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

was gunned down, shot in the back by a sheriff who hid in a dark room and ambushed him. It was a desert oasis in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. An empty town filled with aimless undead and the creak of things going to ruin. Coyotes and wildcats roamed the streets, shuffling feet and the wind sighing through broken windows were the only noises. Miles of nothing before they got to it, and miles of nothing when they departed. A hundred undead were mangled on the road when they left and a hundred chased them out of town, stumbling and baking in the heat. Food for the vultures.

General Carson had lost another satellite, this one due to a collision with something. There were over seven thousand satellites from a hundred different countries and businesses in orbit. Every one that collided with another sent that much more debris flying around the earth, slowly being pulled back down to burn up in the atmosphere. The space junk, on its way to reentry, was plowing into other satellites. It didn’t take much to destroy the sensitive equipment. A pea-sized bit of debris, even a large flake of paint traveling at ten thousand miles an hour, could do a lot of damage. If they didn’t go after Casey now, in another six months they might not have an eye in the sky to locate him. They would only be able to track him by the havoc he caused in the little communities that were starting to pop up all over.

Gunny’s broken leg had healed well enough, his gunshot arm only bothered him when it rained. Hollywood claimed he was fit as a fiddle. Bridget was already jogging five miles a day, her leg and shoulder good as new. Scratch had been itching to go for months, the hole in his lung patched and healed. He wanted payback.

As far as they could determine, Casey had spent the winter south of the border in San Felipe, a tourist town in Baja, Mexico. Gunny had been content to let him go if he kept his gang down in Mexico. Let him be the big Kahuna down there. El Hefe of the Baja. He could be another Zapata or Pancho Villa, as long as he kept his band of idiots out of the States. He must have gotten bored or found the conquest too easy, though, and he had been up in Texas raiding outposts and fortified towns. There were a lot of survivors out in the desert. People were spread out; the towns were small and the individuals that lived in areas like that were the type of people who knew how to take care of themselves. When the virus was released, it had already gotten cold up north and a lot of snowbirds were settled in down south in their RVs and winter homes, enjoying the dry desert climate. Many of the old folks didn’t make it, they were too dependent on medicines they could no longer get or were too frail to survive the harsh new reality. Those that did, those that banded together and built walls of RVs parked nose to tail, or fought to fortify a warehouse, were some tough old timers. Hard-nosed, gray-haired men who would yell at you to get off their lawn, and hawk-eyed biddies who could haggle a Turkish carpet seller into submission.

Wire Bender had been talking to a group of survivors set up on the Gila River, outside of Yuma. They had put down all of the undead in the immediate area and were far enough away from town they didn’t have to worry about being found by the zombies. They’d been discovered by Casey’s outriders. The battle was finished before it began. They only had time for one anguished plea for help over the radio before it went quiet.

Fort Sumner, Pie Town, Show Low, and a dozen other dots on the map came and went in a blur. The thundering machines eating up the miles and blasting through towns before the living or the dead had time to register them. It was desolate country, the roads flat and straight, with only an occasional trailer or building set far off in the desert. These were the roads photographers loved to capture and post online with motivational quotes. They looked like they went on forever, narrowing to a point at the horizon. Anyone alive that had been living here was long gone, searching for food or an easier place to defend. The occasional shambler they came across was left splattered on the side of the road, its black blood being sucked up by the sand.

They had been building the war wagons all winter as the town recuperated. Some of them four-wheel drive, some of them designed like Baja racers, all of them built for speed. Big block Fords, Chevys and Mopars, old engines without electronics or computers to break, because if a check engine light came on or a tiny sensor failed, there was no way to fix it. Old engines were simple.

Gas.

Spark.

Air.

That’s all they needed. They would run even if half the cylinders failed. They could still get you out of a bad situation. Oversized tires with truck shocks and springs gave them ground clearance, bars welded over the windows gave them security. The old muscle cars were big and roomy, plenty of storage space for extra ammo and gear. Back seats were taken out and made into beds and they slept inside, safe and sound. They cannonballed across the country on two-lane roads, only stopping for fuel. They ate behind the wheel, peed in a bottle, and sipped on Jessie’s Trucker Speed concoction. The big tires were singing, the chatter on the CBs carefree, and they all had their radios tuned to the only station in America. Since Bastille had received so many complaints about Scratch’s choice of songs, he wasn’t allowed to make playlists anymore so the music wasn’t horrible. They pushed hard,