Zed's World (Book 2): Roads Less Traveled Read online

  Zed’s World Book Two

  Roads Less Traveled

  Rich Baker

  Australia United Kingdom United States

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to real events or people, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Rich Baker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author or publisher.

  Edited by Sara Jones @ www.torchbeareredits.com

  Cover by Angry Chair Designs

  Formatting by Polgarus Studios

  With thanks to the usual suspects—Mom, Dad, Wendy, Mike, Cookie, and Cosmo. Also, to the guys at Phalanx; Thanks for the support, advice and creative use of the English language. To be successful, it’s said you must surround yourself with people who force you to do better. I’ve got that down.

  Prologue: It’s The End of the World as We Know It …

  A’Ishah Maloof was one piece of a terrorist organization, the extent of which only a few people knew. Her motivations—and those of her father, known to his co-conspirators as “The Scientist”—were, in her eyes, pure. The governments of the West had taken her family from her. Her mother. Her brothers. Aunts, uncles, cousins—all dead because someone in a dark room somewhere in the United States made an error inputting coordinates in a computer. The missile strike blew her family to pieces, right in front of her, at her cousin’s wedding. She was covered in blood, some of it hers, but mostly that of her relatives. She found a finger in her hair later that night. It’s an image that would haunt her dreams for years.

  Two years later, after she and her father had been accepted into the United States as refugees—fast-tracked in part as compensation for the “friendly fire” deaths of her family in 2002—her father confided in her his role in a plot that was then in its infancy. He asked her to join him in it, to join him in getting revenge, not just on the government directly responsible for the murder of their family members—for that’s what it was; murder—but on the culture that allowed such a government to exist. It would be a long time coming, he told her, maybe a decade or more. It would require her to participate in a marriage that would be a ruse. It would be such a ruse that even her husband would not know it wasn’t real.

  The pieces were all being put into place, but there was much research to do before any concrete plans would be made. There was a real chance, he said, that this initiative would fail and their efforts would be for nothing. She was eager to help and told her father she would do anything to avenge their family.

  Her husband, Almahdi Maloof, was told a similar story by his handler, only he wasn’t to know of his spouse’s involvement. He was only told he would be wed to an orphaned Afghan refugee. They would court for six months, be wed, and raise a family. It would help throw any lingering suspicion off of him.

  Almahdi himself was the son of Afghan refugees, people who fled the Soviets long before the Americans and the British came. They lived in Europe for a decade, then moved to the United States in the 1990s when Almahdi was just a boy. He didn’t know that his father was considered a radical who preached Jihad. He just knew him as his father.

  Almahdi had been radicalized at home without knowing it and was put in place as a sleeper Mujahidin in the late 1990s. His father ran a furniture store, and after his death in 2001, mere weeks before 9/11, Almahdi inherited the business. His marriage in 2004 to the beautiful young A’ishah completed his cover. He believed she loved him, and after a time, he loved her too.

  Though he had been coached to be as assimilated into the American culture as he could, Almahdi secretly hated the Americans and all of their excesses, their wasteful ways, the way they took all of their good fortunes for granted. After his father’s death, however, his impressions and beliefs began to change. The outpouring of sympathy from his neighbors for the loss of his father was immense and genuine. For the first time, he saw his neighbors as people, not as enemies.

  They were kind, and giving, and even if they were wasteful and ignorant about the injustice in the world, they weren’t malevolent. By the time his children were born, Almahdi was still attending his weekly “briefing sessions” at the Fort Collins Islamic Center, but he was going through the motions. The moment he saw his son’s face, he knew in his heart that all life is precious, and he knew that when the time came, he would choose life over death, for himself and others.

  In 2005, he first met The Scientist. He was also Afghani, and also Mujahidin. He had scars on his face from a battle he had been part of in 2002. He was missing a finger on his left hand and had piercing blue eyes that touched the depths of Almahdi’s mind. The Scientist terrified him, and at one of the weekly briefings, he joined Ahmadi's handler.

  Almahdi was reminded that he was going to be called on to participate in something glorious, something that would bring the nations of the West to their knees. Participation was not optional; if he wanted his family to remain safe, he must play his part, no matter what was asked of him. His son was the only thing that mattered to him more than life itself, so Almahdi kept playing his part.

  The nature of the plot was so monstrous that Almahdi would not have guessed it in a thousand lifetimes. Always in his mind were his son (and by this time his daughter) and, of course, the lovely A’ishah. He had to play his part to keep them safe. It wasn’t until the final moments of the plot that he knew doing what was right may not be what was best for his family, but the alternative was the complete destruction of mankind. The risk to his family notwithstanding, he had to try SOMETHING to stop the horrors that were about to be unleashed on humanity.

  The Scientist was a step ahead of him, however, and A’ishah took care of the rest. When he arrived home, he was about to tell her that something horrible was coming, that he had taken steps to stop it, but she shot him with a CO2-powered tranquilizer gun before he could get a word out.

  At 6:30 PM on Friday, May 17th, 2013, A’ishah Maloof wheeled her unconscious husband into Moby Gym in Fort Collins, Colorado, injected him with a serum that caused a quick but painful death, followed by a brief period where the virus in the serum hijacked the central nervous system of Almahdi’s corpse, reanimating it and using it to assault others and propagate the strain.

  Minutes later, after being shot by the police, A’ishah fired a dart into her neck, felt the serum burning in her veins and arteries. She believed as she died, in the final moments, she would see her lost relatives bidding her welcome to heaven.

  She lay on the grass, fire burning through her veins, and as her consciousness slipped away, she saw nothing.

  One

  At the same time that A’ishah Maloof wheels her incapacitated husband into Moby Gym, Kyle and Naomi Puckett are escorted to their table in a new restaurant called Fedora in Longview, forty-five minutes south of Fort Collins.

  It’s the start of their Date Night, a sacrosanct ritual with a few unbreakable rules: no phones, no TV, no talk radio; just each other’s company. Their focus is on each other and nothing else. They’ve had Date Night every week for the better part of two decades. Neither one can remember exactly when they started, but once they started, they’ve never missed one. The time Naomi spent the evening in the hospital while Kyle passed a kidney stone, they both agree, counts.

  This week, they’ve moved it from Saturday to Friday night because they’re expecting their son Ben to come home from his freshman year of college sometime the next day. They will, no doubt, be spending the evening with him.

  A
t 6:45, as Almahdi Maloof’s undead corpse begins tearing into the sixty-five-year-old man across the aisle from the wheelchair where A’ishah left him, Kyle tears into a ten-ounce fillet, one of Fedora’s specialties. In cities across the nation, riots have begun, but without their smartphones, Kyle and Naomi are unaware. People around them talk in hushed whispers, and a few ask for the check and leave after hearing reports from Europe indicating thousands of deaths from similar riots, but the pair remains blissfully ignorant of the growing chaos.

  By 7:25, emergency rooms at hospitals in major cities around the country, and in fact around the world, begin to be overrun with the living dead. A’ishah Maloof has died and resurrected and has already infected five more people on the campus of Colorado State University. Kyle’s son, Ben Puckett, and his friends are drinking their first beers in a house party on Whitcomb Street in Fort Collins, just a few blocks from Moby Gym. Sergeant Foster of the Fort Collins Police and the handful of officers with him enter Moby Gym through a side door to find hundreds of the undead wandering the interior of the building. Their gunshots only attract more of them, and soon they’re overrun. At Fedora, Kyle and Naomi finish a piece of tiramisu. Kyle enjoys a glass of port and Naomi a cup of coffee.

  At 7:50, Ben and his friends shut the door to their apartment, having escaped a group of zombies too small to call a horde, but large enough to run down a policeman and tear him to pieces in front of them.

  In larger cities, widespread looting starts as the police are too busy dealing with the dead. Governors have activated the National Guard, but in cities like Denver, where the metropolitan area covers massive expanses of land, there is little hope of containment. In Fort Collins, the joint task force cobbled together consisting of the police, the county sheriff, and the National Guard begin working out a plan to block the major arteries in and out of the town to try to contain the violent residents of the town within its borders.

  An Emergency Alert System message is broadcast warning all Fort Collins residents to stay in their homes, turn out all lights, and not to open their doors for anyone. Similar messages are being broadcast across the country. Kyle and Naomi are almost home in his Ford Explorer.

  At 8:30, the President of the United States makes a speech to the American people authorizing martial law and handing the Department of Homeland Security control over all local law enforcement. Kyle and Naomi miss it. They’ve opted not to go to a movie after dinner as originally planned. Instead, Naomi tells Kyle she has a lot of tight muscles and needs to see her masseur, Sven.

  Her decision to get to the sexy part of Date Night early likely saves both of their lives. Kyle breaks several traffic laws getting home, and in no time, he has her lying face down, naked, on their bed. He methodically massages her from head to toe. He takes a painstaking amount of time pretending to be a professional masseur, whose accent he clearly lifted from the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show. The professionalism (and the accent) ends when she turns over, opens her legs and pulls his head toward her. Kyle begins enthusiastically performing another kind of service for his randy wife.

  At 10:00, pundits on MSNBC are blaming the riots on the Tea Party, the President is on Air Force One en route to a secure location, more than 100,000 people have died, and most of them re-animated, nationwide. Kyle and Naomi collapse in each other’s arms in a sweaty heap, completely content and blissfully unaware of the epidemic or that it has spread out of Fort Collins and is working its way south. Hordes of the undead are coming north from Denver and trickling northeast out of Boulder.

  In essence, Longview, considered a smallish city with just 80,000 people, is about to be surrounded. They don’t know that their son and his friends are about to risk their lives trying to get to Kyle & Naomi’s house. They don’t know that a man named Jason Bowling, who will feature prominently in their future, is fighting for his life in his apartment building in Denver. Instead, they drift to sleep with orgasmic smiles on their faces. For them, Date Night has been a rousing success. For the rest of the world, it was the start of Armageddon.

  ***

  Kyle’s eyes pop open at six the morning of the eighteenth. He has a deal with himself; on days where he wakes up early with no alarm, he MUST go out and run. He’s not a perfect physical specimen, but at forty-three years old he does all right. He’s run three marathons and has designs on a fourth. His best time is just under 4:30, but he feels like he has the potential for a 4:10. He rolls out of bed and reaches for his iPhone but realizes he left it in the charging station in the kitchen, having turned it off for date night. He grabs his iPod instead, puts on his running clothes, and after giving Naomi a gentle kiss on the forehead, he heads out the door.

  He heads south to the end of his subdivision where the streets stop and farmland starts. He loves living on the edge of the small city, where you can still smell the cut hay before it gets baled. The air is fresher than in the center of town, still crisp in the mornings this early in the year. The street loops south past several vacant lots, left unused since the housing market collapsed in 2008, then winds through a couple of curves before turning back north. Here Kyle switches from the road to a concrete path. This loop adds a half mile to his run, but with little traffic, it lets him find his stride before he gets into the busier streets to the north of the Sunny Meadow subdivision where he and Naomi live.

  His playlist leads off with “Savior” by Rise Against. It’s a good song to start his run with, and he gets into his groove quickly. He’s feeling good, so he pushes the pace and by the time the four-minute song is over, he’s gone a half mile. He sees something out of the corner of his eye, and when he looks to his right, he sees three military helicopters speeding north, toward Loveland or Fort Collins. He’s no expert on military vehicles, but even he recognizes that the lead two copters are Blackhawks and the one in the rear with the two rotors is a Chinook. The trio is moving very fast, he thinks, compared to normal air traffic he sees passing over the town.

  He crosses Ninth Avenue to the strains of “Want You Bad” by The Offspring. The lyrics make him smile, reminding him of last night. He doesn’t notice the suspicious lack of cars on the road. Even at this hour, there should be several cars on this stretch of Ninth but today there are none. He clocks one mile about a minute into “Rescue Me” by Buckcherry. He’s making good time, having turned the first mile in about eight and a half minutes. The first mile is usually his slowest, so he thinks he’ll finish his run in about fifty-three minutes total. Yes, he thinks, I am totally doing another marathon this year. Maybe PF Chang’s in September.

  Just over two miles into the run, he comes to Seventeenth Avenue, turns west for a half mile, then turns back south on Price Street. This mile is uphill, so he shortens his stride a little and focuses on his breathing. He can feel his heart rate increase with the steepening incline. He passes a supermarket and the accompanying strip mall and out of habit, he glances down the eighteen-inch wide gap between the cinder block wall that marks the boundary of the receiving area behind the stores and the wooden fence that marks the edge of the housing development that butts against the commercial area. He has looked down this gap a thousand times on his runs, always wondering why it’s there; who decided to leave this narrow boundary open to catch all manner of wind-blown trash? It’s always littered with small cardboard boxes, newspapers, tumbleweeds, and a woman.

  Wait, what was that? he thinks. Did I just see what I think I saw?

  He stops, for the moment forgetting about the fast pace he’s been running. He backtracks a few strides and looks down the small space between the two fences. Sure enough, there’s a female figure in there, about twenty yards from the sidewalk. She has blood on her legs and seems to be wedged in between the fences. Kyle takes the headphone out of his right ear.

  “Miss? Are you okay? Miss?” he calls out to her.

  He sees her body stiffen. She pivots to her right to turn toward him. He notices that her shirt is torn open, and she has a bad chest wound. As she turns, Kyle can
see that most of her left breast is missing, and several ribs are protruding from the left side of her chest. One of them gets stuck against a fence board and pulls away from her body as she turns, opening the hole in her chest a little wider. A blackish ooze runs down her abdomen.

  At first, Kyle doesn’t know what to think. Is it a costume? Is this a prank? Is she hurt? She didn’t react to the sticking rib—and all logic dictates that she cannot be mobile if the wounds he sees are real, so he’s leaning toward a prank. He glances around for cameras or people hiding and filming him, but doesn’t see anything of the sort.

  “Miss, you look like you’re hurt. If you’re hurt I can call for help.” He reaches for his iPhone but remembers that he left it at home. “Actually, I’ll have to run for help. Can you tell me what happened?”

  She begins to move toward him, walking awkwardly in the narrow space. At one point, she stumbles and scrapes the right side of her face on the cinder block wall, leaving a nasty strip of road rash on her cheek. Again, this doesn’t seem to faze her. Kyle is beginning to have serious misgivings about this girl. He thinks she may be on meth. Her skin is gray and mottled with blackened veins, and she reminds him of the girls in the “Meth: Not Even Once” commercials that air on TV. Not that he’s ever considered doing it, but those commercials have scared Kyle away from meth forever.

  It’s not until the girl is about ten yards away that she screams. It’s a horrible, rasping sound that immediately reminds Kyle of someone screaming while breathing in rather than out. He starts backing away from the opening, and as he does so, she starts reaching her arms out toward him. He decides to do something he’s good at: run. He puts about fifty yards between him and the opening in the two fences before he slows and looks back.