Allegiance (8 page)

“Look who gets to be a
speed bump,” he said matter-of-factly. He sprang from the ground and entered the
truck through the passenger door, being very careful to keep his lower
extremities from the flailing hands. He scooted across the seat and placed the
still smoking pistol in the open console next to him. It was hot inside the cab,
smelled of leather and still had that plastic new car smell, though not enough
to mask the undead stench. Something impacted the door near his thigh, then
another resounded. Hollow thumps that told him they knew he was there, and
though he really didn’t want to see how many of them were on the street side of
the truck, he pressed his face against the glass and looked anyway.
Not so
bad
, he thought to himself as he quickly counted a dozen or so zombies
pressing against the Ford, milky eyes fixed on his window, nails scratching the
sheet metal. Reflected in the side mirror, he could see the scrabbling legs of
the persistent few still trying to burrow their way under.

He closed his eyes and
said a silent prayer, then fished the gilded basketball from his pocket and
slipped the key into the ignition. He started the engine running, slammed it
into drive, and stabbed the gas pedal. A shrill chirp sounded from the truck’s
rear end and then the off-road tires clawed into the backs of the dead,
churning tattered clothes and putrid flesh into the wheel wells. Cade heard a
series of beeps emanate from the dash and noticed a little icon flashing on the
instrument cluster as the traction control computer sensed the tires losing
their grip in the gore and automatically locked the differential for him.

As the tires grabbed,
the brute force torque produced by the howling V-10 was transferred through the
bodies and the Ford rocketed ahead. Cade bounced in his seat and the cargo in
back slid across the bed and slammed into the tailgate with a resounding bang.
He flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror. Thankfully, the box was still in
the back but it had come dangerously close to tumbling out. So he stabbed the
brakes and brought everything skittering back towards the cab, where it came to
rest in a disorganized pile.
Close call
, he thought. To come all this
way and then lose the most important item on his list wouldn’t have made the
trip a complete failure, but it would have been disheartening to say the least.

Outbreak - Day 15

Ovid, Colorado

It could have gone
either way. That much Elvis was certain of. One minute he was helping bag the
bodies of folks he had just murdered, and the next he was laying in his bunk at
Schriever waiting for one of two things to happen. Either he’d been fingered by
one of the survivors and rough men with rifles were going to show up and escort
him to a room where he would suffer through a very long interrogation session.
Or his new friend Private Farnsworth was going to pull up at the agreed upon
time, toot his horn like he had done three days running, and punish him with
base gossip and inane conversation all the way to the job site.

In the end the latter
won out. But in a way, Elvis had expected the rough men to show up and he had
even romanticized the notion that he would wrestle a gun from one of them and go
out shooting.

Now, two days removed
from his terrorist act and after he’d had plenty of time to evaluate how he had
prosecuted it, he would be the first to admit the whole affair had been thought
out poorly, but not as poorly as the drive to the mass graves had ended for the
Farns. Elvis had waited until they’d reached the job site and Farns had handed
over the same .45 pistol from the glove box that Elvis had used to protect
himself from the Zs three days running. Then after disabling the dozer, he had
lured Farnsworth from his pickup truck with a ruse about needing help to get
the machine started. Elvis executed the gullible private from a foot away as he
was reconnecting the dozer’s coil wire. The big slug did a number on the blonde
private’s head. In fact his face had been unrecognizable when Elvis buried the
still cooling corpse under four feet of dirt. Then to cover up his
tracks—literally—Elvis had left the fifty-ton D9 tractor parked directly over
the evidence and then drove off in the dead man’s GMC pickup.

He drove nonstop one
hundred and fifty miles east from Schriever on the 70 in order to avoid the
Castle Rock fallout, then he made his way due north following 385 for another
one hundred and twenty-five miles along the Colorado/Kansas state line,
bypassing the fortified city of Julesburg before stopping for the night in
Ovid, Colorado, a stone’s throw from the Nebraska border.

***

As Elvis sat in the
folding chair in the uppermost story of the abandoned house he had been calling
home for the last two days, he had a sudden urge to visit the town of his alma
mater. He looked out the dormer window across the flat Nebraska landscape toward
where he figured there had to be someone he knew. Then reality set in, and
though he bled Husker football scarlet and cream he knew that if he went back
to Lincoln with its quarter of a million people—most of them hungering for
flesh—he would end up bleeding scarlet for real.

Since arriving at Ovid, as
well as the conclusion that the only thing he could do would be to come clean
and reconcile the past, he had been dialing the same phone number twice
daily—the only number that he knew might get him into contact with Ian Bishop.

He thumbed on the
Iridium satellite phone, keyed in eleven numbers from memory, and waited while
it rang—after six, a man answered. Elvis was speechless; he hadn’t thought this
one through very well either, so he just blurted out what he needed to say.
“Ian, this is Elvis. You need to know something... The last time Robert
Christian called me he ordered me to kill you.” He said it so fast he wasn’t
certain Bishop caught it all, but he was relieved it was out in the open.

There was a moment of
silence on the line, then Bishop said, “I know. I bugged the house
and
his phone.”

This revelation sent
Elvis’s head spinning as he tried to recollect what it was exactly that he’d
said to Robert Christian after the edict had been issued. Then he rolled with
it. “I wasn’t going to do it. I promise,” he stammered, as visions of rusty
nails being driven through his hands and feet made him shudder. “And just so
you know, Robert Christian was kidnapped and taken to Schriever by a Delta team
led by a man named Cade Grayson. That’s all I know... and now that Christian is
gone, my loyalty lies with you.”

“I know about it all,”
replied Bishop calmly. “No blood, no foul.”

Elvis took a second to
process his part in things.

“Still there?” asked
Bishop.

“Yes. I heard Jackson
Hole fell to the monsters. Where are you now?”

“You heard correctly,”
Bishop intoned. “Do you have something you can write with?”

“One second.” Elvis
looked around the converted attic. There was a craft table by the far wall that
looked like it had been used primarily for scrapbooking or some other meaningless
retiree nonsense. He grabbed a pen from a plastic bin. “Go ahead,” he said. In
silver glitter ink, Elvis wrote down the GPS coordinates as fast as Bishop
rattled them off.

“Got them?” the former
Navy SEAL asked.

“I got them,” he
replied. “Should I dress for warm or cold weather?” Elvis asked, trying to be
funny. He didn’t receive an answer as the line went dead. He powered the phone
off to save the batteries, then looked at the paper scrap scribed with silver
numbers, which, without a GPS receiver or an up-to-date Atlas or U.S. map—were
totally worthless.

Outbreak - Day 15

Eden, Utah

The two-man patrol took
a circuitous route as they worked their way cautiously down the heavily wooded
draw, losing ten feet of altitude every fifty yards or so.

A dozen feet in front of
his partner, the stocky point man moved silently heel-and-toeing it while
pushing aside creepers and grabby brambles with the business end of his stubby
black carbine. As the men padded downhill, any noise caused by their footfalls
was quickly swallowed by the lush fragrant flora bracketing the barely
discernible game trail. For two hours they had been fighting gravity and the
humid summer air which was trapped under the dense canopy of pine and dogwoods.
Periodically the point man would hold up a clenched fist, and the camo-clad man
bringing up the rear would pirouette a slow one-eighty, eyes and rifle sweeping
the forest to their six and then take a knee, ears pricked, listening for
anyone stupid enough to be tailing them.

After a few minutes,
confident that they were alone, Lev motioned to the point man, and they were on
the move again. Another twenty minutes and two more noise checks later, the men
found themselves in a small area clear of undergrowth. The soft forest floor was
cut through by a small creek running parallel to the trail that had just spit
them out; the cool water jouncing over rocks smoothed by ten thousand seasons
of spring runoff no doubt a destination for many of the areas’ four-legged
creatures.

Lev propped his rifle
against the nearest dogwood, padded to the creek, splashed his face, and wet
his collar. After retrieving his M4, the six foot one hundred and eighty pound
veteran of the latest Iraq war took watch so his partner could take his turn.

Holding back his thickly
braided ponytail with one hand, Chief plunged his face into the frigid water.
Eyes bugged and a grin creasing his ruddy, sunbaked face, the American Indian
point man corralled his rifle and without saying a word continued on following
the meandering cut in the land while keeping a rapid pace which contradicted
his nearly sixty years of age.

In the days since the
occupants of the Eden compound had lost one of their own when the perimeter
fencing along SR-39 had been cut by persons unknown and then breached by the
dead, the more capable among the survivors had been continuously patrolling the
heavily wooded acreage surrounding their bug out retreat.

They had been following
the creek for a considerable distance when Chief halted abruptly.

“Rotters?” Lev asked.
The military style comms gear which he had taken from a pair of dead soldiers a
day earlier at an overrun National Guard roadblock east of the compound worked
flawlessly, and his query sounded in Chief’s ear bud.

Voice amplified and
transmitted by the tiny disc-shaped mike pressed to his neck, Chief answered in
a hushed tone, “I smell death... but I don’t hear any movement.”

Lev persisted, “It’s
gotta be rotters.”

Though they had seen the
dead migrating in much larger numbers during the past week, Chief answered
optimistically. “Since we’re still close to the game trail, it may be a dead
animal.”

“My money’s on rotters.
We’ve gotta be close to the neighbor’s place,” Lev stated, using the term
neighbor loosely. The house that Logan had described earlier, in which the
Gudsons, a family of four lived, was more than six miles from the compound.
Since the Gudsons’ turn-of-the-century farm house and Logan’s buried survival
shelter were separated by thick woods, two barbed wire fences and a small cliff
band of sandstone likely thrust up during an earthquake sometime in the distant
past, merely popping by to borrow a cup of sugar was out of the question.

As the two men neared
the tree line which abutted the property on the far southwest corner of Logan
Winters’s considerable plat of land, a fusillade of gunfire, distant and weak,
like ladyfinger firecrackers, filtered up through the trees.

Riding on a gust of
heated air the pungent smell of death wafted up from below.

“Rotters probably got
them trapped,” Lev muttered.

“We’ll know in a
minute,” Chief said as he snugged the rifle to his shoulder and levered the
safety to burst so that each pull of the trigger would send three tightly
grouped 5.56x45 mm rounds down range.

Through the thinning
forest Chief noticed flashes of powder blue clapboard and black shingles, and
then wavy glass panes in weathered framing to which flecks of white paint clung
tenaciously.

“I’m nearing the
property line flanking the house...
no rotters yet
,” said Chief. “I’m
pushing forward... going to end up near the front. You angle to the right and
recon the back.”

“Copy that,” Lev
whispered. He pushed forward, slowly, cautiously. Practicing perfect noise
discipline, he parted a thicket of waist high ferns and took a knee. He found
himself very close to the house. Only a hundred feet separated his place of
concealment and the scrappy-looking men who were apparently guarding the back
door.

***

After picking a spot
between two closely spaced medium-sized pines where he could remain standing
yet would not produce a silhouette, Chief glassed the scene two hundred yards
distant.

There looked to be some
sort of standoff taking place at the Gudsons’. Parked haphazardly, more than a
dozen pickups and SUVs choked the gravel drive and occupied every square inch
of the expansive front lawn. He could also hear the sounds of gnashing
gearboxes and working engines belonging to an unknown number of vehicles still
navigating the road somewhere out of sight. Milling about amongst the sea of
glass and sheet metal, at least two dozen heavily armed men waited, guns
wavering menacingly.

A man stood out from the
rest. Not because of his stature or hair style or identifiable clothing. He was
average height, of average build, and was stuck at birth with an impossibly
thin face that came to a point where his sharp nose met with a severe overbite.
The thing Chief noticed first was how the others deferred to the smaller
man—gave him room to move freely—their body language said it all: the rat-faced
Caucasian was in charge and the million dollar question was:
Why
?

Bad guys choose their
Alpha leaders differently than real world folks. A piece of paper trumpeting a
course of studies completion didn’t mean shit. Who you knew... ditto. Usually a
rise to power had to do with the severity and cold blooded nature of the crime
committed while on the outside. Or the trail of shanked bodies and bloodied
hands incurred, without getting pinched, while on the inside. Chief had had
contact with many men who had risen to Rat Face’s apparent position—up close
and way too personal—inside the walls of Northern California’s Pelican Bay
supermax prison.

Chief panned the
binoculars, taking in the Gudsons’ home. It was a dingy blue two-story affair,
and, like most rural houses built near the turn of the century, lacked any
unnecessary architectural detailing. No dental molding, fancy wood scrollwork,
or ornate columns gussied up the place—this was not a painted lady in San
Francisco—it was strictly an honest workingman’s abode in rural Utah surrounded
by muddy vehicles and hard looking road dogs.

Hosting a pair of empty
rocking chairs, a sloping covered porch that had obviously seen its share of
inclement weather wrapped around, stretching toward the backyard where well
used plastic playground equipment cooked in the high noon sun. Chief’s eyes
took in the peripheral details, then lingered on each window searching for
movement. The shades at ground level were drawn, but on the second floor they
were open revealing only shadows. Designed to provide light for the attic
before electric lines stretched to the rural areas, several multi-windowed
gables protruded from the roof in front of the house.
A perfect place to
remain concealed and observe
, Chief thought to himself.

Meanwhile, in the front
yard car park, Rat Face strutted around waving a chromed semi-automatic pistol
in the faces of his crew, and appeared to be enjoying immensely his position of
authority.

Lev’s voice sounded in
Chief’s ear and a brief flurry of movement caught his eye as a crouching figure
passed in front of an uppermost window. “I have six tangos at the rear of the
house,” Lev stated, “and if the Gudsons
are
inside the house they won’t
stand a chance against the guys I’m looking at.”

“Can’t call in
reinforcements,” Chief answered back, resignation evident in his voice. “We’re
well out of radio range.”

Lev said, “There’s gotta
be something we can do.”

Before Chief could say
anything to lessen the younger man’s concern, a tinkling of glass reached his
ears followed closely by the booming report of what he guessed was some type of
shotgun.

“It’s on,” Lev’s
stressed voice stated coldly. “Someone just unloaded from the upper window.
Dropped one of the bad guys.”

“Hold your position.”

No shit
, thought Lev. He’d be comfortable one on one.
Hell, he’d recently survived a frantic two on one gun battle at the nearby
hunting cabin just days ago. But one on five—that was stretching it—even taking
into consideration his combat experience earned patrolling the mean streets and
alleyways of Baghdad, Ramadi, and Tikrit, the main cities bordering the
infamous Sunni Triangle in Iraq.

Before the stricken man
had hit the ground, moaning, flesh bloodied and shredded from the hail of lead
pellets, his buddies were unloading frantically on the upper story window. An
AK-47 chattered on full auto followed by a staggered series of booms as a trio
of shotguns and a long rifle entered the fray.

“Permission to engage,”
Lev pleaded as soon as the firing stopped. Waiting for Chief’s response, he
remained hidden while bracketing a strapping country boy, complete with a dark
beard and flannel shirt, in his crosshairs. With practiced movements the man
swapped magazines, slapping a fresh one in his AK. Then, as the blue-gray
cordite haze dissipated, an amplified metallic voice broke the calm.

“
Give up your guns
and come out with your hands up
,” echoed from the front of the house,
followed by a vicious squawk of electronic feedback.

Ignoring Lev’s request,
Chief patiently waited for the situation to run its course. He knew he was
powerless against the gang encircling the house. Furthermore, three tan Humvees
had arrived, disgorging another half-dozen men since he and Lev split up.

“
Come out or we’ll
burn the house down around you
,” the scrawny leader said, speaking through a
bulky front-heavy bullhorn. “
I seen the swing set over there... do it for
your kids. I give you my word we won’t do nothin’ to them
.”

Chief winced as Rat Face
released the trigger, hurling another burst of sonic feedback at his ears. He
was tempted to shoot the man for that simple transgression, let alone what he
feared was about to befall anyone who willingly exited the farmhouse.

“What’s going on up
there?” Lev asked breathlessly.

“Stand down,” Chief
answered. “I’ve got nearly thirty bodies up here now.”

Silence.

“Lev, you copy?”

More silence.

Better not
, Chief thought to himself.
You’ll get us both
killed
.

The screen door opened
on unoiled hinges, announcing shrilly to everyone present that the marauders
had won.

“
The gun first
,”
Rat Face reminded whoever was about to emerge through the front door.

His men drew in around
him, their sneering faces and black weapons like pirates waiting to board a
defeated Man-O-War.

“Five coming your way
carrying one wounded,” Lev blurted.

Relieved to hear Lev’s
voice and grateful that the younger man had wisely decided against taking
matters into his own hands, Chief whispered, “Roger.”

Ten long seconds passed
and then someone slid a shotgun with its breach cracked open, butt stock first
from within the shadowy doorway. Next, a man who Chief guessed to be Mister
Gudson cautiously stepped over the scattergun and into the light.

“
Keep them up
,”
Rat Face ordered, his chest heaving from the adrenaline burst. “
The rest of
you... come out or Pops gets popped
.” He belly-laughed at his funny and the
bullhorn added its own feedback. “
Or if you don’t give a shit about him, we
can send a couple of zombies in to flush you out
.”

His eyes darting about
crazily and gasping for breath, the middle-aged man fell to his knees, pleading
for the lives of his loved ones, offering to trade his own and every worldly
possession for a shred of mercy.

With a casual wave Rat
Face ushered two of his men forward.

As Gudson’s voice rose
to a crescendo, a chatter of words blending together unintelligibly, the screen
behind him creaked open and one by one his family emerged. A young boy, perhaps
ten or eleven Chief guessed, trudged out, shoulders slumped and shaking with
fear. Mom was next. She was fairly attractive, probably closer to fifty than
forty. Her brunette hair fell around her face, framing an expression of
complete and utter defeat.