Free Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse by Nicholas Ryan Page A

orphan. I lived with a foster family in Omaha until I was seventeen. Then I moved here to find work…” her voice drifted to silence for a wistful moment. “There were a couple of guys… but nothing serious.” She shifted her weight subtly, until her shoulder was brushing against his. Cutter didn’t move, but he felt a sudden sense of intimacy.
    “ How about you? Did you lose anyone?” Glenda asked him softly. “Do you have family nearby?”
    Cutter thought about how to answer. It was a simple question, but for Jack Cutter, the answer was darkly complicated. He nodded slowly. “I lost my wife and my son,” he said. “But not to the virus. They were killed in a car crash last week.”
    He heard Glenda gasp softly. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry,” she said, and Cutter believed her. “Was… was it an accident?”
    Cutter nodded, and felt the crushing despair and misery of his loss well up until it was like a knot in his chest. “Yes,” he said. “I was driving. It was late at night. A dog ran out on the road. I swerved…”
    “But you survived.”
    “Yes. Not a scratch on me, but my wife and son were so horribly crushed and disfigured I could barely recognize the bodies.”
    They stared at each other in the gloom for long uncertain seconds of silence and anguish, and then a sudden movement caught in the corner of Cutter’s eye made him turn away. One of the other women who worked in the bookstore was walking past them, her heels loud and echoing in the sullen silence. She was a tall woman, very young. She walked with her back straight, thrusting her breasts out firm against the fabric of her blouse. She had long red hair. She sensed Cutter watching her and she gave him a lingering glance as she passed. Cutter felt Glenda’s hand on his forearm.
    “I’m not surprised,” Glenda whispered, and there was a harsh sound of distain in her voice. “If anyone was going to try it, I knew it would be that little slut.”
    Cutter frowned. “Try it?”
    Glenda followed the younger woman with her eyes, tracking her as she sauntered towards where Hos sat on the steps. “She’s going to make a play for Hos in the hope he will take her with him when we break out of here.”
    Cutter shook his head. “You’re fucking joking!”
    Glenda sniffed. “It takes a woman to know a woman,” she said with a kind of abstractness that Cutter didn’t follow. “Jillian is just doing what a lot of the others have already considered.”
    Glenda’s words hung in the air for a long moment. Cutter turned back to her slowly. “Including you…?”
    Glenda didn’t answer. She glanced towards the stairs. Jillian was standing in front of Hos, leaning against the railing with her other hand resting on her narrow waist. Her hips were tilted at a sensual angle so that her skirt pulled tight across the shape of her thighs and bottom. As Glenda and Cutter watched, Hos muttered something and Jillian leaned closer to the man and then nodded her head willingly.
    Glenda turned back to Cutter. She sighe d. “I don’t blame her…” she began, and then shook her head and started again. “You know, we think we’re civilized. We think we’ve evolved in the thousands of years man has walked the earth. Women have more independence and have been completely empowered – and yet – within twenty four hours of the world going to hell, we revert back to those base animal instincts that we’ve always inherited but learned to suppress,” she said. “Like the instinctive need to find a mate, and to reproduce, the instinct to survive is the strongest one mankind has, and Jillian is just doing what women have done for thousands of years. She’s drawn to the strongest male because it’s her best chance of protection and survival – and she’s appealing to him in the one way men are instinctively created to respond. She’s offering him her body, in the hope he will want her and will protect her. It’s what every woman instinctively craves,”