Anno Zombus Year 1 (Book 9): September by Dave Rowlands Read Free Book Online Page B

straight to you with it.”
     
    The locals had a couple of vehicles that they had kept in relative working order, so we were on our way after the pair before long, catching them up should not have been a problem.  Except, of course, by the time we arrived, they were being frisked by a couple of nasty looking Righteous.  The hilt of my sword was in my hand even before the stench registered in my nostrils.  The same smell that I had encountered in Adelaide, while clearing out a department store full of Ghouls.
     
    I sliced the head from the nearest, Giant firing above Wall’s head to take down the second.  As the gunfire erupted, another seven Righteous swarmed out of the only nearby building standing, festooned with spattered blood and red paint.  Maori and Wall ducked back, behind the Ute we had acquired, as Viking and Giant lay down suppressing fire and Scar lobbed a grenade into their midst.
     
    Once they were all dead, I examined them more closely, and sure enough all nine of The Righteous were Ghouls.  “No wonder they don’t like people leaving…”  I told the others.  “They make them all eat the flesh of the Dead.  This is what it does to you, ladies and gentlemen.”  Giant looked ready to throw up as the blood of the headless Ghoul corroded and pitted the asphalt of the road that it still seeped into.

September 9 th Year 1 A.Z.
    morning
    Not exactly the recon that Apocalypse Mum had been hoping for, but the fact that we now knew that they were a Ghoul cult was perhaps the single most useful piece of knowledge about them that we possessed.  It did mean an extra briefing for me, telling everybody everything that I knew about the blasted creatures.  For this, I asked The Colonel’s aid, as she was with me the first time I met one of them, three in fact, and the sheer wrongness of the situation made her instinctively draw her gun and execute each one of them.  As it was, they laughed about their newfound diet, either oblivious or uncaring that The Colonel was gunning them down.
     
    I didn’t know about their corrosive blood at the time, nor did I know that they laughed off bites from the Dead.  As I relayed what I experienced back in Adelaide, the room full of hardened soldiers and intelligent, scientific minds, all of them sat in silence, digesting the data.  The results of the autopsies performed on the bodies of the Ghouls that we wiped out in the field were equally disturbing; their bodies literally began to transform from their diet.  Their teeth grew longer and sharper, extruding out into fangs in many cases.  It seemed that they no longer felt pain as acutely as they once would have, nor did they require daily sustenance.  One learned fellow mused that they might not ever suffer hunger the way we know it.  Their stomachs were completely empty, suggesting that the digestive system was working overtime, though it seemed as if the entire system was arbitrary.  They seemed not to need to respire, at least not to the point that we do.
     
    It seemed, as well, as though one of the doctors involved had perhaps suffered an accident, as she was being brought forward.  “As you all know by now, the bite of the Dead is always fatal, though not immediately so.” Her accent was faint, but there.  German, I thought.  “The bite of the Ghoul, it appears, is in its own way much nastier.”  As she spoke, the unfortunately bitten one began to convulse in front of the crowd.  They recoiled as much as the benched seating would allow.
     
    “This is the effect a mere fifteen minutes after suffering initial contact with teeth and saliva.  We’re still uncertain as to which actually contains the contaminant.”  She removed the plastic sheeting from the medical gurney upon which the doctor lay.  His arm was a mess, the initial wound seemed almost to have healed, though the colour of the skin was a bright, infected reddish purple nearest the wound, fading swiftly to grey as it went.  His