Read Online The Dead Walk The Earth (Book 4) by Luke Duffy - Free Book Online

main street just thirty metres to their right. The noise from that area was enough to chill their blood as thousands of the infected headed for the ruined store. The city was stirred up. The explosion had attracted every walking corpse for miles around, drawing them into the area. From all directions, ghostly figures lumbered out from the shadows, headed towards the throng of animated cadavers that had piled into the road where the smouldering store sat. The air buzzed with the sound of their conjoined voices as they moaned and howled with excitement.
    “There it is,” said Tommy in a whisper.
    To their front, roughly seventy metres away, a large building rose up from the ground like a huge, black monolith. As they squinted through the pale moonlight, more detail became apparent, and they were able to identify the entry and exit ramps leading into the multi-storey parking complex. The individual floors were visible, the pale grey concrete facades that separated the levels contrasting against the dark interior spaces above and below them. In the low light, and the circumstances, it looked terrifying.
    “What about any defences?” Al asked from over his shoulder. “Can you see if there are any or if they’re still intact?”
    “Not sure, mate,” Tommy replied with a shrug and a shake of his head. “But I can’t see any of these sacks of shit coming from there, so maybe the place is still secure. I suppose we’ll only know when we get there.”
    With every caution, the pair descended from the wall, lowering their legs and hanging by their hands, allowing their bodies to settle before they dropped onto the floor of the alleyway. On the ground, they waited for a moment, tucked away into the shadow of the wall and double checking their surroundings and the street ahead.
    Out to their front, a number of festering bodies ambled along the road, but there were none close by. Most of the dead in the area had already made their way into the adjacent street and only the stragglers remained, dragging their crumbling carcases along the pavements and tarmac, hoping to join in the frenzy taking place in the next street.
    Al took the lead and crept forward from the shelter of the alley and out into the street. He walked in a crouch, keeping his rifle tucked in close to his hip. A silhouette to their left, just ten metres away, let out a series of grunts and gargles when it saw them. It began to stagger towards them, its legs wobbling and threatening to collapse as it raised its hands and began snapping away with its jaws.
    Al stepped forward, and with the butt of his rifle raised, swung the weapon down. It impacted against the creature’s head, cracking the parched bone of its skull, and breaking the leathery flesh of its face. It let out a huff as its jaw fell free from the rest of its head. For a short moment, the body remained standing upright in the street with an almost surprised look on its heavily decomposed face. Then, the brain having been splintered by the fractured cranium, it dropped. The noise of its delicate bones as it hit the floor rattled through the street, sounding like a sack of hollow logs being dropped on to a hard surface.
    The further they walked into the open, the more of the adjoining avenues they could see. Behind them, a mass so dense that they were packed into the street shoulder to shoulder, pulsed and throbbed with the pushing and shoving of the dead as they fought to get closer to the source of the disturbance. The pair of them gingerly crept silently toward the parking garage, headed away from the crowd at a snail’s pace, and doing all that they could in order not to attract any attention.
    Ahead of them the parking building loomed, casting a long shadow out over the smaller buildings around it, and revealing nothing of what lurked within its black recesses. Soon they were within its shadow, still moving slowly as their eyes nervously scanned the area around them. Corpses were still appearing from