Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (38 page)

The junction where 39 and 16 came to a “T” was for the most
part unchanged from the day before when Dregan had come through. The bus was still
on its side. The ditch where he had found Lena and Mikhail, though no longer filled
in with drifted snow, served both as a reminder to them all as to what went
down here weeks ago, and what
he
still had to accomplish before he could
finally achieve that sense of closure he longed for.

Driving one-handed, he crossed himself and looked out his
side window to the blue sky above. The prayer he said was a simple one. Merely
a request to God to make sure Lena was taken care of and would rest well with
the angels for all of eternity. For he knew that if he carried out this mission
the way he had played it out over and over in his mind hundreds of times
already, the justice meted out by him under God’s watchful eye, based on his
firm beliefs from decades of being reminded of the Commandments, would amount
to nothing less for him than a one-way ticket to eternal damnation.

With that gloomy thought settling in, he slowed and pulled
the Tahoe just to the right of the decaying drift of corpses the former police
cruiser had been high-centered on when he had found it already stripped of the
radio and drained of most of its gasoline. Not a bad find considering the
circumstances. All he had to do was scrape the former owner’s brains off the headliner
and put a square of foam over the cloth driver’s seat where several pints of
the man’s blood had soaked in.

He rattled the shifter into
Park
. He looked sidelong
at Peter. “Stay here,” he growled as he shouldered the door open and stepped
out onto the blacktop.

He strode down the two-lane past the Blazer and the two
middle Humvees and stopped beside the Humvee driven by his brother, Henry. The
door was ajar and an awful smelling gray whorl of cigarette smoke was wafting
out.

“Why are we stopping here?’ asked Henry. Smoke curled from
his nostrils as he stared his older brother down.

“Equipment check,” said Dregan gruffly. “Get the launcher manned.
I want a round dropped into the middle of the herd.”

“Futile,” said Henry. “Sure the concussion’ll drop the lot
of ‘em, but they’re going to get right back up. Most of them at least.” He blew
smoke from his nose. “Chances of a little piece of shrapnel piercing skull and
scrambling brain … highly unlikely.”

“Hank … let me do the thinking. I simply asked that you make
sure the thing isn’t going to jam up on us when we get to where we’re going.”

“You’re planning on using this on breathers?”

“If I have to,” said Dregan. He stepped back as Henry blew
another plume of smoke between the door pillar and flicked the butt past his
face.

“Step back a few more paces, then.” Henry closed his door, jockeyed
the Humvee back and forth and pulled the squat rig out of the five-slot and to
the head of the column.

Dregan watched this and then bent his gaze to the herd. It
was clear that since he’d dismounted and the dead had become aware of the
convoy, the ones still standing were beginning to turn in place, moving about
half as fast as normal—which wasn’t saying much, unless you were directly in
their path and had no way of changing that part of the equation.

There was a squeal of brakes as the Humvee with Henry at the
wheel came to a halt near the overturned school bus. A figure emerged from the
turret. Shoulders and a stocking cap, mostly. A handful of seconds passed before
Dregan heard his brother bellow, “Going hot.” This caused a lot of heads at the
far away front of the herd to begin a slow swivel his way.

Three more seconds passed and, in the same gravelly voice, Henry
hollered, “Fire in the hole.” There was a hollow
thwomp
and with his
naked eye Dregan saw the projectile arc up—trailing a wisp of smoke in its wake
for the first thirty feet or so—and then come down in the middle of the
gathered dead. There was a concussive
whoomp
and bodies toppled in a
sort of concentric ring as the middle third of the shuffling procession was
slapped to the wet blacktop by the expanding shockwave.

Dregan put the two-way radio to his mouth. He wanted to get
an idea of what he had to work with. He thumbed the
Talk
button. “Give
me one more straight north down the centerline”—nearly all of the solid yellow
stripe was visible by now—“maximum range.”

Henry went through the same procedure, calling out
going
hot
and then
fire in the hole
. Something he probably lifted from an
actor’s dialogue in
Band of Brothers
or something similar, mused Dregan.
He heard the
thwomp
but failed to track the projectile. However, a
handful of seconds later the explosion was impossible to miss as the grenade
landed near a stalled-out car and window glass was sent flying to all points of
the compass, glittering like chaff kicked out of a fighter jet, before falling
to earth and skittering across the roadway.

Dregan liked what he saw. Though he was no expert with this
weapon, he gathered the launcher’s maximum range to be two thousand yards, give
or take a few.

He smiled. “I’ve seen enough,” he said into the radio, even
as he was climbing back into the Tahoe.

***

Ten minutes removed from the impromptu firepower display, with
the Tahoe back in the lead, the eleven-vehicle convoy had squeezed by the
blockage at the junction single file, every one of them trading a little paint
with the bus’s undercarriage.

***

Another ten minutes slipped into the past and the convoy was
a few miles west of the junction when Dregan slowed the Tahoe and let it coast
to a stop adjacent to the lower and upper quarry roads. With Peter looking on expectantly,
he called up Gregory on the two-way radio to see what, if anything, he had learned
from his captives.

***

A handful of miles west of the quarry, Gregory was dividing
a Hershey’s bar into thirds. Keeping the smallest piece for himself—a
calculated move he hoped wouldn’t go unnoticed—he offered the two larger
squares of milk chocolate to the girls.

Nose curled, Sasha said, “What’s the white stuff?”

“It’s past its sell by date … sorry,” said the bearded man.
“Most everything is getting that way now.”

“I’ll pass on being hand-fed by Paul Bunyon,” said Sasha,
turning her head away.

Raven shook her head vehemently at the offering.

The man shrugged and smiled, big and toothy.

Fake
, thought Raven.

He wrapped the chocolate in the foil. “I’ll save it in case
you change your mind.” The wedge of foil went into his pocket and no sooner had
he shifted and scooped up his rifle, there was a soft little chirp emanating
from inside the same pocket.

A phone
, thought Raven as she watched with rapt
attention. About all she
could
do. Her arms, like Sasha’s, were bound
behind her with a piece of rope the man had unraveled and cut from the bracelet
he had been wearing. It was the same kind of thing her dad wore on his wrist,
only the man’s was a bright hunter’s orange and Dad’s was olive green.
Amazingly, she could feel her fingers. So far this—her first experience as a
hostage—was nothing like she had seen on television. A few minutes after she
had walked in on Sasha being taken forcibly, the notion that they were in
immediate danger of unspeakable things happening to them vanished.

In fact, both she and Sasha had already begun trying to work
free of their bonds and it seemed as if he was none the wiser. Not exactly the
sharpest knife in the drawer, Sasha had mouthed just a minute ago while the man
rooted around in his backpack for the chocolate, with his rifle propped on the
dead snag and his back facing them.

So as the man who called himself Gregory dug into his pocket
for whatever was making the electronic noise, Raven situated herself so that
her hands were near the jagged end of a broken branch sticking vertically from
the fallen log she was seated on.

The man pulled out a radio similar in size to the Motorola
he had confiscated from Sasha—aside from tying them up—the only smart move on
his part thus far. He pressed a button on the chirping device and answered with
a simple
yes.
At once a voice emanated from the speaker: “What have you
learned?”

“The girls say they are orphans,” Gregory answered. “They
were taken in by missionaries who started mistreating them. They say they were
running away when they stumbled onto my position.”

Watching Sasha bury her face in her knees, Raven suppressed
a smile.

“What?” said the raspy voice, incredulous.

“That’s what they told me, Dad. The older one … says she’s
seventeen. She had a radio and a knife. The younger one … says she’s ten. She
had a knife and says she is allergic to bees.”

Again Raven pushed back against the urge to laugh out loud.
She felt the cord hot against her wrists and continued to move it back and
forth, short sawing motions, applying as much pressure as she dared.

“Allergic to bees?” said the voice. “What the hell does that
have to do with Lena?”

“The younger girl … she has one of those EpiPen-looking things
hanging around her neck. I let her keep it, though. Just in case she gets
stung.”

“They’re tied up, right?”

“Yep.”

“First off, there’s no bees out collecting pollen this time
of year. Secondly, you dolt, how’s she going to use it if she’s tied up.” The
last part wasn’t posed as a question. Gregory, though, didn’t catch it. He was
about to talk but was cut off. “What about Lena?” The voice was gruff and
direct and there was no mistaking this as anything other than a question.

“I didn’t ask about Lena,” answered Gregory, eyes darting to
the girls. “I figured I’d leave that to you.”

“Take the EpiPen thing from the girl and keep your eye on
them.”

The call dropped off.

“Zombie apocalypse or not ... aren’t you a little old to
still be living with your
dad
?” asked Raven.

Gregory said nothing. He rose and stretched then took
Sasha’s knife from high up where he had stabbed it into the towering pine’s
trunk. He wiped the pitch from the blade onto his pants. Then, careful not to
nick skin, he cut the EpiPen from Raven’s neck, and without inspecting the
metallic cylinder, stowed it in his right front jacket pocket.

After the blade was no longer near her neck, Raven stared up
at him, the look in her eyes more like one she reserved for a stray animal dead
in the road or a toddler Z who never had a chance to experience living. Her
eyes tracked his hand as he stuck the knife back into the tree next to hers. She
figured even if she was standing on a pair of stilts there would be no way for
her to reach either one of them—the guy was just that big.

“This should be over in no time,” the man finally said. “Then
you two can go back to wherever you came from.” He smiled and Raven took note,
thinking it to be genuine.

“Why the fuck are you holding us then?” Sasha spat. “Let us
go and you won’t
die
like all the others.”

“Shut up,” Raven blurted. “You got us into this hole, Sash.
No need to keep on digging.”

“Quit fighting,” said the man, a pained look on his face. “I
promise I won’t hurt you as long as you don’t give me any reason to. Just be
patient … you are not our problem. Whoever killed my sister is our problem.” The
man turned his attention to the curved stretch of road beyond the clearing.

Sasha and Raven locked eyes for a second. Then Sasha flicked
her gaze to her knife, an unspoken message Raven took to mean they weren’t just
going to run if given the chance. So, with the cold finger of dread tickling
the short hairs at the nape of her neck, she went back to work dragging the
rope along the jagged protrusion at her back.

Sitting on a berm of slowly melting snow eight thousand feet
above sea level and roughly eight miles northwest of downtown Eden, Utah, Oliver
Gladson inhaled mightily and then passed the feather-adorned roach clip to his
new partner in crime. Hands now free, he put the tips of both index fingers to
his lips and crossed his eyes. Pretending he was new at this, he bobbled his
head back and forth like one of those dolls given out as souvenirs at a Jazz game.
Finished clowning, he moved his mouth fish-like, producing one ever-growing
smoke ring after another.

Meanwhile, Daymon was simultaneously relighting the joint
and puffing on the little nub, trying to get it to spark. “Roll another,” he said,
suddenly feeling light-headed from the trifecta of altitude, heavy cardio—the
most he’d done in weeks—and good ‘ol Mary Jane, which he had not partaken in
since the earliest days of the Omega outbreak.

“All gone,” said Oliver, choking the words out along with
the last little curls of smoke he had been holding back. “There’s some in my
bag in the truck. And even more at the house”—his eyes went wide and he
smiled—“lots more.”

Daymon pulled his goggles down over his eyes, more so to
guard against the blazing noon sun than the intermittent wind gusts. The
temperature was still hovering near freezing at the top of Eden View where they
were sitting. Not so much though a third of the way down the black diamond run,
where the air had an almost physical presence to it. Inversion layer, he
thought it was called. He snugged his new gloves on and picked up his poles. He
crossed the poles, speared the tips into the topsoil and lifted himself off the
snow. Standing, he turned his head and fixed a stare on Oliver, who was still
sitting with his back propped against one of the three Powder Canyon snowmobiles
they had liberated from an equipment shed in order to ferry themselves up the ski
hill. “Last night you kind of dodged my question,” Daymon said, feeling even
more light-headed after standing. “Never did hear how you made it all the way
from Oregon to Huntsville unscathed.”

Oliver pushed off of the snowmobile and stood on his
battered skis. “I avoided the
deadheads
by traveling only at night.” A
little buzzed, he laughed at the irony in the name he’d chosen to call the
infected. “Ogden was real hairy. If it wasn’t for the night vision goggles along
with the rifle and bags of weed I found in a dead redneck’s SUV … I’d be dead myself
now, or worse … I’d be a
deadhead
like them. After making it through the
city on foot, I rode a bike up the North Ogden Canyon highway and found it blocked.”

“Glenda escaped by bike, too,” Daymon said, indifferently. “So
you backtracked to the south pass.”

“Yep,” admitted Oliver. “And lucky for me the deadheads had
somehow breached it—”

“It’s sealed up now,” said Daymon, explaining how they’d
left the gravel-filled plow trucks shoring up the containers. He went on, “And
your mind’s gonna be blown when you see the setup we have going on at the
compound.”

“I just want to see my mom again. That’ll make everything I
went through to get here all worthwhile.” He smiled a dumb stoner’s smile and donned
his goggles. They were the two-lens type that made him look like a World War I
fighter ace. All he needed to complete the look was a flowing scarf and a Sopwith
Camel biplane. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and pointed
down mountain with his poles.

The blaze-orange plow truck was impossible to miss. The plow
was in the down position and twin feathery plumes were spewing off to the sides,
painting the guardrails and trees with dirty brown snow.

“Shit!” Daymon exclaimed. He looked at his watch.
Quarter
of noon
.
Fuck.
He had totally lost track of time. Being high hadn’t
helped at all. The plan had been to get one or two runs in and return to Eden
and begin clearing dead from the remaining houses. The first part had gone off
without a hitch. During the two hours between sunup and when their decision to
check out the resort was fomented, they had left ten city blocks strewn with Z
corpses. The latter part of their hastily constructed and ill-advised plan, not
so much. He reached into his new jacket and pulled the radio from an inner
pocket. Found the volume turned way down.
Shit, shit, shit.
He turned it
up halfway and shook his head. “They’ll call when they see the rig in the lot.”

Pushing off with his poles, Daymon launched down the hill,
planted the once-pristine pair of thousand-dollar skis perpendicular to the
fifty-five degree incline, and shot for a patch of virgin snow drifted deep between
two stunted pines. The skis were parabolic twin-tip models, lightweight and
highly maneuverable—all of which didn’t matter one bit with only half a foot of
accumulated snow in places and a lot less everywhere else. Sparks lanced from
his edges with each rock strike, and the racket of the juddering bases grinding
over hidden obstacles was earsplitting. But Daymon was in heaven doing
something he thought never again possible.

The weathered tree trunks whipped by in his peripheral
vision, one on each side, and he was making quick turns toward a small
outcropping he had been working his nerve up to drop from. In deep powder
conditions and on his home mountain he would not have thought twice before
hucking off a similar cliff band and attempting the maneuver his newly acquired
Salomon 1080 skis were named for. But today, in these conditions and with none
of his old Ski Patrol buddies around to scrape him off the hillside if he
fucked up, pulling a ten-eighty—with, or without sticking a sick grab—was not
going to happen. And there wasn’t enough weed in the Land Cruiser below to get
him high enough to take one more run and follow through. So instead he tucked his
poles and shot off the outcropping at an angle parallel to the mountain and let
his knees absorb the rather hard landing.

Now on the second pair of identical skis, and tacking a
second high speed run onto them, he could literally feel the base layer being
abraded away, and started catching chemical-laced whiffs off the melting P-Tex.
So to ensure he didn’t have to walk the rest of the way down, he tucked again
and rode the second half of the hill without getting air while staying away
from the ever-growing patches where the rocks and dirt and grass was showing
through.

With no idea if Oliver was behind him or not, Daymon hit the
end of the marked trail and, just like the old days, rode his momentum all the
way into the parking lot and came to a grinding halt beside the looming orange plow
truck where he received a well-earned double dose of stink eye from Cade and
Duncan.

Duncan was standing near the gore-encrusted plow blade, arms
crossed and looking like he had something to say.

Daymon tossed his poles down, clicked out of the thrashed
skis, and kicked them aside. Sweating profusely, he unzipped the jacket to his
waist. Feeling eyes boring into him, he ignored Cade, who was looking down on
him from behind the big rig’s steering wheel, and instead took the path of
least resistance. He looked over to Duncan, who was standing by the driver’s
side door, and knitted a brow. “What?” he said rather sheepishly.

Before Duncan could unload one barrel, let alone both on the
dreadlocked man, there was a harsh grating racket and Oliver skied onto the
parking lot with sparks flying off his edges. Following Daymon’s line, he made
it to within a dozen feet of the UDOT truck where his momentum bled off and he
stepped out of the still smoking skis.

“What in the hell,” exclaimed Duncan, “do we have here?” He
gave the two a quick once over then answered his own question. “Let’s see,
there’s a black guy with dreadlocks and a white guy wearing a hat sprouting
fake dreadlocks”—Oliver flashed a lopsided smile at that and peeled off the
novelty ski cap—“and if I didn’t know any better I would have thought I was
looking at two-thirds of the Jamaican bobsled team. Only you two are dressed
nowhere like that class act. Wearing all that neon makes you look like a couple
of Technicolor dildos who’ve lost their way and ended up on the mountain.” He
pointed in the general direction of Eden. “The porno convention is down there.
You dolts must have taken a wrong turn in that four-by-wanna-be Cadillac.”

Skis, poles, and gloves shed, Oliver, still clad in a neon green
ski ensemble and clunky boots, approached cautiously.

Daymon said nothing but looked to Oliver, a stupid pot-affected
grin spreading across his face.

“Why yes, yes we did,” said Oliver, sounding rather
disingenuous.

Finally, somewhat composed, Daymon peeled off his goggles. “How’d
you find us?” he asked.

Duncan shifted his weight and leaned against the truck. “The
first dead giveaway was the SUV-sized hole in the front of the ski shop at the
base of the hill.”

“The accordion security gate was closed and locked,” Daymon
protested. “The Kids have the bolt cutters so we had to improvise.”

Duncan said, “Cade here put two and two together and we
followed the Powder Mountain Ski Resort signs. Hell, they’ve got one every
hundred feet leading up to here like breadcrumbs. Must have had a hell of an
advertising budget.”

“Nope … just steep lift ticket prices,” Oliver proffered,
stoned eyes glittering. “And the Salt Lake and Ogden douchebags don’t even
blink at paying them.”

“Didn’t,” added Daymon. “Past tense. They’re
all
gone
now.”

Duncan changed the subject. “We drove through what’s left of
Eden. Good job coming in. What’d it take you, all of an hour to put them down?”

“Thirty minutes,” said Oliver, his grin fading. “I already
started in on them yesterday.”

Arm and head hanging out the plow truck window, Cade asked,
“And the North Ogden Pass … is it still blocked?”

“Real good,” Oliver said. “I got a car running a while back,
waited until full dark and drove up to get a look at it from this side. Even
glowing green you could tell whoever threw it up meant business. In addition to
the shipping containers—kind of what Daymon said you all did up at the south
pass—these folks left the trucks they used to haul the containers up there
nosed in against the barricade. Tires weren’t flattened, though.” He looked up
at Cade. “That was genius.”

“Well, hell,” drawled Duncan. “Why didn’t you
boys
answer the radio then?”

Like a mountain lion waiting to pounce, Oliver began, “Just
cause you’re doinking my mom—”

Cutting him off at the pass, Duncan said, “Whoever told you
that is full of shit.”

“Daymon told me all about you two,” Oliver said, fingers on
both hands curling into fists. “Don’t think you’re going to slide in and try
and fulfill some father-figure fantasy of yours using me as a stand in for
little boy lost”—as the man talked, Duncan’s shoulders slumped and he began to
worry his silver goatee—“in case it slipped your mind already … I just buried
my
dad behind that house.”

Daymon looked away as Duncan pushed off the truck and took a
step toward Oliver. “You don’t have a thing to worry about, Oliver. I am the farthest
thing from Louie you will ever encounter. Drunken degenerate gamblers just do
not make good father material. That’s why I never had any kids of my own … that
I know of, anyway.” He chuckled at his own funny. Then the chuckle became the
full-blown crazy man cackle he was known to belt out now and again, which drove
Oliver back to the Land Cruiser where he promptly lit up a joint and started
changing from the ski gear back into his makeshift armor and hiking boots.

“Let’s go, mon,” Daymon said in a passable Jamaican accent.
“Best be getting before all of deese dead be wakin up.” He clapped Duncan on
the shoulder, whispered in his ear, “You can be my daddy anytime.” Now Daymon’s
pot-fueled crazy man laugh was on display.

“You gonna be alright to drive?” Duncan asked.

“Yes, Daddy …” Daymon said as he turned and clomped off
towards the Land Cruiser, shedding the Day-Glo ski garb as he went.