Jessie kept up a steady pace, breathing hard, but not out of control. He still had a long way to go to get back home, back to the opposite side of the peninsula. He’d heard somebody say it was nearly five miles long and three miles wide at the wall, the narrowest point. Seventeen square miles. Over eleven thousand acres. The town itself was starting to fill up as people kept coming in. Many of the houses and apartments in the downtown area were already taken. There were hundreds more on the outskirts, but everyone seemed to want to bunch up together. His dad was one of the few who had picked a place way out away from everyone, a few miles from the center of things. Most of the people didn’t even have cars anymore. They said they didn’t need them, there was no place to go. They had driven them to a marina outside the wall and abandoned them, didn’t want them taking up garage space. Everyone rode bicycles or had golf carts to get around.
Last night’s whiskey was sweating out of his pores. He’d walked back home after shutting down Pretty Boy Floyd’s like he’d been in the habit of doing. He was the last to leave, Pam finally telling him it was closing time. He’d only had a few, he hung out there as an excuse not to go to bed. To sleep. It was a quieter pub than Up Jumped the Devil, Stabby’s place that was always loud and rambunctious. Pretty Boy Floyd had background music, old men playing checkers and dogs were allowed. Up Jumped the Devil had the music cranked and they danced with abandon.
He was honoring the promise he’d made to quit hitting the bottle so hard. He’d been drinking a lot, it helped him sleep and took the edge off, but he never seemed to get drunk anymore. Even slamming whiskey or Scotch, it didn’t have the same effect as it did before he’d had the miracle IV.
Before the zombies, he’d tried drinking a few times with his friends when they’d have an all-night gaming session at someone’s house. Three or four shots and they’d be laughing at everything and getting their asses kicked by eight-year-olds in Call of Duty. Now, he barely felt it. It dulled his senses, but that was about it. Ever since he’d had that injection, he’d changed. He healed faster, didn’t feel the effects of alcohol, and felt good. Really good, all over. For a few months, he’d had the nightmares and dreams every time he closed his eyes. He tried to drink them away and told the SS Sisters he was in a lot of pain so they’d keep giving him the pills, the OxyContin, but they saw right through him. They couldn’t believe he’d healed so fast, but they sure did think he was lying when he said he needed the pills. The nightmares slowly went away, or at least he didn’t remember them so vividly. Bob helped a lot. He seemed to know when the dreams were bad and more than once he’d awoke to a slobbery tongue and stank nasty dog spit covering his face.
He turned, following the jeep path, when he got to the container wall. One of the guards shouted a greeting down to him and he waved, never breaking stride. Bob spotted a rabbit in the field and took off after it, barking his fool head off. Jessie kept pounding the dirt, one footfall after another, trying to figure out a plan.
His mom had tried to baby him at first, tried to make things go back to the way they used to be. He guessed she wanted him to sleep till noon, spend hours every day playing on his Xbox, and have to be told a dozen times to set the trash out. She wanted him to go back to school. She wanted her boy back. That wasn’t happening.
He had seen things.
He had done things.
He had put away childish things.
They’d had a big argument at the dinner table a few nights ago, before his Dad took off on another rescue mission. She was nagging him about his drinking, telling his old man that he needed to tell everyone in town to stop serving him. He was underage. He was going to become a drunk. He needed to finish his education and learn a trade. A few months ago, Jessie would have blown up, yelled back and threw a fit, probably stomped off and slammed the door to his room. He had just smiled at her a little sadly, his jagged scar pulling his mouth into an ugly snarl.
“I’ve been looking at some of the empty places in town, mom. I’m thinking about moving into one of them.”
She had started to protest, he saw it building up, but his dad had just reached over and covered her hand with his. That didn’t happen very often, it seemed like she usually bossed him around, but that was all it took. The wind went out of her sails, he could see the tears threatening to spill over, and she had excused herself.
He and the old man finished dinner slowly, neither one of them hungry anymore.
“It’s hard for her to let you go so fast,” he said, stirring the peas around on his plate. “Normally she would have you a few more years before it was time to cut the apron strings, take off for college.”
“I know, dad. But I can’t go back to how it used to be. You understand, right?”
His dad had nodded. “More than you know, son. Have you got a place picked out?”
“Yeah,” Jessie answered. “Slippery Jim showed me a really cool boat repair shop near the water. It has a big office and a couple of bathrooms. I can take one of them and convert it to a real bathroom with a shower, I think. I kind of want a place where I can work on the car. I want to make some improvements so if I need to go back outside the wall, it’ll be ready.”
His dad had nodded again. When Jessie tried to give him the keys to the old Mercury a few months ago, the old man refused. Said it was his now, he’d earned it. It had been in the garage all winter and they’d gotten it back into shape, had it tuned up and running good.
“Let your mother help you decorate, pick out the curtains and paint and things like that,” he said. “Let her be a mom.”
Jessie nodded. He had already hung his name on the fence that surrounded the brick building, claiming it, but he needed to get down to the courthouse to register it so it would be official. His mom worked in that office, assigning the new people houses, and he needed her approval to make it legal and show it occupied in the books. He’d been avoiding doing it, dreading her reaction.
“You plan on going outside the wall?” his dad had asked.
Jessie knew it was no use hem-hawing around, the old man would see right through him.
“I can’t go back to school, dad. I’m not going to be an electrician, or a farmer, or a truck driver. I don’t want to join the army, I don’t want to be around other people. I know I’ve got to help out, to do something to stay here, but I can’t go back to being a student. I don’t know what I want to do yet, but it’s not going to be staying behind the wall.”
His dad had pondered that for a minute before he said, “The mayor wants to set up a courier service between here and the Hutterites. There are a few other communities we’ve established communications with on the Ham and we need a way to transport things quickly back and forth. That might be something you could do for now.”
“Be a mailman?” Jessie asked.
“More like the Pony Express riders,” the old man had replied. “Lots of danger and hard driving. I need an emissary to evaluate all these new communities, too. Make sure they’re not a bunch of cutthroats. That is, if you’re up for it.”
Jessie had smiled his crooked smile. Yeah. He was up for it. It would get him out of town and away from the looks he got from people staring at his scar. He was definitely up for it.
Some supplies were starting to get scarce and General Carson was urging Lakota to start a new currency. They were supposed to begin making coins soon. Something new that would have value, not like the old paper money that wasn’t worth anything. Something that would buy supplies they needed so every transaction wouldn’t take an hour of haggling over what the trade goods were worth.
“You can deliver the first shipment of those, too,” his dad said.
“So now I’m a Brinks truck and a Pony Express rider?” Jessie asked, wondering what a real gold coin would look like, whose picture would be on it.
His dad laughed. “I reckon so. I’ll help you build the car. I need an excuse to get out of the office, anyway. It’s enough to drive a man crazy, sitting behind a desk all day.”<
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When they’d finished eating and taking the dishes to the sink, the old man still favoring his mostly healed leg, he said, “One last thing. I won’t tell Stabby or Pam to cut you off at their bars, but you need to slow down. I hear you’re matching shot for shot with some of the guys that have been chugging rot gut for years. Drinking some of them under the table. You’re going to ruin your liver.”
Jessie was about ready to quit anyway. It didn’t seem to do him any good like it used to. He could drink a fifth and barely feel buzzed. Besides, he didn’t have any more money or anything left to trade. Being the president’s son only got you so many free drinks. He thought Bob and time had more to do with the nightmares going away, anyhow. They didn’t come every time he closed his eyes anymore and usually his dog would wake him up before they got really bad. Before he had to relive the days trapped in the trees and he had to kill Porsche over and over or try to match a pile of heads to broken little bodies from the orphanage.
Jessie had just nodded once.
He would slow down.
It was enough. It was his word.
4
Lacy
Lacy was eyeballing the warehouse with a critical eye. It was a few blocks off of Main Street and was probably some fifty years old. Who knew what it had been formerly, now it was a repair shop for boats and jet skis. It was a brick building, probably a small factory of some sort at one time, that someone had installed a couple of overhead doors in at some point. She let the boys clean out the garage area, she was looking at the dingy offices and grungy bathrooms, trying to figure out a nice layout that would include a kitchen. Johnny and Tommy were in the bays, pointing out machine things and boat parts that needed to go, that they wouldn’t have any use for. They had a crew of volunteers helping out and she snagged Firecracker, dragged him over to the offices. He had listed carpentry as one of his skills on Eliza’s spreadsheet and she was going to put him to work. Doug and little James were there, along with that ragtag bunch of tweenagers that were always coming up with excuses to get out of school. The Bullet Brigade, they were called. She’d tried to shoo them off at first, told them to get back to classes, but it was useless since Johnny wouldn’t help her. He’d put them to work packing up the trailers with everything he didn’t want in the shop and sending it over to one of the storage units. Eliza had made a quick inventory of the boat repair equipment, adding it to one of her spreadsheets, and noting the unit where it was going, in case they needed it in the future.
Lacy required a plumber to help her with converting the bathroom, but Eliza said they didn’t have one, just a few guys who were all-around handymen. One of them was Jimmy Winchell, that famous country music star, and she called the operator to track him down. If old Mrs. Henderson didn’t know where someone was, she could find out quick. She’d taken over the ancient manual telephone switchboard they’d found in the basement of the courthouse. Wire Bender and Carl had figured out how to get it up and working, and slowly more and more houses were being hooked up and assigned party line numbers. There wasn’t a whole lot that went on in town Mrs. Henderson didn’t know about, and she happily started on her mission, switching cords and plugs, dialing the rotary and asking everyone she connected with if they knew where he was. Within minutes, she’d tracked him down working on wall reinforcements and he was in route to see what the emergency was.
Lacy was looking at the grimy walls of the office. It had apparently been white at one time, clean rectangles shone where she’d torn down all the boat posters. Most of them had big-busted women who barely contained those big busts with tiny bits of cloth and string. She looked out of the smudged office window at her family. Johnny was clomping around, still with a bit of a limp, as Jessie was pointing out something for the kids to haul off, either to the dump or the storage unit. It seemed to her that Jessie had filled out so much in the past few months, had grown and now stood half a head taller than her. He wasn’t the same boy she had known for sixteen years. Her baby had been snatched away and in his place was a brooding young man, permanently scarred inside and out, by what he’d been through. It was a mystery to her how he’d healed so fast, he’d been on death's door when he drove that old car of Johnny’s through the gate. A month later, you’d never know he had been shot and beat and had broken bones. Stacey was sure there was something in the IV drip he’d been given. It was powerful medicine, but by the time they realized how miraculous his recovery was, there was nothing left in the bag but dried residue. The only part of him that wasn’t as good as new was the nasty gash on his face. Stacey had said there were muscle and tendon damage that went too long without being repaired. It had healed into a scar that pulled his lip into a sneer and ran all the way up to his eye. There was something dark inside of him, too. It hadn’t healed yet, and maybe never would. Everyone had been through a lot, but her baby had been through more. Doug had told her how he got the scar, Jessie claimed he didn’t remember.
They had been trapped in some trees, trying to get to the lake after breaking out of the school. He said Jessie went mad, started killing all of their classmates and teachers that had them surrounded. He said that the pile of bodies was so high that one of the zombies had leaped and sunk its claws into Jessie's face, ripping it wide open. Jessie had kept killing, though. Kept cutting them down. He was the only reason they escaped.
Johnny told her a story he’d heard repeated by some of the guys at the bar, about Jessie beating a zombie to death with its own daughter. It was a tale he’d told them one night when he first started drinking heavy, when he would get drunk after a few shots.
Whatever had been in that IV bag had fundamentally changed him, and she wasn’t entirely sure it was all for the better.
Jimmy Winchell walked in and she smiled. Back at her old home in Atlanta, she had a few of his CDs. He was one of country music’s biggest stars a few months ago, today he would be helping her put in a toilet. She’d have to check if the little record shop in town had any of his music. She still wanted an autograph.
5
Gunny
Gunny had to admit, he was a little bit jealous. This was the kind of crash pad he’d dreamed of having when he was young and single, growing up in the Eastern Kentucky Mountains. He’d been turning wrenches for the whiskey runners since he could hold a tool and a shop like this, set up at the foot of the holler, would have been something special. He’d been avoiding the office and his duties while working on Jessie's new place for the last couple of days. Lacy had turned some dirty offices and even dirtier bathrooms into a charming little bachelor’s pad, complete with a kitchen. That was all fine, but what he really appreciated was the garage area. A three bay, one of them with a hydraulic lift, and plenty of room for toolboxes and welders. The kids had snagged one of the arcade machines out of the bowling alley and Slippery Jim had done something to it so it was set on free play. The sounds of Pacman were coming from the corner as Jessie pulled the old Mercury into the center bay, the one with the lift, and he limped over to push the arms under the frame.
They were going to improve the car as much as they could, build a real Pony Express Runner that would keep him alive, no matter what he ran into. It was the wild, wild west outside of the walls. Bastille had been broadcasting some old radio westerns he’d dug up from somewhere and now it was in everyone’s heads. America had reverted a hundred and fifty years. The dangerous bandito’s of yesteryear were compared to Casey’s Raiders, and the radical Muslims had been compared to wild Indians for a few days, until Dutch and Joey Tallstrider had heard and taken offense. Bastille had decided it wasn’t such a good analogy and hastily apologized to the two pissed off Indians. Now he called the radicals still out there godless heathens. He was pretty sure nobody was going to stomp in claiming to be one and claiming to be offended.
Nobody knew what the raging zombie hordes were like when compared to anything in history. There simply hadn’t been anything like them before.
The wild west idea had taken hold and some
were already romanticizing the wide-open spaces. Not many people wanted to go outside the walls, though. That was a good way to get yourself killed.
Gunny poked around under the car once they had it in the air, thinking about different ways to improve it while his mind worried about the things he was privy to as the so-called president.
General Carson, his number two, had pointed out that the earliest census for the States was in 1790, and there were nearly four million people way back then. Carson’s best guess, judging from satellite signatures, was there were only a few hundred thousand people left in America, spread out everywhere. Unless more groups were discovered, hidden away, living underground or in high rise buildings in the cities that was all. That wasn’t enough people. Anything could happen to wipe them out. Massive hordes of undead. Some new sickness or flu bug that could kill thousands. Casey’s gang of idiots slowly culling the population. The humans were barely hanging on, still on the endangered species list.
Carson was still trapped inside Cheyenne Mountain and he didn’t have the manpower or the know-how in his small group of men to do much more than he was. Over the winter, they were able to pick up more and more fires with the satellite infrared filters set to anything over one thousand degrees. He was able to track Casey and his band the same way, following their path as they headed west, then watching the signature of dozens of fires spring up every night. Carson had made it clear that they wouldn’t have the satellites for much longer. He had no way of controlling them, he could only access what they were downloading. Without the gentle nudges from the engineers, or the computers keeping them on their path, their orbits were slowly getting out of sync. Only a little at first, but a few centimeters out of route became a few meters, then a few kilometers, then one by one, they would be pulled back into the atmosphere to burn up on reentry or hurled out into space. He had a few more months, Carson had said. After that, nothing was guaranteed. Systems started breaking down, minor glitches became major problems, and all they could do was watch some of man’s most advanced creations wind down and end an era that may take centuries to be duplicated.
Zombie Road IV: Road to Redemption Page 4
