Free Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse by Nicholas Ryan Page A

squelching.
    The woman was quite dead.
    Her eyes were open, sunken deep into the skeleton of her face. Her skin was grey and drawn tight. She had been very old. There was a walking stick on the floor by her feet. She had been dead for quite some time – several days, if not a week or more. Her tongue was thick and swollen in her mouth, and the body had bloated. The stench of rotting meat from the corpse was sickly sweet and nauseating. Her clothes were filthy with her own fluids. I reeled away and turned back to the others.
    “Dead woman,” I said softly. “Clinton, keep the girl there until I can find something to cover the body.”
    There was another window in the room and I went to it and drew the curtains tightly together. Then I unslung the nylon bag and dropped to my haunches. I felt suddenly light – like I was floating on the air. I hadn’t realized how heavy the bag had been. I felt a burning ache in my shoulders where the thin straps had rubbed my skin raw, but I ignored the pain and fetched one of the candles from the bag. I lit it and waited until the flame flickered and glowed into life.
    The light was tentative and uncertain – but it was better than stumbling around in the dark. The candle flame flared more brightly, and cast soft dark shadows onto the walls. But more than the light, it provided comfort – some primitive instinctive sense, I suppose.
    I carried the candle with me and got as far as the opening to the hallway. Then I turned back to where the rest of the group stood waiting.
    “Jed. Come with me.”
    He loomed out of the gloom, swarthy and grim-faced, but there was a strange, pained look in my brother’s eyes. I didn’t say anything. I simply turned and headed down the passage with him close behind me.
    We prowled the hallway, my gun held stiff-armed out in front of me, my whole body twisting left and r ight from the hips as we crept through the house.
    There was a n eat little kitchen, a laundry, a bathroom, and a couple of bedrooms. We went through the house drawing every curtain tightly closed.
    The first bedroom we found was packed with stored pieces of furniture, all covered with heavy white sheets. I dragged one of the sheets off an antique-looking wardrobe and slung it over my shoulder.
    There were two more dead bodies in the second bedroom.
    A man and a woman.
    They might have been in their forties. It was hard to tell. They were lying in the bed. The woman’s face had been shattered by a single gunshot. The bullet had torn up through her jaw and ripped the top of her skull open. Blood, thick clumps of gore, and tufts of blonde hair were spattered across the wall and the bedhead. Blood soaked the sheets.
    Beside her was the body of a man. Maybe it was her husband. It looked like he had thrust a gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He had fallen sideways, so that his body was lying slumped across the woman’s. Both the bodies were bloated with gases, and the air in the room was rancid. I saw a little silver revolver on the bedroom floor, close beside the bed.
    While Jed stood in the doorway, I ransacked the wardrobes and bedside chests of drawers for clothes. I dumped them hurriedly at the door to the bathroom and then we took the candle back into the kitchen and searched every cupboard. There were cans of soup, beans, and ham in a pantry, beside a full carton of soda. There were more cans of soda in the refrigerator.
    Enough food and drink to last several days.
    I sighed my relief, and then carried the dust sheet back through to the living room and covered the old woman. Then Jed and I dragged her body down the hallway and left it lying in the laundry. We pulled the door shut.
    I set the first candle on the living room floor, then took the second one from the bag and lit it. I handed it to Jed and he perched it on top of the television set. The flare from the two small flickering flames was enough to cast the entire room in a dim warm glow. Harrigan, the girl and the man