THE DEATH DOLL:
EXODUS
By Brian P. White
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“The Death Doll: Exodus” copyright © 2019 by Brian P. White, based on the series “The Death Doll” copyright © 2014 by Brian P. White
Cover image painted and licensed for use by Irina Celice. Original font by Angelique Shelley. Author image photographed and licensed for use by Brian Michael Schade Visit the following websites for more concept art and illustration:
http://www.angeliqueshelley.com
https://www.deviantart.com/irbisty
http://imageworks.brianschade.com
All rights reserved.
First Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (or other), events, or locals is entirely coincidental. All brand names mentioned in this book are trademark property of their respective companies.
The Library of Congress has cataloged this work as follows:
Brian P. White
The Death Doll Exodus
INTRODUCTION
The road to enlightenment is as long as the treacherous stretch of broken highway our heroes have to cross in this story. One of the hardest lessons for so many to learn is how to change a worldview, especially when it comes to how they see others … and themselves. This is why so many of us take like-minded individuals for granted that; even when they do the worst things in the world, they’re still assumed to be more trustworthy (or at least easier to handle) than those who look and think differently. This kind of thinking costs us so many opportunities for growth, bonds, and forward momentum, and yet we continue to fall back on this old habit because it’s what we know best.
I’ve come to realize there are three types of prejudiced people: fools, traumas, and facilitators. Fools believe what they’re told and often follow it with reckless abandon, while traumas may often equate a tragedy in their lives with a segment of humanity of which the potential perpetrator of the tragedy was born. Both of these have the capability to learn better things, even if it isn’t easy. Hey, what is?
The ones to be wary of are the facilitators, who push their views to rile the fools and the traumas into action and wash their hands of those actions. Many of these goaders may not even be prejudiced, but rather sheer opportunists who know how to stir a disgruntled crowd and aim them at a part of society they may only see as an obstacle to achieving their true goals. Facilitators often use carefully-crafted language to incite the crowd’s rage (you may have heard such old nuggets as “taking our jobs” or “polluting our gene pool,” state that something needs to be done, and—after the crowd does something terrible—respond with the old lie that “I wasn’t advocating (insert resulting atrocity here), but I will say that something needed to be done about (see previous nuggets).” These are the people who will suggest that an action that could kill families—often with small children—is a moral imperative when all the facilitators want is to exploit a plot of land or reduce competition in a certain market. These are people who believe wealth matters more than lives.
Everyone has the potential for great and terrible things, regardless of how they were born or raised, as we can all learn more and choose our paths accordingly. Circumstances only have anything to do with birth or upbringing when someone makes it about that. It’s as if we need a school specifically to grow beyond prejudice. Sadly, the world full of irreparable consequences is the only classroom we get, and an F may cost us any other possible lessons to better ourselves.
If there’s one important thing to learn from this story, it’s this: bad guys (and gals) are defined by their actions, not their shade or shape. We need to recognize this on a wider scale and stop listening to the facilitators who target people who had nothing to do with the actions of these bad guys and gals solely because they “look” like them.
Do you want to know what someone is made of? Look closer at that someone. They don’t even look like the bad guys/gals. God is too talented with faces to make any one part of humanity “all look alike.”
Oh, and the villainous Gamesman will have one thing both right and wrong: Didi is not his social justice warrior; she’s mine.
— Brian P. White, 2019
PART ONE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
PART TWO
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
PART THREE
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
EPILOGUE
PART ONE
And Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven; and there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days.
Exodus 10:22
PROLOGUE
“‘He set me in the middle of a valley full of dry bones,’” Didi muttered, staring blankly at a sun-bleached skeleton within its tattered garb at her feet. Several more lay strewn about the Santee Sioux Reservation, which to her waning vision appeared as little white blobs. A once proud nation she had come to know through a friend’s epic tales over the last two years had been reduced to cloth and ivory about as long ago. People who had endured as much as these didn’t deserve such a fate. Her metaphoric heart broke for them … and for their last descendent mere feet away.
“Huh?” asked Isaac Yancey, one of her new defenders.
“Ezekiel, thirty-seven: one,” she clarified, “though these bones won’t be getting up anytime soon.”
Her massive enforcer nodded. “Yeah. Ain’t nothin’ left of ‘em to get up wit’.”
“They must’ve died at the start,” young Rachelle Ortega said with dismay, “like they got no warning. Did they even get their kids out?”
“That shit ain’t right, man,” Isaac said like he wanted to do something about it, though his sharpened baseball bat dangled from his meaty hand as uselessly as his ire.
Didi felt the same, but what was there to do? Who was even left to answer for this?
“I guess there’s an upside, though,” Rachelle said. “If they all rotted out, the rest will, too. Then it’ll all be over.”
Didi wanted to take some solace in that, but where would that leave her? And what comfort would it bring to her grieving Panel member who asked to come here, only to see his home like this? She regretted this detour as she watched Bob Winter Bear Grey stare at the bones of his people in sullen silence. She had only seen him this morose the day she had met him, sulking over the graves of his former employers in Minnesota. If she was still alive, she would’ve wept. She couldn’t even give him a big hug, lest she tempt her fierce hunger.
“I’m sorry, Bob,” was all she could offer.
“Is there some kind of prayer we could say with you?” Rachelle asked him.
Bob sighed heavily, then turned and walked away without a word.
Isaac and Rachelle faced Didi, wondering what to do. She nodded to them and they followed Bob back to their little convoy parked near the Missouri River, splitting up between Craig’s Ford F-150 and the up-armored motor coach that ferried their people and protected their fuel tanker. All three bodies faded from view in seconds, joining the eternal blur that was her horizon.
She cursed the rot gradually claiming her eyesight, but she didn’t need to look far to see the fate that awaited her. Though technically as dead as the remains around her, she would not feel the same peace. She would ache from every need her body was too dead to satisfy until her Neural Stimulator Unit failed, and then she would wander like any other zombie until her treated skin succumbed to the elements and all the stuffing keeping her shape spilled out. Nothing was meant to last, but the thought of the damage she would do until her final death terrified her.
And what would she leave behind? Her face and body—as they once were—could still be seen in any porn shop, unworthy testaments to the person she had become in the two and a half years since her suicide. Only one object on this planet embodied that now.
She removed her choker and stared at the half-mutilated baby doll face on her new cameo as if looking into a funhouse mirror. Half a sweet child, half a terrifying skull. That was her now: a dolled up zombie with a mostly-working brain. She was a cautionary tale to end them all. Don’t sell your bodies, kids, or you’ll end up like this undead whore! Love it or fear it, that pendant showed who she really was.
Not who she wanted to be.
She was more than just a made-up face; she was a woman with strength and hope. She was the one who defended survivors seeking an upright and decent life after so much death. She was the one who would cut down the dead masses to free the world of the same horrible plague that made her what she was today.
She was the Death Doll.
CHAPTER 1
BUMPY RIDE
Isaac’s heart pounded a mile a second, wishing the backseat of a Ford F-150 wasn’t so spacious. His shoulders throbbed from being repeatedly tossed into the door and his fellow passenger, Craig Dykstra, like a damn dodgeball, even while buckled up and holding the oh-shit handle over his window. Finding what was left of Bob’s people was bad enough, but Didi just had to make the long drive to southern California about giving Rachelle some damn driving lessons. In the four hours the kid had spent weaving through a debris-filled highway, she’d run off the road four times and almost hit a wrecked car. He was not looking forward to the remaining fourteen hundred miles of this trip.
“Come on, Didi, you do it,” the kid begged for the eighth time. She shook all over, her tan little knuckles glowing white on the steering wheel.
“I can’t see the road or feel the pedals,” Her Deadness said with a grin at the overhead vanity mirror, still stitching that second piece of tanned flesh over the gaping hole in her jaw. From what she had told them about her escape from the mob in Sibley, the damage from her own grenade would’ve been worse if not for the face-muncher she had used for cover. Isaac was just amazed at how well someone who couldn’t feel her own fingertips handled a sewing needle.
“You have glasses, and you can see the speedometer.”
“M-mm! All you.”
“C’mon, Didi,” Isaac practically begged. “She don’t want to do it. I’ll drive.”
“But we have so few opportunities to do this,” Didi said as she turned her entire body to face him, kneeling on her seat and hugging her headrest with mock cuteness, which was hard to pull off with jawbone sticking out of the flap of her otherwise pretty face. “This is the perfect time.”
“We can do it when we go out for supplies, can’t we?”
Rachelle looked at Didi hopefully until a random bump in the road made her face forward.
Didi just kept on grinning at Isaac. “Would you rather we do this when we need to escape a mob? Or a gang?”
He hated that the dead chick was right. “Guess not.”
Didi finally faced forward and went back to stitching, her grin more triumphant. Damn it!
“At least it’s an automatic,” Craig whispered, still white-knuckling his ceiling handle.
Isaac was too busy bracing himself to laugh. He hoped to God he wasn’t in the same car when she learned to drive stick. He looked out the window for a hint, but all he saw was a wrecked town and straw-colored fields as dead as the zombies scattered through them. “Where are we?”
Craig tilted the iPad tablet his way, revealing a digital map that miraculously still worked, thanks to a guy who died back in Iowa. The dot crept halfway down Thirtieth Avenue of a town called Kearney. “Less than a mile from I-Eighty. Then we’ll be back on our original route.”
“Then maybe a driver change?” the kid asked hopefully. “My butt’s already numb.”
“I got no sympathy for you,” Didi half-joked. Of course, her own dead body couldn’t even feel the needle piercing her flesh while the kid repaired herself, let alone her memory-foam-stuffed ass. “You’ll be fine after a break. I heard the turn’s coming up soon,” she added with a grin back at Craig. It was amazing how well her dead ears still worked.
Rachelle groaned. “You’re way more patient than my mom was. She would’ve yelled at me to pull over already.”
“My mom did when I almost ran us off the road once.” Didi paused with a smirk and a faraway look in her brown contacts. “She didn’t let me try again for a month.”
“A month sounds good,” Rachelle said with a nod.
“The best way to learn is from your mistakes.”
Rachelle smugly raised a brow. “You mean like your porn career?”
Didi’s fake brown eyes narrowed at her little lackey. “Low blow.”
Isaac let out a quick laugh. “That’s what she said.”
Didi laughed out loud. Everyone else joined in, including Rachelle. No one could calm the kid down like Didi, who looked like death itself and still came off nicer than most of the survivors in her bitching camp … when she wasn’t pissed off, of course.
“I wonder how bad it is in California,” the kid said.
“That’s where you’re from, right?” Isaac asked Didi.
Didi lightly shook her head. “I’m from Delaware, but I had a house in L.A.”
Craig leaned on the front seatback on one arm, the other still in emergency use. “Was it nice?”
“Damn straight,” Didi replied with a proud grin as she clipped the suture knot close to her skin, then pulled a makeup compact and powdered her skin grafts. “Decked out with all the coolest toys—and I don’t mean sex-related. Too bad it’s up in the hills, where you would not want to be trapped by a mob.”
“What kind of place are we looking for?” the kid asked.
“Something that hasn’t been swallowed up by earthquakes,” Craig said.
“We could try Malibu.” Didi grinned at Rachelle. “Maybe you’ll meet a nice surfer dude.”
The kid looked offended, but at least she looked at the road doing it. “Hey, I don’t have time for dating. I’ve got a camp to defend.”
Didi shook her head. “Don’t avoid living. Trust me.”
“What’s that supposed to—” Rachelle started to ask until she jerked the wheel to the left, sharply swerving around a face-muncher in the middle of the road.
Isaac’s face hit the window, which surprisingly didn’t crack. “Give us some warning,” he snapped before glancing through the back window to watch the Greyhound from Hell’s reinforced grill blast the rotten thing right off the road. He couldn’t even see the tanker.
After catching her breath, the kid said, “Maybe I should just run them over from now on.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Craig said.
A pop made everyone but Didi jum
p, though she did look around. “Gunfire?” she asked.
Isaac checked outside, but all he saw were stray zombies taking notice of the engine noises.
“Someone could be taking pot-shots at these guys,” Craig said.
“Didi, Bob, I just blew a tire. I gotta pull over,” came through the cell phone on Didi’s belt, the voice of farmer Ron Tench crackling a bit.
Didi nodded at Rachelle and pressed a button on her phone. “Do it. We’ll cover you.”
The kid awkwardly pulled over, coming to a sudden stop that wrenched Isaac’s neck. He nearly scolded her for it when he spied a whole gaggle of face-munchers clogging up both of the frost-covered lanes ahead. He swore.
Didi leaned forward, trying to get a good look. “Mob?”
Rachelle nodded. “Big one.”
“How come we keep finding so many if they’re all supposed to be rotting out by now?” Isaac had to ask.
“The world didn’t die off all at once, you know,” Craig said with a smartass grin that made Isaac reconsider knocking the man’s teeth in for the second time since they met.
“I should’ve listened to you about putting a plow on the truck,” Didi said as she reached into the backseat between Isaac and Craig, grabbed the two katana swords made by a dead enemy, and stood them on the floor between her legs. She handed one of the custom-made blades to the kid. “Ready to break in your new sword?”
Rachelle grabbed the sword with a raging bull on the round, golden block. “Beats driving.”
Didi grinned sideways at Rachelle. “Don’t be a pussy,” she said, then got out of the truck.
Rachelle scoffed and opened her door, muttering, “Be glad I’m on your side.”
Isaac shook his head at Craig. “Chicks, man; dead or alive.”
Craig chuckled as he opened his door. “I’m just glad they didn’t break my truck yet.”
Isaac grabbed his Louisville Stabber and got out to help unblock the road ahead. He wasn’t fond of the sharpened baseball bat when he first got it, but the example Didi set with her sword made him want to get more comfortable with something that didn’t run out of ammo. He still had a few firearms to choose from, but he also had three people to back him up while he practiced with his makeshift spear.
Exodus Page 1
