The Zombie Plagues (Book 2)

by Sweet, Dell

  He got on the radio and got the particulars. There had been no way to avoid it, but maybe it was better this way. He had a reason for being here now. He might have to come up with a reason why he was out driving around so early, but he would figure something out if it came up. He may not even need to come up with anything at all. Maybe no one would ever ask him and it would just blow over.

  He walked back to his car, climbed in and put the bubble on the dashboard. He called two of the uniforms over and told them to secure the scene for the techs that would be coming out and told them where he was going.

  He backed the car out, pulled out of the lookout and headed down out of the park. He wondered if this was the same thing. And if so what had happened out on Lott road to bring it all to an end. He wondered too about the bundle of cash he had held, if only for a very brief time. He lit a cigarette, cursed the habit and sucked the smoke greedily into his lungs.

  He reached the bottom of the hill, blew the stop sign and bore left. He fell in behind two other units that were on their way out to Lott road too.

  USGS Alaska

  Mieka Petre

  Mieka leaned forward overshadowing Jane Howe as he studied her monitor.

  “Looks good,” he said. Her monitor showed a running seismic graph representing the valley floor of the Yellowstone Caldera. All change had been negligible for the last seventy-two hours.

  “It is,” Jane agreed. “All the equations show nearly the same thing... Our equations anyway.”

  Mieka laughed. “Ours are the only ones that matter, Jane: The only ones. They pay us precisely for this. Years of waiting, all validated in a few weeks time.”

  “Time will prove us right, Mieka. I know that.”

  “If anything changes, let me know... I'll be rechecking David's final calculations on DX2379R.”

  “Anything?” Jane asked.

  “No... No, I'm sure he made a miscalculation...” He leaned close to her and lowered his voice. “Such a minor mistake can make such a large error in distance. I'm confidant my initial figures are correct.” He absently patted her shoulder and wandered off; his mind already turning to the problem with DX2379R, the same meteor he had already announced would miss the Earth by a few hundred thousand miles. David's calculations had narrowed that margin to less than thirty thousand miles. Much closer: Much more capable of crust deformation at that distance. It worried him.

  He realized at that moment that a frown had slipped onto his face. A frown showed lack of confidence, worry, and concern with things that he should not be concerned with. He pushed the frown away and smiled out at the room as he crossed to his office.

  Friday Morning:

  Lott Road

  Billy Jingo

  Billy Jingo had sat watching his television just minutes before: An old war movie, boring, but it was three A.M. and there were only the local stations that he could get, plus the one from Canada when the weather was right, or what-ever had to be right for an antenna to work. Tonight it wasn't working. Excuse me; he corrected himself, this morning. Whatever needed to be right wasn't. It had looked like a good film too, but the goddamn thing had kept fading in and out so much that he had gotten a headache trying to watch it. He'd finally settled for the old war movie on one of the local stations.

  He had been trying to nurse his last beer. He'd been sure that there was one more left, but he'd been wrong. Somehow he had miscounted and that was unlike him. He always knew how many beers he had to the can: Somehow he'd messed up the count tonight. There were no more. He'd even moved the green loaf of bread, which he had hated to do, but he had moved it only to find nothing behind it. He had hoped the one remaining can had rolled behind it, but it had not been behind the moldy bread. He had been wrong.

  It hadn't occurred to him to throw out the moldy loaf of bread while he was at it. Instead, he had gotten one of the spatulas from the silverware drawer, levered it under the bread and then pushed it to the side only to find no beer can hiding there. He had then levered the loaf of bread back into the original position it had been in.

  So he had been nursing his last beer: The last beer and no money for beer. And it was Friday: That meant the rest of Friday, Friday night, and the whole weekend loomed ahead dry. It was too depressing to think about. He had tried to focus on the movie instead.

  His trailer was located at the end of Lott road, a dirt road on the outskirts of the city two miles beyond the county dump. Nobody really wanted to live on Lott road it seemed, except Billy, and if he were honest with himself he didn't really want to live here either, he simply had no choice. His crappy job only paid him enough for a crappy place to live. This was it: The crappiest of the crappiest. In fact, he reminded himself, the morning before the cops had taken the body of a young girl out of the ditch just down the road. Found by someone driving by. She hadn't been there very long either; someone had killed her and dumped her there. It was definitely a crappy place to live. He knew that for a fact because he had gone looking. There were no crappier places. Except maybe the trailer park down the road, he thought, but that was also part of Lott road, so it didn't count.

  He owned neither the trailer nor the lot. He did own the furniture, which had been easy. He had simply cruised every street in the city on garbage day: A chair here, another one there. The mattress and box springs he'd gotten from the Salvation Army. Thirty bucks and only pee stained on one side, well mostly only the one side. There was some other stain on the other side, but he wasn't sure what that stain was. It didn't exactly look like a pee stain. Anyway, it was barely noticeable and the guy in the store had sworn that they weren’t really pee stains, but water stains. Billy wasn't too sure about that. His own brother had wet the bed until he was ten and they had slept in the same bed. He knew what a pee stain looked like and this looked like a pee stain. Still, it had been a good deal and stains couldn't hurt him: After all when his brother had been wetting the bed he had probably peed on him a time or two, if he could live with that he could live with a little pee stain: If it was a pee stain. And if they were pee stains, they were on the other side of the mattress, he had added optimistically. Besides, they disinfected those things. The guy said so. They sprayed them down with something that killed everything on them and in them. He had grinned, tipped his beer, nearly took a large swallow, took a small sip instead and then lowered the can depressed all over again about the long, dry weekend ahead of him.

  Five or six garbage runs and one trip to the city dump, where they didn't mind if you took half the dump away with you, and he had been furnished. It was amazing the things people threw away. He had sipped carefully at his beer as he reminisced, pulled a crumpled cigarette from his pack and lit it with a long, wooden kitchen match.

  There was an old fashioned wood stove store in town and he stopped there once or twice a week for kitchen matches. Not that they gave them away for free, but they used them for the stoves so there was always a box or two lying around that he could help himself to.

  Day old bread and doughnuts at the bakery twice a week, those cheap ten pound bags of chicken and what they had called Crack Head soups in Jail, noodle soups to the rest of the world, and there was his weekly food budget. The only other things he needed were gas and of course beer and cigarettes.

  The rest of his paycheck went for the rent and utilities. Sometimes it was close, but he always made it somehow. The real bummer this morning was that he had today off and the whole weekend too and he'd have to stay here watching the crappy T.V. … Sober...

  His job Monday through Thursday was cleaning for a maintenance company. They only required that you showed up. They ran you all over the city to clean supermarkets; banks; mall shops that were closed. He worked the nights away pretty quickly. Go to work at five P.M. Next thing you knew it was one thirty in the morning and they were through for another night. He kept telling himself that he would have to get a better job if he ever wanted to be better off in the world. A job that paid more than minimum wage had to be in his future
. He was sure there were plenty of them out there; he just didn't know where to look. Some day, he told himself, some day.

  He had taken another deep drag off his cigarette and then sipped carefully at his beer. He thought about the girl's body and realized she could have been killed while he had been sleeping. The thought had made him shudder, he hated this place.

  He had just set the beer down carefully on the coffee table. It was scared with cigarette burns and missing the tip of one leg, but it had been free and an old paperback novel held up that corner of the table well enough. As he had looked back up from the coffee table, lights had swept across the living room wall, bouncing up and down and back and forth. Because his was the last place on the road, every car that came down the road lit up his living room. These headlights however seemed a little more frantic, bobbing, and darting across the wall and then a second set shot up onto the wall too, jittering and jumping across the cheap wood paneling.

  Twice now cars had come down the road, shot right across the bare dirt of his front yard and into the woods before they had been stopped by the trees. Billy had a fear about some car, some day, hitting the bedroom wall while he slept. So far it had just been the woods, but you could never tell. He had jumped up quickly and run to the window.

  It had been immediately obvious that this was something different from just some drunk not realizing that the road was about to end. The lead car had been flat out. He had heard the whine of the engine as it came. The car behind had been trying to stay close, tapping the back bumper of the lead car, causing it to slew all over the dirt road. Apparently that hadn't been good enough because a second later the passenger had leaned out of the car's window and opened up on the lead car with what had looked to be some sort of hand held machine pistol. Billy had let out a startled squawk, ducked below the window and then popped right back up. Now he found himself staring out the window, breathing fast, where what seemed like only seconds ago he had been carefully sipping at his beer watching the TV.

  The shots had taken out the rear window, traveled through the car and taken out part of the front windshield too. And from the large red stain on the spider webbed remains of that window, Billy guessed it had taken out the driver too. Maybe even the passenger had there been one. There was a lot of red.

  Shit, Billy thought. That meant that the lead car was not going to be able to stop, it was nearly on the trailer already as it screamed forward. Billy calculated quickly and realized the car would miss the trailer. At the same time the driver of the rear car locked up his brakes, suddenly realizing that he was on a dead end road, and the car began to slide in the dirt. Billy's eyes shifted back to the front car which hit the end of the road, jumped up over the drainage ditch and roared through the front yard just missing the edge of the trailer, shaking the thin walls; engine still screaming. It was out of his eyesight for less than a split second before he heard the crash. The big oak in the back yard, he thought.

  His eyes came back to the second car long enough to see it slide down into the drainage ditch at full speed, catch its nose on the opposite edge and then flip end over end across an empty lot before it crashed down on the edge of a cement slab that was trailer-less and had been since he, Billy, had moved out here. Billy crouched down quickly to the floor, grabbed his boots and wedged his feet into them. He ran to the kitchen, grabbed a flashlight off the counter and headed out the front door at a run...

  ~

  The smell of hot metal filled the air. Billy looked to the car down the road, partway onto the cement pad first: The trunk had popped open and all manner of stuff that had been inside now lay scattered across the ground. Hot oil and antifreeze dripped from under the hood and onto the concrete. The front roof line was smashed flat to the top of the driver’s seats. The backseat area seemed untouched.

  He slipped around the end of the trailer and looked at the other car. A newer Ford: He could see the badge on the rear deck. The front end of the car was wrapped around the oak in the backyard just as he had thought and steam was rising up into the air. The Ford first, he decided. The car across the road would have to wait.

  The Ford had hit the tree and climbed it a few feet before it came to a complete stop. Billy had to stand on tip toe to peer into it. The driver had no head left, which had been the huge stain on the windshield. There was no passenger. Looking out from the inside it was not just red but gray and black too: Bone, hair and brain matter. His stomach did a quick flip and he began to close his eyes as he turned away.

  As he turned, his eyes caught on the floorboard and a blue duffel bag that was jammed into the space with the drivers legs. There was no way that the door was going to open, but the glass was gone from the window. He balanced over the edge of the door trying to stay as far away as he could from the dead man as he did, leaned in and tried to snag the duffel bag. His fingers brushed the two plastic handles, but he could not get a grip on them.

  Billy levered himself further over the window sill and nearly came down into the dead man's lap as he lost his balance and his feet left the ground. His hand shot down quickly, bounced off the dead man's thigh and hit the seat, stopping him just a few inches above the man's lap and a small splattering of bone and blood that was there. His hand slipped, but he pressed down harder and held himself.

  He could feel the slick blood and splinters of bone under his hand, but he pushed the knowledge out of his mind, took a deep breath, braced himself and then reached down with his free hand and snatched the handles pulling the heavy bag free.

  He pulled back, but the bag was so heavy that he had to hold on tight and push off the seat with his other hand. For one alarming second it seemed he would fall forward into the dead man's lap. After a second of indecision his body dropped back down to the ground, the bag in his hand. He thought about the trunk as he started to turn away, reached back in, shut off the dead ignition, pulled the keys free and hurried around to the trunk.

  The trunk held nothing but a black suitcase. He debated briefly, then reached in and took it. He went back, put the keys back into the ignition, and turned it back to the On position. What else! What else! His mind asked.

  His heart felt like it was beating a mile a minute, skipping beats, and his breath was tearing in and out of his lungs so quickly that it was painful. He could think of nothing he had forgotten. He told himself there was nothing else and then immediately he thought of the glove compartment. He ran back around the passenger's side of the car, dropped the bags and pushed the button on the glove box. A small paper bag and a dull, black pistol rested inside.

  He took a deep breath, thought for a moment and then took both, slammed the glove box shut, picked up the bags and ran for the trailer. He booted the door open, threw the bags inside, slammed the door and then started for the other car down the road. He stopped mid stride, bent double and nearly threw up. He caught himself, forced himself to take several slow breaths and stood experimentally. It seemed as though his stomach had decided the remains of the beer could stay for now and so he trotted off down the road to the other car.

  This was an older Toyota, not one of the small ones though, one of the ones that seemed almost as big as an American car. He stopped thirty feet away. Two large plastic garbage bags had fallen from the popped trunk. They were both crisscrossed with gray duct tape, bound tightly. Two black duffel bags were jumbled in a heap nearby, along with what looked like a cheap foam ice chest. The ice chest had ruptured and splintered when it hit the ground spilling beer, soda, and packages of lunch meat and cheese out onto the ground. Mixed in, and what had really caught his attention, were small brick sized packages, also bound with duct tape.

  His heart was still racing hard. There was no one anywhere yet. No sirens. The nearest neighbors were Suncrest Trailer Park, nearly a mile back down the road... No car lights... Nothing.

  He tried to carry both bales, but they were too heavy. He had to make two trips. The duct taped bricks, which could only mean one thing to his way of thinking, both duffel
bags and two six packs of the beer that hadn't ruptured went next. He had debated about the beer but decided he could not leave it. He came back one more time, looked at a few more cans of beer and the packages of bologna and cheese and decided what the hell. He quickly picked them up and took them too. It would be something to put into the 'fridge except the moldy loaf of bread he told himself.

  He walked back down the road once more. He reached the car where it lay flipped onto its roof and had just started around the hood when he heard a soft pop. He stopped as the hood area suddenly burst into flames. The sharp smell of gasoline hit his nose and he jumped backwards just that fast. The car didn't blow, but he stayed clear watching it as it began to burn, allowing his thoughts and breathing to began to slow down. It had seemed like a log jam of thoughts all trying to be expressed at the same time. He thought back as he watched the flames begin to build from under the hood.

  Not long ago a car had plowed into that same Oak in his back yard where the other car was now. It was just the way that Oak lined up with the road. That driver had not hit as hard. He had jumped from the car and run for the woods that began in back of the trailer at a dead run. Billy had come out to look over the wreck a little closer. The jimmied ignition told him the story. The car had been stolen. He had heard sirens in the distance and said to hell with it, reached into the car and grabbed a cheap 22. pistol from the front seat, and an unopened and miraculously unbroken bottle of whiskey from the floorboards. He had barely stashed them before the cops had shown up.

  He had stood on the sidelines and watched as the cops had popped the trunk to expose a large collection of electronic gear. Flat screen televisions, game consoles, DVD players, a shotgun and several more bottles of whiskey too. He had kicked himself over that one and vowed not to let something like that happen again should providence ever grace him with a second chance: Here was that second chance.