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

His latest job had been in Minnesota when everything went crazy. They’d only been here for a few weeks; his previous assignment had been in Cairo, where they’d lived for nearly two years. Her mom was dropping her off at school and people just went nuts. A middle schooler came running out from the cafeteria where the poor kids got free breakfast and attacked her. She wasn’t used to the cold of Minnesota in September and had been bundled up, so his little teeth hadn’t sunk into her skin. Her mom had gotten bit when she jumped out to help, to pull the screaming little brat off.

They’d made it to the museum where her dad was working and everything just kept getting crazier and crazier. Her father and one of the security guards, a rent-a-cop named Ricketts, helped gather people into the basement and they hid as the world went mad. A few of the people turned into the hungry dead, but they pulled the ancient mummies out and locked them into the sarcophagi of kings and queens. Her mother was one of them, the small bite on her wrist growing steadily worse, blackening and spreading dark runners of poison up her arm. It was easy to believe in something supernatural when you were cut off and afraid for days, nibbling on candy and snack cakes from the vending machines, and surrounded by unnatural things. Her father started telling stories of the ancient Egyptians, about their beliefs of the afterlife. About their prophecies of the apocalypse and how a messenger would rise from the chaos to lead the people to a better life. Soon he was having visions, speaking in an ancient and long-dead language, and telling them of things to come. The eleven people he had gathered already owed him their lives. Was it so hard to believe that he was the messenger foretold in the ancient papyrus scrolls? If he got them out of the basement, if he led them to a better place, maybe then they’d believe.

Scarlet wasn’t buying any of it. She knew her dad could read and write the mostly forgotten Egyptian language. No one spoke Coptic anymore except in church ceremonies, much like Latin was still used by the Catholics, and it did sound ancient and mysterious.

The security guard was the only person with a gun out of their group, so it was him, her, and her father on that first outing to see how bad things were. She and her dad were both equipped with scimitars liberated from the museum displays, although she was much more comfortable with it than him. Everything she’d learned in the Tahtib classes, one of the few pastimes available to her during their stay in Egypt, easily translated from ancient stick fighting to modern sword fighting. It was basically the same thing and she’d convinced her father and the security guard to let her go after she showed them what she could do with it. She danced around both of them in a swirling dervish, slapping them with the flat side of her blade before they could even begin to parry. She left them humbled and with multiple welts. They stopped telling her she’d just get herself killed and grudgingly helped her find protective clothes.

Once they left the museum, they found guns easily enough, but she had never become fond of them. She’d never fired one before and couldn’t get the hang of it. Ricketts tried to teach her, but she wasn’t a very good shot, especially if the zombie was fast, and the noise always brought more. She tried to avoid fights, run when possible. If she had to make a stand, she preferred the batons or machetes. Fast, quiet, never ran out of ammo and she was much more accurate with them.

They had found Doctor Stevens on their first trip out. The museum was in the small downtown area of Sissipaw, where it was nestled between the civic center and the First Minnesota Bank. There weren’t many of the undead wandering around the district after the first few days, they had all run to join hordes trying to get to the living in the various hotels, apartments, or homes in the subdivisions. They saw Stevens in the lobby of the hospital when they passed. He had a teenaged zombie in a catch pole, dragging it back to his laboratory in the basement.

The doctor was actually a scientist type doctor, not a doctor type doctor, working in the University of Minnesota’s virology laboratory. He was borderline genius and had been on a fast track career, maybe even becoming the Regents’ Professor and head of the microbiology department. That was before the accusations of moral ambiguity and situational ethics caused such an uproar in the virology community that he had been publicly terminated and then quietly sidelined to the basement of the hospital. Out of sight, out of mind. He was much happier here, there weren’t so many prying eyes judging his experiments or his methodology. They didn’t ask questions in this small, but well-funded laboratory, and he didn’t answer to anyone. His only contact with the University was a quarterly visit from a man in a suit who seemed more of a government bureaucrat than a member of the scientific community. They didn’t care if some of his experiments were unconventional, they kept him with a steady supply of rhesus monkeys and were unconcerned about how many of them died. The lab had its own incinerator.

The doctor had three other zombies’ strapped and tied to gurneys and was pulling samples of cerebrospinal fluid out of their heads, the only thing that was truly still alive in their bodies. He’d been awake for days, too excited about his discoveries to sleep, ecstatic to share them with other survivors. He hadn’t seemed to care that everyone was dead, he was working