Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos

by Simpson, David A.

  Zombie Road VIII

  Crossroads of Chaos

  David A. Simpson

  Zombie Road VIII

  Crossroads of Chaos

  Book 8 in the Zombie Road series

  This is a work of fiction by

  David A. Simpson

  ISBN: ISBN: 9798720224721

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No portion of this text may be copied or duplicated without author or publisher written permission, with the exception of use in reviews

  Copyright 2021 David A. Simpson

  All rights reserved

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. The Traveler

  2. Unfinished Business

  3. Destruction

  4. Loose Ends

  5. Lakota

  6. Gunny

  7. Jessie and Maddy

  8. The AI

  9. Saved

  10. Corrupted

  11. The Madroleeka

  12. A More Perfect Union

  13. A Way Out

  14. Train to California

  15. Guns

  16. Ensenada

  17. Xavier

  18. Star Wars

  19. Jessie

  20. Takeo and Sandy

  21. Lakota

  22. Remembrances

  23. The Girl He Left Behind

  24. Spaceport

  25. Double Cross

  26. Ancient History

  27. Maddy

  28. The Space Pirates

  29. The Queen of the Outer Reaches

  30. The Arena

  31. The Collectors Men

  32. The Agro Planet

  33. Home

  34. Time Travel One

  35. Time Travel Two

  36. Leaving Lakota

  37. Scarecrows

  38. Natacha

  39. Iona

  40. Choices

  41. The Hospital

  42. Sailing Up River

  43. Mona Lisa Smile

  44. New York

  45. Manhattan

  46. Madroleeka

  47. Arrivals

  48. Training

  49. The Traveler

  50. Jessie + Maddy

  Afterword

  Also by David A. Simpson

  Zombie Road VIII

  Crossroads of Chaos

  A two-fisted trucker tale

  Original Cover Art by Wahyu Widodo

  Cover design by Christopher Michaels

  Dedicated to my dearest partner in life:

  The nitpicky, OCD, grammar-Nazi, Robin.

  Wild Cry

  Attributed to Bonnie Parker

  Distance wheels, spike-rimmed

  Across the curve of consciousness.

  And every mile scars deeper

  Until my every sense

  Blends into one gigantic wound

  You of the cool sweet hands,

  Giver of ease

  Alleviator of longing,

  Where are you now?

  Distance is an enemy

  And the stars spit fire,

  The winds rake baleful teeth

  Down every naked nerve,

  Screaming crimson words of mockery.

  You of the deep warm voice,

  Speaker of music,

  Maker of splendid dreams,

  Where are you now?

  Prologue

  The Asteroid

  Jessie passed the days reading the journals, sitting beside Scarlet watching her float in the healing fluids and slowly piecing the strange story together. The other Scarlet, the machine Scarlet or whatever she was started to thaw some towards him. As time passed, she seemed to resent him a little less. He knew she still blamed him for being here, held a grudge that he was the one to show up and not her Jessie. As far as she was concerned, the Traveler should have left him to die and returned like he was supposed to. She seemed more human to him, also. She became less robotic, more accepting as she grew to know him. She showed more emotions.

  “Something I don’t understand.” He said one evening as they sat down together to eat, which was something new. For the past week or so, he hadn’t seen her eat or drink anything.

  “What is that?” She asked, wiping her mouth with a napkin.

  Her table manners were perfect as was everything else she did.

  “How long has he been trying to jump back in time? The journals don’t have dates, they’re numbered and the newer entries don’t have any details. Sometimes just FAILED is written on a page. I guess he got tired of writing down what happened, they’re mostly just math formulas or something.”

  “They are coordinates.” She said. “And he has been trying for many thousands of years.”

  “What?” Jessie said and stared at her. “He couldn’t be that old.”

  “If you count the years he has been in space between times, it has been thousands of years.” She said.

  “Yeah, okay, but that doesn’t count.” Jessie said.

  “It doesn’t?” she asked.

  “Well, no.” Jessie said. “You’re not really alive are you? When the machine breaks you down you die, right? The only reason he survived is because of the zombie virus, you can’t count the time you’re dead as part of your life time, right?”

  “If you have the virus then you don’t really die, do you?” she asked.

  Jessie pondered that for a moment before answering.

  “I don’t remember anything when I came here.” He said. “But I think I passed out before he activated the bracelet. We talked for a few minutes then he…”

  “You spoke?” she asked eagerly, leaning closer to him. “You were awake?”

  “Well, yeah.” Jessie said “I told him his beard looked like shit. You thought he found me after I was unconscious?”

  “Yes!” she said. “You were almost permanently dead when you arrived. I didn’t know you spoke. You really told him his beard looked terrible?”

  A small, enigmatic smile crept across her face and for a second, she almost looked impish.

  “We are in agreement on this. I encouraged him to shave.” She continued “But tell me, what did he say? Did he leave instructions for me?”

  Jessie opened his mouth to answer then closed it and took stock of his situation. When he spoke again, she didn’t like what he had to say.

  “I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine.” He said.

  Her eyes narrowed much like Scarlets would and not for the first time he was baffled at how similar they were. One of his questions was going to be how she did it.

  “Okay.” She said. “I am familiar with this game. I will ask first. Did he give you any instructions?”

  Jessie thought for a moment before answering. He tried to relive the whole weird situation of meeting himself but most of it was a little fuzzy. His head had been broken open and he was in the middle of dying.

  “No.” he replied after considering it. “Not really. He said to put the bracelets in some blue thing on the table. He said don’t come back, don’t try to change anything. After reading the journals I understand why.”

  The Scarlet machine looked down at the table, disappointment on her face.

  “He said to destroy them?” she asked quietly.

  “No, he said put them in the blue thing, an osmi-something if I remember right.”

  “Osmitron.” She said. “It absolutely eliminates anything that is put inside. Permanently. I will g
et them and do as ordered.”

  “Wait. If you destroy them, then Scarlet and I have no way of getting back.” Jessie said and stood with her.

  “That is what he wished so it must be done. It is for the best.”

  “Where are they?” He asked. “I haven’t seen them anywhere. Or any blue osmi-thing.”

  “They are in his space ship.” She said and started towards the door. “They are dangerous items that you can’t have access to.”

  “He has a space ship?” Jessie asked, ignoring the fact that she was treating him like a child and hiding things that he might hurt himself with. “Really? Can you show me how to fly it?”

  She kept her resolute pace. Her Jessie had given her an order, it had to be carried out.

  “Wait.” Jessie said just as she was about to walk into the airlock. “He told me to do it. Not you. If you do it then that wouldn’t be doing what he said.”

  She stopped, one hand on the locked door.

  “Then I will bring them inside so you may proceed.” She said.

  “I’m not going to destroy anything.” Jessie said and turned back to the table. “He’s not the boss of me.”

  They argued back and forth, his obstinate stubbornness as unwavering as her faultless logic and in the end nothing happened. She couldn’t do it by his logic and he wouldn’t despite hers. She could have continued all night and probably all month with the circular arguments.

  “Jessie said they must be destroyed.”

  “I’m Jessie and I say no.”

  “You’re not Jessie.”

  “How about we let Scarlet decide when she wakes up.” He finally said and she relented.

  Jessie went back to his food and it was still the perfect temperature, the dishes themselves keeping the salad cool, the drinks icy and the casserole looking thing hot.

  “Did he say anything else?” she asked

  “Some. But it’s my turn to ask a question.”

  She sat her fork down in anticipation and almost child-like excitement about the game. He had about a million questions he wanted answered. Like why did she eat? Why did they live way out in the middle of nowhere? Who was the Queen of the Outer Reaches? What would they do once Scarlet was healed? Were there loads of different kinds of aliens? Did the space ship have gun turrets? What was sex like in zero gravity?

  He had to be careful though. She was honest but a shrewd negotiator. He believed she’d answer anything but only for as long as she had questions for him and he really didn’t have much to offer. He needed to ask big questions that had answers she wanted to give. Questions about him, the other Jessie. Questions that would help him fill the gaps in the journals.

  “How did you meet?” Jessie asked, hoping her answer would be long and filled with other answers.

  1

  The Traveler

  Jessie sat in the old Mercury and listened to her playlists through most of the night until he finally fell asleep. He allowed himself a few hours to mourn her, to feel sorry for himself but forced the sadness out. He pushed it away and refused to let it pull him down. She was safe, she was with the boy she loved and Maddy would take care of them. He’d examined his heart and it missed her but the unending ache had faded. He knew it had something to do with the strains of the zombie virus flowing through his veins. The same endless, aching hunger for blood they had was the same as his need for her. It had nearly driven him to madness every time he jumped and failed but this time hadn’t really been a failure. They were together, in a sense.

  She was safe, that was what was important, but he felt cheated. He’d been trying to get back to her for so many years and when he finally succeeded, he chucked it all away.

  That didn’t matter.

  She lived.

  That’s what mattered.

  She was with his young and dumb self and no matter how much he resented it, he knew it was for the best. They could grow up and grow old together. If he’d gone back instead of sending the boy it would have been weird. For her no time at all had passed. Years had gone by for him. He had done so much, had so many endless centuries in limbo between worlds where all he did was think slow thoughts that he felt old and tired and worn out. He’d been back to this world and abandoned it to try again more times than he could remember. Maddy would know how many times he’d made the jump, how many years he’d been in between worlds. Hell, she knew everything. He wondered how she reacted to see the young Jessie materialize before her instead of him. It didn’t matter. She’d get over it and take care of them. She would do what needed to be done. He shook the cobwebs out of his head, wondered if he had any coffee stashed away. Now that he’d accomplished the job he’d been trying to do for so long he felt a little empty. A little lost.

  Scarlet was safe now; he could let her go. He was a little surprised but he kind of missed Maddy.

  That’s dumb. He told himself as he fired up the car. She’s a machine. A protector and nothing more.

  They’d been through a lot over the past few years. Sometimes he forgot she wasn’t a real person.

  Madroleeka, or Maddy as he called her, was an ancient AI made up of smart cells that could take any shape. She had pulled him out of the time stream before he was obliterated but he’d corrupted her programming when their cells merged for a moment. She was much diminished, only a tiny fraction of what she’d once been before the war had destroyed most of her. She had been idle, confined to a destroyed battleship drifting in space for ten thousand years until he had reawakened her sense of purpose. She made it her mission to guide and protect his young and dumb self. She’d taken on the appearance of Scarlet and over time she’d acted more and more like her. It was easy to forgot she was just an advanced computer system from an ancient hulk.

  Jessie drove the old Mercury up to the roof where the early morning sun illuminated the world and got the coffee brewing. He dumped everything out of the car and inventoried his belongings. It had been so long he forgot what he had. Bob was happy after he emptied out the sleeping area on the concrete. He discovered an old chew bone that he’d hidden away and found a sunny spot to gnaw on it.

  There wasn’t much but Jessie didn’t need a lot. He dug out the spare Glocks and spent some time with them, did a few gun katas and his hands remembered the ways of war. He cut away the scraggly beard and looked at himself in the mirror for the first time in a few thousand years. It felt that long, anyway. He touched his scar and tried on a smile. It looked like a grimace. Young Jessie was gonna have his hands full when Maddy got them trained up and they went back to inhabited areas. There was a price on his head. He hoped he destroyed the bracelets and didn’t try to come back and fix things, he’d only make them worse. He’d laid the whole time travel is to dangerous spiel on pretty thick. Maybe he’d stretched the truth to get his point across but he knew Maddy would do the right thing. She knew traveling was a hit or miss proposition even with the coordinates that took him lifetimes to get. She wouldn’t let the boy screw things up.

  He really wasn’t that much older, the stress had put the gray in his beard more than age. If he didn’t count time spent in limbo between there and here, he was probably only four or five years older. He was maybe twenty or twenty-one earth years old. He’d done a hell of a lot of living in those years, though.

  He considered his next moves and tried to remember exactly where he was in the timeline. The Anubis cult had just been defeated mere hours ago. His dad had finally gotten rid of Casey and his raiders and the world was slowly rebuilding. The war of attrition was still years in the future and the slow mutants hadn’t shown their ugly heads yet.

  As he sipped his coffee, he replayed everything he’d done immediately after his other self left here. He wanted the future he remembered, the real one before all the time jumps and knew to keep it, he’d have to do some of the same things he’d done before. In order to avoid some of the futures he’d seen, he would have to take steps now to make sure they never happened. He’d met some good people along the way
and had helped a few. He knew where they were and he’d help them again but his biggest concern was the machine. It had to be dismantled. Horowitz’ scientists were already playing with it, running their experiments. That had to stop. Everything he’d accomplished could be wiped out in a nanosecond if they figured it out. Maybe Horowitz had hired some other retrievers to go after the instructions. He’d found them pretty easily using the information Marylin had given him. Others could too.

  He repacked his gear, his mind plotting death and destruction for the CEO and any of his goons that tried to protect him. His movements were angry and Bob watched the boy who was no longer a boy with some confusion. He was the same but not the same. He was his master but different.

  Jessie reached through the open window, flipped on the radio, grabbed the mic and hailed Lakota. He needed to let them know the Anubis cult had been destroyed. For him it had happened a thousand years ago and again yesterday. It was hard to act excited about it. He felt pissed off and cheated. After all those years, after all that effort he’d finally found her. Her mother was rampaging around hunting the soldiers as she lay dying, her cold blood trickling away, her eyes going dead. He’d hit her with a shot of adrenaline to keep her heart pumping for a few more seconds, snapped the bracelet on her wrist and launched her across time and space to Maddy. He didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, didn’t have time for one last kiss. He should have launched himself after her but he had to find the kid. He knew he had to hunt him down and kill him to end the cycle otherwise it would start all over again with the boy making time jumps. When he found him with his head broken open, he should have left him to die. He should be with her right now. He should be the one, not the boy.