Free Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire by Jonathan Maberry, Rachael Lavin, Lucas Mangum Page B

nineteenth century. It had seen a lot, felt a lot, and even after it was all falling apart the place had offered shelter to someone. Recently, too. She shifted her Glock to a one-hand grip and tried the door handle with the other. It turned and there was a faint click, then the door swung inward. The hinges, at least, had been oiled. Dez reclaimed her two-hand grip and followed the barrel of the automatic into the house.
    As soon as he moved from vestibule to living room she knew that she wouldn’t find anyone alive in there.
    There was a breeze blowing through the downstairs and as she moved forward it became clear that the back door was open. She moved through the downstairs all the way to the kitchen, finding no one but seeing signs everywhere that told her this place had been occupied very recently. The fireplace held the coals of a dying fire, and a pot had been hung there filled with soup that had boiled over. Eight sleeping bags on the living room floor. Empty cans, stacked supplies, some weapons—baseball bats, an empty shotgun that had clearly been used as a club, an axe with a notched blade—but no people.
    There was blood, though.
    Red and black. Human and dead. Furniture was pushed out of place, plates were broken. There had been a fight here. But when Dez checked the back door it didn’t show signs of having been forced. She retreated to the living room and studied the scene, looking at it as a crime scene, reading it. Two of the sleeping bags were stained with blood, and all of them were messy in a room that looked to be otherwise well-maintained. When she peered at one of the bags she saw two kinds of stains. The brown stains were old dried blood. Human blood. But spattered atop those were stains in which the white parasitic threadworms still wriggled. The adjoining sleeping bag was stained with blood that had not yet had time to turn brown. It was splashed red. She looked around and found the trashcan filled with old, stained bandages.
    The scene made sense. It was a tragic story, but a familiar one. One of this party had been wounded and they’d done their best to patch the injuries, but either the wound was a bite, or the damage was so severe that it became fatal. In either case the wounded person had died in his or her sleep, then revived as a monster. It attacked the person sleeping in the next bag, and from there it was a slaughter. Badly handled, badly fought, and ultimately lost.
    And yet…
    She walked over and looked at the spilled blood on the floor. There were scuffs in it, the marks of sneakers. Mostly the balls of the feet, though, as if whoever wore those sneakers was running through the house and out the back door, leaving it open.
    The dead do not run.
    Dez stepped out onto the back porch and saw the bloody sneaker prints heading off into the woods. The scuffling footprints of the dead followed, and Dez had no way of knowing if the runner had escaped. Or had she been one of the zombies she’d killed to get in here? Some of them looked fresh, and Dez figured them to be owners of those other sleeping bags. And the big farmer had been the house’s original owner.
    Jesus.
    She went back inside, closed and locked the kitchen door, and spent forty minutes prowling through the empty house. There were moldering corpses upstairs in the beds, which explained why the squatters hadn’t settled up there. Each of the corpses had a bullet hole in their head and old bite marks on their withered flesh. Dez kept her mouth and heart hard as she went through closets and the attic. The place was a treasure trove of supplies. Blankets, boots, scarves and coats, tools, and more. And downstairs there were the supplies amassed by the squatters. Plenty of food. Too much for them to have carried, so Dez figured they’d raided the pantry here and maybe neighboring farms. There was enough food here to feed her busload of kids for a month. And the well-water was pure.
    The building itself was sound, and she knew she