Dead Days: Season 3 (Books 13-18) by Ryan Casey Read Free Book Online Page B

she saw movement. And she could smell something else now, other than the fire. It smelled sweet. Sweet, like tomato soup, and that made Chloë lick her lips and want to be in this cottage so bad.
    But the monsters. She could still hear them somewhere. But further away now. Maybe this was a magic cottage. A secret cottage that was safe from everyone and everywhere. As Chloë crept closer to it, her shoes crumbling the snow underneath, she noticed a big black Land Rover in the driveway. There were people here‌—‌she’d seen them in the window. They had to be people.
    She crept closer to the window where she’d seen the curtain twitch. The brick was all grey and mossy and the windows were small and dusty but Chloë didn’t mind. The place looked cute. Like somewhere Dad might have taken them on holiday before the bad things started to happen.
    She got closer to the window. So close that she could see an orange glow inside. So close that she‌—‌
    She slipped. Tumbled over, smacked her right shoulder on the ground, tasted warm metal right away.
    And then she heard it. Heard the crying out, felt the hard hands sticking into her, the dirty nails wedging into her face.
    The monster was on top of her. It was once a man, and it had really bad breath and blood coming out of its eyes. Chloë let out a little scream as it wrestled her further down onto the dirty ground, then stopped herself when she realised it would only get the attention of others.
    She tried her best to grip her gun. She couldn’t shoot it‌—‌she had to bash it. She had to‌—‌
    And then the gun slipped out of her right hand. Hit the ground.
    The monster pressed her further down. Its smelly breath and rotting black teeth got closer to her neck.
    “Please, Mummy. Please…‌”
    She heard a thump. A heavy thump, and then the monster let out a whimper. She thought at first it had got her. That the thump was the sound of the biting.
    But then she realised she was free of the monster. It wasn’t gripping her anymore.
    She looked up, still frozen, the gun still out of her hand.
    A man was standing over her. A man with green eyes and a wooly blue hat. He looked younger than Daddy, but he had a beard that was going a bit white so maybe he was older. His breath was clouding in the cold, and he was holding a blood-stained spade.
    “Get up and get inside,” he said to Chloë, offering her a hand.
    Chloë looked over to her left. Looked over at where the cries of the monsters were, but were invisible, like ghosts behind the trees.
    She grabbed the man’s gloved hand and pulled herself back to her feet, wincing with the soreness in her back after falling.
    “I hope you like squirrel stew,” the man said, as he put his arm around Chloë and led her to the front door of the warm cottage.
    Chloë was so cold and so hungry that she could have eaten anything right now, even if it did have poor squirrels in it.

Chapter Nine: Pedro
    Even reaching the motorway didn’t put Pedro any more at ease.
    There was something fucking creepy about this motorway. The way the cars were just abandoned, doors opened, keys still in the locks. No blood, no smells of the rotting flesh that usually filled the air, nothing like that. Just empty cars. Abandoned cars.
    And lots of them.
    Pedro, Chris, Tamara, Josh and Barry moved along the motorway. It was so frigging quiet out here, too. Like eerie silence. Pedro had been to some quiet places in his time‌—‌some sniper missions in Iraq where even the smallest fart would give away his position‌—‌but this was something else. Something else completely.
    The five of them moved around an open door of a car. Pedro kept his eyes on the ground, just in case a goon leapt out and snapped at his heel, but he wasn’t sure. Seemed too quiet for goons. Too empty.
    Sure, maybe it was safe. But was safe a good thing in these end times? Made you wonder why it was safe.
    “Used to drive down this motorway every month, Candice and