Pandora 2: Death is not an Option
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Authors: Richard McCrohan
P
ANDORA
2
Death is not an Option
Richard McCrohan
The Exciting Sequel to the Breakout Zombie Novel
Pandora
Copyright © 2015 Authored by Richard McCrohan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1511482338
ISBN 13: 9781511482332
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015905196
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina
This is a fictional story. Any resemblance to anyone living, dead, or undead is purely coincidental. Some of the locations do exist, but the events in this story have not occurred…yet.
Once again, this book is dedicated to my wife, Linda.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Hello again. Thank you for investing in my novel and for returning to the world of
Pandora
. I hope this means you liked the first book enough that you want to see what happened to your friends from New Jersey.
Sean Sullivan, Mike Quinn, Jack Di Meola, and the rest of their friends and family did indeed succeed in escaping from the zombie holocaust in Boca Raton. A lot of close friends and even closer family were lost along the harrowing way, but they did indeed find open water and made it to Key West—albeit not the Key West you would know from travel brochures. The zombie apocalypse has a way of…changing things.
You will also meet some new survivors of the Pandora virus. Some are similar to our intrepid group from the first book, and some are the kind of people you hope you never run into. So what do you say? Let’s all return to the world that our friends Sean, Mike, and Jack are now forced to live in. It’s been a long, horrific journey so far, but it’s about to get much, much worse.
1
T
he sun reflected off the azure-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It was as if there were a thousand glittering jewels out in the waves. A warm breeze blew in from the sea.
Sean Sullivan reached over, took the bottle of Sam Adams from the side table, and sipped the tepid brew.
I will never get used to warm beer
, he thought.
It’s really awful
.
“It’s going to be another hot one,” he said to his best friend, Michael Quinn.
Michael looked over at him and smiled. “Hot sun, hot beer. Perfect together.”
Spitting out his sip of beer while laughing, Sean said, “There’s nothing perfect about warm beer. It sucks.”
Mike sat back in his lounge chair and, still smiling, raised his bottle in toast. “Here’s to another winning innovation brought to you by the zombie apocalypse.”
It had been one month since Sean, Mike, Jack, Tommy, and the rest of the group had arrived in Key West after the near disaster in Boca Raton. The other survivors consisted of the rest of the core group from New Jersey—Linda Berger, Sean’s girlfriend; Sue Tolliver, Mike’s girl; Dr. Malik Carter; and the two nurses, Carol Pinchak and Naomi Washington—as well as Jack’s brother, Sgt. Tommy Di Meola; his squad; Jake Fine; the Jacobis; and the Mills. Once aboard Jake’s yacht, they barely escaped the zombie horde that swamped Boca on their way north. The survivors then made their way south to Key West and docked on the western side of the city.
It was now the end of September, and the madness of the Pandora comet in February and March had settled into the ugly reality of a full-blown zombie apocalypse. Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe had succumbed to the devastating combination of a huge number of infected humans and the grossly inadequate response of governmental action (or inaction) due to a dialectical political agenda.
Western Europe was hanging on by a thread. A scorched-earth policy might have worked, but no one wanted to torch the ancient cities and destroy centuries of the art, culture, and architecture of their civilizations. While a noble and just cause, it severely hampered the eradication of the zombie masses in the urban zones.
The Australian solution, now appropriately called Operation Pied Piper, of using sound trucks to lure the zombies out of the cities and into the unpopulated outback where they were bombed into oblivion, was a laborious though rousing success.
The Americas had divergent courses during this apocalyptic event. South America was reduced, for the most part, to nonfunctional “nations” in name only. Government moved from national capitals to regional monarchies. Most South American nations fractured into
disparate regions based more on who was in charge there than governmental control.
The United States and Canada were waging their own type of war against the zombies. In the United States, military bases became rallying points more than any city. Populations were moved when applicable, and quarantine centers were created. Most of the able-bodied civilians of both genders were conscripted to join the army units for zombie eradication. The only problems they faced were the sheer number of zombies and the sometimes-disjointed agendas of locally formed militias. Obviously, a firefight between two theoretically aligned zombie-fighting forces was contrary to the goals of each group. Nonetheless, ego at times trumped strategy. Canada was starting to have concerns about a migration of American citizens into Canada. Now that it was September, many people began to surmise that maybe the Canadian winter would freeze the zombies into inactivity. Maybe, being dead, they would freeze easier and become a far lesser threat to the northern portion of the US citizenry. This totally unproven theory was persuasive and led to a trek across the border for a large number of refugees. Canada was extremely unhappy over this unofficial decision. Though loath to assert actual force to stop this temporary migration, it had to protect its own nonetheless. In the end, it was basically left to individual provinces to accept or reject the flow of immigrants.
For the group in Key West, its choice proved to be a good one. When Pandora first started to spread abroad, most of the tourists (at least the Americans) quickly ended vacations and flew back to their homes while they could. The foreign visitors were left stranded as their countries had already closed off all airports. When the Pandora 2 Mutation foisted itself upon civilization, a great number of people, fearing they would be cut off so far south, loaded their cars and boats and proceeded to escape northward. Because of the length and narrowness of Route 1 and the number of bridges, this disbursement of
the population soon ground down to a virtual standstill. Cars stalled and overheated. They were pushed off the shoulders and into the bushes, the occupants left screaming and crying on the sides of the road. Tempers flared, and shots were fired.
While this northward traffic debacle was stalling, a simultaneous migration was heading south. Desperate survivors fled Miami and Key Biscayne while speeding their way south along Overseas Highway, through Marathon, and onto the Old Seven Mile Bridge. They just proved to be the vanguard; they, in turn, led a huge zombie horde from the mainland down that narrow roadway after them. As both groups started to use the northbound and southbound lanes interchangeably, they eventually met in the middle. It was a huge, disastrous confrontation. Refugees from both directions pushed forward simultaneously and previously infected victims changed in the idling cars. The mainland zombies turned this entire snafu into a traveling smorgasbord, and it became one vast caravan of death.
Farther back toward Key West, several enterprising individuals decided to take matters into their own hands. At the bridge just past Duck Key, they drove four large tractor-trailers out to the beginning of the bridge and jackknifed them, totally sealing off all lanes. To make sure they remained in position, the trailers were filled with incendiaries. The saboteurs then detonated the semis, and the entire conflagration, which now included all the surrounding cars, successfully prevented anyone from either entering or leaving Key West for a long, long time.
Sean and Mike turned as they heard footsteps coming up behind them. They saw it was Paul Chen, one of Tommy’s squad members.
“Hey, guys,” he said. “Sorry to ruin your siesta, but Jake Fine is looking for you both. In fact, he wants everyone to get together in
the lobby as soon as they can. He says he has some news that’s really important.”
The true friends looked at each other questioningly. It was very unlike Jake to call for any kind of a meeting.
“Okay, Paul,” said Sean. “Thanks. We’ll be in the lobby in a few minutes.”
Paul smiled quickly and walked back to the main building of the dockside resort where they were staying. It was pretty much deserted, as most of the staff had been in the ill-fated rush to leave. Only the manager and a few employees remained.
“What do you think Jake wants?”
“I don’t know,” replied Sean. “I know he’s been talking to some friend on the boat’s radio, but it beats me as to why he called the meet.”
“Well,” sighed Mike, “we’re about to find out soon enough.”
They both looked around as they walked back to the resort lobby. Things had been pretty quiet as of late. Key West had had more than its share of looting and burning as wildly panicked people streamed back from the Route 1 retreat. Fighting had broken out in the streets as both zombies and human beings tried to claim the town. Most of the west end and Old Key West was cordoned off by the police barricading streets with derelict cars and trucks. The few zombies inside that zone were drawn out and killed. Outside the zone, zombies and attrition quickly whittled down the human residents who were left. There were still pockets of resistance, but these were being quickly populated by a very unsavory element that had come down from the mainland and sailed in from some of the Caribbean islands. A band
of modern-day pirates tried to lead an incursion into the stronghold, but they were beaten back, albeit with high loss of life on both sides. When Jake’s yacht pulled in carrying the group, its members were welcomed with open arms, especially Tommy and his soldiers. With the exception of some isolated incidents and a few disquieting disappearances, the troubles seemed to have subsided.
2
J
ake and Tommy were talking to Regina King when Sean and Mike entered the ornate lobby. Regina was a sheriff from Dade County; she had been in Key West on a police matter when the world went to hell over Pandora. She was a wholesome, down-to-earth thirty-year-old beauty with striking green eyes and fiery red hair. While her beauty attracted the advances of the opposite sex, her no-nonsense attitude most often nipped that in the bud.
Jack walked over to his two best friends. “Hey, guys, what gives with Jake in this meeting?”
“Don’t know,” said Mike. “I wonder if it has something to do with Bouchard and his crew.”
Michael was speaking of the so-called pirate crew who had settled on the far eastern side of Key West. This criminal rogue’s gallery was put together by a Cajun psychopath by the name of Pierre Louis Bouchard. Born in the back bayous of southern Louisiana, Bouchard grew up with a cunning and amoral intellect that was bolstered by a cruel mean streak. At twenty, he found himself in New Orleans, where he made his living as a moderately successful pimp. He ruled his girls with an iron fist and would have had more prostitutes working for him
if it weren’t for his psychopathic paranoia that everyone was cheating him. He had a penchant for forcing his falsely accused girls to drink a bottle of Drano. He was too clever actually to be charged with the murders, but after the fifth body was found, he was taken out of town by a couple of disgusted detectives and told if he ever showed his face in the Big Easy again, he would be joining his unfortunate girls.