Allegiance (25 page)

Outbreak - Day 16

Teton Pass

Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Am I dead?
Tran had asked himself after that first
uneventful encounter with the pack of feeding zombies as he crossed Butte Road.
And now, hours later, trapped on the straight stretch of Teton Pass Road,
barbed wire flanking both sides, with nowhere to go and surrounded by zombies,
he surrendered completely. He said a few silent, solemn words to his maker,
collapsed to the smooth warm roadway, and waited for the inevitable clawing
nails and gnashing teeth.

After a few moments had
passed and his blood hadn’t been spilled, he willed his legs to support him. He
stood on the centerline, hunched over, with a spasm hammering at his lower
back. His eyes tracked the walking carrion as they took the path of least
resistance. He was like a rock in a stream splitting the oblivious throng down
the center. His mind had been playing tricks on him. For reasons unknown to him
at the time, the zombies wanted nothing to do with him. He didn’t know why, nor
did he care. With nothing but the dead and the steady slapping of his own bare
feet for company, he left the crucified behind and tackled the curving mountain
road with renewed vigor. He spent the next several hours trudging uphill among
them, an achingly slow and silent procession, during which he began to question
his humanity —for the second time since the big man named Liam threw him from
the moving truck, he wondered whether he had turned, and was now one of them.

***

As Tran neared the sign
proclaiming the elevation of the Teton Pass to be 8,431 feet above sea level,
he couldn’t help but think someone’s altimeter had been malfunctioning the day
they recorded the measurement, because to him, it seemed like he had been
trudging Mount Everest all day, not this mere pimple on the earth. Without a
watch to consult, he guessed he’d made a respectable mile an hour in forward
travel—ten hours, he supposed, of putting one foot in front of the other while
rubbing elbows with the dead. A feat to a tortoise maybe, but to a biped with a
severely swollen ankle and a throbbing skull, surely it was some kind of world
record.

As he pushed on, the
foundation of hatred he had been trying to ignore strengthened with each
tortured step. He tried to block out the fact that, for more years than he
cared to admit, he had been head chef and sometime driver for a murderous
madman. Instead, he tried to spin his situation into the realm of the positive.
To reflect on his proper upbringing. To strengthen his belief that there was a
certain order to the way the world worked and he had just been playing his role
by working for the crazy billionaire. Truth be told, until the takeover of
Jackson Hole, Robert Christian’s true nature had remained hidden. Sure, he
could have run like all the others after the first group of resistors had been
executed, but he hadn’t. There was no changing the past, and the harder he
tried to distance his thoughts from the evil that had taken place in the
valley, the more it became evident that by association he had played a small
part in so many innocents’ misery. In fact, until this epiphany, he had been
adrift in a river of denial, and in a way he wished the demons would have eaten
him. Put him out of his misery. Made the looming decision moot and
inconsequential. And as he tried to purge the two brothers’ scowling faces from
his memory, he had a psychic shift. Suddenly
an eye for an eye
made
perfect sense to him. He had missed what the one-eyed demon he had been forced
to kill symbolized. Was she sent as some kind of message—a portent of things to
come? Was he fated to survive and somehow stop the two men from further madness
and mayhem?

With these questions
preoccupying his thoughts, he failed to see the zombie directly in his
path—until he collided face first into its sternum. The creature gazed down on
him with cloudy indifferent eyes, then turned and shambled towards the looming
cluster of burned-out vehicles. The largest among them looked to have been at
one time some kind of school bus. It had been parked so that it partially
blocked the road from the guardrail on his left to the far shoulder on the
right, and it was going nowhere because it rested on blackened, bare rims which
appeared to be fused to the road.

Tran stopped and leaned
against a stalled-out SUV in order to watch the lone monster shuffle through
the ten-foot gap that remained between the sloping shoulder and the
hardscrabble mountainside. That the thing hadn’t eaten him came as no surprise.
He limped around to the driver side of the green, two-door Scout. Hinged at the
waist to look at his image in the side mirror. A monster peered back. Blood had
dried black, leaving his already thin face resembling a grinning skull. A
jagged fissure snaked through his hairline. It bulged with glistening, swollen
flesh, and oozed a viscous yellowed fluid. In the failing light of dusk he
could see a stark white strip of his skull underneath the festering mess. Not
only did he look like one of them, the infected wound made him smell like one
of them. The morbid-looking face reflected back at him was a hundred times
worse than he had anticipated.

He backed away.
I’m
not one of them
, he thought to himself. “I’m alive,” he whispered under his
breath, the words doing little to convince him. He evaluated the situation,
trying to decide on his next move. Looked at the truck—something about the
black E spray painted on it seemed familiar. He’d seen other vehicles in town
that sported the same markings. It gave him hope that there might be something
inside that could be of use to him. The door was unlocked, and inexplicably a
set of keys still dangled from the ignition.
Another omen
, he thought to
himself.

Outbreak - Day 16

Near Driggs, Idaho

After losing the fourth
straight round of Rock-Paper-Scissors in a row, Liam rose from the low-slung
couch and ambled on unsteady legs to the ‘50’s-era kitchen. As he transited the
dark hall using the walls and jambs for guidance, he tried to place the unusual
odor. Mothballs maybe. Octogenarian farts? He couldn’t be sure, but it seemed
that twenty years of retired living had had a way of imparting something
malodorous into the furniture and walls and carpet of the dead couples’ home.

With only the moonlight
filtering between the sheer curtains to see by, he poured a few fingers of
Scotch into each of the coffee mugs. Then, for good measure, he tipped the
clear bottle of Claymore, swallowed hard, twice, making bubbles form in the
amber liquid. Made a sour face and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

He returned to the
living room with the mugs and the partial bottle. Set everything on the coffee
table between the burning candles and the half-eaten plate of corned beef and
hash. “Lucas!” he bellowed. “There’s a bunch of those rotting fuckers at the
gate. I can see their white faces from here.”

“What the hell do you
want
me
to do about it?” Lucas called back from the bathroom. “Piss on
‘em?” he added, laughing.

Liam drained his mug and
reached for the booze. “Your popping those two deadheads on the road didn’t do
us any favors,” he intoned.

Lucas hitched up his
pants, grabbed his pistol, and headed back to the living room, talking as he
walked in the dark. “Don’t worry bro... they
won’t
get in.” Staying
clear of the flickering flames, he crabbed by Liam’s knees and nearly broke the
couch when he sat down too heavily.

There was a long awkward
silence as Lucas tried to get ahold of his thoughts. Then, fighting through the
short term memory-stealing buzz, the point he had been trying to make returned
to him. “I put the pin back in the gate. Those things can’t turn a doorknob,
let alone pull out a cotter pin and work the clasp and then reason which way
the
fucking
thing needs to swing.” He finished the statement by throwing
his brother a wild look. A look that said:
do not question me when I’m
loaded
.

Liam ignored the glare
he knew all too well and went there anyway. “You’re sure? Maybe we oughta park
that old truck against it... for a little extra
insurance
.”

“It’ll be OK. We’ll get
up at first light and get back on the road. I’ll drive right
over
the
bastards.”

“What about the old
folks... see that plaque over the mantle?” Liam didn’t allow Lucas the five
minutes he needed to process the complex question. “Old guy was a World War Two
vet. I think we oughta bury them. You know— out of respect.”

“He lost this war. Plus,
I oughta piss on both their bodies for this,” Lucas slurred, holding up the
nearly empty bottle. “Crap’s probably been in their cupboard since
Prohibition.” He laughed hard. Kept it up for a minute or two while Liam tried
to engage him.

“We still trying to find
Bishop?” he finally asked.

Lucas pulled it
together. Took a belt from the bottle before replying. “I figure we head
northwest. Sooner or later we’ll bump into some of his boys. Either that or
some of our old friends.”

“I’d rather it be our
old friends,” Liam stated in a low voice. “Bishop fuckin’ bailed on us.”

“
No
, that dumbass
Paul lost the frickin’ satellite phone at the Cowboy bar. You seen all the
dead. I figure Ian had no choice... we’d been nothing but loyal to him. Hell...
I was a good lieutenant... except for the booze run into Wilson, I followed his
every order to a T,” Lucas declared proudly. His head nodded, chin to chest,
then jerked upright abruptly.

Liam shook his head. “If
you really think we’ll be safe here tonight I’m going to sleep.”

“
In there
?” Lucas
said incredulously.

“Bed smells better than
this couch. Or that nasty shag rug for that matter.”

“Suit yourself,” said
Lucas. “I’m gonna work on this.” He filled his mug half full.

Liam gazed through the
picture window. Stole one final long look at the gathered dead. Threw a shiver
that chilled his spine and lingered for a moment. It still creeped him out how
they stared and stared.
On autopilot, every last one of them
, he
thought. There didn’t seem to be more showing up, so he shrugged his shoulders
and headed into the gloomy crypt of a bedroom. “Put out the candles before you
nod off and burn us to death,” he called out, his voice echoing down the hall.

Lucas said nothing. His
eyelids felt like they were attached to lead fishing weights. He set the empty
mug aside. Laid back on the couch, his boots shooting off the end, heels on the
armrest.

The bottle calling to
him, he grabbed it by the neck and took a long swig as a nightcap. He slid the
bottle onto the table. Then, as a very important afterthought—a
survival-hinging-on-it kind of postscript—he grabbed his .45 from the table and
stuffed it in his waistband right next to the Brother’s family jewels.

Teton
Pass

Tran panned his head
slowly, made certain that he was alone, and then slowly turned the T-shaped
handle and allowed the pressurized gas shocks to push the rear window open. He
fumbled around in the dark, trying to figure out how to lower the tailgate
before finally finding the latch and letting it down softly.

Grateful that the dome
lights hadn’t flared on, he rifled through the various compartments, mostly by
feel. His hands touched over a ribbed metal helmet, and what he guessed was a
full face respirator. He unfolded and then put aside a heavy canvas jacket with
some kind of metal clasps, and a pair of pants with wide belled bottoms that
matched the top. He continued digging, and underneath all of the firefighting
gear he found a very sharp double-bladed axe and a scuffed up pair of boots.
Stiff leather, steel toes, cork soles and four sizes too big.
These will do
,
he said to himself.

In a side compartment
mixed in with discarded fast food wrappers he found a roll of tape. It was
three inches wide, thick-ply, and commonly used on duct work.
Perfect
.
He scanned for unwanted visitors, then gingerly pulled himself up and sat on
the tailgate. He used the majority of the tape to splint his ankle. He started
with half a dozen strips, running them like a stirrup under his heel and up
both sides of his lower leg, then spun the roll around his ankle a dozen times.
At first the improvised cast hurt like hell, but eventually the pain pulled
back to only a dull ache.

Next, he covered the
shredded soles of his feet with the sticky silver stuff, pulled the boots over
his swollen feet, and laced them tight. He looked over his shoulder in the
direction of the roadblock.
Clear.
Then looked down the ten percent
grade where he could see the small grouping of walkers he had left behind just
rounding the corner several hundred yards down mountain.

Risking calamity, he
hoisted up the gate. It closed with a dull clang and latched with a click.
Risked one more look behind him. The creatures had picked up their pace from a
slow shuffle to a jerking half trot. The moans and hissing began a second
later. Leaving the glass window yawning open, he hobbled around the left side,
his heavy new boots scraping a cadence. He folded himself behind the steering
wheel and said a prayer while he worked the key in the ignition.

After a few valiant
cranks from the starter, the engine finally relented and turned over.
It
runs
, Tran thought to himself gleefully. Suddenly the day that began with a
gun being thrust in his face started to look up. The engine idled, nothing like
the near silent power plants crammed under the gleaming hoods of the Cadillac
and Range Rovers he used to chauffer his old boss around in. This engine
sounded precisely how Tran felt—like it was on its last legs and about to throw
in the towel. It ticked and wheezed and then the RPMs would ratchet up
unexpectedly though his foot was nowhere near the gas pedal.

Another peek in the rearview
confirmed his worst fear—the demons had heard the raggedy engine roar to life
and were now closing the distance fairly quickly. Suddenly his only chance of
survival hinged on whether a vehicle that rolled off of the assembly line in
the 1970’s could carry him a hundred feet to the downhill side of the pass.
After that, gravity would relieve the engine, and he’d be at the mercy of the
vehicle’s last brake job and however much tread remained on the tires.

He looked forward just
as the flesh eater that had shown indifference to him a moment ago lurched
through the narrow passage on the road’s shoulder. He put the truck into gear,
wincing as he worked the pedals underfoot.

The old green rig
gathered speed slowly at first. Working against gravity and a general lack of
upkeep, the tired engine propelled Tran’s new ride uphill towards the lone
zombie and the apex of the Teton Pass which was only a handful of yards beyond
the burnt-out bus.

The monster didn’t
flinch. It didn’t leap out of the way like a stuntman in an action flick. It
simply held its ground in front of the rapidly accelerating truck. Then, like a
little girl’s worn out dolly, it folded at the waist where it was met by the
tubular brush guard, head-butted the hood with an explosion of sound and
crimson, then disappeared from sight.

Tran didn’t bother
looking in the mirror again as he squeezed the Scout by the makeshift
roadblock. He focused only on the spot on the moonlit road where the centerline
seemed to disappear into the inky black horizon. Once there, he flicked on the
headlights and let off the gas, figuring he’d save whatever the old girl had
left under her hood and in her tank and use it to hunt down the two brothers.