Free The North: A Zombie Novel by Sean Cummings Page B

that you have to shoot them in the head. Did he get them all?”
    My heart sank a little at her question. Jo was eight years old and thin as a twig. Her red hair hung limply onto her shoulders and her heavily freckled face was smeared with dirt and grease. She should be playing with freaking Barbie dolls and experimenting with makeup and costume jewelry, not sitting in the back of an armored personnel carrier surrounded by bullets and grenades. She shouldn’t have to live in a world that had been transformed into a living nightmare – none of us should.
    “I want you to listen carefully to Kate, okay?”
    Jo nodded, the helmet bobbing up and down on her forehead. “Don’t worry, I know the rules.”
    “And what’s the number one rule?” I said with a note of warning in my voice.
    “Don’t ever get out of the carrier by myself,” she said with a groan.
    “What’s rule number two?”
    She rolled her eyes. “Don’t stick my arms out of the firing holes.”
    “And rule number three?”
    She blinked. “What’s rule number three?”
    I leaned over and wrapped my arms around her bony shoulders. “Your brother is never going to leave you. Ever.” I whispered in her ear.
    She hugged me back and said, “That’s what big brothers are for, aren’t they?”

9
    My idea for a smoke diversion worked surprisingly well. The three canisters landed on the river’s edge and nearly all of the creeps plodded down the riverbank and out of sight. Only a handful remained on the top of the ridge and we smashed through them like they were crash test dummies.
    Thank God zombies don’t have any reasoning ability. If they did we would never have made it past nightfall on Day Zero.
    We’d been gone from the armory for more than two hours. It wasn’t nearly as far as we’d have hoped and that presented a problem. The last thing we wanted to do was to fuel up the carriers with our Jerry cans while we were inside the city limits. Creeps were on our tail and the risk of winding up being overrun was too great if we stopped. But damn it, I’d told everyone we’d be clear of the worst of things within a couple of hours and clearly I’d called that one wrong. Both carriers crawled along at less than twenty clicks an hour and that was eating our fuel.
    The radio hissed. “We should have covered more ground, Dave.” said Cruze. “If we keep moving at this pace we’ll be fuelling up in a built-up area. We’ll be exposed.”
    “Don’t think that hasn’t been worrying me too,” I replied. “We’ll go hatches up. That way we can gun the engines and we’ll have all eyes providing security.”
    “Alright,” she answered. “I’ll get everyone ready.”
    It wasn’t a bad idea to go hatches up. We needed to air out the stench of diesel and motor oil from inside our carrier, and I’d be able to orientate my map to the ground without having to rely on the pale yellow lights inside my hatch and the restricted field of view through my periscope. Even though the sun hadn’t shone in months, daylight was still something we all craved. Terror lived in the darkness and night was when we’d had our most vicious skirmishes with the creatures.
    We’d made it as far as Edworthy Park on the southern tip of Sarcee Trail. To my left was what used to be the Trans-Canada Highway, heading west to Banff, and to my right was the entire northwest of the city. That meant suburbs full of walking corpses. The smartest thing to do was to avoid the entire area, but that meant that we’d have to ford the river again and hug the tree line along the eastern edge of the woodland that led up to Olympic Park. But even though it might have been a smart move, there was still an element of risk. The ground would be uneven, there were sharp culverts and of course any number of the monsters could come teeming out of the woods and swarm our carriers.
    I glanced down at the map and ran my finger along the river’s edge. We could simply drive along the river