by Geo Dell
“Let me get Sandy and Susan,” Candace said. But before she got to the entrance way Sandy was poking her head around the corner, a question in her eyes. Janet had already started down the sloping ledge, Sandy and Susan were only seconds behind her.
~
The heard the story over a fire in the main cave area, heating soup, which Sandy thought was all they would be able to handle.
“Go easy on the water too. Their stomachs have shrunk... They need what room there is there for nourishment along with the liquid intake,” Sandy said.
The big mans name was Craig. He had come around after a couple of cups of the rich broth and told them their story.
They had come up country from Louisiana, crossed Mississippi and then trekked into Tennessee. From there they had headed into the wilderness.
They had come on horseback into the mountains, but they had planned poorly. Carl, the man that had been leading them had been dead for over three weeks now.
It had been Carl's idea to settle in the mountains to the south, and he had taken them up and up, further and further into the mountains, but nothing had met with his approval, finally there had been a show down. Of the thirty of them who had come, six banded together to overthrow Carl who was controlling, and in their opinion, hoarding the food.
They had ambushed Carl, shot him and thrown him off a cliff. Then they had found out the truth. The wagons Carl had guarded were nearly empty. There was no food. There was very little ammunition as well. The group had taken to fighting among themselves. Craig and the other four had escaped the fighting only to find themselves coming down out of a high mountain pass with very little to their name. They had never seen any of the others again.
They had shot a deer two weeks before, a duck five days after that, and then they had run out of ammunition for the two rifles they had between them. They had subsisted on water since then, and some venison Craig had managed to smoke in the first few days. Three days before, the last of the venison had gone and they had been reduced to only water. Sissy, the one he had been carrying, had gone first. Her legs had just given out, sometime yesterday, or maybe the day before.
They had headed in this direction because last night Roberta had seen smoke that had seemed to be coming from the side of the mountain. She had insisted that it had to mean there were people there, even though it seemed very unlikely. Craig had looked as well, but he had seen no smoke, just the blue gray stone of the mountains. But North East was a good direction to be heading in any way, Craig had decided, and so they had come.
Craig, Sissy and Roberta. Bonny and John were the other two.
Janet had called Bob on the radio. He had been prepared to come back then, but Janet had convinced him that they were in no danger and he should stay. Finish what they had set out to do. The days were already growing colder, and who knew if there would be time again this year for any other trips. Besides, she had told him, he could meet them all tomorrow afternoon or evening when they returned.
She had no sooner finished talking to Bob than Annie's voice had come over the radio. They were less than twenty miles out and they would push to be there in a few hours. They had the woman, Annie said, who had lost an arm. It looked like the wound had gotten infected. She had lapsed into unconsciousness and they were concerned she might not last through the evening.
Janet came out after speaking with Bob and Annie, and let the three women who were still on the ledge, staring down the valley, watching the sun finish setting, know that Sissy had passed away and that Annie and the others would be coming in just a few hours.
“Bob says probably Arlene will be here... Or him if not, to take care of her,” Janet had said quietly.
Sissy had died just a short time earlier, she told them. Her heart, Sandy had said. Too much stress. Sandy had her other patients on bed rest and liquids, she told them, and thought that most of them would be fine within a few days.
“I can take care of it... No sense in making Arlene come all the way back for that,” Candace told her.
“No, Candy... Too much stress for you... The baby,” she said quietly. “Let Robert worry about it.” She stood for a second longer. “Might lose one more,” she said quietly and then walked away.
Candace looked back out over the valley after Janet finished speaking. That's the truth, she thought. Too much stress. It is a stressful world out there. She surprised herself to tears over how readily she could accept that senseless death was just a part of life. Patty held her and stroked her hair as they watched the sun set, waiting for Annie and the others.
~
Bob told Janet that he loved her, signed off and then set the radio down.
“It's not the others come back hurt, is it,” Sharon asked.
“No. It's not them. Not any of us. It's a new group of outsiders that arrived nearly starved to death... Lost one of them... I guess they got most of the others resting comfortable now though. Another is bad off...”
“Someone will have to take care of the one,” Arlene said thoughtfully. She stood from the fire, Bob watched her.
“You,” Bob said. “I can... It doesn't have to be you.”
Arlene nodded. “I'll take a horse, be there in just about a half hour or less.”
Bob nodded. “Okay. We'll be back tomorrow.”
“Didn't say anything else?” Arlene asked.
Bob shook his head. “A girl they're bringing in... Lost an arm to one of them. Might not make it... Be there in a few hours, so...”
Arlene nodded. “So, maybe three.” She bent and kissed David quickly. He stood and walked away into the gathering darkness with her.
Bob sat and listened to the early evening. A few minutes later he heard hoof beats as Arlene headed back to the valley. David came back a few minutes later and sat back down by the fire. The silence held.
~
“Just head back,” Arlene told the young man who had helped to carry the body out past the barns to a small cave they had set up to isolate the dead. They had only used it a few times.
The kid looked doubtfully up at the night sky and then back down at Arlene. Arlene patted the gun on her hip.
“I'll be fine,” she told him. “Go on... Head back before they start to worry about you.” The kid started to turn. “Billy, thanks for helping,” she told him. She smiled to reassure him. He smiled back, turned, hesitated briefly, and then started back along the path to the main cave.
A thick wooden door was set into the cave opening. But she wouldn't actually need to get in there. That was only to lock them in if they could not take care of them quick enough. To have a place to isolate them. She was here. This one would never get the chance to turn. There was a small grave already dug a little further down in an area they had chosen for just that purpose. There were, in fact, three graves dug. She would use one tonight, maybe more than one, but tomorrow she would come out and open another two or three to be ready.
The body was inside a sleeping bag. Zippered up. She knew without looking that the arms were tied down to the sides of the body. Sandy would have made sure. They had rules. They had all decided, and none of them had any wish to break their own rules. There would be no dead outbreaks in the Nation.
She walked down to the iron gate that closed off access to the small cemetery hidden away in the rock, fitted the key in the lock, and swung the gate open. She walked back to the body, reached down, grabbed one edge of the bag and dragged it down the rough path and into a small hidden side area where they had buried the few they had needed to bury.
This place had been a natural fault in the rock, a crevice, nearly three hundred feet wide and twice that in length. The stone walls reached away to the moonlit sky far above. Arlene switched on her flashlight and continued down to the first grave in line. There were four others close up and mounded over. The other two open graves, both of which she may need later, were off to her left. Plywood covered them, just as it covered the one she intended to use now.
She let go of the bag, grabbed the ed
ge of the plywood in one gloved hand and tugged. The plywood came away easily. She reached down and grasped the bag once more, her hand feeling the outline of the woman's head beneath the thin layer of cloth, and she very nearly lost the tips of her fingers as the woman's mouth bit down through the fabric. The zombie ended up with a mouthful of glove instead. Arlene swore as she stumbled back, a little unnerved for a moment.
One finger throbbed, she quickly held it up to the flashlight beam and turned it back and forth. Pinched, it was already bruising, but the skin was not broken. The heavy leather glove had saved her. She looked back at the bag where the zombies head whipped back and forth beneath the cloth. The leather glove held between its teeth like a prize. She stepped forward, pulled her pistol and thumbed off the safety. A new rule, she thought now, tie the mouth shut somehow.
She bent lower and pulled the trigger. The gunshot roared within the stone walls and then echoed off down the valley. Arlene returned her gun to her holster, retrieved her glove, picked up one edge of the bag and dragged it over to the hole.
Sandy's Journal.
It's late, maybe close to morning. I laid my watch down somewhere and then lost it. That was hours ago. I just can't remember where I put it. It will turn up, but for the most part, watches are pretty much useless. They can only count twenty-four hours and the days and nights are more than that. Half the time we just look at the sky anyway.
This has been a long day. We have new members. We have some new people that walked right in out of the wilderness. One of theirs died right after they got here. Another is not doing good and I expect he'll be gone by morning. Then Annie came back, Mike sent her back, with a woman that was bitten by a Zombie. They took her arm off. I think she's safe from the bite, but the wound itself got infected. I guess maybe the dead could get her after all, just delayed. It's going to be touch and go. We have our own cultured penicillin. I took the rest of her forearm as well. They had left a stub below the elbow. There is no way to know if she will make it or not. We'll have to wait and see. I'm glad Annie is back, but what she had to tell us has everyone worried about the rest.
The other one of the new ones that came in from the wilderness that is bad off got bitten. Looks like a snake to me, maybe a few days back. How he could keep walking is beyond me. The leg is gangrenous, and it looks to me like the infection is up into his stomach, lungs. His heart has about had it.
I'm glad I know what I know, but sometimes, like this, I feel next to useless. The old world is gone. Neither one of these people would’ve died in the old world.
On a personal note. Susan and I have decided we will follow Molly's lead. Susan will go first this time. I'm next. I want Michael to be the father, so does Susan. We talked it over. I don't know what he will think, hopefully not that we're crazy. This way our children will be close to the same age. Molly is, after all, just pregnant. They'll be able to grow up together.
CHAPTER SIX
September 22nd
On The Road
It was mid morning when they passed the couch in the road with the overturned Harley. Mike took a few seconds, from the window of the truck, trying to spot the woman, or what was left of her. She was nowhere to be seen, but snapping and snarling from the nearby trees told them the bodies Debbie had seen had not gone far. And a large pool of blackened and sun-cracked blood told a story of its own. She must have been good and dead, if it was her blood, his, both.
Mike didn't allow the trucks top stop completely. He sped up again after only a cursory glance. What ever had happened was over. There would never be a way to tell for sure if it had been the man they had passed. And even if there were it didn't answer the why of it and couldn't. You couldn't know what motivated another man or woman. You just couldn't, and it would do Ronnie and Chloe no good to pick at the wound it had caused.
Mike had had the window down. He rolled it up tight as they passed and switched on the air conditioning, but the scene remained in his head anyway as he drove along.
The blood, dark stains on the cracked pavement crawling with ants, and one hand sitting off to the side like a toy tossed away by an angry child. Pink sparkles on the fingernails caught the early morning light and threw it back. Mike pushed his foot down a little harder on the accelerator and turned his attention back to the scenery that was passing the windows.
The roads were deteriorating quickly. The heat, the humidity, but most of all no maintenance. In places, the only way you knew where the road was, was the break in the trees. The straight lines that nature never made. Mike imagined that in a few years even those would be gone, at least to the normal eye. Maybe in a few thousand years or so someone would do a fly over and remark on how, although you can't see it from the ground, there was once a huge road system that covered the continent. The ancient civilization had, had a road system.
He had seen something like that in a documentary once. Roads, ruins, they all left their marks, at least for a few thousand years. Maybe longer if the stuff they had been seeing on Mars were truly indications of past life. It just stayed there, undiscovered, until the next race of people came along that was curious enough to look, or advanced enough to look. Maybe that was the world. Just recycling from civilization to civilization. A few thousand years flow by and it all starts up again. Like wiping the playing field even again. He wondered what would emerge victorious this time.
“Hey... You okay,” Ronnie asked.
“Yeah, I was...” He shook his head and smiled sadly. “You okay,” he asked.
Ronnie frowned but followed it with a small smile. “Pretty much... I just want to get home and see Patty... Let it all go.”
Mike nodded. “Me too, Ronnie. They can keep all of this. I mean we really do have it together back there. We have something real going on. When have you heard of a society where everyone really is equal?”
“Nowhere,” Ronnie said. “At least not in our history as a people.”
“You know my great-grandmother was full blooded Blackfoot. Lived in a mining camp in Canada, up high in the mountains there somewhere. Only one way for an Indian woman on her own to live back then, and so she did. Had more than a dozen kids by different men.” Mike shrugged and watched the roadway go past. He let up on the gas pedal, the road surface really was unpredictable. Better safe than sorry.
“The last three kids were by a black man... An escaped slave that had made his way there... To be free I suppose. I don't know whether they just got along, or they understood each other, maybe loved each other, but they stayed together for a long while... A very long while... Then he died.”
“She was alone for a period... Don't know how she survived. She never told anyone, anyway. Then one day along comes this German-Irish miner. He marries her and brings her to America. At the border he claims all the kids as his own.”
“Didn't go far to settle, right to Watertown. My grandfather passed for a white man all of his life... I met him, he was dark, but he lived as a white man. None of the other kids, at least in my generation, had even met my Great-Grandmother and Grandfather. I was it, and I only got to meet them because I was the oldest. They were old and used up by life then. My Great-Grandmother had no English, or if she did the few times I met her I never heard it. Maybe that made an even stronger impression on me. I remembered them. Still do.”
“A few years back one of my sister's kids hurt himself and ended up having surgery, after that they had a little surprise. The blood work showed certain traits, he had some scaring that was unusual. The family was shocked. Maybe past shocked, but not me. I went out and saw my Grandpa just before he died. He told me all of it. We had a really long talk.. He wished he could go back. Live real, who he really was, I mean, and he was ashamed he hadn't, but there's so much hate in the world. Look at the way it is.”
“I didn't look down on him for it. I never walked in his shoes, but I saw the way the world could be, same as we all do. This crap back there... That's hate too. A different kind, but it's still hate. Look at the shit we
do to each other, Ronnie.”
Ronnie nodded his head and then turned from studying the road.
“We're so lucky to have what we have, and, for real, I'm not coming back out here,” Mike continued. “I have Candace. I have you, Patty. I'm even starting to get along good with Tom. I respect the hell out of Bob and the stuff he has in his head,” he paused and watched the road.
“Yeah. I don't know how he knows so much, but we're lucky to have him... And Tim... Kid's a frickin' genius,” Ronnie said.
“Yeah, but look at you. Look at what you've taught David, and Patty too. No way would we have built all that we have without you. Not shining you on, just being real. It's like we have so many talented people, and they're all so open minded. And it works... Is working... Makes me wonder if it could have worked this good in the old world if we had just tried.”
“Thought the same thing,” Ronnie said. “You know, I don't talk much, you and Patty. Candace... Other than that...” He shrugged. “But I pay attention. Skin color? Always matters. Nowhere in my life in the old world was there a place where it didn't matter. With my own people, family, it was pride. Wear your skin with pride... To most white men? It meant inferior. It just did. Maybe it was better hidden than it was in the old days... My father's days, but it was there just the same. And I'm not trying to make it one way. I would find myself looking at a white man and judging him in a certain way. It's the way hate keeps growing.”
“Where I am now? Color really doesn't matter. It isn't an issue. I don't mean that it's not an issue on the surface, it's just not an issue at all. I know. I don't talk much, but I watch everything. I pay attention. All the shit's gone, Mike. And we can make it gone for good. We don't have to let it back in. Those other guys? The military guys?”
Mike nodded.
“First time in months that I felt someone looking at me as though I was inferior,” Ronnie said.
“Yeah. Me too. They were not coming to our world, Ronnie. No way,” Mike said. “No way at all.”
“I knew that too, Mike. I know you. I knew as soon as they opened their mouths and started spouting that shit, that they were done. Like Bear the other day... I like him... But that isolating shit... That division had to get nipped in the bud, because if he stayed that way I wouldn't be able to like him.”
