The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (101 page)

The first shot took her in the chest
and flung her back like a rag doll. But that was all it did. She
was scrabbling back for him as Bear stepped into her path and
pushed the pistol into her head, squeezing the trigger as he did.
She flew back this time and didn't rise again. Rotted brains
splattered across the wall behind her. She slid down the
wall.

Bear stood for a second,
his breaths coming in long, ragged pulls. He closed his eyes,
slowed his breathing, then turned and went back to the stairwell.
His concern was whether he should leave the door open or closed.
Open and they might get in, closed and he would have to smash the
handle set off himself when he got back so that he could get
inside. And that made him wonder if he
would
be back. If he would find her,
take care of her, and then make it back to here. He had no way to
know.

A minuet later he kicked the board from
the propped open door, and stepped back into the lobby. It closed
with a solid steel clunk. If he came back, he would break in.
Better that than leave it open for the dead, if he didn't make it
back before nightfall, or if they came looking in the daylight. It
was the only safe place he had. He walked across the lobby and
stepped out onto the cracked city sidewalk.

He walked a short distance north before
he found a stalled delivery truck at the curb. The keys dangled
from the switch. The shattered driver's side window and the blood
smeared down the door told the story of what had happened to the
driver. Scattered sheets, towels and uniforms had tumbled from the
shelves and fallen into the aisle of the truck when the driver had
driven it into the curb. But there were no dead lurking in the back
of the truck.

The battery was flat. He pushed the
truck a few hundred yards before he came to a long slow downgrade.
He jumped in, put the truck in second gear, and then popped the
clutch out a few seconds later. The motor roared to life. The
transmission whined, the truck jerking and bucking, throwing him
against the dashboard. A second later he downshifted into first and
began to wind his way around the traffic that clogged the
intersection at the bottom of the short hill. He began looking for
her, convinced that he would find her, be lead to her
somehow.

Out Of The City

Billy and Beth

Billy was up on the roof. Beth, Jamie,
Winston and Scotty were standing at the edge of the building as he
was, looking out over the city. Things were crazy, and they seemed
to be getting worse as the days rolled by.

The police precinct was still burning.
It had started sometime during the night two days before, and since
there was no one to put the fire out, it had been raging for hours
now. A few minutes ago, the roof of the building next door to the
precinct burst into flames. Maybe the fire had started inside, or
the extreme heat had caused it to burst into flame, spontaneous
combustion, but it was a strange thing to watch. It appeared as
though it had simply burst into flames all on its own.

The animated conversation about whether
it had been spontaneous combustion or a fire source from inside the
other building that had simply burned through, had kept up for a
few moments, and then they had all lapsed back into silence. Beth
spoke now.

“
Where would we go?” she
asked.

“
I think south,” Scotty
threw in.

“
South or east,” Jamie
added.

“
Makes no difference,”
Billy said.

Beth nodded. “What's the radio
say?”

“
It's bad everywhere.
Different people, different days, all talking about the dead. Some
talk about the living too, gangs, shit like that, but the big deal
is the dead. Every major city... Boston, Miami, Providence, San
Diego... there are more. Every day you hear more places, and that's
bad. But then there are the ones that you don't hear from anymore,
and that's even worse,” Billy said.

“
So how is south or east
better?” Beth asked.

“
It might not be better
than north as far as the dead are concerned. It might not be, but
it will be warmer. I mean, no problem now, but winter will come,
and we had better be somewhere, with our supplies, settled in for
it,” Billy answered.

Beth nodded. “All of us?”

“
A few others,” Winston
said. “Emma, down street. She has a baby. Don and Ginny across the
street. They got a few friends too.”

“
Babies... I don't know
about babies,” Billy said. “Adults, okay. Children are bad enough,
but babies? How do we take care of them?”

“
Billy, should we leave
them here to die?” Scotty asked.

“
Fuck,
Scotty. I didn't say that. Do we invite them along to get killed? I
mean we're leaving the safety...
Talking about
leaving the safety of
this building and going on the road.”

Beth raised her hand. “Scotty misspoke,
or you took it the wrong way. Can we agree on that?” Scotty turned
away and then turned back and nodded. Billy nodded too.
“Tomorrow... Tomorrow we scout it out. We need trucks... not a car.
Something that can get us over the bad spots. And, we'll have to
see how far we have to go before we can hope to drive. We sure as
hell can't drive here.” She shrugged.

“
Tomorrow,” Billy
agreed.

“
Yeah,” Scotty
added.

Beth turned and looked back over the
city, watching the building next to the precinct burn.

March 11th: Watertown:
Evening

Mike and Candace

The moon was high in the sky. Mike
leaned up against the rock face of the cliffs, sitting on a small
pile of pallets. He and Candace were a few hundred yards down from
the entrance into the cave. Mike had watch. Candace had come with
him.

With Candace had come four others. Bob,
his wife Janet, and Lydia and Tom. Mike got the idea that Tom had
felt he owned Candace, or he had found her first so she was his.
Something like that. If so, he was probably surprised that she was
with Mike now. Mike found himself constantly surprised by
it.

“
Penny for your thoughts,”
Mike asked Candace. She seemed so quiet.

She laughed. “You don't have a
penny.”

Mike dug into his pocket. “Huh,” he
said as he pulled out a penny. “Last one.”

Candace took it, looked it
over, and then slipped it into her own pocket. “Leaving,” she said.
“My mind is on leaving.” She saw his smile falter as she finished
and quickly amended her statement. “Not without you. I mean
us
leaving. We can't
stay here, Mike.”

Mike nodded. “Bob and Jan's plan of
living in the middle of nowhere?”

“
Well, it's not so bad. But
I don't know if I want to live like a...” she screwed her face
up.

“
A native?”

“
I don't mean I wouldn't. I
mean, we're living in a cave, for Christ's sake. A Tee Pee would
almost have to be an improvement, wouldn't it?”

Mike shrugged. “Maybe.” He fell quiet
himself.

“Anyway, I didn't mean to make you worry. I guess we have some
time. But before summer is too far along. Once winter is done?”
Candace asked.

Mike nodded. “South or west, then we
won't have to worry about freezing to death in the
winter.”

Candace shrugged. “Depends if the
climate is still the same. Everything is so changed.”

Silence held for a while. The moonlight
was bright.

“
Hold me, Michael,” Candace
said.

He pulled her close and held her as the
moon traveled slowly across the sky.

Donita: The Lady In Waiting

She opened her eyes. The moon was high
in the sky. A silver, blue-tinged orb. A glow rose up to meet it,
brighter than the moonlight. She lay quietly and watched it for
some time, content to watch it as it moved slowly across the sky -
at least for the time being.

It occurred to her, after
some time, that the man who had shot her - she recalled that now,
lying here in the quiet night; one of the men had shot her when
they were through with her... after they had
raped
her... he had bent over her
and shot her... - but, the man that shot her must have done a bad
job of it. Must have missed her completely, or skinned her, as they
used to say when they were kids. Or a flesh wound. She had heard
that used in countless movies on television.

“
Bobby! ... Bobby, are you
shot bad? Are you?”

“
Naw, Bill. Naw. It's only
a flesh wound. A flesh wound is all.”

Who hadn't heard that in a movie
before, she asked herself. And she had grown up in the projects.
She had seen people get shot and live through it, even get shot in
the head and live through it. And she had not been shot in the
head, she remembered that.

She tensed for the pain and then sat up
all at once. No pain. None at all. The moonlight was bright, but at
the street level she was laying in shadows. She gazed down at her
chest. Her shirt was plastered to her chest with dried blood. It
baffled her. She wondered if she could make it back to the
apartment and Bear. Maybe... Maybe...

It baffled her because it seemed to be
a great deal of blood, yet there was no pain. It baffled her
because the blood was dry, and no way could the blood be dry.
Why... why the man had just shot her a few minuets ago. She had
left the apartment and...

She couldn't make it all come back. She
had gone so that she would not chance coming back and attacking
Bear. It had seemed a crazy thought, but the longer she had thought
of it, the less crazy it had seemed. The more it seemed to make
sense to her.

They had come at her down by the river,
three blocks... four blocks from the apartment. Surely it had been
no more than that. Her heart had begun to skip and beat
irregularly. She had hoped she could make the river. She thought if
she could throw herself in, it might work. But it was clear she
wasn't going to make it. She had stumbled into an alley, slumped
against the wall, pulled the pistol Bear had gotten for her from
her pocket, and slipped the barrel into her mouth.

The taste of the steel,
and the coldness of the barrel had made her gag, and that had been
her mistake. She had not seen them when she stumbled into the
alley. As soon as the gun left her mouth, one of them, the same one
who had ended up shooting her -
shooting
her with her own gun as a matter of fact -
had stepped from the shadows and snatched the gun from her
hands. The others had surged forward then. They had dragged her
deeper into the shadows and taken her.

She stared up at the full bloated moon
hanging directly overhead. Except it had been early evening, and
now it was not early evening. The moon did not hang in the middle
of the sky during the early evening. She touched her chest, felt
across the swell of her breast and found the bullet
hole.

A big bullet hole. A scary bullet hole.
She tried to suck in a deep breath and panicked when she realized
she couldn't draw the breath. Not being able to breath was not
possible. People could not live if they could not breathe. The
panic rose fast and hot, bright in her thoughts.

The hole was crusted with
blood, but sticky wet towards the center. And she probed it even in
her panic. Maybe
despite
her panic. Her baby finger slid right in up to
the second joint. Her breath still wouldn't come. She pulled
harder.
Harder
.
No good.

She struggled to her feet,
still no pain... still no breath. She staggered off down the
street. Weaving, she saw.
Not surprising
I'm dying. I'm dying because I can't breathe. I...

She stopped in the middle of the
street. She was dead... dead or dreaming. That was all that made
sense. Nothing else did.

She had lain on the ground for... She
looked down at her wrist, 9:29 pm. It meant nothing at all to her.
Watches really couldn't keep time anymore. They could only record
passing time if you had a point of reference, and she hadn't
thought to look at her wrist when the whole thing had started. So
she did not know how long she had lain there gazing up at the
stars, and it didn't matter. The last time she had looked at it, it
had read sometime just past midnight. She had been on the balcony,
looking out at the city. Over twenty hours had passed then, and how
could that be? And did it matter?

The thing that mattered was that she
had lain there awake, gazing up at the moon, and she had felt no
pain, same as she felt no pain now. She had lain there gazing up at
the moon, and she had not been breathing, same as she wasn't
breathing now. And it had been a long time. A long time she had
lain there. A long time she had not be able to breath, had not
drawn air. She was not dying at all. She was dead
already.

She let the panic bleed away. A dream
or really dead, she decided.

Pinch yourself and wake
up
.

She didn't wait. She took
a piece of the flesh on her side and pinched. Nothing. No pain. No
waking in pain. Nothing. She did it again, pinching harder. Nothing
at all. She looked down at the flesh between her fingers, smashed
flat. It should hurt, and it did not hurt. She let go, smoothed her
shirt, her
blood-encrusted-shirt
her mind added, and then looked off down the
street. The street was in shadow. She began to walk.