“Welcome to America. Don’t make me come back,” Gunny said and turned to leave. His business was done here.
As they neared the ladders to climb back to the top of the trailers, the man came rushing up, clutching the nearly empty water bottle he’d been chugging. They waited, hands near their guns, as he approached.
“My friends,” he said, looking at each of them, speaking in his accented English. “I wanted you to know, we are grateful. We will not squander this chance you have given us. You are Johnathan Meadows, yes? The president, yes?”
Gunny nodded and the man rushed on. “You need to know, the soulless were led here by the living. They walked among them and were not attacked. They brought them to our walls and slipped away. We did not shoot at them because we did not understand.”
“You mean some people were running in front of the horde, they were being chased?” Griz asked.
“No,” the man clarified. “There were three of them. They walked with the pack and were not disturbed by it. They controlled them, brought them to us, and then left. We thought it was you at first, taking your revenge.”
Gunny cocked his head at this news. “Are you sure?” he asked. “It wasn’t some well-preserved zeds that looked human?”
The man was insistent. Adamant that someone had learned how to be among the dead and not be attacked.
He thanked them over and over, all the way up the ladder, until they were over the top and climbing down the other side.
“What do you make of that?” Griz asked as they dug more ammo out of the panel van and started reloading their magazines. “Somebody knows how to control the zeds?”
“Dunno,” Gunny replied. “Doesn’t make sense. They were probably imagining it, freaked out from the sheer number of them slamming into their walls.”
In the distance, they heard the oncoming roar of a muscle machine coming down the road.
“That’s Scratch,” Hollywood said. “Man, this place creeps me out. Let’s get loaded up and get the hell out of here before that horde comes back.”
“I second that,” Bridget said.
3
Jessie
Jessie was sweating in the crisp morning air as his feet pounded out a steady rhythm on the dirt road that ran along the inside of the container wall. Bob panted at his side, easily keeping pace, his wounds healed and not seeming to bother him at all.
“Take it easy,” they said.
“It’s only been a few months,” they said.
“Don’t overdo it, you’ll hurt yourself,” they said.
He ignored all of their advice and pushed himself. He knew he should be finished, should be exhausted, should be gasping for every breath and ready to barf up breakfast, but he was barely winded. He felt no worse than he would after a hundred-yard dash: breathing hard but feeling good. He didn’t know what was in that morphine drip he’d been given by the weirdos in the cult, but the SS Sisters were beside themselves to get to the bottom of the mystery. They said it was a miracle drug. They said broken bones didn’t knit themselves back together in a month. Gunshot wounds didn’t scab over and scar in a matter of weeks. Bruises and cuts didn’t heal and disappear in days.
But they had.
His dad had hobbled around on a broken leg all winter. The other people he’d met, Hollywood and Bridget and all the rest, spent long months recovering, but Jessie had felt fine by Christmas.
Healed.
The best shape of his seventeen years he’d ever been in.
He’d started off that morning with his daily routine at the gym turned rehab center but needed to get out and stretch his legs. He’d done some running with the rest of the guys, the soldiers who had been hunting Jihadis during the big Lakota battle back in November, but they didn’t go this far. They usually just jogged around town or maybe a little way along the shoreline. He had continued straight, along a guard path worn along the water when they all turned and headed back toward the gym. He ran the beach trails toward the wall, some four miles distant. He could see the coils of concertina wire staked out in the water a dozen yards offshore. Triple rows that would stop any undead trying to stroll up the banks or any boats if the radicals tried to attack again. He’d heard all about the prison escapee called Casey, how he had a huge price on his head. No one seemed to think he’d be back around, though. The last they saw of him, he was high-tailing it west.
Jessie kept up a steady pace, breathing hard, but not out of control. He still had a long way to go to get back home, back to the opposite side of the peninsula. He’d heard somebody say it was nearly five miles long and three miles wide at the wall, the narrowest point. Seventeen square miles. Over eleven thousand acres. The town itself was starting to fill up as people kept coming in. Many of the houses and apartments in the downtown area were already taken. There were hundreds more on the outskirts, but everyone seemed to want to bunch up together. His dad was one of the few who had picked a place way out away from everyone, a few miles from the center of things. Most of the people didn’t even have cars anymore. They said they didn’t need them, there was no place to go. They had driven them to a marina outside the wall and abandoned them, didn’t want them taking up garage space. Everyone rode bicycles or had golf carts to get around.
Last night’s whiskey was sweating out of his pores. He’d walked back home after shutting down Pretty Boy Floyd’s like he’d been in the habit of doing. He was the last to leave, Pam finally telling him it was closing time. He’d only had a few, he hung out there as an excuse not to go to bed. To sleep. It was a quieter pub than Up Jumped the Devil, Stabby’s place that was always loud and rambunctious. Pretty Boy Floyd had background music, old men playing checkers and dogs were allowed. Up Jumped the Devil had the music cranked and they danced with abandon.
He was honoring the promise he’d made to quit hitting the bottle so hard. He’d been drinking a lot, it helped him sleep and took the edge off, but he never seemed to get drunk anymore. Even slamming whiskey or Scotch, it didn’t have the same effect as it did before he’d had the miracle IV.
Before the zombies, he’d tried drinking a few times with his friends when they’d have an all-night gaming session at someone’s house. Three or four shots and they’d be laughing at everything and getting their asses kicked by eight-year-olds in Call of Duty. Now, he barely felt it. It dulled his senses, but that was about it. Ever since he’d had that injection, he’d changed. He healed faster, didn’t feel the effects of alcohol, and felt good. Really good, all over. For a few months, he’d had the nightmares and dreams every time he closed his eyes. He tried to drink them away and told the SS Sisters he was in a lot of pain so they’d keep giving him the pills, the OxyContin, but they saw right through him. They couldn’t believe he’d healed so fast, but they sure did think he was lying when he said he needed the pills. The nightmares slowly went away, or at least he didn’t remember them so vividly. Bob helped a lot. He seemed to know when the dreams were bad and more than once he’d awoke to a slobbery tongue and stank nasty dog spit covering his face.
He turned, following the jeep path, when he got to the container wall. One of the guards shouted a greeting down to him and he waved, never breaking stride. Bob spotted a rabbit in the field and took off after it, barking his fool head off. Jessie kept pounding the dirt, one footfall after another, trying to figure out a plan.
His mom had tried to baby him at first, tried to make things go back to the way they used to be. He guessed she wanted him to sleep till noon, spend hours every day playing on his Xbox, and have to be told a dozen times to set the trash out. She wanted him to go back to school. She wanted her boy back. That wasn’t happening.
He had seen things.
He had done things.
He had put away childish things.
They’d had a big argument at the dinner table a few nights ago, before his Dad took off on another rescue mission. She was nagging him about his drinking, telling his old man that he needed to tell everyone in town to stop
serving him. He was underage. He was going to become a drunk. He needed to finish his education and learn a trade. A few months ago, Jessie would have blown up, yelled back and threw a fit, probably stomped off and slammed the door to his room. He had just smiled at her a little sadly, his jagged scar pulling his mouth into an ugly snarl.
“I’ve been looking at some of the empty places in town, mom. I’m thinking about moving into one of them.”
She had started to protest, he saw it building up, but his dad had just reached over and covered her hand with his. That didn’t happen very often, it seemed like she usually bossed him around, but that was all it took. The wind went out of her sails, he could see the tears threatening to spill over, and she had excused herself.
He and the old man finished dinner slowly, neither one of them hungry anymore.
“It’s hard for her to let you go so fast,” he said, stirring the peas around on his plate. “Normally she would have you a few more years before it was time to cut the apron strings, take off for college.”
“I know, dad. But I can’t go back to how it used to be. You understand, right?”
His dad had nodded. “More than you know, son. Have you got a place picked out?”
“Yeah,” Jessie answered. “Slippery Jim showed me a really cool boat repair shop near the water. It has a big office and a couple of bathrooms. I can take one of them and convert it to a real bathroom with a shower, I think. I kind of want a place where I can work on the car. I want to make some improvements so if I need to go back outside the wall, it’ll be ready.”
His dad had nodded again. When Jessie tried to give him the keys to the old Mercury a few months ago, the old man refused. Said it was his now, he’d earned it. It had been in the garage all winter and they’d gotten it back into shape, had it tuned up and running good.
“Let your mother help you decorate, pick out the curtains and paint and things like that,” he said. “Let her be a mom.”
Jessie nodded. He had already hung his name on the fence that surrounded the brick building, claiming it, but he needed to get down to the courthouse to register it so it would be official. His mom worked in that office, assigning the new people houses, and he needed her approval to make it legal and show it occupied in the books. He’d been avoiding doing it, dreading her reaction.
“You plan on going outside the wall?” his dad had asked.
Jessie knew it was no use hem-hawing around, the old man would see right through him.
“I can’t go back to school, dad. I’m not going to be an electrician, or a farmer, or a truck driver. I don’t want to join the army, I don’t want to be around other people. I know I’ve got to help out, to do something to stay here, but I can’t go back to being a student. I don’t know what I want to do yet, but it’s not going to be staying behind the wall.”
His dad had pondered that for a minute before he said, “The mayor wants to set up a courier service between here and the Hutterites. There are a few other communities we’ve established communications with on the Ham and we need a way to transport things quickly back and forth. That might be something you could do for now.”
“Be a mailman?” Jessie asked.
“More like the Pony Express riders,” the old man had replied. “Lots of danger and hard driving. I need an emissary to evaluate all these new communities, too. Make sure they’re not a bunch of cutthroats. That is, if you’re up for it.”
Jessie had smiled his crooked smile. Yeah. He was up for it. It would get him out of town and away from the looks he got from people staring at his scar. He was definitely up for it.
Some supplies were starting to get scarce and General Carson was urging Lakota to start a new currency. They were supposed to begin making coins soon. Something new that would have value, not like the old paper money that wasn’t worth anything. Something that would buy supplies they needed so every transaction wouldn’t take an hour of haggling over what the trade goods were worth.
“You can deliver the first shipment of those, too,” his dad said.
“So now I’m a Brinks truck and a Pony Express rider?” Jessie asked, wondering what a real gold coin would look like, whose picture would be on it.
His dad laughed. “I reckon so. I’ll help you build the car. I need an excuse to get out of the office, anyway. It’s enough to drive a man crazy, sitting behind a desk all day.”
When they’d finished eating and taking the dishes to the sink, the old man still favoring his mostly healed leg, he said, “One last thing. I won’t tell Stabby or Pam to cut you off at their bars, but you need to slow down. I hear you’re matching shot for shot with some of the guys that have been chugging rot gut for years. Drinking some of them under the table. You’re going to ruin your liver.”
Jessie was about ready to quit anyway. It didn’t seem to do him any good like it used to. He could drink a fifth and barely feel buzzed. Besides, he didn’t have any more money or anything left to trade. Being the president’s son only got you so many free drinks. He thought Bob and time had more to do with the nightmares going away, anyhow. They didn’t come every time he closed his eyes anymore and usually his dog would wake him up before they got really bad. Before he had to relive the days trapped in the trees and he had to kill Porsche over and over or try to match a pile of heads to broken little bodies from the orphanage.
Jessie had just nodded once.
He would slow down.
It was enough. It was his word.
4
Lacy
Lacy was eyeballing the warehouse with a critical eye. It was a few blocks off of Main Street and was probably some fifty years old. Who knew what it had been formerly, now it was a repair shop for boats and jet skis. It was a brick building, probably a small factory of some sort at one time, that someone had installed a couple of overhead doors in at some point. She let the boys clean out the garage area, she was looking at the dingy offices and grungy bathrooms, trying to figure out a nice layout that would include a kitchen. Johnny and Tommy were in the bays, pointing out machine things and boat parts that needed to go, that they wouldn’t have any use for. They had a crew of volunteers helping out and she snagged Firecracker, dragged him over to the offices. He had listed carpentry as one of his skills on Eliza’s spreadsheet and she was going to put him to work. Doug and little James were there, along with that ragtag bunch of tweenagers that were always coming up with excuses to get out of school. The Bullet Brigade, they were called. She’d tried to shoo them off at first, told them to get back to classes, but it was useless since Johnny wouldn’t help her. He’d put them to work packing up the trailers with everything he didn’t want in the shop and sending it over to one of the storage units. Eliza had made a quick inventory of the boat repair equipment, adding it to one of her spreadsheets, and noting the unit where it was going, in case they needed it in the future.
Lacy required a plumber to help her with converting the bathroom, but Eliza said they didn’t have one, just a few guys who were all-around handymen. One of them was Jimmy Winchell, that famous country music star, and she called the operator to track him down. If old Mrs. Henderson didn’t know where someone was, she could find out quick. She’d taken over the ancient manual telephone switchboard they’d found in the basement of the courthouse. Wire Bender and Carl had figured out how to get it up and working, and slowly more and more houses were being hooked up and assigned party line numbers. There wasn’t a whole lot that went on in town Mrs. Henderson didn’t know about, and she happily started on her mission, switching cords and plugs, dialing the rotary and asking everyone she connected with if they knew where he was. Within minutes, she’d tracked him down working on wall reinforcements and he was in route to see what the emergency was.
Lacy was looking at the grimy walls of the office. It had apparently been white at one time, clean rectangles shone where she’d torn down all the boat posters. Most of them had big-busted women who barely contained those big busts with tiny bits of cloth and str
ing. She looked out of the smudged office window at her family. Johnny was clomping around, still with a bit of a limp, as Jessie was pointing out something for the kids to haul off, either to the dump or the storage unit. It seemed to her that Jessie had filled out so much in the past few months, had grown and now stood half a head taller than her. He wasn’t the same boy she had known for sixteen years. Her baby had been snatched away and in his place was a brooding young man, permanently scarred inside and out, by what he’d been through. It was a mystery to her how he’d healed so fast, he’d been on death's door when he drove that old car of Johnny’s through the gate. A month later, you’d never know he had been shot and beat and had broken bones. Stacey was sure there was something in the IV drip he’d been given. It was powerful medicine, but by the time they realized how miraculous his recovery was, there was nothing left in the bag but dried residue. The only part of him that wasn’t as good as new was the nasty gash on his face. Stacey had said there were muscle and tendon damage that went too long without being repaired. It had healed into a scar that pulled his lip into a sneer and ran all the way up to his eye. There was something dark inside of him, too. It hadn’t healed yet, and maybe never would. Everyone had been through a lot, but her baby had been through more. Doug had told her how he got the scar, Jessie claimed he didn’t remember.
They had been trapped in some trees, trying to get to the lake after breaking out of the school. He said Jessie went mad, started killing all of their classmates and teachers that had them surrounded. He said that the pile of bodies was so high that one of the zombies had leaped and sunk its claws into Jessie's face, ripping it wide open. Jessie had kept killing, though. Kept cutting them down. He was the only reason they escaped.
Johnny told her a story he’d heard repeated by some of the guys at the bar, about Jessie beating a zombie to death with its own daughter. It was a tale he’d told them one night when he first started drinking heavy, when he would get drunk after a few shots.
Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus | Books 4-6 | Jessie+Scarlet Page 4