Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (37 page)

“Up there.”

Jamie clucked her tongue and said, “Those are the same black
domes on the ceiling in Wal-Mart and Target. Security cameras. See them Jordan?
There’s one on each corner.”

“Oh ...”

“And this ain’t the movies,” Gus interjected. “Those things
aren’t going to pan our way and let us know we’re being watched. They’ve got a
wide field of view so they don’t have to.”

Jamie made a face. Looked out her side window. “Are we—” her
brow furrowed as she looked up “—being watched?”

“One way to find out.” Logan jumped up and down waving and
smiling at the camera.

They waited a few minutes, and when there was no response
Logan asked Gus to cover him. He hustled around back, popped the hatch, and
came out with his
ace
. And by the time he looped back around—massive red
bolt cutters in hand—Gus was out and had his carbine trained downrange, aiming
at dead space beyond the chain-link fence.

“I’ll watch our six,” Jamie said, stepping onto the ochre
roadbed. “Jordan ... you stay in the truck and keep your eyes peeled.”

Jordan made no reply. She was watching Logan, who was
leaning forward, elbow splayed out, working the tool with all his might. She
didn’t see the lock fall away but knew it must have, because Logan motioned Gus
over and the two of them rolled the fence in opposite directions, creating an
SUV-sized gap. A tick later there was a pneumatic squelch from the gas struts
as the hatch was closed, followed by a heavy
clunk
as the latch dogged
shut. Simultaneously, Logan and Jamie slid into the front seats, and then Gus
was crowding in on her from the right. The doors slammed shut—three consecutive
solid thumps—and just like that they were rolling through the breach.

“Moment of truth,” said Logan as the Tahoe squeezed through
the gap with only inches to spare on each side. Wincing at the idea of a flurry
of bullets coming their way, versus a lone chunk of lead with just his name on
it, he goosed the engine and caught flashes of silver from the wind-rippled
body of standing water rolling by on the left.

“There’s your water source,” said Gus. “You could probably
roll a 747 Jumbo Jet in there and it’d sink from sight.”

“A mining op this size has gotta have the pumps to draw the
water out,” said Logan.

Jamie cut in. “What about filtration?”

“Before the shit hit the fan, there were tons of sites on
the web where you could download plans on how to build large scale water
collection and filtration systems,” answered Gus. “Couple of plastic barrels
and charcoal are about all a person would need. So easy even a caveman could do
it.” He smiled but the quip was lost on everyone but him. “You know that
Government Insurance commercial ... with the Neanderthal?”

Crickets.

A frown furrowing his brow, Logan set the brake and slid
from the truck. He hustled around and shut the gate, looped the chain through
twice and returned to the Tahoe. Once they were moving again, Logan had to
wheel around a series of water-filled potholes, all of which were large enough
to swallow up one of the Tahoe’s tires. He walked his gaze over a trio of
swaybacked buildings. Behind the windowless, corrugated steel and wood
structures, the red earth rose gradually, and then after a dozen or so yards
shot up vertically at a ninety-degree angle for thirty or forty feet before
rounding off at the hill’s apex, where a tiny copse of gnarled junipers grew
skyward.

To the right of the tired-looking sheds, backing up to a
chain-link fence similar in construction and height to the front gate, stood a
monstrous garage that looked to have enough square footage to accommodate a
pair of full-sized fire trucks—or an Abrams battle tank or two.
Wouldn’t
that be awesome
, Logan mused.
Clank into Huntsville, bring the Howitzer-sized
barrel to bear, and settle things once and for all
. He noted how weathered
the facade was. The gray paint was chipped and flaking off, and what remained
was tarnished by vertical fingers of rust, starting where the fasteners held
the steel sheets together, and ending at the frost-heaved cement apron
encircling the building. Two windows, grimy and yellowed with age, wrapped
around the left corner. To the right of the windows, rising above the low
cement stairs, was a banded metal door painted a pale shade of institutional
green. Windowless, and secured with two serious-looking deadbolts and a
padlocked latch thrown in for good measure, the entry looked more suitable for
a correctional facility than protecting a mining operation’s interests.

Offering another positive clue that the property had not
been forgotten entirely were the two rollup doors, both about thirty feet
square, stark white, obviously newer than the rest of the building.

“What’s behind door number one, Vanna?” said Gus, poking his
head between the headrests.

Making a face, Jordan looked at him and asked, “Who’s
Vanna?”

Suppressing a chuckle, Gus said, “Google her.”

Twisting in her seat, Jamie shot the man a sour look.

“What? I’m just pulling her leg.”

“Things are never going to be the same for her. Hell, for
all of us for that matter, Gus. And we don’t need you reminding us of it every
two minutes.”

Putting his arms up in mock surrender, Gus retreated into
the back seat.

Trying to ignore the inane banter, Logan wrestled the
steering wheel left and right, navigating the minefield of water-filled
depressions. Head on a swivel and eyes moving, he pulled broadside to the
double doors leaving thirty feet of separation and the Tahoe’s push bar
pointing towards the dilapidated outbuildings.

He took a peek in the rearview and spotted the
motor pool
.
Languishing in a patch of briars, off to the side of the front gate, were a
number of heavy earthmoving vehicles, colorfully-hued and rust-mottled. A
couple of half-ton pickups, once
Ram Tough,
Logan guessed, were all but
consumed by brambles, only the sheet metal of their sunbaked roofs peeking
through.

Perfect cover, he thought. And as the seconds ticked by and
the pieces of the puzzle fit together it was seeming more and more likely to
him that this was the place they were looking for.

Eden Compound

After a thirty-minute hike, a good deal of that time spent
locating and avoiding Duncan’s many pitfalls, Daymon was standing inside the
tree line overlooking the gently sweeping curve of State Route 39 that had
earlier been the site of so much death and destruction. He swept his gaze along
its entire length looking for rotters.
Nothing.
He looked at the
blacktop, noting the spilt blood which had dried to black; rambling Rorschach patterns
marking where Duncan’s antagonists had fallen and died. Equidistant from either
side of the road at the apex of the curve were four oily black splotches where
a vehicle had burned, its tires melting to pools; the skeletal remains now sat
partially blocking the road a few hundred yards to the west—a warning to anyone
else who dared bring their bad intentions on a road trip from Huntsville.

On both shoulders bracketing the charred asphalt, still
evident and partially filled with brown water from the previous night’s rains,
were the four manhole-sized craters produced when the buried propane canisters
marking the beginning of the end for the marauders had been detonated. And
across the two-lane, beyond a barbed wire fence on the upslope of a small
grass-covered hillock, he could see the freshly tilled dirt concealing the
corpses of the dozen or so dumbasses who had pushed their luck one bad deed too
far. Nearby, above ground, was where the group had set fire to a couple of
dozen rotters. He could see blackened skulls, their shadowy eye sockets staring
blankly, sitting atop a wide debris field of knobby vertebrae and razor-edged
rib bones.

The whole morbid scene took him back to a turn of events
that had taken place shortly after he was forced to give up the search for his
“Moms” on the outskirts of South Salt Lake on the same day he’d first met up
with Cade Grayson.

Nearly surrounded by the dead, and in danger of
high-centering the old mint-green BLM Suburban atop a mound of the writhing creatures,
he’d quickly jammed the transmission into reverse and blindly accelerated away
before pulling the oversized rig into a violent ‘J’ turn.

But the evasive action had had an unintended consequence. By
the time his front end had turned a full one-eighty, leaving the zombies in the
rearview, an oncoming vehicle had been forced to swerve in order to avoid the
collision with his much bigger rig.

The last thing he recalled, etched indelibly in his memory
vivid with detail, was the minivan full of kids flipping onto its roof and
skittering by, trailing sparks and kernels of shattered automotive glass. Then
the immediate fireball, its heat warming the side of his face, followed a
nanosecond later by an oxygen-robbing whoosh that seemed to tug at the Suburban.
Finally, in super slow motion, always playing out in his side vision, were the
backlit silhouettes of tiny arms, desperately fighting gravity and flailing and
pounding against the spiderwebbed windows. And always present in his
nightmares, right before he awoke sweating and breathing hard, were the
innocent faces craning his way, flaming gas running like magma, melting hair
and flesh away.

Thankfully the Motorola sounded in his pocket, a piercing
electronic warble lasting long enough to drag him away from the awful scene
playing in his head. “I can see you,” said a male voice he didn’t immediately
recognize. “You’re pretty good; I almost missed you.”

With a mounting suspicion that Duncan’s hearing was as bad
as his vision and somewhat concerned the loud noise would draw rotters his way,
he grabbed the radio’s stunted antenna and pulled the trilling thing from his
pocket. He quickly backed off the volume and thumbed the call button. “Where
are you? And more importantly, who are you and why the games?”

“It’s me, Lev. Up in the tree line. Your ten o’clock.”

Daymon walked his gaze up the hillside, then panned his head
left by a few degrees. In a grove of mature pines that had overgrown a good
portion of the hilltop was a small sapling quivering to and fro, an exaggerated
little dance. Then, dressed head-to-toe in some kind of camouflage netting, Lev
stepped into the sunlight. Braced against his hip, throwing a long shadow
across the grass, was some kind of scoped rifle. “I see you now,” said Daymon.

“Where you headed?” asked Lev.

“Clearing my head, that’s all.”

The radio hissed again and Lev said, “Be careful of—”

“The Punji pits,” said Daymon, beating him to the punch. “I
know all about ‘em. Logan drew me up a map.”

“Call if you need anything. These things have about a
three-mile range,” said Lev. “I recommend you err on the side of caution and
don’t stray too far.”

“Sheep and cattle stray,” said Daymon sharply. “But thanks
for looking out for me.”
Again.

“Don’t mention it.”

Daymon said nothing. He wanted the chit-chat to end so he
could get going and spend a couple of hours exploring the expanse of property
that he’d been told fell off into a thickly-wooded valley heavy with game
trails and split in two by a small creek.
Who knows
, he thought to
himself as he strode off towards the west,
maybe I’ll cross paths with a
deer or wild boar along the way—either one would be better than the goulash
Logan calls food
.

He set out on the gentle downslope following the fence line.
He’d gone about thirty yards when something out of the ordinary grabbed his
attention. Thinking he’d heard some kind of engine noise far off in the
distance he froze mid-stride, slowed his breathing, and listened hard.
Nothing.
Then, a tick later, the dissonant buzzing, mechanical in nature, once again
reached his ears. It droned on for a split second and then was gone. He stood
stock still for couple of minutes without picking up the sound again. He
thumbed the radio. “Lev ... you there?”

“Good copy. Lev here.”

Cops and former soldiers
, Daymon thought to himself.
Always
communicating in the same clipped syntax—robot-like and impersonal
. He
asked, “Did you hear some kind of engine?”

“Negative,” said Lev, robot-like and impersonal. “Maybe it
was the rotters moaning. Got a few approaching from your right. Saw you freeze
... thought you saw them. Didn’t think you needed warning.”

Daymon walked his gaze the length of the road. At the point
in the distance where the blacktop disappeared into the canyon of trees, a
number of pale forms were emerging from the shadows. He watched as they trudged
silently uphill, past the immolated, now see-through, SUV. “Nope,” he replied.
“It wasn’t them. I can’t even hear their feet slapping the road from where I’m
at.”

“They’re not moaning because they don’t see you ...
yet
.
What is it you think you heard?”

“I think it was a helicopter. Way off— distant. North and
west of us.”

“Military or civilian?” asked Lev.

Contemplating the question, Daymon shifted his gaze to the
sky. Then he scrutinized the approaching zombies and determined from more than
a hundred yards, based on their gait and decomposition, that they were all
first turns, and were thus incapable of producing the sound that he had heard.

There was a brief burst of static and Lev said, “Well ...
what was it?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” answered Daymon truthfully. “Maybe it
was all a figment of my imagination.”

The radio crackled again. “Maybe it’s your Delta Force buddy
trying to find the compound.”

“He would have called first. He’s a soldier just like you.
Ducks in a row and all that jazz.”