The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (123 page)

“
It's not like that, Jimmy.
Billy is a friend only... Lives in the same building.” She had
caught the fact that he had said she was a singer. Something she
wasn't yet, unless...

“
Uh huh. But he wants you.
The kid is like a love sick puppy. If you could step back and look
at it you would see it clearly. Are you telling me you are smart
enough to handle Donny and you can't see this Jingo kid has it bad
for you?”

Beth shrugged. “No... I know... I know
that... But he knows it isn't going to happen. He knows what the
deal is.”

“
Good... That's all I'm
saying... But you need to tell him to stay away... Can't be hanging
around while you're working... See?”

Beth nodded. “I see.”

“
Good, cause next week you
start as my lead act. I know you...” He stopped as Beth lunged
across the bar and hugged him, squealing as she did. He hugged her
back, laughing.

She kissed his cheek and then the smile
went away a little as one hand cupped the side of her breast. Her
eyes focused on his own. “I think we'll become good friends, baby,”
he told her. She nodded as his hand roamed a little further and
then trailed away across the flat plains of her stomach. She pulled
back. Jimmy wore a crooked smile on his face. “So we understand
each other?”

“
Yeah,” Beth told
him.

“
So smile then. Let's have
a drink... On me... Pour us something good, baby,” Jimmy told
her.

3:00 am

Beth stepped out into the darkness of
the parking lot. She had spent over a month trying to convince
Jimmy to let her sing. The Palace had huge crowds every night.
Everyone knew that scouts were constantly cruising the crowd
looking for talent. More than one act had been discovered at the
Palace. Harry knew that and played on the reputation. Singing here
could lead to the big break she was looking for. She had gotten her
wish tonight, and more than she had bargained for, a relationship
with Jimmy. She wasn't sure how that was going to be defined in
public, but in private it was going to be defined as a sexual
relationship. He had just defined it for her, she would have to
wait to see what the public definition was going to be, but she had
a good idea how it was going to be.

Nan, the dancer Jimmy was currently
seeing, was going to be upset. Jimmy was not subtle. It had been
clear that they had been seeing less and less of each other. She
had no doubt that her first night he was going to make it clear she
was his. Like a dog marking his territory. She sighed. Off the
street but still getting fucked for money. She hated putting it
that starkly in her head, but that was the plain truth. She was
still selling it, just different terms, better money, better
protected. She heard footsteps running behind her and her breath
caught in her throat. She turned as the club door that exited to
the parking lot banged shut.

“
Beth,”
Don yelled.
“Beth.”

She stopped and waited.

“
Uncle Jimmy said I should
drive you home... He don't want you walking.”

She sighed. She had half expected it.
Don ran the twenty feet from the door to where she was. She changed
direction and walked slowly toward Don's car. Well, she thought, at
least there would be no more bullshit from Don.

Twenty feet away on Beechwood Avenue,
the prostitutes were just beginning to show up in force, waiting
for the early morning traffic.

Seattle: 6:00 P.M.

Bobby

Bobby Chambers
sat slumped against a wall in an alley off
Beechwood Avenue, in Seattle's red light district. He had been dead
for over six hours. The money he had stolen, had allowed him to
indulge in his habit for over eight hours with no sleep. The last
injection had killed him.

The Cocaine he had purchased had been
cut with rat poison, among other things, so that the hype who had
sold it to him could stretch it a little further. 

The constant hours of indulging in his
habit would have killed him anyway, but the addition of the rat
poison was all his overworked heart could stand, and it had simply
stopped beating in protest.

The alleyway seemed to dip and then
rise sharply as a sudden, strong vibration shook the area. The
shaking lasted for mere seconds. Dust raftered down from the sky,
shaken from buildings. In the silence alarms brayed, and glass
shattered; fell from its frame to the streets below. Gunshots
punctuated the silences in between the sudden periods of quiet,
screams, yelling. Suddenly the ground shook harder, cracks appeared
in the alleyway where Willie's body lay and threaded their way out
into the street. Far off in the distance the earthquake shook
harder at the epicenter, small booms coming over the sound of
destruction as the time wore on. Nearby a building succumbed to the
vibration and toppled over into the street clogging it from side to
side. Cars rocked on their tires shifting violently from side to
side, sometimes bouncing off in one direction or another, or
slamming into a nearby car or building.

This time when the silence came the
sounds that it carried were different. Weeping from the piled
remains in the street. The zap and crackle of power lines as they
danced in the street like charmed snake without their
handlers.

Bobby's eyelids flickered, and his hand
shot up to bat at a fly that had been examining his
nose.

Watertown New York

10:00 PM

The first quake had been minor, the
last few had not. The big one was coming, and Major Richard Weston
didn't need to have a satellite link up to know that. He touched
one hand to his head. The fingertips came away bloody. He would
have to get his head wound taken care of, but the big thing was
that he had made it through the complex above and down into the
facility before it had been locked down.

He laughed to
himself,
before
it
was
supposed
to
have been locked down. It had not been locked down at all. He had,
had to lock it down once he had made his way in or else it would
still be open to the world.

He had spent the last several years
here commanding the base. He had spent the last two weeks working
up to this event from his subterranean command post several levels
above. All wreckage now. He had sent operatives out from there to
do what they could, but it had all been a stop gap
operation.

The public knew that there was a meteor
on a near collision course with the Earth. They had assured the
public it would miss by several thousands of miles. Paid off the
best scientists in some cases, but in other cases they had found
that even the scientists were willing to look past facts if their
own personal spin put a better story in the mix. A survivable
story. They had spun their own stories without prodding.

The truth was that the meteor might
miss, it might hit, it might come close, a near miss, but it
wouldn't matter because a natural chain of events was taking place
that would make a meteor impact look like small change.

The big deal, the
b
igger than a meteor
deal
, was the earthquakes that had already
started and would probably continue until most of the civilized
world was dead or dying. Crumbled into ruin from super earthquakes
and volcanic activity that had never been seen by modern
civilization. And it had been predicted several times over by more
than one group and hushed up quickly when it was uncovered. The
governments had known. The conspiracy theorists had known. The
public should have known, but they were too caught up in world
events that seemed to be dragging them ever closer to a third world
war to pay attention to a few voices crying in the wilderness. The
public was happier watching television series about conspiracies
rather than looking at the day to day truths about real
conspiracies. The fact was that this was a natural course of
events. It had happened before and it would happen again in some
distant future.

So, in the end it hadn't mattered. In
the end the factual side of the event had begun to happen. The
reality, Major Weston liked to think of it. And fact was fact. You
couldn't dispute fact. You could spin it, and that was the way of
the old world. Spinning it, but the bare facts were just that: The
bare facts.

The bare facts were that the
Yellowstone Caldera had erupted just a few hours before. The bare
facts were that the earth quakes had begun, and although they were
not so bad here in northern New York, in other areas of the
country, in foreign countries, third world countries, the bare
facts of what was occurring were devastating: Millions dead, and
millions more would die before it was over. And this was nothing
new. The government had evidence that this same event had happened
many times in Earth's history. This was nothing new at all, not
even new to the human race. A similar event had killed off most of
the human race some seventy-five thousand years before.

There was an answer,
help
, a
solution
, but Richard
Weston was unsure how well their solution would work. It was, like
everything else, a stop gap measure, and probably too little too
late. It was also flawed, but he pushed that knowledge away in his
mind.

While most of America had tracked the
meteorite that was supposed to miss earth from their living rooms,
he had kept track of the real event that had even then been
building beneath the Yellowstone caldera. And the end had come
quickly. Satellites off line. Phone networks down. Power grids
failed. Governments incommunicado or just gone. The Internet, down.
The Meteorite had not missed Earth by much after all. And the
gravitational pull from the large mass had simply accelerated an
already bad situation.

Dams burst. River flows reversed.
Waters rising or dropping in many places. Huge tidal waves. Fires
out of control. Whole cities suddenly gone. A river of lava flowing
from Yellowstone. Civilization was not dead; not wiped out, but her
back was broken.

I
n the small city of Watertown, that had rested above
Bluechip, near the shore of the former lake Ontario, the river
waters had begun to rise: Bluechip, several levels below the city
in the limestone cave structures that honeycombed the entire area,
had survived mostly intact, but unless sealed, it would surely
succumb to the rising river waters. By the time the last military
groups had splashed through the tunnels and into the underground
facility, they had been walking through better than two feet of
cold and muddy river-water. The pressure from the water had begun
to collapse small sections of caves and tunnels below the city, and
that damage had been helped along by small after-shocks.

When the last group had
reached the air shaft, they had immediately pitched in with a group
Weston had sent to brick the passageway off. The remaining bricks
and concrete blocks were stacked and cemented into place in the
four foot thick wall they had started. The materials, along with
sandbags initially used to hold back the rising waters, had been
taken from huge stockpiles within the city, and from the stalled
trucks within the wide tunnel that had once fed traffic into the
base. There was no way in, and no way out of the city. With one
small exception.

The exception was the air
ducting. The ducts led away from the city towards a small
mountain-peak about a mile from the city. There the ducts merged
together, inside a huge natural rock tunnel that had been part of
the original network of caves and passage ways. That tunnel
culminated deep within the mountain at a remote air treatment
facility. There were also several access points where the ducting
came close to the surface via tunnels and passageways that ran
though the huge complex of caves. And it would be possible to walk
through one of the many air shafts to the tunnel, break through the
ducting, follow it to the treatment facility or outside to the
surface and freedom. It would be difficult, but it would be
possible. The end of the trip would bring them to the surface, from
there they could go anywhere.

CHAPTER TWO

Billy Jingo: L.A.

March 4th

Billy paced the hallway,
trying to think it out, telling himself they had to leave soon.
Telling himself it was the right thing to do. The problem was that
he was not used to doing the right thing. So unused to it, in fact,
that he wasn't sure he wanted to try...
should try
.

The world had been turned upside down
for the last few days. There was no official word that anything was
wrong at all, but someone had fucked up. Of that he had no doubt at
all.

The police? Gone. Fire department?
Ditto. Army? Well, wasn't the National Guard supposed to show up
when the shit hit the fan? But so far the army had not raised a
finger to do anything for them at all. There was a base right over
by the airport near the Los Angeles Freeway, but there had been no
sign of them.

He lived on the north side, a high rise
that had been new sometime back in the seventies. He had gone up to
the roof twice during the day and looked over the city.

It appeared to be dead. There was a
precinct only two blocks away, deserted, doors hanging open.
Looters were carrying away cheap computer systems and who knew what
else, a steady stream in and out of the front doors.