Read Online Infernal Sky by Dafydd Ab Hugh - Free Book Online Page A

much gratitude into that one syllable she made me feel like the cavalry, Superman, and Zorro all rolled into one.
    â€œRun!” I shouted, now that she had a clear escape route.
    â€œNo way!”
    The brat liked giving me lip. It was hard to be mad at her though, because she was trying to retrieve the weapon from the floor. The big, hulking zombie was slow, but he didn’t seem interested in giving us all the time in the world.
    Jill leveled the M-l at our problem and pulled the trigger. Nada. Either Jill was doing something wrong or the gun had jammed. Zombie was still fixated on her, even though I was behind him again. Jill looked at me with a hurt-little-girl expression as if to say I gave up a perfectly good metal chair for a gun that doesn’t fire?
    The bad guy still had his cleaver, and he had plenty of elbow room now, so he could swing the thing and add Jill’s head to his collection. It pissed me off that all my heroics had only made Jill’s situation worse. I did what I could. The big hulk was standing with his feet just far enough apart so that I was able to kick him in the groin. I wished I had on my combat boots instead of sneakers. I wished he were alive, as the dead ones are only mildly bothered by that kind of action. But it was the best I could manage.
    The big bearded mother turned his head. That was all Jill needed. She held the barrel in both hands and swung the weapon so fair and true that it was worthy of the World Series. The wooden stock cracked against the zombie’s neck. He was thrown off-balance. As he tried to turn his head, I heard a snap: Jill had done something bad to his old neck bone. Good girl!
    The zombie fell to his knees. Before he could get out of his crouch I karate-chopped the back of his neck. No time to play George Foreman now. So far, Jill and I had merely slowed him down. Time for something more permanent.
    Jill had the same idea. No sooner did I body-slam the hulk into a prone position than she yanked the cleaver away from him and started swinging it at his head.
    â€œHey, watch it!” I shouted. “You almost hit me.”
    â€œSorry,” she said, almost as a gasp. But she kept swinging that wicked blade at the peeling, rotten flesh around the zombie’s neck and head. I wasn’t about to tell her she didn’t have the strength to finish the job. The zombie wasn’t getting up, and I intended to make sure it stayed down.
    As I retrieved the Ml, I realized that no other zombies were showing up to bother us. There was something eerie about Doc Ackerman’s head on the floor, staring at us. (A marine isn’t supposed to use a word like “eerie,” but it was freakin’ eerie, man.)
    I picked up the Ml. So it had jammed for Jill. So she’d used it as a club. It’s not like she’d smashed it against a tree. I cleared the bolt. What the hell, we’d give it another try.
    â€œExcuse me,” I said to Jill, busily trying to return the favor to the great decapitator. The meat cleaver was a little dull. And Jill just didn’t have the necessary body mass. She offered me her hatchet. I declined.
    I fired the Ml once, point-blank. The head came apart like a ripe cantaloupe. The blood that poured out was a brand-new color on me.
    â€œThe gun jammed,” she insisted.
    â€œI know.”
    â€œI didn’t do anything wrong with it!”
    â€œI’m not saying you did. Knocking the gun around probably unjammed it.”
    â€œWell, I just want you to know it wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t fire it.”
    There were times when Jill went out of her way to remind me she was a teenager. I really wasn’t in the mood for her defensiveness just then. God knew how many more zombies were roaming the installation. We had to get back to Arlene. And I was worried about Albert. We’d become like a family.
    At some moment in my military career I’d become used to the stench of death. I