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

grip then gave a little extra shove on the bumper, trying to send the car straight down so maybe all four tires could find a little bit purchase. Maybe he could steer just enough to stay on the roughly smoothed path.

Gunny didn’t try to brake or steer the car, it was a barely controlled free fall the first fifty yards, the tires skimming near vertical stone. He hit the loose shale and rock chunks a hundred yards down at a hundred miles an hour. The gap chiseled out of dead man’s launch wasn’t wide but he managed to get his wheels lined up enough to fly through it, both sides of the cage sending up shards of sparks as they scraped. His tires found the loose shale and when the front end hit a little bump and launched the car airborne, it came back down a few seconds later in a soft landing. He was on the slope now, no more chance of tumbling out into space. Gravity held him in place, he was able to steer and aimed straight down to the desert floor with the big engine roaring and the tranny in fourth.

He circled around the butte, found the asphalt and started chasing headlights. Casey was running west on the only road leading out of the reservation. There were plenty of dirt paths cutting off of it but none of them went anywhere. The only way out, the only way around the canyons cut by creeks or the mountains worn down by time was on the state road. He had fifty miles to catch him before he reached Tuba City. Fifty miles to narrow the ten-minute head start of a man running scared. Fifty miles to find him before he could disappear in any number of directions. Gunny cut his lights and concentrated on the road, running the Chevelle on the edge. Fifty miles to finally end this.

125

Gunny

He knew he was closing in, that he was getting close. He’d pushed the Chevelle hard and cool night air was the only thing keeping her from overheating at the speeds he was running. At the RPM’s he was revving. Casey was in Sammy’s Mustang stolen from Lakota nearly a year ago. All this bloodshed and destruction could have been avoided if he would have put a bullet in him when he’d had a chance. Before he turned into a full-on psychotic baby-killing cannibal. Before he was a power mad war lord and just a three-time loser bossing around the local drunks. It was a wrong Gunny was planning on righting if his car would hold together for a few more miles. If he could catch Casey before he disappeared into the city then escaped on any number of roads leading out. He couldn’t let him get away. Casey would never be satisfied hiding out for the rest of his life. He wouldn’t flee south of the border or into the California lands and disappear. He’d come back with another army of fanatics somehow. He’d convince people to follow him, that he had the answers. The end of the world hadn’t changed the way people behaved.

Far ahead in the darkness he thought he caught a glimpse of tail light. Gunny smiled grimly, rolled his fingers on the steering wheel and checked his gauges again. Temp was low, oil pressure was high, fuel was fine. He leaned back in the Sparco seat and reached over for his old leather poke. He rolled a cigarette at ninety-five while steering with his knees, eyes squinting into the moon lit night and following the black ribbon of sand covered road.

A flare of brake lights caught his eye far ahead and he pushed a little harder, the bowtie growling its thunder over the singing tires. He had him. He was braking to make a turn and Gunny was close enough to see which direction he went. It was a rookie mistake, leaving the bulbs in his tail lights. Casey had never had to run for his life across the wastelands, he didn’t know how to survive on his own. He’d had an army surrounding him and didn’t have to consider little things like operational security or stealth.

“That little bit of arrogance just cost you your life.” Gunny said around the hand-rolled.

He watched with satisfaction as the lights went left. Towards the Grand Canyon. It had been years since he hauled freight in this neck of the woods but the roads hadn’t changed. He remembered them well enough. Like a lot of truckers, he could recall a thousand different docks, a thousand different coffee shops and a thousand different roads that led you to them. He couldn’t remember Lacy’s birthday without being reminded half the time but he knew you had to back into the alley just past the shipper’s entrance at that little place in Allentown. He knew the best slice of homemade pie east of the Mississippi was from the yum yum girl in London, Kentucky. He almost didn’t see the crunched-up cars taking up both lanes until it was too late. He slammed on his brakes and started sliding, he’d been over driving the road, going faster than he could see and react. The nose slid to the left and he slammed into one of them at a glancing angle, sending a Honda spinning off the road and him barreling towards the light pole. The exoskeleton took the brunt of the impact but the passenger window shattered, sent shards of glass flying. Gunny bounced up over the curb, hit the sand and kept sliding. He snapped the pole off cleanly, the brush guard bending against the hood when it did. The pole flew over the top of the car as he ran down the short chain-link fence and tried to steer away from the Moencopi Day school sign. It looked a lot stouter than the light pole and or even the little Honda that had been left crashed and abandoned in