The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (77 page)

They had expected to see other zombies.
Believed that they had come in the night and dragged the biker off,
but there were no other zombies. Just the Biker who had turned
sometime after he died, come back, and tried to drag himself to
safety.

They had heard the noises in the
stillness long before they had come upon him. The rough dragging
sound popped out of the silence and Bear had raised one hand for
them to stop. They had come up on him slowly then, on either side,
safeties off. Bear had circled around to the front.

One leg still worked, the other dragged
uselessly behind him. But the leg was out of sync with the rest of
his body. It kicked and stuttered, scuffing against the pine
needles that covered the floor of the forest.

One arm was gone, possibly back at the
still smoking SUV, the other, not much more than bones and shredded
flesh clutched at the ground to pull him forward. Bear lowered his
pistol and blew his head off. The body jumped, then became still.
The silence returned even thicker than it had been.

“
That's it then,” Ronnie
asked.

Bear nodded.

“
It doesn't seem enough,”
Mike said as he studied the body of the biker.

Bear nodded. “It isn't... But it's what
we have... You can't fight the evil... It's gone now.” He toed one
shoulder of the biker's body with a heavy work boot, rocking the
body as he did. He looked up at Mike.

Mike raised his eyes from the body and
caught Bear's eyes. He nodded and they turned and walked back off
through the forest.

No one had felt much like loading the
other truck with what they had come for, but they had done it
anyway. By Late afternoon they had been ready to leave. Chloe and
Bear had wandered over to the steep sided ravine after the children
had been loaded into the truck. Mike stood with Ronnie, looking
down into the pit. The zombies wandered back and forth, nearly
silent. Some making strange noises as they went. A few stood and
stared back up at them. Tim wandered over.

“
Tim... Tell Josh to go
ahead, we'll catch up with him in a few miles,” Mike told him. Tim
looked from Mike down into the pit and back.

“
Gonna waste them,” Tim
asked.

Mike met his eyes, but didn't speak. He
simply nodded. Tim looked back at the pit and then turned away,. A
few seconds later three of the trucks started and left the parking
lot. Bear left and came back a few minutes later with two five
gallon cans of diesel fuel. He had one of the pumps they used to
siphon fuel with him. He pinched off the end, folded the plastic
loosely against itself and ran a small piece of duct tape around it
to hold it. The result was a very narrow opening for the fuel to
escape from . Ronnie slung his own pistol on his shoulder, walked
over and began to pump the handle as Bear turned and began to spray
the diesel fuel out over the ravine and the zombies. Several
zombies fled to the other side of the pit, their eyes wide and
frightened.

If they ran, Chloe and Mike cut them
down. It was over in just a few minutes. One or two still moved and
Bear, who was the better shot, took them out one by one as Chloe
took over spraying the fuel and Mike pumped.

When Bear finished the last one he left
and came back with a glass jar of gasoline. He had fashioned a hole
in the top of the metal lid with his knife. A rag hung from the
hole, already wicking the gasoline out of the jar. Chloe pulled the
pump from the nearly empty Diesel can and Mike tossed it into the
pit. It tumbled end over end, spraying fuel as it went, crashing to
the ground. Bear pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit the rag.
He cocked his arm and launched the jar into the sky.

The jar arced up into the overcast
afternoon sky and then plunged down into the pit. A second later
the entire pit bloomed into flame, and they found themselves
rushing backwards quickly, away from the heat.

They stood as a group and watched the
burning for a few seconds and then turned away in mass. They left a
few minutes later with a slow, cold rain falling from the gray
afternoon sky.

They had driven through they night as
if death had been chasing them too, and found the auto plant that
they had wanted shortly after dawn.

Chloe had seemed to get a quicker
handle on her grief and moved past it. Maybe dealing with the two
youngest children and keeping them from dwelling on what had
happened had pulled her back from it also, Bear had thought to
himself. He has seen different people deal with it in different
ways. Not always the way you thought they might.

Ronnie and Mike seemed to be taking it
the hardest. Ronnie because Molly had bitten him and caused him to
let her go when he had reacted in pain. Mike because he had
understood in the last seconds what it was she intended to do and
he had been unable to stop her. Her eyes had rested on his for that
briefest of seconds and spoken to him. Transmitted her absolute
despair. She had said goodbye with that look, and there had been no
apology in it. Bear sat and listened to both of them as they spoke
quietly after they had stopped in the early morning light. Letting
them speak it out, rid themselves of the guilt and poison. It had
seemed to help a little. Time would tell though.

Tim, Richard and Josh were also at a
loss. With Tim it may have been harder because he had known her,
but it seemed equally harder for Richard and Josh because they
hadn't. It had happened so fast and it had been so brutal. Not
knowing her well just drove home the fact that it could have been
anyone, at anytime.

The miles rolling by during the night
had taken the immediacy of the pain from them. Of all of them, only
Mike, Ronnie and Bear had seen what Molly had done. The others had
thought that another shot had taken her. But the truth was not
something that could be hidden that easily, and it was not
something they intended to hide in any case.

Chloe had come to Mike and spoken of
it, cried it out as they had waited through the night. She had told
him that she had come close to doing it herself a few months
before. She had put the barrel in her mouth, tasted the metallic,
oily, biting taste. Felt her tongue contract and pull away from it.
She had been unable to do it. She had broken down instead. Cried it
out, and the danger had passed. Mike had held her as she worked
through her tears. After that she had gone back to the children and
seemed to have been able to put it away from her. Mike wished he
could do the same. Even talking to Ronnie and Bear had not
helped.

Killing the zombies in the pit had
seemed to help. It had quieted something inside of him, but he
wondered what that said about him. Maybe Chloe was the only one who
had handled it correctly, she had cried it out and then went on.
The rest of them, he suspected, had stuffed it down inside where it
would come back some day to haunt them. Mike was certain of that.
It had happened that way with him too many times. It was just a
matter of when and how it came back.

The big man, Bear, was a different kind
of man. He seemed to operate on some other level. Mike liked him,
but he had the feeling that it was a rare event for Bear to let
anyone in too close. He had hoped that Bear would share some of his
past with them. Help them to understand what the world had become.
But Bear's answer seemed to be that it was self evident and
required no explanation at all.

They sat now in the falling rain in
front of acres and acres of cars and trucks. The plant itself
seemed largely untouched. It was surrounded by parking lots that
spread out in every direction. At some point there had been a fire
in the east and several cars parked in a lot in that direction had
exploded and burned. They were long dead fires now though; Just
blackened, already rusting hulks in the steady rain.

They were all tired but they cruised
from lot to lot with two of the jeeps looking for what they wanted.
They found it an hour later: Pulled the vehicles together, eying
the plant itself warily, and made a breakfast, mainly for the
children. The rest of them had been subsisting on power bars, nuts,
the travel cakes and smoked meat that Janet had packed.

“
Four is all we can do,”
Mike said, “and we'll have to leave the Jeeps and the last pickup
behind.” They had left one pickup behind already. “We'll pick the
best four.” He had had Tim look them over. “These are not dual
fueled so we'll have to charge them. We can do that with the
converter from the big truck, then we can drive them back... I
can't see any other way,” Mike finished. He sipped at his coffee,
blowing the steam into his eyes.

“
We could use tow bars,”
Tim said. “I saw a man who lived in my building do that a few
times. He raced a car. He towed it to the track every weekend
behind his truck. Set the wheels straight. Locked the ignition.
Disconnected the drive shaft and that was that,” he
finished.

A small smile touched Mike's face.
“That was helpful,Tim.”

Bear nodded. “We passed a place back
down the road a few miles where we can get what we
need.”

Mike nodded. “Well... Sleep or get this
done... I know I've been driving hard... I guess I don't want us to
just sit and think.. I just want to finish it and head
back.”

“
No different for the rest
of us,” Bear said quietly.

Mike nodded. “I can't take it out on
you guys. I'm sorry.”

“
I don't feel any
different... Worse for you folks... You knew them. As for the
world, well, the blinders are off... Even for me. And I've been
living right in it.” He finished so quietly that he may have been
talking to himself, Mike thought.

“
I say let's get it done,”
Ronnie said.

Bear nodded.

Chloe who had come over closer to
listen nodded as well. “Let's get it done... Sleep tonight and then
head back tomorrow... I don't ever want to come back out here
again,” She said.

“
Sleep would be good,” Josh
agreed.

“
Mike nodded. “Okay,” he
said slowly.

“
We'll never get all the
way better if we keep coming back out here,” Tim said.

“
Fuck,” Bear said. He
lunged to his feet and started toward Chloe. She had glanced off
across the parking lot and then turned quickly back and locked eyes
with Bear. She turned away and Bear followed her eyes to the
highway beyond the parking lot.
“Mike...
Ronnie... Two trucks... Three trucks... They saw us,”
Bear called tightly.

Everyone was instantly on their feet
and facing the highway a good distance away where the trucks were
emerging from a screening growth of trees and turning down into the
parking lot.

The Nation

Toward the end of the third day when
the lines were once again packed, they turned to one of the small
streams that fed the lake and got out the netting.

Arlene and David on one side, Sharon
and Bob on the other. They started a few hundred feet out into the
lake where it was still shallow and walked up to the stream where
it flowed into the lake. By the time they reached the creek they
were bunched closer together and the netting was full and hard to
pull. Tom and Cindy jumped in and helped to pull the overflowing
netting up onto the grassy bank. Together they dragged it further
up the bank, away from the water.

Hundreds of crabs, an equal number of
fish, several dozen crayfish, and dozens of small mollusks. The
fish went back, except for a few large ones. The Crayfish, mollusks
and crabs went into several plastic coolers that were not yet
packed with fish. With some fresh water from the lake they would
keep for a few days.

“
I have never had a
crayfish or a mollusk,” Cindy said. She looked doubtful about ever
trying one either, Bob thought. He laughed.

“
You'll like them... Ever
had Squid? Octopus? Part of the family... I'll get this wrong. My
brain is not a book like Jan seems to think... But I think it goes
like this, they are part of the same species... So are Snails,
slugs... Those are Gastropods, the Octopus and Squid are
Cephalopods... Same family. People think they only live in the
oceans but there are fresh water Mollusks too. Cooked and then
dipped in a little butter? Believe me, you will never again look
doubtful about eating them. Crayfish? I have not had them in years.
People think they don't inhabit northern climates but they are
wrong. They are nowhere near as big as their southern cousins are
but they are there and they are so good.” He smiled. Cindy still
looked doubtful. Bob laughed again.

“
No,” Arlene said. “You
really will like them. A crayfish is nothing more than a Crawdad...
Oysters? Clams? Mollusks too, sometimes called muscles.” She made a
muscle with one arm.

“
Nope. Never had them,”
Cindy said.

“
Oh, Honey. You have been
sheltered,” Arlene said and laughed. “But, you're gonna love these.
And we have so much we can take some back for the others too. Come
on, Cindy. Let me show you how we do these.”

While the fish smoked, Arlene, Bob and
Cindy worked on the crayfish and mollusks. The crabs were simpler.
A large pot was already set upon rocks over the fire, waiting to
come to a boil.