America The Dead Book Two: The Road To Somewhere (6 page)

“
I don't know about leaving all
the the technology behind, that seems a waste. Not all of it was
bad. What do we really have left? Cars and trucks? High powered
weapons? I guess it's all still out there somewhere. But the
vehicles, the weapons will all rust away, fall apart, then what?
We'll run out of bullets someday. Does anyone know how to make
bullets, where to get the stuff to make gunpowder with? I don't,
that's for sure. And so what little we have that we're using will
pass away on its own. Maybe, in another twenty thousand years or
so, we'll all be living in caves throwing spears at our food. I
read something about that once. The world goes just so far,
something happens and it falls apart. Society devolves, then the
whole thing starts all over again from nothing,” he shrugged,
seeming uncomfortable.

“
You know, I never heard you say
that much at one time before, Ronnie,” Mike said
laughing.

Ronnie nodded. “I don't, not
usually, but I guess I've been thinking as well, Mike. I have Patty
to think of. We have
each other
to think of. In the old world, well, I was OK
with letting shit go by... slide. I had an attitude of whatever I
think or want won't make a difference so why bother? But now,
that's all changed. We're the ones building our own world. We can
do it right. Not like those guys back in Watertown,” Ronnie
finished.

“
I agree. And I like the way that
you put it, Ronnie,” Kate said.

“
Yeah, it really is that way,”
David agreed.

“
I care about
what Mike wants. I,
we,
want
to have children.
We want them to be safe. Mike and I haven't really talked about it,
but I'll bet that all of us will be talking about it tonight,” Kate
finished.

~

The morning crept by, and eventually Ronnie,
Patty, and Kate said their goodbyes and left to take care of their
own responsibilities. David and Arlene went with them. They all
headed for one of the chain stores.

Mike, Jeff and Sharon wound up checking over a
large map of the Eastern United States that Mike had been carrying
with him. It extended to about the middle of the country. The red
line of a grease pencil ran roughly along, following major routes
and ending in Mobile Alabama.

“
Why Mobile?” Jeff
asked.

“
Ronnie's people are from there.
He lived there as a kid until his parents died, then he came up
here to live and ended up in the city, New York, living with an
Aunt. From there he went up to Watertown to work and stayed. But,
he remembers the gulf coast as a kid. A little town called
Pritchard. He wants to see how it is, whether any of his people are
still there. It's south, that's where we're going. About as south
as you can get, and we'll have someone that knows the area when we
get there,” Mike explained.

“
Got the same thing,” Jeff said.
“Arlene comes from Texas, spent time in Arizona, and got around in
Mexico quite a bit as well.”

They all stood from the map and Jeff looked
over at the Auto store. “Think they got tires to fit my trucks?” he
asked.

“
I wouldn't doubt it,” Mike said.
He looked over at the Hummers.

“
Oh, they look okay,” Jeff said.
“It's dry rot. All cracked and split from sitting around. If you
wouldn't mind us being here a while, maybe we can change those
tires out. I've been more than a little worried about them,” Jeff
finished.

“
You're welcome as long as you'd
like to stay, and I'm sure that comes from everyone. Let's go see
what they got,” Mike said. He and Jeff walked over to the auto
garage.

~

By late afternoon they had swapped out tires on
one of the hummers and started on a second one. Tim and Annie, who
had gotten pretty good at changing tires with only tire irons, had
done the first few tires to show Jeff how it was done, then left
him to it.

Molly was still working alongside Tom and Bob.
Between the three of them, they had finished the third Suburban,
complete with tube bumpers, top racks and rock slider side steps,
along with larger, wider tires and the heavy duty suspension parts
they had used for the other trucks.

They had also installed two winches on this
one, front and back.

“
We'll use it to pull out any of
the other trucks that get stuck, whether in front of or behind us,”
Bob said.

They had wandered over to look over the
Hummers, and Tom had gone with Jeff to show him where the tires
were stored. Jeff had found the tires he had wanted immediately,
and Tom had helped him to get them back to the garage.

Mike had left to locate Kate and the others.
He'd finally found them, over their heads in boxes, in a large
storage building attached to the rear of one of the chain
stores.

“
Looking for flour,” Kate told
him. She turned and pointed at three large boxes resting on the
concrete floor. Those are one pound bags boxed and untouched. All
the twenty five pound bags we found are wet or eaten into, or
both.” She shrugged, leaned towards him and gave him a quick kiss.
He looked injured.

“
Baby,” she said. He looked
around. They were momentarily hidden in the stacks. He pulled her
to him and kissed her harder.

“
Bad, Mike,” Kate said, pulling
him closer to return the kiss.

“
You
guys
,” Patty said coming around the corner
of a stack of boxes. She smiled though.

Kate giggled and Mike rolled his eyes. “Okay...
flour,” he said and began looking in earnest.

~

An hour more of searching located two more
boxes of the one pound bags, a palette of twenty five pound bags
full of rat burrowed holes, and several cases of peanut
butter.

David and Ronnie had loaded up two large
rolling carts, and they were all helping to pull them out through
the main store and into the parking lot. The peanut butter, the
salvageable flour, several cases of vegetables and canned meats,
several different kinds of energy bars, along with dozens of cases
of sports drinks filled the carts.

“
No bottled water at all,” Patty
said.

“
I know,” Kate said. “And we have
a lot, but it's not like we can turn a tap and get
more.”

Everyone murmured agreement or nodded their
heads. There were cases upon cases of sports drinks and vitamin
water, and they had taken several cases of those, but they found no
bottled water at all. As they were pulling the carts back, they ran
into the men from the garage coming back from a stream that ran
behind the garage area back along the wood line.

The water was ice cold, but everyone liked to
stay clean, and it was amazing, Mike thought, what you could get
used to when there was no alternative.

“
I do miss hot showers,” Bob said.
“I think a new Nation will have to find a way to do hot showers.”
Everybody laughed.

“
I'll be up later,” Kate told
Mike. She'd simply picked up new clothes while they were in the
store, as had Patty and Arlene.

As they headed down towards the wood line,
Annie, who had stayed behind to help Tim pick up the garage, called
out to them to wait for her. She caught up and joined them walking
down the trail to the small stream.

The men had picked up their own clothes and
headed to a spot around a small bend in the stream, out of sight of
the women.

~

Lilly and Jessica had cleaned up a few more of
the motel rooms, including a double with adjoining doors to keep
the children together. They had heated water and bathed the
children in one of the bathtubs. Getting the water up from the
stream had seemed as though it would be the hardest part, but Tim
and Annie, testing out one of the lifted Suburbans, had taken them
down with several large water containers, helped them fill them,
then drove them back up in style.

The kids loved riding in the Suburban. It was
just another game to play.

They had not even given them too hard a time
about taking a bath. Jessica took over watching the freshly
scrubbed children while Lilly left to go down to the creek to get
herself cleaned up.

Sandy and Susan were coming up the path as
Lilly was going down.

“
Cold?” she asked. The day had
warmed up. She was hopeful.

“
Jesus, is it ever,” Susan
answered through chattering teeth.

“
Oh well,” Lilly said.

“
We need to get
one of these
Brainiacs
to figure out how to get us hot water,” Sandy said. “I may
never warm up again.”

“
Oh, I doubt that,” Susan said
dead pan.

Lilly laughed and headed down the trail,
leaving the two of them walking slowly, arm in arm, up the
trail.

When she arrived, Molly, Annie, Arlene and
Sharon, along with Kate and Patty were already there.

“
I heard it's really cold,” Lilly
said to no one in particular.

“
It really, really, really is,”
Arlene said. She was standing in the stream, water up to her waist,
shivering.

Kate dove under the water, bobbed up in the
middle of the stream and swam downstream. “It's not bad. Keep
moving,” she called back, “Keeps you warm!”

Lilly peeled her clothes quickly and looked
doubtfully at the water, “Okay, if you say so, here goes!” She ran
into the water and dove under. She surfaced next to
Kate.

“
It's so cold. You lied,” she
laughed. She splashed Kate who giggled and splashed her back. A few
seconds later everyone was involved in the water fight.

“
Now that warmed me right up,”
Arlene said a few minutes later as the water fight came to a
close.

“
Yeah, me also,” Lilly said. She
was out of the water on the grassy bank drying herself off and
getting dressed.

Kate sat close by with Patty. The two of them
working to brush each others hair out.

A few minutes later, Janet Dove came down, “I
Thought I'd better get down here while I had the chance. Dinner's
going. I have a little time to myself,” she said.

“
I can't believe how well you run
stuff,” Patty told her.

“
Yeah, for real,” Lilly said. “You
so much have it together. I wish I did,” she said.

Janet looked embarrassed. “Oh, it's just
helping out. If I didn't do it, somebody would,” she
said.

“
That's true,” Kate said, “but I
doubt they'd do it anywhere near as well as you do.”

Janet blushed again. “Thank you, Katie,” she
said.

Lilly smiled. Janet Dove was about the only
person she knew of who could call Kate Katie. She meant to ask her
why that was someday, but she was pretty sure she already knew why.
Janet was like everybody's mother. She was the ultimate nurturer.
And a mother could get away with things no one else ever
could.

A few of the women were still in the water.
They all waited for each other and left as a group.

~

Mike sat on the sun warmed rock and looked out
over the water. Jeff came and sat down next to him.

“
You have things running pretty
smoothly,” Jeff told him.

Mike laughed. “Not me. I don't lead... not
really.”

Jeff raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you don't
realize it, but you do.”

Mike sighed. “Yeah... Okay, I guess I do. Not a
job I asked for though. I hate to say it out like that. Makes me
responsible.” He laughed. “Guess I'm responsible anyway
though.”

Jeff nodded. “I found myself in the same
situation” He looked out over the water for a few moments. “Listen,
I wanted to talk to you.”

Mike turned from the water. “Sounds serious.”
His eyes focused on Jeff's own.

“
It sort of is... it is. Hell, I
just don't know.” His eyes came up and focused on Mike. “Have you
had any problems with the dead? I mean people who are supposed to
be dead?”

Mike looked at him for a few seconds, thinking
he must have missed some other part to the conversation, or
possibly heard him wrong. “Uh... I have to say, Jeff, you lost
me.”

Jeff sighed. “Yeah... Okay... This
will sound like bullshit, or crazy.” He took a deep breath. “Okay,
so we're going through this small town. What it was is, I came upon
this body. Well, it
seemed
to be a body.” He shook his head. “No...
Look.
I came upon this
body
. It
was
a body. No doubt at all. And
then the goddamn thing got up and took off. Scared the shit out of
me. Okay, I know that sounds crazy. But, well, I wondered if you
might have come across anything like that at all?” He ended with a
look of grim determination in his eyes.

“
Okay. So... Uh, you … Okay, so
really you mean like a... a...”

“
A zombie,” Jeff said. “I know how
that sounds, and I would guess that means you haven't had any
problems... experiences like that.”