Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (16 page)

A quarter mile down the road Duncan finally answered. “I’m
sorry. I can’t remember, Lev.” He looked the question at Daymon and added,
“What’s your best guess?”

“I’m used to calling in airdrops from the bitch seat of a
King Air.”

“What does that mean?”

Pinning his dreads behind his ears, Daymon said, “That was a
long-winded way of saying I was intent on being your eyes in the air yesterday.
A good spotter focuses on the ground only. And that’s what I was doing because
I wanted to find Logan as bad as you.”

Duncan remained silent—thinking hard—trying his best to pull
up any small snippets from memory. All the while, off to his right, following
the same twists and turns of 39 as the Cruiser, the Ogden River intermittently
flashed silver through the trees. He glanced down and checked the odometer a
couple more times along the way, and when three miles had spooled out behind
the Toyota, thumbed his two-way and informed Phil that they were nearly out of
radio range.

After Phillip’s reply, Duncan pocketed the radio and scrutinized
the passing landscape as the Cruiser bounced along. From light travel and the
evening’s rains, the desolate two-lane was left covered with damp, fragrant
pine needles. It wove through forested hills, rising and falling minimally, and
then shot a straight line for a couple of miles before taking on a steeper
pitch where the road snaked through, what appeared to Duncan, a series of
staggered V-cuts that had been dynamited into the red earth decades ago to
allow the road passage.

Up on the hillsides, Duncan noticed that the patches of
reddish rock where the elements had eroded the native grasses and topsoil were
becoming more evident the farther they went from their valley. At last they
rounded a slight bend in the road and a hundred feet ahead on the right Daymon
spotted a reflective sign, the usual beehive cutout with black writing on white
indicating they were still on Utah State Route 39.

Duncan slowed the SUV to walking speed.

Daymon read the first heading, “Woodruff, 11 miles.”

The next line had a smaller beehive labeled
SR-16
with
Randolph, 22 miles
and an arrow indicating the town lay to the
left. And below that, using the same reflective letters and numbers, the third
entry read
SR-16, I-89 South, Bear River, Wyoming, 24 miles
with an
arrow indicating the town was to the right at the eventual T-junction.

“Nothing about a quarry,” said Lev.

Speaking in an awful faked Asian accent, Duncan replied,
“Patience, grasshopper.”

Two turns later those words rang prophetic when Daymon
dipped his head, looking across Duncan and called out, “There. I recognize that
finger of earth.”

“From the ground?”

“Yep. From the ground ... it all just came rushing back to
me, Lev.”

Smiling for real for the first time in a long while,
Duncan’s eyes followed and he said, “I concur.”

With his body pressed back in the seat, a result of Duncan’s
sudden acceleration, Daymon clicked out of his belt and racked a round into the
shotgun.

“That certain?” said Lev.

“Positive,” said Daymon. “Look ... right there. Looks like
it’s just clinging to the bluff.”

There was no need for him to point out the road. For as the
SUV slowed it became obvious to everyone, snaking red at about a thirty-degree
angle from the State Route before the first bend, a right-hand sweeper,
disappeared from sight. Another thirty feet up the bluff the road reappeared,
climbing right to left, a much steeper grade that in the short run, before the
next hairpin, gained a good chunk of elevation.

Lev said, “How do they get heavy mining equipment up a goat
track like that?”

“No need,” answered Duncan. “Cheaper to rent a heavy lift
helo a couple of times than blow up the side hill in order to widen the road.”

“And water?” asked Daymon as the SUV ground to a halt on the
centerline.

“There’s a creek behind the bluff. Heard it burbling faintly
over the falling rain after I killed the helo’s turbine yesterday.” He stopped
talking and turned left, pressing the pedal and wrestling the wheel in order to
navigate the transition from pavement to the unimproved road inches thick with
mud. Then, with the shiver-inducing noise of thorny branches scraping the rig’s
sheet metal, added, “And this is the entry.”

Master of the obvious
, thought Daymon as he grasped
the grab handle near his head.

Duncan said, “The tire tracks I’m seeing were made by some
kind of an SUV with a wide wheelbase.”

“The Tahoe,” Lev said. A statement, not a question.

Then Daymon made an observation, saying, “The grass in the
center is crushed down. The rain alone didn’t do that.”

“Jenkins’ cruiser sits lower than this land yacht. It’s
tuned for speed and handling more so than off-roading. My guess is that the
grass was beaten down by the skid plates and anti-sway bars underneath the
thing.”

On its own accord, as if in protest at being called a land
yacht, the Land Cruiser jinked left towards the road’s edge and a thirty-foot
drop off.

“Whoa,” cried Daymon, still gripping the grab handle, his
knuckles suddenly going stark white.

Narrowly averting a deadly plunge, Duncan wrestled the rig
back into the established ruts and stopped dead center on the incline. Looking
for a way to select a lower gear, he scanned the dash and then the center
console where, next to the shifter, he spied a chromed dial labeled CRAWL.
Couldn’t
hurt
, he thought, rotating it to the midway point. Hearing a click, he
released the brake and noticed an altogether different type of feedback through
the controls. Once the SUV picked up some forward momentum there was zero
slipping and sliding. And though the suspension was forgiving, and the
sidewalls tall and the tire tread more suited for the city than a muddy goat
track, the vehicle decried its luxury heritage and surged uphill.

“Now we’re talking,” said Duncan, feeling the brakes apply
on their own, the ABS thwarting a fishtail on the next corner. “Technology
trumping tread pattern.”

Five switchbacks and ten minutes later, Duncan could sense
them nearing the top. On the last turn he spotted the reservoir in Huntsville,
small and distant and sparkling diamond-like. Above and to the right was the
stunted hilltop peppered with a myriad of small trees clinging steadfast in
defiance of gravity.

Knowing that he would soon be seeing the scene of Logan’s
death under a whole different set of circumstances, while hopefully maintaining
a calm and collected demeanor, he went silent, steeling himself against the
inevitable flood of emotions.

Chapter 24

With a pair of curious first turns shambling in from the
two-lane running parallel to Mesa View 4x4’s flower-lined drive, Wilson dragged
the last of the rotten corpses out of the F-650’s path. He stepped back and
wiped the gore from his gloves on the truck with Cade inside as it passed
through the gate. A moment later, the Raptor rolled onto the drive and came to
a stop, leaving barely a half-foot of clearance for the roller gate to skim by
its rear bumper.

It was Cade’s decision to leave the 4x4 shop as near to how
they’d found it as possible, and Wilson had been appointed the facilitator for
this plan. So, without complaint, he grabbed a handful of chain-link, leaned
in, and ran the wheeled gate closed.

Revving her engine like Danica Patrick on pole position,
Taryn simultaneously eyed the approaching walkers and hollered out her window,
urging Wilson to hurry up.

Panting hard from the exertion, Wilson flung the passenger
door open, took a firm hold of the grab bar, and hauled himself aboard. And
while they waited for the lead vehicle to start rolling, he buckled in and
quickly relayed all of the pertinent information and ground rules Cade had
piled on him moments before. He powered up the two-way radio, maxed the volume,
and stashed it in a cubby near his elbow. He wedged one of the Berettas under
his left thigh, and the other, along with two of the four magazines Cade had
given him, got stashed in the glove box. Seeing this, Taryn demanded to know
how he got the guns.

With a satisfied half-smile he replied, “Cade gave them to
me.”

“Gave
what
to you?” inquired Sasha from the rear
seat.

In unison and in near perfect harmony, Taryn and Wilson
replied, “Nothing, Sasha.” Such words might have placated anyone under seven,
but Sasha had that doubled chronologically, so predictably she pushed the
issue. And, as Wilson expected, his petulant sibling wedged her upper body
between the front seats and into his personal space, demanding to know what was
being ‘
hidden’
from her.

Suddenly the F-650 blocking their exit belched grey exhaust
and spun its wide tires, tilling the flower beds and finishing the destruction
the undead had started. As it surged forward, knocking the two Zs off of their
feet, Sasha said sarcastically, “So that must be a semi-automatic
nothing
under your leg then, huh Wilson?”

Wilson said nothing. He met Taryn’s gaze and delivered the
universal signal for step on it by nodding in the direction of the rapidly
accelerating Ford.

Message received. Taryn pinned the pedal to the firewall,
bringing four hundred of the Raptor’s available five-hundred-horsepower on
line. The race-tuned pick-up shimmied in place for a half second as the torque
spooled up and was transferred to the rear wheels. Then two new furrows were
gouged into the beds as the truck rocketed ahead, going from zero to thirty in
a dozen yards.

Consequently, Sasha, victimized by both inertia and gravity,
was thrown into the seatback with sufficient force to steal her wind.

“Sorry, Sash,” Taryn said, a half beat before belting out a
serious rebel yell.

In the passenger seat, knuckles and face turning the same
ghostly white, Wilson sat speechless and dangerously close to soiling his
pants.

Inside the F-650, Cade flicked his gaze to the rearview
where he saw the baby Ford lurch up like a stallion and then slew sideways
spitting dirt and Z body parts in its wake. Shaking his head, he whispered,
“You better rein it in, Taryn.”

At that same instant, great minds were running on the same
track and Brook had twisted in her seat and stated the obvious: “That truck is
way too much for her.”

Returning his eyes to the fore, Cade arched a brow and
quipped, “And how would you know ... have you been reading Road and Track magazine
behind my back?” Not really expecting an answer to that, he muscled his own
ride through a hard left turn that brought them back onto the tree-lined
two-way heading back towards FOB Bastion.

“Because I got a few new gray hairs riding in one just like it
on the way to Bragg.”

A few?
thought Cade. In his experience, the wild ride
that surviving another twenty-four of the apocalypse had become didn’t just
manifest itself in the way of a few new gray hairs. In fact, nearly every
person who was still living and older than thirty that he’d been around with
any kind of consistency since Z-Day, himself included, had aged considerably.
His normally coal-black goatee, for the first time in his life at just
thirty-five years of age, was, to quote a Grateful Dead song, now showing
more
than a “
touch of grey
.” Crow’s feet were now a permanent addition to his
face, and when he looked in the mirror the stranger looking back possessed
heavy-lidded red-rimmed eyes that gazed back with a thousand-yard-stare
inherited from too many sleepless days and nights spent ‘
downrange
’
rubbing elbows with the dead.

“I found the truck and the keys for Uncle Carl,” bragged
Raven, thankfully snapping Cade out of his funk. “It was the brightest shade of
orange I’ve ever seen and parked
inside
the car place in Lumber Town.
Inside
... pretty random, huh?”

Correcting Raven, Brook said, “Lumberton. That’s where Raven
saved our butts, Cade. Can’t think of when I’ve been prouder of our Bird than
that moment.”

“And
that’s
where Uncle Carl gave Mom the grays,”
added Raven, satisfied she’d picked up on the correlation.

Looking past Cade, eyes locked on the old Craftsman a block
up, Brook said nothing.

Cade was doing the same. He slowed to walking speed as the
duplicate of their old home crawled by. He noticed that the Z that had been
loitering on the porch earlier now was nowhere to be seen. More importantly,
though he didn’t draw attention to it, the front door to the house was hanging
open. With a palpable feeling of dread pressing him into his seat and his brain
grappling with the complexities of the clear and present danger the new
information represented, he pulled the rig hard to the curb and let the engine
idle. Seconds later the Ford formed up on his side, the window powered down and
Wilson looked a question at Cade.

“Did you go over what I told you with Taryn?”

“Sir ... yes, sir.”

With the awful memory of the IED attack that had killed Leo
and Sheila instantly, and then his neighbor Rawley being gunned down as a
direct result when he doubled back to help, Cade decided to let Taryn hear the
grim warning from his own mouth. He rattled the shifter to Park and slid from
the truck. Putting his elbows on the window channel, he made direct eye
contact.

“Taryn, this is real important,” he said slowly. “If we come
upon any trouble, Zs or human, we keep on driving unless the road is blocked.
And if that’s the case ... ”

Interrupting him, Taryn said rather confidently, “I stop and
reverse out of the situation and then pull a bootlegger’s reverse so that your
monster truck doesn’t get trapped. But don’t worry ... I don’t plan on
tailgating you, so that’s not likely to happen.”