Tombstone had completely annihilated the cult’s armies, both living and dead. The Island had managed to hold off the swarms of undead until Eustice strafed them with homemade napalm then eliminated the black clad warriors with bullets and fire. The Cult only had one battle plan and it hadn’t taken into consideration death from above. They were a one trick army and their defeat was so decisive and swift, they didn’t have time to regroup or rethink strategies.
Jessie and Scarlet had a routine to clear a house and set up security and with Bob’s help, they had never been surprised or caught off guard. They unpacked what they needed before it got too dark to see and by the time the moon was up and the stars were out, they were lying on a blanket, enjoying the immensity of the South Dakota sky. She’d found a cookbook that featured recipes made from dry storage goods and she’d whipped up a mean canned chicken lasagna while Jessie dug through the garden and found fresh onions and carrots. They had the radio on low, Bastille was fielding ham radio calls from all around the States from the different settlements and there was a feeling of euphoria in the air. A sense that everything was going to be all right. They had air superiority, they’d whooped the snot out of the weirdos from up north and Casey was next on the list. The undead threat wasn’t near as bad as it used to be and even though winter was coming, the settlements were prepared. There wouldn’t be mass starvation or survivors freezing to death, trapped by the zombies.
Scarlet pointed out different constellations and told Jessie the ancient myths of the ones she knew.
Andromeda chained to the rock then rescued by Perseus.
Taurus the bull who was the father of the Minotaur.
Orion the hunter who was killed by his lover with an arrow.
They lay head to head on the blankets with their feet in opposite directions. Nefertiti was purring on her stomach, Bob gnawed on a rawhide bone beside Jessie and they shared time together. A precious thing. Bastille finally wound up his talk show, put on a playlist and music played softly from the speakers. They were both bone tired and drifted off in the late summer evening, cheek to cheek with their animals snuggled in close.
Jessie heard it and deep in his subconscious and something jerked him awake. He lay still, alert and listening. The moon had moved across the sky, hours had passed and his senses were on high alert. Something had awoken him. Scarlet still breathed evenly beside him, Bob was still snoring lightly and Nefertiti was gone. Either sleeping in the car or hunting something. He heard it again, faint and broken, and relaxed a little. The music was playing quietly but the ham was on. Somebody was talking on it, that was all. He ought to get up and turn everything off, quit wasting battery power, but he was warm and comfortable with the Mexican blankets pulled over them. He heard it again and sat up, careful not to wake her and scratched Bob behind the ears when he alerted to the movement.
“Shhh.” he whispered. “It’s alright, boy. Just late-night chatter.”
Jessie plopped down in the passenger seat, yawned and reached over to turn the radio off. The voice came through again, mostly static, far away and it sounded panicked. Full of fear. He cocked his head, adjusted the squelch and gain on the radio then waited for the call to come again. He was already starting to doubt what he’d heard, he’d probably imagined it. He rubbed idly at his scar, the long gash on his face that still itched from time to time then heard it again.
“Can anyone hear? Answer please. We are at big heads and we are trapped. Hello? Is anyone hearing?”
It was faint, scratchy and wavered in and out. They’d caught an atmospheric bounce with the signal and it was fading fast.
“I can hear you.” Jessie said. “Where are you? What is your location?”
He waited, adjusted the knobs and hiss filled the speaker.
“Hello? Please, can anyone hear us? Can anyone…”
The signal was lost in the noise. It faded and didn’t come back.
“That sounded like Ting Wei.” Scarlet said and Jessie glanced up at her, saw the concern on her face.
He hailed her a few more times but she didn’t answer. An operator from the Island heard Jessie’s repeated calls and jumped in after his third attempt to raise the wavering voice.
“I’ve been monitoring.” he said. “I haven’t heard anyone except you. The radio’s been quiet most of the night.”
“Roger, thanks.” Jessie said and turned to Scarlet. “You sure, that was her?”
“I am thinking yes.” She said. “It sounded like her. Did she say she was at the heads? Wasn’t that where Charlie Safari was going?”
“Yeah, it was.” Jessie said. “Mount Rushmore. That’s only a few hours south of here, we’ve gotta go.”
It only took them a few minutes to gather up the blankets and grab a few things out of the house. Nefertiti came on the run with a mouse in her jaws when she heard the car fire up and they were rolling out of the gate a minute after that, grabbing gears and racing time.
The few hours sleep and the cold-water splash bath from the well had done them good. They were young, full of life and vitality and were blasting down the long, straight farm roads of the Dakotas with the music blasting. Sometimes it would be fifteen or twenty miles before they came to a curve or turn where he had to tap the brakes. Once the sun crested over the eastern horizon, Jessie let the big engine breathe and wound it up to one twenty. The tires sang as they ate up the miles, chasing the asphalt as it split the green fields gone wild. The music was cranked and for once, Scarlet let it play. The heavy metal drove them both and she only turned it down every once in a while, to try the two-way again. Try to pick up a transmission. Neither had much hope of hearing anything during the day. They had barely picked up the signal at night when everything was clearer without the solar interference. From the weak and tinny sound of her voice, Jessie guessed the battery was just about dead or something was wrong with the antenna.
There was only a single road leading back to the carvings on the mountain face and he flew down 244 well above the posted thirty-five mile an hour speed limit. There was no use in trying stealth unless they wanted to walk for miles. The growl of the Cobra Jet engine carried a long way in the silence of the new world.
Scarlett unpinned the M-60 from the exoskeleton roll cage and pulled it around. If Casey’s raiders or the black clad Anubis warriors were there, she’d light them up. If it was zombies surrounding the buildings, they would lead them away. She charged the handle as Jessie roared around the last curve, ignored the road and flew up the incline, running down scrub trees and parting the waist high grass. The oversized shocks bounced them smoothly over the curb into the parking lot as they scanned for targets. For men scrambling to aim guns. For undead hordes turning to face the new sounds. For anything that was a threat.
They saw nothing.
Jessie kept the speed up, dodged around the busses and RV’s in the overflow lot and made a beeline for the walkway leading into the park and amphitheater. Charlie Safari’s armored crew cab was parked in front of the main entrance, the doors were closed and it didn’t appear to have any fresh bullet holes. The glass was intact and the tires weren’t flat. Jessie slowed, idled past it, circled around the entire lot and they craned their necks trying to spot snipers or other wasteland vehicles.
The place was dead. Nothing moved. There were corpses, ancient gnawed on and mostly eaten corpses, strewn here and there in the parking lot but not many. Not enough to account for all the cars. There were busses and RV’s also. There should have been hundreds of zeds stumbling around unless they were all inside or had already chased after a passing car. Jessie swung back around to the colonnade then shut off the engine. It pinged in the stillness as it cooled and they sat, fingers on triggers, waiting for something to happen. Someone to take a shot at them. A horde to come stumbling out of the woods.
Nothing.
Just the silence of pine trees rustling in the breeze. An eagle cry from far away. Slowly the sounds of nature came back and birds started singing again. A squ
irrel chattered at them and shook its tail. They stepped out and Bob immediately started sniffing around, alert but not alarmed.
“Maybe we are too late.” Scarlet said and slid her batons into their holsters.
“Maybe.” Jessie said as he peeked through the windows of the truck. He didn’t dare open the doors, retrievers usually had booby traps on their rigs. Nobody was going to steal them, they’d rather have them blown to bits, especially if the guy doing the stealing had managed to kill them. A little bit of payback.
Everything looked normal to him. There hadn’t been a fight, he didn’t see any brass casings laying around. They had to be inside.
Jessie geared up, slid into his broken-down leather jacket, let the guns find their place low on his hips then flipped the hidden kill switches on his car. He liked his old Mercury and didn’t want it blown sky high if someone stole it. With the fuel pump turned off, the engine would run for a few minutes, just long enough for someone to think they’d gotten away with taking it. Long enough for Jessie to catch up to them and counsel them on the error of their ways.
He stared through the columns, up to the majestic faces in stone and felt a melancholy settle over him. He wondered how long they would last. As long as the pyramids? Stonehenge? Probably. They were carved from granite. Maybe in a few centuries, noses would break off but a thousand years from now, people would still visit. Would their meaning, the identity of the men on the mountain be lost to time? Would they be worshipped as Gods by ignorant tribes? In a few hundred years would all the books be gone? Lost to the elements? The electronic data they had, the internet files, were all fragile and as far as he knew, all the knowledge of the world was held in a few fragile data bases. The Tower and the NSA storage banks. Either could be lost in a fire or lightning strike or even an electrical surge. Then there would only be books or bits and pieces on backup discs. It was all so fragile and people like Casey would happily let it all disappear. They would dance as the world burned.
Was it worth saving? Sometimes he wasn’t sure, sometimes he thought he might be content with a complete reset. Let man take a few thousand years to develop tech again. In a generation, maybe two, most knowledge would be gone. Only the most important things would be remembered: when to plant, how to cook and clean game, basic carpentry and natural medicines. Nobody knew how to make plastic or high cholesterol pills. The survivors were living off the carcass of the old world and most of those things would be gone in a few years. Used up or ruined. They might have a book that told them how to make electricity from a turbine but who made the turbine? How did they make aluminum? How did they make a circuit board? Sometimes the hugeness of it all pressed down on his shoulders and the only thing that kept him going was Scarlet.
His eyes held sadness, he was already bracing himself for what they’d find and what he’d have to do.
He was dreading the trip inside the park, down the long sidewalk to the stores and the offices. He was afraid he’d find Charlie and his bride wandering around in the amphitheater or trapped inside a gift shop, clawing at the doors, unable to figure out how to leave. He stared down the walkway, at the avenue of flags and the faded banners from each of the States. They hung listlessly in the early morning air, occasionally stirring from a breeze, but washed out and torn. Symbols of a bygone era.
He wondered if the new territories would keep the old state boundaries or if it would even matter. It would be a few hundred years before there were enough people to fight over land again. He sighed heavily. There weren’t enough good people left in the world and he was afraid a few more were gone like so many before them.
Scarlet ran a hand through his hair, pushed it away from his troubled brow and rested her palm against his cheek. She saw the darkness in him and wanted to kiss it away as she stared up into his eyes. Emerald green and cobalt blue that understood each other. There was powerful sadness in this place. It was a monumental graveyard overlooking a nation. Solemn faces on the mountain stared down at the ruins as they would for millennia to come.
Jessie kissed her palm and smiled his half smile. She held his gaze with her darkening eye and he saw only fathomless affection, felt her adoration and worshipped her right back. Agape love in its purest form. Unmerited, gracious and rich in mercy. Unnatural and unusual like both of them, willing to lay down their lives or vanquish a thousand enemies. His chest felt too small for his heart. The enchantment between them was nearly palpable, you could almost see the air around them shimmer as if it too rejoiced and danced with their power. With the unfiltered love that was in their very DNA. A love more than love that would move mountains or shape worlds.
“We find them.” she said.
He covered her hand with his, breathed in her scent and agreed.
“We find them.”
19
Mount Rushmore
They were surprised to find all the shops empty. There had been a battle but it was from long ago. A handful of dull shell casings, long dried blood stains on the floors and walls and a few shoes were all that was left. There were more corpses, some still trying to move but chewed up so badly they could hardly worm their way around. There were a lot of gnawed on bones lying around and they found a few heads, mostly intact, trying to bite at them.
“Weird.” Jessie said and used a gift shop t-shirt to pick up a leg bone that had been mostly picked clean.
Bob sniffed around with a low, menacing growl coming from deep in his chest. He didn’t like it either.
“Teeth marks.” he pointed out. “but not human. Looks like some wolves or something started eating zombies. I guess they would be easy prey.”
“Wolves wouldn’t do this.” Scarlet said. “There is plenty of wild game now, they like fresh meat, not rotting flesh.”
They poked through the rest of the stores but they all told a similar tale. At one time, months and months ago, there had been survivors. From the scattering of clothes and shoes in the plaza, it looked like they’d been trapped by a horde. The shelves were empty of anything edible, all the candy bars and bags of chips. They’d probably been starving and had been forced to try to make a run for it. They saw rolls of tape discarded by the clothes bins and could see how desperate people had made armor out of anything they could.
“I think they succeeded.” Scarlet said. “All the zombies are gone. They must have got to a car and led them away.”
“Hope so.” Jessie said but had his doubts. If any survivors had made it to the settlements, a story like this would have been told and retold around the retriever tables. Bastille probably would have had a whole show dedicated to the Rushmore survivors.
The scattering of heads and bones concerned him. Something wasn’t right, something had happened that he’d never seen before.
“Do you think the virus has spread to animals?” he asked, turning a piece of ribcage in the light, examining the bite marks on it.
“Those are zombie parts.” she pointed out, indicating a slowly snapping head that was lying on its side in the weeds. “Zombies don’t eat zombies.”
One of the eyes was milky black, the other completely eaten away by insects. A long line of ants was marching away from it with tiny little pieces of flesh in their mandibles as another line was coming back from the colony for seconds. Or thirds. Or it was probably their thousandth trip. The bones were stripped clean as only insects can. They’d saved the heads for last for some reason. Maybe because they still moved.
Jessie grimaced, tossed the bone away and it clattered into a pile of others. The skeletal remains were everywhere, torn apart, picked clean and scattered.
“Let’s go up the trail, see if we can figure out how to climb up Washington’s nose. That’s where they were headed.” he said and walked back outside into the sunlight.
There was something unnerving about bugs eating the undead while they were still moving around although it really wasn’t any different than what they normally did when something died, he supposed. Dead was dead. It was just a little creep
y, that’s all.
He told Bob to stay by the car and keep Nefertiti company as she dozed on the hood soaking in the heat from the flat black paint.
They made their way down the long concrete avenue of flags to the amphitheater and the walking path that would take them to the base of the mountain. More bones were scattered, picked clean and bleached by the sun.
They were half way up the hundreds of steps on the presidential path when Jessie spotted an overgrown walkway below them. It disappeared around the edge of the mountain where Lincolns head was carved.
“There.” he said and they hopped over the railing, ignoring the signs that said stay off the rocks and stay on the approved trail. More bones were scattered among the rocks and underbrush. Gnawed clean then left for the insects.
They followed the rocky way around the base of the mountain and into the shadows as it continued to climb upward. To their surprise, they found a mounted ladder going straight up, nowhere near as sturdy as the tourist friendly stairs. There was a gap between the back of the heads and the next mountain. A sheer faced canyon a few hundred feet above them separated the two.
“Wow.” Jessie said and started up the rickety, ancient treads. “I thought the mountain was a giant solid rock, not separated like this.”
“Maybe there is truth to the old legend.” Scarlet said, eager to see what mysteries they would discover. “Maybe the mountain is hollow and filled with treasure.”
“Right. Probably piles of elven gold with a dragon guarding it.”
“Silly Jessie. There are no dragons.” Scarlet said and goosed him.
There were scuff marks in the heavy layer of dust on the steps and the closer they got to the top, the more serious the two became. Someone had been through here recently and if it was Charlie, if he was still up here, he’d run into trouble. Maybe he’d taken a fall and Ting Wei couldn’t get him down the ladder by herself. Jessie hoped it was something as minor as a broken leg. That, he could deal with. It was a long climb, some sections a ladder, others steep steps but it leveled off finally and they came out behind the famous faces in a deep, narrow valley that lay in shadows. Quietly as they could, they made their way up the rocky path and stopped when they saw flocks of birds roosting on nearly every flat surface. There were hundreds of them, all silent and patient as they turned their unblinking eyes towards the pair.
Zombie Road VI: Highway to Heartache Page 16