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

from the exoskeleton roll cage and pulled it around. If Casey’s raiders or the black clad Anubis warriors were there, she’d light them up. If it was zombies surrounding the buildings, they would lead them away. She charged the handle as Jessie roared around the last curve, ignored the road and flew up the incline, running down scrub trees and parting the waist high grass. The oversized shocks bounced them smoothly over the curb into the parking lot as they scanned for targets. For men scrambling to aim guns. For undead hordes turning to face the new sounds. For anything that was a threat.

They saw nothing.

Jessie kept the speed up, dodged around the busses and RV’s in the overflow lot and made a beeline for the walkway leading into the park and amphitheater. Charlie Safari’s armored crew cab was parked in front of the main entrance, the doors were closed and it didn’t appear to have any fresh bullet holes. The glass was intact and the tires weren’t flat. Jessie slowed, idled past it, circled around the entire lot and they craned their necks trying to spot snipers or other wasteland vehicles.

The place was dead. Nothing moved. There were corpses, ancient gnawed on and mostly eaten corpses, strewn here and there in the parking lot but not many. Not enough to account for all the cars. There were busses and RV’s also. There should have been hundreds of zeds stumbling around unless they were all inside or had already chased after a passing car. Jessie swung back around to the colonnade then shut off the engine. It pinged in the stillness as it cooled and they sat, fingers on triggers, waiting for something to happen. Someone to take a shot at them. A horde to come stumbling out of the woods.

Nothing.

Just the silence of pine trees rustling in the breeze. An eagle cry from far away. Slowly the sounds of nature came back and birds started singing again. A squirrel chattered at them and shook its tail. They stepped out and Bob immediately started sniffing around, alert but not alarmed.

“Maybe we are too late.” Scarlet said and slid her batons into their holsters.

“Maybe.” Jessie said as he peeked through the windows of the truck. He didn’t dare open the doors, retrievers usually had booby traps on their rigs. Nobody was going to steal them, they’d rather have them blown to bits, especially if the guy doing the stealing had managed to kill them. A little bit of payback.

Everything looked normal to him. There hadn’t been a fight, he didn’t see any brass casings laying around. They had to be inside.

Jessie geared up, slid into his broken-down leather jacket, let the guns find their place low on his hips then flipped the hidden kill switches on his car. He liked his old Mercury and didn’t want it blown sky high if someone stole it. With the fuel pump turned off, the engine would run for a few minutes, just long enough for someone to think they’d gotten away with taking it. Long enough for Jessie to catch up to them and counsel them on the error of their ways.

He stared through the columns, up to the majestic faces in stone and felt a melancholy settle over him. He wondered how long they would last. As long as the pyramids? Stonehenge? Probably. They were carved from granite. Maybe in a few centuries, noses would break off but a thousand years from now, people would still visit. Would their meaning, the identity of the men on the mountain be lost to time? Would they be worshipped as Gods by ignorant tribes? In a few hundred years would all the books be gone? Lost to the elements? The electronic data they had, the internet files, were all fragile and as far as he knew, all the knowledge of the world was held in a few fragile data bases. The Tower and the NSA storage banks. Either could be lost in a fire or lightning strike or even an electrical surge. Then there would only be books or bits and pieces on backup discs. It was all so fragile and people like Casey would happily let it all disappear. They would dance as the world burned.

Was it worth saving? Sometimes he wasn’t sure, sometimes he thought he might be content with a complete reset. Let man take a few thousand years to develop tech again. In a generation, maybe two, most knowledge would be gone. Only the most important things would be remembered: when to plant, how to cook and clean game, basic carpentry and natural medicines. Nobody knew how to make plastic or high cholesterol pills. The survivors were living off the carcass of the old world and most of those things would be gone in a few years. Used up or ruined. They might have a book that told them how to make electricity from a turbine but who made the turbine? How did they make aluminum? How did they make a circuit board? Sometimes the hugeness of it all pressed down on his shoulders and the only thing that kept him going was Scarlet.

His eyes held sadness, he was already bracing himself for what they’d find and what he’d have to do.

He was dreading the trip inside the park, down the long sidewalk to the stores and the offices. He was afraid he’d find Charlie and his bride wandering around in the amphitheater or trapped inside a gift shop, clawing at the doors, unable to figure out how to leave. He stared down the walkway, at the avenue of flags and the faded banners from each of the States. They hung listlessly in the early morning air, occasionally stirring from a breeze, but washed out and torn. Symbols of a bygone era.

He wondered if the new territories would keep the old state boundaries or if it would even matter. It would be a few hundred years before there were enough people to