Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (4 page)

Killing the engine, he wondered briefly if the vivid
flashbacks he’d just experienced were what the doctors at Schriever had taken
to calling Post-Apocalyptic Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Maybe
, he
reasoned. But PATSD didn’t roll off the tongue the same. So he decided to chalk
it up to PTSD, call it a day, and be done with it.
Son, nobody likes a
whiner
, his dad had often said.

And Dad was right. Decision made and behind him. Time to
forget the past and do what he had come here for in the first place. He looked
at the front door, which, like the one in Portland, was a sturdy design
constructed of wide oak planks running vertically and outfitted with an
antiqued brass pull and matching hinges. But sadly, destroying the illusion of
home, this front door had been defaced, spray-painted dead center with a
three-foot-tall white letter ‘
X.’
Noted in the top quadrant of the ‘
X’
in like color was the date the home had been searched. Cade did the math in his
head and determined that nine days had passed since, presumably, anyone had
entered the dwelling. Reading counterclockwise, he saw the words
2nd ID
in the left panel.
Pretty self-explanatory
. The Second Infantry
Division, perhaps even the soldiers at FOB Bastion’s gate, had searched the
dwelling. Between the lower legs of the ‘
X,’
scrawled hurriedly very
small, was
O-3-Zs
. He thought back to his search and rescue training
from years ago. The
O
meant the Second ID had found zero survivors
inside. The
3
indicated the number of cadavers they had found inside. And
finally, the Z made plural told him in code that the three cadavers inside had
been ambulatory.
No living, three dead, all of them Zs.
Lastly, the
fourth quadrant was empty, which when he’d been trained many years ago meant
that there were no dead present—or hopefully in this case—no undead present.
But that was then, old training methods for sure. And this was now, when one
bite spelled doom. So making no assumptions, nor taking unnecessary chances
based on a bunch of spray-painted hieroglyphics, Cade decided that though time
and shambling Zs waited for no one, discretion was the better part of valor.
Then he heard Desantos’s voice in his head:
Take it slow, Wyatt. Life is a
marathon, not a sprint.

So he did. After burning another precious minute scrutinizing
the house and surrounding area, still nothing moving but the lone Z, he nudged
the door open, then propped his crutches against the hinge and climbed out.
Shouldering the door closed, he shifted his gaze south down U-13, quickly
decided he would have five minutes or fewer inside, then armed the lock and
dumped the keys into a cargo pocket.

After one last long look at the upper-story windows and a
glance at the flesh eater pressing its abdomen against the pointed slats atop
the neighboring fence, he nestled the crutches under his pits and clunked his
way up the cement path. He carefully negotiated the half-dozen steps and
stopped on the elevated front porch under an ornate oil-rubbed bronze light,
the graffiti-marred front door daring him to enter.

He tested the knob and found it unlocked and figured that
the soldiers of the Second ID had either A: forgotten to lock up after clearing
the house; or B: the most likely scenario, had assumed that a closed door was
sufficient to keep out the dead.

So he pushed the door open, stood stock still and peered
into the shadow-filled foyer listening hard for any kind of movement.
Nothing.
The place seemed clear, and after an additional second’s hesitation he stepped
inside and back in time.

Chapter 5

Duncan came to with a crushing headache and excruciating
pain stabbing his right side where the leather-wrapped armrest did the job the
unused seatbelt hanging near his throbbing head had not. Stars and tracers
danced before his eyes—not safety-orange arrows fired from a crossbow or .50
caliber marking rounds conjured up by his imagination—but honest-to-God,
head-trauma-induced, streaks and blobs of colorful light. That his head hadn’t
gone through the glass as a result of Daymon’s Fast and Furious-inspired
sideways drift and ensuing rapid deceleration and collision with the pair of
sturdy fence posts was either a testament to long-dead engineers in Japan or
some kind of
miracle
he didn’t deserve.
Would have better served
Logan
, crossed his mind as the ethereal sky show faded and new stimuli
flooded his senses.

The driving rain lessened to a sporadic patter pelting the
smoked-glass moon roof as the rasps of the dead intensified. Hearing this,
Duncan shook his head to blink the fog away and suddenly a blast of damp carrion-tinged
air entered through the open driver’s door. Looking left, he half-expected to
see Daymon’s body sprawled on the ground either mortally injured from the
impact or being eaten by the dead.

Instead, without warning, the driver’s door slammed shut with
a hollow thunk and he saw Daymon crabbing sideways away from the static SUV, a
two-way radio pressed to his lips, and the stubby shotgun, held one-handed,
aimed head high at a crowd of advancing rotters.

Reacting to the gooseflesh-producing sound of nails rasping
the window near his ear, Duncan swept his gaze right and was greeted with a
multitude of snarling zombies, their teeth bared and only three millimeters of
automotive glass keeping them at bay.
The Lord helps those who help
themselves
, crossed his mind as he fought the numbness in his right arm and
fumbled the Colt from its holster. Finally, struggling against the rig’s
downhill list, with his arm throbbing mightily, he wormed across the
rain-slickened center console, opened the door, and slithered otter-like head
first out of the vehicle. The second his chest hit the soggy ground three
closely spaced gunshots set his ears to ringing. Lying in the mud, he looked
left and saw that Daymon was crouched near the Toyota’s rear bumper, the
shotgun trained cross-hill away from the wrecked Toyota. In the next instant
the shotgun belched flame and another thunderous boom pierced the air, crashing
overhead. Watching the targeted rotter’s head dissolve, Duncan sighted over the
.45 but held fire for fear of accidentally hitting Daymon. So, after casting a
quick look at the SUV, and verifying that it had indeed come to rest completely
blocking the breach in the fence entirely, he moved a few feet uphill and, with
his friend now out of harm’s way, engaged the remaining creatures from an
oblique angle.

When Duncan caressed the trigger, two things happened
simultaneously. In his side vision he saw Daymon tossing the shotgun to the
ground.
Empty,
he presumed. Then, almost drowned out by a deep rumble of
distant thunder, a tremendous volume of gunfire sounded from below and to his
right. He didn’t bother looking. There was no reason. Two plus two, put
together in his mind, told him that whoever Daymon had hailed a moment earlier
over the Motorola had just joined the party. Then as the first bullet left the
.45’s muzzle, he realized that the newly turned zombie bracketed in his iron
sights looked vaguely familiar. Like the Chance kid he’d killed the day before,
minus the greasy blond dreadlocks and thirty or forty pounds around the middle.
The pale-faced monster snarled and bared its teeth and, with its last labored
step, some kind of fluid, dark and thick like molasses, pulsed from the
horrific wound on the right side of its neck. Then the .45 boomed again and
jerked in Duncan’s fist and the top third of the Chance look-a-like’s head
dissolved into a viscous spray of brain and bone that mingled with the misting
rain and landed with a patter, a gory strip of detritus a couple of yards long
and several inches wide.

At once the gunfire below trickled off to nothing and the
rain began letting up.

“Let’s get the hell outta here,” bellowed Duncan, turning
his attention towards Daymon who was now wielding the machete and had just
dropped the last standing zombie with a quick downward chop, sinking the
sixteen-inch blade a fist’s width into the monster’s cranium. Suddenly, out of
nowhere, Duncan recalled the vision he’d had of Daymon dispatching the dead on
the road while he held the DHS helicopter in a hover. “Just like I remembered,”
he added. “Only up close and personal your handy-work is much more impressive.”

“Thanks ... I think,” said Daymon, slightly confused by the
offhand comment.

With the surge of adrenaline ebbing quickly from his system,
Duncan moved on shaky legs to the SUV and took a seat behind the wheel. From
there he watched Daymon hinge at the waist to clean his blade off in the
drooping grass. Then he saw more tracers as he regarded the pistol in his hand.
Confused as to how it had come into his possession, he turned it over, looked
at the small print stamped on the slide, and then snugged it back in its
holster. Suddenly his head took a lap around his body and he saw blurred
figures on the road clearing bodies away, the widening blood trails reminding
him of Vietnam. Then he looked in the side mirror at where Daymon had been but
he was no longer there. Seemingly, in the blink of an eye, the dreadlocked man
had sheathed his machete, retrieved the crossbow from twenty feet uphill where
he’d tossed it mid-fight, and then covered twice that distance towards the SUV
and was standing a foot from him.

Handing Duncan the combat shotgun, Daymon noticed the look
of bewilderment on the older man’s ashen face. “You OK?” he asked.

Like a white light moment, Duncan had an epiphany right then
and there. And as sickening as it was for him to acknowledge, considering his
checkered past, he accepted as fact that he’d just lost time slipping in and
out of an alcohol-induced blackout. Managing a nod he muttered, “Here we go
again.”

Ignoring the comment, Daymon gestured at the shrouded bodies
near where the Land Cruiser’s high-speed downhill journey had begun and said,
barely loud enough to be heard over the falling rain, “Get the others and let’s
finish what you came up here to do.”

Chapter 6

Cade crossed the threshold slowly as if going inside might
open up old wounds. But it had no such effect. Instead he felt cheated. The
entire layout was different. The mahogany stairs were not where they were
supposed
to be. The living room was misplaced as well. The house, he concluded, was a
metaphor for how he was feeling just three short weeks into the life-changing
event that the Omega virus had wrought on his family and the world.

When he looked in the mirror he recognized the face staring
back. However, when he went introspective—like the Craftsman’s flipped floor
plan—everything inside him, memories, emotions, loyalties, and values, had been
rearranged, changing their order of importance. So drastic the change had been
that now every decision he made was predicated on a new set of rules. Guided by
a constantly spinning moral compass. White lies were acceptable and had become
a type of family lubricant. Real lies. Big, lifesaving lies, on occasion, had
become necessary. He didn’t like the direction he was headed but could do
little to stop it. “You’re not a Boy Scout anymore,” he told himself as he
elbowed the door closed and threw the lock, just in case.

He stood in the foyer and took in a deep lungful of stagnant
air and instantly hit on a barely perceptible whiff of carrion emanating from
somewhere inside the dwelling.
In for a penny, in for a pound
crossed
his mind as he propped the crutches against the ornate bannister attached to
the stairs doglegging upward to his right.

Silently, the Glock 17 cleared the drop-leg holster and then
not-so-silently he hobbled towards the source of the stench, the moving parts
of his plastic boot betraying his presence with every stride forward.

Along the way he saw at eye level bloody handprints, smeared
and dried to black. The floors were tracked here and there with small
footprints, the fluids dried glossy and flaking. After clomping across the bare
hardwoods and passing under an arch dividing the living room and formal dining
room, he felt the soft give of the oriental rug underfoot. He paused again to
listen and was greeted with a silence with a physicality all its own. So he
pushed deeper into the lower floor, the rug quieting his approach through the
formal dining room as he skirted the walnut table and chairs dutifully taking
up most of the space. Pausing a yard from the narrow doorway he guessed led to
the kitchen, he steadied his body on a walnut built-in housing a host of very
expensive-looking gold-rimmed china, looked left and saw a door with half a
dozen panes of glass. Leaded and cut in diamond shapes and sandwiched between
white woodwork, the entry presented a nice first impression for anyone entering
from the driveway. And positioned in a breakfast nook to the right of the
doorway was an informal oak picnic-style table, complete with a long bench
pushed against the outside edge. Four sets of service had been laid out
alongside ceramic plates featuring a desert motif of vivid reds and yellows.
Three of the plates still contained half-eaten breakfast items, dried hard and
shiny, no doubt a result of prolonged exposure to the sunlight filtering in
from the west-facing wall of windows behind the table.

Knowing what the empty plate likely meant, Cade swept the
pistol right, cautiously craned his head, and found himself peering down the
length of a galley-style kitchen.

At the end were more ornate windows, sunlight beaming in.
Next to the windows was an old enamel refrigerator, ivory in color, a throwback
to a different era. The door leading out to the backyard opened just to the
left of it. And on the floor surrounding the Art Deco-inspired item’s open door
was a half-moon-shaped pool of something rotten, yellowish-colored, and
sprouting a thick carpet of black mold. Whatever the sludge had been, it was now
assaulting his gag reflex, making his salivary glands come alive.