Free The Common Cold (Book 1): A Zombie Chronicle by David K. Roberts

could hear the grisly eating sounds
from where he stood. Rob watched, with a mixture of fascination and horror,
before eventually pulling himself away from the spectacle, and back to the
business at hand. They continued their journey, doing their best to wipe the
ghastly images from their minds.
    “Can you see anyone on the platforms, Rob?” Danny asked, not
having a clear view yet. His musings on the plight of mankind, and the feeding frenzy
below, had temporarily distracted him from his duty, his need to survive to
save Janet.
    “Not yet,” he replied, peering forward, leaning out over the
steel structures at the side of the tracks to get a better view. “We’re still
too far from the station, we need to get closer.”
    “Any ideas about how we get past if it’s loaded with them ?”
    “Well, we can start by re-spraying when we get closer, make
sure we can’t be detected, as best we can; I would also suggest we stay low,
crawl even, and keep to either the far left or the far right of the station. I
don’t want to get caught in the middle of enemy territory.”
    “Sounds like a plan,” Daniel replied as he picked up a
large, rusty spanner found on the side of one of the tracks. He showed it to
Rob. “I think we ought to see if the tracks are live before we go on, that
certain knowledge might come in useful as we go through the station. Perhaps it
could help thin out those bastards if we are chased.”
    Rob nodded his approval. “Go for it.”
    Taking careful aim, trying to throw it as flat as possible,
he managed to bridge the gap between the live rail and the one next to it. A
white flash, blue and yellow sparks flying, told them what they wanted to know.
The spanner bounced off, breaking the connection it had made.
    “Jeez, I wouldn’t want to touch that by accident,” Rob said,
watching the blue smoke rise, smelling the ozone that filled the air.
    “So, it looks like we’ve got a potential weapon we can use,
then. All we have to do is make sure we don’t touch it ourselves, especially if
we have to run for it,” Daniel commented, hoping that fear didn’t make him
clumsy enough to misstep; it looked like it would be a very painful way to go.
    “That should test our coordination to the limit,” Rob
replied, looking along the track.
    “I hope to God it won’t need testing,” Daniel said. Rob held
up his crossed fingers.
    They stayed on the left hand side track as they approached
the platforms, stepping from sleeper to sleeper, making slow and guarded
progress. So far, so good; nothing had either noticed or obstructed their path
eastwards.
    Ahead of them, they spotted two of the undead that had
somehow found themselves on the tracks, and were walking towards them, one
track to the side. If they kept on going, they would walk straight past the pair,
a mere six feet away. With fingers on their rifle triggers, Rob and Daniel
approached them, keeping their movements regular and slow. The men could smell
them now, their decaying corpses venting significant gases, from which orifice
it was hard to tell; there certainly wasn’t much romance on their cards in the
immediate future. The aftershave was still working; the two walking cadavers
hadn’t even glanced sideways as they stumbled past. The lads held their breath
as they got close, not so much to avoid the smell, but more afraid that the
sound of their breathing would somehow give them away. Soon the distance
between them increased enough for the living to start breathing once more.
    They walked stolidly on, all the while concentrating on not
stumbling into the deep rubble that surrounded the concrete sleepers. It felt
like they were walking through a minefield; it was not just the live rail, but
the rubble which was problematic. Apart from being difficult to walk on, it
made a light, clinking sound when disturbed, which of course sounded like
cannon shots to their ears, capable of attracting seriously unwanted attention.
The concrete sleepers would