Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse by Shawn Chesser Page A

just passed. Thinking, Hope it holds , he stuffed
the thin plastic fastener into a pocket, rummaged under the seat and came away
with the biggest pair of bolt cutters he’d ever seen. He slammed the door,
then, with Brook close on his heels, looped around front and approached the wheeled
gate. Once there, Brook spun on her heels and squatted next him. Wavering on
her haunches, she leaned in close and said in a low voice, “Cade says there may
be dogs inside ... so watch your six.”
    Without skipping a beat, Wilson ran the long-handled cutter’s
gleaming jaws back and forth over the chain-link. He locked his gaze on the
distant building and when the discordant jangling finally ceased, looked back
at Brook and said, “No Fido.”
    Focused on the approaching dead, Brook said nothing. Instead
she urged Wilson to pick up the pace with a slight nudge from the collapsed
butt stock of her M4.
    After shooting her a sour look and again eyeing the walking
corpses that were by now only a handful of yards away, Wilson went to work on
the industrial strength Schlage padlock.
    In the box bed, teeth bared and hackles up, Max was growling
and spinning circles atop one of the Pelican containers. At the gate, attacking
the lock with the bulky bolt cutters, Wilson heard the guttural growling at his
back suddenly become a veritable Hounds of the Baskerville’s kind of baying.
    Hearing the commotion, Cade looked into the rearview and saw
pale hands reaching for the snarling and snapping dog. Not good , he
thought. In his experience there were a handful of noises the dead were
especially drawn to. Mechanical sounds and gunfire and especially anything
associated with fresh meat: people’s voices, a baby’s cries, or a dog’s
bark—the latter of which he decided needed to be silenced.
    After threading the hefty cylindrical suppressor to the
business end of his Glock, he checked for a round in the chamber and powered
down his window. The stench slapped him in the face as he called out, “Max,
quiet now!” Then after a quick two-count he added, “Max, down!” Then he waited,
hoping two things would result from the barked orders. The first of which
depended solely on whether Max had received any kind of command training from
his original owners. And the second part of his plan was directly correlated to
the outcome of the former. In theory, Max would cease howling and lie down out
of view. Then Cade would quietly deal with the handful of dead that had been
getting after the dog—which were a pittance compared to the numbers likely to
be drawn if Max continued to bark.
    Suddenly, as if Max knew the battle was lost, he went silent
and disappeared from sight.
    Then Cade’s prediction came true and the dead lost all
interest in the dog and filed towards Wilson and Brook, who by now had her
carbine trained on them. Cade met her gaze and waved her off with a vertical
finger pressed to his lips.
    While all of this was unfolding, Taryn had crawled across
the bench seat and sat up behind Cade just as the tops of the zombies’ heads
passed outside her window. “Do something,” she hissed.
    Cade whispered over his shoulder, “Gotta have faith ... and
a lot more patience.”
    “Thanks, Yoda ,” she mumbled, casting a worried look
at her man.
    Cade flicked his eyes from Brook, who was now crabbing
around the front of the truck, and then back to the side mirror and watched and
waited as the trio of Zs tramped through the colorful flower beds. Without
taking his eyes off the Zs, he gave Raven’s forearm a reassuring squeeze and
eased the Glock out the window. A tick later he extended his arm fully and
pressed the cold steel to the first flesh eater’s equally cold skin, barely an
inch behind its right ear, and squeezed off a single shot.
    The pistol bucked and the creature collapsed into a vertical
heap, scrambled brains dribbling from the quarter-sized exit wound. The report,
though not as quiet as portrayed on TV or in the movies, garnered the