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Surviving In a Zombie Apocalypse Chapter Twenty Nine
"First we find the drugs," Ayaan said, pointing her rifle at me. "Then we can run." I tried to grab the muzzle and push it away, certain she wouldn't shoot me but she took a deft step backward that left me lunging at air. "They are slow. We have the time, Dekalb." In the light of just a couple of flashlights I couldn't read her face very well. I could hear the dead men coming up the stairs behind us just fine, though. I pushed past the girls and into the clinic lobby, my light stabbing through the swirling dust in the corridor. A ward of double rooms stretched to the right - I had no time for this! - to where a nurse's station connected two hallways. Move, I told myself, move, and I broke into a dash. I splashed light across every door I saw. Tub room. Patients' Lounge. Linen Services. Dispensary. Okay. Okay. Yes. The door had a hefty lock on it, the kind you would need a keycard to enter. With the power out it probably sealed automatically. I ran my hand along the jamb hoping ther
Surviving In a Zombie Apocalypse Chapter Thirty
A bullet panged off the passenger-side door and the car rocked on its tires. The Volkswagen's windshield had a long silver crack running across its width but it hadn't broken yet. Gary assumed a fetal position in the leg well of the driver's seat and tried not to make a sound. The demented girl scouts or whatever they were had spotted him and opened fire before he could say a word. He'd tried to run away but he was pinned between two hazards: the boat on the river with its sniper ready to shoot anything that moved, and these heavily-armed schoolgirls who had taken over half of the West Village. It was inevitable that he would be spotted and so he had. He'd barely had time to take cover in the abandoned car before they started spraying the neighborhood down with lead. He was pretty sure they didn't have a fix on him, though, that they were just firing blind. He was pretty sure they would eventually leave, if he could stay perfectly still and not give himself away. Which, considering h
Surviving In a Zombie Apocalypse Chapter Thirty one
I wedged myself through the spring-loaded emergency room doors and ran down the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk, half-expecting to find myself alone. Commander Ifiyah and her company were there waiting for me, though. It looked like they'd taken a prisoner. They had somebody kneeling on the ground with a rope around his neck. It didn't matter - I had to tell Ifiyah what had happened. It had been stupid of us to think we could actually find the medical supplies we needed in this haunted city. We had to leave, and now, before anyone else died. "Ifiyah," I shouted, waving her over. I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and tried to get my wind back. "Ifiyah! At least one of your soldiers is dead. The enemy is in there, and they are coming for us!" The commander turned to face me with a look of passionately studied disinterest. "Three, is more," she said. I saw then that Ayaan stood next to her. Oh, thank God, I thought, at least one of the girls survived. "Three is dead. Ayaan k
Surviving In a Zombie Apocalypse Chapter Thirty two
They filled the street ahead of us, a shambling horde with gaping jaws and rolling eyes. Some looked human except for a few sores or open wounds on their exposed faces and hands. Others lacked limbs or skin or sensory organs. Their clothes hung in tatters or in perfectly-creased folds and all of them, all of them, were coming for us and they wouldn't stop until we were torn to pieces. "We've got to go," I shouted at Ifiyah. I tried to grab her arm but she shrugged me off. With short clipped words she ordered her girl soldiers into a firing formation - the same one she'd used back on the docks. There were a lot more of them this time and their movements were less constrained. I just didn't know if we could survive this. "We can outrun them, head down a side street," I suggested. The dead took another step toward us. And another. They would never slow down. "Ifiyah..." "They have no guns, Dekalb," the commander said as if she were brushing off an insect. "They are so stupid, to lie
Surviving In a Zombie Apocalypse Chapter Thirty three
I called for a stop and we clustered around the statue of Gandhi. I looked up at the smiling bronze face and issued a silent apology for surrounding him with heavily-armed child soldiers. I could remember when hippy kids would put garlands of flowers around the great pacifist's neck but all I saw there now were loops of wire. "They ate the flowers," Gary pointed out, almost as if he'd heard my thoughts. I looked back down at him. "Flowers?" I demanded. "Anything living." "Why, damnit? Why do they do this?" Gary shrugged and sat down at the base of the tree. "It's a compulsion. You can't fight it for long - the hunger just takes over. I have a theory about it, but it's still pretty vague... I mean, they should have all rotted away by now. Human bodies decompose fast. They should be piles of bone and goo by now but they look pretty healthy to me." I glared at him. "Okay, okay, that was a brain fart. By 'healthy' I mean 'in one piece'. I think when they eat living meat they get so
Surviving In a Zombie Apocalypse Chapter Thirty Four
The dead riot police were only forty yards away. We could see them clearly now - their padded armor, their helmets with their clear plastic visors showing the cyanotic skin underneath. They moved haltingly as if their muscles had stiffened to pliability of dry wood. Their feet slipped along the ground, looking for equilibrium that seemed in short supply. "They won't stop," Gary told me. "They won't ever stop." I hardly needed the information. Ifiyah, the wounded commander of the child soldiers who surrounded me had made the mistake of treating the walking dead like any other enemy force. She had tried to rout them with sustained gunfire from a defensible point. She had thought they would stop, if you gave them a good enough reason. For that mistake she'd been bitten by one of the dead and now she could barely maintain consciousness. Which somehow meant that I was in charge, even if I'd never fired a gun before in my life. Ayaan fired again and split open a cop's boot. He stumbled a
Surviving In a Zombie Apocalypse Chapter Thirty five
We spread out to cover the first floor of the megastore, moving quietly through the rows of display racks, pointing rifles behind counters and into closets. The afternoon daylight lit up the main floor pretty swell but the lower level was lost in darkness. I sent Ayaan and a squad of girls down there with flashlights to scope it out. They returned in a few minutes looking scared but with nothing to report. Good.The first order of business was to secure the cafe door. We found the keys to the store in a manager's office and locked it, then pushed tables and chairs up against it to form a barricade. Some of the girls did likewise with the front doors. By this point the dead had already arrived. They pressed up against the windows and for a bad ten minutes or so I thought the glass might break just from the pressure of their bodies but it held. They were terrible to look at - their faces bloated or congested with dead blood, their vacant eyes rolling wildly, their hands cut and broken a
Surviving In a Zombie Apocalypse Chapter Thirty six
"Baryo," the girl, the commander of the girls, moaned, stirring in her sleep. Eggsy had secured her to a padded office chair with his own belt so that she wouldn't fall out if she went into convulsions.He didn't look at her. He couldn't - not quite yet. He knew she was dying and he knew what he would see if he turned around and looked at her and he didn't want to see it. Instead he looked out through the glass at the crowd of the dead there. They pressed up just as tightly against the windows as before but over the last few hours their desperation had slackened a bit. Not that they would be any less hungry, of course - but night, and darkness, seemed to mellow them a little. They didn't need to sleep. Gary knew that firsthand. Yet some kind of ingrained memory of their lives must be telling them that when the sun went down it was time to rest. It would be fascinating to study their behavior firsthand, Gary thought. What an opportunity to do science! The thing about sarcasm, of course
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Chapter 130
- (Last Chapter) -Before I realized what was happening, a collar was being snapped around my neck, sharp electrical pulses shooting through me. Suddenly I couldn’t move, could barely breathe. Panic filled me, joining the adrenaline rushing through me, and my body wasn’t sure how to react. Keep fighting, or shut down.“What are you doing?” I heard Kat scream. “Let her go!”She could see me? The collar, maybe...Keep fighting. Definitely keep fighting. I tried to stand, but my legs refused to cooperate.“You want me docile? Leave the girls out of this,” I tried to shout, but only gurgles escaped.“Ethan?” Reeve gasped. “Help us!”“You told me you wouldn’t hurt Reeve,” Ethan shouted.Instant comprehension. He knew the Hazmats, because he was one of them.He was the spy—no doubts about that now—and he had gotten some of his information from Reeve. When I’d lived with her, she’d known my schedule. The rest he must have gotten by watching me.He’d covered his tracks very well. I still felt
Chapter 129
I wasn’t going to get through to her, was I? “Seriously, how did you find me? And who is we?”“I can answer that.” Ethan moved to her side, watching me warily.Ethan? The potential spy?Great. Wonderful. This couldn’t get any worse. “Fill me in before I have a panic attack.”“Well, for starters,” said another female, “I found out about the zombies.”Reeve stepped up to Kat’s other side.Okay. It was officially worse.“My dad doesn’t know that I know,” Reeve said.“When you disappeared, Reeve did some investigating, and told me what she learned,” Ethan said, “and that’s when we discovered the zombies, and your whereabouts, and decided to bring Kat in to help us save you. You’re welcome, by the way. Do you have any idea what we had to do to hack into Mr. Ankh’s computer and get the coordinates to this place?”I hoped that was rhetorical.“In other astonishing news,” Kat said before I could process everything I’d been told, “Frosty and I broke up—of course. He wouldn’t tell me where you
Chapter 128
He loaded a third. “This is a sedative.”I felt a third sting, and whatever the sedative was, it worked quickly. Darkness fell over me, and my knees collapsed. I knew nothing more.My head pounded as I blinked open my eyes. I lay on...my bed? No, the mattress beneath me was too narrow to be mine. Gingerly I sat up. Dizziness struck me, and I moaned.“Hey, Ali-gator.”Cole’s voice. I breathed deep in an effort to clear my head, saw the haunting beauty of his face. I hated to look away, but curiosity got to me. We...were in a small bedroom I didn’t recognize, with log walls and planked floors.“You’re in a secluded home Ankh owns. It’s twenty miles from my house,” he said, “but they aren’t highway miles, so it takes me forty minutes to get here.”I’d been banished.My expression must have fallen to reflect my dismay, even though I knew this was for the best, because he added, “You’re too dangerous to be around others right now, sweetheart.”Acid eroded my throat, and I choked. “I know,
Chapter 127
“O-kay. I should have guessed this was why you both took off so unexpectedly.”Nothing except Frosty.Dang it! I was so sick of interruptions!Cole sprang away from me, assuming a battle-ready position.Frosty rolled his shoulders, hard and intractable, and just as ready. “Don’t bother trying to get rid of me. I’m not leaving without Ali. Nana is worried.”“Fine. But you will turn around,” Cole snapped.Though he looked as if he wanted to protest, Frosty obeyed.My cheeks burned, and my heart pounded as I sat up. Cole helped me right my disheveled clothing before righting his own. Our gazes locked for a long, strained moment, and we both knew there were a million things we needed to say, but couldn’t. Not now.Later, he mouthed, hooking a strand of hair behind my ear.I should tell him no again, that this was it, the end. I might be dangerous to his health, but he was dangerous to my self-control. Instead, I found myself nodding.Cole kept his arm around me while we walked back to the
Chapter 126
“You trusted me,” I said, shocked to my soul, “despite what you saw.” That was absolutely, utterly huge.“Yes,” he said. He fit his hands against my jaw. “I told you I did. I’m in this thing, Ali. All the way.”“But...why did you stop texting me?”I saw the ice frost over his eyes, and I shuddered. “My dad was monitoring my phone feed.”Oh. The ice wasn’t for me, but for his father.I looked away from him, trying to give myself time to think, and caught a glance of my reflection in the glass. I stumbled backward.Zombie Ali was back.Flickers of red burned in her eyes, and the black smudges on her cheeks were thicker. She smiled at me, waved—and then, through the reflection, I watched her step out of my body, away from the glass.With the tick of a clock loud in my ears, I watched Z.A. glide off the porch and into the driveway. She paused to look back at me and crook her finger, a silent command for me to follow. A need to know her purpose consumed me, and I stepped off after her.Unc
Chapter 125
He even dropped me off at work, only to return an hour later and remain inside the coffeehouse for the rest of my shift. My coworkers stared at him, the guys frightened, the girls excited. Everyone whispered, speculating about who he was, and why he was there.I think I blew their minds when I left with him.“Any zombie sightings tonight?” I asked. The moon was high, full.“So far, none.”“Shouldn’t you be out there searching?”“I traded nights with Gavin.” His voice tightened. “He owed me.”“Don’t fight him over me. Over what happened.”“I want to, but I won’t,” he said tightly. “You aren’t mine. Not officially. Technically he didn’t do anything wrong.”He dropped me off at home but didn’t try to kiss me. I couldn’t blame him.I received a text from him the next day. No party tonight, I’m sorry & I’m not ditching U this time, promise. My dad is sending me out of town. Will U miss me?Me: I plead the 5th.Him: I will definitely miss U.Sappy girl. My heart soared.I could have gone to
Chapter 124
“I’m so glad you’re okay. When Cole called and told me you’d been in a car accident, my heart almost stopped.”“I’m sorry,” I said.“Ali, I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”“Nana, I...” Didn’t know what to say.“I know you’re fighting for a good cause, but it’s hard on me sometimes. Waiting and worrying.”“I’m sorry,” I repeated, but I couldn’t promise to morph into a normal teenager with normal problems, and we both knew it.“Yes, well, enough about that for now.” As she bustled around the kitchen to make me a sandwich, she changed the subject and said, “Are you and Cole back together? Or are you seeing two hot totties at the same time? Or are you single and just playing the court?”Hot totties? Playing the court? “No, Cole and I aren’t back together, but we are going to a party on Thursday. And Gavin... Well, he and I will only ever be friends.”“I think maybe you need to rethink things with Cole. He’s good for you. You light up when you see him, and he can actually get you to
Chapter 123
He instantly sobered. “Okay. Point taken.”“Tell me her name. I’m going to track her down and knock her teeth down her throat.”“As hot as that is, no. She’s part of a past I’d now like to forget. But...I’m glad you never slept with anyone. I don’t like the thought of you with anyone else, probably would have fed the fuc—uh, the guys more than teeth.”Must resist this possessive, charming side of him. “Do I get another question?”“You get as many as you want.”He sounded determined.I’d probably make him regret that.“Did you sleep with Veronica?”He stiffened, but he didn’t hesitate to answer. “Yes. But it was over a year ago, when we were dating.”“Mackenzie?”“Yes. Months ago, for a little while after we’d stopped dating. Then I met you, and that was over.”“Others?”“Yes. You want the exact number?”“No,” I grumbled. Yes. Maybe. “Am I the only girlfriend not to go all the way with you?”“No,” he said. “But I wouldn’t change anything about what we’ve done—and haven’t done. I wanted
Chapter 122
“I’ll tell him.” My pronouncement was quickly met with inquiring glances. “I know what it’s like to lose your family. And I know you guys do, too,” I added in a rush. They’d all lost someone in the war. “But with me, the loss is fresh. Jaclyn was his twin, and he loved her more than he loved himself. I felt the same way about Emma.”Mr. Ankh sighed. “Very well.”Cole made the call.It wasn’t long before Mr. Holland was escorting Justin to my bedside. He sat down opposite Cole, his expression closed off. He had no idea why he was here. My chin trembled as I said, “Justin, I met with a man named Dr. Bendari.”He nodded. “You’ve mentioned him before.”“Yes. He was...he was killed in front of me.” Tears streamed down my cheeks, burning, leaving track marks, I was sure.Justin softened. “I’m sorry.”“Before he died, he told me that your sister—”With a pained groan, he jumped up, the chair skidding behind him. “I know. Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say it.”“You know?” Cole asked.Justin cl