The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. by Geo Dell

a
brief flash of lightening, thirty hours had passed. Not counting
however long the watches had not been working.
    “ It will,” Candace whispered.
    “ Yeah,” Tom echoed tiredly.
    ~
    When the sun finally did rise, it rose
from the South and slowly made its way across the sky on a
ponderous course that saw it slipping back down into the horizon
several times and then seeming to hang dead in the sky for long
periods of time.
    The rains stopped, the temperatures
began to rise rapidly and soon the tarp was discarded. Steam began
to rise from the wet asphalt and the roadside vegetation
surrounding the cave. Mike found himself looking around as everyone
else was.
    A large section of the bank that had
held the old road was gone, and the Black's waters churned muddy
brown, coming closer to the upper roadway where the cave
stood.
    All three vehicles were gone. Over the
edge, and presumably washed away, Mike thought. The sun continued
on its unsteady, drunken course, seeming to be desperately angling
for a sinking somewhere in the northwest, but it was hard to tell.
A few minutes later, it once again stopped and seemed to hang in
the sky, a huge, swollen, yellow-red orb shimmering in the hazy
sky.
    “ We should eat, or at least
drink something,” Candace said.
    “ No way. I can’t even think
of food,” Tom said.
    “ I know. Me too, but we’ll
get dehydrated, possibly already are, and that’s very dangerous.
I’m going to see how the cave is… Get some bottled water, maybe
some of those energy bars. Did anyone think to bring a flashlight
with them?” she finished.
    Everyone shook their heads. Candace
stood on shaky legs, and the dizziness returned quickly. She
squatted down to the ground as everyone else struggled to their
feet and also sank back down to the ground. She took several deep
breaths and then stood again, slowly, taking deep breaths as she
did.
    “ It’s okay,” she told the
others with a shaky lopsided smile, “Just do it slowly.”
    The men made it back to their feet,
standing, shaking, but Janet remained sitting, her head in her
hands. Bob sank back down and circled her shoulders with one arm,
pulling her to his chest.
    “ I’ll wait here with Jan,”
he said quietly.
    The others nodded and headed slowly to
the cave entrance.
    Mike noticed as they walked that if
they had come this far out onto the asphalt, but to the right or
the left of where they had ridden out the night, they would have
ended up in the river sometime during the night. Tom and Candace
were also looking over the destruction on either side of the cave
entrance. Their eyes met briefly, acknowledging the apparent, and
then turned to examine the entrance to the cave.
    A few loose chunks of stone lay upon
the ground, but the pile of loose brick seemed none the worse for
the long night, seeming to Mike to be in the same place they had
been. Not one brick had tumbled from the pile. How could that be,
he asked himself. Tom voiced his thoughts.
    “ Those bricks look
untouched,” he said it softly like such a thing could not possibly
be true.
    “ I noticed that too,” Mike
said aloud. Candace simply nodded, passed the pile by and stepped
into the dark mouth of the cave.
    Within a short time she located a box
of matches, and lighting small little sticks of flame, found her
way to one of the big heavy duty flashlights where it had rolled to
a stop among a stack of canned goods that had shifted and toppled
over from one of the wooden pallets.
    Other than a very small amount of stone
that had separated from the back wall, and a few more toppled piles
of stored goods, the cave looked good.
    “ What do you think, Mike?”
Tom asked.
    It was one of the few things Tom had
asked Mike's opinion about, and it surprised him.
    “ I think if it was going to
come down, it would’ve already,” Mike assured him. Candace nodded
her head in agreement.
    The lightheadedness was still with them
as they moved about the shadowy interior. Candace set