Read Online Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin by Bobby Adair - Free Book Online

trek, maybe a half mile, maybe a little more.
    I followed Murphy down a zigzagging trail off the peak of the hill. We came out onto a dusty stretch of bumpy road between thick cedar forests on both sides. We passed around a long, slow bend to the point where all we were able to see besides the dimming sky above was the dirt road curving away into the trees in front and back.
    Murphy came to a sudden stop, snapping his M4 up to a firing position and glancing quickly back at me before looking forward again. He scanned back and forth across all the trees.
    I gripped my machete and raised the blade as I stepped up beside him and stopped.
    Without the crunch of our boots on the gravelly road to mask the subtleties of the sounds around us, I heard something out in the trees to our left. I hoped it was a noisy armadillo but knew it was Whites.
    I looked around for movement in the trees far ahead. For some reason, Murphy suspected something in front of us. I had to believe he was right. I peered into the dark shadows in the trees behind and beside us. Nothing. I glanced at Murphy. He nodded forward. He whispered, “They’re going to ambush us.”
    “How do you know that?”
    His eyes passed over my machete as he glanced at my shotgun. “You may need to use that.”
    “Should we go back?” I asked.
    “I think they’re ahead of us and behind us,” he said just as a hail of jagged chunks of white limestone—roughly the size of baseballs—arced in our direction from the trees on both sides of the road. The stones weren’t aimed well enough to hit either of us except by luck. Plenty were coming, though.
    “I guess they’ve run out of regular people to eat,” I said, keeping my calm despite the hail of stones, “and now they’ve banded together to hunt the weak.”
    “Yeah Professor, whatever,” Murphy said, with urgency in his voice. He nodded in the direction we’d come from. “My guess is they’ll be weakest that way. I’ll lead. You keep an eye on our rear.”
    One of the rocks hit me in the shoulder, missing my skull by inches. “Motherfucker.”
    Murphy looked up at the other rocks still coming. “We need to go.” Scanning from side to side with his rifle, he hurried but didn’t run.
    I followed, trying to use his massive size as a rock shield while I kept looking behind and to the sides.
    The Whites way behind us—in the direction we’d originally been going—yelped and growled. They seemed frustrated that their plan wasn’t working out. The tree limbs around us rattled with the sound of bodies brushing past. Thankfully, the foliage was thick enough to keep them from simply running through and engulfing us. The Whites were smart enough to set the trap but not quite bright enough to figure out how to react once Murphy and I took some active steps to avoid being ensnared.
    Murphy’s rifle popped off several suppressed rounds.
    I looked forward in time to see two Whites dropping rocks as they fell.
    “Faster,” he said as he picked up the pace.
    Behind us, where my view of the road was cut off by the arc of the trees lining it, I saw several dozen infected gathering their courage to run after us.
    A particularly brave White jumped out of the dense foliage to my right. He planted his feet in a defiant pose and snarled at me for all of two seconds before my machete cut a gash across his throat. He fell, probably wondering what had gone wrong with his simple-minded little plan to menace us into running back toward the others in the main group.
    As I watched the bleeding White crumble, I hurried after Murphy, bumping into him from behind when he abruptly stopped. At least a dozen Whites were emerging from the trees ahead of us.
    “I’ll take these,” I said, stepping around Murphy as I quickly slipped my machete into its scabbard and raised my shotgun. “They’re close enough for me to hit ‘em or they will be in a sec’.” Nodding my head to our rear I said, “You’ve got a bigger problem back up