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

wheel hard and powered into another slide down Pine Street, trying to put some distance between them. He could outrun them easily enough, but he needed to secure this town. Those things would be fast and vicious for months. He needed to take them out so the survivalists could get off the mountain and in a better place. During his passes through it, he’d realized the layout was a lot like Lakota. There was a dam they could use for power, and a river snaked around the whole place. The only vulnerability a narrow band of woods, and that could be walled off with trucks or rail cars or shipping containers. They needed this town.

The school kids were fast and they quickly overtook the broken horde he had been leading to the kill zone. This is what the men and women at the trucks had been afraid of. The day-one zombies, as Scratch called them. The ones that had been indoors the whole time. They weren’t sunbaked and broken and slow. They hadn’t run after prey for days, tearing down tendons and muscles, wearing their feet down to the bone. They hadn’t been feasted on by carrion animals and insects. They had been inside, swaying back and forth or gently bumping around, until they heard something that caused them all to run toward it, slamming into the doors and flinging them wide open. They wanted blood. Any blood would do, but they were after his at the moment.

Jessie shot over Main Street, ignoring the stop sign, and headed for the dirt roads near the river. He spun around again in the library parking lot and this time Bob managed to hang on, crouching low in the seat. They were ten-wide, screaming down the street, when Jessie opened up with the M-60. He walked the tracers in to head level and sprayed back and forth. Faces caved in, skulls popped, and little bodies went sprawling. There was a tracer every fifth round and he kept the solid lines of red tearing into them until they got too close. He slid the bars up on the window and hit the gas, both wheels spinning out in the dirt and raising billowing clouds of dust. Jessie gunned it down the path toward the river, getting air when he flew across the railroad tracks. He was trying to keep ahead of the screaming little hellions and in open areas so he could get turned and gun down some more. He thought maybe he’d killed thirty or forty with the sustained burst, and probably severely damaged nearly as many. He roared down the narrow lane, looking for a wide spot. He only had to do that one more time, maybe twice, before it was safe to lead the slow ones out to the bridge. The survivalists could mop them up, then he’d show them how to clear house to house. If he could teach them that, then…

The path ended abruptly as he rounded a bend and he slammed on the brakes, going into a slide across the T intersection.

“Hold on!” he yelled at Bob, or maybe it was to himself. He watched in slow motion, foot mashing the brake, hands in a death grip on the steering wheel, as he went straight across the path and into a thicket of bushes. He plowed through them and the nose of the car angled down, toward the fast-flowing water. Jessie fought the wheel, trying to angle toward the shallows and not fly out into the deep. The big tires bounced over the rocks and the machine gun slammed against the bars on the window. The river was wide and shallow near the banks, with very little mud. It was mostly sand and gravel in the bed this close to the dam. Waves of water shot up on both sides of the car, washing away gore and old blood, and steam hissed from the headers. Jessie dropped a gear and kept his foot on it, causing the Merc to go into a power slide. He got sideways, a wall of water cascading away from him, and aimed the nose back up the embankment. If he could keep his speed up, he should be able to keep traction so he could clear the top. Get back on flat ground. They hit the hill, plowing down bushes and churning up the grass, and held on for dear life as the old Merc shot up the incline. They cleared the top of the embankment and grabbed big air, the tires spinning across the faces of the screaming horde. The nose of the car came down hard, the oversized shocks and reinforced a-arms taking the brunt of the impact on the undead bodies. Bob went sliding off the seat again, and yelped when he slammed into the floorboard. A dozen undead were crushed under the car and Jessie bounced cadavers off the push bar. Scores of hungry hands reached for him, grabbing for the fresh meat, and he ran them down. The car bumped and bounced over little bodies, knocking them aside as he gained traction again, grabbed second gear, and took off for the bridge.

There were some that were still fast on his tail when he cleared the roadblock and hit the brakes. The survivalists were quick on their triggers and had most of the runners cut down when Jessie joined them with his M-4. The battle was over in a few minutes and all they had to do was pick off the stumblers and crawlers one at a time. There were a lot of them, but the team was getting good at placing headshots. Jessie went back over to his car and crawled under it, checking for damage. The steering had felt fine, so he was pretty sure he hadn’t broken anything, but wanted to check for busted or cracked welds. He drove it hard on occasion, but this the first he’d been airborne in it.

Everything looked good, the