The Dead Road: The Complete Collection

by Paine, Robert

  I turned and started to walk down the path. "Hey, Alex man?" Eli was standing up in the front seat, leaning on the top of the windshield frame. I looked back up towards him. "Uh, if that mob catches up to us... I mean, if we see them coming through the woods, we're in a bad spot here. I'm going to turn us around where I can, and at the first sign of being boxed in, we gotta light out."

  I nodded. "Worst case I'll make my way back to Stapleton's. If you guys have to run, head there. Just beep the horn a couple of times. Maybe I'll hear it, know you're gone."

  Eli nodded back and sat back down. Another pointless contingency. If I got cut off from them, the odds that I'd ever see them again were remote. We were a long way from Stapleton's now, and that horde was somewhere in between here and there. If I could make it there on foot without being overrun by corpses, shot by rednecks or just not get lost in the Vermont hills it would be nothing short of miraculous. It didn't matter how realistic it was, because it was still a plan. It was something to cling to in case everything went sideways.

  Traversing the trail on foot was almost easier than driving it. I didn't have to worry about narrow passes between trees or bouncing over outcropping rocks, and the ground, while steadily up hill, was solid and steady beneath my feet. Knowing that if the mob followed us, they would have to go through Eli and Roger first was also a comfort. They were my early warning system.

  I had contemplated asking one of them to join me, but it just didn't seem prudent. If I left Roger alone he might just take off and leave us. He wasn't the kind of guy to stand on sentiment, and he already proved once that when the chips are down he's looking out for himself. When he got to the parking lot of the campgrounds first he took off. He waited not too far away, but something tells me if that group of dead things followed him he would have just kept going.

  Eli, on the other hand, was on the verge of cracking entirely. I was worried he'd either succumb to the stress and just fall asleep sitting there, or go off on some rampage trying to take as many of them down as he could, forgetting about the Jeep full of supplies. Eli was great to have at your back, but he was proving to be a bit uncertain in a crisis.

  Leaving them there together kept them both in check. With any luck they'd mend whatever rift was opening between them and make for a much more peaceful rest of our lives. I paused as I let that thought sink in. These two guys may be the only people I see for the rest of my life. That's why I was so desperate to get Amy back. She liked us. She was going to be part of the team with us. She was someone we could talk to, someone we could enjoy getting to know for a while. I couldn't help but think that by surviving somehow we'd failed all of our friends and loved ones that didn't make it. It was now our burden to make sure we didn't fail anyone else.

  I could see the end of the trail up ahead, marked by another wooden post, the rounded ends of two guardrails visible to either side of the path. I paused to empty my bladder against a tree before heading up, making sure I didn't have any unwanted distractions while I was looking around. I kept low as I approached the road, crouching as I walked, my rifle at a ready position. If there was someone keeping guard I had to make sure I was ready to handle it.

  My line of vision reached the level of the road. I peered back and forth carefully, trying to keep to the shadows of the trees. Nothing. The road looked as abandoned as all the rest. I could see a few houses through the foliage, a shock of white siding here, a red wall there, the eaves of a roof peeking up over the treetops. I lay down in the dirt behind one of the posts of the guardrail and brought the binoculars up.

  From behind me I heard a groan. I froze. I held my breath. Was it getting closer? My hands shook. The rifle was lying in front of me. If it was closing in, I had to decide fast if I was going to turn and fire. Wait too long and it would be on me. Turn too early and possibly attract attention I could avoid. It groaned again. It wasn't closer, but had moved laterally. It was off to my left before. Now it was more directly behind me. I slowly turned, trying not to make a sound as I shifted.

  I could see it, stumbling its way through the underbrush. It was a woman, probably in her forties, wearing a pair of jeans and a bloodstained T-shirt. Her long hair was tangled and snarled, hanging off of her scalp like a Halloween wig. Her mouth hung open, her jaw at an unnatural angle, tongue lolling out, black and shriveled. My stomach churned. I was disgusted, and it was all I could do to keep from vomiting. I slowly reached back and grabbed the rifle.

  She staggered perpendicular to the path, but its moaning and hissing noises told me it was on the trail of something. In all of the encounters with these things they only made noise when they were on the hunt. Usually they just stood, silent, or milled about as if they were lost and confused. I brought the rifle up to my shoulder and clicked the safety off with my thumb.

  She crossed the trail, then stopped, just on the far side of it. She turned around, head held high, scenting the air. Her dead eyes swept over me. I didn't move; I gave no indication I was a living thing at all. I felt a trickle of sweat roll down my spine. She turned to face the tree again. She groaned loudly, letting out a frustrated sound, pawing at the tree with her ragged fingertips. I watched as she turned in a circle. Her trail clearly led her to that spot, and somehow she didn't catch my scent even though I was less than a hundred feet away.

  Then I recognized where she was. That was where I stopped to urinate. The scent from the puddle of urine had attracted her, and now it was strong enough that it confounded her. She knew there was something alive nearby, something that had left this marker for her to find, but it was gone, lost to her senses. I lowered the rifle and got to my feet. One of my boots shuffled against the dirt. She paused, but not for very long, resuming her search for the source of the scent.

  I took a careful step forward, then another. Step by agonizing step I crossed the distance between us, laying each foot down with utmost care, trying not to make any noise. I hefted the hatchet in my right hand. I kept my eyes glued to the woman, watching for any sign that she heard me coming, or that I was suddenly more interesting than a urine-soaked tree. I got within an arm's reach before she turned to face me, a curious hiss escaping her wide-open mouth. I brought the hatchet down right on the middle of her forehead. She let out a quiet shriek and collapsed in a twitching heap. I put my foot on her head as I pulled the blade free. Her skull cracked with a satisfying crunch, spilling black, rotten brain matter in a sticky mass. So they could smell urine better than they smelled sweat, or engine exhaust. They knew it meant someone alive, someone that could be food. I wiped the hatchet off on her t-shirt and climbed back up the hill.

  The houses in sight all looked empty. I looked from yard to yard, looking in windows, trying to catch some semblance of life. Nothing moved. Some of the windows were broken or cracked, a good indication that whoever once lived there had either struggled to keep something out or the windows were now holding them in. There was no evidence of anyone at all, let alone an armed group. But off to the left, above the trees, I could make out a faint wisp of white smoke.

  The road sloped uphill in that direction, so I began making my way up, keeping off of the road, sticking to the trees, wanting to keep myself out of sight as much as possible. I stepped carefully, trying not to let the fallen leaves crunch under my feet as I moved, keeping my eyes open for the source of the smoke.

  I walked along the curved road until something came in to view that made me duck down behind the guardrail. Further ahead, blocking the road, a pair of SUV's, parked nose to nose. Two men sat on the hoods, one holding a shotgun, the other twirling a Frisbee on one outstretched finger. They looked to be in their twenties, wearing shorts and heavy boots, their t-shirts dirty with road dust. I scowled as I lifted the binoculars to get sight of their faces. I didn't know them, but a part of me was sure they were two of the men in the back of the white truck. They had a rugged, country look to them, the kind of men that probably spent most of their youth in these woods, hunting, fishing, or whatever other outdoor spor
ts caught their fancy. They probably skied in the winter and hiked all summer. This collapse of civilization was probably something these guys dreamed about, able to live as lawlessly and as viciously as they wanted.

  I stewed as I watched them, a white-hot rage boiling up in my stomach. Part of me wanted to put my rifle to my shoulder and pick them off, one at a time, like an army sniper. My hands tightened on the binoculars as I watched them. They were so casual, laughing and talking, kicking their heels against the front tires of the SUVs, all the while they had Amy locked in some bedroom or in their basement. I could imagine her, screaming for help, while these animals played catch on the front lawn. I lowered the binoculars and scooted down the hill, making my way back to the Jeep.

  *****

  I came down the hill, half jogging, half limping, my toes curling in the boots to try to keep my foot from sliding back and forth. Eli had turned the Jeep around, facing back down the trail rather than the impassable spot, and Roger was sitting in the back, shotgun in his lap, facing the way I had gone. He waved to me as I came down the hill, then tapped Eli on the shoulder to start the Jeep. They both looked relieved as I approached. I grinned. "Happy to see me?"

  Roger stood up in the back, "Hell yes. Eli here was ready to write you off as zombie food. My money was on 'Redneck Prisoner.'"

  I climbed up into the Jeep. "Don't joke about redneck prisoners. Amy's still up there."

  Eli put the Jeep in gear and started the slow descent down the trail with Roger and I in the back. "So did you find anything, man?"

  "A few things. First, yeah, they're up there. They have the street blocked by a pair of SUVs with two guys on guard duty. Behind them, I'd guess a house or two up the road, I saw smoke rising above the trees. It was just a thin line of it, burning white. That says fireplace to me, or maybe a wood stove or a cooking fire. Either way, that's got to be the Birch Street survivor's fortress."

  Roger nodded in agreement, "Two guys to watch for walking corpses, with some way to signal up to the house, or maybe a spot to fall back to."

  "That's what I was thinking. They have the SUVs there as a makeshift barricade, and probably something more substantive at the house. The street is situated on a hill. The left side is all downward slope, down to where we are now, while the right is all sloped upward. Good vantage to keep eyes on the most likely approach."

  Eli looked at me in the rear-view mirror. "What else, man? You said first."

  "Oh, right. The corpses are attracted to the smell of urine."

  Eli smirked. Roger blinked and shook his head, a smile on his face. "Do I even want to know how you figured out this tidbit?"

  I chuckled. The words didn't sound ridiculous in my head, but once I said them I could see why the other two were amused. "I was heading up the hill and I had to take a piss, so I pulled up to a tree and watered it. I'm up at the top of the hill a little while when I hear one of them coming my way, groaning like they do when they are chasing prey, but she, I mean, it, didn't come for me. It went right to the tree I watered, and kept wandering around it, looking for whatever made the mess. I was able to walk right up to it and bury my axe in its head and it barely noticed I was coming."

  Roger drummed his fingers on the shotgun while he thought. "That kind of supports the theory that they hunt by scent. Also explains how so many of them converged on our campsite in the dark."

  "It also means that stronger scents throw them off if they associate them with food. So I bet places like supermarkets, full of rotting meat once the power goes out, are going to be swarming with these things, while the remote areas will empty out."

  Eli nodded emphatically, "Makes the winter cabin plan look awesome right about now. And we should stock up on even more before things get really crazy out there."

  I smirked. "You mean they're not really crazy already? But seriously, we get Amy, we get out into the woods, we don't look back until spring."

  The Jeep bumped along the trail and onto the road once again. In the distance we could hear the moaning and hissing of a crowd of walking corpses coming our way, still lured by the scent of three men sweating in an open-top Jeep. Roger looked at me out of the corner of his eye. "I still don't hear a plan to rescue Amy."

  I smiled to myself. "I have one." I peered down the hill through the binoculars, catching sight of the first stragglers of the group. I smiled a little wider. "And it involves them. Eli, drive down their way, but once you get within a hundred yards turn around and drive off again. Let's give them a fresh dose of our scent."

  Eli turned the Jeep around, heading slowly down the hill towards the oncoming crowd. "You sure, man?"

  "Positive."

  As we got closer we could see a renewed vigor enter the corpses at the front of the pack. Their moans got louder, their arms rose, outstretched towards us, their eyes widening, their mouths hanging open. Eli stopped the Jeep, watching them. I put my hand on his shoulder. "OK brother, sit tight, let them come towards us. Once they get close back away, turn us around, and head back towards 67." He nodded, his hands tight on the steering wheel, knuckles going white as he clenched his fists. "Roger, grab one of the gallon jugs of water and start drinking."

  Roger raised an eyebrow. "You intend to lure them with our piss, don't you?"

  I grinned. "Drink up."

  *****

  Eli let one of them touch the hood of the Jeep before he shot us backwards, pulling a tight bootlegger turn on the open road. I watched the monsters howl in frustration as we left them behind, their primitive brains only registering that we were so close an instant ago, but now far out of reach once again. Their steps, while still awkward and shambling, seemed quicker, their desire to pursue reawakened by the near miss. I pulled out the map, re-examining the contours of the hills around Birch Street, tracing my fingers over the lines that represented roads, rivers, and altitude changes.

  The Jeep skidded to a halt at the intersection, Route 67 stretching to either side. "Where to now, man?"

  I looked up from the map, then back and forth. "Left. We're looking for Howe Street. Should be on the left."

  Roger lowered the water jug with a loud exhale. "I don't think I can drink any more right now."

  I nodded, tucking the map away and taking the jug from him. "I know we're dehydrated as hell, so give it a bit." I then started to drink, tipping the jug back to let the lukewarm liquid pour down my throat. The water had a vaguely plastic aftertaste, and was a bit stale, but somehow was the best water I'd ever tasted. I drank deeply, timing my swallows so that a steady stream poured down my throat and into my stomach. I didn't realize how thirsty I was until I swallowed down that first mouthful.

  I lowered the jug when I ran out of breath, taking a loud gulp of air and exhaling with a satisfied grunt. "Holy shit that's good. Eli, pull over and drink your fill."

  Eli ran his tongue over his cracked lips and nodded, pulling over almost immediately so that he could have his chance at the water. I handed him the jug and let him chug as much as he wanted. We had put some distance between us and the corpses so I didn't say anything as we passed the jug back and forth, each drinking until we could barely stand another swallow. In a matter of minutes the jug was empty. I smiled at Eli, "OK, Howe Street. Let's go." As he put the Jeep in gear I looked behind us, watching the distant reaches of the road. For a moment I thought I heard a groan carried on the wind, but I dismissed it as my imagination.

  We parked at the corner of Howe and Route 67 a few minutes later. We had gone uphill the whole way, and the trees had gotten more dense and abundant the further we got from the center of Stockton, making it impossible to see very far in any direction. "So what are we doing here, man?" Eli asked.

  I fished around in the back and pulled a six-pack of beer from the bottom of the pile. I was going to pull the collection of brown glass bottles out of the Jeep to make room for more practical supplies, but I allowed Eli this one indulgence. Now I found myself happy I did. "Drink up. Two each."

  Roger groaned, patt
ing his stomach. "Ugh, Alex, the idea of putting away two beers on an empty stomach? Not good. I'm going to be useless."

  "Then pour it out. It's not the beer that matters, but the bottles."

  Eli gasped. "Pour it out? That's probably the last six of that stuff we're ever going to see, man! Maybe the last in the world! Not like we can get imported beer anymore!"

  Roger's eyes lit up with a glimmer of recognition. "You're going to make Molotov cocktails. Grain alcohol in glass bottles..."

  I grinned. "Not quite. Howe Road curves to the left further up, almost to the point where it touches Birch. The reason it doesn't is we're about a hundred feet up. We cut through the woods or yards or whatever is between us and Birch, find the rock walls that overlook the street below, and toss the bottles into the road."