Roads Less Traveled (Book 3): Shades of Gray Read online

  We didn’t have to reload considering we had fifteen rounds between us, and there were only thirteen runners. Well, thirteen-and-a-half. Why waste ammo on half a deadhead? We’d take care of him later. Even if we’d had to reload, I doubt they would have heard it. We were far enough away that the sound of a shell being clicked into place could have sounded like anything from down below. A rock falling, a chipmunk playing. Three minutes later, the runners were down and the fence was still up.

  Jake breathed a sigh of relief beside me, still looking through his scope, and mumbled, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

  Mia and I both snorted, waiting a while to see if there were any stray runners lurking about, before heading down to Laurel Grove.

  * * *

  About an hour later, and after weaving our way through the blinding-white outer edge of town, we rode up to the privacy fence at an angle, putting as much distance between us and the dead runners as possible while still keeping them in sight. They had been pushing against the front side and corner, and from our vantage point on the opposite side, we could see why. Two of the four homes making up this camp faced us, their matching black shutters coated heavily with wet snow. There was an absurd amount of garbage in both front yards, some stacked nice and semi-neat against the fence itself, becoming gradually more scattered the closer it approached the front porches. As if, after a while, the people inside had said to hell with it, and just started throwing shit out the door.

  In the corner, where the majority of runners had been pushing, were the remains of at least one body.

  “I hope there’s a good reason for that,” Mia breathed.

  I glanced at her but didn’t bother with a reply. Even though the snow covered most of the corpse, an arm and part of a head were clearly visible. It wasn’t old either. At least they hadn’t tossed it off the porch like they’d apparently been doing as of late. My eyes turned slowly towards the upstairs windows of both houses. They were empty. No watch on this side, which was weird considering there had been an undead Baker’s Dozen hollering and pitching a fit out here only an hour or so ago. There was smoke coming out of both chimneys, yet no one keeping watch? It wasn’t the weirdest situation I’d ever been in, though it was beginning to rank a close second.

  “Free Bird One to Laurel Grove Camp, respond,” Jake said quietly into his walkie talkie.

  We were tuned in to the channel the National Guard had approved, and the same channel we’d been communicating on with all the survivors. Our call sign, however, was not military issued. It had been Jake’s idea.

  “They didn’t answer the first time, Jake. They probably won’t answer the second time either.” Mia stared through the small opening between the fence and the house, trying to see through to the next pair of homes in this camp.

  I glanced at Jake and nodded for him to keep trying, then twisted in my saddle to take a look behind us. Nothing but white.

  “Anyone inside Laurel Grove, come back,” he repeated.

  We listened for several minutes, not for a reply, but for any stirrings or noises coming from inside the houses. Nothing except the sound of the hair on the back of my neck standing up.

  And the sound of a body half-sliding, half-dragging itself towards us.

  “Shit, I’ll get it.” Jake turned his horse in the direction of the legless runner we’d forgotten about.

  The horse snorted a few times the closer it got, then stopped and pawed at the ground, kicking up snow and a little dirt. Jake pulled a crowbar from a strap close to his saddle, leaned over, and brought it down hard on the runner’s head, all the while fighting his horse for control. He hit the zombie again, just to be sure, then straightened in the saddle and let his horse jump away.

  “Come on, let’s go around.” I gave Daisy a nudge and let her take us around the back of the neighborhood at her own pace. She’d been my faithful companion even before the Z-uprising, proving her worth a thousand times over since then.

  I made a few hand gestures to the others, reminding them to keep sharp eyes on the upper level windows as well as the lower. We rode back down the sidewalk, leaving hoof prints in the snow, took a sharp right, and basically made a big circle, riding around the block and coming to the fence at a different location. This vantage point was directly in between the two pair of houses.

  “Sonofabitch” was the first thing that fell out of my mouth.

  “Well hello there! Where’d you folks come from? Snuck right up on me,” a thin, balding, middle-aged man shouted to us in an equally thin and high-pitched voice.

  He was standing on the porch of the farthest house, on the backside of the encampment, waving to us like his hand was on a hinge and wearing only shorts and flip-flops. In November. His other hand was planted on his hip and holding something that resembled a meat cleaver.

  “Jake,” I said, my voice flat.

  He was one step ahead of me: the walkie was to his lips and he was trying to raise the Guard before his name even left my mouth. The shirtless wonder was making his way off the porch and strolling over to us before Mia had time to register the same alarm we already had. Her sense of smell was almost nonexistent now. She blamed it on breathing dead stink for over a year, saying it had killed her sinuses or whatever.

  But Jake and I had smelled it.

  And it wasn’t the dead.

  I raised my rifle when the man was thirty yards away. “That’s far enough, mister.”

  Jake and Mia were ready, but their weapons were still lowered. The man followed my order and stopped, his face twisted with something that would normally have me laughing my ass off. If it hadn’t been for the heavy sweet stink in the air, I probably would have.

  “I was just gonna open the gate for you, Miss. I don’t mean you any harm. No, none at all.”

  The tip of the meat cleaver bumped against his leg, forcing me to notice the blood I’d missed before. My heart was thumping hard, and for a moment I was frozen.

  Did I really miss that blood, or am I seeing shit? And if they’re real, what the hell do we do? This guy was a survivor, and we were supposed to bring them all in. All living people who hadn’t been bitten. But this?

  “Just stay where you are,” I said, stalling for time. “What’s your name?”

  I didn’t want to handle this. Captain Waters wouldn’t want me handling this considering what had happened the last time we’d run into a similar situation. The first thing, hell the only thing I wanted to do was put a bullet between this psycho’s eyes. The smell in the air, this crazy dude’s appearance, the blood, and the meat cleaver made it pretty obvious to me why no one had been keeping watch, why no one had taken care of that swarm of runners and why no one had answered our calls over the radio. My group had only encountered this once before, and that was two months ago. Out of the seven people that were supposed to be in that camp, only three were still alive when we reached them. Those three had opened fire on us immediately. Of course we returned fire, and had killed them pretty easily. When we went inside to investigate, it’d been pretty clear what had been going on. That isn’t something a person ever forgets.

  “Andy Johnson, ma’am. Pleased to meet you. Why don’t I just open that gate and let you three in? Got a fire going, nice and warm inside. C’mon, you don’t have anything to be scared of,” he said. Then he smiled. A big, toothy grin.

  “Oh. Shit.” Mia finally realized what this guy was.

  Our new friend, Andy, was a cannibal. I mean, I didn’t know for sure, but I had a damn good feeling. Jake raised his rifle and leveled it on Andy, causing Mia to do the same. This stopped him from moving forward, and he held his hands up in front of him, cleaver still gripped tightly.

  “There were more people here a week ago, Kase. Where are they?” Jake whispered quickly without taking his eyes off Andy.

  I had been wondering the same thing. Obviously most of them were dead and eaten; there had been more than this one man living here when the distress call came in. Michael had mentio
ned hearing other voices in the background, and he’d also mentioned talking to a woman. Our experience with the last crazy bunch of assholes had us wondering if the remaining survivors here were going to burst from the houses with guns blazing.

  “Where are the others, Andy?”

  Those hairs on the back of my neck started doing their little dance again as my mind instantly played the image of kids chained up in a basement, some tortured, some beaten, slowly starving to death as a handful of crazed adults cut away small pieces of their flesh, a little at a time.

  “Oh, them. They’re inside, where it’s warm. Can’t stand the cold, like me.”

  “And what were you doing before we interrupted you?” I asked.

  His eyebrows went up and he waved the cleaver in the direction of the house on our right, one of the front houses. “Well, I was going over there to get supper.”

  My eyes flicked towards that house and I noticed the back door stood wide open. I scanned over to the other front house; the back door was open as well. If I followed my own logic and stayed with the cannibal theory, then this guy was using the fireplaces to cook people.

  I swallowed hard and tore my eyes away, forcing them back on Andy. I hadn’t heard the response over the radio, but it usually didn’t take long for the Blackhawk to arrive. We weren’t that far from Blueville Correctional, as the crow flies. I guessed we only had to keep ourselves alive for another fifteen minutes. In this situation, it was backup, not an evacuation.

  “Where are they? The ones you say can’t stand the cold, like you,” Mia piped up beside me.

  Her voice was strong and clear, and when I glanced over I saw she looked very calm. Her right index finger barely touching the trigger of her rifle was the only thing that gave her away. Andy turned sideways and waved his hand towards the house he had been leaving when he saw us.

  “Over there.” He kept watching us with an empty smile, the kind that never reaches the eyes.

  “Why don’t you ask them to join us out here?” Mia asked. Andy shuffled backward towards the house. “No, no, Andy. Don’t move. Yell for them to come out.”

  The nutjob scratched his head with his empty hand, shaking it and grunting. “Nooo, no I can’t do it, ma’am. Really sorry and all, but I just can’t do that.” He shifted from one foot to the other.

  I clenched my jaw and pulled my rifle tightly against my shoulder. This asshole looked like he was about to run, and if he did, I’d go against Waters’ instructions.

  “We should go in,” Jake’s voice hitched. I shook my head once as Mia continued talking.

  “Why can’t you do that? You know we’re here to help you, right? Get you folks out of here, someplace warm and safe?”

  She had even started lowering her rifle.

  Well, I understood where she was going with this, but no way was I lowering mine. Andy scuffed his feet around a few minutes, biting his lip and trying to decide whether he wanted to talk to Mia or not. Maybe he was trying to decide which part of her to eat first. I caught myself wondering why there had been a body in the front yard. Wasn’t that a waste of food to these people? My eyes drifted to the snow-covered ground.

  Cannibals. Corpse in the front yard. Snow…they’re using the snow for refrigeration.

  “Well…I had to restrain them,” Andy finally said. He actually managed to sound guilty.

  “How many? How many are left and why did you have to restrain them?” Mia pressed.

  I was beginning to think he wasn’t going to answer; his face puckered up like he was going to cry and he kept looking back at the house.

  “Well, Marie got bit, then she bit a couple others. They killed her right away, which I thought was pretty wasteful. Then later…” He scratched his chin, trying to remember. “Later they left and never did come back. I suppose they must’ve run into some kind of trouble. I don’t know for sure now. I had to restrain the rest.” He held his hands up, cleaver still waving, his face alarmed. “Now they weren’t all bit. Just two of them. But I said to myself, ’Self, you better tie them all up, cause if the others don’t come back, you’ll never be able to control all of them by yourself.’ So that’s just what I did. Took those kids upstairs, tied them all up, kept the grownups downstairs where I could see them. There’s not as many now as there were…”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the barrel of Jake’s gun shaking.

  “Anyways, there’s five lef—”

  A bullet from Jake’s rifle stopped poor Andy short of finishing his grisly tale. I’d been so engrossed with what he had been saying that the sudden shot startled me, causing my rifle to almost fall from my hands. Andy was knocked back on his ass, the cleaver skidding across the snow. He screamed and grabbed his shoulder.

  Then he did something I couldn’t not laugh at: little hairless Andy started throwing a tantrum.

  He threw himself backwards, looking for the world like he was going to make a snow-angel. Crying, shouting, swearing, and kicking his feet. The works. Mia actually had to punch my upper arm to shut me up. I cleared my throat several times while she snapped her head around, doing a quick scan of the area. Of course she saw nothing, so I dismounted after her. Jake was already off his horse and kicking at the gate, casting a few glances back at me. He grunted each time his foot slammed into the wood, and after several kicks, the gate flew back.

  We slung our rifles over our shoulders and drew our handguns. Jake walked straight over to Andy, Mia and I headed towards the house Andy had stepped from. Just before Jake pulled the trigger and stopped Andy’s crazy screaming, I thought I heard the far off thwump-thwump of a helicopter. Mia was ahead of me, taking point, and I could hear Jake jogging to catch up. Just as we started up the porch steps, Jake passed me and pressed himself against the wall on the left side of the door. Mia did the same on the right, which left me to go in first. Great.

  “Cover me.” I strode through the doorway, gun up and eyes darting back and forth, quickly seeing the kitchen I had walked into was empty.

  I lowered my arms and heard the other two come in behind me, fanning out and clearing the hallway ahead. Mia nodded and I continued, down the hall, around the corner, and into what I assumed was the living room. Jake and Mia were right on my heels, pushing past me to fan out again, all of our sidearms raised and aimed at five people tied to chairs, forming a circle in the middle of the floor. The furniture had been pushed back to give room, and there was a sickening amount of blood all over the hardwood floor. Some of the people were gagged, some were not. Some had old wounds, clotted and crusty with blood, some had fresh wounds still oozing red.

  Some were alive, some were not.

  The dead ones were the only ones not gagged, which made sense I suppose. Who would want to get close enough to a snapping, rot-infested mouth to stuff a sock in it?

  “Jake, upstairs. Mia, stay here,” I said.

  Jake’s heavy boots thumped up the stairs seconds later. I stepped up to the circle, watching the people closely, watching the deadheads even closer. Those who’d been gagged were staring at me with wild eyes, some with tears falling from them, begging to be released. I walked around until I stood behind them and faced the two deadheads across. I raised my gun, counted to three, and squeezed off two shots. Their heavy, raspy breathing stopped as their heads fell forward, chins almost touching their chests. I took a step backwards, saw I was standing in blood, and looked over at Mia.

  It’s on my boots. I love these boots.

  Blood. It’s always blood.

  These bleeding bastards ruined my boots…teach them a lesson…

  My arms lowered, the barrel of my handgun pointing towards the floor. Mia holstered her own and came forward.

  “You’re okay, we’ve got help coming. You’re all going to be okay,” she said gently, forcing a smile on her face as she edged closer to me.

  She laid her hand on mine, hinting that maybe I should holster my weapon.

  I’ve got that look again.

  I heard he
r sigh, just barely, after my sidearm was safely tucked away. I thought about giving her a smile, then decided against it. She would have known it was fake as hell.

  She’d been on my ass for a couple of months about it. The Look, she called it. I was never really sure what she was talking about when she went off on one of her rants, but I knew it was something she took very seriously. I think it scared her, though I don’t know why. I’d never hurt her or any of the others. I suppose actions speak louder than words, and evidently my actions had been less than desirable as of late.

  I felt fine. A little stressed, a little tired, and sometimes I saw things I later found out weren’t there, but I didn’t see that to be enough reason for all the scoldings I’d been receiving. I hadn’t hurt anyone, and as long as I was getting the job done, what the hell did it matter?

  Jake stomped back down the stairs and joined us in the living room. Before we could ask, he shook his head, the look on his face telling us everything we needed to know about the fate of the little ones. I shoved a hand through my hair and blew out a long breath.

  “Help me get these people loose, I hear the chopper,” Mia said to Jake.

  They went to work on the bindings, some of which had cut through clothing and skin. The three still alive were trying to smile, bobbing their heads in thanks. I noticed the old man was gone. And the women. Maybe Andy left the men for last because the kids, women, and the old man had been easier to kill. Except that didn’t make sense, he had somehow put them in these chairs and restrained them, hadn’t he? He’d also had help for a while, if his story had been true. Where his buddies were now, I didn’t know. Hopefully dead. Hell, maybe they’d been part of the welcoming committee outside. Maybe WVU guy was one of them. I hoped he was, I hoped they all were. At least then they would have gotten what they deserved.

  Karma’s a bitch, boys.

  This thought made me smile, which Mia just happened to catch.