Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (22 page)

Cade reversed the Mack truck off the bodies it had come to
rest upon. Then, intent on clearing a path through the twice-dead Zs, he let
the truck roll slowly forward until he heard the hollow thunk of the bent plow
making contact with flesh and bone. Feeling the resistance of Lord knows how
many pounds of frigid meat building against the truck’s forward momentum, he
gave it more pedal.

In his wing mirror, he saw the diesel exhaust hanging heavy
over the road. Dropping his gaze lower where the words OBJECTS IN THIS MIRROR
ARE CLOSER THAN THEY MAY APPEAR were etched, he couldn’t help but see the reddish-black
ribbon of polished snow unfurling at his six. At first, as the plow truck
picked up speed, the limp arms and legs of the fallen Zs flailed and banged
into the curved metal blade, creating a morbid cadence that set his teeth to
singing. Once enough of them were concentrated up front and the truck gained momentum,
the discordant clanging stopped and the packed drift of dead meat simply slid
along the road, emitting an awful squelching noise not unlike that of calloused
fingers rubbing corduroy. What a sight this Zamboni of death must be to whoever
had eyes on it at the moment, thought Cade as the transmission downshifted and
there was a grunt from the hard-working power plant.

“Leaving a lot of chum in your wake,” said Duncan over the
two-way. “You should see it from our vantage.”

“Saw it from mine,” Cade said.

Thinking out loud, Duncan keyed the
Talk
button and
shared with everyone. “Sure puts the blood trails in Nam to shame.”

Ignoring the morbid observation, Cade flicked his gaze at
the burned-out town off to his right. He still couldn’t shake the feeling of
eyes on him. Earlier, at the top of the hill overlooking Huntsville, he had
been expecting shots to be fired their way but none came. Then the entire time
they were exposed on the road culling the dead so they wouldn’t have a hundred
crawlers to deal with after the thaw, he had been anticipating the sonic
crackle of hot lead cutting the air around them. And now, even after getting
through all of that unscathed, as he was clearing a swath through the dead and
the convoy began picking up speed, he half-expected to see a group of marauders
roaring toward them from Huntsville as it passed on their right.

Shifting his gaze back to the road ahead, Cade keyed the two-way.
“Just in case we’ve got breathers watching us, I want to use the plows as a
rolling shield for the SUVs. Jamie and Daymon … I want you both to get ahead of
Taryn’s truck. Lev and Taryn … once they’re in, you two slip right a little and
tighten up the formation. Grills to bumpers until Huntsville is behind us.” There
were no replies back. Just actions taken. Flicking his eyes intermittently to
the side mirror, Cade watched as the truck Lev was driving slowed and a gap was
created between it and Taryn’s. Then, slowly, like fighter planes escorting a
bombing sortie, the smaller SUVs passed Lev’s plow truck and tucked in tight behind
Taryn’s plow. And it wasn’t until they had driven another half a mile in this
tight grouping and the gradual sweeping left-to-right turn was behind them did
the feeling of being watched go away.

Suddenly neglectful of radio silence, Duncan said, “Was
everyone else’s butt puckered as tight as mine through all that?”

“If I’d have had a piece of coal up there, I’d be shitting
diamonds later,” Taryn replied. “Felt like I was being watched on the hill, for
sure. Same creepy sensation I felt twenty-four-seven at the airport with old Dickless
eye-humping me.”

“Should have said something to somebody,” Cade said, as the
dull gray reservoir and bordering picket of snow-dusted dogwoods drifted by on
the right. “’Trust your gut
always’
is what my old friend Desantos
preached.”

She asked, “Did you feel it, too?”

Cade said, “Of course I did. But I didn’t want to distract
you and the others from the task at hand. So from now on, just act on the
assumption that we are all being watched whenever we’re outside the wire.”

“Roger that,” replied Taryn, having adopted Cade’s
vernacular, if not the ability to process at all times what her sixth sense was
telling her.

In the lead vehicle, Cade put the radio aside and cracked a
half-smile. Though they had been in constant peril and faced death on a daily
basis, the small band of survivors had continually stared it down. Day-by-day they
were becoming less of a frayed rope—only as strong as its weakest strand—and
more of a cohesive unit, able to act without having to be micromanaged, as
evidenced by Wilson, the least tactically seasoned of them, acting without
instruction on two separate occasions so far.

Cade cast his gaze right, where on the reservoir’s choppy
surface, lolling and straining against their lines, he spotted three familiar
sailboats staggered a few yards apart and at anchor a good distance from shore.
The trio of angular bows were all pointed due east and nothing moved above deck
on any of them. Judging by the razor-sharp shadows cast across their decks by
main masts and the upper portion of their cabins, Cade deduced that the layer
of snow there was untracked. And further pointing toward the likelihood there
were no survivors aboard, like a shark’s unblinking eyes, the oval portholes on
all three vessels were darkened and there was no signs of movement below decks.
Just seeing the vessels produced a sharp pang in his gut, for weeks ago on a
trip from the compound to Morgan County Airport, from his seat in the DHS Black
Hawk, he had witnessed a group of gleeful survivors waving at him from these
same uninhabited teakwood decks.

Now, less than a minute since leaving Huntsville and the
feeling of impending doom behind, he was experiencing emotions that normally
would stay stuffed deep down in the back of his brain until he was wheels down
and home in his family’s loving embrace. Maybe the time away from his Delta
brothers was making him go soft again? Though the slim Thuraya sat-phone was
tucked out of sight inside a pocket, he could still sense the missed call light
strobing in there like a lonesome heartbeat he imagined was pounding a message
in Morse from Major Freda Nash saying: “Come back into the fold, Wyatt.
I
need you. The
team
needs you. Your
country
needs you.”
Country
,
he thought, looking in the passenger side mirror at a rapidly shrinking Huntsville.
Not much of it left to fight for
.

The reservoir’s wind-rippled waters slipped behind and soon
Cade could only see the road and snow-flocked trees in his wing mirrors. The
plow kept scraping the road ahead free of snow and the spreader continued
dropping the sand-gravel mixture on the newly cleared asphalt; soon a natural
slot appeared in the mountains ahead. He gently eased up on the gas pedal and
pulled over, stopping adjacent to another large contingent of inanimate dead.

Keying the radio, he said, “Knock yourself out, Kids.” He put
the truck in
Park
, jumped from the cab and, employing the Gerber,
dropped every single Z in his general vicinity with a swift jab to the eye. By
the time the others had dismounted and come forward, a couple of dozen former
humans were dead again and hopefully the souls of who they used to be were
going in the correct direction for a happy rendezvous with those preceding them
in death.

Cade walked toward Daymon, Jamie, and Lev, who were jawing
with the Kids, and in passing said, “You all take care of rest of the dead
while me and Old Man chain up the SUVs.”

“You sure that’s necessary, Boss?” Daymon asked, making a
face. “They’re four by fours.”

“Just hoping to head ‘ol Murphy off at the pass, that’s
all.”

“Pardon the pun, right?” Daymon tugged his knit cap tight
over his mini-dreads and then pulled
Kindness
from her sheath. He looked
at Cade with a smile and a rare twinkle in his eye. “Thought you’d never ask.”
He turned and strode toward the small herd and, as he passed through the low-hanging
exhaust, his black boots set the vapor swirling, giving the impression that he
was walking on clouds.

Cade watched him go for a second then flicked his gaze to
the others. They were arming themselves and chatting like they were getting
ready for a night out—not fixing to take down a hundred former human beings:
men, women, and children all represented within the eastbound procession. He
called Wilson over and relieved him of the baseball bat. Then he drew the
Gerber and held it out, pommel first. “Use this,” he said, more order than
request. “You’ll find it’s much more efficient.”

Without a word, Wilson took the offering and started out
after the others, who were already following closely in Daymon’s footsteps.

Cade leaned the bat against the 4Runner. Then, favoring his
tweaked left ankle, he walked to the Land Cruiser, where Duncan was bent over
and rummaging through the gear in back.

Hearing the squeak of Cade’s soles on the settled snow,
Duncan poked his head around the rear of the SUV. “You prick,” he said. “Volunteerin’
me
instead of Carrot Top to get down on the cold ground and monkey with
these things?” He tossed the two plastic boxes unceremoniously to the road,
breaking one wide open in the process. Grimacing, he hoisted a tangled tire
chain from the box and held it up in front of his face like a metal veil.
“Hell, I’d just as soon try to shove a hot buttered noodle up a cat’s ass than
shred my fingers putting these on.”

“Gimme one of them,” Cade said. “I wanted the Kid to get back
to being used to seeing blood on his blade.” He took the chain from Duncan and
gestured at the dead crowding the road up ahead. “This is just the tip of the
iceberg. There’s bound to be thousands of them at the pass and in and around
Huntsville and Eden.”

“And?” Duncan drawled. “You obviously wanted some alone time
with me, too. So spit it out.”

Cade looked over his shoulder and saw the five survivors
tearing into the immobilized herd. On the periphery, where he had asked that
the corpses be deposited for ease of removal later, Wilson was jabbing the
black dagger head-high then immediately dragging each kill to the shoulder
where a small pile of them was building. Daymon and Jamie were out ahead of
everyone. He had taken his hat off and his stunted dreads were bobbing with
each methodical swipe of the machete. On the far side of Daymon, where Cade
imagined the dashed yellow centerline to be, Jamie was bringing her tomahawk
down in short efficient strokes, dropping the dead into vertical heaps on the
road where they once stood.

All the while the unlikely duo were at work with their
blades, Lev and Taryn were following in their footsteps and dragging the
leaking sacks of pallid skin from their metal-flashing wake.

Cade regarded Duncan with a hard stare. All business-like,
his hand touching the Glock strapped to his leg, he said, “What do you think
about us staying the night in Huntsville when we’re done in Ogden Canyon?”

Duncan’s brow shot up. He hadn’t been expecting this.
Especially after the one-two punch the younger man’s family took last time he
was away for an extended period of time. “Sure … but what’s Brooke gonna say?”

“I won’t be asking her. This is for the good of the group
and
needs
to be done. It’s the first real advantage we have had ...
hell,
all
of mankind has had over the dead without having to resort to
the use of tactical nukes. I just hope the President and her people in Springs
don’t have so many irons in the fire that they throw away this first real opportunity
to make a huge dent in their numbers.”

With a look of confusion on his face, Duncan removed his
glasses and a square of fabric from a pocket. “So what are you asking
me
for?”

“Because of where we’ll be staying.”

Not following, Duncan regarded the nonstop movement down the
road.

Cade followed Duncan’s gaze and, after they both watched the
macabre happenings there for a couple of beats, he noticed the older man’s
shoulders droop.

Wearing a look of concern, Duncan turned to Cade. “You mean
you want me to stay the night in Glenda’s home.”

Cade nodded. “If she’s alright with it. You can call the
compound and ask her first.”

“Well, well. I’ll get to meet Louie after all,” Duncan said,
the look of concern morphing to one of astonishment. He shook his head, cast
his eyes down. “I don’t think the old boy is going to have much to say about
his wife’s new man.”

“I’m not following,” Cade said.

“You’ll see,” Duncan replied, forcing a smile. “Let’s get
these chains on.” As he bent down to grab the box of chains, the smile faded
and, triggered by the fear that he might find out things about Glenda she had
not yet divulged to him, that old familiar craving was back.

A short while after adding a number of fresh lesions to his
knuckles, Duncan was sitting in the passenger seat and pounding his fist on the
dash in perfect time with the chains thrumming against the freshly plowed road.

“What’s eating you?” asked Daymon, taking his eyes off the
road for a long two-count.

Seemingly hypnotized by the shiny wood veneer fronting the
glove compartment, Duncan stared and drummed, but made no reply.

Nonplussed by the lack of response, Daymon shook his head
and shifted his gaze forward just as the 4Runner two car lengths ahead rolled
over an adult-sized corpse, splitting it in half at the hips and sending the
two pieces spinning off in entirely different directions. He muttered an
expletive as the legs and pelvis went into a lazy flat spin across the snow and
became hopelessly tangled up against the right-side guardrail. Then, in the
blink of an eye, he was channeling a sailor and his muttered curse words were a
full on verbal assault on his own bad luck. And though his reflexes were
superb, due to the effect the chains had on both the steering and acceleration,
when he tried to wheel around the three-foot-long chunk of legless upper torso,
the maneuver was not entirely successful. Like hitting a speed bump at
thirty-five miles per hour, the luxury sport-utility rose up on the left side,
but only shortly, because the speed bump was a skull and, bone not having the
same properties as cured asphalt, it imploded, sending a hollow sounding
pop
coursing up through the floorboards
.
In reaction to the sudden change in
angle, in unison, both men listed left and then jerked back to the right as the
rig settled back to earth and the metronomic cadence that had been vibrating
the chassis and their teeth returned, as loud and annoying as ever.

Still grimacing from the imagined visual produced by the
awful noise, Duncan answered the question. “What’s eating me?” he said, voice
rising an octave. “A whole bunch of little problems, that’s what. And all of
‘em put together is like a whole school of piranhas tearing me apart bit by
bit.”

“I feel ya,” Daymon said just as one of the plow trucks
delivered a metal hockey check that sent a dozen corpses careening against the
canyon wall. “I’m dreading the moment my girl runs out of her pills. Ever since
the shit happened in Robert Christian’s mansion she’s been a special flavor of
crazy.” He paused for a tick and then went on, “And when they do run out it is
going to be ultimatum time for good ‘ol Daymon.”

“What do you mean?” Without conscious thought, Duncan popped
open the glove compartment.

Daymon shot him a glare. “Why you goin’ in there?” he asked.

“Habit,” replied Duncan. “An old one that’s dying hard.”

Up ahead, the road took a sharp dip where it looked as if an
unchecked stream had spilled down the opposite hillside and eroded the roadbed
underneath. The four vehicles ahead of them slowed, entered the dip and then
rounded the following right-hand sweeper, picking up speed along the way. As
Daymon braked to navigate the beginnings of a major washout, his eyes were
drawn down below to his left, where visible in places through the snow cover
was a mosaic of color. After staring for a second, he realized what he was
seeing was the clothing of the dead that had fallen or been pushed from the
road. And as he steered nearer to the guardrail and got a closer look at the
canyon bottom, from his elevated position he saw arms reaching up, the fingers
frozen claw-like and seemingly taking desperate swipes at the sky.

“Gotta be a couple thousand of ‘em down there,” Duncan said.

Still gawking at the macabre sight, Daymon replied, “Double
or triple that number ... at least.”

Duncan rapped his shredded knuckles on the glove box door.
“Better keep your eyes on the road,” he said as brake lights flared red up
ahead and the lead truck with Cade at the wheel swung a sudden right-to-left
arc over three lanes.

Heeding Duncan’s warning, Daymon slowed, and once the taller
plow trucks pulled around the bend, got his first good look at the Ogden Canyon
roadblock that up until now he had only seen from the air. To the right of the
road rose a nearly vertical cliff face with scrub and gnarled trees clinging to
it tenaciously. Opposite the steep face, beyond the guardrail, the canyon
dropped off sharply an indeterminate number of feet to the logjam of dead
bodies that a second ago had been the object of his fixation. And looming a
dozen feet over Cade’s now inert and inexplicably high-sided plow truck was a
wall of rust-colored shipping containers. Best he could tell, they were still
mostly blocking off the body-strewn four-lane.

Four abreast, three deep, and stacked two high, the
containers looked to have originally been assembled in an inverted ‘V.’ The
twelve on the side with the drop off had been pushed inward, presumably by the
surging dead, and now sat nearly parallel with the guardrail. From Daymon’s
viewing angle, the breach there looked to be three feet wide and at the most
ten feet deep. And, like cattle in a chute, dozens of unmoving corpses were
stuck fast in it. Most were upright and had succumbed to the effects of the
cold mid-stride. A handful of them teetered precariously over the guardrail,
spared a trip to the bottom of the canyon due to Old Man Winter’s sudden
intervention.

Daymon steered the Land Cruiser around the 4Runner, leaned
forward and looked across Duncan and saw that both Jamie and Wilson were
staring slack-jawed at the scene they had all just happened upon. A little
overwhelmed by the scope of things and just how close the truck Cade was
driving had come to driving off the cliff face, he swallowed hard and said to
Duncan in a low voice, “We’ve got our effin work cut out for us.”

Always the optimist, Duncan replied dryly, “And two hours of
light left in which to git-er-done.”

Noting the sarcasm in the older man’s voice, Daymon nodded
and said agreeably, “We are fucked.” He applied the brakes and, once the
monotonous thrumming of the chains quieted, added, “And I have a sinking
feeling we’re all gonna be staying the night in Huntsville.”

“I think you’re onto something,” replied Duncan,
cryptically.

Daymon pulled the rig hard to the right and parked it with
the passenger side tires on the soft shoulder. He pressed the Engine Stop/Start
button, quieting the motor.

“Why don’t you hail Sarge and see what he was thinking going
balls-to-the-wall toward the drop off.”

“No blood no foul,” Duncan replied. “Besides … he’s the only
one among us who’s not acting like his panties are bunchin up. No sense in
driving him there.”

Daymon made no reply. He was looking at the listing plow
truck with its horribly pranged blade up front and recalling Cade’s prophetic
words:
Just trying to head ‘ol Murphy off at the pass.
“Mission
accomplished,” he muttered.

“What?” said Duncan, his fingers curling around the grab-bar
near his head.

“Never mind,” Daymon replied.

The doors on the Land Cruiser opened simultaneously and both
men exited, Duncan wincing at the annoying metal-to-metal groan his produced.
Eyes downcast, he made his way out of the deep snow-choked ditch and, sneering
with disgust, kicked aside a severed leg blocking his path. Slipping, sliding,
and cursing under his breath while using the vehicle for stability, he shuffled
to the front of the SUV, stepped over the crushed cadaver the leg had
apparently come off and, finally standing on flat ground, shook a fist at Daymon.

Without a trace of sincerity in the delivery, Daymon smiled,
looked over the hood at Duncan standing ankles deep in gore, and said, “Sorry …
I had no idea the ditch was there.”

***

Sitting in the listing truck, left cheek mashed against the
side glass, Cade relived his near-death-experience. First he had felt the
building mass of corpses working against the engine. Then he had eyed the
looming wall of metal and tried to time his left turn so that the blade up
front would clear as many of the Zs away from its base as possible. Finally, as
he gave the truck more gas and straightened the wheel, two things happened
simultaneously. First, the extra added weight bogged the truck down and there
was the groan of rending metal. Then, as a gunshot-like bang of the plow trying
to tear free from its mount rang out, all resistance of the bodies grinding against
pavement gave way, the truck suddenly lurched forward and he felt a sudden
weightlessness.

Ass off the seat and wrestling with the wheel and brake to
get the combined tonnage of truck and load stopped, time slowed for Cade. A
heartbeat away from impacting the guardrail and a fatal plummet over the ledge,
he recalled grabbing the door handle and preparing to bail out. In the next
half-beat, fingers touching the cool metal, inexplicably the sluggish handling
truck hauled over to the left and ground to a complete stop, its once-straight plow
blade bent into an “L” and periscoping over the hood.

Flashing back to the present, Cade took a deep breath and pried
his fingers free of the door handle. He said a prayer, thanking his God as he
looked past the sloped hood and saw the accumulation of bodies below. He
regarded the blade and came to the conclusion that because of the way it was
bent completely to vertical and rocking back and forth gently—thanks to his
numbskull miscalculation at the first roadblock, and this new failure to
foresee certain handling characteristics—it was now rendered all but worthless.
So he set the brake and stilled the engine.
Time to make lemonade out of
lemons.

He hailed Taryn and Lev on the radio and asked one of them
to pull close to the rock spreader attached to his truck. He climbed over the
transmission tunnel and flung the passenger door open. Half-expecting gravity
to send the fifty-some-odd pounds of metal, vinyl, and glass right back into
his face, he immediately leaned back into the cab. But instead of the
undesirable result, the door hit the break point and hinged wide open with the
mirror hitting sheet metal and finally arresting it. After looking over the
sill and judging the drop as doable—even with his tweaked ankle—Cade lowered
himself slowly, facing the detritus-smeared undercarriage, until he felt his
boots come into contact with the unusually spongy roadway. With the stench of
decay assailing his nose, and fully aware of the dangers the splintered bone
and body fluids presented, he limped through the minefield of body parts and
around back of the truck where he was met by Lev.

Holding a nylon tow strap he’d scrounged from under the seat
of his UDOT truck, Lev asked, “Where do you want it?”

A little embarrassed by the predicament he had gotten
himself into, Cade said nothing. The only child in him coming out, he took the
orange strap from Lev, duck-walked under the truck’s passenger side and hooked
it to the frame. When he turned back, Lev had the other end attached to his
truck’s bumper and was behind the wheel, hat off, and staring ahead with a
stony set to his jaw.

Cade straightened the strap and backpedaled well away from
the rig’s exposed undercarriage. Flashing a thumbs up to Lev, he bellowed,
“Go!”

There was a puff of black smoke and the Mack’s big diesel
howled. The strap produced an inharmonious twang as it snapped taut. Then,
slowly but surely, Cade’s
mistake
rolled off the crushed corpses, banged
back onto all ten tires, and lolled side-to-side like a dinghy in a swell for a
quick second until the load in back leveled and all movement ceased.

Grimacing, Cade looked at his mess. For one, he had
drastically overestimated the amount of bodies the plow could handle. He
studied the distance from the wall of cadavers and the guardrail dwarfed by it.
Couldn’t have been more than six feet from going over. Shaking his head, he
shifted his gaze to the scraped and dinged white metal rail and the vertically
ribbed wall of the nearest container and saw through the gap there what had to be
thousands of Zs packed in tight.

Out of his truck and working to get the strap untied, Lev
paused and said, “That was close.”

Cade made no reply. Just stared at what almost was and what
they were going to have to face if his plan here failed.

Having just walked up, Duncan said, “Lev … I think if our
boy
Crash
here woulda somehow jammed just one more carcass under his
truck, we’d be looking over that rail and saying sayonara to him.”

Lev started to say something until he saw how shaken Cade
appeared.

So Duncan did it for him. “Were you trying to commit
vehicular hari-kari there, Cade?”

Cade was about to make a reply he would have probably
regretted when Lev reentered the conversation. “What do you figure, a couple
hundred new ones were showing up here daily until the weather stopped ‘em?”

“At least,” replied Cade, his glare softening as he looked
away from Duncan and met Lev’s gaze. “Good thing for us is it seems just as
many end up below as actually squeeze through the gap.”

“Quit yer jawin’ about couldas and wouldas,” Duncan said.
“This
would
have all been avoided if
someone
”—he looked directly
at Cade—“had let me dynamite this pass closed for good.”

“But I didn’t,” Cade said. He locked eyes with Duncan. “And
I told you my reasoning behind it. And you agreed.”

“I was drunk.”

“When weren’t you?” Cade said.

Duncan had nothing to say to that. Instead, he shifted his
weight and looked longingly up at the sheer rock face.

“Now gather round,” Cade called, his voice carrying down the
road to the others.