Read Online Deadfall: Survivors by Richard Flunker - Free Book Online

attempt to get a warm bath. So we made a few, very quiet, trips to the river to fill up as many water containers as we had, to attempt to fill up the bath with hot water. That idea in itself sounded good. I hope zombies aren’t attracted to the smell of wood smoke.
    So while Aaron is going about getting the fire nice and hot and the water going, I’ve been asking them about all that they know about the zombies and I want to write down the things that we have come up with.
    Two main points ; they come back to life when a living person dies and so far, everyone that dies in any way, comes back to life, no matter who they are.
    The biggest thought gotten from that is that everyone in this room is a potential zombie. The moment any one of us dies, we will become reanimated as a zombie. Not something fun to live with.
    Zombies can be killed by making their brain stop (another technical term). All of us have noticed that while the rest of the bodies remain barely “lifelike”, in other words, it starts to rot, even it at a slower pace than normally, the brain of the former human remains vivid and grey. Whatever the bug does to keep them in their living state, requires that the brain be as fully functional as possible.
    Dawn, the older woman, made a somewhat disturbing comment though ; “What if they can still remember who they are, but can’t control themselves?”
    Tague, the foreign guy (at least he sure sounds foreign) commented ; “Probably not. They died first and then came back to life as something else.”
    Philosophical discussions for some other time I think.
    In either case, it seems that by ridding the zombie of the capacity of the brain ended whatever life they had. So, a gunshot through the brain, or a stabbing of some sort through the head, was usually the most effective way to stop one. Of course, if you so happened to own a nice broadsword, or a katana, you could cut the head clean off. Some of them wondered if the head would keep living, and I had to sadly inform them that yes, the head of a zombie still retained some form of life.
    The rest of them informed me of something that was new to me. Apparently, fire (that is fire burning their bodies) while not essentially killing them, really stunned them. That’s  why my absolute failure of a bomb back at the grocery store worked so well. Now, adding that bit of information to what I already know, I informed them of something else my father and I had discovered. A tazer gun, while again, not killing them, knocked a zombie out cold for quite a long time. I told the group how my father had theorized that the shock to the body somehow knocked the nerves out of communication with the brain. In the same way, the burning of the flesh created a similar nervous shock to the body.
    On the downside, that might just mean that someone might run into a whole bunch of badly burned zombies in Hendersonville.
    We talked about how the zombie s have a need to eat, as their attacks on humans nearly always involve attempts to bite at them, and not just bite to attack, but bite to rip flesh off the body. So many zombies I have run across are half eaten, but, oddly enough, they rarely eat off the face or head. None of my new found group members could remember an instance where a zombie ate from a face.
    Lucy, the younger woman, thought that perhaps, the zombies didn’t need to actually eat, but were just attempting to convert more zombies. These were “alien” outer space bug things that were controlling the zombies. Of course, we had no proof that the zombies needed to actually eat , just as much as we had no idea of the zombies or whatever controlled them was more than just some nasty parasite.
    And yes, apparently, people are still called Lucy.
    Everyone was in agreement that a single zombie poses almost no threat, unless you were severely hurt. Aaron retold a story about how he used one of those animal control lassos on a stick to move one off a five story building. The