Allegiance (13 page)

Outbreak - Day 15

Near Victor, Idaho

The Three Rivers Horse
Farm was four miles up 33 to the southwest of the house that Jenkins, Daymon,
and Heidi were squatting in. The expansive property had a massive entry
constructed of hewn twelve-by-six timbers that were bolted together with
industrial grade hardware. Towering no less than thirty feet over the turnoff
from the main highway, the only real purpose Jenkins could see for the
monstrosity was that it was a proper place to hang the neatly lettered sign
letting everyone who passed by in on the nature of the business. As if the
vivid green pastures crisscrossed with blindingly white fences, seemingly
transplanted straight from the English countryside, weren’t a dead giveaway.

As he made the turn into
the equestrian paradise, the handful of walking dead he had just passed took up
a slow speed chase.

After a short run out,
the drive opened up to a large gravel parking lot contained within the same
white three-tiered fencing as the pastures. Save for two late model compact
sedans, the parking lot was conspicuously empty. Inside one of the vehicles, a
red Hyundai, a putrefying corpse fought against the closed door. The banging
intensified as Jenkins nosed the patrol Tahoe in next to the other car, a
silver Tercel with Oregon plates.

As he slid from the
truck, he thought about putting the former human out of its misery. But he had
bigger fish to fry. Daymon was itching to get a move on, and without treating
his wounds Jenkins had a feeling they would get worse. Therefore this little
excursion was a necessary evil in the big scheme of things. He had even found
it amusing when Daymon had had the audacity to question whether it was safe for
him to go it alone. Alone was all he knew, he’d told the younger man. In fact,
Jenkins hadn’t had a patrolling partner for years. And being the chief had its
advantages. He was the one who wrote the schedules, so he was the one who
always worked the late shift, and he always preferred to do so solo.

Walking by the car, he
caught a whiff of the occupant. The sun had made the rotten thing riper than a
tomato in August, and suddenly the former chief was pleased with his decision.

The barn doors were wide
open, and when he entered a smell twenty times stronger than the car corpse hit
him in the face.

Having been brought up
on a farm, Jenkins considered himself a country boy. He’d hatched chicks from
an egg, raised and tended to cows and pigs, and would even admit (in the right
company) that he still was a member of the 4H. But his first love had always
been, and still was, for horses—and that was why the scene before him was so
hard to accept.

In the barn, which was
big enough to board forty or fifty horses, the stench of death hung heavy in
the air. He walked down one side of the massive, high-ceilinged building and
opened every stall that he came to. A good number of the animals had already
died a slow death due to the hot August weather and a lack of food and water.
The horses that hadn’t were so severely weakened that instead of seeking
freedom most of them remained inside their stalls to wait out the inevitable.
The youngest and strongest among them trotted out tentatively and then
immediately went for the water trough outside in the fenced-in pasture.

After he had opened all
of the stalls, only fifteen of the horses had had enough strength to make their
way outside. And of those fifteen, five were near death and collapsed after
drinking from the trough. Why the owners of the stables hadn’t set them free
before they left had been nagging Jenkins since he first set foot in the big
red barn.

As he walked past the
open stables towards the far wall where a number of saddles, bridles, and bits
were stored, he noticed that fully a third of the tack hooks were bare and a
good number of the saddle cubbies had nothing in them. He thought, perhaps,
that the owners took their personal horses and equipment and headed for the
hills when all hell broke loose in Boise and Idaho Falls. That would certainly
explain why he didn’t see a single horse trailer, let alone a vehicle with
sufficient enough horsepower to tow one, anywhere on the property. But it still
didn’t excuse the actions of the dirtbags who’d left the remainder of the
horses locked up, thus sentencing most of them to a slow and miserable death.

Jenkins knew the zombies
he had passed on the highway would eventually ramble up the drive hunting him,
so he unslung his carbine and hustled towards the small room at the back of the
paddock. He guessed it would be a fairly convenient place to store the things
necessary to keep a number of horses groomed and healthy, and if there were
antibiotics to be had, that was where he would find them.

He switched on his
Maglite and swung the beam through the entry. The room opened up to the left
and was shaped like a rectangle roughly six feet deep by twelve feet long, and
was much bigger than he had anticipated. At the far end of the room a half
dozen shelves had been installed above a Formica counter inset with an aluminum
sink and faucet. Cupboards adorned with basic ceramic pulls flanked the walls
at eye level on both sides. Everything save the ceiling was painted a dingy
off-white with uneven brush strokes. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn could’ve done a
better job, Jenkins mused as he swept the bright white beam about the room.

Still fuming over the
dying and neglected horses, he began to tear through the cupboards. After
working both sides of the room and throwing most of their contents on the
floor, he turned his attention to the shelving above the sink where he
eventually found several foil tubes of some kind of veterinarian
triple-antibiotic.

He stuffed the medicine
and a few large adhesive bandages into his pockets and then passed the
flashlights beam over the floor to see if he’d missed anything important. As he
was doing so, his patrol radio squawked and Daymon’s voice filled the air.

“Chief here,” Jenkins
said out of habit. Then he listened as Daymon informed him about the vehicle
headed his way.

“Roger that,” replied
Jenkins. “I’m at the Triple R and I found your medicine. I’m gonna lay low and
hope your friends pass on by.”

“You’ll hear ‘em before
you see ‘em,” Daymon added.

“Roger that. I think I
might poke around the house up here before I return... see if I can find us
some food and water.”

“Just watch out for the
fools in the Hummer,” Daymon stated. “Chances are they ain’t playing for the
good team.”

“I’m a big boy, Daymon.
You just watch out for you and your lady friend, and I’ll keep an eye on my own
six,” he said wryly. He thumbed off the radio and hooked it on his belt.

Just for shits and
giggles, he tried the cold knob on the faucet.
Nothing.
Not even a drop.
Then, as he about faced to leave the stifling anteroom, he found his way
blocked by a walking corpse. The male zombie made one clumsy step forward and
swiped for his neck but instead only managed to grasp a handful of Jackson PD
uniform. Instinctively, Jenkins pulled away from the flesh eater’s bared teeth
and poked the monster in the chest with the end of his Maglite. And then, in
less time than it took him to bring the hefty black flashlight over his head, a
couple of thoughts raced through his mind: he made a quick calculation and
figured that a vehicle scooting along at sixty to eighty miles per hour would
take less than four minutes to cover the four miles from Daymon’s position.
Then he remembered that his patrol Tahoe was nosed in next to the two compact
cars outside of the barn, and in plain view of the highway. Lastly, he
contemplated pulling his Sig Sauer semi-automatic and blowing the thing’s head
off.

But the Maglite was
already on its downward arc. He felt a considerable amount of give that went
along with the sound of breaking bone as the knurled aluminum shaft, filled
with the weight of five D-cell batteries, impacted dead center atop the
zombie’s skull. The thing’s frigid fingers released and it collapsed to the
floor, still moving.

“
Goddamnit
,”
Jenkins bellowed. “How in the hell did you sneak up on me?” A string of
colorful expletives spilled from his mouth as he repeatedly brought his heel
down on the abomination’s already dented dome, and he didn’t relent until the
monster ceased moving.

He stepped over the
corpse and nearly retched at the sight of all the blood and gray matter
glistening in the brilliant white cone of light. The entire melee had shaved a
minute off of the time he figured he had left to get in the Tahoe and move it
out of sight.

Jenkins peeked around
the doorway and into the paddock.
Clear.
He was grateful the zombie had
been a lone wolf, but was certain there were more of the flesh eaters where it
came from—there always were.

He hooked the Maglite
next to the radio, flicked the carbine to safe, and broke into a full sprint
with the weapon held at a low ready. In seconds he had covered the length of
the barn and broke out into the sunlight. With his head on a swivel, he rounded
the front of the Tahoe, quickly wrenched the door open and vaulted inside. As
he pulled the door shut, he picked up the thunderous bass notes coming from the
approaching vehicle.

The engine fired up and
Jenkins backed away, working the steering wheel, accelerator, and transmission
in perfect synchronicity—moves learned decades ago at the police academy and
perfected since then, patrolling the streets and rural highways of Wyoming.
Then, with a spray of gravel, he launched the black and white into the barn.
Simultaneously, he put the Tahoe in park, cracked the window, and fixed his
gaze on the rearview where he could see a number of zombies ambling up the
driveway.

Then, moving fast left
to right, he witnessed the boxy yellow Hummer blur by in the mirror and,
without slowing, move out of sight and earshot.

Must not be horse
folk
, thought Jenkins.

A satisfied look on his
face, he backed out of the barn and wheeled around facing 33. He sat in the
idling vehicle, shifting his gaze between the advancing walkers and the white
colonial-style house adjacent to the barn.

Since he’d already
dodged two bullets, and with at least a dozen walking dead dangerously close,
he powered his window up. He shifted to drive and slowly rolled the two and a
half ton vehicle forward, and was greeted with the disconcerting sound of flesh
slapping against sheet metal.

At the end of the drive
he turned right and, as he steered the Tahoe one-handed northeast along 33,
picked up the radio and called Daymon.

Miles away, in the
farmhouse on the hill, Daymon’s considerable frame filled the upstairs window.
Binoculars glued to his face, he passed the time waiting for Jenkins’s return,
watching the dead trudge up Bell Road.

“That’s what I was
afraid of,” he muttered under his breath. “Goddamn it Charlie.” It had become
crystal clear to Daymon that the dead had figured out which direction the Tahoe
had come from and were now coming to investigate.

Investigate
, thought Daymon as he reached for the radio.
Hunt
would best describe their actions
. It was his experience that the dead
equated moving vehicles with the prospect of acquiring human flesh. And it had
also occurred to him over the last couple of weeks that even in the zombies’
reptilian minds it was clear that they somehow knew or sensed that
meat
congregated together.

But before he could pick
up the radio to warn Jenkins, it emitted an electronic trill.

Unable to tear his eyes
from the procession, and with the awful memories of being trapped with Cade in
the farmhouse in Hannah propagating his mind, he answered the noisy device.
“Daymon,” he said tersely.

“I’ve got good news and
bad news,” Jenkins stated. “Good news first. The rig passed on by at a helluva
clip. And... I think I found you some useful antibiotics.”

Daymon made no reply.

Nonplussed, Jenkins went
on. “Bad news is I’m going to get myself trapped if I go in the house looking
for supplies. It’s probably best we do it with numbers when we come back this
way. At least then we’ll have Heidi as a lookout... even though she can’t yell,
nothin’ to stop her from honking the horn.”

Daymon thought about
this for a second. “Great in theory, but there are a bunch of walkers heading
towards
this
house,” he finally said.

“Why dontcha go and take
care of them?” replied Jenkins.

“And leave Heidi?”

“A second won’t kill
her.”

“I abandoned her once.
I’m not going to leave her
alone
again,” said Daymon sharply.

“Understood. I’ll be
back in a few minutes,” Jenkins replied. He removed his glasses and pinched the
bridge of his nose, trying to keep the looming headache at bay, and after a
tick he went on. “We’ll just have to take care of them before we leave in the
morning. Shouldn’t be too bad.” He threw an involuntary shudder thinking about
the creature he had just brained and put the boot to in the barn. The idea of
putting down a slew of them set his stomach to churning. In the past he’d had no
problem blowing away a bad guy—no regrets, no remorse. Those dirtbags never
came back to haunt him in his sleep. But these regular folks... the multitudes
who had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had gotten
themselves bit and then turned—he was finding were the hardest to put down.
Since day one of this horrible event,
they
had
been the ones haunting
him day and night.