The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (105 page)

God be with us. Keep us strong. Bring
those we love back to us. Amen.

In The Campground

Candace's diary

It's not over until it's over, they
say. We came back today to find out that one of the girls we had
thought got away came back while we were gone and took off in the
truck the other side left by the woods. We need one more day and
we'll be gone, maybe two. So hopefully she won't be back to cause
us any trouble.

I am so tired of this. Sometimes I
think we should have stayed in the cave in Watertown, fought them
there, let it end there. Then I look at Mike, and I love him so
much that I want any chance at all at a free life. I'm glad we ran,
and all this doesn't seem so bad.

I'm banged up, we all are. At least I'm
not missing part of me like Ronnie and David both are. A piece of
finger for David, a piece of ear for Ronnie. Patty is going to be
so pissed!

Speaking of Patty, and everyone else,
we're all worried. We can't reach them on the radios. Bob supposes
that they could have gotten out of range. I guess we won't know
until we're on our way. And if I don't stop writing and go to
sleep...

I'm back. Mike is sleeping now and my
head's a lot better. I hope we'll start out tomorrow. God help
us.

April 3rd: Late Night

Mike's journal

We have seven trucks, so everyone is a
driver. I thought the big trucks would be the worst, but I have to
admit, once we loaded them down they were much easier to drive. And
they are loaded down with every farm implement we could find. And
more than that, everything we could think of, or thought that we
would need. We also packed in trees to plant, sapling fruit trees,
vine cuttings and so much more. I just lost count.

There were many things that we could
not get, but I think that we have more than we need. I think we can
always come back, like Bob says, when we need to.

Candace is on watch post. We're both
anxious to end the traveling and get there. She told me tonight
that there's a good chance she might be pregnant. Just about three
weeks overdue, give or take, so she didn't want to get my hopes up.
Well, too late! They're up!

We're stopped for the
night, but we'll be back out in the morning. We're still on the
logging road,
well,
one of several logging roads. They weave all over the place
and turn into each other, but this was the one they used. We're
following the tracks of the big tires. With all the mud from the
rain, it's pretty easy to do.

April 4th

Patty's journal

It's fairly early morning here. I have
had bad dreams all night long that Ronnie got shot. No matter what
I did, I couldn't shake it. I don't even have Candace here to tell
me it's okay. I'm such a baby sometimes. I'm not a big believer in
dreams, but it seemed so real. I finally decided to get up and not
try to sleep anymore at all.

We spent the entire day
getting this overhang, and the cave behind, it livable. Whatever
had lived in the cave last liked to eat deer,
big
deer. It took all the morning to
bring out all the bones and dump them.

There's a pretty big smoke
hole that also allows light in. Yes, I said
smoke hole,
because people have used
this cave before. There are drawings of hands, outlines, drawings
of deer and horses and birds all over the walls

This is a huge cave. The main area is
bigger than any church or cathedral I have ever seen. Then there
are several dozen caves off this one, and we can't tell where they
may end. The passages just keep going deeper, and it's pretty cold
the deeper in that you go.

The smoke hole got us wondering what's
up top, so we climbed up to take a look. We thought that would be
hard to do, but there are steps that lead up there, worn down. They
used this place a long time, whoever they were.

Janet says the drawings and paintings
are not like Native American art work that she has seen. It makes
us wonder who they were.

The top is flat, and from there you can
see for miles. I mean it must be miles. We can see the other line
of the Appalachians were we left them in Kentucky, and although we
did not come in a straight line, we did come a long way. I tried
the radio up there, but no go, even as high up as I was. Even so, I
go up there every time now to try it.

The other direction shows us our
valley, which is huge. There are more mountains in the distance,
several rivers, lakes, herds of buffalo, horses, and other animals
that are too far away to see what they are. It's a long valley full
of living things, but no other people. No sign of them.

We don't know how much longer we have
to wait, but what can we do? God help us get our people home to us,
Amen.

April 15th

618 Park Avenue: Seventh floor
2B

Bear paced before the glass slider that
opened onto the balcony. The apartment had been getting on his
nerves more and more every day. Closing him in, making him jumpy,
paranoid.

He had spent five full days scouring
the streets, but he had found nothing. He had learned a great deal
though. The city did not belong to the living any longer. Yes, the
living were there, gathered together, but the living were becoming
the dead. Looking at it, it was inevitable The dead would grow even
as the living shrank. Someday the dead would be more... stronger,
and they would take the city completely. He had wondered if it were
like that everywhere.

He had come back to the building,
killed more of the dead that had taken over the lobby once more,
broken the lock set and made his way back up to the apartment. That
had been days, or even weeks ago. He had fed himself from Amanda
Bynes' cupboards. The water supply at the taps was gone, but he had
carried cases of water and sports drinks up to the apartment early
on, so it was well stocked.

He had lost track of the days and weeks
as he had sunk deeper into his depression. Donita had not come
back. He had gone out searching two other times, but he had finally
given it up. Where did you search for someone who was missing? She
could be ten feet away or ten thousand miles away. There was no way
to know. He had spent more and more time on the balcony, looking
out over the dying city.

The dead had been giving him more
trouble too. He had put a new deadbolt in the stairwell door that
opened onto the lobby. He kept that door locked, but they had
figured out how to force the lock. Not surprising since he had
forced it himself to get back into the apartment. He hadn't been
able to repair all the damage that he had caused to the steel door
frame.

The really bad part about that had been
that when he did return, he had found the key to the stairwell door
- apparently all tenants had one - along with a key to the lobby
front door, hanging on a peg above the kitchen counter.

He had finally scoured all the other
apartments, taken what he could carry and blocked off the stairwell
with a jumble of couches, chairs and other furnishings he had
thrown down into and then stacked up against the jumble in the
stairwell to reinforce it.

He had thought, at the time, that
closing off the stairwell made perfect sense. What he had not
thought out was the fact that he too would not be able to use the
stairwell. Yes, it would keep the dead out, but it would also keep
him in; it had since he had closed it off, and that was not
something he could take much longer.

At night he could hear the zombies
working at the tangle of furniture in the stairwell. It was just a
matter of time before they managed to fight their way through it
and clear the stairwell. When that happened, it would be the end of
him.

And the Zombies were getting smarter.
They had been coming at dusk and assaulting the stairwell. It was
as if they knew he was there, and they had to have him at any cost.
But they had no real thinking process. They simply threw themselves
at the pile, clawing, trying to work their way over or through it,
never making much progress. But the last two nights, they had
stopped simply assaulting the pile of furniture and junk Bear had
tossed into the stairwell. They had instead begun taking it apart,
working at it, as though they had stood back and really looked at
it, decided how to clear it and then went about it. That was not
dumb-dead-zombie thinking. Not at all. That was thinking like any
man could do. They were thinking, and that scared him. It scared
him because the last two mornings before this one had shown
progress. And this morning, they had nearly made it. Another couple
of hours of work, and they would have been in.

He had decided the time had come to
leave. It had, and really, he should have left three weeks before.
He should have left and headed south like he and Donita had
planned. Instead, he had developed a suicidal side. He didn't care.
How else could he explain barricading himself in the way he had? He
couldn't.

It took three hours of the morning to
make his way through the pile of furnishings and junk, and he had
awakened three zombies as he moved it, they had come out of the
shadows in the bottom of the stairwell and stared up at him. Smart,
but not smart enough. He had killed the first one, and then the
second one when it had come right up behind the first one. The
third one was a little smarter.

The third one had waited in the deep
shadows, silent, as he finished moving the tangle of furniture and
started down into the shadows. He stopped just a few steps down. He
had taken a flashlight from Amanda Bynes' kitchen. He flicked it on
now, gun out before him, before he took another step.

The third one was crouched six feet
below, waiting for him, and even though he had been ready, he
nearly blew it.

He was a young boy, or had been. He was
coiled like a snake, and he came out of the coil and launched
himself into the light.

Bear fired three times, his finger
squeezing convulsively on the trigger. The boy landed in a heap
before him, a wet splash on the steps. His mouth continued to work,
biting at the steel step where his teeth now lay shattered,
growling deep in his throat. Bear leaned forward and shot the boy
in the head once more, and he stopped moving. Bear made his way
around him and down the stairs into the first floor
stairwell.

There were two more waiting in the
lobby, but these were not the smart ones. These were slow and
shuffling. He killed the first one as he stepped out into the
lobby. The second one stood looking down at her companion. He
walked up, placed the gun against her head and pulled the trigger.
She collapsed next to her friend where she apparently had wanted to
be.

Bear made the street through the same
shattered door frame he had come through with Donita just a few
short weeks before. The zombies had shattered the windows on the
delivery truck and torn the inside apart. He had hoped the truck
would be intact, and it was not. He looked around at the early
morning quiet of the devastated city, up and down the deserted
street, scuffed the sidewalk with his gore spattered boots and then
walked off to the south.

The Nation

“
Got it... Little to the
left... Okay,” Ronnie leaned back on the ladder and drove a spike
into first one side, and then the other side of the roof beam. He
straightened up. "We should have thought of lumber. All we had to
do was throw a bunch of it on one of those trucks. Next time," he
turned to Mike and started to speak, but the frown on Patty's face
stopped him.

Mike looked over at Patty and Candace
where they stood in the open doorway of the framed cottage. Candace
looked up and met his eyes. She wrapped one arm around Patty and
pulled her close.

“
We've been here for just a
few weeks, and you guys are already talking about going back out
there,” Candace said.

“
Not necessarily,” Mike
said.

“
And it probably wouldn't
be us,” Ronnie added.

Patty rolled her eyes. “Ronnie Vincent,
do not lie to me to try to make me feel better. Don't do
that.”

“
I,” Ronnie started.
Candace raised her eyes to him and arched her eyebrows. “I won't,”
he finished. He came down off the ladder and walked over to Patty.
Patty looked up from where her head lay on Candace's breast.
“Baby,” Ronnie began. “We have fifteen more people already than we
came with. There are so many things we forgot to bring in. And
things that have been added to the wish list. Bob thinks we could
have hundreds before the snow flies. And that's Bob's conservative
estimate. He thinks a thousand isn't out of line. If so, we don't
have enough of anything.” He reached down and tilted her head up to
his, continuing in a lower voice. “We're not even thinking of going
right now. Fall at the soonest, but if someone has to go... I'm not
voting for someone to do my dirty work for me. If you say no, then
no it will be, but I don't see you saying no when the time comes,”
Ronnie finished carefully.

“
If you make me feel
guilty,” Patty said.

Ronnie shook his head. “Not guilt.
Responsibility. This is our life.”

Bob edged through the door with a
second beam.