The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (100 page)

She had been their toy. Passed from one
to the other. Yesterday morning they had come back from someplace
with a new girl. She had no idea where they had found her. Sometime
late afternoon, before dinner, they had killed her.

Something had occurred. She hadn't been
able to tell what. But she had heard the shot, and then they had
brought her out from the bedroom and dumped her on the living room
floor. Naked. A bullet hole in her head. And she had known it would
not be long before it would be her turn to be dead. She had just
known it.

She had been cooking for them, a little
grill out on the balcony. They went out and brought things back,
canned stuff; she cooked it on the grill in a pot, and they ate it
it like it was the finest gourmet food available anywhere. She had
gone into the bathroom, opened the medicine chest and stared at the
sleeping pills she had put there, until one of them, Randy, she
thought his name was, had come and yelled through the bathroom
door. She had taken the pills and dumped them into her pocket,
flushed the toilet and went back out to the kitchen.

She had put all of them in the food.
Mixed them right in with the canned spaghetti, and they had wolfed
them right down. Never had a clue. Now they were all out. Maybe
dead. There had been an awful lot of pills.

She had been with Bobby a few days
before, when she had thought to get the pills. Bobby was nice, if
there could be anything close to nice with these guys. He had
looked her up and down and that had been that. She imagined he had
probably never had a woman that looked like her in his entire life.
Maybe never had a woman at all. It was clear he was an
inexperienced lover. He had no idea what he was doing. He was
rough, cruel even. Nice only meant he didn't beat her, he still
used her as he pleased.

He had taken her with him because the
others had been out and he had not wanted to leave her alone in the
apartment, guessing, correctly, that she would not be there when he
came back. But, he had been bored, left alone, and he wanted to
look through some shops and stores in the neighborhood.

It had been broad daylight, but there
had been no one to stop him or any of the other gangs that roved
the streets and did as they pleased. He had broken into a pawn
shop. She had talked him into going into the medication aisle at
the Korean store down the street. And she had picked up the
sleeping pills. He had seen her do it. She had told him it was
relief for period pain. She had picked up a box of pads too. He had
turned red and had not asked her about them again. As a bonus, he
had left her alone that night also, probably thinking that she had
been indisposed. Fine. Whatever. It didn't matter any
longer.

It was nearly dark by the time they had
finally passed out. That had pissed her off. Pissed her off and
scared her too. The dead were out here somewhere. The dark was
their time.

They had died off when the planes had
come over, but they were back now. Strong, or becoming strong. She
wanted to get as far away as she could before the street was
completely lost to the night. There were people down the street,
two blocks or so down. She had seen them coming and going. Making
sport of the zombies. Enticing them into chasing them and then
killing them with head shots from the shotguns they carried;
routing them out in the daylight and running them over with cars,
shooting them as they roared by, racing the block from end to end
in a souped up car they had gotten from somewhere. They had been
out earlier. If she could get down the street, she was sure they
would take her in. Positive.

She stopped at the end of the street,
caught her breath leaning against the side of a 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. Bobby... 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
building two buildings back. She screwed up her courage.

“
Bobby... Bobby 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 Bobby. Both were shuffling and lurching as
they came. Her heart leapt high in her throat, seeming to clog her
airway. A strangled squawk came from her open mouth. 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 in 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. A second later the others joined in, dragging her
to the ground and then out into the road. They left her under the
street lights, her blood pooling around her head.

The Docks

Donita walked along aimlessly. The
smell of the river was heavy on the air, and she was following it.
She was unsure what she had in mind. The tears continued as she
walked. It wasn't fair, she continued to tell herself, but telling
herself it wasn't fair didn't do anything for her situation. And
here she was wandering around in the night where the dead ruled,
like she wanted the exact opposite of what she had told Bear that
she wanted. Like, instead of dying, she wanted to slip into forever
alive like the zombies seemed to be. Like she was some sort of...
Some sort of Zombie bait... Teasing them.

But there were no Zombies around, or if
they were, she couldn't see them, hear them, feel them. She pressed
her hand flat against her chest. The pain was worse. Much worse.
And she wondered how much more she could take, how much more her
body could handle. She stopped and drew several deep breaths,
trying to ease the pain that seemed to close on her chest like a
fist.

When the pain eased a little, she
started off down the street once more, heading toward the
river.

March 11th

The Dead Girl In The Street:

They came from the shadows, the smell
of blood pulling them. The young man in the lead approached the
girl's body where it lay on the pavement. They had watched it far
into the darkness and now into the sunrise. But unlike some, it had
not come back. He looked over at her now, her eyes dull marbles,
her mouth wide as if frozen in a scream, curled on her side, one
sneaker twenty feet away. The pink sock on that foot had a hole in
the toe, and her toe peeked out, red polish glinting in the early
light.

They had watched as the other dead, the
slow ones, had gotten her last night. Not that they wouldn't have
gotten her themselves. They had been following her too. But the
others had gotten her first. They had chased them off before they
could take her too far into death, to the place where she could not
come back. But sometimes they didn't come back. No reason, no
explanation. They just didn't.

He walked across the asphalt. The
sunlight bothered his eyes, but he wore dark glasses to protect
them. He walked up to the girl's corpse and toed it with one heavy
work boot. She rocked stiffly.

“
Done for,” he said. His
voice was clear but distorted. Two in the small crowd behind him
whined. He stepped back from the body. “Go ahead,” he said in a
rasping whisper, “Go ahead.”

The small crowd of seven fell on the
girl's body and began to feed on it where she lay in the
road.

Park Avenue: Bear

Bear awoke to the early morning light
spilling into the bedroom. He turned to hold Donita, but she was
gone, that side of the bed cold. He lay still for a few minuets,
incredulous that he had not only fallen asleep in the midst of all
of this, but shocked that he had slept through the night. It was a
split second later that he launched himself from the bed. Nearly
flying up, and landing neatly on the flats of his feet and running
down the short hall to the living room in one smooth motion,
propelled by fear.

It was crazy to think that there was
anything wrong. He knew about her heart problem. She had told him
it was fine. But the panic had already slipped into his brain and
pinned his thoughts down. She had just talked to him yesterday. She
had just made him promise yesterday that he would... He pushed it
out of his head as he slid into the living room. Empty.

The strength fled from his body as he
stared at the back of the door. His hand reached out and plucked
the note from the door. The pushpin went flying. He read it slowly,
and then read it again as the tears began to slide from his
eyes.

The outskirts of the city

They stood in the shadows of the
factory as the morning came on. The fires still burned in the
distance. Fires were heat. Fires were bad. Fires frightened them
all, and they wanted nothing to do with them. Several times they
had been tempted to go out into the city and feed, but the fires
had been too frightening. Too frightening even with the smell of so
much fresh death on the wind. So tempting... So tempting, but the
fire was fierce, a pain of its own. Heat was for those who lived
the small life. For those who were dead, heat was an enemy. Pain.
Corruption.

They stood and silently waited for a
leader. A leader was promised. None of them knew where that leader
would come from, when that leader would come, but they knew they
would have one. They sniffed the air and waited. Some whining
lightly, deep in their throats, other times growling, salivating in
their own dry way, eyes running as they scented the air and
waited.

Bear: Last Wishes

The morning moved on. He
had finally gotten himself up from the floor and went and looked
out over the city. His sadness and depression stole away as the sun
rose, and was replaced with a steely resolve. She had asked
him,
made him promise,
that he would bury her if anything happened to her. She had a
fear of the Zombies getting to her, biting her, and turning her.
She had made him promise.
Promise.
Like she had known. Like it was a real thing. And
he had thought it was just fear talking, just things you said when
you were afraid.
Just in case
things.
Not real things.

He had known about her
heart. He supposed, he admitted to himself now, that he had even
known that she could die if she did not have the kind of treatment
she needed. Could... He had known too that it was harder for her.
He had thought immediately about her heart when she had talked to
him, but he had not questioned her. Her eyes had said something to
him. Something like,
Ask me and I will
tell you the truth. All you have to do is ask.
And he had not wanted to talk about the truth, did not
want
to talk about the
truth because the truth scared him too badly. So he had not asked.
He had pretended he had never seen that permission in her
eyes.

She had talked. She had talked about
the things that scared her. She had been worried she would die in
the night, turn, and then go after him. They had talked about it,
but only briefly. He had shut the conversation down. He didn't want
to believe it, and hearing it only forced him to believe it. He had
been selfish. He had given in to his fear when he should have given
in to her need to talk to him, tell him, and here he was. It was a
real thing now. She would not have left if something had not made
her leave. A real thing, he repeated to himself. He could see no
other reason why she would have left.

The note had said next to
nothing. Just,
'I'm Sorry... I love
you.'
At least it said that. At least. But
why had she gone?

He took the stairs down to the lobby.
The stairwell had been empty, but the lobby had not. The Zombies
had long before crashed in through the door and taken over the
lobby. He had eased open the door to find two of them laying in the
shadows, sleeping, or whatever it was they did that passed for
sleeping. He stepped quietly out of the stairwell, shoved a piece
of broken board into the fire door opening to keep it from closing
and locking him out, and then walked quietly to where the two
lay.

They stank of death, rotted flesh,
corruption. Their chests did not rise and fall. They did not move.
Their eyes were partially slitted. It would be easy to believe that
they really were dead and had been for some time. The gun was in
his hand. He had flicked off the safety before he had stepped out
into the lobby. He walked up to the first one, turned slightly to
take in the second one.

Whatever did not work, their hearing
did. As soon as he shot the first one, the second would be up and
on him. He looked from one to the other, lowered the gun and shot
the first one in the head.

The second one screamed as he turned, a
high piercing sound that distracted him for the briefest of
seconds. She began to come up off the floor, her eyes wild, flaccid
breasts swinging freely, flapping like sails, and he nearly let her
get him. He became so distracted that she was very close to having
him before he finally pulled the trigger and shot her.