Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (6 page)

The mental side trip lasted a millisecond and then, for the first
time Cade could remember, he heard Max whine. Not one and done, but a long,
drawn-out series of plaintive yelps ending in a final shuddering whimper.
Concerned for the poor fella, he took his eyes from the road for a second and
saw the shepherd burying his snout into the carpet and pawing at both ears.

“I’m with you buddy.” Feeling his chest rising and falling
rapidly underneath his body armor, Cade swallowed hard and said, “Almost
through them, boy.” Then he looked a few blocks over the heads of the slack-faced
ghouls to the point where Main widened and intersected State Route 39. There he
saw the rounded snout and road-grime-coated underside of the overturned yellow
school bus standing out like a sore thumb against the snowy white background.
On the upturned side was a thin layer of snow that from this distance looked
like frosting atop a slab of lemon pound cake.

He tapped the brakes and walked his gaze over the rear of
the blocks-long column of death and noticed that their eyes were not facing in
the direction of the march. To a Z, all eyes were focused on the cab of the
truck. The strange noises continued and the dead kept toppling.

Then it hit him like a mule kick right then and there that
those eyes must have been shifting subtly, imperceptibly, from the moment the
noisy Ford entered their midst a couple of hundred yards north and had been
tracking the fresh meat—
him
—elevated and displayed behind glass like a
rack of lamb at the butcher’s, all the way to this point.

An uneasy feeling washed over him and he threw an
involuntary shudder as the realization that once the horde thawed out and
reanimated, the ones leading the procession would invariably end up about
facing and following the ones presently eyeballing him down 39 where eventually
they’d pose one hell of a problem for the Eden compound. So possessing only
enough ammunition to put down a tiny fraction of them, he did the next thing
that came to mind. In hopes of concealing his egress from watchful eyes, he
steered the rig at the nearest of the leering monsters and mowed down a dozen
of them. He reversed and repeated the process a number of times until the rear
echelon of the procession was bent and broken, their blood and fluids trickling
onto the snow.

“That should keep them from following,” Cade said aloud,
mainly for his own benefit. Then, as if he had just driven into the vacuum of
outer space, the cacophony of the dead was gone, in place of it the V10 roar
and metronomic swishing of the wipers.

Max sniffed the air and then, one paw at a time, crawled
back onto the passenger seat.

Cade felt his breathing return to normal and the whoosh of
blood rushing between his ears begin to ebb.

Finally, intent on making the junction before the few dead
still left standing could track him with their eyes, he focused on the narrow
band of white bracketed on the left by the bus’s protruding tires, drag chains,
and snaking exhaust pipes and on the right by the soft shoulder he knew was
there somewhere underneath the snow.

He took a breath, held it, and finessed the pedals,
heel-and-toeing them to simultaneously cut speed and power drift through the
turn in a vehicle designed for towing and hauling—not high-speed maneuvers on
snow.

The result was acceptable—barely. The shoulder was under
there, but both passenger side tires fell off it, sending the truck into a hard
list on that side and the road sign marking the 16/39 junction airborne, broken
off like a matchstick and tumbling end-over-end.

In the next half-beat, three things happened near
simultaneously.

First, Cade hauled the wheel hard right, stabbed the gas
pedal, and the dull gray horizon shifted right-to-left in front of his eyes
when the truck started into a slow speed sideways slide.

Then, rivaling the din the dead had been making, there was a
metal-on-metal screech when the truck glanced off the bus and a fair amount of
black paint and road grime was swapped between the two vehicles.

Finally, as he tromped the gas, the front wheels pulled
straight and the school bus flashed by in his left side-vision, while the
ground-hugging shrubs and Jersey barriers bordering 39 blazed by in his right.

Once clear of the choke point, Cade risked a quick glance
over his right shoulder. Barely visible, even from his elevated vantage point,
the prone dead looked small and inconsequential. Whether they had or had not
seen the truck turn onto 39 was the sixty-four-thousand dollar question. Even
if they had, thought Cade, he doubted the seemingly aware among them would
remember enough to hunt him after the thaw. Which could be a day, a week, or
longer. At any rate it amounted to an unknown window of time that the Almanac
didn’t mention and led to another thought that really set the gears in his head
to spinning.

Less than a mile southeast of the 16/39 junction, Alexander
Dregan was fighting off sleep, the battle made all the more difficult by the
layer of snow shrouding the windows and the soothing melody filling the cab
compliments of the Kenwood head unit and strategically placed woofers and
tweeters.
One thing the kid did right.

He rubbed his eyes then started the wipers moving. Not
wanting to roll the window down and get a lap full of snow, he banged a fist
against the driver’s side glass so he could see out, starting a mini-avalanche
cascading off the outside surface. He leaned over and cleared the passenger
window in the same manner.

Dregan consulted both side mirrors, then flicked his eyes to
the rearview.
Nothing.
It was still only him on the lonely road. Parked
nearly equidistant between the old couple’s home and the hallowed ground he was
intent on visiting. The only place where he could think clearly. Perhaps it was
because when he was there he was away from the constant din of responsibility.
The gravitational tugging at him by his boys for approval, answers, permission,
and affection, the latter of which he didn’t know how to dole out—unless it was
Lena who sought it.

But more likely the reason he felt whole where he had found
Lena’s lifeless form was because he could in a way sense her spirit there. In
fact, he’d made the pilgrimage there so many times over the past few weeks that
his older son had on one occasion even gone so far as to question his sanity.
Like a Muslim to Mecca—he was drawn. Maybe he
was
going crazy as the judge
had also insinuated to him days ago. But wasn’t the whole world? After all, the
dead were walking and wouldn’t stop. Their decay rate was agonizingly slow.
Some of the survivors he’d been trading with in the outlying camps were even
beginning to turn to cannibalism to survive. He had heard they were holding
lotteries. A morbid and deadly version of
shortest straw
in which the
loser wasn’t assigned some kind of unenviable task or forced to sleep on the
couch or forgo riding shotgun for the day. The unlucky loser became
dinner
.

Savages
, he thought, and threw a shudder at the
prospect of eating another human. With a reflux of acid tickling his throat, he
yanked his sleeve up and consulted his watch. Half past ten. Wanting to return
to the walls before noon in order to confront the judge before the big man
became too bogged down with hearing grievances and issuing rulings, he rattled
the shifter into Drive and started out slow, the vehicle shuddering as the
accumulated snow was packed down and forward momentum was established.

To the west, riding low over the foothills and presumably
enveloping the Wasatch Mountains farther away still, the dark roiling clouds
scudded along at a rapid clip. He came to a short straightaway, briefly shifted
his gaze right and saw over the craggy red mountains a thin horizontal gash in
the storm, brilliant blue sky showing through it. But behind the brief respite
the break represented was another foreboding gray smudge.

Directly ahead, before the State Route became Main Street in
the town of Woodruff, it made a sharp left and then a short distance later an
equally sharp ninety-degree jog right. From here the road shot razor-straight
north, the low buildings and canted telephone poles of Woodruff cluttering the
horizon in the distance.

Closer in, Dregan saw the toppled bus. Snow covered the
dozens of upward facing right-side windows and more was swirling in the air,
cutting the visibility. He halved his speed as the hallowed ground drew nearer
and suddenly the wind took a break and he caught his first glimpse of the biter
herd he had succeeded in avoiding hours ago and many miles south.

Instantly his gut clenched and he jammed on the brakes,
Pavlovian responses both. The SUV slewed sideways, coming to a stop roughly a
quarter mile short of the road to Huntsville and Eden—both on his short list of
towns ripe for foraging.

The knot in his stomach tightened and the usual butterfly
flutter there brought on by the mere sight of this many monsters in one place
commenced. He silenced the music so he could think. He drew a deep breath to
calm his nerves then snatched the binoculars up and held it in as he glassed
the column.

A few seconds passed and he exhaled slowly, causing the
image to judder. “I’ll be,” he said aloud, liking what he was seeing. “The
dirge has ceased and so has the dead.”

Interest suddenly piqued, he threw the volume back up and
continued north with a million unanswered questions muddling his thoughts.

***

Tooling along 39 a couple miles west of Woodruff, Cade was
glimpsing snippets of the retreating storm through the snow-dusted trees. Shifting
his gaze from the road ahead to the rearview mirror, he saw the widening band
of blue sky to the east and liked what it represented. Though he was no
meteorologist, he figured, based mainly on all the time he’d spent in higher
elevations on Mount Hood and other places around the world, the clear sky and
low sun would drop the temperature into the lower twenties. Optimum conditions
for what he planned to be doing the rest of the day.

But first, he had an unplanned side trip to make and then a
promise he
had
to deliver on.

The quarry turnout was partially overgrown and easy to miss
if one didn’t know where to look. Cade watched the digital mile counter tick
over as he rounded yet another corner on the twisting serpent that was State
Route 39. After a quick calculation in his head, he slowed the Ford to a crawl
and stopped on the straight midpoint of a gradual S-turn. He leaned right of
the steering wheel, over the center console into Max’s personal space, and craned
his neck. The mist and low clouds present earlier had burned off, letting him
see clearly the hillside rising up and away. Using the peak above and behind
the quarry as a reference point, he moved his gaze down the rocky bluff and
located the access road climbing steadily up, a hard-to-miss whip of white
consisting of multiple switch-backs and a handful of steep straights.

He let the idling engine pull the truck and located the
break in the brush just before the road dove into a shallow right-hand sweeper.
Branches raked the Ford’s flank as Cade wheeled it off the State Route.
Instantly, the four-wheel-drive proved its worth as the tires bit into the
feeder road, churning up an icy mixture of mud and gravel that pinged and
thunked off the undercarriage—all out-of-place noises that caused Max to rise
up off the seat after each loud report.

In no time the grade lessened and the final turn before the
gate was in sight. To the left, the road fell away sharply for hundreds of
feet. To the right, a vertical wall of snow-mottled red soil passed close by
the window, giving the sensation the Ford was static on an ice floe and an
icebreaker’s rust-spotted bow was pushing slowly by.

Straight ahead, Cade spotted a lone Z, shoeless and
shirtless and standing stock-still. Its atrophied arms were outstretched and
both gnarled hands were clutching the wheeled gate. Twelve feet from the ground
to the strands of rusty barbed wire strung atop it, the gate dwarfed the
seemingly immobilized ghoul.

Leaving Max in charge, Cade stepped down from the truck and
shut the door. The air was much colder here a couple of hundred feet from the
road, and every inhaled breath was a reminder of that fact.

“Hey Z,” he said, feeling the burn in his lungs. He whistled
and received no perceptible reaction to the stimuli. The Z didn’t flinch or
waver or turn its head to get a fix on the source. It was as if it had somehow
been granted final death while gripping the fence.

Holding the key to the new padlock in his gloved right hand,
and training the Glock on the Z with the other, Cade approached the gate. Wary
of the potholes no doubt containing Great-Lake-sized puddles underneath the
clean blanket of white, he picked his way along the pronounced ridges.
Better
safe than sorry
, he thought. No doubt the half-dozen pools of muddy
standing water were now sheets of ice waiting to send him to his butt. Last
thing he needed was to break his tailbone and miss out on the golden
opportunity laid out at his feet.

When he finally arrived at the gate with his coccyx still in
one piece, he saw that the Z still hadn’t budged. So he leveled the Glock and
jabbed the suppressor against its bony shoulder blade. It swayed forward a few
inches along with the slight give in the fence before returning to its initial
stance.

“Thank you, Lord,” Cade said, dropping his pistol in its
holster. He leaned against the fence and regarded the thing face-to-face. It
was one of the first turns, that was for sure. The adverse effects of nearly
three months spent outside in the elements was showing. Its gray skin was
mottled and sloughing off in places, revealing the corded muscle and tendon
just under the surface. The forty-something man had been short and lean in
life. Five foot tall, maybe. One hundred pounds, max. In death, the nearly nude
and graying being looked more circus oddity than walking dead. Cade imagined
the Barker saying,
Step right up and see the human skeleton
.

He leaned in even closer, face hovering just inches from the
Z’s, and detected a slight twitch in its left eye. A few seconds passed and
that bloodshot orb rotated his way, achingly slow. Then the scratchy moaning
started. Low in timbre at first. Then it rose in pitch and volume, until the
awful peal sounded identical to the calls of the dead making up the Main Street
herd.

With visions of Body Snatchers returning to his head, Cade
drew the Gerber. With no hesitation, he raked the dagger’s jagged saw-like edge
across the Z’s neck just inches above its breastbone. Two sawing back-and-forth
strokes and the Z was silenced—but not dead.

“Much better. Now let’s see what you can do.” He pried the
cold undead hands from the fence and turned the stiffening corpse towards him.
He saw a trio of purple-ringed dots below its solar plexus. A tight triangular
grouping made by small caliber bullets, .22 rimfire, presumably. The skin
around the entry wounds was dappled with tiny black dots.
Powder burns.
Whoever had fired the weapon that had left them there had done so at close
range and likely hadn’t survived the encounter. Looking into its listless eyes,
he said jokingly, “Shall we dance?” The thing remained silent, its
cold-affected vocal cords now severed. And as Cade lowered it to a prone
position on the frozen ground, its head hinged back like a Pez dispenser,
revealing the damage the blade had inflicted while releasing a viscous dribble
of nearly black blood onto the snow.

Cade grabbed a handful of wispy gray hair, twisted the head
towards him, and stuck the Gerber in the waifish Z’s open maw. He rattled it
around in there trying to get a response.
Nothing.
However, the dagger’s
tip clinking against molars and canines did create a macabre symphony nearly as
cringe-inducing as the thing’s utterances prior to having its throat cut.

“We’re done here,” Cade said. He cleaned his blade in the
snow and slipped it into its scabbard. He knelt and grabbed the Z by its
ankles. It was incredibly light, probably weighing closer to eighty pounds than
one hundred. Then, retracing his own serpentine trail of footsteps in the
snow—which had stopped falling for the time being—he dragged the corpse toward
the ledge, its head, attached by only vertebra and a few strands of muscle,
bouncing and twisting violently along the ground the entire way.

There was no countdown when he reached the edge with the
undead corpse. No kind words for whoever it used to be. Just a grunt and burst
of steam from Cade’s nose and mouth as he heaved the dead weight into the misty
void. The sound of breaking twigs and dislodged rocks and pebbles cascading
down the steep face reached his ears as he turned and walked purposefully
towards the gate. Along the way, he imagined the thing cartwheeling all the way
down, pasty appendages flailing, the nearly severed head flopping madly, speed
increasing exponentially until finally the inevitable, and hopefully fatal,
rapid deceleration against a very firm and unforgiving terra firma.

At the gate, Cade again drew the Glock and fished in his
pocket for the shiny key to the new Schlage lock. With his black pistol trained
on the blind spot to his right, he cut the angle and confirmed visually that
the padlock Duncan had snapped shut last time they were here was still in the
closed position and the thick chain was wrapped through the fencing, seemingly
undisturbed.

Seeing nothing waiting for him on the other side—living or
dead—he used the key in the lock. He pocketed the keys and lock, unwrapped the
chain, and let it fall to the ground. With little effort, he got the wheeled
gate moving and kept pushing until there was room for the truck to pass on
through.

On the way back to the Ford, he paused and looked at the
recently stripped electrical wires dangling near a mount where a shiny black
CCTV dome used to reside. The mount was secured to the far right fence post and
was partially protected from the elements by a small alcove etched into the
side hill. Whether the depression was due to erosion or a byproduct of the
blasting that had taken place in order to open up the road, he hadn’t a clue.
What he did know, however, was whoever had removed the dome and then the camera
had left behind the umbrella-shaped shroud installed directly above it.

It took a little finessing to get the Ford tucked in close
to the soaring red wall. In the process, he scraped the right front fender
against the waist-high rocky outcroppings protruding from the side hill.

Satisfied, and not the least bit concerned about the rig’s
finish, he put it into
Park
and set the brake. Grabbed a multi-tool from
the glove box and leaving Max inside and the truck idling, he hopped to the
road.