They never went in, there were twelve people in there. His parents, his brothers and sister and their families. They each had their own houses on the property, but everyone always met at the farmhouse for breakfast and to start the day with family. After that, it was school and work and chores and ranch duties, but you’d better have a good excuse for Mamma Abelson if you weren’t there.
Jessie spotted the ranch sign hanging over the driveway and turned in.
The dirt path twisted and turned for a few miles before it opened up on a little oasis in the high desert. There were a dozen buildings spread out among the tall, old oak trees. A few of them were houses, the rest were barns and equipment sheds. He picked out the main house easily enough, it was the biggest and the first built when the family started cowboying the land.
He pulled up in the yard and spun the car around so it was facing out. Bob could smell them already and was doing his whine-growl thing. He didn’t like them, they were deadly and something unnatural and he was afraid for Jessie, but he also wanted to attack and kill. To make them stop moving, because every sense he had told him they were worm food and they needed to lay down and act like it. They needed to stop walking around.
Jessie hopped out and double checked his loadout. Both pistols firmly in place on his hips, both knives secured. He pulled on the leather jacket with the reinforced shoulder pads his mom had made. It had disappeared from his shop one day and he was actually starting to think someone had stolen it when Stabby and Scratch brought it back, customized even more.
“Now it’s a proper Zombie Hunter’s leather,” Stabby had said when they presented it to him. They’d added bits of chainmail, some ammo bandoliers, and had painted a skull on the sleeve.
“Metal as fuck!” Scratch had proclaimed, sticking out his tongue and throwing the devil’s horn sign. Jessie had to admit, it did look kinda cool.
He grabbed the SRM 12-16 Griz had pimped out for him. It was a twelve gauge with a rotating magazine that would hold sixteen rounds total, hence the name. There were only twelve of the undead and he was using number four birdshot. Each shell had about two hundred bits of lead so he had more than enough to make a big brainy mess, wade through the glop, see if they had any Ding Dongs, then get the books from upstairs. Piece of cake.
No stupid mistakes, he reminded himself and rechecked everything for the third time. Pull them to you, kill ‘em one at a time, keep constant situational awareness.
“You ready, Bob?” he asked and got a cocked head for an answer. Ol’ Bob knew they were getting ready for something. His hair was already standing on end and his growl came from deep in his chest. Jessie took another deep breath, willed himself calm, and started for the porch steps. Nope, he didn’t have to do this, but he was going to anyway. He liked Wally and his wife, the guy had helped him nurse Bob back to health. He didn’t have any schooling, but he knew a lot about animals and how to take care of them. It was Jessie’s time to return the favor.
They were at the door, he could hear them on the other side, slapping at it and starting to keen. Part of him wondered how they even knew where the door was. They were so brain dead they couldn’t turn a knob, but somehow, they knew the difference between a door and a wall. Most of the time. It was made of solid wood, though. No windows to shoot through. There was a big picture window that led into the living room so Jessie walked down to it so he could see in. Maybe see what he was up against. They followed his footsteps, stumbled over furniture and against the curtains. They tore loose and fell on top of the small horde causing a few of them to start thrashing. A flailing arm sent a heavy lamp flying toward the window and it was cold enough for it to shatter. Jessie had the gun up and started splitting heads instantly, raking it across the clawing crowd. They were fast, they’d been protected all winter inside the house and ten of them leapt, almost in unison, for him. Jessie spun and ran, Bob right on his heels. The undead poured out of the frame, using the bodies of the two dropped by the shotgun as a springboard through the opening. There were a couple that were ten or twelve years old and they hit the porch in a bound, springing like animals after prey. They covered the distance to the steps in a single jump and were reaching for Jessie with outstretched arms, curled fingers, and guttural cries of hunger. He hooked the banister with his free hand and spun down the step, the shrieking crowd right on his heels, tumbling over each other in their eagerness.
“Go, go go!” Jessie yelled at Bob, urging him to leap into the car because he wasn’t messing around. He didn’t have time to waste. Bob sensed the danger and understood the commands and was already in his seat when Jessie dove in, pulling the door shut behind him. The bodies slammed into the bars on the window and clawed with desperate hands and snapped with starving teeth. They were savage. They had been slowly bumbling around inside the house for the past six months with a hungering, gnawing, need that couldn’t be satisfied. If brain-dead, barely aware creatures could go insane from desire, these surely had. Teeth broke off trying to bite into steel. Hands broke and faces were repeatedly bashed against the roll cage on the outside of the car. It bounced on its shocks as Jessie righted himself and stared back at them, watching them demolish themselves. They howled and screamed in unison as Jessie fired up the car and launched down the driveway, the Abelson family close behind. Bob was spitting out harsh and guttural barks, spittle flying, at the undead things running beside them and clawing at the bars. Jessie stuck out his arm to hold him in place, then hit the brakes and threw it in reverse. These things couldn’t be allowed to live, he hadn’t seen any this fast since day one. He nailed the go pedal and let the clutch engage, aiming his back bumper right for them. Bodies flew, black blood splattered his car, and corpses were ripped open by the sickle bar teeth welded to the cage. Bob spun in his seat and started barking at them through the mesh covering the windshield.
“Hush, Bob!” Jessie yelled over the racket. “Quit barking your fool head off!”
He brought the car to a stop near the porch and eyeballed the carnage. A few of them were down for good, but the rest were dragging their way toward him on broken limbs and torn open bellies. This was the first time he’d taken on a crowd of them, the addition of the cutting teeth all along the exoskeleton made a difference. Not one of them was complete. They were missing hands, legs were dangling, and intestines hung out in ropey loops and dragged behind them in the dirt. Jessie dropped it back in gear and ran over them slowly, the oversized tires and the heavy Merc crushing them, sending rotting guts and reeking blood shooting out in all directions. It hissed and steamed when it sprayed on his exhaust and filled the car with a new kind of stink that even Griz couldn’t match after a bowl of fifteen bean soup. On the way back up the drive, he decided to avoid the quivering bodies. His nose couldn’t take any more. They were unable to move more than tiny increments, but they still tried to follow. Still tried to infect. Jessie glanced at the sky as he and Bob got out again, looking for the first buzzards. He didn’t see any but he knew they would come. He pulled out a walking stick from behind the seat and went back to the remains of the family and put each one out of its misery with the spike on the end.
He was getting used to this, it barely bothered him.
“Come on, Bob,” he whistled to his dog, who was still sniffing around the corpses. “Don’t you dare drop and roll in that mess, you’ll be riding in the trunk.” He cleaned the spike by shoving it in the sandy soil a few times, stowed it, and then headed back to the house to find the family heirlooms.
20
Hasif
Hasif set up the solar panels on the flattened stone peak so they could do their job, give them a little power. It was the only chore that would take him outside into the sunshine, into the fresh air, and he needed to gather his thoughts. It was already in the 70s, a slight breeze was coming from the Mediterranean Sea a hundred miles to the north, but it held no scent of the ocean. It no longer smelled like death either, so he had that to be grateful for.
It was early spring,
they’d been cooped up inside the great pyramid since October and he hadn’t realized what a drudgery it would be, sharing the small, cramped spaces. They’d lost two of the solar panels during a windstorm and now were limited on how much power they had to recharge their lights. He and Fariq had purchased the best camping gear they could find before the fall, but it was wearing out and wearing down. After six months of continual use, the remaining solar panels were sand scored and barely putting out a charge. The rechargeable batteries in their flashlights and lanterns were nearly worn out, they would go dead within hours. His patience was nearly worn out, as well. His children got on his nerves, his wife got on his nerves, his best friend got on his nerves. The food they had so judiciously hoarded and stored away was getting on his nerves, he was so sick of the same, bland food. The plan had worked, they had survived the zombie uprising, but they were dying of boredom. In the mad rush to prepare, to hide away enough supplies to ride out the apocalypse inside the pyramid, no one had thought about games or books or something to occupy the mind. For a few months, they had their phones to entertain them, the few games that would work without internet kept them busy, gave them something to look forward to. Now, with the loss of the panels and the others barely working, wasting the trickle charges on the phones wasn’t an option. He and Fariq had spent hours making a chess set, and backgammon and checkers for the children, but he was tired.
Tired of the bickering, the games, the pyramid, the food, the monotony life had become. Sometimes he thought he would rather be in prison. Fariq and his wife had taken the events as a sign that somehow they weren’t devout enough, that Allah was angry his will hadn’t been followed. That the true believers hadn’t been strict enough with the infidels, and this was a way to clear the slate. That going forward there would be no more Jews or Hindus or Christians or any other religion. The one true God had cleaned the world of them and it was their duty to repopulate and live a righteous life. They were already talking about marrying their son to his daughters. The eldest when she flowered, the younger when her time came. He couldn’t prove it, but he was pretty sure they had sabotaged the radio. Fariq’s wife had nothing good to say about Lakota or the rebuilding, and their success had made her seethe. Hasif was the opposite. He tried to convince them it would be the best place to go. If they could get to the ocean, they could find a yacht and sail across. They didn’t have many options, Israel certainly wouldn’t allow them inside their walls, the European countries had abandoned the land and moved to the sea, living in ocean liners and on oil platforms. The more they read from the Koran, the deeper they sank into their beliefs that it was up to them to repopulate the earth with true believers.
Hasif had to get out. He needed to get his wife and their daughters away from the kind of religious fervor that had resulted in the death of billions. If anything, he’d lost his own religion. He didn’t know what he believed anymore, but he knew he didn’t want any part of what Fariq was preaching.
Their split had been slow at first, minor disagreements, friendly banter, discussions about the Koran and their future, where they agreed to disagree. But it escalated quickly when they insisted he had to join them, he had to be strong in his faith.
The deeper they went, the farther away he pushed them. They were already rationing the water, they’d stopped taking sponge baths a month ago. There was enough to keep them alive for another six or eight weeks, but he didn’t think he could last that long. He used his binoculars to check the parts of the city surrounding them and nothing had changed. Everyone was dead and milling around, slowly deteriorating, slowly falling apart, but not fast enough. From his vantage point, there were hundreds of thousands that he could see, millions he couldn’t. The base of the pyramid had a few hundred stumbling around it, forgetting why they were there, but not wandering off. Hasif had led them, back a few months ago, on an ill attempted raid to gather more food, at least some more spices. He and Fariq had made it to the nearest apartment buildings, but there was nothing left. Cairo had been cut off and starving long before the hordes swarmed in. The people that barricaded themselves into houses had long ago died of starvation or suicide. The city had been picked clean by hungry people and they found nothing of use, nothing to eat. The only thing they accomplished was to have a horde of undead chase them back to the pyramid. He’d tried to talk to Fariq away from his wife, to convince him they needed to get away, not wait until the last moment, but he had become as devout as her. He insisted they should make their way to Mecca, he didn’t believe the lies of the Americans on the radio. It couldn’t have been destroyed. It just wasn’t possible. In Mecca, they would meet other like-minded people and commence with the rebuilding of the world, the way it was meant to be.
Hasif had tried to reason with him but in the end, he became afraid at the lengths his friend might go. To keep the peace, he pretended to agree to avoid the violence he saw building. Al-Taqiyya. It was allowed to lie to your enemy and sadly, that’s how it felt. Hasif was pragmatic and made plans based on what he knew, what he saw, and what he could conclude from the facts they had. His friend looking for spiritual answers, mystical revelations, and divine guidance. He was radicalizing himself. The isolation, his devout wife, and hours of prayers every day changed him, turned him into those they had shunned before. They talked of getting a vehicle that could carry them all away, maybe out to the fortresses in the desert the wealthy had stockpiled, for starters. Hasif nodded his head, pretended to agree, and helped him make plans. He watched him slowly descend into a kind of madness. He couldn’t handle their situation and found answers in ancient books, instead of seeking a way to a new future.
Fariq believed Hasif’s daughters were destined to be with his son. The boy was fifteen and eager, not wanting to wait. Every chance he got, he would casually mention that Aisha was only nine when she consummated her marriage with the prophet Mohammed. Hasif wouldn’t have it. His eldest was only twelve, still a baby. The boy could go find a dark corner to do his business, he wouldn’t be doing it with his daughter. He’d seen this before, too many times. Good men gone crazy in their beliefs.
He’d had a conversation with Gun Sergeant Meadows about this very thing many years ago. They spoke of many religions and traditions throughout history that lead the masses down dark paths. Twisted words and beliefs of the founders until they were no longer recognizable. They didn’t know if the Aztecs had started out on day one saying, “Hey, let’s kill people and sell body parts in the markets” or if the Spartans allowed their Agoge trainees to hunt and kill a slave from the very beginning, but they guessed not. It evolved over time. Evil men doing what evil men have always done, perverting something pure and good. It was the stupid leading the dumb. Like the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult in Japan that poisoned the subways with sarin gas. Their leader proclaimed himself the Christ and cobbled together a religion with bits and pieces from Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Nostradamus. The stupid leading the dumb, Meadows had proclaimed, and there was no shortage of dumb people in the world.
Hasif had to get his family out before it got ugly. He could see it brewing and made plans. He wished he could take his friend, but he couldn’t. The six months in confinement had changed them both. Hasif wanted more than anything to go to the States and live in Lakota. Fariq wanted more than anything to destroy it.
21
Jessie
He’d been seeing it for over six months now but sometimes he still couldn’t believe how hard the country had been hit with the virus. He knew how it was spread, through the infected meats after an artificial shortage, but it still amazed him that the delivery system was so efficient. He was driving through the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, in some of the most isolated places in the nation and even up here, the trucks had delivered their deadly cargo. In one day, in nearly every town in America, truckers had loaded their trailers and hit the road from thousands of different freight hubs. Even hundreds of miles from the nearest city, they had made their rounds delivering death. Paw
ns in a diabolical plan that relied on the working man to do his job, same as he did day in and day out. In every nation, the men and women who punched the clock and did what needed to be done, the salt of the earth, had been used to kill the world.
The snow was mostly gone from the roads, it was getting up in the low fifties already during the day, but it still covered the mountainsides. Especially where they didn’t get direct sunlight for hours each day. Jessie had a small horde running after him that he’d picked up in the last little town he’d driven through. Even way up in the mountains, the virus had killed everyone. He didn’t see any of them in the rear view when he cut off on the dirt forest service road, so he figured they would keep running straight. He glanced at the map, the next town was at least thirty miles. If there were any survivors there, they’d be having visitors by tomorrow. It was a small mob, they wouldn’t be much trouble. He probably should have taken the time to shoot all of them but he was in a hurry, he wanted to arrive at the next stop before dark.
He had another fifty miles to go before he reached the survivalist camp in a resort area near Lake Warm and played with his iPod as he whiled the miles away. He ran into occasional deep snow but the car plowed through it, and he had the winches in case he did get stuck. The trunk had a bevy of spare parts and an extensive collection of tools. As long as he didn’t blow the motor or tear out the tranny, he could fix almost anything on the side of the road. He tried not to think about it, he was a long, long way from anywhere if he had to walk, and it still got down in the twenties at night. Bob opened one sleepy eye at him when he started singing along to the music and kind of whined.
Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus | Books 4-6 | Jessie+Scarlet Page 14
