The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (97 page)

“
The beans are a bit much
then?” I asked.

“
A bit,” she
agreed.

I brought the truck to a dead stop for
a second, not knowing what to say.

“
You
could say,
'Welcome
back',
” she said softly.

“
Welcome back,” I repeated,
every bit as quietly. “Welcome back...”

CHAPTER TWO

Donita's Notebook

March 1st (Night)

Quakes, at least three. Warmed up fast,
and all the dirty snow that was piled along the streets has melted.
Torrential rains. Thunder and lightening in the snow storm that
came after sunset. Didn't last long; turned back to rain. Parts of
the projects are burning. Jersey is burning. The sky is red-orange,
like everything across the river is on fire. No one has
come.

March 2nd (Day)

Rain 'til noon. Destruction widespread.
Then horrific quake just before dark. Started to rain again, very
heavy, then later at night it turned to snow. Lightening in the
snow storm.

Night, no moon, no stars. Storms
stopped for a while, still no stars. Then the storms came back
harder.

March 3rd (Night)

Rain in the day, but as soon as the sun
set, it turned colder. Snow, heavy snow, thunder and lightening
throughout the night. No moon or starlight. No stars at
all!

March 4th (Day into Night)

Electronics stopped working,
wristwatches, battery powered clocks. Bear tried to start a truck.
Nothing... Dead. Three more quakes, aftershocks. Planes sprayed
blue stuff on us too.

March 5th (Day)

Tremors. Time seems off; days are
longer, I feel it. No way to measure it though. No rain or
snow.

Harlem ~ March 6th

Donita sat on a stool in
the kitchen writing in her little notebook. Something was going on
out in the world. Something, and the news was covering it up. The
local news had been canceled. First at noon and now again at five.
There had been no strange weather today, but the time was still
off.
Really
off.
The days were longer, no doubt about it at all.

There were fires burning out of control
in the projects. No firemen had come. No cops. Nobody at all. There
had been Earthquakes, or at least the ground had shaken. Explosions
somewhere? Was it Earthquakes? It seemed like no one
knew.

Donita didn't know anyone
who owned a phone. A
real
phone. Real phones were a thing of the past. But
a real phone would have been good now, because something had
happened to all the cell phones. The bars had dropped to nothing.
How could that even be, she had asked Bear. There were towers all
over the place! Nevertheless, they had ceased to function, and she
now found herself wishing for a real phone.

Bear had rigged up a C.B.
radio and they had listened to that for a while. Twice a voice bled
through claiming to be from somewhere in Jersey, warning everyone
to stay away. The voice claimed the city was on fire.
Union City? North Bergen? Edgewater? They didn't
say, but it looked like all of Jersey was burning, just like parts
of New York. There were gangs fighting for control of what was left
here, probably the same there.
The voice
went on to say the dead were rising and walking the
streets.

“
Feds?”
Donita
asked.

“
Feds landed and took over
the streets?” Bear supplied.

Donita shook her head
doubtfully. “I hope so, because it sounded like dead...
The
dead
are walking the streets...
” She trailed off and turned her eyes back to the windows;
night coming, noise winding up in the projects, low hanging gray
clouds that slipped past the windows. “That's crazy, though,
right?” she asked. “
Crazy?”

“
Yeah... Nuts... I think it
was Feds, Baby.... Feds... Maybe it means there's some serious shit
going on there? We thought that anyhow, right? But dead walking the
streets… Can't be,” Bear said in his deep, bass voice. He pulled
Donita closer to him.

A few minuets later the C.B. went dead.
When it came back a few seconds after that, there was a man
identifying himself as Commander Roberts, telling them to keep the
channel clear. Donita looked up at Bear. He pulled her closer and
watched the night come down outside the windows.

Billy Jingo: L.A.

Billy paced the hallway,
trying to think it out. Telling himself it was the right thing to
do. The problem was that he was not used to doing the right thing.
So unused to it, in fact, that he wasn't sure he wanted to
try...
should
try.

The world had been turned upside down
for the last few days. There was no official word that anything was
wrong at all, but someone had fucked up. Of that he had no doubt at
all.

The police? Gone. Fire department?
Ditto. Army? Well, wasn't the National Guard supposed to show up
when the shit hit the fan? But so far the army had not raised a
finger to do anything for them at all. There was a base right over
in Jersey, but there had been no sign of them.

He lived on the North side, a high-rise
that had been new sometime back in the seventies. He had gone up to
the roof twice during the day and looked over the city.

It appeared to be dead. There was a
precinct only two blocks away, deserted, doors hanging open.
Looters were carrying away cheap computer systems and who knew what
else, a steady stream in and out of the front doors.

There were fires over past the park. It
appeared to be the projects, or most of the projects, but there
were other single fires all over the city too. There had been for
two days now, and no one had come to put those fires out. And there
was more; you could hear gunfire from all over the city all night
long. He continued to pace the hall.

This was not normally a bad
neighborhood, but it was no picnic either. There had been a few
fires. Dozens of buildings had come down or were now tilted
crazily. The looting had started at some point, and now there were
armed men prowling the streets in gangs.

He had acquired a gun from a pawn shop
a few blocks over, ransacked, left open to the world. He had loaded
it and waited, but the few that had ventured to his door had turned
away when they had seen him with the gun.

Winston, the old man that lived in the
back basement apartment, had called them all down to listen to the
radio just a short time ago. Not your average radio, a Short Band
receiver. They had ended up listening to military talk, military
talk that was probably supposed to be restricted. The stories that
had come from that radio said the rest of the world was no better
off. Explosions or earthquakes, there was a great deal of
devastation everywhere.

A few years before, the CDC had issued
a warning about Zombies, the inevitability of an attack. How it
would come. Why it would come. What you should do. How to survive
it, and more. Billy and his friends had gotten a good laugh over
it. He had been down in Mexico at the time because of some trouble
he had gotten into in New York. And he had been living like a king.
What sort of trouble could come? What he had listened to on the
radio in the last few days had changed his mind
completely.

Washington D.C. was completely overrun,
the President gone. They weren’t even sure he had made it into
hiding. New York and Atlanta, overrun with the risen dead. Mexico,
absolutely silent. Canada, the same. Millions of people absolutely
silent. How could that even be? And right here in L.A., there was
talk on the radio about dead roaming the streets too, and probably
every city in between L.A. and New York, because if they had
overrun the big cities, what kind of chance did the smaller cities
and towns have, he asked himself.

CBS had stopped broadcasting here three
days ago. It had apparently not stopped broadcasting soon enough in
the west, where T.V. viewers had witnessed the network studios
being overrun, and the anchor of the evening news attacked on
camera. The United states was under attack by an army of the
Un-Dead.

He had spent some time checking the
other stations, cable, internet. Univision? Nothing at all. ABC?
NBC? Dead air. Cable? Satellite? Frozen pictures on some channels,
nothing at all on the others, and not a single channel you could
actually watch. The internet was dead. That had seemed worse than
all the rest of it. Google didn't load the page for his browser,
but it also didn't tell him why. Nothing.

And it wasn't just the United States
and North and South America. Germany had not been heard from in a
week. England, France, all the European countries were
incommunicado. The radio man's words, not Billy's. Australia had
seemed fine up until two days ago. They had been talking about the
problems facing America and Great Briton. They seemed to be
wondering what was going on the same as everyone else. Then the
newscast had stopped in mid sentence. Shortly after that, the
satellite feed had gone to static, and the few HAM radio operators
that had been relaying information from there had gone silent
too.

He paced the hallways. He
should talk to Jamie... Beth... Winston... Scotty, a few others. It
might be time to talk about getting out of here. The thing he was
concerned about was the non action from the Army. That was not
Military like. For them to be sitting by and allowing this to
happen, it must be a serious thing. And he had no doubt that
eventually they would get their shit together, or
think
they had their
shit together, and then they would act. And who knew what their
remedy for zombies might be?

He stopped his pacing.
Who
did
know, he
asked himself again.
Nobody.
He stood in the hall for a second. Jamie was
upstairs with Beth and a few others. Night was coming. Traveling in
the night was not an option, at least not one he wanted to explore.
But maybe they should be ready to leave in the morning. Maybe,
maybe not. Maybe it was not something they should do hastily, but
he did believe they should not stay too much longer. He turned back
towards the stairs, debated only briefly, then walked back and
climbed them to the second floor. He would start with Beth. Let
Beth make the decision. She would know what to do.

March 6th: Watertown New
York

Candace's Diary

I've decided to leave. I can't stay
here. There was a tremor last night, and not one of the really bad
ones, but even so I was sure the house would come down on me. It
didn't. Maybe though, that is a sign, I told myself. And scared or
not, I have to go. I have to. I can't stay here. Maybe
tomorrow.

Mike's Journal

There were planes overhead
in the night. I know that sounds crazy, but I awoke to hearing
them. There was a strange smell in the air and I was
thinking,
in my dream?
Maybe in my dream or maybe awake. Anyway, I was thinking crop
dusters. Like they were crop-dusting, spraying something. It was
weird. Today when I went out, I could see traces of blue...
powder?
Something on the
snow, and it made me remember the dream. But I pushed it away and
walked. Too much to see and comprehend as it was without worrying
over bad dreams.

March 9th: 618 Park Avenue: Seventh
floor. 2B

Donita's Notebook:

March 8th
(Morning):
Fresh snow. Made it all look
like it never happened... Clean.

March 9th
(Afternoon):
Warming up, days longer.
Nothing works, so I can't track the hours, but I know the days are
longer.

Donita folded the cover back on her
notebook and slipped it into her pocket. She stood on the balcony
that overlooked the city, watching the fires that still burned here
and there. It was ironic to her that the balcony faced West. Like
she had never really left that world, only acquired a different
view of it.

This was so much different from their
own place. The west side, even the other side of the river over in
Jersey, was almost entirely in flames now. Across the river, the
same west side she was looking over at now, still burned brightly.
And Harlem was strange. The gangs had taken over. First fighting
among themselves, then taking over the streets. The drug infested
blocks just off the interchanges where the white folks had
sometimes driven down into, pretending to be lost so they could buy
their shit, take it back to their cozy, safe neighborhoods -
probably a place just like this, Donita thought - and get high with
their friends, closed down. The whole area blocked off, city buses
pulled across the streets. They had tried to go there. She knew
first hand what it was like.

She and Bear had left that area after
just a few hours of wandering the streets, ducking in and out of
the alleys to stay hidden, hearing the gunfire. The dead were one
thing to have to deal with. She guessed the living would be the
other thing everyone would have to contend with there, and there
were too many dead. Too many poor in life, too many dead in death.
And that was bad because death was not death any longer. Death
was... Donita twisted her head and tried to put it into context,
but she couldn't. There was no context. It made no sense. Death was
still death, except death was also now life. And life, the kind of
life she knew, breathing, drawing breath, was becoming rare. Over
there, if the dead didn't get you, the gangs would. It was a no win
situation. Her heart fluttered in her chest, and she took a short
breath involuntarily. Little angel wings flapping against her rib
cage. It was what always came to mind when it happened,
always.