Free The Apocalypse Crusade 2 by Peter Meredith Page A

The whiners of today who became offended when a man held a door open for them were shadow-puppets in comparison.
    Besides, Thuy was too busy outdistancing men in every way to be coddled by perpetual complainers. In fact, she liked to think she was the ideal feminist having made her own way in the world while demanding and receiving the respect of both men and women alike. Yet, and here she winced a little at the thought, she was wishing that Deckard would hold her and chase the terrors of the night away. Of course, Thuy had an excuse, she had seen things of such horror it was a wonder she didn’t have her thumb permanently corked in her mouth.
    Through slitted eyes, she gave Deckard a peek. He seemed younger in sleep. The hard lines of his face were more relaxed and the normally grim set of his lips was gone; he seemed softer somehow, but worn at the same time. Part of this was due to the fact that he sported little scabbed-over cuts all over his face and hands courtesy of the explosion set by Anna Holloway. Thuy still didn’t quite understand why the young woman had tried to burn the Walton facility down. Was it to hide evidence? Weren’t the zombies roaming around killing people evidence enough? And what part did Eng play? Had there been two saboteurs involved? Or was Eng merely a spy? Or was Anna the spy and not a saboteur after all?
    Thuy didn’t think she would ever know. And really did it matter now? Years of her hard work had been destroyed, utterly; there would be no going forward no matter what happened. There would only be the endless investigations and finger-pointing and lawsuits and the testifying—assuming of course that the authorities could get the infected patients rounded up and controlled without spreading the disease further.
    This was something that the efficient-minded Thuy would have thought had been completed by now. Yes, there had been a lapse in security…or a few of them she supposed, but she was sure that by now Walton had been surrounded and that the majority of the infected people had been killed in the fire or had been captured by the police.
    She was clueless about the terror and the slaughter that was occurring in Poughkeepsie or that the little stream that coursed through nearby Pleasant Valley ran red for miles down to the Manchester Bridge, or that the town of Highland, across the Hudson, was so devastated that out of a population of 4720 people, less than a tenth could still be counted as human. A sleepy toll-taker, wearing a bland expression and a neon-yellow vest over a set of proverbial watermelon sized breasts, became the first to die in Highland as a band of black-eyed zombies followed a car up the incline.
    “You can’t be walking in the middle of the damned road,” she yelled out to the group from her seat in the toll booth on the eastern end of the Mid-Hudson Bridge. “And please! Don’t think you can come up on me like I’m scared of you sorry-ass punks.” Her name was Yvonne Tillers; she was two-hundred pounds of sass. She had grown up in the Bronx and none of the skinny white boys with their patchy beards and their hipster glasses who attended one of the colleges in the area threw the least amount of fear into her.
    Before the boys could make it into the light of the toll station, she was out of her booth, the many gold rings on her fingers flashing. Yvonne was a sight to see when she got angry. It was a true fact, no one messed with her when she was angry. “Get your sorry asses over on that side walk before I call the po…” It was then she saw their faces. In that second her anger straight up disappeared. The heat of it was just gone, replaced by a sudden cold terror. She tried to run back to her toll booth but her two-hundred pounds of sass wasn’t made for sprinting. They caught her in the door of her booth and she screamed and screamed. Her screams echoed over the Hudson for what seemed like ages. Twenty minutes went by and still she screamed, a heart