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  PANDORA 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

  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

  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

  The 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 i
ndividuals 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

  Jake 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.

  Taking this as an opportunity for bigger and better things, he moved around before landing in Miami. After several illegal and increasingly violent professions, he wandered up to Jamaica as part of the crew of a local pornographer’s yacht. Pierre loved telling everyone he met that he was the descendent of the famous eighteenth-century New Orleans pirate Jean Lafitte. With his long hair and manicured beard, he certainly looked the part. The pure truth of the matter was that he was no more a relative of Jean Lafitte then he was of the Marquis de Lafayette of Revolutionary War fame. Still, he reveled in regaling people with his fantasy of pirate blood in his veins and his destiny as a buccaneer.

  Being the manipulative sociopath that he certainly was, Bouchard convinced the crew to mutiny. They took over the yacht and slit the throat of the incredulous pornographer. Bouchard and his new minions spent two days ravaging the several porn actresses aboard before slitting their throats too. The young women were then tossed over the side to join their sleazy employer at the bottom of Davy Jones’s locker. Pierre Bouchard sailed the yacht up to Miami, where he was able to sell it to a local drug lord. Realizing that he had finally achieved his manifest destiny as the present-day reincarnation of the infamous Jean Lafitte, he quickly adapted to the life of a privateer by plundering ships, amassing booty, and channeling his inner Blackbeard.

  The crew that Bouchard worked with was a constantly shifting entity that gained and lost members with the mercurial whims and moods of its degenerate roster. Some came or went looking for a more or less raucous lifestyle, but what usually happened was that a late-night boozy argument led to a knife fight that often left one of the combatants lying gutted on the floor.

  Two individuals stayed with Bouchard and wound up being his close partners in crime (although he liked calling them his First and Second Mates). The first of these criminals was an unknown cipher who only went by the name of Corso. He was a strikingly uncomfortable-looking man in his early fifties. At six foot one and painfully thin, with long, corded arms and unusually prominent veins, he looked like a cross between Keith Richards and Iggy Pop. He sported a mop of unkempt hair that was starting to go salt-and-pepper. His deeply set, intense eyes and heavily lined permanent scowl made Corso a bit frightening to look at. Behind his back, the men said that the zombies looked healthier than Corso did. He knew of this, of course, but didn’t really care. In fact, he quite enjoyed his ability to inspire fear just by looking at someone. It wasn’t just his looks that made him unusual. When he was a child, he sustained a head injury (due to a completely indifferent and often drunken mother) that had damaged the amygdala in his brain. This left him with a very uncommon condition in which he had absolutely no fear of anything. Things that would normally make anyone run away or at least stop and think had no impact on him whatsoever. He would do any dare, go up against anybody, or break any law. Local kids were in awe of him, although in truth they were afraid of him because of that. The very, very unfortunate thing about him was the fact that he also suffered from CIP. Congenital Insensitivity to Pain is a rare malady that causes a person not to feel any pain. This disease generally ranges from complete insensitivity to any kind of pain sensation to an indifference to pain. Corso suffered from the latter. People with CIP tend to have shorter life expectancies because they don’t know when they’re hurt and could die of internal bleeding or other injuries or sicknesses. Combining this with Corso’s amygdala-based no-fear response would normally be a death sentence. However, because Corso’s feeling of pain was more indifference than complete insensitivity and because he was intelligent enough to realize the dangers of each, he was very careful about what risks were worth taking and which were not. He knew the value of being able to look into the barrel of a gun with a smile on his face or having someone hit him and just grinning at them, but he was smart enough to also know when to use this talent and when not to. Overall, it mad
e him a very scary individual.

  The second person couldn’t have been more in contrast to Corso. Carlos Guzman was a mild-looking twenty-eight-year-old with a slight build and a receding hairline. He was five foot ten with a pleasant face and innocent expression that made him seem bland, harmless, and totally forgettable. Carlos used this to his advantage. Born in Venezuela to a well-to-do family, he grew up privileged and protected. His parents always had wanted him to attend medical school and had groomed him from childhood for the profession. Carlos was an exceptionally bright boy, and he would have perfectly fit into his parents’ role for him—if not for a few rather disturbing peccadilloes. Maybe originating from his parents’ constant talk of medicine and anatomy, young Carlos enjoyed operating on the various cats and dogs he was able to get his hands on. Even more disturbing, he really enjoyed doing this while they were still alive. His parents naïvely chalked this up to his increasing interest in anatomy that any doctor would need, but when two neighborhood girls disappeared, they began to suspect the worst. While he was applying to medical colleges, the third girl disappeared. A week later, her flayed and vivisected body was found artfully arranged in a drainage ditch. This time his parents, fearful of disastrous repercussions against them if Carlos’s hobby came to light, quickly made arrangements for him to study medicine in the school in Colombia. Ever the mild-mannered young man, he graciously accepted his fearful parents’ wishes.

  It was not long after starting his continuing studies at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá that the young almost-Dr. Guzman started up his bloody outside activities again. He continued undiscovered until the body of a young man he met in the bar was discovered with his entire intestines removed from his abdominal cavity and arranged neatly next to him though still actually attached. To make matters worse, the victim’s eyelids were Super Glued open so he could view the operation in its entirety. Carlos’s parents had recently cut him off from any more funding, and he had been reduced to seeking money from a local member of the drug cartel. A series of misadventures on Carlos’s part and the suspicious and curious nature of the loan shark led to him following and then catching Carlos in midoperation on a prostitute whom he had just abducted.