LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation (8 page)

“I look out for myself just fine—“

“—So sit your ass in the truck so we can get out of here!”
 

Kate moved around the front of the truck and headed her off. Without another glance I moved into the trees, weapon up and eyes glued to the distance. I whistled once, as I got nearly twenty yards in, trying to watch my footing around fallen trees, earth berms, and dangling branches. Romeo responded once, and I took my bearing from his bark.
 

It was a quiet wood, and the sound of branches dropping in the distance kept me alert. A whisper of wind passed through the branches, and I could hear nothing but the rustling leaves and pine needles and my own soft footfalls.

Nearly eighty yards from the road, the trees thinned as I climbed a small rise, and I noticed a woodpile and a rusted ax at the edge of the small plateau. Neatly split logs covered the ground where the earthquake had thrown them about, and several large trees had fallen in to converge on one another in a small clearing. A narrow dirt road wound away on the other side of the clearing, up further into the mountains, while a small wooden cabin—barely the size of a large shed—stood cold and empty ahead of me. Green shingles hung haphazardly from the roof, many having been shaken loose recently, and a short length of cement steps led to the single door, bracketed on either side by small, grimy windows, one of which had clearly been broken out by the earthquake.
 

Romeo’s nose found my left hand before I heard him, and I cursed as he fell into me with excitement.
 

“This better be good, man,” I whispered softly, eyes scanning the area quickly.
 

He grunted once, and with a flip of his tail, he disappeared behind the small cabin.

No smoke from the chimney. No recent use of the axe. No car in the driveway. Maybe it was abandoned.

In the distance, the rumble and glow of the still-erupting volcano cast a pall on the night sky, and the cloud of ash and smoke was pushing itself in front of the faint moonlight. I kept my eyes down to maintain my night vision, and moving quietly, followed the idiot dog into the darkness.

The ground was uneven behind the small cabin, and it took me a moment to realize what Romeo was showing me.
 

It was a body.
 

A human, non-zombie, body.
 

Flannel and jeans underneath a thick coat, with a pistol still clutched in one hand. A bullet hole in the chest, and eyes open and staring, the large man was slumped against the rear wall of the small structure, an armload of twigs strewn out next to his free hand. He must have been out gathering firewood when he was shot.
 

But why?
 

In this age of tidal waves and zombies, a regular murder seemed close to inconceivable—and certainly a wanton waste of a very rare human life. The murderer hadn’t taken the victim’s pistol, hadn’t raided the firewood—hadn’t done any of the things that we associated with our new world.
 

They had simply ended this man’s life.
 

From a distance I heard a single pop. A gunshot.
 

“Okay, buddy, time to go,” I said, and began to jog toward the woods. Romeo got the hint, and nosed at the body once before following.
 

I didn’t bother with silence on this route, and bulled through the brush and branches straight ahead, letting them whip me as I passed through, under and over. I could hear Romeo trotting behind, spryly clearing even the largest piles of debris.
 

The road came into view and I slowed as I saw Kate leaning from the passenger’s side door, standing on the frame and scanning the woods.
 

I whistled the first few notes of the 70’s rock song we had agreed on as our identification tune a week ago, and she raised her weapon and spoke quickly.

“You hear that?” she asked.

“Why do you think I ran? I’m too lazy for that shit without a reason.”
 

She continued her scan, eyes sharp.
 

“I think we should keep moving,” she said. “Something about this area—I don’t know. It just feels wrong.”
 

I opened the driver’s side door and got in, waiting for Romeo to fly through the open rear door before starting the engine.
 

“Tell me about it. Get a load of this,” I began and turned the truck slowly toward the shoulder and around the tree as I recounted the details of the cabin and the body in the woods.

“That doesn’t make much sense, but we can’t say it’s unusual. It’s a shitty world out there. Maybe the guy had food in his cabin, maybe he had a truck or a car. We can’t know much about it, other than that they didn’t take his pistol. Odd, but then again … you didn’t take it either. Maybe they were outfitted sufficiently. No need to steal a dead man’s sidearm.”
 

I shook my head. “No, it had a bad feel to it. Feels like …” I couldn’t find the words. “Just like maybe it’s connected to the reason we haven’t seen anyone—dead or alive—since we left Seattle. Maybe there’s something human at work, here. Not just the zeds.”
 

The graded road was becoming difficult, and I weaved between holes and narrow crevasses until the trees grew sparser and we emerged from the winding road hugging the hills onto an open space between two fields. I sighed as our wheels hit old pavement again, and the ride became smoother. Ahead, the pavement had been demolished by a huge piece of rock that had spit up out of the ground, and I slowed the truck. In the far distance, Mount Rainier continued to smolder, stronger now than it had been at the beginning of the night.

“I don’t discount that as a possibility,” said Kate, glancing at the fireworks display to the south. “So we have to play it safe and be careful. I’d say that for us, humans are more dangerous than zombies right now.”
 

The fields on either side of the road were thick with wilting crops, impossible to tell what they had been before. A single farmhouse had collapsed at the end of a thin dirt driveway that led away from the road before the broken pavement. I turned down the driveway, and found a narrow pathway through the crop until we had passed the crevasse, mounting the road again several hundred feet beyond.
 

“Any idea on our location?” I asked, squinting into the distance as the sky was growing imperceptibly lighter. “We’ll need to find a place to stay for the day soon, or push on past the river if we have time.”
 

Kate stared at the map and pointed.
 

“We should be approaching the next possible crossing, a small bridge over the river on the other side of the town coming up.”
 

Indeed, we were passing a green sign that lay on the ground, the name of the town indistinguishable as we rolled past. Remarkably, a single stop light still swung from two poles in the center of the abandoned crossroads between two commercial centers, a bank, and a police station. A post office sat just past the main drag, followed by a small grocery store. None of the stores had windows. None of the buildings were entirely intact. No sign of life, or undeath, anywhere.
 

The stoplight creaked in a slight breeze and I slowed to a stop in the crossroads, cutting the headlights and scanning the area.
 

Ahead, an obscure collection of shapes and angles was distinguishable against the backdrop of the river valley. The water was high, having pushed over the banks and into the adjacent homes and farms, taking with it several cars and trucks. We had come up into the hills, and back down into the river valley, moving further eastward and away from the heavier destruction. But here, the river seemed to have wrought extensive damage as seawater was pushed through the narrows and into the town.
 

The sun began to crest the horizon and weakly tried to break through the still-streaming cloud of ash and smoke issuing from the flattened top of Mount Rainier. It lit the mountains to the east with a dull purple highlight as I scanned the town quickly.
 

“There,” I pointed and turned the wheel, accelerating slowly to keep the noise low.
 

“Really?” said Kate, half amused and half serious.

“No way,” said Ky from the back seat, voice somewhat scandalized. “That’s gross!”
 

I shrugged off the comments, noting that most of the buildings in town had been leveled by the earthquake, with those still standing—like the post office—just shattered husks surrounded by broken glass and cracked pavement. This building was a solid concrete rectangle with a thick wooden door that was still attached. Most importantly, it had no windows—just a cement box that would keep the sunlight and any marauding herds out of our space.
 

“I can’t believe we’re staying here,” said Kate, mostly amused now, as I pulled close to the front door and pointed the truck toward the main street. The sound of water lapping and debris coming to rest somewhere in the ruined town caught my ear as we got out, grabbed our food, and approached the door.

The thick door was locked, and the doorframe had shifted and warped, making it impossible to open without noise. Reaching into the bed of the truck, my hand found the large fireman’s axe we had swiped from an abandoned station two days ago, and quickly brought it down into the frame near the lock, separating the door from the frame slightly and allowing me to grab the thick wood and pull out. It squealed in protest, and in my ears it sounded like a gunshot.
 

“When I get this open …“ But before I could finish, a rotten hand snaked out of the darkness and I leaned back, missing it by inches.
 

Rookie mistake.

I grabbed the hand at the wrist and pulled it forward in one fluid motion, feeling the satisfying crash as the body was pulled against the door from the inside. Ripping the door the rest of the way open, I let the body fall forward, and brought the axe around in my left hand, shattering the skull quickly.

As the creature hit the ground, Kate trained her gun on the darkness inside, and I knocked on the door frame with the axe, trying to coax any more creatures forward before we went into the confined space. The dank, stale smokiness of the air mixed with the reek of the body and I wrinkled my nose as Ky made a gagging sound.
 

“Seriously?” she whispered, staring at the naked zombie on the ground in front of the door.
 

In the distance, the sound of a large amount of water being displaced—like several vehicles moving slowly through floodwaters—caught my ear. I held up a hand and squinted toward the main intersection, waiting as the moving forms solidified.
 

“Yeah, kid,” I whispered, pushing her into the hallway and pulling the door shut slowly to avoid the loud squeaking. “Seriously. We got company.”

I took a final look at the herd that had materialized from the direction of the river, probably following the sounds we had made, and slipped into the doorway of Nick’s Nudes, which, according to its sign, was the “Preeminent Men’s Club in the County.”
 

***

“Clear,” said Kate, emerging from the back of the bar, face still wrinkled in disgust at the smell of the dank, smoky establishment.
 

“Bathrooms too,” I said, trying to shake the smell of the months-old waste decay out of my mind. “And for the record, if you need to go, just go in the corner. The bathrooms are not an option.”
 

“Hey, I found an exhaust vent in the roof of the kitchen—we could open that and hang out in there, it’s a little cleaner. I don’t think that naked zombie chick hung out in there,” said Ky, eyes still taking in the decor and the signs.

“I take it you’ve never been to a strip joint,” I said, passing her as I stuck my head in the kitchen. Small puddles from broken water pipes and cheap, shattered porcelain was strewn across the floor, but the ceiling was solid and the small vent was indeed within arms reach from the counter.
 

“Oh sure, all the time,” she said nonchalantly. “My dad was big into titty bars and used to take me all the time as a kid.”
 

Kate stopped and stared at her until she picked up the severely sarcastic look that Ky was aiming at me.
 

“I was just kidding,” she muttered, pulling a bag of MREs onto the counter next to the sink and opening one.
 

“How about you?” asked Kate, eyes devious. She casually rested her arms on the rifle attached to her chest rig and I looked away casually.
 

“‘Course not, you think I had time for that shit when I was a big star? Go to one of these places and you’d get mobbed for autographs, the paparazzi would have a field day, and my wife would castrate me. No way, man. Not Mrs. McKnight’s boy.”
 

She stared at me briefly with an indulgent look and then moved away to check out the water pipes.
 

Bullet dodged.
 

I wasn’t immune to all forms of injury, after all. It still hurt to be kicked in the groin—it just healed quickly.
 

We opened the vent and allowed some fresher air into the small room, but noticed the dim lighting outside, despite the time. The sun should have been well up by this hour, and we watched as it slowly brightened somewhat, but maintained the low intensity of a cloudy day.
 

“Rain?” asked Kate hopefully. Rain confused the creatures. It masked our sounds and our scents, and since they couldn’t see very well, drove them to move away, looking for the branches and falling water—all the various sounds that a rain storm created.
 

“No, it’s the volcano,” I said softly, realizing that the fine mist I thought I saw creeping through the vent was in fact ash. “It’s pushing ash and smoke into the air and clouding out the sun. If it keeps up, we might be able to move in the daylight today.”