Read Online Dead Highways (Book 3): Discord by Richard Brown - Free Book Online Page B

it—maintain it. I could relate. I hadn’t forgotten the brief period in the early days of the infection when I’d been without Sally. I’d left her in the house where Diego had murdered that innocent kid. She’d only been out of my possession for half a day, but during that small time she was gone, I felt incomplete. I was so happy Robinson had returned her to me later that night in the woods.
    In a zombie infested world, developing a close relationship with your weapon of choice was crucial for survival. These simple tools of destruction were often the difference between staying alive or tumbling into the vast unknown that followed the final heartbeat. Much like how soldiers in military field training don’t go anywhere without their gun, the weapon becomes a part of you, another appendage, and reaching for it becomes instinct. The more you use it, the more comfortable you become, until one day you don’t feel weird carrying it anymore. The opposite becomes true. Without it, you feel weak and exposed. That was the unfortunate reality we dealt with every second of every day—kill or be killed. We traded bullets for air to breathe—for a little more time on Earth. We were all soldiers now stuck on a never-ending battlefield, fighting skirmish after skirmish, trying to beat the odds and win an unwinnable war, knowing in our hearts sooner or later we’d be choked from existence by the cold hands of a painful death, but hoping that maybe— please God maybe —we would find peace somewhere on the other side, and those we’d loved and lost would be waiting to welcome us.
    More on that later.
    “So…how’s the leg doing?” Robinson asked Bowser.
    “I don’t know, nigga, how’s your shoulder?” Bowser snarled back. “Good enough to drive?”
    “Oh, whatever. It was an accident. Did you forget the lady with the slack jaw blocking my view?”
    “You should have let me drive the fucking cart. I told you that one handed shit would get us into trouble, and I was right.”
    “What you want a cookie?”
    “Yeah, you got any?” Bowser replied, smirking wide.
    “No.”
    “Already ate them all, huh?” Bowser’s face remained lit up in a smile. “That don’t surprise me.”
    Despite being in some serious discomfort, arguing with Robinson always seemed to cheer Bowser up. I could sense that the negative feelings that had existed between them when Bowser joined the group were becoming a thing of the past. Their relationship now was more like that of two brothers picking on one another, love hate love. Gradually, they were finding their way back to the place they began, twenty years earlier when they were good friends, back when they used to bet on sporting events and Robinson wasn’t pregnant with a food baby.
    We all perked up in our seats as Aamod began to slow down and then finally stopped a hundred yards back from a busy intersection.
    Even from the third row of seats, from a good distance away, I could see the bodies—the dead people far ahead heading west down another highway not unlike the last one we’d nearly died attempting to cross.
    Naima sighed. “No, not again.”
    “I could get us a closer look,” Aamod said, starting to let his foot off the brake.
    “Forget it. We’re not going through that again,” Ted replied. “Is there another way around? How close are we to Dixon?”
    Robinson turned around to address Ted. “You still got that map with you?”
    Ted nodded. “Sure do.” He rummaged through his backpack. A moment later, he came out with the crumpled up map of New Orleans.
    Robinson folded the map open, started looking for other options. “All right, so the road ahead should be Earhart Blvd.” He ran his index finger north on the map to a spot near interstate 10. “Dixon is here.”
    I leaned closer, poked my head over the seat. “What? That’s where we’re going?”
    “Yeah. Right here is where my ex lives,” Robinson said, tapping the same spot as before.
    “But that’s