The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. Read Online Free Page A

day
because, truly, I don’t want to deal with them today.
    So I spent my day getting food. There
are maybe two dozen buildings still standing downtown. But that’s
where I was when I left off writing yesterday, heading for
downtown, so I’ll pick it up from there.
    When I got downtown there was no one
there, only the handful of buildings standing as I mentioned, and
two of those went down a short time later from an aftershock. The
Police department... Gone. The Fire department out Washington
Street… Gone. I know I walked out there. Ditto the high school. All
the old houses, the newspaper, the museum. Really, it’s all
gone.
    There were some tracks, but how old
were they? I couldn’t tell. And I couldn’t tell where they were
headed either. I got pretty down about it and ended up walking back
down to the square and then down towards the river in back of the
square. There was a porn shop, still there. It seemed like the
dirtiest place I’d ever seen. I mean, why would a place like that
still be there, still be standing when almost nothing else
was?
    Is that a statement or what? Hey, maybe
it is. But since I was down that far, I thought I’d take a look at
the river, and that made me think about the cave.
    This whole area is limestone, caves
everywhere. This one just happened to be a big one.
    It wasn’t hard to find it. It’s on an
old abandoned road below the level of the square, but a good
hundred feet or so above the level of the river. All the brick work
that had once closed it off had fallen. The cave itself seemed
okay. Some rock had come down, but not much. Most of the rock lying
around looked pretty old, like it had been there for some time.
Given the buildings, which were still falling, or the cave, I chose
the cave. It just seemed to make more sense.
    It’s quite deep. I have no
idea how deep it goes and no inclination to follow it and see. The
front area is huge, and dry, more room than I could ever use, so
there’s no need for me to go into that darkness and find out how
deep it goes. And that’s funny, isn’t it? What is it that I’ll
need? Might need?
Could need? I don’t know. I do know I won’t be spending the rest of
my life living in a cave, that’s for sure. But it’s winter. I have
to stay somewhere for the next few months. Then maybe I’ll head
south if no one shows up to rescue me. I guess it would be me,
there’s no one else here. It shouldn’t be that way though. There
has to be more than me.
    I spent the rest of the day looking
around. I walked all the way out to Arsenal Street as well as
Washington Street. The mall, or most of it, has collapsed. But I
should be able to get some stuff out of it. The interstate is car
wrecks and bodies everywhere. I could see it from the overpass. I
didn’t feel a need to go down there to see it in person. I didn’t
want to.
    I hadn’t really seen many
bodies. Some at the mall, some at the supermarket, a few others
here and there, but there is so much ground, houses, things missing, that I
think the other people just got swallowed up by the quake. There is
a lot of raw earth. Most of the streets are messed up. The
interstate is like that in places, what I can see any way, but
close to Arsenal Street, it’s all wrecks and bodies, wrecked and
burned vehicles; and it smells horrible. I could smell it long
before I came up on the overpass. I’ve decided it will take a lot
to get me to go back out Arsenal Street again.
    The supermarket has that smell also,
and I found two people up by the checkouts when I first dug it out,
but none since then as I’ve dug out other parts of the store. Maybe
it’s the meat department at the back of the store that smells like
that.
    I spent most of the next
day wandering around, trying to start cars and trucks, calling out
to the people I had hoped were there. Nothing. I heard something
that sounded like an engine running, but it came and went on the
wind and I couldn’t tell where it had come from. But I took