Assuming Room Temperature (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 3) by S.P. Durnin Read Free Book Online

bi-pod stationary, swiveled its muzzle 180 degrees to the rear, pulled the charging lever back, and took aim down the street to the west.
    “I see her!” Henry called. The big man was down on one knee, gazing beneath the vehicles undercarriage as young Salizar watched his back. “She’s not moving!”
    “Crap! Leo, get up on the on the front and watch our escape route! Henry? Time to earn our paychecks.” Kat pulled the Glock from her thigh holster and dropped into a shooters stance.
    “Wait. We actually get paid for this?” Henry asked.
    Leo all but jumped up on the hood as Sampson circled around to help her face the oncoming infected. There weren’t that many. Only thirty or so.
    “Elle? Kill any outside fifty feet, then shut down.”
    The blonde broke into a wide smile. “Going live!” With that, she unloaded on the dead.
    While it was broad daylight, tracer rounds still made ugly orange streaks as the MG-34 spat sub-sonic death downrange. Five of the creatures were blown into their component parts in seconds. They’d been grouped closely together and the weapon turned them into flying schmutz in short order. Another six dropped as Elle targeted them one by one, sending rounds into their center mass, and separated dead torsos from their still snapping craniums. She whooped loudly when one of the heads sailed into the bed of a pick-up, but kept firing and cut another pair in half.
    Henry and Kat hadn’t sat idle during her show of controlled chaos. Sampson took careful aim at the nearest infected and vaporized six of their skulls with his riot gun. He cursed loudly after missing three shots, hitting the creatures in their chests instead of their heads, before aiming carefully to put each of them down for good.
    Cho was no slouch either. She hit eight of them squarely with her silenced Glock 19. The weapon had virtually no recoil, and it made no more noise when it fired than a popping kernel of Orville Redenbacher’s Original Recipe. She could handle the larger—and much louder— weapon as Henry did, if she chose to. She’d more than proven that by killing a small pack of them on the football field with Jake, on day one of the outbreak. Kat liked the nearly silent pistol though, because it didn’t attract attention. She was a ninja, after all.
    Kat and Henry changed up to their melee weapons for the last five creatures. The things were a bit too close, and shooting multiple firearms in tight quarters was dicey at best. So as Sampson took a good grip on his mace Kat pulled her sword and then they waited for their opponents to move into striking range. That was the only good thing about fighting zombies, really. They didn’t tend to follow any detailed or complicated plans. They didn’t have a chain of command or act as a group. They couldn’t care less if you killed the one standing next to them in the slightest. Each of them—every single one—was a microcosm unto itself. Unfeeling, uncaring, and totally unconcerned with the fate of any others of its ilk. They saw prey, they walked toward prey, they tried to grab and eat prey. That was about the extent of their cognitive abilities.
    The huge man clubbed the first in the top of its head with his nail studded mace, causing the creature to stop mid-moan. Its eyes crossed comically, and the long nails spiked its brain like an awful butterfly on a pin. It dropped to the filthy street, and Sampson promptly turned to face another. Cho knew he didn’t hate the things as some of their party did. He pitied them. Walking around, mindlessly eating other people? That was no way to end your life. Or un-life, rather.
    Kat, on the other hand, was unable to find the slightest bit of pity for the nasty droolers anywhere in her heart. She simply wanted to destroy the rotten things, before they took anyone else she cared for away from her. Her sword whipped out and took the head off the nearest zombie, as easily as someone would swat an annoying insect. She jumped up,