Zombie Road IV: Road to Redemption Read online

  Scarlet’s father finished his speech about the Choosing, mixing passages from the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead, the Bible, the Quran, and even an internet meme if she wasn’t mistaken.

  Finally, he raised the staff high and his voice thundered through the loudspeakers, “Let the Choosing begin!”

  Behind them, the doors sprang open and a hundred ravaging undead came screaming through, hungry arms outstretched, running for the living. The two gods stood without fear in their golden robes and animal masked faces, pointing towards the supplicants. The undead flowed around them, sprinting down the stairs and leaping into the shrieking men and women who had not been given the elixir of invisibility. The Medicaments of life. The blessings of Anubis. The dead tore into those not medicated, and gouts of blood splattered and sprayed their white smocks. They screamed and fought but within minutes, they had risen from their ghastly wounds and joined the other undead wandering around the hall, sensing the living in the balconies above and reaching for them. The survivors remained silent, unmoving, standing near the tables. Trying to control their breathing, trying to be invisible to the undead.

  Anubis and Bastet turned slowly, lowered their arms, and walked to the rear entrance of the stage, the newly Chosen following in blood-sprayed robes.

  The devout followers quietly emptied the balconies, leaving the blood spectacle behind. They joined in the festivities in the main hall of the palace, ready to celebrate with the chosen ones. They had just witnessed a miracle. They had seen his power with their own eyes. They believed.

  It was no longer a casino, all traces of the glittering, buzzing machines were long gone. Gauzy linens hung from the tall atrium, plastic pine trees were adorned with fairy lights, and everyone wore robes and burnooses. Music played, people danced, and the recently slaughtered dead weren’t remembered. They hadn’t been worthy. They would be forgotten, their deaths wiped from memory, and most fervently hoped they wouldn’t be called upon to prove their worth. They would all worship a little harder. Show devoutness a little more. That should be enough. They would do everything their leaders wanted and with gusto. They had seen the power, the miracle of walking among the dead, and they believed. Most would do anything to prove they believed, except volunteer to be Chosen.

  Professor Harrison relished the attention, the fawning way the women silently ran their hands over his body when they passed by, just as he’d suggested was custom during one of his sermons. He was in his early forties and still had the desires of any man. Before, he could only live vicariously through pay sites on the internet, but now he had a whole harem of women to choose from. He grinned behind his mask and basked in their attention. Nothing like a little spilled blood and rejoicing that it wasn’t you to make even the most chaste women crave the attentions of a god. The LSD didn’t hurt matters, either. The Viagra would help him perform like a god, too.

  9

  Scarlet

  Scarlet locked the door behind her and went over to the windows of her penthouse suite. She’d remained at the festival for hours, acting regal and cat-like, playing for the devotees. By the time she left, couples and groups were already having sex on the couches and barstools. That just wasn’t her scene. Maybe if she’d drank some of the laced wine she probably would have been like a cat in heat, like the rest of the people, but she’d steered clear of it. Dr. Stevens was a mad genius, there was no doubt about that, but just because he could create a mild hallucinogenic aphrodisiac that made you lose all your inhibitions, didn’t mean she wanted to be a part of an orgy. Especially with her dad right there with a girl on each arm. She knew a little about the ancient gods and Bastet and Anubis had hooked up. Gross. That wasn’t going to happen.

  She stripped out of her costume and tossed the priceless, three-thousand-year-old jewelry carelessly on a chair. She’d ensured the undead had been rounded back up and caged again, a part of her duties with the security team she took seriously. Another reason not to get drunk, stoned, or tied up in a love knot somewhere. Somebody had to keep this place running smoothly, and her dad no longer bothered himself with the day to day operations. He had long since stopped doing menial tasks, it was beneath him. He was too busy being ‘The Messenger of Anubis.’ Ricketts had promoted himself to Captain and had taken over the day to day operations, but he was in his cups tonight, enjoying his new minor god status. She sighed, rang the bell for her handmaidens, and then sat at the window as they started unbraiding her hair. She needed to get a wig for her Bastet duties, this was too bothersome.

  Her mind drifted as they unwove each strand, their fingers working carefully not to pull her hair. She wasn’t even sure how she’d wound up in such a ludicrous situation, being worshipped as a Goddess and having hundreds of people at her beck and call. Pretending prisoners were new converts wanting to be chosen and watching them get slaughtered by the undead. Was that really necessary? Her dad and Doctor Stevens had both insisted it was, so she’d gone along with the charade, but it could have been done some other way. They could have shared the results with everyone, instead of continuing this whole Anubis Cult thing, pretending like it was divine intervention that made them invisible to the undead. They could have embraced science and the future, instead of magic and the past.

  She was sixteen but wasn’t a typical teenager, had never really had any friends, didn’t know what it was like to have a BFF. They’d moved around so much when she was growing up, she’d never had time to put down roots or get to know any girls her own age. Most of the time she was homeschooled by her mom because they were out on some archeological expedition in some exotic sounding location that was really just a miserable dig sight in a remote desert wasteland. When they were in the States, they never stayed put for long. He’d be a guest professor at a college for a year, then they’d move to another city where he would help set up a museum. She’d start all over, trying to make friends and the older she got, the harder it got. Finally, she’d just quit trying and became the weird loner girl who rode motorcycles, hung out in the library and ate lunch by herself. No one in America cared that she had helped uncover ancient tombs in places they couldn’t pronounce or that she was a master in Egyptian stick fighting. No one in Persia cared about reality TV or Facebook. She always felt like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.

  His latest job had been in Minnesota when everything went crazy. They’d only been here for a few weeks; his previous assignment had been in Cairo, where they’d lived for nearly two years. Her mom was dropping her off at school and people just went nuts. A middle schooler came running out from the cafeteria where the poor kids got free breakfast and attacked her. She wasn’t used to the cold of Minnesota in September and had been bundled up, so his little teeth hadn’t sunk into her skin. Her mom had gotten bit when she jumped out to help, to pull the screaming little brat off.

  They’d made it to the museum where her dad was working and everything just kept getting crazier and crazier. Her father and one of the security guards, a rent-a-cop named Ricketts, helped gather people into the basement and they hid as the world went mad. A few of the people turned into the hungry dead, but they pulled the ancient mummies out and locked them into the sarcophagi of kings and queens. Her mother was one of them, the small bite on her wrist growing steadily worse, blackening and spreading dark runners of poison up her arm. It was easy to believe in something supernatural when you were cut off and afraid for days, nibbling on candy and snack cakes from the vending machines, and surrounded by unnatural things. Her father started telling stories of the ancient Egyptians, about their beliefs of the afterlife. About their prophecies of the apocalypse and how a messenger would rise from the chaos to lead the people to a better life. Soon he was having visions, speaking in an ancient and long-dead language, and telling them of things to come. The eleven people he had gathered already owed him their lives. Was it so hard to believe that he was the messenger foretold in the ancient papyrus scrolls? If he got them out of the basement, if he led them to a better
place, maybe then they’d believe.

  Scarlet wasn’t buying any of it. She knew her dad could read and write the mostly forgotten Egyptian language. No one spoke Coptic anymore except in church ceremonies, much like Latin was still used by the Catholics, and it did sound ancient and mysterious.

  The security guard was the only person with a gun out of their group, so it was him, her, and her father on that first outing to see how bad things were. She and her dad were both equipped with scimitars liberated from the museum displays, although she was much more comfortable with it than him. Everything she’d learned in the Tahtib classes, one of the few pastimes available to her during their stay in Egypt, easily translated from ancient stick fighting to modern sword fighting. It was basically the same thing and she’d convinced her father and the security guard to let her go after she showed them what she could do with it. She danced around both of them in a swirling dervish, slapping them with the flat side of her blade before they could even begin to parry. She left them humbled and with multiple welts. They stopped telling her she’d just get herself killed and grudgingly helped her find protective clothes.

  Once they left the museum, they found guns easily enough, but she had never become fond of them. She’d never fired one before and couldn’t get the hang of it. Ricketts tried to teach her, but she wasn’t a very good shot, especially if the zombie was fast, and the noise always brought more. She tried to avoid fights, run when possible. If she had to make a stand, she preferred the batons or machetes. Fast, quiet, never ran out of ammo and she was much more accurate with them.

  They had found Doctor Stevens on their first trip out. The museum was in the small downtown area of Sissipaw, where it was nestled between the civic center and the First Minnesota Bank. There weren’t many of the undead wandering around the district after the first few days, they had all run to join hordes trying to get to the living in the various hotels, apartments, or homes in the subdivisions. They saw Stevens in the lobby of the hospital when they passed. He had a teenaged zombie in a catch pole, dragging it back to his laboratory in the basement.

  The doctor was actually a scientist type doctor, not a doctor type doctor, working in the University of Minnesota’s virology laboratory. He was borderline genius and had been on a fast track career, maybe even becoming the Regents’ Professor and head of the microbiology department. That was before the accusations of moral ambiguity and situational ethics caused such an uproar in the virology community that he had been publicly terminated and then quietly sidelined to the basement of the hospital. Out of sight, out of mind. He was much happier here, there weren’t so many prying eyes judging his experiments or his methodology. They didn’t ask questions in this small, but well-funded laboratory, and he didn’t answer to anyone. His only contact with the University was a quarterly visit from a man in a suit who seemed more of a government bureaucrat than a member of the scientific community. They didn’t care if some of his experiments were unconventional, they kept him with a steady supply of rhesus monkeys and were unconcerned about how many of them died. The lab had its own incinerator.

  The doctor had three other zombies’ strapped and tied to gurneys and was pulling samples of cerebrospinal fluid out of their heads, the only thing that was truly still alive in their bodies. He’d been awake for days, too excited about his discoveries to sleep, ecstatic to share them with other survivors. He hadn’t seemed to care that everyone was dead, he was working on the greatest mystery of all. He was going to find out how the dead remained mobile, animated, and vicious. A beneficial arrangement was reached and months later Scarlet realized her dad was already plotting his rise to godhood, even during those first chaotic days.

  When he led them through a series of underground flood control tunnels and dried out sewer passages, they started to believe even stronger in his message. He claimed he’d had a vision, showing him the way.

  Ricketts had supplied him with a map.

  As the weeks, then months, went by, they kept finding survivors and making them converts to the new religion. Those that resisted visited the good doctor and never returned. It didn’t take long for the mostly starving people they rescued to start believing. He had concentrated his efforts on pulling people out of the city. Survivors in apartment buildings, surrounded and cut off. No water. No electric. No food. They saved hundreds the first month but by November, those in the city had succumbed to starvation, dehydration, or their hurriedly constructed defenses finally collapsed. They expanded the search, pulling in people from the countryside. Most of them had to be forced, they didn’t need rescue and didn’t want to go live in the underground.

  They were doing just fine.

  Thanks, but no thanks.

  The Scientist demanded new test subjects every day. He kept telling them he was close to a breakthrough, so they no longer asked people they found if they would like to join. They took them by force. It was all for the greater good.

  The last of the braids came out and the servants starting running brushes through her hair, getting the tangles out. It pulled and her scalp hurt, despite their care. Never again, she thought for the hundredth time. Next ceremony, if there is one, I’m wearing a wig.

  She stared out over the dead landscape and could see the outlines of darkened structures by the moonlight. Theirs was the only building with lights, the casino generators quietly humming in the basement. It was one of the tallest in the Two Rivers area, built on a corner of the tiny Chippewa Blue Earth reservation, just on the outskirts of town. The wastewater and flood control tunnels tied the casino to the rest of the little city and for the first few months, they had stayed hidden and warm from the roaming hordes. As the Anubis army came together, the roughest of the men volunteering to be fighters, they had lured most of the undead away in armored cars taken from the bank. Another team had blown the bridges over the Minnesota and Blue Earth Rivers after the horde passed over chasing the trucks. Once the majority of the undead were gone, the roving patrols kept the smaller swarms under control. Ricketts and Scarlet would round up the most preserved specimens, the freshest, and bring them back to the lab for Stevens to run his experiments. They kept him a secret at her father’s behest. The believers didn’t need to know about him, he said. It would bring discord and cause dissent among the people. He was right, and once the doctor started requesting living patients to test his vaccines, they saw the wisdom of the decision. The devout didn’t need to know how the sausage was made, it might tear their whole community apart before it had a chance to become strong.

  That was when they started forcibly taking prisoners. They had early versions of the super soldier serum and it gave them the motivation, the drive to want more. To become stronger. If a few more unwilling patients had to die to get it just right, so be it. Things had progressed so quickly, sometimes she thought she was the only one left who was still sane. Now, she wasn’t even sure of that. She’d just willingly, and with foreknowledge, been part of mass murder. She knew what she’d been told, that it was necessary to cement the faith, but it was all a lie. Why did they have to keep up the charade of Egyptian gods and messengers and phony prophecies from hieroglyphics and five different religions? Did no one see that it was careening out of control? Six months ago, did hundreds of people think they’d be living in an Indian casino, worshipping cats and jackals, cheering as their fellow citizens were eaten alive because they were deemed unworthy? Did they really believe the stories her dad was telling them?

  Yes, they did, she concluded. They did because they wanted to, maybe even needed to. They were committed, and her father was a charismatic mad genius himself. He’d gotten them to believe a lie, to rejoice in murder, then celebrate with sex. They’d never go back to who they were. They had drunk the Kool-Aid.

  10

  Gunny

  They were running fast and light again, driving hard, headed west and eating up the miles. Another distress call. No one within a thousand miles to help. Gunny and the Lakota Crew were on the way, but it w
ould take days. There needed to be more settlements, or he needed to find someone that could pilot some attack helicopters.

  Gunny was still a little amazed at how fast nature was reclaiming the earth, it hadn’t even been a year. The road they were running was covered in tumbleweeds and drifts of sand in places. Fort Sumner was only a few miles ahead, their next fuel stop. These beasts of machines they were driving stayed thirsty, but that didn’t matter much, not when gas was still plentiful and free. In a few years, if they couldn’t get a refinery back up and running, everyone would be driving diesel-powered war machines. Diesel would still be good enough to use a decade from now, long after the gasoline had lost all its octane and would barely burn, let alone power a vehicle.

  They came to a convenience store with pumps and Gunny swung in. This was the town where Billy the Kid was gunned down, shot in the back by a sheriff who hid in a dark room and ambushed him. It was a desert oasis in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. An empty town filled with aimless undead and the creak of things going to ruin. Coyotes and wildcats roamed the streets, shuffling feet and the wind sighing through broken windows were the only noises. Miles of nothing before they got to it, and miles of nothing when they departed. A hundred undead were mangled on the road when they left and a hundred chased them out of town, stumbling and baking in the heat. Food for the vultures.

  General Carson had lost another satellite, this one due to a collision with something. There were over seven thousand satellites from a hundred different countries and businesses in orbit. Every one that collided with another sent that much more debris flying around the earth, slowly being pulled back down to burn up in the atmosphere. The space junk, on its way to reentry, was plowing into other satellites. It didn’t take much to destroy the sensitive equipment. A pea-sized bit of debris, even a large flake of paint traveling at ten thousand miles an hour, could do a lot of damage. If they didn’t go after Casey now, in another six months they might not have an eye in the sky to locate him. They would only be able to track him by the havoc he caused in the little communities that were starting to pop up all over.