The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (74 page)

They all looked at her.

“
Zac ain't gonna like it
that no ni...
black boy
touched his bike, I'll tell you,” she said. She
took a quick hit off the joint as if to fortify her resolve;
squinted and held her breath.

“
Really?” Ronnie asked.
“What was that other word you were going to use?”

“
Never you mind, smart ass.
And you had best watch how you talk to your betters too,” she told
him. She dismissed him, picked up a bottle of pink sparkle
fingernail polish, shook it up, pulled out the wand and began to
paint one nail.

The three continued pushing until the
bike was over the line. Mike kicked the stand down.

“
Dumb fucks,” the woman
said. “Wait until Zac hears about this.” She took another deep pull
on the joint, held her breath, almost lost it, then let the smoke
roll out her nose. She seemed to forget about the three men again.
She spread her fingers and looked at the one nail critically. She
began to dab at another nail.

“
You have a nice day,” Bear
told her.

“
Yeah. It's been real,”
Ronnie added.

“
White trash,” Molly said
as she climbed back into he truck.

“
Who you?” the woman said.
She squinted at Molly who paused part way into her truck, but she
said nothing else.

They crept around the section with
their vehicles. Just as Chloe inched past the bike it fell over
onto one of the ratty old couches.

“
Huh,” Mike
said.

“
Must not have set the kick
stand right,” Ronnie said.

“
Yes!” Mike said. He raised
his hand and they both high-fived. “Unbelievable.”

“
Yeah. You can say that
again,” Ronnie agreed.

~

They dismissed the episode from their
minds. It was late afternoon, and despite what was behind the vast,
empty countryside; the devastation that was worldwide, the coming
fall was painting the foliage in vivid colors and the beauty of it
caught their eyes as they drove along.

They had spent most of the early
morning cleaning out an alternate energy store that they had
happened upon. It had anchored the end of a huge strip mall on the
outskirts of a large city they had come upon. There had been no
sign for the city. Someone had erected their own from a piece of
plywood, spray painting, 'Stay The Fuck Out' and at the bottom,
'Dead Body Count 457'. The sign had been done in blue spray paint.
Someone else had x-ed out the 457 with orange paint and wrote
458.

They had stopped; they had heard
nothing and they had seen nothing, but they had kept their machine
pistols handy, and the safety’s off as they drove down into the
strip mall. They had spotted the store and it had also appeared
empty at first look, but as they pulled down off the highway the
dead had been on them immediately.

Mike had run down three of them that
had come down off the cracked sidewalk and ran at their Jeep. And
then he and Ronnie had jumped out and gone after the few that were
still coming toward them. Within a few seconds there were ten of
them scattered across the warped parking lot. Mike walked up to one
that lay on the pavement, halfway onto the orange painted curbing
that framed the sidewalk.

Half it's mid section was gone. It's
spine vaporized, but it continued to scrabble against the blacktop
trying to pull itself up. Mike crushed its head with the Jeeps tire
iron he had bought from the jeep for just that purpose. A few
minutes later the other vehicles were parked by the front doors and
Bear and Ronnie kept watch as they searched through the stores for
things on Tim's wish list.

They had taken everything they could
fit onto the second truck. Tim had decided what to take. Solar
panels. Huge spools of wire that they found on a power company
truck in the parking lot. The truck's windshield was caved inward,
and dried maroon splattered the interior of the truck, but there
was no one in it, dead or otherwise. They helped themselves to all
the specialized tools the truck carried too.

In the alternative energy store, Tim
had found specialized computers set up to run solar powered, wind
powered, or virtually any other kind of alternate power supply or
individual units. He spent time reading the documentation and then
loaded them inside one of the trucks where they would have an
easier ride.

There were aisles of specialized
appliances, but he had no real use for them. There were two huge
refrigeration units in pieces, and those did find their way onto
the truck.

Lighting for homes. Street lighting.
Generators, converters, heating units that ran on DC current. Mike
lost count long before Tim had finished loading the truck. It
seemed to him though, that he had taken nearly everything he had
come across that he was even slightly sure he might
need.

In the end the truck was completely
loaded, with no room for even one more item. They decided to press
on in search of at least one more big truck, possibly two, once
they were moving again they were all happier.

The roads were bad. Much worse than
they had been And good fuel was tough to find. It was even tough to
tell if it was good fuel. It all burned, but the vehicles were
severely under-powered and knocked and pinged with the bad stuff.
Even so the roadway itself was the worst of it.

In the hot, humid climate the
vegetation was growing like crazy. Kudzu was everywhere. Creeping
across the road from side to side. Climbing the trees. Draped from
whatever power lines and poles still remained. So thick in places
that it was tough to tell what the vines had covered or climbed in
the first place. It was like driving through some futuristic
jungle, Mike had thought. And that had made him laugh because it
actually was a futuristic jungle.

They came upon a huge mall on the
outskirts of another city an hour or so after they had left the
strip mall. One of the anchors was a huge national home improvement
chain store.

They stopped on the highway and checked
out the store from there.

There seemed, at first, to be no dead
anywhere near it. Maybe inside, but Mike had doubted that too
because of the steep sided ravine that circled the store
building.

The store sat on a near island. Behind,
and on both sides, a steep sided, red earth ravine plunged down a
good fifty feet. The rains, a flash flood, something had taken away
all the earth surrounding the store on three sides. Leaving a deep
sink hole, with just the area of pavement that fronted the store
still whole.

As they came closer they could see that
there were several dead in the ravine, some lying down, others
pacing back and forth in the prison the ravine made. The sides were
soft crumbly red dirt with no way out. As he watched the same
zombie tried a half dozen times to crawl up the embankment and out.
Five or six feet up she would begin to slide back, ending up in a
heap at the bottom each time. It seemed to infuriate her, and the
last time she fell she turned and attacked one of the others that
had been wandering back and forth.

Her fury was out of control. The other
zombie tried to run but she chased him down and pulled him limb
from limb, finally leaving him scrabbling along the ground,
entrails dragging along behind him as he crawled.

“
Like a trap,” Bear said as
he came up beside Mike.”

“
Jesus... I had no idea
they were so crazy... So...
Strong
.” Mike said.

“
One your size is at least
twice your strength.” Bear nodded when Mike shook his head, and
then turned back to the store. “Good thing is, there isn't likely
going to be any inside of the store.”

There was a large area of pavement in
front of the store that was untouched. More than big enough to
drive the trucks across and park on. One part of the concrete slab
that the store rested on extended out over the ravine at one end of
the building.

They pulled down into the mall and over
to the store front.

The glass doors were shut against the
humid air. Powdery dust coated the front walk where bags of some
sort that had been piled left of the door had toppled and split
open. The dust was undisturbed. Nothing had passed this way in some
time.

They entered cautiously, but there were
no dead inside the store. The inside was a mess. Humid, green mold
growing on nearly all the surfaces that were exposed. Several
batteries stacked on pallets near the checkouts had burst in the
heat and a strong chemical smell filled the store. They chocked the
doors open but it did little to clear the air. After just a few
minutes inside eyes began to water and throats began to close up.
Bear walked off into the store and came back just a few minutes
later with masks used for spraying paint and chemicals. A few
minutes later Mike and Molly were guarding the front of the store
as they others went off looking through the aisles.

At the back of the store a huge flatbed
delivery truck sat just inside the rear garage doors along with two
smaller trucks. They searched but could not find the keys. Chloe
offered to get the truck running, they drove one of the jeeps in
through the open doors past Mike and Molly to jump it with, and a
few minutes later the truck was running.

Mike went in to see it a few minutes
later, thinking he would find a bunch of hanging wires, but instead
a screwdriver protruded from the ignition switch. Chloe seemed
embarrassed when he complimented her on how quickly she had made it
work.

Mike went back out front sending Tim
back in, and he and Molly watched the parking lot as the others
pulled the truck up through the middle of the store and began
loading it up. Plumbing, pipe, electrical boxes and wire. Supplies
of all types and sorts. Hand tools, power tools, fiberglass shower
stalls and tubs, connectors, switches, outlets...

Gang
Boxes
, Nellie read on the side of one box
as she loaded it.

“
What exactly is a gang
box,” She asked Tim.

“
It's the box that you
mount the electrical outlet, switch or whatever else into. Goes
into the wall.” He walked over to a wall switch, pulled a
screwdriver from his pocket and removed the plate and showed her
the box that rested inside the wall and mounted the switch; the
wires coming into it from inside the wall somewhere.
“See?”

Nellie nodded. “How do you know all
this stuff, though?”

“
I read,” Tim said shyly.
“I like to know things, so I read. I picked up a book on house
wiring last spring, and then another on commercial grade wiring as
well. Before we went in, I mean, before we left Watertown. I
actually started reading it back there.”

Nellie shook her head. “Good for us,”
She said.

“
Here,” Ronnie told her. He
walked over to a bin of gang boxes and pulled one out. “These
nails,” he pointed to two nails that protruded from one side. He
proceeded to show her how to make it fit as he held it up against a
nearby wall.

A large computer store sat across the
ravine, nearly half of the concrete slab broken and leaning down
into the ravine. Mike had no doubt that a few more months and the
whole mall might be at the bottom of the ravine. At least what was
left of it.

The back warehouse area of the computer
store looked to be intact. He pointed it out to Tim and he and Bear
went over with Nellie. They made short work of gathering together
what he wanted, but they decided to leave off loading it until the
next day. With the warehouse at their back, they circled the trucks
and camped out on what was left of the parking lot.

Instead of tents, they set up three
large tarps tied to the tops of the Jeeps, and held up in the
center with a tall aluminum step ladder they had liberated from the
home improvement store, if it did rain they would stay dry. The sky
gave no hint of rain, but twice so far they had been driving along,
sun shining, and had been hit by what amounted to a tropical
downpour. The sun had continued to shine through the downpour and
had still been shining when the rain had abruptly stopped, since
then they had payed closer attention.

“
You know,” Mike said now.
“This may be a faster trip than what we thought it would
be.”

“
How so?” Molly
asked.

“
Well, we already have
almost everything we were sent to get.”

“
I thought of that too,”
Nellie said. “Good luck do you suppose?”

“
I'd say,” Molly
agreed.

“
What is left?” Nellie
asked.

Bear shook his head. “Tim says he has
all the rest of what he needs right over in that
warehouse.”

Tim nodded. “But there is a lot of
other stuff. Electric cars, well, four by fours really. Books...
Specific books. Did anyone see if there was a book chain in this
mall,” He asked

“
Has to be,” Nellie
said.

“
Yeah, but it could be all
mold too, like the store was,” Molly said.

“
True,” Mike said. “But if
not, there are our books...” He paused to think, and then pulled a
small lined notebook from his shirt pocket. “Seeds. Trees. I mean
fruit and nut trees. The four by's... Sheep. A tea bush? I don't
know where to find that. I didn't even know there was such a thing.
A book that tells how to grow coffee. Furniture... Anything we can
find is one less thing we have to make.”