Forced back out onto the road, Chris is soon pitted against old foes - the Dead Men, a cannibalistic motorcycle gang, still thirsting for revenge after their last encounter. And in Amarillo, Texas, he runs into an old friend from his days in Pagan - Hooley Hoolihan.
Now Chris is pitched into a vicious battle on the streets of Amarillo. Opposing him, Colonel Gareth Stone's zombie army, now forged into a deadly alliance with The Dead Men; at his side, Joe Thursday, Hooley Hoolihan and of course, his daughter Ruby; at stake, the lives of his family and the survival of every human settlement in the west.
Click the "Read More" link below to read an excerpt from
Deadly
one
Jed “Hooley” Hoolihan
adjusted the sight on the Barrett M107 sniper rifle and peered through the scope
along Polk Street. It was nine o’clock on an early fall morning and the city of
Amarillo, Texas was already sweltering, with only a slight breeze to take the
edge off the day.
Thirteen floors below, a tumbleweed traversed the cracked blacktop
in lazy turns and came to rest against the makeshift tripod he’d constructed in
the road junction. Suspended from the tripod by a length of rope, was a bucket,
in it a vile concoction that included the contents of his latrine, some long
expired army ration packs, and the rancid remains of a couple of prairie dogs.
His stomach lurched as he remembered the putrid stench of it, but it was having
the desired effect, the first of his customers had just appeared.
The rat peered out from a
crack in the pavement and sampled the air, its whiskers twitching. Now it
scurried a few paces from its hiding place, stopped and raised itself onto its
hind legs, then sniffed again. He was a big feller, not as big as some Hooley
had seen, but at least the size of a small dog.
Hooley lined up the rat in his crosshairs, bringing into focus its
course, black fur, white underbelly, yellow chisel-shaped teeth and pinpoint
red eyes. He gave an involuntary shudder, then shifted his aim. The rat wasn’t
his target. It was bait.
The scope of the rifle came to bear on the tripod and zoomed in on the
rope. Hooley took a breath, held it, squeezed the trigger and felt the rifle
kick back against his shoulder. A sharp crack echoed off the empty buildings.
The rat dropped instantly
onto its haunches and scurried back towards its hideout. The bucket hit the
pavement, tottered briefly then tilted and spilled its vile contents onto the
ground. Hooley shifted the rifle again
and picked out the rat standing frozen on the blacktop. He could almost imagine
the dilemma playing in its fevered little brain - feed or flee.
He picked up movement at the periphery of his vision, another rat,
this one smaller and brown in color, attracted by the delicious aroma wafting
from the bucket. It scampered from an alleyway where another appeared, then
another. Soon he picked up a cacophony of squeals as more of the creatures
scurried from the alley. The black rat, perhaps sensing his meal slipping away,
charged forward and reached the bucket just after his smaller brethren. He
swiped at one of them, sending it tumbling across the road surface, then waded
into the bucket.
A stream of rodents was traversing the blacktop now, a torrent of
black and grey and brown pouring from the alley, from the drains, from the
buildings. Other predators joined the fray, a pair of hawks swooped down and
picked up a few squirming victims, a coyote and a gang of mangy alley cats,
picked off prey on the fringes. And the rats turned on each other too, larger
individuals attacking and cannibalizing smaller, weaker opponents.
As the road surface boiled with thousands of frenzied rats, the
first of the Zs - a female missing an arm and a child with severe head trauma -
staggering from one of the decrepit mansions along Polk Street. They lurched
towards the massed rodents, while behind them more of the creatures appeared,
most of them naked or in rotting rags, all of them carrying horrendous
injuries. He saw a man without legs dragging himself across the blacktop, a
female with a stomach wound that ran right through her, others with flesh
falling away from their bones, severe burns, head wounds and missing limbs.
The first of the zombies had reached the rats. She swooped down and
scooped one up, bit off its head and drained the flow of blood before chewing
on the carcass like it was a piece of beef jerky. Now the rest of them waded in
and fed, oblivious to the bites and flailing claws of the rodents.
Enough of the Zs were now in the killing zone. Hooley lined up the
rifle on the head of a one-armed man, pulled the trigger and watched the man’s head
explode. He shifted his aim and took out another, then another. The rats were
in flight now, sent cowering by the sharp report of the rifle. The zombies,
though, seemed oblivious to the sound. They staggered around in aimless
circles, perhaps wondering – if they were capable of such things – where the
feast had disappeared to.
“Sum bitches,” Hooley muttered to himself. He sighted through the
scope, aimed and fired, again and again, decimating them.
two
“Order! The
meeting will come to order!”
The convener slammed his gavel into the podium. “Order!” he shouted
again, his face flushed and red under the stage lights. “Order!” This time his
message seemed to get through. Shouts were stilled, conversations became muted,
the few scuffles that had broken out, abated. The hall fell silent by degrees.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the convener said, once calm had been
restored. “I’ll ask you all to heed the chair. Really! We’re not animals!”
“That’s easy for you to say, Clarky,” someone shouted from the
audience. “I got a family. We’re talking about their safety here. Hell, we’re
talking about life and death.”
A trickle of “hell yeahs” and “damn straights” echoed through the
auditorium.
“All the more reason for us to resolve this in a civilized manner,”
the convener, Eugene Clark, said. He turned his attention to Joe Thursday,
sitting fifteen rows back in the middle of the Flagstaff Community Hall. “Mr.
Thursday, you were saying?”
Joe got to his feet and looked across the sea of faces staring back
at him. To his right sat Chris and Kelly and their kids, to his left Ruby and
her friend Ferret. Along with Kelly’s mother, Janet Capshaw, these were the
only friends he had in the room.
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Joe said. “What I was saying is that we’re
prepared to leave if that’s the decision of the council. It was never our
intention to place the City of Flagstaff or any of its citizens in danger.”
“Why’d you come here then?” someone shouted.
“Glad you asked that question, friend,” Joe said, addressing his
answer to the entire gathering. “We came here mainly because we figured we had
friends in Flagstaff.”
“Figured that wrong,” somebody said, triggering a ripple of
laughter.
Joe held up a hand to still them. “But we also came here to warn
you. While General Pike and his army are on the move, none of the settlements
is safe. It’s my belief that General Pike intends destroying all of the
settlements, and that includes Flagstaff, whether we’re here or not.”
“That’s bullshit,” a man at the front of the hall shouted. He got
slowly to his feet, a burly man with a thick, black beard.
“You’ve not been acknowledged by the chair, Rayburn,” Eugene Clark
said.
“Fuck the chair,” Rayburn said. “I’m saying my piece.”
“No, you’re not,” Clark insisted.
“Let him speak,” Joe said and Clark nodded reluctantly.
“Chair acknowledges Rayburn Finch,” he muttered.
Finch took his time, looking around the room and drawing nods from
his friends and supporters. “I’ve lived in Flagstaff all my life,” he said
eventually. “Both before and after the troubles. And when I look around this
room I see friends and neighbors who’ve spent their whole lives here too, and
it does me proud. It does me proud because while the rest of the country has
gone to hell in a hand basket, we folk up here have done a damn fine job of maintaining
a sense of normality. We take care of our town and we look out for our own.”
Applause rippled through the auditorium.
“Mark what I said, though. I said, we look out for our own. These
folks breezing in here from California, they’re not our people. We owe them
nothing. Now, you all heard Mr. Joe Thursday tell you from his own mouth, he’s
got some beef with this General Pike. We shelter them here and it seems to me
we’re getting ourselves involved in matters that don’t rightly concern us. I
for one ain’t going to sit by and allow that to happen.” This time the applause
was thunderous.
“Now you listen to me Rayburn Finch,” Janet Capshaw said, jumping to
her feet. “I’ve lived in this town a lot longer than you. Hell, I remember when
you were still in diapers, wore them well into your third year as I recall.”
Finch turned to the chairman, “Has she been acknowledged by the
chair?” he said in a mock hurt tone. Laughter rang out and the chairman raised
his gavel to still it.
“Chair acknowledges Mrs. Capshaw.”
“Thank you, Eugene. My point is this, Kelly was born and raised
here, she has as much right to be here as any of you.”
“Her maybe, but what about the others?”
“What? Her kids? Her husband? You expect her to send them away?”
“Sit down, Janet.”
“I won’t, I have a right to speak.”
“Why don’t we put this sucker to a vote?” Finch said
“Yeah!” someone’s shouted setting off another volley of “damn straights” and “hell yeahs” and
evolving into a chant of, “Vote! Vote! Vote!”
“Silence!” Eugene Clark shouted, but this time he was swimming
against the tide. The meeting soon devolved into chaos.
When order was eventually restored the vote was held. It was all but
unanimous.
three
“Way I see it,”
Joe said, “We’ve got three choices. We can head back west and take Pike head on,
we can hunker down, find a place to hide and hope they don’t find us, or we can
keep going east. I’ve still got men out there that are loyal to me. Dave Bamber
in White Plains for one.”
Chris scooted forward in his seat and cast his eye around his
mother-in-law’s tastefully furnished living room. His gaze came to rest on the
sideboard where a vast array of silver framed photographs was displayed. He
recognized one of the men in the photographs, an old friend of his, Charles
Babbage. He wondered how Babs would have handled this situation.
“Chris?” Kelly said beside him.
“Just thinking this through,” Chris said, then to Joe. “From the way
you’ve just put your argument, it sounds to me like you favor heading east.”
“Makes the most sense,” Joe agreed. “We don’t have the men or
equipment to win a fight with Pike, and I never was one for laying low. What do
you say?”
“I don’t know,” Chris said. “Feels like we’re running out, leaving a
lot of good people to the tender mercies of Gideon Pike.”
“Out of necessity,” Joe said. “Getting ourselves killed won’t help
those people much either. This way we can head back east, put together a force
capable of taking Pike on, and then come back and kick his ass. We make a move on
Pike with what we’ve got now, and it’s one step removed from suicide, and not a
big step at that.”
“Joe’s right,” Kelly said. “I’d feel a lot better for the kids if we
kept moving. You saw what happened in Lancaster.”
Chris knew they were right, of course, but still he was reluctant to
say the words out loud. It felt too much like quitting, like giving up all the
gains they’d fought so hard for these last twelve years.
“I know what you’re thinking, compadre,” Joe said. “I feel the same
way you do, but remember what General Patton said, ‘he who fights and runs
away, gets to come back another day and kick the ever loving crap out of his
opponent. Or was that Gandhi? Either way, it’s the right thing to do.”
The door pushed open and Janet Capshaw backed through. She was
wearing a blue dress that looked like it might have been designed by Donatella
Versace, diamond earrings, and enough make-up to supply a small branch of
Macy’s. In her hand she clutched a tray, on which a number of glasses clinked.
“Who wants Margaritas?” she said. “My own special blend, limes grown right here
in my back garden.”
“Mom, I don’t think now’s the time,” Kelly said.
“Nonsense, how often do I have my whole family together, not to mention
a handsome man in the house?” She shot Joe a meaningful look and Chris was
amused to see that Joe looked away and actually blushed.
“Well, I guess one won’t hurt,” Chris said. “No more than that
though, we’ve got some preparations to make. We’re heading east in the
morning.”
“Heading east?” Janet said. “When did you decide this?”
“Just a minute ago.”
“But when will I see the kids?”
“Mom, you hardly see them now. Samantha was just out of diapers the
last time you saw her.”
“I know that, but now that we’ve been reunited, I thought we might
spend some time together.”
“We might have done,” Kelly said. “If your citizen’s committee
hadn’t run us out of town.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t bother with that,” Janet said. “Just a couple of
Neanderthals beating their chests.”
“It was a unanimous vote!” Kelly said giving her mother an
exasperated look.
“Yeah? Well, let’s see them try to make you leave. They’ll have to
get by me first.”
“Too late mom, it’s already decided. We leave tomorrow.”
Janet looked back at Kelly with a sorrowful expression on her elaborately
made-up face. She removed a handkerchief from her sleeve and blotted at the
corners of her eyes. For a moment Chris thought she that she was going to cry,
but then she lifted one of the glasses from the tray on the counter and downed
its contents.
“Well, that’s settled then,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”
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