The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (18 page)

As the young woman looked up at Mike's
approach, he realized that she was not much more than a child
herself, a young girl closer to Tim’s age. She had a hard, worried
set to her face that made her appear much older than she really
was.

“
Annie,” Candace said,
“This is Mike. Mike, Annie.”

Mike nodded. “Ann, nice to meet you,”
Mike said. “You okay?”

“
Yes, sir,” She
answered.

“
Just Mike,” Mike told
her.

She smiled. “Just Annie, “she told
him.

“
Annie it is,” Mike
agreed.

She remained grim, but the smile played
around the edges of her mouth.

“
This is Brian and
Janelle,” Annie told him.

The little boy had large round eyes and
a shock of thick blonde hair. The little girl had light brown skin
and dark brown, nearly black hair. They both looked up at him with
serious expressions on their faces.

“
Sin shooted Miss Bev,” The
little boy said seriously. The little girl nodded her head
solemnly.

Mike nodded back. “I’m sorry for that,
but there isn’t anyone here to hurt anyone now.” He squatted down
on one knee, eye level to the children. “It’s okay now. No one can
hurt you here, okay?”

They both looked quietly around, then
nodded slightly but didn’t say anything else.

“
Ann.
Annie?
” Mike asked. The young girl
raised her too serious eyes to his own. “If you want to, you can
take them inside the cave. It’s warmer in there. You can get some
sleeping bags, make a place to sleep. Candace will show you where
everything is, okay?”

“
Yes, Sss...
Mike
,” Annie said. She
smiled like she wasn’t used to smiling at all. She took the little
girl's hand as Candace took the little boy's hand. Her free hand
slipped easily into Candace’s free hand and they walked off into
the cave, talking low as they went.

~ Evening ~

Dinner was eaten without a great deal
of enthusiasm. No one found themselves too far away from their
weapons. Mike made a point of talking to everyone during the meal,
just a few words to see how they were doing, what was on their
minds, or at least the most pressing thing on their
minds.

Everyone was concerned about what could
happen next. Two people had run off. Yes, they had set their
weapons down, but there were weapons everywhere that they could
pick up any time they wanted, weapons much nastier than the ex-GI
who called himself Sin had gotten for them.

Mike had looked the two rifles over.
They were both the same. A carbine that held a fifty round clip and
was either semi or fully automatic with the slide of a small
button. If the first guy hadn’t gone right down, he could have cut
down Tom, Bob and the others easily. The second guy had laid his
rifle down without firing a shot. What if it hadn’t gone that way?
What if it didn’t go that way the next time? Those were the
questions that mattered to everyone.

The second man and the woman had turned
and run. Tom had berated himself for not stopping them, but as
everyone had pointed out to him during the evening, what could he
have done? Shoot them? Certainly that was not an option. But then
Tom had said what was on everyone’s mind. What if they came back?
What if they came back with Machine guns? Hand grenades? Or even,
what they had the first time which were really very close to
personal machine guns anyway, as far as Tom was concerned. Knowing
that, and Tom had thought about most of that as they had suddenly
bolted, but knowing all of that, that he or one of them may very
well have to deal with those same two people again in the future,
shouldn’t he have shot... To kill? To maim?

No one had answered at first when Tom
had tossed his own doubts out and asked, but Mike had been about
to. Before he could, Patty had spoken up.

“
That’s a maybe, not a
fact, not an absolute. And you can’t see the future. Maybe,
maybe,
someday we’ll have
to deal with them. That doesn’t make killing them an option,
doesn’t make it right. I mean, I’m scared too. They could come
after us. Do they know where we are? But,” she lowered her voice
which had risen with her passion, “It’s only fear. They might, they
might not. If they do, I’ll shoot to kill. But until they
do…

Do
something
… I couldn’t,” she
finished.

Mike had let the conversations run
their courses and nearly everyone had had something to contribute.
But it became apparent that after dinner was over they were going
to have to discuss it more fully, decide what they wanted to do
about the situation, what the group wanted to do.

Mike looked around. The sun was setting
slowly in the North East. The day had been a long one with nothing
settled yet. The trucks had been unloaded and the supplies carried
inside the cave. The back of the Suburban had been cleaned up.
Dinner was over. The dog, which was still lacking a name as far as
Mike knew, was nosing around playfully with the two children,
wagging his tail. The children were smiling, coming out of
themselves already. Mike was surprised, but happily so. The chill
of the night was moving in on the air that rose from the river and
flowed across the asphalt and dirt at the front of the
cave.

“
Why don’t we take this
inside?” Mike said at last. “We’ll all get comfortable and figure
out what to do, how we want to handle this.” It seemed that
everyone had been waiting for that announcement. Within just a few
minutes everyone was picking up items and heading into the cave out
of the growing darkness.

Mike watched the two children laughing
as they ran into the cave with their newest friend close at their
heels, tail thumping against their legs. Mike looked over to where
Annie walked with Patty and Candace. She was smiling also, in spite
of the day. In spite of the heaviness of his spirit, he felt a
smile rise to his own face. He hurried to catch up to Candace and
the others, walking into the cave with them.

~

Tom went first. It was obvious to
everyone that he blamed himself for letting the two run off, but it
was also clear that no one - some after hearing what Tom had to
say, some after giving it more thought - had placed the blame on
Tom, except Tom himself.

Janet Dove went on for quite some time
about it in an obvious attempt to cheer Tom up, but that didn’t
look to be possible, Mike thought. Then Nell spoke, relating what
the woman who had been shot had told her before she had
died.

“
She told me he had been
stationed at the base, but he’d been A.W.O.L. for quite some time
before things went bad. No one knew his real name; he went by the
handle Sin. The other guy, the one that ran off, called himself
Death. It was some sort of private joke between the two of them,”
Nell grimaced, as if to say she saw no joke, private or otherwise.
“No one knew whether they had served together or only ran into each
other once things got bad. But they had both been soldiers, and
they decided to walk back out to the base for weapons.”

“
They never did make it
back out there though, but found the two rifles they were carrying
somewhere in town. The other woman that ran off was Death’s woman.
They all met each other on the street. Emma, and Wanda, the one who
ran off, had met Death and Sin. The four of them had found Ann and
the two smaller children a few days after that. She just kept
telling me Sin wasn’t a bad guy, just wired,” Nell finished. A low
murmur greeted her last words. Mike looked around.

“
She didn’t say she thought
that; she said the woman thought that,” Mike said. Annie spoke up
in the silence that took over.

“
Did a lot of cocaine,” she
said quietly. “All the time. Death did a lot of speed. Between the
two of them you never knew what they might do. Sometimes they mixed
it. They tried to get me to do it...” Her voiced trailed off to
nothing.

Mike shook his head, bad thoughts
running wild through it. “There was nobody else, Annie,” he
asked?

“
No,” she
answered.

“
Well, that’s something,”
Bob said.

“
You think so?” Lilly
asked. She looked pasty sitting next to Tom. Too pale. Too fragile.
Too young to be involved in all of this.

“
Well, it’s only two is
what I mean. And they saw there were more of us than them,” Bob
finished.

“
Maybe, maybe not,” Candace
said. “They saw a few more. And they’re only two. There are
probably others. That’s what we really have to talk about…
others... the fact that we could’ve already had this problem
several times over. Who knows how many little groups are wandering
around out there? Are they all like that? Probably not, but how are
we going to be now?” She looked around, “Trusting? Naive? I hope
not either. But we will be some way. We have to be. We can’t close
our eyes and just tell ourselves there aren’t people like that out
there, because there are.”

“
So, that’s it,” Mike said
after a few moments of silence. “We need to discus it. What options
do we have? Who has some ideas?”

“
Better weapons,” Tom
said.

“
At least that,” Ronnie
agreed.

“
No more going out on trips
split up,” Nell suggested.

“
Maybe we should leave
now,” Tim threw in.

“
Maybe we should,” Lilly
agreed.

Tom had lowered his head as he often
did when he listened. He would turn his head toward the speaker and
listen as they spoke. His head shot back up and his eyes focused on
Lilly, but he said nothing. Candace shot Mike a quick look. Mike
shrugged his shoulders.

“
No guarantee that we
wouldn’t run into the same type of people no matter where we might
go,” Mike said.

“
Probably would,” Patty
added.

Candace nodded. “Bad is bad. It’ll be
everywhere.”

“
If we went back to the
land,” Bob said, “Far enough out, who would there be to bother
us?”

“
But,” Candace said, “Not
everyone wants to do that, Bob.”

“
Maybe it’s the only way,”
Bob came back.

“
I don’t want to do it,”
Patty said. “But I don’t want to live in a cave either, and here I
am. I also don’t want to live in fear of what someone might or
might not do.”

Mike raised his hands palms out in a
gesture of conciliation. “We can talk about leaving,” He
said.

“
Maybe we’re all not
wanting to go to the same place,” Janet Dove said.

“
Maybe,” Mike agreed. He
tried not to show it, but her remark surprised him. He knew she
wanted to go back to the traditional Native way of life, but, hell,
everything was nature now, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that the same
thing?

“
I didn’t really want to
go,” Tom said. “But,” he looked over at Lilly, “Now, I don’t
know.”

Even Candace’s head shot up. It seemed
everything was a surprise tonight, Mike thought.

“
Maybe,” Mike said, “We
need to air all of this out.” He waited until all the little side
conversations that had sprung up fell silent.

“
It seems everyone has
something on their mind. Maybe this is the best time to get it off
your mind. Speak your mind. Let it go. We should work out where we
all are, where we want to be, where we’re going to, what we’re
working towards… I’ll be honest,” he paused, “I was surprised twice
in a couple of seconds. What I thought I knew about some of you…
What I had thought you had said, turned out to be wrong. We can’t…
No...
I
can't tell
you what to do, but we shouldn’t do that to each other. We should
all know what page we’re on. True?”

“
It’s not like you can’t
change your mind,” Candace said. “It’s your mind, your life. But to
plan for all of us, we need to know where we’re going, where we
are, don’t we?”

Bob spoke: “You’re right,
of course. I guess once Sandy came along we started to think more
about the real kind of life we wanted to live.
I
have always wanted to live, but I
think I speak for Jan and Sandy too, I have always wanted to live
the Native lifestyle. I want to go back to the land… I mean really
go back. I don’t want to live in a cave either. And I'm not saying
I want to live in a longhouse even. It’s the
way
of life I want, the stories I
heard as a child. Only do it right this time, not give up our land,
live on it... with it. Can you see that?” He seemed defensive but
enthusiastic.

“
I can see it,” Mike said.
“I can’t say it’s for me, not yet. Maybe it will be someday,” he
shrugged his shoulders, “But… But I don’t know what else might be
left. Could the world really be destroyed? All of it? Everything? I
can’t imagine it, not all of it. Not everything. I’m not saying I
want my T.V. back, but I’m not sure I want to move into a cave
either.” He grinned and looked around. “But I did. I’ll admit that.
It’s the first thing I did. Maybe that says something… and not just
about me. But that’s me. If Bob’s not talking about living in a
cave or a long house…” He shrugged again. “I don’t know… We each
have to make up our own minds. You have to live true to you,
because if you don’t, you are nothing.” Silence held. Bob nodded
his head a few times.