Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (39 page)

Gregory had relocated the girls to a patch of damp ground opposite
the log where he could see them as he took down his tent. To Raven, the thing
looked like something one would get in the Kid’s section at
Ikea
. God,
how she missed going there and getting all of those little containers and
stationaries that she used to keep her desk back home so organized. She hated
it when thoughts of the way things used to be crept in out of the blue on
account of some stupid unrelated observation. Worst of all was the day she came
to the realization that she would never again hear the familiar tune of the ice
cream truck. Nor would she ever again have to battle the Pavlovian response it
triggered in her.
Ice cream
, she thought. What she wouldn’t give for one
scoop of salted caramel in a waffle cone.

Gregory had just cinched up the stuff sack and was on one
knee and turning at the waist with it in his hands when he froze. Went
completely still and cast a sidelong glance at the girls. “You hear that?” he
asked.

Raven snapped out of her daydream and shook her head. She looked
to Sasha, who also indicated
‘no’
with a quick roll of the eyes.

The only thing Raven
had
noticed when she gave it a
second thought was that the pair of black birds—
mountain birds
, to Mom
or Dad—that had been calling back-and-forth from somewhere behind her, in the
general direction of the fire lane, had recently gone silent.

Then there was a crash from the woods as, presumably,
another tree or two shed their early season coat of snow. The sound hadn’t yet
faded when from the opposite direction, downhill and across the clearing, the
growl of engines in low-gear tackling an incline floated up to the hide.

Sasha could not resist. “I heard
that
,” she said. “I
bet it’s Cade and the others coming back from wherever they went … and when
they find out we’re gone they are going to hunt us down and kill you.”

Wincing, Raven blurted, “They came back hours ago, Sasha.
Remember?”

Smiling inwardly at this un-coerced tidbit of information,
Gregory put a vertical finger to his lips and shushed the girls.

Hating nothing more than being shushed, Sasha stared daggers
at the back of the man’s head, and though there was nothing to work the cord
against but dirt and pine needles, she continued trying to loosen it by forcing
her wrists apart against the slight give.

Expecting nothing less than to hear a bugle call hailing the
Calvary’s arrival, Raven went to her knees as the motor sounds reached a
crescendo. She smiled and glanced at Sasha when the black and white Tahoe she
associated with Jackson Hole Police Chief Charlie Jenkins swung into view. Then
her brow furrowed when she saw that it was followed closely by a number of
other vehicles, including a trio of Humvees similar to the one parked in the
motor pool near the compound.

Being a full head taller than Raven gave Sasha a better
vantage of the road below. She looked for a second and regarded Raven. “That’s
not them,” she whispered.

Raven knew this a half-beat before it was voiced. The
vehicles were coming from the direction of the quarry, not the roadblock. Her heart
was already sinking when Gregory raised the black radio to his lips. Then he
spoke the words:
I see you. I’m at your ten o’clock inside the tree line,
and like it had never left in the first place, the finger of dread was back and
a knot was forming in the pit of her stomach.

“Anything more from the girls?” a disembodied voice answered
back.

Gregory nodded and a knowing smile rippled the whiskers
ringing his mouth. “I have it on good word that whoever has set up camp down
that road is sitting a little, or maybe even a lot undermanned right now.”

Raven was watching her captor and started feeling the cord begin
to flex against the constant pressure she was putting on it. Finally sensing that
the thumb on her right hand was close to slipping free, she halted her effort
long enough to shoot a glare at Sasha. “
Keep your trap shut
,” she
mouthed, then resumed her silent struggle.

Coming to see what her slip of the tongue might have ultimately
cost them all, Sasha blinked against the tears forming in her eyes and hung her
head between her knees.

Wondering where she had picked up ‘
shut your trap’
from—a
Duncanism she supposed—Raven took advantage of Gregory’s preoccupation with the
new arrivals, got up onto her knees, and craned her head towards the road. Now
head-high with Sasha, who was staring intently at the road, Raven saw the
Tahoe’s door open and a man just as tall as her captor—if not taller—unfold
from the vehicle. Walking a little stooped over, he looped around the SUV and
approached the front gate, where he stopped a few feet from the black camera
domes. Then, as if the man already knew about them, he held up one of those
large yellow pads of legal paper—whatever that was—and started stabbing his
finger at it.

As the man continued pointing and flipping pages, a sound, kind
of like the lift mechanism at work on a garbage truck, came from the second
vehicle in line as the round part on top started swiveling slowly to the right.
There was a younger man with a red beard standing straight up in it and holding
onto something that looked like a smaller version of one of those cannons
sticking from the side of a pirate ship. As the faint garbage-truck-sound ceased
Raven saw that the
cannon
barrel was trained away from the road and in
the direction of the compound where her mom and the others were. In the next
instant, just as she and Sasha both figured out what that likely meant, Red
Beard tilted the black barrel up and the big man with the pad backed away from
the gate and went to one knee behind the Humvee.

Eden Compound

Brook selected the book she was reading at random from the pillowcase
full of them Cade had brought home the day before. Letting the hand of fate do
the choosing, she just reached right in and grabbed one.

The title had revealed little, and since she was the type of
person who usually skipped reading the back blurb—especially when sci-fi and
dystopian books were concerned, as she always got those two mixed up anyway—she
cracked the cover and was hooked from the first page.

Having lost all track of time, she was at a part in the book
where the protagonist and his young son were hiding under the floorboards of an
old farmhouse, in the dark, and thinking they were alone. Then, just a few
paragraphs in, she came to learn that the pair she had been rooting so hard for
to survive had stumbled onto a cellar that was a larder of sorts, and the
provisions
were humans and still alive—albeit missing parts of limbs, the choicest cuts,
perhaps.

Though she had yet to come across evidence of, nor hear
about, the living eating the living,
yet
, the winter-like setting and
all of the running and hiding from bad guys the two protagonists in the book
were facing was starting to hit a little too close to home for her.

Suddenly hungry, she threw a shiver and looked at her watch.
Saw that it was quarter past noon and immediately began to wonder why the girls
weren’t already pestering her for lunch, or, at the very least, sniffing around
for some MRE pound cake, which seemed to be a big hit among the younger
survivors.

She stepped into her boots and laced them tight. Grabbed her
carbine and looked around for her gun belt before realizing she had been
wearing it throughout her
treatment,
the brief nap
,
and all
hundred some odd pages of one hell of a spooky read.

Heidi was watching the monitors when Brook stepped into the
security container. The young blonde looked up at the sound of boots on plywood
and smiled, which to Brook was a good thing that meant her medication dosage
was working. Had she stayed glued to the monitor for a little too long and then
presented her old flat affect, there would have been cause to worry.

Brook unfolded a metal chair and sat backwards on it. “How
are things?” she asked, cheerily.

“It has been eerily quiet.”

“Better than the alternative.”

“Truer words have never been spoken.” Heidi rolled her
shoulders, her back popping as a result. “Are you taking over?” she asked.

Brook took a second to answer. She was looking past Heidi,
at the monitor. On the partition showing the entrance from 39, save for
rivulets of snowmelt coursing off the steaming two-lane, nothing moved up
there. On another panel, she saw that the middle gate was closed and only dual
strips of white remained on the road’s shoulders where the undergrowth had
shielded the snow from the effects of the high noon sun. Her eyes flicked over
the other incoming feeds. The clearing was once again a sea of grass, now
broken and bent over to reveal the muddy landing strip running down its center.
On the far side of the clearing, the vehicles sat silent, sun glare lancing off
all of their angled glass and chrome surfaces. And lastly, she saw that the
camera trained on the compound’s hidden entrance showed only the camouflage
panel surrounded by a grove of small- to medium-sized trees that cast shadows
in all different directions, rendering it hard to see even if one knew where to
look.

“Everything looks great topside,” replied Brook. “Want to
trade me chairs? I think I’ve dropped a few pounds since the …” She still
couldn’t bring herself to verbalize what had happened to her. The weight of embarrassment
she still shouldered and carried around as a result of losing Chief and nearly
her own life had almost sent her running the couple of times she’d actually
opened up and talked about
that day in September
to anyone who hadn’t
been there. “Any way … my butt’s so bony I bet it looks like two razorblades wrapped
with parchment paper. I’ve got my pants cinched all the way down and still they
want to fall off me.”

 “Better than the alternative,” replied Heidi, for the
second time in as many minutes. “Those pills you gave me have got me eating
like a horse. I think I may have taken on the weight you lost.” She removed the
headphones and powered off the shortwave set. Absentmindedly she ran a hand
through her spiked blonde hair as she relinquished the
‘comfortable chair,’
which in her opinion was little more than a folding chair on rollers with a
stadium seat jammed under cheap fabric—forty dollars, tops, at the Office
Depot.

“Thank you,” Brook said, sliding over and taking the seat. “Sorry
I’m late.” She grabbed a two-way from the shelf, and once she saw it was tuned
to the proper channel and sub-channel, keyed the side button. “Sasha … Raven.
Pick up. It’s lunch time.” She released the key to a little bit of squelch—par for
the course considering the thin layer of dirt covering the roof. “Raven.
Sasha.” Nothing. Just static.

“Maybe they’re out of range.”

“Shouldn’t be. I explicitly told them to remain inside the
inner perimeter.”

“Batteries?”

“Could be,” said Brook agreeably. She made a face and was
about to hail Foley and Tran, whose radios were tuned to the same frequency,
when someone broke squelch and then Foley’s voice emanated from the speaker.
“Did you find them yet?”

“No. They aren’t answering.”

“I’m over here by the solar array. Me and Tran are gonna
drop everything and go looking for them.”

“He’s not going to be happy … but I’m going to wake Seth and
send him and Glenda out to help you.”

“Copy that,” Foley said.

“I’ll get a coat and head on out,” Heidi said through pursed
lips, her smile long gone.

Brook made no reply because movement on the monitor to her
left caught her attention. In her side vision flashes of yellow and black
registered, making her think at first that a fat bumblebee had taken interest
in its own reflection in the camera’s dome. But once she focused on the panel
where the movement was, two things dawned on her. One, the camera recording the
movement was the one watching the east approach on 39. And two, the movement
was no bumblebee ogling itself, that was for sure. Filling up almost the entire
partition on the flat screen was a yellow sheet of lined paper filled with
bold, black, handwriting. The letters were all capitalized, punctuation was
nonexistent, and the grammar was horrible.

With Heidi reading over her shoulder, Brook leaned in and
devoured every word, sentence, and paragraph on all five pages. After speed-reading
the first page, when she saw a hand fill up the screen and turn it over, she
knew from the thick fingers and knobby knuckles that a man was stating his
case. He had started with evidence first. Apparently whoever had found the
feeder road cameras had matched tread patterns from the scene of the perceived crime
with identical ones owned by a vehicle he had tracked here the day before. He
stated in writing that he had ‘
half an army’
and demanded the killer of
a person he identified as Lena be brought out to the road. Ten minutes was allotted
for the transfer. The last page was filled with instructions that ended with
the phrase: “You have ten minutes. If ten minutes passes, a ‘message’ will be
sent.” The word
message
on the sheet had been underlined—twice.

Brook didn’t like the implication the word carried. Hell, the
man calling himself Alexander Dregan was pissed, and she sympathized with him.
If she lost Raven the same way she wouldn’t rest until the person responsible
was dead by her hand and she was the one dumping the last shovelful of dirt on
their grave. Unfortunately for the man, that kind of closure would never be
achieved. Because the person who had killed his daughter, Lena, was already
dead and buried.

What Brook couldn’t wrap her head around as she read the
last sentence on the final sheet was why this Alexander Dregan had made no
mention of the young man
she
had killed that day.