The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (24 page)

“
Okay!” Mike yelled to get
his voice above the gunfire and screaming engines. Everyone had
come outside in the last few minutes. He had no doubt they had both
heard and felt the explosions inside the cave. “Get back inside.
Everybody except Bob, Tom, Candace and Patty. You get the clip
rifles, shotguns and the deer rifles too... and ammo.” He paused
and looked around. No one had moved yet. “Nell, Sandy, start moving
the trucks. They can’t get in here from the other end. Run these
down and block the road.”

He began walking rapidly back towards
the cave entrance as he spoke. Nell stayed with him, Sandy
hesitated only briefly and then sprinted to catch up with the two
of them. “Wait until we have firepower to cover you. Drive those
trucks about…” Mike stopped and his eyes shot rapidly up and down
the road, gauging the distance. “About 200 feet down from the end…
where that little cliff juts out,” he motioned with one hand.
Candace came back and tossed him a clip rifle.

“
Turn them sideways, block
the road. Let’s go.” He sprinted towards the trucks with them,
split off and wound up with Nell. Candace climbed into the other
truck with Sandy. A few seconds later, both trucks were moving
fast. Mike watched the roads and the cliffs as they went. It seemed
as though the people who were fighting were too caught up with
killing each other to worry about them. Fine. Let it be that way.
But when they did remember them, the road would be blocked, and
there would be no easy way for them to get to them.

Nell cut the truck hard left. Sandy,
who had been watching, cut her own truck in and the two trucks
nearly collided as they came to a stop blocking the road completely
side to side.

They jumped from the trucks and found
that Tom and Ronnie were less than a hundred feet away covering
them. Mike and Candace put Nell and Sandy between them, covering
them as they ran back towards the cave.

At the mouth of the cave, Mike took a
second to gather his thoughts as everyone gathered around him. The
sound of the fight on the square and lower State Street was louder
than it had been. More gunfire, more explosions. Mike leaned
towards the three men.

“
If they turn down this
road, open up on them. Don’t wait. Light them up!” he turned to
Ronnie. “We’re going up.”

“
Up?”

Mike nodded. “Up to the parking lot
above the cave. We can climb up quick enough from down here. There
are some scrub trees, bushes… Should be good cover. We’ll watch
from there. Stop them if they try to come at us that way. You got
this. Nobody else, you.” He leveled his eyes on Ronnie’s own.
Ronnie nodded. Mike looked around.

“
Lilly… Tim,” They were
both standing near the entrance to the cave. “You two check on
Annie and the two little ones.”

Another explosion rocked the ground.
Rocks and loose gravel sprayed down from the cliffs and the parking
lot above the cave. A pair of vehicles, chasing each other, went
roaring past the end of the road heading for the damaged bridge and
the north side of the city. They exchanged gunfire as they went.
Just after they passed the mouth of the road, the sound of
screaming tires came to them and the sound of one of the vehicles
as it crashed.

Mike turned back to Tim and Lilly,
“Then come back here. Candace and I are climbing to the top. You’re
covering us as we go. Make sure no one gets in back of us, sneaks
up on us.” He looked at them. “You can do that?”

“
Yeah, I can,” Lilly told
him. She seemed so calm it spooked

Mike. Tim echoed the same sentiment,
and then both of them turned away and raced inside of the
cave.

Mike leaned back against the cliff face
and watched the end of the road. Their four remaining trucks were
now parked down the road, closing it off. Bob, Nell, Patty and
Sandy crouched behind the trucks, using them for cover. Another
vehicle went flying past the end of the road heading into the
square. A small car of some sort, Mike saw as it flew past. The
sound of the car locking up its brakes came to his ears no more
than a split second after it passed the end of the road. The
transmission whined and the cars engine screamed. A second later
the car flew back past the end of the road in reverse, locked up
the tires again, and turned onto the river road, two young men
hanging out of the back windows. What looked like wire stock
machine pistols in their hands.

Before the car had rolled more than ten
feet onto the River Road, Patty and Bob were up and firing. Tom
came up next; Candace socketed a clip rifle into her shoulder and
opened up. Mike raised his own rifle, but the car was
disintegrating before his eyes before he ever pulled the
trigger.

The windshield starred and then blew
inward. The two young men who had been hanging out the side windows
of the car preparing to shoot never got the chance. The car
suddenly veered left, accelerated hard and smashed into the cliff
face. Everybody ducked low below the trucks. Mike, Candace, Tim and
Lilly threw themselves to the ground. Flames shot up the cliff
face. A second after that the gas tank blew.

The car lifted completely off the
ground. The concussion from the explosion took Mike's hearing for
the next two or three minutes. The car crashed back down, burying
its nose in the dirt at the base of the cliffs. A body flew from
the interior and lay burning on the ground. The car jumped back up
as something else beneath it exploded, came back down, skittered to
the left and landed on the burning body, snuffing the flames out.
One of the rear tires blew with a loud wham, then another one went,
and the car dropped closer to the ground at the rear.

Tim grabbed his sleeve from behind,
startling Mike momentarily.

He and Lilly stood, one holding a deer
rifle, the other holding a Forty Five caliber pistol. Candace
headed for the wall. Mike glanced over at Ronnie so he would know
they were going.

Two minutes of easy climbing, and they
were in the scrub brush at the back of the parking lot.

From the square side of the parking lot
it probably looked as though there were nothing at all at the back
of the parking lot. Fine, Mike thought. He only hoped none of them
knew what was below the parking lot, but he didn’t believe it.
Anyone who grew up here knew what was at the edge of this parking
lot. Anyone here now knew they were in the cave down on the Old
River Road. Mike believed it was only a matter of time before they
came for them. When they did, he would be here waiting.

Before the thoughts were completely
formed in his head, three people came running straight toward them
where they stood within the scrub brush. Four heavily armed men
were pursuing them. Firing as they ran. The three runners appeared
to be unarmed. Mike stepped from the screening scrub. He had given
it no thought at all. He stepped nearly into the path of the lead
runner. Her mouth flew open in surprise; a small spatter of blood
tattooed one of her cheeks. Mike stepped easily around her, took
aim at the first of the four chasers and shot him just as he was
slowing down to bring his own rifle up. To his side Candace
crouched and began popping off at the other three as they continued
running, perfectly aimed shots. She took out two. Lilly dropped the
last one. The lead man's momentum carried him forward another
fifteen feet before he realized he was dead and fell end over end
onto the blacktop.

One of the remaining chasers managed to
pop off one last shot before he went down. The last runner
collapsed in a heap. It was over in less than a second. Five people
lay dead. The lead runner looked around in wonder, saw the last
runner laying dead and began to cry hard, her chest hitching as she
tried to hold the tears back. Candace stepped forward and grabbed
her as she stumbled. Lilly helped Mike grab the last woman. They
faded back into the brush not knowing if anyone else might be close
by or not.

“
It’s okay,”
Candace said.
“It’s
really okay.”
She pulled the one woman
close to her and held her as she shook. Lilly held the other one.
They were both breathing heavy, sobbing. The one Candace held
struggled to catch her breath. She turned to Mike.

“
You,” she managed. “You’re
from the cave?” She turned to include Candace in her statement.
Turning in her arms. Too beaten to struggle free if the answer
should be no, trusting that Candace would not hurt her.

“
Yeah,” Candace told her.
“Yeah.” She pulled her close, holding her as the woman began to sag
towards the ground. The panic and fear left her face.

“
Thank God,” she breathed.
She turned around, still allowing Candace to hold her, looking back
through the trees into the parking lot. “We… We were trying to get
here… To here… You…” her voice faded as she saw the other woman’s
body crumpled on the ground.
“Fuck,”
she breathed.
“Fuckers,”
she
screamed.

Candace pulled her closer and held her
as she cried, whispering to her, calming her, pulling her further
into the scrub brush.

Mike and Tim both scanned the area.
There was gunfire, but it was from farther away, the other side of
the square, hidden by the toppled and crumbling buildings. Mike
looked out at the machine pistols and ammo the four men had been
carrying.

“
Hey,” Mike said. Tim
looked over at him, his eyes round and hard. He's too young for
this, Mike thought. Too young. “Cover me? I’m going to get that
ammo. Those machine pistols.”

Tim looked out over the parking lot.
His eyes trying to take in everything. He looked back at Mike and
nodded. The forty five in his hand came back up and he turned back
to scan the parking lot as Mike ran out on to the pavement. He was
back in just over a minute with all four Machine Pistols. Ammo
belts looped over his shoulders, looking like some strange refugee
of war, he supposed. The self image made him laugh, but he choked
it off before it could become much more than a ghost of a smile on
his lips. He tossed two of the guns to Tim and then faded back into
the scrub brush where Candace and Lilly waited with the two
women.

~ Sudden Quiet ~

The first skirmish lasted the better
part of an hour, and then, as quickly as it had started, the
gunfire fell off. Cars and trucks both raced by on the Old River
Road heading back across the bridge there to the north side of the
city, a bridge, Mike thought, that was about to fall into the
river, or so it seemed from looking at it. Crumbling supports,
buckled decking, but they were running back and forth across it
like it was as good as the day it was built.

Other vehicles raced back up State
Street. Several burned out vehicles continued to spew dirty, black
smoke into the air. There were too many burning wrecks to count
scattered around the Public Square and the streets that led away
from it.

Patty and Bob scouted down to the still
burning car that had turned onto the road, a Nissan it turned out,
and picked up the two machine pistols that lay close by
it.

Ronnie and Tom moved two of their own
trucks back to the bare area in front of the cave as Nell drove the
truck they had appropriated the night before down to within a
hundred feet of the burning Nissan, turned it sideways blocking the
road and left it. Patty and Bob trotted along the side of the road,
covering Nell as she parked the truck, and then came back with her
until they reached the safety of the cave. The other trucks that
had been moved were pulled back into a V that further blocked the
road, but mainly provided a barrier to shoot from. It was where
they had taken out the Nissan from.

Mike came to the back edge of the scrub
brush and called down softly. Annie came from the shadows on the
side of the cave and looked up expectantly. “Get Patty or Tom,”
Mike told her. Annie nodded and was off before Mike could think to
say anything else.

Patty and Tom both appeared a few
moments later.

“
Everything okay?” Mike
asked.

Patty nodded along with Tom. “You?” she
asked.

“
I got two women up here.
I’ll explain it later; in fact I really don’t know all of it except
they were headed for us when we stepped into a mess up here… Or
they did, or we both did…” He paused and rubbed the bridge of his
nose for a second. “I’m going to send them down, okay?”

Patty nodded again. “Send them, Mike,”
she said, but it ended up being easier to say than it turned out to
do. Neither of the women wanted to attempt climbing down the cliff
face. Of all the things they had collected or had in the cave, they
had no rope. Tom scouted further down the road, checking the cliff
face.

When Tom had been a kid, the Old River
Road had been in daily use and was then connected to one of the
bridges. He thought that he remembered another old road that came
into Old River Road. It was an old blocked off road even then. The
road had come down from the back of the parking lot, most probably
long before it had been made into a parking lot. The road itself
was gone, but the long, gradually sloping area that had once held
the road was still there, overgrown yes, but an easily walked path
down to the road from the parking lot if you knew where to find it.
Tom smiled after finding the place. He followed it nearly to the
top to make sure it was still passable, and then he turned around
and went back down the road to where Mike was waiting for
him.