The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (128 page)

A few minutes later they were running
through the desert that ran alongside I 10. There were not a great
many cars or trucks there, but in several places there had been
wrecks that closed lanes down. With no one to clear them they would
have ended up in the desert anyway. And there seemed to be a dirt
road that ran beside I 10 for as far as they could see.

The landscape in the distance had been
changing as they drove the day away, but with the sun setting a few
hours after they set out once more it was hard to tell what the
surrounding countryside was like. Billy dropped speed and flicked
the trucks high beams on. A short while later Beth was sleeping,
her head heavy against Billy's arm. He drove through the night and
into the early morning before she woke again.

Watertown New York

Mike Collins' Journal

March 13th

Man, it’s been a long day. We walked
out to Washington Street to where the car dealerships are.
Everything’s torn up out there, but there are tons or cars and
trucks. We found three trucks that we got running, and we drove
them back. So we have a pickup truck, a suburban and a big four
door state truck, one of those you always used to see along the
highway when they were doing road repair. There were a few others
we found that also ran, but they were in such bad shape that we
left them.

Tom wanted to build one. I mean take
one of the new trucks and put old parts on it. I got the idea from
Bob that it probably wouldn’t work out the way Tom thought that it
would. The right parts would be hard to find. I could see the idea,
the appeal of a newer vehicle so we wouldn’t have to be concerned
about break downs, but I could see Bob’s point of view too. I think
it pissed Tom off though, but it seems that almost everything
pisses Tom off.

I didn’t write this in here yet, but
Candace and I are together. It just happened that fast. I was
surprised in a way, but in another way I wasn’t all that surprised.
Who knows how long this world will last, what it was that really
happened? Maybe there is no time for slow anymore.

Candace said that, and once I thought
about it, I agreed. Things are so different. And she’s right for
me. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened this fast in the old world.
Maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all, but everything’s changed.
It’s all different, and this seems right. It seems like the way it
should have happened with her and me, the right way for it all to
work.

It also seemed to work out for the
others as well. By that I mean Tom ended up with Lydia. She’s a lot
younger than he is, but like I said, it’s a different world now.
They seem to be happy together. I thought I felt some animosity
from both of them at first, but either I imagined it, or they’ve
moved past it, gotten over it, something like that.

We haven’t discussed leaving again.
It’ll come up. Candace and I want to go. I think Bob and Jan want
to go too. Tom and Lydia seem to be against it. Lydia keeps talking
about how none of us know what it might be like anywhere else, like
she wants to throw that out before we even discuss leaving at all.
Here we have food, shelter, what’s so bad? I guess we have been
talking about it without really talking about it at all.

Tom backs up everything she says with a
nod of his head. He pointed out we’re in an area of mainly
limestone, that’s what made this cave, and we may not find that
anywhere else. At least not easily. Maybe they’re right. Hell, they
make sense, but it’s the attitude. The rest of us bend. They refuse
to.

We decided to go out to Arsenal Street
tomorrow to the sporting goods store, and also look at some super
markets out there, something else I didn’t check out while I was
out there.

Lastly, I’m glad Candace and I have
each other. It makes all of this easier to deal with.

She asked me why I’m writing this
journal. I felt kind of stupid. I told her why I started it though,
and that I’m continuing it for someone in the future. Maybe a
child? Someone to come later on?

I expected her to laugh that off, or
look at me like I was crazy, but she only nodded as if that made
perfectly good sense. She told me she has a journal too. A diary,
she said. Of course Lydia jumped on that as well. At first arguing
against it, then saying she thought it might be okay. Tom said he
wouldn’t do it. He said he’s not leaving to go anywhere and if
someone shows up here, he’ll be here, not some journal.
Okay.

It’s stuff like that that
makes me wonder. And, anyway, I only mentioned it; it wasn't like I
wanted anyone else to do it or was trying to encourage someone else
to do it. It's that kind of
jump on
it
attitude I don't like, like they think
I'm looking to screw them over somehow.

But it’s all good. I’m
alive. I looked back at some of what I wrote in here. I had no one
just a short time ago. I didn’t even know whether there
was
anyone else. Now I
have Candace. We have some plans, things we’ve begun to talk about,
agree about. A little ego trouble with Tom is really just bullshit
in the scheme of things. I have to try harder to look past that.
Maybe I'm too damn sensitive. And anyway things are good. This
could be a lot worse.

A thing that bugs me and I can not
figure out, where are all the bodies? I mean there don't seem to be
enough bodies to match all of those that were killed. It bothers
me. Maybe they weren't killed? But that makes no sense. Where would
they be? I don't have an answer. I only know it bugs me.

Billy and Beth

March 14th

The name of the place was Tonopah
Arizona. Billy had eased the truck up onto I10 and that had waked
Beth up, the tires bouncing over the broken asphalt.

“
Not a big city... A town
from the looks of it. Phoenix is close. Ten, fifteen miles maybe.
Can't really tell from the map,” Billy said. A gas station loomed
out of the early morning gray and Billy wheeled the truck under the
roof the covered the pumps. He shut off the motor and they both
listened to the tick of the cooling motor for a few
seconds.

“
Coffee would be real
nice,” Beth said. “No way do we want to go into Phoenix... Too
dangerous.” She yawned and then covered her mouth and laughed.
“Jesus... Morning breath.” She zipped open her knapsack, retrieved
a bottle of water, her toothbrush and some toothpaste. She stepped
from the truck.

Billy opened his door and settled his
feet onto the pavement. It wasn't just old pavement, he saw, it was
gray, like it was completely washed out, used up. There was no
black left in it. Beth stood slightly in front of the truck, her
gun in one hand the toothbrush working around her mouth on its own.
The other hand was reaching for the rifle which was just coming
free of her shoulder. Billy hand his own rifle off his shoulder and
into his hand before he even saw what had alarmed her. She spit out
the toothbrush, holstered the gun and flicked the safety off. Three
men stepped out of the shadows of the open garage bay.

They were kids, Billy saw. Or at least
not much more than kids. They walked slowly forward.

Beth raised the rifle and pointed it at
the lead kid. “That's it right there.” She said.

She didn't scream it, softly spoke it,
Billy thought later, but the kid stopped I his tracks.

“
What's with the fuckin'
guns?” The kid asked.

“
Ours weren't aimed at you
until you aimed yours at us,” Billy said. He hoped he sounded as
cool as Beth had.

“
Bullshit,” one of the
other kids said. “You had it in your hands when I looked at you.
That's why I got mine ready.”

“
I don't want to kill
anyone today,” Beth said.

“
It really don't bother
me,” The third kid said. His eyes were blood shot. They had
interrupted him while he was sleeping, it seemed. He kept rubbing
at his eyes, Beth saw.

“
I think you're right.
Can't matter if you're dead,” Beth said.

“
Hey,” the lead kid said,
“Maybe all's we want is to party a little.”

“
Well I don't know if Billy
swings that way,” Beth said.

“
Pretty funny,” the kid
responded. “Look... It's our town. We ain't the only ones here. You
shoot there will be twenty more here in seconds. Then everybody
dies.”

“
Oh... I guess I didn't see
it right,” Beth said. “I can see where it might be preferable to
get raped and then murdered instead of getting murdered
outright.”

The one in the back, the one with the
sleepy eyes, stiffed a yawn and reflexively raised one hand to his
mouth as his eyes slipped shut for a split second. Beth shot the
lead kid in that split second, Billy had the second guy a moment
later. The third kid opened his eyes to a changed
situation.

“
Just give me a reason,”
Beth said. “Any reason.” The kid released the rifle he held and it
dropped from his hands to the pavement.

“
Can't shoot me I ain't got
no gun... Can't...
Can't shoot
me...
” He spun and looked off toward a rag
tag collection of trailers that lined a dirt road in back of the
station. “Johnny!” he screamed.
“Johnny!
Killers!”
he turned back to Billy and Beth.
“Can't shoot me... I ain't armed...
Can't...”
Billy shot him.

A second later the truck roared to life
and Billy spun the wheel hard heading back towards the drop off
from the pavement, back the way they had come.

Beth bounced around the cab and smacked
her head hard enough on the windshield to star the glass when the
truck left the pavement at better than fifty miles an hour and hit
the hard packed dirt that ran alongside I10. She finally got her
balance, swept one hand across her forehead, looked at the blood
and cursed lightly. Behind them three trucks had launched off the
pavement and were running hard to catch them.

“
Fuck me,” Billy said. He
pushed the pedal to the floor, there was nothing else for it. The
glass in the back window starred a second later as Beth rammed the
rifle stock into it. Another hit and the glass fell out into the
pickup bed area. She raised the rifle and began to fire back at the
trucks. A second later a hole punched through the windshield to
Billy's left. He mashed the pedal harder into the floorboard
feeling the truck skate across the hardscrabble of the desert as it
flew beside the highway.

“
We have to get north, the
other side of the highway. If they squeeze us south we'll be in the
goddamn desert,”
Beth yelled above the
scream of the engine.

“
There's cars up
there,”
Billy yelled back.
“On the highway!”

“
There are bullets down
here and they're gaining on us,”
Beth
yelled back.

“
Better sit down,”
Billy yelled.

“
Just do it,
Billy!”
She continued to fire out the back
window.

Billy turned the wheel hard right and
the truck lurched hard to the left, threatening to roll over as the
center of gravity changed. It nearly rolled before it hit the edge
of the pavement, broke over, and then became airborne. It came
within ten feet of a stalled, wrecked semi and trailer and then it
plunged off the other side of the highway so smoothly that billy
couldn't believe it had actually landed.

“
Nearly broke my neck
slamming it into the ceiling,”
Beth yelled.
She fell silent.
“I...”
She started, but an explosion from the highway
stopped her words.

“
Hit that fucking
truck,”
Billy screamed.
“Has to be.”

“
Keep it floored though,
Billy. Keep it floored.”
She stayed where
she was, staring out the back window, knees driven into the seat
top. Billy's eyes strayed to her ass, and then snapped back to the
road. He watched the hard packed earth fly by.

“
Roads coming up... Like
dirt roads,” Billy said. He had no sooner said it than the truck
hit the slight rise and flew across it.

“
Like back roads, looks
like,” Beth said. “Nothing on the map.” She was trying her best to
read the map as the truck bounced and tilted. One hand clutching
the seat back held her in a somewhat stable position as she looked
at the roads. “Looks like all dirt roads, back roads and then it
falls away to nothing. Just keep it pointed at the mountains in the
distance.” She turned completely around and sat down with the map
in her lap. “Must have hit the truck or each other. Whatever it was
I don't think they feel like coming after us again... Billy, we
can't fuck up like that again. I don't know what the fuck I was
thinking letting my guard down like that.”

Billy said nothing. Beth went back to
reading the map.

“
Start breaking left,
Billy. There's a river... No, maybe some sort of waterway, not a
river, too straight. It ends and then picks up again a few miles
later. We can get through and into the desert from there.” She
looked at the map for a few more minutes, “Maybe twenty miles or
so. Just run right by I10 and we should be good.” She turned and
peeked over the back seat once more. “We're leaving a lot of dust,
Billy.”