Page 53 of The Red Rider
“Did you know if you look to your left…the plane will tip over?”
“Dice!” I yelled, trying to swat at his helmet.
“Seriously, though. Look out the window. It’s pretty.”
I’d never been afraid of heights before, so this didn’t bother me. Crashing the plane certainly did, but looking down below didn’t. I could really see the devastation the last bombs had caused, but I could also see where nature was fighting back. Greenery was trying to grow again, even if it looked like some ancient trees had died.
I looked out the window and focused on the radio chatter during the flight. I had no idea what any of it meant, but it was mesmerizing. Someone was sitting at a booth in Orlando and controlling everyone. Fucking amazing. I didn’t understand a single word out her mouth, but I was going to have to paint her something special for doing this.
It felt like Dice was slowing a bit.
“I’m going to be dropping here. This is the perfect, unpopulated spot for the aerosol to hit all three states.”
It was so uneventful. Dice pressed a button, and the place shook a little. He turned us around, and we started flying home. It felt like something bigger should have happened. We dropped a bomb on three states, and all the zombies were going to die.
And nothing happened.
Did I even want it to? It made me feel better that my father was shit out of luck when it came to stopping us, but it also filled me with dread. The Rage Heads were supposed to be his soldiers in his war against Heaven. If all he did to stop us was Leonard and a random Bubba, did he have something even bigger planned when we came for him?
Because we were coming for him, and we were going to try to kill him. He didn’t just piss off the Four Horsemen. He pissed me off too.
And I was coming for him.
Chapter 29
D
ice was eerily silent when we got back. He didn’t speak and just kept moving all this equipment out to the picnic tables. We had gotten started pretty early in the morning. I didn’t have a watch, but the angels could tell time by the sun, and Leif informed me it was three in the morning.
It was now starting to get dark, and people were slowly trickling back in from their flights. We were eating leftover burgers, and there was more apple beer. No one was talking, and I had no idea why. Did something go wrong that I didn’t know about?
Dice finally hopped on the picnic table. He had his MP3 player out and a small headset on.
“People of the United States. Florida has brought you a gift. You should be able to leave your houses now, and you’ll notice the Rage Heads are now dead. Burn them, don’t bury them. But be smart about it. Don’t cause fire damage. We are about to move into the process of rebuilding the world.
“We’ve been through some shit. We’ve all lost people. It’s time to move forward. In a few weeks, we will elect a new government and remaking the world. But now we just celebrate. Mourn your dead. Give them a proper rest.
“We’re all scattered now. Some of us are no longer in our home states. We don’t talk to our neighbors anymore, and I want that to change. If you have a radio, I want to hear your story. We all do. The entire country wants to hear from you. This is more than just my music. We have a shared experience. If you’re hearing this and you have a way to talk back to us, do it. Tell us your story. Tell us about the people you lost. This is all we have now. We are our stories.”
Dice just hopped off the table, plugged his MP3 player into his contraption, and took a bite out of his burger. We all just waited. Was someone going to talk to us? Would I actually hear from someone who wasn’t in a state I’d already been to?
“Hello?” a male voice said.
“Hello. What’s your name, friend?”
“Davis.”
“Where are you from, Davis?”
“New Jersey.”
Oh, shit. A living person from New Jersey after everything I saw there?
“Some nasty shit went down in New Jersey, Davis. Tell us your story. How did you survive?”
I heard Davis’s breath hitch.
“We were visiting family in Georgia when the Rage Mutation hit. We tried calling our family and neighbors back home, but we got no answer. We wanted to go home, but they blocked all the roads with traffic, and the news cut out shortly after that. One of my friends back in Newark does radio as a hobby, but I couldn’t raise him either. We’ve gotten no news from New Jersey. Do you know what happened?”
