by Geo Dell
They were too far away to be certain, but it appeared there were four of them. They had somehow entered the valley and were following the stream as it meandered across the valley floor.
“Candy,” Janet said quietly. “I think we have visitors.”
The Dog huffed, Angel growled low in her throat. Candace squinted into the fading light. This was not someone returning from the fishing expedition. They would have told them to expect them. They were four. They were still too far away to tell much more with any certainty. They looked to be carrying packs. One larger figure bought up the rear. His pack seemed larger than the others.
The sun, what was left of it, would be in their eyes, Candace thought. “They probably can't see us,” she said aloud. She patted her side but she was carrying no weapon. All four women ducked back inside the cave and came back out moments later with their weapons. They let Susan, Sandy and a few of the others inside know there were people coming. They came back out, checked their weapons and clips and then settled back in the fading light to wait.
On The Road
The three trucks came to an immediate halt when Mike stepped from the circle of trucks into view. It may have seemed a risky move to those in the trucks, but every gun from Mike's party was aimed at the trucks. If anyone seemed about to shoot, or a window so much as rolled down they would be on it.
Ronnie stepped out into view, then Bear about fifteen feet further away. Tim and Richard stepped out another twenty feet along like ghosts materializing from a mist. Josh stepped around the end of one of the big trucks, about ten feet from Ronnie. Chloe stepped out into full view last, her machine pistol raised and aimed at the windshield of the lead truck.
Everyone held their machine pistols ready. Trying not to be overly aggressive but taking absolutely no chances at all. Two young women sat in the front seat of the lead truck. They both looked frightened.
Chloe shifted to the side of the lead truck and looked back at the other two trucks. With Tim and Richard on the opposite side they had a complete view of all three vehicles between them. The second truck held three men and two women. The last truck three men and a young woman. As she came up alongside the lead truck, Chloe noticed there were two men in the back seat of the extended cab.
The woman in the drivers seat of the lead truck, raised both hands into the air, turned them over and then upright once more. Her dark face wore a neutral expression. Chloe nodded at her.
The hum of the electric motor came to them all clearly as she rolled down her side window. The young, dark skinned woman leaned out. She looked from person to person... “We don't want any problems. We didn't know anyone was here... We can simply turn around and leave... We really don't want any problems.” She looked from Chloe to Mike to Ronnie to Bear, and then allowed her eyes to drift further over to Tim and Richard.
“We're not looking for any trouble either,” Chloe told her.
“Just being careful,” Mike told her.
“I can see that,” The woman answered.
The silence held for a short space. Ronnie and Bear stepped forward. “Feel free to stay if you want,” Ronnie said. He and Bear both lowered their machine pistols. Chloe and Mike followed suit. Richard, surprised he had even been handed one lowered his own and looked over to Josh. Josh nodded. His own weapon at his side, but still in his hands.
The young woman opened her door and stepped down onto the asphalt. The others in the trucks behind her followed suit. They were all heavily armed too, but their weapons were slung over their shoulders or holstered. The five from the second truck were all dressed in military fatigues.
“Who's in charge,” The woman asked.
“I am,” Mike said as he appraised her. “Mike.”
“Debbie... Deb,” she said and stuck out her hand.
Mike released his machine pistol and shook her hand. She allowed a small smile to creep onto her face.
“I meant what I said about leaving,” she said. “The last thing we want is trouble.”
“No... No,” Mike said. “We've just been through some trouble of our own the last little bit,” He told her.
“We've seen some ourselves,” she agreed.
“Come on,” Chloe said. “We'll make some coffee.” She looked around. “We'll make lots of coffee,” she amended.
It turned out that they had been traveling all night as well. Coffee turned into breakfast. Breakfast turned into conversation. Both groups telling each other exactly what they had been through the last few days.
“My God,” Debbie said. “Where did the guy come from?”
“We don't know... Some crazy,” Ronnie said. “There was a guy we had passed earlier in the day, but there was a woman with him. There was no woman with this man. And we had a little run in with them, but it makes no sense that he would come after us. What for?”
“We had passed them by on the highway... Camped right out in the middle of the road,” Chloe said.
Debbie was nodding. “Okay. Saw that. At least I think so. About eighty miles back... Yesterday. Camped right out in the road. Big old Harley...”
“Tipped over onto a couch,” Ronnie supplied?
Debbie nodded once more. “Skinny woman? Tube top?”
“That's her,” Mike agreed.
“Dead,” Debbie said. “Her and a couple of others.”
“There was only her and the boyfriend when we were there,” Bear said.
“These were dead... Dead for a while too. Hanging around. We stopped and they came from the woods. Desperate, I suppose. Six all together. Took them all down, but we lost one of our own too... Got bit,” she cleared her throat. “Thought one was done... Wasn't... They aren't stupid... They were at first, or seemed to be, but they aren't now.” She thought for a second. “Anyway... That might have been your woman. Sounds like her. But there was no guy there. If it was your guy he was gone, and she was dead.”
“Sounds like the same place,” Ronnie shook his head.
“Hey. Even if it was, who chases someone for knocking over a bike,” Mike said. He could see the wheels turning in Ronnie's head.
“Besides,” Chloe said. “I knocked over the bike. I hit it with the mirror of the truck. It went right over.”
“That's because it wasn't all the way up on the stand,” Ronnie said.
“Ronnie, maybe it was that guy, maybe it wasn't. Nobody chases somebody down for knocking over a bike. They're free now for Christ's sake,” Bear said.
“It's probably something else. We looked around. There was a lot of blood on the road. Big pool of it. The woman was covered in blood too. Stuck to her clothes, hair, plastered to the side of her face. She couldn't have been dead long at all. But there was no guy and she was already dead, so unless your guy killed her, it probably wasn't the same people at all. Probably your people moved on. These people came along... This woman maybe... Gets herself killed, maybe the zombies got her. Then we come along and chased them off. All the blood though, maybe someone else got killed there. Maybe your guy and he just didn't come out of the woods.” She shrugged.
Mike nodded. “That I can see. I mean the guy wouldn't even get up for us to pass... Maybe she shot him. He shot her. They killed each other. Or maybe they took off and these are other people. I just can't believe the guy would have any reason to come after us.” He turned to Ronnie and Chloe.
“You guys are trying to take blame that doesn't belong to you. I'm sure it wasn't the same guy, but even if it was, you can't control someone else.” He paused again. “I think it was some crazy that came along... Hell, for all we know he thought we were dead... Whatever it was, it wasn't your fault. That's something I'm not going to stand for. Not after what we've been through. The world out here is crazy. We came here and bad shit happened, but we’re going back where it's sane, and both of you are going too. There's no blame of any kind going back with you.”
They both still looked sick, but they both nodded.
“Where,” Debbie asked.
“Wher
e what?”
“Where is it sane,” She asked. Her face was serious. She leaned forward to listen. Hope in her eyes.
Mike told her. The others joined into the conversation as it went on. Several more from her party were listening raptly by the time Mike was done.
Then Debbie told her story. It turned out that what they had taken as one group was not. They were three separate groups. The four in Debbie's group had come across from the East Coast. They had stopped in a small town in Pennsylvania and there they had met the other two trucks.
The last truck in line was driven by a man named Brad. He had come down the coast from Vermont. A little town by Lake Champlain. The young girl in his group was his sister Alice. Darren John and George Dell rounded out their group. They had picked both of them up along the way.
The other woman with Debbie was Lisa Stevens, who looked like she had just stepped out of some high fashion magazine. She had that super model look. She told them she used to be a dancer. The other two were Joe Stevens, her brother, and his friend Stephen Choi.
The other truck, the second in line, held some military types that Mike just couldn't warm up to. It wasn’t him only. Ronnie and Bear both seemed to keep them at arms length. It was when Debbie also seemed to keep them at arms length that he realized they were all not one group at all.
The five of them simply introduced themselves by their last names: Rodriguez, Melendez, and Roberts were the three men, although Mike could not have told which was which. They all wore the same mirrored sunglasses, Khaki fatigues and carried military issue weapons. The two women were Smith and Patrick. None of them had name-tags, ranks or stripes, or whatever the hell it was he would have expected they would have had, had they come from some real military group. Five months was a long time to hold a group like that together if they were indeed regular Army, Mike thought.
They didn't actually worry him. He didn't sense a threat from them. They simply had this air of superiority. They were aloof and held themselves apart, and they made it clear they were headed for the other coast.
“Only place to live, Man,” Rodriguez, Melendez or Roberts had said. “The chicks, the surf... The weather.” He smiled, but it was hard to tell if it touched the eyes behind the glasses.
“But it would all be gone,” Chloe tried.
“Just leaves more of what is left for us. Know what I mean, Girl,” the guy had said.
“Yeah,” one of the others echoed.
Debbie stared down at the ground, when her head came up she exchanged a meaningful look with Mike.
Chloe ignored them after that. She said nothing at all, but Mike had seen her face when the guy had called her girl That was one no vote if they had wanted to join. They didn't, and Mike was glad they didn't. He didn't want them and he was positive that Bear, Ronnie and Josh felt the same way. Tim had said nothing. But Mike was sure it was on his mind and he would hear about it later. Or Ronnie would. It didn't appear that Debbie wanted them either. Possibly she had only tolerated them. Mike didn't want them to corrupt what they had.
He thought about it and realized the thought was true. What they had was special. He didn't want these people in it. These five. One bad apple could spoil the bunch. An old analogy; his aunt Ellie would have been surprised he had used it, but he had heard it from her all of his life. It had sunk in. One Bad apple... It only took one. And what they had was too good to risk. The others? Yes, if they wanted to come, but not these five. As he let his eyes travel from person to person he was positive no one else did either.
It was a good thing, he told himself, that they had not been in the lead vehicle with their military get ups and smarmy attitude, he told himself. He put them out of his mind and listened as Debbie told her story.
Debbie and her party had come up from the city, New York, and cut across the state. The city was a horror, she said. The gangs ran everything that was left. But the dead were picking away at them. The dead were one of the few groups that were thriving in New York. Most of Manhattan was destroyed, more than half of Long Island was submerged. There was a quasi group of ex-cop types who had tried to retain control of what was left of Manhattan, but they had ended up caught between two rival gangs and slaughtered. Harlem was barricaded, gang controlled maybe, or something else, there was just no way in to be able to know.
“The city is dead,” she told them. “You can smell it from miles away. I'm not kidding. No power. No water. Rats everywhere. We got out after two weeks. There were six of us, but we ran into a group of three guys riding bikes just east of Trenton. Something about them just gave me the creeps.”
“As soon as we relaxed they made their move. It was me, Lisa and Lani they wanted. But not all of us had let our guards down.” She took a breath, blew at her coffee and then sipped at it...
“They just shot Kevin. Lani tried to grab one of their guns. The rest of us just opened up on them. Lani died right away. She was just a kid too, you know? Kevin hung on for two days. Not a goddamn thing we could do for him,” she hung her head and shook it. She looked back up and stared off across the lots of parked cars and trucks.
“Lani came right back. We had known about the dead, the zombies. And we knew dead were coming back. I remember watching a man that had lain dead in the street for three hours come back. Another guy shot him. He was dead. Three hours later he got up and walked away.”
“So we knew it happened, but Lani came back so fast that I thought for a few moments that she hadn't died... I tried to lie to myself, and she almost got me.” Her eyes moved back to Mike's own and then away again. Her eyes were over bright when she finished. But she seemed strong. Filled with resolve. Mike liked her, she reminded him of Candace. The same kind of straight forward honesty... Real, he decided. Zero bullshit. All real.
“So,” Debbie finished. “I,” she looked around. “I am ready for sane.”
Bear cleared his throat and Debbie turned toward him. “I came from the City myself,” he said. It was more information than Mike had had about Bear. He was not talkative. “Harlem had power when I left... Gangs did take it over... Sealed it... We came from the projects.... Stayed awhile in... Well, it doesn't matter. I saw it... Central Park was a horror show when we left, but Harlem was still kicking.”
“Somebody told me that... Saw a glow in the sky but we didn't go up that far. It was so bad we just concentrated on getting out,” Debbie said.
Bear nodded, but stayed silent.
It was over that quickly. The five commandos, as Mike had come to think of them, begged off right after breakfast. They just got in their truck and left. The other two groups stayed and they were seventeen.
“Not for nothing,” Debbie said after the others had left. “But those are the kind of people you should be wary of... I didn't like being around them. I'd catch Melendez, or maybe it was Roberts, who can tell, looking at Lisa... It was just a bad look, you know? I mean, I know she's a looker, used to be an exotic dancer, men are gonna look ,but this was different. It wasn't that kind of look, you know?”
Chloe who was sitting next to Mike as Debbie spoke said, “I know exactly what you mean... Several of us do... Like real creeps, and I've seen where it goes from there. Believe me. No man is going to do that to me again,” Chloe said.
They small-talked back and forth for a few more minutes over coffee and Mike filled them in on what their plans were. The morning moved on and they got back to what they had started to do. The reason they had come there in the first place.
They decided to take two more of the electric four wheel drive vehicles since they would have two more trucks to pull them. They also decided that, although it was probably overkill, they would go back up the highway together, get the tow bars and then come back and get the six electric four by fours ready to go. There had simply been too many bad things going on. There was no reason to get lax now, and every reason to stay cautious. They had all agreed.
They were back at mid-morning with the six tow bars they had wanted, and an hour a
fter that they were on the road heading back across the state toward what had once been Kentucky, and the flock of Sheep Josh had seen about sixty miles past the campgrounds.
They stopped in the late afternoon. Ronnie had a good sight on a doe calmly feeding in an overgrown garden off the side of the road. He squeezed off his shot and the deer dropped. The garden provided the rest of the meal.
They made dinner and then posted a guard. Those who weren’t on guard duty sat and talked quietly, getting to know each other as the evening came down.
The Nation
Two men and two women, but what they had taken to be an overly large pack on the one man's back turned out to be a woman he was carrying on his back.
They had stopped at the bridge by the bend and waited for the fourth member to catch up. That was when they had seen it was a woman he carried on his back.
The man was huge, muscular, but even so it was easy to see that he was exhausted. They continued past the houses. The houses, Candace supposed, were hidden in deep shadow, they may not have seen them, but they had to have seen the barns, and she wondered what they had made of them. She had watched them walk right past them though, as if they hadn't seen them at all, Candace thought.
“Doesn't make sense,” Patty said.
The four walked on, their eyes on the ground. As they got closer Candace could see that they were stumbling, the big man looked up his lips moving as he walked along. They made it to the bottom of the ledge that came up to the ridge. The sun was bright fire in the sky, directly in their eyes. The big man stumbled and went down on one knee. The woman, who was not much more than skin and bones, slid off his back and on to the ground. She released her hands from around his neck. The big man leaned back, kicked his other leg out and collapsed back against the rock wall.
The three people in front, the two women and the man stared at the other man for a moment then slumped down to the ground themselves. One of the women walked to the pool, knelt carefully, and drank deeply. She spun the cap off a military style canteen and began to fill it in the pool.