Read Online District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse by Shawn Chesser - Free Book Online Page B

Beretta,
Wilson was pleading for Taryn to get off the landing when a pair of first turns
suddenly spilled through the doorway, clambering over the twice-dead corpse.
Numb fingers swiped the air a yard in front of Taryn, but, inexplicably, the
long- dead duo stopped their forward surge just one footstep beyond the door’s threshold.
    “What the eff?” Wilson exclaimed, lowering his weapon.
    “You’ve got to see this to believe it,” Taryn said,
massaging her scalp and slowly distancing herself from the curled fingers
kneading the airspace to her fore.

Chapter 10
     
    The familiar abandoned school bus in the roadside ditch was
a yellow blur as the new Chevy fishtailed through the slight S turn where
Center crossed 16 and became State Route 39.
    In the passenger seat, Oliver was beginning to think he was
about to live out a scene from Bullitt or Gone In 60 Seconds. And as the
realization settled in that the man driving the pickup was not a trained
driver, let alone a stuntman, he began to wonder if live out was the
proper way of framing the upcoming experience. The prospect of Daymon taking a
corner too fast and leaving them alive and trapped in the crushed hulk and easy
prey for the walking dead was almost too much for him.
    Glancing sidelong at his passenger, whose right hand was
curled around the grab bar, Daymon snickered and applied more gas, throwing the
truck hard through a left-hand sweeper. “You need to barf, Oliver?” he asked. “’Cause
if you do, it better not be in the gym bag.”
    “What’s in the bag that’s so damn important?” Oliver queried
through tightly clenched teeth.
    Daymon began, “A couple of things for Cade, a couple of
things for Duncan, and a couple or twenty things for Raven and Sasha.”
    “What?” Oliver pressed.
    Tongue firmly planted in cheek, he said, “If I told you
what’s inside the bag, I’d have to kill you.”
    “It better not be full of effin Snickers bars and six packs
of Diet Coke. ‘Cause if it is …” Oliver made a play of grabbing for his carbine.
“I just might kill you.”
    Near simultaneously—or so it seemed on account of how fast
Daymon was driving—the lower mine and upper quarry entrances both flashed by.
The former had come into view first off the left-hand side. Then, a tick later,
the brush-covered road snaking up the mountainside was in the rearview and
growing smaller by the second.
     
    Woodruff
     
    The fix-it shop was a handful of blocks east of Main Street
and only two long country blocks south of Woodruff’s northern boundary. Set back
from the two-lane and fronted by a large gravel lot, the once-white cinderblock
garage was now mottled gray from what Taryn guessed to be several decades’
worth of seasonal change. Rain, wind, and no doubt an inordinate amount of the
white stuff that had just recently come and gone had taken its toll on the
swaybacked structure. From the ground to roughly waist-level on Taryn, furry green
moss clung tenaciously to the red brick foundation.
    She was leaning against the Raptor’s fender and looking in
the general direction of Main when she first heard the engine sounds approaching
from the south. That Wilson had just hailed the others to come and offer their
opinion on what they had found inside the shop led her to believe it could only
be the Graysons’ F-650. And that initial assumption moved closer to one hundred
percent in her mind when the vehicle was near enough for her to discern the
unique exhaust note. Still, trained ear or not, and the times being what they
were, she shouldered her carbine and aimed the business end at the nearest
intersection where the vehicle in question was sure to emerge.
    Across the lot, Wilson was standing behind the rusted-out
shell of an old Studebaker pickup and aiming his carbine at the intersection.
Should their assumption be false, from where he and Taryn had positioned
themselves, any evasive maneuver the vehicle should undertake would expose both
the driver and