Family, page 30
When the channel opened, Harley jumped on. “I say we stop at the mouth of the tree tunnel and launch the drone. Use it to recon both the graveyard and your old compound.”
Nonplussed he hadn’t considered deploying the drone, Cade thumbed the Talk button. “Good call, Greg. There’s a clear stretch of road before the trees crowd in. The compound is well within range. It’ll be a perfect place to launch.”
Cade looked at Raven. “Are you up for it?”
She said nothing. Just nodded and gripped the steering wheel even tighter. The closer they had gotten to the compound, the harder it was for her to ignore the enormity of what she … what they all were about to undertake. Undertake, she thought. No wonder they called the creepy cemetery guy in the movies the undertaker. They sure had a morbid job. But it was nothing like the one she had pressured her father to undertake with her. While she’d seen plenty of putrefied corpses since the summer Omega went and ruined everything, none of them had been her mother. None had suckled her as a baby. Or had protected her during their dangerous journey from Myrtle Beach to Fort Bragg. This was different. Way different. Truth be told, she had been experiencing a sense of foreboding since they rolled outside the wire what now seemed to her like a lifetime ago. What had begun as an icy tingle, a sensation that made her imagine a ghost was caressing the nape of her neck, had metastasized into the bowling-ball-sized lump of worry now residing in her gut.
The treed tunnel, it turned out, was not as Raven had remembered it. It was just a place in the Ogden National Forest where US-39 entered an especially dense section of woods. It didn’t seem like a tunnel to her now. Before, when the world was so large to her, when things from her nightmares were real and a dire threat to her every waking minute, the best description she could come up with for the gloomy stretch of two-lane spooling out before Black Beauty was what everyone had come to call it.
Harley was out of the Mercedes and walking back toward the F-650 when Raven climbed down from the driver’s seat. Shutting her door, she shot him a questioning look.
“It was my idea,” Harley led with. “Least I can do is watch your six while you’re concentrating on flying the thing.”
“You mean you want to watch the screen over my shoulder and be a backseat driver, am I right?”
Sheepishly, Harley said, “I did hope you’d let me be a second set of eyes.”
Raven stalked around to the back of the pickup and dropped the tailgate. It hit with a solid clang. She saw that, once again, everything in the bed had been sliding around and was piled up in front of her. The drone case was out of her reach. Regarding Harley, she said, “You can help me with this. I’m still considering the other ask. So don’t go there yet.”
Harley said nothing. He moved a couple of things out of the way, leaned over the open tailgate, then snatched the case by a corner. Sliding it to where Raven could reach it, he raised his arms, held them there like a robber with a gun trained on him, then backed away slowly.
The saying “actions speak louder than words” came to Raven right away. And what her father’s friend had just done, the passive-aggressive shit, it kind of pissed her off. She threw the latches and held the case lid part way open. Looking over her shoulder at Harley, she said, “Peter does the same shit to me. I don’t like it. From now on, treat me and talk to me like I’m my dad. Or, if you have an imagination, next time you need to say something to me, just pretend he’s right here with us and listening in.”
“Apologies, Raven. I’m not around you all the time like your dad is. Believe you me, he has talked you up. Way up. Every time I think he’s going to talk about himself, he mentions how you took out a dozen rotters, at close range, and only burned through half a magazine. Or that you don’t take crap from authority figures. Whether they’re wearing a badge or heading up a group of pikers, you treat them the same … fair and square. When I was with the Company, we had a name for younger people like you.”
Raven had just finished pulling the drone from the Styrofoam packing when a string of expletives erupted from her mouth.
Taken aback, Harley said, “That was supposed to be praise.” He shrugged. “At least it was my idea of it.”
Shaking her head, she said, “It’s not you, Greg.”
Hollering out his open window, Cade said, “What’s the matter, Bird?”
“Karen and David are what’s the matter. The drone is damaged. It had to have been those big oafs.”
Harley said, “Looks like one of the engine nacelles got tweaked. It’s one of four. It could still fly with three, right?”
“Wishful thinking,” she said, powering on the remote. “Only way to know is to launch the damn thing.”
Walking to the front of the pickup, she set the drone on the flat spot of the rig’s wide hood. Holding the remote two-handed, she powered on the drone. Nudging the throttle, all four propellers became white blurs. The whine of the four electric engines was loud up close. From experience, she knew that would not be the case once the thing was at recon altitude.
She watched the drone for a second. It seemed a bit wobbly; kind of light on its landing gear on one side. By now, everyone save for Cade and Peter was standing around front of the F-650. Cade was staring at her through the bug-spattered windshield. And although she had her back to the Bravo, she could still feel Peter’s eyes on her.
Saying, “Here goes nothing,” Raven pushed gently on the throttle stick. The drone rose slowly, then settled into an unsteady hover a couple of yards over the F-650’s hood.
Duncan said, “What are you waiting for?” He looked at his watch. “We only have twenty minutes of daylight left.”
No pressure whatsoever was what Raven was thinking sarcastically as she pushed gently on the stick controlling the throttle. “Screw you, Murphy,” was what came from her mouth as the drone listed to port, began to wobble mightily, then rocketed toward the tunnel of trees. Trying to rein in the out-of-control UAV only added to her misery. Applying some right stick and reducing the throttle sent it careening left, a big corkscrewing maneuver that caused it to plunge into the woods somewhere northeast of the clearing on their left.
“Maybe you should have tested it over the clearing first,” posited Duncan.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have been rushing me,” shot Raven.
“I can see both sides of the argument,” declared Harley.
“I don’t want to be running a saw in the dark if we come up on a block inside the tunnel,” added Daymon.
Knocking on the F-650’s windshield to get Raven’s attention was Cade’s response.
Raven saw his finger cutting a hole in the air inside the cab. It meant one thing: He wanted to be Oscar Mike. On the move. Considering what lay at the end of the tunnel, she wasn’t as eager to get the show on the road. For what she was about to face, the thing she had been steeling herself against all these years, was about to come to fruition. There’s no turning back now she thought as the Bravo got underway.
Not wanting to get left behind, Raven hopped into Black Beauty, belted in, and got her moving. Once they were in the woods and catching up with the Mercedes, the road seeming to shrink as the branches crowded the convoy on all sides, she said, “I’m sorry we’re going in blind. I should have bought a Pelican case for the thing when I had a chance.”
“Hindsight is always 20/20, sweetie. Don’t forget it.” He pointed across the dash. “Hit your lights and keep your eyes on Greg’s ass. The rest will sort itself out later.”
Chapter 29
Ten minutes after entering the tunnel of trees west of the Eden compound the convoy reemerged on a gently curving stretch of SR-39 that was recognizable to everyone but Harley. In the span of a few minutes during which the sky was shielded from view by gnarled branches and the trees crowding the road, it had gone from a powdery shade of blue to a hue that reminded Raven of the surface of the Pineville Reservoir. Instantly, the sloping hillside to their right had her undivided attention. The fence that had been an effective barrier against the Zs for the entire time she had called the compound home was now leaning over the roadside ditch. A good twenty-foot-long run of fence was down completely. In the nearby ditch lay bones and skulls and scraps of clothing. Here and there a boot or tennis shoe protruded from the long grass bordering the ditch, which she figured contained the remnants of a dozen or more zombie corpses.
She walked her gaze up the hill. The grass looked as if it would come up to her waist if she were to wade in there. The makeshift grave markers they had erected so many years ago weren’t visible. She didn’t need to see them to know where her mom and many of her friends were buried. She had spent so much time on that hill that their location was indelibly burned into her memory. In her mind’s eye, she saw the colorful plastic flowers sprinkled on the fresh dirt and the cross made of sticks she and her father had fashioned and planted in the ground near where her mom’s head would be. She also imagined the other people buried up there with her. Logan Winters, Duncan’s little brother, a man everyone called Oops, was here. Then there were Chief and Phillip, friends of Logan’s who had perished shortly after arriving here in the early days of the outbreak. Though she didn’t know the locations of the newest graves, the ones that contained the last earthly remains of Lev, Jamie, and their unborn child, ripped unmercifully from Jamie’s womb by the Chinese invaders, she could sense their presence.
Cade was also transfixed on the hillside. He said, “Pretty overgrown, eh sweetie?”
Seeing the Bravo and Mercedes brake and pull toward the right-side shoulder, Raven followed suit. She set the brake and shut down the engine. Dabbing at a tear, she said, “It’s a mess. Which means we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
Cade looked at his watch. “We’ve only got about ten minutes of light left. I think we better call it a night and get to digging come first light.”
Raven shook her head vehemently. “Hell no. I’m not sleeping out in the open. At least not this close to a graveyard. Then we have the wandering Zs to worry about.”
“What are you suggesting?” He looked to the left. Found the hidden gate. It was still studded with artificial foliage, most of it faded from prolonged sun exposure.
The sun had been shielded by the Wasatch Range for hours now. Still, the temperature in the shade was closer to ninety than eighty. If she remembered correctly, nightfall usually caused the temperature to drop another ten degrees. Not a bad thing seeing as how sleeping outside tonight was inevitable. She’d rather be a little warm inside her tent than able to see her breath. With that in mind, she said, “I suggest we continue to the compound. We can circle the wagons again and erect our tents in the middle.”
Cade said, “Hop out and take a look at the gate.”
Though she knew what he was driving at, she wanted to hear him say it. “What am I looking for?”
“Evidence that someone or something has traveled the feeder road in the not-so-distant past. Look for signs that the gate has been opened recently. See if there’s a lock. Inspect the hinges. If they’re fused by rust, it hasn’t been opened recently. Lastly, the biggest tell of all would be the presence of fresh tire tracks in the grass.”
“Understood.” She regarded him for a beat. “Are you okay? Do you need something stronger for the pain?”
He shook his head. “No. I just want to put off any big movements for as long as possible. I’m not looking forward to sleeping on the ground tonight, either.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, elbowing open her door. “Keep your radio on. If I see anything out of the ordinary, I’ll phone a friend.”
Cade laughed at the game show reference. He’d watched more than his fair share of them at the Boise house. A lightning bolt of pain raced down his right side. He took a deep breath and shifted on his seat. As he did so he thought he felt bones grating together. Which made sense, because it was happening close to the spot on the ballistic vest where the PLA soldier’s round had struck. A couple of inches left or right, the bullet would have done real damage. The kind of damage that in the ‘Stan would have warranted a Nine Line call and a ride in a medevac bird. Grimacing, he said, “Sounds like a plan, Bird.”
Duncan met Raven on the road, explaining to her that he was Daymon’s emissary. “Spider Head thinks we should stay the night right here.”
Raven shook her head. “Not going to happen. Forget it.” Instead of elaborating, she cast a furtive glance up the grass-covered hill.
“Don’t kill the messenger, kid,” Duncan said. “It’s just that Daymon doesn’t think the Bravo will fit.”
Harley showed up carrying his M4 and with a lip that made him look like he was sucking on a golf ball. Or that someone had punched him in the mouth. Spitting a stream of tobacco juice on the road, he said, “What’s up?”
“Apparently, Captain America has left it up to his progeny to decide whether we’re staying the night here or if we’re driving a mile in and setting up camp in the clearing.”
“The clearing would be better for stargazing,” Harley said. “But I’m not so sure my rig will make it, either.”
Raven put her hands on her hips. “Progeny? Whatever. If Black Beauty can make it to the compound, so can you guys. If I don’t see anything to suggest anyone’s been going in or out of here recently, I’m going in. You can follow … or not. Your choice. I’ll be watching stars while you guys are watching for rotters.” She strode off toward the gate, Glock in hand.
“Like father like daughter,” Duncan said, hurrying to catch up.
Arriving at the gate ahead of the others, Raven checked to see if any zombies were lurking around. Seeing nothing, she holstered her pistol. Instead of waiting for adult supervision to arrive, she studied the hinges. They were spotted with rust but didn’t appear to be fused. Moving to the other side, she saw that the padlock was gone. Which was no surprise, considering that a PLA patrol had visited the compound a few years back. In the padlock’s place was a zip tie. It was weathered. And it was also different from the ones she and her father carried.
When Duncan arrived, he took hold of the zip tie. Spun it around. “That’s a military issue item,” he said. “Not our military. Ours are overdesigned and overpriced. This one here is dime-a-dozen. It’s made in China crap.”
“I’m guessing it’s been on there for a long time.” Raven climbed the gate and peered over the top. After a couple of seconds, she said, “I don’t see parallel tracks to suggest the road’s been traveled recently.”
“What about motorcycles?” Harley asked. “Every one of the blockages we had to deal with on 39 between here and Huntsville could have easily been bypassed by our unlucky PLA friends back there. It’s possible they’re operating out of your old compound.”
“I don’t see any narrow tracks,” Raven said, hitching herself up further on the fence. “No zombie trails, either. Nobody’s been down this road in a long time.”
Rubbing the back of his neck where he’d been sunburned, Duncan said, “Does the rest of the road look as overgrown as it does right here?”
“It’s passable,” she said none too convincingly. “Just tell Peter he’ll need to keep his head down.”
“He’s well practiced at the whole whack-a-mole thing,” Duncan said. “Learned the hard way back there a mile or so. Took a branch to the face. Never heard a person cuss in Russian.” He chuckled. “Seeing as how I’ve never heard him speak anything but English, it sure sounded funny coming out of him.”
“It’s settled then,” Raven said, jumping down off the fence. “We’re going in. Last one locks the gate behind us.” She sliced the zip tie off with her knife, then hustled back to Black Beauty.
Chapter 30
The compound feeder road was so overgrown in places that the encroaching branches came close to ripping the side mirrors off the vehicles. The cacophony inside the F-650 fluctuated between mildly annoying and barely tolerable. At times it sounded to Cade as if they were parting a large zombie herd. The noise of the branches scraping the pickup’s flanks could easily pass for the shiver-inducing keen produced by zombie fingernails raking sheet metal.
With the rapidly fading light at the end of the tunnel signaling the ordeal was close to being over, Raven triggered the high beams and slowed from the fifteen-mile-per-hour pace they’d been keeping to a slow crawl.
The vehicles were each separated by a dozen feet or so when the convoy rolled into the clearing. As the headlights swept from right to left a lot was revealed to Raven. Like the hill on which her mother had been buried, the grass here was growing out of control. It rose to the F-650’s bumper and had completely taken over the dirt airstrip she remembered riding her bike on.
Eyes roving the clearing, carbine in hand, Cade said, “Park with your side facing the compound and shut her down.”
Steering left, Raven studied the tree line to their fore, searching for the gnarled pine she remembered was her favorite to climb. Once she found the tree, getting a fix on the blind shielding the compound entrance from prying eyes was easy. Amazingly, it was still standing.
They were about a third of the way across the clearing and closing with the compound entrance when the F-650 began to buck wildly. Raven gripped the steering wheel tight and tried to keep it tracking in a straight line, the pickup heaving and lurching like a wild bronco. Not happening. She tried charting a serpentine course. Same result. No matter which way she steered the pickup, one of its off-road tires would inevitably roll over a dirt mound or plunge into one of the many deep holes that had to have been dug recently and left unfilled on purpose.
“Who did this?” she asked.
Cade’s sixth sense was jangling. “No idea,” he said. “It wasn’t like this when I was here last.”
In her side mirror, Raven saw that the other vehicles had fallen behind. She also noted that they were having as bad a go of it as she was, the headlights rising and falling and jinking left and right as they tried to avoid the unseen pitfalls.
