Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (25 page)

Daymon and Lev moved close. “What is it?” asked Lev.

“Whoever grabbed her lost some skin ... at the very least.
I’m sure there’s some shitbag out there with a sore pair of testicles as well.”

“Look where it got her,” said Lev.

“From what Heidi says ...” Daymon went silent. Hung his
head.
Filter, dumbass
, he thought to himself. And though he didn’t want
to speak of Heidi’s ordeal without her permission, it was way too late to
swallow his words. He looked up, cleared his dreads from his face, and regarded
the water-filled quarry, focusing on the sun-splashed ripples moving east to
west behind a soft breeze. After a long pause, he drew in a deep breath and
went on. “Whenever Robert Christian or one of his cronies weren’t having their
way with her ... Bishop’s boys were.”

“I’m so sorry,” Duncan said. “We’ve all got a dog in this
fight. I don’t care who gets to do it ... just so long as Bishop dies.”

Breaking through his inhibitions, Lev said to Daymon, “She
deserves to have back her dignity. Will you give me a hand?”

Daymon nodded and scooped up the sheets. Knees creaking, he
rose and passed one of the stark white items to Duncan, then watched solemnly
as the older man knelt next to the petite corpse and covered it from head to
toe.

Together Lev and Daymon grabbed Jordan’s rigor-affected arms
and pressed them close to her nude body, holding them there while Duncan
finished swaddling her corpse in the remaining sheets.

Standing up, Duncan drawled, “Follow me.” Without a backward
glance, he trudged around the thicket and set a straight course for the
outbuildings.

Daymon watched Duncan walk away. Regarded the body near his
feet for a second and then looked at Lev and mouthed, “What the hell.”

Answering with a shrug, Lev double-timed it and fell in
behind Duncan, who was obviously on some kind of a mission.

After covering the seventy-five yards of mud-puddle-pocked
gravel with two curious stragglers on his heels, Duncan entered the first of
the three outbuildings and ten seconds later emerged empty-handed.

With Lev and Daymon still looking on curiously, Duncan
entered the middle building, was inside for a handful of seconds and came out
wearing a dejected look.

“Third time’s the charm,” he said. He pushed the shattered
door of the third outbuilding inward. This time he was inside for a couple of
minutes and came out with a flat-bladed shovel in each hand. “Found them in the
rafters,” he said, doling out the rusty items. He disappeared inside again and
returned with a pickaxe that had seen better days. The head was dulled and red
with rust, its wooden handle rife with vertically running cracks.
It’ll do
,
he thought. Then, answering the bewildered looks directed his way, he said,
“We’re gonna bury her here.”

Lev made a face. He said, “Why not bury her on the hill next
to Logan and Gus and Sampson?”

“We will. But later,” intoned Duncan. “We bury her deep
enough to keep the critters away. And the same reasoning that went into that
thing about the rotters learning needs to be applied here. I see no sense in
letting the others know about this until we have to ... especially Heidi.”

“Thanks,” said Daymon. “Good call.” Throwing the shovel over
his shoulder, he turned and struck off for the distant briar patch.

Chapter 36

Shoulder-to-shoulder, Cade and Brook walked twenty yards
beyond the parked Fords and took up a spot behind an abandoned Chevy fifteen
feet short of where I-70 began the long and gradual run out into the Green
River valley below.

Instinctively, Brook unlooped the Bushnell’s from around her
neck and handed them to Cade. Using him for support, she put a hand on his
shoulder, stood on her tiptoes and pointed a few degrees right of a rising
column of black smoke and said, “I saw movement.” She pointed. “
There
... to the right of the vehicles.”

“What I was afraid of,” said Cade. “And the reason we aren’t
rushing headlong down the hill ... yet.” He spun around to check their six and
saw the outline of Raven’s head superimposed over the F-650’s rear window. He
shifted his gaze to the Raptor and counted three more similarly backlit
silhouettes. Then pressed the binoculars to his face, adjusted the focus wheel,
and scanned the retreating stripe of gray highway behind the Raptor. Nothing
moved. No dead. No vehicles. Not so much as a single tumbleweed twitching in
the wind. Satisfied that all was clear behind them, he turned back and squinted
into the distance, trying to see anything out of the ordinary on or around the
road. He searched a quick grid pattern for the glint of light off of glass that
would give away a sniper’s position. Then examined all of the static vehicles,
giving any that weren’t wearing a skirt of trapped tumbleweeds three weeks in
the making a little extra scrutiny. After seeing nothing that screamed roadside
bomb or even looked remotely indicative of an ambush waiting to be sprung, he
shifted his gaze up and glassed the first exit servicing Green River. There he
saw a pair of SUVs of indeterminate make and model and a trio of stout-looking
motorcycles parked near the shoulder. Razor wire was strung up along both sides
of the off-ramp and a pile of Z corpses was stacked three deep nearby. He panned
south of the Interstate where a much larger drift of death was fully engulfed,
red flames licking dozens of feet into the air with fingers of oily black smoke
roiling high above them.

“They’ve been busy,” Cade said, pointing out where the
median was blackened and littered with charred human remains from a point just
past the onramp all the way west along I-70, downwind judging by the drifting
smoke, for as far as he could see. Panning farther ahead, he noticed a few Zs
meandering in from the west, but clearly evident from the size of the pyre
burning, and the bodies stacked and waiting to be torched, the dead that had
gathered overnight had already been culled. Same old story wherever he went.
Like
moths to a flame
, as the female guard at FOB Bastion had put it.

He swung the binoculars right of the vehicles and counted
five men and one woman, all sitting on colorful folding camp chairs in the
shadow of a large picnic canopy erected just beyond the guardrail. And next to
the guardrail was a hand-lettered sign with orders for anyone passing to stop
and pay a toll before entering or continuing on. But it didn’t surprise him
that the Interstate was wide open. Likely the folks down there had been
threatened with serious repercussions if a patrol from FOB Bastion came along
and found it blocked.

Beeson had even stated the night before that due to
attrition and a lack of the replacements he’d requested, he had been forced to
adopt a temporary
live and let live
policy in regards to the growing
sanctuary Green River had become.
The natives
, Cade had been warned,
were
getting a little too big for their britches
—hence the spray-painted warning
miles back.

Cade propped his elbows on the Chevy’s trunk and, feeling
the warmth of the hot metal through his shirt sleeves, snugged the field
glasses in tight. With the magnified image blurred slightly due to the rising
heat vortexes, he picked up the would-be welcoming party and scanned beyond the
off-ramp. A tick later he froze and whistled softly. “It’s worse than Beeson thought.”
He took the binoculars from his eyes and regarded Brook. “It looks like they’ve
adopted their own brand of justice in Green River.” He refocused on a flatbed
truck that had been left parked haphazardly on a corner lot where both roads
from the Interstate converged.
Good high visibility area
, he thought.
Maximum
message delivery
. On the back of the flatbed, arranged facing the asphalt
confluence, were three corpses, two male and one female. Seated on stackable
lawn chairs for all to see, they had been stripped naked and posed, each
sporting a different hand-lettered cardboard sign. Cade took in the macabre
sight, starting with the handless male corpse on the left. The sign around his
neck said:
Thief caught stealing food
. He walked his gaze over the second
male corpse. Crimson red from the waist down, the man had suffered a savage
V-shaped wound to the groin. The corpse’s face was a mask of pain, and stuffed
into the gaping mouth was a shriveled penis, the scrotum still attached. The
sign clutched in the corpse’s dead hands read,
Caught fucking the dead
.
And the third placard nailed to the chest of a female corpse with what looked
like a single rusty railroad spike read,
Adulterous murderer
.

Not wanting to describe the scene, nor thinking he could
even do it
justice,
Cade passed the binoculars to Brook and let her see
for herself.

A second passed and Brook let out a gasp and promptly thrust
the Bushnell’s back into Cade’s hands. She buried her face and said, “Animals.”

Cade said nothing. No way to label the folks responsible
more succinctly than Brook just had. So he made three more quick sweeps of
Green River, which was surrounded by what looked to be the remnants of an
ancient watershed, probably last fully supportive of life when the dinosaurs
roamed. The ever-present Book Cliffs rambled off into the distance north by
west. Closer in, ripples of hardened sedimentary deposits lent the landscape an
unforgiving lunar appearance. And in the center of it all, nestled in a
twenty-square-mile gash and backstopped by red rock cliff bands upthrust on a
diagonal, was a lush green diamond-shaped tract of land, treed and dotted with
tired-looking businesses and nicely kept homes. Cade had received the Cliff’s
Notes rundown on the city from Beeson. Apparently it had once swelled to
two-thousand residents in the early seventies, had enjoyed a long period of
prosperity due to the mostly Air Force personnel overseeing nearby ICBM test
firings, and then, with the budget cuts of the eighties, all of that had come
crashing down and the city had been a veritable ghost town until the fall of
Salt Lake City three weeks prior. Now bustling with refugees, the city looked
busier than anything Cade had seen since leaving Portland.

A low haze hugged the hillsides, no doubt exhaust from
generators he guessed had been humming along all night down there. There were a
couple of vehicles moving within the city proper, trolling the side streets
like predators, slowly and meticulously. Security perhaps? Dangerous for sure.
Clothes drying on lines were strung between some of the houses, colorful
articles brightening up the place, like lipstick on the pig of a city that was,
as Beeson had put it, “A cesspool to steer clear of.” And after seeing the
brutality some of its inhabitants were capable of, that’s exactly what Cade had
in mind. But even though I-70 wasn’t blocked physically, the fact that several
well-armed people and a few chase vehicles were assembled near the tightest
chokepoint meant it might as well have been.
This nut,
Cade thought to
himself,
is going to take a little cunning and maybe some gunplay
—
or
at least the threat of the latter before all is said and done
.

Just as they were about to wrap up the reconnaissance and
return to the vehicles, Cade noticed some movement near the off-ramp. He looked
through the binoculars and saw the lone woman and one of the men of the group
leave the oasis of shade, head for the vehicles and climb into one of the boxy
SUVs. Its headlights flared on and he watched the gray SUV—which he guessed, based
on the amount of aftermarket chrome stuck on the thing, had to be a civilian
Hummer—reverse down the ramp and perform a smooth J-turn and then slink away
silently past the flatbed of death and into the city.

Not wanting to lose the golden opportunity of dealing with
just four guards instead of the original six, Cade said, “Let’s go.”

Hustling back to the F-650, amid a steady stream of nods and
clipped “
OKs
,” Cade relayed his plan to Brook. Once they had both
climbed aboard, the cab erupted in a flurry of activity as Brook keyed the
two-way and filled in the others, telling them what she’d seen and what to
expect. But most importantly, she made it abundantly clear to Taryn that though
they might slow down, they were not stopping for
anything
.

While Brook did her part, Cade rapped the transmission into
Drive and started them moving. He reached over and toggled the - key on the
navigation system, zooming the map out until it presented a bigger picture that
showed clearly the course Interstate 70 took past the city. After committing
the particulars to memory, he toggled the system off and, with a smile, heard
his father’s voice in his head. Heeding that advice, he gripped the wheel
two-handed—
at the proper ten-and-two position
.

In the back seat, Max, sensing something was amiss and also
keying in on the scent of the recently dispatched dead clinging to his masters’
clothing, emitted a guttural growl to let his concern be known.

“Max is frosty, Dad,” said Raven. Then, with pigtails
flopping about, she stuck her head over the seat and was hit with both barrels
simultaneously when Brook and Cade barked, “Get down.”

“And buckle up tight,” Brook added, clicking her own
seatbelt home and looping the shoulder restraint behind her head.

Glancing in his rearview just as the massive F-650 crested
the hill, letting loose butterflies in everyone’s stomach, Cade saw Taryn tuck
the Raptor close to his ride’s bumper, a racing move she’d called ‘drafting’
during the brief instructional conversation she’d had with Brook via the two-way
a moment ago.

Speeding down the gradually sloping hill, sitting high with
a good view of the surrounding countryside, Cade pictured the people under the
canopy in his mind. He knew that once they heard the engine noise and looked
into the sun and saw the vehicles, their minds, dulled from the monotony of
watching the dead stretch of sun-baked road all morning, would burn two or
three seconds processing the sight before any kind of a decision-making process
would kick in. Then, depending on what kind of training, if any, they might
have had in their previous lives, anywhere between three and six additional
seconds would slip by. And based on his first impression of the crew down
below, Cade was betting on the latter before they unfolded themselves from the
low-slung camp chairs and rushed to their vehicles, of which only the Suburban
concerned him.