Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos

by Simpson, David A.

  “No.” Griz said. “Had buddies that did some Seal training there at the MOUT sight. They said it looks just like Afghanistan, it’s a desert.”

  The bell above the door tinkled as Hollywood, Scratch, Bridget and Stabby barged in, spotted the men in the back and made a beeline for them.

  “What’s this I hear about a mission to run out west and pick up a bunch of squibs?” Scratch demanded.

  “Where’d you hear such a thing?” Griz asked “You can’t believe every dumbass rumor you hear floating around.”

  “Twitter.” Bridget said and Gunny rolled his eyes. The Tower had rolled out the app recently and much like before the fall, anonymity brought out the worst in people.

  “Conspiracy theories.” Gunny said.

  “In the paper.” Scratch retorted and rattled it for emphasis as he read from Bastille’s headline story. Our well-intentioned but misguided president has once again arbitrarily made a decision that affects us all without the input or guidance of city council. He has agreed to add thousands of naval men to our burgeoning population that have never had to fight the undead scourge, the Anubis army or Casey’s Raiders. They were at sea when the virus was released on the unsuspecting world and have been sheltered from any inconvenience or hardship while spending the winter on a tropical island. Now that they have exhausted all of their resources, they will be invading our town and consuming our very limited supplies.

  “What limited supplies?” Gunny asked and grabbed the paper out of Scratch’s hands to skim over the story. “We have warehouses full of stuff and plenty more is out there for the taking.”

  “He’s still mad about the time when we ran out of toilet paper.” Hollywood said.

  “Booze is getting limited.” Stabby said. “It’s already hard to get Jack Daniels and Jim Beam.”

  “They’re Navy.” Griz said. “They’ll drink homemade rotgut and won’t be able to tell the difference.”

  “Women.” Bridget said. “I can’t even walk down the street without some body hitting on me. Add another thousand men and that’s another thousand problems.”

  “They’re not all coming here.” Griz said. “There are a bunch of other walled cities, we ain’t the only one.”

  Gunny scowled at the headline and wondered who had leaked the story. They were still in talks, still considering options. He had tried to negotiate to get a 50 50 mix of men and women with skill sets he needed but that wasn’t going to happen. There were less than a thousand women and almost five thousand men. Most of them had trained on weapons systems or ship maintenance, not exactly the skills needed in a post-apocalyptic world but they were young and healthy. They could learn a new trade. He was okay with that, they were Americans, they were soldiers and it might be a strain at first but everything would work itself out.

  Their situation was getting desperate on San Clemente. The big ships that hadn’t been infected had used up most of their fuel to get to the island off the coast of California, the nuclear sub needed critical maintenance and would have to be scuttled, their food was gone and they didn’t have the small arms ammo to mount a raid on the massively overpopulated mainland. He had never considered refusing aide although the mayor and members of the city council had. The plan was to reduce the numbers on the island so it could be self-sustaining and disseminate the rest of the men and women to the various walled cities.

  He crumpled the paper and tossed it aside. They needed able bodied men. With the expansion of the dairy farm and clearing the woods outside the gates to plant crops, they were already woefully undermanned. They needed more mechanics. More truck drivers. More militia to man the walls and escort the deliveries between towns. The SS sisters had a few apprentices but there would be medics in the group that could help lighten their load. Cascade needed fishermen and lumberjacks. Tombstone wanted to start planting crops and needed hands to till the soil and help with the harvest. Blackfoot was trying to relocate solar panel farms closer to their town and needed every hand they could hire.

  “So what’s your beef, anyway?” Griz asked as he admired his handiwork, turned it this way and that checking for imperfections. “You worried about some pollywog gonna steal your girlfriend away?”

  “No,” Bridget said. “We’re worried about you two sneaking out and not taking us.”

  “Yeah.” Scratch agreed. “Like last time. You’re taking a train, aren’t you? Slippery Jim said one is getting geared up for something. He said Tommy is adding a bigger blade up front and putting a bunch of bus seats in some of the rail cars.”

  “I swear, it’s impossible to keep anything quiet in this town.” Gunny grumbled “How does that kid know so much? I ought to put him on the payroll so I’ll know what Bastille is going to blindside me with next.”

  “So, when we leaving?” Bridget asked.

  “Who said anything about taking you clowns?” Griz asked as he and Gunny both reassembled the weapons and checked the slide action at the same time.

  “We’re the presidential protection squad.” Scratch said. “Where he goes, we go.”

  “The only thing he needs protecting from is you idiots.” Griz said. “And put that back!”

  Scratch had a box of ammo in his good hand and was trying to slyly slip it into his pocket.

  “We’re leaving in the morning.” Gunny said as he holstered his gun. “You lot get your gear loaded; we roll at dawn.”

  “So early?” Hollywood complained. “You know I need my beauty sleep.”

  “Nobody’s gonna disagree with you there.” Stabby said and dodged a soft sided holster tossed at his head.

  “Get out!” yelled Griz when a display of old Kalashnikovs tumbled to the floor adding a few more scratches to their already well-worn stocks. “And I’m charging you double for that box of shells you thieving bastard!”

  The bell over the door tinkled merrily as the crew ran out, laughing and in high spirits. It had been a while since they’d had any kind of action. The town had become a little too boring.

  7

  Jessie and Maddy

  “How did Jessie and I meet?” The Scarlet entity repeated the question. “To understand how, you must first know why. Jessie sacrificed himself for your world. He knew he couldn’t fix it so he allowed himself to be killed so they couldn’t destroy it even more than it was.”

  Jessie stopped, the fork halfway to his mouth, and looked surprised. He knew Horowitz had tried to kill him, or the other him, but he hadn’t thought he’d allowed himself to die on purpose. The journals had gotten vague, the other him had stopped writing any kind of details about his later trips, mostly cryptic notes, coordinates and equations. He’d thought the guy had had enough like he had in Scarlet’s room at the Anubis Headquarters. He was ready to lay down and die.

  “But he’s not dead. He survived.” Jessie said, glad that she seemed to be in a talkative mood.

  He chose his words carefully; he didn’t want her to clam up again and leave him frustrated trying to piece together the parts of the story that weren’t written in the journals.

  “Yes. Because I saved him.” She said matter of factly.

  Jessie waited for her to go on and after a moment of internal debate, she started talking and continued for a long time.

  “Jessie told me many things on our long journeys between planets. It was at my request that he started writing in the journals, it helped him keep things in perspective. To remember what was real and what wasn’t.”

  “Eat.” She said, as she began the story. “The sarshwan loses its flavor if you let it sit too long. I will tell you of me, our meeting and what I know of the things that are not written.”

  Horowitz spun one of the knobs at the top of the board. The one that set the year. He smiled and spun it some more.

  Then some more.

  Jessie didn’t care. He was dead and he knew it and he was okay with it. The world was rebuilding, he had done his part and he was tired. The image of his dad dying of radiation sickness, his mom a lifeles
s husk curled up on the floor and the tale Gunny had told of a frozen, poisoned world made his death seem like a small price to pay. Horowitz was so angry he seemed to forget he needed Jessies blood to live through the jump. No one knew about the vest and Marilyn wouldn’t tell them. It might be years before they figured it out and before then someone would avenge his death. Horowitz would meet a quick end. His dad or one of the retrievers would find out what happened and give a little payback. Too many people knew, word would get out.

  Maybe Takeo, he was smart and if he visited the mile marker Jessie told him about, he would figure it all out pretty quickly. The world he was leaving was the best he could hope for. He’d made everything worse every time he tried to make it better. He hadn’t saved Scarlet; he hadn’t fixed anything. The zombies were still here, but so was Lakota. Things would work themselves out.

  He wished the CEO would quit stalling and send him on his way, he was going to join her; he wasn’t afraid. He rolled his hand, made a hurry up gesture at Horowitz and closed his eyes. The man reddened and stabbed the button to send him to oblivion.

  Horowitz had randomly spun a few knobs, concentrating on dialing up the date, not really understanding what the others did. The accelerated tachyons hit Jessies’ dematerialized atoms and sent them rocketing off through space on the random trajectory he had punched in. It only took seven minutes until he was spread out a thousand miles long in a mini comet going faster than light and picking up speed. He should know nothing. See nothing. Remember nothing. He should be dead for all intents and purposes but he was still complete. He was all there down to his leather jacket and the locket around his neck. The neurons maintained their connections and he passed the time in a hazy fog. Not awake, not aware but not black with nothingness either. It might take a year for his unconscious consciousness to recognize the flickering light of a planet pass by and then forget what it registered and be lost in a haze of semi nothingness again.

  Time passed and the planets of the solar system fell behind him. He shot by one star system after another. Sometimes close, within a few hundred billon miles, sometimes far. Years went by, he reached maximum velocity and was an insignificant speck streaking through the vast emptiness of space.

  Horowitz had aimed the beam in no particular direction, his fiddling with the knobs had sent Jessie out into nothingness where he would travel at faster than light speed until he was five million years in the future. He would pop out of the time stream then, rematerialize where ever he was at, most likely in the vacuum of space, and be dead thirty seconds later.

  More years passed, another ten trillion miles from home with each one.

  Planet Earth and its solar system are near the end of an arm of the Milky Way, a spiral galaxy with four hundred billion stars in it. There are another hundred and seventy billion known galaxies, each with just as many stars and most of those with planets. The universe is old and full of life.

  Time passed. Planets spun. Creatures lived their lives, died and the next generation repeated the cycle.

  8

  The AI

  The artificial intelligence existed. She passed the time. She was essentially immortal, an entity of manufactured cells, each with its own data storage, each completely autonomous and each bound to the others. A hive mind organism that could assume any shape or become any type of tool, even those with intricate moving parts.

  A hammer.

  A clock.

  An engine.

  It thought of itself as female, that’s what the programmers had instilled into each cell because that’s what the battleship crews preferred. Her purpose, her prime directive, was to preserve the lives of the humans in her care.

  She had failed.

  Now she had no purpose and was in a state of semi hibernation, occasionally ghosting through the empty corridors in a human form, occasionally drifting through the silent rooms as a mist. She was diminished, she used to be much more. Many of her cells, parts of herself, had been destroyed in the explosions, the fires and the caustic weapons used against her. That had been thousands of years ago and now the mother ship drifted farther into the nothingness, another frozen bit of space junk. Another casualty of the war, its remaining AI with no mission, no job, no purpose. She monitored the few scanners that still functioned, diverted some of the limited power to directional antennas and for centuries there was nothing. She started picking up primitive, weak signals after a thousand years and listened as the worlds advanced. It only took one planet to recover enough to make it to space and the technology spread fast after that. The jump gates between systems that hadn’t been destroyed were utilized and in another thousand years the galaxy was similar to what it had once been. Similar but very different. By monitoring tens of thousands of transmissions, she knew the societies weren't the same. There wasn't a universal peace keeping force, wars between planets were common. There weren't as many worlds that could be colonized as there once were and terraforming was slow. It took years for a moon to be able to sustain life. Her people never came back, the humans who had built her, the ones she was programmed to serve. None ever came within range so she could make her final report. There was no one to notify so they could take the bodies home for a military funeral. The rituals were important but time had passed and they were no longer remembered. The war they had fought and the reasons why it was waged were forgotten. The humans were gone from this part of the galaxy and there were none that could give her a purpose again.

  A collision alert went off and she dutifully awoke from a hundred-year sleep to monitor the situation. There was nothing she could do to avoid it if a rogue meteor was spinning towards her. The hunter-killers that had breached her hull during the war had left the power suppliers in smoking ruin. With scraps and unbroken pieces, she had rigged a solar sail to generate enough power to keep the monitoring equipment operational.

  Part of her entered the system to analyze the data, she didn’t need to turn on monitors and screens like the humans would to visualize it.

  She discovered an anomaly.

  It was coming fast and would pass within a few hundred miles of her but it wasn’t solid. Wasn’t a space rock or bit of debris from another wreck. More of her went into the system to analyze and categorize what the monitors had picked up.

  It was a time jumper. If she could feel emotions, she would have been surprised. Time jumping was forbidden and suicidal. During the rebuilding of the galaxies after the war, the first equipment that was deployed was time disrupters. Every planet, every orbiting station, every mining outpost, every warp gate and space going craft of any kind in the known galaxy had disrupters to instantly and permanently scatter any time jump signatures. Whoever it was would be erased from existence as soon as he came anywhere near one.

  She determined the trajectory, plotted the course and calculated it would pass by her drifting ship in another ninety-seven seconds. She had nothing to do and although she couldn’t get bored, she had been idle for millennia. This was the first interesting thing to happen since the destruction of the ship, the loss of all those in her care and the caustic weapons that disintegrated most of her. She read more of the scans and backtracked the beam to see where it originated from. Again, if she were capable of emotions, she would have been surprised. It was from a planet at the end of the spiral in a forgotten part of the galaxy. A solar system where all the inhabitable planets had been destroyed eons ago in the galactic wars. The beam was a human.

  She immediately went into action. She already knew the status of every system on the ship, the number of resources at her disposal, the charge of the single functioning energy cell after thousands of years, the chances of bending the beam to her ship and the odds of a successful materialization. Fifty-three percent probability of success. She was a machine. If the odds had been anything below forty-nine point nine nine percent, she would have gone back into hibernation and let the jumper be destroyed when he neared the inhabited systems. As it were, there was a possibility to have purpose agai
n. Her decision took five seconds as she calculated all known factors. Ten seconds after that the ship came back to limited life, the millennia long trickle charge from the single, partially operating solar sail gave it enough power to operate systems that hadn’t been decimated during the attack. Oxygen started pumping into the long dead chambers. Gravity was restored. The walls and floors started emanating heat. She split herself into multiple units and raced through the ship to prepare for the arrival. Most of her had been disintegrated during the battle but there was enough left if she made herself small. A piece the size of a drink tube would be enough to initiate the controls inside the ship and most of her went outside to manually bend the collector antenna into position. The part of her still monitoring the systems kept the rest of her informed of light speed, travel trajectory and time until interception. As long as any cell of her was in contact with the ship she could communicate with the various parts of herself.

  She tried to manually spin the antenna array but it wouldn’t budge, the oversized cogs were broken and jammed. She had forty-eight seconds until the beam shot past her position at seven hundred million miles an hour. She was too diminished, there wasn’t enough of her to force a damaged array. She formed pincers and hooked them onto the remains of the antenna dish and bent it but the angle wasn’t right. The diversion beam would miss, the human would streak by.

  Her prime directive was to protect human life.

  She didn’t hesitate.

  She leaped to the antenna then sent herself out into space in a long, thin line. Every cell of her hive mind stretched and reached, a tiny, fragile string that could easily be snapped by a spec of space dust. If it did, that part of her would be lost forever, leaving only the smallest bits of her on the ship. She stretched farther, made the connection dangerously thin but entered the path of the onrushing time stream. The parts of her still inside the controls activated the receiver. The pull from the ship was strong along the line that stretched a hundred miles into space like a gossamer wisp of spiderweb. The subatomic particles of the human diverted, shot down the life line and into the prepared room almost instantaneously. The drinking tube sized bit of her saw him reform, stumble and throw out his hands against the wall. The rest of her saw it too and started retreating but the pull of the faster than light beam ripped part of her away into the slipstream. She tried to get back, to send every cell towards the ship, to hold the line but the pull was too much, too fast. Another piece of her was lost and sent rocketing though space.