Free Life Among The Dead (Book 3): A Bittersweet Victory by Daniel Cotton Page A

head. “Now you don’t.”
    The window explodes as the living dead lawman
falls toward the passenger side. His safety belt leaves him
suspended above the seat.
    “The world is overrun with zombies,” Marko
explains. “We have the power to stop them. We know how to shoot,
how to survive. This is just like Red Dawn!”
    “Is that the one that happens in a mall?”
Biff asks.
    “No, not Dawn of the Dead,” Marko snaps. “But
that’s not a bad example.”
    His needs to get his friends into the spirit,
convince them that they can be heroes and do the world a great
service. But his true motivation is greed. Why be a hero when I can be a god ? Marko thinks to himself. Go anywhere . Do anything . No laws . No rules . Nothing to stop me .

 
4
     
    “Vida, it’s time to wake up,” a voice gently
says from miles away. A hand shakes her shoulder slightly, and then
moves down to her bicep for a second attempt at rousing her. The
unfamiliar hand moves once more, becoming too familiar with her
chest.
    “What the fuck?” She wakes with a start and
gives Brad a shocked, accusatory look.
    He withdraws his hand, blushing with
embarrassment as he quickly explains himself, “I’m so sorry! I was
looking around the area while trying to wake you. I wasn’t paying
attention to my hand.”
    She straightens in her seat, wrapping her
thin sweatshirt around herself tightly like a robe. Their jeep is
parked within a town under a darkening sky. Broken and smeared
bodies lie in the streets.
    “Holy shit,” she says softly with a hand to
her mouth. The sight makes her nauseated, even as the waning light
robs it of its full gory effect.
    “Looks like whoever did this is long gone,”
Brad says, scanning the area once more for possible threats.
    “Are we close?” Vida asks.
    “Almost. We’re in Worchester. I just fueled
up and wanted to know if you were hungry.” A hitch of his thumb
indicates a small market. The glass in the front door is
broken.
    Vida notices Brad gassed up and moved the
jeep closer to the store while she slept through it all. “Yeah, I
can eat,” she tells him.
    “You’ll have to cover me.”
    “Cover you with what?”
    “This.” He pats the large machine gun bolted
to the back of the jeep. Her eyes go wide at the sight of the
menacing weapon. “Don’t worry. It’s easy. She’s ready to rock. Just
point and click.”
    “Ok,” she says, not sounding too sure of
herself, but she takes her place behind the imposing firearm.
    “You look good up there,” he says, attempting
to instill some confidence in her. He takes a second to admire the
contrast.
    Vida familiarizes herself with the pivoting
machine gun, looking down the length of it to line up its sights.
Her hand trembles as it closes around the grip and trigger. She’s
never held anything like this before. The paintball guns at the
Zombie House were harmless, but this is deadly. She nervously scans
the area, moving the weapon from side to side in a sweeping motion.
She never even fired her father’s gun, and the thought of actually
pulling the trigger frightens her more than the things she would be
shooting at.
    The time it takes Brad to explore the shop
feels like an eternity to her. The dead moan in the distance as she
waits. Not a creature stirs in her field of view until Brad
returns, and his sudden appearance almost causes her to discharge
the weapon out of reflex and jumpy nerves.
    “See? I told you it’d be easy,” he says,
placing a brown paper bag into the back of the jeep. “I’d rather
not travel at night. We’d better find a spot to hunker down.”
    “I thought we were close?” she asks,
returning to the passenger seat.
    “We are, but I’m wiped out. We’ll just get
some rest and hit it first thing in the morning.”
    “All right,” she agrees. Catching some decent
sleep actually sounds really good to her now.
    Brad hits a button near the steering column
that turns the engine over. He guides them through the