Free Dead Life Book 5 by D Harrison Schleicher Page B

to go down there? Let’s go back up to the road now.”
                  “You know why. We have to be sure.”
                  I drove through the horrible remains of the zombie horde. This was by far the worst experience I’d had since this all began. Losing friends and loved ones was bad, don’t get me wrong, but driving over the crushed bodies that still crawled along this gravel road turned my stomach. The smell was beyond description. Flies buzzed everywhere. We kept the windows up to try and keep them off of us but soon we’d be climbing out into the thick of things.
                  Cindy had her shirt pulled up over her mouth and nose in a vain attempt to filter out the worsening stench. The gore got thicker the closer we got to the U-Haul. Where we had backed through the bodies in an effort to make the road passable for Al and Gina the horror only intensified. The bodies here were smashed to a pulp. The river of black blood and guts moved with a life of its own. If it was still attached to a head that wasn’t crushed it slithered through the slime that lay two feet deep on the road. Cindy retched in the seat next to me.
                  “You’re going to throw up down the inside of your shirt,” I said. “If that happens I’ll lose it too.”
                  “I can’t help it,” she said, her face still partially covered with her shirt.
                  “Breathe through your mouth.”
                  “I tried that. It only makes it worse. I taste the rotten flesh in my mouth.”
                  “Try to hang on. It looks like it’s not as bad behind the truck. I’m going to drive past. Then I’ll back up to the lift gate. If I can get close enough we won’t have to get down on the ground.”
                  “That’s good, because I’m not about to get down in that shit.”
                  There was just enough room to get by the U-Haul. It was easy to see all the damage Al and Gina had done with their grenade attack. Small craters dotted the road all the way down to the creek. There were even a few on the other side. I wondered what kind of damage we had done to the ecology of the small creek that only yesterday I had bathed and washed my clothes in. Now the creek flowed black with the gore that ran down the hill and mingled with its waters.
                  The tree the U-Haul had slid into blocked most of the back of truck but there was enough room that I was able to get a corner of the bed of our truck up against lip of the other truck. Cindy and I sat in silence. Listening to the flies buzzing and the garbled wet sound of the moans that came from the hundreds of crushed zombies just outside our doors.
                  “Do you want to wait in here?” I asked.
                  “Yes, but I’ll go with you.”
                  We crawled into the back seat and out the window into the bed of the truck. Right away I could see that someone had climbed down the tree the U-Haul was stuck against. When they got to the bottom it looked like they had hacked up a few zombies. After that I couldn’t tell what happened. I knew one thing for sure though. They hadn’t crossed the road here. There was no way Gina would have waded through all the blood and guts that covered the road. I didn’t think Al would have been foolhardy enough to try that either. I could imagine stepping into the pile of corpses only to be pulled down into the worst of it. No they had gone up on this side of the road. They may have crossed further up but not here.
                  “Can you see where they climbed down the tree?”
                  “Yeah, I think so.”
                  “They climbed down then went up through the woods on this side of the road.”
                  “How do you know