Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (23 page)

Elvis covered his ears against the thunderous noise as the
choppers, now just two hundred yards away, abruptly took on a nose-up attitude,
slowed, and hovered in place over the lake’s edge. “Thousand bucks says they’re
going to fit on my clearing,” he said.

“I hope so,” said Bishop behind a thin-lipped smile. “’Cause
it’s your ass if they don’t.” His smile faded as he regarded the impromptu
airshow. Then a frown formed when he realized what a Siren’s song to the
walking dead the noisy helos were.

After hovering for a tick, their considerable rotor wash
creating a frothy chop on the lake’s surface, the noisy craft turned
gracefully, gained some extra altitude and passed over the lake house before
settling gently on the newly graded acreage.

“Like a glove,” said Elvis smugly as the final Little Bird
settled to terra firma, leaving room enough for two or three more of the
smaller aircraft next to the north gate.

Collectively the whining turbine noise diminished to a
throaty whoosh and the individual rotors gained definition as the rpms bled
off.

When he could finally hear his own voice, Bishop began to go
over the looming mission point by point. He let Elvis know that he had already
entered the necessary GPS coordinates into the tow truck’s navigation system
and then outlined the three tasks that needed completing after reaching the
target. The first of which was to lower the delicate device to the ground using
the truck’s boom. The second, and most important, was to enter the arming code
properly. And task number three, tantamount to Elvis’s survival, was to avoid
contact afterward and get the hell out of Dodge. Lastly, Bishop let slip where
‘Dodge’ was, as well as the staggering number of casualties they could expect
as a result of perfect placement of the device. When the one-sided briefing was
over, Elvis was wearing a Cheshire Cat grin and the helicopters had gone quiet,
their massive Nomex and fiberglass blades stilled and drooping under gravity’s
pull.

Bishop asked, “Any questions?”

His eyes glazing over, Elvis heard the question but said
nothing. Then, still in the throes of the mental orgasm from learning that he
was finally going to avenge his dead family in grand fashion, and with the beer
he had just downed making everything fuzzy around the edges, the knot in his
back loosened and everything went dark. He didn’t see the woman emerge from the
nearest Black Hawk. He also missed the hood being yanked unceremoniously from
her head, allowing dark hair to spill over her shoulders. He was out cold,
therefore there was no way he could know that the athletic former soldier named
Carson, whom he had met weeks earlier on the Minot mission, was the person
escorting the fit brunette towards the house.

Bishop, however, was clued in the moment he felt the two-way
radio vibrate in his pocket.

However, the warbling that followed had a different effect
on a snoring Elvis. At first he was certain he’d failed his mission. That the
Guardsmen had found him out and sounded a Klaxon and were mobilizing to mount a
hot pursuit. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the Klaxon died to nothing.
Elvis heard the sound of boots clomping and scuffing against what he gathered
were wooden stairs. They were drawing near. Slow. Deliberate. Then he heard a
door suck open. And a moment later there was the distinct sound of a door
slamming shut. Next, he heard more voices, strangely distant. Finally, sensing
that he was about to be caught red-handed, he felt a tremor that he was certain
was the device detonating. It lasted for a second or two and then the crisp
images of wonton death and destruction he had wrought on his enemies took on an
ethereal quality. The melting faces and contorted and crisped limbs faded away
to black. The roaring tempest of radioactive winds calmed, leaving a mushroom
cloud roiling up and up and casting a snaking shadow over the destroyed city.
Then, out of the blue, the temblor intensified and the imagined vista from
where he had witnessed the explosion began to crumble from under his feet.

Chapter 32

Elvis came to with Bishop kicking his boots, which were
splayed out at an odd angle. There was also a second person shaking him from
behind. In his peripheral he could see large calloused hands clamping down hard
on both of his shoulders. Then he gazed up and instantly recognized the
inverted face staring down at him. A cold ball formed deep in the pit of his
stomach. He struggled to rise but couldn’t. Then, still half asleep, he
stammered groggily, “I didn’t desert. Robert Christian made me ... he ordered
me to leave the convoy.”

Carson released his grip and walked around the chair and put
his hands on his hips. Looked Elvis square in the face. “Relax, ” he said. “You
passed out. Started mumbling and smiling and carrying on ... in your sleep.
While you were out, Bishop told me how you are going to win back our trust.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not entirely sold that vaporizing a few
thousand United States soldiers is going to wipe out your debt to me.”

Shaking his head wildly, Elvis whispered, “Nothing I could
do.”

The veins in his neck bulging, Carson hinged at the waist
and got in Elvis’s face. Then, with the volume of his voice rising with each
word, he said, “When I found out you had rabbited and left us a driver short
with a long haul ahead ... I wanted to hunt you down and
kill
you
myself.”

Pulling an irate Carson away, Bishop maneuvered him towards
a chair and said, “Sit. Calm down.”

Carson took a minute to compose himself, then went on, “You
got lucky, buddy. Robert Christian started in at once hounding Ian about the
nukes. And that was just enough distraction to save your sorry ass ... from
me.”

Bishop put a hand up, silencing Carson. Set his gaze on
Elvis and said, “When I found out about RC’s idiotic play on the
President—dispatching you and Pug from two different directions—I knew the
house of cards in Jackson was about to fall. Then RC really started boozing it
up.” He shook his head. Looked at the floor and added in a low voice, “The
amount of champagne and gin that he was going through tripled after the dead
started walking. And the second I saw him spiraling down that rabbit hole ...
blacking out and forgetting things, I made the decision. It was easy. I
diverted the nukes. Had Carson truck them here. No sense letting that fool have
a truckload of warheads. No use in sticking around to go down with Captain
Hazelwood on that sinking ship.”

Elvis was wide awake by now, but getting bored with the
story. Cocking his head sideways, he asked, “Then what happened to RC?”

“Couldn’t tell you. Last I knew he was holed up in his place
...
isolating
. He was
not
answering his sat phone. Then, after
the bus barrier failed and the dead started pouring in—” Bishop threw a visible
shudder and subconsciously his hand went to the butt of his pistol—“that was
when
I
made the tactical decision to cut the drunk’s umbilical cord ...
so to speak. I had a duty to my men. Had to save as many of them as possible.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” asked Elvis. “And why
in the hell did you wake me up? I was having the dream of a lifetime.”

“Blonde or brunette?” asked Carson, flashing a sly grin.

Ignoring the quip, Bishop said, “You risked a lot in order
to get here from Schriever. I have to say I’m pretty impressed. And agreeing to
put your life on the line in order to take out our common enemies ... should
you succeed, will be enough in my book to get you back in my good graces.”

In one long pull, Elvis finished his warm beer and set the
bottle aside. He made a face and belched. “I’ve kind of resigned myself to
death one way or the other. Figured I’d either be killed by the soldiers at
Schriever. Or be eaten by the dead while running from the soldiers. And to be
honest with you ... the second I honked last night to get your attention ...”
He went silent for a second.

Listening intently, Carson steepled his fingers.

Bishop did the same and said, “Yes. Go on.”

“I thought I would be crucified before dawn. So living ...
no ... that’s not my motivation. And though it would be nice—neither is getting
on your good side. I have three reasons of my own why I want to do this and
there’s no way I’m going to allow myself to fail.”

“Two birds with one stone then,” intoned Bishop. He looked
up at Carson conspiratorially, then went on, “In one fell swoop this one blow
will set things right for you, reduce my enemies to dust, and make the roads
between impassable for the next ten thousand years.”

Elvis paused as if in thought. He regarded the finger of
lake in front of the house. It was a strange shade of aquamarine blue with
cold-water eddies sullying the reflection of the surrounding landscape. Finally
he turned, gingerly squaring up with Bishop and said, “When do I get my gun
back?”

Bishop reclined in his chair and said, “So that you won’t
stray again ... you’ll get it back when you leave tomorrow.”

Not liking the answer, especially after being trapped in the
house in Ovid with undead grandma banging around in the basement and scores of
walking corpses gathered outside, Elvis shook his head and said bitterly,
“That’s a load of crap.”

Bishop rose from his chair. Stared Elvis down and said
menacingly, “It’s the
only
way.”

Carson also stood. Made his way to the rail and craned his
head right to see how the unloading was coming along. Lined up on the ground near
the smaller choppers were several neat rows of black plastic boxes brimming
with thousands of rounds of the most sought-after calibers—5.56 hardball for
the M4s. 9mm and .45 hollow points for the pistols, as well as a few hundred
rounds of 7.62x39 mm for the smattering of AKs favored by a number of Bishop’s
Spartan soldiers.
Pretty good haul
, he thought to himself as he watched
the two conscripts do the grunt work. In fact, they were dead men walking.
Bishop had ordered them killed for riling up the walkers near the entry—but
that could wait. For now, the doomed men were useful, humping the boxes into
the abandoned house next door like a couple of pale overweight Sherpa.

Suddenly Carson’s attention was drawn to one of the Black
Hawks, where the pilot, having apparently just finished his post-flight walk
around, hauled open the starboard side sliding door. There was a rasp of metal
on metal and then a flurry of startled movement in the shadowy cabin. A few
seconds passed, then, one at a time, the three women taken from the city near
the reservoir stepped clumsily from the cabin to the ground below. Once the
pilot had arranged the prisoners shoulder to shoulder, he went down the line
and jerked the hoods from their heads. Instantly, eyes squeezed shut against
the afternoon sun, all three fell to their knees like falling dominos.

No reason for the zip ties now
, thought Carson.
Though their pupils had had the time to adjust, still, all three remained
hunched over, shoulders slumped, chins nearly touching their chests. Clearly
all three of the twenty-something women were completely broken. Every last
ounce of piss and vinegar in them gone the second he tossed the Jordan bitch,
kicking and screaming, out of the helo two-hundred feet above the quarry. And
to add a visual to go with the audiotrack of that bitch’s last seconds on
Earth, Carson had had the pilot descend while he removed the others’ hoods and
forced them to look at her broken form on the ground below. So that they would
know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, precisely what would happen to them if they
ever drew blood from him.

He traced the quartet of raised welts running from the
bridge of his nose to his right ear. That he hadn’t lost an eye was a miracle.
In a way, giving the petite blonde flying lessons had been more satisfying than
gunning down the two armed men at the quarry. Out of nowhere he felt a
throbbing down below—the first stirrings of an erection.

Elvis hauled himself out of the deck chair and took up
station next to Carson, eyeing the women. “Well, well. What do we have here?”

To this, Carson repeated the same three-word-quip he had
used earlier. Only delivered not in a joking manner, but with all the
seriousness and banality of a host at Thanksgiving offering a serving of white
meat or dark. And though Elvis was dead tired, those three words,
blonde or
brunette
, perked him up like a shot of epinephrine. An impish grin crossed
his face. He cocked his head and said, “Both?”

Bishop caught Carson’s eye and nodded subtly, like a trader
on the New York Stock exchange floor giving a sell order.

Taking the cue, Carson turned and said over his shoulder,
“Follow me.”

Chapter 33

Interstate 70 dove south for a spell then meandered west by
north, paralleling the Book Cliffs through the hardscrabble desert.

Along the way, Cade couldn’t help but let his gaze wander,
for short durations at a time, to the remnants of the frantic eastbound
diaspora sitting inert in the opposite lanes of travel. Backed up for miles
behind a horrific multi-car pileup were slab-sided SUVs, tiny foreign-made
compacts, and just about everything in between. There were the obvious signs of
savage zombie attacks and the bloody feeding frenzies that always
followed—severed limbs, headless torsos, meat-stripped bones and remnants of shredded
clothing flapping in the breeze. Doors were open with skeletal half-eaten
bodies spilling out. In some of the vehicles, unfortunate attack victims who
had died and then reanimated still thrashed and banged against closed doors
trying to escape their metal crypts.

But this wasn’t the first traffic jam of death Cade had
seen, and certainly not the last. Still, he marveled at all of the crap the
people had jammed inside of their vehicles prior to fleeing Salt Lake City and,
presumably, points further south and west. In fact, visually, it kind of ranked
up there on the absurdity scale with all of the trinkets and statues and
jewelry the ancient Egyptians sent their dead into the afterworld with. Only
these Americans opted to burden themselves of their own free will. A move, in
Cade’s opinion, that had hastened their own journey into the very same
afterworld. And further making the metal column snaking east look like a modern
day desert caravan, it seemed as if the occupants of every fifth vehicle had
been in the process of unpacking, having piled most of their worldly
belongings: suitcases, sleeping bags, tents, microwaves, televisions, and toys
of every shape and size and color atop their vehicles after finding themselves
trapped.
Or perhaps
, thought Cade.
Maybe the subsequent waves of
survivors had come along and picked through the belongings, attempting to
fortify their own provisions.