I guess this must be a shock, or will be a shock, or will it? Isn't it only my own sensibilities of what is taboo, what life is that my mother instilled in me, that makes me think that someone who read this would be shocked? I think so. I think other people do as they please. I think they live their lives, and I haven’t been living my life at all.
I would just like to be held the way I’ve seen others held, or hold. I would just like to be made love to with the passion I’ve heard between Mike and Kate, or Janet and Rob, Patty and Ronnie. So I think about it. And I see Sandy looking at me, and I think I’ll have to take the chance and catch her. Maybe it will make us both happy.
~The North side~
She slipped from the shadows and ran along from house to house until she reached the end of the block. She had expected to hear the gunshots behind her, expected to find herself falling to the cold ground, a bullet in her back, but the bullet never came. Randy must have stayed asleep. She had put a handful of sleeping pills in his food, mixed them right in with the canned spaghetti, and he had wolfed them right down. Never had a clue.
She stopped at the end of the street, caught her breath leaning against the side of an old pickup truck and then took off once more at a fast walk.
She was halfway through the block when she realized someone was following her, and her heart sank like a stone. Randy. Had to be. She stopped and peered back through the shadows and dark. The moonlight was bright, but it was still not easy to see. She thought she saw movement at the corner of a house two houses back. She screwed up her courage.
“Randy... Randy don't be sore... Don't...” She stopped and squinted into the gloom. Two people had come from around the edge of that house. Two, and neither of them looked anything like Randy. She swore under her breath and turned to run.
He caught her under the arms. He must have been standing right behind her all along, she realized.
“Hey... Hey, there's no...” She stopped mid word and began to scream at the rotted face that angled down at her own face. His hands clawed at her throat, closing off her screams and then his teeth found her and he began to tear and bite.
CHAPTER SEVEN
War
~March 23rd~
The cave was up early the next morning. It seemed as though everybody had some task to complete, some job to fill the day.
The open space of the large limestone cave accommodated all of the people and all of the supplies and possessions they had accumulated over the short period of time they had been together. Now it also held the first truck that Bob and Tom were going to convert. Everybody found a reason to stop and look at what they were doing as they went about their chores.
Bob and Tom would be left behind for the next several days as the others continued to search out items on Jan’s lists as well as a few parts Bob and Tom had been unable to find.
Mike was working on getting some coffee into him when Tim and Annie came back into the cave in a hurry, looking around. When Tim’s eyes fell on Mike he headed straight for him. Mike glanced from Tim and Annie to the covered entrance way but no one else came through it. “Ronnie wants you,” Was all Tim said. His frightened eyes said more than his words. Everyone had seen Tim and Annie rush into the cave and they looked at Mike now, wondering what had caused them to hurry in. Mike shrugged his shoulders and headed for the entrance way, Kate and Patty behind him. Everyone else paused in what they were doing; waiting to learn what was going on.
Mike stepped outside into the early morning quiet. Ronnie,
Nell and Sandy were staring down the river road toward the old restaurant that graced the end of the street. Mike walked up, but before he reached them, a volley of gunshots reached his ears. It sounded to him as though they had come from lower State Street, just off the square, very close by.
The sound of a revving engine reached his ears at nearly the same time, and a speeding truck raced by the end of the road about a quarter mile away. The shots came heavy and hard. It sounded like a war zone.
“How long’s this been going on?”
“About fifteen minutes or so. That’s the third truck that’s gone by the end of the street,” Nell said.
The gunfire sounded even louder if that were possible. Squealing tires on pavement, straining engines.
“The gunfire is new. The trucks have been going by though. Somebody’s at somebody,” Ronnie said. “Maybe with those people we had the run in with.”
The sound of a crash came to their ears followed by what sounded almost exactly like machine gun fire, a steady, heavy crack, and that was followed by what sounded like another heavy crash; and then another heavy explosion shook the earth. A fire ball lit up the sky towards lower State Street., possibly closer even than Mike had thought, just off the square. The sound of the explosion was deafening. The ground continued to shake.
“Okay!” Mike yelled to get his voice above the gunfire and screaming engines. Everyone had come outside in the last few
minutes. He had no doubt they had both heard and felt the explosions inside the cave. “Get back inside. Everybody except Bob, Tom, Kate and Patty. You get the clip rifles, shotguns and the deer rifles too... and ammo.” He paused and looked around. No one had moved yet. “Nell, Sandy, start moving the trucks. They can’t get in here from the other end. Run these down and block the road.”
He began walking rapidly back towards the cave entrance as he spoke. Nell stayed with him, Sandy hesitated only briefly and then sprinted to catch up with the two of them. “Wait until we have firepower to cover you. Drive those trucks about…” Mike stopped and his eyes shot rapidly up and down the road, gauging the distance. “About 200 feet down from the end… where that little cliff juts out,” he motioned with one hand. Kate came back and tossed him a clip rifle.
“Turn them sideways, block the road. Let’s go.” He sprinted towards the trucks with them, split off and wound up with Nell. Kate climbed into the other truck with Sandy. A few seconds later, both trucks were moving fast. Mike watched the roads and the cliffs as they went. It seemed as though the people who were fighting were too caught up with killing each other to worry about them. Fine. Let it be that way. But when they did remember them, the road would be blocked, and there would be no easy way for them to get to them.
Nell cut the truck hard left. Sandy, who had been watching, cut her own truck in and the two trucks nearly collided as they came to a stop blocking the road completely side to side.
They jumped from the trucks and found that Tom and Ronnie were less than a hundred feet away covering them. Mike and Kate put Nell and Sandy between them, covering them as they ran back towards the cave.
At the mouth of the cave, Mike took a second to gather his thoughts as everyone gathered around him. The sound of the fight on the square and lower State Street was louder than it had been. More gunfire, more explosions. Mike leaned towards the three men.
“If they turn down this road, open up on them. Don’t wait. Light them up!” he turned to Ronnie. “We’re going up.”
“Up?”
Mike nodded. “Up to the parking lot above the cave. We can climb up quick enough from down here. There are some scrub trees, bushes… Should be good cover. We’ll watch from there. Stop them if they try to come at us that way. You got this. Nobody else, you.” He leveled his eyes on Ronnie’s own. Ronnie nodded. Mike looked around.
“Lilly… Tim,” They were both standing near the entrance to the cave. “You two check on Annie and the two little ones.”
Another explosion rocked the ground. Rocks and loose gravel sprayed down from the cliffs and the parking lot above the cave. A pair of vehicles, chasing each other, went roaring past the end of the road heading for the damaged bridge and the north side of the city. They exchanged gunfire as they went. Just after they passed the mouth of the road, the sound of screaming tires came to them and the sound of one of the vehicles as it crashed.
Mike turned back to Tim and Lilly, “Then come back here. Kate and I are climbing to th
e top. You’re covering us as we go. Make sure no one gets in back of us, sneaks up on us.” He looked at them. “You can do that?”
“Yeah, I can,” Lilly told him. She seemed so calm it spooked
Mike. Tim echoed the same sentiment, and then both of them turned away and raced inside of the cave.
Mike leaned back against the cliff face and watched the end of the road. Their four remaining trucks were now parked down the road, closing it off. Bob, Nell, Patty and Sandy crouched behind the trucks, using them for cover. Another vehicle went flying past the end of the road heading into the square. A small car of some sort, Mike saw as it flew past. The sound of the car locking up its brakes came to his ears no more than a split second after it passed the end of the road. The transmission whined and the cars engine screamed. A second later the car flew back past the end of the road in reverse, locked up the tires again, and turned onto the river road, two young men hanging out of the back windows. What looked like wire stock machine pistols in their hands.
Before the car had rolled more than ten feet onto the River Road, Patty and Bob were up and firing. Tom came up next; Kate socketed a clip rifle to her shoulder and opened up. Mike raised his own rifle, but the car was disintegrating before his eyes before he ever pulled the trigger.
The windshield starred and then blew inward. The two young men who had been hanging out the side windows of the car preparing to shoot never got the chance. The car suddenly veered left, accelerated hard and smashed into the cliff face. Everybody ducked low below the trucks. Mike, Kate, Tim and Lilly threw themselves to the ground. Flames shot up the cliff face. A second after that the gas tank blew.
The car lifted completely off the ground. The concussion from the explosion took Mike's hearing for the next two or three minutes. The car crashed back down, burying its nose in the dirt at the base of the cliffs. A body flew from the interior and
lay burning on the ground. The car jumped back up as something else beneath it exploded, came back down, skittered to the left and landed on the burning body, snuffing the flames out. One of the rear tires blew with a loud wham, then another one went, and the car dropped closer to the ground at the rear.
Tim grabbed his sleeve from behind, startling Mike momentarily.
He and Lilly stood, one holding a deer rifle, the other holding a Forty Five caliber pistol. Kate headed for the wall. Mike glanced over at Ronnie so he would know they were going.
Two minutes of easy climbing, and they were in the scrub brush at the back of the parking lot.
From the square side of the parking lot it probably looked as though there were nothing at all at the back of the parking lot. Fine, Mike thought. He only hoped none of them knew what was below the parking lot, but he didn’t believe it. Anyone who grew up here knew what was at the edge of this parking lot. Anyone here now knew they were in the cave down on the Old River Road. Mike believed it was only a matter of time before they came for them. When they did, he would be here waiting.
Before the thoughts were completely formed in his head, three people came running straight toward them where they stood within the scrub brush. Four heavily armed men were pursuing them. Firing as they ran. The three runners appeared to be unarmed. Mike stepped from the screening scrub. He had given it no thought at all. He stepped nearly into the path of the lead runner. Her mouth flew open in surprise; a small spatter of blood tattooed one of her cheeks. Mike stepped easily around her, took aim at the first of the four chasers and shot him just as he was slowing down to bring his own rifle up. To his side Kate crouched and began popping off at the other three as they continued running, perfectly aimed shots. She took out two. Lilly dropped the last one. The lead man's momentum carried him forward another fifteen feet before he realized he was dead and fell end over end onto the blacktop.
One of the remaining chasers managed to pop off one last shot before he went down. The last runner collapsed in a heap. It was over in less than a second. Five people lay dead. The lead runner looked around in wonder, saw the last runner laying dead and began to cry hard, her chest hitching as she tried to hold the tears back. Kate stepped forward and grabbed her as she stumbled. Lilly helped Mike grab the last woman. They faded back into the brush not knowing if anyone else might be close by or not.
“It’s okay,” Kate said. “It’s really okay.” She pulled the one woman close to her and held her as she shook. Lilly held the other one. They were both breathing heavy, sobbing. The one Kate held struggled to catch her breath. She turned to Mike.
“You,” she managed. “You’re from the cave?” She turned to include Kate in her statement. Turning in her arms. Too beaten to struggle free if the answer should be no, trusting that Kate would not hurt her.
”Yeah,” Kate told her. “Yeah.” She pulled her close, holding her as the woman began to sag towards the ground. The panic and fear left her face.
“Thank God,” she breathed. She turned around, still allowing Kate to hold her, looking back through the trees into the parking lot. “We… We were trying to get here… To here… You…” her voice faded as she saw the other woman’s body crumpled on the ground. “Fuck,” she breathed. “Fuckers,” she screamed.
Kate pulled her closer and held her as she cried, whispering to her, calming her, pulling her further into the scrub brush.
Mike and Tim both scanned the area. There was gunfire, but it was from farther away, the other side of the square, hidden by the toppled and crumbling buildings. Mike looked out at the machine pistols and ammo the four men had been carrying.
“Hey,” Mike said. Tim looked over at him, his eyes round and hard. He's too young for this, Mike thought. Too young. “Cover me? I’m going to get that ammo. Those machine pistols.”
Tim looked out over the parking lot. His eyes trying to take in everything. He looked back at Mike and nodded. The forty five in his hand came back up and he turned back to scan the parking lot as Mike ran out on to the pavement. He was back in just over a minute with all four Machine Pistols. Ammo belts looped over his shoulders, looking like some strange refugee of war, he supposed. The self image made him laugh, but he choked it off before it could become much more than a ghost of a smile on his lips. He tossed two of the guns to Tim and then faded back into the scrub brush where Kate and Lilly waited with the two women.
~ Sudden Quiet ~
The first skirmish lasted the better part of an hour, and then, as quickly as it had started, the gunfire fell off. Cars and trucks both raced by on the Old River Road heading back across the bridge there to the north side of the city, a bridge, Mike thought, that was about to fall into the river, or so it seemed from looking at it. Crumbling supports, buckled decking, but they were running back and forth across it like it was as good as the day it was built.
Other vehicles raced back up State Street. Several burned out vehicles continued to spew dirty, black smoke into the air. There were too many burning wrecks to count scattered around the Public Square and the streets that led away from it.
Patty and Bob scouted down to the still burning car that had turned onto the road, a Nissan it turned out, and picked up the two machine pistols that lay close by it.
Ronnie and Tom moved two of their own trucks back to the bare area in front of the cave as Nell drove the truck they had appropriated the night before down to within a hundred feet of the burning Nissan, turned it sideways blocking the road and left it. Patty and Bob trotted along the side of the road, covering Nell as she parked the truck, and then came back with her until they reached the safety of the cave. The other trucks that had been moved were pulled back into a V that further blocked the road, but mainly provided a barrier to shoot from. It was where they had taken out the Nissan from.
Mike came to the back edge of the scrub brush and called down softly. Annie came from the shadows on the side of the cave and looked up expectantly. “Get Patty or Tom,” Mike told her. Annie nodded and was off before Mike could think to say anything else.
Patty and Tom both app
eared a few moments later.
“Everything okay?” Mike asked.
Patty nodded along with Tom. “You?” she asked.
“I got two women up here. I’ll explain it later; in fact I really don’t know all of it except they were headed for us when we stepped into a mess up here… Or they did, or we both did…” He paused and rubbed the bridge of his nose for a second. “I’m going to send them down, okay?”
Patty nodded again. “Send them, Mike,” she said, but it ended up being easier to say than it turned out to do. Neither of the women wanted to attempt climbing down the cliff face. Of all the things they had collected or had in the cave, they had no rope. Tom scouted further down the road, checking the cliff face.
When Tom had been a kid, the Old River Road had been in daily use and was then connected to one of the bridges. He thought that he remembered another old road that came into Old River Road. It was an old blocked off road even then. The road had come down from the back of the parking lot, most probably long before it had been made into a parking lot. The road itself was gone, but the long, gradually sloping area that had once held the road was still there, overgrown yes, but an easily walked path down to the road from the parking lot if you knew where to find it. Tom smiled after finding the place. He followed it nearly to the top to make sure it was still passable, and then he turned around and went back down the road to where Mike was waiting for him.
“There’s a place farther down the lot, the end of the lot. You’ll see where the slope down to the River Road becomes more gradual. .. There used to be a road. The road itself is gone, but it’s easily walked. You can send them down that way, or I can come up,” Tom said.
The Rising of the Dead Page 18