Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (12 page)

The house Dregan had initially claimed for himself and his
two sons was one of those you’d find built on an abbreviated lot in a growing
city. In-fill was what he had heard them called. Two-and-a-half times taller
than it was wide, and with a single-car garage taking up most of the downstairs
footprint, the three-story place was perfect from a defensive standpoint.

The main living area, once accessed by a steep stairway
rising from the cement pad fronting the garage, was home to an average-sized
sofa and pair of overstuffed chairs. Next, divided by a wide granite bar, came
the dining room and kitchen. And at the rear of the house on the left was a
small bedroom and opposite it, a half-bath. A sliding patio door led out to a
deck overlooking an overgrown backyard. Secured to the sturdy cedar railing
with three-inch decking screws was an emergency fire ladder ready to be
unrolled in a moment’s notice to effect a quick escape if need be.

Two more bedrooms were on the third floor: the master, with
the balcony over the parking pad facing north, and the other, diametrically
opposed at the rear of the house, facing south, its deck affording a sweeping
vantage looking out over an orchard with a clear view of 16 snaking off into
the distance.

Dregan parked in an alcove of sorts. Stacked haphazardly
against the wood shake wall rising up in front of the rig were dozens of
rust-streaked propane tanks commonly found under most outdoor barbecues. Rising
to the top of the driver-side door were a pair of industrial-sized propane
tanks, the kind normally exiled to the periphery of your local gas station and
emblazoned with all kinds of OSHA-approved warning stickers. Partially strangled
by creepers and host to a thin veneer of snow were the remains of the front
stairway, brown pressure-treated treads and risers and stringers all cracked
and twisted from being physically rent from the house by a vehicle with a tow
chain.

He killed the engine and grabbed his belongings. Exited the
Blazer and looped around front of the captured Jackson Hole patrol Tahoe. He
slung his carbine and sword over his shoulders, letting them cross behind his
back. Removed his gloves and stowed them in a pocket. Then, commencing his
least favorite part of coming home, took ahold of a freezing cold rung and
began to scale the telescoping ladder propped up where the stairs used to be
attached.

He hauled his considerable bulk hand-over-hand to the front
porch, making it there a little out of breath. He worked his keys in the trio
of locks on the door and once inside could still see his breath coming in
blossoming plumes. He rubbed his hands together and called out, “Gregory!”

Nothing
.

“Peter!”

Still no response.

He closed the door and crossed the foyer to the base of the
stairs. “Anyone home?”

A sleepy voice called down. “Yes, Dad. I went back to bed.”

“Is that all you do … sleep?”

“No. I play video games but it’s too cold to go outside and
start the generator.”

“Get your lazy butt up, Peter,” bellowed Dregan. “It’s
nearly noon.”

“Who cares. I don’t have to go to school. Or work. Sleeping
passes the time.”

“Get down here. We need to talk.”

A bunch of grumbling and bellyaching filtered down the
stairway. Then heavy footsteps crossed the floor followed closely by the hollow
clunk of a toilet seat hitting the tank.

“Damn right it’s cold, boy,” Dregan said, crossing the room.
He knelt on the tiles in front of the jury-rigged natural gas fireplace. There
was a braided steel hose running from a tank outside through a hole in the wall
and across the hearth, where it disappeared behind a steel grate. In the center
of the hose Dregan had spliced a valve with a wheel. He palmed the wheel
counterclockwise, starting a slow hiss of gas from behind the clouded glass.
Acting quickly so the gas couldn’t build, he clicked the Piezo igniter,
producing a whoosh and instant warmth that he felt on his face.

***

A handful of minutes later, the fake logs were glowing and
Peter had come downstairs and was prone on the sofa, wrapped up in multiple
blankets and peppering his dad with questions.

“We’ll have to see,” replied Dregan to Peter’s third inquiry
as to how many people the
other side
had. At twelve, the boy tended to
still see conflict as if it were a first-person-shooter game and not the life
and death equation the apocalypse often presented.

“The only way I’ll know the answer to that question is if
they pay a visit to the ranch before we move on them.”

“The old couple?”

“No Peter. We can’t rely on them. I dropped in on them this
morning and they seemed a little standoffish—”

“What’s that mean?” asked Peter.

“They didn’t seem too friendly.”

“Oh.”

“You have to learn how to read people, Peter. You get that
down … you’ve won the battle before it begins.”

Sitting up, Peter asked, “They were mean?”

“No … they just weren’t as inviting as before. I felt like a
stranger in their home.” Dregan stopped pacing and leveled a serious gaze at
the boy. “For all I know they’re trading with the kids too. So I’ve hatched a
plan to make sure I know if they venture back into our part of the valley by
this time tomorrow.”

“What happens this time tomorrow?”

“I’m going hunting.”

“What about me?”

“I need you to stay here. If the judge comes sniffing around
again you are not to talk to him. Think you can you do that this time?”

Peter nodded.

Dregan smiled. He could no longer see his breath and had
removed his gloves. However, even with the radiant heat slowly warming the
family room and working its way upstairs, the house remained cold and
uninviting. Nothing like the
home
the dead ran him and his family out
of, forcing them to leave behind everything including decades of fond memories.

He walked to the kitchen and looked out the window. Across
the street, fronted by a ragged hedge, was the house Lena and Mikhail had
recently taken as theirs. The grass not beaten down by the snow was drooping
away from the hedge and crowding the narrow cement path leading to the front
door. The curtains were pulled closed and the driveway was empty. Just looking
at it infuriated Dregan and shot a cold chill through his body.

Turning back towards the warmth, he looked down at his watch
and realized he was not going to make the agreed-upon meeting with Pomeroy at
the makeshift courthouse.

To a person, the Eden survivors thought Cade’s plan was
doable until twenty minutes or so in, when all of the dragging and lifting and
pushing it took to toss the corpses into the void began to take its toll on all
of them.

“We need help,” Wilson said.

Daymon cleaved a rotter’s head from crown to brow, then
paused and shot the redhead a cold stare. “You’re beginning to whine like your
sister.”

Coming to Wilson’s aid, Taryn shot back. “That’s harsh. He’s
pulling his weight.”

Saying nothing, Daymon took hold of a corpse that the cold
had shut down mid-stride, jaw leading the way, in a pose suggestive of forward
motion. Still making no comment, he hauled the stiffened body across the
eastbound lane to the railing, where he released his arm from around its waist
and left it like he’d found it—standing, skin as white as the snow its bare
feet were planted in, and looking more like a store mannequin preparing to take
a leap than something carrying a virus deadly to them all. He let his gaze
linger on the male corpse for a second then looked down the length of the rail
and addressed Wilson. “My moms told me it’s easier to get your work done when
your gums aren’t flapping.”

Finding a strange sense of confidence after hearing his girl
stand up for him, Wilson toppled a Z into the void, turned, and said, “My
moms
was fond of saying if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

Taking a handful of the creature’s soiled blue jeans, and
wrapping the fingers of his other hand in its oily hair, Daymon rose with a
grunt, twisted at the waist, and heaved the shirtless creature over the edge.
He watched it bounce and come to rest atop the pile then turned back to Wilson,
lip curled into a sneer, and hissed, “You taking my effin inventory ...
boy?
”

After shifting his gaze from Daymon to Wilson and then
quickly back to the dreadlocked man, Duncan dropped his corpse like a sack of
potatoes. “Daymon ... you been readin’ my Big Book?”

Already kneeling next to another corpse, Daymon looked up,
brow furrowed, and said, “Your what?”

“Never mind,” drawled Duncan. He held Daymon’s gaze for a
beat then went on, “You already gave Lev a shot to the jaw. Now you and Mister
needs-to-grow-a-pair
here are jawbonin’. To me it sounds like something’s eating at you. Shall we talk
about it?”

Daymon flashed Duncan the bird, then, for a beat, as
snowflakes danced across the road on a gust, regarded the middle-aged female
staring up at him. Looking like he had come to some kind of a decision, he
finally grabbed a fistful of natty blonde hair and plunged a gloved thumb into
the Z’s eye socket. Smiling, he worked it around like he was churning butter,
then dragged the dead thing to the railing and, without pause, added it to the
growing mound directly below the bridge.

“Guess that answers my question,” muttered Duncan, snatching
a child-sized flesh-eater off the ground by its stick-thin arms and giving it a
flying lesson.

“Halfway there,” bellowed Cade from across two lanes as he
watched a limp body cartwheel down the cliff wall and smack the rocky creek bed
below with tremendous force. “Keep it up. We’ll rest when we clear a path to
the west end.”

***

Heeding the sage advice of Daymon and Wilson’s long dead
mothers, the group put their heads down, their differences aside, and worked in
silence. Thirty short minutes later, the narrow bridge was cleared of the dead
and the group had gathered mid-span.

“Five hundred down, two hundred to go … is that about right
Cade?” Duncan asked.

“I’d say you’re in the ballpark,” Cade replied. “You want to
take charge of getting our wheels up and running?”

Duncan took a pull of water from a Nalgene bottle. “I’m on
it,” he said, dabbing a sheen of sweat from his forehead with a faded
handkerchief. He put the damp rag away, finished the water, then walked the
length of the gore-spattered bridge to the overgrown spit of land hemmed in by
a drop-off on the left and the tree blockade on the right. He knelt down and
fumbled around in the snow until he found the flat rock Cade had hidden the
keys under. He wiped the dirt off the two sets and thumbed the unlock button on
the black fob.

Success
.

The 4Runner’s lights flashed and he heard the soft double
thunk
of the door locks actuating. He opened the gore-streaked door, climbed behind
the wheel and, half-expecting to find the battery dead since the vehicle had
been sitting idle for weeks, was delighted to hear the seatbelt warning chime
when he inserted the key in the ignition.

Two for two
, he thought.

“Be gone, Mister Murphy,” he said, as he turned the key. At
first,
not
sounding like
success
, there was a faint clicking that
didn’t sound at all good; then, as if his plea had been heard and heeded, the
V6 motor churned to life.

Leaving the engine running to work up the charge, he made
his way to the Land Cruiser with the plastic doodad in hand that looked nothing
like a key or a fob. He simultaneously waved the device by the door handle and
depressed the button there. The sound of the locks popping was much quieter
than the 4Runner.
Oh the refinement an extra fifty grand could buy a fella
in the old world
.

Once he was sitting on the supple leather driver’s seat, he
set the smart key in the console, pressed a foot on the brake, and depressed
the
Engine Start/Stop
button. At once the dash lights dimmed and went
dark entirely. That was it. No seatbelt chime. No starter ticking away
futilely. Just silence interrupted now and again by the faraway sounds of the
others dispensing of the dead.

Duncan pounded a palm on the wheel and without conscious
thought snaked his hand into his inside coat pocket—an autonomous action
learned from years of dealing with his problems the only way he knew how.
Glenda called it
coping by numbing out
. And it caught him
completely
flat-footed.

He sat straight and took a deep breath. Thankfully, there
had been nothing in the pocket. No smooth metal flask. No pint of Jack. Not
even a dainty airline bottle crafted perfectly in scale to resemble the
full-sized item.

He had been coping without that liquid crutch since the
first time he sat down with Glenda in the clearing at the fire pit weeks ago
and poured every drop of Jack he possessed into the ashes. In fact, he hadn’t
had so much as a nip since Chief and Jenkins went into the ground and he’d even
succeeded in white-knuckling it through Phillip’s ordeal.
Fake it til you
make it
, Glenda had said at the time. And though he was the one who had
been sent to the hide to check on Phillip and found him in a different state
altogether than he had expected—wandering around the clearing with half of his
neck ripped away and all of his guts missing—he couldn’t do what needed to be
done. At least not at that stage in his sobriety. So, all the while fighting
the overwhelming urge to find a bottle and check out—he waited by the fence
until Cade arrived and then, with a feeling of utter worthlessness hanging over
him, watched the steely-eyed survivor stick a dagger in the snarling beast that
used to be their friend.

He made it through the funeral, cursing Phillip for losing
his life even while he sensed he was one drink away from losing his own.

So that night, with Jack Daniels and the ghosts of the
recent dead sharing equal space in his head, he had dropped to his knees beside
Glenda and repeated a prayer he thought hokey and old-fashioned at the time.
Instantly the weight from living the way he had been for the last decade—a
weight that had increased tenfold since the dead began to walk—was suddenly
lifted.

Seeing this recent knee-jerk reaction for what it was—a
learned response to stress he would probably never be rid of and thankfully
didn’t ever again have to rely on—he bowed his head and closed his eyes and
said in a low voice, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the
difference.”

Feeling a thousand times better, Duncan opened his eyes and
fixed his gaze on the far end of the bridge. There he saw Cade moving through
the dead, stopping here and there to stab into them with his blade.

Nearby, Wilson was still swinging away at skulls with his
bat, wasting way more energy than necessary, culling only one rotter to Cade’s
half-dozen.

A couple hundred feet beyond the stretch of road Cade and
Wilson were clearing, Taryn, Lev, and Jamie were dragging corpses already
granted a second death off the road and into the woods.

Meanwhile Daymon had been working a knot of dead between the
other two groups, swinging
Kindness
at the standing corpses and felling
them like wheat to a combine.

Duncan watched the former firefighter cull the last of the
ones that were standing; then, as nonchalantly as if he were taking a
union-mandated break, sit atop one of the larger specimens and then start
running his whet stone back and forth along the machete’s blade.

“That’s my boy,” Duncan said, in front of a sad-sounding
chuckle. Then, having seen enough heads being chopped to last ten lifetimes, he
hinged over and popped the Land Cruiser’s hood. He hauled himself out of the
driver’s seat, made the long walk to the mound of gear, and returned,
schlepping the tools, cables, and battery.

He connected the jumper cables between the rigs, slid onto
the Cruiser’s cold leather seat, and commenced the wait necessary to determine
if the battery would take a charge. Bored and cold, he opened the center
console and dug around in the contents. Passing on the manual and spare bulbs
and fuses, he came out with an official-looking document, unfolded it, and
determined it was a dealer’s shipping and sales invoice. He perused the specs,
got to the small print indicating the sales price, and took a deep breath.
“You’ve gotta be effin kidding me. Seventy-nine grand for this trailer queen.”
He knew it was a pricey ride, but not closer to a hundred grand than fifty.
Shaking his head, he refolded the piece of paper, put it back inside the
console, and closed the leather-wrapped lid. Then he leaned over and punched
open the glove compartment. Trimmed in fake walnut and skinned with the same
leather as the rest of the rig, the lid opened slow and quiet, revealing in all
of its black and white glory a full and sealed fifth bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Fuck me running,” he whispered. He wracked his brain and
couldn’t recall placing it there. But then again, as he thought back, he was
always prone to finding bottles he had stashed away during a blackout.

What he did next was totally unexpected and involuntary.
Causing the rig to shimmy and consequently the amber-colored liquid to ripple
in the bottle’s neck, he recoiled and sat ramrod straight.

With a knot twisting in his stomach, he sat there staring
straight ahead and listening to the nearby 4Runner’s V6 purr away. After
another minute or two, during which he stole a couple of quick guilt-filled
glances at the bottle, he worked up the courage to lean over and, as if the
yawning glove box was harboring some kind of venomous snake or brimming with
skittering jumbo-sized scorpions, quickly slam it shut.

With the elephant in the Land Cruiser now behind closed
doors, he let out a deep breath and thanked God he wasn’t tilting Old No. 7 to
his lips and making bubbles. However, in a perfect world and to another person,
out of sight, out of mind
would probably suffice. His first instinct
after the split-second recoil should have been to crack the seal and pour it
out on the snow outside—the operative words being
should have
. But a
beat after seeing the label, he was no longer driving the bus, metaphorically
speaking. And the little voice in his head, the one currently taking fares and
issuing transfers, had already convinced him that shutting it from view would
be adequate for now.

He drew in a deep, calming breath, reached over with his
right hand, knuckles still showing through the skin from gripping the wheel
tight, and once again depressed the
Engine Start/Stop
button. There was
a different sound this time, like a starter turning. A tick after there came a
promising shudder from the engine then absolute silence.

“Bastard.” Duncan slapped the wheel and flicked his eyes to
the exotic wood-trimmed glove box door.

Fighting the urge to give in to the little voice in his head
telling him he could get away with
just
one
, and knowing that one
always
tasted like
more
, he muttered under his breath and stepped
out into the cold.