Read Online The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney - Free Book Online Page A

here,” he said. “What snipers call the kill spot. Hit there and all autonomic functions cease.”
    Another shot.
    Pilar turned back to the window. Out on the floor, the man with the gun had managed a head shot that blasted away most of the top of the other man’s skull. A tattered flap of his scalp was hanging down the back of his head.
    “Nope,” said Ramon. “He missed it.”
    Pilar was speechless. It was impossible, completely and unbelievably impossible, but the man was still on his feet. She expected him to fall over any minute, but he didn’t. He staggered forward. The man with the gun started to plead with the man to stand back.
    “That won’t help,” Ramon said. “Once somebody’s infected, and the bacteria have had a chance to take over, the person can’t be reasoned with. All they want to do is attack. Doesn’t matter who, doesn’t matter what. They’ll even go after their own children. If our friend out there wants to get through this, he’ll have to destroy the medulla oblongata.”
    None of what Ramon was saying made sense. He could be that way, cryptic, but she had never felt this over her head with confusion before.
    “Hmm,” he said. “Nope. He’s done for. Look.”
    Pilar hadn’t even realized she was staring at Ramon.
    “Look,” he said again, and pointed toward the floor.
    She did as he commanded. The man with the ruined face had knocked the other man down. The room filled with screaming. Pilar watched it all with a blank expression on her face. What had Ramon done? That man should be dead, but he wasn’t. He was missing the top of his head and his chest had a handful of metal in it, yet he was still making a meal of the man. Oh, God, he was eating him.
    “He is dead, Pilar,” Ramon said.
    “What?” For a moment, she thought she’d said something out loud, but then she reminded herself that he had always been able to do that. No one else she’d ever known, except maybe Lupe, when she was younger, could read her face as well as Ramon Medina. Whether she liked it or not, she had no secrets from him.
    “You’re wondering why he isn’t dead. That’s because he already is dead. He died before he attacked that first man.”
    Pilar shook her head.
    “It’s true. Here, watch.”
    Ramon pounded on the glass. Out on the floor, the man looked up, trying to find the source of the sound.
    “Though they’re dead, they still respond to sight and sound. There’s no other real brain function that we know of, though. Well, except that need to move around and grab stuff. In all other ways, they’re dead though. No breathing, no thirst, no nothing.”
    He beat on the glass again, and this time, the man got up and crossed to them. He walked right into it. Then, to Pilar’s horror, he started trying to chew his way through it, beating on it with his gore-stained palms, smearing blood all over the glass.
    “He’ll stay like that for hours,” Ramon said. “Once they catch the trail of something, they just keep going until something else comes along.”
    Pilar stared at the man. He was ghastly. She’d seen people tortured before, dismembered, burned, scalded with acid . . . this was worse. Worse by far.
    “It’s the eyes, isn’t it?” Ramon said.
    She nodded, still staring at the man on the other side of the glass. Ramon was absolutely right. The look in this man’s eyes was the same as what she’d seen staring back at her from severed heads on tables or looking up at her from inside duffel bags. Exactly the same. Distant, profoundly vacant.
    “That’s when you finally believe they’re dead, when you look in the eyes.”
    “Are you saying that man’s a zombie?”
    He laughed. “Yes! That’s it exactly.”
    “You made a zombie?” A thousand questions raced through her head. But there was only one that really mattered. “Why?”
    “Pilar, you don’t need me to tell you that. You’ve spent enough time in the United States to know them as a people. They consume.