Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (2 page)

Cade stood on a fence post, stretched out his full length,
and ran a microfiber cloth over both onyx-colored domes, bringing a shine that
lasted only a moment before the flakes started sticking again.

He hopped down, landing purposefully with most of his weight
on his recently healed left ankle. He felt nothing abnormal. No flash of pain
from compressing scar tissue. Not even the twinge of discomfort he’d
experienced after fast roping from a hovering Osprey and sprinting over the
sloped clearing upon returning from a recent snatch and grab mission to
Southern California.
So
, he thought in Ranger parlance,
the ankle is
one hundred percent, good-to-go
.

Retracing his steps, he stopped and dragged the Zs, one at a
time, into the ditch, figuring he’d send Wilson to dispose of them later.
Finished, he boarded the idling truck which had come into his possession in a
crazy roundabout way shortly after the dead began to reanimate and walk the
earth. After having been stolen from a mansion somewhere in Colorado, the
oversized vehicle—which had obviously been custom-built for the long dead NBA
basketball player whose underground multi-car garage it had been liberated
from—was driven to Schriever Air Force base in Colorado Springs, a homicidal
killer named Pug behind the wheel.

Nudging the details of the truck’s crazy odyssey from his
mind, Cade inadvertently gazed uphill and caught sight of the disturbed ground.
Though not entirely evident unless you knew precisely where to look, the
replaced sod, newly green from recent rains yet still stunted from the shock of
being peeled away from the dirt, marked the location of the graves containing
the fallen.

Cade saw them in his mind’s eye, from left to right: a ski
instructor and friend of Logan’s named Sampson. A man whom, embarrassingly, he
didn’t remember ever meeting. Then there was the former Salt Lake Sheriff named
Gus whom he had barely gotten to know before the
event
at the quarry stole
him and Jordan and Duncan’s brother Logan from the earth. Capping the right
side were the three recent additions, the grass atop them greener, the feeling
of loss to Cade and the entire group still stinging like a freshly opened
wound.

Shoving those thoughts down where they belonged, tucked away
in the place where they would be less apt to resurface at an inopportune time
and possibly divert his focus or cause him to forget something as small in
detail yet still very important like cleaning the CCTV domes for Seth, he
racked the transmission into Drive and accelerated east. Eyes forward, hands
gripping the wheel tight, he kept his speed under thirty the entire length of
Utah State Route 39, up the hill, then on down the slight dip and into the
first turn, where the two-lane became crowded again on both sides by towering
firs.

As the wipers beat out a cadence on the windshield, and the
heater finally began to warm the truck’s frigid cab, Cade cast his gaze at the
rearview mirror and watched for a second as the season’s first snowfall,
disturbed by the rig’s passing, was sent into a frenzy, the big flakes jinking
and swirling away hypnotically in a thousand different directions.

Once the right-hand curve straightened and the trees had
fully closed in around the road, he stilled the wipers and, to beat back a
forming band of condensation, set the heater blowing on the windshield. Having
made hundreds of trips to Mount Hood’s ski areas — at first either with his dad
or by himself, and then later with Brook and Raven—Cade was no stranger to
driving in snow and ice. However, though the F-650 had four-wheel-drive and was
shod with tires that looked capable of tackling all that Antarctica could throw
at it, piloting a behemoth such as this was nothing to be taken for granted.
The growling V10 possessed the kind of power he’d never been exposed to. On
pavement the thing handled like a dream, eating up bumps and powering through
herds of zombies without missing a beat. But the old adage—four-wheel-drive
can’t help you stop—had been drilled into Cade’s memory by his father starting
in his teens when the two of them would make the hundred-and-twenty-mile round
trip from their home in Portland, Oregon to the Timberline Lodge ski area in
the family’s venerable Jeep Grand Cherokee. So at the next snow-covered
straightaway he came to, with his hands in the proper ten and two (also
influenced by his father), he gripped the wheel even tighter and stood on the
brakes. Instantly the foot pedal hammered back against his lug-soled boot as
the four-wheel anti-lock brakes brought the beast’s forward momentum from
thirty miles-per-hour to a complete juddering stop within an astounding three
truck lengths.

Impressive
came to mind as Cade looked back at the
chevron patterns pressed by the tires into the dusting of freshly fallen snow.
At first the two laser-straight tracks behind the rig took a slight jog right
then, presumably, when the hammering had first hit his foot and technology took
over, they righted and showed no further deviation.

Time to see what Black Beauty
(as Raven had named
her)
can do accelerating from a standing stop.
Still clutching the wheel
in a way that would’ve made Dad proud, Cade released the brake and pinned the
pedal to the floorboard. Instantly the truck was pulling strongly ahead, and in
the next beat the white emptiness of the snow-dusted meadows on both sides of
the road was blazing by in his peripheral. Attempting to break the rear end
free from the road’s surface, he jinked the truck sharply left and then right
to no adverse effect.

***

A handful of minutes after taking the rig through the
impromptu Truck-Trend-Magazine-type of cold weather test, the stunted hill on
which the abandoned quarry was located passed by on Cade’s left. Due to the
inclement weather, the top third, which was notched flat where the sheds and
massive garage resided, was hidden behind a gauze-like veil of clouds.

The feeder road, however, was not. The bushes flanking it
were beaten back by multiple vehicles making dozens of trips to empty the
compound of its worthwhile contents. The muddy road was now partially
snow-covered and easy to follow with the eye. The white stripe clinging to the
side hill rose and fell and then disappeared to the right before reemerging and
then vanishing again into the clouds.

Leaving the quarry road behind, Cade hit the straightaway
bordering the Ogden River and upped the speed. Moving at a forty-mile-per-hour
clip, in under ten minutes the Ford ate up the distance from the quarry road to
the juncture where State Route 39 bisected State Route 16.

He tapped the brakes well before the crossing and then a
football field’s length short of the junction brought the Ford to a complete
stop with the engine idling and heated air hissing through the vents. He
trained the Steiner binoculars at the convergence of State Routes and glassed
the area from right-to-left. He saw the jog in 16 where it went from a
north/south run, took a right angle turn west and ran straight for a short
distance before swinging back northbound again. A stone’s throw north of the
jog in driving terms was the intersection and the wrecked yellow school bus
where a Z had literally gotten the drop on Brook and rent a baseball-sized bite
of flesh from her back. The rear end of the bus was facing him and the wheels
jutted out horizontally to the left, leaving a scant few yards of road on which
to squeeze by.

Both Chief Jenkins’ patrol Tahoe and a second vehicle that
Cade expected to see here were gone. Instantly a tingle shot up his spine. He
felt the combat juices begin to flow, sharpening his focus and slowing his
heart rate.

Momentarily finding himself caught in a break between the
slow-moving clouds, Cade lowered the field glasses and decided, despite this
new development, to continue on into Woodruff and get this
shopping spree
over with.

Cutting the air behind a big overhand swing, the razor-sharp
blade created a faint whistle before embedding in the putrefying creature’s
skull. The honed steel, pre-treated with a liberal amount of gun oil and now
slickened by a viscous mixture of congealed blood and lumpy gray matter,
retreated easily from the six-inch chasm and in the next beat was tracking on a
horizontal plane, backhand, towards the monsters vectoring in from the man’s
right. A deft back step and guttural grunt later, the former humans crumpled to
the gore-slickened roadway like a couple of stunned boxers, their heads
bouncing and spinning away, jaundiced eyes in the sockets still scanning the
surroundings for fresh meat.

Overhead, a murder of crows, having been disturbed from
their early morning feast, cussed and muttered, their shrill caws echoing off
the cold metal skin of a nearby cluster of inert vehicles.

Hearing a dry rasp at his back, the man tore his eyes from
the swirling black mass overhead and leveled his gaze at the sword clutched
firmly in his two-handed grip. Reflected in the blade’s polished surface, he
watched a half-dozen biters round the SUV he’d left parked near the shoulder
several yards north of him. He stood stock-still and waited for the dead to
come to him. Energy was his friend. Especially with the temperature sitting
somewhere in the low thirties and food high in calories and protein a dwindling
commodity. Wait, watch, and at the last second uncoil like a bear trap was an
energy saving technique he’d adopted early on.

The zombies doddered across the recently crushed mess of
rotting flesh and bone. Protruding from the putrid morass, wisps of hair still
attached to half-moons of crushed and shattered skull waved in a wind gust
stout enough to cut through his oiled leather duster. Still he didn’t move.
With nothing to his fore, he watched them shamble closer, their stunted clumsy
steps accentuated and clownlike as reflected back to him in the black blood
dripping down the unwavering blade.

Once free from the obstacle course of human detritus, they
picked up speed, moving in an almost lock-step fashion.

He remained still as their spindly arms elevated, straining
for him.

Getting closer. Ten feet,
he guessed, judging by the
growing size of the leering faces mirrored back at him.

The raspy hisses rose over the wind and then morphed into
hungry sounding guttural moans.

Five feet.

He imagined their crooked fingers kneading the air and the
hairs on his neck sprang to attention. And though already chilled to the bone,
gooseflesh rippled like an electric current up his ribcage.

Still he didn’t move. He felt alive now more than ever.

Three feet, now.

Excitement building, his body shivered against the
stiffening wind. Finally, with the calls of the dead in his ear and his toned
muscles under incredible tension, he spun counter-clockwise, straightened his
arms and locked his elbows, bringing the nearly invisible blade—now horizontal
and reflecting sky—around like a natural extension of his body. Breaking his
wrists just before impact enabled the razor-sharp edge to cleave cleanly
through two skulls and enter a third before coming to rest against the female
cadaver’s ethmoid bone. She had been big in life, and her twice-dead weight nearly
ripped the weapon from the man’s calloused hands as gravity instantly yanked
all two-hundred-plus pounds of her vertically to the pavement.

Three things happened near simultaneously as the man
backpedaled left, still in control of the wildly vibrating blade. First off,
the initial victim of his roundhouse, suddenly minus the top third of its
skull, staggered forward, the final impulses sent from the now-bisected brain
urging pustule-covered arms to grasp the meat that was no longer occupying the
last place registered in its dead gaze. A fraction of a second after the first
to meet the blade—arms outstretched, crooked fingers still blindly probing thin
air—crumpled to the pavement, the rotten interloper to its right, bald head
cleaved clean through on a forty-five from ear to crown, tumbled sideways over
the plus-sized corpse, the energy from it meeting the ground still rippling
through its decay-ravaged blubber.

Three down, three to go
, crossed his mind even as he
was acting on muscle memory and dropping them one at a time behind three
efficient downward strokes, separated by a barely perceptible right to left
pivot, and only a half heartbeat’s time between each lethal blow.

On the LCD screen in the F-650, north/south-running State
Route 16 was represented by a thick yellow line intersected by eastbound 39. As
soon as Cade turned north onto the straight stretch of two-lane, he saw a sign
indicating 16 would soon turn into Main Street, which bisected the
blink-and-you’d-miss-it town of Woodruff. On the screen, the name change was
already indicated in blue font and, like seedlings growing in time-lapse
photography, smaller yellow lines representing side streets began sprouting
left and right off the main drag.

He drove on for a few blocks and, seeing nothing but a
burned-out mom and pop store and fields in the distance, shrouded by a gray
haze of falling snow, he decided to double back and work his way east, starting
with the nearest cross street.

He made a quick U-turn and, nearing East Center Street,
turned his attention to a mid-sized passenger car that had been pushed up onto
the curb. It was wedged tight nose first between a light pole and a mature oak,
the latter doing considerable damage to the passenger side and creasing a sharp
V into the roofline. The sheet metal reflecting the image of Cade’s ride was
dented and dirty and scratches marred the once-shiny black paint. There was a
long dead corpse behind the wheel, its skeletal hands still clutched the
misshapen steering wheel and, like a big white tongue, the deflated airbag
draped from the torn leather housing and onto the unfortunate victim’s lap. And
speaking to the considerable forces that delivered the large Cadillac DTS and
driver to their final resting place, all of the glass in the doors was blown
out and it sat on four flat tires. On the ground, refracting the newly fallen
snow and looking oddly out of place, shards of safety glass thrown under the
vehicle’s rockers and bumpers sparkled and shimmered as he let his foot off the
brake and started the truck moving again.

Half a block south of the mangled luxury car, Cade’s eye was
drawn right to the waist-high hedge paralleling the sidewalk and separating an
automotive shop from Main Street. Something about the entire run looked odd, like
it had been trampled recently. From the corner of Center to the block’s
midpoint, the dense, squared-off shrub angled sharply away from the street, and
the snow that dusted everything else—nonexistent.

On the expansive but nearly empty parking lot to the lee
side of the shrubs, a dozen or so cars waiting for service they would never
receive were pushed up tight against what appeared to be the shop’s office and
an adjacent rollup door, which was battered and bowing inward.

Cade stopped the truck, swung his gaze back to the road, and
suddenly the cause of the damage dawned on him. Where he was sitting, Main and
Center, was
the
chokepoint on the dead’s migratory route where State
Route 16 narrowed, and the roaming hordes, due to their size and mass capable
of moving vehicles and shoving houses off their foundations, came against the
most resistance. Further scrutiny revealed more damage from the shambling
masses. A trio of power poles on the east side of Main were leaning away from
the street at about the same angle as the hedges opposite them. The lines once
supplying power to the fix-it shop and nearby business were all stretched
laser-straight overhead under great tension and looked as if they might give
way at any moment. Cade’s eyes touched upon the sidewalk and he couldn’t decide
if the upheaved concrete at the base of the poles was keeping them from
toppling completely or if the taut supply lines were doing the job. At any
rate, sitting in the idling truck anywhere near the listing poles was asking for
a Darwin Award, so he continued on and hooked the next left at Center.

A little baffled that so far he hadn’t spotted a single Z in
downtown Woodruff, he drove walking-speed east for a full block. At the next
intersection, he spied the business where Brook’s foraging foray had nearly
been derailed. The words on the shingle hanging over the front door read, “Back
in the Saddle Rehab.” Although he knew the major details of the ill-fated stop
just off of Main Street, he’d been spared the minor ones, the first of which he
now found to be false advertising, because it was here where Wilson had been
nearly
bucked
out of the reversing Raptor and into the arms of the dead.
And it was also here where Chief was bit in the
saddle,
so to speak.

Secondly, the building looked much smaller in person than
Wilson’s description of it. It struck Cade as more
residence
than
business. Just a little two-story house on a quarter of the block surrounded by
a big unimproved parking lot. A sea of gravel, in fact. Therefore, Cade decided
to swing by on his way out of town to procure the items on the list he presumed
would be there. A quick in-and-out. Crossing T’s and dotting I’s.

Two minutes.

Tops.

Cade scanned all points of the compass and still nothing was
moving. Seeing that Woodruff suddenly ended three blocks east, he brought the
Steiners up and swept his gaze over a cluster of buildings just up the road
beyond the edge of town.

On a knuckle of land and set back south of the road were a
trio of prefabbed homes. The unremarkable single-story items were made from two
halves constructed someplace else, trucked here, and then hemmed up on site.
They were placed on side by side lots and had identical snow-covered driveways
leading up from the road to flatly graded rectangles all white with snow and
large enough to accommodate a pair of vehicles. Probably a family plat divided
for siblings, Cade guessed.

He snatched up the CB and hailed Seth, who for the day was
acting as Chief of Security, a position created by Duncan not only to instill a
certain sense of pride in the job, but also to make the solitary experience
attractive to others besides just Heidi, who, through the marvels of modern
pharmaceuticals, was quickly bouncing back from her month-long malaise and
could only be pried off the shortwave radio using the jaws-of-life.

Seth answered at once and, after a brief back-and-forth,
assured Cade, save for the wet snow having already accumulated on the CCTV
domes, that all was well at the compound.

“I’m going dark for a few minutes,” Cade said. “I want to
check out some mobile homes east of the Woodruff main drag.”

“On Main Street?”

“No. About a half a mile east on”—he craned around to see
the sign—“looks like I’ll be six or eight blocks east of Main on Center Street.
Woodruff isn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis.”

“Roger that,” replied Seth. There was a clicking sound that
Cade took to be the younger man’s thumb releasing the switch on the microphone
attached to the base unit. Then, out of the blue, the silence in the cab was
broken when Max let out a low guttural growl. Cade looked to see the
shepherd—ears drawn back and teeth bared—on the seatback and looking focused on
something through the truck’s smoked rear window.

With the volume knob trapped between thumb and finger, Cade
was about to power off the CB when Seth’s voice came through the speaker. “You
still there?” he asked, a sense of urgency in his voice.

“Roger that. What’s up?” Listening for a response, Cade
again scanned his surroundings, only to find that he’d drawn some unwanted
attention. Attracted to the idling engine, a small group of walking dead had
just emerged onto Center Street roughly a block east of Main. After a couple of
seconds of dead air, during which Cade kept his eyes locked on the rearview
mirror and watched the dead spread out shoulder to shoulder across the yellow
line, Seth finally came on and promised he would be right back as soon as he
found the list of new requests he had misplaced.

“You gave me the list.”

“These are
additions
to that list.”

“Make it quick, Seth. I’ve got Zs on my six and I’ve got
work to do,” Cade answered back irritably.

Seth made no reply to that. So Cade let his foot off the
brake and, driving one-handed with the CB in the other, covered half the
distance to the trio of structures on the hill. He soon grew impatient and was
on the verge of silencing the radio altogether, more so to conserve the
batteries than from a reluctance to talk to the kid, when Seth beat him to the
punch. “Glenda wants to know if you can read the writing on her list.”

“I learned cursive in school,” Cade replied.

“You
are
old,” said Seth.

“Spit it out.”

“She wants to add some things to it.”

“Go ahead, I’ll commit them to memory.”

“You sure?”

“Can’t write, I’m driving. And Max isn’t growing an
opposable thumb any time soon, so spit it out.”

“Suit yourself.” Seth rattled off a laundry list of stuff
Glenda thought of after compiling her first fairly lengthy list. Then Seth
tacked on a couple of things for himself: magazines, a handheld video game,
batteries—which were already on the first list as well as Cade’s own mental
list. There was a pause and then, in a soft voice, as if he was asking for the
world, Seth requested a Snickers bar if Cade came across one.

“Who would run from Zs and leave their last Snickers
behind?” Cade said, incredulous.

“Good point,” Seth conceded. “In that case, then. Any
chocolate will do.”

“Gotta be aboveboard with you, Sport. If I come across a
Snickers ... I’m keeping it all to myself,” said Cade, smiling. “Finders
keepers. Spoils of war. Besides, what you don’t know, won’t hurt you.”

“Come on,” replied Seth. “That’s not fair. I’ve got a sweet
tooth and I’m sick of
frickin
MRE pound cake.”

Max issued another ominous rumbling warning.

“Any Mounds Bars I find have Seth written all over them,” Cade
said, laughing.

“Keep ‘em. Those and Baby Ruth are the worst,” Seth fired
back. “Especially after watching
Caddyshack
.”

Cade wheeled the truck right, muscling it one-handed onto
the driveway. “I thought you had a
cheese
tooth,” he said, eyes scanning
the squat dwelling’s darkened windows.

“Fine,” Seth said, dejection evident in his tone. “I’ll take
the crumbs.”

“Roger that,” said Cade. He switched the radio off and
stowed it in a cargo pocket. He stuffed the yellow sheet torn from a legal pad
and completely filled with handwritten requests in another. With the sound of
gravel crunching under the rig’s off-road tires, he halved his speed and
covered the last thirty feet to the empty parking pad, never taking his eyes
off the curtain-shrouded windows, of which there were three. The two windows
bookending the dwelling looked to be four foot tall by six wide and situated
between them, but closer to the one on the left, was another half their size
and frosted. In his mind, working left to right, Cade paired each window with a
room:
bed, bath
and, to the right of the garish-looking bright-red front
door,
living
. Presumably he would find the kitchen at the right rear
corner opposite the living room. And if that was the case, then no doubt a
hallway and closet and second bedroom, in that order, would finish off the back
half of the prefab.

Easy enough.

Cade reached to the passenger side footwell and retrieved
the red Kelty backpack he’d borrowed from Daymon. Forgoing the carbine for now,
he plucked the Glock from the center console and looked over his shoulder at
Max. “Coming or staying?”

Max moved toward the open door, stub tail twitching
furiously.

“Coming, obviously,” Cade stated. “I want to check something
first.” He toggled out of the navigation system and then fooled with the
buttons below the truck’s LCD display. After a few seconds of trial-and-error,
he called up a screen displaying the current outside temperature and saw that
it was thirty degrees and probably dropping. He sat there for a bit, listening
to the soft patter of snow hitting the metal roof overhead. Saw big fluffy
flakes alight on the windshield, break apart and begin the slow slide toward
the static wipers. The flakes landing on the warm hood, however, didn’t stand a
chance, some melting away at once and running off in all different directions,
while others collapsed instantly, creating dime-sized pools on the flat
portions of the black slab of sheet metal.

He watched the temperature drop another degree from 30 to 29
then climbed from the Ford, waited for Max to bound by him, closed the door and
locked the truck using the key.

Max beat Cade to the black
Welcome
mat in front of
the contrasting red door and was sitting there, tail twitching, and staring
over his shoulder as his master-for-the-moment approached.

“All clear?”

Max pawed at the mat.

Cade pounded the door with a closed fist, calling out,
“Anyone home?” He pressed his ear to its cold surface and listened hard. A
handful of seconds passed. He craned and checked the windows for movement then,
raising his Glock, flicked his eyes to Max, who was peering up expectantly.
“Sounds empty inside.”

As per usual in the zombie apocalypse, the door was locked.
So Cade put the sole of his size nine desert boot to work delivering a solid
kick just left of the knob and deadbolt. On impact an electric shiver ran up
his right shin, a mild ache started in his ankle, and there was a sharp crack
as wood split and the door flung open. A second dull thud reverberated about
the front room as the inside knob impacted drywall, producing a nice-sized
dimple there.

Fingers tented, Cade met the rebounding door, stopping it
mid-swing. “Anyone home?” he asked again, the earlier tone of formality gone
from his voice.

Nothing.

Once he’d crossed the threshold and was standing on the
dingy white square of linoleum passing as the foyer, the former Delta operator
cocked an ear toward the back of the house and sniffed the air. Hearing
nothing, he shrugged off the pack and, with Max sitting on his haunches and
facing the hall to the left, closed the destroyed door and barricaded it with
an overstuffed loveseat.