Zombie Road IV: Road to Redemption Read online

  Zombie Road IV

  Road to Redemption

  David A. Simpson

  Also by David A. Simpson

  Zombie Road: Convoy of Carnage

  Zombie Road II: Bloodbath on the Blacktop

  Zombie Road III: Rage on the Rails

  Zombie Road IV: Road to Redemption

  Anthologies

  Tales from the Zombie Road: The Long Haul Anthology

  Undead Worlds: A Reanimated Writers Anthology

  Treasured Chests: A Zombie Anthology

  Spoiler Alert

  Although this book is the beginning of a new direction in the Zombie Road series, mostly following the exploits of the Road Angel as he finds his place in the new world, a lot of time isn’t spent on background. You are dropped into the middle of the action. If you haven’t read the first books in this series,

  Zombie Road:Convoy of Carnage

  Zombie Road II:Bloodbath on the Blacktop

  Zombie Road III:Rage on the Rails

  I urge you to do so for the complete story.

  Some of the motivations of the characters in this fourth book may not be easily understood without the background.

  Zombie Road 4

  Road to Redemption

  Book 4 in the Zombie Road Series

  This is a work of fiction by

  David A. Simpson

  All characters contained herein are fictional and all similarities to actual persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

  No portion of this text may be copied or duplicated without author or publisher written permission, with the exception of use in professional reviews.

  ASIN: B07D3JVKGR

  ISBN: 9781982965495

  Copyright © 2018 David A. Simpson

  All rights reserved.

  Zombie Road IV

  Road to Redemption

  A two-fisted trucker tale

  Dedicated to my dearest partner in life:

  The nitpicky, OCD, grammar-Nazi, Robin.

  Contents

  1. Gunny

  2. Gunny

  3. Jessie

  4. Lacy

  5. Gunny

  6. Jessie

  7. Jessie

  8. Scarlet

  9. Scarlet

  10. Gunny

  11. Gunny

  12. Jessie

  13. Jessie

  14. Jessie

  15. Casey

  16. Gunny

  17. Scarlet

  18. Gunny

  19. Jessie

  20. Hasif

  21. Jessie

  22. Jessie

  23. Jessie

  24. Jessie

  25. Hasif

  26. Jessie

  27. Jessie

  28. Jessie

  29. Jessie

  30. Jessie

  31. Jessie

  32. Jessie

  33. Jessie

  34. Gunny

  35. Gunny

  36. Scarlet

  37. Jessie

  38. Lakota

  39. General Carson

  40. Gunny

  41. Casey

  42. Jessie

  43. Jessie

  44. Jessie

  45. Jessie

  46. Jessie

  Afterword

  Authors Note

  1

  Gunny

  They were running fast and light, hell-bent for leather in purpose-built machines, eating up the miles and leaving the stumbling dead far behind in trails of dust. It had been six months since the outbreak and nature was reclaiming the earth. The two-lane blacktop was covered with drifts of blown-in dirt and last year’s leaves in places. Grass and weeds were forcing their way through cracks in the asphalt, slowly spreading across the roads in the early spring sunlight. The men from Lakota were on a mission and time was the enemy. The CB distress call had come in late last night, faint and fading, but clear enough the garbled plea was heard, “Overrun and surrounded, out of bullets, out of food, out of water. Situation is desperate. Suicide mission to even send this message. Half the people already lost. We can’t hold out much longer. Can anyone hear us? Can anyone help?”

  In the chaotic first weeks after the overnight outbreak, most of the world had perished. Those that managed to survive, those that learned how to fight and win against the undead hordes, had banded together in fortified warehouses, reinforced buildings, and boarded up homes. They had cleared out small towns, built walls of logs or semi-truck trailers or train cars dragged into place with farm tractors. Their will to live was strong and only the strong survived.

  The town of Lakota, Oklahoma had fared better than most outposts through the winter. They had been lucky. A convoy of armored semi-trucks and heavily armed men had rolled in, cleared out the town, and sealed it off with shipping containers. Within weeks, they had the electricity back on and were broadcasting on the old gospel station, sending their signal across America.

  “Come to Lakota if you can, it’s safe and secure.”

  They offered encouragement, advice, suggestions, recipes for canned goods and hope. “Make it through the winter, spring is coming,” they said. They promised to send out aid, supplies, and assistance. They had a plan, and if the rest of the country could survive the winter, the new year would be a new beginning. “Contact us on the CB or Ham radio if you’re in trouble, we’ll help if we can.”

  The radios were monitored 24 hours a day and in the wee hours of the morning, a weak distress call came through. Only for a few minutes as it caught the clouds and bounced, but long enough to give an address. Corning, Arkansas, up near the Missouri border.

  “Stay alive,” Wire Bender told them. “Help is on the way.”

  It only took twenty minutes to wake up enough volunteers, and within the hour they were throwing their go-bags into the machines, downing cups of coffee, and kissing loved ones goodbye.

  This wasn’t a supply run, they weren’t taking a truckload of food or ammo. This was a rescue, requiring speed and urgency.

  Gunny slowed for a sharp curve, dropped a gear and hammered on it again, the fifty-five Chevy growling its big block fury into the afternoon. Hard men driving hard cars. Old school metal and pre-computer engines. They were simple to build, easy to fix, and parts were plentiful. Hollywood was in his Cadillac, five hundred cubic inches purring under the hood. Scratch sat behind the wheel of a flat black Buick Skylark with big-inch power and ram air induction. Griz brought up the rear in a Hemi powered Dodge panel van. He liked his comforts. Liked to stretch out when he slept. All of them had oversized tires, lifted suspension, Kevlar reinforced doors, bars over the windows, and custom brush guards protecting their fronts. Four barrels, superchargers, and oversized fuel tanks were the norm. They were trying to cover an eight-hour trip in seven. Maybe six. Time was ticking for people barely hanging on, a thousand corpses were beating on their defenses, slowly wearing them down.

  Stabby McStabsalot was riding shotgun with Scratch and navigating. He called out the turns on the CB for Gunny, and the rest followed in his trail, eating up the miles.

  “Our reserve tank is down to a quarter,” Bridget announced over the radio. “We’re going to need to refuel in the next fifty miles or so.”

  She rode with Hollywood in his ’71 Coupe DeVille. He said he always wanted a pimp mobile like Super Fly had in the movies he’d watched as a kid. Now he had it, loaded with luxuries, and built like a Baja race car.

  “Next little town is Mountain Home,” Stabby called out. “It looks big enough to have a few stations, small enough we won’t get mobbed.”

  “I see it coming up,” Gunny said. “Stay sharp, people. Just like we practiced.”

  Gunny flew in at
eighty miles an hour, then slowed as he approached a gas station on the outskirts of town, pulling in fast next to the drops. He was out of the old Chevy and sliding his hose in the tank when Scratch zipped around him in his Skylark and made a run at the store, pulling any undead toward the sound of death metal blaring from his loudspeakers. Griz flew by on the road, making his pass and picking off any runners coming toward them from town. Lars circled the lot in his Cadillac, taking out the stragglers. He was ready to swing in and drop his hose the second Gunny pulled out, taking his place in the orchestrated ballet of armored cars swarming like bees.

  Gunny flipped the switch on the bilge pump and started pulling gas out of the underground tank and into his. He crouched with his back against his quietly rumbling Chevy, pistol out, making himself inconspicuous with the din of blaring music, screeching tires, and revving engines drawing all the undead attention.

  The dead ran in.

  The dead were cut down.

  Iron bumpers with sharpened steel running their width sliced through the zeds and sent them sprawling, dismembered and ruined. Some of them chased the Cadillac in circles around the parking lot, until he pulled back on the road in time for Griz to run them down, sending broken boned bodies flying away from his truck. Gunny finished refueling in minutes and tossed the hoses back in the rack, the big magnets on the nozzle holding them secure. He cranked his radio, blasting 80’s hair metal, and roared out of the parking lot taking Griz’s position. Hollywood and Bridget zipped in and started their refuel. The cars circled in and out, confusing the undead and running them down, never stopping for longer than the few minutes it took for the high-speed pumps to fill their oversized fuel tanks.

  Griz was the last in line and when he finished, he closed the lid. It was a good supply, no sense leaving it open to the elements. He climbed back into his old Dodge panel van and got sideways peeling out of the parking lot. The Hemi under the hood squalled, and the tires rolled smoke. Fifteen minutes after they’d swarmed in, they were hammer down again, leaving scores of dead bodies scattered around the station. They had miles to cover and were hitting it hard, jacked up on adrenaline and a sense of urgency.

  “Wonder why they chose a Jehovah’s Witness church to hole up in?” Bridget asked an hour later, looking at the barely legible note from Wire Bender and her own state map of Arkansas, tracking their progress.

  “Most of them don’t have windows,” Gunny said. “Big places, usually brick. This town is a dot on the map, it’s probably the strongest building they have. We’re almost there. Keep an eye out for a horde. They may be way off the road so we might miss them.”

  They slowed as the country houses and farms started getting closer together and the yards got smaller. They didn’t have an address, just the name of the town. The church could be anywhere. They passed a FedEx freight warehouse and a small Walmart, still no sign of a mobbed building. The streets were empty, just blown-in litter and a few haphazardly abandoned cars. There was a roadblock ahead, semi-trailers parked nose to tail, running down a cross street. Underneath them were cars with their roofs flattened and crammed in place with bulldozers and forklifts. It made for a solid wall, thirteen-foot-tall, taking up one lane of the road for blocks in both directions. There were little guard shacks built on top, every few hundred feet. Gunny took a left and paralleled it, crunching over the bits of safety glass that covered the road, remains of the car windows as they were crushed and jammed into place.

  “Pretty good defenses,” Griz said. “Quick and easy. Wonder how they got breached?”

  The little convoy of cars followed the wall, their rumbling exhaust the only noise as they made their way along trailers that enclosed the center of town. When Gunny rounded a corner, they saw how it had been overrun. Where the wall crossed Route 67, there was a huge horde of milling undead still slapping and clawing at it. There were hundreds of trampled bodies, discarded shoes, clothing and spent brass casings littering the area, evidence of a fierce battle.

  “Looks like they got swarmed,” Hollywood said, staring at the broken guard shacks on the roofs, the blood and gore covering the sides of the trailers all the way up to the top.

  “Sixty-seven runs straight into St. Louis,” Scratch said. “I bet a horde got to running this way and just never stopped. Must have been a big one if enough got over the top.”

  The undead had stopped their futile attempts to break down the wall, and there weren’t enough left on this side of it to pile on top of each other like they’d done at first. They had formed a solid stack of undead corpses that kept climbing over each other until they had made a ramp. Numbers too massive for the townspeople to defend against. The milling dead had stopped and were staring at the newcomers now, at the machine sounds that might mean fresh blood. The crows circled and cawed, alarmed at the noises, and squawked their displeasure at their meal being interrupted. The turkey buzzards still feasted on the broken open heads of the gunned down dead, ignoring the feast that was walking around, and keeping a wary eye on the noisy machines.

  “Man, that’s a lot of zombies,” Scratch said. “You want to shoot ‘em, or lead them off?”

  “Need a semi to take out that many,” Gunny said. “A pack like that might tear the cars up. Scratch, see if you can get them to follow you out of town, lead them on a chase and circle back. We’ll find the gate and see what’s going on inside.”

  “Roger that,” he said, turned on his loudspeakers and turned up his favorite band. Brutal Retort blasted their death metal screams and blistering guitars into the afternoon, and like a siren’s call, the zombies came running. He took off up the road, leading them back toward Saint Louis. The other cars waited until the last of the hobbling stumblers were out of sight, chasing the noise that meant food.

  Gunny eased out the clutch and continued to follow the line of trailers, looking for an opening. In ten minutes, they were back where they started from, having circled the whole compound. It was a solid wall, no way in. The townspeople hadn’t built any kind of gate.

  “Guess we’re going to do this the hard way. Griz, pull up close, we’ll have to climb,” Gunny said, as the rest of them started strapping on armor and spare magazines.

  He parked the panel van as close as he could and one by one they scrambled to the top of the trailers. The townspeople had about ten square blocks walled off. They’d enclosed the area with all the retail stores, gas stations, and supermarkets. There were dozens of small businesses and at least a hundred homes inside the barrier. There was plenty of everything to last them through the winter. It was a pretty good layout. That is, until they were overrun.

  Griz was the last one up, tossing can after can of ammo to them and finally his M-60, before he heaved himself to the roof. He stood and looked to where the rest of them were watching. A circling of crows and buzzards were dipping and diving near the center of the protected area. Feasting on the moaning dead.

  “Crap,” he grumbled. “It couldn’t have been near the wall, could it? We couldn’t just pick them off from up here, could we?”

  “Might be enough of them to stack back up, to get over the top and over run us if we draw them all here.” Bridget said.

  Gunny found what he was looking for a few trailers down. There was an aluminum ladder near one of the guard shacks. He checked the next one and saw that it, too, had a ladder.

  “We really are going to have to do this the hard way,” he said. “Let’s go in quiet, see what we’re up against. If things go bad, if we get chased, look for the shacks.”

  He pointed at the ladders near each one. “That’ll get us back up here, at least. It’ll take zed a while to pile up. We can make a stand but it there’s too many, we’ll have time to make it down to the cars.”

  They nodded, loaded up the extra ammo, and started down. The crew slipped quietly down the streets, staying hidden when they could, crouching and dashing when they couldn’t, mindful of their battle rattle. They followed the circling birds, the keening of the undead, and the
awful smell that was getting riper and riper the closer they came. Three blocks later Hollywood pointed out a Victorian style house with a third-floor cupola that had windows facing the direction of the moans. They were close, it would give them an overview of their battlefield.

  The door was unlocked, kitchen cabinets hung open. The townspeople had already cleaned it out of any supplies they needed. The four of them made their way up the stairs, sniffing the air for hints of the dead, but it only smelled musty, like a house that had been closed up for too long without any fresh air. Gunny approached the window slowly, not wanting sudden movement to draw attention, and sighed when he saw what they were up against. He heard a sharp intake of breath and knew Bridget had seen it, too. The church was completely mobbed. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, gathered around it. All lethargically milling around, pounding on the doors.

  “Survivors inside,” Griz said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be trying to get in.”