Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (30 page)

The throng of monsters split in two—half veered toward the
repaired fence and pressed their flesh against the barbed wire, reaching for
Phillip, who was steadily walking downhill towards them. The other half,
roughly seven or eight, plodded ahead on a collision course with Daymon’s
tempered steel blade.

Leading them east down 39, the lanky ex-fire fighter culled
the shambling lot one at a time. Skull caps went spinning and bouncing across
the blacktop. He decapitated the final two—a gigantic pair of undead specimens
rivaling the Brothers brothers who, along with Pug, had originally abducted
Heidi from the Silver Dollar Cowboy Bar back in Jackson.

He looked west down the road and saw that together, without
firing a shot, Lev, Duncan and Phillip had created their own tidy pile of
unmoving corpses.

He bent over and grabbed two handfuls of greasy hair.
Hefting the human heads, he was struck by how much heavier they were than he
had guessed. Probably a good ten pounds each. Clowning around, he pretended to
tightrope walk the centerline, the still chattering heads acting as
counterbalance.

A primal urge kicked in, causing Duncan to back away from
the clacking teeth. Though he knew a rotter wasn’t dead until its brain was
destroyed, the unusual sight always gave him a scrotum-shrinking case of the
heebs. “What the hell are you doing with those?”

Daymon hoisted the heads—eyes still moving in their sockets,
teeth clicking an eerie cadence—over his own. He said, “Blowing off steam.
Let’s have some fun. I figure we’ll keep them and do some experimenting.”

“What are you getting at?” growled Duncan.

Quizzical looks washing over their faces, Lev and Phillip
listened intently to the conversation.

One at a time, like flesh and bone bowling balls, Daymon
heaved the heads down the road. Landing with solid sounding thunks, they rolled
in two different directions until miraculously inertia bled off and both
stopped, wobbling right-side up, the wildly different profiles positioned in a
classic face-off a couple of yards apart. Shaking his head in disbelief, Daymon
said sharply, “You tell ‘em. Or I
will
.”

“I was going to,
goddamnit
.” Duncan turned a
one-eighty. Faced the fresh graves up the hill and stared for a long silent
minute. He turned and squared up with Lev and Phillip. Right off the bat, he
apologized for contemplating keeping his findings from them. Then he described
his
test
and his thoughts on the matter and their ramifications, which
all together stunk on ice.

“Extinction level event ...
supersized
,” exclaimed
Lev. He walked away from the circle, shaking his head.

“I’ll get everyone together later and tell em’ exactly what
I told you all,” Duncan said gruffly.

After a short walk, Lev returned to the fold. He looked at
Daymon first and then addressed Duncan saying, “What about what we found at the
quarry?”

Duncan said, “Phillip ... earmuffs.”

To which the rail-thin man cocked his head and said, “I’m
not following.”

Duncan jerked his chin to the side. “Please, take a walk.”

Sullen. Head down. Phillip took a walk. Along the way he
tried to bend it like Beckham with one of the heads but missed horribly, his
boot barely grazing the ear of his intended target and setting it spinning like
a top.

There was a short huddle and the trio came to a consensus.
“Sorry Phillip,” said Duncan. “Help us move the bodies and then we’ll go
inside. You’ll drive the Chevy. Lev ... you get the gate. This time close it
and lock it.”

Lev’s mouth worked silently, but he decided to let it go.
True,
Duncan had been drunk at the last change
, he thought. And also true was the
fact that Lev had been under the impression that the grieving man had wanted to
do everything on his own. That the barbed wire wasn’t secured after Duncan
drove the Toyota through was a shared responsibility. So Lev vowed to himself
to be more vigilant in the future. Learn from his mistakes. A few minutes
later, after the twice-dead rotters were piled in the ditch with the others,
Lev opened the gate and watched the three trucks disappear down the forest-lined
gravel road.

He wrapped the chain, secured the padlock and arranged the
foliage to fully conceal everything. Looked down the road to the west. Nothing.
All clear. He looked east and saw the severed heads sitting near the shoulder,
the mouths still moving nonstop. And though he couldn’t see them, still, he
imagined the eyes flicking left and right, following his every move. “Fuck
that,” he said aloud as he vaulted the barbed wire fence. “Not my job.”

Chapter 43

Bishop liked to be on his feet. He was always restless as a
kid. Riding his bike for hours upon hours around whatever base his father was
billeted at the time had been his daily reprieve from the monotony of life as a
military brat. And later on—after surviving BUDS and joining the Teams—unlike
most of his contemporaries, he lived for long marches with a heavy ruck biting
into his shoulders and the reassuring feel of ten pounds of lethal metal in his
hands. It allowed him to think, he supposed. So when he was not out in the
field and on patrol, he ran to think. Any time. Day or night. Getting his
cardio going always helped him clear his mind. See things from a different
perspective.

Leaving Carson and Elvis alone at the house, he jogged to
the gate, where, with several of his Spartan mercenaries looking on, he took it
upon himself to do the job that Carson hadn’t gotten around to yet.

He called Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb over and engaged them
in a little small talk. Asked them if they liked the dead. If they wanted to
keep one for a pet. If they liked to fuck them when nobody was looking. After
all of his questions has been met with a chorus of no’s and no ways and then a
couple of simultaneous
hell no’s
, he ordered them to go into town and
clear the marina and retail area of any walking dead and then bring him back a
fresh bucket of steam. The latter part of his edict was met with the usual
blank stares he had been accustomed to seeing since the two showed up after
having been kicked out by a group of local survivors two days prior. That they were
both low-IQ dolts led to them being ostracized from the rest of Bishop’s men.
But every army, no matter how small it was, needed bottom feeders to burn the
shit and bury the garbage—and in the case of Bishop’s fifty-man army—dispose of
Omega-infected corpses, a job that, to a man, nobody wanted.

Without another word, as the pair turned to go to their
vehicle—to collect the bucket of steam—Bishop motioned one of his men over and
relieved him of his rifle. Shouldering the black carbine, Bishop flicked the selector
to burst and triggered a couple of three-round-salvos knee-high at the
departing duo.

Walking left to right, the slugs chewed up Tweedle Dee’s
calves, pulping the muscle and severing one or both of his Achilles tendons,
sending him to the dirt screaming and clutching both legs. Then, a half dozen
5.56 x 45mm hardball rounds caught Tweedle Dum a little higher, shredding both
hamstrings and his right butt cheek, leaving a mass of bloodied flesh and fat
and torn fabric in their wake.

Rooted in place not five feet away, Jimmy Foley’s eyes went
wide. And though he didn’t really agree with the way the two men treated the
dead, what Bishop had just done was downright evil.

With both conscripts grievously wounded and screaming and
writhing on the dirt, Bishop looked directly at the balding conscript named
Foley and berated everyone at the gate—including the dying duo. “I don’t want
another one of those dead things coming anywhere near the fence ... do you
copy?” Foley nodded, as did the others. The men on the ground made no reply.
Continued thrashing the dirt and bleeding out. “I want a second roadblock
erected farther east. Find some heavy chain-link and string it up in the forest
as well if that’s what it’s going to take to keep those things away from me.”
As the two men continued bleeding and wailing and calling out for help, Bishop
spun a tight circle and looked each of the assembled men in the eye, stopping
back at Foley. Then, with spittle flying from his lips, he continued, “I don’t
want to see another fucking walking corpse unless I decide to go outside this
wire. Am I clear?”

To a man, Foley included, Bishop’s fiery diatribe was met
with more nods—all to the affirmative.

“Fresh magazine, please,” he said to Barry, a local kid with
a penchant for drinking and speeding, who promptly ripped a black polymer item
from his brand new chest-rig and mutely handed it over.

Sensing what was to come, all of the men—save for Foley, who
was trying to distance himself from the madness—crowded around the bigger of
the two, who had gone into shock, blood pulsing from the wounds where the
bullets had carved deep vertical furrows of flesh from his inner thigh. The
other man, however, was far from silent. He had been reduced to a blubbering
mess, all wound up into a fetal ball. And he was the one who left the world
first.
Squeaky wheel gets the grease
, thought Bishop as he fired a
couple of three-round-bursts into Tweedle Dee’s neck and head, causing the
man’s body to twitch once and go limp, a dark stain marking the seat of his
pants when his bowels loosened.

Handing the rifle back to its owner, Bishop bellowed, “I
want them left here as a reminder to anyone who thinks it’s fun to fuck with
the Zs.” Once again he regarded each of the men personally, then added, “Let
the crows eat what they want and dispose of the bodies at change of guard.”

Bishop tightened the laces on his running shoes. Motioned
for the hewn timber gate to be opened and padded on down the road.

***

An hour later, give or take, Bishop was back. Pulse pounding,
he stood hands on hips and breathed in through his mouth. The smell of death
was heavy. Pervasive. It was one of the things he hated most about the dead.
You could outrun them. As he had just proven on his jaunt outside the compound.
But you couldn’t elude their stench. It permeated his clothes and hair and,
though it was probably just his mind fucking with him, he could almost taste it
in his mouth.

Salivary glands pumping abnormally, he spat on the grass
outside the gate. Still catching his breath, he looked over at the bodies of
the two men he’d gunned down earlier. A murder of crows surrounded the prone
forms, strutting around, their beady eyes throwing sideways looks as if aware
there were more from where these two came from. One had taken station on
Tweedle Dee’s forehead and was laboriously working its head inside one empty
eye socket. Red rivulets ran down the corpse’s pallid cheek from where the
raptor’s claws had sunken in. It came up with a morsel, glistening wet and
trailing some kind of membrane, then raised its head towards the blue sky and
swallowed the treat whole and cawed mightily. Triumphantly. And though the
cadavers were not yet contributing to one of the banes of Bishop’s existence,
in this hot sun, he knew they soon would be. “The birds have had enough,” he
said to the bald conscript who was opening the gate for him. Hitched a thumb
over his shoulder and added for everyone present to hear, “Wait for my rotting
entourage to catch up and when you’re finished culling them I want those two
fools buried in the same pit.”

Moving the conscript aside with a sweeping motion, an
oversized Spartan mercenary nodded at Bishop and stepped aside, allowing him
passage.

Bishop said nothing. He used the walk to the lake house to
cool down. Stopping to stretch along the way, he regarded the newly cut landing
zone and the fuel-laden helicopters sitting there quiet and dark. There would
be no repeat of Jackson Hole. His plan for Elvis was going to see to that.
However
,
he thought.
Having the helos and pilots nearby as insurance offers me a
sense of security I haven’t known since before the dead began to walk
.
Suddenly from the vicinity of the gate there came a fusillade of gunfire. It
lasted three or four seconds and then trailed off. He went to work stretching
the other leg. Working the lactic acid from his hamstring with a steady
kneading, he listened to the satisfying sound of single and sporadically spaced
kill shots. The hollow pops—that to him signified but a single grain of sand in
the dune of dead he’d need to cull in order to be satisfied with his new
sanctuary—crashed off the houses and trees across the lake and came echoing
back and dissipated to nothing.

All was quiet as he mounted the stairs and entered the house
through the back door. He stopped and listened hard. Nothing stirred. He walked
the length of the hall past the powder room and was hit face first with a very
satisfying aroma. Sage and basil and garlic instantly came to mind. Ten more
paces and he was in the kitchen and saw the source. To his left, sitting atop
the gas stove, was a jumbo steel stockpot and another pot a quarter its size.
Steam was pouring from the large pot and he could hear the water inside roiling
and making it shimmy slightly. The aroma he’d hit upon when entering the house
was emanating from the other smaller pot. And sitting in a chair in the living
room, that with the kitchen and dining area made up an open plan great room,
was his number two, a veteran of the Iraq war who simply went by Carson. First
name or last, only he and Bishop knew. And he was wearing a shit-eating grin
that made the quartet of red welts marring his face fold in on themselves to
resemble a vertically arranged W.

“You like?” asked Carson with a sweeping gesture.

“The view’s great,” he answered, looking towards the sliding
glass and shimmering lake beyond.

“No ... the spread, Ian.”

Looking left, Bishop noticed the wood slab dining table had
been set for two. There were two napkins folded fancy. Two plates with gold
trim guarded on both sides by an array of silverware, two of everything it
seemed. There was even a pair of distinct glasses, one for wine, and one,
presumably, for water. Peeling off his sweat-soaked tee, Bishop said, “Are you
coming out of the closet on me or something? We having a date here?” He held a
straight face for a second and then burst out laughing.