Free The Crossing: A Zombie Novella by Joe McKinney Page B

Jesus, had all three thousand of the bastards decided to hit them right now?
    He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to catch Chris jamming the butt of his rifle into his shoulder. Beyond him, Jeremy curled into a ball and screamed. He wanted to do the same thing, but something told him he couldn’t, not yet.
    “ C’mon, Ellis,” Stevenson said as he sighted down the barrel. “Don’t you dare leave me alone here.”
    The rifle cracked, and the ice in his gut shattered.
    The approaching wall of rot separated into individual targets. Blake jacked the shotgun once and planted it in his shoulder. He swung the weapon to the right, where the zombies had closed to within twenty feet of the truck and were stampeding toward the side, and pulled the trigger. The twelve-gauge bucked hard in his hands, and a head that showed more skull than flesh disintegrated along with the thing’s neck and chest. The monsters on either side of the destroyed zombie flew backwards and crashed into the throng. More bodies surged forward to take their place, angry waves at high tide. A few climbed onto the trailer, only to tumble off when they tried to stand.
    The truck accelerated, and Blake shifted onto one knee, centering his weight. He pulled the trigger, and another zombie blew apart. Beside him, Chris snapped off a few more shots before pausing to change out a magazine.
    He saw a sagging body tumble past and fall apart as it struck the concrete. He guessed it had tried to grab onto the side of the pickup. The rest of the dead whipped past, running but unable to keep up.
    Holy shit, he thought. We might actually make it through this.
    Then the truck slowed down and one of the zombies leaped into the bed.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    END OF PREVIEW

PREVIEW
     
    REANIMATED AMERICANS: A ZOMBIE NOVEL
     
    By Martin Mundt
     
    “ With REANIMATED AMERICANS, author Martin Mundt has created a malignant masterpiece.  Like a literary mad scientist armed with diabolical narrative skill and a mordant sense of humor, Mundt manages to mash-up the zombie mythos with both mayhem and Swiftian satire.  REANIMATED AMERICANS is a must-read for undead-heads of all persuasions, slithering from laugh-out-loud sequences to gut-wrenching gore with the greatest of ease.  Highly recommended!”
    - Jay Bonansinga, National Bestselling author of PERFECT VICTIM, PINKERTON’S WAR, and co-author of THE WALKING DEAD: RISE OF THE GOVERNOR.

“ We oughta be killing them, you know,” said Tully. “Well, killing them again , I mean. I’m telling you, these zombies aren’t some mass, electrical muscle-twitch; some random, evolutionary experiment. They’re an invasion. All right, all right, a bunch of people have already tumbled to that, but they’re not the invasion that everybody thinks.”
    He propped his right foot up on the wooden bench that ran between the two rows of lockers. He hiked his pant leg up and slid a Glock 70 into an ankle holster. He was short and wiry, with glossy blond hair slicked back and tied into a tiny ponytail like some coke dealer in an ’80s documentary on the History Channel.
    “ I thought we were supposed to be counting them,” I said, but he ignored me. My still-warm laminated Census Bureau ID badge screamed New Guy. Not in so many words, of course, but the badge was bordered in green. Everybody else’s was bordered in blue. Census Blue, not New Guy Green. As in, doesn’t know how to find the bathroom yet. Too dumb to come in from the rain. Wouldn’t know a zombie if one lurched up his ass. A green aura glowed around me. Census-takers were low drones on the totem pole in government service: statisticians, compilers, actuaries, analysts, and then there were the field workers, the guys on the street who were on a level with sewage in the organizational flow chart. And zombie census-takers seeped into the ground below the sewage. And on top of all that , I was the new guy.
    “ Man,” said Tully,