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

Gunny learned that their weapon of choice, the microwave blasters, were fine for up close work. Anything over a few dozen yards and they weren’t effective. The batteries didn’t last very long, either. If you held the trigger down, they would be drained in less than a minute.

“Why don’t you have guns?” Gunny asked

“They’re hard to find.” Xavier replied. “The stores don’t have them and not very many people in California owned guns. We have some but not very many and ammunition is hard to find, too. Lance knew how to make microwave guns and there are plenty of those, every house has at least one microwave oven.”

Gunny was getting a clearer picture now. Simon was the titular head of a large group of Silicon Valley techs, a group of women celebrating five years sobriety, a handful of local survivors and others that wandered in. William was the muscle who kept them safe and supplied. It was understandable he’d want something better than the microwave guns. As clever and effective as they were, they weren’t as good as a rifle.

When they neared the gate at the border crossing Gunny slammed the brakes as soon as he saw the first sign. It was a sheet of plywood mounted on the tracks that said rails have been removed in one mile.

He smashed through it at forty miles an hour as the wheels locked, sparks flew, metal screeched and sailors tumbled over each other with the sudden harsh braking. He crashed through the next three signs spaced every quarter mile until he finally brought the train to a halt. A few hundred yards ahead the tracks had been moved and set a few inches aside. They were resting on the cross ties, ready to be reinstalled or left where they were. The wall between the countries was only a half mile away. William, the big man with the bad attitude approached the train and shouted up to the open engineer’s window.

“You have our guns?” he asked without preamble.

“Yeah, we got them.” Gunny said, pissed they had chanced derailing the train. If he hadn’t already been slowing, preparing to do a reverse run to wipe out a few thousand followers, he would have been going too fast to get stopped.

“What’s with trashing the tracks?”

“Bring them out and we’ll replace the rails. That’s our guarantee you don’t just keep on going and decide to keep them for yourself.”

“Your guarantee is I told you we’d give them to you.” Gunny called down to him from the window, anger in his voice.

“No.” William shouted back. “Our guarantee is we get them in our hands before we open the gate.”

“Piss off.” Gunny said. “I’m going to throw this thing in reverse. I’m going to go kill a few thousand undead and when I get back, those rails better be fixed.”

“That’s not going to happen.” William said. “Give us our guns. That was the deal.”

“Safe passage was the deal.” Gunny yelled over the rumble of the locomotive. “I’ll be back in a half hour. I’ll be going eighty miles an hour, holding the throttle wide open and I guarandamntee I’ll plow though those walls if they’re still closed and the tracks are still missing.”

Gunny threw the train into reverse and started picking up speed. The man ran alongside and shouted up at the window.

“I’m not authorized to make that decision!” he shouted. “Simon is the only one who can negotiate!”

“Half hour.” Gunny said. “We’ll be coming in hot. It’s up to you whether you’ll still have a border wall.”

The man fell away as the train picked up speed, running back into Mexico to lay waste to the followers.

It took nearly an hour for Gunny to run them down, get past the crawlers and come back in for another round of killing for the ones he’d missed the first time. The sailors lined up and took out as many as they could that were stumbling along the scrub beside the tracks. He and Griz opened the throttles wide on both engines and came roaring back to the border, train whistles blowing as they came barreling at the wall. Gunny knew they would move the rails back into place and spike them back down. They wouldn’t risk losing their southern wall. He hoped they wouldn’t, anyway. He was betting a lot on it. He breathed a sigh of relief as they blasted through the town and saw the gates standing wide open, the rails back in place.

He hit the brakes as they neared and slid to a halt a half mile inside the wall then, the gates shutting behind them. The ramps dropped and the Sailors started bringing out their rifles and carbines, leaning them into stacks. Simon and his followers came riding up a few minutes later in their modified Tesla’s and they didn’t look very happy. He had a score of men hop out of the electric cars, their robes flowing and the big bracelets prominent.

“What is the meaning of this?” Simon demanded when Gunny slid down the ladder and approached, Xavier at his side. “Your behavior is reckless and completely uncalled for.”

“This is no way to establish trust.” Gunny said, glaring at both men. “When a man makes a deal, when he shakes on it, he expects that deal to be upheld.”

“We fully intended to uphold our end of the bargain.” Simon blustered, we needed reassurances. We don’t know you.”

“Yes, you do.” Gunny said. “You know us very well. You know who I am, what we’ve done and why we did it. Lakota is an open book. All are welcome and none are turned away. You choose to hide and not be part of the rebuilding, that’s fine. It’s a free country. But Lakota does what it says and if we’re going to do business in the future then you need to get that straight.”

“We don’t need anything from you.” William spat, still furious.

“Maybe not.” Gunny said and held his stare. “Maybe so. We have the