Free The Dead Series (Book 1): Tell Me When I'm Dead by Steven Ramirez

from inside the truck.
    I saw the mob coming towards us, as hungry as before, and climbed into the truck and took off. Something stepped into the road—a man. I couldn’t swerve. I hit him full on, flattening his body under my truck. A few feet ahead, I slammed on the brakes and looked in amazement in the rearview mirror as the victim sat up. His legs crushed, he tried crawling towards us.
    Isaac saw him too. “Just drive,” he said. His voice was calm.
    “But he’s hurt.”
    “Drive. He’s already dead.”
    We jumped onto the freeway and headed towards Tres Marias.
    “What about your car?” I said.
    “It’s not important.”
    “Isaac, what were you doing in the forest?”
    “Trying to prove that this isn’t happening.”
    “What is happening?”
    “I don’t know.” I looked at him and saw that he had the same haunted look as Detective Van Gundy back at the hospital. “But the gates of Hell have opened.”

    While I waited in the emergency room, I texted Holly to let her know I was back. I didn’t say anything about the forest. She replied with a single letter— K .
    I realized there was no way I was going to make it to work in time, so I called Fred. I told him I wasn’t feeling well and would have to come in later. Other than the accident, I hadn’t taken a sick day since I started there. He knew it and didn’t argue.
    A couple of hours later Isaac came out, wearing a large white adhesive bandage on his forehead. Other than some bruised ribs and a sore neck, he was fine.
    We drove over to the Tip Top Café to get some coffee. This place had become a refuge of mine since I stopped drinking. It was two doors down from the Beehive. Though this created a temptation the AA people wouldn’t approve of, it gave me a strange comfort—knowing I could be so close to that den of pain, yet never allowing myself to set foot in there again.
    The Tip Top was old-school. It had opened in the early sixties, before the British Invasion. The booths were made of red leather. The menus were trifold and laminated. It was a great place to get a burger and shake. A soda fountain featured banana splits and fresh cherry pie. There was a jukebox, and for a quarter you could still hear Bobby Darrin singing “Beyond the Sea.”
    For a long time Isaac and I sat staring out at the world through a plate-glass window. Everything here looked normal. Cars drove by. A mother walked past, holding a child by the hand and laughing. A postal worker delivered mail to the local merchants. A teenage boy kissed his girlfriend leaning against a streetlight. There was nothing out of the ordinary.
    “That guy in the forest,” I said, “the one I hit. What did you mean, he was already dead?”
    “I mean you didn’t kill anyone—not a person anyway.”
    “And what about Jim Stanley?”
    I already knew the answer. It’s what I suspected. Like everyone else in town, Jim had also been Isaac’s patient. He told me about the autopsy. People were dying, but they weren’t staying dead. He finished his coffee, set the cup on the saucer and wept into his hands. I didn’t know what to do.
    A clueless server came over with a glass coffeepot in each hand, one decaf and the other regular. “Anyone need a refill?” she said.
    I titled my head towards Isaac. She left and said something to one of the other servers.
    “Sorry I almost crashed into you,” he said.
    “Don’t worry about it. I was pretty messed up myself. I saw a bunch of those crazies attack a man near the bridge. What do you think is causing people to act this way?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Do you think it has anything to do with all those other people we’ve been seeing?”
    “You mean the ones with the jimmies?”
    “You said they were dead already.”
    “That or their symptoms mimic death,” he said. “If these illnesses are connected, it could be some kind of virus. And it might be mutating. I called the CDC over a week ago. They were supposed to send someone