Read Online Dead Beginnings (Vol. 1) by Alex Apostol - Free Book Online Page B

black outline of Rowan’s head bobbled up and down. It was almost enough to make Lonnie burst out in laughter. Immense exhaustion might have had something to do with that. He couldn’t have gotten more than a few hours of sleep, though it felt like minutes. He wasn’t wearing a watch and there was no clock in the bedroom so he couldn’t check the time.
                  “What do we do?” Rowan asked.
                  Lonnie flicked the safety off his gun. “We check it out.”
     
     
                  Downstairs, the light from the half-moon shown through the open curtains. The shadows of many hands rattled the glass and Lonnie’s nerves. The sound of the front and back door shaking on their hinges made every muscle in his body tense up and refuse to release. His hands gripped the AR-15 so tightly his knuckles turned a sickly shade of white.
                  “Shit—shit, shit, shit!” Rowan whispered in panic behind him.
                  Lonnie wanted to tell him to shut up and calm the hell down, but it wouldn’t have done any good. He was certain if he said anything his voice would have come out high and unstable, like a boy going through puberty. In all his eight weeks of Army training, they never taught him how to prepare for an attack against the undead, which is what those things had proven to be. They were not people anymore—they were freaks of nature. They deserved to die, for good.
                  Low, drawn out moans drifted through the warm night air and into the sealed off house. A chill ran through Lonnie’s sturdy spine, giving him goosebumps on his arms and a tingly feeling in his brain. With every passing minute, the banging grew louder and faster as more joined in to beat down the walls and devour whatever was on the other side.
    Lonnie tried to calm himself long enough to do the math and figure out how many bullets he had left. Assuming the magazine was fully loaded when Buddy first showed up in Amy’s house minus the shots he fired off into her chest and head, that meant in the best case scenario he had about twenty rounds left. Knowing Buddy and how lazy he was about refilling the rounds once he’d used the gun, he could have anywhere from fifteen to one single bullet left.
    His eyes flickered from window to window to try to count the number of shadowed hands. His chest heaved with massive intakes of air, making his head feel like it was going to float away at any moment. There was no way to figure out the odds of them surviving the attack once the windows gave out. All the two men could do was wait and pray that they were double paned.
     
     
     
    XIV.
     
     
     
                  Glass shattered and fell to the wooden floor of the living room. Lonnie flinched as the sound reverberated through his aching head. Dead and mangled hands reached through the new opening ferociously. The shards of broken glass that clung to the sides of the frame dug into soft, loose skin and tore it from their bones as they tried to pull themselves inside.
                  Lonnie’s heart raced as his eyes moved from the broken window to the others that remained intact. They didn’t have long before those gave out too and they were perilously surrounded with no way out. He had to think fast. The Army may not have trained him to fend for survival against walking, hungry zombies, but they did teach him to shoot and use hand-to-hand combat. It would have to do.
                  Another crash tore through his dashing thoughts. The dead pulled themselves up by the window sills to get through. The two broken windows were spread far enough apart that they still had a chance—one directly in front of the terrified men and one to their right in the dining room that opened to the living room they stood in.
    Lonnie couldn’t tear his eyes away as one male used both arms to propel itself forward through the opening over