The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (109 page)

Beth traced a finger across the map.
“Look. We need to get to 81... We decided that... 3 to 46... 46 to
80.. 80 to 81...” She sighed and looked up.

Bear laughed. “Yeah, and no way to tell
what is what.”

Beth nodded. “I think the map is pretty
close to worthless.”

Bear nodded this time.
“It's just that there has been so much destruction. It might get
better as we go,” he shrugged his shoulders, “It might get worse.
But it's not too bad. I say keep the map. It may help on occasion.
It's not bad to know where we
might
be. But we have to acknowledge that everything is
torn up and there is no way to know if a particular route will be
where it should be.” He looked at the map himself and then
straightened up. “Okay, sun sets in the northeast now. A compass
can not tell us that. Or if it can, I don't know how to do it. All
I know is that the few times I have tried to use the compass, it
points at different areas. Needle won't stay still. So,” he reached
into his pocket and pulled out a small key chain
compass.

The key chain itself held several keys.
Bear looked at the keys for a second as though he had never seen
them. “Well, anyway,” he said. “It's no good.” He drew back and
rocketed the keys, compass and all into the sky. “Should have
gotten that gone a long time ago. So, no good. But sun rises in the
southwest, a little more to the south than the west. That gives us
something to follow. If we stay to the right of the sun by a few
degrees, we'll be okay. Even if we followed the sun itself, we'd be
okay. That will bring us to 81 eventually. Of course, I'm not sure
81 will do us much good once, or if, we find it.”

“
How so?” Mac
asked.

“
Because, Honey,” Iris
said. “Remember?”

“
If I remembered, I
wouldn't have asked,” Mac said. “Hey... I mean that in a
not-being-an-asshole way,” he added.

“
Sounded like it,” Iris
said dryly. “Well, there was a run toward the south. I remember
seeing the interstate and the thruway clogged. People tried to
leave the north. So I would bet that everything going to the south
is packed solid.”

Bear nodded. “Saw that,” he
agreed.

“
Bad wrecks on the
thruway.” Winston added. “I remember seeing huge wrecks on the way
here... I think it was the thruway.”

“
So, a few degrees to the
right of the sun as it travels. Or follow routes where we can. We
have about fifty to sixty miles to get into Pennsylvania. I'm
thinking about staying away from the cities. I'm thinking what
could they, the dead, want in the middle of nowhere? It seems we
could be safe there.”

“
Probably,” Beth agreed.
“But there's no way we'll make it today.” She looked out of the
parking lot at route three, which was hopelessly clogged and had
only been getting worse as they drove it. She turned and looked
back at the store behind them.

“
Listen, this will sound
crazy, but if we drove right into the store, built a fire right
outside the doors... a big one... burn all night... how could they
get us?” Beth asked.

“
Leave early... get on the
road. We might be able to make Pennsylvania tomorrow,” Mac
agreed.

“
Not bad,” Billy
agreed.

“
We'll need a lot of wood
to burn,” Bear threw in.

“
More of those pallets.
Every store has those out back,” Iris added. "Dead wood from the
tree parks around here."

“
Parking lot full of tires.
Tires burn,” Winston added.

“
Let's get to it then,”
Bear agreed.

An hour later, as the sky began to
darken, they had a stack of pallets and tires piled up in front of
the doors to the store. The five trucks were inside. The back doors
to the loading docks were shut and locked once more.

Several more piles of pallets were set
up about ten feet apart in a half circle that closed in the front
of the parking lot. Tires had been piled on top of the pallets
Spares from cars and trucks in the parking lot. They had not tried
to get them off the rims, just punched holes in them so they would
not explode as they burned.

Kerosene lanterns burned inside the
store, casting their light. Beth finished pouring a can of kerosene
she had liberated from an aisle in the store over the piles, and
Bear stepped forward and flicked a match at the first pile. It went
up with a whoosh. He and Mac held sticks in the flames and then set
the other piles ablaze one by one. Bear finished by lighting one of
his cigarettes from the stick, and then tossed the stick into one
of the piles to burn. He walked back to the building, sat down on a
pile of pallets, leaned his back against the building and smoked as
evening came down.

Donita

The Moon shone brightly in the sky.
Cold air curled around her as she walked along, slipping from
shadow to shadow at the building fronts and the alleyways. The boy
and the twin clung deeper to the shadows, farther behind, under the
overhangs of the buildings, hidden from the moonlight, trailing
along behind her. The big man farther still, but not so far that
she was out of his sight at any time. The others farther
still.

The breather she was following was
alone, walking the roadway.

Falling down and then getting back up
and walking the roadway would be a better description, Donita
thought. Was he injured, she asked herself. No. It was more than
that. He was injured, at least a little from falling down
repeatedly, she could smell the blood that leaked from his palms
where they had scuffed the roadway, but that was not it. There was
something else wrong with him, something else that she knew she
should be able to understand, yet she could not get it to
come.

She thought about it, but
her new mind did not work that way.
Something... something she should know...
something from her old life, but that was quickly dissolving
into nothing, fading.

She knew she had come from the
breathers. They all came from the breathers, but she could not
remember the details of that life. It wasn't there. It was like
that part of her memory was dying away, gone more and more each
day.

He stumbled, fell, got back to his feet
after a time and scrubbed one skinned hand against his pants.
Donita could smell the blood from where she was in the shadows. She
could feel the excitement from the boy and the twin as they smelled
it.

She had brought only the boy, the twin
and the big man with her. The others were in a factory she had
chosen. More joined them by the hour. They knew she was there. They
knew they should follow her. They made their way to the factory and
waited with the others.

She had left to hunt for a
time, to bring her familiars with her, away from waiting for what
would soon come to them:
war.
She cocked her head from side to side, scenting
the air with her eyes.

The old sensory inputs
meant nothing. She did not breath, so there was no scent that came
to her as the air was pulled into her body. Instead, all smells
being particulate, her eyes absorbed the particles and turned it
into smell. It was a thousand times stronger than her old
human
ability to smell.
Deeper, more complex; it told a story, not just delivered a scent.
She drank it in now.

The man scrubbed his hand against his
jeans, leaving a trail of blood so bright, so glaring, so
compelling that Donita herself could barely stand it. She could see
the microscopic droplets clinging to the cotton, some falling away,
becoming airborne. Her head ducked lower as she drank in the
intoxicating scent. She straightened suddenly.

Two things had disrupted
her train of thought. Intoxicating. That was what was wrong with
the man. He was
intoxicated.
She remembered intoxication. Had she ever been
intoxicated herself or had she simply remembered seeing it, she
asked herself. She had no answer. She could not remember either
being intoxicated or not being intoxicated. The second was the
other of her own kind who stood hidden herself within the shadows
two blocks down. She had scented the man also; then she had scented
Donita. Donita drank her in.

There was no give to this one. She
believed she would be the one who took the man. She did not ask;
she knew, and she transmitted this knowing to Donita.

Donita was sure she had felt her own
knowing too, and she wondered when the defeat would come. One would
win. One would lose. There was no other position, and Donita knew
she would be the one to win. For some reason the other did not know
that.

Donita stared at her through the gloom
from her hiding place in the shadows, the man forgotten
temporarily. A second later, she stopped. The boy and the twin
skittered away into the darkness, sent away by Donita. The big man
moved up closer to her, protective of her, barely restraining
himself from rushing at the other female where she had hidden
herself in the shadows.

The man finished scrubbing his hand,
unseen by anyone except the boy and the twin who were deep down an
alleyway slightly ahead of him. As he began to walk again, he
caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned and
watched a woman, surely a dead woman from the look of her, step
into the moonlight. He stopped and stared, his mouth hanging
open.

A blur farther along the line of
buildings caught his attention, and he watched as another woman,
also dead - he could tell from the way her skin stretched too
tightly across her face, the way her bones protruded through that
skin in places - stepped out into the moonlight and faced the first
woman. Before he could fully grasp what was happening, the first
woman screamed and then launched herself at the other one. The man
stumbled back, backed into the alley wall where he stood watching
in fear.

Donita met her in midair. Her hands,
hooked into claws, punctured the other woman's chest and dragged
her down to the ground. From there it was all downhill for her. She
had underestimated the power that Donita possessed. Donita's
fingers had punched straight through her chest, hooked into her
ribs and then ripped her chest apart. Donita threw her to the
ground and then pounced on her, her feet driving powerfully into
her. Her mouth angled down and tore at her face as her hands closed
around her neck. She squatted on her torn chest, weight on the
balls of her feet, and rode her as she fought to live.

The fight did not last long. Her
powerful hands ripped her head from her neck even as her teeth tore
her face apart. There was no mercy in treachery. This one could
have been a part of Donita's army. She could have had power handed
to her, but she had decided to go her own way, and she had
convinced herself that defeat of Donita was obtainable. That was
not a belief that could be allowed to grow.

She looked over at the
breather. He stood still, mouth open, staring at Donita. She looked
back at him levelly. He was really too big for the boy and the
twin. If he had been stronger, in his right mind, she would have
taken him herself. But, as he was, he was perfect for the boy and
the twin, and they needed to practice...
learn.
She dropped her eyes from the
breather, looked up at the bloated moon and then gave them
permission to take him.

The boy flew from the shadows, thigh
muscles bunched, arms extended, and fell on him. The twin circled
to the other side and grabbed his flailing arm, nearly wrenching it
from the socket as the two of them took him down to the ground. In
his shock, he never uttered a sound. Teeth closed on his neck, and
the man's feet began to beat against the pavement as he finally
realized, too late, how serious the situation was.

Donita walked slowly from the shadows
to where the boy and the twin held the breather, the big man behind
her, his glassy eyes fixed on her as she walked up, so alive, but
he was dead. He just did not understand it yet. And this death
there was no coming back from. She watched the two take him all the
way, the eyes losing focus, sliding upward. They knew that she was
proud of them. She squatted on her haunches and watched, along with
the big man, as the two began to feed.

~

They came through the
roof...

Bear was talking to Beth, leaned
against the door frame, staring out at the night black parking lot,
when the first Zombie dropped from the ceiling of the store behind
them. There were four of them outside the vehicles talking or
keeping watch on the parking lot. Bear and Beth, Mac and Billy.
When the first one dropped, Billy spun around and clubbed it to the
ground. But the rest came so fast that they could not hope to
easily and quickly pick them off.

Beth raised her machine pistol straight
up and began firing into the roof. The light from the lanterns
didn't penetrate the darkness all the way to the ceiling, so there
was no way to see how many there were or even where they were. She
found herself wishing she still had the flashlight taped to the
rifle barrel.

Six dropped, and Bear had to wait for
them to come at him so he could be sure of shooting them and not
accidentally shooting into the trucks. Billy ran from truck to
truck pounding on the doors and window glass, waking everyone
up.