Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (35 page)

Holding his free hand up, fingers splayed, Cade met Raven’s
eyes and made a fist. Seeing his diminutive twelve-year-old respond instantly
and freeze in place, eyes searching for the perceived threat, made Cade want to
run back out front and give Brook a high-five
and
a big wet sloppy kiss.
But school was still in session. He pointed to his eyes, two fingers in a ‘V.’
He then motioned with the same two fingers toward the far side of the inert
Suburban where a pair of recent turns, low guttural moans emanating from their
constantly working maws, marched in place, fighting a losing battle against a
tangle of waist-high shrubs.

Raven’s gaze followed her dad’s gesture. She nodded subtly
and remained motionless, waiting for instruction which came quickly in the form
of one vertical finger pressed against his lips. She watched him creep nearer,
knees bent, weapon outstretched. Her eyes went to the Zs. She saw them craning
and leaning and stretching against the thick bushes, trying to see where the
mechanical engine sounds were coming from. Then the dagger was in her dad’s
hand and he covered the final three feet at a trot.

Raven didn’t look away. She forced herself to watch.
Thankfully it was over swiftly and silently. Not a shot fired. Two short
efficient jabs, the point of the knife piercing each creature through the eye
socket, only a half second between each one’s final death.

They filed by the rotten corpses, both of them hinged over
the hedge as if in supplication—perhaps praying to remain dead.

A jumble of Daymon’s firefighting gear was in the rear of
the Suburban. On the front seat was a letter, previously folded three ways.
Cade reached in the open window and snatched it by one curled-up corner. Saw
that it was addressed to Heidi and, ignoring its content, promptly folded it
and stuffed it into a cargo pocket for safekeeping. And hopefully future
delivery.

He spun a slow one-eighty. Looked over Raven’s head to check
their rear.

Nothing.

He spun back around, slowly, eyes probing all points of the
compass, listening hard. The truck’s engines had been silenced. There were no
discernable moans or rasps of the dead. No screams of the living. Nothing to hear
but the aspen’s soft rattle.
Things were good.

Raven caught her dad’s eye and pointed towards the desert
tan dirt bike. Then a flash of recognition. The sum of two plus two fell into
place and her brown eyes got wide as a knowing look fell upon her tanned face.

Cade saw that nothing was amiss. The saddle bags, though
scarred from when he dropped the bike outside of Camp Williams, appeared to be
sealed, protecting their contents from the elements. The bike represented one
of the vague facts about his flight from Portland he’d previously disseminated
to Raven. Unsubstantial, in and of itself. Nothing pointing to what went on
inside the charnel house looming over them.

The bike could wait.

Raven’s full bladder could not. That much had already been
proven. And he had seen to it that the unfortunate result had been handled
tactfully and with the utmost respect.

The back stairs led to a small porch. There was no hand rail
so Cade motioned silently and had Raven wait on the first tread. Stepping only
on the nail heads indicating where the under support and treads met, he scaled
the seven stairs without making a sound. Bloody hand prints marred the shingles
and wood casing to eye-level all around the back entry. There was more of the
same and the door hung ajar and was creased vertically in the center, the
victim of constant and certain pressure inflicted upon it by a couple of tons
of determined dead weight.

Cade could see through the back window the damage the throng
of Zs had inflicted on the kitchen table and chairs. Every piece was upended,
their chromed legs bent and twisted at odd angles. More hand prints walked up
and down the walls between the kitchen and long hallway leading to the
destroyed front door. On the linoleum floor, two badly decomposed corpses lay
among shards of broken china, their limbs intertwined, each harboring one of
Daymon’s arrows in an eye socket.

Repeating the dinner bell tactic he had used at the RV, Cade
pounded on the windowless door. He waited and listened for a moment and heard
only the sound of branches rubbing together coming through the open front door.
The sound seemed to be bouncing around the expansive foyer before transiting
the enclosed confines of the lengthy hall. Though the stench of decay was heavy
in the house, nothing told him to turn back. His sixth sense was eerily quiet.
So he brought Raven forward.

She nodded and scaled the stairs, then looked around the
kitchen, mouth ajar, first taking in the destruction and then acknowledging the
corpses. Finally, curiosity having gotten the better of her, she whispered,
“What happened in here?”

“It’s a long story,” said Cade quietly. As she watched he
went about the kitchen searching all of the drawers. He removed a couple of
items from a far drawer and stuffed them in a pocket.

“What do you need those for?” she asked.

“For a friend,” he answered. “Now follow me.” He stepped
over the fallen Zs, walked half a dozen feet down the hall and found a narrow
door with a hole for a skeleton key. Sensitivities being a little different
around the turn of the last century, residents had no problem with a toilet
being so close to the kitchen. Plus, routing the plumbing with only one wall
between the two was a win-win for architects and tradesmen alike.

He pushed the heavy door in with his right hand and
side-stepped to his left, the hefty silencer keeping track with his gaze.
“Clear,” he stated. “Come on over, Bird. It’s all yours.”

With his back pressed to the wall across from the small
first floor powder room, he peered up and marveled at the jumble of bedroom
furniture and corpses clogging the stairway leading to the second floor. There
were pale arms bent at strange angles reaching through the mess, some still
twitching. The claw foot tub that he and the lawyer had worked so hard to
uproot lay on its side where it had landed and crushed a pair of unfortunate
flesh eaters.

As he waited for Raven to finish her business, the sound he
had heard from the kitchen a moment prior was repeated. Only when he looked
left through the empty windows framing the battered front door he saw the
aspens were unmoving, their brittle leaves deathly quiet. He noticed Brook and
Taryn standing near the Raptor engaged in conversation but couldn’t hear a word
across the distance.

A tick later the bathroom door creaked and swung inward and
Raven rejoined him in the hall wearing a sour look on her face. She said, “No
toilet paper,” then put her hands on display and added, “Or water.”

Cade said, “Sorry, sweetie. Beats squatting in the bushes or
peeing yourself again.” Regretting his choice of words, he passed the Glock
back and with a nod towards the kitchen added, “Keep it pointed that way. I’ll
be right back.”

With the business end of his suppressed Glock leading the
way, Cade stepped over a handful of bullet-riddled corpses and then cut the
corner around the baluster, keeping the front entry to his back. He swept his
gaze right to the formal dining room where golden dust motes skipped between
splashes of light. Speaking to the numbers of dead that had cornered them upstairs,
the walnut table fit for eight had been shoved up against the far wall and
around its periphery a mosaic of bloody footprints marked up every inch of a
finely woven Persian rug.
It was a miracle
, he thought to himself,
that
the house hadn’t literally come apart at the seams
.

Then the subtle sound again. Almost like a barber running a
straight razor slowly over a strap—back and forth and back and forth.
Intrigued, Cade took two steps to his left, looked up, and saw a bloated gray
face staring back at him from atop the mass of shattered joinery, and when eye
contact was established its maw opened and once again the brittle rasp echoed
about the open foyer.

He called down the hall. “Don’t worry, it can’t get us.”
Raven’s reply caught him flat footed. Voice devoid of all emotion, she said,
“Leave it then.”

A breath caught in Cade’s throat. He supposed he was
expecting a little more empathy. But then again, she didn’t know that the
creature impaled on the picket of splintered balusters between floors used to be
the man that he and Daymon had endured way too many grueling hours trapped
upstairs in the hot attic with.

His name had been Hosford Preston the something or other.
But Cade couldn’t recall if he had actually declared a title other than
attorney of law. And though Cade was no detective, how Hoss had come to be
perforated diagonally through the abdomen by three wrist-thick wooden spindles
was evident by the gaping hole in the ceiling directly overhead.

Stripped clean from the waist down, undead Hoss’s lower body
was harder to look at than his face. All that remained was a leather belt and
shreds of fabric no longer resembling dress pants. There was a gaping cavity
where his manhood had been, and from there on down, looking like a school of
piranhas had gotten to them, all that was left of his tree-trunk-like legs was
bare bone. One foot had gone missing, a rounded nub of bone and strips of
opaque tendon where it used to be. Inexplicably, the other foot remained
attached and still shod in a tightly laced leather wingtip.

Baffled by the fact that the lawyer’s meaty head wasn’t
already home to a half dozen 9mm Parabellums, Cade aimed his Glock up the
stairs and, before the thing could emit another hair-raising rasp, finished
Daymon’s job for him.

With the two spent casings still pinging across the foyer
floor, he hustled down the hall, gathered Raven in one arm and ushered her from
the charnel house the same way they had entered.

Now standing on the back porch, Raven screwed her face up
and asked, “Who was it?”

“
Who
is not important,” replied Cade. “The
it
part is what we need to remember. If me or Mom become an
it
you must not
hesitate. Two to the head ... hear me? I just had to finish a job in there
someone else couldn’t.”

“You did know
it
then.”

Thinking through his answer, Cade led them down the stairs
and to the motorcycle. He opened the saddle bag nearest him and looked up at
Raven and said, “I knew
it
briefly.” Which was as nice a way as he could
think of putting it. He grabbed the single pair of goggle-like NVGs—night
vision gear—and the bulging Ziploc filled with the spare batteries that went
with them. He also scooped up the loose ammunition—5.56 for the Colt and 9mm
for his Glock—as well as the spare magazines the armorer at Beeson’s fallen
command had been so kind in providing.

“If it happens,” Raven said solemnly, “I think I can do it.”
She looked at the ground. Kicked at a pine cone, then looked him in the face.
“If I
really
have to.”

Handing a box of shells to her, Cade said, “I know you
will.” And he believed it. Had to. Because hope was all he had. All any of them
really had. And the alternative—him or Brook turning and taking her with
them—was unacceptable. There was no failsafe. So faith was going to have to do.
He scooped up his Glock, rose from kneeling, and with one arm embracing his
only child left the dirt-bike and Suburban and bad memories behind him.

Ignoring the pair of leaking corpses and following the sound
of quiet conversation, they walked the drive and rejoined the others.

Chapter 53

Propping a pair of Daniel Defense M4 carbines against the
door frame, Daymon said to Duncan, “That’s the last of ‘em.”

Daymon turned to leave, then paused mid-stride and asked
Duncan if he wanted to come along and hunt some game for dinner.

“I’ll take a rain check,” he replied. “I need some space and
a little time to do some thinking ... so I can try and process all of this
mess.”

You mean you need to do a little more forgetting
,
thought Daymon darkly, as he picked up the smell of charcoal-filtered whisky
coming off the older man’s breath. But he didn’t feel like arguing the point.
There was still a lot of time before tomorrow for sobering up. And besides,
what harm could he do to himself or others as long as he was only boozing it up
inside the wire? So he let it go.

Duncan, hands shaking perceptibly, asked, “Anything else
need to be stowed away?”

“Negative,” replied Daymon. “Have you heard from the Sarge
yet?”

“Haven’t given it much thought,” said Duncan truthfully.
“He’s got until tomorrow. He either shows up or he doesn’t. Either way I’m
going north.”

“Where are you going to go?”

Duncan shrugged.

“I tried coaxing more details out of Tran this morning.”

Duncan arched a brow.

Shaking his head from side-to-side, Daymon said, “No help.”

“Heidi get anyone on the horn?”

Again, Daymon shook his head.

A string of expletives and another blast of alcohol-laced
breath burst from Duncan’s mouth. Then he reared back and put the boot to a
plastic bucket filled with five gallons of rice, sending the lid and at least two
gallons worth of the dietary staple airborne.

Daymon watched thousands of white grains erupt and then rain
down on the plywood floor, little dainty patters filling the cramped room. Once
silence had returned, he said, “Tell me how you really feel.”

Cupping his face with both hands, Duncan said, “Helpless.
Fucking helpless.”

“Well I know one thing ... you surely are
not
gonna
find your answer to that kind of problem at the bottom of a bottle.”

Duncan glared at the floor. Then, without meeting Daymon’s
gaze, he turned away and said, “So you said earlier in not so many words. But I
figure maybe this one will be the exception to the norm.” He reached over his
head and snatched the half-empty bottle of Jack down and quipped, “I’ll let you
know if I find
empirical evidence
.”