Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus
Jessie + Scarlet
David A. Simpson
Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus
Jessie + Scarlet
Books 4-6
This is a work of fiction by
David A. Simpson
All characters contained herein are fictional and all similarities to actual persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
No portion of this text may be copied or duplicated without author or publisher written permission, with the exception of use in professional reviews.
Copyright © 2021 David A. Simpson
All rights reserved.
Contents
Zombie Road IV Cover
1. Gunny
2. Gunny
3. Jessie
4. Lacy
5. Gunny
6. Jessie
7. Jessie
8. Scarlet
9. Scarlet
10. Gunny
11. Gunny
12. Jessie
13. Jessie
14. Jessie
15. Casey
16. Gunny
17. Scarlet
18. Gunny
19. Jessie
20. Hasif
21. Jessie
22. Jessie
23. Jessie
24. Jessie
25. Hasif
26. Jessie
27. Jessie
28. Jessie
29. Jessie
30. Jessie
31. Jessie
32. Jessie
33. Jessie
34. Gunny
35. Gunny
36. Scarlet
37. Jessie
38. Lakota
40. Gunny
41. Casey
42. Jessie
43. Jessie
44. Jessie
45. Jessie
46. Jessie
Afterword
Authors Note
Zombie Road IV Back Cover
Zombie Road V
47. Gunny
48. Jessie
49. Gunny
50. Gunny
51. Gunny
52. Jessie
53. Lakota
54. Gunny
55. Slippery Jim
56. Jessie
57. Gunny
58. Casey
59. Jessie
60. Jessie
61. Jessie
62. Gunny
63. Lakota
64. Jessie
65. Eustice
66. Jessie
67. Jessie
68. Jessie
69. Lakota
70. Jessie
71. Jessie
72. Gunny
73. Gunny
74. Jessie
75. Slippery Jim
76. Tombstone
77. Jessie
78. Jessie + Scarlet
79. Jessie + Scarlet
80. Jessie + Scarlet
81. Tombstone
82. Jessie + Scarlet
83. Gunny
84. Jessie + Scarlet
85. Gunny
86. Casey
87. Gunny
88. Jessie + Scarlet
89. Jessie + Scarlet
90. Jessie + Scarlet
91. Jessie + Scarlet
92. Gunny
93. Captain Ricketts
94. The Tower
95. The Tower
96. The Tower
97. Gunny
98. Jessie + Scarlet
Epilogue
Afterword
Zombie Road V Back Cover
Zombie Road VI Cover
99. Jessie + Scarlet
100. Jessie
101. Jessie
102. Jessie
103. Jessie
104. Jessie + Scarlet
105. Gunny
106. Jessie + Scarlet
107. Jessie + Scarlet
108. The Tower
109. Jessie + Scarlet
110. The Tower
111. The Tower
112. Lakota
113. Blackfoot
114. Anubis Headquarters
115. Tombstone
116. Mount Rushmore
117. Mount Rushmore
118. Charlie Safari
119. Jessie + Scarlet
120. Lakota
121. Lakota
122. Gunny
123. Gunny
124. Gunny
125. Gunny
126. Gunny
127. Gunny
128. Jessie + Scarlet
129. Doctor Stevens
130. Jessie + Scarlet
131. Jessie
132. Jessie
133. Jessie and Jessie
134. The Traveler
Epilogue
Also by David A. Simpson
Zombie Road VI Back Cover
Zombie Road 4
Road to Redemption
Book 4 in the Zombie Road Series
This is a work of fiction by
David A. Simpson
All characters contained herein are fictional and all similarities to actual persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
No portion of this text may be copied or duplicated without author or publisher written permission, with the exception of use in professional reviews.
Copyright © 2018 David A. Simpson
All rights reserved.
Zombie Road IV
Road to Redemption
A two-fisted trucker tale
Dedicated to my dearest partner in life:
The nitpicky, OCD, grammar-Nazi, Robin.
1
Gunny
They were running fast and light, hell-bent for leather in purpose-built machines, eating up the miles and leaving the stumbling dead far behind in trails of dust. It had been six months since the outbreak and nature was reclaiming the earth. The two-lane blacktop was covered with drifts of blown-in dirt and last year’s leaves in places. Grass and weeds were forcing their way through cracks in the asphalt, slowly spreading across the roads in the early spring sunlight. The men from Lakota were on a mission and time was the enemy. The CB distress call had come in late last night, faint and fading, but clear enough the garbled plea was heard, “Overrun and surrounded, out of bullets, out of food, out of water. Situation is desperate. Suicide mission to even send this message. Half the people already lost. We can’t hold out much longer. Can anyone hear us? Can anyone help?”
In the chaotic first weeks after the overnight outbreak, most of the world had perished. Those that managed to survive, those that learned how to fight and win against the undead hordes, had banded together in fortified warehouses, reinforced buildings, and boarded up homes. They had cleared out small towns, built walls of logs or semi-truck trailers or train cars dragged into place with farm tractors. Their will to live was strong and only the strong survived.
The town of Lakota, Oklahoma had fared better than most outposts through the winter. They had been lucky. A convoy of armored semi-trucks and heavily armed men had rolled in, cleared out the town, and sealed it off with shipping containers. Within weeks, they had the electricity back on and were broadcasting on the old gospel station, sending their signal across America.
“Come to Lakota if you can, it’s safe and secure.”
They offered encouragement, advice, suggestions, recipes for canned goods and hope. “Make it through the winter, spring is coming,” they said. They promised to send out aid, supplies, and assistance. They had a plan, and if the rest
of the country could survive the winter, the new year would be a new beginning. “Contact us on the CB or Ham radio if you’re in trouble, we’ll help if we can.”
The radios were monitored 24 hours a day and in the wee hours of the morning, a weak distress call came through. Only for a few minutes as it caught the clouds and bounced, but long enough to give an address. Corning, Arkansas, up near the Missouri border.
“Stay alive,” Wire Bender told them. “Help is on the way.”
It only took twenty minutes to wake up enough volunteers, and within the hour they were throwing their go-bags into the machines, downing cups of coffee, and kissing loved ones goodbye.
This wasn’t a supply run, they weren’t taking a truckload of food or ammo. This was a rescue, requiring speed and urgency.
Gunny slowed for a sharp curve, dropped a gear and hammered on it again, the fifty-five Chevy growling its big block fury into the afternoon. Hard men driving hard cars. Old school metal and pre-computer engines. They were simple to build, easy to fix, and parts were plentiful. Hollywood was in his Cadillac, five hundred cubic inches purring under the hood. Scratch sat behind the wheel of a flat black Buick Skylark with big-inch power and ram air induction. Griz brought up the rear in a Hemi powered Dodge panel van. He liked his comforts. Liked to stretch out when he slept. All of them had oversized tires, lifted suspension, Kevlar reinforced doors, bars over the windows, and custom brush guards protecting their fronts. Four barrels, superchargers, and oversized fuel tanks were the norm. They were trying to cover an eight-hour trip in seven. Maybe six. Time was ticking for people barely hanging on, a thousand corpses were beating on their defenses, slowly wearing them down.
Stabby McStabsalot was riding shotgun with Scratch and navigating. He called out the turns on the CB for Gunny, and the rest followed in his trail, eating up the miles.
“Our reserve tank is down to a quarter,” Bridget announced over the radio. “We’re going to need to refuel in the next fifty miles or so.”
She rode with Hollywood in his ’71 Coupe DeVille. He said he always wanted a pimp mobile like Super Fly had in the movies he’d watched as a kid. Now he had it, loaded with luxuries, and built like a Baja race car.
“Next little town is Mountain Home,” Stabby called out. “It looks big enough to have a few stations, small enough we won’t get mobbed.”
“I see it coming up,” Gunny said. “Stay sharp, people. Just like we practiced.”
Gunny flew in at eighty miles an hour, then slowed as he approached a gas station on the outskirts of town, pulling in fast next to the drops. He was out of the old Chevy and sliding his hose in the tank when Scratch zipped around him in his Skylark and made a run at the store, pulling any undead toward the sound of death metal blaring from his loudspeakers. Griz flew by on the road, making his pass and picking off any runners coming toward them from town. Lars circled the lot in his Cadillac, taking out the stragglers. He was ready to swing in and drop his hose the second Gunny pulled out, taking his place in the orchestrated ballet of armored cars swarming like bees.
Gunny flipped the switch on the bilge pump and started pulling gas out of the underground tank and into his. He crouched with his back against his quietly rumbling Chevy, pistol out, making himself inconspicuous with the din of blaring music, screeching tires, and revving engines drawing all the undead attention.
The dead ran in.
The dead were cut down.
Iron bumpers with sharpened steel running their width sliced through the zeds and sent them sprawling, dismembered and ruined. Some of them chased the Cadillac in circles around the parking lot, until he pulled back on the road in time for Griz to run them down, sending broken boned bodies flying away from his truck. Gunny finished refueling in minutes and tossed the hoses back in the rack, the big magnets on the nozzle holding them secure. He cranked his radio, blasting 80’s hair metal, and roared out of the parking lot taking Griz’s position. Hollywood and Bridget zipped in and started their refuel. The cars circled in and out, confusing the undead and running them down, never stopping for longer than the few minutes it took for the high-speed pumps to fill their oversized fuel tanks.
Griz was the last in line and when he finished, he closed the lid. It was a good supply, no sense leaving it open to the elements. He climbed back into his old Dodge panel van and got sideways peeling out of the parking lot. The Hemi under the hood squalled, and the tires rolled smoke. Fifteen minutes after they’d swarmed in, they were hammer down again, leaving scores of dead bodies scattered around the station. They had miles to cover and were hitting it hard, jacked up on adrenaline and a sense of urgency.
“Wonder why they chose a Jehovah’s Witness church to hole up in?” Bridget asked an hour later, looking at the barely legible note from Wire Bender and her own state map of Arkansas, tracking their progress.
“Most of them don’t have windows,” Gunny said. “Big places, usually brick. This town is a dot on the map, it’s probably the strongest building they have. We’re almost there. Keep an eye out for a horde. They may be way off the road so we might miss them.”
They slowed as the country houses and farms started getting closer together and the yards got smaller. They didn’t have an address, just the name of the town. The church could be anywhere. They passed a FedEx freight warehouse and a small Walmart, still no sign of a mobbed building. The streets were empty, just blown-in litter and a few haphazardly abandoned cars. There was a roadblock ahead, semi-trailers parked nose to tail, running down a cross street. Underneath them were cars with their roofs flattened and crammed in place with bulldozers and forklifts. It made for a solid wall, thirteen-foot-tall, taking up one lane of the road for blocks in both directions. There were little guard shacks built on top, every few hundred feet. Gunny took a left and paralleled it, crunching over the bits of safety glass that covered the road, remains of the car windows as they were crushed and jammed into place.
“Pretty good defenses,” Griz said. “Quick and easy. Wonder how they got breached?”
The little convoy of cars followed the wall, their rumbling exhaust the only noise as they made their way along trailers that enclosed the center of town. When Gunny rounded a corner, they saw how it had been overrun. Where the wall crossed Route 67, there was a huge horde of milling undead still slapping and clawing at it. There were hundreds of trampled bodies, discarded shoes, clothing and spent brass casings littering the area, evidence of a fierce battle.
“Looks like they got swarmed,” Hollywood said, staring at the broken guard shacks on the roofs, the blood and gore covering the sides of the trailers all the way up to the top.
“Sixty-seven runs straight into St. Louis,” Scratch said. “I bet a horde got to running this way and just never stopped. Must have been a big one if enough got over the top.”
The undead had stopped their futile attempts to break down the wall, and there weren’t enough left on this side of it to pile on top of each other like they’d done at first. They had formed a solid stack of undead corpses that kept climbing over each other until they had made a ramp. Numbers too massive for the townspeople to defend against. The milling dead had stopped and were staring at the newcomers now, at the machine sounds that might mean fresh blood. The crows circled and cawed, alarmed at the noises, and squawked their displeasure at their meal being interrupted. The turkey buzzards still feasted on the broken open heads of the gunned down dead, ignoring the feast that was walking around, and keeping a wary eye on the noisy machines.
“Man, that’s a lot of zombies,” Scratch said. “You want to shoot ‘em, or lead them off?”
“Need a semi to take out that many,” Gunny said. “A pack like that might tear the cars up. Scratch, see if you can get them to follow you out of town, lead them on a chase and circle back. We’ll find the gate and see what’s going on inside.”