America The Dead Book Two: The Road To Somewhere (13 page)

"Well, I'm pretty sure you'll get to ride
horses," Patty said, "We both will. Even Geldings," she said and
laughed.

“
Okay,” Ronnie said. “How have I
got it wrong?”

“
No testicles,” Patty said. “A
Gelding has had their testicles removed.”

“
Jesus,” Ronnie said. His eyes
looked hurt.

“
Guess that would make you pretty
docile,” Mike said.

“
Yeah,” Ronnie agreed.

“
We'll learn how to ride,” Patty
said.

Kate turned and smiled, and they touched closed
fists and laughed. "It's going to be so good," she said. They both
looked over at Ronnie who was still cringing. His lips compressed
into a thin line. They both laughed.

~Donita in the daylight~

She had seen them start into the field, but
even before that, she had known they would come. It was the way her
new mind worked. It had seemed cloudy for so long that it had
surprised her when it suddenly began to process thoughts again. She
thought maybe she was coming back to her old self. But like her
eyesight, it was completely different.

She simply knew things. One second they were
not there and the next they were. Clear, concise, every detail
fully understood. What was not there was reasoning. There was no
reasoning process she had used to arrive at the information her
mind had held. It was as though it came from some other place. As
though it had been delivered to her.

That had caused her to panic. Delivered meant a
kind of dependance, and she did not desire dependance on anything
or anyone. But she had come to understand that dependance was not
what it was, and delivery was not what it was. Knowing was what it
was. She knew things. She knew things out of the air. They came
with the scenting, a part of her new abilities.

Even so, she had nearly waited
overly long. They had stepped into the field and panic had leapt
into her chest and shot through her body like a live wire. She had
leapt backwards where the two lay sleeping and kicked them into
flight.
Mindless, screaming flight,
and they had run through the trees soundlessly,
leaping from footfall to footfall.

They had run until they had come to the
opposite end of the small woods and Donita had stopped. The sun was
up, sapping their strength, seeming to burn her eyes, but she was
not dead again. She did not fall down and lapse into twilight. It
was not pleasant. The heat from the sun was not
pleasant.

She stared out at another field that looked
almost exactly like the one they had run from. Two horses grazed
nearby, the air brought their scent to her eyes. They had not
turned, so the same air had not betrayed her by bringing her scent
to them.

The idea, the knowledge, came to her all at
once, blooming in her mind, fully formed and ready. If she knew it,
the two behind her knew it too, or at least the one did. She tensed
her legs, squatted, and then leapt from the tree line.

The horses panicked, but far too late. She
reached the largest one almost at the same moment it saw her. The
huge horse reared, muscles bunching in its rear quarters, front
hooves tearing at the air. Donita was past the sharp hooves and at
its side even as it twisted itself and tried to turn. Her teeth
fastened in the animals neck as she leapt to its back, hands
entangled in its mane, legs clutching at its broad, muscular
back.

She looked over at the other horse. Her new boy
rode its back, teeth into the thick skin of its neck. The other boy
lay scattered upon the ground. His body broken beyond repair,
kicked apart. Her horse reared, and she lowered her body, pressed
into the horse and held on as he ran. The bite would have him. It
was only a matter of time.

~The Road~

Eventually they had to cut out channel nine on
the C.B. For some reason the static, skip and occasional talk from
Syracuse was louder on that channel than any of the others, and it
would not allow the C.B. to scan.

It was better, as far as everybody was
concerned, not to have to listen to it. A steady flicking through
the channels and the occasional bursts of static the skip offered
was much easier to deal with.

~

Late afternoon found them on the edge of a
large lake. The rain was still a low drizzle as they
stopped.

Mike was driving the lead vehicle, so it was
clear to everyone in that vehicle why they had stopped. The road
was gone. The asphalt tilted down and then disappeared into the
lake. Everyone behind them had to come up to take a
look.

A nearby stand of trees provided
enough protection from the rain to consult the map, but the map
told them what they already knew; the lake wasn't supposed to be
there. They were in the finger lakes region, and there
were
several small lakes
scattered across the map, but none that corresponded to where they
were.

"There was a road, cut to the right about a
mile back," Bob said.

"That's back toward Syracuse," Mike
said.

"That is where we don't want to go," Tim
said.

"Can't go off road. The ground's too saturated.
So we are probably going to have no choice," Ronnie
said.

"Maybe the road will curve around after a bit,
bring us back in this direction. If so we'll be okay, and we've
driven quite a way, so it should have more than a few roads cutting
across it going in the direction we want to go," Mike
said.

"Either way, we got to go back or swim," Arlene
said.

Lilly laughed.

"That's the truth," Tom said looking at the
road where it ran into the water. "Wonder what
happened?"

The lake stretched away to the horizon. There
didn't appear to be an opposite shore, at least not one close, Mike
thought. "More damage from all those earthquakes I would imagine,"
he said. "Limestone caves, maybe, that have collapsed. Lot of that
around here. I'd bet it's something like that, something along
those lines," he said.

"Might see a lot of changes like this though,
if you think of it. There were places in Watertown that completely
disappeared," Patty said.

"Whole neighborhoods," Kate agreed.

They backtracked to the next road, then took
the next one going in the direction they wanted to go. That road,
although broken and in some places missing short sections of
pavement, skirted the lake at a comfortable distance. And even
where the road itself was missing, the gravel base made for better
traveling than the fields which were quickly becoming waterlogged,
little ponds and lakes of their own. Mike had no doubt he would
bury the Suburban even with the four wheel drive and the wider
tires if he tried driving through the fields.

By late afternoon the sun was creeping from the
sky, changing everything around them to a darker shade of gray than
they had been seeing all day long. The back roads became wider,
though still broken up, and soon they found themselves on the
outskirts of what must have been a small village. It was hard to
tell for sure. It was really just the presence of more buildings
still standing and a few stretches of nearly intact residential
neighborhoods.

They stopped at a large truck stop at the
convergence of two major roads to top off the trucks' gas tanks
once more. By the time they had located the underground tanks and
then found a way into them, it was late afternoon, and what little
light there had been was quickly fading from the sky. They decided
to stop for the night and fill the trucks in the
morning.

Within a short time, several fires were going
under the long metal roof that covered the gas pumps. They parked
the trucks in a large circle and posted lookouts. They had seen no
one, and even the C B's were quiet, but they were taking no
chances.

Janet Dove, Lilly, Tim and Nell began to work
on getting dinner ready, while a few others checked through what
was left of the small diner and a little convenience store that was
part of the truck stop. They were both stripped bare. Not so much
as a moldy loaf of bread rested on the shelves.

"Must be people around somewhere close by,
probably down in the village," Ronnie said to Mike.

They were all back under the steel roof sitting
on overturned crates and a few leaning chairs they had
found.

"Had to be, but where are they now? They had to
see us," Mike said. He was carrying a portable V.H.F. radio which
continued to flip serenely from channel to channel, picking up
nothing at all.

"Might maybe left," Arlene said.
She seemed to gravitate towards Mike's group, even though she had
come with Jeff's group, and she grew on you quickly, Mike thought.
She had an open, honest face and seemed to be genuinely concerned
about other people. Mike could understand. It didn't take long
seeing people who
didn't
care to know where your own heart lay. Mike and
several others had liked her immediately.

"That could be," Kate said. "After all, we
did."

Mike nodded. The little town, village, or
whatever it had been had been destroyed. What was left of it had
looked deserted. Maybe they had left, he decided. Tim came around
with a large aluminum container of coffee. Nearly everyone had
acquired a sturdy plastic or Aluminum cup or mug during their stay
at the large truck stop, strip mall complex and had kept it. It
wasn't always easy to find a cup, even disposable foam or paper
cups were hard to find.

The coffee was hot, steam rising up into the
rain chilled air. The children were quiet and kept to themselves
looking out at the falling rain. Even The Dog and Angel, we're
subdued by the weather, lying on the asphalt, heads on paws,
looking out at the rain and the darkness.

If there was anything or anyone out there that
shouldn't be, they would let them know, Mike told himself, and so
far they seemed as bored by the rain as everyone else was. But it
wasn't really bored, Mike thought.

"What are you thinking about?" Kate
asked.

"I was thinking this rain makes you feel kind
of lethargic, dragged out. Even the dogs."

"Kind of," she agreed, snuggling closer to him,
"But I like the way it sounds on the tin roof. And we should all
sleep like babies tonight," she said.

Mike listened for a second to the light
drumming on the steel roof panels, then nodded. "Lethargy," he said
smiling.

In no time at all, a small pile of cans
magically appeared, and one of Janet's large steel pots was heating
up dinner.

The children were playing with a small pile of
toys, overlooked by Lilly and Jessica.

"So, where are we?" Bob asked.

They dug out the map and began to go over it,
but they had seen no signs, and even the small village had no sign
that they had seen. The cars and trucks scattered around the truck
stop still, predominantly, bore New York State license
plates.

They had been angling across the state, so most
likely they would pass through part of Pennsylvania or Ohio within
the next day or so, unless they had dropped lower into the state.
It would take more than a map to tell them that though, a roadside
sign, something like that.

"Put over...
Just
over, three hundred and fifty
miles on the odometer today," Mike said. "Of course some of that
was doubling back, the long way around, stuff like that, but we
have to be close to out of the state by now."

"We should have hit the thruway," Bob
said.

"I'll agree with that," Jeff said, "Unless it's
gone. Seems to be a lot that is gone."

"We should have," Mike agreed.
"The problem is, there's so much destruction it's hard to tell
where we really are. That lake for instance, that threw me for a
loop. I just wasn't expecting it. That means there could be other
changes. Well, actually that's a
major
change, so more major changes
like that, or even more so."

"Like?" Patty asked.

"I don't know. But have you noticed we haven't
seen a lot of torn up, jumbled mounds of earth?" he
asked.

Several heads nodded.

"At first there was, in Watertown. Then all
that rain flattened things out. Then before we left, we were seeing
grass sprout up. Might be like that here. If so, it won't be long
before we can't tell what's new and what isn't. This rain just
keeps leveling things out. The warmth has the grass seed
sprouting," Mike said.

"You can still tell, or you could before the
rain. The grass was thin, but you're right, as we go it'll get
harder and harder to tell anything old from new," Bob
said.

"So how will we know when we get to where we're
going?" Kate asked.

"Good question," Patty said.

"Well, yeah, that is," Bob agreed. "But we'll
know when we get to the mountains that we're close. Really it's all
enclosed by ranges if you think about it. The first one has a few
wide open gaps in it. We'll pass right through one of those gaps,
and we'll be in. There's another range that cuts across to the
east, and then the tail end of the other range picks up there and
closes off what amounts to several million acres. I guess it's like
one very big valley nestled between those mountain ranges," Bob
elaborated.