America The Dead Book Two: The Road To Somewhere (24 page)

Tom laughed a short, unsettled laugh.
”So...?”

“
Mike
shrugged.
“So that's what he
said.”

“
A goddamn
fuckin' Zombie,”
Cindy said very quietly,
like speaking a spell against evil.

Tom looked over at her, his eyes wide. He
looked back at Mike incredulous. “Seriously?” he asked.

All Mike could do was shrug.”Tom... It's what
he thought.”

“
It was on the news,” Cindy
said.

“
Oh for Christ's sake,” Tom said.
“If it's not one thing, it's another.”

“
You know, Man. For real. You're
the most negative man I know,” Ronnie said.

Tom's eyes cut to Ronnie's and challenged him.
Ronnie met the gaze and held it.

“
Alright!”
Mike raised his voice. “I
heard it also. Come on... We all did. How could you not? I thought
it was a joke. I still do. Maybe... I
think
I still do,” His voice fell
and he seemed uncertain. “Doesn't matter, except I brought it up so
we could keep our eyes open. Dead people... I don't know. But, I
know Jeff was convinced, and that
is
a fact.”

Silence held. Then Kate spoke. “I...“ she shook
her head. “I don't know, but, well, we still got some dead here. We
had better check them.”

~

They all dressed alike, were built alike, even
looked alike. They wanted them that way, made them that way, picked
them that way. Looking at what was left of the girl on the ground,
Cindy felt like vomiting again. But she looked harder.

The way Kate had described her fighting with
her sounded like Chloe, who was afraid of nothing. But Chloe had
never worn anything but black fingernail polish and this girl wore
pink. Cindy forced herself to lift the girls shirt. Death had been
carved in spidery white lines into her stomach. Cindy rose and let
the shirt fall back across the dead gray skin of the girl's
stomach.

Had Tammy been Death's woman before Chloe came
along? Cindy didn't know. There was no X through the name. That
meant nothing either though, not really. Tammy had been no one's
woman, so there would be no other name. And Chloe would look the
same.

"I just can't tell," Cindy said. "It's one of
them. I just don't know which one."

Kate nodded, "Either way, we're
missing several...
bodies,
I guess... people," she sat looking at
Mike.

The six of them had searched carefully once
more, even searching the side of the road up to the curve. Nothing
turned up. They went back to camp, made coffee, and then finally
made the meal they had intended to make the night before. Then they
sat down to talk things out.

~

"We're out of range on the V.H.F.,” Bob said.
"It can't be anything else.”

They had tried to contact the vehicles that had
left, but they had received no reply. Just a quarter mile off the
road, even the C.B. channels were scratchy with static rather than
run over with skip talk. The trees, maybe, but more than likely the
foothills and all the trace metals in the rock and the ground, Bob
thought.

Everyone had been patched up, and the seven of
them looked like refugees from a war zone.

Ronnie had cuts to both elbows, and a nick in
one ear lobe. Whether caused by a flying piece of debris or a
bullet, no one could say, but the edges looked slightly burned
which lent itself more to a bullet than anything else.

Tom had a deep cut over one eyebrow. Where it
had come from, he had no idea.

Bob had several large splinters of green wood
taken from just below his right eye. He had no idea they were even
there until Kate pointed them out to him, made him sit down and
then extracted them one by one.

Mike had a deep slice on the palm of one hand
and a fairly deep cut to one knee, all from his plunge down the
road and into the trees when Kate's voice had cut off over the
radio.

David had lost the very tip of his right pinky
finger when the shootout at the camp had happened. Somehow the tip
of his finger had been in the bolt way when he had slammed it home
loading the chamber of one of his rifles. He hadn't even ended up
using that rifle, but one of the clip rifles instead. He had simply
loaded the five rifles around him so he would have them if he
needed them. He had noticed after the battle had ended that he had
lost the tip of his finger. Even then it didn't hurt. He kept
expecting the pain to kick in, but even as Kate bandaged it, there
was no serious pain.

They were all weary, but the food and coffee
helped to revive them.

"How far do you think they could have gotten?"
Mike asked.

"A ways, anyways," Bob said, "After the logging
trails run out, they could run right through the trees. That
reforestation stuff was planned out in nice, neat rows, and you
should be able to drive along it just like it was a real road.
Forrest service often did. I guess they would be stopped once that
ran out," Bob said. "Fifty miles? Sixty? I don't know."

"Then how will we know where they're at?" David
asked.

"We won't know. Not exactly. But, we'll keep on
the radio, once we're within distance. They'll hear us. We'll work
it out from there, I guess," Bob said.

“
There was no way of knowing how
many were coming," Mike said. “I couldn't take the chance.” He
looked around at the the trees. "Looks good down here, hidden even,
but it's vulnerable. You saw the way they sneaked through the trees
to come down in here. We couldn't get them in the trees, too hard.
Kate and Ronnie did that. Really, we got only one guy, and that guy
pretty much jumped out of the wood line, and that's why we got him.
The second one we thought we might have gotten did the same thing.
Tom shot him, but he jumped back into the wood line. What I'm
saying is, we were sitting ducks. So I sent them out. Better that
than we were over run and lose more people. But we'll find them.
Might take time, but we'll find them," Mike said.

“
So we have no cows, no horses, no
trucks. It's like everything we planned to do just fell apart," Tom
said.

Bob smiled. "Life is like that sometimes. We
need some stuff. I don't know how far Janet got with her lists.
Does anybody?" He looked around. Everyone shook their heads
no.

"I figured. So, we have to find a place close
by, and we haven't passed anywhere, but we have to find a place
that has what we need," Bob said.

"Like?" Mike asked.

"Axes, seed, horses and cows, maybe chickens.
Sickles, bolts of cloth, things like that, you see? All the stuff
that we will need until we get on our feet... in a few years? We'll
be able to make everything we need," Bob said.

"Everything?" Ronnie asked
doubtfully.

"Yeah, we will. It's not going to be so hard.
Will we be manufacturing televisions? Or telephones? Or truck
tires? No, but, we won't need them either. Eggs? Beef? Our own
wheat? Will we be making cotton and our own clothes? Yes. I think
we can do all of that," Bob said.

"Sounds like Quakers, or Amish," Kate
said.

"No," Bob said, "I don't think we'll be nearly
that advanced."

Kate laughed and everybody joined
in.

"Back from here, about two or three miles, was
a turnoff. I remember seeing it. No signs. The road was shot, but
if I'm right that will take us into a small town about fifteen
miles down. At least there's one marked on the map. It may not have
everything we want, but we'll have to make do," Bob
said.

"Well," David asked, "When?"

"Well, now," Bob said and laughed.

"Shouldn't... well shouldn't we bury them?"
Cindy asked.

“
And what about the missing ones?”
Tom added.

"They wouldn't have buried us," David said.
"And they killed Jeff and then took his body. Sharon's gonna go
ballistic," he said.

"I think they took the bodies. I don't know
how. We'll have to explain it to Sharon and the others." Mike said,
"But Cindy is right about burying the ones they didn't get, and we
aren't them. Maybe they would've left us, maybe not. They took
Jeff," he finished.

"Nor do we want to be like them," Bob
added.

“
You think they took Jeff and the
others?” Tom asked.

Mike shrugged. “Either they took them, or they
came back to life and walked out of here. You think they came back
to life?”

“
No... I don't... I... I don't,”
Tom said.

The silence held thick for a few beats. Kate
broke it. "Let's go get it done. Maybe it's smart to bury them...
just in case," she said.

~

It took about two hours to get the graves dug.
They used one of the trucks that had been parked by the woods. The
ground was still hard a few inches down, and the soil was rock
filled, hard to shovel. They're were all sweating freely when they
finished.

"Ground's still frozen, but it's hot," Ronnie
said in a subdued voice.

"Yeah, like summer almost," Cindy said
quietly.

"I think it's spring," Bob said, "We're just so
much farther south..." he trailed off.

They finished up, left the truck they had used
where they had ended up with it, and a few minutes later the three
remaining pickup trucks pulled out of the park road and turned left
onto the highway.

~

Most of the town was gone. A farm equipment
dealer sat on the outskirts of town. The main showroom was a
shambles but contained that year's new tractors, and although
tractors were not what they were interested in, they found what
they were interested in out back of the showroom
building.

There were over one hundred new heavy duty farm
trucks parked on the large lot behind the garage building. There
were about twice that many used vehicles. Out of that, they had
more than twenty of the large cattle trucks to choose
from.

"Will a horse ride in something like that?" Tom
asked.

Everybody shrugged. They had passed several
large herds of horses on their way down the road. The question in
Bob's mind wasn't would they, but whether they even needed
them.

“
Arlene said no. I believe she's
right. But I'm not sure we still need them,” Bob said
thoughtfully.

Bob had brought out several bags of oats and a
half dozen bales of fresh hay and set them in the back of one of
the pickup trucks. He had had something in mind for the way back.
But within a few minutes, several of the horse's had approached the
trucks and nuzzled the bags. Bob had split open a few of the bags
and spilled them across the other bags. That was all it took. A
dozen horses were gathered around the truck in no time, and a
couple dozen more trying to get close to it.

"Huh," Mike said.

"Huh, is right," Tom said smiling.

"I wanted to try it on the way back, see if
they would follow. I got to thinking about that other group we ran
across that day. They were probably fed by truck like Arlene said,
and used to people. So they were hungry and missing human
companionship, and they were looking to us for both of those
things. They only veered off because we had no feed and we didn't
slow down. I think this bunch, and probably some of the bunch down
the road will follow us. Just feed them from the back of the truck,
spill it out a few times a day to keep them interested, and I think
they'll follow us," Bob said.

"Think it will work with cows?" David
asked.

"I do," Bob said. "It only makes sense. Big
outfits use long feed troughs. Smaller outfits feed this way, or
smaller troughs they fill a few times a day. Either way the animal
will come to the food," Bob said.

"So, we don't need the stake rack trucks," Mike
said.

"Well, yeah we do, but only a couple. Think
about it, we can pack a lot of stuff into a couple of those trucks.
Chickens, tools, seed, farm implements, Tim's solar panels. I guess
we better get busy," Bob finished.

"Where are we going to find all of that?" Tom
asked.

"There are a lot of little towns, small cities
around here. I think it'll take a little legwork, but I also think
we'll get everything we need. Maybe two days," Bob
predicted.

"Not going to make me ride a horse are you?"
Mike asked.

Bob laughed, "Not yet," he said, "Not
yet."

~

Janet, Patty, Lilly and Annie had a fire going
and breakfast ready before the sun was more than a hint of color on
the horizon. Everyone watched in wonder as the sun broke over the
mountains to the south and drenched the land with golden
light.

The herd of buffalo was huge, several hundred
animals, maybe as many as a thousand, Janet had supposed. They had
moved off down the valley, and a few large cows kept an eye on the
strange visitors. They didn't seem frightened, just cautious. There
were several dozen calves within sight, being fussed over by their
mothers, and the bulls, as well as the females were taking no
chances.