Pox Americana 2 Read online

  POX AMERICANA 2

  Zack Archer

  Contents

  BLURB

  Also by Zack Archer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  AUTHOR NOTES

  LIMINAL OVERVIEW

  LIMINAL PREVIEW

  LIMINAL PREVIEW PART II

  BLURB

  A hundred thousand zombies, six hot ladies, and a partridge in a f*#!ing pear tree.

  What you might call an impossible situation, Nick Dekko calls a busy Tuesday. Book 2’s here and Nick’s back with Slade and his harem, fighting some, loving a whole lot, and doing his damnedest to find a way to the Promised Land. If your idea of a good time involves hot guns and hotter chicks, then you’ve come to the right place, my friend. Pick up Book 2 in what is believed to be the world’s first zombie harem series and see what all the fuss is about.

  Copyright stuff: This is a work of fiction (shame on you if you didn’t already know that) and all rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Copyright 2019 by the House of Archer

  Created with Vellum

  Also by Zack Archer

  OTHER HAREM BOOKS BY ZACK ARCHER:

  THE SWORDSMAN – BOOK 1

  THE SWORDSMAN – BOOK 2

  POX AMERICANA – BOOK 1

  FIASCO HEIGHTS – BOOK 1

  FIASCO HEIGHTS – BOOK 2

  LIMINAL – BOOK 1

  You can follow Zack on Facebook, here and here, where he posts about books, movies, screenplays, games, and all kinds of other cool stuff. It’s a great way to be a part of the discussion, or just a way to learn about updates and new releases.

  Thanks to all the indie authors who’ve blazed a trail for the rest of us, and a hearty shout-out to all the amazing fans who enjoy reading fun, occasionally silly, adrenaline-fueled stories of guys and gals thrust into impossible situations, who somehow find a way to cultivate a harem, discover their inner abilities, and save the world (and sometimes the universe). Hope everyone enjoys it!

  Editor

  The great team at Ascension E&P.

  Archer’s Army/Beta Readers

  “Big” Jim Bridges

  Kenneth Stinson

  Maria Sexton

  David Denison

  “The Mighty” Leo Roars

  Andrew Rose

  Angus Hutto

  Matthew Burley

  James Farler

  1

  In my experience, there’s a sliding scale when it comes to anger.

  A “one” is what happens when you get a paper cut, while a “ten” is the sensation you feel when a zombie sinks its less-than-pearly-whites into your tasty flesh. I was definitely experiencing an eleven or twelve on the day Hollis was kidnapped.

  The anger arose both as a result of an unsettling feeling of powerlessness, and because all of us had come so far. Deb, Raven, Lexie, Hollis and I had joined forces to locate a weapons vault in what was left of downtown Washington, D.C. We’d laughed some, loved a lot, and had bonded as a team and even become friends as we battled our way through a zombie horde on Pennsylvania Avenue, only to be separated under the Library of Congress.

  Hollis took shelter in the Madison Building, and the rest of us had gone to the Cannon Building where we’d located the vault and headed to the roof, only to see Hollis kidnapped by what we assumed was the vigilante gang known as the Vrah.

  Hollis was gone and there was nothing we could do about it.

  Nothing we could do about it yet.

  I had fleeting thoughts of trying to shoot down her kidnappers from the roof, but the distance was too great and I didn’t want to risk hitting her. Stiff with rage, I stormed across the roof and headed down the staircase that led to the interior of the building.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Slade, my tart-tongued AI companion. “What the hell are you doing, ace?”

  “I’m going to kick ass.”

  “Not without the elevator, you’re not.”

  Lexie was right behind me and tapped the button for the elevator. The machine hummed and whirred, but nothing happened. We stood silently for several seconds, Lexie humming a tune that sounded like background Muzak, but there was no pinging sound, no opening of elevator doors, no nothing. My eyes swung from the elevator to the black metal door off to my left, the one that led down into the building.

  I looked back at the ladies. “Looks like we’re stuck.”

  Lexie stepped forward, tapping her foot on the ground. “Nick, what did your old man do for a living back in the day?”

  “Most of the time he was a chair jockey for the state government. His specialty was moving papers from the left side of his desk to the right side.”

  “Well, my daddy owned a restaurant that specialized in fried chicken. It was called Mother Cluckers.”

  “That’s a great name.”

  “Best ever,” she replied. “Before that he played in a rock band called Involuntary Commitment. Being a fan of rock music, he also dug the Beatles and John Lennon in particular. He used to quote Lennon, who said something that’s kinda appropriate given our present situation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That there are no real problems. Only solutions.”

  She grabbed Raven’s rocket launcher and jammed the stock against her hip.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Solving our problem,” she replied with a wicked grin. “Step aside.”

  I did, and she fired a shot that nuked the black metal door.

  Smoke billowed and I steeled myself, waiting for the telltale sound of bare zombie feet slapping across metal and stone, but silence greeted us.

  “Let’s go,” I said, dropping into a half-crouched stance, entering the stairwell which was barely large enough to contain the bulk of my battle suit.

  We moved down the stairs to the first landing on the building’s third floor. There was another black metal door on one side, and a flight of stairs that continued down to the next landing on the second floor. All was still remarkably quiet.

  “Maybe the bad guys called it a day,” I said.

  “Check your HUD, Einstein,” Slade replied.

  I did, scanning my battle suit’s heads-up display, to see that the space on the other side of the metal door was teeming with the Woken, a euphemism we used for the zombies.

  “Okay, so we won’t go that way,” I said. “We’ll just head on down to the basement and avoid the zombies.”

  “Yeah, that’s gonna be a problem,” Slade said.

  My eyes flicked once aga
in to the HUD where I saw that the landing on the first floor was completely blocked by a snarl of building debris.

  An entire section of the roof and walls had collapsed. It was unclear whether it was intentional or accidental and frankly it didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t be going that way.

  The only path down to the weapons vault at the bottom of the building led through the last metal door.

  Deb, Raven, and Lexie peered down at me from the stairs. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a door.”

  “Congratulations, Nick,” said Raven.

  “What I meant is, it’s our only way out.”

  Lexie raised her hand. “What’s on the other side of the door?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yep.”

  “Zombies.”

  “How many?”

  “How many do you think you can fit on one floor of a government building?”

  “Do I get a surprise if I answer correctly?”

  “This isn’t a test, Lexie.”

  “Okay, well, a shitload then,” she replied, smiling.

  Shadows moved under the door. Lots of shadows.

  Deb shifted her head side-to-side, cracking her neck, getting limber. “Okay, let’s do this. I haven’t gotten laid in nearly a year or killed anything in, like, ten minutes so I’m getting a little antsy anyway.”

  I motioned for them to line up behind me and then I squared the metal shoulders on the shark cage.

  “Last one in is a rotten egg!” I spat, booting the door down.

  2

  I immediately took out my anger on the first zombies to greet me, jump-kicking two males.

  They fell on their backs and I stomped them to pieces, then sprayed my cannons, bullets churning a warren of offices, whipsawing three ladies and a potbellied naked dude in a construction hardhat who were moving toward us with menacing purpose.

  Lexie broke off to the right. Stevens, her small cat, hissed as she fired up her flamethrower. A large-boned female zombie with a crooked neck rushed her and she jammed the tip of her flamethrower in the thing’s mouth. The blue flame roared to life, melting the woman’s head from the inside out.

  The fire and smoke tripped the building’s few remaining ceiling sprinklers as I led the charge forward, rampaging down the main corridor.

  Using my old skills to create a kill box while on the run, I calculated that I could inflict maximum damage on the Woken by using the blades on my arms to rip out the walls on either side and expose those hiding inside to gunfire, so that’s what I did. I chewed through the drywall as dozens of zombies spilled through it like bees from a smashed hive.

  This allowed Deb to swing her minigun around and riddle the infected on her left as Raven hip-fired her rocket launcher, blasting apart the offices at the other end of the corridor until all that was left was a forest of twisted metal studs and conduit that dangled from the roof like entrails.

  Unfortunately, Deb’s demolition weakened the roof and I felt a shudder course through the building as Slade screamed, “ABOVE YOU!”

  My head tilted back as the ceiling bulged and then collapsed.

  Zombies rained down on us, a waterfall of putrefying flesh.

  “TAKE COVER!” I screamed.

  The ladies reacted, a fraction of a second too late.

  A heap of dirty and ill-clothed zombie children—the remnants of some employee childcare center, I imagined—fell through the ceiling first, glancing off Raven, knocking her off balance. She crashed to the ground but managed to throw a couple of elbows, shrugging the punks free before they could do any damage to her.

  One of the kids, a girl who was probably ten or twelve, leaped into the air and landed on top of Raven’s launcher.

  Raven squeezed the trigger and the explosive round from her gun shattered the zombie, sending pieces of her bones into the air like shrapnel, slicing through the other zombie kids, mowing them down.

  I bobbed and weaved, avoiding the remaining ceiling zombies who quickly levered themselves up and attacked.

  I couldn’t fire my cannons for fear of hitting Raven and the others, so I pulled up my metal fists like a futuristic prize-fighter and cocked a finger, beckoning the Woken.

  The zombies came at me and I fought with cold control, measuring my punches, conserving my energy.

  My fist shot out and I punched a hole clean through the skulls of the first three ghouls. Then I grabbed another by the arms and swung him around like a club before his limbs broke off.

  Two more of the things, a woman and a man, jumped onto the cage, stabbing their fingers at me, biting at the metal with black teeth. The woman managed to make a small fist and socked me in the nose, which stung like a sonofabitch.

  Unable to knock them off, I simply ran through what was left of a wall, the impact knocking them free as I turned and curb-stomped them.

  “LET’S GO!” I yelled to the others.

  The ladies continued to fight a running battle, but soon joined me as we entered a rear stairwell and moved down to the bottom of the building.

  Here, I bent the door in to prevent the Woken from following and then we threaded our way down through an access hallway

  The hallway curled around to the corridor we’d originally used to enter the building. Moving through the double doors, we slipped by the tangle of furniture, the crude barricade we’d encountered before.

  We descended the final wobbly stairway and shuttled through the sealed door we’d blown up and then we were back in the white-bricked hallway that led to the vault.

  Using my battle suit’s strength, I secured the sealed door as best I could and then we were on the move again until we’d reached the door to the weapons vault.

  We’d positioned a heavy metal crossbar on the other side, but the gaps I’d left at the edges of the door were wide enough for me to slot my fingers through and dislodge it. The door swung in, we entered, and I repositioned the crossbar so that any pursuing zombies wouldn’t be able to get in.

  The vault was just as we’d left it, stacked high with all sorts of gear and weapons, and the emaciated zombie that Deb had shot who was still tethered with a section of nylon webbing. The infected man writhed and moaned, seeming to greet us as we neared him.

  “Jesus, put that coffin-knocking monstruo out of its misery,” Raven said, adding something else in guttural Spanish that I couldn’t make out.

  “Negative,” Deb replied. She dropped to her haunches and appraised the zombie. “He’s very valuable.”

  “As what?” Raven asked. “Roadkill?”

  “No, intel.”

  Slade groaned as I put him on speaker. “You planning on chatting him up, Deb?”

  “Possibly. God knows he’s got to be more interesting to talk to than a robot.”

  “That’s cold,” Slade replied. “You know damned well I’m an AI.”

  “Like there’s a difference.”

  Lexie squinted at the zombie. “We need to give him a name.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he used to be somebody, didn’t he? He deserves one.”

  “The hell he does,” Raven answered. Then, seeing that we were waiting on her, she groaned, moved over and appraised the man, gesturing to his hands. He was missing two fingers.

  “Ocho,” Lexie said, clapping her hands together. “He’s missing two fingers so we’re totally calling him Ocho.”

  “We’re naming him after a number?” Raven asked as Deb crouched next to her.

  “Got a better suggestion?” Lexie asked.

  Raven looked to me. “How about Mister Bitey?” I offered with a slight shrug.

  She rolled her eyes. “How old are you again?”

  “Mentally, I’m stuck around age twelve-ish, but I’ve been told that’s what makes me so darn lovable.”

  She stuck out her tongue as I raised my hand. “I’m good with Ocho.”

  The others agreed and Deb stared deeply into the zombie’s eyes. The creature’s swollen, blacken
ed gums moved as if the thing was trying to speak.

  Raven stood, powered up the walkie-talkie and tried to raise Hollis, but nobody answered. Realizing that time was of the essence, I moved away from the ladies, taking a mental inventory of everything. If we could find a truck of some sort there might be a way to come back for most of the stuff, but for the moment I was focused solely on locating that which might provide the biggest bang for the buck.

  As if reading my mind, Slade said: “Five feet to your right.”

  Following his directions, I came upon the object I’d seen before when we first entered the vault, the black wing with what looked like tiny jets mounted on the underside.

  Exiting the shark cage, I knelt in front of the object, running my fingers over the wing’s smooth exterior.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A wing.”

  “I can see that...”

  “A special kind of wing,” Slade replied.

  “You’ve seen one before?”

  “I’m familiar with its basic design, yeah.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “Besides add awesome sauce to your battle suit? If memory serves, it’s got six microjet engines, two on each side and one in the middle on the back that run on a charge from the batteries. It can generate nineteen-hundred horsepower and allow the user to fly laterally and up to sixty feet vertically.”