The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (162 page)

~

Black... Darkness... Nothing, and then
something. Red beyond his eyes, a red film, something he didn't
quite understand... He had been... He had been? He tried to force
some kind of memory, but none would come.

His eyes opened with a flutter and he
found himself staring into a pair of red rimmed gold flecked eyes.
The eyes were set into a face of tautly stretched skin:
Yellow-green, split in places: Fine, black lines running below the
surface. Lips stretched tightly across chipped and blackened teeth.
The eyes watched him. Cold, calculating. Something off to his left
caught his attention. A blur of movement, a soft purring-ripping
sound, fabric, something.

His eyes broke away for a second and
settled on iris where she lay crumpled on the sidewalk. Three of
the dead crouched over her remains, pulling pieces from her body in
bloody chunks. Bile rose in his throat and his eyes darted back
just as the face arrowed down, the teeth darted quickly to his
throat and fastened: Biting, tearing, ripping...

The Nation

Janna unfolded the piece of paper as
she looked out over the valley. Impossible, but there it was in
black and white. The Nation stood at 1562 souls. She had been in
possession of the note for a few hours now: Jamie had handed it to
her in a hushed expectancy, as though she too could hardly believe
it.

Janna had known they had grown over the
last few weeks, several parties had come in, like a huge influx
trying to beat the weather, but she had not thought the numbers
would be anywhere close to where they were. She had thanked Jamie,
they had both laughed excitedly, and she had slipped the piece of
paper into her pocket.

She pulled it from her pocket and read
it once again, Convinced it was real, and then unconvinced all over
again.

She returned the note to her pocket
once more and watched as David Reed started up the path from the
valley below. Arlene was not with him. She felt at the scrap of
paper in her pocket, lifted her head and looked around the ledge as
though the truth in her pocket might be challenged by something
there, but nothing came to her, and she finally accepted it as
real. David reached the top and smiled as he started past her. She
smiled back and her mouth opened of its own accord.

“
David,” her arm reached
out and pulled him close as she spoke. He smiled back
nervously.

“
David, if you had to
guess, how many people would you think we have in The Nation? A
wild guess, David... How many?”

He stared at her for a second,
uncomprehending, before he found his tongue. Her hand brushed
against his thigh as she dug into her pocket. He could feel her
fingers now, pressure against his thigh, he backed away a step and
tried the smile back on his face.

Janna seemed to realize how close he
was at the same time, and tried to take a backward step and nearly
tripped. David's hand shot out and caught her, brushing against one
breast as he did, helping her back to her feet, aware of her body
in a way he hadn't been aware of it before as he held her briefly.
They both stepped apart.

“
I'm, sorry, David. I,” she
started, but she had nowhere to go with that thought. No
finish.

“
It was my fault,” David
said as his face flushed bright red.

“
David?” From behind them.
Arlene coming out the door. They both jumped guiltily as she came
to them.

Oblivious, David thought. Oblivious of
what, his mind asked a second later.

“
Arlene,” Janna cried. She
grabbed her and pulled her close, breaking whatever spell had held
them. “I had told David, what do you think the population of The
Nation is tonight, right now?”

Arlene smiled and looked at David.
“What did you guess?” She asked. She brushed his hair away from his
eyes where it always seemed to fall of its own accord.

“
Didn't have a chance,”
David answered, glad the moment, whatever it had been, had
passed.

“
Eight hundred?” Arlene
asked.

“
Fifteen-hundred-sixty-two,” Janna said in a subdued voice and
then broke into laughter.

“
Get out,” Arlene said
loudly. “That is not possible.”

“
What's not possible?” Bob
asked as he stepped through the doorway and closed it behind
him.

“
Our population,” David
said.

Bob raised his eyebrows.

October 19th

Dawn was cold and overcast for the
second day in a row.

Mike stood, Ronnie beside him, several
others scattered across the ledge, and watched the vehicles make
their way through the valley below. In a few moments they would be
out of site. Heading for the flat land and the forest in the far
distance.

There were five vehicles. Bear and Beth
in one, Billy and Pearl in another, and three other teams that
would be erecting shelters at the old state park and setting up an
outpost.

“
It seems like things have
moved so goddamn fast,” Mike said thoughtfully to
Ronnie.

“
Really?” Ronnie asked. “To
me it seems like we should already have been here. It has seemed
like pulling teeth every time we make a change or step
forward.”

“
Really?” Mike
asked.

Ronnie laughed. “No. It seems the same
to me. Crazy fast. I hope they really know what they are up to. I
really do.”

Mike nodded, the door to the main area
opened and Amy and Candace walked out onto the ledge and the low
stone wall where they stood.

“
Can't see them,” Amy
said.

“
Right...” Ronnie began as
he lifted one hand. He laughed, his hand hanging in mid air and
then he dropped it back to his side. “Well, they were right
there.”

Mike laughed. “You missed them by this
much.” He held his thumb and fore finger together, barely
separated. His eyes scanned the distance again. They had
disappeared just that quickly. He took Candace's hand. “Come on,”
he said. “It's far too cold out here this morning.” He lead the
four of them back inside just as small flakes of snow began to fall
from the sky.

SEVEN

October 28th Year One

Watertown New York

Bear's truck rolled to a stop at the
side of the roadway, and Billy and Pearl pulled in behind them.
Beth levered the door open and jumped down to the ground, her
machine pistol in her hand.

“
This it?” Beth
asked.

“
I think so,” Bear
answered. “Right city, anyway. We followed the maps as best we
could.”

“
This is it.” Pearl, as she
strode forward from the truck she shared with Billy.

They had followed what was left of the
interstate, turned off, found route 11 and followed it into the
city. They were at the top of a long stretch of road that sloped
steeply down into the small city below. They had a good view for
miles, but there was very little to see. A building here or there,
poking through the fall colors of the valley below them, and that
was it.

“
Don't look like much,”
Bear said.

“
Isn't,” Billy
agreed.

Bear looked at him. Billy met his eyes
and then turned and looked back out over the valley.

“
I can't believe I lived
here at one time,” Billy said.

“
What can you add that
might help?” Bear said?

Billy shrugged. “Nothing I can say
about it. It was several years ago... A different world... I wasn't
here when this started and so I have no idea what went on here. And
it's been years, probably a lot of changes... It's not a place you
want to remember... At least I don't,” Billy shook his head. “Pearl
probably knows more than I do,” he finished.

“
Even so, you could
probably help us find our way around... Mike says the Army Base is
out the other end of the city... Route 3.”

Billy pointed across the valley. “If we
go down to the river, we can follow the river out to Route 3. That
will take us to the base... I don't know from there...” He looked
harder. “The problem is we have no idea what streets are gone, what
roads may or may not still be there. And, I don't even see the
river from here. ”

“
Where should it be,” Bear
asked?

Billy laughed. “Straight ahead, but I
never came up here to look down at the river... So I don't know if
it could be seen from here... Maybe in the winter... I think. We'll
have to go down and see. But it should be straight down this hill,
into the city and we can follow Route 3 right out, if its still
there... There are other ways out there too...” Billy turned and
looked at Bear.

“
I don't know the area,”
Bear told him. He shrugged and looked down at Beth and then back up
at Billy where he stood with Pearl. Pearl spoke.

“
A dozen
ways to get in that they showed me... All from inside, I have no
idea where they come out here. I do know that this base has nothing
to do with the base out route 3. A separate place... Maybe there
were connections I didn't know about, but on the surface they were
run and maintained separately.” She looked up at Bear. “The thing
is I remembered so little of it after I got out of there. After I
got away from the people who...
took
me I hid for three days, trying
to find a way out... finally just collapsed. Met some people
leaving shortly after that and traveled with them. Lucky to be
alive,” her voice tightened as she slowed and then stopped speaking
for a moment. “The river... That is where I got out... I listened
to the people I traveled with. They came from here, along the river
itself, there's a cave. They spent time there. It's on a road that
follows the river. The road is abandoned, or was abandoned, even
then. I came out on that road myself when I got out, before the
others captured me. I'm sure that I could find the way in if we can
find that road... I say find that cave, then get down on the cliffs
that front the river. It's going to look like a small dark cave
opening from a distance, but up close you can see the jackhammer
marks, at least I did when I came out of it.”She
shrugged.

“
I say, lead us down then,
Pearl.”

Pearl looked back at Bear, frowned, and
then nodded.

~

The buildings they passed were silent,
crumbling ruins. The roadway was cracked and missing huge sections
in places. The low thump of the exhaust echoed off the buildings as
they passed them and headed down into the city itself. Billy
crawled along the road, allowing the truck to idle its way. The
hill flattened out, and they began to pass areas of what had been
strip malls and then passed into block after block of old houses.
Tilted, some fallen, all the yards were overgrown. A few areas were
devoid of anything at all.

They passed what looked to be a
hospital building. At least the signs that were still legible
referred to it as a hospital. The top floors were collapsed, debris
scattered across the parking lots. Many of the cars were crushed
under huge slabs of concrete. They could see only slices of the
landscape through the gun slots in the armor that covered the
windows. The monitors on their dashboards sent a clearer picture to
them.

The CB radios were scratchy silence,
and had been for miles. They had skirted the city of Syracuse, and
the radio had jumped to life a few times as they were traveling
away from it, but even then it was nothing they could understand.
It might have been someone transmitting, it might have been
something else, although none of them could think of what else it
might have been. Whatever it was they had understood none of it. A
series of pops and screeches, periods of absolute silence. It
happened three times, and then stopped. The radio had reverted back
to scratchy silence and stayed that way.

The roadway narrowed to not much more
than a wide street, and then the taller buildings of the downtown
area began to show ahead. The CB radio in Bear's truck suddenly
squawked to life.

“
... Hey... Hey, you
guys... Two coming... Two coming... Some strange looking shit right
here. Coming downtown... Hey come on back...”

Beth picked up the FM radio from the
seat top. “Billy?”

“
Yeah... Heard it,” Billy
said. “Look at this.”

The brake lights on Billy's truck lit
up as he slowed. Bear pulled slightly to the side to see why he was
stopping.

The road was blocked from side to side
just where it entered the downtown area. There were more than a
dozen wrecked cars and trucks closing it from one side to the
other. Bear pulled up even with Billy's truck, glancing around at
the buildings as he did. He saw nothing at all.

“
Tell him to back out of
here,” Bear told Beth.

Beth nodded, picked up the radio, and
that was when the first shots came, ringing against the steel armor
of the trucks.

Bear floored the gas and the big truck
leapt backwards, the tires screeching as it did. Billy's truck
raced along backwards next to him. Together they backed at full
speed out of the downtown area, and away from the
roadblock.