The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (166 page)

The dead were all around them, he could
hear them moving, searching, he knew he had the briefest of
minutes, no more. He stopped and shifted Pearl to one shoulder, and
then sped up, limping faster through the overgrown field. Behind
him a soft whump sounded in the night, and he felt the heat against
his back as the truck burst into flame behind him, flames shot up
into the night. Billy shifted Pearl's weight more fully onto his
shoulder, and lifted the gun, searching for the dead, but the
flames were keeping them at bay. One thing they were still afraid
of. Before he could turn fully back to the building just a few feet
away now, the truck blew up behind him and he felt himself pushed
by the blast up onto the concrete of the driveway, where he
struggled to stay on his feet.

He got his feet moving,
skirted the closed garage doors, and barreled into a steel door set
into the breezeway that connected the building,
a house he realized
, to the garage.
A second of fumbling, breathing hard, panicked completely, and the
door swung inward. Warm, stale air rushed out to meet him. He
stumbled inside, kicked the door shut and collapsed to the floor. A
few minutes of stillness and his eyes began to adjust to the sparse
light. Moonlight leaked in from windows in the garage. Most of that
light was blocked.

A few seconds later as he laid Pearl
out flat on the floor in the near darkness, he heard the door
handle rattle. He was on his feet fast, turning the deadbolt to the
locked position, locking the handle-set, but the dead on the other
side of the door had heard and they knew he was there. A snarl came
to him as he backed away from the door. The door shook as it was
tested again and again, and then silence descended. Silence in the
near absolute darkness. A bad place to be.

The dead made an odd clicking sound on
the other side of the door along with the occasional snarl, a sort
of strangled scream, which, Billy supposed was all they could do
with no air to move their lungs. He pulled a lighter from his
pocket and clicked it on, holding it high as he turned and looked
over the garage. An SUV loomed out of the darkness, illuminated by
the flickering flame and the moonlight through the dusty windows. A
second later Billy had the door open and Pearl tumbled inside onto
the passenger seat. He worked the seat belt around her body, really
beginning to panic now. She was covered in blood. Her entire face
and the front of her shirt. He loosened the shirt he had made into
a tourniquet for her leg and allowed the blood flow to return. He
carefully cut her jeans away from the wound, a long nasty gash,
that was, fortunately, shallow. The bleeding had stopped, the
tourniquet had done the job, the wound was starting to
close.

She didn't move or speak. He forced
himself to stay calm, belted her in and moved around to the drivers
side of the SUV. He watched a shadow pause by one dusty window as
he made the drivers side and jumped inside. He heard the breaking
glass as he slammed the door on the dusty garage and shot his hand
toward the ignition. Nothing. He slammed one hand against the
visor, driving it down. Again nothing. His eyes swept around the
garage and fell instantly on a board with several sets of keys by
the inside doorway near the breezeway.

The shadow at the window was forcing
itself through the opening piece by piece, snarling, the garage
wall shook from the exerted force. More behind it, he supposed. It
seemed hopeless.

He decided, flung the door open and
slammed it shut. He ran straight at the zombie, a woman, or she had
been. Her breasts were shredded green-black flesh in the sparse
light from forcing herself through the too small opening. Her face
lifted to his, gray-black, gold eyes, almost iridescent, animal
like in the semi darkness. He shot her once in the head and watched
her relax, half in, half out of the window: Blocking it
momentarily. He didn't wait to see how long she would remain
blocking the window, he sprinted for the board, gathered all the
keys and ran back to the truck. A moment later he was inside. His
breath a ragged, tearing pain in his chest. He glanced at the
window and watched as more dead ripped the body from the opening
and began shoving themselves through. A split second later another
pane of glass broke, then the divider that had held the glass panes
apart, and a second after that the opening was large enough for
them to crawl through.

He dropped the keys on the seat top and
pushed them apart, the SUV key was not there. A Chevy key was what
he needed, and there were none there. He looked again, nothing but
old keys. His eyes wandered off the edge of the seat to the
floorboards. The key was there, one mixed with a half dozen others
on a worn leather fob. Had they been there all along? Had they
fallen as he had dumped the others on the seat top? Was it the
right key? A second later it was in the ignition switch. He
hesitated, scared. He closed his eyes to say a small prayer and one
of the dead slammed into the side of the SUV. He sucked a hard
breath in, twisted the key, and the motor began to turn over
slowly. He stopped, his eyes swiveled to the glass. A man stared
back, inches away. Lips curled over yellow-black teeth. Gray-green
skin stretched over too prominent cheekbones in the dash light.
Eyes gold flecked orange. Billy slammed his fists against the
steering wheel just as the zombie smashed its own hands against the
glass. The window shattered, Billy twisted the switch, the motor
roared to life and just as the zombies hands reached for his throat
he slammed the truck in reverse and roared out of the garage, the
hands clutching against his t-shirt, ripping part of it
away.

The SUV hit the aluminum door and just
the edge of the small wood trim at the far edge next to the
breezeway. The door itself crumpled, wood splinters flew, the SUV
bounced hard, tires screaming, and flew across the pavement heading
into the street. Scattering the debris before it as it
went.

Billy managed to lock up the brakes,
shift into drive and tore away down the street. A few minutes later
he made a hard right onto the main road, and drove the broken
pavement fast, lights dead, running hard in the
moonlight.

EIGHT

Watertown New York

Billy and Pearl

The road grew worse as he drove away
from the city and he had to slow the truck down. It wasn't a
question of driving away from Watertown and leaving: They had a job
to do. It was a question of safety. Get Pearl far enough away so
that she could be safe, but where was that place.

His eyes scanned the sides of the road
as he drove. He caught sight of a small weeded blacktop surface off
to his left leading into the forest and took it. The blacktop was
only a suggestion. It hadn't taken the world long to break it down
and turn it to mostly earth. The earthquakes, the rains, the
unchecked growth of vegetation. He had no idea what it had been
before, but now it was barely recognizable as a road. He slowed to
a near crawl as he entered the woods and the darkness dropped down
heavily. The road went away, or at least the pretense of a road
went away. What was left was a bare pine needle covered lane that
twisted away into the woods. No weeds, no growth, probably much as
it had been left a few months before.

Nothing moved in the tress. The light
swept by, white and cleansing and found nothing at all. Ten minutes
of driving bought him to the top of a rise and a small metal
building perched there, nearly on the edge. The star light had
assumed its place in the sky once the trees had opened up to this
clearing atop the hill, and Billy switched off the headlamps and
coasted to a stop on idle at the top of the rise just past the
small, metal building.

Below him a valley stretched out,
running east to west, or what had been east to west. In the
darkness there were no landmarks to tell him what he was looking
at, but glimpses of silver through the trees cover told him a river
flowed far below, the Black, he was sure, and farther to the west
the opens waters of a lake: Ontario.

He drove in a tight circle around the
building, looking it over. His eyes tried to watch everything at
once. The trees, the building, the dark valley below, all of it. In
everything he saw nothing that suggested life, danger, it seemed to
be as desolate as it looked.

He stopped at the front of the building
that faced the worn out road. Two garage doors were set into the
metal sides. A metal entrance door off to one side. A few black
windows along each side, one in the front. He circled once more.
Two more windows in the back. All intact, all whole and unbroken.
And why was his mind simply repeating things he knew again?
Rephrasing them? Nervousness. Stalling tactic. He drove back to the
front of the building, switched off the motor and lifted Pearl's
rifle from the seat top. He checked it over. A full clip. Safety
off.

He took several calming breaths and
then laid two fingers against the side of her throat. A strong,
steady pulse beat there. It made him worry less, but for the steady
pulse he would be convinced she was dead. Her eyes were shut, no
movement behind them. Her breathing shallow, quiet, he couldn't
hear it over the rumble of the exhaust and he couldn't hear it now
that the truck was silent. He didn't like it at all. He bent
closer, brushed his lips against her own, and then left the tuck
before he could change his mind.

The night was graveyard silent: Back
within the trees the darkness seemed to be thicker. A living thing.
Out here at the top of the valley it seemed less so, but every bit
as worrisome. There could be dead inside the building. Inside the
tree line. On the sides of the valley waiting to climb the slopes
and find him, waiting only for him to settle in. He looked back
through the glass at Pearl and then forced his feet to move once
more.

The back door was locked, the windows
gave away nothing as he walked close enough to cup his hands and
look inside. He thought of another place very much like this place
in Arizona where he and Beth had been holed up for several days as
she had healed from an attack. That place had been fine. Dead, but
dead that had been and would remain dead. In fact they had known
almost nothing about the dead at that point. They weren't a
concern, not really. That building and this building had nothing in
common at all, and that one being okay didn't mean this one would
be. He continued back around to the front and scouted the area
carefully. Nothing.

He walked to the front door, twisted
the knob and pushed the door inward. A dry, dusty smell wafted out.
There were no dead here. From the inside there was plenty of light
to see by once his eyes adjusted. The windows flooded the inside
with moonlight. He closed the door behind and checked the rest of
the garage and a small office. Empty, nothing at all. No vehicles,
some tools and benches, grease stains on the concrete here and
there, but little else. Whatever this had been it didn't appear to
have seen any use since March, maybe long before that. He levered
one wide garage door up, trotted to the truck and drove it
inside.

He lowered the door, locked the place
up tight and then turned his attention to Pearl.

Bluechip

Bear and Beth

The way into the base had not been hard
to find. They had found several places where the pipe had been
broken into and not repaired.

“
Maybe broken out of,” Beth
said in a whisper as she looked over the jagged edges of the huge
hole. “The metal is curled out, away from the inside, like it was
opened from inside the pipe... Explosives?”

Bear examined it briefly and then
nodded. The whole area around the pipe had been flooded too. There
were no footprints, the ripped metal was corroded: It looked as if
this damage had been done a long time ago and never repaired.
“Makes me wonder if there's anyone down there at all,” Bear said.
“This looks old.”

Beth eased her head into the duct work
and looked around. A small puddle of stagnant water covered the
floor. There was nothing else as far as she could see. She shined
her flashlight up and down the duct work into the darkness, but the
beam of light showed nothing at all on the floor except the still
puddle of water and what looked like cameras mounted within small
boxes in the ceiling. One was close by, the other a few hundred
yards in the opposite direction. She flicked off her light and
waited, staring into the darkness. She was just about to turn back
to Bear when a small red flash came from the darkness. She turned
in the other direction and waited for the flash from the second
camera.

“
What?” Bear
asked.

“
Cameras,” Beth told him.
She stepped back away from the duct work. “Two that I can see and
both have power... Saw a flash from each... Doesn't mean they're
working, but it does mean they have power.”

“
Could be bad if they see
us,” Bear said.”

“
If
they're working they probably already have...
If
they're
working...
If
they're being monitored,” Beth said. She looked up at Bear.
“In for a penny,” she said.

Bear nodded. “Might as well, if they
know we're here then they know. They'll know eventually anyway.
This looks old though. This looks like maybe some of them left... A
long time back too. Maybe the cameras are on and there's no one
home to watch them. This place has its own power supply.” He
hesitated briefly. “Go?”