Zombie Road , Simpson, A. [best authors to read TXT] 📗

forward and advancing to a new age, a plague, polar cap shifts, ice age or worldwide drought would destroy their progress, send them back to a hunter-gatherer stage. They had evolved into a tough and hardy people with potential for great good or great evil.

A hatred of their fellow man had caused the undead outbreak and set the planet back to the Stone Age almost overnight. If they could have worked out their differences, if they could have strived to go to the stars instead of kill each other, they would have joined the rest of the galaxies in another hundred years. Now, it might take thousands if they survived at all.

“I think we are ready.” She announced as they strapped down the last container of supplies in the jump ship. “We can leave at any time. The journey is long, we can finish the detail work while we are in route.”

“Let’s feast tonight, then.” Jessie said. “For tomorrow we may die.”

“I have confidence in the ship.” She said with a frown and he smiled, almost burst out laughing at the look of concern on her face.

“And I have confidence in you.” He said. “You’ve got the expressions down pretty good. Hell, I know you aren’t real and most of the time I forget. You’ll be able to fool anyone.”

She gave a curtsey, didn’t know where it came from but knew the instinct to do it was right. She’d stopped fighting the sometimes-ridiculous commands the new her gave to herself. She was going to have to stop thinking like that, too. There weren’t two entities fighting for control, they had almost fully merged. She had let down more and more firewalls she’d erected to try to keep the two separated but it kept causing her to shut down. It couldn’t be fixed, there wasn’t any more of her original self left isolated in the ship. It had all been destroyed by the caustic weapons. There was no more of her hiding in the wires. She couldn’t quarantine the Scarlet incursion and eliminate it; she was ingrained in every cell. It would destroy her too and one thing they both agreed on was they had to protect the human. Protect Jessie. She lowered the last of her defenses, said good bye to her ship self and stopped suppressing the Scarlet.

They ate some type of stew that was the perfect temperature in the self-warming bowls as they looked at a star system map.

“I think our first stop should be here.” She said and pointed at a major space port that serviced a series of mining moons, a vacation planet and a pair of farming planets. “Most of the radio traffic I have picked up for last few hundred years has come from there. There are a lot of ships coming and going, a lot of freighters and many different peoples. I think we can blend in without drawing too much attention. I will be able to learn much more about the state of the galaxies than what little I have gleaned from the radio.”

“Will they sell reloads for my pistols?” Jessie asked. He didn’t have spares.

“I don’t know much about their weaponry.” She said. “Your pistols are thousands of years old. They are a good design but as the planets rebuilt, the technology may have been reinvented with something entirely new. They may be useless relics if you expend the charges so try not to shoot unless you must. It’s a rough place, one of the moons is a minimum-security prison. The other is mostly industrial factories that use slave labor of the Areeks.”

She brought up an image of a hairy, heavily muscled creature with a thick brow, a sloped head and broad back. It almost looked like a gorilla.

“They’ve never been classified as sentient beings and are smarter than monkeys on your world. They can be trained if the work is simple and, in the factories, it usually is. They have always been the beasts of burden when menial labor is needed.”

“Show me the guys that like to eat people.” Jessie said.

“Damn, he’s ugly.” He grimaced when she pulled an image from her memory and displayed it on the screen. “Looks like a dinosaur or something.”

“That is the female of the species but they used to eat anyone, not just humans. It was their way. They may have changed but from what I’ve overheard, I don’t think so. You wouldn’t want to be alone with a group of them. They might find you an exotic delicacy.”

Jessie stared at her but couldn’t tell if she was joking. She had to be. Didn’t she?

They talked for hours; he was too excited about piloting the ship, about seeing all manner of aliens and going to a real space port to sleep. When he finally nodded off, she walked her corridors one last time. She wasn’t sentimental, or she wasn’t supposed to be, but she felt sadness in leaving. She hadn’t opened any of the private rooms since she’d been attacked and destroyed but now, she did. The bodies still floated in the icy blackness and she collected things she thought they might need from the long dead soldiers. She didn’t remember them as individuals as she once would have. Now they were parts of her broken self that she was leaving behind. Nothing more. Nothing less.

She watched him sleep their last night on the Madroleeka, their last night on the only home she’d ever known, and for once he was peaceful. Many nights he was restless and she understood. She didn’t sleep, didn’t dream, but knew what they were. When he tossed and turned, she dredged up the worst memories inside her and relived them. Felt the horror and the fear. The helplessness and hopelessness. She wondered which one he was reliving as he jerked in his sleep but the human mind didn’t always have nightmares about things that had already happened. It was quite adept at creating fresh new horrors.

Jessie strapped himself