Read Online Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation by Adrienne Lecter - Free Book Online Page A

sped the car into town, Burns closing in on my left while Andrej hung further back to my right. We’d plotted this formation—and I’d spent a good fifty hours learning to drive with the updated gear box and steering gimmicks that Martinez had outfitted the car with, and another hundred doing what Nate casually referred to as “more active driving,” which included more than just a few stunt driving moves, I was sure—and it was about time to put my new skills to the test.
    Even before we blasted through the city limits at over fifty miles per hour, I saw the first few shamblers turn toward us. Not many, maybe ten or fifteen, but the town had clearly not seen any action since the plague hit it. That boded very well for our plans.
    With no internet—and no one local who could point us toward the stores at hand—we were left to find our own way around, old school. That meant simply sticking to the road I was driving on until Nate called out for me to take a right turn, and I swerved into the other street without reducing the speed significantly. The left rear wheel went off the road, spitting gravel behind me as it found traction again, and off we went, right past a zombie that came galloping toward us. Another turn, and we were sailing into the mostly empty parking lot of what looked like a supermarket—jackpot. There were three shamblers up and about, all rearing up to or already running toward us. Instinct made me want to step on the brakes, reverse, and flee, but instead I kept right on. Just before I was about to hit the first one, I wrenched the wheel to the side hard, using the handbrake to force the car into a hard left drift. The reinforced back passenger side slammed right into the zombie with a loud crunch, throwing it toward one of the abandoned cars on the lot. From the corner of my eye I saw it crumble to the ground but it was still moving, trying to reach us by dragging itself forward with its one good arm. Letting the momentum bring the car to a halt, I slammed in reverse and went right over the zombie, the skull and hip bones breaking under the easily two tons of the car. Looking back through the rear window, one arm flung over the headrest of Nate’s seat, I was just in time to see Burns ram one of the remaining shamblers full-frontal, splattering gore all over the steel cage at the grill before going over the remains just like I had. That left the third zombie; yet before I could gear up to dispose of that, too, Nate wrenched open his door and fired across the lot, making me wince from the racket—and effectively taking care of the problem.
    And then we waited for the remaining shamblers in the region to come to us so we could either gun them down or otherwise end their miserable existence with clubs and baseball bats. After all, why waste bullets when you could get in some good upper body workout instead?
    Fifteen minutes later, the air was clear, the lot somewhat more gory than before, and we were gearing up to raid the store. Through the windows we saw a few more shamblers, locked inside and drawn magically to the noise, that still needed taking care of. Cho and Santos took point, reducing the locks to so much scrap metal with a shotgun blast.
    Adrenaline was pumping through my veins as I stepped over the now inanimate corpses into the store, helping make sure that there weren’t any stragglers lurking behind. I’d learned the hard way that zombies could be sneaky fuckers, so before anyone turned their flashlights on the prospective loot, we made sure that we were the only thing moving inside.
    The store hadn’t been raided, but it was far from well stocked. Days of what the news had tried to sell as an influenza outbreak had gotten people antsy to stock up on all the things that might be in short supply within a day or two. The stench of rotting corpses and what used to be fresh produce lay heavy in the air, and even after Pia smashed several of the windows, it didn’t get much better. The