Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (24 page)

“No worries,” Brook said, returning the smile. “I’ll be at
the range with the girls if you need me.”

Seth noticed that the corner of Brook’s mouth and her cheek
on the right side still drooped a little. Then, highlighted by the overhead
bulb, the streaks of gray shot through her dark hair were suddenly evident. He
looked away before she had a chance to catch him gawking. Locking his gaze on
Chester the Cheetah on the Cheeto bag, he said, “Heidi’s pulling watch for me
in a few so I can take a pee break and get a little something more filling than
these puffs of air.”

The skin around her right eye and mouth still slack, Brook
said, “Yellow the snow well away from the entrance, please.”

Seth looked up, smiling. “Maybe we ought to yellow up a few
snowballs for Lev to chuck at Daymon when he gets back.”

“Better yet,” she said over her shoulder. “You ought to
write Lev’s full name in the snow in front of Daymon’s trailer.”

“What is his full name?”

Already out of earshot, Brook made no reply.

Shrugging, Seth looked into the bag, picked an extra cheesy
specimen, and turned his attention back to the monitor.

Once topside, Brook, Max, and the girls tromped across the
snowy clearing, walked around the Winnebago and then entered the trees near the
Black Hawk. With their every breath producing a churning white cloud, they
followed the snowy path for thirty yards or so until reaching a small clearing
where the ground rose sharply, creating a perfect backstop of packed earth and
clay twenty-five feet across, and nearly half as high. Likely created instantly
by some kind of violent seismic upheaval, it curled at the top like a dirt wave
frozen mid-break. There were rusty cans scattered about, all misshapen and with
jagged holes torn in their sides. Tatters of colorful paper still clung to some
of them and quite a few remained stuck in the mud wall where they’d been placed
as targets, each consecutive bullet burying them deeper. Brook’s first
impression, though she was partially responsible for the mess, was that someone
had indiscriminately shot up a supermarket’s entire canned goods aisle.

Obviously excited to be out of the compound, Raven and Sasha
scurried ahead and assembled a dozen cans and plastic bottles of varying sizes
against the backstop. Some they pressed into the mud. Others they arranged on
horizontal slabs of bark inset into the mud here and there and acting as
makeshift shelves.

“That’s enough,” Brook said. She looked over her shoulder
and was pleased to see Max sitting on his haunches behind them all. She told
the dog to stay then looked at the girls saying, “I want to go first.” She
donned the pair of shooters muffs and dragged the Glock from its holster.

Without being told, the girls formed up well behind her and
stuck Day-Glo yellow earplugs into their ears.

With the Glock clutched in her off- hand, working the slide
with her dominant right not only was unnatural but also next to impossible.
Though she’d been working on her fine motor skills and strengthening her grip
through a variety of exercises Glenda had taught her, it was apparent and
humbling that a full recovery from the effects of the battle waged in her body
between the Omega virus and the antiserum Cade had injected into her would take
a lot of hard work and time, the latter of which, thankfully, she had an
inordinate amount.

After a valiant ten-second struggle—exactly nine seconds too
long to be effective in a true survival situation—she managed to finally cycle
the slide back and release it, chambering a round with a metallic
snik
.
A week ago she couldn’t grasp a soda can let alone hold the pistol in the hand
in question.
Progress, not perfection
. With sweat beading on her lip,
she held the Glock in as tight a two-handed grip as she could muster, set her
feet apart a little wider, and cast a surreptitious sidelong glance at the
girls. Tracking her eyes straight, she drew a breath and exhaled slowly while
simultaneously drawing the trigger pull in. The gun bucked, yet she kept it
under control. The sharp report seemed to circle the small clearing then rolled
over their heads like a mini sonic boom.

Already bouncing lightly on her toes, Raven beamed and
clapped excitedly.

Strengthening her grip on the Glock, Brook took three or
four calming breaths then repeatedly caressed the trigger. Three more
thunderous booms, spaced seconds apart, crashed and banged the cold air around
them.

The hot expended brass tumbled through space and disappeared
down a trio of holes burned into the snow near the first.

Brook crinkled her nose at the result. Two of the four cans she
had targeted were untouched. So in the interest of saving ammunition, she
snugged the Glock into its holster. Once again forgetting her condition, she
made a sweeping bowing movement to usher the girls forward, and suffered the
consequences. Wanting nothing more than to numb the pain the easy way—with one
of the opiates Cade brought back earlier—she instead bit her lip until the pain
there took her mind off the sensation of what seemed to be a million pins and
needles assaulting her back.

“Show me what you got, ladies.”

The crumpled cereal bar was poised an inch from Gregory Dregan’s
mouth and the previous bite was still mid-swallow when the first gunshot caught
him completely by surprise. He swallowed, drew in a deep breath, and froze. At
once a flurry of thoughts bombarded his brain:
One shot. Most likely a small
caliber pistol. And very, very close.

He rocketed off of his backpack which he’d been sitting on
and cast his gaze upward, darting his eyes all around as if he could actually
see the dissipating sound waves. When a second report didn’t immediately follow
the first, he clean-jerked his pack off the snow, thrust his muscled arms
through the straps, and snugged the waist belt tight. He grabbed his rifle and
calmed his body. Stood still, listening hard against his own breathing and was
rewarded a few seconds into the vigil when another boom sounded off in the
distance. His nylon jacket rustled softly as he swiveled his upper body and
faced the retreating sound. He stood statue-still and just a handful of seconds
later there came two more identical reports spaced apart like the other.

He waited a few long seconds and, when no fifth shot came,
hiked off in the general direction of the gunfire with no more of an idea where
he needed to be than when he had folded and stowed the ruined map.

***

Gregory walked in silence for a couple of minutes with the
fire lane meandering away from where he thought the shooting had taken place.
Not wanting to go breaking brush through the heavy forest—a move that would
undoubtedly give him away and provide an inviting target for the shooter if he
or she were still nearby—he stayed the course.

After slogging another hundred yards or so through the snow
with the weight of the pack cutting into his shoulders, a single shot rang out
deep in the woods off to his left. He paused and a few beats later there came
another shot. Then a few seconds after that he heard a third and fourth.
Nine-millimeter
,
he told himself.
Same as the others.
The fifth report was unexpected and
caused him to start. He had assumed the four-and-done pattern would hold true.
But it hadn’t. And this changed everything. The shots continued coming. And
they were methodical, like someone was taking aim, concentrating hard,
presumably. No sane person would cruise about the countryside wasting good
ammunition on the roamers when they were incapacitated and easy enough to kill
with a blade. So he figured what he was hearing was one or more people engaged
in a round of target practice.

Acting against the overwhelming urge to bolt in the other
direction, instead he broke into a dead run towards the sound and began
counting the shots. By the time his mental tally had hit fifteen and the
shooting stopped, the fire lane was looping back around almost like it was
encircling the shooters’ position.

With the sound of the final shot still crashing through the
firs overhead, he came to a complete stop, bent over, and braced his hands on
his knees. Save for the noise of him greedily gulping lungfuls of crisp
mountain air, a heavy silence returned to the forest. There were no hardy
mountain birds calling to each other in the canopy above. As the sweat beaded
on his brow found the path of least resistance and started the slow slide down
his angular nose, he became acutely aware of the pressure building steadily
between his ears and the accompanying noise of his own heartbeat throbbing
inside his skull.

He remained that way, stooped over, his back arched and
straining against the weight of the pack until another round of gunfire
commenced. Acting on the assumption that this volley would peak at fifteen, he took
a final deep breath, hinged up, and took off running down the road. With the
gunshot tally in his head standing at twelve and the steady popping still off
of his left shoulder and coming every couple of seconds, the road seemed to end
and he found himself staring at a thick phalanx of ferns and ground-hugging
undergrowth.

As shot number thirteen rang out, Gregory shed his right
glove and drew his pistol. He quickly pulled the slide back and saw a glint of
brass in the chamber. Using shot number fourteen as cover, and feeling a little
like Indiana Jones entering some jungle-choked ancient temple, he bulled his
way through the head-high wall of foliage to his fore. Spitting snow and
batting creeper tendrils from his face, he stepped over ferns the size of small
trees and inexplicably found himself standing an arm’s reach from a single
solitary upright rotter on the side of a two-lane road that had to be State
Route 39.

Thoroughly disoriented, like a dog dizzy from chasing his
tail, he looked left along the road and fixed his gaze on a spot where the
forest canopy gave way and saw what looked like a wide-open meadow. The field
of white was fenced near the road and rose gently up and away from the
two-lane. Trying to get his bearings, he looked right down the natural tunnel
created by the encroaching forest. The road there was straight and littered
with fallen branches and needles and a light sprinkling of snow that had
managed to infiltrate the thick canopy.

Though it had seemed much longer as Gregory stood there
gaping at his surroundings and being gaped at by the thing in stasis, in
reality he had only been in the open for a couple of seconds when the fifteenth
and final shot sounded off in the distance. Not sure what to do, he ignored the
creature and bolted across road to the other shoulder and froze in place, his
breathing loud against the all-encompassing silence that followed. He stood
unmoving for five long minutes and, when the shooting hadn’t resumed, found a
path through the flora to the point where the abandoned fire lane picked back
up. He shrugged off his pack and laid it flat on a dry patch of ground amidst a
huddle of massive firs. There he sat for another fifteen minutes and when a
boisterous conversation between a couple of crows started up down by where he
thought the shooting had originated, he took his gloves off and fished the Utah
road map from the side pocket.

With the birds bringing their war of words nearer, he
unfolded the map very carefully to keep it from tearing completely along the already
damp creases. Using the pack as a table of sorts, he folded the flimsy edges in
and placed the map flat on the pack so that the town of Huntsville was on the
lower left corner and Bear River was on the right. Then, seeing as how he still
didn’t know which direction north was, he went about tracing the fire lane with
his finger from its origination at the lower quarry and came to the same
conclusion as before—the map was old and he was lost.

So he fished the CB radio from a pocket and powered it on.

***

Thirty argument-filled minutes later, with his dad on the
other end juggling a radio of his own while consulting a more recent
topographic map of the area, they concluded that sometime in the past another
road that was not on either of their maps had been carved through the forest.
And by comparing the stretch of 39 and retracing his steps on the fire lane in
his head, Gregory realized that both the State Route and fire lane had dipped
about a mile north before coming back on itself, nearly encircling a seemingly
impenetrable tract of forest in the process.

Finally, after looking at the topo-map from every
conceivable angle and estimating with a ruler and the mileage key just how far
Gregory had come did his dad confirm that where the fire lane crossed 39 was a
bit west of where he had spied the tracks and pair of black camera domes.

After once again arguing over compass points and then listening
to his dad spew a litany of orders, Gregory turned the volume low on the long
range CB and flipped it the bird.

***

As per Dad’s orders, Gregory continued following the fire
lane. A dozen yards from where he paused last, it started a slow rise in
elevation and began a big lazy right-to-left arc. He walked through the snow
with the Odd Couple crows and their argument keeping pace. After figuring he
had travelled a quarter mile or so, just as his dad had predicted, the fire
lane leveled slightly, then turned very minimally to the left and began a
gradual descent.

“Shit, Dad,” he said under his breath. “You were dead to
rights about the road.”

He paced left for a few yards, scrutinizing the brambles and
low-hanging ferns, searching for a way through. Finding nothing, he retraced
his steps and repeated the process a few yards in the other direction.

It was a scrap of fabric, red and checked like a
lumberjack’s flannel, that caught Gregory’s attention first. Trapped waist-high
by the bramble’s sharp thorns, it seemed to be marking an opening just wide
enough to fit a man, albeit one with much narrower shoulders than his.

He forced his way through, half-expecting to meet a hail of
lead or at the least be looking down the barrel of a gun on the other side.

Though the briars grabbing at his jacket and pack slowed his
progress, he didn’t have to wait long to find out his fate. When the brush gave
way, he found himself in a sheltered little alcove surrounded on three sides by
a smattering of old growth and juvenile firs and aspens. Much like the foliage
concealing the fire lane both times it crossed 39, the undergrowth in front of
the little hide consisted of ferns and some kind of wild shrubs that came up to
his waist.

He looked out from the sheltered pocket abutting the meadow
and saw the road below. It ran left to right, and though his dad insisted the
vehicle responsible for the tracks had turned north off of 39, he still wasn’t entirely
sold. The dense woods in which he was certain the gunfire had come from
stretched out ahead of him beyond the gently curving stretch of 39. A triple
strand of barbed wire bordered the road nearest him. Across the two-lane State
Route an identical run of fencing stretched from left-to-right almost the
entire run of road, but for some reason came to an abrupt end where the thick
tree line took over.

Nothing moved in his field of view—living or undead. So he
shed his pack and set it at his feet on the dry, packed earth. Laid his rifle
atop the pack and his eye was drawn to a recurring pattern in the soil.

He went down on one knee and, like an umpire dusting off
home plate, brushed aside the accumulation of dry needles and rotted leaves.

The pattern was left behind by someone wearing lug-soled
boots. The marks were numerous and had mostly crumbled over time, the edges
losing most of their definition.

For a moment Gregory contemplated digging out the CB and
calling his dad and asking him to again describe the location where the tire tracks
in the snow left the road. Instead, he took his binoculars from the pack,
slipped the strap over his head, and stuck the rubber cups to his eyes. He
walked the field glasses from left-to-right all the way to where the fence
across the road ended, seeing nothing out of the ordinary until he got to the
wall of foliage. For some reason he couldn’t point to, when viewed under high
magnification, it just didn’t seem natural. Continuing on, seemingly hovering a
dozen feet off the ground and reflecting a sliver of white that was the nearby
State Route, he spotted the black plastic domes his dad had mentioned. Perched
under a circular shroud affixed to a tall tree just inside the tree line, the
shiny orbs looked like a pair of unblinking and all-seeing eyes.

Bingo.

Feeling a sense of accomplishment after overcoming the soggy
map fiasco and more importantly, avoiding contact with his sister’s gun-wielding
murderers, Gregory Dregan set the binoculars aside and started preparing his
hide for the long night ahead.