Allegiance (14 page)

Throwing the radio in
the console, Jenkins white-knuckled the wheel all the way to the house on the
hill, utterly dreading the fact he was going to have to deal with the dead.

Outbreak - Day 15

Huntsville, Utah

Duncan let the Land
Cruiser coast most of the way down the hill, then braked a few feet shy of the
supine bodies they’d spotted from the rise. He put the e-brake on, and out of
habit started the flashers ticking. “Remember to keep your head movin’... ‘On a
swivel,’ as a good friend of mine likes to say. And one more thing... those
‘rotters’ as you all like to call them... they don’t always let you know
they’re comin’.”

“Yes, Sir,” Phillip
replied. He exited the truck, then looked left, then right, then back like he
was in grade school and the crossing guard was AWOL.

Duncan smiled—clearly
his advice had sunk in. Remaining vigilant himself, he craned his head around
the Humvee’s buried rear end. “Clear on this side,” he called out. Because he
had seen walkers that had appeared to be truly dead rise and attack, he
approached the nearest body with a great deal of caution.

Mouth agape in a final
silent scream, shadowed sockets where his eyes had been, the dead National
Guardsman glared blindly at the morning sky. The cause of death was obvious:
like a kindergartner’s unfinished connect-the-dots, purple entry wounds riddled
his abdomen and left leg. Contrasting sharply against alabaster skin,
coal-black tribal tattoos spiraled up both arms before finally coming together
an inch above his sternum. On his left shoulder, encircling a soldier’s
cross—an M4 rifle standing vertically with a pair of boots at the base and a
helmet perched on the buttstock—were the words
Fallujah, Never Forget
,
and a unit insignia he didn’t recognize. To Duncan, it was painfully obvious
that the young soldier’s last seconds on earth had been spent suffering with
immeasurable agony. He had seen dozens of men, the same age, and in similar
poses—usually minus their manhood as well as their eyes—on the muddy and bloody
battlefields of Vietnam. The fact that the Guardsman had escaped joining the
ranks of the walking dead seemed to be the only bright spot to the man’s final
day on earth.

“Fucking savages that
did this,” Phillip said, contempt dripping from the words.

Duncan regarded the
statement, nodded, but said nothing.

“Hey Sir... over here,”
Phillip called out. “We got some more dead soldiers in the ditch and a whole
lot of head-shot rotters on the road.”

Duncan looked both ways
before crossing the two-lane blacktop—a habit not entirely necessary for
survival in the zombie apocalypse. Then he skirted the front of the Humvee,
giving it a wide berth, all the while looking underneath to ensure a grabber
wasn’t lying in wait and ready to ruin his day—a habit he found
very
necessary for survival in the zombie apocalypse.

Duncan stood alongside
Phillip, who was kneeling and peering down into the roadside ditch where a
dozen more guardsmen, their bird-pecked bodies frozen in various death poses,
had been unceremoniously dumped.

“Bunch a shit,” Phillip
muttered sullenly as he stood up straight. “They were just doing their jobs.”
He shook his head.

A few silent seconds
passed.

Phillip sat on his
haunches and poked a stick at one of the dead zombies that had been left where
they fell by whoever had gunned them down. “What do you think went down here
Sir
?”

Duncan envisioned his
hands around Phillip’s scrawny neck. Squeezing the seeds from his Adam’s apple.
He had heard one too many
sirs
uttered by his talkative road dawg.
That’s
it
, he told himself as he revisited in his head the hours’ old exchange
he’d had with his brother.

“
It’s not wise to go
out there by yourself
,” Logan had said, suggesting that Duncan take a
handful of men with him.

“
I work best alone
,”
he had countered.

Little brother finally
relented, but did so with one condition attached: excluding Gus, Lev, or the
Chief, big brother had to choose one of the men from the compound to ride
shotgun, and for once, age hadn’t trumped persistence. The fact that he was a
loner by nature and usually eschewed travelling companions—especially ones with
a sidekick mentality—made Duncan wonder what the hell he had been thinking when
he agreed to Logan’s
one
condition.

“
Sir
...” Phillip
said again.

Cursing Logan under his
breath, Duncan squared up to the walking stick bug. He looked down into the
man’s closely-set eyes and said in his best John Wayne, “Phil, I don’t carry a
rank any longer... and callin’ me
sir
just makes me feel old. I’m no
math major, but I figure I’ve only got ten—maybe twelve years on ya—so I’m not
your elder either.” He paused for effect, and stroked his silver mustache which
was trying to grow into a goatee. “So how bout we stick with Duncan or
Winters... you do that, and before you know it—you and me—hell... we’ll be
thick as thieves.”
And if you don’t, it’s the wood chipper for you.

“Understood,” Phil said,
breaking eye contact. At a loss, he pressed the binoculars to his eyes and
slowly turned a full circle. “We’ve got six rotters coming from the west. Also
there are a few of them in the field over there... couple hundred yards off.”

“We’ve got time,” Duncan
stated. He removed his Aviator’s glasses and wiggled the ear pieces, testing
the tiny screws holding them together, then produced a handkerchief and
polished each thick lens with meticulous precision before squaring them away on
his face. “To answer your question, Phillip, these soldiers died more than a
week ago. Probably closer to ten days, give or take.” He turned and walked
along the edge of the ditch towards the Humvee. “Let’s take a closer look,” he
added, covering his nose and mouth with the handkerchief.

Trying to determine what
had happened to the small patrol, Duncan eyed the desert-tan rig. Half in and
half out of the ditch, with one knobby tire clawing the air and a
wicked-looking gun barrel stabbing skyward, the metal beast looked like a
stricken Cunard liner about to slip under the sea.

He turned his scrutiny
to the roadway and angrily kicked at a mound of shell casings. The four-inch
long, finger-thick brass threw the sun and tinkled like chimes as they
skittered and bounced along the flat surface. He guessed that these dead men
had been deployed to this weather-beaten stretch of road to either set up a
checkpoint or to block its passage altogether. Whichever the case, it appeared
to have been hastily constructed. There were no Jersey barriers—those 42-inch
high modular concrete slabs usually employed on freeways to re-route traffic.
He also thought it odd that the troops hadn’t strung up concertina wire or
employed sandbags. These two observations, when combined, led him to believe
that this had been set up not only to allow people out of Huntsville, but more
importantly to keep looters from going back into the city. To say the
checkpoint and the troops manning it had been dangerously exposed—to the
infected but also to human threats—would be overstating the obvious.

“Phil... Come here, I
wanna bend your ear.”

“Whatcha got, Duncan?”

“See these shell
casings?” He nudged a small pile with his boot.

“Lots of ‘em,” Phil
observed. “Different calibers, it appears.”

Good job
, Duncan thought. “Yep. We’ve got 9mm, 556 Nato,
7.62x39mm...
Kalashnikovs
.” He raised his brow an inch. His glasses
hitched up too. “AK-47s probably. The bigger shells are from that mounted .50.”
He gestured to the long-barreled gun atop the high centered Humvee. “I figure
these dead boys—they probably knew the people gathered. Probably even knew the
ones who did this... ate lunch with ‘em at the diner in town on occasion. Never
forget, Phil... when push comes to shove, people change...
allegiances
shift.”

“So
the Guard let their guard down—”

“And let the bad guys
get too close before they engaged. Lethal mistake, because the .50—she ain’t
designed for accurate close quarters combat,” Duncan said, finishing the
younger man’s thought. They’d held their fire, probably as a result of
compassionate human nature overriding self-preservation, he guessed. Hell, he
would rather be eaten alive by army ants than be stuck in the same position. He
couldn’t fathom having to follow orders that said he had to shoot his fellow
countrymen—especially with the world going to shit around him—that would have
been a hell of a moral dilemma. For anyone with a sense of fairness it’d be
hard to wrap a mind around, let alone actually follow through. “They went
through all of the ammo for the .50. Musta been a shit show.” This got Duncan
to thinking. He picked up a handful of the metal clips that linked the .50
caliber bullets together. There were hundreds of them littering the floor and
footwell in the open-backed vehicle—a by-product of the disintegrating ammo
belts fed into the Ma Deuce by the gunner.
These need to be repurposed
,
he said to himself.

“Duncan... check this
out.”

“Whatcha got Phil?” he
drawled.

“A pile of bloody
uniforms. This one belonged to Corporal Howard of the Utah National Guard...
apparently he was O-negative,” he said with a frown as he displayed the
punctured ACU blouse so that Duncan could see. “Says so right here.”

“Unfortunately that
info’s not gonna help him... wherever he is now.”

“There are more uniforms
than bodies. That makes no sense. Why would they take prisoners but leave their
vehicle?”

“Probably to use ‘em for
slave labor. Make them do the things you don’t want to... clear a house of
infected. Burn bodies. Cut firewood. You name it. Or worst of all... you infect
them—and we’ve already seen it at the compound—then you got yourself
fire-and-forget weapons. Rotters don’t need to be fed or watched too closely.
Can’t think or reason... therefore they’re not scheming on how to escape,”
Duncan proffered. Then he pointed at the grass near the far shoulder. “There were
a couple more vehicles parked on the side... there. Probably Hummers judging by
the tire impressions. And all of these cars stretching down the road, see how
they’re loaded up with crap, camping gear and what not? Look closely, Phil.
You’ve got mostly Utah plates, but damn near all of ‘em have either Salt Lake
City or Ogden automotive dealerships advertised on their frames. The people who
left these vehicles
did not
continue forward on foot, otherwise we’d
have passed all kinds of discarded things they tired of carrying... so I’d be
willing to bet someone forced them back into Huntsville.”

“And?” Phillip said.

“And most of them are
probably rotters by now,” replied Duncan. “Roaming the interstate and the back
roads. I think that goes a long ways toward explaining why we’re seeing so many
undead visitors outside the compound.”

Phillip turned his gaze
towards the town and the glittering reservoir beyond. “So, the other day... why
in God’s name did they cut the wire and let in the rotters and then not follow
them in and attack us?”

“Easier for them to loot
what they need from unguarded soft targets in the area first. As I said before,
they wanted to flush us out to the road... to get a ballpark idea of how many
we were and whether or not we were armed. I god-damn guarantee you that they’re
thinking twice about comin’ in... seein’ as how we chewed up the mess of
rotters they sent in.”

“So why didn’t they
ambush us at the fence?” Phil queried.

“For all they know we
have a small army inside the forest. What would you think if a military type
helicopter was flittin’ around the countryside that you previously thought you
had all to yourself?”

“Well, if I had anything
to do with killing National Guard soldiers,” Phillip nodded to the eyeless
cadaver to his right, “I’d be suffering from a very tight sphincter, and
wishing I had eyes in the back of my head.”

“So what choice do
we
have then?” Duncan asked.

“I dunno.”

Come on
, thought Duncan.
Use the brain God gave you, Phil
.

Fracturing the quiet,
staccato bursts of gunfire rolled across the reservoir coming from the nearby
town.

“AK-47,” Duncan stated
confidently.

“How can you be so
sure?”

“Vietnam. Been on the
wrong end of ‘em more than once. They have a slower cyclic rate than the
M-16... they’ve got a distinctive chatter that I’ll never forget.” Then,
playing into the whole democracy thing Logan insisted the group practice, he
decided he’d delve further into Phil’s brain. “So what do
you
think we
should do... do we sit in the compound and assume they aren’t going to return?
Do we get into an arms race with an enemy we know nothing about? Or should we
go and hunt them down?”

As if saying,
Beats
the hell outta me
, Phil shrugged his shoulders and waited for Duncan to
enlighten him.

Flunked the test,
Phil,
Duncan thought. Then he
said, “They’ll come. When they need food, bullets, or women.” He kicked at the
shell casings again and locked eyes with Phillip. “They’ll come. So we have to
be ready for them.”