Free Death After Life: A Zombie Apocalypse Thriller by John Evans Page B

and the nose angled into a ditch.
    More troubling was the fact that both doors were wide open with no one in the car.
    Darla slowed, giving it a wide berth. She glanced around. When she killed her music, the sudden shift from jangling chords to nature’s stillness was jarring.
    Darla glanced in passing at the Acura’s interior. She gasped. The white upholstery was spattered with blood. Quite a bit had pooled in the driver’s seat.
    Darla turned and started, at a trot, back down the road toward home. She pulled a slim, miniature digital phone from her inside pocket and pressed a red button. After an agonizing pause, the display flashed “911 EMERGENCY” and a reassuring dialing sound began.
    As she hurried away from the accident scene, Darla scanned the forbidding walls of trees. Though it was too dense to penetrate with her eyes, a disturbing rustling sound in the undergrowth froze her gaze on an area just ahead. She stopped and un-Velcroed her pistol. Its slight weight was reassuring in her palm.  
    The curt voice of the operator in Darla’s ear made her jump. “What is your emergency?”
    Darla didn’t know how afraid she really was until she started to talk, and heard it in her own voice. “There’s an abandoned car on Black Loop Road, just outside Kenwood.”
    The operator was all business, without a trace of concern or compassion in her voice. “Is anyone hurt?”
    “There’s blood in the car. Like they were hurt… And then they left.”
    The operator paused. They were thinking the same thing, Darla felt sure. When she spoke again, the note of urgency in the woman’s voice scared Darla more than anything she’d seen thus far.
    “Ma’am, are you armed?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “Good. Now I want you to walk carefully away from the car, as fast as you can, with your weapon in your hand and the safety off. Can you do that for me?”
    “You bet your ass I can,” Darla said. She started moving again.

    #

    At the Safeway, Winter and Nic had responded to their first call of the morning. They were talking to a customer who witnessed the shooting. The store manager stood by, discussing the situation with another employee.
    “I was walking to the store — it’s only a few blocks and I enjoy the exercise,” the woman said proudly. She was in her sixties, and did appear fit beneath her purple Washington Huskies sweatsuit. “This guy here was waiting for a parking spot…”
    She pointed to a corpse slumped behind the wheel of a red Nissan pickup truck. It was still idling. The rear of the man’s bald pate had been perforated by a bullet entry, several inches north of the brain stem.  
    “This young couple zoomed in and stole the spot. The guy in the truck didn’t like it so he started hollering at them. The girl was screaming back at him. You know, ‘Eff you, we were here first….’ You get the idea. And he started shouting too. ‘I saw you pull up, that’s b.s.,’ blah blah blah. The girl called him a crazy Chink bastard. Terrible thing to say.”
    She glanced uncomfortably at Winter, then pressed on. “Her boyfriend flashed his gun — if I had to guess, I’d say it was one of those black SIGs.”
    Winter nodded. A popular choice was the police sidearm, the SIG Sauer P226. Even civvies recognized their distinctive look, nowadays.
    “You know your stuff,” Nic commented dryly.
    “Yeah, three years ago I couldn’t have told you the difference between an M-16 and an AK, but I got smart real fast,” the woman replied.
    “What happened next?” Winter asked.
    “The guy in the truck pulled a shotgun…looked like an old twelve-gauge, to me…and shot them. I think both kids caught some, but it mostly hit the boyfriend. He fired back, three times I think, and tagged the Asian gentleman in the throat. Looked like he was only using nine mils, but the kid was pretty accurate. They have good hand-eye coordination. Must be all the PlayStation, I guess.”
    Nic tried to keep the witness on track.