Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (7 page)

He stepped onto the heavy-duty bumper and then crawled up
onto the slick hood. Hand over hand, gripping the fence to keep from slipping,
he made it to the corner post and went to work on the oval shroud with the
Phillips drive. In a couple of minutes he had defeated the trio of fasteners
and tossed the liberated part to the ground.

One down, three to go.

The shroud went behind the seat and Cade climbed in and
began jockeying the rig around. Once through the gate, he hopped out, rolled it
closed and locked himself in.

He clambered back behind the wheel, maneuvered the rig past
the quarry’s still black waters, and parked it near the enormous rust-streaked
building, complete with its destroyed office and attached multi-vehicle garage.
The dozens of bullet holes punched into the steel siding were instantly
evident, each one punctuated by its own vertical streak of rust. At first
glance Cade got the impression that the building was weeping and, given the
savagery that happened here just weeks ago, that impression came as no
surprise.

He sat in the cab with the heater blasting and took the
entire scene in. Straight ahead, sitting atop a series of carefully hidden
underground chambers, the recently retrofitted steel building looked as much
forgotten relic as the weathered mining equipment scattered about the property.
In addition to the newly created bullet holes marring the building’s west
facing façade, Cade recognized high up on the siding the circles of fresh paint
that had been exposed when Foley or Seth—he wasn’t clear on whose undertaking
it was—relieved the building of the west- and south-facing camera domes. He
also noticed they had initially been mounted flush and tucked under the eaves,
therefore there were no shrouds like the one up front to be had here.

Cade shook his head and pounded the steering wheel gently.
“What now, Max?”

The shepherd yawned.

Not one to give up so easily, he shifted his gaze left.
Settled it on the trio of swaybacked outbuildings sitting in a neat little row
jutting off at a right angle from the left side of the main building. All of
the windows were darkened with grime and, showing signs of forced entry, all
three doors had been reduced to splintered boards hanging from rusted hinges.

Though Cade wasn’t here when the place had been stripped of
its essential items, on a visit since, he had poked his head into each building
and learned that they contained mostly specialized tools useful only to miners
and roughnecks.

He looked a circle around the property searching for
anything Foley might fashion into a shroud like the one he’d just liberated
from the front gate.

Finishing the three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep, he returned
his attention to the shed and saw them in an altogether different light. Saw
them for what was useful on the
outside
.

Rust … nature’s camouflage
, thought Cade as he shut
the motor off. Armed with the Glock and multi-tool, he exited the truck and,
with Max on his heels, went straight for the nearest of the three dilapidated
sheds.

With the motor off and Mozart silenced, Dregan spent ten
minutes sitting in the truck watching the stalled horde through a pair of
binoculars. During that time, with the snow still falling lightly and the
delicate flakes alighting on the camouflage hood, he witnessed many of the dead
making up the horde toppling over. At times only one stiff corpse would fall to
the road with all of the grace of a knocked-out fighter. A handful of times he
witnessed one of the biters lose out to gravity and fall into another, starting
a domino-like chain reaction. In fact, he found it quite humorous seeing a
daisy chain of rigor-affected corpses bang into one another and end up tangled
on the road like some kind of undead orgy gone awry. Whoops, he’d thought
morbidly at the time. Looks like somebody forgot to holler their
safe
words.

***

Now, having deemed it safe enough to venture outside amongst
the overwhelming numbers of dead, Dregan could see his breath
inside
the
truck, and nearly two-thirds of the horde were horizontal on the road, arms and
legs akimbo, not a sound coming from their rotten mouths.

He grabbed his sword and a suppressed AR-15 from behind the
seat. The carbine he slung over his shoulder. Then the sword, which he intended
to use on the assembled monsters, came out of the scabbard with a metallic
snik
.

Dregan closed up the SUV and marched solemnly down the State
Route, keeping to the middle of the snow-covered road right where he imagined
the yellow centerline to be. Twenty yards north of his parked Blazer he came
upon the exact spot where he’d found Lena’s lifeless body. As it always did,
his proximity to the scene of the crime brought back the mental image of her
cratered face. The bullets, a trio of them he guessed, had done precisely what
they were designed to—break apart on impact and tumble. The initial impacts
shredded her angelic features. He figured the bullet that entered below the
bridge of her nose had killed her instantly. The kinetic energy punched
everything, nose and all, inside before the bullet broke into pieces and
shredded her brain. The other bullets only added insult to the lethal injury
created by the first. The skin and muscle and flesh that was her left cheek had
been peeled back, one big bloody flap revealing shattered teeth, most of them
blown into a thousand splinters scattered on the road and now buried somewhere
here under the snow.

Dregan crossed himself and recited a prayer. With tears
forming and a lump welling in his throat, he trudged ahead. He ignored the
school bus. He walked right over the particular spot on the road at the
junction with 39 where they’d found the Jackson Hole Police Department Tahoe
parked on top of dozens of mashed corpses.

He paused a few steps beyond the bus and looked at the
ground near his boots. Standing there with the duster flapping in the wind, he
wiped the tears and ruffled his bushy black beard.

Then, in his mind’s eye, he saw through the snow and was
looking at the skid marks on the gray asphalt. The black chevron patterns left
behind were unusually large and appeared to have come from the tires on a
military vehicle or commercial truck. The distance he had paced off between the
two parallel black stripes told the same story. Add the numerous shell casings
found here and Dregan had many clues to the puzzle that was her death. A puzzle
he was still far from piecing together completely.

Now, just past the intersection, walking head down, eyes
sweeping the road, Dregan picked up on two faint parallel lines imprinted in
the snow. They tracked off to the north toward the herd. And if not for the
emerging sun he would have missed them entirely.

Stooping over, he probed the top quarter-inch of snow with
the sword. He inhaled and held the breath. Set the sword aside and went to his
knees. Gently he brushed the fresh layer of snow away and saw the same thick
chevrons compacted into the base layer of snow. Like metal shavings to a
magnet, his eyes were drawn north.

Still staring down the road, he reached into his pocket and
drug the iPhone out. He swiped through the photos and came to the series he was
looking for. Wincing, he bypassed the postmortem shots and stopped the scroll
on the evidentiary pictures.

“Perfect match,” he said, looking down the road. In the
ensuing couple of minutes the dead hadn’t moved at all. The snow had stopped
falling and, as if Lena were sending a message, shafts of golden light were
bathing the roadway ahead. The phone went back into his pocket and he lapsed
into a moment of deep reflection.

***

A couple of minutes later, after calculating the snowfall at
roughly an inch an hour and estimating the new coverage over the tire tracks to
be a quarter to half an inch, he concluded that the vehicle responsible for
leaving them had passed by sometime in the last half hour or so.

He stood up and paced off the distance between tracks and
found it to be a perfect match. Smiling at his good fortune, he followed the
tracks north past the sign proclaiming to any northbound traffic—of which there
had been very little in the last few months—that
State Route 16
was now
Main
Street
and the speed limit a
Strictly Enforced 35
.

With his labored breathing producing a seemingly constant
white cloud that swirled around, shrouding his face, he marched on, emboldened,
until he was standing on the center of the road, the nearby telephone poles
lining it canted at odd angles and the road smeared with pulped biters
everywhere he looked.

It was obvious that the southbound vehicle responsible for
the tracks had also cut a swath through the middle of the dead and apparently
took the time to run these ones over.

The dead on the road made not a peep, standing or fallen.
However, as he followed the trail of battered bodies north on Main, he
did
detect the slightest of movements at times. Mostly action in his side-vision
that he wrote off as blowing snow or tattered clothing flapping in the breeze.

He didn’t believe his own intuition until he spun a
one-eighty and noticed that the hundreds of pairs of lifeless eyes he had made
contact with as he hiked north into the belly of the beast were now inexplicably
fixed on him. Not all of them. But the ones still standing at an angle where
they could see him as he had moved through their midst
had
tracked him.
And it pissed him off. He thought the freezing cold and the wind chill had
killed them. He prayed it had. The first frost of the season was yesterday and
they seemed slower then. And now, miraculously, Utah and Wyoming had been
blessed with a very early first snow.

But they weren’t truly dead in the sense of the word. So he
raised the sword and held it two-handed, vertical in front of his face, and
belted out a war cry that echoed off the nearby buildings.

The full-throated wail had no noticeable effect on the dead.
There was no movement whatsoever.

He remained rooted, staring at the upright biters. Watching
the final tiny flakes drift down and settle on their heads and shoulders,
adding to the snow already accumulated there as silence returned to Main
Street.

In a fit of rage, and projecting a generic man’s face on the
biters—the face he’d arbitrarily assigned to Lena’s killer— the big man waded
into the stalled-out herd, swinging the sword in wide-reaching arcs. In a
frenzy that lasted only a couple of minutes, he’d relieved two dozen of them of
their heads, stabbed a dozen more through the temple where they lay, and came
to the conclusion that though they still hungered for his flesh, they were of
no threat to him so long as the weather held.

Stooped over and panting, he dropped the bloodied sword
between his splayed-out feet. Planting his hands on his knees, he started to
cry. His back heaved and the tears flowed hot as he contemplated the hard
uphill slog he and his family had before them.

***

He stayed in that position for a couple of minutes; then,
with tears freezing to his cheeks, he scooped the sword off the ground, stalked
over to one of the prone creatures and wiped the double-edged blade off on the
thing’s tattered white and blue
BYU
tank top.

On the way back to the camouflaged Blazer, Dregan
contemplated the tire tracks. He wondered what their being here near Woodruff
implied and quickly concluded that none of it could be good. With those boxes
checked, all that was left was the hard choice he needed to make.

Near the intersection, he glanced up and read the road sign
facing him. There were three towns listed and the distance between the nearby
junction. The first entry read Huntsville 49, then in descending order
vertically, Eden, 53, and lastly, Ogden, 63.

Standing at the junction, he began to feel Lena’s presence
and slowly the rage that was still bubbling under the surface receded. And as
if she were pointing the way from the afterlife, his gaze was inexplicably
drawn from the ditch where he had found her faceless body to the shoulder just
off to his right bordering 39 westbound.

Incredulous, he asked himself, “How’d you miss those,
Dregan?” There, on the ground where southbound 16 swooped to the right, the
sloping edge beyond the shoulder was partially collapsed. He covered the
distance in a hurry, knelt on the road and discovered the true nature of the
disturbance. Pressed into the soft gravel were the same bold chevron patterns
as the ones cut into the off-road tires responsible for the southbound tracks.

Hands shaking, he dug out Lena’s phone and compared the
pattern in the photo with the ones in the freshly churned-up gravel. Again they
were a perfect match.

Following the tracks with his eye, he came to the conclusion
that the vehicle that made them

had also sheared off a nearby sign,
leaving a two-inch splintered nub sticking up through the snow on the shoulder.

With yet another piece of the puzzle tumbling into place, he
rose and turned to the west, fixing his eyes on 39 winding away into the
distance. And though he couldn’t see the tracks because of the effects of the
flat light on the snow, he knew in his heart of hearts they were there
somewhere.

“Gotcha,” he said. Out came an old wallet-sized school photo
of Lena. He kissed her on the forehead and hustled back to the Blazer. Along
the way, he unshouldered his AR and untied the sash securing the sword and
scabbard to his body. With his heart breakdancing in his chest and a smile
spreading on his face, he piled into the Blazer behind his weapons and started
the engine.

Inside one of the rundown sheds, Cade had found a rickety
wooden box on which the words TNT and HANDLE WITH CAUTION and NO SMOKING had
been stenciled in warning-red. He placed it in front of the broken door of the
first shed and, using it as a makeshift stepladder, was able to reach the
gooseneck lamp affixed to the weathered siding. Finding his multi-tool of no
use on the screws that had been fused tight by age and rust, he grabbed ahold
of the tubular neck two-handed and stepped off the dynamite box, letting his
hundred and eighty pounds do what the Phillips attachment could not. Instantly
there was a sharp crack, a horizontal fault line formed in the gray clapboards,
and he was back to earth holding the rusty light standard and base plate
complete with the stripped-out wood screws still sticking from it.

Under Max’s watchful eye, he repeated the process, tearing
the lights off the other two decaying buildings, and when he was done there
were three fixtures lying in the snow and heavily insulated wires protruding
from the three fresh wounds atop each door.

The fixtures, bases and all, went into the Ford’s bed with
the bikes, garbage bags, and other odds and ends.

Back inside the truck, Cade started the engine and spent a
moment warming his hands in front of the heater vents. Meanwhile, Max had
regained his place on the passenger floor and was licking snow and mud from his
paws.

Outside the truck, the snow had tapered to just a few
scattered flakes and, as Cade had assumed would be the case, the thermometer
built into the truck’s trip computer told him the temperature was still
falling.

Scratching the shepherd behind the ears, Cade said, “The day
is young, Max. What do ya say we get back to the compound?” To which Max,
eyeing the curved plastic ball launcher Cade had snatched from the house with
the dog food, thumped his stub-tail excitedly on the floor mat.

“When we get back to the compound, I’m sure someone’ll throw
the ball for you, boy,” Cade said, wheeling the rig around in the quarry lot.
“Unfortunately, Old Man Winter has left no time for R and R in my immediate
future.”

As always, Max offered up an indifferent yawn and rested his
muzzle on his paws.

***

Fifteen minutes after monkeying the first fixture off its
outbuilding, the quarry gate was chained and locked up tight and Cade had
negotiated the winding feeder road with no issues.

With a thin sliver of blue peeking through the cloud cover
directly overhead, he bumped the Ford back onto 39 and proceeded west toward
the Eden compound.

***

Delaying the inevitable conflict at the end of the freshly
printed tracks, Dregan sat in the truck with the engine stilled and rooted in a
pocket for a power cord. He plugged the USB end into the stubby 12v lighter
adapter. Then he reached into his parka and pulled his battered business iPhone
from an inside pocket. He hadn’t made or received a call with it since three
days after the dead began to walk. It had been in the console of his truck
along with the charger for most of the forty days leading up to Lena’s murder.
In the days since it has been with him always.

He snugged the large end of the white data cable into the
phone’s charger port and powered it on. “I’ll be ...” he said upon seeing the
device light up.

He tapped out 9982—Lena’s birthday: month, day, and year—and
the phone unlocked and he was presented a screen cluttered with colorful
application tiles. He navigated to the video playback app, sorted through the
videos until he found the one shot only a week before the Great Fall. Hit the
opaque arrow on the screen and started the three-minute snippet running. He watched
Lena and Mikhail—Michael to everyone outside his close circle—exchange vows.
Saw the camera waver for a few seconds on the priest as he finished reciting
the nuptials and then in a sing-song nasally voice proclaim the young couple
man
and wife
. Feeling his face flush, he cursed at Lena for choosing Mikhail
for her husband—an opinion that resided only in his head and heart until the
two of them were dead.

After spending fifteen minutes watching mostly older videos
from
before,
he noticed that the snow was tapering off and a wide
north/south band of cobalt sky had appeared off to his left. The low mountains
to the east were no longer indiscernible from the gray clouds, their white
peaks standing out sharply against the brilliant blue backdrop. Behind the peaks,
however, another storm front consisting of snow-heavy black clouds was forming.

He turned the key and listened to the rattle clatter as the
ancient diesel motor surged to life. While the power plant worked up to a
proper operating temperature, he powered on the CB and raised his eldest son,
Gregory.

The second Dregan stated his intentions, a heated argument
broke out with both men pleading their cases, the son’s coming across heated
and emotional, and the father’s relayed calmly and rationally; when Dregan
didn’t capitulate and agree to wait for Gregory to join him before proceeding,
the connection was terminated abruptly on the son’s end.

Dregan shook his head. “Fools rush in,” he said in a low
voice. That the boy had even dared question his decision to follow at a
standoff distance and gather as much information as possible before striking
only served to solidify it. Weeks of perceived inaction on his part had caused
a rift that was threatening to widen and break them all apart.

With a bevy of emotions tugging his heart every which way,
he drove slowly to the junction with 39, hooked the sharp left there,
negotiated the gap between the school bus on the left and the low Jersey
barriers on the right, and then picked up the faint tire tracks spooling out to
the west. Keeping his speed to half of the posted fifty-miles-per-hour, he
followed them a number of miles through canyons of snow-flocked trees until
there came a point in the road where there was a deviation in the westbound
tracks. There they abruptly veered hard left into the oncoming lane, looped
back and disappeared through the low bushes flanking the right side of the
road. Beyond the point of entry were identical but opposite tracks from the
maneuver being repeated when the vehicle he was following had emerged back onto
the road and resumed its westbound tack.

Dregan ground the SUV to a halt. He looked right and saw
that the shoulder was churned up from the comings and goings. His eye traced
the snowy white straights and switchbacks up the side hill.

With every intention of following the road upward, he
cranked the wheel right and was nosing the rig through the underbrush when the
CB crackled to life. Derailing his plan, his youngest son said in a voice
strained and emotion-filled, “Don’t do it, Dad. You know Judge Pomeroy has
forbidden us from taking the law into our own hands.”

Forbidden
. Dregan absolutely hated that word.
Fuck
Lucius Pomeroy
. Dogs were
forbidden
from jumping on furniture. Kids
were
forbidden
from playing with matches. Adults were free to choose
their destiny. Always had been, within limits. And now with the world gone to
shit, he believed men and women should have even more freedom. He especially
hated how the judge from Salt Lake had sidled onto the scene shortly after the
fall and started throwing his weight around, quoting old laws and exerting his
authority on even the most mundane of issues. It was as if Dregan had been
thrown back into the business world, where every little peon with a government
title reveled in keeping him under their thumb through inane rules and
regulations.

Feeling his face flush hot with anger, Dregan snatched up
the CB. He paused briefly to collect his thoughts then spoke. “This is none of
Pomeroy’s concern, Peter. I don’t know what Gregory has been telling you, but
you need to remember one thing … this is a
family
matter.”

There was silence for a moment. Then a rustling in the
background followed by an unmistakable voice emanating from the CB. “You’re not
the one to dole out judgments, Dregan,” said a deep male voice. “I am. The
people”—
Sheeple
, thought Dregan—“elected me and don’t you forget that. A
jury will decide what happens to Mikhail and Lena’s killers when they are
caught.”

“Bullshit. It’s my score to settle,” Dregan shot back. “Not
yours or twelve or a hundred of my
peers
.” He spat out the last word.

“That’s not how we did it before,” came Pomeroy’s banal
reply. “And that’s not how we do it now.”

Like a fork of lightning, it hit Dregan where the judge was.
“Why are you in my home?” he spat.

“I’m not,” replied Pomeroy. “I’d never make it up that
ladder of yours. So I’m standing in your yard next to your Tahoe and talking to
your boy. Where are you?”

“None of your business. Now put my boy back on and go bother
someone else.”

“I came to speak with you,” replied Pomeroy. “Someone said
you were snooping around Helen and Ray’s place again.”

“Providing a service.”

“Now I’m
really
looking forward to seeing you in my
chambers when you get back from your little sojourn,” Pomeroy said.

Through gritted teeth, Dregan said, “Me as well.” He paused.
“Now give the CB to my boy.”

There was a rustling and a grunt and then the radio went
silent.

“Peter?”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I was playing in the snow when he drove up.
He saw your truck in the drive. He didn’t believe me when I told him you were
gone.”

Knowing Pomeroy was probably still within earshot, Dregan
lied to Peter. “When your brother gets back, tell him that I changed my mind
about going to Huntsville. I figure since the biters are slowed down I’m going
to continue on north and snoop around Randall.”

“When will you be home?” Peter asked.

“Before noon,” replied Dregan, truthfully.

“Love you, Dad.”

“Love you too, Peter.”

Standing in the snow in the front yard of the Dregan home,
Peter put the CB in his coat pocket and swung his gaze to the big man dressed
in black. “Don’t be mean to my dad,” he said, voice wavering.

In turn, Pomeroy smiled wide and said, “If your dad
continues to walk the line, you have nothing to worry about.” He turned toward
his full-sized Chevy Suburban, took two steps through the snow and turned back.
“You did the right thing, Peter. You kept your dad safe by telling me the
truth.”

Peter stuck a spindly branch in the middle snowball of the
three making up the scrawny-looking snowman’s body. Unsure of what to say,
wisely, he said nothing and watched the black SUV reverse from the drive and
motor off toward the center of town. When it turned from view, he looked over
both shoulders and, upon seeing the coast was clear, threw a pair of upthrust
middle fingers after the SUV.