Allegiance (12 page)

Silence
… except for the rising crescendo of growls and
moans coming from the agitated creatures.

Liam looked into the
mute prisoner’s almond-shaped brown eyes. Somewhere in there he could sense a
smoldering coal of hatred. It didn’t register on Tran’s slack expression—only
in the man’s eyes. Suddenly Liam, who enjoyed a foot and a half height
advantage and at least a hundred pounds over Robert Christian’s former chef,
was breaking out with a case of cold feet.

The Hummer’s grill met
the iron gate with a screech. Slowly, on well-oiled hinges, the thousand-pound
gate began tracking a steady arc outward, pushing a number of the assembled
zombies with it.

With dexterity and speed
that belied their awful appearance, a clutch of creatures slapped at the
fenders and hood of the slab-sided sport utility vehicle.

“Almost there,” Lucas
stated. A gap widened between the gate and the compound wall, and he forced the
rig through the undead throng, wrenching the steering wheel left and right.

Liam reached across
Tran’s writhing body and couldn’t help but take another look into the man’s
narrowed eyes.
Fucker, Luke
, he thought.
This was too close and
personal. A bullet would have been easier. Least I’d sleep better.
He
opened the door with a click, waited a beat...

“Now!” bellowed Lucas.

It was over in seconds.
Lucas elbowed Tran, who barrel-rolled out and hit the pavers amongst bare feet
and clawing hands. The door slammed and Liam urged his brother to step on it.

The dead, numbering at
least a hundred strong, surged around the yellow vehicle, hungering for the
fresh meat.

“Not a sound out of
him,” Lucas said as he downshifted and maneuvered the H2 through the tail end
of the herd, half of which had taken the bait; the rest swiped at the windows
leaving a viscous blood-tinged residue.

“Fucking lemmings. Those
things are pouring down the bluff,” Liam said, stealing a look through the
narrow rear window. “Maybe he got away. The look he gave me was like a
thousand-yard stare. Like he was on a fucking mission from God.”

“Don’t matter, he served
his purpose,” Lucas said coldly. “And you know what, bro... I don’t blame him.
I wouldn’t be makin’ lovey dovey googly eyes at you either if you were about to
feed me to the goons.”

An uneasy silence
prevailed.

Sunlight filtering
through the high canopy splashed a mosaic of gnarled shadows across the slowly
moving truck.

Lucas glanced at the
rearview. “Bottom of the hill... what do you think? Should we go left or
right?”

Receiving no response
from his brother, Lucas thought it over for a second and made an executive
decision. “We’re going right, over the Teton Pass. I’ve got a feeling the
majority of the goons took the path of least resistance and followed 189.
Jackson Hole’s probably swimming with them.”

“Teton Pass, here we
come,” Liam said with all the enthusiasm of a
Griswald
on vacation.

“Liquor store, here we
come,” Lucas added, making bubbles in the Crème de Menthe. “Want some, bro?”

After a millisecond Liam
relented. “Why not? It’s noon somewhere.”

Lucas removed his eyes
from the road for a brief time in order to hand the bottle back. And when they
flashed forward he immediately knew they were in trouble. The H2’s huge disc
brakes grabbed as Lucas jumped on the pedal. Smoke billowed from the colossal
tires as he wrestled the rig from forty miles per hour to a dead stop.

“What the fuck?” Liam
cried.

“Take a look.”

Liam poked his head
between the front seats. Less than a car length away, in the center of Butte
Road, two dozen dead were kneeling around a carcass the size of a compact car.
The large three-point rack with the unmistakable rounded edges jerked with each
hunk of flesh rent from the bull moose’s carcass. One by one, bloodied faces swiveled
towards the H2. Then, totally forsaking their cloven-hooved meal, the creatures
arose and like lifeless-eyed automatons lurched stiffly towards the yellow
vehicle and the meat contained within.

“Go around or go over
the top!” Liam yelled. “Do something. Please... just fucking drive.”

Stealing a sideways
glance at his brother, Lucas was dismayed to see tears streaming down the
younger man’s cheeks. At a loss for words, Lucas returned his gaze forward,
pretended the Hummer was equipped with a cowcatcher, put the transmission into
a lower gear and bulled the gathering dead out of his path. Pale hands
high-fived the windows and bones crunched under the off road tires as he
wheeled the wide Hummer around the seemingly immovable four-legged carcass.
Engine groaning, the once yellow SUV parted the dead sea.

“You can look now, bro,”
Lucas said as the truck gathered a head of steam. “They’re gone.”

Slowly Liam hinged up
from the classic doomed airline passenger position he had assumed. He panned
his head right and visibly shuddered at the sight of the sheen left on the
window by the groping hands of the undead. He pulled his shirt to his face in
order to wipe the accumulated sweat and surreptitiously stole a look through
the pillbox-sized rear window—
just in case
.

“You lose a contact back
there or something?”

“
Something
,” Liam
shot back, visibly embarrassed. “Quit busting my balls and drive.”

Lucas chuckled as he
shifted the whining gear box from four-wheel into normal two-wheel drive, and
after three more tight hairpins the gore-streaked Hummer sat idling at the
interchange.

Taking into account that
in all likelihood Jackson Hole was overrun, there was only one way left to go.
Lucas, being the smartass that he was, flicked his right turn indicator and
looked both ways before turning onto the Teton Pass highway.

Outbreak - Day 15

Jackson Hole, Wyoming

With the lurching throng
literally nipping at his heels, Tran had thrown caution to the wind and hurled
his body face first into the void. And after a landing violent enough to steal
his wind, he skidded several yards down the pitch before gravity gave in to
inertia and his feet traded places with his head. His slippers flew in two
different directions and the underbrush tugged at his pajamas.

Thirty yards flashed by
in dizzying fashion, and when he finally came to rest flat on his back, it was
nothing short of a miracle that his bare feet pointed south and his trussed
arms were not broken. Struggling to draw a breath, he stared at the bluebird
sky. Then, reluctantly, he took mental inventory of his injuries. His left
ankle throbbed angrily—no telling whether it was broken or sprained. The forked
lightning pulsating up his spine brought him the most worry. What if a bone was
broken back there and he moved and worsened the injury—maybe pinching the cord,
leaving him paralyzed and helpless? His mind raced. The demons would surely get
to him then. There would be nothing left for him to do but hope they started in
on his lifeless legs. Pushing the worst case ruminations from his mind, he
tested his theory and tried to wiggle his swollen and dirt-encrusted toes.
Movement
.
A smile crossed his face. He bent his bloodied knees, testing the joints.
Not
so bad
. The tartan pajamas that he had been wearing when Lucas had come to
get him were in tatters, and adding insult to injury, he could feel a draft
somewhere down below.

Strangely enough—though
he had bashed his head repeatedly on who knows what on the way down, and
swallowed a great deal of dirt in the process—his teeth still remained firmly
anchored in his head. If he was going to have any chance of getting off the
butte and eluding the undead mob, he had to find a way to free his wrists. No
sooner had the thought crossed his mind than the pursuing zombies began to spill
into the void. Dozens of pale limp bodies went cartwheeling downhill past him.
Many more became entangled in the brambles and low brush on his left and right
flanks.

Shocked into action, he
rose, and trying his best to ignore the currents of pain arcing from his
rapidly swelling ankle, attempted to put some lateral distance between himself
and the undead raining down around him.

Maneuvering on the
precipitous grade with the luxury of four functioning limbs would have been an
achievement worthy of a mountaineering merit badge. Doing so with tightly bound
hands that had turned from pink, to white, to a deep shade of purple and had
lost all feeling proved to be impossible. After attempting one small step for
Tran, he lost purchase, and once again watched sky and earth trade places too
many times to count before a writhing drift of decaying flesh arrested his
free-fall. Oblivious of the excruciating pain he was experiencing, he pushed up
and away from the snapping and grabbing abominations and, as he sensed his body
once again rag-dolling down the decline, his world suddenly went silent and
dark.

Outbreak - Day 15

Near Driggs, Idaho

Eight
miles from the Teton Pass

Sometimes, when he
closed his eyes and the smell of death was downwind or supplanted by the heady
aroma of blooming roses as it was at this very moment, he could trick himself
into thinking that the world was still somewhat normal. That the Omega virus
was a thing from the movies or a figment of some twisted fuck’s imagination.
That the infected didn’t die and then rise and hunger for living flesh. That
his
Moms
was going to call at any moment and ask him about Heidi. Ask
him if he’d been eating right or if he was getting enough exercise. At that
moment, in his manufactured fantasy, he was off duty lounging at his little
home in Driggs, waiting for Heidi to return from her nightshift at the Silver
Dollar, and soon they would be enjoying each other intimately.

But as soon as the wind
shifted and he could smell the stench of the dead and hear their throaty moans
inside his little prison on the hill, the reality of his situation came rushing
back to him. The dead were out there. His Moms was dead. And he feared that
Heidi was never going to be the same woman he had fallen in love with.

He craned his head away
from the open window. She was still breathing steadily. No doubt asleep again.
He didn’t know why she was sleeping all the time. His insecure little voice in
his head said it was because she wanted nothing to do with him. The rational voice
in his head told him she had PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder— and had
slipped into some kind of a depression and would recover on her own timetable.

‘
Give her time
,’
is what Jenkins kept telling him. It was day three and all he’d gotten out of
her was a wan smile and a handful of scratchy muffled words. He didn’t know
why, but what he really wanted to hear from her were the gory details. What had
happened to her while he wasn’t there to protect her? What did they do to her?
He had nothing but questions, and part of him feared hearing her answers.

He opened his eyes and
gazed towards the main highway. Reality was down there trudging lockstep
towards Victor and Driggs and other places in the form of multitudes of rotting
former humans. And as he shifted his gaze from the lurching dead to a nearby
ash tree, he spotted a hummingbird milking a plastic feeder of its last few
drops of red nectar. For a half a second he thought he could actually hear the
little bird’s wings beating the air. Then the sound rose in volume and he could
tell it was coming from the east.
Thrumming tires?
he wondered. Then he
sensed an accompanying vibration that was so heavy with bass it resonated deep
in his chest.

He grabbed the police
radio Jenkins had given him. It was set on the same channel as the one the
former police chief carried, and had a considerable range—several miles, he
guessed. For a second he considered getting ahold of Jenkins and giving him an
earful for not checking in sooner and letting him know where he was.

But he decided to heed
the man’s advice and practice
patience
. First he needed more information
about the vehicle with the thrumming tires and booming system that was quickly
approaching from the northeast. From the direction of the Teton Pass and
Jackson Hole.

He put the radio down
and bolted for the stairs, took them down two at a time and skidded on the rug
in the front room. He cast a cursory look around the room.
Nothing
.
Tromped through the kitchen. Quickly scanned the Formica countertops and the
kitchen table.
Nothing.
Finally he caught sight of them, sitting upright
on the lenses between the decades-old refrigerator and a Felix the Cat cookie
jar.

Field glasses in hand,
he bounded up the stairs three at a time. He passed the bedroom, giving it a
sidelong glance, and noticed Heidi sitting upright with a look of confusion on
her face. Like she had come to and didn’t remember where she was or what day of
the week it was.

“It’s OK honey,” he said
while trying to convey a reassuring look. “I heard a vehicle on the road and
I’m going to take a look.” There was no time to explain further so he continued
on to the end of the narrow hallway, leaving Heidi a bit in the lurch.

He hauled the window up,
pressed the field glasses to his face and trained them on the spot in the
distance where the highway emerged from between the copse of trees. He braced
his shoulder against the window sash to steady himself and waited for whatever
was responsible for the raucous rolling concert.

Finally, after a couple
of heartbeats, the slab-sided culprit came into view. With yellow paint a tick
louder than the stereo, the Hummer straddled the dashed centerline as it closed
the distance to the intersection of Bell and 33. And as Daymon tracked the
vehicle left to right, it disappeared momentarily behind the grove of trees on
the lower part of the property. Trying to match its pace, Daymon kept panning
steadily to the right, catching only flashes of the garish colored rig through
the densely interwoven branches.

“Better slow down,
fool,” he said aloud as the vehicle burst back into view and was now rocketing
towards a handful of zombies, all of which were now fanned out across the
entire highway. It seemed to Daymon, as he watched with morbid fascination,
that the person behind the wheel was oblivious to the impending collision and
had to be either drunk or high. He guessed the driver had the accelerator
pegged and the rig was topping eighty miles an hour—and at that speed, he
reasoned, neither the vehicle nor the zombies would be recognizable after the
collision.

He lowered the
binoculars and continued watching with the naked eye. The undead didn’t waver.
Though they seemed mesmerized by the booming music and the drone of the engine,
Daymon knew without a doubt the prospect of getting to the fresh meat in the
vehicle was what held their undivided attention.

His brain suddenly
received a jolt of dopamine as impulses, Pavlovian in nature, jumped synapses.
He felt his stomach clench and muscles tremor as he braced mentally for an
impact he knew would have zero effect on him. He wasn’t the unfortunate person
about to get a lap full of walker parts when the near-vertical windshield blew
inward. There was no danger of him being ejected and eaten by the dead when the
Hummer lost control and rolled, becoming a crushed yellow tin can. Still,
Daymon’s mind raced out of control, matching the speed of the slow moving train
wreck below. Then at the last second the driver course corrected, ran the two
passenger side tires onto the shoulder and careened through the intersection,
somehow managing to clip only one of the walking dead. The creature’s right arm
lost the battle with the stout brush guard and went airborne, trailing sinew
and veins and splintered white bone. Meanwhile, the body of the male zombie completed
three full revolutions as it cartwheeled face first into the roadside ditch.

“Fucking close call,
dude!” Daymon exclaimed. The last thing he saw was a red flare of brake lights
as the tin roof on one of the outbuildings blocked the fishtailing truck from
view.

He let the curtains drop
and thumbed on the police radio which he used to hail Jenkins.