The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (38 page)

“
You have things running
pretty smoothly,” Jeff told him.

Mike laughed. “Not me. I don't lead...
not really.”

Jeff raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you
don't realize it, but you do.”

Mike sighed. “Yeah... Okay, I guess I
do. Not a job I asked for though. I hate to say it out like that.
Makes me responsible.” He laughed. “Guess I'm responsible anyway
though.”

Jeff nodded. “I found myself in the
same situation” He looked out over the water for a few moments.
“Listen, I wanted to talk to you.”

Mike turned from the water. “Sounds
serious.” His eyes focused on Jeff's own.

“
It sort of is... it is.
Hell, I just don't know.” His eyes came up and focused on Mike.
“Have you had any problems with the dead? I mean people who are
supposed to be dead?”

Mike looked at him for a few seconds,
thinking he must have missed some other part to the conversation,
or possibly heard him wrong. “Uh... I have to say, Jeff, you lost
me.”

Jeff sighed. “Yeah... Okay... This will
sound like bullshit, or crazy.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, so
we're going through this small town. What it was is, I came upon
this body. Well, it seemed to be a body.” He shook his head. “No...
Look. I came upon this body. It was a body. No doubt at all. And
then the goddamn thing got up and took off. Scared the shit out of
me. Okay, I know that sounds crazy. But, well, I wondered if you
might have come across anything like that at all?” He ended with a
look of grim determination in his eyes.

“
Okay. So... Uh, you …
Okay, so really you mean like a... a...”

“
A zombie,” Jeff said. “I
know how that sounds, and I would guess that means you haven't had
any problems... experiences like that.”

Mike shook his head. “I... No. I
haven't. None of us have. I don't want to sound like an ass, but
you're serious?”

“
I'm serious. Look, I'm not
an over reactor. This woman was dead. I didn't think so at first,
but afterward I realized she had to have been dead. No doubt at
all. I saw all that Un-Dead stuff on TV in the old world. I didn't
buy any of it at all. But this... This was different. I actually
saw this with my own two eyes.”

Mike nodded, unsure what else to do or
say.

Jeff nodded back. “I know how it
sounds. But I brought it up because maybe it will happen again.
Sounds pretty lame in the light of day, I know. But, well. It's
something to consider.” He stood from the rock. “I guess I better
get in if I'm going.” He nodded once more and then looked at Mike.
“I'm not a nut.”

Mike sighed. “I know. That makes what
you said even more troubling.”

Jeff nodded once more and then turned
back to the water. A second later, he walked off without another
word, leaving Mike alone and wondering.

~

The evening meal was one of the best
Mike could remember in a long time. Venison, beef, asparagus, rice
and biscuits.

“
How did you manage to make
rice, or real biscuits,” Patty asked Jan.

“
Really,” Candace chimed
in.

“
Bisquick, and a really big
pot,” Janet Dove said.

“
Bisquick, duh,” Candace
said looking at Patty.

“
Where did you find all
these huge pots though, Janet?” Candace asked.

“
The restaurant, Candy,”
Janet said.

“
And the Bisquick. We
didn't even think of Bisquick,” Patty said.

“
Oh, they have cases of the
stuff over to the little store,” Janet said. “And flour too. You
know, their store room is all concrete block. No rats like those
others. I thought you knew,” She said.

“
Nope,” Candace said,
“You're the best, Jan. This is really good.”

“
Absolutely,” said
Patty.

“
You bet.”

“
Best I ever had.” And many
other similar compliments flooded the air. Janet Dove flushed but
continued to smile. “Thank you,” she said, “Thank you.”

~

After dinner, several of the people in
the camp helped to do the dishes and clean up, including some
visitors. The evening was warm, and everyone sat around one of the
larger fires drinking coffee and talking low, watching the light
fade from the day.

~Across The field~

She came awake in the dark. The boy
pressed tightly against her side, his cold seeping into her
own.

At first her vision had suffered
horribly, but as time wore on, it had changed. Her eyes had
changed. She knew that because she had seen them reflected in a
shop window a few miles back as she had been traveling alone,
before the boy.

The glass had been reflecting only the
yellow-blue of the moon until she had stepped in front of it and
then it had scared her so badly she had nearly run screaming at
what she saw. What does the monster see when it looks in the
mirror?

At that time she had still remembered
who she had once been, had an idea of what she looked like stored
in her head. When she stepped in front of the Moon-shiny glass,
that picture flew away.

She had stopped, her knees buckling at
the sudden urge to reverse and run away. She had actually taken two
scrambling steps backward before she realized the thing in the
glass - the Monster that has seemed about to pounce upon her - was
nothing more than a reflection of her own radically changed
self.

Her body had been reduced to skin and
bone. The skin had stretched tight, illuminating the bones beneath
it. Causing ridges and valleys where she had never seen
any.

Her skin had peeled away from her face
in a few places, and the bone showed through yellow-white, gleaming
in the moonlight. Her black hair was a ruined mass of black.
Stringy, tangled, plastered to her head like a helmet in places.
But it was her eyes that had caused her to stare the
longest.

They were silver slits in the
moonlight, but as she looked closer, she saw that the irises were
bright red, no longer the dull orbs they had become after she had
died. She had seen those eyes reflected back from the water of the
harbor in New York when she had started this journey. She had gone
for water. She had to have water to survive; every living thing
did. She had not yet realized that she was no longer a living
thing.

The moon had been bright that night,
reflecting off the trash strewn water. A drowned cat had floated by
and transfixed her. She had been torn between vomiting and reaching
into the water and retrieving the cat... bringing it to her
mouth... tasting it. But the moment had passed, and she had shaken
herself, come back to herself. And that was when she had seen her
eyes reflected in the harbor water.

She was only hours dead then. She had
been running from a group of men, and she had run right into the
arms of someone else. Something else. She never saw him... her...
whatever it had been. Its teeth had found her neck; the blood had
spurted, and she had spiraled down into darkness.

When she had come to, she had thought
maybe she had dreamed it. Maybe he had not killed her and left her
for dead. But the sticky blood that coated her neck and clothes
said otherwise. Later, as she wandered the dying city, she realized
her heart was not beating. Her blood was no longer coursing through
her veins. She had wandered, wondering her fate, and had found
herself at the harbor.

She had bent to bring the water in her
cupped hands to her dry, cracked lips, and she had seen her eyes.
Dull, colorless marbles in her head, barely reflecting light at
all. And she had known - known she was dead. Not that all the other
things had not already told her, but that her mind had finally
clicked over, taken the information it had shoved to the corners of
her cloudy thoughts and thrown it out into the
conscious.

She had shaken it off, scooped the
water to her mouth, swallowed and then gagged, vomiting the water
back up.

That had been her glimpse of her old
eyes. These eyes were not those eyes. There was nothing dead about
these eyes. These eyes were alive, bright, reflective, hungry,
intelligent... Predatory, she told herself.

Now she focused on the moon above, the
moon that had never meant much of anything to the old Donita. Now
it talked to her, pulled something inside of her, spoke to her very
being.

She sat quietly, the boy beside her,
and scented the air. Animals had been here. A dog... A rat...
Something else traveling by had wondered about her deadness, but
decided against tasting her, warned by some instinct. The dog
worried her the most. She could tell from the scent that he had
lingered. She would have to deal with the dog if it came back
again.

Her hand reached over and shook the boy
from twilight. The night was young. They needed to hunt.

~The Camp~

The fire burned hot but low, the heat
feeling good as the temperature of the air dropped. The fires were
still many, meat spread upon drying racks before the smoke and
flame. A small group had been sitting, watching the stars come out,
when one by one nearly all the others had come to sit and watch
with them.

Quiet conversations passed back and
forth between them. But it seemed as though there were other things
on everyone’s minds, and the conversations began to die down after
a short time. Mike broke the silence that had held for a few
moments.

“
So, Bob,” Mike began.
“I... I don't want to put you on the spot, but after you left today
we all, several of us anyway, talked a bit about what we're going
to do, and that led to what you and Janet had talked about, and I
didn't really feel I knew enough about what it is you want to do,
and really I didn't feel it was my place to explain it. So... I
thought...” Mike finished.

“
Sure,” Bob agreed. “What
is it you want to know?”

“
Well,” Lilly said. “Pretty
much all of it, Bob. At least me. I don't know what it is you want
to do, and I'd like to.”

“
Same here, Bob,” Ronnie
said.

“
Us as well,” Jeff Simmons
said.

Bob nodded, “Okay then,” he said. “What
we really want to do is start the world over, but leave all the bad
stuff out. I know that sounds like a pipe dream, and I've realized
that, because that's what it mostly is, a pipe dream. There is no
way to leave all that stuff out. Some of it is built into who we
are, you know?” He paused.

“
So now that this has
happened, and the opportunity to really do something is here, I've
had to revise my ideas. And I may have to revise them again. I
think where I'm at is this, we, Janet and I, speak about the
Nation, but it isn't really about that anymore either. It has been
a long dream of some native people to go back to the land. To
become, again, the people we used to be. But the reality of that
life is a different thing. That romantic ideal is a long way from
the life we would have to live.”

“
So it's a compromise. Back
to the land? Certainly. But we are not Quakers, or Amish, we'll use
whatever modern advantages we can find or put our hands on that
will help us. Certainly horsepower in the form of vehicles to at
least get us to where we're going. After that? Will we need them?”
he shrugged, “And how would we get fuel? No. I think we use them to
get us back to where we want to be, and that might be it. It's
probably going to be horses after that, so, somewhere between here
and there we are going to have to get horses, and not just a few, a
good sized herd. Maybe fifty, a hundred would be better. Seed?
We'll bring all we can get. I don't know if anyone here has ever
seen Indian corn, the stuff that sustained my people, but it was
very small, sometimes no bigger than my index finger, and not much
bigger around either. Generally it was bigger, but not much. Modern
corn? Vast improvement. I guess you get my drift. We're thinking of
taking every advantage we can with us. But, we're thinking back to
the land too. No canned goods, although we'll certainly take more
than enough to survive on until we have our own crops, animals,
like that. It isn't going to be an easy life, that's for sure, but
we are going to do it.” He paused and the silence held for a few
minutes as what he had said settled in and everyone thought it
over.

“
Where were you thinking of
to do it?” David asked.

Bob nodded as though he had expected
the question, “I'm looking at a huge area of what was forever wild
lands. Encompasses quite a lot of the middle of the old country,
stretches south, north, east and west. Several million acres,
mountains, valleys, and a lot of it is the same as it was when this
country was settled, untouched. There have been expeditions back
into it a few times, but no one has lived there since natives lived
there.”

He borrowed the map that Mike had shown
Jeff earlier, pulled a black grease pencil from his pocket and
circled the area.

“
Take us a few weeks of
steady travel to get close to it. Then there's a lot of
preparations to make. And, well, we don't know what to expect on
the way. Who we may meet, who might want to come,” Bob
said.