The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (79 page)

They both still looked sick, but they
both nodded.

“
Where,” Debbie
asked.

“
Where what?”

“
Where is it sane,”
She asked. Her face was serious. She leaned
forward to listen. Hope in her eyes.

Mike told her. The others joined into
the conversation as it went on. Several more from her party were
listening raptly by the time Mike was done.

Then Debbie told her story. It turned
out that what they had taken as one group was not. They were three
separate groups. The four in Debbie's group had come across from
the East Coast. They had stopped in a small town in Pennsylvania
and there they had met the other two trucks.

The last truck in line was driven by a
man named Brad. He had come down the coast from Vermont. A little
town by Lake Champlain. The young girl in his group was his sister
Alice. Darren John and George Dell rounded out their group. They
had picked both of them up along the way.

The other woman with Debbie was Lisa
Stevens, who looked like she had just stepped out of some high
fashion magazine. She had that super model look. She told them she
used to be a dancer. The other two were Joe Stevens, her brother,
and his friend Stephen Choi.

The other truck, the second in line,
held some military types that Mike just couldn't warm up to. It
wasn’t him only. Ronnie and Bear both seemed to keep them at arms
length. It was when Debbie also seemed to keep them at arms length
that he realized they were all not one group at all.

The five of them simply introduced
themselves by their last names: Rodriguez, Melendez, and Roberts
were the three men, although Mike could not have told which was
which. They all wore the same mirrored sunglasses, Khaki fatigues
and carried military issue weapons. The two women were Smith and
Patrick. None of them had name-tags, ranks or stripes, or whatever
the hell it was he would have expected they would have had, had
they come from some real military group. Five months was a long
time to hold a group like that together if they were indeed regular
Army, Mike thought.

They didn't actually worry him. He
didn't sense a threat from them. They simply had this air of
superiority. They were aloof and held themselves apart, and they
made it clear they were headed for the other coast.

“
Only place to live, Man,”
Rodriguez, Melendez or Roberts had said. “The chicks, the surf...
The weather.” He smiled, but it was hard to tell if it touched the
eyes behind the glasses.

“
But it would all be gone,”
Chloe tried.

“
Just leaves more of what
is left for us. Know what I mean, Girl,” the guy had
said.

“
Yeah,” one of the others
echoed.

Debbie stared down at the ground, when
her head came up she exchanged a meaningful look with
Mike.

Chloe ignored them after that. She said
nothing at all, but Mike had seen her face when the guy had called
her girl That was one no vote if they had wanted to join. They
didn't, and Mike was glad they didn't. He didn't want them and he
was positive that Bear, Ronnie and Josh felt the same way. Tim had
said nothing. But Mike was sure it was on his mind and he would
hear about it later. Or Ronnie would. It didn't appear that Debbie
wanted them either. Possibly she had only tolerated them. Mike
didn't want them to corrupt what they had.

He thought about it and
realized the thought was true. What they had
was
special. He didn't want these
people in it. These five. One bad apple
could
spoil the bunch. An old
analogy; his aunt Ellie would have been surprised he had used it,
but he had heard it from her all of his life. It had sunk in. One
Bad apple... It only took one. And what they had was too good to
risk. The others? Yes, if they wanted to come, but not these five.
As he let his eyes travel from person to person he was positive no
one else did either.

It was a good thing, he told himself,
that they had not been in the lead vehicle with their military get
ups and smarmy attitude, he told himself. He put them out of his
mind and listened as Debbie told her story.

Debbie and her party had come up from
the city, New York, and cut across the state. The city was a
horror, she said. The gangs ran everything that was left. But the
dead were picking away at them. The dead were one of the few groups
that were thriving in New York. Most of Manhattan was destroyed,
more than half of Long Island was submerged. There was a quasi
group of ex-cop types who had tried to retain control of what was
left of Manhattan, but they had ended up caught between two rival
gangs and slaughtered. Harlem was barricaded, gang controlled
maybe, or something else, there was just no way in to be able to
know.

“
The city is dead,” she
told them. “You can smell it from miles away. I'm not kidding. No
power. No water. Rats everywhere. We got out after two weeks. There
were six of us, but we ran into a group of three guys riding bikes
just east of Trenton. Something about them just gave me the
creeps.”

“
As soon as we relaxed they
made their move. It was me, Lisa and Lani they wanted. But not all
of us had let our guards down.” She took a breath, blew at her
coffee and then sipped at it...

“
They just shot Kevin. Lani
tried to grab one of their guns. The rest of us just opened up on
them. Lani died right away. She was just a kid too, you know? Kevin
hung on for two days. Not a goddamn thing we could do for him,” she
hung her head and shook it. She looked back up and stared off
across the lots of parked cars and trucks.

“
Lani came right back. We
had known about the dead, the zombies. And we knew dead were coming
back. I remember watching a man that had lain dead in the street
for three hours come back. Another guy shot him. He was dead. Three
hours later he got up and walked away.”

“
So we knew it happened,
but Lani came back so fast that I thought for a few moments that
she hadn't died... I tried to lie to myself, and she almost got
me.” Her eyes moved back to Mike's own and then away again. Her
eyes were over bright when she finished. But she seemed strong.
Filled with resolve. Mike liked her, she reminded him of Candace.
The same kind of straight forward honesty... Real, he decided. Zero
bullshit. All real.

“
So,” Debbie finished. “I,”
she looked around. “I am ready for sane.”

Bear cleared his throat and Debbie
turned toward him. “I came from the City myself,” he said. It was
more information than Mike had had about Bear. He was not
talkative. “Harlem had power when I left... Gangs did take it
over... Sealed it... We came from the projects.... Stayed awhile
in... Well, it doesn't matter. I saw it... Central Park was a
horror show when we left, but Harlem was still kicking.”

“
Somebody told me that...
Saw a glow in the sky but we didn't go up that far. It was so bad
we just concentrated on getting out,” Debbie said.

Bear nodded, but stayed
silent.

It was over that quickly. The five
commandos, as Mike had come to think of them, begged off right
after breakfast. They just got in their truck and left. The other
two groups stayed and they were seventeen.

“
Not for nothing,” Debbie
said after the others had left. “But those are the kind of people
you should be wary of... I didn't like being around them. I'd catch
Melendez, or maybe it was Roberts, who can tell, looking at Lisa...
It was just a bad look, you know? I mean, I know she's a looker,
used to be an exotic dancer, men are gonna look ,but this was
different. It wasn't that kind of look, you know?”

Chloe who was sitting next to Mike as
Debbie spoke said, “I know exactly what you mean... Several of us
do... Like real creeps, and I've seen where it goes from there.
Believe me. No man is going to do that to me again,” Chloe
said.

They small-talked back and forth for a
few more minutes over coffee and Mike filled them in on what their
plans were. The morning moved on and they got back to what they had
started to do. The reason they had come there in the first
place.

They decided to take two more of the
electric four wheel drive vehicles since they would have two more
trucks to pull them. They also decided that, although it was
probably overkill, they would go back up the highway together, get
the tow bars and then come back and get the six electric four by
fours ready to go. There had simply been too many bad things going
on. There was no reason to get lax now, and every reason to stay
cautious. They had all agreed.

They were back at mid-morning with the
six tow bars they had wanted, and an hour after that they were on
the road heading back across the state toward what had once been
Kentucky, and the flock of Sheep Josh had seen about sixty miles
past the campgrounds.

They stopped in the late afternoon.
Ronnie had a good sight on a doe calmly feeding in an overgrown
garden off the side of the road. He squeezed off his shot and the
deer dropped. The garden provided the rest of the meal.

They made dinner and then posted a
guard. Those who weren’t on guard duty sat and talked quietly,
getting to know each other as the evening came down.

The Nation

Two men and two women, but what they
had taken to be an overly large pack on the one man's back turned
out to be a woman he was carrying on his back.

They had stopped at the bridge by the
bend and waited for the fourth member to catch up. That was when
they had seen it was a woman he carried on his back.

The man was huge, muscular, but even so
it was easy to see that he was exhausted. They continued past the
houses. The houses, Candace supposed, were hidden in deep shadow,
they may not have seen them, but they had to have seen the barns,
and she wondered what they had made of them. She had watched them
walk right past them though, as if they hadn't seen them at all,
Candace thought.

“
Doesn't make sense,” Patty
said.

The four walked on, their eyes on the
ground. As they got closer Candace could see that they were
stumbling, the big man looked up his lips moving as he walked
along. They made it to the bottom of the ledge that came up to the
ridge. The sun was bright fire in the sky, directly in their eyes.
The big man stumbled and went down on one knee. The woman, who was
not much more than skin and bones, slid off his back and on to the
ground. She released her hands from around his neck. The big man
leaned back, kicked his other leg out and collapsed back against
the rock wall.

The three people in front, the two
women and the man stared at the other man for a moment then slumped
down to the ground themselves. One of the women walked to the pool,
knelt carefully, and drank deeply. She spun the cap off a military
style canteen and began to fill it in the pool.

Lilly spoke, breaking the silence and
the spell the five strangers held over them.

“
They look half starved to
death,” she said.

The woman at the pool looked up at the
sound of the voice above her. The sunset painting her face a deep
fiery red.

“
Let me get Sandy and
Susan,” Candace said. But before she got to the entrance way Sandy
was poking her head around the corner, a question in her eyes.
Janet had already started down the sloping ledge, Sandy and Susan
were only seconds behind her.

~

The heard the story over a fire in the
main cave area, heating soup, which Sandy thought was all they
would be able to handle.

“
Go easy on the water too.
Their stomachs have shrunk... They need what room there is there
for nourishment along with the liquid intake,” Sandy
said.

The big mans name was Craig. He had
come around after a couple of cups of the rich broth and told them
their story.

They had come up country from
Louisiana, crossed Mississippi and then trekked into Tennessee.
From there they had headed into the wilderness.

They had come on horseback into the
mountains, but they had planned poorly. Carl, the man that had been
leading them had been dead for over three weeks now.

It had been Carl's idea to settle in
the mountains to the south, and he had taken them up and up,
further and further into the mountains, but nothing had met with
his approval, finally there had been a show down. Of the thirty of
them who had come, six banded together to overthrow Carl who was
controlling, and in their opinion, hoarding the food.

They had ambushed Carl, shot him and
thrown him off a cliff. Then they had found out the truth. The
wagons Carl had guarded were nearly empty. There was no food. There
was very little ammunition as well. The group had taken to fighting
among themselves. Craig and the other four had escaped the fighting
only to find themselves coming down out of a high mountain pass
with very little to their name. They had never seen any of the
others again.

They had shot a deer two weeks before,
a duck five days after that, and then they had run out of
ammunition for the two rifles they had between them. They had
subsisted on water since then, and some venison Craig had managed
to smoke in the first few days. Three days before, the last of the
venison had gone and they had been reduced to only water. Sissy,
the one he had been carrying, had gone first. Her legs had just
given out, sometime yesterday, or maybe the day before.