Road to Riches: Deadline: Book 1 (Zombie Road)

by Wesley R. Norris

  I’d take just about any job, if the pay was right, and I was discreet. Just ask the gentleman who paid me to retrieve his private collection of vintage lingerie. He was happy and I was happy, right up until he told me to help myself to his liquor cabinet and have a seat while he tried on a steamy little pink number for me. No thanks, not even washing my eyeballs with battery acid would erase that image. Some things you can’t unsee.

  I opened the door and Bo leapt in, taking his position in the shotgun seat, ears up and bottom wagging in anticipation of new stuff to sniff and pee on. I tossed my pack in the back and climbed up into the Armadillo, my armored-up four door Jeep Wrangler. With the dull silver paint and the bullet proof mesh that covered the open top, she did kinda resemble the hard-shelled critter, if you stood way back and squinted your eyes just right.

  The Jeep Wrangler sat tall on aggressive thirty seven-inch off-road tires and a bullet proof suspension, along with a few nasty surprises for any wannabe thieves. The cargo area held a gun vault packed with all sorts of lethal toys and high explosives. A Hemi V-8 with a minimum amount of electronics had been dropped into the engine bay and mated to a transmission capable of handling the torque of the big motor. One ton axles from a pickup truck had been swapped underneath, the frame gusseted and reinforced with steel plate to support the extra weight of the armor. There was a three hundred sixty-degree machine gun mount on top of the roll cage. I could pivot and fire the gun from the controller mounted to the center console. Too bad I’d had to trade my last machine gun to pay off a debt, but easy come, easy go. Heavy duty bumpers with winches on the front and rear gave me the ability to push or drag derelict cars out of the way and the heavy steel construction of the bumpers wouldn’t bend from impacts with the undead. All the chimes and airbags were disconnected. Auxiliary lights mounted around the vehicle gave me plenty of illumination for nighttime excursions.

  A bunch of ten-year-old scofflaws, who reminded me of myself at that age, had christened her the Armadillo when Tommy and his crew rolled her out of the bay in the Lakota truck shop. I finally got the little band of brigands to quit flipping switches and climbing all over her asking questions by bribing them with a trip to the ice cream parlor. I thought they looked familiar and found out they’d been on the wall hauling ammo cans in the battle of Lakota. I’d been there too, manning a thirty-caliber machine gun atop the cargo container walls. Wrong place, right time but the town had survived. The fight had broken Casey’s gang and the concerted efforts of the townspeople kept the undead from swarming the walls. I made it a point to visit that gang of prepubescent outlaws whenever I was in Lakota. Those kids had their finger on the pulse of everything and most of the time knew more than the adults who were running things. They were also mighty useful when a fellow needed some gear he didn’t have the gold to buy.

  I scratched at the scab on the nub of my pinky finger. It itched but didn’t really hurt much anymore. The first joint of it was still missing, but I held out hope one morning I’d wake up and find it had grown back overnight. The last time I saw it, my wayward digit was floating in a pickle jar down on the Tex-Mex border after a job had gone sideways. That Mexican bandit Pascal had given me the option of cutting it off myself as an apology for sniping a job out from under his nose, or him lopping off my head with that frigging Katana he carried around. My big mouth had earned me a couple of loosened teeth and a mild concussion when I suggested he change his name to Burrito Bushido. Some people can’t take a joke, but seriously, wasn’t cutting off your finger as an apology a Japanese Yakuza thing? With no other viable option, I’d given him the finger to keep my head attached long enough to figure a way out of the mess I’d gotten myself into.

  “Just give me the tip, senor.” He’d said in his heavily accented bastardization of the English language while he and his men laughed. Hell, I would have laughed at his crude joke too if it wasn’t my finger on the chopping block. I mean, dick jokes are funny, I don’t care who you are.

  After a daring escape, with the retrieve intact, I’d hauled ass for friendlier surroundings. I figured I’d gotten out of there pretty light judging from the collection of retriever skulls that adorned his stinking office. I swore I’d go back one day and get his skinny ass and I would take more than just a finger joint. Somehow, word of the encounter had made its way through the ranks of retrievers and bounty hunters. I swear, they gossiped like teenage girls. If I had to hear one more lame joke about giving Pascal the finger, someone was gonna get a dose of lead poisoning.

  I flipped the hidden kill switch and hit the ignition. She idled smoothly, vibrating slightly from the horses under the hood. I turned on the radio to see what the latest news was out of Lakota. That loudmouth Bastille was prattling on about the new president’s son, Jessie. Someone, probably Bastille, had dubbed him the Road Angel. The man had a flair for the dramatic. The young man already had a cult following and his reputation seemed to grow with every broadcast. Our paths hadn’t crossed yet, but I liked his style. He rambled the road in an old school muscle car, fighting, freeing, or killing whoever needed it.

  Bastille had an interview with a trucker who swore he’d seen Jessie take down a thousand undead in Kansas lined up after a word from his sponsors and the farm report. I didn’t care much for the man after hearing most of the nonsense he spewed on the radio, but his show was a good source of information about the progress that was being made in reclaiming the country from the undead. There were still pockets of survivors being discovered all the time. New settlements were popping up, established settlements were growing. The blue-collar heroes of Lakota were working hard to reestablish a sense of stability out of what was left of the country. The human spirit is resilient if nothing else, but without their efforts, we may have all went the way of the dinosaurs.

  Deciding that I really didn’t care what was going on in the world of farming, I slid an old Dire Straits CD into the player and the opening riffs of “Money for Nothing” poured from the speakers of the heavily modified Jeep Wrangler’s sound system. I popped the clutch and sent twin rooster tails of rocky sand from the rear tires and headed out. I had the window v shields up so Bo could hang his head out in the breeze. I watched as a stream of slobber from his jaws whipped in the wind, then splashed onto the seat. Nasty. I scratched his ears and let him enjoy the ride.

  The lure of a big payday was calling to me. Gold was something I was in desperately short supply of after too many long hours hanging around the cantina in Polly, a pothole of a town out in the middle of nowhere. My money seemed to run out quickly due to my penchant for good whiskey, hand rolled cigars and the ever-present back room poker games. Seemed like the more gold you had, the better time you had. Apocalypse or not, some things never seemed to change.

  I watched my cabin disappear behind me in a cloud of dust as I headed for the metropolis of Carrizozo, New Mexico, population nine hundred and ninety-six before the zombie virus, to beg, barter or steal enough fuel and grub for the five-hundred-mile trip to the settlement at Tombstone, Arizona. I had to let the client know I’d meet them tonight in Tombstone to discuss the particulars and Carrizozo was the closest point I could relay a message from.

  There was a potentially huge payday attached if I made it back, and that’s if, with a capital I and F. A job this size wouldn’t be cheap. The message I’d received said they would make it worth my while just to show up, ten thousand to listen to the pitch, so I would hear it out at the least. The kicker was, it was east of the Mississippi River. I ran through what I knew about the east side of the river from the rumors. In every seedy dive bar where you found my type of people, you’d hear the same thing over and over. East of the Mississippi was a no man’s land and attempting retrieval there was suicide. It couldn’t be done. It belonged to the zombies. Too many big cities, too much population density, fallout from the failed nuclear plants. There were as many reasons as there were zombies, I thought wryly.

  That was mostly true. There were a couple of ferries acros
s the river operated by people with the foresight to position themselves to take advantage of a prime business opportunity for the day the undead were a manageable risk. Everyone knew a time would come when the undead would completely rot away. They couldn’t last forever. A few adventurous souls were already staging runs into the border towns along the eastern shore in the less populated places to loot the gold, fuel and other valuables that were lying there unclaimed. The eastern side of the river may have been overrun with undead, but I was related to some of those old boys from the deep south and had spent many a summer of my misspent youth with my cousins in that triangle where Georgia, Florida and Alabama come together. Hunting wild pigs, alligators, country girls of questionable virtue and drinking Grand Pappy’s moonshine. If I was a betting man, and I am for the record, I’m almost certain that there were pockets in the swamps and the tall pines where some bands of rednecks were doing just fine, and the zombies were the ones who were worried.

  As bad an idea as it seemed on the surface, I just couldn’t resist the temptation this job offered. Maybe it was the challenge; maybe it was the thrill of risking life and limb for fame and glory. Maybe it was the chance to cement my name in the history books. I didn’t really know the reason, I just knew if anyone out there could pull it off, it was me.

  The settlement at Carrizozo was close enough to be convenient from my cabin nestled in the foothills of the Carrizozo Mountains, but far enough away to ensure my privacy. Not that the people who lived there had any interest in a broke retriever anyways. They tended to mind their own business and focus on their own survival, but there were unsavory types who passed through on a regular basis. My cabin was hard to find even if you knew where to look and I preferred to keep it that way. In this business, memories were long, and fuses were short. Thanks to Pascal, I had a bounty on my head. Coupled with my tendency to piss people off sometimes, I had a few enemies who would be more than happy to shoot me in the back if and when the opportunity presented itself. There were also the gunfighters to consider. Mostly young men, but a few women too, with Wild West delusions who’d seen movies like Young Guns and Tombstone too many times. I’d been in a few gunfights, mostly with bandits and cannibals, and managed to walk away. That gave me a reputation as a dangerous man and also made me a target for someone wanting to make a name for themselves.

  The town of Carrizozo sat at the intersection of US 54 and US 380 in Lincoln County New Mexico, the area where Billy the Kid shot his way to infamy. Now, it was one of the fortified towns that fell under the Lakota government with twice the population it had boasted in its heyday. Just about anything a person could need from the network Lakota had set up for trading with the other settlements could be found there. As long as you had a pocket full of gold or something to offer in trade, desert life wasn’t too hard. True, most technology was gone, but many places now had electricity again and the people from the Tower had restored internet in some places.

  I had heard that Facebook and Twitter were going to be a thing again in some of the bigger settlements. I guess that was a positive. Everything had gone digital over the last few years. Most people didn’t have photo albums full of pictures, it was all on their phones, on their social media posts or floating around in the cloud. Memories lost forever without the technology to access it. I didn’t know if the world would ever go back to the way it was and wasn’t sure that I wanted it to.

  2

  Call

  Carrizozo, NM

  I ran into a small group of undead on the road to Carrizozo. They were in poor shape, nothing like the apex predator they’d been when freshly turned, but still just as dangerous. The scavenger animals had been feeding on them, whittling them down to scraps. Only one was still upright, dragging its left leg along in a limping shuffle. One of its feet was completely gone, it hobbled along on the eroding stumps of its fibula and tibia. The other four were in even worse condition. They were naked shriveled torsos, nothing left of them below the rib cage. They inched along, dragging tattered strands of sun baked intestinal jerky along behind them, their clothing long ago deteriorated by the unrelenting desert weather or torn free by the teeth and claws of the scavengers. They resembled unwrapped mummies from a low budget horror movie. Dry, cracked, the skin stretched tight across face made them appear to be smiling. Their eye sockets were empty cavities where the crows and ravens had pecked them out. The desiccated husks dragged themselves along by what remained of their hands, the abrasive effects of the asphalt like sandpaper slowly grinding them away, layer after layer. They were being hounded by a pack of fat coyotes, darting in to rip strips of dried flesh and muscle off their emaciated frames, snapping and snarling at each other for the bits of flesh. I had no love for coyotes or the undead. Neither did Bo. I grabbed him by the collar and latched the window shield to keep him from bailing out and mixing it up with them.

  The coyote is the ultimate survivor. Before the outbreak they roamed across all of the lower forty-eight states. They lived in the shadows among the farms and suburbs in nearly every city, their eerie cries as they called to one another at night the only evidence of their true numbers. Most were never seen, and when they were, there were usually a dozen more nearby that you never laid eyes on. More often than not, a picture of a missing pet stapled to a light pole or taped in a store window was a result of their predations. Female coyotes in heat were used by the pack to lure in family dogs where they’d fall victim to the hunger of the pack. Traps, poisons and year round hunting seasons did little to curb their numbers. They were too smart and cunning for any one method to be effective before they learned to ignore the easy pickings that leg traps and snares holding meat tainted with the smell of antifreeze offered. With mankind on the endangered species list their population numbers had exploded. The undead provided a walking buffet of free food. Unlike a horse or a bull, the undead didn’t fight back against the pack; they ignored the animals that stripped the rancid flesh from their bodies, even as they were reduced to immobile piles of cracked, scattered bones. In areas where the undead had been eliminated, the coyotes went after the cattle, pigs and sheep herds. They were also a serious threat to anyone caught out in the open. Something about eating all that infected flesh did something to their brains. Their increased numbers were decimating the livestock herds and the ranchers had placed a bounty on them in an effort to cull their predations.

  I stopped fifty yards short of them and pulled the M4 carbine from its mount in the overhead roll cage rack. I was in need of currency and the four-legged fiends presented a chance to get my belly and fuel tanks filled. The coyotes paid no mind to Bo’s barking or the noise from the Jeep’s engine. They were too focused on the easy pickings of decayed meat in front of them. The undead, however, sensed my untainted flesh and let out keening cries, dragging themselves as fast as they could, leaving a greasy, stinking trail of whatever fluids they had left in them steaming on the hot asphalt.

  The coyotes finally noticed me when they were twenty yards out. They let out low growls, the fur bristling on their necks as they crouched low and stalked towards me. Maybe they thought I was trying to steal their meal, or maybe their fear of man was completely gone. In the old days, coyotes would run from man, even in pack strength. Bo snapped and snarled from the passenger seat, desperate and eager for me to let him in the fight. I ignored him and unlatched the guard on my window and let it ride up out of the way on the hydraulic cylinders. I laid my rifle across the mirror and when the coyotes answered Bo’s challenge and sprinted in my direction, I cut loose on them. Yips and howls erupted from them as they went down, biting at the bullet wounds, snapping at each other, confused as to the source of noise and pain that was killing them. I kept firing until they were all dead, and then put the undead to rest as well. If any part of their spirits were still trapped in their ruined bodies, they were free now. I didn’t hate the undead, I’d lost too many of the people I cared about to their ranks.

  It took me just a couple of minutes to collect the right
ear from each coyote. It was all the proof needed to collect on the bounty. Bo whined to let me know he would be glad to chew on one of the ears, but I did my best to keep him away from any animal that fed on the undead. I gave him the last of the jerky in the Jeep to mollify him. He growled happily as he gulped down the dried beef strips.

  I tossed the bag of ears in the door panel to keep Bo from giving in to temptation and steered around the mess. The shadows on the road told me that the carrion birds were already circling. The stench of fresh hot blood and decayed flesh would certainly bring more scavengers, nothing went to waste in the desert, but I’d be long gone by then.

  I rolled into Carrizozo early in the afternoon. I exchanged the sack of ears for payment at the cantina. I earned a handshake and a meal from a rancher sitting in the bar who’d witnessed the exchange. The bounty topped off my fuel reserves and Pablo at the general store credited the balance towards what I already owed him for. I had a sizable balance on the books. He promised to wipe the debt when I brought him a Faberge egg, but I hadn’t run across one yet. I had tried repeatedly to entice him into a poker game, but Pablo was too shrewd to sit down at the poker table with me. Unlike me, he preferred to work or barter for his wealth.