Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (46 page)

“What do you think the odds are of that?”

“Pretty low,” said Daymon. “I’ve explored the canyon south
and west of the compound pretty extensively. There’s a creek flows through and
the woods down there aren’t dry like all of those dead lawns back there.”

After toying for a moment with the thought of calling the
compound and putting them on alert, Cade finally decided not to because of the
undue stress it would create.

***

The Black Hawk cruised along in radio silence for a good
twenty minutes before Cade finally broke it. “Daymon ... any luck with the
airports?” he asked.

“This is some small-assed print,” he said, flattening out a
crease. “Plus everything is vibrating. I’m doing my best.”

Cade replied, “Keep looking. We’ve got time.”

Below them an unidentified road snaked south to north,
interconnecting a number of smaller cities that Cade guessed were bedroom
communities to the rapidly approaching sprawl. He looked at Duncan and asked,
“What city is that.”

“Logan,” said Daymon over the comms. “Couldn’t miss that one
on the map.”

Inwardly Cade cringed, and out of respect said nothing.

Seemingly unaffected, Duncan drawled, “City of about fifty
thousand. And no, my bro wasn’t conceived there nor does the city have anything
to do with his name.”

The flood gates opened, Lev piped up, “Refresh my memory,
Duncan. Why did your dad name him Logan?”

“After some stupid Sci-fi drivel about a bunch of folks who
have gem stones in their palms.”

Looking up from the map, Daymon asked, “Surgically attached
... or are they just holding them?”

“I’ve no idea,” conceded Duncan. “But what I do know ... if
the palm gem goes black on ya then it’s Reaper time.”

Cade said, “Now that Daymon went and opened Pandora’s Box,
I’ve got to know, Duncan. Is this trip about revenge, or justice?”

Duncan remained quiet and dipped the helicopter towards the
ground and turned a few degrees left. Then he regarded Cade and said, “Great
big helpings of both.”

Sun flared off of Cade’s visor as he nodded in agreement.

“Holy shit,” exclaimed Lev. “Port side ten o’clock.”

“There has to be at least fifty thousand of them,” said
Cade. “Haven’t seen numbers like that since Castle Rock.”

Daymon chuckled then said, “Which I bet is still glowing.”

Craning his head groundward, Cade began to feel a sense of
vertigo course through his body. With the memory of the recent crash still at
the forefront of his mind, he cinched his safety harness tight.
Lot of good
that did Tice
, he thought, seeing the Spook’s crumpled body in his mind.
Grimacing, he fished the sat phone from his pocket. It was still turned on and
a tap on the number pad lit up the display. “Bingo,” he said. “Forget Boise.
Inputting coordinates.” He leaned forward and tapped a long string of numbers
into the flight computer. “Way point is set.” He cycled through the basic
functions and shook his head. “But the maps for Idaho, Washington, and Oregon
aren’t in here. I’m only seeing software updates that cover Nevada, Colorado,
California, and New Mexico.”

“Roger that,” said Duncan. “I’ll fly by compass while you
find it on the map. Hell, before computers and GPS, all we
had
was
laminated squares of plastic.” After gently carving an arc in the airspace over
infested downtown Logan, Duncan pointed the helo’s nose northwest and kept the
altitude a steady eight-hundred feet.

“How do we know where we’re going then?” said Daymon.

Cade passed the phone back and said, “You tell me.”

A couple of minutes spent poring over the maps and Daymon
came back on the comms and said, “These GPS coordinates are for the McCall
Airport in Idaho. Looks to be two-fifty or three hundred miles northwest of us.
But Cade”—Daymon handed the phone forward—“Tell me what this second message is
all about.”

Rather cryptically, Cade replied, “‘Stand by, detailed
images to follow.’ Speaks for itself ... don’t you think?”

Already thinking two steps ahead, Lev took his eyes off the
horde below and leaned back, knowing that his skills would be coming in handy,
sooner, rather than later.

Chapter 71

They’d been airborne in the DHS Black Hawk for close to two
hours and were now following a diagonal flight path northwest towards the new
GPS coordinates that Cade had inputted over the outskirts of Logan, Utah.

Millions of acres of Cache National Forest were behind them.
They’d overflown dozens of small cities, all seemingly inhabited by nothing but
walking dead. Then in the blink of an eye the scenery went from inhabited land
crisscrossed by stripes of empty highway interconnecting farms and small
communities to a vast volcanic plain spreading to the horizon.

Breaking over the comms, Lev said, “Craters of the Moon. Me
and Oops camped there once.”

Cade replied, “Looks like the ‘Stan to me ... minus the
folks wanting to blow us outta the sky and cut our heads off.”

Lev said, “You had to go there, didn’t you?”

“I never left there.”

Duncan added, “I haven’t had those kind of nightmares for
quite a while. However, some of the sights and smells lately have taken me back
to the Nam with my eyes wide open. And I can’t decide which one is worse —”

Lev said, “I have ‘em ... but thank God they slip away the
second I wake up.”

“Lucky you,” said Duncan.

For a long minute nobody spoke as the Black Hawk engaged in
a futile race with its own shadow. The black shape would morph, stretching and
shrinking, an illusion created by the rifts and cracks in the ancient volcanic
flows below.

After a short while, Daymon said, “I’m no expert. But that
sure looks like the moon down there.”

Cade opened his mouth to reply but was silenced as the helo
encountered a thermal and bucked like a bronco for a split second. Cinching his
harness tighter, he felt a slight vibration against his thigh. At first he
attributed it to the natural flight characteristics of a craft boldly defying
physics. Helicopters were no stranger to shaking and groaning as they fought
gravity and their natural inclination to drop from the sky. So Cade had learned
long ago not to pay heed to all of the different sensations—such as the
jostling created by the pocket of rising air—and instead take the cues
pertaining to the Black Hawk’s airworthiness only from the pilots. But after
experiencing the same sensation in the same place for the second time in as
many minutes, he realized it for what it was. He extracted the sat-phone and saw
on the screen that he’d missed two calls and there were two corresponding
unread messages. He thumbed the four-digit code, unlocking the Thuraya.

With Duncan casting quick glances his way and the
unforgiving landscape below slowly giving way to sage and grass, Cade read the
two SMS messages. The first was several paragraphs—almost a book by modern
texting standards—and greatly buoyed his hopes of them finding the needle in a
haystack as vast as the state scrolling by under the helo. The second, much shorter
correspondence, caused a pit in his stomach the likes of which he hadn’t
experienced for quite some time.

Duncan cast a sidelong glance and asked, “Everything OK?”

Cade replied, “For now. Find a place to land and take us
down.”

Duncan said incredulously, “Here?”

“Here and now.”

Daymon asked, “What’s up?”

Cade said nothing as Duncan slowed the craft and the ground
steadily rose up to meet them.

Cade unbuckled and, with the sagebrush whipping madly in the
cyclonic rotor wash, he opened his door and leaped from the bird the second its
tires hit Terra Firma.

The side door slid open before Cade’s hand hit the handle.
Then Lev appeared, the smaller Pelican case in hand. Cade received it without a
word and loped south thirty yards. He set the box on the volcanic soil and
turned a quick three-sixty. Nothing to see but sagebrush and grass and tan rock
for miles around the emergency LZ. Farther off to the northwest, the Sawtooth
Mountains rose up, their eastern-facing flanks and sharks-teeth-like crags
catching the full force of the afternoon sun.

Consulting the compass feature on the Suunto, Cade found due
south and scribed a line in the earth with his toe. He heard the whine of the
turbines drop a few octaves to a low howl and then detected footsteps and Lev
was at his side with a second, medium-sized Pelican hard case in hand.

In seconds they had both boxes open and, working silently,
had extracted the larger pieces from their eggshell foam interiors. Working as
a team, Lev assembled the desert tan-colored dish and positioned it facing the
azimuth etched in the soil while Cade cracked open the armored Panasonic laptop
and plugged it into a port on one side of the dish.

Powering on the computer, Cade said, “Thanks. You reading my
mind?”

“Recognized the boxes. That’s all,” Lev said. “I went on a
couple of joint ops with an SF team during my second deployment.”

Cade nodded. Then the computer got his undivided attention.
He tapped on the keys and waited. Then a few more keystrokes and a
topographical map dominated the screen.

“We could use a printer,” said Lev.

Tapping his flight helmet, Cade said, “This is my printer.”
Using the arrow keys, he scrolled the image up and down then panned it left and
right. Lastly, he zoomed way in and sat in front of the static image, letting
it burn into his memory. Eighteen minutes from setup to tear down and
everything was stowed and everyone was aboard the Black Hawk. A minute later
amidst a storm of sand and bouncing tumbleweeds, they were airborne and Cade
was fielding the questions, reluctantly.

Chapter 72

The house Elvis settled on was five miles southeast of the
final destination. Wary of being trapped again, he made certain there were no
walking dead in the vicinity before turning off the highway and barreling up
the paved drive.

Like the house in Ovid, this two-story clapboard affair was
set back on a hillock with commanding views of the highway. The house was
surrounded by a sturdy looking post and beam fence, while the drive leading
toward the garage was bordered by both a chain-link fence and the dense strip
of hedge that, over time, had completely engulfed it.

He parked the truck and killed the engine and, though the
music coming from the speakers was barely above a whisper, turned off the
stereo as well. Sitting in silence with the field glasses trained on the
highway below, he witnessed hundreds of dead stagger by over the span of just
forty-five minutes, the vast majority of them heading in the direction from
which he’d just come.

Finally satisfied that he hadn’t been made by the dead, he
grabbed his pistol and quietly exited the truck. He tucked the .45 in his
waistband and scaled the wooden fence. The walk to the house was brick, the
mortar between tinted green with a thin veneer of moss. There was a rise of six
stairs leading to the back door. Gun drawn, Elvis took them two at a time and
peered in the window. Nothing to see but a barren back room, one wall of
shelving holding rows of glass jars containing home canned fruits and
vegetables. The other, a hook full of coats and assorted brooms and mops and
the like. The kitchen beyond seemed unused. There was nothing in the sink that
he could see and the counters were devoid of small appliances. After rapping on
the glass quietly, nothing dead arrived so he tried the knob.
Locked
.

Instead of breaking the glass, he jumped to the browned lawn
and curled around front. After scaling the same number of steps, he stood in
front of a wooden door sporting a posted notice of foreclosure.
Someone
didn’t pay their note
, thought Elvis. He noticed its posting date was two
weeks before the outbreak. Bad for the previous occupants. But good for him. He
ripped the notice in two and broke into the house.

For a foreclosure, someone sure left a ton of shit
behind.

But that was a good thing. He liberated a chair from the
kitchen. With its chromed legs and a red vinyl seat brittle with age and
showing more fault lines than California, it was plain to see why it had been
left behind. The same could be said for the few pieces of furniture in the living
room. There was a side table and coffee table—both far from Amish quality. A
lamp with a pea-green tasseled shade. Definitely not a keeper.

He dragged the chair across the scarred wood floor. Spun it
around and planted it in front of the grand west-facing picture window. Cracked
seatback pressing against his chest, Elvis propped his chin on steepled fingers
and watched the dead march south.

Chapter 73

For a long while they continued on, the Black Hawk keeping
roughly the same heading. The new GPS numbers, Cade said, were going to leave
them south and east of the McCall airport where they would need to find a place
to safely secrete the helo for future use.

The miles ticked off quickly and the closer they got to
their final destination the lower Duncan seemed to fly. The drop in altitude
was gradual, but if another fifty miles were added to the trip the big UH-60
would eventually plow into the earth.

Cade looked to his right and said, “Hey Dunc, how are you
liking your new glasses?”

Keeping his gaze locked dead ahead, Duncan replied, “The VA
hospital couldn’t have nailed the prescription any better. Guess I owe you a
big thanks.”

“Or a sloppy kiss,” said Daymon.

A broad smile formed under Cade’s smoked visor. “Wasn’t my
idea,” he conceded. “Yesterday I received a message from Daymon saying Mister
Magoo needed new glasses and that I was supposed to pillage a LensCrafters.”