Free The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) by Robert Mathis Kurtz Page B

He had a particularly bad patch this past week. I heard the gunfire. Got himself in a really bad spot and I know I heard him fire off damned near a hundred rounds getting himself out of it.”
    Cutter nodded. “Yeah. He didn’t tell me what happened, but I know he went through almost all of the .22 ammo I had given him.”
    “I figured you were doing that for him,” Dale stated.
    Cutter damned himself for letting slip that he either had access to ammunition or could produce it. Either way, he had made a mistake. He had lasted for as long as he had by keeping people at arm’s length. Too much familiarity was certain to cause complications.
    “Well, I can see that you want to be about your way,” the other man said. “But the last thing I want to say is that if you ever want to reconsider those other options , I’ve mentioned…well, let me know.”
    “The rebuilding stuff. The starting over.”
    “If you want to put it that way, yes.”
    “I’ll tell you the same thing I have before,” Cutter said. “I’ll let you know.”
    “Very good. I guess I can’t ask for more than that these days.” Without another word , the Colonel pivoted on his heel and leaped out of the shattered window through which he had entered. Cutter did the same, moving off in the opposite direction. Neither man looked back.
    **
    Two hours after leaving the good Colonel had brought Cutter no closer to his goal. He needed a new tank of propane. It was the only fuel that got the metals hot enough to cast new bullets. There was always charcoal to melt lead, but he was into other materials to make ammunition that was more lethal . It had to be propane and he needed to get it back to his place as soon as possible. It wasn’t that he was completely out. He still had a good forty gallons untapped, plus some of the smaller canisters he’d been lucky enough to find stashed in a house he explored. That little adventure hadn’t cost him more than the sweat it took to beat a couple of deads into mush, so the payoff had been good , when compared to the effort.
    What he really wanted was another forty-gallon container , or at least a twenty-gallon tank. The large holding tanks in the big box stores and U-Haul centers had all been bled dry months before. His only good bet these days was to luck into the smaller tanks in garages and storage buildings around abandoned homes. However, even then it was just pure luck to find one. The first thing that people had fallen back on was cooking on grills when the power went down.
    He figured it was possible that the area was completely tapped out. Nevertheless, he was going to spend at least another week looking before he gave up on his own neighborhood and ventured further afield. He had safe houses scattered as far as four miles from his favorite pad, so if it came to that, one of those could be his base of operations for a while.
    Cutter was standing in the overgrown backyard of what had been a really nice four-bedroom executive’s home at one time . The place had been posh in its day, but now the weeds and the rats had taken it over. Some rats were so bold that they trotted along in plain view of him , as he stood and surveyed the half-acre of formerly green grass surrounding an in-ground concrete swimming pool. The pool was almost full, but a mat of green slime covered it . Even where the algae was broken the water was dark and green. A sulfurous stench burped out of the water from time to time.
    On the cracked patio with a new forest of sweet gums and poplar seedlings reaching through the gaps in the cement, he had found a very nice stainless steel grill. The kind that was many BTUs and which went through propane like nobody’s business when it was running. There were three tanks sitting in the bin beneath the burners, but each of them was quite empty. He’d picked them up, one by one, feeling the light heft in his gloved hands, holding them up and shaking them just to make sure there wasn’t a gallon