Free In the Dead: Volume 1 by Jesse Petersen

over his own feet to sprawl across the grass.
    “ What is wrong with him?” Bobby asked as the two men watched Jenkins flip over and begin crawling toward him, still snarling and biting.
    “ It’s like he’s rabid or something,” Rex said with a shake of his head. “Come on, we can call 911.”
    “ My cell is in my car,” Bobby said, and sprinted after Rex toward his house. “I’ll go grab it.”
    Rex looked up ahead. There were more people now in the yards. In Bobby’s yard. And they were all swaying and staggering the same way Jenkins had been. A sick feeling started in his stomach.
    “ Um, I’m not sure your house is the best choice,” he said, motioning up ahead. “Look.”
    Bobby blanched and his steps faltered as he saw the same group of people Rex did.
    “ Come on, into my place,” Rex barked as he sprinted into his garage. Bobby got inside just as he hit the door button and the garage shut with a clank of gears.
    “ God that thing is loud,” Bobby snapped. “You know it wakes Maggie up some morning?”
    “ Right now you want to talk to me about the garage door?” Rex asked while he unlocked the back door and let them both into the house. “Don’t you think we should deal with the people outside first?”
    Bobby snapped his mouth shut. “Fine. You think they are why the tornado siren is going off?”
    That stopped Rex as he passed through the mud room and into the small kitchen. He turned to stare at Bobby. “If they fired the siren for that, it would mean some kind of mass sickness.”
    Bobby moved past him, through to the living room where he looked out onto the street. “Yeah, I’d say this might qualify.”
    Rex stood in the kitchen for a minute and then slowly made his way to join Bobby. There were at least twenty people milling about on his lawn now and even more up and down the street. By the way they held their limbs, some were clearly injured. Others vomited that same black material Jenkins had. Even others were carrying what looked to be… meat in their hands. Raw meat that they gnawed on.
    Rex turned his face. “I’ll get the phone.”
    “ Yeah,” Bobby said softly. “You’d better do that.”
    Rex moved to the end table next to his couch where his cordless phone was resting in its cradle. He picked it up and turned it on, but when he lifted it to his ear, there was no dial tone waiting for him. Instead, there was dead air on the line. He clicked the phone off and on a second time, but it was no use.
    “ Phone is dead,” he said softly. “And I don’t have a cell.”
    Bobby turned toward him. “How do you not have a cell?”
    He shrugged. “Just don’t need one. You said yours is in the car?”
    Bobby looked outside. There were four or five infected people next to his car. “Um, yeah. But I’m not going out there.”
    “ Chicken shit,” Rex muttered.
    Bobby glared at him. “You want to do it?”
    Rex looked outside and shook his head.
    “ Yeah I didn’t think so.” Bobby moved away from the window. “Turn on the TV, maybe they’re talking about… whatever this is.”
    The remote was next to the phone, so Rex grabbed it, clicked on the TV and sank into his comfy LazyBoy to watch. He had been watching “The Deadliest Catch” on Discovery the night before, so he was ready to change the channel to CNN or a local channel, but he was surprised that there was already news on Discovery. They were sharing a feed with MSNBC.
    The news reporter had her “serious” face on and she was talking about infections, outbreaks and… to Rex’s utter surprise, she said the word “Zombie.”
    Bobby moved to the couch where he could see the television. “Did she say zombie?”
    Rex nodded. “That’s what I heard.”
    They both leaned forward and for the next hour they just watched, taking in how an Outbreak had started hundreds of miles away in Seattle and spread like wildfire across the West. And that word: zombie. ZOMBIE. They said it over and over. Until it was no