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

about
building a small fire while Tom and Mike went out to help Bob bring
Janet back into the cave.
    Candace passed out bottled water and
energy bars once everyone was back inside, and their stomachs
seemed to settle down, but the water only woke the queasiness back
up, and no one wanted to try the energy bars. They remained
untouched.
    ~
    Tom wandered back outside the cave,
rested his head against the coolness of the stone that fronted the
cave, and watched the sun in the sky. It described a crazy course
across the sky and did not seem to pick up speed and become more
stable as it headed for the Northeast.
    Eventually Mike and Candace wandered
out with coffee, bringing a cup for Tom. He sipped at it
cautiously, but his stomach seemed to accept it better than it had
the water earlier, and it did help to clear his head.
    “ Bob’s with Janet. They’re
both sleeping,” Candace said between sips of coffee. She looked up
at the sun where it seemed to hang in the sky.
    “ It’s reversed,” Tom said.
“Going backwards; or nearly backwards.”
    Mike and Candace both
nodded.
    “ Maybe this is it,” Mike
said. Tom raised his eyebrows at him.
    “ It, as in maybe it’s done
and finally about to start rotating in one direction. You know,
stay that way.”
    “ Maybe that situation will
straighten out the magnetic poles,” Candace said thoughtfully.
“Maybe electronics, circuits, will work again.”
    “ Is that what it was,” Mike
asked?
    “ Maybe,” Tom
said.
    “ I don’t pretend to know,”
Candace said. “Only the Earth wasn’t spinning right, or at all for
a while, and none of the electronic stuff worked. Maybe now it
will.”
    “ Yeah. Yeah. But even after
it started back up again nothing worked. At least not when we tried
it,” Tom said.
    “ Did we?” Candace
asked.
    Tom looked puzzled.
    “ Hey, you know what? She’s
right. We didn’t really check again. We just assumed it wouldn’t
work. At least I didn’t check. I assumed it wouldn’t work. I mean it didn’t,
why would it?” Mike asked. “Did you guys think the same
thing?”
    “ I did,” Tom agreed “First
day or two, but not after.”
    Candace nodded in agreement. “If that’s
what caused it, the Earth not really rotating, maybe it will work
now. Or, maybe it’s something else,” she finished.
    “ That dust or ash,” Mike
said. “I’ve never seen volcanic ash, but I’ve read about it, and it
seems that’s what it was.”
    “ Yeah, I thought that
also,” Candace said. “Really, if there weren’t volcanoes going off
somewhere, I’d wonder. All this Earthquake activity, volcanoes just
make sense. Wherever it happened, it worked its way here on the air
and was dumped on us.”
    They looked around at the nearly dry
asphalt. Small areas steamed as the moisture made its way back into
the air. Mike noticed that both Candace and Tom’s shirts were
soaked through with sweat. His was no different.
    “ Yeah,” Tom agreed.
“Getting hot.” Mike and Candace both shrugged. Who knows , the gestures said.
    They all leaned back against the sun
warmed stone, sipping at their coffee, watching the bloated sun
stagger across the sky.
    It was Candace who first noticed the
small group walking across the steaming pavement towards them. Her
gun seemed to magically appear in her right hand. Lying alongside
her thigh, just out of sight.
    ~
    Mike and Tom were nearly as quick
getting their own guns into their hands, but not nearly as
subtle.
    “ That’s close enough right
there,” Tom said.
    No one spoke for a moment. The two
groups of people appraised one another carefully in the
silence.
    The group was small, four women, and
two men. One of the men was no more than a boy, Mike though, but,
after the shootout with the kids a few days prior, no one was about
to take any kid lightly.
    “ We saw you from way back,”
one of the women said. She pushed sweaty brown hair from her eyes
as she spoke. “If we meant trouble…” She let the implication