The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (96 page)

The blood dripped from my chin onto the
ground. My rifle was pointed squarely at Cammy, safety off and an
empty clip, but Cammy didn't know that. The blood dripped slowly.
Cammy's eyes swam in and out of focus, but remained on me. Her
rifle barrel dipped and then rose again, leveled on me once
more.

She seemed to take a deep
breath that went on forever, and then, once more, time sped
up.
“I'll kill you,”
Cammy told me.
“If you touch her,
I'll kill you... I will,”
She started out
strong but ended in a doubtful, whining whisper.

I didn't drop my rifle barrel, but held
one hand out in front of me in a placating gesture. “Not touching
anyone... Not,” I managed through my busted lip and aching jaw. The
pain was a live, throbbing thing.

“
You
will... But... I
know
you will... You think...
You think...”
She seemed all at once
to realize that she no longer held Madison in her arms. She took a
deep shuddering breath and then dropped her rifle to the ground.
She collapsed back down to the ground and crawled to Madison’s
body.

I stood shocked, not knowing what to
do. Time side-slipped again. The bird went back to calling out, if
it had ever stopped. The wind came back, blowing cold against my
face, pushing the flush of heat that the situation had brought with
it away, cooling the sweat on my brow. The bird called. Another
picked it up, and soon all the birds were talking as though nothing
at all had happened. It became a perfect storm of noise after the
deepness of the silence. Time slipped away again, clouds moving
across the cold, blue of the sky.

Cammy sat, Madison pulled up into her
lap, a large smear of maroon on her forehead, stroking Madison’s
black hair. The birds called. The coldness of the wind seemed to
bite at my bones. Nipping. Tasting. An un-dead thing of its
own.

I can't tell you why I did it, but I am
glad I did. I pushed the button on the rifle butt, dropped the
empty clip in to my waiting palm, and slid another up into the
rifle where it socketed itself home with a solid click. I did it
perfectly, like I had been doing it all of my life instead of just
the last few months since the UN-dead disease, epidemic, disorder,
plague, what-ever-the-fuck it is has happened. She never looked up.
The birds didn't stop singing their birdsong. Just in case, I told
myself. Just in case.

I stood, my knees screaming, flexed
experimentally and then walked a short distance away, leaning up
against the cliff face. I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out
my pouch and rolled a cigarette. I felt at my lips, busted up, but
it would heal. I had been in fights in my old life where I had been
busted up much worse. I lit the cigarette, held it carefully
between my lips, smoking as I watched the clouds slip across the
sky. Letting the urgency of the situation float away on the wind
like the smoke.

Cammy's voice had fallen to a barely
audible whisper as she stroked Madison's hair and held her.
Madison's lips, blue tinged, moved, too quiet to hear her words. A
private conversation. A private conversation in the wide open,
which, thanks to the UN-dead, was a very private place. No one at
all around, alive anyway, and the dead couldn't care less about
love, secrets, whispered promises, goodbyes. The UN-dead only cared
about the hunger that seemed to drive them. Flesh, and more flesh.
The time turned elastic once more and spun out of control for some
unknown length. I only know that when I came back to myself the sun
had moved across the sky. My thoughts were about darkness, Zombies,
staying alive.

~

When I think back on it now, I realize
a noise had brought me back. Had to be, otherwise there was no
reason for me to come back at all, just stay gone. Let the sun go
down and the UN-dead take the night, me, Cammy, Madison and
whatever else they wanted. But it didn't go that way.

A noise, a sliding foot, a pebble
falling from above... I really don't know. I know that this time I
reacted fast. My rifle came up; my mind was clear. I focused; two
of them dropping from the cliffs above... like cats... like dead,
stinking, feral cats... dragging that stink of death with them. The
stench of rotted flesh falling from the sky, enveloping me even as
I fired into them.

I had a choice. I couldn't get them
both. One falling at me, one falling at Cammy where she sat with
Madison cradled in her arms, oblivious to everything around her. My
reaction chose for me. The rifle came straight up and spat short,
little barks of noise and flame. The Zombie started to come apart
before it hit me. A shower of cold, dead blood rained down on me,
splattered against my face. The body hit the barrel of the rifle
and took me down to the ground, clutching the rifle hard to keep
from losing it as the full weight of the Zombie came down on
it.

I kept it, but only by sheer
determination. The Zombie had impaled herself onto the barrel. Her
flesh so rotted that it had simply punched through her breast and
out her back. I shoved her off as quickly as I could, one booted
foot kicking against her chest, knocking her apart, pulling the
barrel back through the soft flesh and hard bone.

I expected to see Cammy done for. I
expected to see her dead or dying, but she had somehow ended up
about twenty feet from where the Zombie had fallen. She looked
herself, as if she had no real idea how that had happened, but when
I raised my eyes and they took in the whole scene before them, I
saw exactly how it had happened.

Madison must have still been awake.
Laying there badly injured but not gone, taking the comfort from
Cammy that she offered. When the Zombie fell, she saw it. She saw
it and managed to push Cammy away from her and take the attack on
herself.

The Zombie was no match for her,
wounded though she was. She straddled the Zombie with a rock easily
the size of her own head and brought it down hard: Once. Twice, and
then I lost count, and the Zombie quit fighting. The undead, dead
again. This time for good.

The silence came back hard. Like a
curtain on the last act of a play, just when the audience isn't
expecting it. It crashed down.

~

Time did its elastic trick and then
snapped back before I was ready for it. My senses were shot. At
first I could not connect the dots of memory that I needed to
connect to make sense of what my eyes were seeing.

Cammy rose to shaky legs and started
toward Madison, sobbing once more. Madison’s eyes swiveled to me. A
sick look in them, and pain riding there too. She slumped forward,
one wrist flapping uselessly, and lunged for the rifle that Cammy
had trained on me not so long ago. Time stopped its elastic
trickery right around that time. I knew exactly what she intended
to do before she did it.

Cammy stopped in mid stride and nearly
fell backwards at the effort of stopping so quickly. I think she
believed for a second that Madison intended to shoot her. I really
believe she thought that. But that was not the plan, and I knew
that was not the plan. Because the plan that had resurfaced in her
mind was the one we had talked about, half seriously, half
jokingly, for as long as we had been traveling together. Before she
followed through on that plan, I heard her tell it to me in my mind
once again, the way she had a week or so before, when she had been
unmolested... whole... not about to join the ranks of the UN-dead
herself.

“
If I ever fuckin' have to,
I won't hesitate,” Madison had said, “Once I'm dead, I don't want
to come back.” She shuddered and grimaced at the same
time.

We had been in an old house over in
Harlem. That was before Harlem got crazy too. We'd had gas lanterns
for light. The windows were boarded over. The UN-dead scratched and
cried and pleaded, but they could not get in. The four of us - John
had still been alive then, in fact he had died just two days later.
Fell through a rotted section of floor in that same old house.
Impaled himself on a pipe in the basement. Madison had shot him in
the head nearly as soon as he had stopped his struggles. Cammy had
bent double and vomited. I had held it in, but barely - but that
night John had been alive, he had still been with us. With us as we
listened to the sounds of the UN-dead that were trying to get to
us. To kill us. To eat us. To satisfy their ceaseless hunger. In
the flickering light from the gas lanterns, she had said it, and he
had nodded his head, agreeing immediately with what she had said.
And I had not. It had not been a real thing to me, despite what I
had already gone through on my own, until two days later when John
had died and she had wasted no time. None.

“
He would have expected
it,” she had said, and nothing more. But that night... that night
she had said it straight out, like a mantra, like looking into the
future and seeing this day.

“
If they
come for me, if they get me? I'll put a bullet in my own head. I
will. I
swear
I will. If I ever fuckin' have to, I won't hesitate,” Madison
had said, “Once I'm dead, I don't want to come back.”

And Cammy had begun to cry. “Don't say
it, Maddy. Don't say it.” And she hadn't said it again, but it
didn't matter. She had already spoke it into truth. I had heard it.
I had heard it, and I knew she meant it.

And now, time stopped its trick. She
jammed the rifle under her chin and squeezed the trigger. Her head
exploded in a spray of red and gray. I swear I could hear the
sounds of small bits of bone and drops of blood pattering down to
the ground. And then the silence was roaring again.

I took a breath, another... And then
Cammy began to scream once more.

~

It's been three weeks. I thought Cammy
would never talk again. I believed she wouldn't, right up until she
did yesterday.

I just kept us moving. Different places
in the city, not staying in one place for more than a day. Walking
days, seeking refuge at night. The zombies smell us, you know. They
can smell us for miles. So at night it's been strong places, strong
places where they can't get in, and then hope like hell that these
were not some new breed, the ones that don't seem to have a need to
avoid the day, and that they would be gone in the
morning.

I started carrying a radio the other
day. Clips on the belt. FM. Picks up a lot of talk during the day.
There's a place that a lot of the people I hear from have heard
about, down south somewhere. Nobody seems to know exactly where it
is. But others swear they have talked to the people that founded
this place. A city somewhere down south. I had heard of something
like that when it was Donita and me back in New York, but the word
I keep hearing is that it is a safe place, that it is open to
everyone.

That is where I had been thinking about
getting us to. Three days ago we got a truck. It's still just me
and Cammy, but it feels safer.

I have been thinking about this place.
I don't know who these people are, if they even exist. I only know
the whole world is fucked up. I have come to understand that even
if I get us as far south as I can, we won't make it for long. There
are only two of us that can fight. The dead are getting smarter,
and that is not just my point of view. It's on the radio. They all
say it.

L.A. and New York, both are barely
hanging on. Both! Barely hanging on! Nearly over run! We're right
here. I see it every day. The people talking aren't exaggerating at
all. If the big cities are truly falling apart, and people can't
make it banded together, how can we make it alone?

No. I'm heading for this
place. I'm hoping it's real. Today on the radio I heard someone
talking, and it sounded like he was talking about the same place I
have heard about. Too far away to hear me.
Skip.
You can never tell where it's
coming from. I'm just hoping it's true, that I didn't just imagine
it to assuage my mind.

Meantime, I am trying to keep us alive,
find strong places to stay through the nights. There are strong
places, places you can find if you give it some thought. Stairwells
in high-rises, steel and concrete. They can't get through those
doors. Deep freezers in grocery stores. Heavy steel doors. The
vehicles if we have to, and we have had to. They can't get in there
to get us either. A little fire at night if I can, because they are
afraid of fire. It's one constant, so far. The Zombies don't like
the smell of smoke.

Canned stuff to eat. Christ, we'll be
eating canned shit until we die. Get up the next day and push on.
Get moving again. And that is what I've done. Kept us moving. Kept
us safe. And she has come willingly, although silently, like a big,
semi-animated puppet. And then yesterday she was sitting beside me,
silent as she had been since the thing with Madison, and she
spoke.

“
I don't like beans, Bear.
I just don't. Maybe we could find something different tonight?” She
had lifted her voice at the end and made it into a question. I was
winding my way through the middle of an abandoned car and a
wrecked, burned out truck, months old. I looked over at her. She
smiled, tentative at first, but then it lit up her face. I had to
laugh. I had so much pent up inside me.