Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos Simpson, A. (new books to read .txt) 📖

and alleys but at least he could see the tracks ahead of them now, he wasn’t driving blind into a swarm of writhing bodies.

He set the controls for twenty miles an hour and yelled at the crew to clean off the deck. They needed to watch for upcoming spurs, cars across the tracks, other trains blocking the way or anything else that could derail them.

Scratch and Stabby strapped on their claws and spikes with unhappy faces. They hated the smell of rotting zombie blood and they were about to get it splashed all over them again.

“I didn’t miss this part of adventuring.” Stabby said glumly.

“Yeah.” Scratch complained. “Think I’d rather be at the pub about now, sipping on a tall one.”

“Why don’t you shoot them?” Xavier asked.

“Ricochet.” Hollywood said. “Gotta be careful or you’ll shoot yourself. Safer to use blades when we can.”

With one last check of their armor the boys shoved open the door and laid into the undead. Xavier watched through the glass and Gunny watched him. He didn’t particularly like having a spy in their midst. He didn’t have anything to hide but it was clear the kid was supposed to observe and report.

When they’d taken care of the dozen or so undead that had tumbled over the railing, they started tossing them overboard as Gunny increased the throttle. Bridget locked the military grade, gyroscopically balanced binoculars to the mount on the front rail and started looking for trouble or rail crossings. They had a range of about two miles and as she called out the obstacles the train slowed or sped up to deal with them. For cars stalled at crossings, they slowed to bump them out of the way. For hordes running straight at them they picked up speed and sent them flying.

“Intersection.” Bridget yelled. “About a half mile ahead.”

“Hollywood, you’re up.” Gunny said but the former gangster, former soldier and former drug dealer was already at the controls of the remote track switcher Tommy had invented. He extended the repurposed loading arm from a telescopic forklift to its limit as the train slowed. It stretched out some forty feet as he got it lined up to snap the point rails over to the right position. More undead poured out of the surrounding roads, drawn to the sound of the engines and the clank of the wheels on rails.

Stabby and Scratch manned the .50’s, raked back and forth across the crowds and blew chunks of undead body parts for yards. The impact of the big bullets sent them flying away from the tracks and kept them clear so the track switcher could work.

The rails slammed into position and Hollywood raised the arm then pulled the levers to collapse it.

“We’re good to go.” He yelled over his shoulder to Gunny. “Give gas, get us out of here.”

It was only about fifty miles to the ocean but the tracks dipped dozens of miles down into Mexico and once they neared Tijuana, they had to clear a lot of intersections. The undead followed and the undead poured out of the city. The tracks became very congested as they ran through narrow passages between the buildings they had to reverse frequently to pull the hordes away. The withered husks were never a threat to derail them but the wheels lost traction and spun on the spoiled blood and putrefying entrails. Sometimes it took both engines, one pushing and one pulling, to get them away from the press. Gunny and Griz would work the engines, force them through the thickly packed crowds and run them back out into the desert. They would come to a stop, wait for the horde to show then plow through them with both .50’s blasting away, the big bullets imploding bodies eight and ten deep. Bones broke, chests exploded, ropes of entrails and rotting organs were sucked through holes and followed the path of the bullets.

Tijuana had a population of over two million before the fall. An eerie lull had fallen over the city, the only sounds an occasional flapping of something loose on the wind or coyotes yipping at the moon. Near the ocean gulls circled and called but the rest of the city was silent until the roar of the diesels and the thunder of the guns brought the milling undead out of their stupor. The train would plow through them for miles, back out, clear the tracks, build up speed and came back in. The dead were piled so deep they couldn’t see over the wall they formed on both sides of the tracks. The closer they got to the border the worse it became. In the narrows between the buildings, they had compacted them so much they had broken through the stucco walls of some of the houses. Somewhere ahead of them there was something blocking the tracks, most likely another train, but they never got close enough to see it before their locomotive ground to a halt. No matter how many they killed another ten thousand replaced them and ran screaming at the metal beast. Day became night and they kept at it. Running, gunning, crushing and killing. Back up ten or twelve miles then do it again. Night became day and they kept killing. The thunder of the guns was a constant. They couldn’t make it halfway through the city, the train was covered with the undead as they leaped from the teetering piles of cadavers. They left Lakota with a dozen pallets stacked with thousands of crates of ammo but after the second day they were down to the last pallet and no closer to breaking through than they’d been when they started.

Gunny idled the train ten miles out of the city, past the mud buildings and scrap wood shacks of urban sprawl. The fuel tanks were down to below half, they’d killed a hundred thousand undead and the tracks were black with gore. Body parts festered in the sun, their spilled liquids reeking, the smell was