The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (108 page)

Bear looked over at Cammy.

“
We were
thinking of going across through Pennsylvania, over that way. We
keep hearing...
Bear
keeps hearing, about the middle of the states
being dead free,” Cammy said. She didn't correct the misconception
Billy had that she and Bear were together. In truth, it really
wasn't clear in her mind whether they were or not. They had both
lost people they loved. It was probably too soon for both of them.
Maybe it always would be, she thought now, as her eyes met Bear's
and she saw the pain still riding there.

“
Heard some talk, but I
don't believe it. L.A. was so bad,” Billy said.

Bear nodded. “The radio, a few weeks
back... They were talking about a city that was still safe... still
held by people,” he shrugged again. “It's south anyway, maybe
Alabama, just over and then down. I figured what the hell,” Bear
finished.

Billy nodded. “Alabama is gone. We
nearly drove ourselves into the ocean. It's just gone from about a
hundred miles into the old border from the north.”

“
Looked through my rifle
scope, there is land, it's a long way out, but the water is
shallow, I mean just a few inches,” Beth added.

“
I can't speak for everyone
here about traveling with us,” Billy continued after a slight
pause. “We threw in together. It wasn't a vote kind of thing...
Safety in numbers and all of that.”

Beth shrugged. “We can go
your way...
I
can
go your way.” Her eyes met his. They were deep brown, liquid,
intense.

Billy scrubbed at the growth of beard
that covered his jaw. “I'm good with it.”

“
So what is this place you
heard of?” Iris asked.

“
Somewhere south. It was
back when this whole thing started. I rigged up a C.B. Just heard
talk of a place in Alabama. People were gathering together. I think
Alabama, maybe it isn't, but it was south... not on the coast.
Really it was just a snatch of conversation. I got nothing better
than that, but it sounded real. And I heard it more than once.”
Bear scrubbed at his own beard. “Okay. Well, I'm heading for it...
and, well... fuck it, I got to come out with it because I don't
want a mistake about it later; I don't follow. I'm just not built
that way. I didn't do it in the old world, and I won't do it now.
As long as that's clear, you're coming with me... I'm not coming
with you.”

“
Harsh,” Mac
said.

“
Maybe,”
Bear agreed. “Can't have a shit load of chiefs and no Indians. I
don't mean I have the only say, I mean that I don't... hell, I
don't know a better way to say it. I can't sugar coat it.
I
don't follow
. It doesn't mean I don't listen though. I do. It's that
simple. I guess that means what it means.” He threw up his
hands.

“
I don't need a leader,”
Beth said. “I lead me, as long as that's straight.”

“
Do you?” Bear
said.

“
Wow... Can you feel the
love?” Billy asked. Jamie cut her eyes over at him where she stood
next to Dave. She rolled her eyes once she caught his, and then
turned and looked up at Dave adoringly. He turned away from her,
his eyes looking for Beth, but Beth had eyes only for the big man,
Bear. Billy sighed, looked down at the ground, and then back up as
the conversation picked up once more. He ignored Jamie. He deserved
her anger, after all.

Cammy laughed, put a hand to her mouth,
and then took it away and laughed harder. A second later all of
them were laughing.

“
Hey,” Billy said after a
moment. “The two of you lead. Sounds workable to me. I don't have
even a slight wish to lead. Not at all.”

“
Peace,” Mac said. “Along
for the ride. As long as it's stable, you know?”

Beth eyed Bear. “You and me
then?”

Bear nodded. “I can roll with that.
First thing though, we need better weapons. If this thing is south,
we don't know how far, and it could be dead by now. Not saying it
ever even got off the ground. So we don't know how far we're going.
We need good guns. How bad did you see it in L.A.?”

“
Oh, Christ,” Billy
started.

~

The morning turned to early afternoon
before the four trucks pulled up out of the field together,
followed the service roadway back onto route three and headed
toward Clifton. Cammy studied a map as Bear drove.

“
It's hard to believe this
is as far as we have traveled in over a month together,” she said
as she studied the map.

“
We had no real direction,”
Bear supplied. “It's not like we had decided on a place and headed
toward it.” Bear watched the sides of the road. They were traveling
along at less than twenty miles an hour, weaving down into the
median and off onto the service roads that paralleled the highway
when they had too.

There were too many cars abandoned next
to the road, in the road, even across the road, to be able to keep
track of all of them at one time. A large mall came up on the
right, and Bear slowed at the interchange to look it over. Billy's
truck rolled up, the window dropped and Beth leaned out.

“
Looks okay,” she said,
breaking the silence of the quiet afternoon.

“
Except it's quiet,” Bear
agreed. “That's always been bad news.”

Beth held up her machine pistol. “We
need what we need.”

Bear nodded. “Let's go then. We stay
together though.”

Beth nodded, Billy shifted back into
drive and waited for Bear to pull away. He pulled in behind him and
followed.

There was a thick line of trees behind
the shops that Bear didn't like. It seemed like the perfect place
for the dead to hide away. He drove slowly into the first Mall
area, past the trees and into the second lot. The trees were not as
thick up close, but he could still not see through them, and it
bothered him. Anything, or anyone, could be hidden within them. He
turned the truck, pointed it back toward the entrance road and shut
it down.

Billy, and then Mac, pulled down,
turned around and stopped next to Bear's truck. They shut down too,
and the ticking of cooling motors filled the silence of the parking
lot. Bear looked around the lot but saw nothing that seemed out of
place.

Abandoned cars and trucks. The front
doors to a discount store were shattered, the aluminum frames
twisted, pushed open wide and pinned against the faux brick front
with carts. Bear had left the windows up. He didn't like the idea
of having to start the truck to roll them back up. It was better to
roll them up before he shut down. He levered the door open, and
stepped down to the pavement. Beside him, Billy, Beth, and Mac
stepped out of their own vehicles. The doors chuffed closed, and
the silence came back heavy.

Bear scanned the parking lot but saw
nothing. He looked over at Beth. She shrugged and looked back over
at the wood line Bear turned away and started toward the shattered
front entrance. The others fell in behind him.

The front of the store was destroyed.
They stayed together, walking aisle to aisle looking for the
dead.

The smell had hit all of them when they
crossed the threshold into the store. The dead were there, where
they did not know. They walked slowly forward into the huge
building, silent, safeties off their rifles, waiting.

At one end cap, Bear snatched a stack
of flashlights and passed them around. A few seconds later they had
stripped off the packaging, installed the batteries and, with a
roll of duct tape, strapped the lights to their rifle barrels in
the on position. Bright pools of light followed them as they made
their way further into the store.

Bear stopped at the back of the store.
A set of heavy steel doors lead into the back storage area. There
was nothing in the store itself, but he didn't doubt that there had
been. He eased his pouch from his jacket pocket, snagged a paper,
shook the tobacco out and rolled a cigarette with one hand. He
popped the cigarette into his mouth and then looked around near the
back area. A pile of wooden pallets was stacked against the
concrete block wall.

“
Give me a hand,” Bear
said. All three of them joined in and the stack of pallets came
down and was re-stacked in front of the double steel doors in just
a few minutes.

“
Lighter fluid... paint
thinner... something flammable,” Bear said. Beth looked around,
crossed to the steel shelving that ran along the back of the
wall.

“
Starting fluid?” She
asked.

Bear nodded. He took the starting fluid
and sprayed down the top pallet. He pushed it over and it hit the
door with a loud clatter, taking several other pallets with it,
pushed the door open, and the stack spilled through into the
interior. Bear heard a skittering, scuffling noise from inside the
inky blackness. He continued to spray down the now toppled stack of
pallets until the can emptied. It tended to dry fast, so he had let
it build up and soak into the wood in a few places.

He pulled a kitchen match from his
pocket, popped it to life with his thumbnail, lit the cigarette and
then tossed the match at the pile of pallets.

The flare of flame lit up the faces of
a half dozen of the Dead where they stood just beyond the circle of
light cast by the open door. As the flames leapt, they began to
scramble back into the darkness, but the four opened up on them
before they could get away into the shadows.

Two ran at the flames in their fear and
were cut down as they did. The others ran further into the shadows,
but most dropped dead just beyond the fire as the bullets found
them. Bear and Beth stepped past the flames, into the darkness of
the storage area, and chased them down. There were a half dozen
more, and in their fright, they simply cowered from the smoke and
light and were easy to deal with. These were not the smart ones
that they'd had to deal with in the city.

Bear came up on the last one as it
cowered, looking up at him from a space next to several pallets of
boxes. It had tried to work its way behind them but had failed.
Whatever the boxes held, the pallets were too heavy for it to move.
It turned back, a young girl, no more than a child, the pleading in
her eyes, and Bear hesitated for a split second. Beth stepped
around him and shot her in the head as she started to spring from
her crouch and launch herself at them. The bullet threw her back
against the pallets. She landed with a solid crunch of bone and
slid down to the floor. The silence came back, and in it Bear met
Beth's eyes. He turned without speaking and crossed to the double
rear doors, hit the bar that opened them and threw them open to the
bright afternoon light.

The light flooded into the storage
area. After the darkness, lit only by the flashlights, they had to
blink to get their sight back. Beth pushed a stack of boxes over to
prop one side of the door open, Bear matched it with a heavy steel
push cart to block the other side open. The light and air swept
into the back area.

Beyond the doors, empty concrete
loading docks ran the length of the rear of the building. Bear
stepped out cautiously and looked around. Nothing as far as he
could see. Beth stepped out behind him and looked too. A few
seconds later, they were making their way back into the main store
area.

~

“
It's a bad place to try to
defend,” Beth said.

They were in the parking lot of a huge
chain store, a few miles down the road from where they had started.
It was late in the day, the light beginning to fade from the sky.
It was the only real way to tell time any longer, watch the sky.
There were just too many variations in the length of the days. It
did seem as though the days were becoming more uniform as they
passed though. The last several were somewhere close to
twenty-eight hours.

The trucks were loaded down with
camping gear, ammunition and other necessities they had picked up.
They had also picked up another truck for Beth and Scotty to
drive.

The stores on both sides of route three
had been ransacked, but they had still found more than enough
ammunition, guns and camping gear to suit their needs as they
worked their way from store to store. Cammy had taken Bear's arm
and lead him away from a display of canned beans in one of the
stores they had gone through. "No," she had said. Now they were
deciding whether to move on or stay.

Mac looked over the map. "There's a
golf course, right?" He handed the map to Beth. Beth looked it over
and nodded.

“
Okay, so it's huge... a
few miles ahead,” he looked up from the map.

“
My problem with that is
trees, areas where they can hide. I'd almost rather be in the
middle of the highway or a cleared field... something like that,”
Bear said.

Beth nodded. “It has got
to be overgrown, the golf course. Be great,
perfect,
if it wasn't. But it's been
several months, and that grass has got to be higher than we stand.
I say no. I can't see a way we could be safe.”

“
There's an overpass
ahead,” Don offered.

“
I saw that, but it looks
like a pedestrian overpass. That's not gonna work,” Bear said.
“They could use it to drop right down on us if we stayed under it,
and we'd have to be on foot if we stayed up top.”