Free Double Dead by Chuck Wendig Page A

wiping her eyes. She’d been walking now for… how long was it? She didn’t even know. From time to time she’d hear her father calling, or Leelee (but never Cecelia), and when she heard their voices she either hunkered down and hid or traveled in what she could best surmise was the opposite direction. A part of her knew this was wrong—a bonafide bad idea —but even still, she wanted to punish them a little bit.
    And another part of her just felt ashamed. Like her father said she should be. For getting him hurt. And Ebbie. For arguing with Cecelia—why couldn’t she just shut up and try to keep the peace?—and for breaking the door.
    Didn’t help that she was just making it worse by being away. If her father was out here looking for her, who was back there fixing the door? Ebbie? Ebbie was an IT manager before the zombie guts hit the fan: the world no longer had much use for computers, and so Ebbie’s place in the food chain had been supplanted. Survivors knew how to identify edible plants and siphon gas from cars, not quarantine computer viruses and search for porn on the Internet. (Hell, the Internet wasn’t even a thing anymore. It had long gone away, as insubstantial as a distant wind.)
    Shame dogged her. So did anger. And righteousness. And a whole other squirming bag of emotions—Kayla had crossed the puberty threshold and her body was a cauldron of warring hormones. It was like someone had overturned a bag of snakes inside her heart and mind and let them tangle all up together in one big crazy breeding ball.
    It didn’t help that all this walking had made her sore—her back ached, her legs throbbed, her very bones seemed to radiate waves of pain. It sucked the energy right out of her. She could practically hear Leelee’s voice: You’re sick, Kayla. You shouldn’t have strayed so far .
    With a follow-up bonus question: How are you going to get home ?
    She put her back against a tree and slid down to a sitting position, her elbows resting on her knees.
    Here, the forest was quiet. The occasional rustle of leaves as a squirrel darted from tree to tree. A wind came along and shook the evergreens. Above, the oaks and maples were already starting to bud and uncurl the year’s new leaves.
    She closed her eyes. For just a moment.
    And when she opened them again, the sky was dimming. The horizon brightening, like a distant fire on the far side of the forest.
    How long had she sat here, sleeping? How many hours, lost?
    Sundown. That wasn’t good. The living dead were bad news any time of the day or night, but they seemed to become more active at night, more directed. During the day they might not even notice as you passed by, provided you weren’t within fifty feet or so and didn’t make much noise. One time, middle of the day, she saw one rotter just blankly orbiting a lamppost. Slack-jawed and murmuring.
    At night, though, they stirred up more. Kayla didn’t know why and wasn’t sure it really mattered much; her father said he figured the sun either charged them up like batteries or instead maybe sucked the energy from them. Whatever it was, night-time wasn’t a good time to be out amongst them.
    She had to get back to the camper.
    She stood, her bones aching. Her blood rushed to her head—‘orthostatic hypotension,’ Leelee told her, also known as the common head rush . Took a moment to orient herself. From which way had she come?
    Had to be that way, she thought. Past the fallen log.
    She hurried in that direction, her muscles sore, her back throbbing from sitting in one position for so long. Everything about this disease tried to sap her strength, nibbling away at her. Sometimes she found herself wishing the cancer would kill her, like it was supposed to have over three years ago.
    Kayla pushed through the forest, stepping over thorny tangles and big boulders that looked like turtle humps, the shadows of the trees stretching longer and longer until they began to disappear with the coming of