ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) (23 page)

My luck ran dry an hour ago
, Duncan thought, dragging
the rabbit’s foot and keys from his pocket.

There was a long pause during which a staring contest
ensued.

Finally the man spoke. “I guess it’s
real
bad back
east. New York, Boston, D.C.—”

“Out west, too,” Duncan added. “L.A., Seattle, the Bay Area.
Hell, Portland’s prognosis is looking pretty grim. Those things are on the
streets all the way east to 122nd Avenue now.”

“You comin’ from there?”

“Just passing through,” Duncan lied. A stock answer he used
to head off a prolonged conversation that usually started with:
I lived there
—(insert
year, decade, etc. ...) or,
I knew a guy
— (insert: who worked, went to
school, herded cats there, etc. … ). He just didn’t want to think about
Portland, Tilly, and now Charlie if he didn’t have to.

Taking the hint, the man smiled for the first time since
Duncan set eyes on him. However, it was a nervous smile that disappeared as he
moved around the desk worrying a set of rosary beads in his hand. He said,
“Travel safe, friend. I’m just going to
lock
up
after you.”

Duncan nodded once and walked out the door without looking
back. Even as the
click
of the lock being thrown registered, he was
already working up a Plan C in his head.

Jockeying his wide-fendered Dodge around in the motor
hotel’s narrow parking lot burned off a few seconds. The two-block-drive south
to the I-84 underpass lasted another half-sweep of the jittering second hand.
By the time Duncan blew the light and nosed the Dodge into the cool shadows
under the overpass, less than two minutes had ticked away into the past. In his
mind’s eye he saw the trooper giving in to all the pressure and allowing
everyone passage east.
No blood, no foul
. So, just drawing even with the
eastbound on-ramp, the combination of his pie-in-the-sky vision and the urge to
hustle east as fast as possible and start the search for his brother grabbed
caution by the collar and belt and violently hurled the notion out the window.
And in the same manner as the old truck had automatically found its way into
Mickey Finn’s lot the previous day, it was now turning left onto the on-ramp
before Duncan had a chance to logically vet the action. The difference between
then and now? What lay roughly a half mile east from where the ramp met the
road was a scenario whose outcome—should it go sideways—could not be rectified
by a loan from a friend or a lucky hit on a series of Keno numbers. The Grim
Reaper was lurking nearby, and Duncan knew the feeling it produced in his gut.
Feathery wings brushed his insides and his mouth had inexplicably gone dry.
Still, all things considered, he couldn’t make himself institute Plan C. At
least not until he deemed the trooper’s roadblock and knot of bikers
encroaching on it to be insurmountable obstacles to Plan B.

Nearing the top of the ramp’s long run-on, he swerved right
and brought the rig to a jarring halt on the soft shoulder where he guessed its
roof would be hidden behind the crest of the hill, thus out of the line of
sight of anyone looking west.

After checking behind him and finding the coast clear, he
grabbed the binoculars, snatched the pump gun from under the front seat, and
exited the truck with its motor still running. The tailgate fell open with a
resonant clang. Which didn’t matter, because it was most certainly lost amidst
the rattle clatter of motorcycle engines at idle and angry shouting taking
place a few hundred yards from his position.

He draped the binoculars around his neck. Then he propped
the shotgun against the box bed, sat on the tailgate, and swung his legs up on
the ledge it created. Using the side sheet metal for support, he rose to stand
on creaky knees.

The truck’s warm flat roof was a perfect platform to plant
his elbows on. Much better than the narrow window ledge in 304.

First he scanned the road with his naked eye. Close in,
about a hundred yards away in the three desolate westbound lanes, two bikers
had stopped their Harleys in the breakdown area and appeared to be working on
one of them.
They don’t call them hardly ever-runs for nothing
, thought
Duncan as he swept his gaze forward and found that making out the details at
the far end where the roadblock had been erected was impossible without the
binoculars. So he raised them to his eyes and picked up the trooper, who was
now being crowded around by citizens and bikers alike. It looked like the scene
in Frankenstein when the villagers were trying to get at the man-made monster,
only the people surrounding the trooper held no pitchforks or torches. They
were American citizens with inalienable rights—freedom tantamount among them.
And dollars to donuts, if he was close enough to hear what was being said, the
civilians would be arguing about civil liberties, the Bill of Rights, and a
myriad of other First World problems keeping them from continuing on eastward.

And the trooper would no doubt be imploring them to be calm.
Telling them he was only following orders. Then, as a last resort, threatening
arrest if the crowd didn’t stand down and back off. A threat he was in no position
to carry out unless backup arrived very soon. In short: panic had the upper
hand. The introduction of the outlaw bikers into the mix only made matters
worse.

Then the true nature of the situation hit Duncan like a mule
kick when, for the third time today, he saw the
pink mist
and the
trooper dropped from sight like a trapdoor had been opened underneath him. One
second he was there, the next he was gone. Where his head had been a pink halo
was now blooming and drifting, seemingly in slow motion, over the people
crowded around the dead lawman’s squad car. The Smokey the Bear hat had been
blasted off the trooper’s exploding head. Caught by the east wind, it was now
flying end-over-end above the heads of the shocked civilians being pressed in
by a dozen or so bikers who were all suddenly reacting gleefully to the
trooper’s execution.

Through no volition of his own, Duncan tracked the mist left
to right and watched it paint the squat police car with a glistening sheen of
detritus.

The booming report had rattled the Dodge’s rear window
glass, causing Duncan to duck instinctively. Left ear ringing subtly from the
unexpected discharge, he crouched lower, and pressed his right shoulder tight
to the sliding rear window.

Bringing the field glasses to bear on the nearest pair of
bikers, Duncan saw the shooter—full black beard all tangled and windblown—set
aside an impossibly large sniper rifle and high five the second outlaw biker.
When they did so, Duncan got a good look at the patching on the back of their
leathers. Same as before. On the top across the shoulders was the scroll
reading
Nomad Jesters.
In the center was the sneering,
Kalashnikov-wielding jester caricature. And below the big red and black jester
head,
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho
was spelled out in white, swastikas
bookending the bottom patch.

Right then it was clear to Duncan there was nothing wrong
with the pair of Harleys. The dismounted bikers had been readying the rifle,
which they were now wasting no time putting away in a soft case of some sort.
Still laughing, they lashed the long gun to one of the bikes, kick-started
their steeds, and rode along the shoulder all the way to the scene of the
crime, where the carnage resumed at once.

Stomach twisting in knots, Duncan continued to watch through
the binoculars as an impossibly large redheaded biker smacked around one of the
male civilians. Other bikers soon joined in, stomping the men and rounding up
the women and kids. Finally, as if things couldn’t get any worse, the big
redhead snatched a young girl from whom Duncan presumed to be her mother, held
the writhing youngster aloft in front of his disciples, and drew a long knife
against her bare midsection.

The last image indelibly imprinted on Duncan’s memory before
he sank to his butt in the pick-up bed was a fan of crimson spraying horizontal
to the road and a jumble of shiny guts tumbling in slow motion to the heated
blacktop.

Imagining himself putting his shotgun up the biker’s keister
and pulling the trigger, Duncan collected the weapon and binoculars and crawled
over the side of the truck to the blacktop. But first things first: he needed
to get out in front of the wastes of skin bikers and start forgetting the evil
acts that he’d been utterly helpless to prevent. Wanting nothing more than to
crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels and speed up the process of forgetting, he
instead fished a bottle of water from his bag and cracked the seal.

Naïve, indeed.

Duncan was missing Charlie’s humor the moment the hiss of
the wheels resumed inside the old Dodge. Eyes misting over for the little girl,
the other civilians, and now, once more, his friend, he enacted Plan C.

The drive east through downtown Troutdale—all three blocks
of it—were uneventful. The power was out here, but the streets were lined with
cars and trucks and the lone bar was hopping. In fact, it looked to be filled
to capacity, with folks spilling out onto the sidewalk, drinking and smoking.
With the infection spreading outward from Portland twenty miles west of them,
they were dancing on the deck of the Titanic and didn’t seem to care.

Duncan’s gaze was drawn from the revelers outside to the
plate glass windows and the darkened neon signs promising cold Budweiser and
Miller High Life. The niggling internal voice was back and telling him how nice
it would be stop and tip a few.
Go ahead,
it chided.
You’re a big
boy. You deserve it. Park this rig and bull your way to the bar and talk the
bartender into extending you a tab on credit.

Once again, like some demonically possessed Plymouth Fury,
the truck began to slow. But family was more important. And the only family
Duncan had left was roughly eight hundred miles away by crow, and seeing as how
the helicopter procurement mission had failed horribly, as had the second
option of taking I-84 east, stopping and getting drunk would be the nail in his
coffin. So he dragged his eyes from the mingling going on, from the signs and
the frothy emotional appeal they produced, and drove on through the
blink-and-you-miss-it town.

***

Troutdale’s short main drag went from a straight west to
east affair and dove into a series of gradual turns. Along the way he passed
houses new and old before the winding road spilled the Dodge onto a narrow iron
and cement bridge spanning the glittering Sandy River. Rusty and flecked with
curls of hunter green paint, the dilapidated thing looked as if it wouldn’t
support a moped let alone the three-ton truck underneath his butt.

To Duncan’s surprise, there was no groaning of metal or
hundred-year-old rivets popping from the supports as he wheeled the
wide-fendered Dodge across the bridge. And when he turned right onto southbound
Historic Columbia River Highway he was also surprised to see a couple of trucks
parked on the frost-heaved spit of blacktop making up the parking lot set aside
for people recreating on the Sandy.

He was truly blown away when through the trees he saw two
men in hip waders and tan vests rhythmically casting flies into the river’s
gently moving current.

Cast.

Jerk.

Reel it all in.

They went on like that—rinse and repeat—until they were lost
from view in the passenger-wing mirror.

***

Charlie’s company was sorely missed as the Dodge tackled a
steep and narrow two-lane running east away from the river’s banks, bringing on
memories from earlier. Them avoiding the bikers and guardsmen. Sitting atop
Mount Scott and watching the rising sun.

As the shaded gray stripe snaked left and right up the hill
with the truck’s engine laboring, a couple of wisecracks out of his friend
would have been nice to pass the time. The thought of Charlie saying:
What,
did ya forget to feed the hamsters?”
or “
Hey Flintstone, want me to kick
a hole in the floorboards and help with the hill?”
brought a much-needed
smile to Duncan’s face.

At the top of the two-mile-climb the road went laser-straight
and the dotted yellow became a double solid. Here farmhouses and pastures
dominated the scenery. A swaybacked barn, its once red paint weathered and
peeling, flicked by on the left. Rusty farm implements dotted the fields. There
were no dead things in sight.

After a couple of miles the road narrowed and took a
sweeping left before going straight again and shooting north past a country
store with a gravel parking lot full of cars and trucks. And though the
students were on summer break, the lot fronting Corbett Grade School was a hive
of activity. There was a black and white police cruiser as well as a dozen or
so other vehicles nosed in by the brick structure. Beside the school were a
pair of yellow Corbett District school busses piled high with camping gear.
Parents were preparing to send their Cub Scouts on a camping trip, Duncan
presumed. At face value, a good idea. Get them out in the woods and away from
the crazies carrying the infection.

Though he was far from a social scientist, he knew a little
about normalcy bias. Saw it in Vietnam. The REMFs (Rear Echelon Motherfuckers),
most of them, anyway, acted as if a bloody war wasn’t being waged just beyond
their doorstep. The old “pretend it’s not happening and it might go away” type
of wishful thinking had been at work there until the Tet Offensive. And now,
based on the general lack of truthfulness coming from the President early on,
Duncan feared most of the population of Portland proper—all six hundred
thousand of them—were planning on staying put. Riding it out, so to speak.
Which would lead to exponential rates of infection and eventually a frenzied
diaspora of the living bringing the infected along with them.

The normalcy bias that had gotten a lot of people killed in
Saigon in 1968 was about to be the downfall of Corbett and all of the tiny
towns like it in close proximity to highly populated areas.

Passing the post office, he noted that Old Glory was at
half-staff, the east wind making her pop and crack loud enough to be heard over
the hiss of the truck’s off-road tires. Forgetting Charlie was no longer with
him, he started to sing the National Anthem. He was already at “
can you see
”
when he looked to his right and it hit home that his friend was really gone.
Their
strength in numbers,
which was Charlie’s stated rationale for
coming along, had indeed been cut in half by a freak accident. With hot tears
rolling down his cheeks, and the image of the flag retreating in the rearview,
Duncan decided what his friend had done to himself to avoid becoming a monster
without a pulse would never be revisited. No reason to remember the man with
anything but the easy smile on his face. That final image—the powder burns,
bulged blue eyes and elongated skull—was filed away, hopefully forever.

The sight of the flag not only brought on the melancholy
mood, it also gave birth to hope. For if the citizens of Corbett knew enough to
lower Old Glory out of respect for the truly dead, then there was no reason to
doubt that they were aware of what had taken place at Pioneer Courthouse
Square, and that knowledge alone, at the very least, gave them a fighting
chance to survive the coming onslaught.

A few blocks north of the solemn reminder of the outbreak
was an ODOT sign that read: Crown Point 3, Multnomah Falls 11.

Apparently ODOT suffered from no kind of sign post shortage,
because half a mile past the previous, another sign caught Duncan’s eye. It
read: Narrow Winding Road Next 14 Miles and below that Vista House and
Multnomah Falls Next Left.

Now we’re cooking with gas.

That the Dodge had barely made it down half a dozen of
Ladd’s Edition’s skinny little streets without losing a couple of inches off
each fender made Duncan question whether the old girl was gonna make it down fourteen
miles worth of that kind of civil engineering.

***

The first mile wasn’t an issue. Duncan and his Dodge were
all alone on the narrow winding road, so he just took his half out of the
middle.

Soon he came to a fork in the road where he had to make a
decision. To the left was the Vista House—a stone and glass homage to days gone
by with a million-dollar-view up and down the Columbia River Gorge. In the
parking lot were a pair of cars and a trio of people leaning against them and
talking amongst themselves.

To the right, the scenic highway continued winding away to
the east—narrow, shaded, and looking as lonely as he felt sitting in the cab by
himself.

Strength in numbers.

Indecision gripping him, Duncan plucked the binoculars off
the seat and focused on the dome-shaped Vista House. He walked the field
glasses over the vehicles. One was a yellow classic car. A Camaro or Chevelle
of the Sixties’ vintage. The other was a red convertible. Cute with a white top
and made in Germany by VW. Next, he panned lower and scrutinized the people.
The taller of the three was an older man dressed in polyester and wearing a
powder blue fisherman’s hat. Dark sunglasses shielded his eyes; still, Duncan
categorized him as the furthest thing from a threat. The other two were young
females, blonde, tanned, and very beautiful. Their similar dress, body
dimensions and mannerisms led Duncan to believe they were twins. Spying on them
from afar made him feel voyeuristic and a little dirty.

He had a decision to make and Charlie was not here to offer
his opinion. So Duncan did what he always did in situations like these: he took
a quarter from the ashtray and assigned heads to taking the left fork and
perhaps another chance at fulfilling Charlie’s
strength in numbers
strategy. If tails should come up, he would take it as a sign he was meant to
make a solitary journey to find his brother.

Here goes nothing
.

Duncan thumbed the quarter into the air. It spun end over
end, catching the sun’s rays on the way up. He nearly lost it at the apex, but
ended up snaring it and quickly closed his palm around its flat cool surface.

Anticipation building, he said a little prayer and then
slowly opened his hand.

Tails.

Damn
.

In his head he again heard the admonition “
strength in
numbers
,” only this time it was spoken in
his
East Texas drawl.

He dropped the quarter back where it had come from and
released his foot from the brake, letting gravity take the truck. At the bottom
of the hill, as had already happened more than once, someone else took the
wheel and the old Dodge swung wide left.

The rest, as they say, is history.

###

To be continued in
Trudge:
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

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Drawl
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