The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (35 page)

I was about to write when I found out
we'll have visitors in the morning. I hadn't expected it so soon. I
wonder if they are people we can make a part of us? I guess we'll
all see tomorrow. I'm excited, but I was already.

Susan and I, well we're together. As in
living, as in sleeping together. I can not believe I took the step.
I didn't know I could. I didn't really believe there could be
someone out there for me. But she made it clear to me how she felt
and that she will go with me where ever I want to go. You know, up
until right then, all I wanted to do was go and help Bob and Jan
start this Nation. I thought that was all I had in my mind. It
wasn't though. If she asked me not to go, I wouldn't.

I've never known an emotion that could
affect such change inside of me so quickly. I'm not sure I've even
known this emotion before... not like this. People are coming, and
that is exciting. I'm with Susan, and that is life. Do you know
what I mean? And that means I'm a lesbian. I guess I knew that. It
is important to me to know who I am though. To say it, to own it.
In our so called enlightened society it wasn't universally
accepted. Oh, on the surface, sure. But not really. And where is
that world now? Gone. I guess it's just us now. We don't have time
to be so judgmental, or for me, to care if I am judged. I'm
happy!!!

~ In the Dark ~

The cow turned her head towards the
woods, nervous. Her large eyes reflecting silver glints from the
moonlight.

The smell of death and corruption was
nothing new, and that was the smell that came to her now. But there
was something wrong with it, something not right with this smell...
something different. Her calf nuzzled her and began to nurse. The
smell of humans came to her along with smoke and mumbled snatches
of conversation, and she stopped thinking about the dead smell,
turned away from the woods and stared at the firelight across the
fields.

~In the Trees~

The eyes watched her and the other cows
from the cover of the trees. The hunger was terrible, all
consuming, and it came in crashing waves. The impulse to feed
seemed to be the only coherent thought she had. It was hard to
think around, hard to think past.

A few weeks ago she had been... Been?
But it did no good, she could not force the memory to come. A name
came, Donita. She had been Donita; she knew that, but that was all
she knew. And a name was not everything she had been. She had been
something else... something more, but she could not get to whatever
it was. Something that did not wander through the woods. Something
that was not driven by all consuming passions that she could not
understand.

She turned her eyes up to the moon. It
pulled at her. Something in it spoke directly to something inside
of her., something deep, something she believed had always been
there, but there had never been a need to address it because it
lived under the surface, out of her line of thought, sight... below
her emotions. Now it didn't. Now it ruled everything. It was all
she could do not to rush from the trees, find the smell that
tempted her and consume it. Eat it completely. Leave nothing at
all. Oh to do it... To do it...

Her eyes snapped back from the moon,
and a low whine escaped her throat. The calf, sated, had wandered
away from her mother. Behind her, the boy made a strangled noise in
his throat. She turned, gnashed her teeth and growled. The thin,
skeletal boy fell back, hungry but frightened. She could feel his
fear. It fed her, tempted her to taste him, but he was no food for
her. She knew that much. It was a sort of instinct... drive...
something inside of her. The boy was not her food. The boy was not
her sustenance. He was one of her own. Corrupted. And corrupted
flesh could not feed and sustain itself on corrupted flesh. Fresh
flesh was needed, live flesh. Fresh human flesh, she
corrected.

The boy trembled and grinned sickly,
his one good eye rolling in his head. The other eye was a ruined
mass of gray pulp sagging from the socket. A great flap of skin
below that socket had curled and dried, hanging from the cheek. He
felt at it now, carefully, with his shrunken fingers. She hissed at
him and his hands fell away. She turned her attention back to the
wandering calf that was nosing ever closer to the edge of the
trees.

She desired human flesh. She needed it,
but it didn't absolutely have to be that way.

Two nights ago it had been a rabbit.
The night before that she and the boy had shared a rat. The night
before that they had come upon the old woman. She thought about the
old woman as the calf wandered ever closer to the line of
trees.

The old woman had been good. They had
brought her back here and her bones lay here still, in the weeds at
the edge of the clearing behind her. She turned and gazed back past
the boy into their makeshift campsite, searching for the what was
left of the old woman, finding her bones where they lay at the edge
of the clearing they had made. She turned back to the field,
watching the calf as she remembered the old woman...

~The old woman in the ditch~

They had come across the old woman at
near morning. Near morning was the best she could do. Time was not
a real concern to her anymore. The concept held no meaning. She
understood near morning because the sickness, the sickness that
began to send the searing pain through her body, had started. The
boy had already been whining low in his throat for an hour in pain.
It was like that whenever the night began to end, when the morning
was on the way, soon to be.

She remembered sunlight. Her old self
had needed sunlight just as she now needed darkness, absence of
light. That had been Donita as well, but a different
Donita.

They had been crossing the rock filled
ditch to get to an old house on the other side. The basement of the
house was what she had in mind. Quiet, private, darkness. She had
been scrambling down the steep, sandy side when the scent had found
her eyes and froze her brain.

That is the way she thought of it.
Frozen. Everything... everything besides that smell of flesh was
frozen out. The boy's whining, the coming dawn, the constant hunger
in her belly, the moon silvery and bright so far up in the night
sky, nothing got by that desire. Urge. Drive. It consumed her, and
it had then.

It had touched her eyes and then seeped
into her brain; then it had spread out into her body. Her legs had
stopped moving and she had nearly tumbled all the way to the bottom
of the rock strewn ditch before she had caught herself, her head
already twisted in the direction of the smell. Her ears pricked,
her tongue licking at her peeled, dead lips.

She could smell the old woman. Knew
that she was an old woman. It was in the smell. Somehow it was in
the smell. And her flesh. And her fear. The boy had slammed into
her then, still whining, and nearly knocked her to the
ground.

She had come up from that near fall in
a crouch, and the boy had slammed into her once more, so she had
grabbed him to steady him. He had thought she meant to kill him and
had pulled away, but a second later he had caught the scent and
they had both gone tearing down the ditch.

~The Old Woman~

The old woman had heard them coming.
She had begun to whine herself, replacing the boy's whining which
had turned to a low growl. The panic had built in her as she heard
them coming. Her heart pounded, leapt, slammed against her ribs,
bringing pain with it. The pain rebounded and shot down into her
broken leg, the leg that she had broken the day before trying to
scramble down into this ditch to reach the house across what was
left of the highway so she would have a safe place to stay. The
pain slammed into her leg, and she cried aloud involuntarily. A
split second later, the female slammed into her.

She had been on her belly. The pain was
less that way. When the female hit her, she drove her over onto her
back. A second after that, she was ripping at her flesh, biting,
feeding and she could not fight her. She was too strong, too.....
animal strong. And then the boy hit her hard, pouncing on her
chest, driving the air from her lungs, and before she could even
react, catch her breath back, he was biting at her
throat.

She felt the pulse of blood as he bit
into her jugular, and it sprayed across his face. She felt it go,
felt her consciousness drop by half, her eyelids flutter, flutter,
flutter and then close completely. And the biting was far away, and
then it was gone.

~The Feasting~

The boy had her throat, but Donita had
been biting her way into her chest. She had felt her heart beating,
and she had been gnawing against her ribs when she felt it stop.
They had both calmed then, loosening the grips they had on her, and
settling down to feed.

~

She glanced now at the calf that was
less than three feet from them, its huge moon eyes staring
curiously at them. The calf did not know death, had not seen it,
she thought. It knew its mother's tit, the sweet grass of the
spring field, the warmth of the sun and nothing else. It edged a
little closer.

~

She had killed the old woman. She had
no use for her at all. They had eaten so much of her flesh, that
she was useless to them. Couldn't sit up all the way. The boy had
taken one arm off at the shoulder and carried it away like a
prize.

Donita had eaten so much that she had
vomited, but that had only forced her back to feeding until she was
once again filled. She had looked around the ditch and spied the
rock. The old woman had come back already, and she was trying to
raise herself from the ground, trying to raise herself and walk
once more. She had picked the rock up from the ditch. A big rock,
but she was powerful, and she had smashed the old woman's skull in
as she had tried to bite at her. They had dragged her into the
woods a little farther down the road, this place where they still
were.

~

She turned again to the calf. The calf
was not what she wanted, but the calf would have to do for now. She
let her hand fall upon the boy's thigh and they both sprang at the
calf.

The calf did not have the time to
react. It did not even bawl. One second it was standing, and the
next it was on its side, Donita's teeth clamped tightly across its
throat. A second after that, it was sliding across the dew wet
grass and into the woods, one wild eye rolling and reflecting the
silver of the waning moon, as Donita and the boy dragged her into
the trees.

Chapter Two

Strangers And Friends

~ March
27
^th
~

Smoke from the many fires hung close to
the ground mixing with a heavy mist that had risen off the nearby
river and painting the fields white into the far treeline. As the
sun touched the edge of the horizon, soft red-gold light began to
flood into the world, reflecting off the ground mist, lighting it
from within.

Mike could feel the heat on his face as
he sat drinking coffee with Candace, Tim, Ronnie and Patty. Bob and
Janet sat close by. The rest of the camp was up and waiting with
them.

Janet had organized some helpers, and a
breakfast that included cold meat from the evening meal, oatmeal
cooked in a huge pot she had salvaged from somewhere, and something
that was a cross between a biscuit and a pancake. She was cooking
on a large rectangular cast iron grill that Mike and Ronnie had
taken from one of the fast food restaurants and set up for her. The
resulting thick pancakes, or thin biscuits, depending on your
viewpoint, could be used to make sandwiches of the cold meat or
drowned with honey or Maple syrup from one of the nearby stores.
Mike had tried it both ways and some oatmeal as well. He had eaten
two thick sandwiches. He couldn't remember any time in his life
where he had consistently eaten the way he did now. His body just
seemed to crave and use more calories than it ever had.

As he looked around, he realized he
wasn't the only one. Everyone seemed to be able to put the food
away, yet everyone seemed to be thinning down, dropping the excess
weight they had once carried. He himself had noticed that the few
extra pounds he had once carried were gone. His stomach had not
been as flat as it was now since junior high school. Maybe not even
then, he admitted to himself. He sipped at his coffee and watched
the sun rise across the fields, burning the mist away as it
rose.

Jeff Simmons had called on the radio
some fifteen minutes earlier to let them know his party was on the
way. The whole camp was waiting, including Brian and Janelle. Even
Tom, Bob, Molly and Nell who had had their day all planned out were
hanging around, waiting for the newcomers to come into camp. It
seemed everyone had changed their plans to wait.

“
You waiting also?” Mike
had asked Brian as he wandered by him.

He nodded solemnly. “I want to see the
new kids.”

“
Might not be any new
kids,” Mike told him.

“
Oh,” Brian said. He looked
worried for a few seconds. “Nellie said there would.”

Nellie meant Janelle, his constant
companion, one year older. Looked like she was a God to him,
because she knew so many things that Brian didn't.