The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (59 page)

She nodded. “How far?” She asked Bob,
“I had about 30 miles.”

“
Same as me,” Bob agreed.
“We might get twice that, but we'd lose too many animals. Most
likely came too fast this afternoon. Tomorrow we'll slow down, be
lucky to make thirty for the whole day. Probably less.” He thought
a moment. “Really doesn't matter now though. We're on our way,” he
smiled.

~

He came awake in the darkness and lay
looking up at the silvery moon far over head.

His mind was clouded, but seemed to be
clearing. For a second there... For a second there he had forgotten
who he was, or... or what was going on.

He tried to move, but his body seemed
excessively heavy. That was okay though. They would come for him.
They would realize he had not made it to the top of the hill. They
would come back and... He tried to pull a breath and the panic set
in. He bolted upright, the weight of his body suddenly not an
issue, still struggling to pull a breath, but his lungs would not
comply. His hands came up to his neck and then fell away slowly.
His neck was a ruined mass of flesh. He had taken a bullet there,
he reasoned. Taken a bullet there, but it hadn't killed him... yet,
his mind supplied. But you can't breathe!

That set the panic on fire within him.
He lunged to his feet, prepared to run up the hill, but the hill
was gone. The camp ground was gone. He was standing in a dense
forest. Others stood around him, silent, seemingly waiting on
him... or with him, his mind reasoned.

He tried to speak. “Hey... I'm hurt
bad. Help me!” And he did speak the words, but not a sound came out
of his mouth. He had no air to drive the words, and that brought
him back to the panic. No breath. No breath meant no life. No life
was death. He didn't want that. He had been...

He had been going up the hill? Going
down the hill? He couldn't remember. The... the attack had come.
The attack had come and he was... must have been wounded... gravely
wounded. And if he didn't breath soon, it would turn into something
even worse. He had to breath. He had to breath soon
or...

She stepped into his line of sight. The
bones in her face were close to the surface, pushing at the taut
skin there. Her skin was greenish-gray, or maybe it was a trick of
the moonlight. Her silvered eyes held his own. Her long black hair
was a tangled ruin.

The skin of the rest of her body was
pale white. Unbelievably white. So white, translucent, that he
could see the spidery trails of purple-blue capillaries, veins
rising and touching the surface of her skin and then plunging deep
into her body, under the skin and muscle... pulsing... seeming to
be alive, although she seemed as dead as anything dead that he had
ever seen.

As a kid, he had happened into a vacant
lot one morning on the way to school. He had seen something over in
the weeds that ran along the fence line of the lot next door. There
he had looked down upon the body of a bum who had either died
during one of the recent cold nights or had been murdered and
dumped there. His face had looked like this one before him. Gray,
too pale, the bone structure too close to the surface. The skin
looking more like wax than skin. Just like this... this... whatever
this was.

Jeff sank back down to the ground on
his knees. The cold moonlight shone down, the others still silent
and standing around him.

~

They listened to the radio, and even
called a few times themselves, but they heard no reply. They split
up the posts, built the fire up, banked it, and those not on post
turned in.

Candace lay alone in her sleeping bag,
looking up at the deep black of the star filled night. She wondered
about where they would end up, followed by how much she wanted a
baby, how much she loved Mike. She thought maybe she should write
in her journal. Somewhere in there she fell asleep and woke later
to Mike's gentle touch, waking her to turn the post over to
her.

She rose, kissed him softly, took the
cup of coffee he offered and walked off into the night.

~April 3rd - Mike's journal~

This must look like the craziest
caravan anyone has ever seen. Pigs, cows, chickens, horses and
people all moving down this logging trail that hasn't been used
since who knows when.

We have seven trucks, so everyone is a
driver. I thought the big trucks would be the worst, but I have to
admit, once we loaded them down, they were much easier to drive.
And they are loaded down with every farm implement we could find,
and more than that, every thing we could think or thought that we
would need. Several cast iron, wood fired cooking stoves in pieces,
with instructions I hope. Several more wood burning stoves. Steel
buildings, seed and grain, two electric generating windmill kits,
and one that will work with stream or river power. We could not
find any solar panels for Tim, so those will have to do, or he will
have to wait until we come out again. Bob thinks next spring, but
he says it could be as soon as this fall. We also packed in trees
to plant, saplings of fruit trees, vine cuttings and so much more I
just lost count.

There were many things that we could
not get. A weaving frame, a spinning wheel, both to make new cloth.
We could find neither, but we did find books on constructing them.
We found guitars, banjos and violins, but no acoustic basses, no
flutes. We did find a piano but couldn't figure out how we could
get it on the truck without breaking it all to hell. And where
would we put it?

I think that we have more than we need.
I think we can always come back, like Bob says, when we need
to.

Candace is on watch post, we're both
anxious to end the traveling and get there. She told me tonight
that there's a good chance she might be pregnant. Just about three
weeks overdue, give or take, so she didn't want to get my hopes up.
Well, too late! They're up!

We have had no surprises, except late
in the day when a herd of moose began to follow us. We thought it
would be a problem, but it turned out not to be. They followed
along and ate the Cow Chow falling off the truck. The cows and
horses don't seem to mind them. I don't know how far they'll follow
or what we'll do with them, but they seem to like the Cow
Chow.

I feel bad about Chloe, but grateful
that we got Cindy. The things they did to these girls really
sickened us. I can't be angry at Chloe. We'll never know what
happened her. We found where she called from, from the radio
anyway. She's gone, but there's a body there. Maybe one of the
crazies that we couldn't find? Hard to tell. But It almost has to
be. It even makes sense. She couldn't have carried those bodies
away on her own. He must have been with her, helped her, and then
they had some sort of falling out. He went too far, did something,
said something.

There was blood on the phone, so
whatever he did, she was hurt. And we know she was also shot. Maybe
life will treat her better from here on out.

We're back out in the morning. We're
still on the logging road, well one of several. They weave all over
the place and turn into each other. But this was the one they used.
We're following the tracks of the big tires. With all the mud from
the rain, it's pretty easy to do.

~April 4 - Patty's journal~

It's fairly early morning here. I have
had bad dreams all night long that Ronnie got shot. No matter what
I did, I couldn't shake it. I don't even have Candace here to tell
me it's okay. I'm such a baby sometimes. I'm not a big believer in
dreams, but it seemed so real. I finally decided to get up and not
try to sleep anymore at all.

We spent the entire day getting this
overhang and the cave behind it livable. Whatever had lived in the
cave last liked to eat deer, big deer. It took all the morning to
bring out all the bones and dump them.

There's a pretty big smoke hole that
also allows light in. Yes I said smoke hole, because people have
used this cave before. There are drawings of hands, outlines,
drawings of deer and horses, birds, all over the walls.

This is a huge cave as well. The main
area is bigger than any church or cathedral I have ever seen, and
then there are several dozen caves off this one, and we can't tell
where they may end. The passages just keep going deeper. It's
pretty cold the deeper in that you go as well.

The smoke hole got us wondering what's
up top, so we climbed up to take a look. We thought that would be
hard to do, but there are steps that lead up there, worn down. They
used this place a long time, whoever they were.

Janet says the drawings and paintings
are not like Native American art work that she has seen. Makes us
wonder who they were.

The top is flat, and from there you can
see for miles. I mean, it must be miles. We can see the other line
of the Appalachians were we left them in Kentucky, and although we
did not come in a straight line, we did come a long way. I tried
the radio up there, but it was a no go even as high up as I was.
Even so, I go up there every time now to try it.

The other direction shows us our valley
which is huge. There are more mountains in the distance, several
rivers, lakes, herds of buffalo, horses, and other animals that are
too far away to see what they are. It's a long valley, full of
living things, but no other people. No sign of them.

We don't know how much longer we have
to wait. But what can we do? God help us get our people home to us,
Amen.

~Lillie's journal~

I am hanging in there. We worked hard
all day, and I was still so keyed up that I couldn't
sleep.

We found the cave Janet was sure would
be here. We unloaded the trucks. We thought they were so packed,
but all of that in here just looks empty. That's how big this place
is. Even so, the cave is cleaned out, bones, mice, rats even. I
really don't know how we'll keep them out, but they're out for
now.

We also cleaned off the stone ledge
where it goes down to the valley. We walked it down. It is able to
be walked, so it may be able to be driven, but who knows. We threw
all the rocks and pebbles over the edge.

At the bottom there is a large open
area and a deep pool from where the stream falls from above. It
doesn't really do a waterfall thing. It's more of an angle down the
wall and into the pool at the bottom. It's nice though. Fresh water
so close is a good thing, Janet says. You can see tracks from small
animals where they come to drink.

I think I'll go sit with Patty for a
while and talk. We are both missing everyone so much. God stays
with us.

~Jessica~

She sat up abruptly and the dirt and
mud flew from her. She had only been covered with what had trickled
back down into the hole, or slid down in the form of mud. They
hadn't bothered to re-bury her. Her hands came up and batted at her
face for a moment, catching the rat that had been gnawing there.
One bony hand closed around it, and the rat squealed in pain,
turning and trying to bite her. She brought it to her face, stared
at its beady eyes for a moment.

She squeezed harder, and the rat's eyes
bulged from the sockets. She lunged forward, took the rat's head in
her mouth. It bit at her tongue weakly. The taste of the rat and
its fear flooded through her. She bit down hard, and blood spurted
across her face as she crunched down on the small skull
bones.

~Happy Trails~

They were up early, but the sun was
still well up by the time they fed themselves, loaded the calves
and foals and began to move out once more.

The hardest part was rounding up the
two separate groups of animals and herding them with the Jeep's
towards the logging trail. Once they got them going, it wasn't so
bad. But they had not been interested in leaving the small
clearing.

Candace drove the front Jeep, keeping
slightly ahead, scouting for the trucks. When she came to the
beginning of the reforestation project, she stopped and waited for
the other trucks to catch up. It was close to midday, time to feed
themselves, water and feed the chickens and piglets and let the
calves and foals out to nurse for a while.

Straight lines of trees marched away in
long even rows off into the distance. The logging road naturally
ended at one row, and it seemed to make sense that that was the way
the others had gone. Scouting up that way a few hundred yards, they
found dried mud cast off the tires as they had moved along the pine
needle covered floor of the forest.

“
It's good. It tells us
it's this one. But if they turn off...” Bob said.

They all nodded in agreement. Candace
tried the radio, waited fifteen minutes and tried again. Nothing,
but they had to be getting closer.

They had everything moving again a half
hour later. The afternoon passed by slowly as they moved along
through the tall trees. The cows, as well as the horses, didn't
seem inclined to go wandering off into the trees.

The sun was just beginning to set
behind them when they broke through the end of the trees and rolled
into a long valley. A large herd of buffalo grazed close by, but
the racket of the trucks, and the unfamiliar scents of all the
people and so many other animals, sent them running, herding the
calves as they went, to the other end of the valley.