Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (40 page)

“Something,” answered Cade. He’d been afraid something like
this might crop up. Better to find the possible weak link here behind the wire
than out there on the road. His first inclination when Brook proposed letting
the kids come along was to scream
Hell no,
but he’d caved like he was
prone to when Brook turned the screws or turned on the charm. Now he wished
he’d listened to his gut instinct, which was usually always right.

But three against one was long odds so he said nothing more.
Looked at his Suunto and did a quick calculation.
If we get going soon
,
he thought,
then we might make Mack
—the small town straddling the border
between Utah and Colorado—
sometime around dusk
. Just in time for a hot
meal, and if the scuttlebutt he’d heard from some 4th ID soldiers who’d spent
time there was correct—a hot shower just might be over the horizon.

The door creaked open and Wilson stepped into the flat light
of morning. Mist swirling, he gently closed the door, head hanging low, eyes
hidden by the brim of his boonie hat. Then he tossed his meager belongings into
the back alongside Sasha’s and, without looking at Cade or anyone else, took
the wheel and made a shooing motion, urging Brook to pull ahead.

The carts started in near unison.

Brook edged around and nosed in the direction of the
humongous aircraft hangers piercing the fog in the distance.

“Taryn’s not coming?” Raven asked.

Once again Cade shrugged. He had no power over people—unless
the circumstances required him to abduct or kill them. He tried to make eye contact
with Wilson as they passed by the idling Cushman, but only registered the
funereal-look parked on the redhead’s face.

Quarry

After dragging the near-headless bodies out of sight, the
three of them proceeded single file through the office and into the garage
itself, leaving Jordan behind as lookout.

Once inside, another dichotomy presented itself. Although
the exposed beams and rafters were obviously roughhewn old-growth and original
to the building, Logan noticed that everything else was brand new and modern.
There were work benches along two walls complete with peg boards and a plethora
of tools, each outlined and hanging in their own assigned location. Sitting in
the corner near the far overhead door were two enormous Honda generators—both
shiny and red and still in their shipping packaging—crated in knotty yellow
wood with Styrofoam showing at the corners. The floor they sat on had been
painted a pale gray and was flecked with some kind of traction aid—which did
wonders considering the slug tracks created by the female rotter as it had
dragged its intestines everywhere. Aside from the slimy floor and streaks of
body fluids and scraps of flesh and guts on the insides of the garage
doors—every other surface in the place looked clean enough to eat from.

Gus, who trailed in last, flicked the wall-mounted switch—a
move both rote and highly optimistic considering the electrical grid had been
down since day two of the outbreak. However, he was rewarded for the effort as
the overhead fluorescents flared to life, bathing them with a stark blue-white
light. “Smart old guy ... installed himself a solar collection system on the
roof,” he said, looking up at the ceiling which had to be at least thirty-five
feet overhead. “And I’d bet the farm that he probably installed twelve to
fourteen panels at a hundred plus watts each. Hell, a kilowatt will go a long
ways if you only have the essential stuff drawing from it.”

Jamie looked at Gus. Made a face and said, “What were you
doing, reading up on water filtration
and
solar arrays in between
handing out speeding tickets and lounging around the donut shop?”

“Ha ha ... so easy to crack on a cop with the donut jokes.
Pretty original, Jamie.” His smile faded and he added without one scintilla of
remorse, “That’s exactly what I was doing, and that’s why I left my badge and
cruiser on the freeway near Arsenal and decided to take Logan up on his offer.
And I’m glad I did. Wouldn’t change a thing.”

“I’m glad you did too,” said Logan.

“Enough with the mushy stuff,” Gus said sharply. “I think we
ought to dismantle this system and load it onto those trucks along with the
generators and take it all back with us.”

The trucks Gus mentioned were nosed in to the back wall.
Both were American-made rigs with dealer invoices glued to their passenger
windows. The white Dodge was a factory-prepped extended cab 4x4 with a pair of
whip antennas presumably for a citizens band radio. It was shod with dual rear
wheels and oversized tires all tucked under widely-flared fender wells. The other,
a black Chevy Silverado 4x4, was equipped similarly with a big Vortec engine
sans the dual rear wheels.

Looking around the space, Jamie said, “So where’s the video
feed from the front gate end up?”

“Good question,” answered Gus. “Surely they weren’t monitoring
it on that old IBM in the office.”

Nosing around the far side of the hulking Chevy, Logan
called out, “Over here.”

Jamie worked her way around, Gus in tow, and arrived just as
Logan was kicking aside a charcoal-gray area rug that looked like it belonged
in the high-traffic entry of an auto parts or hardware store.

Gus said, “Whatcha got?”

“I found a door,” he answered, pulling his shirt over his
nose. “But there’s something dead down there. Your turn to do the opening,
Gus.” He backed away.

Shouldering his AR, Gus approached the trap door which
looked to be eight to ten feet long, and wide enough for two decent-sized men
to stand atop shoulder-to-shoulder. He knelt and grasped the handle, pulled
hard and swung it cleanly to the right and allowed it to rest against the
workbench.

Simultaneously a cloud of flies, thicker than the first,
enveloped his head while the air from below, thick with the stench of death,
blasted him in the face. Throat constricting, he fell backwards and rolled onto
his stomach. Instantly a torrent of vomit and bile sluiced from his mouth,
running in rivulets over the edge of the shadowy opening and down the stairs
which he’d caught a fleeting glimpse of before the unexpected two-pronged
assault.

Grateful that a rotter hadn’t followed the swarm from below,
and certain he’d be as good as dead if one had, he slid on his butt away from
the stairs and pulled a flashlight from its carrier on his belt.
Once a cop,
always a cop
, he thought, as he twisted the bezel and swung the beam over
the stairs. Wood treads—not quite as high tech as the rest of the
garage—disappeared into the ground. Suddenly on the verge of hurling again, Gus
said, “Someone open up a door. Let some of this stink out.”

There was a clunk and then a discordant metallic rattle as
Logan raised one of the garage doors upward in its tracks.

“Going in,” said Gus, wiping his mouth with the back of his
arm. Feeling like a tunnel rat in Nam, he fully collapsed the stock on his AR,
clamped the tactical light between his teeth, and moved down the steps one at a
time, careful to tread on the sides only, heel first, slowly transferring the
weight to his toes.

Nine steps later he was standing on the metal floor of a
buried Conex container. He walked the flashlight’s beam left to right,
illuminating the walls which were covered with small colorful murals, each with
its own theme, painted by someone barely graduated from stick figures. Suddenly
three light bulbs a yard above his head came on.

“How’s that,” Logan said, his voice thin and reedy in the
stair’s confines.

“Bright,” answered Gus. He squeezed his eyes into slits
until his pupils adjusted, and when he opened them fully he saw the source of
the pong. Huddled in the far corner were two putrefying corpses, a boy and a
girl.

The boy was tow-headed, thin in the face, and looked to have
been about ten before death caught up to him. His hair was meticulously combed
and he wore a pin-striped three-piece suit which was bulging at the seams from
post mortem bloating. His shirt’s top button had popped, dropping his clip-on
tie into the biohazard soup wetting the front of his jacket and slacks.

The second corpse looked a spitting image of the boy.
Identical
twins?
Gus noted that her blond hair had been cropped short—harder for a
rotter to get a hold of, he guessed. Both wore masks of contentment, like
they’d gone to sleep on Christmas Eve with visions of sugarplums banging around
in their heads and simply failed to wake up.

On the floor near the kids was a woman of about forty, her
body curled in a fetal position atop a once-yellow sleeping bag that had done a
wondrous job of soaking up copious amounts of her bodily fluids. The sight
reminded him that on average the human body held ten pints of blood, all of
which had run in a continuous rivulet from the woman’s slit right wrist,
following the natural slope of the floor a number of feet before pooling and
drying to black in the opposite corner of the container.

His gaze followed the nearly straight black line back to the
sleeping bag. Then, full of sadness, his attention was drawn back to the woman.
Nothing about her face was placid or calm or content. Her lips, thin bands of
blue, were bared over a picket of crooked teeth. Her eyelids were frozen open
but the windows to her soul were gone—having been usurped by a writhing plug of
shiny maggots turned the color of ivory by the bulbs overhead.

He took a step closer, knelt down and took a pill bottle
from under the sleeping bag near her head. He read the label.
Percocet.
Prescribed by Doctor Jeff Malone.
Quantity: 40 tablets, 5 milligrams per
.
Enough to put the kids to sleep forever, he reasoned. But not enough for mom.
So she resorted to slicing her wrists the correct way—vertically—thus taking
the tendons out of the equation.

After covering the dead woman with the sleeping bag’s top
flap, Gus searched around and found a fleece blanket in a stuff sack which he
used to fully conceal the kids.

Using the AR’s flash suppressor he pushed open the next
door, flicked the light switch and peered inside.
Clear.

Following the same procedure he’d learned at the Academy and
perfected from years serving the citizens of Salt Lake County, he searched the
entire compound which was a warren of shipping containers, placed end to end
like the Eden compound, but half the size. The technology, however, had not
been skimped on. The security cameras at the front gate were indeed real, and
broadcasting a steady image of the gate in one corner of a large flat-panel
monitor.

Once he had checked the catacombs for more rotters, and
after he’d taken a cursory inventory of the dead man’s preps, he called out for
the others to join him.

Quarry

But only Logan came down the stairs. “Big enough for the two
of us?” he asked.

“Judge for yourself.”

“Wow, old man was keepin’ himself busy.”

“Where’s Jamie?”

“She’s doing the same thing you did.”

“Puking?”

“And crying.”

Gus made a face. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said. He
pulled aside a number of hard plastic Pelican cases lining the wall opposite
the glowing monitor, and with Logan helping, delved into them.

Inside the first box they found ammunition of various
calibers as well as two sets of communication gear that rivaled the
voice-activated units Lev and Chief had taken from the National Guard rotters.
The next container held a half-dozen pairs of the earliest generation NVGs—not
the best, but better than they already had, which was zip. The third case was
filled to the top with medical supplies, arranged in neat little rows from meds
on the left to bandages and sutures on the right.

Gus said, “Follow me,” and led Logan into another room
where—Eureka!—ballistic vests in multiple sizes hung on wooden hangers. Extra
sets of camouflage clothing in kids and adults sizes were piled high. And above
them, a host of pistols were affixed to the wall in the same manner as the hand
tools up top. Each weapon had its own outlined place with hooks holding them in
place. Standing up on the adjacent wall were a couple of scoped bolt-action
sniper rifles, a half-dozen modern automatic rifles prepped for close quarters
battle, and a trio of riot shotguns.

Then, stacked neatly along the wall below the guns were, by
Gus’s best estimation, several thousand rounds and at least thirty loaded
magazines—mostly for the CQB rifles.

“This could
not
have been the old man’s hideout,”
said Gus behind a low whistle.

Logan whistled also and spun a circle in the dead prepper’s
armory. He wanted to say,
I told you so
, but refrained. Instead he
intoned gleefully, “Let’s load this into the three trucks and get back to the
compound ASAP.” He picked up one of the head sets. Looked closely at the
disc-shaped throat mike and smiled. “These will do. Don’t you think?”

Eyes narrowing, Gus returned the smile, and nodded.

Jamie entered the room, still wiping away tears. Seeing
this, Gus said, “I covered them up for your protection.”

“I looked anyway. Shouldn’t have though.” She began to
bawl—a mournful, hair-raising dirge.

“Come here,” Logan said. Held his arms wide, took her in,
gently wrapped her up and held on tight as sobs racked her body. After a couple
of minutes she took a deep breath, fixed her red-rimmed brown eyes on his and
mumbled, “Why? Why did she have to do that?”

“I’m guessing she couldn’t find it within herself to go
upstairs and kill her folks ... I’m guessing the rotters were those kid’s
grandma and grandpa,” said Logan, nuzzling her dark hair. “And if she did, then
she’d have to expose the kids to the world up there.”

“Let’s get cracking,” urged Gus. “We’ve got lots of stuff to
hump upstairs ... and we are burning daylight down—”

His appeal was abruptly interrupted by the long, drawn-out
wail of the Tahoe’s siren.

Gus backtracked to the container with the electronic gear,
bent at the waist and looked hard at the monitor. “The gate looks clear,” he
hollered. “Maybe she’s just lonely. You two get going. I’m right behind you.”

***

With Jamie in tow, Logan snaked through the unfamiliar
labyrinth, dodging hanging bulbs, piled-up stores, and bare metal bed frames
along the way. As they entered the death room and passed the bodies of the
woman and her kids, he sensed her slow and fall behind.

But he continued on.

He hit the stairs. Took them two at a time, and when he
reached the top was blessed with a lungful of crisp clean air, nearly blinded
by the light streaming in the open roller door, and greeted with two different
noises. The first was familiar and in his face—the high-pitched piercing wail
of the Tahoe’s siren a dozen yards in front of him. The other was less
distinct, much farther away. At first it struck him as perhaps coming from a
big-rig compression-braking on the state route below. But countering that
theory was the fact, that save the quarry drive, there were no steeply-graded
hills to necessitate such an action.

So he stood under the half-open overhead door, squinting
against the light and waving, trying to get Jordan’s attention. But she was
looking everywhere but in his direction. The siren blared on and then suddenly
she turned her head and looked directly at him. Instantly her mouth formed a perfect
‘O’. A beat later the blue and red lights went dark and the siren went silent.
At first the crushing silence hung heavy over the quarry, but without the
competing racket of the siren the noise he’d first chalked up to brake
compression increased in tempo, the decibels rising. Then a blur, all glass and
matte-black paint entered his side vision and began to slew and slow
incredibly, almost in defiance of gravity.