The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (146 page)

She drew a breath, another, and
suddenly the noise and smells of the world rushed back in
completely. The screams became louder. Horns blared. The ground
trembled under her feet as if restless. She could smell sewage on
the air. Broken lines below the pavement her mind reasoned. She
swayed on her feet as the earth trembled once more, lurching as it
did. She waited, but the tremble was not repeated. She sucked in
another deep breath and then began to walk, slipping on the broken
pavement and slush as she did.

Franklin street appeared untouched as
she lurched from the side street, slipping over the broken
pavement, and retching from the overpowering smell of sewer gas.
She collapsed to the icy pavement, skidding on her knees and was
surprise to hear herself crying as she struggled to get back on her
feet.

She nearly made it to her feet before
the next tremor hit, this one much harder than the last one. She
bounced sideways, knees slamming into the ground, crying out as
they did, but unaware of her own cries. Just as the trembling
stopped she made her feet again and stood, hand clasped to her
knees to steady herself, breathing hard, holding herself rigidly,
wondering what was coming next. When the shaking stopped and
silence flooded in she was shocked.

She finally opened her eyes, she had no
idea when she had closed them, straightened from the bent posture
she had found herself in, quieted her sobbing and looked
around.

Forty feet away, the gray stone of the
mission that had rose just past the sidewalk was no more: Churned
earth had replaced it. The sidewalk was still intact, as though
some weird sort of urban renewal had occurred in a matter of
seconds. Her eyes swept the street and now they took in the
sections where the sidewalk was missing. The entire side of the
street was gone for blocks. What was in evidence was an old house
several hundred feet away, perched on the edge of a ravine. Beyond
that, houses and streets continued. She was on the opposite side of
complete destruction, and there appeared no way to reach that
side.

She turned and looked back at the side
street she had come from. Churned earth, tilted pavement, the car
was now gone. Farther down the short hillside that had appeared the
public square seemed completely destroyed. Water had formed in the
middle of the square and ran away to the north, probably toward the
Black river, Pearl thought. To the west everything appeared to be
intact, to the east, Franklin street stretched away untouched
toward the park in the distance. Close by someone began to scream,
calling for help. She took a few more calming breaths and then
began to walk toward the screams: The west, angling toward the
opposite end of the square.

The screams cut off all at once, and a
second after that the sound of a motor straining came to her.
Cycling up and then dropping. She paused in the middle of the road,
listening, wondering where the sound came from. As she stood
something ran into her eye, stinging, clouding her vision, she
reached one hand up and swiped at it and the back of her hand came
back stained with a smear of blood.

She stared at it for a second. The
ground seemed to lurch, shift suddenly, and she reached her hands
to her knees to brace herself once more, expecting the shaking to
start again, but her hands slipped past her knees and she found
herself falling, her legs buckling under her. The ground seemed to
rise to meet her and she found herself staring down the length of
the roadway, her face flush with the asphalt. The coldness of the
ice and slush felt good against her skin: As if she were
overheated; ice wrapped inside of a dishrag at the base of her neck
on a hot day. She blinked, blinked again, and then her world went
dark.

She floated, or seemed to, thinking of
London. A hot day. She was a child again: Standing in the second
floor window and looking down at the street far below. The dishrag
dripped, but it felt so good against her skin. The memory seemed to
float away. She was rushing headlong through a never ending stream
of memories. All suddenly real again. Urgent, flying by so fast,
but sharp in every detail.

Pearl had grown up on a council estate
in London: When her mother had died she had come to the United
States only to find herself in the Maywood projects on the north
side of Watertown. From one pit to another. Just different names,
she liked to tell herself. Up until a few weeks ago she had still
made the trip back and forth every day, but she had found a place,
a small walk-up, not far from the mission on the other side of the
public square. It seemed extravagant to have her own space, but
living in the downtown area suited her.

She seemed to be in both places at
once. Back in her childhood, staring at the street below the
window, yet hovering over her body, looking down at herself where
she lay sprawled on the winter street. She wondered briefly which
was real, but nearly as soon as she had the thought she found
herself struggling to rise to her knees from the cold roadway, her
eyes slitted, head throbbing.

In front of her a shadowed figure had
appeared staggering through the ice and snow, angling toward her.
She blinked, blinked again and her eyes found their focus. The man
from the car, suddenly back from wherever he had been. One hand
clutched his side where a bright red flood of blood seeped
sluggishly over his clasping fingers. Her eyes swept down to his
other hand which was rising to meet her. A gun was clasped there.
Probably, her mind told her, the same gun he had been going to
shoot her with before. The gun swept upward as if by magic. She
blinked, and realized then that the sound of the motor straining
was louder. Closer. Almost roaring in its intensity. The gun was
rising, but her eyes swiveled away and watched as a truck from the
nearby base skidded to a stop blocking the road from side to side
no more than ten feet from her. She blinked, and the doors were
opening, men yelling, rushing toward her.

Bright light flashed before her eyes,
and a deafening roar accompanied it. An explosion, loud, everything
in the world. A second explosion came, then a third, and she
realized the explosions were gunshots. She felt herself falling
even as she made the discovery. The pavement once again rising to
meet her. Her eyes closed, she never felt the ground as she
collapsed onto it, falling back into the dark.

She was back standing in the window,
looking out over the street. The heat was oppressive, but the ice
wrapped in the rag was mothers' wonderful cure. She tried to raise
it to her neck once more, to feel the coldness of it, but her arm
would not come. She tried harder and the window suddenly slipped
away. A man was bent toward her face. A helmet strap buckled under
his chin. Her hands were somehow held at her side. The motor
screamed loudly as this world once more leapt into her head. She
was on the floor of the truck, vibrations pulsing through her body
as the truck sped along... In the back of the truck, her mind
corrected as her eyes focused momentarily. Other men squatted
nearby, including one who was partially over her holding her arms
as the other man was tapping the bubbles from a syringe with one
gloved finger. The mans face angled down toward her own and he
aimed something in a silver canister into her face from his other
hand. The hand opened and the canister fell to the
ground.

“
Itzawight,” his voice said
in a far away drone. “Awightzzz.” She felt the prick of the needle,
the light dimmed, his voice spat static: The light dimmed a little
further, and then she found herself falling back into the
darkness.

Watertown New York

Project Bluechip

11:00 P.M.

The first quake had been minor, the
last few had not. The big one was coming, and Major Richard Weston
didn't need to have a satellite link up to know that. He touched
one hand to his head. The fingertips came away bloody. He would
have to get his head wound taken care of, but the big thing was
that he had made it through the complex above and down into the
facility before it had been locked down.

He laughed to himself, before it was
supposed to have been locked down. It had not been locked down at
all. He had, had to lock it down once he had made his way in or
else it would still be open to the world.

He had spent the last several years
here commanding the base. He had spent the last two weeks working
up to this event from his subterranean command post several levels
above. All wreckage now. He had sent operatives out from there to
do what they could, but it had all been a stop gap
operation.

The public knew that there was a meteor
on a near collision course with the Earth. They had assured the
public it would miss by several thousands of miles. Paid off the
best scientists in some cases, but in other cases they had found
that even the scientists were willing to look past facts if their
own personal spin put a better story in the mix. A survivable
story. They had spun their own stories without prodding.

The truth was that the meteor might
miss, it might hit, it might come close, a near miss, but it
wouldn't matter because a natural chain of events was taking place
that would make a meteor impact look like small change.

The big deal, the bigger than a meteor
deal, was the earthquakes that had already started and would
probably continue until most of the civilized world was dead or
dying. Crumbled into ruin from super earthquakes and volcanic
activity that had never been seen by modern civilization. And it
had been predicted several times over by more than one group and
hushed up quickly when it was uncovered. The governments had known.
The conspiracy theorists had known. The public should have known,
but they were too caught up in world events that seemed to be
dragging them ever closer to a third world war to pay attention to
a few voices crying in the wilderness. The public was happier
watching television series about conspiracies rather than looking
at the day to day truths about real conspiracies. The fact was that
this was a natural course of events. It had happened before and it
would happen again in some distant future.

So, in the end it had not mattered. In
the end the factual side of the event had begun to happen. The
reality, Major Weston liked to think of it. And fact was fact. You
couldn't dispute fact. You could spin it, and that was the way of
the old world, spinning it, but the bare facts were just that: Bare
facts.

The bare facts were that the
Yellowstone Caldera had erupted just a few hours before. The bare
facts were that the earth quakes had begun, and although they were
not so bad here in northern New York, in other areas of the
country, in foreign countries, third world countries, the bare
facts of what was occurring were devastating: Millions dead, and
millions more would die before it was over. And this was nothing
new. The government had evidence that this same event had happened
many times in Earth's history. This was nothing new at all, not
even new to the human race. A similar event had killed off most of
the human race some seventy-five thousand years before.

There was an answer, help, a solution,
but Richard Weston was unsure how well their solution would work.
It was, like everything else, a stop gap measure, and probably too
little too late. It was also flawed, but he pushed that knowledge
away in his mind.

While most of America had tracked the
meteorite that was supposed to miss earth from their living rooms,
and had been side tracked by all the trouble with the former Soviet
Union, he had kept track of the real event that had even then been
building beneath the Yellowstone caldera. And the end had come
quickly. Satellites off line. Phone networks down. Power grids
failed. Governments incommunicado or just gone. The Internet down.
The Meteorite had not missed Earth by much after all. And the
gravitational pull from the large mass had simply accelerated an
already bad situation.

Dams burst. River flows reversed.
Waters rising or dropping in many places. Huge tidal waves. Fires
out of control. Whole cities suddenly gone. A river of lava flowing
from Yellowstone. Civilization was not dead; not wiped out, but her
back was broken.

In the small city of Watertown, that
had rested above Bluechip, near the shore of the former lake
Ontario, the river waters had begun to rise: Bluechip, several
levels below the city in the limestone cave structures that
honeycombed the entire area, had survived mostly intact, but unless
sealed, it would surely succumb to the rising river waters. By the
time the last military groups had splashed through the tunnels and
into the underground facility, they had been walking through better
than two feet of cold and muddy river-water. The pressure from the
water had begun to collapse small sections of caves and tunnels
below the city, and that damage had been helped along by small
after-shocks.

When the last group of five men had
reached the air shaft, carrying the inert form of a woman between
them, they had immediately pitched in with a group Weston had sent
to brick the passageway off. The remaining bricks and concrete
blocks were stacked and cemented into place in the four foot thick
wall they had started. The materials, along with sandbags initially
used to hold back the rising waters, had been taken from huge
stockpiles within the city, and from the stalled trucks within the
wide tunnel that had once fed traffic into the base. There was no
way in, and no way out of the city. With one small
exception.