America The Dead Book Two: The Road To Somewhere (7 page)

Mike shook his head. “I... No. I haven't. None
of us have. I don't want to sound like an ass, but you're
serious?”

“
I'm serious.
Look, I'm not an over reactor. This woman was dead. I didn't think
so at first, but afterward I realized she had to have been
dead.
No doubt at all
. I saw all that Un-Dead stuff on TV in the old world. I
didn't buy any of it at all. But this... This was different. I
actually saw this with my own two eyes.”

Mike nodded, unsure what else to do or
say.

Jeff nodded back. “I know how it sounds. But I
brought it up because maybe it will happen again. Sounds pretty
lame in the light of day, I know. But, well. It's something to
consider.” He stood from the rock. “I guess I better get in if I'm
going.” He nodded once more and then looked at Mike. “I'm not a
nut.”

Mike sighed. “I know. That makes what you said
even more troubling.”

Jeff nodded once more and then turned back to
the water. A second later, he walked off without another word,
leaving Mike alone and wondering.

~

The evening meal was one of the best Mike could
remember in a long time. Venison, beef, asparagus, rice and
biscuits.

“
How did you manage to make rice,
or real biscuits,” Patty asked Jan.

“
Really,” Kate chimed
in.

“
Bisquick, and a really big pot,”
Janet Dove said.

“
Bisquick,
duh
,” Kate said looking at Patty.

“
Where did you find all these huge
pots though, Janet?” Kate asked.

“
The restaurant, Katie,” Janet
said.

“
And the Bisquick. We didn't even
think of Bisquick,” Patty said.

“
Oh, they have cases of the stuff
over to the little store,” Janet said. “And flour too. You know,
their store room is all concrete block. No rats like those others.
I thought you knew,” She said.

“
Nope,” Kate said, “You're the
best, Jan. This is really good.”

“
Absolutely,” said
Patty.

“
You bet.”

“
Best I ever had.” And many other
similar compliments flooded the air. Janet Dove flushed but
continued to smile. “Thank you,” she said, “Thank you.”

~

After dinner, several of the people in the camp
helped to do the dishes and clean up, including some of the
visitors. The evening was warm, and everyone sat around one of the
larger fires drinking coffee and talking low, watching the light
fade from the day.

~Across The field~

She came awake in the dark. The boy pressed
tightly against her side, his cold seeping into her own.

At first her vision had suffered horribly, but
as time wore on, it had changed. Her eyes had changed. She knew
that because she had seen them reflected in a shop window a few
miles back as she had been traveling alone. Before the
boy.

The glass had been reflecting only the
yellow-blue of the moon until she had stepped in front of it and
then it had scared her so badly she had nearly run screaming at
what she saw. What does the monster see when it looks in the
mirror?

At that time she had still remembered who she
had once been, had an idea of what she looked like stored in her
head. When she stepped in front of the Moon-shiny glass, that
picture flew away.

She had stopped, her knees
buckling at the sudden urge to reverse and run away. She had
actually taken two scrambling steps backward before she realized
the thing in the glass -
the
Monster
that has seemed about to pounce
upon her - was nothing more than a reflection of her own radically
changed self.

Her body had been reduced to skin and bone. The
skin had stretched tight, illuminating the bones beneath it.
Causing ridges and valleys where she had never seen any.

Her skin had peeled away from her face in a few
places, and the bone showed through yellow-white, gleaming in the
moonlight. Her black hair was a ruined mass of black. Stringy,
tangled, plastered to her head like a helmet in places. But it was
her eyes that had caused her to stare the longest.

They were silver slits in the moonlight, but as
she looked closer, she saw that the irises were bright red, no
longer the dull orbs they had become after she had died. She had
seen those eyes reflected back from the water of the harbor in New
York when she had started this journey. She had gone for water. She
had to have water to survive; every living thing did. She had not
yet realized that she was no longer a living thing.

The moon had been bright that night, reflecting
off the trash strewn water. A drowned cat had floated by and
transfixed her. She had been torn between vomiting and reaching
into the water and retrieving the cat... bringing it to her
mouth... tasting it. But the moment had passed, and she had shook
herself, come back to herself. And that was when she had seen her
eyes reflected in the harbor water.

She was only hours dead then. She
had been running from a group of men, and she had run right into
the arms of someone else. Some
thing
else. She never saw him...
her... whatever it had been. Its teeth had found her neck; the
blood had spurted, and she had spiraled down into
darkness.

When she had come to, she had thought maybe she
had dreamed it. Maybe he had not killed her and left her for dead.
But the sticky blood that coated her neck and clothes said
otherwise. Later, as she wandered the dying city, she realized her
heart was not beating. Her blood was no longer coursing through her
veins. She had wandered, wondering her fate, and had found herself
at the harbor.

She had bent to bring the water in
her cupped hands to her dry, cracked lips, and she had seen her
eyes. Dull, colorless marbles in her head, barely reflecting light
at all. And she had known -
known
she was dead. Not that all of the other things
had not already told her, but that her mind had finally clicked
over, taken the information it had shoved to the corners of her
cloudy thoughts and thrown it out into the conscious.

She had shaken it off, scooped the water to her
mouth, swallowed and then gagged, vomiting the water back
up.

That had been her glimpse of her old eyes.
These eyes were not those eyes. There was nothing dead about these
eyes. These eyes were alive, bright, reflective, hungry,
intelligent... Predatory, she told herself.

Now she focused on the moon above, the moon
that had never meant much of anything to the old Donita. Now it
talked to her, pulled something inside of her, spoke to her very
being.

She sat quietly, the boy beside her, and
scented the air. Animals had been here. A dog... A rat... Something
else traveling by had wondered about her deadness but decided
against tasting her, warned by some instinct. The dog worried her
the most. She could tell from the scent that he had lingered. She
would have to deal with the dog if it came back again.

Her hand reached over and shook the boy from
twilight. The night was young. They needed to hunt.

~The Camp~

The fire burned hot but low, the heat feeling
good as the temperature of the air dropped. The fires were still
many, meat spread upon drying racks before the smoke and flame. A
small group had been sitting, watching the stars come out, when one
by one nearly all of the others had come to sit and watch with
them.

Quiet conversations passed back and forth
between them. But it seemed as though there were other things on
everyone’s minds, and the conversations began to die down after a
short time. Mike broke the silence that had held for a few
moments.

“
So, Bob,” Mike
began. “I... I don't want to put you on the spot, but after you
left today we all,
several of us
anyway
, talked a little bit about what
we're going to do, and that led to what you and Janet had talked
about, and I didn't really feel I knew enough about what it is you
want to do, and really I didn't feel it was my place to explain it.
So... I thought...” Mike finished.

“
Sure,” Bob agreed. “What is it
you want to know?”

“
Well,” Lilly said. “Pretty much
all of it, Bob. At least me. I don't know what it is you want to
do, and I'd like to.”

“
Same here, Bob,” Ronnie
said.

“
Us as well,” Jeff Simmons
said.

Bob nodded, ”Okay then,” he said.
“What we really want to do is start the world over, but leave all
the bad stuff out. I know that sounds like a pipe dream, and I've
realized that, because that's what it mostly is,
a pipe dream.
There is
no way to leave all that stuff out. Some of it is built into who we
are, you know?” He paused.

“
So now that
this has happened, and the opportunity to really
do
something is here,
I've had to revise my ideas. And I may have to revise them again. I
think where I'm at is this, we,
Janet and
I
, speak about the Nation, but it isn't
really about that anymore either. It has been a long dream of some
native people to go back to the land. To become,
again
, the people we
used to be. But the reality of that life is a different thing. That
romantic ideal is a long way from the life we would have to
live.”

“
So it's a compromise. Back to the
land? Certainly. But we are not Quakers, or Amish, we'll use
whatever modern advantages we can find or put our hands on that
will help us. Certainly horsepower in the form of vehicles to at
least get us to where we're going. After that? Will we need them?”
he shrugged, “And how would we get fuel? No. I think we use them to
get us back to where we want to be, and that might be it. It's
probably going to be horses after that, so, somewhere between here
and there we are going to have to get horses, and not just a few, a
good sized herd. Maybe fifty, a hundred would be better. Seed?
We'll bring all we can get. I don't know if anyone here has ever
seen Indian corn, the stuff that sustained my people, but it was
very small, sometimes no bigger than my index finger, and not much
bigger around either. Generally it was bigger, but not much. Modern
corn? Vast improvement. I guess you get my drift. We're thinking of
taking every advantage we can with us. But, we're thinking back to
the land too. No canned goods, although we'll certainly take more
than enough to survive on until we have our own crops, animals,
like that. It isn't going to be an easy life, that's for sure, but
we are going to do it.” He paused and the silence held for a few
minutes as what he had said settled in and everyone thought it
over.

“
Where were you thinking of to do
it?” David asked.

Bob nodded as though he had expected the
question, “I'm looking at a huge area of what was forever wild
lands. Encompasses quite a lot of the middle of the old country,
stretches south, north, east and west. Several million acres,
mountains, valleys, and a lot of it is the same as it was when this
country was settled. Never been touched. There have been
expeditions back into it a few times, but no one has lived there
since natives lived there.”

He borrowed the map that Mike had shown Jeff
earlier, pulled a black grease pencil from his pocket and circled
the area.

“
Take us a few weeks of steady
travel to get close to it. Then there's a lot of preparations to
make. And, well, we don't know what to expect on the way. Who we
may meet, who might want to come,” Bob said.

Susan looked at Sandy, then whispered something
in her ear. She nodded. “We want to go,” Susan said and Sandy
nodded again.

“
So do we,” Tim said. He was
holding Annie's hands.

“
We really do,” Annie
said.

“
Then you will,” Bob said looking
at Mike.

“
It's your call, Tim,” Patty
said.

“
But what about you,” Tim asked
Patty.

“
I... I want to talk it over with
Ronnie. It sounds good,” she looked from Ronnie to Kate to Mike,
tears threatening in her eyes.

“
I asked Bob,” Mike said, “not to
force anyone to decide - we have lots of time for that - but to see
what it is. I... I for one am impressed. But this isn't something I
can decide alone. Kate comes first on my list of things that make
up my world. We'll talk it over, same as all of us will, I guess,”
Mike finished. Patty looked grateful.

“
If you don't mind, we'd like to
think about it also. I guess that's taking for granted you'd let us
in if we decided we wanted to come,” Jeff said.

“
And we would. You're welcome,”
Janet Dove said.

“
I know we've been thinking along
the same lines,” Sharon said. “I know we've kind of crashed in on
you. You've been so kind to us. It's appreciated.”

Bob nodded.

The light was rapidly bleeding from the sky as
the conversations broke up and people began to drift
away.