Free The Afflicted: A Zombie Novel by Russ Watts Page B

honest, mate. I’m through with Mrs Craven. It’s her bloody fault Lucy’s dead, rushing off into the house like that. You know she would’ve left you behind to die in that house? She’s a piece of work I tell ya. If Pete knew what had happened to his Lucy...” Joe slapped the desk in frustration.
    “She’d never admit it, but she only married Pete for the money. He always was a sucker for the ladies. God rest his soul.”
    “ I know I only just met her, but I don’t trust her,” declared Amane.
    “Believe me, there’s nothing I would like to do more than throw her to the wolves, but we have to think about George. He just lost his sister and I’m not confident Karyn has his best interests at heart,” said Evan.
    They were silent, thinking about their situation. The zombies outside were very faint now, locked outside the building.
    “ Amane, isn’t it?” said Joe. “Where’s home? Where are you headed?”
    “I have a flat in the city. I was just at the airport collecting my parents. They’d flown in from Tokyo.” She closed her eyes and clasped her hands before continuing.
    “They’re dead now: still at the airport. I could go home, but what’s the point? There’s nothing there for me apart from boring textbooks. I don’t even know how I’d get there. I reckon there are a million zombies between here and my place.”
    “And you Joe?” asked Evan.
    “Similar story actually. I’ve got a small place south of the city , close to Pete’s place, but there’s no chance of making it there through those things. Unless you found an armoured bulldozer? I thought Mrs Craven’s might be a good hideout until this shit is sorted out, but we’d never make it. You’d basically have to go into the city to get there. That’s not going to happen.”
    “You think this can be sorted out, Joe? I don’t think so.” Amane was shaking her head. A dark cloud of fear and depression hovered over her like a summer thunderstorm brooding over a cornfield.
    “When I met my parents at the airport , they said they were pleased to see me, all the usual you know, but they said that back home in Tokyo, it wasn’t safe anymore. I hadn’t honestly followed the news, I’d been studying so much, but they said fights and riots had broken out all over the city and was spreading to the rest of the country. Apparently, Fukuoka was a no-go zone, the military had cut if off completely. It was the same in China, Korea, everywhere. They left just as things were getting out of control. They said they were pleased to be in a safe country. Look how that turned out.
    “ The Kannushi were saying it was a curse and that our ‘Kami,’ our souls, were facing a day of reckoning: that mankind had brought this on itself. I’m not a believer in that anymore but my parents are. Were,” she corrected herself and went on.
    “ At the airport, we went to look at the television screens and the things they were showing, my God. This isn’t some terrorist attack that we can send the army in to fight. This is unnatural: un-Godly. Dead people are walking around, killing us: killing the living. I’m starting to wonder if my parents were right. I mean look outside, right now, and you will see a hundred zombies just waiting to get in here and rip us apart. It only takes a second and we’d be dead. At the airport, my parents and me were leaving, when all of a sudden, it was happening right around us. It took just a few minutes and it was chaos. It was so quick. My father...”
    Amane welled up and bit her lip. She felt at ease with Evan and Joe, but still, she didn’t want to cry in front of these relative strangers. It wasn’t right.
    “From what I’ve seen , Joe, she’s right,” said Evan. “No one is going to come and save us. There is no police, army, or government. Law and order is fucked. I think the only thing we can do now is look after ourselves. Outside of this room, and George, that means I need to find my family.”
    “Well,”