The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (60 page)

A stream swung in from their left,
dropping from some high cliffs on one side of the
valley.

Everyone was stretching their legs when
David saw the red ribbons fluttering from a tree a little past
where they had parked. Once he noticed them, everyone did. And they
couldn't figure out how they had missed them in the first
place.

They fed the chickens and piglets,
turned the calves and the foals loose to be with their mothers and
cleaned the insides of the trucks out.

Dinner was smoked beef added to several
cans of stew that had been opened and dumped into a large cast iron
pot.

“
I'll be glad when your
Janet is cooking for us again,” Mike said.

“
Me as well,” Bob agreed,
“No slight to this meal, but she has a way with food.” Bob
said.

“
I'll second that,” Candace
said.

A few grunts of agreement were
added.

~

Candace tried the radio a short time
later. She climbed up the back of one of the stake rack trucks
hoping for better reception.

Janet's voice came back almost
immediately, faint, but intelligible.

“
Oh, Candy, dear, let me
get Pats. She's been beside herself,” Janet said.

Patty had come running, grabbed the
radio and bounded up to the flat area above the cave.

“
Candy? Are you there,
Candy?” Patty called. Her voice was strong and clear.

“
Pats, it's me. I'm here; I
can't believe it!” Candace yelled into the radio. She looked down,
“Get your ass up here, Ronnie,” she said.

“
I love you, Pats. It's so
good to hear your voice, but here's another one for
you.”

Ronnie took the radio, swallowed and
pressed the talk button “Hey, Babe. I love you, and I've missed
you,” he told her.

“
Ronnie,” she screamed.
Ronnie held the radio away from his ear. “I love you... I love you
too, Babe. I missed you so bad,” She sighed. “We should let some
others talk, though” she said.

Mike yelled out. “Tell them to fire up
a couple more radios and choose different channels.” He handed one
to Bob and one to David as he began to climb up. Within a few
minutes they were all standing around on top of the truck, talking
on the radios.

The radios passed back and forth and
Mike and Candace looked at each other at the same time. Candace
mouthed Jeff. And it was only a few minutes later that David said
Sharon was waiting to talk to Jeff.

Candace got on the phone to Sandy and
talked to her and Janet to let them know what they thought had
happened to Jeff.

“
I'll talk to her,” Candace
said, “if it will help.”

“
If she needs to, I'll take
you up on that,” Sandy said. “I'll give this back to Patty. She's
taken charge here. Maybe we can figure out how far away you are and
how to get you here.”

The radio conversations went back and
forth for another hour, each side telling the other about what they
had found, what they were bringing with them, finding the red
ribbons, what the cave was like, the livestock. Tim was
disappointed at first about the solar panels, but after Mike told
him about the windmills, he couldn't wait to see them.

“
So it's a matter of
following the red ribbons, and somewhere around thirty to forty
miles to go and we're there,” Bob said. He was relaying the
conversation back to the others.

“
Candace,” David said. She
looked over at him. He held the radio out to her, “Sharon,” he
said.

She broke down as they talked, and that
had gotten Candace crying as well. She told Candace stories about
Jeff, what he had been like in the time she had known him. And
Candace brought Cindy into it, letting her know what kind of people
they had been up against.

When she asked to talk to Cindy,
Candace was unsure, but they were both eager to talk to each other.
Cindy broke down as well. They talked for over an hour, long after
everyone else came down from the truck, finally Cindy came down as
well.

“
She's a nice lady,” she
told Candace. Her eyes were bloodshot and shiny.

“
You okay?” Candace
asked.

“
Yeah,” Cindy said, “Better
than I have been in a long time. It was like talking to my
mother... Someone that loves you that much, you know?”

Candace did know. She had that in Patty
and Mike. She nodded

They sat quietly and watched the stars
come out in the sky. They were so sharp, so close, so beautiful.
They both took the last posts and waited for dawn to come over the
mountains and color the sky.

~April 5th~

The trucks were rolling just after
sunrise. All three Jeeps were needed to herd the errant cows and
horses into a loose herd as they continued across the valley,
following the occasional flutters of red.

They stopped for lunch in the early
afternoon, turned the calves and the foals loose and made a quick
lunch of smoked meat, peanuts and chocolate bars. The gap between
the range was in sight, so after a short rest, water and feed for
the chickens and piglets, an extra ration of Cow Chow and oats for
the other animals, they pushed on. The moose and several deer were
still following along.

~

The foothills slowed them down. The
larger trucks fell behind, moving slower and slower as they worked
their way up the steeper grades. The heavy loads were probably all,
Mike decided later, that got those trucks up to the top of the last
rise. In low gear the tires kept them moving up, but without the
load, they would have spun on the slick rock and loose
gravel.

Cindy was the first to see them. They
had all been looking, knowing they were near the top of the pass
somewhere, when Cindy spotted a small crowd on top of a rocky
outcrop at the top of what looked like a nearly sheer cliff face
that rose up into the mountain itself.

“
There they are! There they
are,” she yelled excitedly. “That's them, right?”

She waved, and the people silhouetted
against the sky waved back.

~

Everybody stood on the wide ledge
outside the cave, watching as the three big trucks battled their
way upward in low gear, made the top and drove across the flat
ledge to where the Suburbans were sitting.

The Jeeps and the pickup finished the
short distance, the cows and horses following easily. When the
trucks stopped, the animals kept going, smelling the water in the
valley down below.

Bob and Ronnie set the calves and foals
loose, and their mothers herded them over the rock and down into
the valley below, moose, deer and all following along.

Then everything was cheers and yelling,
hugs and kisses and tears. Cindy stood a little apart feeling
overwhelmed, unsure of her place. A heavyset older woman approached
her, her eyes puffy, but a smile on her face.

“
I'm Sharon,” she
said.

“
I'm Cindy,” Cindy told
her. She looked around at all the people. Two dogs were running
around barking, wagging their tails crazily, sniffing the cow and
horse dung.

Sharon laughed and swiped at her eyes.
Cindy's own eyes were running freely. She came closer to the young
woman, put her arms around her and hugged her to her
bosom.

“
Come on, Honey, let's go
up and meet every one. They're gonna like you, I can
tell.”

~Arlene's journal~

I missed last week, so I tested. I
tested again today. I can't believe it, but I'm
pregnant!

~Patty's Diary~

It's night. It's finally quiet. The day
was crazy, but they are here. We are all back together again. I
realized today that there is nothing at all that I can do about
Candace and how I feel about her.

It was good to have Ronnie back, and I
did miss him, but the way my heart jumped when I saw
her.

It seems funny to read it like that,
written right there in my own handwriting. And it's real, but
somehow that makes it even more real. I don't know how that can be,
but it is. And I don't know what I can do about it. I certainly
can't tell her. Seeing her with Mike, it's obvious she loves
him.

It's a mess.

THE ZOMBIE PLAGUES: BOOK
THREE

Created by Geo Dell & Dell
Sweet

* * * * *

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED ON SMASHWORDS BY GEO
DELL

Geo Dell and independAntwriters
Publishing

The Zombie Plagues Book
Three

Copyright © 2010 – 2015 by Geo Dell
& independAntwriters Publishing All rights reserved

This book is licensed for your personal
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LEGAL

This is a work of fiction. Any names,
characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the
author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual living persons
places, situations or events is purely coincidental.

This novel is Copyright © 2010 – 2015
Wendell Sweet. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means,
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without the author's permission.

Permission is granted to use short
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print.

THE ZOMBIE PLAGUES: BOOK
THREE

CHAPTER ONE

September 15th year one

Mike sat quietly on the stone ledge,
feet dangling over the edge, watching the sunrise. Patty and
Candace were both on post and Mike expected them to come down from
the top of the pass in just a few minutes. He sipped at his coffee
as he waited for them.

He was midway up the ledge, just below
the wider ledge that fronted the cave, before him the valley spread
out in all directions. You could see the mountains where they
blocked one end and sent the valley into a long right hand curve,
but even that was several miles distance from where he sat. It was
a huge expanse of land, and it was only a small part of the land
that was available to them.

There were three large metal barns
within sight, constructed from the steel buildings they had bought
in with them. There were two smaller steel structures, one that
housed the school, the other their small power plant.

That building sat next to the stream,
further down the valley, and held the power generator they had
bought, and two large diesel engines from two of the flatbed
trucks.

It had taken three days to get the
trucks down there. Using a winch on the pickup and the third stake
bed as an anchor, but, they had done it. The two diesels were soon
to be hooked into the main power supply line so that when the wind
power was not enough they could run the diesels for supplementary
power. The stream itself generated power, but the current was not
fast enough, or strong enough to fill their needs. Coupled with the
wind power it was more than enough. Backed by the two diesels to
turn the generators, they would be fine year round

They intended to add solar
panels eventually to provide on demand power and to take the load
off the water turbine on sunny days. The power that wasn't used
could be stored in a bank of batteries. Another item that was
needed.
Items
,
Mike corrected himself. Plus wire, lots and lots of wire. Because,
although the power plant was working, there were only a few lights
here and there and only very close to the plant, most of the other
dwellings, and the cave, were without power.

The other dwellings were made of stone.
Like the power plant, they had Tim’s remarkable mind to thank for
the stone and concrete walls. He had read about the power plant and
put it together. He had read and understood the formula for cement
and made it.

The first few batches were not the
best, but they worked well enough, and after that he had shown
Ronnie, Patty, David and Mike how to mix the batches. The stone
buildings had gone up fast after that.

It took the longest to build the roofs,
they were nearly all wood and they had not thought to bring a
sawmill, although Bob was sure there had been a fairly large
portable one at the farm equipment store.

They had remembered chain saws and oil,
and Tim had used an illustration in a project book to build a small
Sawmill using one of the larger chain saws. It worked well enough,
but ate into their gas supply, which was very low. Even so it had
allowed them to build dwellings, another barn, milk house,
slaughterhouse.