That was when they started forcibly taking prisoners. They had early versions of the super soldier serum and it gave them the motivation, the drive to want more. To become stronger. If a few more unwilling patients had to die to get it just right, so be it. Things had progressed so quickly, sometimes she thought she was the only one left who was still sane. Now, she wasn’t even sure of that. She’d just willingly, and with foreknowledge, been part of mass murder. She knew what she’d been told, that it was necessary to cement the faith, but it was all a lie. Why did they have to keep up the charade of Egyptian gods and messengers and phony prophecies from hieroglyphics and five different religions? Did no one see that it was careening out of control? Six months ago, did hundreds of people think they’d be living in an Indian casino, worshipping cats and jackals, cheering as their fellow citizens were eaten alive because they were deemed unworthy? Did they really believe the stories her dad was telling them?
Yes, they did, she concluded. They did because they wanted to, maybe even needed to. They were committed, and her father was a charismatic mad genius himself. He’d gotten them to believe a lie, to rejoice in murder, then celebrate with sex. They’d never go back to who they were. They had drunk the Kool-Aid.
10
Gunny
They were running fast and light again, driving hard, headed west and eating up the miles. Another distress call. No one within a thousand miles to help. Gunny and the Lakota Crew were on the way, but it would take days. There needed to be more settlements, or he needed to find someone that could pilot some attack helicopters.
Gunny was still a little amazed at how fast nature was reclaiming the earth, it hadn’t even been a year. The road they were running was covered in tumbleweeds and drifts of sand in places. Fort Sumner was only a few miles ahead, their next fuel stop. These beasts of machines they were driving stayed thirsty, but that didn’t matter much, not when gas was still plentiful and free. In a few years, if they couldn’t get a refinery back up and running, everyone would be driving diesel-powered war machines. Diesel would still be good enough to use a decade from now, long after the gasoline had lost all its octane and would barely burn, let alone power a vehicle.
They came to a convenience store with pumps and Gunny swung in. This was the town where Billy the Kid was gunned down, shot in the back by a sheriff who hid in a dark room and ambushed him. It was a desert oasis in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. An empty town filled with aimless undead and the creak of things going to ruin. Coyotes and wildcats roamed the streets, shuffling feet and the wind sighing through broken windows were the only noises. Miles of nothing before they got to it, and miles of nothing when they departed. A hundred undead were mangled on the road when they left and a hundred chased them out of town, stumbling and baking in the heat. Food for the vultures.
General Carson had lost another satellite, this one due to a collision with something. There were over seven thousand satellites from a hundred different countries and businesses in orbit. Every one that collided with another sent that much more debris flying around the earth, slowly being pulled back down to burn up in the atmosphere. The space junk, on its way to reentry, was plowing into other satellites. It didn’t take much to destroy the sensitive equipment. A pea-sized bit of debris, even a large flake of paint traveling at ten thousand miles an hour, could do a lot of damage. If they didn’t go after Casey now, in another six months they might not have an eye in the sky to locate him. They would only be able to track him by the havoc he caused in the little communities that were starting to pop up all over.
Gunny’s broken leg had healed well enough, his gunshot arm only bothered him when it rained. Hollywood claimed he was fit as a fiddle. Bridget was already jogging five miles a day, her leg and shoulder good as new. Scratch had been itching to go for months, the hole in his lung patched and healed. He wanted payback.
As far as they could determine, Casey had spent the winter south of the border in San Felipe, a tourist town in Baja, Mexico. Gunny had been content to let him go if he kept his gang down in Mexico. Let him be the big Kahuna down there. El Hefe of the Baja. He could be another Zapata or Pancho Villa, as long as he kept his band of idiots out of the States. He must have gotten bored or found the conquest too easy, though, and he had been up in Texas raiding outposts and fortified towns. There were a lot of survivors out in the desert. People were spread out; the towns were small and the individuals that lived in areas like that were the type of people who knew how to take care of themselves. When the virus was released, it had already gotten cold up north and a lot of snowbirds were settled in down south in their RVs and winter homes, enjoying the dry desert climate. Many of the old folks didn’t make it, they were too dependent on medicines they could no longer get or were too frail to survive the harsh new reality. Those that did, those that banded together and built walls of RVs parked nose to tail, or fought to fortify a warehouse, were some tough old timers. Hard-nosed, gray-haired men who would yell at you to get off their lawn, and hawk-eyed biddies who could haggle a Turkish carpet seller into submission.
Wire Bender had been talking to a group of survivors set up on the Gila River, outside of Yuma. They had put down all of the undead in the immediate area and were far enough away from town they didn’t have to worry about being found by the zombies. They’d been discovered by Casey’s outriders. The battle was finished before it began. They only had time for one anguished plea for help over the radio before it went quiet.
Fort Sumner, Pie Town, Show Low, and a dozen other dots on the map came and went in a blur. The thundering machines eating up the miles and blasting through towns before the living or the dead had time to register them. It was desolate country, the roads flat and straight, with only an occasional trailer or building set far off in the desert. These were the roads photographers loved to capture and post online with motivational quotes. They looked like they went on forever, narrowing to a point at the horizon. Anyone alive that had been living here was long gone, searching for food or an easier place to defend. The occasional shambler they came across was left splattered on the side of the road, its black blood being sucked up by the sand.
They had been building the war wagons all winter as the town recuperated. Some of them four-wheel drive, some of them designed like Baja racers, all of them built for speed. Big block Fords, Chevys and Mopars, old engines without electronics or computers to break, because if a check engine light came on or a tiny sensor failed, there was no way to fix it. Old engines were simple.
Gas.
Spark.
Air.
That’s all they needed. They would run even if half the cylinders failed. They could still get you out of a bad situation. Oversized tires with truck shocks and springs gave them ground clearance, bars welded over the windows gave them security. The old muscle cars were big and roomy, plenty of storage space for extra ammo and gear. Back seats were taken out and made into beds and they slept inside, safe and sound. They cannonballed across the country on two-lane roads, only stopping for fuel. They ate behind the wheel, peed in a bottle, and sipped on Jessie’s Trucker Speed concoction. The big tires were singing, the chatter on the CBs carefree, and they all had their radios tuned to the only station in America. Since Bastille had received so many complaints about Scratch’s choice of songs, he wasn’t allowed to make playlists anymore so the music wasn’t horrible. They pushed hard, knowing every day they delayed was that many more people Casey might kill.
Bridget was still having a hard time understanding how people could be so evil, how they could take joy in murder. There were reports from some travelers that they found human bones in the campfire remains. Bones that had been eaten on, and it wasn’t from the coyotes. Gunny and Griz understood, though. They knew it was only too easy to fall so far from decency, that things like eating people seemed normal. It was much easier to go crazy than it was to stay sane. Whatever excuse they used to justify their actions would seem reasonable to them. A man strapping on a vest full
of ball bearings and explosives to blow up a Christmas market didn’t do it because he thought it was wrong. He did it because he thought it was right. It was just. It was deserved. Men raping little girls didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. Gang members being initiated were required to go out and kill a random stranger to prove their worth. They did it because they thought it was necessary. It was right.
Casey’s Raiders had been men freed from a maximum-security prison. They were gang bangers and rapists and murderers before the collapse of society. Now they had no reason to try to control themselves. There was no more law to throw them in jail. There was no one to stop them. No reason at all not to do whatever they wanted. The only law was Casey’s Law, and he encouraged brutality. If anyone wanted to join the Raiders, he made them eat the flesh of someone to prove their worth. To prove they were the kind of soulless person worthy to be a part of the greatest band of outlaws that ever lived.
The hard-charging caravan had been at it for nearly nine hundred miles when Scratch came over the radio. “We plan on stopping anytime soon? I don’t want to chug anymore of Jessie’s soup if we’re actually going to sleep tonight.”
“There’s a good spot outside of Payson to get some shut-eye for a few hours,” Griz said. “I delivered a loader to some sand and gravel place a few years back. Big lot, plenty of exits, hidden from the road.”
“Sounds good,” Gunny said. “Take the lead.”
He let off on the gas a little and Griz eased past him in the old Dodge panel van. As soon as they were even, Gunny cut his halogens and Griz lit up the high desert for miles when he hit the switch on his. It was nearing two o’clock in the morning and the timing was good. They could get about four hours sleep and get back at it around sunrise. After they made coffee, he amended to himself. Definitely after coffee.
11
Gunny
It took them three days to get to the RV park where the distress call had come from. They came in quiet and slow on the dirt road north of the Gila River and watched through binoculars and gun scopes for a time. The people had done a pretty good job of building a walled community using telephone poles and tin torn from the sides of old mobile homes. The digger derrick truck was still inside the wall they’d built. It wouldn’t have withstood a massive horde, it was only reinforced tin nailed to utility poles, but it was good enough for where they were in the lightly populated desert. The raiders had either seen their fires at night, or maybe heard them hunting the bighorn sheep or mule deer. The gate was smashed in, the car used to ram it buried in the burned-out husk of the manager's trailer. There were no signs of movement, aside from the turkey vultures and their occasional hopping around from meal to meal.
Griz peered down the scope on his Barrett .50 caliber rifle, the magnification bringing the half-mile distant trailers in close.
“They’re gone,” he said, lowering the gun and edging back from the peak of the roof they were on.
“There’s still some smoke curling up from a fire-pit, though. They probably left this morning.”
The land was flat and scruffy, what wasn’t cropland lying fallow. From the rooftop, they had a good view down into the walled compound. Gunny had the spotter’s scope and with the better magnification, he was watching the shattered windows of the trailers, looking for movement inside. There was none, just the fluttering of curtains. There didn’t appear to be any survivors, no one had started cleanup or dragged the bodies off for burial. He and Griz climbed back down the ladder to join up with Bridget, standing guard at the farmhouse. The others were quietly refilling the car’s tanks from the elevated drums of fuel for the tractors. There were thousands of acres of cotton, alfalfa, and wheat gone to ruin without the irrigation pumps. The olive groves seemed to be doing a little better, they might survive.
“Got you some olives,” Scratch told them as they walked up, handing Griz a handful he’d picked from the nearby trees.
“What’d you do, spit on them?” Griz asked, suspicious of the little act of kindness.
“You wound me,” Scratch said, his hand over his heart. “I would never stoop to such juvenile shenanigans.”
Griz took the green olives then held them out, offering them back. “Then I insist, after you.”
“After all we’ve been through.” Scratch sighed dramatically and popped one in his mouth, chewing it to show he hadn’t tampered with them.
Griz and Gunny just watched and waited as the friendly grin became more and more forced.
“See,” he said. “They’re good. Try some.”
“They do look delicious, my good friend,” Griz said magnanimously. “But you are much too kind, here, have some more of mine.”
He was trying his best not to laugh, his dramatic acting skills so bad everyone else was starting to crack up, too.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t,” Scratch said gamely and pretended to enjoy the horribly bitter raw fruit, which tasted nothing like an olive that had been salted and pickled. His eyes were starting to water as he tried to keep the charade going.
“I think you forgot he spent a lot of years over in the Middle East,” Gunny said and Scratch started cursing and spitting out the acrid, near caustic chunks, accusing him of intentionally trying to poison him, forgetting he had been trying to feed them to Griz. It wasn’t often the big man got one over on him, and he was well pleased with himself, the smug grin splitting his beard.
Hollywood hung the fuel hose back up and closed the caps, his car the last in line.
“RV camp looks empty,” Gunny said. “We’ll go in fast and spread out, though, just to be sure. Let’s roll.”
Griz offered more olives to Scratch as he walked by the young man, still bent over spitting out the taste, and got a middle finger for his troubles.
Ten minutes later, they had cleared the campsite and saw the cooked and half-eaten remains of someone for themselves. The coyotes had been at him or her and body parts were scattered.
Gunny poked at the still smoldering fire-pit with a stick, turning over glowing embers and bits of bone. The fire came back to life when the air hit them, and tiny flames licked at the few bits of wood that hadn’t been consumed. It was a big pit and it had been fed from the woodpile for hours. He didn’t know how long it took to cook someone, probably about like a pig. Six or eight hours, maybe. There were empty beer cans and bottles scattered all around it. Gunny counted the camp and lawn chairs pulled up in a wide circle and there were eighteen of them. Griz came over with a handful of shell casings and laid them out on one of the chairs. There were a dozen various kinds, including shotgun shells.
“There’s a lot of brass from a bunch of different guns, most of them pistols,” he said. “There are some .223, but not a lot. They probably have a few Walmart AR15s and a couple of AKs. No links, so they don’t have machine guns. They haven’t raided an Army post yet.”
Gunny stood and surveyed everything with a practiced eye.
“They rammed through the gate, probably caught them by surprise,” he said, indicating the half-buried car in the burnt-up trailer. “These tin boxes offered no protection, they just shot through the walls.”
Every trailer and camper had holes punched through them, some with hundreds. Those were the ones who fought back, had guns of their own. There were bodies sprawled out on the grounds here and there, people trying to run or fight, cut down and left to rot.
“Looks like they rounded up survivors and had them chained up over there.” He indicated an area near the fence that was trampled down and had a makeshift latrine, just a hole in the ground, in one corner.
“They were here for at least one day, maybe two. Probably had some women, plenty of booze, so they stayed for a while to enjoy the spoils.”
Hollywood pointed out an area under the swing set still dark with blood and a few dried-out intestines. “They strung them up there and gutted them. They cooked them whole, not one piece at a time.”
Gunny nodded and looked at the makeshift spit lying next to
the fire-pit. It was built out of a driveshaft and parts of someone were still attached to it with chains. Most of the body was gone, either eaten by the raiders or the coyotes.
Bridget made the sign of the cross. “At least they weren’t roasted alive,” she said, looking away from the swing set where the gutting and cleaning had been done.
“Yeah. That’s gotta be the worst way to go, being burnt,” Scratch added from halfway across the small lot. He was double checking bodies on the off chance someone had survived.
“They took prisoners, though,” Gunny said, indicating the area where people had been chained. “Griz, any idea how many?”
The big man looked closer at the mess of footprints and after a minute said, “Maybe eight or ten. Hard to tell for sure.”
“They’re a half day ahead of us,” Gunny said. “Judging from all the empty beer bottles, they probably slept in and left late this morning.”
“If they’ve got a bunch of prisoners, they might be headed back to their headquarters. As far as Carson knows, they’re still down in San Felipe, right?” Scratch asked.
“Yeah,” Gunny said. “If we hustle, maybe we can catch them before they get there.”
Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus | Books 4-6 | Jessie+Scarlet Page 8
