The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (55 page)

Mike shook his head. “I'm not saying
anything at all. Jeff said he thought she was dead. Never sucked in
a breath as she got up... even exerting herself scrambling
backwards to get away from him. Nothing. No breath. No blood. No
anything... And, yeah... We talked about it, and that was the
morning before we left that little complex we were camped out in.
Jeff found a... a place. Some of us went and looked it
over.”

Tom laughed a short, unsettled laugh.
“So...?”

Mike shrugged. “So that's what he
said.”

“
A goddamn fuckin' Zombie,”
Cindy said very quietly, like speaking a spell against
evil.

Tom looked over at her, his eyes wide.
He looked back at Mike incredulous. “Seriously?” he
asked.

All Mike could do was shrug.”Tom...
It's what he thought.”

“
It was on the news,” Cindy
said.

“
Oh for Christ's sake,” Tom
said. “If it's not one thing, it's another.”

“
You know, Man. For real.
You're the most negative man I know,” Ronnie said.

Tom's eyes cut to Ronnie's and
challenged him. Ronnie met the gaze and held it.

“
Alright!” Mike raised his
voice. “I heard it as well. Come on... We all did. How could you
not? I thought it was a joke. I still do. Maybe... I think I still
do,” His voice fell and he seemed uncertain. “Doesn't matter,
except I brought it up so we could keep our eyes open. Dead
people... I don't know, but I know Jeff was convinced, and that is
a fact.”

Silence held. Then Candace spoke.
“I...” she shook her head. “I don't know, but, well, we still got
some dead here. We had better check them.”

~

They all dressed alike, were built
alike, even looked alike. They wanted them that way, made them that
way, picked them that way. Looking at what was left of the girl on
the ground, Cindy felt like vomiting again, but she looked harder
despite her feelings.

The way Candace had described her
fighting with her sounded like Chloe, who was afraid of nothing.
But Chloe had never worn anything but black fingernail polish and
this girl wore pink. Cindy forced herself to lift the girls shirt.
Death had been carved in spidery white lines into her stomach.
Cindy rose and let the shirt fall back across the dead gray skin of
the girl's stomach.

Had Tammy been Death's woman before
Chloe came along? Cindy didn't know. There was no X through the
name. That meant nothing either though, not really. Tammy had been
no one's woman, so there would be no other name. And Chloe would
look the same.

“
I just can't tell,” Cindy
said. “It's one of them. I just don't know which one.”

Candace nodded, “Either
way, we're missing several...
bodies,
I guess... people,” she sat
looking at Mike.

The six of them had searched carefully
once more, even searching the side of the road up to the curve.
Nothing turned up. They went back to camp, made coffee, and then
finally made the meal they had intended to make the night before.
Then they sat down to talk things out.

~

“
We're out of range on the
V.H.F.,” Bob said. “It can't be anything else.”

They had tried to contact the vehicles
that had left, but they had received no reply. Just a quarter mile
off the road, even the C.B. channels were scratchy with static
rather than run over with skip talk. The trees, maybe, but more
than likely the foothills and all the trace metals in the rock and
the ground, Bob thought.

Everyone had been patched up, and the
seven of them looked like refugees from a war zone.

Ronnie had cuts to both elbows, and a
nick in one ear lobe. Whether caused by a flying piece of debris or
a bullet, no one could say, but the edges looked slightly burned
which lent itself more to a bullet than anything else.

Tom had a deep cut over one eyebrow.
Where it had come from, he had no idea.

Bob had several large splinters of
green wood taken from just below his right eye. He had no idea they
were even there until Candace pointed them out to him, made him sit
down and then extracted them one by one.

Mike had a deep slice on the palm of
one hand and a fairly deep cut to one knee, all from his plunge
down the road and into the trees when Candace's voice had cut off
over the radio.

David had lost the very tip of his
right pinky finger when the shootout at the camp had happened.
Somehow the tip of his finger had been in the bolt way when he had
slammed it home loading the chamber of one of his rifles. He hadn't
even ended up using that rifle, but one of the clip rifles instead.
He had simply loaded the five rifles around him so he would have
them if he needed them. He had noticed after the battle had ended
that he had lost the tip of his finger. Even then it didn't hurt.
He kept expecting the pain to kick in, but even as Candace bandaged
it, there was no serious pain.

They were all weary, but the food and
coffee helped to revive them.

“
How far do you think they
could have gotten?” Mike asked.

“
A way, anyways,” Bob said,
“After the logging trails run out, they could run right through the
trees. That reforestation stuff was planned out in nice, neat rows,
and you should be able to drive along it just like it was a real
road. Forrest service often did. I guess they would be stopped once
that ran out,” Bob said. “Fifty miles? Sixty? I don't
know.”

“
Then how will we know
where they're at?” David asked.

“
We won't know. Not
exactly, but, we'll keep on the radio, once we're within distance.
They'll hear us. We'll work it out from there,” Bob
said.

“
There was no way of
knowing how many were coming,” Mike said. “I couldn't take the
chance.” He looked around at the trees. “It looks good down here,
hidden even, but it's vulnerable. You saw the way they sneaked
through the trees to come down in here. We couldn't get them in the
trees, too hard. Candace and Ronnie did that. Really, we got only
one guy, and that guy pretty much jumped out of the wood line, and
that's why we got him. The second one we thought we might have hit
did the same thing. Tom shot him, but he jumped back into the wood
line. What I'm saying is, we were sitting ducks. So I sent them
out. Better that than we were over run and lose more people, but
we'll find them. Might take time, but we'll find them,” Mike
said.

“
So we have no cows, no
horses, no trucks. It's like everything we planned to do just fell
apart,” Tom said.

Bob smiled. “Life is like that
sometimes. We need some stuff. I don't know how far Janet got with
her lists. Does anybody?” He looked around. Everyone shook their
heads no.

“
I figured. So, we have to
find a place close by, and we haven't passed anywhere, but we have
to find a place that has what we need,” Bob said.

“
Like?” Mike
asked.

“
Axes, seed, horses and
cows, maybe chickens. Sickles, bolts of cloth, things like that,
you see? All the stuff that we will need until we get on our
feet... in a few years? We'll be able to make everything we need,”
Bob said.

“
Everything?” Ronnie asked
doubtfully.

“
Yeah, we will. It's not
going to be so hard. Will we be manufacturing televisions? Or
telephones? Or truck tires? No, but, we won't need them either.
Eggs? Beef? Our own wheat? Will we be making cotton and our own
clothes? Yes. I think we can do all of that,” Bob said.

“
Sounds like Quakers, or
Amish,” Candace said.

“
No,” Bob said, “I don't
think we'll be nearly that advanced.”

Candace laughed and everybody joined
in.

“
Back from here, about two
or three miles, was a turnoff. I remember seeing it. No signs. The
road was shot, but if I'm right that will take us into a small town
about fifteen miles down. At least there's one marked on the map.
It may not have everything we want, it may even be gone, but if
it's there we'll have to make do,” Bob said.

“
Well,” David asked,
“When?”

“
Well, now,” Bob said and
laughed.

“
Shouldn't... well
shouldn't we bury them?” Cindy asked.

“
And what about the missing
ones?” Tom added.

“
They wouldn't have buried
us,” David said. “And they killed Jeff and then took his body.
Sharon's gonna go ballistic,” he said.

“
I think they took the
bodies. I don't know how. We'll have to explain it to Sharon and
the others.” Mike said, “But Cindy is right about burying the ones
they didn't get, and we aren't them. Maybe they would've left us,
maybe not. They took Jeff,” he finished.

“
Nor do we want to be like
them,” Bob added.

“
You think they took Jeff
and the others?” Tom asked.

Mike shrugged. “Either they took them,
or they came back to life and walked out of here. You think they
came back to life?”

“
No... I don't... I... I
don't,” Tom said.

The silence held thick for a few beats.
Candace broke it. “Let's go get it done. Maybe it's smart to bury
them... just in case,” she said.

~

It took about two hours to get the
graves dug. They used one of the trucks that had been parked by the
woods. The ground was still hard a few inches down, and the soil
was rock filled, hard to shovel. They're were all sweating freely
when they finished.

“
The ground's still frozen,
but it's hot,” Ronnie said in a subdued voice.

“
Yeah, like summer almost,”
Cindy said quietly.

“
I think it is spring,” Bob
said, “We're just so much farther south...” he trailed
off.

They finished up, left the truck they
had used where they had ended up with it, and a few minutes later
the three remaining pickup trucks pulled out of the park road and
turned left onto the highway.

~

Most of the town was gone. A farm
equipment dealer sat on the outskirts of town. The main showroom
was a shamble but contained that year's new tractors, and although
tractors were not what they were interested in, they found what
they were interested in out back of the showroom
building.

There were over one hundred new heavy
duty farm trucks parked on the large lot behind the garage
building. There were about twice that many used vehicles. Out of
that, they had more than twenty of the large cattle trucks to
choose from.

“
Will a horse ride in
something like that?” Tom asked.

Everybody shrugged. They had passed
several large herds of horses on their way down the road. The
question in Bob's mind wasn't would they, but whether they even
needed them.

“
Arlene said no. I believe
she's right. But I'm not sure we still need them,” Bob said
thoughtfully.

Bob had brought out several bags of
oats and a half dozen bales of fresh hay and set them in the back
of one of the pickup trucks. He had had something in mind for the
way back, but within a few minutes, several of the horse's had
approached the trucks and nuzzled the bags. Bob had split open a
few of the bags and spilled them across the other bags. That was
all it took. A dozen horses were gathered around the truck in no
time, and a dozen more were trying to get close to it.

“
Huh,” Mike
said.

“
Huh, is right,” Tom said
smiling.

“
I wanted to try it on the
way back, see if they would follow. I got to thinking about that
other group we ran across that day. They were probably fed by truck
like Arlene said, and used to people. So they were hungry and
missing human companionship, and they were looking to us for both
of those things. They only veered off because we had no feed and we
didn't slow down. I think this bunch, and probably the bunch down
the road will follow us. Just feed them from the back of the truck,
spill it out a few times a day to keep them interested, and I think
they'll follow us,” Bob said.

“
Think it will work with
cows?” David asked.

“
I do,” Bob said. “It only
makes sense. Big outfits use long feed troughs. Smaller outfits
feed this way, or smaller troughs they fill a few times a day.
Either way the animal will come to the food,” Bob said.

“
So we don't need the stake
rack trucks,” Mike said.

“
Well, yeah we do, but only
a couple. Think about it, we can pack a lot of stuff into a couple
of those trucks. Chickens, tools, seed, farm implements, Tim's
solar panels. I guess we better get busy,” Bob finished.

“
Where are we going to find
all of that?” Tom asked.

“
There are a lot of little
towns, small cities around here. I think it'll take a little
legwork, but I also think we'll get everything we need. Maybe two
days,” Bob predicted.

“
Not going to make me ride
a horse are you?” Mike asked.

Bob laughed, “No, not yet,” he said,
“Not yet.”

~