Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (17 page)

Stunned at the fact that she even knew the name of the
maneuver he’d been taught years ago during the defensive driving section of Delta’s
OTC—Operators Training Course—he went silent and stared at her, trying to
decide if she was parroting something she’d heard on an old Starsky and Hutch
rerun or if she was actually being sincere. After a few seconds without the
pendulum swinging either way towards any kind of a logical conclusion, he
flat-out asked her.

“And just how many bootlegger reverses have you successfully
completed in your—” He paused mid-sentence, thinking back to his youth. He
remembered getting his learner’s permit at sixteen and it was common knowledge
that Taryn was nineteen going on twenty—so that meant she’d been driving three,
maybe four years at the most. Unless she’d been brought up on a farm where
special allowances are given to drive at fourteen, which Cade thought highly
unlikely, because judging by the desert surrounding her hometown of Grand
Junction the only thing anyone was pulling from the ground was dirt clods.
After a couple of seconds, during which the two trucks engines idled and she
maintained constant eye contact, he resumed his line of questioning. “So in
four years behind the wheel, how much evasive driving have you actually done?”

“None,” she said. “But I’ve raced open wheel cars on dirt
tracks since I was seven and could reach the pedals.”

Without wasting another word on the subject, Cade returned
to the 650 and got back behind the wheel. He sat speechless for the second time
since waking and, after the brief lull in both word and action, shifted into
drive, and as soon as they were moving again filled a slightly amazed Brook in
on the new revelation.

As the larger truck pulled away and Taryn shifted the Raptor
into drive, Wilson powered up his window, looked at her with his head at an
angle, and said, “Really?”

“Yeah ...
really
,” she replied, her eyes glued to the
road. “Every word I said was the honest to God truth.”

“Shut him up real good, too,” Wilson noted. “And as far as
I’m concerned, my butt is glued to this seat for the rest of the trip.”

“You are a badass,” said Sasha from her backseat domain.
“But next time ... please warn me
before
you take off like that.”

Chapter 25

One heartbeat after leaving the final stretch of road with
its deadly three-hundred-foot drop-off behind and entering what Duncan hoped
was the final blind corner before reaching the quarry’s entry, several things
happened simultaneously. He nosed the Land Cruiser out of the right-hand
sweeper and his attention was immediately drawn to the airspace above the
quarry where a good number of raptors rode the thermals in lazy counterclockwise
circles. As he straightened the steering wheel, his gaze fell next on the
twelve-foot-tall concertina-topped fence looming thirty feet away. And in
nearly the same instant, he saw the dozen or so rotters standing on the road
between the SUV and the quarry entrance.

At first the dead remained rooted. Just staring and
swaying—seemingly in some kind of state of hibernation—until the exact moment
he crushed the brake pedal to the floor, bringing the nearly three-ton vehicle
to a grinding halt. Then all hell broke loose. And in the microsecond between
decision and action, as the dead surged forward in unison, a last furtive
glance told Duncan that, prior to turning, this group had been mostly
working-age folks with only a few falling outside of those demographics. That
they were clothed in blue jeans and tee-shirts—sensible attire—not the kind of
biker chic that the Huntsville crowd had seemed to favor, led him to believe
that they had come from the east, drawn here by the recent activity.

But from experience, he knew that the lives the walking dead
left behind had no bearing on their intent now. They weren’t marauders from the
west. Nor were they friendly survivors from points east. What they were right
now was dead and hungry. Nothing more, nothing less. And he was sitting in a
truck full of fresh meat only a few paces removed from them. So discarding his
useless evaluation, he racked the transmission into reverse and tromped the
pedal. In the next instant, as a few precious feet of separation was created,
Daymon drew in a deep breath and Duncan heard Lev use God’s name in vain and
bitch about them nearly becoming surrounded.

Intuitively Duncan steered with one hand and craned around
to look out the rear window. Then with the roar of the engine and a shrill
whining from the overtaxed transmission leeching into the cabin, he ticked off
two seconds in his head and again stood hard on the brakes. Lev uttered an
unintelligible expletive and the distinctive click-clack of him drawing back
the M4 charging handle reverberated from the back seat area. A half beat later,
after the SUV had lurched to a complete stop, Duncan, with spittle flying off
his lips, bellowed, “Out. Out. Out.”

There was the familiar creak of metal as Daymon’s door,
opened followed by a soft click signaling Lev’s exit. A staccato slamming of
both doors came next.

Once the two had bailed out, Duncan dialed down the CRAWL
feature, selected drive, and started the SUV—now three hundred and fifty pounds
lighter—hurtling forward. A truck’s length later he stood on the brakes and
jerked the wheel hard right—an instant and aggressive move that saw the
Toyota’s rear end break loose. Finally, wrestling the wheel left against the
slide and braking for a fourth and final time in the span of just a few seconds,
Duncan let the front bumper kiss the hillside, leaving the roadway mostly
blocked.

Frantically trying to create a comfortable shooting
position, he clicked out of his seatbelt, clawed the .45 from its holster, and
thumbed the hammer back. Motoring his window down, he was hit broadside by the
wave of stench preceding the raggedy line of flesh eaters nearing the Toyota.

He braced one elbow on the window channel, had the other
pressed against the steering wheel, and was drawing a bead on the nearest rotter
when two things registered in his peripheral.

On his right, through the windshield’s curved glass, he saw
Lev’s upper body—head and elbows and forearms—and then finally, completing the
fluid sequence, a black carbine settled horizontally across the mud-spattered
sheet metal with a dull thud, fire lancing star-like from its muzzle.

And on the left, he saw orange muzzle flashes behind a
series of thundering booms that rocked the SUV, both reassuring and letting him
know that Daymon had just entered the fray.

So he steadied the Colt in a two-handed grip, bracketed a
middle-aged male cadaver within his sights, took a calming breath, and let
loose a pair of closely spaced shots. Delivered from a dozen feet away, the
perfect double-tap ruptured the thing’s skull right where Duncan had been
aiming, sending one half airborne behind a cascade of blood and fluid, and the
other, still connected by a membrane of skin and muscle, hinging over onto its
shoulder with a wet meaty slap. A microsecond later, with his spent casings
still pinging off the inside of the SUV’s windshield, Duncan witnessed the
two-hundred pounds of dead meat collapse in place. Simultaneously, amid the
cacophony of gunfire, he saw two more rotters to his immediate left receive
point blank shotgun blasts, ugly face shredders creating translucent halos of
airborne brain, blood and tissue.

With all of this happening around him, Duncan added three
more rotters to his body count while at the same time witnessing an impressive
display of shooting as Lev put down more than his fair share of walking
corpses.

As the gunfire ceased and the echoes made their final rounds
of the hills before dissipating into silence, Duncan stepped out onto the
roadway. His gaze was drawn to the mud uphill where the twin J-shaped tire
marks created by his initial evasive maneuver were filling with the blood of
the twice-dead rotters. He looked high and noted the buzzards, undeterred from
whatever had piqued their interest, still gliding high above the ground-hugging
cordite haze. He jammed a finger knuckle-deep into one ear and wiggled, a
futile effort to quell the shrill non-stop ringing the raucous gunfire had
produced in his head. “Sorry about that, fellas,” he said, giving his lobe a
solid tug. Still talking, he repeated the procedure on the other ear. “Bastards
kinda caught me flat-footed up there ... gaping at the birds and taking in the
scale of the fence. And boom! They were right there in my grill ... literally.”

“No worries,” Lev said behind a half-grin. “Redeemed yourself
with that excellent driving.”

“I’ll say,” replied Daymon as he fished a few twelve-gauge
shells from his pocket. And as he reloaded his shotgun, he nodded at Lev and
asked, “Hell’d you learn how to shoot like that anyway?”

After swapping out magazines and chambering a fresh round
into the M4, Lev set the safety, tossed the carbine into the backseat, and
said, “Basic is where I learned how to shoot like that. The
sandbox
is
where I learned how to shoot moving
people
like that. All courtesy of
Uncle Sam. And when it comes to the enemy ... my philosophy is kind of like
that of an alcoholic taking that first drink. You know the saying, Duncan: one
is too many and a thousand is never enough.”

Daymon made a face. He looked at Duncan, who wasn’t biting.
“That was a low blow, Lev. But these things ain’t
people
and I don’t see
them as the enemy
.
They’re kind of like snakes were to me when I was
fighting fires, ya know ... if you gotta take off a head or two to be safe then
so be it.”

“Close enough comparisons. You see these ones ... how their
heads popped. Brains and blood and shit spraying everywhere,” countered Lev.
“And they’re still bleeding now. That’s because these ones are fresh. Their
blood hasn’t congealed yet. I figure they’re two days dead ... maybe three at
most.” He went quiet for a second. Then said, “
People
,” while staring
off into space.

Changing the subject, and for some reason choosing not to
address Lev’s jab at his booze-soaked grieving period, Duncan said, “Let’s get
these bodies moved off the road. This first one is real big. Lev, any help
here?” He strode over to what had been by far the largest of the rotters—a
morbidly obese male probably weighing upwards of three hundred pounds. How the
undead Bob’s Big Boy in the John Deere shirt had made it up the road, with
diminished motor skills and the extra weight, was beyond comprehension. But
none of that mattered now, because somehow—judging by the two dime-sized entry
wounds near its hairline—the corpse was still moving even after having been struck
by a pair of 5.56mm hardballs fired from Lev’s carbine.

So he took a step back and gave it some room as it labored
hard to roll over onto its stomach. And then it suddenly struck him as he
watched it wallow, fighting against gravity, just how much the chalky white
specimen with its rolls of fat leaking from under the hiked-up shirt reminded
him of a beached pilot whale. Then it moaned, a bovine-like noise that stood
the hair on Duncan’s arms at rigid attention.

“You going to finish what you started, Lev?”

“Consider that one on me,” he replied. “Pretend it’s a
chaser if you want.”

“You got something to say to me, boy?” Duncan said to Lev.
“If you do you better say it now.” He thrust the Colt out at arm’s length,
aiming an inch behind the big flesh eater’s left ear. This got Daymon’s
attention. He released the wrists of the corpse he’d been dragging. Left it on
the shoulder, walked to the Cruiser and leaned against the rear fender.

The bucking corpse craned around and locked its jaundiced
eyes on Duncan. Then it emitted a drawn-out moan that sounded suspiciously like
Noooo
.

Daymon pushed off of the Land Cruiser and racked a round
into his shotgun. “No way,” he said quietly.

After looking each man in the eye, one at a time, Duncan
fixed his gaze back on the big rotter. “This is not the
empirical
proof
you were speaking of, Lev. What we just heard was a garden-variety moan that on
account of all of this flopping around came out sounding
kinda
like a
word. Nothing more.”

“Hope you’re right.”

Daymon nodded. Returned to his task of checking the bodies
for identification.

Duncan’s .45 boomed, shattering the still. And stilling the
rotter. He holstered his Colt and said to Lev, “Lay off the booze cracks. I’m
not amused.”

“Copy that,” replied Lev as he drew his semi-automatic. Then
said nothing more and zippered his way between the fallen rotters, delivering
an extra
just in case
bullet into the back of each of their heads. After
the twelfth unnecessary coup de grace, he swapped mags and expended twelve more
9mm Parabellums on the unmoving bodies.

“Smartass,” said Duncan as he and Daymon struggled to roll
the now inert
whale
over the edge.

***

Ten minutes later and still Lev hadn’t said a word. But he
had helped clear the road.

“Come and check this out,” called Daymon. “I thought that
big one looked familiar.”

Duncan looked up and said, “Whatcha got?”

“I lifted his wallet. ID says he’s from Etna, Wyoming. Name
was
James Carter. I remember meeting him ... Mr. Carter, he called himself then.
Before the dead started to walk he taught fifth grade at Etna Elementary.”

“You went there?”

“No, Lev. We drove through there on our way down from Victor
and Driggs the other day. They had us dead to rights. Fifteen guns in our faces
and a school bus blocking the way ...”

Duncan was cleaning his glasses. He looked up and asked,
“What happened?”

“I’m standing here, aren’t I?” said Daymon. He looked up and
regarded the buzzards for a second.