Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (14 page)

The fallen tree roadblock and patch of discolored snow where
Duncan had emptied the fifth of Jack Daniels on the roadside was four miles
behind the Land Cruiser when he stabbed its brakes and pulled over to the
shoulder.

“What do you want to do?”

Cade craned around and watched the 4Runner pull up even and
stop. “I say we push on and tackle the root of the problem. That was hard work
back there. I can only imagine how longshoremen feel after a day’s work.”

“I’ve done some of that kind of work ... in my youth.”
Duncan smiled at the memory. “We mostly hit the bars after shift. Closed the
place down. Rinse and repeat after a bowl of Wheaties.”

Daymon poked his head between the seats. Looked at Duncan.
“You didn’t do much if
any
of the heavy lifting back there, Old Man.”

“Yeah ... but against all odds I got this here demolition
derby victim running.”

“True dat,” said Daymon, offering a fist bump, which Duncan
regarded for a second before leaving it hanging in the air over the center
console.

Saying nothing, Daymon disappeared into the back seat all by
himself.

Duncan looked a question at Cade. The same one he had
offered on dozens of occasions since his brother was murdered, leaving him the
sole Winters at what had at times informally been called the Winters’ compound.
A reluctant
why me
look that meant a vote was in order.

Cade nodded. “So we vote.”

Duncan powered his window down. He nodded at Wilson and
addressed Taryn, who was driving. “You guys need to vote on whether we cull
these rotters here and now, or finish them on the way back. Cade’s of the
opinion we need to push on.”

Taryn nodded. Duncan watched her twist around and talk to
the back seat passengers, Lev and Jamie.

“Three of us want to push on to Huntsville now,” Wilson
said. “Jamie”—he nodded toward the back seat—“wants us to put down as many as
we can before the weather turns.”

“I kind of agree with the lady,” said Daymon. “Glenda did
say the temps can make wild swings this time of year. I’ve seen a little of it
in Idaho and Wyoming.”

Cade had been listening, but he was also walking his gaze
over the herd of Zs spread out across the road thirty feet off the Land
Cruiser’s bumper. “There’s less than two hundred here,” he said. “We
need
to move on.”

“Yep. I’m with Cade,” Duncan drawled.

Daymon said nothing.

“Five yay, two nay,” Cade said, stating the obvious. He
shifted and met Daymon’s stare. “Don’t worry. You’ll be killing more of them
with Kindness before the day is done.”

Duncan chuckled. “Poor Urch.” He mouthed, “
Follow me
,”
to the Kids in the 4Runner and eased off the brake.

It was slow going, but by keeping to the shoulder in
places—the path of least resistance—Cade and Daymon only had to dismount a
couple of times to clear a swath of road through the dead wide enough for the
bigger Land Cruiser to pass.

In the 4Runner, Wilson was leaning as far away from the
passenger window as possible. Even though he knew the abominations gliding by
just outside his window weren’t an immediate threat, it still seemed as if they
were all being consumed alive by their vacant stares.

Every so often he would muster the courage and steal a quick
peek and see what effect the elements, raging fire, and decomposition had on
the human body. It quickly became clear to him that many of the monsters had
caught bullets during the course of their travels, the damage presenting as
mostly just pencil-sized entry wounds to the arms or torso. One in particular
stood out from the others and would probably be visiting him in a nightmare
later. Powder burns dappled the middle-aged rotter’s pallid skin from hip to
neck. There were frozen streamers of dermis and scraps of flesh dangling in
semi-permanent stasis from the periphery of a basketball-size hole in its gut.
And further evidence of a run-in with a shotgun blast were the connect-the-dots
patterns peppering the flesh around the empty chest cavity, where hundreds of
shot pellets had entered and stayed just under the skin.

Finally having seen enough, Wilson tipped his head back and
closed his eyes.

The group burned thirty minutes navigating through the herd
and had just gotten going again when they came upon a scene that begged a
dismount and further investigation.

Dregan had cut to the chase. No pleasantries. No small talk.
It was clear the two men didn’t see eye-to-eye and there was no reason for
either of them to put up a front.

First Dregan voiced his displeasure for the judge’s
unannounced visit and contact with his minor son, a move the judge explained
away as a simple I-was-in-the-neighborhood type of thing. Then Dregan cut to
the chase and told the judge that his visit with Ray and Helen had been to
deliver propane, nothing more. After all, how was the judge to corroborate the
story when he hadn’t set foot outside the wall since he’d arrived. This the judge
didn’t protest. A kind of quid pro quo, since Dregan hadn’t pressed him further
on the house call issue.

When they finally got around to the matter of Lena and
Mikhail, all Dregan had to do to convince Pomeroy he was content to wait was
lavish a little praise on the way
justice
had been handed out to the
Ford kid. And as an exclamation point to the matter, Dregan blew a little more
smoke up the man’s fat ass by adding how he believed—after all he had seen
during the last hour—that the wheels of justice would soon catch up with Lena’s
killers.

And finally, in response to the judge questioning him about
how he was coping with his loss—a query Dregan believed to be from the mouth
and not the heart—Dregan had said simply, “Time has a way of healing old
wounds.”

In the end, Dregan had the judge’s promise to not visit
without prior warning. And in return, telling a bald-faced lie, Dregan promised
to not take the law into his own hands.

“We’re going to crawl back out of this,” Pomeroy had finally
said after a pregnant pause.
Bullshit
, thought Dregan as he rose and
shook the man’s clammy hand. And as he did, he thought to himself,
Justice
will be swift and final.

Suppressing a smile, Dregan left the musty room, closing the
frosted glass door at his back. Letting the smile curl his lip, he slow-walked
through the deserted bookstore where the cannibal rapist had just gotten all
that he deserved.

Outside, he stood on the raised wooden sidewalk and marveled
at how, under the gray light of afternoon, the snow-covered main drag lined
with one and two-story buildings reminded him of the faded old photos of
Deadwood or Tombstone or Silverado. Then it struck him how those towns had
fallen, not to the rampant crime prevalent at that time in history, but to the
advent of Mister Ford’s assembly-line-produced four-wheeled steed that in part
had made the Iron Horse serving the frontier towns, of which Bear River was
one, as obsolete as the venerable Colt Peacemaker.

He chuckled at the irony. Him standing here thinking about
one Ford’s deeds when perhaps a direct descendant of ol’ Henry himself was
about to get his privates gnawed off on account of his own misdeeds.

Suppressing a chuckle, Dregan stepped into the street at
about the same time a red Jeep with more rust streaking its squared-off body
than paint rounded the corner. Noticing the vehicle approaching off his left
shoulder, he gave the driver a wave and stepped back onto the curb just as the
rig crunched to a stop inches from his toes. The driver’s side window whirred
down and instantly Dregan received a hot blast of fart-laden air to the face.

“Let me guess,” he said to the man driving the Jeep.
“Breakfast was venison jerky and Smirnoff.”

The man’s lined face stretched tight and he smiled wide,
revealing a mouthful of cracked stumps for teeth. “Just Smirnoff,” he replied.

Why did all the dentists have to get eaten?
thought
Dregan, wincing from the added stench of halitosis. “I’m glad you came, Cleo,”
he said. “I need a favor from you.”

The man held Dregan’s gaze, took one hand from the steering
wheel and rubbed his fingers together briskly, universal semaphore for:
It’s
going to cost you
.

Dregan offered a conciliatory nod. “It’s just a little recon
job,” he began. He laid it all on the table. The where’s, why’s and how’s. Once
he got to the how he wanted the job done part, Cleo shook his head. He wasn’t
having it. Dregan pushed the issue and Cleo said, “Keep me in propane for two
winters.”

Figuring the man’s liver wouldn’t hold out that long, Dregan
nodded. Didn’t matter if it did. He had squirreled away enough propane since
the fall to keep all of Bear River going for two winters. And he also knew
where more could be found.

Unfortunately, Cleo knew this too. “
And
a case of
vodka and two cartons of cigarettes,” he added.

“
Two
cartons?” said Dregan, almost yelling.

“And vodka.” Again Cleo showed off his rounded teeth,
sharing his bad breath in the process.

Exasperated, Dregan took off a glove and ran his fingers
through his beard. The vodka was nothing. He had cases stashed in the garage.
The cigarettes, however, were damn near worth their weight in gold. But then
again, so was maintaining the element of surprise. And the only way to ensure
that was to know the comings and goings of everyone in the valley.

“You are raping me, Cleo. You know that, right?”

Another big smile as Cleo extracted a small notepad, the
coiled wire pinched in places and the paper curled up. Still grinning
ear-to-ear, with intelligent—though bloodshot—blue eyes sparkling, Cleo licked
the tip of a pencil and wrote hard on the lined sheet until it was full of tiny
scribbles looking more like something from a Pharaoh’s tomb than words taught
in school. The smile disappeared and, after underlining the last sentence
twice, pressing hard enough to break the pencil lead, he handed the contract
along with a pen taken from his flannel pocket to Dregan.

“Sign it please,” he said, eyes narrowing to slits.

A vehicle slid by on the opposite side of the Jeep, heading
in the general direction of the main gate.

Dregan glanced up at the truck carrying a foraging party of
six in the back, then, looking like a man about to score drugs, he conducted a
recon of his surroundings, two slo-mo jerky sweeps, one over each shoulder.
Satisfied he wasn’t being watched, he read the words jotted on the pad. After
spending an inordinate amount of time deciphering the barely understandable
prose, he read the heavily underlined words again. “The fee is up to three
cartons now?”

Cleo nodded. He loved having
anybody
by the short
hairs—especially the former wannabe sheriff of Bear River.

Dregan signed on the line and fantasized about throttling
the little fucker. Picking him up off the ground and holding him aloft until he
shit himself and his legs twitched after receiving their last ever orders from
his dying brain. But that would get him nowhere closer to his end goal. Telling
himself this was just business and he’d make up the loss elsewhere, he drew in
a deep breath.

“Two cartons and a roll of chewing tobacco,” he said over
the exhale.

“OK,” Cleo conceded. “Camels and Copenhagen. And handwarmers
… it’s going to be cold tonight.”

Dregan shook his head. “All of that
and
the vodka.”

“Stolichnaya,” added the man, straight-faced.

Dregan sighed and gazed up and down the street. Then he
looked skyward as the snow started coming down in thick sheets full of big
flakes. “You know, Cleo,” he said, flipping the collar up on his coat. “I’m
just glad you didn’t ask me to give you a blowjob.”

The nubs for teeth reappeared and, after delivering a
coquettish wink, the pencil reappeared in Cleo’s hand and he played at amending
the contract.

Dregan put his hands up in mock surrender and backed away
with the Jeep already moving forward and Cleo’s face sporting a wide grin. He
kicked the pile of snow pushed up by the Jeep’s tires and watched the boxy rig
circle back around and head off the way it had come. In the next instant, he
started calculating how many favors were owed to him by others that he could
call in at such short notice.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way
, crossed his mind
as he stalked off for his vehicle.

The dead baby girl was swaddled head-to-toe in a pink
blanket and clutched tightly to the young mother’s bosom. A placid expression
was frozen on the child’s delicate features, and if not for the presence of the
blue jump rope knotted neatly around her impossibly thin neck, Cade would have
thought death had come as a result of the firm one-armed embrace—not
strangulation by ligature.

Sitting on the bench seat in back, shoulder-to-shoulder—small,
medium, and large, like empty cups on display at a fast food joint—sat three
other corpses, all grade-school-aged boys, separated by about a year or two
chronologically and about half-a-head each in height. The boys were dressed in
winter attire and wore blindfolds fashioned from an eco-friendly grocery
bag—not quite fabric or plastic, but some kind of marriage of the two. Unlike
the infant, each of the boys had one neat little entry wound about the diameter
of a pencil eraser dead center on their foreheads.

Up front in the center console, partially concealed
underneath cereal bar wrappers and balled-up tissues, was the weapon the woman,
who Cade presumed to be the mom, had used to kill the boys: a chrome .22 or .32
caliber semi-auto pistol by the looks of the grip and mag well width.

Next to the pistol were a couple of well-worked-over
pacifiers and a bottle half-full of a pinkish-looking liquid. And laying on its
side by the baby bottle was what looked like some kind of over-the-counter kids’
cough-medicine. It was brilliant red and looked high in viscosity, like pancake
syrup. Cade guessed Mom used the medicine and formula or some kind of canned
milk to make the cocktail in the bottle. Though the defenseless little former
bundle of joy would never see a first birthday, Cade felt better about the
whole thing knowing the baby probably hadn’t suffered—much.

He craned and looked closer at the kids in back and saw very
little blood; he guessed—based on the lack of visible bugs or maggots—they had suffered
from perhaps a day’s decomposition.

The mom on the other hand, like the dead man on the road,
had taken no chances. It was clear she had not wanted to come back and spend
eternity thrashing around inside the van with her dead daughter in a baby carrier
on her chest. The gun she’d used to relocate her brains from inside her skull
to the windshield and headliner was a black 9mm semi-auto that was still
clutched firmly in her dead hand. Closer inspection would divulge that it was
poorly made and inexpensive, like the chromed number between the seats.

Cade worked the scenario through his head. Judging by the
twenty or so Zs ground into the pavement underneath the van, the occupants had
probably come upon the herd up the road and then, either acting out of fear or
hubris, decided not to turn back toward Huntsville and instead took a chance at
bulling their way through. And once the driver had committed and the low
clearance minivan became inexorably stuck, he dismounted and shot a few and
then tried rocking the vehicle off the writhing pile of death with the lady
behind the wheel.

However it went down, the result was crystal clear. Trapped
inside, the mother did what any parent facing that many flesh eaters would do.
Maybe to make it easier on all parties involved, Cade thought, she had proposed
a game that required the boys to wear blindfolds before ... at least that was
how he hoped it had played out. But he’d never know, because, as the saying
went, dead men—and women and their four kids—tell no tales.

The sound of a door opening and closing snapped him out of
his funk. He looked towards the other Toyota parked a dozen feet behind the
Land Cruiser and saw Taryn on the road and approaching the scene. He watched
her step over the partially eaten corpse of the man whom he had already pegged
as the dad. There was a bullet entry wound on the right temple and most of the
left side of his face was bulged out and misshapen—like a grapefruit squeezed
of all its pulpy goodness. Only there was nothing good about what Cade imagined
lay under the snow, scattered on the roadway in a radius around the same side
of the body the bullet had exited. Suddenly he was reminded of a bumper sticker
popular with the pro-Second Amendment crowd before the fall—a group of
like-minded folk whom he had proudly counted himself one of.
You can have my
gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands
, was how it went, and that’s
exactly what Taryn did. She planted her boot on the cadaver’s wrist and pried
the desert-tan semi-auto free from the rigor-affected fingers. She patted down
the body and came out with one empty magazine; the rest, Cade figured, were
somewhere near the body, but covered with snow and brains. Pocketing the mag
and what looked like a handful of cereal bars, the lithe brunette picked her
way through half a dozen fallen rotters and approached the high side of the
mound of unmoving Zs the family’s van was high-centered on.

For a second, Cade contemplated letting her see what was
inside the death ride and then enlisting her help in searching the contents.
Instead, as she was craning and skirting the vehicle’s driver’s side, like a
cop stopping traffic, Cade held his gloved hand up palm out and turned her away
with a slight nod to the 4Runner.

She froze in her tracks and shook her head. Matching his
gaze, she blinked first and turned a one-eighty. She made it one pace back
toward the vehicles, then paused as if in thought and performed a pirouette,
finishing a complete, albeit rather sloppy, three-sixty.

“When do I get to be part of the decision-making process?”
she asked, standing her ground and glaring back at Cade.

“You just were,” hollered Duncan, who was in the nearby Land
Cruiser with his window partway down and warming his hands in the air coming
out the heater vents.

“Come on then,” Cade said. “If you can handle Cobain there
... I’m sure you can stomach”—he gestured at the van—“what’s inside there.”

Without warning, big flakes began falling all around them.

Cade looked to the sky, and far off to the southeast, in the
band of blue left by the clouds that had already passed them by, saw a number
of contrails. Though he’d seen them thousands of times in his life, from this
distance there was no telling what made them, nor which way the jet aircraft
that had were headed.

There was a squeak and then a rapid
thwopping
as
Duncan toggled the wipers too high for the conditions. Cade swept his gaze to
his right and watched as Taryn skirted the bent and broken appendages sticking
out from under the minivan. She approached him and stood on her toes, with one
hand gripping his shoulder for support.

In the background the wiper noise died down to a manageable
thwop
every three seconds or so.

The mom’s destroyed upper palate and shredded lips and
cheeks were the first things Taryn saw as her eyes broke the plane of the
bottom of the driver’s door glass. She flicked her eyes up and saw the clumps
of brain and hair and bloody shards of white bone stuck fast to the once
cream-colored headliner.

Taryn was feeling the first tingling in her salivary glands
when her gaze swept the dead baby. Then, the knotted jump rope and what it
represented registered in her brain. She didn’t even get a chance to look in
the back seat before her jaw had locked up, and she lost her grip on Cade’s
shoulder and pitched back off of the crushed bodies she had been standing on.
In the next instant, her hands and knees went cold as she landed in the snow on
all fours. A tick later, pound cake and applesauce mixed with the pint of water
she’d just consumed painted the ground a foot from her face. It steamed coming
out and melted the snow on contact, creating a color strikingly similar to the
detritus dried onto the van’s headliner.

“Seen enough?”

“Fuck you,” she said to Cade, dragging a hand across her
mouth. “You could have warned me about the
baby
.”

“I could have also told you about the three boys, aged six
to ... ten, I’d guess. They’re in the backseat blindfolded and sitting
shoulder-to-shoulder, each with a bullet hole to the head most likely courtesy
of Mom there.” He shrugged and stood in front of the lift gate, examining the
stick figure family on the back window: Dad, Mom, three boys and the infant
represented as if it was already a crawler—on all fours—which Cade doubted. It
had probably just barely perfected rolling over and doing that seal thing Raven
used to do—up on her hands, back arched, head on a swivel checking out her new
world. Simultaneously as he searched the lift gate for a latch, he smiled at
the memory and his eyes misted over. Dragging a sleeve across them, he added,
“It’s a cruel world, Taryn.”

Wilson skidded in the snow, through the debris field from
the man’s destroyed head, and went to his knees beside Taryn.

“I’m OK,” she hissed, not looking at him. “Let’s just take
what we need and get going.”

“I’m looking for tire chains,” Cade said matter-of-factly.

Knowing her cars, Taryn said, “Don’t bother. That van has
different series tires than the SUVs.”

“You’re the expert,” said Cade. He opened the hatch and
stepped back while a mini-avalanche of loose sleeping bags, cans of food,
bottled waters and various toys—mostly sports-themed—spilled from the back.
After the items stopped pouring forth and settled in the snow, Cade stepped
over a mini-basketball and waded through the colorful—though soiled—sleeping bags
and started policing up the food, putting it all in the smallest of the bags, a
Mutant Turtles-themed item rated for summer nights, not surviving winter
temperatures.

Without needing a prompt, Wilson helped Taryn to her feet,
had a couple of private words with her, then proceeded to rifle through the
van, checking the side pockets, cup holders, and center console before finally
striking pay dirt within the glove compartment. Coming out with a smile and
several boxes of ammunition held aloft, he suddenly started feeling queasy
himself. Something about finding fortune on account of a young family’s tragic
end unsettled him more than the baby’s bugged-out lifeless eyes and Mom’s gray
matter frozen to the inside of the passenger window.