Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus by Simpson, A. (e ink manga reader .txt) 📗

his crooked smile. Yeah. He was up for it. It would get him out of town and away from the looks he got from people staring at his scar. He was definitely up for it.

Some supplies were starting to get scarce and General Carson was urging Lakota to start a new currency. They were supposed to begin making coins soon. Something new that would have value, not like the old paper money that wasn’t worth anything. Something that would buy supplies they needed so every transaction wouldn’t take an hour of haggling over what the trade goods were worth.

“You can deliver the first shipment of those, too,” his dad said.

“So now I’m a Brinks truck and a Pony Express rider?” Jessie asked, wondering what a real gold coin would look like, whose picture would be on it.

His dad laughed. “I reckon so. I’ll help you build the car. I need an excuse to get out of the office, anyway. It’s enough to drive a man crazy, sitting behind a desk all day.”

When they’d finished eating and taking the dishes to the sink, the old man still favoring his mostly healed leg, he said, “One last thing. I won’t tell Stabby or Pam to cut you off at their bars, but you need to slow down. I hear you’re matching shot for shot with some of the guys that have been chugging rot gut for years. Drinking some of them under the table. You’re going to ruin your liver.”

Jessie was about ready to quit anyway. It didn’t seem to do him any good like it used to. He could drink a fifth and barely feel buzzed. Besides, he didn’t have any more money or anything left to trade. Being the president’s son only got you so many free drinks. He thought Bob and time had more to do with the nightmares going away, anyhow. They didn’t come every time he closed his eyes anymore and usually his dog would wake him up before they got really bad. Before he had to relive the days trapped in the trees and he had to kill Porsche over and over or try to match a pile of heads to broken little bodies from the orphanage.

Jessie had just nodded once.

He would slow down.

It was enough. It was his word.

4

Lacy

Lacy was eyeballing the warehouse with a critical eye. It was a few blocks off of Main Street and was probably some fifty years old. Who knew what it had been formerly, now it was a repair shop for boats and jet skis. It was a brick building, probably a small factory of some sort at one time, that someone had installed a couple of overhead doors in at some point. She let the boys clean out the garage area, she was looking at the dingy offices and grungy bathrooms, trying to figure out a nice layout that would include a kitchen. Johnny and Tommy were in the bays, pointing out machine things and boat parts that needed to go, that they wouldn’t have any use for. They had a crew of volunteers helping out and she snagged Firecracker, dragged him over to the offices. He had listed carpentry as one of his skills on Eliza’s spreadsheet and she was going to put him to work. Doug and little James were there, along with that ragtag bunch of tweenagers that were always coming up with excuses to get out of school. The Bullet Brigade, they were called. She’d tried to shoo them off at first, told them to get back to classes, but it was useless since Johnny wouldn’t help her. He’d put them to work packing up the trailers with everything he didn’t want in the shop and sending it over to one of the storage units. Eliza had made a quick inventory of the boat repair equipment, adding it to one of her spreadsheets, and noting the unit where it was going, in case they needed it in the future.

Lacy required a plumber to help her with converting the bathroom, but Eliza said they didn’t have one, just a few guys who were all-around handymen. One of them was Jimmy Winchell, that famous country music star, and she called the operator to track him down. If old Mrs. Henderson didn’t know where someone was, she could find out quick. She’d taken over the ancient manual telephone switchboard they’d found in the basement of the courthouse. Wire Bender and Carl had figured out how to get it up and working, and slowly more and more houses were being hooked up and assigned party line numbers. There wasn’t a whole lot that went on in town Mrs. Henderson didn’t know about, and she happily started on her mission, switching cords and plugs, dialing the rotary and asking everyone she connected with if they knew where he was. Within minutes, she’d tracked him down working on wall reinforcements and he was in route to see what the emergency was.

Lacy was looking at the grimy walls of the office. It had apparently been white at one time, clean rectangles shone where she’d torn down all the boat posters. Most of them had big-busted women who barely contained those big busts with tiny bits of cloth and string. She looked out of the smudged office window at her family. Johnny was clomping around, still with a bit of a limp, as Jessie was pointing out something for the kids to haul off, either to the dump or the storage unit. It seemed to her that Jessie had filled out so much in the past few months, had grown and now stood half a head taller than her. He wasn’t the same boy she had known for sixteen years. Her baby had been snatched away and in his place was a brooding young man, permanently scarred inside and out, by what he’d been through. It was a mystery to her how he’d healed so fast, he’d been