Zombie Road VI: Highway to Heartache

by David A. Simpson

  His men had gone through the car thoroughly while they were away and the dog wasn’t there to stop them. There weren’t any exoskeleton weapons or amped up military grade body enhancement suits. They themselves were the weapons. Somehow, they had gotten ahold of a serum or some injections that trans mutated them. He had to have it, had to know where it came from. She was riddled with the zombie virus, it was slowly growing throughout her body and the pills Samed had given her would speed it up but he wasn’t concerned with her. She was damaged goods, a bargaining tool to get what he wanted. Samed said they could stop the spread with some experimental nanobots, even reverse it if they acted fast. That wouldn’t do. The CEO wouldn’t waste valuable resources on her. He needed her sick and getting worse so they would raid the DARPA computers for him. He needed that data, it would surely have information on whatever drugs they had been enhanced with. Maybe then he’d help her.

  He focused the telescope on the boy. He was the key. He wasn’t infected. He didn’t have those dark runners corrupting his DNA. He needed a blood sample. It would be pure and clean, not diseased and breaking down. With it and the information on the hard drives they could replicate him. Clone him. His mind reeled with the possibilities.

  He’d almost sent a team to look for them but Marilyn had suggested it would seem suspicious. They were both guarded in their manner and the boy was almost skittish. His eyes never stopped roaming and she’d noticed he always had his back against a wall if he stopped moving. Better to wait for them to return.

  Subtlety was best and he had a plan. As soon as they were back in the Tower, they would get an urgent call from Samed. He would say they needed to draw blood to ensure he didn’t have the infection either. Samed would hint that it may be transmitted through sexual contact if he showed any hesitation and Horowitz was pretty damn sure there was some sexual contact going on. Probably a lot of it. If all else failed, if they couldn’t get the hard drives or there wasn’t enough information on them, if he had a pure sample of the boy’s blood, they could figure it out.

  Reverse engineer it.

  Create their own.

  He could have his own team of hyper humans and they would be able to gather all the information he wanted. He would be able to get into the classified areas that had no outside internet access, even the ones in New York or Los Angeles. He could learn the secrets of the governments of the world. The findings from all those black budget trillions spent on research projects would be his. Who knew what technologies were hidden away? Maybe wormhole technology or faster than light travel. Maybe they had invisibility suits or anti-gravity devices. He knew they had already created super humans and time travel and was nearly giddy with thoughts of what else there was. He could get to the NASA computers and find out about alien technology.

  The government wouldn’t have had him build the endless miles of tunnels and the particle accelerator if they didn’t have plans for it. They had never treated it like an experimental unit, they had executed the project like they already knew would work. They needed a secret location out of the limelight, away from the prying eyes of oversight committees. It had been built in stages using different contractors for every step. This one was told it was an advanced geothermal unit. That one was told it was section of a high-speed courier line to Los Angeles. The military that came in to assemble parts of the machine asked no questions and worked around the clock. They did their job, packed up and left. The project was finished years ago then never put to use. It was mothballed and a crew came in every six months for maintenance and to ensure the security locks were still in place.

  After the uprising, Horowitz had let his best men, his brightest engineers, in on the secret. They had been trying for months to figure it out, how to make it work and had succeeded in traveling forward and backward in time. They had sent cameras but they always came back with dead batteries and blank film. They had sent baited animal traps and some came back with various creatures that died moments after arriving. Sometimes the cages came back crushed and broken. Sometimes rusting, dripping in seaweed or entangled with vines. The two human subjects he had forced to go through, one to the future and one to the past, came back wild eyed and unable to speak. They also expired moments after arriving back to the Tower.

  They knew it worked, though. They knew the subjects were traveling through time, not just disappearing and reappearing a few moments later. The Tasmanian Tiger proved that. An animal extinct for over a hundred years had come from the past and the man he’d sent had arrived there safely. When he returned, he had aged forty years, had a full beard with streaks of gray and he had the Tiger with him. In his timeline, he’d been gone for decades. At the Tower, it had only been moments. Getting there wasn’t the problem. Getting back was the issue. The return journey is what killed everything.

  His smile was uncontainable at the thought of it. At the prospect of his own private group of super humans, of gaining all the knowledge there was to be had from all the secret files. To know everything knowable. To unlock the secrets of time travel. He would have all knowledge of every great event and with the machine, he’d know it before it happened. All he needed to get started was a little of what the Meadows kid had. A single vial of blood would be enough to deconstruct and replicate. They’d get it, send them down to retrieve the hard drives and then the world would be his oyster.

  He’d be omnipotent.

  He could be God Emperor of the Galaxy if he wanted to.

  Not that he would.

  He’d use the knowledge to help people.

  But if he had to, if he was needed to fulfill such a role, he could.

  For the betterment of all, of course.

  He nearly rubbed his hands in glee but stopped himself, his mind conjuring up an image of some half-mad cartoon character cackling maniacally. He looked over his shoulder to make sure that he was alone. He had dismissed the bodyguards to stand watch from below, no one was looking.

  He cackled maniacally, rubbed his hands in glee and it felt good.

  “I’m going to check Hot Rod, see how far they made it.” Jessie said as he fired up the Ham and Scarlet started straightening up the car, shaking dog and cat hairs out of the blankets.

  “We’ll be in Blackfoot late tonight.” Hot Road answered. “We’re hitting it as hard as we can but some of the other settlements are being attacked too. We’ve got the trucks to use as weapons and plenty of ammo. It’s not much but we’ll do what we can.”

  Scarlet watched him as he spoke, as he switched channels and hailed Lakota. As his face grew from carefree and happy to hard and clouded. From a sweet boy with a scar to a gnarled warrior radiating menace.

  “Standby.” Wire Bender said. “Cobb wants to talk to you.”

  “It’s started.” she said. “We have to go.”

  Jessie waited while Wire Bender called the old First Sergeant to patch him through.

  He looked into her emerald eyes and she stared back.

  A little fear.

  Some apprehension.

  Complete acceptance.

  “You can stay.” he said, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “I really wish you would.”

  “The doctor said it will take a week before they know anything.” Scarlet said and placed her hand on his cheek. “We always knew it would be like this. We go together, we come back together.”

  He nodded slowly as Cobb’s voice came through the speaker, tinny but strong.

  “I’ll tell Captain Macon to send our weapons over.” she said and put the blankets back in the car.

  She felt the slow burn of anger kindling in her belly as she wrote the note and put it in the air tube for the Captain of the Guard. Her father had started his advance and it wasn’t a probing operation. It was a full-on attack across all fronts using the undead to surround the villages. She knew the tactic. It was one always available to them but Ricketts had never tried to employ it. She wondered if there had been a shakeup in the leadership since she left. If more hardliners we
re in charge. It only took a few days, maybe a week, to gather an undead army and aim them at a fortified enclave. The defense forces in the towns would concentrate all their firepower to stop the horde from breaching the walls. The Anubis warriors would quietly climb over on the opposite side then sneak up and shoot them in the back. They’d kill approximately fifty percent of the people, concentrating on the fighting age men. Even if they tried to surrender, the prevailing thought was half had to die to teach the others a lesson that wouldn’t be forgotten. The warriors would then rest, rape, indoctrinate, add the devil’s breath to the food, regroup and start again with the new converts.

  If a village was already under attack, there was nothing anyone could do. By the time help arrived from their neighbors, it would be too late. There were too few people spread too far apart. The Anubis advance would take a few months to make their way south but it was unstoppable, like a slow-moving glacier. Like a wall of locusts. A snow ball gathering size and strength as it rolled downhill. They would destroy everything in their path, strip the compounds of supplies and move on. Before winter, they would have Lakota. If the strongest towns were able to defend against the undead hordes from their attack, if they had enough firepower to stop the warriors from breaching the walls, the Movement would put the captured women and children at the front of the lines with ladders. The enclave would have to kill their own or let them scale the walls. It was an evil, insidious plan but it was foolproof.

  They had to be stopped.

  Jessie strapped on his weapons and Horowitz realized too late what was happening. No one saw him screaming and smashing priceless Ming Dynasty statues in an apoplectic rage when he saw the Mercury spin around and disappear down the gravel road.

  14

  Lakota

  Eustice was filling the tanks of his Soviet era biplane. He’d been readying it for weeks in anticipation of the call, the distress signal where the Lakota Air Force could possibly be of some use, and it had finally come. He thought he’d be flying south to help Gunny and Griz who had run off on some foolhardy mission but the cry for help came from the north. From up near the Canadian border. The Anubis army was finally on the move and they had already wiped out some smaller settlements. They didn’t have much information: the towns would radio in saying they had massive hordes attacking them. Sometimes they would get a mayday, men with machine guns had breached the walls and were cutting everyone down. Sometimes they didn’t even get that, just radio silence and no answers to repeated calls. Dani tossed his go bag in the back of the cockpit and came over to help finish the last-minute preps. The two men and the old forest service airplane were the sum total of the Air Force. They had cleaned out dozens of little country airports over the past few weeks, Eustice teaching him how to fly in and out of overgrown grass runways, making sure they had clean avgas at each one and moving on to the next. They’d logged hundreds of hours, had dozens of fairly secure refill stops and could reach just about anywhere in the middle states in less than a day. From the Rockies to the Mississippi river, from the Dakotas to the Gulf, they’d picked out the quietest, off-the-beaten-path airports and made sure they were ready. Thelma and Tommy arrived, she with a basket full of food, he with a case of white phosphorus grenades.

  She moved some guns out of the way and placed the basket carefully between the seats before going to the rear of the plane to ensure Eustice was being careful.

  “I put your blood pressure medicine in the basket.” she said “Don’t forget to take it every morning. It’s best if you do it at the same time so set an alarm on your watch.”

  “Okay, Thelma. I’ll do it.” Eustice said, half listening and with no intention of following through with his promise.

  He wondered how she knew he’d forgotten them in the rush since they’d gotten the news early that morning. And what was she doing rummaging through his RV?

  “I put some of my good silverware in that basket for your lunch along with some of Martha’s apple pie. You mind I get them back now, you hear? I have a complete set; don’t you lose any of my forks.”

  “We won’t.” he said, returning the fuel hose and snapping the lid closed on his plane.

  “I’ll expect you back safe and sound by Friday.” she added as he moved around her. “There’s a picture show I want to see at the Roxy and you need to take me. They’re playing African Queen and you know I love Bogart.”

  “We’ll be back, Thelma.” he agreed. “I’ll let the bad guys know so they don’t give us any extra trouble.”

  “Don’t you get sassy with me, Eustice Eugene Wilkins.” she said, wagging her finger at him. “You just make sure you’re back in time to get a bath. You know I don’t like the smell of airplane gas.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” he agreed again and whatever she was going to say was drowned out by Dani yelling fire in the hole and hitting the starter.

  He gave her a peck on the cheek and waved goodbye as he climbed in, got situated and put on the headset.

  “I think she’s sweet on you.” Dani said as he started to taxi towards the runway.

  Eustice gave a half snort then started running down the checklists and double checking his calculations.

  Debbie stared at herself in the mirror, searching her eyes, looking for an answer. Bobby had come by her apartment last night. He knew Griz was out of town and with a little bit of whiskey in him from Up Jumped the Devil, he’d come knocking bearing gifts, wanting his wife back. She hated herself for being weak with him. She could stand toe to toe with any man, stare them down or gun them down, whatever the situation called for. But Bobby was her husband. He spoke so sweet and didn’t try to push. He just wanted to talk. He just wanted his old life back. He’d been trying to find her for a year and didn’t understand why she hadn’t waited for him. Couldn’t they at least try? Hadn’t she loved him like he loved her?

  Yes, she had loved him but that was then. She’d loved him deeply and truly but too much had happened. They weren’t the same people. Things had changed. Time had passed.

  It took her an hour to get rid of him and she felt the guilt, just like he knew she would. She was torn between duty and honor and what she wanted for herself and he kept pushing. Kept making her feel small.

  She finished dressing, making sure her uniform was crisp, her badge was straight then buckled on her duty belt. Her stomach was in knots and she missed Griz. Missed his no nonsense way of speaking, the way he knew to bring her bullets and not a stupid stuffed animal with a pink bow. She knocked it off the table, sending the little bouquet of flowers it held flying across the floor. She glared at it and all it stood for. It was soft and cute. It was harmless and weak. It was how she felt around him, nearly powerless to make him stop. Make him shut up. Make him disappear again.

  Griz made her feel solid and sure about her decisions. Never made her second guess herself. Most of the time her job was easy but sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes she held someone’s future, their life or death in her hands. He never gave her back handed compliments that could also be insults and little jibes to make her feel small. He gave her guns or bullets or roses with prickly thorns. Things that were beautiful and strong but could hurt you, too. In just a short time, Bobby had made a lot of friends. He was already a shift watchman on the wall and worked with the electrical crew. He knew most of the townspeople and was always cheerful and grateful to be behind the walls. He always had a kind word or something nice to say to everyone and everyone liked him, felt sorry for him. The sheriff was being hard on the poor guy. She liked to hang out with the big hairy man who owned the gun shop but was never around. He was always out doing something beyond the wall and nobody was ever sure what it was.

  Griz didn’t have a lot of friends besides the military guys. He wasn’t unnecessarily mean to anyone but he wasn’t particularly nice, either. Even when he was trying to be friendly, sometimes it came across gruff. His big beard hid his smile and it looked like he was scowling most of the time. Most folks who didn’t know him tended to avoid
him. He wasn’t their first choice of guests to invite for an ice cream social or a Will and Grace watch party. But they liked Bobby. He was the guy to call if you had a problem with your power and he always had jokes. He got invited to a lot of gatherings and parties.

  She slipped her chrome Colt Python into its holster. A gift from Griz. Pearl handled with the Lakota Sheriffs badge meticulously engraved on both sides.

  “Every time you touch it, you’ll think of me.” he’d said.

  She touched it a lot.

  “Just speak some injun, tell them to flash their lights three times at three o’clock or something.” Scratch said, pushing the microphone over to Joey Tallstrider.

  “Are you sure you didn’t lose your brain as well as your hand?” he asked, pushing it back. “You know there are a hundred different languages? Cherokee isn’t the same as Blackfoot. Sioux isn’t the same as Apache.”

  He rolled his eyes, shook his head in amusement and Dutch laughed out loud.

  “Just speak some injun.” he said, imitating Scratch.

  “Paleface heap big horses’ ass.” Dutch said, hardening his accent and both men grinned at him.

  “Yuk it up Tonto.” Scratch said in annoyance. “You guys really can’t help? It was Gunny’s idea.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Tallstrider said. “But I don’t speak Hopi. It’s a unique language, comes from the Aztecs.”

  “Me either.” Dutch said “But I know a little Navajo. There are probably some there since the Hopi res is in the middle of the Navajo nation.”