The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (85 page)

It was not a huge area, but still a
little over two acres that they had planted with corn. Another
field, farther down the valley, held almost four acres of mixed
Wheat and Rye. That harvest would be the harder one.

They snapped the ears of corn from the
stalk, leaving the blighted ears behind, and leaving the stalk
itself standing. They would be back in a few weeks to harvest the
field corn that was planted a few fields down from this field. That
field would come down stalks and all for feed; when it did the
stalks in this field would come down and be mixed right in. A
second and third field would be processed into feed
corn.

Two of the barns had silos. They were
not the huge multistory types that were seen on most farms, but
short and squat, two story ones. They would serve the purpose well
enough though.

There were two mixed grain hay fields
that were already drying out. They would also be feed. Yesterday
most of the people in the nation had gone through those fields,
gathered the standing hay into large bundles, tied it, and then
using a sickle, cut it at the base and left it to dry.

Their own Wheat and Rye fields would be
much harder to process as the seed heads had to be pulled from the
stalks. The best way to do it was to let the stalk run through your
closed fist, pulling off the heads and dropping them into a basket
you carried with you. It was time consuming and best done with a
large group.

They had harvested a smaller crop
earlier in the year, and had planted the second crop in hopes that
there would be time for it to mature. It had, and that had told
them there would be two growing seasons here. A third was not
likely as the mornings and late evenings were already turning
cooler. Fall could not be far away.

Craig came in with Ben on his shoulders
looking sleepy. He laid him down onto the second quilt where some
other children were sleeping.

“
Wore him out, I think.” He
smiled and then walked back out into the field.

At noon the three women were joined by
Janet. Tom, Bob, Craig and David set up two heavy rough-cut-lumber
tables, and the four women served a lunch of cold sliced buffalo
roast on thick slices of sourdough bread.

It was not the first bread they had
made, but it was one of the first batches of bread since they had
gotten the sourdough batch working right. There were so many people
now that they needed to bake bread every day. They kept the working
batches of sourdough stored in the cooler reaches of the cave. It
gave the dough more than enough time to work, usually two days
before it was needed for baking.

Shar had made a batch of mustard using
wild mustard seed, turmeric, dill and some horseradish root. It sat
on the table next to a bowl of thick, fresh butter. There was cold
water, powdered drink mix and hot coffee, as well as fresh milk to
drink.

The mustard, dill and horseradish root
had come from the first experimental herb garden they had planted.
The week before they had transplanted most of the herb plants into
larger containers for the winter. In the spring they would plant
cuttings in a much larger herb garden Bob had plotted out close to
the cave.

The rear recesses of the cave were
already colder. They were still not freezing, but Bob had opinioned
that they probably would be in the next few months and they would
probably stay frozen long into late spring, early summer. They had
shifted most of the vegetables that they did not want to freeze
into rooms closer to the main cave area. It had been a lot of work,
but they would only have to do it once, Janet pointed out. After
this coming winter they would know which rooms froze and which did
not.

They were not at an extreme elevation,
but they were well up into the foothills. The lower ranges of the
mountains were framed against the sky just a few miles away. They
had not done much exploring but they knew there were small fields
in the mountains above them.

There were two fields above their own
small ridge that they had explored. A path ran from the rocky ledge
that fronted their cave, up and around the stubby peak above them,
ending in a long field of mixed grasses and a few stunted pine
trees. A narrow stream wandered the length of that field, falling
down off the back side of their little mountain as it left the
field.

The first field opened into an even
smaller field, enclosed on all sides with high rock walls. That
field was where Bob hoped to summer the Deer, and the Sheep he
hoped that Mike and the others bought back with them. They could
easily winter in the huge steel barns that they had erected from
the kits they had bought in with them like the horses and cows were
going to do.

With lunch finished, the four woman
picked up the remains, and then sat back down to watch the sun
travel slowly across the sky. Patty laughed quietly.

“
What,” Candace
smiled.

“
Well... All this
evolution. Out of the caves, into houses, woman’s rights, and here
we are sitting in a field, having just served lunch to the other
women and men who are doing the field work, and we live in a cave,”
She laughed as she finished.

Janet laughed as she got to her feet.
“And this woman is going back out to work in those fields,” she
said with a smile. She looked down at Patty. “And you are bare foot
and pregnant too.”

Patty, Candace and Lilly burst into
laughter. Patty and Candace clutching their bellies as they
did.

“
I have my sneakers around
here somewhere,” Lilly protested. That set Patty and Candace off
into gales of laughter that followed Janet as she chuckled to
herself, walking back out to the fields.

A few minutes later Lilly dragged out a
huge hardcover book on knitting, and they sat talking quietly back
and forth as they practiced stitches, getting themselves familiar
with the needles, and the method Janet had shown them.

Janet had started them on the huge
supply of synthetic yarn they had bought in with them. In the
coming year they hoped to have wool yarn to work with.

Lilly held up a small, perfectly made
pair of booties.

“
Nice,” Candace told her.
“But those booties wouldn't fit your kids big toe,” she told
her.

Lilly laughed.

Candace laughed as well. “Mine either,
or yours,” she said turning to Patty.

“
Okay, you,” Patty
said.

“
So... How do we make them
bigger?” Candace asked.

“
Add more stitches. I think
that's what Jan said,” Lilly answered. “But doesn't it look good?
Like the real thing?”

“
Absolutely. You got that
part right,” Candace agreed. She held up her own. Slightly larger,
with a few bumpy areas here and there. “Maybe I added one or two
too many,” she sighed.

Patty held hers up. A perfect pair of
booties, but about twice the size of Lilly's.

“
Hey, that's as nice as
Lilly's, only bigger, Pats. Good job. How did you do it though?”
Candace asked.

“
Yeah. What gives,” Lilly
echoed.

“
Thanks,” Patty said. “I
added about twice the stitches, same as Lil said, but I watched as
I did it and it didn't come out to exactly double everywhere. Like
the top part,” she held one of the booties up. “It folds over. That
didn't take only a couple of extra stitches. Let's see...” She told
them exactly what she had changed. They each pulled theirs apart
and began again with the modified pattern.

On The Road

The truck was parked blocking both
lanes of the highway. Mike and Ronnie, driving the lead truck, had
topped the small rise and come to a fast stop.

They had stopped so quickly that the
other trucks behind them had not even topped the rise. Tim and Bear
were in the truck directly behind them, Tim driving. He had seen
the brake lights come on and had reacted just as quickly as Mike
had. Ronnie’s voice came over the radio every bit as
quickly.

“
Stop! Stop!” He called
into the radio.

Grabbing the hand held microphone
instead of the grab bar as Mike stopped the truck, cost him a
broken nose as Mike locked up the brakes. His face slamming into
the padded dashboard.

“
Shit... Goddamn,”
Ronnie yelled as he rebounded off the dashboard.
The big truck was probably a little slow to stop because of the
four by four it was towing behind it. Even so when the truck came
to a stop the tow vehicle was still at the crest of the
hill.

“
Don't come over that
hill,” Ronnie said into the radio. His voice was clogged sounding,
his nose already swollen and bleeding freely. He gingerly touched
his nose as he surveyed the truck ahead in the road. Just the small
touch made him wince. He looked at the blood on his fingers.
“Great,” he grumbled. “Just great.”

Mike glanced over quickly. “Dash?” he
asked. He didn't wait for an answer. “Sorry, Man.” As he spoke he
picked up his machine pistol from the floorboards where it had come
to rest, thumbed off the safety and raised it above the dashboard.
His eyes scanned the road.

Below them, a truck was parked blocking
both lanes of the road. Two other vehicles were parked off to one
side. A half dozen people were off the side of the roadway in the
field that ran beside the highway, gathered around a horse that was
down.

Mike's eyes took in the rest of it: The
skid marks from the truck. The crumpled front end, hood and roof
line. The reddish-black smear on the road. An accident, his mind
supplied.

“
Looks like an accident,”
Ronnie said. His voice was nasally and he was searching the front
of the cab for something to hold against the flow of blood, which
was coming faster now. Mike looked over. “Christ,” he said, “I had
no idea...” He ripped off the bottom of the flannel shirt he wore
and passed it to Ronnie. “Sorry, Ronnie... Really,” he told
him.

“
Ouch... Goddamn,” he said,
as he pressed the rag tight enough to his nose to stop the
flow.

“
Tilt your head back,” Mike
told him.

“
What's Going on?” Bears
deep, bass voice over the radio.

“
We don’t know yet. It
looks like an accident,” Mike told him as he took the radio mic.
from Ronnie. “It looks like a truck hit a horse.”

Three from the crowd around the horse,
two women and a man, turned away as Mike watched and began to walk
back out to the highway. Another woman, one of the three still
surrounding the horse, pulled her pistol from a side holster,
thumbed off the safety, Mike knew, although she was too far away to
actually see it, the motion told him that was what she had done:
She aimed the pistol and shot the horse in the head. The horse's
head jerked, but that was all. She turned and looked at the truck
where Mike and Ronnie sat. A small woman, dark skinned. Blood ran
down the side of her face from a cut above one eyebrow.

The three who had come back onto the
highway stood staring at the truck as Mike turned his eyes back to
the roadway.

“
That was a gunshot...
Speak to me,” Bears voice said calmly.

“
Yes,” Mike agreed. “They
shot the horse they hit... Stay where you're at... I really don't
know what's going on over here.”

One of the women that had stepped out
onto the highway called out.

“
We hit that horse...
You're freaking me out just a little, sitting there and not saying
anything... There are more of us than you, if we wanted to hurt you
we could. We obviously don't have any intentions like that.” Her
pistol was out of her holster and she was holding it to one side,
Mike noticed.

The woman back with the horses had not
put her pistol away. The other two on the road were holding
rifles.

“
Hunting rifles,” Ronnie
said as he tilted his head a little more forward to see better.
Mike nodded. The other two by the horse were not holding weapons at
all. They were both older... A man and a woman.

Mike looked at Ronnie. “What do you
think?”

“
Un-break my frigging nose,
is what I think.” He looked out the windshield. “I say, just to be
safe... Let them know we're not alone,” he said after a long pause.
He met Mike's eyes. Mike nodded.

“
Bear... Tim, everybody
else get behind Bear... Get your machine pistols, if you haven't
already, and walk to the top of the hill. Keep them pointed at the
ground, but be ready... We'll be waiting on you,” Mike told
them.

They knew without looking when the
others had crested the hill. The machine pistols were nasty looking
weapons. Compared to the simple hunting rifles that this group
carried, that alone would probably have been enough to shake them,
but Mike was sure that just the size of Bear silhouetted against
the sky at the top of the small hill added its own edge to the mix.
Now they knew that they were not alone, that they did not outnumber
them. Mike and Ronnie levered their door handles and stepped out
onto the roadway. “Got your back,” Bear said in his deep bass
rumble from behind them.

Mike turned to the people in front of
him. “We're not looking for trouble,” he told them.