Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (5 page)

Trying to breathe through his mouth, he averted his eyes,
steered clear of the mess and began searching for what had drawn him to the
house in the first place.

Starting with the drawer farthest from the
triangle—
the
recommended placement of the most important kitchen items—which in this
instance consisted of the gas range on the right wall, a double-wide kitchen
sink opposite it, and the putrid mess of a fridge at the tip, he began his search.

In his experience, every house had a junk drawer. And this
one, which was exactly where he’d expected it to be, had a smell all its own.
In addition to all of the usual stuff: small tools, old-fashioned screw-in
fuses, batteries, pencils, and a myriad of other items all without a dedicated
place of their own, there were a dozen patchouli-scented tea light candles
mixed in. He hated the putrid earthy odor almost more than the stench of
carrion. In fact, it was giving the fridge a run for its money in the offensive
odor category.

After picking the candles out and tossing them into the
moldy sludge, he searched the rest of the junk drawer without finding what he
was looking for. So he moved on and rifled through the other drawers and again
came up empty. As a last resort, he opened all of the cupboards one by one, and
when he finally reached the one near the far door he found a number of eyehooks
screwed into the wood, not one of them with a car key dangling from it.

“Dammit,” he muttered, slamming the cupboard door. He walked
back past the unfinished morning meal and scrutinized the Lincoln SUV through
the side door, trying to determine if it could be hotwired. Noticing the
keyless entry and guessing that the high-dollar vehicle also came standard with
one of those computer-chip-embedded keys, he spit a string of epithets cursing
Mister Murphy.

Crestfallen from not finding the keys to the Navigator as he
had hoped, and definitely not wanting to go back to Beeson and asking for
another handout, he padded through the dining room, creaked across the
hardwoods, and retrieved the crutches. Before leaving the familiar-feeling
house, he paused in the foyer and closed his eyes and imagined the floor plan
flipped and the world righted. Thought of how nice it would be for him and
Brook and Raven to be back in Portland, picking up right where they had left
off. For a brief moment he experienced a respite from reality until from
somewhere outside the dead and their incessant moaning had to go and ruin it.

He looked through the window inset into the door.
All
clear.
So he opened the door slowly, stepped out onto the porch, and left
it closed but unlocked just as he had found it.

Looking south down
Unlucky 13,
he spotted the same
herd of monsters, now adjacent to the house next door, and on a collision
course with the parked Ford.

With a certain urgency dictated by the events unfolding, he
clunked down the stairs and through the lava rock, relying less on the crutches
and placing more trust in his bad ankle. By the time he had reached the truck,
the dead were stumbling over the curb, their calls becoming increasingly
louder. With seconds to spare, he hit the unlock button, hauled the door open
and tossed the crutches across the seat. He had just gotten inside and closed
and locked his door when the Zs encircled his truck. As he sat there serenaded
by the sounds of the dead worrying the truck’s exterior, he closed his eyes and
relived the ride along with Beeson. He retraced the route from FOB Bastion,
passed by the Craftsman he was parked in front of and continued on until a
four-wheel-drive shop somewhere down the road entered his mind’s eye. The
details were vague but the still-darkened sign shone like a Klieg light in his
memory. He started the truck and powered on the navigation system, bringing up
a colorful map denoting the recommended route from his present location to the
GPS coordinates he’d inputted earlier. He looked at the myriad of buttons and
switches and repeatedly pressed the one marked
+
. Up popped a new map,
zoomed in, and not as cluttered with arterials and Interstates and side streets
as the previous. He hinged forward and looked closely at an overhead
view—rendered in colorful pixels—of maybe two square miles of his surroundings.
Running east to west were the oddly labeled streets, all named after letters of
the alphabet and each followed by the word
Road
. Some of them had
fractions attached after the corresponding letter; most did not. He looked over
the names in small font. To the right was an entry for the Loma post office.
There was a restaurant named Lola’s, presumably a greasy spoon, definitely
closed for good. Then the out-of-place numbers caught his eye and he matched
the rest of the text with the sign he saw in his mind.
Mesa View 4x4, here I
come
, he thought as he checked the time on the Suunto. Deciding he had a
couple of spare minutes to burn before Brook set the hounds after him, he
selected Drive, tromped the pedal and bulled through the desperate throng,
completing another one-eighty. With its off-road tires throwing rock and cactus
thorns at the pursuing Zs, the Ford swallowed up the curb and Cade steered
north, the two-lane leading him further away from FOB Bastion.

Chapter 7

A mile north of the Craftsman, Cade spotted the darkened
signage casting its long shadow beside a rectangular steel prefab. Emblazoned
in red on a yellow background were the words
Mesa View 4x4
and a phone
number below. The building itself was situated smack dab in the middle of a sea
of dingy gray asphalt on which a dozen spots were lined out in the same faded
yellow as the sign. To Cade, the place looked like it once had belonged to one
of those large nationwide outfits that used to regularly send glossy catalogs
disguised as an enthusiast’s magazine to his home in Portland. Far from the
immaculate store represented on the catalog cover, this place had fallen into a
sad state of disrepair. He reached into the center console, coming out with his
Bushnell's. Placed the cups to his eyes and manipulated the center wheel, bringing
the once-white building into sharp focus.

The operation looked like any other rural garage Cade had
ever seen—only this one apparently specialized exclusively in off-road
vehicles—which was a good thing seeing as how the two hundred miles and God knows
how many Zs they were likely to encounter between FOB Bastion and the compound
would chew up a normal passenger car.

Parked haphazardly on the oil-stained cement beside the
garage were a half-dozen pick-ups of all different makes and models. “Gotta be
keys for one of them inside,” Cade muttered to himself as he swept his gaze to
the glass and metal door on the far right hand corner of the building where a
handwritten sign was taped to the glass. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE had been
printed meticulously in three-inch-high block letters. He ventured to guess the
person who had made the sign had taken their time in hopes that the outbreak
playing out live on television that Saturday would be revealed as some kind of
an Orson Wells War of the Worlds-type of prank and everything would reset to
normal after the weekend. But that hadn’t been the case.
Closed forever was
the reality of the situation
, he thought morosely, remembering his
indoctrination to the outbreak on that Saturday in July. Killing his infected neighbor
Ted with an ice axe had been the most surreal experience of his life, and
thankfully his survival instinct kicked in and overrode his brain as it tried
to process what he was seeing at the time.

Striking the troubling thoughts from his mind, he panned
left to the plate window, where, below a set of horizontal blinds, drawn
half-way up and far from level, a number of sun-faded placards hawking six-inch
lift kits and Warn winches and all manner of aftermarket 4x4 parts leaned out
against the glass.

Left of the office window were two dirt-streaked roller
doors tall and wide enough to accommodate a monster truck of Bigfoot’s stature.
Inset on the nearest door was a smaller two-foot square opening with a rubber
flap that Cade assumed was a dog door. Stacked vertically at the top of each
roller door was a pair of fairly large windows through which Cade could see a
white vehicle up on the lift; the sun entering the building’s skylights glinted
from the curvature of its windshield.

Next, he eyed the driveway, which, unlike the rest of the
operation, was a scene of order. The thirty-foot stripe of asphalt was lined
with beds of recently spread mulch dotted with hardy desert flowers that lent a
colorful contrast to the shop’s rundown exterior.

He scrutinized the sturdy wheeled gate at the end of the
drive and grimaced upon noticing the chain and padlock put there to keep people
like him out. And that was good and bad, he supposed. Good if nobody had come
back seeking refuge from the dead the weekend Hell decided to open up. Bad if a
couple of guard dogs had been left behind to watch over the place. More so for
the dog’s sake than his, for with three weeks without food or water he supposed
they’d be long dead anyway.

As he sat in the idle truck while watching a trio of Zs
amble his way, the fact that he was going to need to ask for help (one of his
least favorite things to do) in order to crack this nut became painfully
obvious. On the other hand, having six people—two of them bickering
siblings—and a dog crammed into the Ford would be painful in its own special
way doled out like a thousand paper cuts over the course of the upcoming trip.

Weighing the pros and cons of the latter scenario in his
mind, he put the truck in reverse and backed up, bouncing over the curb and
flower beds in the process. Then slapping the transmission into Drive, a quick
look at the Suunto told him he’d been gone too long.
Shit
, he thought,
wheeling left and destroying a good portion of Mesa View 4x4’s only redeeming
asset, sending multicolored petals airborne as he tore off in the direction from
which he’d come.

Chapter 8

Like a speakeasy patron working a bottle of bathtub gin, the
hip-high mound of dark earth was greedily soaking up the rain. The first
shovelful had been nothing. Number fifty was a different story altogether.
Daymon’s muscles burned from the exertion, therefore, number fifty-one seemed
exponentially heavier and more cumbersome than the previous. But he didn’t
stop. In between scoops he cast a sidelong glance at Duncan who was moving a
degree slower and had just cast another load of thick mud into the grave, fully
concealing Logan’s upturned profile. Bowing his head, Daymon followed suit,
depositing number fifty-two near where he imagined Gus’s feet were.

With their combined efforts, the backbreaking work filling
the graves took only a fraction of the time that Duncan had spent digging them,
and when they had finished, both men were muddied and tired and hungry and all
alone.

***

An hour earlier, as it turned out, Lev and Chief were the
ones who’d answered Daymon’s mayday and rushed from the compound armed to the
teeth. And after the rotters were culled, they had tossed the bodies in the
ditch to be burned later.

Afterward Duncan declined their offer to help bury Logan and
Gus and instead redirected their good intentions and had them go back and ready
a couple of vehicles for a return trip to the quarry.
And start some coffee
,
he had called out to Chief as he closed the gate to the compound feeder road
behind the waiting Toyota with Lev at the wheel.

***

“Coffee sounds good right about now,” Duncan said, still
staring at the spot in the forest where the Toyota had entered earlier.

There was a long minute of silence during which the drizzle
let up and the clouds parted to reveal a sliver of blue sky.

Daymon leaned in and said, “Don’t you want to say some words
first?”

Duncan removed his glasses and wiped them for the hundredth
time. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he said, “God already knows my feelings
for Logan ... don’t see a need to tell him again.”

“And Gus?”

“Didn’t know Gus very well but I did think good thoughts for
the both of them while I was digging.”

Daymon said, “Two birds with one stone ... pretty
efficient.” After which he held Duncan’s gaze for a second and then flicked his
eyes up at the retreating clouds, trying to resist the urge to forget about the
subject he wanted to broach and instead go with some bullshit comment about the
weather.
Nothing doing
. This was life and death type of stuff, he
reasoned. So instead of praising Mother Nature for the sunshine, he dove right
in and spoke from the heart. “I’m worried about you, Old Man,” he conceded.
“The Duncan who I’ve gotten to know wouldn’t have sent Lev back to the compound
without restringing the barbed wire behind him. Truth be told, I’m kinda pissed
that Lev didn’t string it up on his own accord, but I’ll cross that bridge
later.”

“It was a long cold night for the kid,” drawled Duncan.

“No excuse for slippin’ up like that.”

“Hell, Daymon. His friend ... my brother ... he was murdered
yesterday in cold blood. Can’t blame Lev.
Besides
,” added Duncan, nearly
shouting, “
I
told him to git and then ran him off.”

“You know ... you almost bought the farm today,” Daymon said
through clenched teeth. “What if you left the gate leading to the compound wide
open? More lives at stake than your grizzled carcass.”

Duncan remained silent, his gaze fixed on a clutch of
rotters emerging from the gloom where 39 exited the forest.

“What’s
your
excuse?” asked Daymon, feeling oddly like
a father dressing down his kid. He glanced over at the empty Jack bottle. Said
nothing more as the impulse to scream and vent his anger grew exponentially.