Free Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed by Shawn Chesser Page A

long,
drawn-out series of plaintive yelps ending in a final shuddering whimper.
Concerned for the poor fella, he took his eyes from the road for a second and
saw the shepherd burying his snout into the carpet and pawing at both ears.
    “I’m with you buddy.” Feeling his chest rising and falling
rapidly underneath his body armor, Cade swallowed hard and said, “Almost
through them, boy.” Then he looked a few blocks over the heads of the slack-faced
ghouls to the point where Main widened and intersected State Route 39. There he
saw the rounded snout and road-grime-coated underside of the overturned yellow
school bus standing out like a sore thumb against the snowy white background.
On the upturned side was a thin layer of snow that from this distance looked
like frosting atop a slab of lemon pound cake.
    He tapped the brakes and walked his gaze over the rear of
the blocks-long column of death and noticed that their eyes were not facing in
the direction of the march. To a Z, all eyes were focused on the cab of the
truck. The strange noises continued and the dead kept toppling.
    Then it hit him like a mule kick right then and there that
those eyes must have been shifting subtly, imperceptibly, from the moment the
noisy Ford entered their midst a couple of hundred yards north and had been
tracking the fresh meat— him —elevated and displayed behind glass like a
rack of lamb at the butcher’s, all the way to this point.
    An uneasy feeling washed over him and he threw an
involuntary shudder as the realization that once the horde thawed out and
reanimated, the ones leading the procession would invariably end up about
facing and following the ones presently eyeballing him down 39 where eventually
they’d pose one hell of a problem for the Eden compound. So possessing only
enough ammunition to put down a tiny fraction of them, he did the next thing
that came to mind. In hopes of concealing his egress from watchful eyes, he
steered the rig at the nearest of the leering monsters and mowed down a dozen
of them. He reversed and repeated the process a number of times until the rear
echelon of the procession was bent and broken, their blood and fluids trickling
onto the snow.
    “That should keep them from following,” Cade said aloud,
mainly for his own benefit. Then, as if he had just driven into the vacuum of
outer space, the cacophony of the dead was gone, in place of it the V10 roar
and metronomic swishing of the wipers.
    Max sniffed the air and then, one paw at a time, crawled
back onto the passenger seat.
    Cade felt his breathing return to normal and the whoosh of
blood rushing between his ears begin to ebb.
    Finally, intent on making the junction before the few dead
still left standing could track him with their eyes, he focused on the narrow
band of white bracketed on the left by the bus’s protruding tires, drag chains,
and snaking exhaust pipes and on the right by the soft shoulder he knew was
there somewhere underneath the snow.
    He took a breath, held it, and finessed the pedals,
heel-and-toeing them to simultaneously cut speed and power drift through the
turn in a vehicle designed for towing and hauling—not high-speed maneuvers on
snow.
    The result was acceptable—barely. The shoulder was under
there, but both passenger side tires fell off it, sending the truck into a hard
list on that side and the road sign marking the 16/39 junction airborne, broken
off like a matchstick and tumbling end-over-end.
    In the next half-beat, three things happened near
simultaneously.
    First, Cade hauled the wheel hard right, stabbed the gas
pedal, and the dull gray horizon shifted right-to-left in front of his eyes
when the truck started into a slow speed sideways slide.
    Then, rivaling the din the dead had been making, there was a
metal-on-metal screech when the truck glanced off the bus and a fair amount of
black paint and road grime was swapped between the two vehicles.
    Finally, as he tromped the gas, the front wheels