The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (147 page)

The exception was that air ducting. The
ducts led away from the city towards a small mountain-peak about a
mile from the city. There the ducts merged together, inside a huge
natural rock tunnel that had been part of the original network of
caves and passage ways. That tunnel culminated deep within the
mountain at an air treatment facility. There were also several
access points where the ducting came close to the surface via
tunnels and passageways that ran though the huge complex of caves.
And it would be possible to walk through one of the many air shafts
to the tunnel, break through the ducting, follow it to the
treatment facility or outside to the surface and freedom. It would
be difficult, but it would be possible. The end of the trip would
bring them to the surface, from there they could go
anywhere.

March 7th

Route 40: The Southwestern
Desert

The truck began to rattle deep in the
engine block and a second later a loud wheeze rent the air,
bringing the smell of hot motor and burned oil with it.

Sammy Black's eyes shot up to the
mirror and he saw the dark spray of oil behind him on the highway,
the trail of smoke coming away from that, following the now
coasting truck. His eyes came down and the rear tires on the truck
suddenly locked up and he had to fight for control as the pickup
skated across the wreck dotted interstate and plowed into the side
of a burned out SUV. The airbag was in his face before he could
even react, and a second later the truck slammed back down to the
ground from the bounce the rear end had taken at impact: The quiet
began to creep back in to the roar in his ears.

He pushed himself slowly away from the
steering wheel, flexed his jaw experimentally and felt blood go
trickling away, running across his chin and then down his throat as
he laid his head back against the headrest and waited for his blood
pressure to drop and the roaring in his ears to taper
off.

The silence of the desert came back a
few moments later. How long he didn't know, but he had flexed his
left leg and the pain had made him scream. The next thing he knew
his eyes were opening to the late afternoon sun and the desert
quiet.

His fingers scrambled across the seat
top and he found the bottle of water he had been working on. The
whole back of the pickup was full of water and packaged food.
Camping stuff, the things that hikers ate. Freeze dried this and
that. Jerky. Protein cakes. It was the first thing he had done
after he had set off the last canister in Houston. He had driven
south and then began southwest. He found the bottle, lifted it to
his lips and drained it. He had not realized how thirsty he had
been.

He had started in North Carolina,
worked his way into Georgia, then Alabama before the shit had
really hit the fan, and he had barely managed to keep the truck on
the road when the first quake had hit.

He had just left the tunnel that passed
under the Mobile Bay when the quake had hit with such force that he
had bounced off the road, skipped over the concrete rail and found
himself rolling slowly down a grassy median toward the highway
below. He had managed to get the brakes on and get turned around,
pointing back up toward I10 above, but he couldn't get the truck
back over the concrete rail, so he had left the truck to see if
there was some other way to get back up onto I10. When he stepped
through a break in the concrete rail, and back up onto the highway
a few seconds later, he turned his eyes back to the tunnel he had
just come through. Water lapped at the roadway. The tunnels swept
down into that water. The whole bay had seemed to be boiling,
agitated, but as he had watched the water had suddenly dropped,
receding, leaving the bay a muddied mess. All around him there were
screams of panic, calls for help, and he was torn: If the water
went out that fast it was a… He couldn't make it come, but it was
bad. A hurricane could suck the water out like that, he had seen it
once, but so could a tidal wave, a tsunami... His breath caught in
his throat as he realized it could very well be a tsunami. He ran
back down to the truck and got it moving. A few miles down the road
he had managed to work his way through a field and back onto I10,
running in the night for the Louisiana border.

The trip had been harder from there on.
He'd had one vial left and he had decided on Houston as the best
possible place to use it. Getting there had been tough, but he had
made it late noon four days back. Far too late to do much good in
his opinion. The city was devastated. Gunfire sounded everywhere,
fires burned out of control. He had triggered the canister and
dropped it into Galveston Bay a few hours later.

From there he had headed north west.
Interstates when he could find them, desert when he could not. He
had found route 40 and he was now somewhere in between New Mexico
and Arizona. He looked down at his leg after a few moments. He
looked quickly away.

The leg was a mess, and he was not
going to be able to get it out from under the dash, and even if he
did he would probably bleed out once the pressure came off the leg.
He sighed. His hand searched along the top of the passenger seat,
not finding what he wanted. Movement was painful, but the sun was
sinking, albeit slowly, and he did not want to be in this truck
flinching at every movement or sound in the night. He did his best
to lean forward and keep his leg from moving. His gun was wedged
between the very edge of the seat top and the pushed in dash. He
closed one hand around the grip and pulled. It was wedged tight,
but it did pull back a few inches. Something on the gun was
catching on something under or on the edge of the metal lip of the
dash. He pushed the gun forward and then pulled back again. Almost,
but a grating sound reached his ears, and he could feel the
vibration in the weapon as it ground to a halt, once again hung
up.

He pushed it back and forth lightly,
realizing it was the seat cushion that was forcing the gun up into
the dashboard. If he could get his fingers wedged in there, over
the gun, push it downward, then pull back, maybe... He jammed his
fingers into the tight space, ignoring the skin that scraped of on
the sharp edge of the dash. A second later he was forcing them past
the edge of the barrel and taking a deep breath. In his hurry to
pull the gun free he forgot about his leg and pressed down with it
as he suddenly yanked back.

The pain was like fire, a live wire
straight to a circuit in his brain. The circuit overloaded and he
slipped instantly into darkness.

Route 40: The Southwestern
Desert

March 8th

Sammy Black

The sweat trickled across his eyelid
and then slipped into the eye as it opened, stinging. He squeezed
his eyes shut and felt the pain flare slightly in his leg as he
moved it in his reaction. He kept his eyes closed, trying to
remember. It came to him after a brief second. He was in the truck.
Wrecked... Night was coming... He opened his eyes slowly, ignoring
the stinging from the salty sweat.

No... The sun was low, in the wrong
place... Morning, he decided. Somehow... Somehow he had slept the
night through. It was gone. Morning was here. He remembered why he
had slipped away, moving the leg. He looked down at it now. It was
much worse. Swollen, pushed hard against the dashboard, black and
purple where he could see the skin through the shredded and ripped
cloth of the pants. He could feel the metal lip of the dash
embedded into the long bone of his thigh; like a hatchet, he
thought.

His leg stank, he stank, like urine and
spoiled meat. Maybe he had been out for days. He had no way to
know, just laying here rotting in the heat. It was morbid, but he
couldn't get the mental picture out of his head once he had thought
it into being.

He closed his eyes and took several
deep breaths. It did seem to help clear his head, but a low buzz
came right back, if it had ever been there. He wasn't sure. Maybe
it had, but it settled in as though it belonged there. He
remembered the gun. The gun he had reached for that had started it
all and he felt the cool metal under his right hand. He curled his
fingers around it, they were stiff, unwilling. He looked down at
his hand. Scraped skin, dead and black clung to his fingers. The
bone showed through in places. Black blood flaked off the fingers
as he forced them to close around the grip.

~

The wolf was fifty yards away, hidden
in a slight dip in the desert, an arroyo that cut through the hard
pan, dry now, but it could change in an instant out here. The bare
rock that lay against his belly, cool, an escape from the heat.
Nevertheless, he panted. Already his body was overheated in the
desert morning.

He had smelled the man a few hours
before light and followed the scent. He knew the scent of man. It
had always meant fear, flight, but lately it often meant food,
sustenance. He wondered, as he lay, which one this would
be.

It was quiet in those hours before
sunrise, still he had been afraid to follow it to its source. He
had heard it breathing... Whatever this man was he was not dead
yet. The wolf could wait. Waiting was something he
understood.

The roar took him by surprise and he
whined deeply in his throat, flattening himself against the cool
stone. Crying in his fear, but time slipped by and the noise did
not come again. He waited, listening, watching the sun lift further
into the pale blue of the sky, but he heard nothing more. He lifted
his head from the ground, stood on gaunt legs, and howled into the
quiet of the morning. He sank back to the cool rock and waited.
Nothing answered him. A few minutes later he raised from the rock
and made his way up onto the highway.

Watertown New York

Project Bluechip

Pearl

She came awake with a start. In her
dreaming she had been leaning, leaning, holding the window sill and
staring down at the street below. The heat, the cold dishrag
freezing her tiny fingers. She had leaned back, shifted hands,
placed the rag against the base of her neck once more, leaned
forward and braced herself against the window frame and her
fingers, slicked and unfeeling from the ice had slipped. She had
plunged suddenly forward, falling, faster, panicked, and she had
awakened as she had slammed into the surface of the bed, a scream
right on the edge of her tongue waiting to leap.

“
Here.” A woman's voice. A
soft hand at the base of her neck, holding her, easing her back
down to the bed. “It's okay now.” She held Pearl's head up and
bought a water glass to her lips. Cold, ice clinked together in the
glass, she took the straw between her lips and drank deeply. She
collapsed back against the bed.

“
Where?” She managed at
last. “Where is this place?” The ceiling was florescent lights in a
panel ceiling. Dropped ceiling, her mind supplied. An
Americanism.

“
Blue,” the woman told her
as Pearl's eyes focused on her. She was short, slim, dressed in
fatigues, a pistol in a holster at her side.

“
Blue?” Pearl sounded as
doubtful as she felt. She must have misheard. “Drum?” She asked. It
was the closest military base.

“
Blue,” the young woman
shook her head. “The new base... Blue.” She smiled, but it was a
tired smile. “You remember anything at all?”

Pearl shook her head, but then spoke.
“A car... A boy with a gun... An earthquake?”

“
English?” The woman
asked.

Pearl nodded. “Was it then? An
earthquake?”

“
More than one,” The young
woman sighed. “It's bad up there. You're lucky they found you,
Jeffers and the others. Lucky.”

Pearl nodded and then moved her legs
and nearly fainted. She looked down, both were bandaged. She
recalled the gun. “Shot?” She asked.

“
No... No, just scraped up,
banged up maybe” The woman told her.

“
Badly scraped up?” Pearl
asked.

“
No... A few cuts, but they
are swollen. A day or two and you'll be fine.”

Pearl didn't hear the rest as she
sagged back against the bed and fell away back into the dream once
more...

TWO

Present Day: Plague Year One

September 28th

Watertown New York

They came from the hill. They came from
the many graveyards that dotted the city where they had hidden in
fear. They came from the surrounding countryside and made the
journey to the small northern city. The wolves followed them from
the tree lines, shadowy alleyways and doorways of abandoned
buildings, but they kept their distance. More and more the wolves
turned and made their way out of the city, leaving it to the
dead.

He lead them. His limp was gone
entirely. His body had finished the major changes that being
un-dead bought with it. He had come from a barn outside of the
city, looked down at the blackness of the valley that the small
city lay in, and he had known it was time.

Miles away another lead a similar
group, beyond that another, and another, across what had been the
United States and beyond. Across the lands, the oceans, the
continents. The living were through. The dead were the inheritors
of this world now, the living mere squatters, hanging on to
something they had no claim to.