Chapter 27

Outbreak - Day 6

Hanna, Utah

 

Cade held in place for a few minutes observing his surroundings before sprinting to the Winnebago. Pressing his back to the skin of the RV he reached for the door handle, which happened to be unlocked.

Once inside, the only smell to assail his nostrils was that of your garden variety mold and mildew. The interior was as dirty as the outside: food wrappers, beer cans and articles of clothing, both men’s and women’s, were strewn about. It appeared someone had been using the vehicle for their “play” house.

Cade planted himself in the driver’s seat and scanned the instruments; they looked no different than the ones found in any U-Haul he had ever driven. He had a choice to make: It would take him a couple of minutes to hotwire the vehicle or he could search for the keys, which would only take a few seconds. Cade chose the latter, because when running from zombies, every extra second counts.

His first inclination was to check the glove box. It was empty save for some maps, an ice scraper and miscellaneous paperwork, but no keys.

It was a hunch, he’d seen it on television and the movies a hundred times, there was no way that they were going to actually be there, but he was compelled to look anyway. The vinyl sun visor on the driver’s side was stuck in the up position and wouldn’t budge. Cade took off the kid gloves and manhandled it, finally getting it to flip down. Deposited on Cade’s lap, like Manna from heaven, was a fob full of keys. “I’ll be damned,” he said out loud. Incredibly, whoever owned the vehicle was a fan of cliché.

Cade didn’t have high expectations for the worn down Winnebago. He turned the key in the ignition. The planets must be in alignment, he thought. First the keys and now the whining starter did what it was designed to, and with only a little bit of complaining. Black smoke billowed from the tailpipe until the engine decided to turn over. A gunshot-like backfire beckoned the dead to come and get it. Cade had a visual of a cowboy cook, banging on a triangle, calling all hands to dinner.

Cade found he couldn’t see a thing through the grimy windshield; it was obscured with an opaque brown coating of tree sap, dirt and who knows what. After finding the wiper control, Cade liberally spritzed the glass with windshield cleaner. The crumbling wiper blades beating a rhythm, swishing back and forth reluctantly, only made things worse.

Cade snatched the ice scraper from the glove box and cautiously left the idling land yacht. With his M4 in hand and his head on a swivel, he began furiously scraping away at the glass.

The sun would be making an appearance very soon, the first rays of light were slowly revealing the details of his surroundings, and for the first time in many days Cade was aware of the faint chirping of the early birds.

He was working at cleaning the windshield when the moaning started. He had already heard the eerie sound a hundred times, yet it still caused the hair on his neck to stand at attention.

A number of walkers abruptly appeared, emptying from the open doors of the Handy Pantry food mart a block away. The surging wave of pale walking corpses quickly homed in on the RV.

Cade shouldered the M4 bracketing a female walker in the Trijicon ACOG crosshairs. Her face bore the marks of a violent attack. Waxy skin and purple muscle sloughed from one side of her head, the torn cheek bounced up and down with each lurching step, and the bared orbital bone and mandible caused a permanent half smile.

Cade caressed the trigger, sending the 5.56 hardball downrange. The bullet struck the exposed part of her skull below the eye socket, sending a fan of razor sharp bone and tooth fragments into the trailing walkers. He expended half of the magazine on the first few ghouls, buying him a little more time.

Turning his attention back to the window seemed foolish considering the encroaching mob, but hanging his head out the window and trying to drive the ungainly Winnebago through a throng of undead seemed even more asinine.

He risked five more quick passes with the scraper and jumped back into the driver’s seat. Without hesitating, Cade put the RV into gear and mashed the accelerator to the floorboard. The Winnebago lurched forward when the underinflated tires jumped the wheel chocks meant to keep it in place.

Cade kept his foot to the floor and heaved the rig into a sweeping right-hand turn, intent on getting back to the house before sunrise and the cover of darkness was totally lost.

Fifty feet in front of the RV Cade noticed the same ghoul from earlier. He couldn’t believe the tenacity of the blind zombie, it was in the middle of the road, head panning side to side, totally oblivious of the speeding motorhome. Rooted in place, the walker met the grill face first. The dual rear tires cleaved the creature in two. The monster’s severed lower extremities did a strange looking cartwheel and rolled into the gutter, while what was left clawed across the asphalt, trailing blood like an injured animal.