Free The Fall (Book 3): War of the Living by Joshua Guess Page A

compound had been thirty or forty yards. It was hard to judge. In the time he ran, no longer constrained by a need to stay hidden, he traveled twice that distance back and a good ways to the side, trying to get the corner of the compound and a slope of the hill between his body and the truck. Which wouldn't count for much if the trees began to fall. That was a fun thought.
    When the explosion happened, the trees did not fall, though they did shake. Chunks of vegetation crashed into him along with the pressure wave. All sound ended with a monumental crack and boom as the two huge propane tanks mounted on the back of the truck met what Kell assumed was a fairly large amount of dynamite.
    Even hundreds of feet away, the blast wave knocked him down. That, combined with the mind-numbing sound, instantly knocked him stupid. Rational Kell didn't speak up from the back of his head to point out the sudden change in air pressure had probably screwed up his balance, because Rational Kell was cursing like a sailor and kicking around the furniture.
    The ground was soft. Comforting, really. The quiet was nice, but someone started turning the volume back up. All around, people scrambled as someone shouted at them. More people appeared from other parts of the woods, many of them carrying or even dragging bulging sacks full of hard objects.
    Vehicles began to roll up the road. Kell could tell because headlights swept over him. It was a testament to how shaken his brain was that this deduction felt like utter brilliance.
    Reality asserted itself once more as he carefully stood. Bodies streamed around him, and a slight gust of wind brought the smell of burning wood and cooking meat once more.
    “Oh, god,” he said, before bending at the waist to vomit on the leaves, one hand on the trunk of a tree. People. He was smelling people burning.
    The explosion had done its grisly work well, clearing enough leaves from trees—along with a great number of branches—to give him a decent view of the hill. New Haveners and the volunteers with them swarmed to the base of the wall like ants attacking a carcass. With desperate heaves they threw object after object over the lip. Some were water balloons, and those semi-solid orbs Kell recognized. New Haven used thermite as a weapon often, as it was simple to make, and filled balloons with it. Other people tossed Molotov cocktails or small glass jars filled with liquid. Every time one of those went over, a whoosh of flames and smoke followed.
    The front of the compound near the door was just...gone. Fifty feet of wall had vanished in an instant. The truck was also nowhere to be seen, though a blackened twist of metal dangling over the side of the crater left in the hill might have been part of its frame.
    Fire raged where the door had been, obviously spreading throughout the compound on its own but helped by the people feeding it from the outside. Gunfire filled the deepening dusk in scattered bursts, coming from the other side of the compound where the fire had not yet spread. As Kell stumbled forward to stand on the edge of the woods, he could see the scene in his mind clearly.
    People would be running from the fire in a desperate attempt to escape. They would use any means, risk any danger, to clear the wall. Outlined against the bright fire raging behind, they would make easy targets. Every staccato blip of gunpowder-made thunder was another life. Another death.
    It took a long, long time for the fire to spread to every corner of the place, but eventually night fell and was filled with a funeral pyre almost too large to comprehend.
    Kell watched then entire time. No one bothered him, told him to help. He stood there in stunned denial until the last embers of day had guttered and died.
    But the work was not yet finished.
     
     
    The smell of burning bodies and the chorus of screams brought visitors, many of them. Though the compound was situated in a location chosen to prevent the undead from approaching,