The night was endless. They loved each other tenderly, reaching nirvana through gentle caresses and dozed.
They loved each other violently, left marks that would bruise, and dozed.
They broke furniture.
They stumbled into the wild rose bushes and relished the stinging thorns cutting their flesh.
They floated weightless in massaging hot water and whispered undying love. Neither could put a voice to it, had the words to explain, but both knew what they felt must be different because they were different. They weren’t quite human anymore, their very being had been fundamentally changed. The super soldier serum had bits of animal genes in it to make the subjects more aggressive but it also carried the DNA that made a creature mate for life. Like a mourning dove or a wolf. They both felt it, sensed it and accepted it without question. It was deeper than love, darker than lust and stronger than anything they’d ever felt once it had been explored and released. It was some sort of magic and Jessie felt whole for the first time in a long time. The hollowness was gone. The constant searching for something, the endless miles of trying to forget, the sleepless nights of knowing something was wrong and assuming it was guilt all faded away. This is what he was missing. His other half. The lost piece of his soul. This is why he hadn’t been able to leave her or forget her. His very blood knew the truth, it just took his mind a while to catch up.
They dozed. They woke. They loved.
“That penicillin isn’t working very well, I wonder if we should up the dosage.” Jessie said over breakfast of coffee and pancakes with peaches.
“Maybe.” she said. “But it’s supposed to take a while, right? I mean, it’s slow medicine?”
Jessie didn’t know. He only knew the slashes on her face were still kind of raw and the cuts on her legs still had those little black runners of infection. They might be a little smaller but it was hard to tell. He needed to get her to the SS sisters. They had worked on him, knew a little about the serum. They would know how much medicine to give her.
“You want to go to military base today or maybe eat peaches again?” she fluttered her eyes at him and oh so accidentally dropped a peach between her breasts, changing the subject, hoping he would forget about the black lines.
It worked.
He did.
Hours later they pulled up to the Armory. It had been in full lockdown, red alert mode. The staggered concrete barriers were in place, the gates were secured and Humvees with mounted machine guns were just inside the fence. They had been ready for the enemy, it wasn’t a drill and live ammunition had been issued. Then they rotated in to the chow hall for breakfast and the base fell with very few shots being fired. The car idled quietly at the entrance and they only saw a few of the undead milling around, some still had their M-16’s slung over their back.
“I don’t see very many.” Scarlet said. “Want to go in and take them out?”
“This place was activated,” Jessie said. “There’s probably thousands in there out of sight. They might be trapped in the barracks but I doubt it. They were probably all in the motor pool or on the parade grounds waiting for orders. Let’s lead them away. We’ll get them started towards Canada then lose them. Maybe, with a little luck, they’ll run into some of the cult.”
He zig zagged through the barriers, opened the gates wide and started up the road towards the buildings. The base covered nearly forty thousand acres, it was the main training center and had the gun ranges where everyone qualified each year. They found the majority of the undead in one of the motor pools milling around the trucks and Humvee’s. The fence had been knocked down in one area and a scattering of bones was all over the asphalt. Dull brass littered the ground and a Hummer was crashed into the building. A last stand had taken place here. Dull black eyes turned to stare at the movement and noise of the Mercury and Jessie revved the engine. It wasn’t loud but it was enough for them to realize it meant there was fresh meat just yards away. The first dry, scratchy keen was echoed by others and the horde turned as one towards them. Hands started reaching, feet started shuffling and the chase was on.
“Wake me up if I fall asleep.” he said and tapped the brakes again, slowing their pace down to barely a crawl. They’d gone a few miles but he wanted to take them a little farther, get the horde turned onto the main county road that ran fairly straight all the way to northern Canada. If they didn’t get side tracked, if they kept going straight, they would be frozen solid in a few months.
Scarlet read from her tourist books for a while then her and Bob got out to stretch their legs, easily keeping up with the walking pace they were going. Nefertiti had no interest in leaving the car, found a spot on Jessies lap and curled up to purr as he idly scratched her back. Every once in a while, a faster zombie would make its way to the front of the pack but she’d pick it off with the .22. The rest kept up their moaning and stumbling chase until Jessie finally stopped after a few miles for Scarlet and Bob to get back in. The turnoff to circle back around was only another mile away, he needed to get some distance so they wouldn’t follow.
It was getting late in the afternoon by the time they got back to the base. They tinkered around with a fork truck in the motor pool until they got it started then drove it to the ammo bunkers. They weren’t sure what they’d find in a National Guard base but were hoping for something besides machine guns, maybe some LAW’s or Claymores or something that could really put a hurting on any attackers. Jessie cleared a path so he’d have a straight run at the doors then started ramming them. The rear of the fork lift was a heavy, solid chunk of poured steel and he used it as a battering ram. It made quick work of the reinforced metal doors and the forks ripped the twisted remains free from their frames.
Jessie whistled when he saw what they had found. Hundreds of cases of 40-millimeter grenades. Every different kind from the training chalk rounds to the high explosives that would penetrate armor.
“Bingo.” he said.
“Are these good?” Scarlet asked, a dubious look on her face at the unimpressive crates.
“They’re perfect.” Jessie answered. “Any idiot can use them, there’s an attachment that clips onto the M-16’s and they fire like a single shot shotgun. They’re super simple, after a couple of practice rounds, anybody can get the hang of it. They don’t have the range of RPG’s but they’re exactly what the Islanders need.”
“We’re going to need a truck.” Scarlet said, ever the practical one. “Think one of those big ones would be hard to drive?”
It took them a while to find a Hemmitt that was full of fuel, all eight tires held air and seemed to be in good working order. It took a long time to get it started, they had to jump start a couple of Hummers then use them to jump the big diesel that looked like it would be at home bouncing around on the moon or Mars. It was an automatic and like all army vehicles, didn’t need keys and was designed to be easy to drive. With all four front tires steering, it actually turned well and Scarlet got the hang of it pretty quickly. They worked until dark stacking and strapping the crates, jamming them in tightly. They needed to save space for the M203’s, the actual launchers on the M-16’s, but they’d found hundreds of them in racks around the base. They’d already been issued to the soldiers from the arms rooms on that fateful day, ready to be taken up at a moments notice.
They camped out that night in the base commander’s office, taking advantage of a pair of the long, leather sofas pulled together to make a bed. Jessie stroked her hair as she curled into his arms and they talked of things long into the night. Schools and friends. Favorite foods and movies. YouTube videos and Facebook memes. Places they wanted to visit and worst bands ever.
For a while, even if only for a few hours, they were boy and girl. Teenagers without cares. They both slept deep and dreamless, relishing each other’s embrace.
Morning came too quickly and when they went to the mess hall just to see if there was anything worth eating, they were met with the hungry undead. They left them, neither wanting
to get splattered in gore or possibly draw more in with gunfire. Jessie made coffee while Scarlet opened cans of dog food, cat food and finally people food. They had hot soup straight from the tin with peanut butter and crackers from an MRE.
Jessie stared at her in the light, at the slowly healing marks on her face.
“As soon as we deliver this stuff to the Island and teach them how to use it, I’m taking you to Lakota.” he said. “We’ve got some pretty good doctors there. We really need to get you on the right medicine.”
Scarlet smiled and went back to her crackers. What she really needed was Dr. Stevens to figure out why she was healing so slowly. Something was wrong but she didn’t know what. She was just as strong and fast as ever, the zombies still ignored her, thought she was one of them, and she felt great. She just wasn’t healing like she used to. Even the little pricks she’d gotten on her backside and knees from the roses were still raw. Paying him a visit was out of the question, though. Every one in the Movement was after her. They’d kill her on sight.
85
Gunny
“This is disgusting.” Gunny grimaced as he snapped off four more fingers and put them in the bowl.
“Not as disgusting as the chompy girl you got bolted to the hood of your car.” Griz replied and went back to sewing the withered digits onto his vest.
They were at a Halloween party store on the outskirts of Amarillo, Texas. The black blood they were painting their faces with was fake. The zombie fingers weren’t, compliments of the half a hundred undead followers that were splayed out across the parking lot. Gunny had spent hours twisting his hair into a bunch of scraggly looking braids and tied bones and feathers here and there in them. Griz had rough shaved half his head with a Ka Bar, leaving a wide, thick mohawk down the center. They’d taken the movie quality sets of vampire teeth and trimmed them down to look like the cannibals sharpened fangs. A little sandpaper roughened them up, a little coffee stained them yellowish and a little Super Poligrip from the drug store kept them in place. They smeared their faces with the warpaint the Raiders favored, hung scalps from their belts and looked in the mirrors. They hardly recognized themselves. Their cars looked like they belonged in Casey’s gang, too. They had zombie parts and chains and sawblades and other useless stuff bolted to them. Gunny even had the top half of a day one zombie they discovered in the Halloween store chained and bolted to his grill, some of her guts hanging down on the blacktop.
This is what would be deemed unsanctioned activity if anyone in Lakota knew about it. They were supposed to be headed north to help set up defenses at the Island, not driving right into the middle of Casey’s camp and acting like they belonged. They knew enough about Raider operations to pass themselves off as members from the north. They had ground to air radio’s now and they’d been listening for days. They knew the northern war bands operated fairly independently of the southern groups. The original members had left Mexico months ago and many of them had been killed or gone missing. New people, new recruits, were nothing unusual. As long as they didn’t get in a face to face meeting with Casey, Gunny and Griz were pretty sure they could pull it off, their disguises were good. They had their story straight and if they saw the bald bastard, he was dead anyway so it didn’t matter if he knew who they were. Meanwhile, they had some infiltrating to do.
Gunny and Griz, or Johnny Killjoy and Tomahawk as they had scrawled on the doors of their cars, tore out of the parking lot and chased their headlights across the desert towards the Hopi Indian Reservation, Casey’s new Headquarters in Northern Arizona. Big pow wow coming up and he wanted all his troops, his entire Raider army, to gather for celebration, feasting and new orders. The recruitment drive was over. Now was time to implement the plan. They weren’t entirely sure what the plan was supposed to be but they’d soon find out. They’d be one step ahead of that idiot until they got close enough to kill him and as many of his war chiefs that they could. Meanwhile, Lakota was evacuating all the smaller settlements and quietly arming the larger ones with military ordinance. Gunny listened to the chatter on the ground to air radios and wasn’t surprised at how much information he learned. They had no sense of communications security, names of towns were asked and given in the open. Somebody was trying to get a total of how many raiders they had and answers weren’t coded or encrypted.
They ran into the first group of outriders at a gas station, a handful of cars coming in from the far Eastern regions, all the way over from the Mississippi. They had lined up in a circle around the fuel drops and were shooting the undead as they stumbled in, every man and woman using their cars as shields. They had a couple of half starved and half naked men filling their tanks with a hand pump, every once in while yelling at them to hurry up.
Gunny and Griz roared into the parking lot, circled them once and started plowing down the undead with the oversized bumpers on their reinforced war machines. They made quick work of the last thirty or forty shambling husks, bouncing them bone broke into store fronts, through plate glass windows and leaving them crumpled on sidewalks. Gunny pulled back into the convenience store and motioned for the staring raiders to move one of their cars so he could pull in for gas. The men and women exchanged glances, decided they didn’t know who these guys were or what they were capable of and thought it would be best to comply. For now.
Gunny pulled up next to the cowering man.
“Fill mine with premium guzzo.” he said as he got out and let his guns fall into place, one on each hip. “Tomahawks, too.”
The prisoners where unsure what to do. Should they stop fueling up the trucks they were working on and start on the new guys and risk another beating? Should they continue what they were doing, ignore them and risk getting shot? Gunny leaned against the old Chevelle and pulled out his poke, started rolling a cigarette. He saw the man’s hesitation, his uncertainty and fear and stopped what he was doing. Just stared at him. He was shirtless, had raw wounds on his back that came from the bullwhip being held by a brown skinned lanky man with MS-13 tattoos covering his arms, neck and face.
It was quiet in the town now, the engines shut off, the moaning undead silenced and the gunfire finished.
“You deaf?” Gunny asked, putting the hand rolled between his lips and firing it up.
The man had that deer in the headlights look, he knew no matter what he did, it would be the wrong choice. He was going to get a beating either way. Maybe even killed.
“You heard him.” the man with the bull whip said when the prisoner couldn’t move, frozen from fear. “Something wrong with your ears?”
Gunny relaxed internally. He wasn’t sure if it was going to be a fight or if the Raiders would relent, accept him as someone not to be trifled with. Griz took his finger off the trigger and ambled forward. From his position, he’d been ready to cut most of them down. They’d bunched up and had their attention focused on Gunny, not on the real threat: the man behind the car with the machine gun.
“Any beer left in the store?” Gunny asked their leader
“We haven’t checked yet, se. I’m Spider. Where you guys coming from?”
“Johnny Killjoy.” Gunny said and bumped fists. “We’re from up north. Lost the rest of the crew when we got surprised by a horde. Must have been ten thousand of ‘em.”
“I heard about them giant hordes.” One of the other men said. “They’re using trains to gather them up. Heard they were massive, no way to fight them but they’re easy to outrun.”
“Yep.” Gunny agreed. “Unless your guard falls asleep and you get surrounded. We barely got out. If we hadn’t had these rigs, we never would have made it. Casey must have been watching over us.”
“My life for his!” someone shouted and they all thumped their fists over their hearts.
Gunny and Griz did the same, lightning fast reflexes making up for their unfamiliarity with the ritual response.
“I need a beer.” Griz said ending the conversation before too many questions were asked. “Anyone else?”
&
nbsp; 86
Casey
Paco had said it was a good location, that the Indians had a pretty sweet setup on a cliff top. It was July and the weather wasn’t hateful. After the heat and humidity of Mexico, it felt good. This was high desert and it was scrub land but there were forests close by. He liked the desert, you could see for miles. You could see any approaching danger from hitmen or zombie hordes. He liked that clifftop town, too. There was only one way in, up a steep and winding road that was easily defended. Casey needed this town. He needed a headquarters that was safe. That asshole Gunny had nearly got him, had nearly put a bullet in his head. Only luck had saved him. He’d almost walked out to the balcony to breathe in the sea air, the only good thing about that miserable place. If he had, he would be dead. He knew he couldn’t take Lakota head on, he had a man on the inside. His Mata Hari, his Rosenberg, his Wowo spy letting him know all the inner workings, all the behind the scenes drama he could take advantage of.
Sure, Lucinda and Edmunds had come up with the idea and picked out a likely pair but it had been his brilliant idea to add a kidnapped baby to the mix to make it seem more legit. He knew those bleeding-heart wussies would do anything for the children. It had worked, too. Dirty Dustin, Lezbo Lexi and the bratty kid were in. She even got a job in their courthouse. His plan was paying off. Dustin had radioed letting them know Lakota had army tanks stashed behind the walls and in the woods. Freaking army tanks! No way to attack it directly, those jerks had them hidden, hoping he’d do just that. He was too smart for them, though. He’d do what he’d planned all along. Those two broads thought they were advising him on the best way to take over the country but he’d already thought of everything they were telling him. Most of it, anyway. They had a few half way decent ideas, he’d give them that, but he was the one in charge. He was the one calling the shots and they’d best not forget it. The creepy baby eating old bat was just a little too far out there for him and Lucinda was getting to be just as bad. This was HIS army, by God. He’d gather them all together if he wanted to, he didn’t care if they thought it was a bad idea. He knew Lakota didn’t have any jets or missiles or anything like that able to blow them all up, his man on the inside would have told him. They didn’t even have an eye in the sky anymore. Dustin said all the satellites were failing. All they had was one crappy old airplane that looked like it barely flew.
Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus | Books 4-6 | Jessie+Scarlet Page 55
