Apocalypse Of The Dead by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online Page A

moment later, Richardson felt himself coming out of his seat, strong arms pulling him across the cockpit of the helicopter and into cold water that came up to his waist. He coughed and tried to rub the acrid smoke from his eyes. The water in his mouth tasted nasty, oily.
    “Are you okay?” Barnes asked.
    Gradually, Richardson’s vision cleared. He looked at the officer and nodded.
    Barnes turned on the helicopter and then punched it. “Fucking piece of shit,” he said. “Goddamn worthless fucking piece of shit.”
    Richardson was still too stunned to take in the fact that he had just lived through a helicopter crash. It was all he could do to stand on his own two feet.
    Barnes, meanwhile, was digging through the cockpit for the emergency kit and his AR-15. He came up with an orange backpack and two rifles. He came over to Richardson and stuck one of the rifles into his hands.
    “You know how to use that?”
    Richardson took hold of the rifle, gripping it like they’d taught him in the army twenty years earlier.
    He nodded.
    “Good,” Barnes said. “Because we’re about to have company.”
    Only then did Richardson get a sense of their surroundings. They had landed in what looked like a grocery store parking lot. He could see the tops of cars and trucks just rising above the water. Off to their right was a subdivision, the houses sagging in on themselves, empty black holes where the windows and doors had been.
    There was movement all around them.
    The noise of the crash, he thought. It’ll be like a beacon for the infected.
    Ragged shapes that hardly looked like people anymore stumbled into the water from the subdivision, filling the air with the sounds of their splashing and their moaning.
    He looked down at the gun in his hands, then at Barnes.
    “Let’s move out,” Barnes said. “We’re on the clock now.”

CHAPTER 5
    Art Waller was eighty-four years old and suffering from the classic one-two punch of gastrointestinal nuisances that nature so generously doles out to the elderly: a fixed hiatus hernia and a peptic ulcer.
    Add to that two bad knees, a back that screamed at him every time he had to reach below his thighs, and a palsied shake that he was pretty sure was the advance calling card of Parkinson’s, and his life was basically an object lesson in misery.
    Still, for all that, right now, he had no intention of giving it up.
    He turned slightly. Just enough to see that the thing behind him was still gaining.
    Art needed a walker to get around. The tennis balls on its legs softened the noise, but the contraption still clanked each time he put his weight on it.
    Clank clank. Clank clank.
    He was creeping along, but it was as fast as he could go.
    He chanced another look at his pursuer. There, on the sidewalk, less than ten feet behind him now, was one of the infected. It shouldn’t be here. They were supposed to be quarantined. He had seen them on TV, and they had said they were all locked up behind the wall. It shouldn’t be here.
    But it was. And it was about to catch him.
    The zombie used to be a nurse here at the Springfield Adult Living Village, but she was nothing but a mess now, no legs. They’d been torn off below her thigh. Now, she was pulling herself along on her belly with raw, bloody, mostly fingerless stubs that had once been her hands, leaving a thick blackish-red snail trail behind her.
    And she was getting closer.
    He gasped. The sound came up inside him like the rattle of dried beans in a coffee can. He was ashamed at the weakness he heard there, angry at himself. Damn it, he’d fought in Korea. Now, this miserable body of his was moving like the hour hand on a clock.
    And that zombie behind him, she was the minute hand.
    It was a slow-motion pursuit, but she was going to catch him. It was just a matter of time.
    Clank clank. Clank clank.
    He tried a few doors, but it was the Fourth of July weekend, and there was almost nobody left here at the Village. Just a skeleton crew of