The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (91 page)

Donita stood at the tree line itself.
Her body leaned into, blended with, the trunk of a huge pine. Her
familiars were close around her. They were her closest. Almost
lovers if sex were a part of her life, and it was not, but the same
closeness. The same intensity in the relationship. Familiars. The
immediate Army, and the larger army radiating out from
there.

She could send them down into the
valley now. It could be over for those in the valley just that
fast. They were no match for her. No match at all. She watched for
a few moments longer. The little lights here and there, shining
through the darkness. The smell of wood-smoke on the air. They
believed they were safe. And they were for now. They were for now
because the thing inside her that guided her had another plan.
Another place for her to be, and she had to follow. When it was
over, when the other thing was finished, she would be back. She
would be back with many more thousands joined to her army, and the
end would come for those below just that much faster.

She stood for a few moments longer and
then turned away. The others fell in behind her as she picked up
her pace from a fast walk, moving at a sprinting lope through the
trees. The wolves and the lions, the other wild animals that called
the forest home, fled before them.

Down in the valley Tom dozed lightly,
leaning back into the shadows at the side of the barn.

CHAPTER EIGHT

September
27
^th

On The Road

“
How are you feeling,” Mike
asked. It had been nearly two days since Jessie had been shot. She
had slept all day the day before, waking up late last night and
assuring Mike she would be good enough to go in the
morning.

“
This is the easy part,
Jess,” he had said. “It's all down hill from here. We can wait
another day if you're not ready.”

“
I'm the doctor and I say
I'll be ready,” she had told him in mock seriousness.

Now she looked at him and smiled. “I'm
ready to go see this valley of yours, Mike,” she told
him.

“
It's everyone’s valley,
Jess. Yours too for as long as you want it...
If
you want it,” Mike
said.

“
Is that all you are
offering?” Jess asked. Her eyes were suddenly more direct: More
open.

“
Jessie,” he
said.

She held her hands up. “I know. That
wasn't fair... Your Candace is a pretty lucky woman. I hope she
knows it,” she said.

“
I think I'm a pretty lucky
man, Jess.” Mike said seriously.

“
I guess that is what makes
me feel the way I do, if you weren’t that kind of man I wouldn't
feel this way. Ironic... I know...” She looked away and the silence
held uncomfortably for a few moments.

“
I feel pretty good, Mike.
Sore, but I feel good. Steve did a good job with the stitches and I
see the excess fluid is draining nicely... The leg looks pretty
good to me,” she said.

“
It looked good to me too,”
Mike said, and then colored when he saw the look of amusement in
her eyes. “I mean...” he started.

“
I know what you meant. I
was just teasing. I thanked Chloe and I thanked Steve. I wanted to
thank you too... They intended to kill us. I have no doubt that
they would have, had you not come back.” Her black, liquid eyes
teared up. “Thank you, Michael,” she said softly.

“
Just wish we could have
gotten there sooner. It was just a fluke of the wind that we even
heard.” He stood. “Okay... About fifteen minutes, Jess, and we're
pulling out.”

She dried her eyes with the heel of one
hand. “Okay,” she said huskily. “I'll be ready.”

They had stopped at the farm store in
the middle of the night and picked up the other truck. There had
been no dead around, or they had kept their distance from the dry
pine branches they had set afire for torches. Ten minutes after
that they had been at the Jeep dealership and had picked out two
Cherokees.

They weren't exactly what Mike would
have chosen had he had the time, but it had been full dark by then
and there had been noise from the tree line despite the fires they
set and the torches they held. They had simply jumped the Jeeps.
One had had a fender dented in nearly to the tire, but Tim had
convinced it away from the tire with a heavy sledge hammer. The
tire itself had not been damaged. Probably the fender had been
dented by the other Jeep that had been parked next to
it.

Mike had moved both of those Jeeps just
a few weeks before to get to what he had wanted so he knew the keys
were in them and they would have enough gas in them to at least get
them to the campground where they could fill them up.

The trip in had been
uneventful from there on. They had arrived early yesterday morning
and Steve had taken over Jessie's care. The artery
had
been nicked, but the
pressure had allowed it to begin to heal on its own. A couple of
stitches to close the wound, antibiotics and an antibiotic salve,
along with fresh bandaging, finished Steve's work. Steve found a
large lump on her head that had worried him more than her leg
had.

“
Whatever did that did
maybe more damage than the bullet did,” he'd said. “It's probably
why she's out.” He peeked at her eyes. “Let's hope she doesn't have
a concussion... We'll just have to watch her for the next day... We
don't have to go right out, do we,” he had asked.

“
No,” Mike had told him.
And just like that he had changed his plans and decided to stay. He
had been set to pack her up safely and get her to the cave and
Sandy's care as soon as he could, but if that trip could jeopardize
her they would stay right here. “You call it. We'll sit here until
you say we go.”

Steve had nodded. “Good let's sit out
tomorrow and see how it goes, it may be that's all we'll need,”
he'd said.

Mike looked around at the small
clearing now. Everyone was standing around waiting. The sheep and
goats were loaded. Four of the big trucks ready to go. The two
Cherokees they had picked up. Two pickups. The four small Jeep like
pickups and the four electric four wheel drive vehicles they were
towing. Everyone grew even quieter as he looked around.

“
Okay, let's go,” Mike
said. He walked over to the truck he and Ronnie were driving, got
into the passenger side and Ronnie pulled around the other trucks
to lead the way.

The Nation

“
There are two ways you can
do it,” Bob said. He held an ear of corn in his hand by the stalk
with the ear pointing away from him. He held a curved knife in his
hand. He took the knife and ran it down the length of the cob: A
slab of corn fell away and into the bin. He rotated the cob twice
more and he was finished. “That's one,” he said.

“
The second way is to let
the machine do the work.” He fed a cob into a screw like apparatus
that he, Tim and Tom had worked out. It had four blades mounted at
angles. The cobs rotated up against the blades and were peeled like
a potato.

He picked up half a dozen ears of corn
and slid them down the chute that fed the machine. “If you keep
this chute full the machine will do the rest.” The machine grabbed
each ear, stripped it, and then dropped the cob into a large basket
that would eventually be dumped and taken to mix in with the silage
or fed to the pigs as it was.

They were in the second day of
harvesting the field corn. They had about a quarter of a field to
go. At the rate they were going they would be done sometime this
afternoon. When they had planted this same field they had figured
at least four days to harvest it with the labor they had available
at that time, Candace recalled. She and Jan had talked about how
many newcomers that there might now be in the Nation this morning.
It was something that Candace had not given much thought to either.
She, like everybody else, had assumed that someone, probably Janet,
was keeping track of it. She had an idea that Janet's conservative
number of about two hundred was way short of the real
number.

Jamie, one of the women who had come in
a few months earlier had been siting with them this morning as they
had discussed it and she had volunteered to get the number for
them. Candace wondered now how well she was doing, and what the
real number might be.

Candace, Patty and Lilly had grown
bored with all the inactivity, so they had switched jobs with
Janet, Roberta and Bonny. They had been equally bored with
stripping corn from the cob and had jumped at the opportunity to
prepare meals and watch the action from the sidelines.

The children were all sleeping: Since
they were harvesting there was no school. They were in between
meals, so there was not a lot for them to do. The day was hot,
clear and sunny. All the hints they had seen of winter on the way
were nowhere in evidence today. The sky was an endless bowl of
light blue, not a cloud in sight. Both dogs had found a shaded spot
under a wagon and were lazing around watching the insects lift into
the sky from the field as the people made their way through it. Two
of the children had crawled under with them and fallen asleep
curled up with them.

The smell of wood-smoke was on the air,
and heat shimmers rose from the large concrete pad between the two
barns farther down the valley. The sweet smell of corn roasting
filled the air along with the smokey smell of wood fire. Craig and
Tom kept the heaps of corn turned and spread evenly on the pad.
They were both bare to the waist. The humidity next to the slab
causing them to sweat freely.

They both wore heavy rubber soled
boots, but the heat could still be felt through the soles of the
thick boots. The fires were still nothing more than coal beds. An
occasional fresh log kept the coals replenished.

About six hours on the concrete and the
corn was dry enough to go into storage. They kept one wagon in
constant use taking corn to storage and bringing more corn to dry.
A large chest sat nearby filled with cold water from the
creek.

Farther down the valley, a herd of
horses grazed near the stream. The large teams they used for work
were stabled in one of the barns, and had their own fenced area to
graze. The rest of the herds were turned loose to graze during the
daylight hours. They made their way back to the barn at evening.
Instead of individual stalls, one end of the barn was a large open
area. The dirt floor was kept clean and fresh hay was put down
daily. The horses bedded down in that area each night once the
evening came on and the doors were then closed for the night. They
had plans to build stalls before fall settled in hard, and cull out
some horses for riding. It would have to wait until the harvests
were finished and the chores were lessened so there was free time
to do it.

Down the valley farther still, the cows
grazed along with the Bison. They grazed the end of the valley and
around into the El that began the second valley. There were a half
dozen Moose mixed in that seemed to think they were cows. Two huge
moose bulls had found their way into the meat supply after they had
refused to leave the cows alone. Running them all day, which had
hurt their milk production. Between the two huge bulls they had
smoked more than two thousand pounds of meat, and they had eaten
Moose burgers, Moose steaks and Moose stew until everyone was sick
of it.

The deer made their home down past the
El in the second valley. A small forest of mixed hardwoods grew
right up to the steep rock walls of the valley. The deer seemed to
prefer the shelter of those trees, and the succulent leaves and
grasses that grew there. Even so they would make their way back
down through the valley and return to their own barn each
night.

Candace placed the last three ears of
corn into the chute that fed the machine and watched as they fell
into line. Lilly reached for another ear to core by hand and
realized they were finished.

“
I would have fallen asleep
if I had stayed out there,” Lilly said to no one in
particular.

“
Me too,” Candace
said.

“
Yeah, but now we all smell
like corn. My hands are sticky with corn juice. I have corn silk
all over me,” Patty said.

“
Bitch, bitch, bitch,”
Candace said laughing.

Patty grinned. “It's a trip to the
locker room,” she said.

“
Yeah,” Lilly
agreed.

“
Ditto,” Candace
added.

The locker room was what they called
the area where the women took their showers or bathed. There was a
very small waterfall, only about nine feet high before it crashed
into the water. The air was always misty because of it. It made a
perfect shower, and the mist had reminded Arlene of the steam in
the showers when she had been in high school. She had coined it the
locker room and the name had stuck.

Candace reached over and flipped the
switch on the machine, another one of Tim's creations that seemed
to work well. As she shut the machine off, Bob popped his head
through the door. Annie with him.

“
It's off, we're done,”
Candace told them.

“
I am so jealous,” Annie
said. She turned sideways to showcase the small bump that seemed
much larger than it really was on her small frame, running her hand
across her stomach. Candace turned sideways and Lilly and Patty
followed suit. “God,” Annie said. The four of them laughed as Bob
looked on puzzled. He cleared his throat, clearly
uncomfortable.