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

avoid slamming into the pickup truck. The oversized tires squalled in protest as the nose went into the grass and started sliding. Jessie counter steered, dropped a gear and hit the gas, breaking the rear wheels loose and sending the car into a controlled drift. He kept it sideways, white smoke rolling and engine roaring, as he steered into the slide. The moment of panic was over, he was going down the road at a crazy angle, but he’d done it a hundred times before, practicing his car skills in the dirt. He let off the gas and let the car straighten and looked around for the truck, thinking it had careened off into the woods.

Bob barked a warning a second before impact as the big Dodge slammed into the side of the Mercury, forcing him over toward the shoulder again. Jessie slammed the brakes and the truck shot by him, swerving on the edge of control. Bob was barking frantically behind him and a glance in the rear view showed him headlights looming fast. He let off the brakes, floored it, and hit the nitrous button on the shifter. The big horse motor leapt forward, throwing both of them against the seat. Jessie ran it up to redline, grabbed third, and tapped the nitrous again, easily pulling away from the chasing cars.

He flew past the Dodge in a long curve, the driver hesitant to try to ram him again and saw the flash of guns. He ducked low, heard a few of them hit. The layers of Kevlar stopped them and within seconds, he was rounding another bend, getting out of the line of fire.

Casey’s Raiders, he thought. We meet at last. Hope you’ve got good insurance.

The Mercury wasn’t built to carve through twisty mountain curves like a Ferrari. It sat too high, the tires had off-road tread, and the suspension was too soft for high-speed curves. He could keep ahead of the trucks, though. They were set up about the same way, they wouldn’t be any good on the turns, either. He was pretty sure he had a lot more motor than any of them did, so all he had to do was lose them in the straights until he could find a cut off to slip down when he was out of sight, maybe come back up behind them and see how they liked getting rammed off the road. He concentrated on his driving, taking up both lanes and aiming for the inside of the curves, sliding to the outside and trying to put distance between them. He worked the transmission hard, slamming through the gears and trying to keep at least one curve ahead, so he was out of gun range. At last glance in the rearview, he was walking away from them, widening the gap at every bend.

He glanced at the side mirror when he heard a different sound from behind and saw three headlights carving the curves and coming up fast. The high-pitched whine of crotch rockets was unmistakable and they would be on him in seconds. He saw guns come up when they straightened out of the last curve. They must have had them in the back of the trucks. Silly raiders, he thought. You don’t bring a bike to a car fight.

“Hold on, Bob,” he said, when the lead bike twisted the wick and came zipping up beside him, the passenger aiming an Uzi for his head. Jessie threw open his door, slammed on the brakes, and hunched his shoulders against the flying debris when the bike plowed into it. The passenger went flying over the top and landed face-first on the asphalt at a good eighty miles an hour. The other rider tumbled and bounced into the woods with the motorcycle

Jessie hit the gas and his door came slamming shut, cutting off the view of a wide streak of red painting the blacktop. Bullets tore into his car, stitching a line of holes across the trunk as he powered into another curve.

“One down, two to go,” he told Bob.

Bob said, “Get ‘em! Get ‘em! Get ‘em!” Or probably something similar, Jessie thought. He was barking enough to say that and a whole lot more.

There was a hard curve coming up, Jessie could see through the trees that it doubled back around in a hairpin. One of those turns where you could nearly see your own tail lights. He came in fast, jerked the handbrake, banged reverse, and slammed the gas. The car slid around, nose and tail swapping places in a whiskey runner spin and he let the clutch fly, rocketing him backwards down the road. He swung the machine gun around, pulled the trigger, sending tracers into the corner as the two bikes came flying around it, low to the ground, knees nearly dragging.

Jessie slammed the brakes again, bringing the Merc to a smoking halt. The first bike took a dozen rounds and spun crazily into the trees in an explosion of fiberglass and bones. The other slid to a stop and tried to get turned around, the passenger abandoning the fallen bike and sprinting for the cover of the woods. He didn’t make it. The rider pulled the bike up, spun it around as a continuous line of red fire walked its way toward him. He had time to twist the throttle before the tracers found him, sent pieces of him spraying out in long, red arcs. He tumbled off and the bike wobbled, fell and slid to a stop against a tree.

Jessie could hear the screaming of the truck engines as they were approaching the curve, catching up after they had unloaded their high-speed rice rockets. Jessie waited, and when the nose of the Dodge came around the bend, he lit it up, walking the tracers up the grill and through the windshield. Steam and glass exploded from the truck as blood and brains splashed from the driver’s head. He spasmed once and fell across the