Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus | Books 4-6 | Jessie+Scarlet Simpson, A. (pride and prejudice read txt) 📖

bathroom. They knew there were hundreds of ruthless bandits in Casey the Cannibal’s gang, and they would kill you and eat you if given half a chance. They knew there were still hundreds, maybe thousands, of radical Jihadis out there still fighting the war. Still killing and beheading anyone they found. They knew that many of the zoo animals had been set free or escaped in desperation and there were lions and tigers and wolves and feral dogs and even packs of feral cats that would kill you. They knew there was some mysterious group of people up north that had nearly beat him to death and left him for dead. Jessie tried to tell them that yeah, okay, maybe all those things were out there, but they were few and far between. It was mostly just abandoned and desolate country. Ten thousand miles of roads with no one on them. Thousands of vacant houses and towns, with nothing living or dead anywhere to be found. They nodded and smiled, maybe clapped him on the shoulder as they told him good luck and God Speed. They seemed to know better than he did what was out there and Bastille didn’t help matters, blowing every wild story he heard from newcomers into something the National Enquirer would have been proud of. No one thought to ask the truckers their opinions of the dangers. They went on supply runs every week, but they went in numbers, with armored rigs and army escorts. Of course they didn’t have any trouble, they weren’t out there all alone. They weren’t delivering important mail or much-needed parts between settlements all by themselves. They weren’t exploring new areas. Jessie was tired of telling them it really wasn’t that bad. They didn’t believe him.

Slippery Jim elbowed him and cocked his head toward a girl about sixteen. “She’s been eyeballing you all night,” he said with a grin. “Her name’s Carla and I heard her gushing about you on the radio every time there was a call in about the Road Angel.”

“Piss off, Jim,” Jessie said with an eye roll, then reached over to give him a wedgie as the kid danced out of reach.

“Just saying,” Jimmy said. “I can set you two up. If I had a girl as pretty as her staring googly eyes at me, I’d at least go talk to her.”

“She’s probably just grossed out by my face,” Jessie said and took off toward the buffet that Martha and Cookie had laid out and Bob was busy begging at. He was uncomfortable talking about girls, especially pretty ones. She probably just believed all that nonsense Bastille was always going on about anyway. He wasn’t a hero or a Road Angel or anything else. He just did what had to be done and the faces in the mirror were telling him he hadn’t done enough. He hadn’t atoned enough. He was still looking for redemption, still wanting the kids with their slightly askew heads to stop staring at him. They had faded far back in the mist for a long time, but they were becoming clearer again. They were making their silent demands in the mirror, and the wolf was starting to pace, making him feel edgy.

Every time he saw Doug or Slippery Jim, it reminded him of all the people he’d failed. Reminded him he still had some making up to do to balance the scales. Every time he forgot about feeling guilty, he’d see one of them and it would all come crashing back on him. His dad had told him none of what happened was his fault. He hadn’t told the nuns to drive on without him, he hadn’t been the one to decide to break into the convenience store. Jessie would nod, say okay, but in his heart, he didn’t believe it, he still blamed himself.

He’d drifted apart from Doug, didn’t see him much anymore. They’d tried to rekindle the friendship, had played Xbox together a few times but it wasn’t the same. Doug, like most of the rest of the people, were trying to get back to a life they had before the outbreak. School and homework, jobs and responsibilities, video games and football, Friday night movies or concerts, bonfires at the beach and trying to forget what was beyond the walls.

Jessie couldn’t forget. He saw it every time he looked in a mirror. He’d thrown himself into the training with everything he had, exhausting himself every day and trying to push the ghosts away. He knew what his old man said was true, that in a high-stress situation you didn’t rise to the occasion, you defaulted to your level of training. The embarrassing memory of him fighting a room full of zombies with the strap of his rifle tangled so he couldn’t bring it around to shoot, the whole time having a fully loaded pistol on his hip, was enough to make him believe. He wanted to be ready when he went out, didn’t want to fail.

He was trying to get people to leave, dropping obvious hints that he was tired and needed to get some sleep, but it fell on deaf ears. They were celebrating another new beginning. This party was more for them than it was for him. Hadn’t the world gone from Pony Express to putting people on the moon in a hundred years? That was back when everything had to be invented, now it had already been done. The knowledge wasn’t lost, it was all in books and computers, and Lakota was ground zero of the rebuilding.

Carl the Engineer, as they now called him, didn’t tell them the world had exploded into prosperity and technology because there were a few billion people driving everything forward. He didn’t want to be a party pooper, everyone was optimistic and celebrating. Now, with so few survivors, even with the technology they had, he didn’t think they’d be back to where they were a few months ago for hundreds