The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (11 page)

“
Yeah. They were just kids
though… even Lydia,” Mike said.

Candace nodded. “But they weren’t sweet
little innocent kids. I’ve seen gang bangers all of my life. I grew
up with that. It’s really a way of life. Sometimes, for some kids,
it’s the only way of life there is. I ran myself for a while.” She
frowned.

“
All I’m saying is, they
weren’t sweet little innocent kids. And, believe me, nothing you
could’ve said, had you been there, would’ve changed anything.
Believe me. I tried to talk to one of them. No good. And the other
one I shot didn’t even bother to try talking.”

Mike nodded, took an
experimental sip from his mug, then a longer satisfying drink. “I
see it,” he said. “This city has a lot of drugtrade what with the
base so close by. I’ve never been in a gang or knew what one was
really about until I was introduced to that life in Rochester as a
kid. When I came back here, I saw more and more of it. Now it’s
everywhere you look.” He seemed startled for a moment.
“Was...
Was
everywhere you looked,” he added thoughtfully.

“
There is still good in the
world. This didn’t just take the good people and leave the bad,”
Candace said. She took another long sip from her coffee. Her eyes
met Mike's own; he leaned over and kissed her lips softly. She
smiled and took the coffee mug from his hands, set it down, took
his hands and pulled him to his feet.

“
Come on,” she said and
kissed him once more. Mike kissed her back and pulled her body
closer to him. His hands encircled her waist and rested on her
hips. Her tongue probed gently as her own hands found the back of
his head. She drew back, giggled and then pulled him toward the
river and the screening growth of trees and bushes farther down the
road.

~

March sixteenth, Mike thought, would
always be remembered as the day that didn’t quite happen. The sun
never really rose. A half light lit the sky for the next forty-two
hours, but the sun itself never made an appearance through the
thick, black clouds that blocked off the sky from horizon to
horizon, dark and moving swiftly across the skies.

The sun seemed to creep around the
perimeter of the horizon from the West where it first appeared, to
the East where it finally sank, setting the sky on fire with it’s
pink-red light only to fade away without ever actually
rising.

The air became warmer throughout the
day, and what little snow remained melted away. Everyone noticed a
queasy feeling in their stomachs, and a few commented on feeling
something similar a few weeks back right after the first
earthquakes had hit.

As the day wore on, a fine gray ash
began to fall from the skies. The skies grew even darker as the ash
fell down faster, like dirty snow.

After several hours, the landscape
around the cave looked as though everything was covered with a
thick coat of dust. Everyone fashioned cloths around their mouths
to avoid breathing in the thick haze of ash.

The ash was followed by a slow dirty
rain that turned the piles of ash into a slushy, runny kind of mud,
and just before the sun finally fell in the East, the rain began to
fall harder, the air turned cold, then colder still, and lightening
began to stab at the gray and sullen skies above the
cave.

~

Everyone huddled around the fire in the
cave, talking very little. They shared a meal of canned beef stew
and crackers. The stew was hot and drove away the cold that had
returned, but it did nothing to lift their spirits.

Bob offered to take the first watch,
Mike volunteered for the next and Tom offered to take it from there
if the sun wasn’t up.

Mike held Candace in his arms and
drifted off to sleep, thinking about what the day might mean and
what the morning down by the river with her had been
like.

Tom ~ March 16th

I’ve never kept anything like this in
my entire life. I don’t know why I am, really, because when the
rest go I’ll be staying.

I can’t even give a good reason for
staying, except that there’s shelter here, and I know there are
other people here as well.

I know that all the others are going.
They’ll follow Mike. What can I say or do about that?

I feel so responsible about
what happened to Lydia. She was just a kid. A kid,
Jesus.
I can’t really
think rationally about it. I can’t deal with it. I can’t believe
how fast and how deep my feelings went. I’ve heard about things
like that, but I had never experienced something like that before
Lydia. I’ve heard that can happen in relationships that are formed
in situations like this.
Crisis…
What else could be like this? Nothing. Anyway, I
didn’t believe it could work like that, but it did.

I thought she would be here with me.
They could go, she would be here. I could deal with that. This has
almost made me cave in and say yes to going. But I can’t do it.
Something inside of me won’t let me do it. It’s not that I don’t
respect Mike, or like him. I was a little jealous, maybe still am,
a little. I had a thing for Candace, and I still do. That’s another
reason I can’t go. I would end up hating him. Her too. But, it’s
not really any of that. I have to run my own railroad. That’s all.
Very lame. Probably very dangerous in this new world as
well.

Maybe I can change. I’m open to that.
What I’m really hopeful for is other people. When the other four
leave, I don’t want to be alone. I spent the first few days of this
alone. I didn’t like that. I don’t want to go back to
that.

How do you develop such deep feelings
for someone so fast? Right now I’m trying to get past that. I guess
what I need to do is freeze everything else out for now.

I don’t know what to say
about how I felt about Candace, or how I still feel. And I can’t
explain how I could feel that way about her and still feel the way
I did about Lydia. Am I kidding myself? Was Candace just temptation
and Lydia the real thing? No. That’s hard to say, but true. I would
have walked away from Lydia for Candace in a heartbeat. That makes
me feel even worse about things. Even so, I loved her…
Love
her.

As far as this journal goes, I can’t
share it. I don’t think I can write deep, personal things about
myself and then share them with anyone. I never could… I won’t
begin now. But I can write them here. I can see where this can help
me to work through things, help me deal with this. This can bring
me through this, just writing it out. So I’ll do it for that
reason, and no other.

~ March 17th ~

The storm kept up through the longer
than usual night. Twelve hours into the night the first quaking of
the Earth shook the ground. Everyone was up at the same time. They
stood outside in the cold, pouring rain just moments later, huddled
under a blue plastic tarp while the lightening split the sky and
the ground continued to shake and tremble.

Everyone was sick. Every movement
seemed exaggerated, uncoordinated. Between the tremors and the
sickness it was nearly impossible to remain standing, but Mike, Tom
and Bob held the outer edges while Candace knelt in the center
holding Janet Dove who seemed to be having a harder time with the
lightheadedness and the sickness than anyone else.

The first large Earthquake came a few
hours later. Some sounds were off in the distance, the sounds of
buildings collapsing. Other sounds were closer and came to them
over the sounds of the storm, wood snapping and cracking, brick and
concrete, already loosened by the previous quakes, crashing to the
ground, the Earth itself trembling and moving.

The three men finally gave up the fight
to remain upright and sank to the ground with Candace and Jan, all
of them huddled close together in the cold rain, hanging on as best
they could to the moving ground beneath them.

The night dragged on. Aftershocks came
and went. It was hard to tell which were the main shocks and which
were the aftershocks. The lightheadedness and queasy stomachs
became intolerable, yet they had no choice but to endure the
sickness. The cold rain continued to fall.

Occasionally someone would thrust an
arm out into the light of a lightening flash to catch a glimpse of
the time, but somewhere in the night the wind up watches even
stopped working. The second hands seemed to shake and shudder back
and forth. Not actually ticking the time away any
longer.

Mike watched as the Suburban began to
shake and skitter sideways during one of the Earthquakes. It caught
the unprotected edge of the road and then crashed through the
brushy trees that fronted the cliffs and skated off the edge into
the river below. Shortly after that, the sounds of destruction in
the distance began to taper off.

Sometime later on, the sun appeared
about to rise once again. A dull, pink glow lit up the horizon in
the North, but for the second day in a row, the sun itself never
rose. Once again, the light seemed to skate around the very edge of
the horizon and then disappeared back into blackness. Shortly after
that, Bob told everyone that his watch seemed to be working once
again. Everyone quickly checked their own watches to find them
working as well.

Twenty five hours into the darkness
something changed.

It came on slowly, but eventually they
all noticed that the lightheadedness was abating. The queasiness
was letting up as well. No one felt like jumping up and running
around, but after so many hours living with the sickness, it felt
good to have it going in the other direction. Janet slipped in to a
light sleep in spite of the relentless, cold rain.

Everyone was soaked, but the tarp did
provide some protection. Shortly after the strange sickness had
passed, another series of Earthquakes, or aftershocks, hit. Not as
strong as any of the ones that had come before, but one of them
caused some nearby damage they could only hear. Something, it
sounded like part of the cliff side close down by the river, split
away. The sound came to them clearly, and the roar of the rushing
Black increased in intensity for several minutes before it slipped
back into its previous roar. Buildings continued to crash in the
distance, lightening stabbed at the rain flooded ground and the
small, tired group huddled beneath the tarp, sleeping when they
could.

“
What if the sun never
comes back up?”
Bob whispered.

Mike glanced at his own watch during a
brief flash of lightening, thirty hours had passed. Not counting
however long the watches had not been working.

“
It will,”
Candace whispered.

“
Yeah,”
Tom echoed tiredly.

~

When the sun finally did rise, it rose
from the South and slowly made its way across the sky on a
ponderous course that saw it slipping back down into the horizon
several times and then seeming to hang dead in the sky for long
periods of time.

The rains stopped, the temperatures
began to rise rapidly and soon the tarp was discarded. Steam began
to rise from the wet asphalt and the roadside vegetation
surrounding the cave. Mike found himself looking around as everyone
else was.

A large section of the bank that had
held the old road was gone, and the Black's waters churned muddy
brown, coming closer to the upper roadway where the cave
stood.

All three vehicles were gone. Over the
edge, and presumably washed away, Mike thought. The sun continued
on its unsteady, drunken course, seeming to be desperately angling
for a sinking somewhere in the northwest, but it was hard to tell.
A few minutes later, it once again stopped and seemed to hang in
the sky, a huge, swollen, yellow-red orb shimmering in the hazy
sky.

“
We should eat, or at least
drink something,” Candace said.

“
No way. I can’t even think
of food,” Tom said.

“
I know. Me too, but we’ll
get dehydrated, possibly already are, and that’s very dangerous.
I’m going to see how the cave is… Get some bottled water, maybe
some of those energy bars. Did anyone think to bring a flashlight
with them?” she finished.

Everyone shook their heads. Candace
stood on shaky legs, and the dizziness returned quickly. She
squatted down to the ground as everyone else struggled to their
feet and also sank back down to the ground. She took several deep
breaths and then stood again, slowly, taking deep breaths as she
did.

“
It’s okay,” she told the
others with a shaky lopsided smile, “Just do it slowly.”

The men made it back to their feet,
standing, shaking, but Janet remained sitting, her head in her
hands. Bob sank back down and circled her shoulders with one arm,
pulling her to his chest.

“
I’ll wait here with Jan,”
he said quietly.

The others nodded and headed slowly to
the cave entrance.

Mike noticed as they walked that if
they had come this far out onto the asphalt, but to the right or
the left of where they had ridden out the night, they would have
ended up in the river sometime during the night. Tom and Candace
were also looking over the destruction on either side of the cave
entrance. Their eyes met briefly, acknowledging the apparent, and
then turned to examine the entrance to the cave.