Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus | Books 4-6 | Jessie+Scarlet

by Simpson, David A.

  The war room was in the court house and some unfamiliar faces were there when Gunny and Griz walked in with cups of coffee from the diner. He knew captain Wilson who had brought in a group of survivors from Memphis, Lieutenant Cobb who had been assigned to guard President Edmunds and the Mayor of Lakota whom they had rescued from the basement fallout shelter. He was already politicking for governor, maybe even president. Gunny didn’t recognize an old black man with a full head of gray hair, but Griz greeted him warmly, asked how the trip had been and if they were being treated right.

  “We are.” he said. “Miss Meadows set us up in the RV park, got a nice view of the lake.”

  “Enough chit chat.” Cobb said in his gravelly voice. “Gunny, what are we up against? What’s their numbers? What kind of ordinance do they have?”

  The meeting got under way and every fifteen or twenty minutes, Lexi, the girl Gunny had met in the café that morning, would bring in coffee and refill their mugs or refresh the plate of donuts Martha and Cookie had made. It hadn’t taken long for society to get back to normal he mused as he tuned out when they started talking about supply routes. He just took it for granted the lights would come on when they flicked the switch. The garbage would disappear every Thursday when he set the can on the curb. The water would be hot when he wanted a shower. And of course, coffee would be served at staff meetings.

  Had it really only been ten months? At this time last year, his biggest concern was setting aside some extra money each payday because the motor in his Peterbilt was coming due for a rebuild; it had started burning oil. He had been worried about Jessie misbehaving in school and they couldn’t afford the military academy where he wanted to send him. The boy spent entirely too much time playing video games, a little discipline would do him good. He had barely trusted him to drive to the store by himself to get a gallon of milk.

  Then September happened. The world as they knew it had ended. Billions were dead, humans were no longer at the top of the food chain, they’d been worried about the nuclear power plants melting down, there were the Jihadi’s planning on mopping up the survivors, they had no electric, no running water, no sewers, no nothing. They only had a will to survive and against all odds, they had. Muslim attacks, zombie attacks, that outbreak of the flu the SS sisters had whipped over the winter, attacks from Casey and that weird cult from Canada… Nothing had been able to stop them from rebuilding and thriving. They had blown the bridges crossing the Mississippi and dynamited the mountains on the roads leaving the Western states. The landslides didn’t make it impossible to walk out but most of the undead lost interest trying to climb over the rubble. He didn’t even know how many crews they had out slowly driving armored trains through the major cities and leading the undead out into the desert to bake.

  Now they were talking about setting up some fish farms and Gunny zoned out. He hated meetings. He looked over at the map of the States, of all the new settlements that were rebuilding and starting to thrive. They had thousands of good, honest, hard working men and women but they were spread too thin. Three hundred fighters in Tombstone wouldn’t stand a chance against a thousand Raiders with RPG’s. The Tower up in Oregon that Jessie found was the pinnacle of all knowledge and essential for the rebuilding but it had no defenses yet. A platoon of armed men could take it down in a matter of minutes. Blackfoot had a few hundred people, good fighters, but they were wild and unorganized. There were dozens of other dots on the map, spread out over twenty different states. Small, fortified towns or farmsteads and a couple of Amish and Hutterite communities. Isolated and alone, none of them stood a chance against a determined foe.

  Cobb circled back to defenses and made it clear Lakota was heavily fortified and Casey had to know he would take massive losses if he attacked head on.

  Captain Wilson wanted to get a few more tanks and place them across the river in case they attacked by boat, the Mayor wanted more guards on the walls and Gunny noticed Eustice didn’t say a word, just took it all in. The meeting wound down after a few hours and Cobb dismissed everybody. Gunny grabbed his coffee cup and was getting ready to leave when the old man stopped him.

  “You two stay, I need you to tell me about Mexico.” he said, indicating him and Griz.

  The others filed out and he yelled at the last of them to keep the noise down and close the door behind you.

  Eustice was still sitting in his chair and when the door shut, he leaned forward and spoke.

  “It’s both of them.” he said and Cobb nodded.

  “Thought so. That’s a shame.” he replied and let out a heavy sigh.

  “You want to fill us in?” Gunny asked, understanding that Cobb wasn’t really interested in a report about what happened in Mexico.

  “The Sergeant Major had an interesting history working in counter terrorism before he retired.” Cobb said “He and Cadillac Jack set up a little sting operation because they had a hunch. Turns out they were right. Dani brought back a load of ground to air radios but we kept that hush hush. Wire Bender set up a round the clock listening station and they’ve been scanning and monitoring.”

  “Late last night, somebody was talking to Casey. It sounded like the new guy, Dustin.” Eustice added “He reported that you’d returned and there was going to be a meeting today to discuss strategy and he’d let them know what was said.”

  “His wife.” Gunny said, realizing why Cobb had harped on how strong Lakota’s defenses were when she was in the room. “I thought she was being awful attentive.”

  “Yep.” Eustice continued. “Someone also snuck out to the airplane and disabled the radio in it. They snapped the cable so it might look like it happened naturally.”

  “We have a spy here in town?” Griz asked, realizing what they were saying.

  “Two of them.” Cobb replied. “and they have their own radio. I imagine they’ve been reporting in every night ever since they got here. I didn’t want to tip our hand, as long as they don’t know we know, we can use them to feed Casey bad intel.”

  Gunny took a deep breath. He was a checkers kind of guy, not chess. His first instinct was to go shoot them but Cobb and Eustice had different plans that involved subterfuge and lies.

  Gunny and Griz listened.

  “We know Casey won’t attack Lakota directly.” Eustice said. “Especially after what we let ‘slip’ today. He knows it’s too heavily fortified. His plan is to make us come to him.”

  “He didn’t say how he’s going to accomplish that, did he?” Griz asked, ready to disregard anything Casey planned. The guy was an idiot as far as he was concerned.

  “He’ll start on the small settlements.” Gunny said, figuring it out in a flash. “He knows we use ham radios to communicate. He’ll start wiping them out, one by one, letting them send out their cries for help. We’ll go to their aid, we won’t let him slaughter them, he knows this.”

  Cobb nodded. “He didn’t come right out and say that but he’s calling all his troops to him. A giant gathering on the Hopi reservation. He’s going to take over the cliff top city, I imagine. It’ll be hard, it’s a good defensible town on the high ground but all the Indians have is some ordinance from the National Guard base. Some crew weapons and grenades, nothing bigger. Casey has the numbers, he’ll be able to take it and once he does, he’ll have a fortress in our back yard.”

  “That sounds like a plan Edmunds would come up with.” Eustice said then went on to explain when they turned to stare at him.

  “I worked in the State Department for a while and I’ve always been a news junkie. I followed her career when she was Secretary of State and she pulled similar shenanigans in the middle east. She didn’t care about collateral damage, as long as the end goal was met. Remember a few years back when there was a rash of wedding parties and funerals getting blown up just to get one bad guy? That was her. We came, we saw, he died, she was famous for saying and laughing about it. Can’t prove ‘em all but some conspiracy sites had a running tab of all the people that crossed her then mys
teriously committed suicide. There were a lot of them, she’s bad news. She’s hella smarter than some ex con, too. She never got caught doing her crimes.”

  “So they have a mastermind who is calling the shots, now?” Griz asked “and that dumbass Casey thinks he’s still in charge?”

  “From what we can gather, that about sums it up.” Cobb said. “Dani said she’s ruthless, had all his Marines killed and abandoned a bunch of officials in Atlanta. She wants control of what’s left of the States and she won’t stop until she gets stopped.”

  “I’ll have to add her to my people to kill list.” Gunny said “But what are we going to do about the immediate problem? A thousand raiders getting ready to take out one of our towns. We need to help.”

  There was silence from Cobb and Eustice and they both looked down.

  “What’s the problem?” Griz asked “We’ve got tanks and Bradley’s. Let’s convoy down there and give support.”

  “They’re out in the middle of the desert. They’d see us coming for miles and they have RPG’s. We’d never get close.” Cobb said.

  “As near as we can figure, they have a thousand fighting men and at least that many more in support who can pick up a gun.” he continued. “I can get other settlements to send a few men but they don’t have any to spare either. If we pull every fighter we have and attack, we may or may not win. Either way, casualties will be high. Real high. Take away the tanks and we’re pretty evenly matched as far as fire power goes but they outnumber us three to one.”

  “By the time we gather an army and make it to Arizona, there’s a good chance they’ll have already taken the town anyway.” Eustice said. “If they have, then it was a wasted trip, we’ll never get them out. It would be like the charge of the light brigade if we tried. We’d throw away most of the good men left in this world and just make it easier for them to take our towns, which would be left mostly undefended.”

  Gunny sighed deeply. It wasn’t easy to turn your back on a friend but they were right. A full-blown assault would wipe out most of the survivors with no guarantee of success.

  “We need to start evacuating towns.” Gunny said. “We need to get them out before he gets there.”

  “Yep. We can afford to lose the farms and ranches.” Cobb said. “There are still plenty of warehouses we haven’t hit yet. There was enough food sitting on the shelves to feed three hundred million people for a few weeks. As long as we don’t lose lives, we’ll be okay. That’s the most important thing.”

  “Too bad we can’t do an airstrike when they’re all gathered together. Hell, a single Apache could finish them off.” Gunny said.

  “Well we can’t.” Cobb said matter of factly. “So we’ll save who we can, get everyone into fortified cities and concentrate all our defenses around them. They won’t be able to break through and once we draw them out, we can attack the flanks. We should be able to thin them out with every engagement.”

  “They have enough men to lay siege, to completely surround us and starve us out.” Gunny said. “Just like wars were fought in the middle ages, before we had airplanes and missiles. We need to send in another hit team to take out Casey and Edmunds both before they can even get started.”

  “Ain’t gonna happen.” Cobb said. “It’d be a suicide mission. We don’t have time to mess around, we need to start pulling people out and it needs to happen fast. We’ll keep it quiet, we won’t let the spies know what we’re doing. As far as they’re concerned, we’re worried but not too worried. We’ll let them think we’re dismissing Casey as unimportant, something we’re not too concerned with for now.”

  It didn’t occur to Gunny to question the decisions. Guys smarter than him had put the plan together and the bottom line was to save as many lives as possible.

  “And you need to start showing up for work.” Cobb said as the meeting was finally ending. “Start doing your duties, quit running around acting like you’re still in the Army. You’re the president, you need to act like it. Maybe you should wear a suit once in a while, too.”

  “Okay, Top.” Gunny said as he and Griz left the office.

  “Got a plan?” Griz asked when they were walking down the courthouse steps.

  “Not really.” Gunny said. “Gonna go kill Casey. You in?”

  “When we leaving?” Griz asked.

  74

  Jessie

  The kids didn’t offer hospitality, didn’t ask them back to their hideout. They were still being secretive and disappeared into the night when the conversation was over.

  “Well, that was weird.” Jessie said. “But I guess it makes sense. They never would have survived without each other.”

  Scarlet had folded the spikes down on the side of the car and sat on the fender, idly drumming her feet against the tire and staring at the freshly dug grave. Two little kids gunned down for no reason. There were flowers and a few stuffed bears from the gift shop on top of it and she didn’t answer Jessie. Just sat and stared. It was sad for him, a waste of innocent life, but he wasn’t angry. He’d killed the men responsible. He’d evened the score. Scarlet felt their deaths on a deeper level. It was her people who had done it. The army she had helped establish, had helped grow and had helped brainwash so much they would gun down kids. She didn’t have any more tears, any more rage, any more feeling sorry for herself. She had done this. She was as guilty as the men splayed out in the warehouse, food for flies.

  Jessie watched her for a minute then flipped on the ham. He had to let Lakota know about the kids and that they needed a few livestock trailers sent out as soon as they could. The town would be having some interesting new residents soon.

  “10-4” Wire Bender said and Jessie wondered when the guy slept. No matter what time of day or night he called, the old man answered. “It might be a while, though. Your old man came back in yesterday and they think Casey and his damn raiders are getting ready to attack. Got a lot on our plate at the moment.”

  “Gotcha.” Jessie said. “You need me to do anything?”

  “Yeah. Keep your radio on. Your dad was bitching at me because he can’t get a hold of you.” Wire Bender said, feeling completely put out. “Your mom, too. I’ve started slipping out the back door every time I see her coming.”

  “I’ll check in tomorrow.” Jessie said. “Promise.”

  He turned the radio back off.

  It interfered with the stereo, caused static and a humming sound in the speakers when it was turned on.

  Scarlet was still staring at the mound of earth, Nefertiti curled up in her lap. Jessie checked the moon, guessed it was around two in the morning and looked around at the nearby buildings. They needed a place to crash out, the car was too small for all four of them. Maybe he should get a little camper and tow, that might make things a little easier. Hook up some kind of disconnect switch he could operate from inside the car in case he needed to ditch it in an emergency. Tommy could probably figure something out, he’d have to ask about it tomorrow when he called in.

  He grabbed her go bag, a lot lighter than his with no guns or ammo and tossed it on the hood. He shouldered his, flipped the kill switches and waited for her to join him. They trudged over to the local grocery store that was on the first floor of a sturdy two story brick building. Upstairs were living spaces and the four of them climbed, Bob in the lead, senses alert for danger. The place was empty and they found the bedrooms, barely taking time to strip out of sweat stained clothes before crashing out.

  Jessie awoke to the smell of coffee and frying meat. Scarlet had his little camp stove set up on the counter and was cooking them a breakfast of reconstituted eggs, spam and fried apples. She was freshly scrubbed, wearing clean clothes and back to her usual cheery self.

  “I brought up a case of water from the store.” She said. “It’s in the bathroom, get cleaned up. I set you out some clean clothes, too. You stink.”

  Jessie sniffed at his shirt and wrinkled his nose. She may have a point. He headed for the coffee pot but she blocked his
way, spatula in hand, and pointed down the hall.

  “Wash first.” she said.

  “Yes mom.” Jessie grumbled but obeyed.

  He was back, clean and hungry within minutes and she poured his coffee into a porcelain mug. She set a heaping plate before him, the apples fried with cinnamon and brown sugar, the eggs sprinkled with paprika and the spam sliced thin and browned crispy.

  Jessie looked at the plate then at her with narrowed eyes. “What’s going on?” he asked “Why are you being so nice? Did you wreck my car or something?”

  “You have suspicious mind.” she said then primly added. “I’m always nice.”

  “Right.” Jessie snorted but picked up his fork. The food looked to good to wait any longer.

  “Besides.” she said “I’m buttering you up.”

  “This ought to be interesting.” he said around a mouthful of eggs.

  “We have to stop my father.” she said. “I know how they operate, their strengths and weaknesses. It’s up to us.”

  Jessie stared at her as he took a sip of coffee and knew she believed what she was saying. She had the look of someone with their mind made up.

  “Me and you against a thousand?” he asked. “Yeah. Good plan.”