The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books.

by Geo Dell

  Mike watched her go. Apparently everyone was more appreciative of people now, not just himself, he thought. He turned his attention to the field and the highway. After his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he could see the dark shapes of cattle grazing in the field, a few deer mixed in with them.

  He thought about what he had just said, how much he felt for Candace. How for the next few nights they would have a real bed. His mind filled with thoughts of her. He almost missed the radio call, almost wrote it off as one of their own, until he realized it wasn't.

  ~

  “Hello the camp,” the voice repeated.

  Mike unclasped the radio from his belt and raised it to his mouth and spoke. “I guess you mean us,” he said more calmly than he felt.

  “I do,” the voice answered. “We've been traveling. Saw your fires from about five miles back. I guess the question is, are you okay? If you've been living in the same world that we've been living in, I guess you'll understand that question.”

  Mike keyed the button and let the smooth static play out for a few seconds before he spoke. “You must have stopped quite a way back. We didn't hear the sound of your vehicles.”

  “We did. Like I said, it's a funny world. Listen... we kind of wanted to feel you out. I'm Jeff... Jeff Simmons,” he finished.

  “Mike... Mike Collins,” Mike told him. “I understand your point. We've been through a few things too. Do you want to come in?”

  “Well... we do but we're stopped now for the night. In the morning? Would the morning be okay with you?”

  “That will work. I... I guess breakfast will be on us,” Mike told him. “You know where we're at?”

  “Yeah, we do,” Jeff told him. “I sent a couple of scouts down. It looks like a little build up off the interstate... No actual town or anything. We're a couple of miles back. But we can see the light of the fires from here.”

  “I would've sent scouts too,” Mike allowed. “It's about like you imagine, a wide place in the road. Garage... Motel... A few chain stores. It looks like it all built up around the truck stop diner that's also here. There's plenty of gas here, plenty of supplies also,” Mike finished.

  “That's good to hear, Mike. We swung down from Vermont. We're all from there. We've been avoiding the cities as best we can, trying to get out West... somewhere where we don't have to worry about winters,” he said.

  “I hear that. We're in the same boat here, only heading South. Or at least right now we are. I guess we're still undecided where we'll end up. We're pretty heavily armed, Jeff. I guess you'll see that when you come in tomorrow. We've been through some stuff as well. I won't apologize for the weapons,” Mike finished.

  “Don't need to. We're loaded too. I don't exactly like it, but it's the way life is now. I... Well... I couldn't come in unarmed, Mike. I couldn't. I'm sure you see that.”

  “I understand that,” Mike told him. “And I'm sure you know we'll be on the defensive for the first little while ourselves. I don't like it either, but same as you, I do what I have to... we do. We've got some good people here, Jeff, good people, and we're careful.”

  “Us too. Well... there's eight of us, Mike. I don't like to give away numbers, but you'll know soon enough anyway. We'll be eight in the morning.”

  “Sixteen of us here, Jeff.” Mike told him.

  “Wow. No wonder you got so many fires going. We wondered about that.”

  “Yeah, well, some of it is the people, but we're smoking meat to take with us. There are cows and deer everywhere. We figured we might as well get some fresh meat while we can. Beats the hell out of stuff from a can.”

  “You'll have to show us how to do that. We don't have anyone who knows how to do that. I don't think we even have a hunter of any kind either,” Jeff said. “I can shoot, but I've never hunted.”

  Mike laughed. “We're all learning to do new things,” He said. “And we're lucky to have some people with us that do know how to do those things.”

  The radio hissed silence for a while.

  “Well, Mike, it was good to talk to you, and we'll see you in the morning,” Jeff said.

  “Okay, Jeff. Same here. And I meant that about breakfast, so come hungry,” Mike said.

  “Will do,” Jeff said. “Out.”

  “We're out too,” Mike said. He clipped the radio back to his belt. He thought about making love to Candace. How she had swapped time with Patty to make it all work out so Patty and Ronnie would have time together too. He thought about how he was going to have to wake Bob, Tom and Ronnie... Patty as well. Well, he realized, most of the camp. Hell all the camp except the two kids. The V.H.F. Squawked as he was thinking. Candace calling for him.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I'll help you get them all up,” she told him.

  “Thank you, Babe. Tell them it won't be overly long. They can go back to sleep after we talk.”

  “Okay, Babe. Out,” Candace said and giggled.

  Mike's face broke into a grin.

  “Uh, Babe. You need anymore help?” Lilly's voice came through.

  “Okay,” Mike laughed. “You can go wake up a few as well. And, Lilly?”

  “Yeah?” she asked.

  “I'll want you there too,” Mike said.

  “Um... okay, Mike. I'll go help Candace,” she told him, sounding flustered.

  ~

  Mike was able to keep the meeting short. In the end, there was not a lot to say or to discuss. They asked a few questions, made plans to be up early in the morning and then everyone went back to bed.

  ~Sandy's Diary - March 26th~

  I should start calling this a diary not a journal. It's funny, but we started these to leave at the cave but then we brought them with us to keep for the children. Now it's becoming something more, although still for the children, so they can see who we were or are... or both.

  I was about to write when I found out we'll have visitors in the morning. I hadn't expected it so soon. I wonder if they are people we can make a part of us? I guess we'll all see tomorrow. I'm excited, but I was already.

  Susan and I, well we're together. As in living, as in sleeping together. I can not believe I took the step. I didn't know I could. I didn't really believe there could be someone out there for me. But she made it clear to me how she felt and that she will go with me where ever I want to go. You know, up until right then, all I wanted to do was go and help Bob and Jan start this Nation. I thought that was all I had in my mind. It wasn't though. If she asked me not to go, I wouldn't.

  I've never known an emotion that could affect such change inside of me so quickly. I'm not sure I've even known this emotion before... not like this. People are coming, and that is exciting. I'm with Susan, and that is life. Do you know what I mean? And that means I'm a lesbian. I guess I knew that. It is important to me to know who I am though. To say it, to own it. In our so called enlightened society it wasn't universally accepted. Oh, on the surface, sure. But not really. And where is that world now? Gone. I guess it's just us now. We don't have time to be so judgmental, or for me, to care if I am judged. I'm happy!!!

  ~ In the Dark ~

  The cow turned her head towards the woods, nervous. Her large eyes reflecting silver glints from the moonlight.

  The smell of death and corruption was nothing new, and that was the smell that came to her now. But there was something wrong with it, something not right with this smell... something different. Her calf nuzzled her and began to nurse. The smell of humans came to her along with smoke and mumbled snatches of conversation, and she stopped thinking about the dead smell, turned away from the woods and stared at the firelight across the fields.

  ~In the Trees~

  The eyes watched her and the other cows from the cover of the trees. The hunger was terrible, all consuming, and it came in crashing waves. The impulse to feed seemed to be the only coherent thought she had. It was hard to think around, hard to think past.

  A few weeks ago she had been... Been? But it did no good, she
could not force the memory to come. A name came, Donita. She had been Donita; she knew that, but that was all she knew. And a name was not everything she had been. She had been something else... something more, but she could not get to whatever it was. Something that did not wander through the woods. Something that was not driven by all consuming passions that she could not understand.

  She turned her eyes up to the moon. It pulled at her. Something in it spoke directly to something inside of her., something deep, something she believed had always been there, but there had never been a need to address it because it lived under the surface, out of her line of thought, sight... below her emotions. Now it didn't. Now it ruled everything. It was all she could do not to rush from the trees, find the smell that tempted her and consume it. Eat it completely. Leave nothing at all. Oh to do it... To do it...

  Her eyes snapped back from the moon, and a low whine escaped her throat. The calf, sated, had wandered away from her mother. Behind her, the boy made a strangled noise in his throat. She turned, gnashed her teeth and growled. The thin, skeletal boy fell back, hungry but frightened. She could feel his fear. It fed her, tempted her to taste him, but he was no food for her. She knew that much. It was a sort of instinct... drive... something inside of her. The boy was not her food. The boy was not her sustenance. He was one of her own. Corrupted. And corrupted flesh could not feed and sustain itself on corrupted flesh. Fresh flesh was needed, live flesh. Fresh human flesh, she corrected.

  The boy trembled and grinned sickly, his one good eye rolling in his head. The other eye was a ruined mass of gray pulp sagging from the socket. A great flap of skin below that socket had curled and dried, hanging from the cheek. He felt at it now, carefully, with his shrunken fingers. She hissed at him and his hands fell away. She turned her attention back to the wandering calf that was nosing ever closer to the edge of the trees.

  She desired human flesh. She needed it, but it didn't absolutely have to be that way.

  Two nights ago it had been a rabbit. The night before that she and the boy had shared a rat. The night before that they had come upon the old woman. She thought about the old woman as the calf wandered ever closer to the line of trees.

  The old woman had been good. They had brought her back here and her bones lay here still, in the weeds at the edge of the clearing behind her. She turned and gazed back past the boy into their makeshift campsite, searching for the what was left of the old woman, finding her bones where they lay at the edge of the clearing they had made. She turned back to the field, watching the calf as she remembered the old woman...

  ~The old woman in the ditch~

  They had come across the old woman at near morning. Near morning was the best she could do. Time was not a real concern to her anymore. The concept held no meaning. She understood near morning because the sickness, the sickness that began to send the searing pain through her body, had started. The boy had already been whining low in his throat for an hour in pain. It was like that whenever the night began to end, when the morning was on the way, soon to be.

  She remembered sunlight. Her old self had needed sunlight just as she now needed darkness, absence of light. That had been Donita as well, but a different Donita.

  They had been crossing the rock filled ditch to get to an old house on the other side. The basement of the house was what she had in mind. Quiet, private, darkness. She had been scrambling down the steep, sandy side when the scent had found her eyes and froze her brain.

  That is the way she thought of it. Frozen. Everything... everything besides that smell of flesh was frozen out. The boy's whining, the coming dawn, the constant hunger in her belly, the moon silvery and bright so far up in the night sky, nothing got by that desire. Urge. Drive. It consumed her, and it had then.

  It had touched her eyes and then seeped into her brain; then it had spread out into her body. Her legs had stopped moving and she had nearly tumbled all the way to the bottom of the rock strewn ditch before she had caught herself, her head already twisted in the direction of the smell. Her ears pricked, her tongue licking at her peeled, dead lips.

  She could smell the old woman. Knew that she was an old woman. It was in the smell. Somehow it was in the smell. And her flesh. And her fear. The boy had slammed into her then, still whining, and nearly knocked her to the ground.

  She had come up from that near fall in a crouch, and the boy had slammed into her once more, so she had grabbed him to steady him. He had thought she meant to kill him and had pulled away, but a second later he had caught the scent and they had both gone tearing down the ditch.

  ~The Old Woman~

  The old woman had heard them coming. She had begun to whine herself, replacing the boy's whining which had turned to a low growl. The panic had built in her as she heard them coming. Her heart pounded, leapt, slammed against her ribs, bringing pain with it. The pain rebounded and shot down into her broken leg, the leg that she had broken the day before trying to scramble down into this ditch to reach the house across what was left of the highway so she would have a safe place to stay. The pain slammed into her leg, and she cried aloud involuntarily. A split second later, the female slammed into her.

  She had been on her belly. The pain was less that way. When the female hit her, she drove her over onto her back. A second after that, she was ripping at her flesh, biting, feeding and she could not fight her. She was too strong, too..... animal strong. And then the boy hit her hard, pouncing on her chest, driving the air from her lungs, and before she could even react, catch her breath back, he was biting at her throat.

  She felt the pulse of blood as he bit into her jugular, and it sprayed across his face. She felt it go, felt her consciousness drop by half, her eyelids flutter, flutter, flutter and then close completely. And the biting was far away, and then it was gone.

  ~The Feasting~

  The boy had her throat, but Donita had been biting her way into her chest. She had felt her heart beating, and she had been gnawing against her ribs when she felt it stop. They had both calmed then, loosening the grips they had on her, and settling down to feed.

  ~

  She glanced now at the calf that was less than three feet from them, its huge moon eyes staring curiously at them. The calf did not know death, had not seen it, she thought. It knew its mother's tit, the sweet grass of the spring field, the warmth of the sun and nothing else. It edged a little closer.

  ~

  She had killed the old woman. She had no use for her at all. They had eaten so much of her flesh, that she was useless to them. Couldn't sit up all the way. The boy had taken one arm off at the shoulder and carried it away like a prize.

  Donita had eaten so much that she had vomited, but that had only forced her back to feeding until she was once again filled. She had looked around the ditch and spied the rock. The old woman had come back already, and she was trying to raise herself from the ground, trying to raise herself and walk once more. She had picked the rock up from the ditch. A big rock, but she was powerful, and she had smashed the old woman's skull in as she had tried to bite at her. They had dragged her into the woods a little farther down the road, this place where they still were.

  ~

  She turned again to the calf. The calf was not what she wanted, but the calf would have to do for now. She let her hand fall upon the boy's thigh and they both sprang at the calf.

  The calf did not have the time to react. It did not even bawl. One second it was standing, and the next it was on its side, Donita's teeth clamped tightly across its throat. A second after that, it was sliding across the dew wet grass and into the woods, one wild eye rolling and reflecting the silver of the waning moon, as Donita and the boy dragged her into the trees.

  Chapter Two

  Strangers And Friends

  ~ March 27th ~

  Smoke from the many fires hung close to the ground mixing with a heavy mist that had risen off the nearby river and painting the fields white into the far treeline. As the sun touched the edge of the horizon, sof
t red-gold light began to flood into the world, reflecting off the ground mist, lighting it from within.

  Mike could feel the heat on his face as he sat drinking coffee with Candace, Tim, Ronnie and Patty. Bob and Janet sat close by. The rest of the camp was up and waiting with them.

  Janet had organized some helpers, and a breakfast that included cold meat from the evening meal, oatmeal cooked in a huge pot she had salvaged from somewhere, and something that was a cross between a biscuit and a pancake. She was cooking on a large rectangular cast iron grill that Mike and Ronnie had taken from one of the fast food restaurants and set up for her. The resulting thick pancakes, or thin biscuits, depending on your viewpoint, could be used to make sandwiches of the cold meat or drowned with honey or Maple syrup from one of the nearby stores. Mike had tried it both ways and some oatmeal as well. He had eaten two thick sandwiches. He couldn't remember any time in his life where he had consistently eaten the way he did now. His body just seemed to crave and use more calories than it ever had.

  As he looked around, he realized he wasn't the only one. Everyone seemed to be able to put the food away, yet everyone seemed to be thinning down, dropping the excess weight they had once carried. He himself had noticed that the few extra pounds he had once carried were gone. His stomach had not been as flat as it was now since junior high school. Maybe not even then, he admitted to himself. He sipped at his coffee and watched the sun rise across the fields, burning the mist away as it rose.

  Jeff Simmons had called on the radio some fifteen minutes earlier to let them know his party was on the way. The whole camp was waiting, including Brian and Janelle. Even Tom, Bob, Molly and Nell who had had their day all planned out were hanging around, waiting for the newcomers to come into camp. It seemed everyone had changed their plans to wait.

  “You waiting also?” Mike had asked Brian as he wandered by him.

  He nodded solemnly. “I want to see the new kids.”

  “Might not be any new kids,” Mike told him.