ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) (19 page)

“He finds out he’s mortal, doesn’t he,” Charlie said
solemnly.

Duncan nodded, flashed a wan smile, then went on. “Pig Pen
lit a cigarette. His Zippo lit his face up. He takes a sniper’s bullet as a
result. Dead center. Devastating wound. I didn’t even get a chance to shake the
dew off my lily before he’s dead in the mud and I’m wearing his brains all over
my flight suit. The same brains that formulated the idea to get me a coffee and
drag me outside with him. The same gray matter that harbored the last fond
memories of his wife and young boy back home. Wearing Pig Pen’s
pink mist
changed me forever. Feeling I got then just came back to me when I gunned down
that young lady back there. Changed forever.”

Sorry that he’d urged his friend to elaborate, Charlie went
deathly silent, his eyes roving in search of infected and bikers, but not
necessarily in that order.

Two miles north of the
Norma Jean
, gleaming new cars sat
static on lots festooned with colorful balloons and signs promising low down
payments, instant financing, and all manner of favorable terms meant to get
folks on the lots and submit themselves to the powers of persuasion wielded so
effectively by salesmen in starched shirts and comfortable slacks and shoes.

Flapping in the early morning breeze, multicolored pennants
strung above the Volkswagen lot drew Duncan’s eye. He gave them a cursory
glance then dropped his gaze to the single lane running away to a metal and
glass rollup door with the words
Service Entrance
emblazoned on it in an
aristocratic shade of blue.

In front of the service door was a bulbous black
convertible, presumably a VW. The driver’s side door was wide open and the rear
amber flashers were strobing incessantly. Sprawled on the ground behind the car
was a prone body. And kneeling in a pool of blood and greedily tugging viscera
from the body were a trio of infected.

Charlie saw the long greasy ropes of intestine strung
between them and could only conjure up a mournful whistle as the grisly sight
slid from view.

***

A handful of blocks down 122nd they finally hit substantial
traffic, most of which was moving north and east, away from the most recently
established quarantine perimeters.

On the left side of the street the power was still out.
Without stating his intention, Duncan slowed the pick-up and, dodging vehicles
speeding about and changing lanes unexpectedly, turned left off the four-lane
and into the vast parking lot of a grocery chain store known locally as the
place for one-stop-shopping.

Through empty window frames they saw dark forms moving about
the gloomy interior. Dozens of people in full-on loot-mode streamed in
empty-handed past those coming out with arms and shopping carts brimming with
all types of ill-begotten goods.

A Gresham police cruiser was nosed in against the destroyed
plate windows, blue and red flashers as dark as the store’s interior.

Sunlight glittered wildly off the carpet of glass looters
trampled through as they continued to shuttle bulky boxes adorned with pictures
of flat screen televisions and stereo components to waiting cars. Other folks
with self-preservation in mind eschewed the worthless electronics and instead
were loading their rides up with bags of groceries and bottles of water, juice,
and adult beverages.

Duncan made the observation that the different groups of
people and handful of lone wolf opportunists seemed to be getting along.

“It may be pretty orderly out here,” Charlie countered. “But
I betcha anything it’s a shit show inside.”

Duncan nodded agreeably while watching an officer exit the
store through a broken window, crunch across the glass with a twenty-four-pack
of bottled waters under each arm, and toss the liberated goods into the back of
the Crown Vic. Close behind, a female officer exited through the same window
frame carrying a pair of bulging brown paper bags.

“What do you think precipitates the one-eighty from
to protect
and serve
to
let’s join the looters
?”

Incredulous, Duncan said, “Really? After all the shit we’ve
witnessed since yesterday”—he gestured at the lady cop as she placed bags in
the trunk—“
that
is not dereliction of duty. I’m afraid it’s all about
survival of the fittest now.”

“How do you figure, Duncan? You saw the military taking
ground and holding. They’re probably already working their way towards the
flashpoint downtown.”

Duncan shook his head as the two officers, who were largely
being ignored, returned from the store’s interior with more supplies. “Not
likely,” he said soberly. In the next beat a minivan pulled broadside to the
Crown Vic and disgorged a couple of men who, with no hesitation or furtive
glances cast at the cruiser or cops, sprinted across the broken glass and into
the store. “
Nobody
is going back into the city. It’s lost. Think about
it, Charlie. Those two officers are privy to the most up-to-date intel
available. They’ve got a radio and hear the morbid details behind every call
dispatch has fielded. Staying on and toeing the line at this stage is futile.
It’s akin to putting your little finger in a dike. You may be able to plug one
hole, but another leak eventually pops up somewhere else. You and me saw it
firsthand at Providence. They were beyond triage and I’ve come around to your
way of thinking about what happened to that poor girl who got herself bit—”

“I wasn’t seeing things yesterday, was I? That sergeant … he
did shoot her, didn’t he?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

Charlie chewed on that one for a second.

Duncan went on, “Those two cops are people just like us …
they’re not doing this because they
can
. They’re doing this because they
need to
.”

“So what does it all mean?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Charlie.
I’d go all in and say that this virus is spreading faster than a two-dollar
hooker. Hell, I bet they’re already discussing dropping the bridges across the
Columbia and sealing up Interstate 5, 84, and 205 with Guard troops all in one
coordinated effort.”

Shaking his head in stunned disbelief, Charlie said, “We
gotta get going then.”

“Yes we do.”

“Are we going in for supplies?”

“I was thinking about it … until that.” Stroking his
mustache nervously, Duncan pointed out his window. “One o’clock. Whole bunch of
infected coming to the party.”

The female cop had just deposited her latest haul into the
Vic’s trunk and was spinning right to reenter the store when the dozen or so
walking stiffs Duncan was alluding to began to moan.

The hair on the back of Duncan’s neck snapped to attention.

Charlie swallowed hard and licked his dry lips. “There’s got
to be twenty of those things. It’s like they’re hunting in a …
pack
.”

“Doubt if it’s coordinated. I’d guess the sound of breaking
glass started drawing them in from blocks around. Then the voices and all the
cars coming and going …” Duncan’s hand found the butt of his .45. He wrapped
his fingers around the grip, feeling the reassuring crosshatching against his
palm.

From the safety of the Dodge, while fully expecting to see
one of the officers fetch a shotgun or AR from the front of the Crown Victoria
and put down the dead things, Charlie and Duncan witnessed the corpses amble
past the cops and set their sights on the activity taking place near the
wide-open front doors.

Unable to not watch the unfolding drama, Charlie reached
down blindly and hauled the shotgun up from the footwell.

Still shielded from the dead’s view by the cruiser, the lady
cop eased the trunk shut and joined her partner, who was just scooting in
behind the wheel. In the next second an amplified female voice rose above the
shouts of the living and moans of the dead. Then, with shouted warnings to the
people still in the store going out over the cruiser’s public address system,
the black and white backed away from the store and performed a precise
three-point-turn.

“That’s all the warning they get?” Charlie said.

“Better than no warning. Dontcha think?”

Public Address still emitting the female officer’s strained
voice, the cruiser crawled past the Dodge.

Duncan locked eyes with the officer behind the wheel and
detected a measure of shame. It was as if the man couldn’t believe what he and
his partner were doing. And Duncan was right there with them. The last day had
been one full of shame, disbelief, and a bit of embarrassment for him as well.

The cop broke eye contact first and the lights atop the
Crown Vic came alive. Needle antenna vibrating wildly, the car bounced over the
curb, turned left, and sped north down 122nd, leaving a puff of exhaust in its
wake.

Charlie watched the retreating cop car until its brakes
flared red and it turned a hard right a few blocks distant. When he swung his
gaze back around he saw Duncan staring at the looting still taking place. In
the span of twenty seconds since the dead had arrived on scene, the police had
driven off while warning anyone in earshot the infected had arrived, and,
consequently, those that had heard the female officer’s perfectly enunciated
admonitions to “leave at once” were drawn from the bowels of the store and into
a life or death battle with the living dead.

Charlie exhaled sharply. He stared hard at the slow-moving
train wreck occurring seventy feet away and said, “I’m so effin grateful my
folks and your folks aren’t alive to see this … it’s like Hell opened up.”

“Tilly checked out just in time.” Duncan grimaced, then went
silent for a moment. “Probably planned it that way … she was fond of saying
‘timing is everything.’”

“Hell, Duncan … all morning I’ve been hoping to wake up and
find that all of this was just the mother of all nightmares caused by that
late-night chili dog.”

“Keep hope alive,” Duncan said in front of a sad little
laugh. As he let off the brake and the truck began rolling away from the store
toward 122nd, a woman’s shrill scream pierced the air. No longer were they
witness to a rather orderly grab for supplies. In fact, with the introduction
of the walking corpses that most of the looters had probably only seen on
television, the parking lot was becoming the
shit show
Charlie had
predicted the inside of the store to be.

A gunshot rang out.

Which was all the motivation Duncan needed to mat the pedal
and put some distance and sheet metal between them and the store. As a couple
of cars also angling for the nearby exit pulled even with the Dodge, Duncan
glanced quickly at Charlie and saw the shotgun clutched in the man’s meaty
hands.

To avoid the cars as they pulled in front of him, Duncan
swerved left and, in the face of a cacophony of loud angry honks, drove off the
curb and into oncoming traffic. Gripping the steering wheel for dear life, he
jinked the less-than-nimble rig between two approaching cars and drifted into
the proper lane unscathed and once again heading north toward I-84.

Breathing hard from the adrenaline spike, Duncan nudged the
box of shells across the seat to Charlie who, without prompting extracted a
pair, flipped the stubby shotgun over and started shoving them one at a time
into its tubular magazine.

Righting the pump gun, Charlie said, “What do ya think, Bo
Duke … can you get us to 84 in one piece?”

Keeping his eyes locked down 122nd, Duncan let loose with a
cackle. The cackle devolved into a belly laugh. Wiping a tear from his eye,
Duncan said, “I always kind of related to old Roscoe P. Coltrane more so than
those starry-eyed Duke boys. But I think you’ll be surprised when you see what
this old dog is aiming to do.”

“OK,” Charlie said in a sing-song voice. “Make it so,
Roscoe.”

***

In total, from Foster at the south end of 122nd to where it
began a shallow downhill run toward the now visible east/west stripe of
Interstate 84, they’d travelled five miles north on the four-lane and along the
way experienced a lifetime’s worth of hard-to-fathom sights and sounds.

Seeing the sun and snippets of bluebird sky reflected in the
Columbia river off in the distance, Charlie said, “Hard to believe the big guy
upstairs decided to let the shit hit the fan on such a beautiful day.”

“I bet that’s what they were thinking in Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, Chernobyl—”

“I get your drift,” Charlie said. “But those were man-made
disasters.”

Duncan moved over to the slow lane and motored around a
Mercedes, catching a look of disdain from the bleached blonde woman in the
passenger seat. Sliding the Dodge over again, he took his eyes off the road to
look at Charlie. “And
this
wasn’t man-made?”

“God is responsible for all of the disease and pestilence
that brings about misery and suffering. Says so in the Book.”

“Sure God tests us. He goes about it in many different ways.
Just not like this. Hell … I didn’t think you were
that
naïve, Charlie.”

Charlie shot Duncan a sour look, held it there as his friend
drove and talked.

“The Spanish Flu in the early 1900s killed fifty million.
The War and all it brought with it … dirty field hospitals, to be specific,
helped that little bugger spread exponentially. I hear the CDC eggheads were
attempting to resurrect that efficient killing machine from preserved tissue
samples.” Duncan clucked his tongue, then went on. “There are too many
man-caused famines to count. Either due to poor farming practices, complacency
among the citizenry brought on by promises that they’d be taken care of by
their leaders, or just those same leaders being greedy. China, India, and the
Soviet Union lost seventy-five to a hundred million citizens to famine just
since the turn of the last century.
Man
caused the Bhopal chemical
leaks. Also the Kurds, wherever they were, Saddam gassed thousands of ‘em. What
I’m saying is God’s got no kind of a monopoly on pain and suffering, much less
death on a grand scale.”

Charlie had no answer to that. His friend, as always, was a
thousand percent correct. He only hoped God would be there if and when either
one of them needed him most. Which to his horror—upon swinging his gaze forward
and seeing the I-84 overpass as big as day, and the eastbound ramp on the right
just a dozen yards off the truck’s right front fender and closing very fast—was
right here and now.

Apparently spewing facts and figures like Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man had distracted Duncan to the point that he was about to miss their
turn. So all at once, with the ODOT sign announcing the Interstate looming
large and green like a ping-pong table, Charlie yelled a warning at Duncan to
get his attention, said a quick prayer in his head, and released his grip on
the shotgun.

Nothing doing
. His shout had no immediate effect and
the turnoff was too close to make without killing them both at this rate of
closure. Duncan seemed to be in a trance, eyes locked dead ahead, while
inexplicably his right hand was coming off the wheel and crossing overtop his
left as if he was about to haul the wheel hard right.

As the shotgun hit the floor with a metallic clatter,
simultaneously Charlie clamped down on the handle near his head two-handed and
closed his eyes. Seeing only the capillaries backlit and bright red against his
lids, he envisioned the Dodge missing the turn and going airborne straight
through the green sign.

They had one thing going for them, Charlie thought as his
life flashed in front of his clenched eyes: If the sign didn’t shear off and
impale them both with those massive white stilts attached to it, the initial
impact should be violent enough to bleed the truck’s speed from fifty to
survivable before it collided with the cement underpass abutment.

It was just the kind of glass half-full,
lemonade-out-of-lemons type of wishful thinking Charlie was known for when
facing long odds.

However, never straying from the original laser-straight
heading, Duncan let loose one of his trademark cackles and pinned the pedal to
the floor, quickly adding another ten miles-per-hour to their forward momentum.
“Making diamonds over there,” he drawled. “Cause it looks like Old Man got one
over on ya again.”

Face drained of all color, Charlie opened his eyes just in
time to see the ODOT sign—just a large blur of green at that extreme angle—whip
by in his right side vision. A half beat later, when the decline went level,
gravity pushed the Dodge down on its suspension and the sun was blotted out by
the cement overpass scything the air a dozen feet above their heads. After
passing underneath the Interstate, 122nd was flanked on both sides by
medium-sized trees until it crossed Fremont, where it started a more gradual
downward run toward the Columbia River a mile or so ahead.

Charlie exhaled sharply as the sunlight warming his face
reassured him he was still among the living. Then, fighting the urge to reach
over and throat punch his old friend, he barked, “That was wrong on so many
levels,
asshole
.”

His laughter finally subsiding, Duncan wiped his eyes with
the back of his hand and said, “Gotta be ready for anything, Charlie my boy.
We’re living in a totally different world now.”

Acting unfazed, Charlie quietly drew in a calming breath. “I
assumed we were taking the Interstate, that’s all.”

 “Oh yea of little faith,” Duncan quipped. “We’re not taking
the Interstate. Not if I can help it.”

***

Five minutes after nearly making Charlie soil his shorts,
Duncan ground the Dodge to a jarring halt at Marine Drive, the terminus to the
road they’d been following since leaving Foster roughly seven miles back.

“If we aren’t taking 84 east,” Charlie said arching a brow,
“then what’s the plan?”

Duncan smiled, but remained tight-lipped.

Drawing a blank as to what hole card Duncan was hiding,
Charlie took a quick inventory of their surroundings.

At roughly ten o’clock were a handful of squat one-story
buildings encircled by a chain-link fence and mostly obscured by a picket of
small trees. Through the trees he saw the steeply pitched metal roof of a
multi-story boathouse moored in the marina below. Beyond the marina, in the
middle of the wide and swift-moving Columbia River, was a thickly treed island
that completely obscured the river’s edge on the Washington side.

“You’re planning on stealing a boat, aren’t you.”

“Go fish.”

Shaking his head, Charlie turned around in his seat to look
out the rear window. The knot of cars that had been keeping pace with them up
until the stunt at the Interstate on-ramp were no longer in sight.

Duncan kept his foot on the brake and watched his friend
crane around left. He saw Charlie’s gaze follow the empty two-lane west where
it hooked left with the river’s bend. Finally, after sitting there quietly at
the T-junction for a handful of seconds, the light came on in Charlie’s eyes.

Voice taking on a serious tone, he said, “We can’t go anywhere
near PDX, if that’s what you’re thinking. News 8 broadcast some footage from
the airport cam yesterday. It was crawling with military. A tent city was going
up.”

Duncan signaled a right turn. “You’re getting warmer. But
PDX isn’t what I have in mind. I’ve got a better idea,” he said
enthusiastically. “Came to me after a very disappointing conversation I had
yesterday.” He plucked his phone from his breast pocket and saw two bars
showing on the outside display.
Good as it gets
. He flipped it open one-handed,
and worked the buttons to access his Favorites list. Which wasn’t lengthy,
because he was sitting next to his only friend in a five-hundred-mile radius.
The bar buddies he had exchanged numbers with over the years didn’t fit his
definition of friend. From past experience, of the half dozen or so names of
bar acquaintances he’d inputted into the phone, not a one of them could be
counted on for much of anything. Duncan’s experience was you buy a round for a
couple of fellas and nine times out of ten they forget to reciprocate. Ask them
to meet up at the horse track and they no show. To him, they were just names
and numbers with no real significance. So he scrolled right on down to the L
section where he found his brother’s number and hit Send.