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

staff and a few residents.
    He tried another door.
    “Help me,” he cried. “Please.”
    Behind him, the thing crawling on the sidewalk began to moan.
    The sound of it unhinged something inside him. Union troops, he remembered, waiting on one knee in some cornfield someplace, their rifles ready at their cheeks, told stories of hearing the Confederates coming toward them, the rebel yell echoing off the surrounding hillsides. It did something to you deep in your bowels, they said, rattled you.
    This was infinitely worse.
    He tried to go faster.
    Clank clank. Clank clank.
    Just ahead, there was a hallway. He could hear voices. A man’s deep voice. A woman’s laughter.
    The man’s voice again.
    Ed Moore, he thought. The retired U.S. Deputy Marshal.
    “Help me,” he said. “Ed?”
    He put everything he had into it.
    Clank clank. Clank clank.
    Ed Moore had moved to Florida back in February because he liked the weather. For eleven years after his retirement from the U.S. Marshals Service, he’d lived in Amarillo, the Texas panhandle, where the winters were an endless parade of icy sleet and gray skies and wind that never stopped howling. Compared to that, Florida, with its comfy little villas nestled among the bougainvillea and palm trees and the live-in staff who wandered the place in their golf carts, was an absolute paradise.
    The woman, Julie Carnes, was new to the Springfield community. She’d moved in at the end of June. She’d caught his attention right off, slender, a pretty face. Not handsome, but pretty. Still wore her hair long. He liked that. He leaned against the doorway to her private cottage and tipped his cowboy hat to her through the screen door. Ed said he thought it was time he introduced himself.
    She was knitting something. She folded the needles together and rested them on the lap of her white dress.
    He was wearing loose, faded blue jeans, black boots, a clean white shirt open at the neck. He doffed his cowboy hat to her as he entered, exposing a thick, uncombed tangle of white hair before sliding the hat back onto his head. There was a weatherworn look about him, like he should be trailing a cloud of dust.
    She said, “You the resident cowboy?”
    He smiled. He didn’t mind smiling. He still had all his own teeth. “You’re just like I figured,” he said.
    “Oh? And what did you figure?”
    “Well, I figured I’d found somebody I could talk to.”
    “How do you know you can talk to me?”
    “Well,” he said, “I ain’t never seen you in purple. I hate purple on a woman. All the women around here, they wear purple like it’s some kind of uniform.”
    “You mean an old-lady uniform? I’m seventy-five years old, Mr. Moore. I don’t need a uniform for people to know I’m an old crone.”
    “You ain’t a crone,” he said. “You wanna know the truth? I think you’re about the best-looking woman in this place. I mean that. I’m talking about the staff, too. And by the way, you can call me Ed.”
    She nodded. There was a lull.
    “So, you’re here by yourself?” she said.
    “For the last six years.”
    “You’ve been here six years?”
    “I’ve been here since February. I’ve been on my own six years.”
    “Ah,” she said. “Two years for me.”
    “You get lonely?”
    She shrugged. “Sometimes. A girl can knit only so many scarves. Why, you asking me out?”
    “Jerry Jeff Walker’s gonna be in Tampa next Friday.”
    She laughed. “I knew it. A cowboy. The hat isn’t just for show, is it?”
    “Been wearing it all my life. Don’t see any reason to give it up now.”
    “You mean now that you’re not a marshal anymore?”
    “How’d you know about that?”
    She looked down at her knitting needles, fidgeted with them. “I asked around about you,” she said. He thought he saw a blush, but that might have been the light.
    Encouraged, he said, “They’d don’t have cowboys where you come from?”
    “I’m from Monroeville, Pennsylvania. They got George Romero,