The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (39 page)

Susan looked at Sandy, then whispered
something in her ear. She nodded. “We want to go,” Susan said and
Sandy nodded again.

“
So do we,” Tim said. He
was holding Annie's hands.

“
We really do,” Annie
said.

“
Then you will,” Bob said
looking at Mike.

“
It's your call, Tim,”
Patty said.

“
But what about you,” Tim
asked Patty.

“
I... I want to talk it
over with Ronnie. It sounds good,” she looked from Ronnie to
Candace to Mike, tears threatening in her eyes.

“
I asked Bob,” Mike said,
“not to force anyone to decide - we have lots of time for that -
but to see what it is. I... I for one am impressed. But this isn't
something I can decide alone. Candace comes first on my list of
things that make up my world. We'll talk it over, same as all of us
will, I guess,” Mike finished. Patty looked grateful.

“
If you don't mind, we'd
like to think about it as well. I guess that's taking for granted
you'd let us in if we decided we wanted to come,” Jeff
said.

“
And we would. You're
welcome,” Janet Dove said.

“
I know we've been thinking
along the same lines,” Sharon said. “I know we've kind of crashed
in on you. You've been so kind to us. It's appreciated.”

Bob nodded.

The light was rapidly bleeding from the
sky as the conversations broke up and people began to drift
away.

“
Did you get a room at the
motel?” Mike asked Jeff.

“
Jessica and... Lilly?” He
asked looking at Lilly where she sat with Tom.

Mike nodded, as did Lilly and Tom.
Lilly smiled.

“
She took care of that
today, so we will be sleeping on real beds tonight, I
guess.”

“
Oh, you'll love it,” Mike
said. “After the ground? Absolutely recommended. The best night's
sleep I've had... Well, I was just thinking of another night, but
it's the best night in a while, that's for sure.”

“
What?” Candace
asked.

“
Well, the night I was
first with you. Everything had happened, things looked so bad, and
there you were. It was my first good night's sleep since it all
happened,” Mike finished quietly.

“
Oh,” she said, “that's so
nice. It was like that for me as well. Just to know someone
cared... about me.”

“
It was like that for all
of us, I think,” Jeff said.

“
It was for me,” Ronnie
agreed.

“
Yeah,” Patty agreed, her
eyes on Candace.

“
This is such a changed
world,” Bob said. “Since when have you sat around and had a
conversation that was this true or personal?”

“
I can't recall,” Arlene
said, “Probably, if I'm honest, never.”

“
Me either,” Tom said. He
sat with one arm around Lilly's shoulders.

“
I do now, with Tom, with
others, but I never did, not even with my close girlfriends,” Lilly
said.

“
That's what I mean. It's a
changed world, and I for one am glad for it.”

A few minutes later Tom and Lilly and
Candace and Mike got up to leave for the night's first post. They
made their goodbyes and left the others.

“
...Now, what about crops,
and what about domesticated animals? I mean, why can't we have our
own herds?” Jeff asked Bob as Mike and Candace were walking
away.

“
Well, I thought about that
too,” Bob began.

~Candace's journal~

I am in an actual room with privacy and
a candle for light. It's almost like the world is
normal.

Mike and I did early posts and then
came back here and spent some alone time.

It was nice, and it was needed. Bob
spoke more in depth about his ideas than I've ever heard him speak
before. I almost said yes on the spot, but I want to talk it over
with Mike, and we still haven't done that either.

I've also grown really close to Patty,
I wouldn't like to be without her. But it's really Mike. I won't
even kid myself. He helps me to be me, a real part of me, that is
the only way I know to explain it. I love him. Maybe we made our
child tonight. Just maybe. I hope so.

We met some good people today. I don't
know if they will join up, so to speak, but I hope so, and I hope
there will be others.

Things we know: The days are about 26
hours now, give or take a few minutes. That means the Earth is
turning slower, so we weigh more than we used to. I can't tell any
difference. But Tim, who pointed it out, swears that he
can.

Most animals survived, whereas most
people did not. The stupidity factor, Mike calls it, and I agree.
C.B. radios are being used by a lot of people. We can hear more
than we can talk to. But Bob says with a bigger antenna we can both
hear more and talk more. I know there are still good people in the
world worth talking to, so maybe once we're settled, it will be
worth the bigger antenna.

~

I clicked on my MP3 player, chose the
play list I wanted, clicked it down to the bottom of my screen and
then clicked up Gimp and loaded the graphic I wanted to work on. My
mind wasn't on it though. I stared at the screen for something like
ten minutes before I gave up and closed down the graphic, pushed
away from the desk and listened to the song that was currently
playing - Solution Six, by somebody new that I had never heard of -
while I decided what it was I really wanted to be doing.

The graphic was a small logo for one of
my clients. It was done, but like everything else I did, I would
play with it long past the time I needed to. It seemed like
everything in my life was like that. I was constantly fussing with
it. It was never really done, finished, complete. It wasn't life;
it was me. I could tell myself it was because I wasn't satisfied
with my life, that I felt it wasn't complete, but that did nothing
at all to solve the problem.

I could know, and did know, that what I
missed was a relationship. Sharing myself with more than just the
girl in the electronics section at Walmart where I bought whatever
computer supplies I needed. And what did that amount to? A smiled,
Hello, how are you, a quick, reserved, superficial conversation,
Oh, the blank CD sleeves are two aisles over. Another superficial
smile. Those were the types of relationships I had.

Relationships? Did I really consider
those to be relationships? I did. After all, I knew her name,
Becky. Becky N. Sometimes I wondered what the N stood for. And
sometimes I even thought about a conversation that had nothing to
do with electronic needs.

Pathetic, I told myself. I must have
had better relationships than that. Oh, the pizza kid. I almost
knew his name... Johnny or Tommy something.

I needed relationships. I was missing
life. It was going by, and I was stuck watching it pass by the
glass like a lonely man riding the bus, watching the world slide by
stop after stop, day upon day.

Anyway, I knew all of that. I knew what
bothered me, drove me, and it was useless. It was useless because I
wasn't willing to do anything about it. I remember thinking, in
fact, that it would take something drastic to take me from the kind
of life I had built for myself and into the kind of life I really
wanted. And that was also part of the problem. I didn't know what
kind of life I did want. And I didn't want to invest any actual
thinking into it.

So there I was, staring at my monitor
again, watching the little red sound graphic jump up and down to
the music. A blues piece. Catchy, but not exactly uplifting. Still,
it held my attention with its murky lyrics, but was probably
dragging me right into my own blues at the same time. Weren't blues
supposed to take away the blues? It never worked that way for me.
It only reinforced my own blues. I needed a real life, I remember
thinking.

The furnace kicked on, and a few
seconds later I felt the heat along with the slight metallic odor
that the new furnace had come with. The furnace guy who put it in,
call me Rocky, he'd said, had told me the smell would go away. So
far it hadn't. Maybe by next spring, I thought. In any case, it
decided me. I needed to get out of the house, go for a ride, do
something, anything but sit around and stare at my
monitor.

It was cold, but the roads were clear.
I grabbed the keys to my car and headed out just that quickly. I
opened the door, and the cold air slapped me in the face. And just
that fast, that world was gone again, and I found myself sitting up
on the mattress in the slightly musty smelling Motel room. Cold air
slipped past my bare chest and I shivered involuntarily.

Candace finished closing the door and
then turned, slowly making her way to the bed in the nearly
absolute blackness, her night vision ruined by the bright moonlight
and fires outside.

“
A little to your left,
Baby,” I whispered.

“
I woke you up,” she
whispered back as she readjusted her path and found the bed,
slipping across the mattress on her hands and knees. I caught her
and pulled her into my arms.

“
Not you,” I
answered.

“
I was trying to be quiet,”
she said as she snuggled down beside me, her cool flesh setting my
own on fire. “What was it?”

“
What?”

“
That woke you, Baby.” Her
cool hands slipped over my back and pulled me closer to
her.

“
The old world... You...
Nothing at all,” I told her. My lips found hers and we stopped
talking.

Chapter Three

All In

~ March 28~

Mike awoke before dawn. He lay quietly,
feeling the heat from Candace's body where it pressed up against
his, and thinking about what the future might be.

The first thing he had thought was that
whatever had happened to the world would be made right. That
somewhere there was someone still in charge, and eventually that
person would get everything back on track. The world would be fun
again. Television, phones, electricity, the Internet, the mortgage
on his house, all of it. That turned out to be a pipe dream. The
whole idea had dissipated quickly. Even so, when they had finally
started out, he had held out some hope, and they hadn't come far,
but Jeff and his people had, and it was the same everywhere. There
was no man sitting in an office somewhere waiting to get everything
back in shape, and if there was, he would have to be a complete
idiot, because he'd be waiting an awfully long time.

The dead woman Jeff had told him about
bothered him a great deal. He had remembered a day he had gone out,
after things had fallen apart. He had heard airplanes in the night.
In the morning, there was some sort of blue liquid they had sprayed
all over the city. He had wondered about that. Why? What was it?
And the bodies in the market... Had it been dogs? Had it been dogs
that had been... eating them? There was no nice way to look at it,
or put it.

If Jeff was crazy... But he wasn't. He
seemed as sane as any of them did. No. He couldn't write it off to
crazy or not crazy. He obviously believed what he saw. He had to
mark it down to... To what? He asked himself. To...

Candace stirred and pressed closer to
him, and then settled back down. Gray light began to creep into the
room. He could see the outline of her body.

The movement, the light seeping into
the room, sent his thoughts along an entirely different
line.

For the last two days he had found
himself thinking in an entirely new direction. All the old shit is
gone, and that's okay. He didn't care at all if he never saw
electricity again. In fact, he'd rather not have it, and even if
there was a way to fix it all, he didn't want to go back. He was
positive, in fact, that they couldn't go back, none of them, was
positive he wouldn't be able to live that way again, when less than
a month ago his entire life, his entire focus, was wrapped up in
the old way. Hadn't he been watching the countdown show for the end
of the world? Reality TV every night? The big party for the end of
the world? And really, that had simply been a joke.

Nobody, at least most people, didn't
believe the world was going anywhere. It was just another thing to
occupy the head. Even the terminology, World Ending, was bullshit.
The world did not end. We think so highly of ourselves that we
believe that the end of society means the end of the world, and I
guess it did for us... some of us. But the end of the world? No.
The world will go on and on when we are nothing at all but dust
upon the ground.

Now it really was gone, and not only
didn't he miss it, he didn't want it to come back. He didn't want
to chase across half of what had been the United States looking for
some semblance of the old world. His mind was at rest; he was
happy. He allowed one hand to stroke the length of Candace's body.
Very happy, he decided. Candace stirred again. One of her own hands
came down his side, across his abdomen, searching.

“
Hello,” she said, finding
what she wanted, “No fair, you're awake.”

“
I was just admiring,” he
said. He felt himself grow hard in her hand.