Pox Americana 3
Page 1
POX AMERICANA 3
ZACK ARCHER
Contents
A Post-Apocalyptic Pulp Men’s Harem Adventure
Book Description
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
The End Of Book Three
Author Notes
FIASCO HEIGHTS Book Summary
Copyright
FIASCO HEIGHTS Book 1 Chapter 1
FIASCO HEIGHTS Book 1 Chapter 2
FIASCO HEIGHTS Book 1 Chapter 3
A Post-Apocalyptic Pulp Men’s Harem Adventure
By Zack Archer
The only thing that stands between us and the apocalypse is one man in a battle suit, a potty-mouthed AI, and a harem of beautiful, ass-kicking women.
Book Description
Nick and the ladies are taking their talents to South Beach!
Rescued from the zombie horde in downtown Washington, D.C., Nick and the ladies are whisked away to a top-secret military installation run by what’s left of the government. But the installation is hours away from being overrun, so Nick’s offered a deal: lead a team down to Miami, locate a hidden CDC lab, and recover a drug that may be an antidote to the zombie virus.
Catching some rays in South Beach with a harem of beautiful ladies in tiny bikinis? What’s not to love? But Nick’s happiness is tempered when he discovers that the city is flooded, filled with millions of hungry zombies, sharks, alligators, and bandits led by a crooked DEA official who are cruising around on armored speed boats.
Forced to team up with a sexy female pirate named Sadie, Nick and ladies decide to hit the zombies and the bandits head-on in a series of adrenaline-fueled battles across Miami’s new system of canals, racing to locate the lab and find the antidote before the bad guys do.
If your idea of a high-concept harem adventure involves hot ladies, big guns, and bigger explosions without any of those pesky fades to black, than this book is for you. Pick it up today and see what all the fuss is about!
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WARNING: I’m not a huge fan of fades to black, so would it surprise you to learn that this polyamorous action book is intended for those over the age of 18 who like over-the-top action, zombie craziness, hot warrior women, cool snarky characters, and lots of haremy (yes, that’s a real word) adult situations? Probably not, so if you like those things, and I’m guessing you do, suck it up, strap in, and get ready for Pox Americana, Book 3.
Copyright 2019 by the House of Archer
Created with Vellum
Thanks to all the indie authors who’ve blazed a trail for the rest of us, and a hearty shout-out to all the amazing fans who enjoy reading fun, occasionally silly, adrenaline-fueled stories of guys and gals thrust into impossible situations, who somehow find a way to cultivate a harem, discover their inner abilities, and save the world (and sometimes the universe). As far as I know, this is the first harem book set during a zombie uprising, but it contains all the genre elements you know and love along with the irreverence of Zombieland (as reimagined by Cinemax of course!) Hope everyone enjoys it!
Editor
The great team at Ascension E&P.
Archer’s Army/Beta Readers
“Big” Jim Bridges
Kenneth Stinson
Maria Sexton
David Denison
“The Mighty” Leo Roars
Andrew Rose
Angus Hutto
Matthew Burley
1
Having defeated the villainous Madam Secretary and orchestrated a tenuous truce with the zombified populace of Washington, D.C., I, along with my lady friends Deb, Raven, Lexie, Hollis, Scarlett, and Layla, found myself in the belly of a Blackhawk helicopter cruising over the darkening Maryland countryside.
Beside me was the enigmatic Sharla Frost, and beyond her were the figures I’d seen earlier in the biohazard garb, two black pilots, and a white gunner wearing a nineteenth century cavalry slouch hat who was grooving to the old Kinks song Apeman. The song blared from a dented boombox as the gunner swept his multi-barreled minigun back and forth, searching for targets.
“Lawless,” Sharla Frost said.
I leaned over, fighting to hear over the racket of the rotor blades. “What?”
“Our door gunner slash resident deejay. His name’s Lawless.”
“I dig his hat,” I replied.
“It’s in honor of his relatives who fought at the Little Bighorn with Custer.”
“Who?”
“George Custer.”
“The last stand guy?” She nodded and I continued, “Speaking of last stands…”
She tapped a finger on the end of my stump. “If you were wondering, we were coming to the rescue.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“We were fashionably late,” she said with the sweep of a hand.
“We saw your helicopters before. The other day, back over the city. How long were you watching us?”
“We’ve been monitoring the city for the last nineteen days.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Somebody like you,” she answered with a faint smile.
“Who are you, really?”
“I’m Sharla Jean Frost and I used to work for the Program Coordination Division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
“Doing what?” I asked.
“I specialized in moving papers from the left side of my desk to the right.”
“And now?”
Sharla chuckled. “I’m in charge of a mountain.”
She pointed, and I looked out the bay door to see a cluster of lights off in the distance, blobs of white light illuminating a spire of earth and rock that rose to an elevation of over fifteen hundred feet, jutting up into the air like the horn on some great beast.
“That’s Site R,” she said. “Welcome to the Raven Rock Mountain Complex.”
The helicopter arced around the upper portion of mountain, which was eerily silhouetted against the hazy illumination from a battery of floodlights. Even in the semi-darkness I could tell that the complex was vast, more than eleven hundred acres Sharla said, comprised of a series of buildings lining a road that snaked around the bottom of the mountain and curled up toward a radar and communications installation called Site R-T that crowned the mountain’s peak.
“What you see down there is just ten percent of the overall facility,” Sharla said as the helicopter descended toward a helipad that was just down the street from what she said was the complex’s fire station.
“Where’s the other ninety percent?” I asked.
“Underground.”
I looked over at Hollis, whose gaze narrowed. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dekko.”
We were ushered off the helicopter and I stopped and stretched my sore muscles. Even though I’d injected the leveling up drug back in D.C., I was exhausted after the confrontations with the Madam Secretary, the Vrah, Xan, and the zombies. My muscles also weren’t as pumped and I felt like I’d
lost something in the stamina department.
“I’m feeling a little deflated, Slade.”
“The impact of the drug doesn’t last forever, kid. Your internal nanomachine is still functioning, so you’re able to perform better than ninety-percent of most humans depending on conditions and drive.”
I tried to mentally conjure up my HUD, but it didn’t appear.
“No HUD.”
“No worries,” Slade replied. “I’m busy working on it.”
I noticed some of Sharla’s personnel carry out Shiva, the neurotoxin-laced doomsday weapon hidden inside the metal crate.
“Where are you taking it?” I asked Sharla.
“It will be stored underground and then taken to a secure location as quickly as possible.”
I strode forward and paused as there was a sound hanging in the air, a strange humming note that seemed to come from all around. Closing my eyes, I did my best to summon a link with Slade, my AI wingman.
“You awake?” I asked.
“I’m a machine now, Dekko. I kinda never sleep and I can assure you that androids do not dream of electric sheep.”
“I don’t know what that means, but what do you know about the place?”
“How long do you have?” Slade replied.
“The quick and dirty would be nice.”
“The site became operational on June 30, 1953, can hold fourteen hundred people comfortably, and the inner complex is protected from nuclear weapons, or in this case the Woken, biters, the infected, zombies, whatever you want to call them, by a quarter mile of granite.”
“What happens once we go inside?”
“Unclear, but it ain’t gonna be easy to get back out, brother,” Slade answered.
Exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
Sharla whistled and led us toward an idling Suburban SUV with tinted windows that was guarded by three men clutching automatic weapons. The man at the front, a bearded hulk wearing a skintight T-shirt with the word “Hung” on the front with an arrow pointing down, stepped to us. He lowered his automatic weapon, looked back at the other two men, then grinned.
Hollis whispered under her breath. “Cliché number one-hundred and two. A military base filled with toxic dudes who screw with the survivors of a zombie attack.”
“Well, hot damn and alright,” the big bearded man said, an Appalachian twang in his voice. “I asked Miss Frost to pick us men up a little something, something on her rounds, but I never thought she’d come back with such fine specimens of ladyhood.”
“Well, you better tell her to go back out.”
The man’s brow furrowed. “Why?”
“‘Cause she needs to track us down a man.”
The big man’s smile wilted. “Why don’t you get back in the kitchen, little lady.”
“Sure will. That’s where all the big knives are, dumbass.”
This threw the man for a loop. His eyes narrowed to dots as he glimpsed Deb and the slightly bluish hue of her skin.
“Jesus God, would you look at this,” he said, cackling at the other men. “They’ve gone and brought us back…what? What the hell are you? A fucking halfbreed?”
Deb stared right through the big man. “I’m not halfbreed.”
“Then what are you?”
“An in-betweener. Who’s asking?”
The big man pointed at himself. “Bo Knox, but everyone, and I do mean everyone, calls me the Plumber.”
“Why?”
Bo grinned lasciviously. “‘Cause I know how to lay pipe.”
Deb smiled. “How are you at napping?”
“What?”
WHAM!
Deb jabbed Bo in the neck, hitting his carotid artery. He crumpled to the ground in a heap, unconscious.
The other guards tensed as Sharla held her hands up. “At ease, everyone.”
Sharla motioned for one of the guards to check on the unconscious man, who was just fine, then she turned to Deb. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“In moments like this, I prefer to fall back on the words of Mozart.”
“Which words would those be?” Sharla asked.
“‘Just as people behave to me, so do I behave to them.’”
“I’m going to have to keep my eyes on you,” Sharla replied with a smirk. Then she pointed to the still-unconscious man and the other guards before leading us to the Suburban.
“You’ll have pardon them. It’s been a long time since the boys have been around women.”
“That doesn’t excuse their bullshit,” Raven said.
“We tend to overlook their failings because they do a very difficult job, and they do it well,” Sharla said. “They’re what’s left of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. Keepers of the Rock, we call them. They patrol the grounds and keep an eye on the fence.”
“What fence?”
I had fleeting thoughts of utilizing my internal HUD and its nightvision capabilities, but before I could do that, Sharla tilted her head toward one of the other guards. He removed an enormous portable floodlight from the back of the Suburban, clicked it on, and angled it toward a darkened area out to our left.
“Please don’t let there be zombies, please don’t let there be zombies,” Lexie said, fingers crossed, eyes closed.
The beam of light splashed an area two hundred feet away from us that was previously obscured by the darkness. A section of the twenty-foot tall razor-wire tipped perimeter fence shingled with high voltage and electrocution warning signs that surrounded the entire complex sprang into view. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention because every inch of space on the other side of the fence was filled with zombies.
Thousands of them.
Some were naked and others were garbed in ratty clothing, but they were all standing very still, staring at us. The only things that moved were their quivering mouths, black teeth sawing back and forth, emitting the strange humming sound I’d heard after disembarking from the helicopter. Others began moaning, humping the fence, while still others made small sounds or squalled like a bunch of infants at a nursery.
“Yeah that’s not totally creepy at all,” Lexie whispered, clutching Stevens the cat and stroking his neck as he hissed at the zombies.
“Give no ground and do not look the bastards in the eye,” Lawless said. “They’re like wild animals. They can sense fear in real people.”
“I hope like hell that fence is electrified,” Gina said.
Sharla nodded. “For the time being.”
“What happens if the power goes out?” Scarlett asked.
“It won’t.”
“But what if?”
“I’ve learned not to traffic in hypotheticals,” Sharla replied, opening a door on the Suburban.
I shot a quick look at Deb. “What are they saying?” I asked, bobbing my head toward the zombies.
“They’re hungry,” she whispered.
We entered the Suburban and, given my added girth from the leveling up process, I was forced to squeeze myself into a back seat next to Sharla and another guard while Lawless the door gunner sat up front in the passenger seat. The vehicle’s engine rumbled to life as we drove down the road toward an entrance into the side of the mountain.
“There are four portals into the main complex,” Sharla said. “The others have been closed off, so Portal A is the only viable entrance.”
We drove toward two guards manning a vestibule who slapped a button on a controller as the largest doors I’d ever seen, two thirty-four-ton blast doors, swung open with a loud shuddering, grinding sound. Lights flashed on the other side as we drove past and into a tunnel that led straight down into the mountain.
“Welcome to Command Post Alpha,” Sharla said.
Lawless looked back at us, a glimmer in his eye. “Welcome to the Alamo.”
2
The main road into Site R, which ran for a little over a thousand feet, had been blasted into the mountain and was bordered on the right side by a pedestrian wal
kway that was peopled by a few workers in hardhats. We drove slowly, following the road until it terminated at a collection of three-story buildings, a mini-city that had been plopped down in the center of the mountain.
“All of the buildings were constructed on top of the world’s biggest mechanical springs,” Sharla said. “In order to alleviate swaying in the event that the complex was bombed.”
Hollis raised her hand. “Speaking of bombs, why weren’t any used?”
Sharla arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“I think she means nukes,” Layla said. “How come you didn’t use a few to clear-cut the revs?”
“If by ‘revs’ you mean zombies, the use of tactical weapons was considered and approved, but someone blew a fuse.”
“Come again?”
Sharla smiled grimly. “A COG, continuity of government alert, was supposed to go out announcing one of four readiness levels: a communications watch, an initial alert, an advance alert, or the last and most important, a warning that a global attack is in progress. So, once the dead starting attacking the cities, everyone was supposed to get that final warning, including the men and women who can authorize the use of nuclear weapons.”
“They didn’t get the message?” Lexie asked as the Suburban came to a stop.
Sharla shook his head. “Apparently, a six-cent fuse blew in some mainframe and nobody received it. The key bureaucrats, basically the ones who were supposed to prevent the collapse of civilization, got stuck down in D.C. By the time they knew what was happening, it was too late to leave the city and none of the bombs were ever dropped.”