The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (180 page)

“
David,” Mike told him as
he tried to lead him away. “David, let them look at her. Come on
over and sit down with me and I'm sure they'll be back to get you
soon. Just give them some time. A few minutes,” Mike told him. He
had no idea if any of what he said was true, he only knew he had to
let them do what they had to, and David couldn't be there. Steve
patted David on the shoulder and then hurried into the room after
Jessie. Mike had walked David to the bench and sat him down beside
Janna before he had realized what he had done.

They had looked up, met each others
eyes and burst into tears.

It was no secret. Bob had come to Mike
and told him about the relationship as well as what Janna, Jessie
and the others had planned to do. He had not got around to deciding
what to do about it. He had only discussed it with Candace, Ronnie
and Amy, but someone else had known about Janna and David. He had
been approached by Tom down in the barn this morning who had heard
about it from Josh. By noon others had been asking. Bob had not
heard it, but nearly everyone else had known about David and
Janna's meeting in the baths.

The door opened, the cold air blew in,
and this time it was Candace, followed by Lilly, Bonnie, and a few
others he couldn't put a name to.

“
Amy is coming with
Ronnie,” she told him as she kissed him. Her eyes shifted to David
and the blood on his hands. Mike rose and pulled her aside and
filled her in on Arlene being bought in. Susan and Sandy had risen
and went back into the clinic when Jessie had appeared at the door
and motioned for them, Candace walked back to Janna, sat down
beside her and pulled her head to her breast. She talked to her in
low tones as if she were a child, one hand stroking her hair,
smoothing if from her brow. Mike sat next to David, one hand on his
shoulder, unsure what to do. A few seconds later Lilly got up to
talk to Amy and Ronnie as they entered. A second after that the
clinic door opened, Jessie came out, took a nearby chair, turned it
around backwards, straddled it, and sat down in front of Janna. She
took one of Janna's hand and patted it lightly, her face
set.

“
No,” Janna moaned. She
began to weep and tried to get up, but Candace held her. Janna
broke down and sobbed.

“
I'm sorry,” Jessie
began.

THIRTEEN

The OutRunners

Year One December
20
^th

New York: Manhattan

They had tried to go into the city the
day before, but once there, there had been no question of leaving
the truck, the dead were everywhere. Millions, it seemed, roaming
the streets: Waiting, watching.

Now Bear held a vial in his hand. “It
seems impossible that this can work.”

“
Just maybe it will free
all of us,” Beth said softly.

Billy nodded his head. His eyes were
tired. Beside him Pearl slept. Badly wounded, but he was confidant
she would pull through. Her breathing had eased. The red lines of
infection were gone from her leg.

Bear cupped the vial in his hand. A
small glass vial that looked totally harmless, but had the power to
wipe out the dead. Everything he had read about the vial said the
compound did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was designed to
attack the dead. Those who had made the original virus compound,
SS-V2765 had known enough about it to create an antidote. Known
enough to know they would need one. This supposedly stopped them in
their tracks, returned them to death within twenty-four hours. It
could survive for an indefinite period in the tissue of those
living and those dead. It would end the plagues. It had seemed to
work on Weston.

The second compound,
REX34T, just Rex in most of the documents he had read, had no
guarantees, except one: It would kill the virus in the living. It
would end whatever the virus had begun in their bodies. It could
also kill all of them in the process. He slipped a small silver
canister from his pocket, looked it over, and then slipped it back
into his pocket. He could not release that one, it was too
complicated. It could change,
would
change, their entire world.
The
entire world, he corrected. It
was not a decision one man could make. He would take it back and
the council would decide.

“
This one kills them, the
other reverses whatever it did to us.” He looked at the one
remaining vial. “We have enough paperwork to keep us all reading
for months... I say this second one has to be decided by the
council. Let them read the files and decide.”

The dead had surrounded the truck
during the afternoon when they had tried to get closer, and they
had been forced to retreat from the city itself. The dead here were
not animated corpses, they were smart enough to use whatever they
had at their disposal to their advantage. They had attacked the
truck with bricks, concrete chunks, metal scrap. They had seen
several who seemed to be directing the others. At first they had
been reluctant to accept that as a possibility, but after watching
for over an hour as darkness came down, they became convinced that
the dead could be, and were being directed: Were acting in accord,
as one, for a common purpose.

That thought had been sobering. How
long would it be before they picked up more deadly weapons? How
long before they graduated from bricks to machine guns... Tanks...
What would be beyond their ability to use? Nothing they had
decided.

They had moved off further, past the
outskirts of the city, back across the river, and had found an open
field and shut down for the night. The truck would protect them
from the few that might find them. This morning they had come
closer, not crossing the river into Manhattan, but driving through
the ruins of New Jersey. Burned and crumbled buildings dotted the
landscape for miles. The land looked war torn, destroyed. Bear had
remembered the savage fires he had watched from the apartment on
Park Avenue. The last he had seen of Jersey there had still been
areas that were whole. What he saw now was destruction for miles on
end. Nothing was left that was not destroyed.

The wind was blowing east, but that
didn't matter that much. Most of the vial would end up in the
river. From there it would find the ocean. From there it would find
the world. Bear had no idea how long it would take to shut down the
zombie plagues, but he was sure it would. This close there should
be no doubt that the millions that inhabited New York would fall
first. Who knew if the dead were not similarly gathered in cities
across the earth. Paris, London, Berlin. Most likely they were,
Bear thought.

“
Hey,” Beth said. She
slipped her hand into Bear's own. “We go back and discuss the
second one, but we do this one now... The sooner the
better...”

“
I see that, but... my
question is, what if they lied about this one too? Or just didn't
know?What if this one does more than just kill the dead? I mean,
that seems a little too good, doesn't it? Nothing we read said
definitively that it wouldn't affect others, only that it would
kill the dead that had risen. The first compound was only supposed
to cause some dead to come back. Look what it did, nearly all of
them come back now. It got stronger as it went.”

“
Point,” Billy said glumly.
“It didn't say that. It did say that the soldiers that were sent in
to administer it suffered no side effects... I think it's the best
shot we have, Bear. It's what we have. We can't leave them alive...
Not after all of this.” Billy raised his hands to include the
desolation on the monitors, but to also include the
world.

Bear leaned forward and opened the end
of the tube that lead to the outside. It was a fresh air tube that
bypassed the filtration system that Tim had built in, in case the
air system failed for some reason. The smell of damp fire flooded
the interior of the cramped truck. A second after that a soft chime
began to alert them to the penetration of the sealed air system.
Fans kicked on and the air began to reverse from the interior,
pouring out of the tube to the outside. The smell of damp, charred
wood and fire leaving. Replaced with the electric smell of cleansed
air that always reminded Bear of static. There was no static in the
air, it was just a cross connection his mind made. He looked at the
small vial once more. Unconvinced that it would work at all, but
just as convinced that it would destroy them also in the process of
destroying the dead. He spun the small cap off as he leaned toward
the tube. There was an audible rush of air, a slight whistling as
the air was forced outside through the tube. Bear worked the edge
of the small plastic seal up, pulled it free, and watched it tumble
into the tube; sucked outside. That was it. That, according to what
they had read, was all that was needed. The organism was in the
air, just from whatever compound was on the back of the seal. The
rest of the process wasn't even necessary. Over time that compound
would continue to develop and grow in the bodies of the dead,
spreading to anything that came into contact with it. Eventually it
would overtake the entire globe. A dead free zone. One big happy
family again. As he tipped the vial into the tube the airflow
caught the stream of red liquid and took it. Some stained the tube,
but the majority of it was in the wind, floating east, to the river
and everything beyond the river. Bear let the vial tumble from his
hands and watched it flip into the tube, making a small bonking
sound as it hit the sides, bouncing back and forth, rattling in the
tube as it made its way outside. A second later he replaced the cap
on the tube. The silence held, save the high pitched hum of the
fans, and then the fans cycled down and the silence was complete
once more. Bear looked at the monitor, it all looked exactly the
same. He took Beth's hand. “Better take us home,” Bear said
quietly.

The Nation

The Council

There were more people than could fit
in the meeting area. Mike had an idea of how many they were, but
even his best estimate was only that, an estimate. He called for
quiet, and then adjourned the meeting to the largest barn in the
valley, and waited until the crowd began to leave. He had thought
about asking Bob to make sure the large barn was empty before he
remembered Bob was gone. He had turned to Tom instead, and Tom and
Craige had left to take care of it. Candace and Amy were somewhere
in the large crowd with Lilly, Cindy and Annie.

The main meeting area of the cave was
several hundred feet deep, and more than three hundred feet across.
It had been packed with people outside and unable to get in. The
barn in the valley was probably smaller, but they could leave the
doors open and accommodate as many people as cared to attend. This
would be the first meeting since Bob and Arlene had passed. Arlene
had never made it past the first hour in the clinic. She had been
warned several times by Steve and Jessie that she shouldn't attempt
to carry the baby to term, that they should take it, that it could
kill her to try, but she had ignored their warnings. In the end it
had killed her and the baby. The rest of the events had passed as
though they had been preordained and nothing had been able to stop
them.

Mike had taken care of Bob, Arlene and
the baby. Ronnie had been with him. It was unimaginable to him that
any of them could come back, but they both knew the truth. They
were not buried in the small rockbound cemetery where the rest of
the dead were buried, but placed in the smaller cemetery near the
falls where the stones for Molly and Nellie had been placed. The
baby rested in Arlene's arms.

David, Janna, Brad and
Jessie stone had been long gone at that point. On the morning of
the 10
^th
their belongings
were gone. No one had seen them go. Not the guards who had the
posts that night, not their closest friends. They had simply
vanished overnight. It was the talk of The Nation and one of the
main reasons for the meeting.

“
Hey,” Ronnie said as he
stepped close to Mike. “You look bad.”

“
Feel
bad,” Mike agreed. The people were still filing out and he watched
them leave. He caught Candace's eyes through the crowd and
mouthed
I love you
as she and the others made their way to the door.
Se gave him a smile that lifted his heart. “Walk with me
Ronnie.”

They started slowly forward at the back
of the crowd.

Cave Two

Josh

Josh sat quietly watching the morning
come on. The air outside the plastic walls of the green house had
gone from black to gray and it continued to lighten.

During the day the green house heated
right up and the vents would be open by early afternoon into early
evening. The vents were temperature sensitive. Purely mechanical,
Bob had told him, but it was another thing to see them working. The
vents were what had killed Bob, he thought now. It wasn't a new
thought, he'd had it several times in the last week. Yesterday,
last night, and he supposed he'd have it several more times before
it finally moved on and left him be.

“
Hey, Honey,” Shar said,
startling him from his thoughts.

“
Hey,” he told her. He
tried a worn smile on his face.

She handed him a steaming cup of coffee
and then sat down beside him.