by Geo Dell
“A little more than he said the first time he told us. We talked about it a little more... just he and I. I wasn't trying to freeze anyone out or keep it from you. Things have just been happening too fast.” He looked up after a quiet moment had passed to see all of them simply staring at him.
“So... What?” Tom asked. “Are you saying she managed to live with that hole in her? And you guys,” He turned and looked at the others, “You guys talked about this before?”
Mike shook his head. “I'm not saying anything at all. Jeff said he thought she was dead. Never sucked in a breath as she got up... even exerting herself scrambling backwards to get away from him. Nothing. No breath. No blood. No anything... And, yeah... We talked about it, and that was the morning before we left that little complex we were camped out in. Jeff found a... a place. Some of us went and looked it over.”
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 as well. 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 Candace 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 despite her feelings.
The way Candace 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.”
Candace 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 Candace 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 Candace'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 Candace 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 way, 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,” 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 trees. “It 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. Candace 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 hit 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,” Candace said.
“No,” Bob said, “I don't think we'll be nearly that advanced.”
Candace 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 eve
rything we want, it may even be gone, but if it's there 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. Candace 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.
“The ground's still frozen, but it's hot,” Ronnie said in a subdued voice.
“Yeah, like summer almost,” Cindy said quietly.
“I think it is 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 shamble 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 dozen more were 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 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, “No, 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 of the larger cows in the herd 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.
After breakfast they tried the radios again, but received no answer. “It doesn't mean they aren't on the way or that anything bad has happened,” Patty said, when Annie seemed about to burst into tears.
“Oh no,” Janet said. “Bob told me they'll be along directly. They have to take care of those people, pick up some supplies, but they'll do that and then they'll be along. They will. I wouldn't expect them to catch up to us for several days. They have too much to do.” She tried to sound as sure of herself and as upbeat as she could, but both were things she didn't particularly feel.
Annie looked at her, a faint doubt line creasing her forehead, but after a few seconds she nodded, and the line smoothed out.
“What we have to do is find a place,” Janet said.
“Do you have a map,” Annie asked, “to help us find... whatever it is we're looking for?”
“Yes, dear, but the map is no good now, don't you see, where we are there have been only a few people in over two hundred years. No map can show this. No, we'll do this on our own. I guess we'll get moving now as well. Patty?” She asked. She waited until Patty looked over, “Would you find something, yarn... ribbon, to tie to a few of these trees... Something to show that we've been here?” Janet asked.
“Yes, that's a good idea,” Patty said and smiled. She had worried about the others being able to find them, but had not wanted to voice her concern.
“Yes, but I wish I had thought of it yesterday,” she frowned. “Well there's nothing for it, as Bob would say. We will mark our way from here on out,” Janet proclaimed.
They had the Suburbans loaded and ready to go a half an hour later. Bright red ribbons fluttered from several trees, and Patty had a good supply cut from a bright red plastic tarp. She'd mark trees periodically as they went.
The herd grew nervous when the Suburbans moved out. The cows gathered around the calves; the bulls pawed and snorted. But the three Suburbans gave them a wide berth as they passed them and continued down into the long valley.
~
She wiped her sweaty hands on her jeans. The trucks had been gone for over half an hour now. She needed dry hands, she didn't want to slip coming down the tree. She wiped her hands once more, and slowly began to shimmy down the pine from limb to limb, favoring one leg as she descended.
Sticky sap stuck to her hands and clothes, but she didn't care. She made the ground and headed into the camp a short distance away. She was starved. She couldn't even remember the last time she had eaten.
A large iron pot sat at the edge of the fire. In the larger of the four tents she found a stack of plast
ic bowls, cups and eating utensils. She ate first.
When her belly was reasonably full, she rummaged through the clothing in one of the tents and put together some clean clothes. She found one of the V.H.F. Radios, turned it on and set it on the picnic table. If they came back, she would know. She took the clothes down to the stream to clean up.
She had a bullet wound in one leg, the fleshy part of the outer thigh, a crease really. The bullet had furrowed a hole through the skin, but it hadn't gone into the meat of her leg. Even so, it was an angry red, and she knew what that meant.
She cleaned it out, grimacing at the pain as she did. She looked at it closely, decided it was as clean as she was going to get it, and then smeared a half tube of antibiotic ointment on it from a first aid kit she'd found in the same tent as she had taken the clothes from; she bandaged it.
She walked around testing the leg before she slipped the jeans back up and pulled the boots back on her feet. She could find the rest of what she wanted in the nearest town. She looked down at her chipped fingernails, the black polish nearly gone in places. I'll fix that too, Chloe told herself.
She retrieved the radio. She had heard them calling back and forth to each other a few times, crossed the camp and walked down to the truck they had left.
The back of the truck was a gory mess, flies took off and landed from the blood covered floor, making loud buzzing sounds as they did. That was okay, she told herself. She'd just find another truck when she got to the next town. This one would still get her there.
She flipped her hair away from her head, her flat emotionless eyes focused on something only she could see. She laughed to herself and then climbed up into the truck.
~
She had spent the night in hiding. She had seen the others come and drag the bodies away. Nearly impossible to see in the night. She had heard the others looking around all morning long, and she had known they would not find what they wanted.
The others had been a puzzle. It wasn't Death or Murder or Shitty. She was sure of that, or as sure as she could be. It had been damn black, hard to see anything, but it was the way they had moved that told her it wasn't her own people. And, she had been about to call out. It had even seemed as though they had looked up at her. But then something had seemed wrong, something in the blackness. She just hadn't been able to put her finger on what it had been. So she had stayed silent. She had held onto the tree for all she was worth - suddenly scared all over again - kept her breathing as quiet as she could and waited.
