving herself of the transgression. A little
white lie wouldn’t hurt anybody, she reasoned as she thumbed the radio and
tried to hail Daymon or Duncan or whoever happened to pick up first.

After three tries Duncan’s familiar drawl came back at her.
That there was a little bit of a slur to his words went over Heidi’s head and,
forgoing a hello or any type of small talk, she instead immediately—with little
warmth or inflection in her voice—asked to speak to Daymon.

Coming across to Heidi like Cade had earlier, Duncan said
nothing. He held the radio up and paced a few steps left of Daymon and waved
the Motorola back and forth, trying to get the dreadlocked man’s attention.

The warbling whine of a hardworking chainsaw somewhere in
the background sounded in Heidi’s ear for a handful of seconds. Suddenly there
was silence and she heard static and the rustling noise indicative of the phone
changing hands. Finally Daymon said, “What’s up, hon?”

Heidi asked Daymon to switch over to a channel where they could
expect a degree of privacy.