Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed (5 page)

Nothing undead or living rushed him, so Cade holstered the
Glock and entered the garage, which he found utilized in a vastly different
manner than the other. There were a couple of grease stains on the concrete
pad, but no cars, because they were both parked outside, one speared through
with a twice-dead corpse, and the other atop what had presumably been the dead
woman-of-the-house’s husband.

Against the rear wall, he spotted a pair of multi-speed road
bikes, both gently used. Next to the bikes was a pair of modular shelves, the
plastic stacking type, brimming with automotive products. It appeared from the
diverse selection assembled on them like soldiers at parade rest, that the man
liked his car as much as the woman liked her food. And with the weather over
the coming months forecast to be worse than normal—at least according to the
pre-recorded opinions of some long dead farmers—that was a good thing, because
the Black Hawk and other vehicles needed to be winterized. So everything went
into the bag. There were bottles of lubricant, spark plugs, air cleaners, two
cans of Fix-a-Flat, and cans both of starting fluid and windshield deicer.

On the way out with the newly filled bag, Cade spied a spare
car battery still hooked to a deep cycle battery charger. After depositing the
stretched and misshapen Hefty Sack near the door with the others, he returned
for the battery and charger.

He stacked the final two items by the other stuff, padded to
the picture window behind the sofa in the living room, parted the horizontal
slats and peered out. Due to the blowing snow and the hulking F-650 in his line
of sight, he couldn’t see anything beyond the end of the driveway.

He made a bigger portal in the blinds, pressed his face to
the glass and looked left. He saw
Jack
still trapped under the car and
still swiping at the snow with his gruesome bite-riddled arms. As if it sensed
Cade’s scrutiny, the corpse suddenly ignored the falling flakes, lay back,
stretched out on the snow as far as possible and fixed its glassed-over eyes on
the house.

What a way to go
, thought Cade. He pulled his head
away and let the slats snap shut. Moved the clock aside and hustled the
scavenged supplies out to the truck, heaving everything into the load bed. Then
he whistled and opened the driver’s door. Once Max was inside the cab, Cade
shut the door. With snow collecting in his beard and every exhaled breath
creating big white plumes that slowly rose and roiled away, he stood there
shivering and thinking. To anyone with a shred of imagination, concluding that
he looked like a Viking or Mongol raider contemplating which city to sack next
would not have been much of a stretch.

After a few seconds, apparently having made up his mind
about something, he hurried back to the house. Crabbed past the broken door and
stepped over the clock and twice-dead woman and went straight for the garage.
Once inside, he reached over his head and pulled the pin that disengaged the
drive chain from the overhead motor. With visions of the dead-filled parking
garage in Los Angeles still fresh in his mind, he rattled the door up in its
tracks and turned back to the pair of bicycles.

One at a time, beginning with the larger of the two, he
wheeled the bikes to the Ford and heaved them both in back, where they settled
with a whoosh of disgorged air atop the bed of plastic garbage bags.

With Max watching him from behind the steering wheel, and
looking every bit like he was about to start the rig up and drive the thing,
Cade went back inside the garage through the open overhead door. He entered the
house again and made a bee-line to the vanity on the wall opposite the front
door. He reached high and snatched the depression-era glass vase there, removed
a bouquet of silk flowers from it, and without thought dropped it to the
linoleum floor. Flowers in one hand, Glock in the other, he hurried back the
way he’d come.

Outside, he closed the garage door and zippered between the
sedan and the hybrid SUV. He stopped near the burn pile just out of arm’s reach
from Jack.

Saying a silent prayer, Cade holstered the Glock and set the
flowers on the car’s trunk. Then he drew the Gerber and gripped the creature’s
left wrist with his free hand. With little effort on his part, he trapped the
arm under his knee. Finally, after making the sign of the cross and reciting
the Holy Trinity for the unfortunate man, in one fluid stroke—a move performed
too many times to count and perfected in the months since the dead began to walk—he
slid the blade into his left eye until he felt the high-carbon stainless-steel
tip meet bone. At once the trapped Z went limp. Cade withdrew the black blade,
dragged the dagger through the snow, and then finished cleaning it on the
twice-dead Zs tee-shirt.

Again clutching the multi-colored bouquet of fake roses in
one hand, and the Glock in the other, Cade made his way back to the Ford. He
hopped inside and caught Max looking at him the way dogs are wont to do. Head
cocked to one side as if saying,
Are we done here yet, or what?
To which
Cade said, “Don’t get any ideas, Max.” He tossed the roses on the console.
“Those aren’t for you. They’re for Raven.”

Realizing he was talking to the dog way too much, Cade dug
the CB out from under the flowers and switched it on. He looked over at Max and
said, “We better—” but cut himself short and instead pressed the key to talk
and got Seth on the other end. He quickly filled him in on the news, good and
bad, the former being that he had procured a fair amount of the items on the
lists, and the latter being the scarcity of a certain brand of candy bar
wrapped in brown and made by a certain company bearing the same name as the
Greek God of War. After listening to Seth go on about how badly he
needed
chocolate, Cade needled him further. “Do you want some cheese with that whine?”
he asked, already knowing the answer. That prompted another full minute of
bellyaching out of Seth before Cade was able to get a word in edgewise and
detail his next two planned stops.

Once Cade finished, Seth asked, “If anybody inquires, when
should I say you’ll be back?”

Cade looked at his watch. “I can’t see being outside the
wire past noon.”

“Roger that,” said Seth. “Call in when you get close.”

“Still having problems with icing on the camera domes?”

“Yep. Both of them on the State Route and the one on our
feeder road are getting it good.”

Cade removed his camo ball cap and banged it against the
floor mat to rid it of melting snow. “We’ll have to get Foley working on a fix
for that.” He paused. “The ones trained on the clearing ... how are they?”

“Fine. They’re inside the tree line. In fact I’m watching a
ferocious battle taking place up there.”

Cade snugged his hat on. “Come again?” he said.

“Daymon, Wilson, and Foley are going up against Duncan,
Tran, Jamie, and Taryn.”

Watching the snow intensify outside the truck’s windows,
Cade suddenly caught on. “Oh … a snowball fight. Who’s winning?”

“Believe it or not, the Old Man’s squad is taking it to
Daymon’s crew. Don’t know how he does it, but Tran melts in and out of the tree
line like a little ninja.”

“Jamie’s no slouch, herself.”

“Copy that,” Seth said. “Wouldn’t want her sneaking up on
me”—he went silent for a long beat—“unless, of course,
Lev
was out of
the picture.”

Detecting a trace of humor in Seth’s voice, Cade said,
jokingly, “Easy, cowboy.”

Seth laughed. “You know I wouldn’t wish ill will on him.”

“Roger that,” Cade answered back. “I’ll see you in a few.”
He consulted his Suunto and noted the time. Ten after ten. He put the truck
into as tight a U-turn as the big 4x4 would make. Still, he had to reverse it
half a truck length before transiting the drive to Center Street where he went
left and, making new parallel tracks where the old ones had already filled in,
finally wheeled west towards the rehab place.

***

Two minutes later, after using all of the shoulder to pass
by the trio of near-frozen Zs, and with his silent wingman curled up into a
ball on the passenger floor in front of the heat vent, Cade pulled to a smooth
stop a block east of Main. Gripping the wheel with both hands at twelve
o’clock, he leaned forward and rested his chin on his knuckles. He blinked his
eyes in disbelief at what he was seeing. “They’re immobilized,” he said, taking
his eyes from the herd and regarding Max. “This, my furry four-legged friend,
is a game changer.”

***

A minute after seeing the phalanx of dead rooted in their
tracks, some in mid-step, many more toppled over onto their faces or sides or
backs, arms and legs twitching minutely but not fully responding to the neural
commands issued, Cade was alone outside of the truck.

With Max nosing the passenger window and watching him, Cade
stole one last look down the sidewalk at the dead, then mounted the back steps
to the rehab place.

The rear door was ajar and a small snowdrift had accumulated
just inside on the scuffed wood floor. Forgoing the normal routine, he entered
silently with his Glock leveled, the black cylindrical suppressor leading the
way. There was a rich odor of decay in the air that grew stronger as he crept
down the short hallway.

From where the hall opened up to the front of the business,
the floors were covered by the kind of blue tumbling mats usually found at a
wrestling match or gymnastic event. On the right wall were a series of doors,
all hinged open. Drawers and plastic containers had been ripped from within,
their contents—paper brochures detailing therapeutic exercises, resistance
bands fashioned into different lengths, and rubber balls of all sizes and
colors—littered the floor.

He bent to pick up an item and caught a flash of movement to
his left. He turned and saw the reflection of a Z in the floor-to-ceiling
mirror affixed to the south wall. In one fluid motion, he spun to his right and
brought the Glock on target, its tritium sights lined up with an imaginary spot
between the rotted thing’s roving eyes.

Having a hell of a time picking its way through the clutter
near the back stairway, the Z emitted a screech that instantly sent the hair on
the back of Cade’s neck to attention. “That’s not right,” he said aloud, hoping
that all of the undead weren’t going to sound like this after the temperature
buoyed back up. He didn’t remember Nash mentioning anything about the cold’s
effect on the dead other than the fact that they didn’t ever completely die.
However, he did know that early on, after the outbreak, Sylvester Fuentes froze
some recently turned specimens solid. And when he had thawed them out,
inexplicably, within a very short time they were ambulatory again. For all Cade
knew, the notes detailing those first experiments had been in the computers and
were lost in the fire set by Pug. Moreover, if the thumb-drive found by Taryn
contained anything other than the doctor’s notes on the Omega antiserum, Nash
had decided, for whatever reason, to keep that knowledge to herself.

Moving with a locked-knee type of shuffle, the high-pitched
squawking still emanating from its constantly moving maw, the creature caught a
9mm round to each milky eye, fired by the man whose pistol prowess had earned
him the nickname
Wyatt
early on in his Special Forces career.
They
don’t call it a silencer for nothing
, he thought to himself as the
screeching pusbag went silent and fell in a heap, partially blocking a gloomy
stairwell leading up.

Finished ‘
shopping
’ in under a minute, cargo pockets
bulging with liberated goods, Cade hurried back to his truck.

He popped the door and climbed in, saying, “Mission
accomplished, Max.” He trapped the Glock under his thigh and transferred some
of the liberated goods from his pockets to the deep center console.

Max growled as soon as the motor turned over. “Yeah ...”
Cade said in response, “I don’t want to drive through them either. But it’s
what we’re going to have to do in order to get back to 39. And Max, when we
return to the compound”—the dog looked up from the floor, regarded him with
multi-colored eyes, and yawned—“do not let on to the others that I talked to
you so much.” Another yawn confirmed acknowledgement as the truck rolled slowly
over a handful of withered and gunshot Z bodies and then bounced and lurched as
Cade drove it off the curb.

As Cade angled the F-650 toward the column of dead, he
detected no movement whatsoever. They were rooted in place like life-sized
figures in a museum diorama. Or those terra cotta soldiers on display in the
Forbidden City in China, the country responsible for this entire mess.

“Domino time,” said Cade, intending to put the wide steel
bumper to use like a cowcatcher on a locomotive. He turned left onto Main and
drove south, weaving slowly left and right, pleased when his spoken assumption
came to fruition. The impacts with the Zs sounded through the sheet metal like
hollow thuds, which were a far cry from the usual resonant slaps and screeching
of fingernails digging into the paint. Instantly a chain reaction was started
and, domino-like, the dead began toppling into each other, cascading away from
the Ford like dual waves pushing out from the bow of a ship. Gunshot-like
cracks of bones breaking under the tires competed with the same shrill noise
the Z in the rehab place had made. Only here, in the midst of scores of
immobilized flesh eaters, the noise soon rose to a deafening peal and suddenly
Cade was driving through a scene from his childhood nightmares. In the next
instant, with the windows vibrating slightly from the sonic onslaught, in his
mind it was
Oldies Night
and he was at the Moreland Theater in Portland
ensconced in the comfortable love seats in the back of the house. He wasn’t
alone and there was this ethereal feeling of being wary and excited all at
once. He was on the precipice of stealing a kiss from his first real girlfriend
when
that
sound belted out of the speakers directly above them. He let
go of Barbara’s hand then, took his arm from around her slender shoulders, and
clamped his palms over his ears just like the people were doing on the movie
screen. Who knew the body snatchers screamed when they were onto you? Until
then, sitting through it in the theater, he’d had no idea. That God-awful noise
ruined the moment and the screaming pod people returned in his sleep regularly
in the form of nightmares that lasted nearly a year until another
Oldies
Night
featured
Alien
and a whole new cast of baddies took their
places.