Zombie Road (Book 7): Tragedies In Time, page 1
part #7 of Zombie Road Series
Zombie Road VII
Tragedies in Time
David A. Simpson
Contents
Also by David A. Simpson
Introduction
Prologue
1. Jessie
2. Jessie
3. Casey
4. Jessie
5. Jessie
6. Lakota
7. Jessie
8. Jessie
9. Casey
10. Ruby
11. Jessie
12. Rachel, Nevada
13. Area 51
14. Under the Mountain
15. Jessie
16. Casey
17. Friends of Scarlet
18. Marilyn
19. Horowitz
20. The Time Machine
21. Iowa
22. The Old House
23. The Animal Safari
24. The Truck
25. Leaving
26. The Rescue
27. Ian
28. Tower
29. Marilyn
30. Jail
31. Escape
32. Lakota
33. Jump
34. Road Trip
35. New York
36. Information
37. Conspiracy Theories
38. Gunny
39. Casey
40. Jessie
41. Overseas
42. Different
43. Dead End
44. Q Clearance
45. Gunny
46. Jessie
47. The Tower
Epilogue
Afterword
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
Zombie Road V: Terror on the Two-Lane
Zombie Road VI: Highway to Heartache
Zombie Road VII: Tragedies in Time
Tales from the Zombie Road: The Long Haul Anthology
Undead Worlds: A Reanimated Writers Anthology
Undead Worlds 3: A Reanimated Writers Anthology
Treasured Chests: A Zombie Anthology
Trick or Treat Thrillers: Best Paranormal 2018
Trick or Treat Thrillers: Best Horror 2018
Zombie Road: The Road Kill Coloring Book
Zombie Road VII
Tragedies in Time
Book 7 in the Zombie Road series
This is a work of fiction by
David A. Simpson
ISBN: 9781691723546
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No portion of this text may be copied or duplicated without author or publisher written permission, with the exception of use in reviews
Copyright 2019 David A. Simpson
All rights reserved
Zombie Road VII
Tragedies in Time
A two-fisted trucker tale
Cover design by Dean Samed
Dedicated to my dearest partner in life:
The nitpicky, OCD, grammar-Nazi, Robin.
Introduction
I’m sure the ending of book six threw you for a loop. I can imagine everyone scratching their heads and thinking Simpson must have drank too much trucker speed or something. Where did that come from?
It came from the beginning. The first pages of the first book when Jessie said “it’s kind of hard to separate the legend from fact after all these years. I can’t tell the difference in what was real and what I remember as real sometimes.”
He also said “It’s all true but some of it may not have happened.”
He failed to add “in this timeline.”
The recording crew wasn’t ready for that kind of truth.
This book addresses that “timeline” issue.
I hope you like it, hope I didn’t make too many mistakes and hope it all makes sense when you reach the end. See you in a few hundred pages…
Prologue
Jessie
The weird Scarlet looking thing, he didn’t know what she was really, had walked into the medical lab and then was gone. He followed after her because he had more questions. About a million of them. But like a wisp of smoke in the breeze, she wasn’t there. He looked for other doors, maybe hidden doors, but couldn’t find any. She had disappeared or turned invisible or maybe walked through the wall. He could see the real Scarlet still floated gently in her case, the healing fluids doing whatever they were doing to make her better. He was afraid to touch anything; afraid he’d push the wrong button or something and hurt her. He couldn’t understand any of the writing or patterns of the blinking lights. He finally went back out to the living area and picked up the bowl of stew or soup or whatever it was and tasted it. It was still warm, the perfect temperature actually, and didn’t taste half bad. He realized how hungry he was and wondered how long it had been since he’d last eaten anything. It seemed like a lifetime ago when he and Scarlet had nibbled on junk food and summer sausage driving across Minnesota. This place felt a long way away from there.
He explored the little house, tried every door and discovered a bathroom and an extra bedroom that was full of junk and clutter. A lot of it looked old and broken, and all of it looked foreign and strange. He didn’t know what any of it did or was supposed to do. He couldn’t get a couple of the doors to open no matter what he tried. They simply ignored all voice commands, hand waving or tugging on the handles. As aggravating as she was, he believed the weird Scarlet when she said the air would kill him. She’d said she was his protector and he believed that too. Even if she was annoying.
The medical room was clean and sterile. The main living room and kitchen were neat and organized, decorated tastefully and at odds with the other two rooms. They were messy and it appeared like no one had run a broom through them in a long time.
He opened every cupboard and discovered a refrigerator filled with strange looking plants, packages and different drinks in oddly shaped bottles. He picked an orange colored one and after a few moments of fumbling, figured out how to open it. It was tangy and sweet, maybe something from a mango family he decided. He went back to the bedroom, the decidedly messy room where he first woke up in this strange, new place. This was where the other Jessie had lived and slept. The desk was covered with notes and journals and scribbled formulas on scraps of paper. What impressed him the most was the equations that were written out and fully legible. Not because they were of some discipline of higher math that he didn’t understand, but because it was all in his handwriting. He had done that calculus or trigonometry or whatever it was.
Him.
Jessie.
The guy who was barely passing basic algebra and didn’t even have his multiplication tables memorized. He wondered what had happened, what the other Jessie had gone through to wind up living alone in some metal hobbit house with a girl that looked like Scarlet but could turn into smoke at the drop of a hat. He looked around, under the piles of clothes and the discarded bits of electronic equipment. He found more diaries, more journals and more notes. The other Jessie had kept a record.
He spent the rest of the day cleaning and organizing and was startled when the weird Scarlet told him dinner was ready. She was standing in the doorway of the extra storage room, looking at all he had done.
“I was not permitted to touch anything in this room.” she said. “Otherwise it would not have been in such a state.”
“Looks like a teenager lived in here.” Jessie said.
Scarlet smiled, the first emotion she had shown.
“Perhaps one did.” she said, maybe a little sadly.
“How long have you known him?” Jessie asked.
She said nothing, her smile dropped and she went back to her inscrutable ways. She said nothing else and he couldn’t even get mad at her for acting like the Sphinx. He figured she was some kind of computer program. An extremely advanced one that was a cross between the T-1000 liquid Terminator and Metamorpho from the comic books. He understood what she was and it scared him a little. Nothing like her existed from where he came from. He had to be hundreds of years in the future but he couldn’t think about that right now. The traveler had saved his life, saved Scarlet’s too, but he wasn’t sure if it was worth it. Especially if he was trapped in this fancy prison forever. Everyone he knew was dead, long gone and long forgotten.
“The other Jessie took a lot of notes.” Jessie said, trying something besides asking her questions. Maybe he could get her to start talking.
“Yes, he did.” She agreed.
“Well, they’re just taking up space. I’m going to throw them all away. Is there a place I can burn them?”
“You cannot.” she said and stood abruptly. “They are not yours.”
“Yeah, but he’s not coming back. He can’t can he? He doesn’t have a bracelet.”
She froze in place for a moment and he could almost hear gears spinning and clicking and a whirring of discs in her head but it was only his imagination. That was what twenty first century earth computers did when stumped with a problem they couldn’t figure out. Her reaction was the same, though. No matter how advanced she was, she was running through a thousand different responses an
She was more than a computer though. Jessie saw genuine concern cross her features. He wondered if it was real and learned over time or programmed into her.
“The journals are important.” she finally said. “They are the truth that isn’t. They are the only record and he would not want them destroyed. Only Scarlet can decide. You have sixteen more earth days until she is healed.”
With that, she turned away, was silent again and wouldn’t answer anything he asked. He followed her, kept asking questions but she ignored him as she cleaned up the kitchen. He gave up after a while.
“Look, I wasn’t going to destroy them. I was just pulling your chain. I want to read them, maybe try to figure out what’s going on.” he said then added a little peevishly, “Since you won’t give me any answers.”
“His earlier notes are stored in boxes. I’m forbidden to enter his storage room but I can point out their location to you.”
She did and was very helpful. She wanted him to read them and she wanted them read in order. She wanted him to know everything the Traveler, her Jessie, had been through. He started to wonder if she was a little in love with him. He wondered how advanced she was, if she could pass the Turing test. Had machines become so innovative they were indistinguishable from human? He wondered what kind of man he’d become to live like a hermit with a smoky Scarlet robot who seemed to be a lot more than just his housekeeper.
He cleaned off a long workbench in the cluttered room and started laying things out in order. With her directions as she stood on the threshold, he dug out a dusty box. They worked together and started organizing everything by dates. He recognized one of Scarlet’s old journals and thumbed through it, saw where she’d left a long, black mark across the page where he’d jagged the wheel when he was driving. He smiled and ran his fingers over the page. Everything had been so hopeful back then, it seemed like everything was going to work out fine.
His handwriting started about halfway through the book, after her last entry. He didn’t remember writing any of it. The first notebooks were scribbled, barely legible and a lot of them weren’t numbered but by the time he’d finished laying them out in order, the latter books were meticulous. The handwriting neat and compact. They weren’t unstructured, slap shod afterthoughts or long almost poetic ramblings that would be more at home in a weepy teenage girl’s journal. The last notepads were scientific, exact and written by someone driven to get it right the next time. There were lists and formulas. Calculations and time charts. Correlational studies and specific names and dates and long mathematical coordinates that he didn’t understand.
He began at the beginning, with the diary entries and disjointed thoughts and put them all together, step-by-step. He filled in the blanks because it was easy. He knew exactly what he would have done, what he would have thought because for him, it had all happened a few days ago. He followed himself on a journey that spanned years but, in all actuality, started yesterday in a burning building. He could still feel the tears streaking down his smoke smudged cheeks, still see Scarlet turned into a raging monstrosity and burning in a fire three floors below. He relived the story that he hadn’t lived.
1
Jessie
Someone was running up the stairs above him, he heard the boots slapping and knew it was a soldier. One who had escaped the carnage below. He should try to hurry but his strength was flagging. He was out of bullets and out of breath. They’d be there when he got there. Below him, the stairwell was glowing orange as the fire spread and licked at the drapes and banners decorating it. He could hear Scarlet and her mother still hunting, keening and snarling. Bathed in blood, ignoring the danger the fires presented, and looking for fresh flesh. He heard a door burst open above him. The man on the run had made it to the top floor as Jessie plodded onward and upward. Scarlet’s last words kept echoing through his head. Bring me back. She’d said. The time machine.
Even if it was real, and not some weird experiment the kids were totally wrong about, it didn’t work. Everything that went through it, whatever it was, came back dead or misshapen, or just a little different looking. Like they got beamed up and reassembled wrong. It was a last ditch effort of a dying girl, he told himself. She wanted him to survive, and not die with her. She’d tossed the crazy idea out to give him a reason to live. He paused to wipe at his eyes, which were stinging from the smoke, and something clinked on the stairs above. He gripped his knives tighter and waited. The sound didn’t repeat but he remained deathly still and silent, straining his eyes in the smoky darkness. He had made a promise, he reminded himself as he stood listening. He had told her he would finish this and clomping up the stairs like a bull in a china closet would get him killed. Probably by a bullet through the top of his head. He started up again, this time paying attention. This time trying to stay alive long enough to finish the job. Maybe the soldier didn’t go through the door. Maybe the soldier was lying in wait for him to stumble right into a trap. He spotted it then and smiled. Maybe the soldier had been trying to reload while on the run and had dropped a round. Maybe it had been balanced on the edge of a tread and had just fallen to the step below. Jessie picked it up, saw it was a nine-millimeter and his snarling grin became even wider.
He rested on the landing of the top floor. He ached all over from the impact of the bullets slamming into his Kevlar, his heart ached with each thud in his chest and he only had a single full metal jacketed round. It was enough. He loaded it and eased the slide forward. It would take out the soldier and he’d bury his blades in the cult leader’s chest, rip him wide open. He closed his eyes, gathered his strength and lunged. He slammed the door open, caught movement and a flash of light at the same time he felt the air displaced from the bullet streaking past his head. He fired on instinct; his hands knew the ways of war. He heard the grunt of the soldier as the bullet hit its mark and he didn’t slow down, didn’t even try to dodge when the guard kept firing in panic, sending more rounds his way. They went wild, hitting the walls, the ceiling or the door behind him as Jessie lowered his head and pumped his arms. The lights in the hallway were pulsing, growing dim then bright, then back to dim. The generator was cycling up and down, maybe shorting out and resetting or perhaps starving for fuel. Ricketts spun and ran, attempting to get through his door and to get to his arsenal before Jessie caught up with him, but he barely turned the handle when he was hit from the side.
Jessie didn’t slow. He slammed into him like a linebacker, wrapped his arms around his waist, lifted him off his feet, then tried to run him all the way to the end of the hall and out of the heavily draped window. Ricketts finger tightened on the trigger, fired once more sending a bullet grazing down Jessie’s back and the slide locked to the rear. He slammed the gun into the side of his attacker’s head and kicked out with his heavy boots. Blood spurted from Jessie’s scalp from the blow, his feet tangled with the guard’s and they both went down hard with Jessie landing on top. Ricketts used his gun as a club, smashed it into his head again, lightning fast and viciously hard. Jessie rocked with the blow, bounced off the wall and slashed at Ricketts face, a trench knife curled in his fist. Ricketts reacted, flinching faster than the eye could see and clubbed out with the pistol again. Jessie blocked the strike, the armor on his leather absorbing the blow, and then countered with an uppercut into the meaty part of the guard’s arm, bouncing the blade off bone, punching out the other side. Ricketts shoved and rolled away, sprang to his feet and ignored the wound spurting blood on the carpet. He dropped the empty magazine, wrapped his fist around it and gripped the gun around the slide, ignoring the blistering heat. He shoved a finger through the trigger guard and smiled. He had steel in both hands now. Bludgeoning, cutting steel and he would pound this insolent pup down. He’d bash his brains out himself. He’d eradicate this little problem once and for all.
