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

before she took any action. He probably knew where more compounds were. It would be easier to follow and make notes than try to find them on her own.

22

Jessie

After a breakfast of powdered eggs and reconstituted bacon, Jessie met with a group of men and women who volunteered to go outside the wall. He’d been quietly asking around, trying to find out exactly who these people were before Z day. They were all just everyday folks. Despite a handful of them being in the colonel’s Militia, none of them had any military or police experience. They were wannabes pretending to be gearing up for Armageddon, but it was just talk. The only training they’d done is what they’d taught themselves and from watching videos before the fall. He tried hard not to fault them, they were doing the best they could with what they had. He knew he was lucky to have spent the last six months working with Lakota’s finest. His dad figured everyone that started the schedule last fall had learned the equivalent of a stripped-down Seal Team or Delta Force patch. Not the mental toughness or the peak physical conditioning, but the knowledge. The skills that were important in the new world. A lot of the guys were older, most out of shape, so the physical training wasn’t very intense for most of them. Nobody was planning on going hand to hand with a horde of zombies. Nobody was training for a twenty-mile road march with loaded packs or doing pushups with waves breaking over their heads. The instructors concentrated on what they were good at, each man had a different specialty from their times in the service or police force. They learned how to sweep a house, tear down and rebuild a hundred different weapons, clear a jam, fire a mini-gun, dial in a scope, hit targets at a thousand yards, basic field medicine, advanced knife fighting, and everything else that would help keep you alive beyond the barriers. They could hotwire older cars, drive trains, find water in the desert and knew where to find medicine.

He couldn’t believe how nervous, how afraid of the world beyond their borders the volunteers were. They’d lived in isolation for six months and had grown accustomed to it, had never ventured out beyond their walls, beyond doing some trapping or bow hunting close by. They were afraid to fire their guns to hunt, they thought they would bring a horde down on them. The walls wouldn’t hold against a sustained onslaught. They’d taken out a Boy Scout troop and the occasional zombies that wandered up the road with their compound bows. They were being careful. Playing it safe. They had convinced themselves if they stayed isolated and quiet, they would be fine.

The whole lodge turned out to watch them go, some of the women were actually crying. Jessie grinned his crooked grin. They were in for a pleasant surprise at how easy it was to stay safe in the wilds, if you were careful. If you knew what you were doing. Maybe he should ask Bastille to make a video to give out, showing what they’d learned the hard way about surviving among the zombies.

To get away from all the people standing around watching them, and to get their minds off of the danger, he finally just told them to load up and follow him. He wasn’t much for classroom teaching. He’d rather show them how to kill the undead with a demonstration. Both trucks needed fuel, so they drained some out of the Merc, and one of them had to be jumped to get started. These people really were on the edge of reverting back, he thought. If the lodge didn’t have the ham radio, in a few more years Jessie could imagine them living life like it was the 1800s. They would be wholly forgotten up here in the mountains and would have quickly reverted to a basic lifestyle. Kind of like the Hutterites, but without hundreds of years of knowledge and practice behind them. They would have had to eventually leave their compound to survive, if they made it at all. Without the trucks, it was a long hike out.

An hour later they were idling a mile outside of Cascade, the nearest village with a gas station. He had the map spread out on the hood of a pickup and had pointed out where he wanted to make a stand and a fallback position. They were both at bridges on the opposite sides of town. The dead were dumb, they didn’t try to flank you, and they came straight down the path of least resistance. They weren’t concerned about getting shot, but they didn’t seem to like water. They avoided it if they could. The little burg was barely a dot on the map, much smaller than Lakota, and Jessie was pretty sure they could clear it of the milling horde in a few hours, if there were one still in it, if they hadn’t chased some car down the road months ago.

“Wait here,” he told them, pointing at the first bridge. “I’ll go in and lead the zombies out. They’re pretty slow now, they’ve been out in the weather all winter. Just shoot them as they stumble down the road. Remember, headshots are the only ones that count.”

They nodded and angled their trucks across the road, using the hoods and beds as a platform to steady their aim. It couldn’t be this easy, they told themselves. The kid had to be wrong, the dead wouldn’t just follow him right into their line of fire. They couldn’t all be slow and shambling like he said. They drew strength from each other, though. None of them were going to let some teenager show them up.

They got ready and waited as he disappeared across the bridge into town. The water coming from the lake feeding the Payette River was running fast and