Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed
Read Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Online
Authors: Shawn Chesser
Tags: #Zombie Apocalypse
Frayed:
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
By
Shawn
Chesser
KINDLE
EDITION
***
Frayed:
Surviving
the Zombie
Apocalypse
Shawn
Chesser
Kindle
Edition
Kindle
Edition, License
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This
eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to
share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for
each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was
not purchased for your use only, then please go and buy your own copy. Thank
you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any
similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any
references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights
reserved.
Shawn
Chesser Facebook Author Page
Shawn
Chesser’s Amazon Author Page
***
Acknowledgements
For Maureen, Raven, and Caden ... I couldn’t have done this
without all of your support. Thanks to all of our military, LE and first
responders for your service. To the people in the U.K. and elsewhere around the
world who have been in touch, thanks for reading! Lieutenant Colonel Michael
Offe, thanks for your service as well as your friendship. Shannon Walters, my
top
Eagle Eye
, thank you! Larry Eckels, thank you for helping me with
some of the military technical stuff. Any missing facts or errors are solely my
fault. Beta readers, you rock, and you know who you are. Thanks George Romero
for introducing me to zombies. Steve H., thanks for listening. All of my
friends and fellows at S@N and Monday Old St. David’s, thanks as well. Lastly,
thanks to Bill W. and Dr. Bob … you helped make this possible. I am going to
sign up for another 24.
Special thanks to John O’Brien, Mark Tufo, Joe McKinney,
Craig DiLouie, Armand Rosamilia, Heath Stallcup, James Cook, Saul Tanpepper,
Eric A. Shelman, and David P. Forsyth. I truly appreciate your continued
friendship and always invaluable advice. Thanks to Jason Swarr and
Straight 8 Custom Photography
for the awesome cover. Once again, extra special thanks to Monique Happy for
her work editing “Frayed.” Mo, as always, although you have many pokers in the
fireplace, you came through like a champ! Working with you has been a dream
come true and nothing but a pleasure. If I have accidentally left anyone out
... I am truly sorry.
***
Edited
by Monique Happy Editorial Services
Table of Contents
The man shifted his gaze from the thin band of blue sky up
ahead to the rearview mirror, where he saw nothing but angry clouds and
darkened countryside. Seemingly following him on the same northwesterly tack,
the pewter smudge was depositing big heavy flakes on the rolling hills and
abandoned farmhouses and rust-streaked silos whipping by on both sides of the
winding State Route.
Thinking ahead, just after traces of the first snowfall of
the season began to stick, the driver had stopped on a zombie-free stretch of
road a few miles back and engaged the four-wheel-drive. Now, negotiating the
snow-dusted rollercoaster-like two-lane cutting between Wyoming to the east and
Utah to the west, all the driver had to concentrate on as he approached his
destination were the clusters of walking dead making yet another slow motion
sojourn north. As he halved his speed and zippered between the staggering human
husks, he noticed that their movements seemed sluggish—more so than usual—their
already diminished motor skills seeming to degrade before his eyes in pace with
the rapidly dropping mercury.
As the rig passed within arm’s reach of another slow-moving
group—where normally the younger and more agile specimens would at least crane
and get an eye lock on him or, if the conditions were right, manage a clumsy
swipe at the vehicle—there was a delayed response, their maws opening and arms
extending only after the SUV was well past them.
“Well, well,” said the man, flicking his eyes to the
rearview. “
That
is what I was hoping would happen. Levels the playing
field, a little.” Despite the task at hand, a grin spread across his face and
he rapped a ditty on the steering wheel. “Bite me biters … aren’t such the bad
asses now are we?” Though he wanted to stop and take out thirty or forty of the
things in one fell swoop, he didn’t want to expend the energy clearing their
carcasses from the road would require. As he swept his gaze forward, he saw off
in the distance the north-moving herd he’d first seen two hours prior and a
number of miles south.
Spitting a string of expletives, the man slowed the vehicle
and grabbed his binoculars from the seat next to him. Then, knee-steering, he
risked a couple of glances at the shambling mass, only pressing the field
glasses to his eyes for a couple of seconds at a time, which was all he needed
to learn that the main body had just passed his turnoff, leaving only a loose
knot of walking corpses and the few lone stragglers bringing up the rear for
him to worry about.
Knowing the distant herd would soon crest the small hill and
then be on the downslope and out of sight, he slowed his ride to a crawl, swung
wide right, and hauled the wheel hand-over-hand. The sun-dappled horizon swung
a one-eighty across the windshield’s wide curvature and the tires squelched on
the far shoulder as he straightened the wheel and looped around the listless
pack of dead he’d just bypassed. A hundred yards south around a bend in the
road where he figured the vehicle’s silhouette would be masked from the dead,
he eased off the gas and let the rig coast until its forward momentum bled off.
Now, with two hundred yards or so and a grass-covered hillock between him and
the biters, he jammed the SUV to a stop on the solid yellow centerline and put
the automatic transmission in
Park
. For the sake of comfort, he took his
boxy semi-auto pistol from its holster on his hip and placed it on top of the
dusty dash within easy reach. Eyes threatening to close on him, he kicked his
seat back, elbowed the door lock down, and flicked on the stereo to start the
soothing sounds of
Johann Sebastian Bach
flowing from the speakers.
***
The man’s respite was cut short just minutes into his
powernap when the half-dozen dead not fooled by the coast maneuver caught up to
the inert vehicle and began raking their nails against the sheet metal. Though
the late German composer was being all but drowned out by the keen of bone
against metal and hollow moans of the dead, the man tolerated the sneering
creatures batting the window just inches from his face for ten long minutes.
Once the ten minutes had passed, for good measure the man
stared at the second hand’s sweep and allowed five more minutes to crawl by.
Finally, convinced most of the dead would be far enough away to the north so as
not to key in on the growl of the diesel engine, he jacked his seat up and
started the motor. Fighting the wheel and clunky gearbox, he conducted a
three-point-turn and was rolling north at a fair clip.
Seconds later, he arrived at the crest of the hill where he
had first spotted the herd which, in the thirty minutes since, had only
shambled a half a mile beyond his turnoff and into a veil of falling snow.
Closer in, however, was the smaller knot of biters that inexplicably were still
within eyeshot of his turnoff, which was a narrow dirt road shooting uphill and
to the right off the paved State Route.
Practicing what he preached to his kids—
better safe than
sorry
—he gently pressed the pedal to start the SUV rolling forward over the
hill’s crest. Once gravity grabbed the three-quarter tons of American iron, he
jacked the transmission into neutral, manhandled the transfer case out of
four-wheel-drive, and then killed the engine. Without the boost of power steering,
keeping the SUV’s squared-off grill guard aimed at the throng of dead took
considerable effort.
Halfway down the hill, the wind whistling through the
half-dozen bullet holes in the driver’s side door alerted the dead to his
approach and, sluggishly, as if in slow motion, they turned in unison and faced
the noise.
A beat or two later, the sickening sounds of the coasting
SUV plowing through the picket of corpses made its way through the rusted floor
pan and again the soothing string work of another Bach masterpiece was drowned
out. Before the remaining corpses could scrape themselves off of the roadway,
the man had set the brake, grabbed his weapons, and was unfolding his massive
frame from the high clearance vehicle.
Standing on the road in the midst of the crushed and mangled
corpses, he slipped his Glock back into its holster. Then he donned his faded
knee-length western-style duster, leaving it unbuttoned. Finally, he cracked
his back and neck then slipped the corded nylon rope over his head and adjusted
the scabbard it was attached to so that the pommel of his ancestral blade was
within easy reach behind his head.
“Come to Daddy,” he growled, a wolfish grin spreading on his
face as he began wading through the leaking corpses to get to the throng of
dead vectoring toward him.
Cade Grayson’s undead welcoming party on Utah State Route 39
consisted of two horribly decomposed first turns. In a
can’t-see-the-forest-through-the-trees type of way, he would have missed them
entirely had the colorful tatters of wind-whipped clothing clinging to their
bodies not drawn his eye to them through the picket of lodgepole pines. And as
he ground the big Ford pickup to a halt just inside the Eden compound’s
foliage-covered front gate, it became clear that prior to hearing the vehicle’s
approach, the Zs had been trudging along on an easterly heading. Which was a
good thing. Because it meant that the wall of logs blocking the two-lane a few
miles west of the compound was doing its job.
Dreamed up by another Eden survivor—former Bureau of Land
Management firefighter Daymon Bush—the barricade provided a buffer between the
compound and both the herds of dead finding their way along the State Route
from the burned-out towns of Huntsville and Eden and the larger hordes of
rotten corpses migrating from the more densely populated city of Ogden twenty
miles further west of there.
So far the blockade had done exactly what Daymon had
promised it would. However, much to the small band of survivors’ collective
surprise, the feat of engineering brought about by a week’s worth of precision
chainsaw work was inexplicably doing double duty. For no matter the size of the
group of walking dead, upon hitting the wall of trees and finding no prey
there, invariably, either jogged by some snippet of memory or driven by the
primordial urge to hunt buried deep down in the reptilian part of their
atrophied brains, they would about-face and shuffle back from whence they’d
come. But, unfortunately, there was an exception to the rule. If the dead saw
or heard anything—talking, engine noise, sometimes an animal or bird’s
call—while near the roadblock, the urge to hunt in them would be triggered,
resulting in a moaning assemblage of death. Which was a whole ‘nother can of
worms which necessitated the tedious and dangerous task of a great deal of up
close and personal killing followed by the back-breaking labor disposing of the
putrefying bodies entailed.
Messy work that Cade wanted no part of, that was for sure.
The latter more so than the former.
Keeping one eye on the dead through the trees, Cade killed
the engine and set the brake. He fished the long-range 40-channel CB radio from
a pocket and adjusted the volume up a couple of notches. He looked out the
windshield at the snow falling faster now, keyed the Talk button and hailed
Seth, who was manning the security desk inside the nearby subterranean
compound. “I’m going east to the 16 junction and then north from there,” he
stated, looking down at his Suunto and noting the time. “Figure I’ll be gone
for a couple of hours at most.”
“Heading out
solo
,” Seth came back, wryly. “You got
some kind of a death wish there, Grayson?”
“We’ve all got to die sometime,” Cade shot back. He reached
over the center console and scratched Max, the brindle-colored Australian
shepherd, behind the ears. “No need to worry, though. I’ve got my wingman, Max,
by my side.”
Seth said, “That’s already been established in spades ... on
both counts. Watch your back. There’s nobody at the overwatch to help you with
the gate. And remember … there won’t be anyone there when you return either.”
“Roger that. I have eyes on two Zs. Are you seeing anything
else on 39?”
The radio in Cade’s hand broke squelch, then Seth’s voice
emanated from the tiny speaker. “I’ve got a bad case of CSS down here.”
Max yawned and swung his head in Cade’s direction, cropped
stub of a tail beating a steady rhythm on the passenger seat.
Furrowing his brow, Cade thumbed Talk and asked, “C-S-S?”
“A bad case of
can’t ... see ... shit.
”
Cade shook his head. “Are we talking or texting?”
“A bit of both, old man. Can you wipe the camera domes for
me before you leave the ...
wire
?” Still not used to using the military
lexicon adopted by most since Duncan took control, and used more frequently
since Cade’s arrival, Seth sometimes found himself struggling to recall the
proper words, second-guessing himself, and often fearful that he was misusing
them.
“Roger that.” Cade stuffed the radio inside his MultiCam
parka and plucked his suppressed Glock 17 from the passenger seat. Acting on
years of training, he ejected the magazine and pulled the slide back to verify
that a 9mm round was in the pipe. Satisfied, he seated the full magazine in the
well and, knowing that the dead and locked gate were tasks he’d have to tackle
alone, shouldered the door open. With one leg in space and about to step down
from the cab, the radio in his pocket emitted a low hiss. Cade froze, one foot
on the running board and one hand holding the grab handle, as he listened to
Seth ask him to keep an eye out for cheese.
“Any kind of cheese,” Seth went on. “Moldy sixty-day-old
parmesan. Those little bastards hermetically sealed in red wax. Hell, at this
point I’m a beggar. I’d even settle for processed cheez-whiz-in-a-can.” The
radio never left Cade’s pocket and soon Seth’s desperation-filled voice trailed
off and there was a heavy silence in the cab.
No moans. Damn.
With a firm set to his jaw, Cade lowered himself to the
ground. He clucked his tongue ushering Max out, then, intent on making as much
noise as possible, reached behind his head and flung the door shut. The
resulting metallic clang resonated loudly for a beat, but without a wide-open
expanse for the sound to expand and travel, it died off quickly.
Already alerted to the presence of fresh meat by the Ford’s
rumbling engine and throaty exhaust, the eastbound Zs, now frozen in place and
eyeing the forest, heard the door slam and immediately set off at a fast lope
in the gate’s general direction. Their moans growing loud, the pair refined
their search by homing in on the noise of wet gravel crunching underneath
Cade’s boots—and with their own bare feet slapping a cadence on the cold
asphalt, traversed the road on a collision course with the realistic-looking
wall of foliage.
Before Cade had taken a dozen steps beyond the truck’s
bumper, the Zs’ dry raspy calls had risen in volume. A beat or two later, the
gate was rattling against its hinges and crooked and bloodied digits were
probing the nylon netting holding the carefully arranged saplings and vegetation
in place.
“Keep your pants on,” Cade barked. He stopped a yard back
from the gate and paced left and then right to make sure two was the magic
number.
And it was. So he holstered the Glock and withdrew his
Gerber Mark II fighting knife from its scabbard on his right thigh. Carefully
he probed the fence head-high with the honed black blade until he saw a flash
of white through the warren of interwoven branches. He widened the opening a
bit and saw a pair of cracked and shredded lips. They were drawn taut over a
mouthful of yellowed teeth, all jagged shards parked in a jaw hinging slowly up
and down. The little snippet he saw through the fence reminded him of an
expectant grouper inspecting a pane of aquarium glass. The narrow face and
bloated lips, even the swollen black hunk of flesh for a tongue looked as if it
belonged in the mouth of a fish instead of this shell of a former human being.
Guessing where he thought the shorter of the two creature’s
eye socket would be, he banged on the fence there with his free hand and held
the dagger’s tip perpendicular to the inner netting. Seconds passed and then
the fingers withdrew and disappeared and a tick later probed the fence a foot
to the left. Meeting Cade’s expectation, the fence bowed in a couple of inches.
Palm on the Gerber’s pommel, he leaned in and thrust the dagger through the
barrier left-of-center of the steadily growing human-head-sized impression.
There was a bit of resistance at first, but the attempt yielded nothing but a
fresh inches-long-gash to go along with the roadmap of lesions and scratches
already criss-crossing the Z’s alabaster face. Enticed by Cade’s presence, but
confused by the gate, the two Zs wavered, their heads bobbing tantalizingly
close yet still just outside of striking range. So Cade searched the ground
nearby and found a wrist-thick foot-long piece of tree branch. He scooped it
up, peered over his shoulder at Max, and waggled it over his head. After
catching the shepherd’s multi-colored gaze, he threw the stick overhand to the right
and watched it sail twenty feet or so and land on the spongy ground inside the
fence with a hollow thud.
Stub tail a blur and eyes fixed on Cade, Max sat on his
haunches waiting for permission.
“Get it boy.”
Instantly gravel shot from under Max’s paws as he gave
chase.
The flexing at the gate stopped as the rotters, keying in to
the out-of-sight sounds and sudden flurry of movement, released their grip. A
tick later the wet slaps of rotted flesh on pavement started anew.
Gerber still clutched in his right fist, Cade followed Max.
After traversing a dozen feet, he stopped near the gate’s edge where a gnarled
wood post was buried in the ground and the barbed wire fence separating the
roadside ditch from the dense tree line began its westward run. He shifted his
weight to the balls of his feet and bent his knees, going into a partial combat
crouch while keeping his upper body coiled tight, like a spring under pressure.
Max paralleled the barbed wire fence, picked up the
sun-weathered length of wood with his mouth, and began working it between his
teeth, pulverizing it into a hundred little pieces in seconds.
With the usual eye-watering stench preceding them, the Zs
staggered from behind the blind. Fixated solely on Max and unable to feel pain,
they hit the fence at full speed and continued their hunt, with rusty barbs
tearing chunks of flesh from their emaciated frames.
Cade waited behind the blind for the faster of the two to
pass him by and then let out a soft whistle, causing the trailing creature to
stutter step and turn clumsily to its right.
“Peek-a-boo,” Cade said, as the Gerber flashed black against
a growing white background and penetrated the rotter’s right eye socket with a
soft squish. Instantly, like a snipped marionette, the thirty-something female
rotter folded to the ground where it settled face down, ass up—an unmoving heap
of skin and bone. Resting there on the cold ground, with the knuckles of knobby
vertebra and sharp pelvic bones straining against the pale bruised dermis, the
thing could have easily passed for a concentration camp victim.
Before the first flesh eater had been stilled, Max had
already destroyed the stick and was sizing up the remaining creature, teeth
bared and hackles raised.
Still unaware of Cade’s presence, the second Z leaned hard
into the chest-high strand of wire, bowing it inward half a foot, and gouging a
foot-long, inch-wide chasm into its pale skin. Eyes fixed only on Max, and with
its own teeth bared, a guttural, seemingly hate-filled sound escaped its maw.
“I got this,” muttered Cade, approaching the abomination
from its blindside. Without pause, he reached across the wire and wrapped one
gloved hand around the thing’s scrawny neck. Simultaneously he lifted and
tightened his grip, closing off the hissing creature’s windpipe. With silence
returned to the lonely stretch of road, and hatred burning hot behind his eyes,
Cade thrust the dagger deeply into the patch of soft flesh an inch in front of
the male cadaver’s right ear.
Like its
off
switch had been thrown, the Z went limp,
its toes swaying an inch off the ground. Milky eyes rolled back, retreating
into hollow sockets. And then, held aloft an arm’s length from Cade’s face, its
jaw slackened, revealing a maggot-addled tongue and mouthful of crooked teeth
still home to ribbons of flesh and sinew from its last kill.
Cade released his grip and let gravity take the dead weight.
Then, cursing his decision to lay hands on the dead, and feeling a tinge of
discomfort from the sight of the yellow pus sullying his glove’s padded leather
palm, he added baby wipes and hand sanitizer to his mental grocery list.
“Come on boy,” he called to Max. “You get to watch my six.”
Seemingly aware of his appointed position, Max sat on his
haunches, peering through the fence at the twice-dead humans. He panned left
down the road then held steady for a moment, ears perked, nose sniffing at the
cold air. Then the multi-colored shepherd swiveled his head right and fixed his
gaze on the shadow-covered road to the west.
“I’ll be damned,” said Cade. “You’re hired.”
Max yawned and lay flat, his graying snout at rest on his
outstretched forelegs. Then with his eyes, one brown, one blue, moving left and
right, he issued a split-second throaty growl which Cade took as an
affirmative.
Cade swung the gate away, then called Max and ushered him
inside the truck. He hopped in after, fired up the big V10, wheeled the F-650
through the gate and onto the smooth two-lane where he left it facing east, and
set the brake. Again he grabbed the suppressed Glock off the seat next to him
and checked his surroundings for Zs.
Better safe than sorry doesn’t count
any longer.
In the new reality brought on by the swift-moving Omega Virus,
sorry meant dead, and Cade wasn’t about to chance the latter. He’d seen way too
much of it recently. One instance in particular hitting more closely home than
others.
Seeing nothing moving, east or west, he hopped out on the
road and quickly closed and locked the gate behind the matte-black truck. With
its low engine rumble fracturing the morning stillness and wisps of gray
exhaust hanging above the road, he adjusted the foliage affixed to the
camouflaged entry. Then, remembering his earlier conversation with Seth, not
the part where he was begged to seek out a Hickory Farms and return with a holiday
cheese log, but the request to clean the CCTV domes, he hurried past the gate
and down the tree line. It took him a second or two of scrutinizing a trio of
firs before he located the two half-domes ubiquitous in nearly every store and
bank and eatery before the fall. The
eye in the sky
as it was not so
affectionately called by some Vegas casino players. Only these cameras weren’t
looking for card cheats. They were trained on both approaches to the entry. The
east-facing camera viewed a short stretch of the road that was relatively
straight and included a steady uphill grade and then nothing but low hills
breaking up the distant horizon. The camera trained to the west had a little
bit of a warped view of the entire curving length of 39 through the dip in the
road on up to where it disappeared into a tunnel created by the encroaching
woods.
