Resurrection: A Zombie Novel - - (the best motivational books txt) 📗

Annie couldn’t believe what she was looking at. Just sere brown wasteland, prickly scrub and blue sky. Wide open emptiness like an ocean of land. No trees, no water, no houses, no cars, no nothing.

And this was in Oregon, a state she’d always thought was entirely rain-drenched and forested. She’d hardly seen even a tree, let alone any water, since she and her companions crossed the Cascade Mountains on snowmobiles. Hardly anything existed on the other side of the mountains, which meant no infected, no ruins, no bodies.

Any infected people that had ravaged the eastern sides of Oregon and Washington had frozen to death by exposure to winter. There was no snow on the ground even in December, but a rock-hard frost covered the sagebrush in the early parts of the morning and the road sparkled as if it had been paved with ground-up pieces of glass. Those things could not last a night out there, let alone two.

This part of the world had been emptied of the infected. It had also been emptied of people.

There were no apparent survivors. At least none who dared show their faces to strangers, and anybody with ears could hear the Suburban coming from miles away without trees to muffle the sound. The silence of the Oregon desert was total.

Somebody had actually built a road through that void. A road that could carry her and her companions clear across the continent, to Atlanta if they could make it that far. To the Centers for Disease Control, if it still existed, where a real vaccine could be made from her blood. And then home to South Carolina, or whatever was left of it.

Charleston, South Carolina’s second-largest city after Columbia, was not the Oregon desert. Hundreds of thousands of people lived there. Millions more lived in Atlanta, which meant millions of potential infected. The southeastern United States could very well look like Seattle. Dead and burned to the ground. A wasteland even more wasted than the Oregon desert that Annie had not known existed.

She sat in the Suburban’s back seat behind Hughes as he drove. Kyle sat next to her and listened to music on his phone as Parker cringed up front in the passenger seat.

Annie worried about Parker. He’d recovered from the virus when her natural immunity was passed on to him—thank heaven they shared the same blood type—but his recovery was considerably rockier. The man wasn’t himself anymore. He had always been keyed up and difficult and aggressive, but now he looked ready to crack.

The virus ravaged his brain for three days and left hideous wreckage behind. Homicidal thoughts kept bubbling up. The impulse to act on them was missing, but the thoughts themselves hadn’t gone anywhere.

“For God’s sake,” Parker said as he turned around in the front seat and faced Kyle in the back. “Would you please turn the volume down on those earbuds.”

Annie had barely noticed the scratchy sound coming from Kyle’s ears until Parker couldn’t take it anymore.

“Sorry!” Kyle said angrily. He turned the volume down, but not by much.

“I can barely hear my own thoughts,” Parker said.

Annie wondered why Parker even wanted to hear his own thoughts. She knew what he was thinking about. When he was infected he wanted to rip everyone’s throat out with his teeth. He still imagined ripping everyone’s throat out with his teeth. The neural circuits the virus created in his mind hadn’t fired apart yet.

Kyle placed his hand in the exact center of the seat between himself and Annie. She noticed him sneaking his fingers closer to her a quarter inch at a time. If he’d done that a few weeks earlier she would have held his hand—followed by much more in private, of course—but she felt differently about him now

Kyle was enraged when Parker tried to shove him over that cliff, but they had punished Parker enough by infecting him. None of them had any idea if Parker would recover like Annie did, no idea if injecting her naturally immune blood into his arm would have any effect, but they sure knew what the virus would do. If what they’d done to Parker couldn’t be legally defined as attempted murder, it was certainly reckless endangerment. Parker and Kyle were more or less even.

Kyle still wanted Hughes to execute Parker even after Parker’s recovery. Annie found Kyle’s vindictiveness, his bloodthirstiness, repulsive. Maybe she could get past it in time. There were only three men left in the world that she knew of, and Kyle was the obvious choice if she wanted to pair up with one of them. Hughes was terrific, even heroic, but a 250 pound black man and former bail bondsman in his mid-forties wasn’t even in the same time zone as her type. Parker was even less so. The man was an angry and impossibly difficult head case. She and Kyle, though, were both in their early twenties. He’d worked in high tech and owned a loft condo in Portland. He was her type even before the world crashed.

Out the Suburban’s window the expansive flat scrubland rolled by. They were traveling at 70 miles an hour, but Annie felt like they weren’t going anywhere. Every mile looked identical to the previous mile and she hadn’t seen a single house in at least the last fifty.

“How long does this desert last?” she said to no one in particular.

“No idea,” Hughes said. “Never been here before.”

“Why would anyone have ever been here before?” Parker said. “There’s no here here.”

“There’s someone on the road up ahead,” Hughes said and slowed. Parker sat bolt upright in his seat. Kyle yanked out his earbuds. Annie leaned forward and, squinting, made out four figures a