A Little More Dead by Sean Thomas Fisher Read Free Book Online

them
did.
    “I don’t wanna do this anymore,” she said faintly, tears glistening on her cheeks.
    “I don’t either, Sophia, but we don’t
have a choice.”
    Fortunately, they’d only come across two
walking corpses all day and that was way back when they got on the interstate.
At first glance, Paul thought they were hitch-hikers, but quickly realized they
were two Schwan’s guys with no interest in delivering frozen pizzas and corndogs
anymore. Purposely ambling into the SUV’s path, the men tried stopping them on
the ramp but Paul swerved around the gruesome twosome and kept going. He prayed
their luck held out on foot and things remained just as quiet.
    “This is a bad idea,” Carla concluded aloud,
literally shaking in her boots outside the open tailgate.
    Paul stuffed his coat with full clips
and boxes of ammo. “You got a better one?”
    Carla looked around. “Yeah, let’s stay
in the truck and wait for someone to come along.”
    “The only person that is going to come
along,” he started, looking down to Mike and Matt and swallowing the rest of
his statement.
    Dan clipped a spare holster on Carla and
showed her how to shoot a nine millimeter without actually firing it. The last
thing they needed right now was to attract unwelcome attention. Her new weapon
clicked as she practiced loading and ejecting the fifteen round clip .
    Paul insisted everyone keep their
safeties off. Safeties were for dead men now and reaction time was everything.
He assured Carla they would get some target practice in after finding another
vehicle, but for now silence was golden.
    “Where’d you get these guns?” she asked,
aiming out over the field and staring down the sight with one eye closed.
    “Some we had, the others we looted from
a gun shop on the way out of town,” Dan told her, straightening her arms.
“There was hardly anything left.”
    She popped off a pretend shot and turned
to Dan. “Once in the head, huh?”
    His brow folded. “Yeah, haven’t you ever
seen Night of the Comet ?”
    She snorted and holstered the weapon. “I’m
more into rom-coms .”
    Paul rolled his eyes and didn’t bother
shutting the tailgate. A few hundred yards later, they crested a gentle hill,
the wind painting their cheeks red. He took one last look back at his
incapacitated truck. Sunlight gleamed off the black paint. The Jeep winked at
him and then it was gone. Turning back around, he plodded through the thick
snow and wiped his nose with his glove. “Unbelievable.”
    “Two Miles!” Dan shouted out from behind
a pair of binoculars.
    Paul squinted up ahead. “Gas station?”
    “And a McDonald’s,” Dan reported,
focusing on a blue interstate sign down the road.
    “There has to be a car there,” Carla
said, fidgeting with her new sidearm.
    “And a kid’s
meal!” Matt added.
    “You hungry, buddy?” Paul asked,
watching his boots disappear into the snow with each step.
    “I’m starving.”
    “We’ll find something soon. I promise.”
    When the woods crept closer to the road,
Paul kept seeing blood-thirsty fiends spring from the tree line out the corner
of his eye. Just like the deer. The trees were bare but there were so many of
them in places it would be easy for someone to get the
jump on them. He flexed his cold trigger finger, worried his stiff joints would
flub the shot at the worst possible time.
    “I’m so scared,” Sophia whispered, peering
into the woods like she’d just seen some of Paul’s imaginary flesh-eaters
herself.
    “Everything is going to fine.” He
wrapped an arm around her as the snow crunched beneath their boots and the cold
wind stung their faces. “We’re almost there.” A shriek went off up ahead,
making them stop. Even the sunshine couldn’t wash away the horror lurking in
that scream.
    “Damn,” Dan muttered, stopping to rest
his shotgun between his legs and break out the binoculars again.
    Carla drew her gun, eyes wild and jumpy.
“Why do they keep doing that?”
    “You