Read Online Rise of the Dead by Jeremy Dyson - Free Book Online Page B

careens off the hood and cracks the windshield. The girl in the back seat lets out a scream as the police cruiser fishtails. I clench the door handle in case Danielle loses control, but she recovers and keeps the car on the road.
    “I want to go home,” the young girl pleads. She bangs her fists against the fiberglass partition between the back seat and the front. “Please, stop the car.”
    “Everything is fine,” Danielle assures her, but the girl just begins to sob.
    “She’s okay,” I tell Danielle. “Just worry about the road.” We don’t have time to deal with the girl right now. Not until we get someplace safe.
    At the next intersection, the road comes to an end at an abandoned pizza factory. A police barricade blocks the left side of the intersection, so Danielle hooks a right. Unfortunately, this route takes us past the north entrance to the college. I just hope there are less of those things this way.
    I feel my stomach tighten as the cruiser climbs the hill again. As the car approaches the college, Danielle has to weave through a graveyard of smoldering automobiles. Dead bodies drift through the clouds of smoke that seem to keep getting thicker. She brings the vehicle to a stop.
    “I can’t get through,” says Danielle. She scans the road ahead but with all the smoke we can’t see more than a hundred feet in any direction.
    “There’s a cemetery on the left.” I point to the wrought iron sign above the entryway. “We’ll cut through there.”
    Danielle steers the cruiser through the open cemetery gates. I hop out and scan the area while Quentin drives the Mercedes through the entrance. He hurries over to help me pull the gates closed. I kick down an iron post on the fence that locks into a recess in the ground, then step back as the first corpse lunges at us from the other side of the barricade. It reaches through the bars, clawing at the air in front of my face. More of the dead converge on the entrance from the street. Even the ones that are burnt to a crisp just keep coming. They press their smoking bodies against the gates, filleting their charred flesh off on the iron bars. The smell of singed human hair and skin wafts through the air. I cover my mouth and nose with my hand and retreat from the smell.
    “I don’t know how much farther we can get,” I tell Quentin. “It’s even worse out here than I was afraid it would be.”
    “Maybe we should check out the office,” suggests Quentin. “See if we can lay low here a while.”
    I looked around a minute, thinking it over. For a second, I wonder about the dead people in the ground, but I decide it doesn’t matter. Dead or not, they aren’t going anywhere. “These fences will keep them out, and all this open space makes it easy to see anything coming.” I shade my eyes and look towards the office. It sits at the far side of the grounds halfway up the hill. I spot a single corpse, his body swaying in the shadow of a tree.
    “We might as well have a look around,” I agree.

Five
     
     
     
     
    “I hate cemeteries,” Dom shudders. She peers over her shoulder at the countless rows of tombstones. “I hated them even before all this. They freak me out.”
    Quentin cups a hand to the glass door to try and see inside the lobby of the office. “Looks clear,” he reports as his hand closes around the handle. He holds open the door and waits while we pass inside.
    Afternoon sunlight slants across the room from elongated windows that span the top of the two-story entry. Even though there isn’t much more than a few wooden platform benches, the quiet, empty lobby is a welcome sight. I cross the tile floor to a pair of service windows and peer into the darkened office beyond.
    “Oh thank God,” Danielle exults. “Bathrooms.” She ushers the young girl over to the bench where Dom is fishing a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. Dom flashes a sardonic smile to express her displeasure at having to keep an eye on the kid.
    “Hang on,”