Read Online The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors by Peter Meredith - Free Book Online Page A

sloppy; he nicked part of a white picket front yard fence and for just a moment he had reverted to his pre-apocalypse programming and felt an immediate contrition.
    Then he laughed at himself since the owners were all long dead—and then he laughed at him self some more. He was in a badass Hummer H2 with a heavy grill in front; what was to stop him from just plowing through this fence and through the one in the back yard? That one was six foot privacy fence that wouldn’t last a second in a tussle with his hummer.
    A minute later, t he fence came down with a very satisfying crash.
    Now there was only one more barrier to the city: the Schuylkill River, and again, just like the streets, the bridges were blocked, only this time brute force wasn’t going to be much help. One after another he found his way across the water stymied by piled cars, so that he was forced ever northward. After another wasted hour and with aggravation setting in, he passed through the tony area of Wynnfield Heights, where the smallest homes were mansions and the largest were veritable palaces.
    Here he came across a new sign of humanity: a long wall of rusty steel that would stop even the most aggressive zombie. Someone, likely the very same someone who had blocked up the city, had hauled cargo containers up from the port and had sent them end to end so that they encircled, strangely enough, a golf course of all things.
    “Now that is an exclusive course,” he said with a smirk.
    In truth it was an entire country club with many posh homes and buildings included within the walled area, however with the land as flat as it was, Ram couldn’t see much beyond only a few ill-tended fairways. Intrigued, he drove his Humvee closer and parked it just up the street from a tall tree that sat near one of the cargo containers. The tree, with its many branches, looked like a snap to climb and so, forgetting his illness and the fact that climbing trees was the sport of kids, he decided to hoist himself aloft to see what there was to see.
    In spite of dark clouds that had begun to mass in the west, it was still a fine afternoon and although the nearest zombie was a tiny figure far down the road, he slung his M16 on his shoulder and proceeded on foot toward the tree. It wasn’t more than a forty yard tramp through the new grass, but it proved nearly too far.
    He was halfway to the tree, humming a bit of nonsense, when a strange noise had him turning, and there in his tracks raced a pack of zombie dogs, charging at him with fearfully large teeth bared in either anger or hunger. In a split second Ram judged the distance between them, calculating how many he could bring down with his rifle before the rest were on him and tore him into shreds. It was far too few.
    Because it would only slow him down, he let the M16 fall with a clatter—he still had his Beretta at his side and more than enough ammunition to take care of the dogs—and raced for the tree. Though he had a good head start and wasn’t exactly slow, the dogs gained on him so quickly that there wasn’t time to climb; instead, as he neared the tree he leapt for one of the lower branches and not three feet behind him, the lead dog leapt along with him as well. It was a strange and unnerving sensation to feel the razor sharp teeth of a German Shepherd close on his ankle just enough for him to feel a hard pinch and then let go.
    Gasping, Ram clawed the bark, struggling higher into the tree, while below the dogs snapped and snarled, yet none barked. Instead they made an odd hu-reh, hu-reh noise deep in their throats. When he finally got a good perch beneath him, he pulled his pistol thinking he would kill these devil dogs and get back to his search for Julia’s murderer, only now that he wasn’t running and climbing for his life he saw that these were not zombiefied dogs after all. They were real.
    “Wow,” he whispered, eyeing the motley pack. Besides the Shepherd and an array of mutts, there was a Pug,