"Right," the old man wheezed and crawled over to where Deke had the thing pinned. The trucker was pale, and clutched his left arm as if it hurt him, but his face was set in grim determination. "Hang on to her, boy...but roll off and over to your side. Once I get her legs off the ground, that should take away a lot of her leverage."

"Whatever you say," Deke panted.

At this point the boy was ready to try anything.

He rolled over to his side, pulling the thrashing corpse over onto its side as well.

"Got her," the trucker grunted. "Now see if you can get to your knees.

To Deke's surprise, the trucker was right. Once the thing's feet were off the ground, it couldn't brace to bring much of its strength into play. Even better, he discovered the thing didn't weigh as much as he originally thought. Perhaps being dead for a while had made it much lighter.

That's when he realized this plan might actually work.

Hope flared as he struggled erect, with Grandpa Tom ahead of him holding the thing's feet. Things had just gotten much better. Now that it hung completely off the ground, the monster could only twist with limited effect between them. Its arms flailed uselessly out to the sides, posing no threat to anybody.

"I like this plan!" Deke enthused "Let's do this!"

The two hustled the writhing corpse over to where Stacey held the big door open. Deke could feel a blast of cold air issue out, and realized it must be the restaurant's walk in freezer. The irony didn't escape him.

"Oh yeah! Back to the cooler with you, Grandma!" he exclaimed. "Okay, mister. When you get to the door, just drop her feet and jump out of the way. Got it?"

"Got it," the trucker panted.

"You ready with that door, Stacey?"

The girl said nothing, but nodded...her face tight and eyes wide.

"Okay, when I throw her I'm going to yell 'now' and jump back. Got it?"

"Yeah," she half whispered. "Got it."

The two of them positioned themselves in front of the open door, with Grandpa Tom standing with his back to the freezer, holding her feet. They locked eyes with each other, and the trucker cleared his throat.

"Are you ready for this, boy?"

"Yeah," Deke flashed a tired grin. "No time like the present."

"Then, go!"

The old man dropped the things feet and lurched out of the doorway. Deke lunged forward as its legs came down, and used the momentum to launch the monster through the entrance in front of them.

"Now!" he cried and jumped back.

The door almost grazed him as it went past, and slammed shut with a reverberating crash. The noise echoed in the concrete and cinder brick hallway. Stacey grabbed the pin hanging from a chain attached to the door and drove it down through a little hole in the handle. A split second later a thud issued from the door as something smacked into it from the other side.

The three of them backed across the hallway from the freezer and stared wide eyed at the steel frame.

Two more thuds sounded from inside.

The heavy metal structure barely even vibrated, and all three breathed a huge sigh of relief.

It was over.

The monster was trapped.

Chapter Six: Deluge.

With a thunderous explosion of lightning, the storm finally unleashed its full wrath on the already drenched landscape below.

Old timers called storms like this a "Texas Blue Norther."

Rolling in from the Rockies out of the Northwest, it was like an advancing atmospheric wall that could cause temperatures to plunge over 25 degrees in almost no time at all. Arriving at nightfall only intensified the drop. Blue Northers almost always brought a downpour, and when they came at night they could produce spectacular storms. This one was no exception.

Water hurtled to earth from the lightning fractured sky in a titanic deluge. It descended in towering, wind driven curtains that tore through the nearby fields, and smashed against the asphalt lot of the Textro with enough force to raise a foot of spray that hung over the pavement like a fine mist. The outside lights of the truck stop became dim haloed spheres swaying like disembodied wraiths in the gale. Wind howled with the rage of all the Furies as it roared between the trucks and hammered the structures with volley after volley of liquid bullets.

Neither man nor beast ventured out in nights like this...

...but the dark figures stalking the grounds of the Textro tonight qualified as neither.

They took no notice of the rain. And if the Furies screamed around their death ravaged forms in the roaring night blast then they ignored them as well. The storm only existed as an environment through which they moved. Wet, cold, darkness, wind...all were just stimuli they uncritically accepted and disregarded. It meant nothing to any of them.

Only their need mattered.

Many clustered around the fallen prey, still ripping and tearing, but now things began to change. The feeding became less frenzied and more deliberate. Now that several full size corpses had been devoured, and their initial hunger reduced, their eating strategy began to focus more on the nutrient rich organs than just the random orgy of consumption of before. Many even walked away, attracted more by the lights from the front of the truck stop than the food at their feet.

The nature of their need had begun to morph as well.

Their hunger no longer drove them, but the desire to kill remained undiminished. Even gorged, their need to drag down and tear at prey consumed them. None of them even remotely possessed the ability of self reflection, so they made no distinction between these drives. They simply waited for the opportunity to fulfill them. It never occurred to them to doubt, or even wonder if that opportunity would come.

More wandered from the clusters of feeding dead and tramped through the deluge towards the front. The bright fluorescent lights under the awnings over the gas and diesel pumps attracted them first, but as they moved around the building their focus began to change.

A softer, more interesting light caught their attention.

As they slogged around the sides and the front, the windows of the truck stop came into their view. Yellow light from the indoor incandescent bulbs spilled out into the night, creating golden rectangles on the asphalt. And the windows themselves seemed to shimmer as they streamed with running rainwater, making this light somehow more "alive" than the cold blue illumination over the pumps. This light was warmer...more inviting.

It drew them in like death-faced moths to a flame.

And once they reached the glass, the hints of life and motion behind the distorting effects of the running windows kept them there. Nothing came close enough to the pane to trigger an attack, but just enough movement occurred to alert them that prey was near. Somewhere in the shimmering light, their need could be filled again.

Their inability to make out their victims confused them, rendering them incapable of decisive action, so they did one of the things they did best...

...they waited.

Deluge - Rachel.

"Mmmph!"

Rachel paused in the process of dabbing Deke's wound with a soapy rag when the boy jerked with a suppressed cry.

She stood next to where he gripped the edge of the stainless steel sink in the truck stop's now crowded kitchen. The scene out in the diner proper had initially driven everybody but the larger of the two local boys in here. The one called Harley had elected to stay out in the diner, behind the counter, and let them know if things out there changed for the worse. At least the crowd meant she would have plenty of hands to help if she needed them.

At the moment she would have traded all those extra hands for the lidocaine she had out in her truck. Her work truck contained everything she would have needed to do this right, and it would have been a lot easier on the people she was doing it to.

Cleaning wounds was a painful business.

She knew it had to hurt, and hated every second of doing it. And with almost everybody now sitting in the kitchen and watching, Rachel figured the young man's pride was the only thing standing between him and tears. Since she couldn't get to her vehicle out in the parking lot, all she had available as a disinfectant was the industrial strength anti-bacterial soap of the Textro's kitchen, and while she didn't doubt its effectiveness she also knew it must be like pouring raw rubbing alcohol into the wounds. Stacey had cried in pain at the same treatment on her arm, and even the unconscious janitor had moaned aloud when his wounds were being cleaned.

Still, one made do with what one had.

At the moment it wasn't much...just a sink with scalding hot water, harsh soap, and all the rags that Marisa and the others could rush around and scrounge up while Rachel continued her fight to keep the janitor from bleeding to death. She had also ordered the trucker, Grandpa Tom, to take a seat on a nearby plastic crate. Something about his skin tone, and the way he kept rubbing his left arm, bothered her.

"Deke," she tried to keep her voice calm and professional, "I know it hurts and I'm sorry. Your trapezius muscle has been punctured in three places, and I'm having to clean deeper."

"How deep is that?" the boy groaned between clenched teeth.

"However deep it takes," she replied. "That monster was filthy, and I don't even want to think what some of these specks I'm cleaning out of these wounds could be."

"Which is why I said we should lock the injured people in the storeroom," Gerald's voice cut in from where he sulked at his place on a nearby countertop.

Rachel closed her eyes in an attempt to keep her temper, and could feel Deke stiffen next to her.

Gerald had indeed brought the same idea up about ten minutes ago when the veterinarian had been treating Stacey, and it had not gone over well then either. Marisa had practically exploded in a directed stream of obscenities from where she knelt on the floor next to the wounded janitor. She held a baseball bat she had retrieved from Big Earls office that some joker had branded with the words, "Tipping Is Its Own Reward," and had leveled it at the out-of-towner in a rather meaningful way. On top of that, Rachel had thought for a second that Deke was going to physically assault the obnoxious redhead as well. She could tell he felt protective of Stacey, and it didn't take a genius to figure out the two were on their way to being a new couple.

But clearly such social complexities were lost on Gerald, and she wondered how he managed to get through life in one piece. Any idiot could have told him bringing up the subject again wasn't going to accomplish anything but possibly anger Deke, or get him a date with Marisa's bat. She could see he didn't use his girlfriend as an advisor on such matters either, since the pale blonde's only response was to try not to look so mortified it might embarrass him in front of others.

"In case I didn't make it plain the first time," Rachel snapped while simultaneously laying a calming hand on Deke's uninjured shoulder, "getting injured isn't contagious. Why don't you let me worry about the medical problems and you just focus on trying to get though to somebody and get us some help. There is only one cell phone tower servicing this entire area, and it's famous for going out during storms. So how about you keep trying to get through to the police before that happens."

It turned out Gerald and Holly were the only two with available cell phones left alive in the Textro. Rachel's still rested in the lab coat in her office, and Marisa had left her's in the restroom when she rushed back to help Stacey. There was a landline in Big Earl's office but it was dead, either as a result of Deke falling on it or the lines were out. Since the only other landline had been at store-side checkout, there was no way to check.

Holly dutifully began punching buttons on her cell phone again, but Gerald must not have been ready to let his point go.

"I hate to pull Hollywood on you, Your Sorta-Docterness," the dumpy redhead sneered, "but it's common knowledge that when a zombie injures somebody, they become a zombie too. I know it's 'just the movies' but this is a pretty unreal situation and I think it's only common sense to take precautions."

Rachel tightened her grip on the young redneck's shoulder while starting a mental ten count of her own. She wondered if she would really put much effort into stopping Deke if he decided to go after the little jerk. In the end, medicine decided that question for her because it simply wasn't worth the risk of him tearing his already damaged shoulder muscle. She didn't like violence, but had come to realize over the years there were some people in this world who would really benefit from a thorough butt kicking...and Gerald struck her as a prime example of one of those people.

To her surprise, Deke didn't respond with anger at all.

"Zombies?" he mused aloud, "These things don't seem much like the zombies I've seen in the movies. Those just groaned and shambled around in slow motion. These things are fast, focused, and vicious as hell."

"Hah!" Gerald scoffed with a dismissive wave of his hand, "Those were the old zombies from the black and white days. Those were due to some silly signal from outer space and never really realistic in the first place. The new zombies are faster, and are the product of a virus."

"Yeah," Deke agreed amiably, "but the zombies in those movies come from living people being infected. These guys are obviously dead from the beginning. How do you explain that?"

"So it's a virus that infects dead people," the aloof urbanite shrugged.

This was getting ridiculous.

"It's not a virus," Rachel sighed. She couldn't believe the twist this conversation had just taken. Zombies? Seriously? She consoled herself with the thought that at least it wasn't turning into a brawl.

"Oh really? Why not, Dr. Doolittle?"

Was this guy for real?

"Because," Rachel answered sweetly while wondering if things were going to end up with Deke and Marisa holding her back from the abrasive twerp, "a virus requires a living cell with a functioning DNA process to splice into. A corpse doesn't have those. The DNA process stops and the strands break up soon after death. That's why dead people don't catch the flu."

"Really?"

"Really. So I think you can relax and stop worrying about Stacey over there tearing her face off and trying to eat your brains." She felt it was a lame attempt at levity, and regretted it as soon as she said it.

The veterinarian gave an apologetic wince at the wounded waitress.

"I don't think these things care about brains, Doc," Stacey's somber face was still tight in a haunted way that worried the veterinarian almost as much as the old truck driver's condition. "They seem more like animals or something."

Rachel had pieced together that Stacey had been the first to encounter these things and survive, and whatever scene the girl had encountered out there had shaken her badly. Unfortunately, psychology wasn't a big part of veterinary science and the doctor had no idea what to say to her. Instead, she resolved to hurry and finish up on Deke so he could get over to her and provide a shoulder to lean on.

"Okay, Deke. I think I've done all the damage I can do here, so I'm going to put a pressure bandage on you just like I did the others. Then I'm going to put you in a sling to keep you from tearing your shoulder even worse. You need stitches...hell, all three of you need stitches...but that's for the hospital guys to handle if they ever get here."

"Thanks, Doc," the young man's thanks didn't sound very enthusiastic...not that she blamed him.

"Just be glad my needles and sutures are out in my truck," Rachel quipped and handed him a folded towel. "Now hold this down against your shoulder while I try to figure out how to tie it on."

"You mean you don't know?" he looked at her in surprise.

"Well, I would if you were a Rottweiler. You aren't exactly built like most of my clients, you know."

"Oh, right."

Rachel settled for wrapping his ribs almost like she did Stacey's, then running a strip of towel over his shoulder from there to hold the pressure bandage down. The system seemed to work, which was all she cared about. She then grabbed a nearby apron off a wall and fashioned it into a sling. Deke carefully pulled his bloody shirt back on, and then let her fit him with the impromptu sling.

Rachel surveyed her handiwork then nodded in satisfaction.

"Okay, young man. I officially pronounce you 'treated.' There are to be no more heroics out of you. You are to protect that shoulder. Got it?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good," Rachel then leaned close, nodded towards Stacey, and whispered into his ear, "Now go over there and hold that girl. She really needs it right now. She's a tough little thing but she's hurt and she's been pushed way too far."

"But I just asked her out tonight," Deke wavered.

"Trust me on this," she hissed. "Now step up and be there for her."