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

This time he would get it right.

This time luck would be with him.

He was only in the future for four or five years but the pod, the ship and Maddy had been there waiting for him for a long, long time. He never asked her and he didn’t have his journals to figure out how many years it had been. A thousand. Maybe two? He’d made a lot of jumps and had never made it in time to save her. Until the last time.

The fire had burned out and was cold in the hearth.

Like my heart he thought. Nothing left to give, nothing left to burn. He didn’t even have a picture of her. There were plenty on Facebook from the girls in the Tower but none of them captured her the way he remembered. None of them caught that wry little smile she had. The one that looked like she was thinking something funny or that she knew secret things.

Slippery Jim, Gage and the rest of his crew dropped their bicycles, banged once on the door then barged in without waiting for an answer.

“Hey Jessie!” Jim called out as Bob bounded to the kids, tail wagging so hard his rump was shaking.

He held the door for the big Shepherd and ran with him down to the beach. It had become their morning routine before school. They were supposed to be walking the dog but Bob knew how to open the door. He didn’t need to be walked; he needed the companionship. He needed someone to toss the frisbee.

Jessie stared at the dead fire, at the empty spots on the mantle where photos should be. Above the fireplace was a still life painting he had no memory of. He was sure it hadn’t been there before. It was a bowl of fruit on a table with a glimpse of the ocean out of the window. He ought to get rid of it, maybe put up something he liked and tried to think of what he’d replace it with. A poster of some random girl in a bikini? A car? He was having a hard time coming up with something he cared enough about to look at every day.

Maybe I should just put up a poster of whiskey bottles he thought.

Or her smile. Jumped into his mind. Maybe that’s all you need to get out of this funk. Not her face to remind you of everything you lost, maybe you just need her smile. Her Mona Lisa smile.

By the time they returned with Bob soaking wet and still carrying the frisbee Jessie had made up his mind and was backing the old Mercury out of the bay.

“I’ve gotta take off for a while.” He told the kids. “You mind taking care of ol’ Bob for me till I get back?”

“No problem, Jessie. How long you gonna be gone?” Jim asked.

“Not sure.” He said and got out of the car. “A while. I’m going across the Mississippi.”

He noted Bob hadn’t tried to jump in like he once would have. Like he would with the other Jessie.

“But you guys can use my place as your new clubhouse. I heard your old hideout was turned into condos.”

Jessie knelt and called the dog over, placed his head against his and ran his hands through his fur for one last time. Bob whined, He knew his master was leaving, knew he should go with him but knew it wasn’t really his master anymore. He wasn’t the same.

He didn’t say goodbye to anyone else. There was no need. He had drifted apart from them and the gulf was wide. Maybe when he got back with the painting everything would be better. He would mend fences. If he could see her smile every day, he could shake off his depression. He could snap out of it and start living again. It would be difficult, a real challenge, but that’s what he needed. According to the dozens of requests from the Tower on the retriever’s app she was still hanging in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, on loan from the Louvre. No one had been crazy enough to go after it yet. Jessie was and she would soon be hanging above his fireplace.

There was a crew working on the wall when he pulled up to the gate. While he was waiting for them to finish what they were doing, the guard, one of the sailors, came over to his window.

“Give ‘em a few more minutes. We’re installing the tracks for the laser.”

“Laser?” Jessie asked.

“Yep.” The guard said proudly. “Came off the nuclear sub we scuttled. It’ll cut down a whole horde of the undead fast and clean. Once they get the tracks finished, we can have it anywhere on the wall within a few minutes.”

The guard gave up trying to make conversation with the scarred boy after a few minutes and waited as impatiently as the kid in the Mercury for them to finish up what they were doing.

When the second gate of the sally port closed behind him he aimed the car east and didn’t look back.

37

Scarecrows

The old man operating the ferry across the Mississippi had warned him about packs of feral cats, the tribes of savage Cajuns, the pockets of survivors that would shoot you just as soon look at you and a hundred other dangers. He only mentioned the roving hordes of undead once.

“Most of ‘em’s gathered up in the cities.” He said. “Everybody stays out of ‘em so’s they don’t lead them out to the countryside again. Only a damn fool goes into the cities.”

Jessie listened as the gray-haired man wound the cable and pulled them slowly across the wide expanse of the muddy river. He told of steam trains running the rails, the wild monkeys that escaped from zoos and secret enclaves of jihadi radicals that were still hiding out.

“You’ve got a look of