The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (104 page)

April 1st A small willing
army

The twins awakened from the
little death just as the moon had reached the middle of the black
sky. She turned her attention to them. The twins were
hers...
for
her...

The silvery light was bright, almost
daylight in its intensity. The twins did not fight the changes as
she had thought they might. Their eyelids fluttered almost in
unison. Black liquid eyes shone out and took in their surroundings
and each other. They looked around at the darkness making not a
sound and then lifted their black eyes to the moon above, when they
looked back down they gazed at her frankly. Seeming to accept their
fate, looking to her to guide them, their eyes large, reflecting
the cold, silvery moonlight. And she realized they were not the
same. One was slightly taller, a streak of silver-white in her hair
falling across her forehead. She swept it aside.

Donita rose from her crouch and set off
into the night at a fast walk. The twins fell in behind her, the
boy bought up the rear. The twins walked obediently, quietly
looking around at the trees and the woods with their newborn eyes
as they followed. They reached out and linked hands as they walked,
drawing closer to one another.

She led them out of the scrub and into
the deep woods. The tall trees marching away in even rows. Absolute
silence fell as they walked. The predators recognized them and left
them alone. A small rabbit stopped, sniffed the air, and began to
shake with its fear, frozen in the path of the walkers. Donita
skirted it, but stopped and turned to see what the twins would do.
The twins stopped when Donita stopped and looked down at the rabbit
frozen on the pathway.

They moved forward slowly, unlinked
their hands and squatted beside the trembling rabbit. The shorter
one reached out one hand and began to stroke the soft fur of the
rabbit. The other, with the streak of silver-white hair still
fallen across her forehead, dangled her own hands between her
thighs and watched, but she made no move to pet the rabbit or stop
the other from doing so. The silence seemed to deepen. The time to
crawl. The rabbit seemed to tremble less, leaning into the girls
hand as she stroked the fur.

Donita almost didn't catch the
movement. It was so fast. The other girl's hands flew from between
her thighs and in one movement closed around the rabbit's throat,
pulled it into the air and then flipped it backwards with a fast
snap, breaking its neck. She threw the bundle of fur back to the
ground at the other girl's feet. The rabbit's feet kicked hard
once... twice.. and then stopped. A thin trickle of blood flowed
from one side of its pink nose. The smaller girl cocked her head to
one side, raised her eyes to look at her sister briefly, then
looked back down at the rabbit where it lay on the ground by her
feet. She extended one hand, touched the blood that ran from the
rabbit's nose and then brought that finger to her blue tinged lips
to taste it.

Her eyes closed, and her body began to
shake. Her twin leaned forward and rested one hand on her shoulder,
a barely audible whisper coming from her lips. Words spoken
strongly, but there was no air in her lungs to move across her
vocal chords.

I love you,
floated on the dark forest air.

Her eyes opened and locked with her
sister's. The red smear of blood on her blue-tinged lips seemed
astonishingly bright in the moonlight. She looked down at the
rabbit once more and then stood from her crouch, took her sisters
hand and turned back to Donita. Donita held her eyes with her own
for a moment and then turned and began once more to make her way
through the rows of tall trees, the three children following
quietly behind.

On The Road From Watertown

They had left Watertown before April
1st. Mike, Candace, Bob, Janet, Patty, Ronnie, and several more
that had joined with them in Watertown.

They had fled before an onslaught from
the living. Gangs that sought to take over what was left of the
small northern city. They had all sat down together and decided
what to do, and as a group, they had decided after two days of
being caught in the middle of the fighting between the North side
of the city and the South side, that it was not their war. They
were simply in the middle of the two groups that wanted to take
over the small city. It was better to leave before it became
personal and they were forced into it. They had taken in more
survivors before they had left, and then gathered more on the road.
They were a sizable force in their own right, growing as they
traveled across the country.

What little evidence there was of the
dead, most of them refused to believe in. They had heard the
stories on the radio, they found evidence of the dead as they
traveled, but they had still not encountered the dead directly, and
so refused to believe.

They had stopped to modify the trucks
they had taken in Watertown to better deal with the conditions of
the roads, and then continued on looking for Bob's ideal location
for the new Nation he so believed in, driving across what was left
of Pennsylvania and then turning south, down into Tennessee and
Kentucky.

As they had traveled, a funny thing had
happened, the rest of them had become interested in Bob's idea of a
New Nation, and then become invested in it. It made sense. The
outside world was falling apart faster and faster, the evidence was
right in front of them. A safe place seemed like heaven to all of
them.

By April first they had reached a small
park in Kentucky where Bob believed he could find his way deeper
into the forever wild lands beyond the borders of the old park,
using centuries old logging trails. But they had been followed by
the same people that had caused them to flee back in Watertown, and
the show down had come, even though they had tried to avoid
it.

The gun battle had lasted through the
night, and they had destroyed the group that had followed and tried
to enslave them. They had taken in some of them captive too, people
the gang had enslaved earlier. In the morning they had counted up
the dead and missing on both sides, and Mike had sent most of the
others down the trail to find the new Nation Bob believed was
there. Mike and several of the others had stayed behind to take
care of their own dead and to finish collecting the things they
needed. They had vowed to catch up to them on the trail, or to find
their way back in to where they settled as soon as they
could.

In Watertown, they had not had to deal
with the dead. They had not known about the dead until they had
found themselves confronted with the reality of the dead rising to
life, on the road. Even then, some were not convinced. They had not
actually seen the dead, only nests where they had been, and so they
could not believe in something they had not actually
seen.

They still did not find the living dead
in the light of this day, but the results were before them. As they
looked for their dead, and the ones they believed should be there
from the attackers, they could not find them. They were
gone.

They searched long into the morning,
but eventually, Mike called it quits. The few bodies they found,
those that had been shot in the head, by design or accident, where
found and buried. Mike felt they could do little else. They left
the small campground and struck out in search of the remaining
supplies they needed, before they too would start down the trail on
their way into the heart of the wilderness and the new Nation Bob
believed would be founded there.

April 2nd

Donita

She was moving town to town. It was so
easy with more help. The boy was far stronger than any human man,
and the twins more than capable of taking down a full grown man.
They seemed so fragile, so defenseless, innocent. She sent them
forward, and they easily took breathers with nearly no
fight.

They were thirty now, and there were a
half dozen laying on the ground who would be coming up out of
twilight any minute. Killers. Or they had been in the old world.
Being dead took the killer out of you, at least at first it did.
But then it came back. You forgot all the little things of the old
life. You nearly forgot your name. Where you had lived, what you
had done. And then it changed. Every day you got a little more
back. It wasn't exactly a memory, like a memory would be in the old
days, like a breather would have. It was more like found knowledge.
Not there one second, and then there the next. But it was clearer
than the old memories she had had.

Donita didn't question whether that
found knowledge was true or not. It didn't matter, just like it
wouldn't matter to these. What would matter to these was getting
through the first bit of time, that time where heat still seemed
like the only possible source of life, and you struggled to find
it, only to realize it did nothing at all for you any longer. In
fact, it could kill you.

Then the cold came upon
you,
found you,
along with its understanding, and you were fine. You began to
understand that life was just a short stop on the way to dead, and
that dead was just a way station to walking. And walking could be
forever. Walking was not something as trifling as life. But that
took time, and these killers would be nothing more than babies for
a few nights.

There was a process. She
had gone through it, and the others had gone through it. She
supposed any walker had gone through it. Everything that had to do
with life, heat,
that world,
had to come out of you... sick it up... shit it
out. It had to go. It had to go because it had nothing to do with
walking. Nothing at all.

A walker used what it took in. There
was no waste. So there was no need for a system to dispose of that
waste. A walker did not heal in the same way that a breather did.
There was no need for time to heal. You couldn't predict it. You
weren't even precisely injured. You could lose a finger, or a leg,
while you were turning, and that was that. It was lost. But you
could lose one after, and it was back in a short time, or most of
it. She had not lost a leg, but she had lost a few fingers. One of
the twins had lost an ear a few nights before. It was back. Those
things could be. But they did not depend on any kind of healing
like a walker. No.

These were killers. For a few days they
would be babies. Then for a few days they would get used to the
gift they had been given. Then they would be killers again. They
would be because that is what they were, and you could not change
the basic truths of what you were, whether you were a breather, a
walker or even dead.

The turnings were coming faster. Where
once seven would pass in to death and maybe one would rise to a
walker, now seven passed into death and five came to be walkers.
Soon it would be seven for seven. She knew that. And soon after
that, the whole world would belong to the walkers. The breathers
would be done.

She let her silvered eyes pass along
the bodies that lay stretched out on the ground.

She was not weak. There was a strength
that came with being a walker, a strength that came to your whole
body once you embraced cold. They had moved silently into the woods
and taken these without a sound. They had carried them here. It had
been no expenditure of energy at all.

Killers, except one. One
had not been a killer at all. But that one might not come back. If
he did, she would have to watch him anyway, and she really didn't
want to do that. She would leave him to the twins to teach. He
would learn their ways, or he would learn that even in UN-Death
there could be death.
Permanent
death.

She looked him over. The night was
getting along. They would come from twilight soon.

In Search Of The Nation

Lillie's diary

We traveled for two days, and now we're
in the middle of nowhere. I mean, like, we're really in the middle
of nowhere.

When we came up over this pass, we
could see for miles, and there was nothing. No buildings, no
quilted farmland, towns, cities, nothing at all. It was almost too
big to see. I didn't know there was anywhere left on this planet
where you could have a view like that.

But, here we are. We found a cave,
really an overhang, but Patty and Janet Dove think there is an
actual cave farther back in it. We'll know tomorrow. Patty said
it's funny, because we're right back in a cave again, and we are.
But Janet said it seems right, and it also does feel
right.

I'm worried. We're all
worried. We don't know where our men are, or Candace. We don't know
what happened at all. And we don't even know how long it will be
until we do know something. I wanted to ask,
how will they find us?
But I just
didn't want to upset anyone. I don't think it will be easy at all.
Why didn't we think of global positioning? They sell that kind of
stuff everywhere. But are there still satellites going around and
around up there? Or are they all useless now because of what
happened? Did they crash? Lots of questions; almost no answers. And
even if we had global positioning, we would not have had the time
to use it.

So we'll have to place our hope in the
radios. Starting tomorrow we're going to monitor fifteen minutes of
every hour during daylight, Patty says. We'll all be
hoping.