Trudge: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (3 page)

Until fifteen months ago Cade was in country in the “Stan”, short for Afghanistan, hunting HVTs (high value targets), foreign fighters and Al-Qaida terrorists. After about thirty or so he had stopped counting the men he had sent to paradise.

He travelled light during his neighborhood excursion. His aim was to check out his surroundings and determine if he should shelter in place or bug out.

He wore khaki heavy duty workpants, a black long sleeve tee shirt and a well-worn black Trailblazers ball cap that covered his dark, short cropped hair. A pair of black wraparound Oakley sunglasses shielded his eyes. Sturdy, steel toed, black leather, Danner boots wrapped his feet. Strapped to his left upper thigh was a semi-automatic 9mm Glock 17 and under his right armpit was a compact semi-automatic 9mm Glock 19 in a quick draw Bianchi holster.  Both pistols were polymer, very light and dependable. Within easy reach in a nylon pouch on his belt were four extra, seventeen round magazines. A Gerber Mark-II combat dagger, ten inches of double bladed, hardened black steel, hung upside down from his combat harness. In his free hand, he held a lightweight titanium ice axe. It was worth its weight in gold during his first encounter with the undead. An hour spent with a rasp and file honed the points and blade of the axe razor sharp. Cade discovered this to be a very effective and quiet weapon.

Even though he was more than a year removed from the Special Forces, he still possessed the tools of the trade; and had not forgotten how to use them.

Chapter 4

Day 2 Southeast Portland

Straddling the bike, he secured the axe to the frame and rode quietly westward down the alley past his former neighbor’s back fence. Two blocks into the ride he noticed the sickly sweet smell of death.

Cade dismounted his bike to seek out the source. Cautiously glancing around the corner, he saw them. One was a balding black man, ashy and grey with sunken jaundiced eyes. Above his collar was a bruised and bloody gaping neck wound with dangling streamers of flesh that left muscle, veins, sinew and white vertebrae exposed. The only thing that appeared to hold his head on was a blood soaked necktie. Blackish dried blood fully coated the front of the ghoul’s three-piece suit.

Next to him was a small black woman, with no visible wounds. She was undead also. Her formerly pastel yellow bathrobe now thoroughly congealed with drying blood. Dirt, twigs, hair and all manner of refuse clung to the fabric.

Both of the undead were circling around the base of a large oak tree hands in the air, reaching, mouths working like two macabre marionettes.

 Cade assessed the situation from a distance. Upon further scrutiny, he noticed a milled lumber platform with a coiled up rope ladder attached about twelve feet off the ground. It was a tree house partially hidden by the lower boughs and leaves of the old oak.

There was some movement in the middle branches of the tree.

The two undead noticed it as well and started to moan. Barely audible over the chilling sound, a voice yelled, "Help, up here!”

The undead were oblivious to Cade’s presence. Their attention was fully focused on the tree and the meat in it.

Taking advantage of the diversion he crept up on the male cadaver from behind and to the right, being careful to stay shielded from bathrobes view. Three feet away from the undead businessman, he raised the sharpened ice axe in his right hand, shoulder high and swung it in a wide horizontal arc at the creatures head. Brackish black liquid and putrid grey matter vomited from the baseball sized hole in its temple. The dead executive collapsed instantly and the ice axe slipped from his head.

The heavy thud of the body colliding with the ground alerted the other ghoul to Cade’s presence; hissing and biting she turned and lurched towards him.

In one fluid movement Cade sidestepped her lunge, drew his Gerber left handed and buried the dagger, handle deep into the things eye socket. Her flailing arms were unable to get a purchase on him as she slumped towards the base of the tree.

After a quick wipe through the grass, he put the dagger back in its sheath.

Cade felt something soft and wet squish under his boots. Looking down, he was sickened to see a mound of human looking remains. Ribs, spinal column, a small skull as well as scraps of skin, tendon, and flesh and blood lay in a greasy pile on the grass.

Cade was examining the bodies when a high-pitched voice from above shouted a warning, "Watch out behind you!”

Faster than an old west gun slinger the Glock was out of the Bianchi shoulder holster and in Cade’s left hand.  The pistol barked twice in rapid succession. The lethal double tap removed the frontal lobe and most of the elderly man’s forehead and skullcap. As he fell towards the other two bodies, the remaining contents of his cranium painted the ground. The walker was wearing bloody night clothes and clutched a newspaper in its hand. Numerous bite wounds were evident on its arms, face and neck.

“Shooooot. It’s old man Bandon. He was one of them too?" said the faceless voice in the tree house.

Gunfire was guaranteed to attract the dead. As if on cue their eerie moaning started to reverberate from blocks around.

"Get down here!" Cade said, pausing to scan the surroundings.

"If you want to live let's go,
NOW!
"

Two frightened faces peered down from the tree house.

The ladder rapidly unfurled and they nearly clambered over each other trying to reach the ground.

At the first sight of the gory pile of remains, the younger of the two blurted out, "Missy’s dead!”

 Thinking the worst, Cade asked the boys if Missy was their sister.

The older boy tearfully choked out "No.., Missy was our cocker spaniel.”

Glancing down, Cade was at the same time relieved and momentarily at a loss for words. Then he barked instructions at the two.

"Follow me, be quick, but be quiet!"

The older boy grabbed the younger one around the neck and hustled him by the three corpses at the base of the tree, all the while struggling to shield him from the scene using his hands. He wasn’t successful in keeping his younger brother from seeing his dead parents. Tearing away from the older boy the younger one dropped to his knees and gave forth a guttural wail. “Mom....Dad!”

Cade knelt down and placed his arm around the young boy’s shoulder.

The boy fought off the embrace landing a fist on the stranger’s temple. “You killed them!” the younger boy screamed, spittle flying from his mouth.

Cade grabbed the boy in a bear hug. He was hoping to calm him down enough to talk the kid’s mind around what he had just witnessed. But also, he was seeing stars from the sneak attack and needed a brief respite. The shot that he took to the temple was perfectly aimed and had rung his bell.

The boy finally stopped struggling after some quiet, calming words from his brother.

Cade kept his grip firm and whispered into the boy’s ear “I don’t blame you for reacting the way you did. You need to understand something though. I am truly sorry for what I did, but as hard as it is to believe, they were already dead.” He paused for a moment before finishing out loud “Why don’t you guys help me understand what happened this morning.”

Cade released the boy.

The skinny, younger boy spoke first, “When Mom came home from graveyard shift at the hospital she started fighting with Daddy. They fight a lot but this was the worst ever! We usually just get out of their way until they chill.” 

“I hustled Ike up into the tree house. We thought we’d wait until they calmed down” Leo, the older of the two added.

“Things got real quiet for a while and then we decided to go back into the house. I opened the screen door and it squeaked like it always does. The next thing I see is those” Leo said while pointing at his dead parents.

Cade told the two boys what he had learned, “It’s all over the news. A virus or something is making people die and then come back to life or un-death, or whatever; they only want to eat. You, me, your dog...anything living... they don’t discriminate. They don’t even recognize family.”

“We were wondering why they kept circling the tree and wouldn’t answer us. I was tripping because Dad was all bloody” the older boy said, wincing as he again looked at the dead bodies. The brothers, eyes tearing, embraced each other and cried.

Cade got their attention to add one last important detail, “The people on the news are saying that the only way to stop the infected if they attack you is by destroying their brain. Hit em anywhere else and they just keep coming.”

The whole exchange took just moments. Now undead were moaning all around them and it sounded as if they were drawing nearer.

Cade holstered his pistol and secured the ice axe to the bikes utility rack and quietly whispered to the two boys, “Follow me if you want to live.”

The nerve wracking sounds coming from the large group of walkers, about a hundred yards away, was more than enough to convince Leo and Ike to follow the stranger on the bike.  

Chapter 5

Day 2 Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

A woman’s piercing scream came from down stairs. Sitting bolt upright, it took a minute for Brook to remember where she was. The clock read 8:37 A.M. Raven had shared the queen size bed with her. She was eleven now, but still a little small for her age. Being a heavy sleeper, she was slower to wake from the commotion downstairs in the kitchen.

Brook kept quiet, fearing an intruder had entered the house and attacked her mom. She stared at her daughter, as she awoke with a start. She then kept Raven quiet with a serious glare and a vertical finger to her lips. Stillness pervaded the house. She strained to hear anything more. Brook thought,
Dad must still be in bed, how could anyone sleep through that
?

*****

Her dad went to bed before everyone else the previous night. He had cramps and was burning up with a high fever. The superficial bite wound on his abdomen was the least of his worries; he had a strong suspicion that he was sick with the new flu pandemic.

Keeping his distance just in case, he said, “See you in the morning, I love you Brook and my little bird, Raven” 

Before he came home one of the ER doctors cleaned the bite wound, bandaged him up and administered a shot of antibiotics.

This took place yesterday evening about 9:00 PM, when he was finishing up with his rounds. The man that had bitten him had shown identical symptoms to the ones he now suffered from. The feverish, hallucinating, patient bit him as he was leaning over, probing with his stethoscope to listen to his heart. As the orderlies tried to restrain the combative dying man, the Grand Strand Regional hospital’s first confirmed victim also bit one of them.

*****

The noises resumed downstairs. To Brook it sounded like someone was moving furniture around.

Brook silently ushered her daughter into the adjoining bathroom and gingerly pulled the door shut.

On stocking feet, she crept along the upstairs hall to the closed door of her dad’s study. He kept an antique Ithaca shotgun displayed in his office, on the wall, behind his desk.

She found the closed office door unlocked. As she entered, the familiar smell of dad’s personal quiet space, leather, tobacco and of course Old Spice aftershave, greeted her. Good memories of her childhood flooded her brain.

Everything was where she remembered it, a black leather swivel chair behind his big wooden desk, two maroon red overstuffed leather pub chairs, one in each corner by the door. All types of artifacts filled every nook and cranny. Above the bronze wild bronco statue and world globe was dad’s prized over and under Ithaca shotgun. Its pale walnut stock gleamed and the light from the hall reflected in the ornate etchings on the blued metal.

Cade had introduced her briefly to the basic workings of a firearm. They practiced a small amount of target shooting every time they went camping together.

Brook retrieved the shotgun and opened the breech. As she suspected, it was unloaded. After quietly rummaging through a couple of drawers, she found some loose shells. Carefully, she loaded both chambers.

Brook descended the steps slowly one at a time. Loaded shotgun in hand, she went to investigate the noises, pausing on the bottom step to listen.

What she heard, reminded her of a big dog greedily wolfing down wet canned dog food. 

Gun poised at the ready and safety off, she said, "Mom, Dad... is that you? I've got Dad’s shotgun, its loaded."

 She thought to herself,
I’ve lost the advantage now if there is an intruder in the house
.

Just then a mournful, haunting moan came from the kitchen. The sound made her hair stand on end.

She had an urge to flee but stood her ground between the kitchen and the dining room. Craning her head to the right she could see the blood splashed travertine tiles beyond the island. It looked like a slaughterhouse floor.

Making her way into the kitchen, she noticed that breakfast ingredients were on top of the black granite island. Eggs were broken on the floor and a half full gallon of milk rested on its side, the other half pooled on the floor.