The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (142 page)

She smiled again as Jessie's eyes left
Mike and rested on her briefly on their way to Sandy. She would
have to ask Mike about it later, because the thing was, he had told
her almost nothing at all about Doctor Jessie Stone. And nothing at
all about the woman he seemed comfortable calling Jess. She pushed
it from her mind.

“
Sandy,” Jessie said.
“Maybe you could show me around? ... You too Susan, of
course.”

“
A doctor,” Sandy said. She
seemed flustered.

Jessie laughed. “From what
I have heard, you are the doctor here. Believe me. I've heard only
good things about you, Sandy,” Jessie said. She turned to Susan.
“And you. I heard you are learning...
Have
learned a great deal.” She
smiled at the tall, beautiful black woman and Susan smiled
back.

“
What do you want to see
first,” Sandy asked? She was still flustered.

“
Well, the golf course
first, I guess. I hope it's a good one,” She said dead
pan.

Susan laughed aloud and took the
smaller woman’s hand in her own. Sandy's face froze between a laugh
and surprise.

Jess patted Sandy's arm. “Kidding... I
thought you'd expect the golf course joke,” Jessie said. All three
of them laughed and Jessie turned back to Candace and Patty, “It
was good to meet the two of you,” She said. “Michael.” She nodded
at him and then turned and walked slowly away with Sandy and Susan,
up the ledge toward the main cave area and the clinic Sandy and
Susan had set up.

Patty's eyes slid to
Candace. She knew that Candace knew. She missed nothing. Patty
widened her eyes slightly and blinked. Candace shrugged her
shoulders, just enough to send Patty a
'It
will be okay'
message. Mike and Ronnie had
turned and were looking down into the valley where Bob and Josh
were making their way toward the first of the barns, oblivious to
the small drama playing out right next to them.

A few feet away, Rain and Alicia stood
staring at one another. Alicia was a year older, but smaller than
Rain.

“
I'm a girl,” Rain told
her.

“
Well, so am I,” Alicia
said.

“
I have a little brother,”
Rain told her. “Well, he's not my really brother. He's a
orphoon.”

Alicia nodded “What's a
or
phoon
?”

“
It's a boy nobody wants, I
guess,” Rain told her. “But, I'm not for sure.”

“
I got a brother too,”
Alicia said. “He's my for real brother, but he's really old and he
don't like girls at all.” She told her.

“
How old,” Rain
asked?

“
I don't know,” Alicia
said. “A lot.” She looked at her fingers and then held up all ten,
fanned out. “Maybe this many... Maybe even more.”

“
Wow,” Rain said. “That's
crazy! ... We got a school. They teach us to count there and then
you can know how many for sure.”

Alicia nodded and then scrunched up her
eyes. “You play with dolly’s?”

“
Yep,” Rain assured her.
“And I got a lot of them too... Wanna see them?”

Alicia smiled. “We could play,” she
said.

Rain smiled back, stuck her hand out,
and Alicia took it. “Come on,” she said. “I'll show you, only you
got to be careful and stay away from the ledge.” She had been
pulling Alicia away, but she stopped and looked back at her
seriously, still holding her hand. “We could fall down a long
way... Auntie Janet said so,” she whispered.

“
Okay,” Alicia whispered
back. She followed Rain up the ledge, holding her hand as they
went, looking respectfully over the rock wall at the long valley
below.

THE ZOMBIE PLAGUES BOOK SIX

Published with Smashwords

The Zombie Plagues Book Six is
Copyright © 2015 Geo Dell

Additional Copyrights © 2010, 2014,
2015 and 2016 by Wendell Sweet All rights reserved

Frequent Walker Lyrics Copyright ©
Wendell G. Sweet 2010. Used with permission

This book is licensed for your personal
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this author.

LEGAL

This is a work of fiction. Any names,
characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the
author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual living persons
places, situations or events is purely coincidental.

This novel is Copyright © 2016 Wendell
Sweet. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means,
electronic, print, scanner or any other means and, or distributed
without the author's permission. Geo Dell, W.G. Sweet and Dell
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Permission is granted to use short
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print.

THE ZOMBIE PLAGUES BOOK SIX

FOREWORD

Frequent Walker

In this world time moves by, doesn't
stop for you or me, yes the ones who choose to wait are the ones
who never see...

So my feet move me on though they're
weary of this flight, they will lead me to tomorrow, wipe the
fallen from my sight...

In my life I have seen distant dreams
of futures past, and the one who filled my cup left it empty at the
last...

And my eyes, tired from sight, rimmed
in red and slow to see, can't conceive eternity from the edge of
what can be...

Pick me up. Fill my cup. Fix the damage
in my head...

Fill my soul. Make me whole. Raise me
from the dead...

Show my eyes what can be. shine your
light so I can see...

Walk alone through this world. Through
this cold I've always known. Taking only what I need from the seed
that has been sown...

And this world sells itself pretty
dreams that can not be, and though we stop to look we can never
truly see...

Take my time, tap the glass, raise the
bubbles from my cure. Pull the curtains on my pasts, and all I
thought they ever were...

As my soul finds its way, push the
darkness from my mind. Lay your words upon my heart as my rest I go
to find...

Pick me up. Fill my cup. Fix the damage
in my head...

Fill my soul. Make me whole. Raise me
from the dead...

Show my eyes what can be. shine your
light so I can see...

Let my heart lead me on, from your
memories in my mind. Lay your coins upon my eyes, speak your magic
line by line...

As my sun slowly sets I will try not to
forget, all the lessons from this world and the souls that I have
met...

Lyrics copyright 2010 Dell
Sweet

BEFORE THE PLAGUES

PROLOGUE

Project Bluechip: Watertown
NY

Complex C: Patient Ward

Test Subject: Mike Hunter

Compound SS-V2765

Gabe Kohlson moved away from the
monitors. “Heart rate is dropping, don't you think...” He stopped
as the monitor began to chime softly. Before he could get fully
turned around the chiming turned into a strident alarm that rose
and fell. “Dammit,” Kohlson said as he finished his
turn.

“
What is it,” David Johns
wheeled his chair across the short space of the control room. His
outstretched hands caught him at the counter top and slowed him at
Kohlson's monitor.

“
Flat lined,” Kohlson said
as he pushed a button on the wall to confirm what the doctors one
level up already knew. Clayton Hunter was dead.

“
I see it,” Doctor Ed Adams
replied over the ceiling speakers. The staff called him Doctor
Christmas for his long white beard and oversize belly. “Berty and I
are on the way.”

“
Lot of good that will do,”
Johns muttered.

Kohlson turned to him. “Go on in... Do
CPR if you want... They don't pay me enough to do it. I don't know
what that shit is. Look at the way the Doc suits up. Clayton Hunter
will be in rigor before anyone gets in there at all.”

“
No argument,” Johns said.
He wheeled back to his own monitor, called up an incident sheet and
began to type.

“
Me too,” Kohlson agreed.
“Preserve the video, med and monitor data.” He punched a few
buttons on his console and an interface for the medical equipment
came up. He saved the last 48 hours of data, and then began to fill
out his own incident report. These reports might never be seen by
more than one person, maybe two if you counted the person that
wrote it, Kohlson thought, but it would always be there.
Classified. Top secret for the next hundred years or so. And he
wondered about that too. Would it even be released after a long
period? He doubted it. The shit they were doing here was bad. Shit
you didn't ever want the American public to know about. This
incident report, along with the one Johns was doing, would probably
get buried deep under some program listing that no one would ever
suspect to look into. Or, maybe, it would get burned right along
with Clayton Hunter's body. He glanced up at the clock and then
went back to typing.

“
Uh... Call it 4:32 PM?” He
asked.

“
Works for me,” Johns
agreed.

“
I got 94 for the body,”
Johns said.

“
Yeah... Yeah, me too.
That's a fast drop, but we both got the same thing. 94 it is... No
heart, no respiratory, dead as dog shit.”

“
Dog shit,” Johns agreed.
They both fell silent as they typed. A few moments later the doors
to the observation room chimed, the air purifiers turned on with a
high pitched whine, and they could both feel the air as it dragged
past them and into the air ducts. The entire volume would be
replaced and the room depressurized and then re-pressurized before
the doors would open. And that would only happen after the air was
tested and retested. A good twenty minutes away before anyone would
step foot into the room with Clayton Hunter.

Complex C, Autopsy Room

Ed Adams and Roberta Summers had
dissected Clayton Hunter's body methodically. The autopsy had been
painstaking. It had to be, it was recorded in detail and some
General somewhere, hell, maybe even the president, would be looking
that video over in the next few days. Maybe even watching live now.
They had that capability. There was nothing to see. He had suffered
a major heart attack. The heart had a defect. No history. One of
those things that just came along and fucked up your two billion
dollar research project all at once.

“
Coronary Thrombosis,” He
spoke in a measured voice. “Appears to be after the fact. The
artery looks to be mildly occluded... The myocardial infarction
appears to be caused from a congenital defect... Specifically an
Atrial Septal Defect... Berty?”

“
I concur. Easily
overlooked. The lack of sustenance put a higher demand on the
subject's heart, the defect became a major player at that point...
Bad luck for us.”

“
Uh, bad luck for Clayton
Hunter,” Ed Adams added.

“
Of course. Bad luck for
the subject, Clayton Hunter. I simply meant bad luck for a research
volunteer to be defective in such a way that in effect it would
compromise a project of this magnitude so badly.” She turned her
eyes up to one of the cameras she knew to be there. “This in no way
paints a true picture of V2765. We should proceed, unsatisfying as
these circumstances might be, we should proceed with subjects 1120F
and 1119X... Same compound.” She turned back to the corpse on the
table. “You want me to do the brain biopsy,” She asked
Ed.

Ed frowned as he made eye contact with
her. They had decided, at least he had thought they had decided,
not to mention brain biopsies. Three times now he had discussed the
importance of not focusing on the changes that V2765 made to the
brain. Anything that altered the brain could alter financing,
funding, lab time. Even the government didn't like changes to brain
matter.

“
Are you thinking there
could have been an embolism?” He asked.

'Well I,” she sputtered away for a
second before Ed rescued her.

“
I think all we would see
is evidence of the embolism that occurred near the heart. We could
search out areas of the body and most likely find more than one
occurrence of embolism. Well thought, but I believe we will take a
look at the brain later in the week. Right now I want to focus on
the enzymes, proteins, blood work and readying the other two for a
conclusion of this trial.”

“
Yes. I agree entirely,”
Doctor Adams.